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Uruguyan novelist, journalist and historian Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) wrote more than 40 books in Spanish, a dozen or so translated into English. Monthly Review auded Galeano's creative non-fiction Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1973, original Spanish 1971) as 'outstanding political economy . . . and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx'. This paper speculates on the political philosophy of Galeano's political economy. Five years before he died, he agreed on a compilation of extracts appearing as a chapter in a non-market socialist collection. However, due to copyright issues, Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (2011) was published bereft of this richly textured chapter. Drawing on the unpublished draft — and wider work in English — this paper traces certain perceptual and conceptual developments in his work around 'money', 'price', 'market', and a 'community-based mode of production' as pointing to a form of socialism centering on use values, participatory governance and direct democracy. This non-market socialist reading explains why, when referring to The Open Veins of Latin America in 2014 as 'badly written' and amateur political economy — 'this prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden, and my physique can't tolerate it' — he was not (as was widely speculated) renouncing socialism but rather the form it took in the hands of certain writers, economists and politicians. — http://ppesydney.net/political-economy-space-time-eduardo-galeano/

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The Political Economy of Space and Time in Eduardo Galeano

Anitra Nelson (Center for Urban Research, RMIT University, Melbourne)

1.* Paper presented in 'Panel 4. Space of Dispossession, Populism and Anti-Politics' at the

9th Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Workshop, 8–9 February

2018, School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne (Caulfield) Australia

2. Uruguyan novelist, journalist and historian Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) wrote more than

40 books in Spanish. Monthly Review lauded Galeano's creative non-fiction Open Veins of

Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1973[1971]) as 'outstanding

political economy . . . and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation

since Marx'. More than one million copies of Open Veins have been sold, it has been

translated into more than one dozen languages and is a classic for students of history,

geography, literature, cultural and ethnographic studies (Rohter 2014).

In Open Veins, Galeano traces a rapacious history of dispossession as soldiers and managers

of capital fractured the continent into territories and nations, and named the whole 'Latin

America', an exotic playground of trade in which Indigenous peoples almost always lost.

They lost soil and minerals, they lost their cultures and virginity, they lost their languages,

forms of governance and Indigenous sensibilities — all for the global accumulation of capital

with powers centralised in Europe and North America. Galeano traces this half-millennium-

long history in ethnographic detail, journalistic flair and poetic voice, chasing narratives

across the continent as the power of money drives the plot. The cyclic seasonal and natural

rhythms of Indigenous cultures are challenged by a linear workday clock time of offices,

machinery and stock exchanges. Moreover, the perpetual abstract growth of money as capital

means expansive exploitation of landscapes and human energy.

3. Galeano had a multicultural working-class background, drifting into journalism to become

an internationally renowned and awarded author of insightful works combining the best

magical realism with a non-fictional analysis of capitalism. His perspective revealed how it

feels for Latin Americans to live within, alongside and in conflict with capitalism. His space

was glocal and he read time from the present as an embodiment of the past. Galeano (1992,

244) wrote that: 'By saying no to the freedom of money, we are saying yes to the freedom of

the people: a mistreated and wounded freedom, a thousand times defeated as in Chile and, as

in Chile, a thousand times arisen.'

Scott Witmer (2006, 1) has described Galeano's Voices in Time (2006) as a 'fluid mosaic' of

hundreds of 'prose poems'. Indeed, many of Galeano's books comprise short-short stories,

which cascade into collages of meanings, communities and neighbourhoods of being. These

short-short stories are cells each with both internal and external dynamics, a way of being in

and for themselves while contributing to the whole in much the same ways as leaves, fruit,

bark and roots constitute a tree. Not only does his work show a disciplined care in selecting

precise and appropriate words but also a film editor's concern with carefully cutting from this

and that scene in order to compose a well-paced documentary-style logic for his narrative.

Nonmarket socialism

In this paper, I speculate specifically on the political philosophy of Galeano's political

economy.

4. Five years before he died in 2015, he agreed on a selection of extracts from previous works

appearing in compilation as a chapter in a nonmarket socialist collection. However, Life

Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies was published late 2011 by Pluto

Press (London) bereft of this richly textured chapter. When the co-editors came to clearing

permissions, the Galeano chapter was pulled due to complicated copyright agreements with

seven publishers and a standard clamp on electronic reprints. However, drawing on the un-

published draft of this chapter one finds approaches to the 'market' and the vision of a

'community-based mode of production' as pointing to a form of socialism centring on use

values, participatory governance and direct democracy, i.e. nonmarket socialism.

5. This nonmarket socialist reading is significant yet no-one else has drawn attention to it. It

explains why a 73-year-old Galeano close to death described Open Veins as 'badly written':

'[T]his prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden, and my physique can't tolerate it', he

complained about his early work (in Rohter 2014). Once we appreciate that Galeano is a

nonmarket socialist, we see that such utterances do not equate with renouncing socialism as

was widely speculated at the time (Rohter 2014) but rather show his rejection of mainstream

socialist approaches of many political economy writers, economists and populist politicians.

Galeano's work developed a perceptual and conceptual consistency with nonmarket socialists

who argue for a socialism, and a transition to socialism, that dispenses with the state and the

market, thus avoiding monetary values and relationships, undercutting the props of class in

monetary exchange, cutting capital off at its knees, and developing a substantive participatory

democracy akin to strains of anti-politics. Alongside the general vision of all socialists for

class-free and want-free societies, nonmarket socialists argue for market-free, money-free and

state-free forms of socialism drawing on Marxist, anarchist and feminist, frames of reference,

to argue that genuine socialism is impossible while a market and money operate. 'Is it not

absurd to sacrifice Nature and people on the altars of the world market?' Galeano (1992, 313)

asks, only to add: 'We live within that absurdity and we accept it as if it were our only

possible destiny.'

6. In Galeano's hands the nonmarket socialist point of view offered poetic tension and

dramatic contradictions along with a post-capitalist direction consistent with the values and

operative principles of precapitalist societies in a 'community-based mode of production'

consistent with contemporary anti-politics calls — for commons, participatory democracy and

sharing economies. Speaking of Indigenous Latin Amercans, Galeano (1991) wrote:

Against the capitalist law of profit, they propose the life of sharing, reciprocity, mutual

aid, that earlier inspired Thomas More's Utopia and today helped us discover the

American face of socialism, whose deepest roots lie in the tradition of community …

This is how the Mayas explain why their people are hunted down by the army: 'They

kill us because we work together, eat together, live together, dream together.'

7. Here, Galeano is revealed as much closer to the Marx that railed against Proudhon and

Owenists — for believing they could tinker with exchange and exchange values in order to

create a more socially-just world — than he was to the actually existing socialisms of Fidel

Castro and Cuban statism. Thus, in an interview with Potosi (2003: 7), Galeano would

criticise Soviet communism in these terms: '[S]ocialism is not dead because it hasn't been

born. It's something I hope that humanity may perhaps find.'

Galeano's contribution to nonmarket socialism

Galeano's work certainly expresses a nonmarket socialist analysis, recovering an appreciation

of the world of use values. His black humour and cinematographer-like point of view clearly

define a highly ideological appearance-world of exchange values — price, profit and

speculation.

8. This tension is clear in Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (1998), where

the world of exchange values is thrown into stark relief by the concrete essence of everyday

life, the search to fulfil basic needs with real use values, and the struggle to maintain an

Indigenous reverence and stewardship of nature.

Galeano (in Raskin 2009: 3) strips bare the essentially disabling dynamics of capitalism sold

to us as freedom:

We are the machines of our machines … Cars drive us. Computers program us.

Supermarkets buy us.

9. Although spending time in jail and longer in exile for his political views, Galeano had a

strong appreciation of the disabling brutality of the market in everyday civil life:

Money and people work in opposite ways. (1992, 282)

There is only one thing which is free: prices … Freedom of investment, freedom of

prices, free exchange rates: the freer the businesses, the more imprisoned are the people.

(Galeano 1981, 28)

We say no to the praise of money and of death. We say no to a system that assigns

prices to people and things… By saying no to the freedom of money, we are saying yes

to the freedom of the people.

(Galeano 1992, 241, 244)

10. As such Galeano continually points to the absurdity and vacuity of excessive consumption

and reveals, instead, qualitative and experiential realities. His strategies for and vision of

socialism is via a regrowth of the human and humane, the natural and ecological, a world of

synergies with Indigenous, diverse and mega-natural relationships and values. While making

a mockery of exchange values and monetary capitalist structures that contort social and

environmental values, Galeano's analysis strips our world back to the essentials of use values

and implies more straightforward, efficient and effective dynamics of balance and

sustainability.

11. Galeano (1987: 61) reminds us that, in Thomas More's 'planned economy' of Utopia

commons and sharing economies abound, and 'superfluous consumption' and gold are

subjects of 'scorn':

neither money nor private property exists … Everybody gives the fruits of his work to

the public stores and freely collects what he needs … Work and rest are shared; the

table is shared.

Furthermore, Galeano (1998, 170) points out that in capitalism: 'Time that isn't money, free

time lived for the pleasure of living and not dutifully in order to produce, provokes fear.'

12. He shows the absurdity of private property in the ways that Indians see the Earth:

The land has an owner? How's that? How is it to be sold? How is it to be bought? ... We

are of it. We are its children … As it nurtures the worms, so it nurtures us. It has bones

and blood … It knows how to give birth to potatoes. It brings to birth houses. It brings

to birth people. It looks after us … How is it to be sold? How bought?

(Galeano 1987, 225)

13. For all these reasons, Galeano calls for the restitution of local sustainability in a timeless

and time-full approach:

It's out of hope, not nostalgia, that we must recover a community-based mode of

production and way of life, founded not on greed but on solidarity, age-old freedoms

and identity between human beings and nature… the Indians, the first Americans, who

… have kept their identity and message alive… simultaneously they bear witness to the

past and cast the light of fresh fires on the path ahead.

14. In particular, 'Against the capitalist law of profit, they propose the life of sharing,

reciprocity, mutual aid'. The politics of all this is central: 'From capitalism's point of view,'

writes Galeano 'communal cultures that do not separate human beings from one another or

from nature are enemy cultures'. (Galeano 1991: 13–14; 14; 15 respectively)

15. In short, Galeano abhors the standardisation of humanity characteristic of globalisation, a

dominating force that unifies space and time:

This is a form of violence against all the worlds that the world contains … We are

practising each day … a sort of massacre of our capacity to be diverse, to have so many

different ways to live life, celebrate, eat, dance, dream, drink, think, and feel. It's like a

forbidden rainbow. Now we are being more and more obliged to accept a single way.

(Galeano in Potosi 2003: 7)

Such insights support visions and strategies of nonmarket socialism that embody diversity,

security and plenty just as much as a space full of spaces and a time full of times.

Conclusion

16. Galeano seamlessly blends caring for people and caring for the planet, an approach central

to post-capitalism. His work offers a language and images of a nurturing and abundant

nonmarket socialism. He binds the tragedy of the Global South with the Global North casting

both faces of capitalism as deplorable. He attacks a disabling politics stuck in economic

domination.

Galeano's passion and politics remind us that we cannot build socialism from political

economy or straightforward traditional left politics. It is a cultural process of becoming,

through practices that revalue social relationships and respect nature in terms of qualitative —

not quantitative — minimalism and efficacy. Galeano shows that another mode of production

exists today, in this space in this time, in embryo.

References

Galeano E (1973) Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.

[Trans Cedric Belfrage, 1971 Spanish edn, Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina.]

London/New York: Monthly Review Press.

–––––––– (1981) 'Eduardo Galeano: Days and Nights' — Selections from Days and Nights of

Love and War [Trans Judith Brister, 1978 Spanish edn, Días y Noches de Amor y de Guerra]

New York: Monthly Review Press — NACLA Report on The Americas XV(5): 2–32.

–––––––– (1987) Genesis (Memory of Fire Part I), London: Methuen.

–––––––– (1991) 'The blue tiger and the promised land', NACLA Report on the Americas

XXIV (5) February: 13–17 — https://nacla.org/article/blue-tiger-and-promised-land

–––––––– (1992) We Say No: Chronicles 1963–1991, New York: WW Norton & Co.

–––––––– (1998) Upside Down; A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, New York:

Metropolitan Books.

–––––––– (2006) Voices of Time: A Life in Stories. [Trans. Mark Fried, 2004 Spanish edn,

Boscas del Tiempo.] New York: Metropolitan Books.

Nelson A and Timmerman F (2011) (Eds) Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable

Economies. London: Pluto Press.

Potosi M (2003) Interview with Eduardo Galeano. The Progressive 13 July. Accessed 1

January 2012, http://www.mail-archive.com/ugandanet@kym.net/msg05039.html

Raskin J (2009) 'Saying more with less: Eduardo Galeano interviewed', Monthly Review :

October. Accessed 1 January 2012 — http://monthlyreview.org/2009/10/01/saying-more-

with-less-eduardo-galeano-interviewed-by-jonah-raskin

Rohter, Larry (2014) 'Author changes his mind on '70s manifesto', The New York Times, 23

May — https://nyti.ms/TCPrV4

Witmer S (2006) 'Writer without borders', In These Times 14 July. Accessed 1 January 2012,

http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/2699/

*Numbers 1–16 relate to slide show

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

• Jonah Raskin

Eduardo Galeano, who was born in Uruguay in 1940, has written big, thick books. Open Veins of Latin America (1973), which Hugo Chávez of Venezuela handed to Barack Obama in May, hoping it would teach him history, is more than 300 pages. Then there's Galeano's Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind that adds up to nearly 1,000 pages. More recently, he has written shorter books, and practiced a kind of ecology of the word. Mirrors, his newest work, contains more than one hundred short entries about almost everything — from salt to maps and money, and almost everyone, from Cleopatra to Alexander Hamilton and Che Guevara. None of the entries is longer than a single page. Not surprisingly, Galeano's answers to the questions in this interview are pithy, poetic, humorous, and sometimes oblique. "I'm fighting word inflation, which in Latin America is worse than monetary inflation," he says. "I try to say more with less — because less is more." -J.R. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Eduardo Galeano: Days and Nights' -Selections from Days and Nights of Love and War

--------(1981) 'Eduardo Galeano: Days and Nights' -Selections from Days and Nights of Love and War [Trans Judith Brister, 1978 Spanish edn, Días y Noches de Amor y de Guerra] New York: Monthly Review Press -NACLA Report on The Americas XV(5): 2-32. --------(1987) Genesis (Memory of Fire Part I), London: Methuen.

Upside Down; A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

--------(1991) 'The blue tiger and the promised land', NACLA Report on the Americas XXIV (5) February: 13-17 -https://nacla.org/article/blue-tiger-and-promised-land --------(1992) We Say No: Chronicles 1963-1991, New York: WW Norton & Co. --------(1998) Upside Down; A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, New York: Metropolitan Books.

Voices of Time: A Life in Stories

--------(2006) Voices of Time: A Life in Stories. [Trans. Mark Fried, 2004 Spanish edn, Boscas del Tiempo.] New York: Metropolitan Books.

Author changes his mind on '70s manifesto

• Larry Rohter

Rohter, Larry (2014) 'Author changes his mind on '70s manifesto', The New York Times, 23 May -https://nyti.ms/TCPrV4

• S Witmer

Witmer S (2006) 'Writer without borders', In These Times 14 July. Accessed 1 January 2012, http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/2699

The blue tiger and the promised land

--------(1981) 'Eduardo Galeano: Days and Nights' -Selections from Days and Nights of Love and War [Trans Judith Brister, 1978 Spanish edn, Días y Noches de Amor y de Guerra] New York: Monthly Review Press -NACLA Report on The Americas XV(5): 2-32. --------(1987) Genesis (Memory of Fire Part I), London: Methuen. --------(1991) 'The blue tiger and the promised land', NACLA Report on the Americas XXIV (5) February: 13-17 -https://nacla.org/article/blue-tiger-and-promised-land --------(1992) We Say No: Chronicles 1963-1991, New York: WW Norton & Co. --------(1998) Upside Down; A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, New York: Metropolitan Books.

Interview with Eduardo Galeano. The Progressive

• M Potosi

Potosi M (2003) Interview with Eduardo Galeano. The Progressive 13 July. Accessed 1 January 2012, http://www.mail-archive.com/ugandanet@kym.net/msg05039.html

Posted by: mirthamirthahornberge0267767.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323533711_The_political_economy_of_time_and_space_in_Eduardo_Galeano