The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Slave Religion and Rise of the Free Peasantry 61
ted down the generations, reinforced by the primary socialization of
family life.
This Hobbesian view of society and human nature, the quintessence
of the bourgeois experience of alienation and reification, interprets
political ideology as the mechanical expression of the selfinterest
of opportunist caudillos. Yet it finds little support in the
social history of Japio. In the southern Cauca Valley the peasants did
not follow their erstwhile overlords. Rather than blindly follow a
mystifying ideology imposed on them by an elite or be forced into
struggle without moral conviction, they forced the elite to respond
to a peasant anarchism fired by hatred of landlords and fanned by
millenarian dreams. Heroically stimulated but forever crippled by
vagueness of doctrine, this is the social basis that largely accounts
for the bewildering tumult of caudillo realpolitik. Anarchism is
most visible at the time of abolition and the millennialist fervor in
the war of 1876-77. The absence of a vigorous bourgeoisie inclined
the social struggle toward the populist form—the "people" versus
the aristocracy. That the peasantry could not constitute itself as a
class for itself, although it came close, does not justify theories that
exclude class conflict and class alignments.
Frank Safford has argued, perceptively, that without detailed regional
studies, the conventional occupational and economic class
explanations of party affiliation and civil war in nineteenth-century
Colombia must remain inadequate. But even he concedes that in the
Cauca area "liberalism came to be an instrument of class conflict,
representing the landless or dispossessed in their struggle against
the large landowners, and often with leadership from a lower stratum
of the upper class" (1972:361; cf., Bergquist, 1976).
These class struggles assumed a religious character. Orlando Fals
Borda, summarizing a large body of scholarly opinion, writes, "The
internal conflicts after 185 3 that were fought ostensibly for the control
of the budget, or for changing the Constitution, were really
fought on religious grounds" (1969:108). The two parties became
defined in Manichean terms. "One was either for or against the
Church, on the side of God or the devil" (Ibid.: 105). Contrary to the
assumption that is often made, the Conservatives had no monopoly
on religious passion. The Liberal extremists advocated a kind of
romantic Christian socialism, as the Conservatives recognized. A
prominent Conservative wrote of the uprisings at the time of abolition:
"I have seen that demagogic socialism has appeared in some
parts, as in the beautiful valley of Cauca, with the fatal furor with
which the Anabaptists wanted to establish it in the sixteenth century.
I am seeing the alarm which the gains of communism cause