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Hernán Alejandro Cortés Ramírez

The Strike in Colombia:

Accumulation and Democracy

In memory of J. Alexánder Idrobo-Velasco

The Gordian knot underlying Colombian history is the way that its elites
have used violence to confront political conflict. This article argues that the
destituent process initiated by the national strike, starting on April 28, 2021,
opens a dispute over the forms of domination deployed through the repro-
duction of inequality and processes of capital accumulation, whose conse-
quences are suffered by the majority of Colombians.
It is important to note that the distance between being poor and being
middle class in Colombia is razor thin, nothing more than science fiction,
mediated through access to banking and the circulation of debt as conditions
for accessing a life of consumption. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that
the economic and social differences between Colombians are rooted in
intense historical processes of accumulation, dispossession, and violence
that are interwoven in complex and heartbreaking ways. A large part of the
history of the armed conflict revolves around that axis of dispossession/accu-
mulation on which both the form of power and the form of capital produc-
tion in the country are based.
In what follows, I delve into three dimensions in order to analyze the
conjuncture of the national strike in light of these different historical struc-
tures of reproducing inequality. First, I address the issue of accumulation as
a logic that articulates a process of the dissociation of Colombian society.
Second, I discuss the impact of the Havana Peace Agreement with the

The South Atlantic Quarterly 121:2, April 2022

doi 10.1215/00382876-9663716 © 2022 Duke University Press

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418 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • April 2022

FARC-EP in terms of a democratic opening. Last, I examine a few historical

elements of the recent mobilizations and strikes in order to trace a continu-
ity. In doing so, I would like to question that undefined temporality of the

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destituent movement that can be felt in the streets and think about the emer-
gence of a constituent force that, in Negri’s (2015: 24) words, “is the motor of
an ontological metamorphosis.”

From Accumulation to the Strike

“the middle class is starting to smell like a ghetto”
—Ayax y Prok, “Pandemonium”

The current situation in Colombia cannot be analyzed in isolation from its

historical components or its structural dynamics. The root of the problem lies
in the modes of capital accumulation: How are processes of capital accumula-
tion connected with the logic of neoliberalism and to what extent is the
decline of those neoliberal formulas behind the crisis facing Colombia today?
The formula, well-known to all, of reducing state intervention to stimulate
the market economy and free competition has been the cornerstone of the
political class’s governing strategy for the last thirty years. What lies under-
neath the rationale of a neoliberal government is not the aforementioned
stimulation of the market and production of wealth in general, but rather an
open process of the accumulation of capital—and therefore of power—that
leaves the majority impoverished and unprotected. Under the precepts of aus-
terity, Colombian governments have pushed a series of reforms that benefit
the stability of large capital, without increasing workers’ rights or protections.
For decades, Colombians have been subjected to a series of measures that
benefit the logic of separation and dissociation that makes the accumulation
process possible. Contrary to traditional liberal narratives, it is not a matter of
state abandonment, but rather a crude and criminal form of governing that
revolves around the excessive accumulation of capital.
Those who are in the streets today are not responding to a revolution-
ary energy stimulated by the obscene proposal for a tax reform that would
attack the “middle class.” Those who make up the different protest move-
ments and social mobilizations are saying that something is wrong with the
economic model in which wealth is highly concentrated, in which the
expanded modes of accumulation and dispossession rob the majorities of
their present and their future. The main point of the protests is not the rejec-
tion of a reform, but rather a questioning of the very grammar of the political
and economic discourse that the Colombian political class has turned into

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 Cortés • The Strike in Colombia: Accumulation and Democracy 419

the horizon of meaning for the impoverished majorities. This is a key point
in philosophical terms: when a generation is denied the possibility of living
in the present, of reconstructing the past, and of imagining the future, soci-

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ety enters into crisis. That is precisely what we are experiencing in Colom-
bia: a crisis that is made up of three tightly interwoven elements that cannot
be analyzed separately from one another.
I would like to make a few points about each of these elements and
how they are related to the radically unequal modes of accumulation. The
first is a profound, and very obvious, crisis of representation and political
legitimacy. On the streets of any city or municipality, you will find a general-
ized discontent with the “political class.” Nobody believes that the traditional
politicians understand or want to solve the majorities’ problems. That dis-
content is expressed at several levels. What has become clear is that “politi-
cians” concentrate power and money in their hands, and they prey on insti-
tutions for their own personal gain. As if that were not enough, they have
built a whole political machinery that allows them to incessantly reproduce
their privileges, using one of the main mechanisms of accumulation: inher-
itance. In a sort of violent spiral, they accumulate money and decision-mak-
ing positions, which they invest in their next campaigns or companies, while
they legislate or administer public resources in favor of contracts that benefit
their supporters or family members. Disguised as technocrats, their per-
sonal wealth accumulates while they ask citizens to have patience and the
strength to escape from poverty. How could anyone have faith in the state’s
political institutions if they are occupied by a class that only governs for
itself? As Marx (1976) showed, accumulation is not only a process of hoard-
ing or concentrating, but is fundamentally a process of separation, of disso-
ciation, in whose rupture one of the parts captures that which the other pro-
duces. In Colombia, it has become hegemonic for that separation to be used
as a way of perpetuating privileges. To an almost insurmountable degree,
participation in spaces of deliberation, decision making, and transformation
has been restricted to an oligarchic elite that has used the benefits of a liberal
state to satisfy their desires in an unlimited way.
This latter point brings me to the second aspect. This crisis of legiti-
macy is also the effect of a mode of government centered around capitalism’s
most patent dynamics. The mobilizations have shown that the very organiza-
tion of society is hanging by a thread, as a minority hoard major privileges,
while others barely have enough to survive. The numbers are powerful:
more than 21 million people live in poverty and 7.3 million live in conditions
of extreme poverty; land ownership is concentrated in the hands of very few
property owners: 0.9 percent of the population hoards 40 percent of the

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420 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • April 2022

land; access to education does not guarantee any sort of social mobility. In
Colombia, we are experiencing inequality to an extreme, bodies suffer the
ravages of a model that, privileging what it calls free enterprise, has con-

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demned thousands to servitude, disguising it in discourses of personal over-
coming and individual guilt. For sanctimonious progressives, inequality is
nothing more than a discourse, but, for the impoverished, it means a life of
hunger in a system that throws us into so-called free competition without
any guarantees for the majorities. The ravages of inequality are reproduced
at multiple levels and scale up to cruel dimensions.
One of those cruel manifestations is the constant classification of pro-
testers as vandals or terrorists in order to delegitimize them. This forms part
of a security doctrine that considers them the undesirable other that must be
eliminated. This understanding by authority is deeply rooted in the coun-
try’s historical structures and correlates with a profound structural classism
and racism, whose most cruel expression has been the thousands of disap-
pearances and assassinations seen in the country.
If political power’s legitimacy emanates from either consensus or the
use of force, the Colombian political class has used the second means to
reach where it is today. This has created a profound institutional crisis: polit-
ical institutions have no legitimacy when conflict is only managed through
violence; there is only obedience and indifference. What is most concerning
about this situation is that this conception of the other is fueled in the pub-
lic’s common sense, strengthening the idea that “other” in its multiple forms
is undesirable and—even—can be killed. This way of understanding the
other as the leftover is at the center of a politics of accumulation, since what
matters is the surplus that is captured. It does not matter who produces that
surplus, only that it is produced and circulates in order to be accumulated, as
denounced by Marx (1976) and Federici (2004). This is the axis of a politics
of inequality in which production matters more than life. That is where the
voice of the demands from the streets arises. The clamor of the youth is a
denunciation both of invisibilized poverty (“We are hungry”) and of a sys-
tematized politics of death (“They are killing us, they are disappearing us”).
Finally, there is the brutal question of violence, our Gordian knot. The
expanded forms of the reproduction of accumulation, as signaled by Harvey
(2005) and Lazzarato (2021), use mechanisms of violence, whether warfare,
in which groups eliminate one another, or confrontations that are necessar-
ily warlike, but often discursive, in which the other is constructed as unde-
sirable (Black, terrorist, Indigenous, migrant, etc.), for the purposes of accu-
mulation. However, the mechanisms of violence in Colombia have their own
specificities, and the refusal to recognize them activates a series of forms of

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 Cortés • The Strike in Colombia: Accumulation and Democracy 421

negation. Those can be disguised as public policies or as armed actors who

carry them out. Public policies such as the proposed tax reform, which
would impoverish the majority and that triggered this strike, are one way of

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reproducing violence that has major impacts on the production of the social
fabric. Although it is not comparable to war, “governing” this way puts thou-
sands of citizens at risk, endangering their access to the conditions of the
reproduction of life, by the way in which that institutional design privileges
large capital, benefiting the logic of accumulation as the capture of surplus
for its reinvestment and the expanded reproduction of capital. This form of
the production of wealth goes hand in hand with a series of violent actions
against the bodies and lives of thousands of people who oppose that form of
accumulation. The response in those cases is nothing other than physical
elimination, harassment, and armed actions that occur in parallel to those
forms of accumulation. While in certain moments of Colombian history the
relationship between the elimination of the other and expanded accumula-
tion has been clear, such as in the parastate armies called Chulavitas (1948–
53) or the development of the criminal self-defense and paramilitary compa-
nies (1998–2008), today the situation continues to have grim reiterations.
We are witnessing a threat to the bodies of young people who have been
denied any sort of temporal horizon.

The Peace Agreement and the Democratic Horizon

Despite this difficult panorama, the peace process with the FARC-EP
changed the political map of the country. At first one might think that it had
changed everything, but the right-wing’s current onslaught against the
Havana Agreement’s policies clearly shows that the old powers are going to
continue resisting, using any means possible so that the country’s narrative
serves their interests. The agreement made it possible for us to think about a
form of political opposition other than that which had been initiated by the
armed insurgencies. That the second point of the agreement expressly
focuses on that problematic says a lot about why it has been so hard to talk
about democracy in the country. The peace deal managed to reinforce a long
tradition of social mobilization, as a long history of struggles found ways to
tackle the country’s current obvious structural problems through the negoti-
ation points in the agreement.
With its successes and failures, the gesture opened by the peace deal
was an invitation for political conflicts to be handled in a way other than war.
That is the agreement’s most important symbolic victory, since it broke down
the narrative that any political opposition was, by definition, an extremist

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guerrilla who must be eliminated. Sadly, this has not meant an end to the
assassination of political actors across the national territory. The peace deal
opened up many possibilities for reinforcing social mobilization, for con-

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structing a forward-facing narrative for the nation, and making visible the
strength of collective social fabrics that exist throughout the national terri-
tory, both for civil society in general and for the international community.
But, like any agreement, there are limits, primarily imposed by a government
that promised to “tear apart” the deal and govern under the horizon of “peace
with legality.” The government’s failure to implement the agreements of
point 1, i.e., Integral Rural Reform, and to establish effective mechanisms to
guarantee the fulfillment of point 4, i.e., crop substitution, is truly dramatic.
The peace deal was undoubtedly a sort of opening of the possible in the
country’s democratic life. Those of us born after the 1990s lived through a
wave of intensifying violence that has no comparison. We witnessed the deg-
radation of hostile methods and the physical and moral elimination of the
enemy. In this situation, the reality of the political conflict was the reality of
war: that of elimination through any means possible. Speaking of democracy
because elections were possible in the middle of desolated fields, mined terri-
tories, and violent actions that claimed civilian lives is something that could
only occur to the sanctimonious whose symbolic privileges cloud their vision.
Those of us who grew up in the urban and rural peripheries carefully
observed how war is embodied in the body’s forms of expression and how
political conflict becomes annihilation. The peace deal caused a break with
that logic of the elimination of the other, opening up the possible to reimag-
ine a political field that would cease to define actors as necessary/unnecessary
and would create the possibility for political conflict to be treated as differ-
ence. What was widened was democracy as a field of disputes, as a stage in
which political power dismantled the doctrine of the internal enemy to give
way to the idea of the political opponent. The agreement’s democratic open-
ing had repercussions in the 2018 elections. Instead of focusing on the armed
conflict, the national agenda turned to the management of the public and
how the elite had looted institutions. That, in turn, helped make it possible
for the destituent force of the strike to find a channel through which to run.

A Long Birth: Destituent Potentia

The country’s social mobilizations are not spontaneous, nor unexpected.
Social mobilization in Colombia has never ceased, at least not in the last fifty
years, during which we have experienced intense moments of social mobili-
zation with different characteristics and demands. The 2021 strike is an

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 Cortés • The Strike in Colombia: Accumulation and Democracy 423

effect of several mobilizations that have taken place in the country since
2007. The formation of the Marcha Patriótica (Patriotic March) and the Con-
greso de los pueblos (People’s Congress), as ways of bringing social move-

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ments together in a mass movement, were determining factors for the devel-
opment of the large mobilizations that followed their formation in 2012. With
those mobilizations, the campesino and Indigenous movements entered into
a more fluid dialogue with the student movement and there were multiple
instances of popular and assembly-based decision making (of course, this
had also happened in the 1950s and 1970s, under different formats and with
different intensities).
Undoubtedly, the student movement of the Mesa Amplia Nacional
Estudiantil (Broad National Student Commission) and the agrarian strike in
2013 are two precursors to the current strike in that they demonstrated that
citizen mobilizations have the strength to stop policies that go against the
public. Those two movements successfully demonstrated that disputes over
the rights of rural people and students do not belong to “students or campes-
inos” but rather that they are key struggles for a democratic society.
Finally, I think that it is important to clarify that this mobilization con-
tinues to fly the flags of two earlier powerful strikes: the civic strike in Bue-
naventura in 2017 and the national strike in November 2019. The Buenaven-
tura strike illuminated a key contradiction of the accumulation process: that
the lives of thousands of residents of that port city were so fragile, despite
being so close to capital’s material wealth. The extreme poverty rate and vio-
lence in Buenaventura contrast with the large cargo ships that enter the port.
The strike made clear that the population is not giving up (“The people aren’t
giving up, damn it!”) and brought to the table structural discussions about
the port’s management and conditions of residents’ lives. In 2019 this energy
was taken up again, reviving a sensibility of nonconformity that was key in
the configuration of a destituent potentia, to use Colombian philosopher San-
tiago Castro-Gómez’s (2015) terminology. If the COVID-19 pandemic had not
arrived so forcefully, president Iván Duque’s government would have faced
serious trouble in responding to the demands that emerged from the streets.
Thus, I think this opens up three issues. First, social mobilization has
been constant in a country characterized by an oligarchic form of the circu-
lation of power, which has benefited those oligarchs for decades. People are
tired of that and are in the streets, as a way of opening up democracy and
making the political class understand that they can no longer think about
the world without them. On the other hand, there is the issue of what we
could call “necropolitics,” that is, a way of ordering the world that is traversed
by death and in which the powerful decide who should or should not die.

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Today that sovereign rationale that hangs over Colombian society is being
challenged by many actors. That is why the Front Line movement (see Abud
in this issue) has emerged to defend life from the different actors of death

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(multinational corporations, state agents that abuse their power, and paramil-
itary forces that continue acting with the silent complicity of the state). Finally,
there is the issue of how to initiate a model of a country that thinks about the
present and future of the majority. There are many groups working every day
to break with the pact that the elites have signed to maintain their privileges.
There are trans, feminist, Indigenous, Afro, campesino, student, and leftist
struggles to build an option for the country that looks toward the future of the
new generations, in which death and inequality do not dominate, but where
we can construct a different future. That is, according to Castro-Gómez,
(2015) the destituent potentia that marks the path of transformations.
To conclude, I want to point to two major challenges. First, I think it is
necessary to deepen that destituent idea that is on the streets today. To do so,
we have to construct a broad narrative pact against Uribismo and against that
oligarchic elite that has built its privileges by using the state in its favor, which
is what corruption is at the end of the day. Closing spaces so that those politi-
cians that govern with the mafia are in institutions and held accountable is a
task that must be more profoundly taken up and should become common
sense. On the other hand, we must open spaces so that that destituent force
can give rise to a constituent potestas, an alternative government for the major-
ities. In other words, we must take up the task of producing a force that enables
the construction of a horizon of the future. That force cannot be in any one
person’s hands, it must emerge from the construction of a social fabric. Thus,
it is not exhausted in the electoral arena, but must spread, as it already has
with the strike, to neighborhoods, rural areas, plazas, and classrooms, to polit-
icize the population and win a future for everyone. Now we need to inaugurate
a time in which no decisions about us are made without us.

References
Castro-Gómez, Santiago. 2015. Revoluciones sin sujeto (Revolutions without a Subject). Madrid:
Akal.
Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation.
Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
Harvey, David. 2005. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lazzarato, Maurizzo. 2021. Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin.
Negri, Antonio. 2015. El poder constituyente. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños.

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