A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

Given these supposed problems, the efforts to solve the question in
Latin America are always aimed at the ‘integration’ of the indigenous
population into a single mixed-race (mestizaje), thus combining the
worst vices and roots of the colonial past. This mixed-race ideal has become
national policy, its degree of success in the different countries depending
on the various kinds of resistance of the indigenous peoples
and the strength that they have built up. However, after 500 years of
conquest and colonization, the vigour of the indigenous peoples in protecting
their own culture highlights the failure of the mixed-race concept
as a basis for national coexistence. For it must not be forgotten that this
mixed-race concept was based on acts of social violence, such as the
violation of women’s bodies and the exploitation of labour, as well as on
those symbolic acts of violence that negated the very existence of ‘The
Other’ and its future possibilities (rooting out ‘idolatry’, the denunciation
by sons of their fathers, etc.). Indeed, the mixed-race ideal, far from unifying,
has generated a myriad of different identities based on the racialisation
of people, attempting to mask the real traumas of domination.
The notion of presenting the indigenous people as a problem (Trujillo,
1993) is a response to the modernizing process, and to the construction
of a capitalist economy in countries like Ecuador. The underlying assumption
is that the indigenous peoples present an insurmountable hurdle
obstructing the future advance of capitalism as a destiny. In sum,
the social concept of them and ‘The Other’ as being stuck in the past
(Fabian, 1983), is not only a distortion of reality, but above all generates
the perception that these ‘others’ are an obstacle hindering the construction
of a capitalist nation-state, based either on the idea of Infinite
Progress (during the 19th century), or of Development as the goal of humanity
(in the 20th century). Far-off and alien - distant in both time and
space - the consequences of thinking of distinct cultures based on these
premises, continually manifest themselves at the local, national and
global level, and are the direct descendants of capitalism.
239