Gustavo Gutierrez, in his address to the Conference on Christianity in Latin America and the Caribbean,[1] said, "Liberation Theology hasn't died. If it did, I wasn't invited to the funeral." The audience responded with applause. For many, that was a confirmation that Latin American Liberation Theology (LLT) continues alive and needed. However, it is important to clarify that LLT is not still alive just because someone said so, and nor will it remain alive just because some groups want it so. This theology will remain alive and relevant to the extent that the current and coming generations are able to produce theological reflections that overcome LLT's internal theoretical problems and that respond to new challenges. As Gustavo Gutierrez used to say in the early days of LLT: "Liberation Theology must think critically about itself and its own foundations."[2]
The notion that theology is the "second moment", coming to shore up the practices of liberation, is certainly one of the fundamental characteristics of LLT. Thus, it explicitly assumed that its reflections were, basically, attempts to respond to questions arising both from an ethical indignation and from the battle against situations of oppression, while trying to "discover and proclaim the deep meaning"[3] of these struggles and historical events.
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On the basis of this epistemological principle of LLT, I would like to offer some reflections.
The leader of an Argentinean organization posed the following problem during a training program. She and other members of a Catholic ecclesial community, after their encounter with Liberation Theology, engaged in several tasks of consciousness raising and organizing in their barrio. After a great deal of struggling, and considering that "the liberation of the poor" was not happening, they decided to create a cooperative to improve the living conditions of the place. Once it was formed, the leaders of the movement assumed the cooperative's leadership.
At the time of the training program, the coop was doing all right, although it faced a serious problem: one of the directors was not efficient in the exercise of his functions. He was good at rallying and mobilizing people but didn't have the skills needed to administer such an economic organization. On the one hand, the other members of the administration knew that the coop could not afford the costs of that director's bad management; on the other hand, they didn't want to accept economic efficiency as the dominant criterion over solidarity with a colleague. For them, that would be tantamount to neoliberalism and submission to the same market laws that they so much criticized. At the same time they knew that the future of the coop was at stake.
These questions about faith and administrative decisions, efficiency and solidarity in grass-root organizations, are recent concerns and a result of the success of the people. In the 70's and 80's LLT didn't discuss such questions, for a single reason: they were not the ones dictated by the ecclesial and social practices. It was the progress and achievements of people's struggles that caused them to emerge.
When we move from demand and protest movements to the leadership of an organization, or to management positions in public administration, we face a new challenge: the need to manage scarcity. As we struggle for the "liberation" of the poor and of all humankind, and as we wish for a New World and a New Human Being, we dream about a situation of abundance and full freedom, with no scarcity. But when we engage in the administration of institutions, we realize that we have neither enough time, knowledge, human, financial and material resources, nor the needed political power. Scarcity of means and resources sets limits to what we can do. These limitations mean that priorities must be set, so that feasible decisions can be taken. Once the priorities and practicable decisions have been set, there will probably be someone or some problem, at the end of the line, that will not have been duly considered.
We have to take into account the paradoxes emerging from the contradictions of reality that affect concrete lives. Today, micro-level economic relations are being articulated and influenced by global actions and situations. That is why the struggle for a more dignified life for all persons has to deal, at the same time, with challenges at micro and global levels.
Facing such contradictions and complexity, some prefer to maintain the purity of their theological and ethical principles and do not want to take into consideration the reality of scarcity. There are others who do not want to lose either the faith that led them to that struggle, or their sense of reality regarding scarcity. Those people want to find a deep and spiritual meaning when they are in the midst of a real struggle, and they face difficult decisions and contradictions.
Besides the difficulty with the notion of efficiency, we also have a strong bias against the logic of the market. The option for the poor, as emphasized by the Latin American Christian churches and LLT, was always based on a critical view of the capitalist market. For many, the concept of the capitalist market and the concept of idolatry of the market became synonymous.
We need to seriously consider our critique of both the market and the idolatry of the market.
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Hugo Assmann is, certainly, one of the Latin American theoreticians who has most intensely considered this concept of idolatry of the market. I believe that a summary of the evolution of Assmann's thought about the market can help us understand not only this notion, but also the various critical positions regarding the market in today's LLT.
Concerning the critique of the market, we can identify three great phases in Hugo Assmann's thought. The first is found in the beginnings of LLT. In his book Teología desde la práxis de la liberación, [4] although very critical of Marxism, he shares the vision of most Marxists and socialists of those days: i.e., in a socialist society there is no relevant role for the market. When he considers the market, he associates it with capitalist exploitation and the process of fetishizing the capitalist economy. We can say that he makes a metaphysical critique of the market while proposing an economy without it.
In the early 1980s, Assmann started his second phase by deepening his critique of capitalism with the notion of fetish and idolatry. For instance, he states, "The capitalist mode of production, as Marx tried to show, rests basically on a fetish making process. Capitalism is a construct of social appearances. This ideological construct isn't in any way secularized. It is rather deeply 'religious'. […]The system rests on the strength of its idols"[5].
The apex of this second phase is found in his book A idolatria do Mercado (The Idolatry of Market). In the preface he writes: "The themes that we deal more directly with are: the way in which economic rationality "sequestered" and functionalized essential aspects of Christianity; an "economic religion" unleashed a vast process of idolatry that finds it most evident expression in the supposed self-regulation of the market's mechanism; this economic idolatry feeds on a sacrificial ideology that implies constant sacrifices of human lives."[6]
Assmann unmasked what he called the "idolatry of the market", the market elevated to the category of absolute, through the transcendentalizations brought about by liberal and neo-liberal economic theory. This critique of the idolatry of the market is not a critique of the market itself, as was the case in his first phase, but rather a critique of its absolutization, as well as of the economic religion that capitalism had become.
This change of position by Assmann is due, among other factors, to his assimilation of Franz Hinkelammert's thesis: utopias (as total market, or perfect planning, or societies without laws and institutions, or the Kingdom of God) are necessary horizons to give direction to historical projects, but impossible to fully achieve within history[7]. Moreover, any attempt to fully bring about a utopia, i.e., to identify some historical project with the utopia, ends up demanding human sacrifices.
In the 1990s, Assmann initiated a dialogue with the natural sciences, without abandoning his readings in social and human sciences. He included in his reflections other areas of knowledge and other themes, such as self-organization, self-regulation, emergent properties, self-production, etc. Thus, for him, "Self-regulation or self-organization is, today, a key concept in all scientific fields, (...) Self-regulation is the notion through which one proposes to explain, supposed or real, internal circular causality of spontaneous orders. Internal mechanisms regulate the functioning of the system. The key to the rational explaining of the internal phenomena must be found in their own internal mechanisms. This is the case with living organisms. (...). Therefore, the crucial issue is not the assumption that the market has self-regulating mechanisms, but knowing the extent to which they are inclusive and/or exclusive."[8]
This can be considered one of the most representative texts of the beginning of the third phase of his critique of the market.
This dialogue led Assmann to a new position: "Do we know how to conjugate social consciousness and ethical subject with a (partial) self-regulation of the market? "To accept, critically, but positively, the market, without giving up solidarity objectives, requires a new reflection (…) One has to think, concurrently, about the ethical and individual options as well as the material and institutional objectification of values under the form of normalization of human companionship, with strong self-regulating connotations."[9]
Assmann acknowledges that self-regulating mechanisms do indeed exist in societies and that the market is one of them. This does not mean that he is giving up his critique of the idolatry of the market. This critique is now directed to two pillars: a) the neo-liberal belief that the self-organization of the market will always produce the best results, i.e., the faith in the always benefic character of the self-organization of the market, which hinders any social intervention aiming at social goals; and b) the requirement of sacrifices of human lives that result from this belief in the market system, as the only way to bring about social solidarity.
However these revisions do not mean a change in his radical option for the defense of the poor and the victims of history. They only mean that in order to remain critical, a theology has to constantly rethink its foundations and mediations, its historical projects and its images of God.
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New questions arise from practice. Will the new generation of LLT be sufficiently creative to critically rethink LLT's foundations on that basis? Will we be capable of theologically reflecting the endless tension between grace and political efficiency and pragmatism? My answer is yes! To that end we need to listen better to the voices coming from the praxis, to re-evaluate the theoretical mediations we have consciously or unconsciously utilized, and to engage in constant dialogue with the new theories of social, human and natural sciences. That is the only way we will be able to continue to offer a relevant theological service.
We should also seriously rethink the very concept of liberation proposed by LLT. I believe it is important for us to articulate dialectically the struggle for liberation and the freedom for which "Christ liberated us" (Gal. 5,1), as well as to deepen our reflections about the experience of God's freedom in the interior of the contradictions of struggles for liberation, so as to recover the original notion that LLT is, fundamentally, a spiritual theology.
[*] Professor of Religious Studies at the Universidade Metodista de São Paulo (UMESP) and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP).
[1] Held in São Paulo, July 29 to August 1, 2003.
[2] G. GUTIERREZ, Teologia da Liberação. Prespectivas, 6ª ed. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1986, p. 23.
[3] Ibid. p. 25
[4] H. ASSMANN, Teología desde la práxis de la liberación: ensayo teológico desde la América dependiente, Salamanca: Ed. Sígueme, 1973..
[5] H. ASSMANN, "A Teologia da Libertação faz caminho ao andar", in VV.AA., Fé cristã e ideologia, Piracicaba / S. Bernardo do Campo: Unimep / Imprensa Metodista, 1981, p. 79.
[6] ASSMANN, H. & HINKELAMMERT, F. A idolatria do Mercado. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1989., p. 7.
[7] F. HINKELAMMERT, Crítica a la razón utópica, San José (Costa Rica): DEI, 1984
[8] H. ASSMANN, Desafios e falácias: ensaios sobre a conjuntura atual, São Paulo: Paulinas, 1991, pp. 23-24.
[9] ASSMANN, Metáforas novas para reencontrar a educação. Piracicaba: Unimep, 1996, p. 64. Italics are ours.
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Revista Eletrônica Rever - ISSN 1677-1222