Contra la Democracia Bárbara

Vigencia de la Propuesta Teórico-Política de José Revueltas

Abstract

This article analyzes José Revueltas’s political thought on democracy 50 years after his death. It aims to demonstrate the continued relevance and theoretical and analytical strength of his ideas beyond the Mexican context in which they were developed, a context initially marked by the optimism of the Desarrollo Estabilizador period and later by the profound crisis of 1968. First, it examines the critique of the democracy established in post-revolutionary regimes that Revueltas develops in Mexico: una democracia bárbara. Second, it compares the central categories of Revueltas’s critique—state concealment, ideological mirage, and the fetishization of the ballot box—with the theoretical approaches present in the European debate on the crisis of democracy within a capitalist system. Next, it traces the proposal Revueltas developed through his participation in the 1968 movement, centered on “cognitive democracy,” articulated with the concepts of “self-management” and “organized consciousness,” as an emancipatory alternative to the alienation characteristic of liberal-bourgeois regimes and the crisis of communist parties. The article concludes with an assessment of his political approach, reaffirming the importance of revisiting Revueltas as a theorist given contemporary problems.