[News] Hugo Chávez and Maoism

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/24/hugo-chavez-and-maoism-a-conversation-with-chris-gilbert/
Hugo
Chávez and Maoism: A Conversation with Chris Gilbert
by Cira Pascual Marquina
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/cira-pascual-marquina/>- December 24,
2020
------------------------------

*Professor of political science at Venezuela’s Bolivarian University, Chris
Gilbert is creator and co-host of Escuela de Cuadros, a Marxist educational
program broadcast in Venezuelan public television and a participant in the
Barcelona-based project Seminari Taifa. Gilbert’s articles have appeared in
Rebelión, LaHaine, Monthly Review, and CounterPunch, and he has coauthored
the recently-published book *Venezuela, the Present as Struggle
<https://monthlyreview.org/product/venezuela_the_present_as_struggle/>*
(Monthly Review Press, 2020).*

*The Chinese revolutionary experience in general, and Mao Zedong’s thought
in particular, had a global impact. What can you tell us about its
influence in Venezuela? *

Well, the first thing to say is that in Venezuela, Maoism did not play an
important role in any direct sense. That is a question of timing and
geography. In the first place, the Cuban Revolution’s influence was so
important in the whole region that it tended to eclipse everything else.
Then, when Maoism became a fashion, capturing the imagination of many
European leftists in the late 60s and after, it did influence people in the
Venezuelan left, but by then the revolutionary struggle was already
beginning to subside.

That, of course, didn’t keep some Venezuelan revolutionaries from having
Maoism as some kind of theoretical reference, and it’s important to point
out that Che Guevara, who was obviously very influential throughout Latin
America, sympathized with many Maoist ideas.

*So would you say that, if there is a common ground between Maoism and
Chavismo, it is more a question of parallel evolution?*

Certainly, and one of the most fascinating parallels comes by way of Simón
Bolívar [Venezuela’s key independence leader, 1783-1830] and his attitude
toward the army. Bolívar, like Mao, believed his revolutionary army to be
an important democratic and popular force. When people criticized Bolívar
for relying on his army in politics – attacking him from a liberal position
– Bolívar responded: *the army is the people who can actually do things*.
Bolívar’s phrase could also be translated: *the army is the people with
power*. For Bolívar, the revolutionary army was part of the people (think:
“The people are like water and the army like fish”), and it was a
democratizing force. That was true at the time and, as it turns out, the
relationship between army and people became one of the key factors in the
revolution that happened in Venezuela two centuries later.

*That brings us to Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Process. What can you
tell us about Chávez, his Chinese allies, and Mao Zedong?*

There are interesting anecdotes about Chávez and Mao. Chávez established
close relations with China, which he called a “strategic ally.” As
everybody who observed him knew, Chávez was a politically and socially
skilled person. He used to make the Chinese leaders uncomfortable, because
he would bring up Mao when he was with them, quoting from the* Little Red
Book*. He treated Mao just as he treated Bolívar, that is, as someone who
is alive and among us. But that wasn’t what the Chinese leadership wanted
to hear. They preferred Mao as something more distant and static – more
like an icon – because of course most of them were capitalist-roaders. I
think Chávez, who was socially very sophisticated, liked to make them
uncomfortable. He knew what he was doing!

*But beyond the anecdotes, was there a substantial relation between the
practice and theory of Chavismo, on the one hand, and those of Maoism, on
the other?*

There was a very important relation between Chávez’s conception of the
transition to socialism and some key Maoist ideas. When Chávez decided that
the commune was the path to socialism, he started to promote the
reading of *Inside
a People’s Commune: Report from Chiliying*, the book by Chu Li and Tien
Chieh-yun.

In fact, in his last substantial discourse, the so-called “Strike at the
Helm <https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/strike-at-the-helm/>” [2012],
Chávez criticized his ministers for not having read the book, which he had
published as a pamphlet and from which he read sections on national
television. Chávez thought that the experience of Chinese communes – which
was an important Maoist legacy initiated in the Great Leap Forward – held
many important lessons for Venezuelan communes. In fact, he saw the latter
as the basic building blocks of socialism in Venezuela.

*In his “Strike at the Helm” discourse, Chávez actually behaved a bit like
Mao. When he attacked the ministers and criticized them publicly, that was
like Mao saying at the beginning of the Great Cultural Revolution that the
party’s headquarters should be bombarded!*

Exactly! And that brings us to the most important if somewhat abstruse
relation between Chavismo and Maoism – it comes by way of the Great
Cultural Revolution, but not directly (and that is why it is a bit
abstruse). The truth is that there is an extraordinary parallel between the
ideas of István Mészáros, who was the most important Marxist thinker for
Chávez, and Mao’s project in the Cultural Revolution, although as far as I
know, Mészáros didn’t have much to say about that aspect of the Chinese
revolutionary experience.

*Hence, more like a parallel evolution here too?*

Yes, precisely that, and it is an important point. The coincidence between
Mészáros’s thought and the project of the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976],
shows how the key ideas of socialism are part of a universal legacy because
they respond to the same problems and challenges (namely, the problems of
overcoming capitalism, which is a world system). Mao and Mészáros faced the
same problems of real socialism at roughly the same time. The central
problem was the persistence of the logic of capital – what Maoists
called *bourgeois
practices *and *capitalist tendencies* (in spite of the fact that the
bourgeoisie had been defeated and removed in China).

Just as Maoists sought, during the Cultural Revolution, to root out these
bourgeois practices that persisted in the bureaucracy, party, and
management in China, so Mészáros argued in his book *Beyond Capital* [1995]
that even though a society might no longer be capitalist, it might be
governed by the *logic of capital.* The latter – the logic of capital – is
metabolic and it permeates every space in society.

In its place, one would have to construct substantive democracy, which
would eradicate or abolish the hierarchical logic of capital (with its
insidious division of labor). That is exactly the project of the Cultural
Revolution and it’s what Chávez, following Mészáros, wanted to do in
Venezuela using the commune.

Listen to this quote from the great French Maoist Charles Bettelheim: “The
Soviet experience confirms that what is hardest is not the overthrow of the
former dominant classes: the hardest task is, first, to destroy the former
social relations – upon which a system of exploitation similar to the one
supposed to have been overthrown for good can be reconstituted – and then
to prevent these relations from being reconstituted on the basis of those
elements of the old that still remain present for a long time in the new
social formation.”

Bettelheim wrote this in 1974, but it’s precisely the sort of problem that
Mészáros addressed in his work from the 1990s, which would inspire Chávez
so profoundly.

*This is all very interesting, but the communes are rather embattled in
Venezuela today. They often find themselves in contradiction with the
government…*

Well, it seems that history repeats itself! Yes, the capitalist-roaders
have gotten the upper hand in Venezuela just as they did in China. That,
however, doesn’t keep Chávez’s defense of the commune (he said: *Commune or
Nothing!*) and the key ideas of the Cultural Revolution from being a
shining example. And also a practical one. That is, they are not merely
utopian ideas, but rather the only way to construct socialism. For only by
eradicating the logic of capital in all spaces – especially but not only in
the spaces of production – can we achieve socialism. On the contrary, it is
the other proposals – stagism, for example – that amount to building
castles in the air!

*Anything else about Chavismo and Maoism?*

Yes, both legacies have suffered a similar fate. Of course, the left around
the globe is in a bad state generally and has failed to reflect on its most
important inheritances. But in the case of Chavismo and Maoism, there is a
further problem, which is Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism is the enemy of
revolutionary science, because it leads people to overlook the universal
contributions that quite often emerge in the periphery of the world system.
It is important to recognize that Europe (and the Global North in general)
hasn’t always been that way… or it would still be doing mathematics without
the zero!

But the development of revolutionary thought has often been hurt by its
inability to incorporate key ideas that come from outside the center. Such
is the case with Mao’s stress on the continuation of class struggle
following the revolution, the Maoist emphasis on political participation of
the masses, and the way of dealing with contradictions in the movement. In
the case of Chavismo, as far as its universal contributions are concerned,
I would point to the dialectical relation between state and popular power,
but above all the emphasis on substantive democracy as the cornerstone of
socialism.

*Cira Pascual Marquina is a teacher and political organizer in Caracas, and
a writer for for **Venezuelanalysis.com* <http://.venezuelanalysis.com/>*.*
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