On Impure Communism: Rethinking Radical Democracy in Two

Early Latin American Colonial Utopias (1516–32)

Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco

CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2020, pp.
123-145 (Article)

Published by Michigan State University Press

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 On Impure Communism
Rethinking Radical Democracy in Two Early Latin American
Colonial Utopias (1516–32)

Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco

Temple University, Philadelphia

THE PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TWOFOLD. ON THE ONE HAND, I INTEND TO

introduce a concept that might shed some light on the much-debated ques-
tion of radical democracy. This is the concept I would like to refer to as
“impure communism.” On the other hand, I am perfectly aware of the absur-
dity (not to mention the brazen boldness) of such an ambitious enterprise,
that is, the enterprise of defining impure communism in purely theoretical
terms. Thus, I will talk about impure communism not in terms of what it
potentially could be but in terms of how it actually solves a very specific
historical plight: the purported Spanish inability to produce utopian thinking
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early capitalist Spain, or so
the argument goes, would have failed to spur a genuine utopian literature of
the sort her European counterparts cultivated. Instead, Spaniards, faithful to
their inner Sancho Panza-esque appreciation for everyday things, devoted to

CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2020, pp. 123–146. ISSN 1532-687X.
© 2020 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.

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124  On Impure Communism

their millennial penchant for immediacy, would have preferred to transplant

those foreign-grown utopias on American colonial soil with, of course, disap-
pointing when not tragic results (Manuel and Manuel 1971, 1–30; Eliav-Feldon
1982, 15–16; Cro 1994, 4–6).1 That is where the dream would have gone awry.
These practical utopias, although well intentioned and carefully fashioned
after their literary models, would have not lived up to the true spirit of utopia,
therefore disqualifying Spain and the Spanish colonies as a legitimate source
of utopian thought.
There is, to be sure, a good deal of truth to this argument. Many of the
works usually cited as examples of Spanish literary utopias are marginal and
unconvincing; some are in Latin (Juan de Maldonado’s Somnium), others are
brief interventions scattered in Renaissance dialogues by intellectuals like the
anonymous author of the Viaje a Turquía (ca. 1557) or Alfonso de Valdés
(see King Polidoro’s speech in the Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón). A few of them
are even excerpts taken from specula principium like the Libro áureo de Marco
Aurelio by Antonio de Guevara (chapters 31 and 32), or interpolations found in
political treatises like the De motu Hispaniae by Maldonado himself. However,
one might argue that the aforementioned and other Spanish texts do not differ
much in content from the classic literary utopias written by More, Günzburg,
Campanella, or Bacon. Moreover, Omníbona, another speculum in the Xeno-
phontean tradition that was well known to scholars but still unavailable to the
public until three years ago, reads indeed like a bona fide literary utopia, one
that exceeds the 400-page limit in Ignacio García Pinilla’s first edition of the
book (2016). The same can be said about Mariano Baquero Goyanes’s conten-
tion that the “Spanish repugnance for utopia” (“repugnancia española por las
utopías”) extended well into the eighteenth century (1962, 22). Beyond Sina-
pia, the full-on Spanish utopia popularized and studied by Miguel Avilés
shortly after, José Carlos Martínez García published a catalog that included 20
more utopian texts written in Spain by the end of the eighteenth century
(2006, 259–69). Twenty, one might dare to say, is a respectable figure for a
country typically regarded as a barren land for utopia. The argument is indeed
very much alive today. Of course, northern Europeans had been blessed with
the ability of thinking, whereas Spaniards and the peoples they colonized
could always perform worldlier, low value-added tasks, such as cooking, gold
 Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco  125

mining, and practicing utopia. Of course, northern Europeans were res cogi-
tans and the imaginary south (which includes Southern Europe and Latin
America) were res extensa in good-old fashioned Cartesian jargon. This was
precisely the argument that would retroactively engender the myth of the
Spanish “realist spirit” as opposed to French and German idealism, a myth
that would enable Ramón Menéndez Pidal first, and Francisco Franco later, to
re-interpret the Hispanic canon in a seasonable national-conservative key
(1918, 205–35). How could we not address this issue when we evaluate the
disdain scholars profess for the labor involved in these sweaty, mundane,
mucky, Spanish “practical utopias”?2
This is not to say American utopias were in any way flawless or even
remotely fair. It is clear that they cannot be assessed outside of a colonial
framework of exploitation and acculturation. Regardless of how relatively
advantageous these utopian settlements could be for the indigenous popula-
tion, they were always ideological apparatuses that sought the extraction of
surplus value through body disciplining and the erasure of the colonial other.
Yet, as anyone who is familiar with it will be able to acknowledge, utopian
literature already enforced a similar if not greater level of discipline upon the
members of their imaginary communities.3 They were no less patriarchal and
hierarchical than their enacted versions, which should come as no surprise
when we consider that practical utopias reimagined literary utopias only
inasmuch as Thomas More’s Utopia intended to come to terms with Amerigo
Vespucci’s early account of the New World in his Mundus Novus (Cave 1991,
209–29). Hence, I want to note, it is not the pure critique of colonial reason
that stands in the way of an objective examination and appreciation of these
attempts to democratize the colonies, not even a predictable (inasmuch as
engrained in a remnant and very English-speaking Cold War ideology) aver-
sion to censorship and state repression, customarily represented by the Inqui-
sition. Things are sometimes simpler at a deep-core ideological level. The
truth is, as we will see, nothing seems to bother more the detractors of
practical utopias than their practical nature.
The term “practical utopia” itself implies the existence of a “true” Kantian
theoretical utopia that is only guaranteed by the impossibility of its practice.
We could even say that the disavowal of the communitarian logic they display
126  On Impure Communism

(which is, I will claim, the way community qua community works) relies on a
utopian reading of utopia that has many names. Some will call it fiction, some
will call it theory, and some will even call it literature. I am less concerned
about names than I am about procedures, or as Louis Althusser would put it,
about theoretical practice (2005, 167). What all the approaches that are rep-
resentative of this theoretical practice have in common is their “universalist”
take on the commons, as ultimately illustrated by philosophers by the likes of
Jean-Luc Nancy or Alain Badiou, as we will see later. I will take the opposite
road in this essay; I will confront the term “practical utopias” not because I
think utopias cannot be practiced, but—much on the contrary—because I
believe that utopias are not utopias until they are practiced. Thus, the two
examples of utopias that I am going to discuss are not so much practical
utopias as they are utopias in practice. If anything, the ultimate end of impure
communism is to challenge the formal subsumption of theoretical labor
under the autotelic realm of theory, which poses, in my view, the real danger of
operating with loose signifiers as the financial world operates with self-
reflecting assets in late capitalist social formations.
So, what is impure communism anyway? It is, before anything else, a
theoretical practice, a means though which to recognize and actualize de-
mocracy in a given historical setting. I will focus on three of its theoretical
traits, which are not as much traits as conceptual nodes that will allow us to
describe its political effectivity. They are commonality, unpredictable syncre-
tism, and performative conflation.

ONLY IN AMERICA: COMMONALITY AND UNIVERSALITY

REVISITED

Let us travel back to Spanish colonial America in the sixteenth century to

examine the theoretical feasibility of two events, which are to some extent
complementary. The first event is an unconsummated one: Bartolomé de las
Casas’s attempt to found a city of equals in Cumaná, a Spanish settlement
located in today’s Venezuela. The story went out more or less like this: Las
Casas had sailed to Hispaniola in 1502 to take possession of the encomienda
inherited from his father, Pedro de las Casas, who had accompanied
 Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco  127

Columbus in his second voyage. For years, he had acted no differently than
every other encomendero, spreading the word of Christ, collecting revenue,
trading slaves, and staying impervious to general outrage on the part of the
Dominican friars who, led by Antonio de Montesinos, were denouncing the
situation of the indigenous people working in colonial missions. It was prob-
ably not until 1513, when Las Casas witnessed the atrocities committed by the
Spaniards in the conquest of Cuba, that he did not change his mind about the
colonial business. To everybody’s dismay, he suddenly renounced to his own
encomienda, and three years later, in 1516, he wrote the Memorial de remedios
para las Indias, a package of 14 measures intended to improve the living
conditions of the indigenous peoples in Hispaniola (Arias 2002, 128–30). Not
surprisingly, nobody took Las Casas’s petition seriously. The bureaucrats who
were in charge of reviewing it were either landowners (that is, encomenderos
as well), or, plausibly, state officers who had their hopes set on the bribes they
would receive as payment for a negative response. However, Las Casas kept an
ace in the hole. Following a suggestion by his friend and mentor Pedro de
Córdoba, he had applied for a land grant to establish an experimental com-
munity in the already-existing settlement of Cumaná. The new community
would logically follow Las Casas’s own 14 recommendations for a good gov-
ernment. By just taking a simple glimpse at them, we will discover a compel-
ling resemblance between these 14 recommendations and the legislation of
Thomas More’s Utopia, published that very same year of 1516. For both More
and Las Casas, slavery is restricted to cases where the ius ad bellum doctrine
applies, and in both cases surplus value has to be redistributed among the
workers once expenses have been covered (Las Casas 1988, 24).4 Other striking
similarities include the emphasis on the division of powers (particularly the
legislative branch and the judicial one), the idea that the community has to be
a community of teachers and learners, or the preference for productive agri-
culture over unproductive (and capital-oriented) sheep farming. As in More’s
Utopia, commerce will only be justified once the needs of the community have
been satisfied:

Porque teniendo las comunidades los ganados que han de tener y que Dios en
aquellas tierras cría, y los pescadores que pesquen, no solamente habrá para
128  On Impure Communism

dalles de comer y que les sobre, mas aun para vender y hacer muchos dineros
dello para las dichas comunidades, pues el pescado hay más que en parte otra
pueda haber. (39)
[Because having the communities the livestock they are going to have and
that God raises in those lands, and considering that fishers are going to fish,
there will be enough not just to feed them all and to have more, but even to
sell the leftovers and make a lot of money from them for said communities. For
there is more fish than there could be in any other part of the world.]5

Unfortunately, Las Casas’s project never came to fruition.6 First, his enemies
slandered him to the king under the accusation of planning to escape with the
money to Genoa or Rome. In 1520, Las Casas’s concession was finally granted,
but it was a much smaller grant than he had initially asked for; he was also
denied the possibility of extracting gold and pearls, which made it difficult for
him to find investors for the project. Finally, Gonzalo de Ocampo, sent by
Diego Colón (that is, by the elder son of Christopher Columbus), launched a
punitive expedition into the very heart of the territory Las Casas wanted to
colonize peacefully, putting an end to his raucous dream of soft acculturation.
It turned out it was impossible to build a community where all its members
were either dead or mourning the dead.
It just could not be, but a little over a decade later the dream came true in
Mexico. This is the second event that culminates the first one, or, in teleolog-
ical parlance, the second part of an unfinished event. Vasco de Quiroga, one of
the four judges (“oidores”: “those who listen”) in the supreme court of the New
Spain, had reached the conclusion that the only way to evangelize the indige-
nous population without shedding more blood was to gather them in coeno-
bitical communities. With his own money, he went to found two “hospitals” or
“hospitales,” as he called these communities, one of them in Santa Fe of
México (western Mexico City), and the other one in Michoacán. These
hospitales-pueblos were explicitly modeled after the organizational princi-
ples laid out in Thomas More’s Utopia (Zavala 1983, 13).7 As in More’s Utopia,
the basic social unit would be the family headed by the paterfamilias. Every 30
families would be overseen by a “jurado” (jury) corresponding to More’s office
of “Syphogrants.” Above every ten jurados there would be a “regidor”
 Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco  129

(councilor), corresponding to More’s office of the “tranibore” or “philarch.”

Finally, on the top of them there would be two “alcaldes ordinarios” (ordinary
mayors) and a “tacatecle” corresponding to the Utopian prince. All of these
offices were to be held by natives, except for the highest one, that of the
“corregidor” (chief magistrate), who would be a Spaniard appointed by the
audiencia or supreme court. Nevertheless, Quiroga’s utopia in practice is
much more than a simple, or rather than a complex, chain of command. A
close look at the Reglas y ordenanzas para el gobierno de los hospitales de Santa
Fe de México y de Michoacán reveals living conditions for peasants the likes of
which may have not been seen in Mexico ever since. To begin with, in Quiro-
ga’s hospitals there is no such thing as the capitalist division of labor. Much
like in More’s Utopia, work is mandatory, and all occupations are carried out
on a rotational basis: workers spend two months in the mine, and then
another two laboring the land, and then two more doing artisanal work, and
so on. On top of it, they enjoy six-hour workdays, and wealth is equally
redistributed among the members of this colony within the colonies, after, of
course, tax obligations with the crown are met. There is a generous welfare
system for those who cannot work, while private property of the means of
production is restricted to those who work said means of production.8 To
make the point short: these work conditions were not just far more lenient on
the workers than the ones regular peasants endured in sixteenth-century
colonial Mexico, both before and after the new laws of 1542; they are very good
even by today’s standards too (or especially by today’s standards).
What is, then, to be criticized? What is not to like? Customary critique of
Quiroga’s hospitals focuses on their disturbingly “medieval” traits, which
were prominent as well in the Memorial and in other works by Las Casas.
Unlike More’s utopia, which advocated for religious freedom, Quiroga’s uto-
pia is an inevitably Catholic community that adheres to the universitas chris-
tiana doctrine. It does not abhor the feudal notion of servitude, imposed from
above within the framework of the feudal state. All community members are
at the same time subject to the hospital rules and subject to the crown,
because islands (even if we were talking about islands, which we are not) are
not islands in the New World. Surely, they can choose their own representa-
tives at every sublevel of the hierarchical ladder, but at the price of abiding by
130  On Impure Communism

the corrective mandate of the Christian corregidor. Furthermore, the most

basic level of this organigram, the family, presents itself as an openly patriar-
chal institution according to which both young males and females must obey
and worship the oldest male of their lineage. As Jesús Torrecilla points out:
“Quiroga would react against the abuses rather than against the uses of a
Catholic Monarchy that had universal pretensions, thus making it clear that,
despite adopting a critical stance, his worldview could be defined as essen-
tially medieval” (1992, 100–101).
I emphasized the word “universal” for a particular reason. Though I largely
agree with Torrecilla’s complaint, I cannot help but thinking this word occu-
pies a symptomatic space apropos the real question at stake. One has to
wonder if, by denouncing that a Christian universality is being forced upon
this community of Christians and natives, Torrecilla is not actually replacing
the “Christian universal” (which is a very particular and historically deter-
mined ideology) with another form of universality: the “Utopian universal.” In
other words, if Quiroga’s utopia fails because it fails at being as pure a utopia
as it should be, then maybe the question is not whether utopias are possible
but rather whether such utopia of utopias, which is just another name for the
universality of the commons, is even worth thinking of.
We know that for Aristotle this expression (“the universality of the com-
mons”) would have made very little sense. Over the course of his work, Aris-
totle distinguishes many times the strictly general or common (koinon) from
the universal (katholou). As Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot recall in their
monumental Commun:

Aristote avait fort nettement distingué le général ou le commun (koinon) de

l’universel (katholou). Alors que l’universel est déterminé par les limites d’un
genre (par exemple, “homme” ou “animal”), le commun signifie ce qui est
commun à plusieurs genres. Du point de vue de l’extension d’un terme, le
commun est donc supérieur à l’universel. (2014, 41)
[Aristotle had clearly distinguished between the common (koinon) and
the universal (katholou). While the universal is determined by the limits of a
genus (“man” or “animal” for instance), the common signifies that which is
 Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco  131

common to several genera. If we look at the breadth of the two terms, the
common is therefore superior to the universal.]

It is true that the distinction is more subtle than Dardot and Laval would be
probably ready to admit. As far as I can ascertain, there is not a single passage
in Aristotle’s oeuvre in which such distinction is clearly (“nettement”) made;
rather, the difference comes up casually here and there, when discussing the
universality of axioms in the Metaphysics (1996, 31) or when examining the
limits of the zoological genus in Parts of Animals:9

For instance, should we take each single species severally by turn (such as Man, or
Lion, or Ox, or whatever it may be), and define what we have to say about it, in and
by itself? Or should we first establish as our basis the attributes that are common to all
of them because of some common character which they possess?—there being many
attributes which are identical though they occur in many groups which differ among
themselves, e.g., sleep, respiration, growth, decay, death, together with those other
remaining affections and conditions which are of a similar kind. I raise this, for a
present discussion of these matters is an obscure business, lacking any definite
scheme. However, thus much is plain, that even if we discuss them species by
species, we shall be giving the same descriptions many times over for many
different animals, since every one of the attributes I mentioned occurs in horses,
and dogs, and human beings alike. (1961, 55)

Aristotle might have deemed the difference between the universal and the
common too elementary to address it explicitly, too interior to his system.
After all, the universal he was proposing to replace the independent Platonic
form could only be predicated on a community of traits among particular
elements. The koinon is therefore a pivotal notion in Aristotelian metaphysics;
invisible insofar as it is an operational notion; it is always already given and
needs no definition. One could say that the koinon precedes Aristotle as it
precedes the katholou. However, we would make a mistake by thinking that
the universal and the common are just correlative terms. As Dardot and Laval
explain, the universal is constrained within the boundaries of a genus or
family (for instance, man or animal), whereas the precondition of the
132  On Impure Communism

common is to be common to different families (say, the space that men and
animals share). The common is, therefore, more general than the universal,
but it is in contradiction with the notion of universality itself: whereas the
universal is the abstraction of one individual feature that excludes the rest,
commonality is a form of generalization that includes a plurality of features
without privileging one over another. To expect that the commons may be
universalized means to expect that one single actualization (or common
event) can speak for and replace the others, which is in contradiction with the
nature of the koinon itself. Bluntly put with an example, the Constitution of
1869 brought universal suffrage to Spain for the first time. Almost 4 million
people voted, all of whom were men over 25 years old. Instinctively, we rush to
dispute the universality of an electoral process that denies the right to vote to
women and men under 25. In my view, this gesture is politically right and
terminologically wrong. The problem is not that this suffrage is not genuinely
universal; the problem is precisely that it is. What we actually call universal
suffrage (the one that makes no exclusions of men or women) is philosophi-
cally speaking a common suffrage, which is not so much a whole with no
partitions but a partition with no apparent whole, or in less abstract terms, a
historical actualization that is the actualization of nothing in particular. What
common suffrage would mean is that the right to vote belongs to everybody
because it belongs to nobody in the first place. Parts need not be included in a
whole; the whole is only inclusive inasmuch as it is absent in the first place. It
is, once again, not my intention to speak in pure theoretical terms, whose
pretentiousness and elitism I certainly loathe, but I do want to note, even if it
is marginally, that this absent whole should not be read from the standpoint of
a Heideggerian critique of presence. It matches more accurately a Spinozan
model of substance (the whole that merely consists of the interrelation of its
parts), or even the Hegelian notion of Darstellung.10
In this light, the dismissal of Quiroga=s event as “not utopian enough” is
permanently doomed to clash with the limits of categorical universality. Any
notion of a pure, nonhistorical utopia, be it in its normative version (the
utopian goal that can be pursued but never attained), be it in its subjective
one (the utopian impulse or drive that creates its own object, more Ernst
Bloch [1959]), is but the result of an operation that includes the koinon to
 Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco  133

immediately dissolve it into the universal. Kant’s notion of sensus communis in

the Critique of Judgement is perhaps the most transparent formulation of this
philosophical operation:

The common Understanding of men . . . has therefore the doubtful honour of

being given the name of common sense (sensus communis); and in such a way
that by the name common (not merely in our language, where the word
actually has a double signification, but in many others) we understand vulgar,
that which is everywhere met with, the possession of which indicates abso-
lutely no merit or superiority. But under the sensus communis we must include
the Idea of a communal sense, i.e. of a faculty of judgement, which in its
reflection takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of all other
men in thought; in order as it were to compare its judgement with the collec-
tive Reason of humanity, and thus to escape the illusion arising from the
private conditions that could be so easily taken for objective, which would
injuriously affect the judgement. (2012, 101–2)

Kant’s position could hardly be more straightforward. The sensus communis

cannot be the abstraction of a particular (“private”) case that is elevated to the
rank of the universal. It does need to reflect a feature that is common to all
human beings: Reason, which Kant subsequently labels as “collective.” How-
ever, some people are excluded from the reasonable collectivity or fellowship
of Reason: the common people, the vulgus, people who are “vulgar” and whose
judgment “indicates absolutely no merit or superiority.” It is clear that the
sudden exclusion of the vulgus from “collective Reason” begs the question of to
whom this collective Reason really belongs (the prince? The ruling classes?
Kant himself?). Torrecilla’s stand toward “practical utopias” is not so differ-
ent; the human Subject substitutes human Reason as the katholou that shapes
a more “liberal” and tolerable utopia like More’s Utopia. Then, he goes on to
criticize Quiroga’s hospitals for lacking these fundamentally human traits; he
bashes the uniformity of life in the hospitals, the absence of religious freedom,
that young men and women have to arrange their marriages with people from
the same community, or the division of labor into masculine and feminine
work. The same goes for Fernando Gómez, who, after a more nuanced and
134  On Impure Communism

postcolonial-oriented reading of the Reglas y ordenanzas, still situates Quiro-

ga’s endeavors as a part of a “dehumanized repressive culture” (2001, 35). For
these authors, as for many others, once we subtract the Universal Human
subject from a given community, utopia vanishes, or simply makes no (com-
mon) sense. That is the rule of the utopian universal.

UNPREDICTABLE SYNCRETISM, OR CHANCE WITHOUT

CHANCE

How does impure communism confront this critique? Before saying anything
else, the critique of the critique is the obvious one: community could have
never rested on the liberal utopia of multicultural coexistence, because that
“freedom to choose your own cult” would have been saluted as some kind of
polytheistic aberration by both the Christian and the indigenous populations
in the hospitals. As noted earlier, the utopian universal enables rather than
prevents epistemic violence, and it does so equally effectively both under the
guise of the feudal Spanish recipe and under the guise of the liberal, early
capitalist one, turning the hospital dwellers into serfs or picturing them as ratio-
nal subjects. Impure communism does not ignore this, which is partly why it
deserves the name of impure. What impure communism does is to think commu-
nity beyond the always-existing organizing principle that regulates the produc-
tion of the whole to focus, instead, on the interrelation of the parts. If Jean-Luc
Nancy taught us something, this was to understand community not as the result
of an interaction between previously given social actors but as the precondition of
such interaction. Community is already given and inevitable, no matter the ideo-
logical parameters under which it takes place. Community happens. This said, for
Nancy this is an ontological principle that concerns Being, conceived of as a
singularity of singularities, or as the constant production of clinamen (in the
Lucretian sense of the tendency atoms show to encounter other atoms in an
empty space). Nancy does not mean by this that the subject is inclined to become
the other; he means, more precisely, that the subject (or, rather, its absence)
consists of this inclination (Nancy 1991, 3–6).
Less ambitious, less inclined to nurture theoretical paradigms whereby
the subject is already taken into account in praesentia or in absentia, my
 Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco  135

stance only assumes community as a necessary yet contingent encounter

inasmuch as social formations are uneven and contradictory, as uneven and
contradictory in colonial settings as they are outside of them. The shift is the
obvious materialist one: political practice does not stem from community;
community stems (can only be deduced) from political practice, which there-
fore defines the relative autonomy of the political instance. More crucially
perhaps, I claim that community cannot be detached from political practice:
wherever there is friction and contradiction, there is community as well. If
anything, colonial settings, with their brutally stark contrasts and deeply
entrenched oppositions, will help us visualize more vividly the political com-
munitarian practice I am daring to call impure communism here. Syncretism
can be a good example of this practice. Unfortunately, most critics think of
syncretism as willing appropriation, or in other words, privatization; in the
Spanish colonial context, it is either the sly appropriation of indigenous ob-
jects by the colonizer (as a means of, say, nonforcible evangelization), or the
appropriation of European objects by the colonized (to “subvert” the estab-
lished order, etc.). Say, either Bartolomé de las Casas’s translation of Bible
verses into K’ekchi in Vera Paz, or Guamán Poma’s famous reappropriation of
European symbolic economies in his Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno,
magisterially dissected by Rolena Adorno. Still and all, the kind of political
practice I am trying to describe would require us to consider an unwilling,
unlikely, or even unpredictable syncretism for which individual agency is less
relevant.
Let me explain what this means with another colonial example. In a
brilliant article entitled “The After-Life of Inka Rulers: Andean Death Before
and After Spanish Colonization,” Carolyn Dean reflects on “how painted por-
traits and festive embodiment—both practices introduced to the Andes from
Spain—were adapted (if not appropriated) by the Inka as ways of keeping
their ancestors physically present” (2010, 27). According to Dean, the Inka
preserved the essence (kamay) of their deceased rulers embodied in a material
object they called wawqi, frequently a stone, which conveys the idea of solid-
ness and durability. A transmutation like this allowed for the coexistence of
the dead and the mortals, who would talk to the wawqi, pay their respects to
and wave at them, and so forth. Dean emphasizes that the wawqi did not
136  On Impure Communism

represent the royal dead but rather coincided with him: “While representa-
tions mediate between absent or invisible prototypes, embodiments make the
absent or the invisible immediate” (36). As soon as the colonizers noticed the
cult, they rushed to punish it as idolatry: the cuzqueños were indeed venerat-
ing an object in itself rather than what it represented. Dean then asks herself a
question: How did the Inca react to the confiscation of their royal corpses? Her
answer is clear: by taking objects regulated by the representational regime of
the European episteme and turning them into wawquis, objects that embody
(and not represent) their ancestor’s souls. The portraits of the Incan nobility
commissioned by the viceroy Francisco de Toledo and sent to Phillip II in 1572
would inaugurate the representative regime in Cuzco, but this does not imply
that the wawqi tradition would vanish away for good. On the contrary, the
Incas adopted the art of representation to prolong it; to own portraits of the
Incan nobility and to use them to decorate their houses became a widely
extended custom among them during the seventeenth century (44–48). Con-
sequently, the mimetic mechanism that regulated representation in Spain
was merely a crypto-religious pretense through which the indigenous popu-
lation made the Spaniards believe they were just contemplating an absent
object (44).
The problem with Dean’s interpretation is that it is an interpretation; she
is not able to provide evidence as to substantiate the hypothesis that the Inca
orchestrated a crafty maneuver to deceive the Spaniards. Not that she is to
blame: we can actually work with hypotheses, and this one is reasonable.
However, as far as hypotheses go, I believe that the following is at least equally
viable and interesting, if not more: I refer to the hypothesis that the Incas
regarded pictorial representation as a certain kind of embodiment in the first
place, just as Spaniards regarded pictorial embodiment as tolerable represen-
tation. If this were so, we would need to assume no astute strategy, no subjec-
tive irony whatsoever; what we would get instead is impure communism,
which is nothing but the productive confusion of the Aristotelian koinon: the
overlapping of embodiment and representation, or the moment when em-
bodiment becomes representation and representation becomes embodi-
ment.11 Openness and indifference replace universality and difference to facil-
itate a coexistence (or an existence in the commons) that paves the way out of
 Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco  137

colonization whenever revolution is bound to fail.12 This is, I hold, what the
Reglas y ordenanzas set out to achieve in practice, even if they cannot put it
explicitly for censorship-related reasons. How else could we explain that these
bylaws, stretching over some 21 pages, which go into great detail depicting
such anodyne aspects as the fabric of garments that must be dressed (cotton
or wool) or the number of people that may live in a house (up to 12), only invest
three lines in regulating the religious services commoners must attend? The
rule sounds more like a laconic recommendation than a mandate: “Que entre
semana por la mañana no pierdan misa, si posible es” (“That they do not miss
mass on a week day, if possible”). That “if possible” finds its echo in the
following line: “no la perdáis, pues es santa ocupación en que se gana mucho
en todo, y por pereza o poca cristiandad, no se deje, salvo justa ocupación o
legítimo impedimento (“do not miss it, for it is a sacred occupation in which
there is much to gain in every sense. Do not stop attending mass due to
laziness or lack of Christianity, unless a fair duty or a legitimate obstacle gets
in the way”) (Quiroga 1940, 238). It certainly seems odd that an Augustinian
rule that pursues full enforcement of the Catholic doctrine would urge the
parishioners to go to mass “if possible,” or to overcome their lack of motiva-
tion or of even Christian faith unless they have better things to do. Be it as
it may, Quiroga’s utopia helps us envision a probable scenario: one in
which indigenous commoners did not need to change their beliefs if when
they said “God” they simply meant a different thing; or, as Jacques Ran-
cière famously put it: “Disagreement is not the conflict between one who
says white and another who says black. It is the conflict between one who
says white and another who also says white but does not understand the
same thing” (1999, 10).
Rancière’s politics of disagreement (the inclusion of the part that has no
part) comes indeed very close to what impure communism is supposed to
mean, because it brings our attention to the moment in which a genus is in
contradiction with the elements that belong to it. This parallel notwithstand-
ing, we must point at an irreconcilable difference: impure communism is
fundamentally impure, also politically speaking, which means that it cannot
take place outside of a given ideological framework. When Rancière breaks
with the Althusserian problématique (fairly, because Althusser never
138  On Impure Communism

developed a proper theory of the “political instance”), he goes as far as to flirt

with the possibility of pure politics, which he rejects with debatable success.13
It is true that la politique is not the exact opposite of la police, in that la
politique, or the purely political act, does not constitute a negative (Hegelian)
version of la police or the already-existing political status quo; its function is to
render visible the status quo rather than replacing it. Yet, true as this is, there
is a reason why this dichotomy (police/politics) exists, or even why this di-
chotomy is a dichotomy unlike, for instance, the link between the political and
the ideological instance in Althusser, which does not lay claims to mutual
exclusivity. The reason why this dichotomy presents itself is that politics can
never fully coincide with police without surrendering the emancipatory value
of its political practice. In Althusser, the political instance and the ideological
one inhabited an unevenly developed structure, but said unevenness could
not develop by virtue of a direct, bilateral opposition. A third instance had to
be taken into account to evaluate the degree to which the social formation was
disjointed, to verify the décalage: the economic one. Politics and ideology—
considered as a symbolic set of conditions that shaped politics—could very
well appear aligned. For Rancière, though, politics may not be the negation of
the police (it remains attached to it insofar as it consists of a different distri-
bution of the same sensible), but it is clear that politics gets detached from the
police the moment it renders it visible or it manifests its inner truth. This
moment is a time for pure epiphany or anagnorisis: the moment in which the
subject realizes that white is not white, which is also the moment in which
police recognizes itself as contingent. Quiroga’s utopia, by contrast, remains
inevitably a colonial utopia; its politics remain ideologically determined and
overdetermined. Black remains black and white remains white. There is some
common ground between whiteness and blackness nonetheless, one that
cannot be reduced to a mestizo compromise between them, because it needs
no self-recognition or identity solution to flourish. If we had to translate
impure communism to Rancière’s politics of disagreement (to which it is
deeply indebted), we would have to say that it not only allows the overlapping
of la politique and la police but also, and most significantly, seems to demand
it. Therein lies the paradox: to reach a breaking point with its ideological
configuration, the political act has to identify fully with it. That is what I called
 Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco  139

performative conflation. Impure communism is a politics of misunderstand-

ing rather than a politics of disagreement: it does not try to seek emancipation
from power (emancipatory politics is not the emancipation of politics), and it
does not know that it is intimately differing from it. Impure communism is,
perhaps, the disagreement of those who do not necessarily know that they are
disagreeing. Its manifestation should not leave any trace of a pure identity
behind, not the European sameness, not the purity of the indigenous being,
not the hybrid subject that comes at the expense of their reconciliation in a
new universal subjective category.14

CONCLUSION: ARE FAILED UTOPIAS, FAILED?

There is one conclusion to draw from the examination of this historical case:
the choice—the epistemological choice regarding the operational principles
of radical democracy—was never the choice between an irreducible particu-
larity (relativism) and a particular totality (universalism), which usually
amounts to the choice between a postmodern atomism (Deleuze and Nancy)
or a Hegelian-inspired idealism (Agamben and Badiou). The first one (atom-
ism) constitutes an example of what we could call a universal particularity,
that is to say, a particular form of life to which we universally should return;
the second one (idealism) takes the form of a particular universality, the
universal idea of the commons that, sooner or later, is bound to be incarnated
in a particular event. Both place the possibility of the commons in a radical
alterity, idealistically situated in either the past (the arcadia formula) or the
future (the utopian formula), a past resilient to corruption or a future where
the Idea might someday rejoice in its final actualization. Fortunately, the
study of practical utopias or utopias in practice opens up some room for a
third option: a radically immanent one. The radical alterity of utopia does not
consist of opposing something else to the already-existing order but to pres-
ent the already-existing order as something else. In Quiroga’s example, this
means to transform the feudal order into a hospital, which is an artifact that
did not previously exist, and yet one that would be unthinkable outside of the
feudal superstructures rendered by the mercantilist mode of production. The
hospital, however, does not exist by virtue of the universalization of its feudal
140  On Impure Communism

principles. Such universalization would have logically entailed the universal-

ization of the structural conditions underlying ideological feudalism, leading
to a widening of the gap between the institution of lordship and servitude.
Instead, what we find here is a model of inclusive generalization, according to
which each of the elements that take part of a structure becomes representa-
tive of the structure as a whole. For instance, the Spanish and the indigenous
commoners are subject to the sovereign, but in the hospital environment, they
serve each other as they serve the king. The Reglas y ordenanzas encourages
mutual service with these words: “Y os ayudéis con gran voluntad y animán-
doos los unos a los otros” (“And you shall help each other with good will and
you shall encourage each other”) (1940, 229). Meanwhile, Las Casas writes in
the Memorial: “porque los compañeros que tuvieren serán como sus ayos”
(“because the comrades they will have will be like their tutors”) (1988, 25).15 It
is once and over again the same operation: the feudal institution of service has
been neither universalized nor abolished; it has become common, which
means the horizontal disposition of its parts comes as a result of its conflation
with the whole (all commoners are both masters and servants of each other).
Another example: the hospital is a strictly agrarian community that forbids
money and surplus accumulation, remains strictly regulated, and so forth.
Peasants are not prisoners, but they belong to the land so long as they live in
the hospital. However, agriculture, in the hospital, is an “oficio común” (“com-
mon duty”), meaning anybody is a peasant, as everybody does everybody else’s
job. Not by chance, “anybody” appears constantly in our utopian texts: it is
“cualquiera persona” in Las Casas’s Memorial (35) and “utroque homine” in the
Reglas y ordenanzas (223). It goes without saying that the subjective category
of “anybody,” much like the political edifice of the hospital itself, did not make
sense within the ideological coordinates of feudalism, but it is also evident
that it could have not been produced from outside of its boundaries. When the
political does not alter but confirms the established police, we get impure
communism. In almost any other sense, inclusive generalization, unlike uni-
versalization, simply implies what Rancière would denominate a different
“partage du sensible” where there is no part that has no part. According to its
jurisdiction, community cannot be distinguished from the set of practices
that generate community; that allows us to deduce community from practice
 Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco  141

itself, regardless of its reference to a major organizational principle (Chris-

tian, feudal, liberal) or lack thereof. Unlike Badiou’s communism, impure
communism is communism without an idea.16 That is the lesson these utopias
conceal in the very root of their meaning: there is no place for utopia in the
nonplace utopia wants to represent.
Of course, by saying this I am not trying to suggest that we should settle
down for a practical communism or a communism without communism,
much less to condone the ridiculous charade of “really existing communism,”
or the communism that never deserved that name. I am actually claiming
something a little less obvious: if we really want to imagine what a community
of equals could look like, we should begin by abandoning the archipolitical
notion of a universal utopia fashioned after an idea or a negativity to come.
This community of equals is neither the actualization of a universal Idea nor
the universalization of a singular event but the reorganization of real condi-
tions of existence within a very specific ideological framework with which it
tends to coincide. Perhaps it is not enough to defend that these conditions are
preparing the ground for pure communism to finally land, or even to suggest,
as Paolo Virno did, that post-Fordism is already “the communism of capital”
(2004, 110). A serious ontology of real communism, if there is such thing, must
include in the definition of community whatever lies beneath the community
itself, especially whatever prevents community from being finished. Other-
wise, we will be left with the “universality of the commons” with its multiple
variants (the universitas christiana, international socialism, alter-globalism,
etc.), which is a project destined to fail from its very inception, if not a blatant
contradictio in adjecto. Replacing the “universality of the commons” formula
with the more horizontal, and maybe painfully tautological, “commonality of
the commons” should not be an empty theoretical gesture. It should help us
frame the need to identify a common terrain between those practices that we
associate with community building and those practices that seem to under-
mine it. How can we omit that the effectiveness of these colonial rules (what
sets them apart from their literary recreations) is their ability to incorporate
elements that are alien to their own utopian ambitions? It is far too easy to
criticize Quiroga’s vision of a communitas christiana as incomplete or as
patently imperialistic, as if there were another alternative or as if the liberal
142  On Impure Communism

utopia in which we already live were the retrospective alternative. We may be

missing the point here. In trying to keep up with the high expectations of
modernity, we tend to forget that a utopia fails when it fails, not when it fails at
being a utopia. This particular one never failed: Quiroga’s hospitals, which at
their peak harbored as many as 30,000 pobladores at a time when Madrid had
around 19,000, remained active until 1872. The experiment lasted for almost
three centuries and a half, more than most original American settlements and
more than some sovereign states. One century and a half later, the failure
proves itself again a secret success.

NOTES

1. Frank and Fritzie Manuel state that utopia was not a “distinguished form in either Spain or
Germany” (1971, 1); Miriam Eliav-Feldon goes even further: “Why were there some countries
or nationalities which (to the best of my knowledge) did not produce in that period even a
single utopia proper? . . . Why none in Spain? Was it the preoccupation with colonization in
the New World, which diverted the attention of the Spanish humanists from imaginary
societies to real social experiments? Or was it the rule of the Inquisition and the enforced
religious uniformity that prevented the appearance of utopias proper which are, as indi-
cated above, a product of a fundamentally secular impulse? (1982, 15).
2. It is notorious that the very bulky and otherwise classic Manguel and Guadalupi’s Diction-
ary of Imaginary Places (1999) does not refer to colonial America, but it does mention
Kafka’s Amerika. Once we have deprived utopia of its most elementary historical substance,
the closest we can get to the shores of the New World is, in a very much Hegelian fashion,
Kafka’s Bohemia.
3. The critique of the restrictions Renaissance utopia imposes on freedom can be traced back
to R. W. Chambers’s seminal article (Adams 1991, 137–41).
4. Let us note that this redistribution is relative to the strictly feudal logic of extraction that
still perseveres in the language of the Memorial: before anything else, “ha de ser sacado
primero el diezmo para Dios” (“the tithe for God has to be subtracted first”) (1988, 24).
5. Compare with More’s community, where “they have little commerce with any other nation;
and as they, according to the genius of their country, have no inclination to enlarge their
borders” (27). More had literally advanced Marx’s thesis of primitive accumulation in his
first book, blaming those who promoted capitalist investment in sheep livestock and
facilitated the privatization of common pool resources. Let us not forget that Castile had
expanded under the rule of the Trastámara dynasty almost exclusively by raising ovine
livestock and selling the wool to European manufacturers. Hence the semantic link
 Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco  143

between capital and the “cabezas” (caput-capitis) of the herd, and between the ganatum
(capitalist profit in Latin) and the ganado (both “earnings” and “livestock” in Spanish). See
Javier García Irigoyen (2014, 3–15).
6. As it is well known, Las Casas attempted to create a second community of equals in la Vera
Paz (Guatemala) that was similarly thwarted by imperial interests. The crown reluctantly
agreed to the experiment and conceded Las Casas a region of north-central Guatemala that
had been notoriously hard to subdue: the local K’ekchi people were warlike, defiant, and
killed any Spaniards who attempted to enter their territory. Spanish fortune hunters,
slavers and conquistadores swarmed in, looking for treasure and slaves. The K’ekchi rose in
bloody revolt, which was brutally quashed in a heartbeat. By the late 1540s, the Vera Paz
project was in tatters and Las Casas ready to throw in the towel.
7. There is even a testimonial mural painting featuring Vasco de Quiroga side by side with
Thomas More and designed by Juan O’Gorman for the Gertrudis Bocanegra public library
in Pátzcuaro (Michoacán).
8. Unless, of course, they abandon the land. Ownership of the land corresponds to what Alain
Testart categorized as “proprieté usufondée,” or ownership based on use (2012, 417–18).
9. Axioms in Aristotle are an example of what I will later call general or “universal particular-
ity”; they are universal, but they belong to particular sciences and therefore they do not
apply to all phenomena at once.
10. See Heikkilä (78–85).
11. This is, in psychoanalytic terms, the Lacanian sinthome; that is, the symptom that is not
ciphered in language as a message but inscribed in the bodily quality of language itself
(2016).
12. It is worth noting that unlikely syncretism does not coincide with Ángel Rama’s “transcul-
turation.” Transculturated texts and bodies are re-inscribed into a particular form of
subjectivity, which is the Latin American subject.
13. That is, at least, Slavoj Žižek’s contention, who directly accuses the ex-Althusserians
(Rancière, Balibar, and Badiou) of dreaming up different modalities of “pure politics.” See
Žižek (1999, 171–244). A nice rebuttal can be found in Samuel A. Chambers (2011, 306–20).
14. I want to take the chance to express my gratitude to my colleague Paul North (Yale
University), who made me much more aware than I already was of my debts to Rancière and
my differences with him.
15. The word “tutor” retains in Spanish the double meaning of “tutor” and “servant” (who looks
after the children of his or her master).
16. Badiou’s definition of the idea, “the subjectivation of an interplay between the singularity of
a truth procedure and a representation of history” (2010, 235), is more complex than the way
many tend to portray it. It does demand a certain degree of impure mediation to allow for
the historical inscription of politics in a concrete situation. As Bruno Bosteels rightly notes:
“To avoid the trap of speculative leftism, therefore, a certain degree of duplicity and
impurity must be preserved in the articulation between the old state of things and the new
emancipatory truth” (2011, 28–29). For Badiou, it is the mediation that is nonetheless
144  On Impure Communism

impure, not the idea itself, which despite being its relation with practice, hides its funda-
mental purity in the notion of the “truth procedure.”

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X X X
VÍCTOR PUEYO ZOCO is an Associate Professor and Graduate Chair in the
Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Temple University (Philadelphia).
He holds a PhD in Hispanic languages and literatures (Stony Brook
University, 2010). His interests include Marxist and post-Marxist critical
theory, early capitalist ideological production in the Spanish Empire and the
colonies, and contemporary cinema and popular culture in Spain. He has
published two books and several articles in these fields. He is currently
working on two parallel projects: an introduction to the commons in
medieval and early modern Spain and a book on neoliberal fiction.