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<h1 class="title">Preparing for a Post-Chávez Venezuela</h1>
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<p class="byline"> By <span class="author">George Ciccariello-Maher -
Counterpunch</span>, <span class="date">March 7th 2013</span> </p>
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<p>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 <a
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbKsD8PIwzE">the words of the
great revolutionary folk singer Alí Primera</a> are on the tip of many
tongues:</p>
<p align="center"><em>Los que mueren por la vida<br>
no pueden llamarse muertos</em></p>
<p align="center"><em>—</em></p>
<p align="center">Those who die for life<br>
cannot be called dead.</p>
<p><strong>A Barefoot Revolutionary</strong></p>
<p>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 <em>llanos</em>,
that crash abruptly into the towering Andes mountains.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The Old Venezuela</strong></p>
<p>The old Venezuela is no more. The Venezuelan <em>ancien regime</em>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/03/03/the-fourth-world-war-started-in-venezuela/">1989
rebellion known as the Caracazo</a>, somewhere between 300 and 3,000
were slaughtered as Pérez ordered the military to “restore order” in
the poor <em>barrios </em>that surround Caracas and other Venezuelan
cities.</p>
<p>It was this rebellion more than any other, and the repression it
unleashed, that led, nay <em>forced</em>, 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. <em>Finally</em> someone had taken a stand, and when
Chávez promised on national television that the conspirators had only
failed “<em>por ahora</em>, for now,” he was effectively promising, as
did Fidel Castro nearly 40 years prior, that history would absolve him.</p>
<p><strong>The New Venezuela</strong></p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/chavezs-legacy">reduced
significantly</a>, 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).</p>
<p>More important than this improvement in the social welfare of the
Venezuelan majority, however, are the <em>political </em>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<br>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>A Combative Democrat</strong></p>
<p>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 <em>llanero </em>song, speak in
country parables and <em>refranes</em>, 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, <em>latigo</em>, the whip, described his approach
to politics at least as well as it described his fastball.</p>
<p>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 <em>from above</em> to
clear the way for radically democratic participation <em>from below</em>.
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <em>escualidos
</em>(or more recently, <em>majunches</em>), 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.</p>
<p>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, “<em><a
href="http://thinkingafricarhodesuniversity.blogspot.com/2011/08/jumpstarting-decolonial-engine-symbolic.html">with
his very image</a></em>, Chávez has shaken up the beehive of social
harmony… <em>His image</em> 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 <em>mestizaje</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The Revolution Will Not Be Reversed</strong></p>
<p>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 <em>ni un paso atras</em>, a single step back, and that
conversely, <em>no volverán</em>, they shall not return. And they mean
it.</p>
<p>This is a revolutionary assurance that has never depended solely on
the figure of Chávez. <a
href="http://es.scribd.com/doc/128885749/counterpunchmaga">As I write
in the introduction to my forthcoming book <em>We Created Chávez</em></a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“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.’”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“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?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em><strong>George Ciccariello-Maher</strong>, teaches political
theory at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is the author of <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822354527/counterpunchmaga">We
Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution</a>
(Duke University Press, May 2013), and can be reached at
gjcm(at)drexel.edu.</em></p>
<div id="articlesource"><span class="label">Source:</span> <span
class="source"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/06/preparing-for-a-post-chavez-venezuela/"
title="Source: Counterpunch">Counterpunch</a></span></div>
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