THE FARC-EP’S RELATION TO SOCIAL CHANGE
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FARC-EP has moved beyond mere guerrilla combat and matured to a place of political-militaristic control (González, Bolivar, and Vázquez, 2002: 54). This, however, does not suggest that the insurgency refrains from moving in and out of guerrilla tactics (FARC-EP, 1999: 26). Rather it has periodically “adapted its military to offset the government’s air power advantage by re-employing guerrilla warfare tactics, moving in small units, and dispersing its forces into larger areas” (Richani, 2005b: 89). The FARC-EP has opted against taking centralized state power through an immediate win over the governing apparatus or a series of revolutionary pushes aimed at the capital (Petras, 1999: 30; see also Granada and Rojas, 1995). Adopting a war of position has facilitated a “system of dual power in several regions of the country,” offering an alternative to conventional state power (Petras, 2003: 25; see also Schulte-Bockholt, 2006: 201–2; Williams, 2005: 161; Petras, 1999: 31).7 By extending influence through a slow, realistic, ideologically motivated program, the FARC-EP has created a distinct counterhegemony via “the accumulation of local power” (Petras, 1999: 30). Although the situation is fluid, specific rural territories are under guerrilla control and experience the fulfillment of needs left unmet by the state’s absence (Rochlin, 2003: 132–3; Petras, 1999: 31; see also LeGrand, 2003: 178, 181). The insurgency has tried to sustain regionalized social-based welfare programs that provide individual and communal benefit to the immediate populations (Pizzaro Leongómez, 1992: 181–2; see also Avilés, 2006: 36; Hylton, 2006: 56–7; Petras, 2003: 24; 1999: 30–1; Pearce, 1990a: 168; Gomez, 1972). This reflects Gramsci’s argument that socialism is a process, an intermediary evolving series of developments for the betterment of a given society (Gramsci, 1977: 55). A socialist revolution must be a “continuous and systematic revolution of a people,” not merely the taking of state power: “a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria,” always in process and response to the societal conditions of a revolutionary epoch (Gramsci, 1977: 55; 1971: 182).8 Over the past several years, the FARCEP has tried to achieve this using dual power. Nevertheless, an explanation is needed of how this is being realized within contemporary Colombia. THE FARC-EP’S CONTESTATION OF URBAN-CENTRIC POWER THEORIES James F. Rochlin (2007; 2003) has characterized the FARC-EP as a revolutionary movement trapped in the framework of pre-modernity, modernity, and postmodernism. By pursuing a political-military model in the countryside, and not taking steps to first procure centralized state power by taking control of Bogotá, the FARC-EP is said to be engaged in a “premodern disposition toward space and politics” (Rochlin, 2003: 144; see also 2007: 48). This is quite ill-informed as it lacks any theoretical understanding of what the FARCEP is doing within modernity itself (see also Hardt and Negri, 2004: 83). Much of the FARC-EP’s capacity to create substantive change is ignored under the assumption of limited power in metropolitan centers. As the insurgency
