[News] Preparing for a Post-Chávez Venezuela

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Preparing for a Post-Chávez Venezuela

<http://venezuelanalysis.com/printmail/8087>http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/8087
<http://venezuelanalysis.com/print/8087>

By George Ciccariello-Maher - Counterpunch, March 7th 2013

Hugo Chávez is no more, and yet the symbolic importance of the 
Venezuelan President that exceeded his physical persona in life, 
providing a condensation point around which popular struggles coalesced, 
will inevitably continue to function long after his death. It's not for 
nothing that the words of the great revolutionary folk singer Alí 
Primera <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbKsD8PIwzE> are on the tip of 
many tongues:

/Los que mueren por la vida
no pueden llamarse muertos/

/---/

Those who die for life
cannot be called dead.

*A Barefoot Revolutionary*

Hugo Chávez was a poor kid from the country, which tells you much of 
what you need to know about him. Bare feet, mud hut, perpetual sunburn, 
gleaning hard lessons and a strong dose of audacity from everyday 
experiences in that wild part of the Venezuelan flatlands, or /llanos/, 
that crash abruptly into the towering Andes mountains.

While politics was in the soil under his feet and in his every social 
interaction, Chávez's first formal contact with revolutionary politics 
came through his elder brother, Adán, a member of the still-clandestine 
former guerrilla organization, Party of the Venezuelan Revolution (PRV). 
It was the PRV that refused intransigently to come down from the 
mountains in the late 1960s when the Venezuelan Communist Party decided 
to withdraw from the armed struggle, and it was the PRV more than any 
other organization that resisted Marxist orthodoxy by excavating 
Venezuelan and Latin American revolutionary traditions under the 
umbrella of "Bolivarianism."

Through Adán, Chávez the younger was imbued with the legacy of this 
Venezuelan guerrilla struggle and its aspirations, a necessary and 
portentous counterbalance to the official doctrine he would learn in the 
military academy. But even as a soldier, Chávez was always irreverent to 
the core, and it wasn't long before he had begun to organize with other 
radical officers. Their conspiratorial grouping would eventually be 
called the MBR-200, the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement, and it was 
not a purely military affair, evolving in close contact with 
revolutionary communist guerrillas from the PRV and elsewhere.

*The Old Venezuela*

The old Venezuela is no more. The Venezuelan /ancien regime/ was one of 
self-professed harmony, and it cultivated this myth to the very end. For 
political scientists, this translated as "Venezuelan exceptionalism": in 
a sea of unrest and dictatorship, it alone remained relatively stable 
and "democratic." But this was a harmony premised on the invisibility of 
the majority, and a stability crafted through the incorporation and 
neutralization of any and all oppositional movements. Those who refused 
to concede were murdered or imprisoned in the gulags of this 
"exceptional" democracy.

When Hugo Chávez first attempted to overthrow the Venezuelan government 
of Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992, he was attacking a democracy in name 
only. Decades of two-party rule had created a system that was utterly 
unresponsive to the needs of the vast majority, and as economic crisis 
set in during the "lost decade" of the 1980s, the poor turned to 
rebellion and the government to brute repression. In only the most 
spectacular of many moments of resistance, the week-long 1989 rebellion 
known as the Caracazo 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/03/03/the-fourth-world-war-started-in-venezuela/>, 
somewhere between 300 and 3,000 were slaughtered as Pérez ordered the 
military to "restore order" in the poor /barrios /that surround Caracas 
and other Venezuelan cities.

It was this rebellion more than any other, and the repression it 
unleashed, that led, nay /forced/, Chávez and others to attempt a coup 
with the support of revolutionary grassroots movements, and it was this 
coup more than any other event that led to his eventual election in 
1998. /Finally/ someone had taken a stand, and when Chávez promised on 
national television that the conspirators had only failed "/por ahora/, 
for now," he was effectively promising, as did Fidel Castro nearly 40 
years prior, that history would absolve him.

*The New Venezuela*

In many ways, it has. Under Chávez's watch, Venezuela has become more 
equal, the most egalitarian country in Latin America in fact, according 
to the Gini coefficient if income distribution. Poverty has been reduced 
significantly 
<http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/chavezs-legacy>, 
and extreme poverty almost stamped out. Illiteracy has been eliminated 
and education is freely accessible, through the university level, to 
even the poorest Venezuelans. Health care is free and universal. Despite 
catastrophic language by the Venezuelan opposition and foreign press, 
the economy is strong, and has weathered the global economic crisis 
better than most (notably, the United States).

More important than this improvement in the social welfare of the 
Venezuelan majority, however, are the /political /transformations that 
the Venezuelan state and people have undergone, transformations that 
remain far from complete. This was not a merely populist government that 
sought to buy votes through handouts, but a
radically democratic government that sought, often despite its own 
autocratic tendencies, to empower the people to intervene from below as 
the true "protagonists" of history. Through communal councils, 
cooperatives, communes, and popular militias, the Venezuelan government 
has radically empowered the radical grassroots, albeit not without 
resistance from its own bureaucrats.

But these accomplishments do not belong to Chávez alone, and in fact, 
they do not belong to Chávez at all. Long before Chávez, there were the 
revolutionary movements that tried, failed, and tried better, generating 
the experiences, organizations, and outlooks that would eventually 
propel Chávez to the helm of an untrustworthy state. Any celebration of 
Chávez that presents him as a savior is an insult to the people he held 
in such high esteem, and whose orders he followed.

Inversely, some ill-informed leftists decry him as not having been 
revolutionary enough, not moving quickly enough toward socialism: the 
revolution must be all at once or not at all. Others, here taking a page 
from the liberals, attack him for being authoritarian, autocratic, and 
undemocratic. But this all misses the most fundamental point: that the 
Venezuelan revolution is not Chávez. If we fail to understand why many 
millions of Venezuelans are in mourning today, then we have voluntarily 
abandoned any serious effort to understand what is going on in Venezuela.

*A Combative Democrat*

Even as President, Chávez's rural persona always managed to break 
through the polite veneer of political leadership: as when he would 
often spontaneously break into /llanero /song, speak in country parables 
and /refranes/, or brutally attack opponents and allies alike on live 
television. Also arguably a legacy of the countryside was his 
paradoxical democratic authoritarianism: deeply respectful of the people 
and fervently egalitarian, he would not take no for an answer when it 
came to revolutionizing the country. While Chávez had long dreamed of 
becoming a major league pitcher, his childhood nickname, /latigo/, the 
whip, described his approach to politics at least as well as it 
described his fastball.

But this contradiction was not his own: direct democracy and 
representative democracy are rarely the sympathetic allies their names 
might suggest, and one of the seeming paradoxes of the Bolivarian 
Revolution is that it has taken a firm push /from above/ to clear the 
way for radically democratic participation /from below/. This is what 
critics of Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution mean when they suggest 
that he has run roughshod over democratic "checks and balances," failing 
to note that such institutional constraints, however justifiable, are 
often far from democratic.

As a result, the two sides seem to speak completely different languages: 
for the one, which seems to include Republican Congressman Ed Royce bid 
a quick "good riddance" to Chávez, the leader was an authoritarian 
dictator. Such claims come as a surprise to Chavistas, however, who have 
elected him many times, repeatedly choosing the path of an increasingly 
radical revolutionary process, and who are quick to point out the 
contradiction between their democratic will and term limits. Many poor 
Venezuelans, too, were surprised at the outrage that ensued when Chávez 
referred to George W. Bush as "the devil" or as a "donkey." The poor 
rarely grasp the role of politeness in politics, seeing it instead 
intuitively but correctly as the realm of powerful oppositions, of 
Bush's own "you're with us or you're against us."

The Manichean nature of Venezuelan politics in recent years has been 
undeniable, but we would be well advised to recognize, with Frantz 
Fanon, that this division between us and them, Chavistas and /escualidos 
/(or more recently, /majunches/), was more a reflection of a structural 
reality than the fault of Chávez or the Revolution. While elite 
Venezuelans began to mourn the disappearance of Venezuelan "harmony," 
what they really meant was that, all of a sudden, poor and dark-skinned 
Venezuelans had appeared, had made their presence felt, and had even 
assumed the mantle of the government as a mechanism for pressing their 
demands.

Chávez certainly courted Manicheanism to mobilize the people in the 
struggle, but this Manicheanism also came to him, for phenotypic as well 
as political reasons: dark-skinned, with a wide nose and large ears, 
"/with his very image 
<http://thinkingafricarhodesuniversity.blogspot.com/2011/08/jumpstarting-decolonial-engine-symbolic.html>/, 
Chávez has shaken up the beehive of social harmony... /His image/ upsets 
the wealthy women of Cuarimare." Chávez and his supporters have long 
been racialized in terms that would seem scandalous anywhere else: 
monkey, blackie, scum, horde, rabble. Open racism exploded during the 
2002 coup that unseated Chávez for less than two days, in many ways 
forcing him to recognize it publicly in a country that had often 
celebrated /mestizaje/ and insisted that there was no racism in 
Venezuela. In the end, this Manicheanism has become the most important 
motor for driving the revolutionary process forward, unifying the people 
against a common enemy and preparing them for the struggle ahead.

I was supposed to meet Hugo Chávez, but he cancelled at the last minute. 
His unpredictability stemmed from a combination of security concerns and 
an irrepressible desire to do everything himself. The closest I ever got 
was about 10 feet away, awash in a rushing torrent of red-shirted 
Chavistas on the Avenida Bolívar in 2007, as the now late President 
drove by atop a truck. As he passed, I reached up and performed my 
favorite Chavista gesture: pounding palm with fist to symbolize the 
brutal pummeling of the opposition. As though confirming the centrality 
of combat in a Revolution that would outlive him, he looked at me and 
did the same.

*The Revolution Will Not Be Reversed*

What will happen next? Within 30 days, there will be elections, in which 
Chávez's hand-picked successor Nicólas Maduro will almost certainly 
prevail against an opposition that only seems to ever come together for 
the purposes of then falling apart. But the future in the longer term 
remains unwritten. While nothing is inevitable, however, a great many 
poor and radicalized Venezuelans will tell you that they will not take 
/ni un paso atras/, a single step back, and that conversely, /no 
volverán/, they shall not return. And they mean it.

This is a revolutionary assurance that has never depended solely on the 
figure of Chávez. As I write in the introduction to my forthcoming book 
/We Created Chávez/ <http://es.scribd.com/doc/128885749/counterpunchmaga>:

    "The Bolivarian Revolution is not about Hugo Chávez. He is not the
    center, not the driving force, not the individual revolutionary
    genius on whom the process as a whole relies or in whom it finds a
    quasi-divine inspiration. To paraphrase the great Trinidadian
    theorist and historian C.L.R. James: Chávez, like the Haitian
    revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture, 'did not make the revolution.
    It was the revolution that made' Chávez. Or, as a Venezuelan
    organizer told me, 'Chavez didn't create the movements, we created
    him.'"

In 1959, Frantz Fanon declared the Algerian Revolution irreversible, 
despite the fact that the country would not gain formal independence for 
another three years. Studying closely the transformation of Algerian 
culture during the course of the struggle and the creation of what he 
called a "new humanity," Fanon was certain that a point of no return had 
been reached, writing that:

    "An army can at any time reconquer the ground lost, but how can the
    inferiority complex, the fear and the despair of the past be
    reimplanted in the consciousness of the people?"

In revolution, there are no guarantees, and there's no saying that the 
historical dialectic cannot be bent back upon itself, beaten and bloody. 
The point is simply that for the forces of reaction to do so will be no 
easy task. Long ago, the Venezuelan people stood up, and it is difficult 
if not impossible to tell a people on their feet to get back down on 
their knees.

/*George Ciccariello-Maher*, teaches political theory at Drexel 
University in Philadelphia. He is the author of We Created Chávez: A 
People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822354527/counterpunchmaga> 
(Duke University Press, May 2013), and can be reached at 
gjcm(at)drexel.edu./

Source: Counterpunch 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/06/preparing-for-a-post-chavez-venezuela/>
-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20130307/85eb14a9/attachment.htm>