The FARC-EP’s contestation of urban-centric power theories The transformation of JAC: from pacifying state mechanism

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

is perceived to lack urban strength it is believed to be restricted from implementing revolutionary shifts. Essentially, the position equates counter-hegemony to the ability to consolidate urban power (Rochlin, 2003: 139). “[T]he most profound debility of the FARC has been the group’s failure to cultivate meaningful popular support outside its enclaves in the countryside. The rebels have not attracted a measurable following in cities, where the vast majority of Colombians reside” (Rochlin, 2003: 143). Urban-centric ideologies have long suggested that true change can only prevail as revolutionary movements take power over those regions where the vast majority resides. Arguments depicting “the city” as key socio-geographical mediums of power pragmatically lack understanding of the agency of those in the rural setting.

Neo-liberal structuralists tend to assume a one-way flow of influence and pressure: from the cities to the countryside – from the globalized economy inward. Their concept of power is based exclusively on an institutional or market conception of power in which the top institutional position and the flows of capital are the only source of power. Although institutions and markets are important modules of power, they are not the only source of power. Organized masses of people are also sources of power. Power is a class relation in which the dominant class has resources like money and what it can buy and state instruments of armed forces while the peasants/rural workers have large numbers, a new form of (potential) organization and grass-roots support …. Implicit in most neo-liberal structuralist arguments is a virtuous view of the city. Urban economies are seen as dynamic, creative and the wave of the future. A corollary to the dynamic city is the image of a static, stagnant countryside .… In their negative view neo-liberal structuralists fail to examine the class context of agricultural activity. Where rural movements have been successful in expropriating productive lands and securing credit and technical assistance they have produced virtuous outcomes, demonstrating that there are many roads to agrarian modernization. By examining the class context of modernization we can understand the facile incorporation of elite classes and the difficult and insurmountable obstacles to popular incorporation and hence their resistance, not to modernization per se, but to a particular form of it. The issue of realizing modernization goals is less a problem of “peasant embrace of traditional values” or resistance to “structural adjustments” and “short-term pain”, but the lack of access to available alternative employment, housing and security in the urban setting. Staying in the countryside and attempting to improve rural livelihoods is a modern, rational decision based on cost–benefit analysis: the real possibility of change based on perceptions or information of other successful activity in other regions or adjoining territories. The diffusion factor is also operative: positive activities in one region have a multiplier effect; successful occupations have a demonstration effect. The demonstration effect is only successful if peasants or landless laborers already have a predisposition to want to remain in the countryside and farm if the opportunity presented itself. Illustrating what we could call