Knowledge and People's Power - Multiworld India

the routine of exploitation and submission, when they return to the passivityof old, or forget their countervailing mechanisms of protest and vigilance.Setbacks also occur when the animators allow themselves to be co-opted, orwhen they become tired or fanatical and mix politics with trade unionmatters, often through impatient vanguardism and the contradictions ofpivotal figures.Diversity in their respective conception of time may be one cause oftension between bases and animators. This problem arises when pressingneeds claimed by often petit bourgeois activists lead them to actcompulsively as if suddenly they want the whole world right now. However,the common people, albeit heroic at times, are not in such a hurry to "makehistory." They know how to wait, and have faith in the future, especiallywhen they discover themselves and the potentialities of their action.An example of this dialectic of ebb and flow, bubble and seed,impatience and hope can be seen in Puerto Tejada and the People's CivicMovement of Northern Cauca which grew into a political front as a result oflocal PAR experiences in 1978. Once the initial academic stage with thesponsoring authority was completed, the movement then undertook the searchfor a participative model of social and economic action in the region. Therewas a reaction against the dogmas of the vanguard left from which most ofthe cadres were drawn, although something of their elitist messianism stilllingered on. This defect was tempered only by the obvious need to find aneffective response to the serious problems of the region.The work advanced so well that soon it was possible to discover latentorganic intellectuals among the peasant classes with whom the creativetension derived from the destruction of the object-object binomial could bepracticed. Andres was one of those intellectuals of the working classes, ateacher of peasant origin. The great forum of 1981 on regional problemswhich climaxed the movement was organised by external animators and localintellectuals such as he. The success of the forum gave encouragement to thesubsequent tactical step: to participate in the forthcoming municipal electionsto win seats on the town councils of the region. Two seats were won. Butthen, perhaps because of the elections, a process of disintegration began.Until then the movement had been a "popular" one, that is, it was a socialmovement based on the struggle for specific cultural,49