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<h1 class="title">Estoy con Chávez, Soy un Chávista: Exploring the
political appeal and significance of Hugo Chávez</h1>
<div class="submitted">
<p class="byline"> By <span class="author">Samuel Grove - Ceasefire</span>,
<span class="date">March 20th 2013<br>
<small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/estoy-con-chavez-soy-chavista-exploring-political-appeal-significance-hugo-chavez/">http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/estoy-con-chavez-soy-chavista-exploring-political-appeal-significance-hugo-chavez/</a></small><br>
</span> </p>
</div>
<p><em>The death of Hugo Chavez has produced a heavily polarised debate
over his legacy. In a new essay for Ceasefire, Samuel Grove takes issue
with the eagerness of the Western left to cloak Chávez in a liberal
garb, and argues this is symptomatic of a deeper conservative
ambivalence towards what Chávez represented: a unapologetic fighter and
leader for the Venezuelan working-class.</em></p>
<p><strong>Introduction</strong></p>
<p>There has been a wide range of commentary in the wake of the death
of Hugo Chávez. Large swathes of it has been the predictable right wing
bluster about him being a ‘dictator’ etc. This is obviously absurd and
not worth engaging with. For me, it is far more interesting to examine
what accounts for much of the Western left-wing critique of this
right-wing bluster; critique that I, as much as anyone is <a
href="http://www.redpepper.org.uk/carroll-in-wonderland-how-the/">responsible</a>
for <a href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4195">producing</a>.</p>
<p>I want to address this critique not because it is wrong, but because
it is limited. The limitations are, I believe, significant enough that
it runs the danger of misunderstanding, or failing to recognise, a
large part of what Chávez represents to so many ordinary Venezuelans.
Using a combination of the philosophy of <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_badiou">Alain Badiou</a> and
a <a href="http://alborada.net/documentary-venezuela-chavez">documentary</a>
on Venezuela’s Bolivarian process by my friend Pablo Navarrete, I want
to explain what these limitations are and propose a better way of
interpreting Chavez’s appeal and significance.</p>
<p><strong>The limitations of critique</strong></p>
<p>We cannot ignore the right wing bluster, and the limitations I am
referring to, in many ways, stem from the Western left’s preoccupation
with it. What does the right accuse Chávez supporters of? Many things
of course, but a lot of it can be condensed in this loaded question by
the <em>Guardian</em> journalist (and the paper’s former Latin America
correspondent) <a href="http://www.rorycarroll.co.uk/">Rory Carroll</a>·:</p>
<p><em>How did [Chavez] seduce not just a nation but a significant part
of world opinion? How did he make people laugh, weep, and applaud as if
on command? And how did he stay popular while Venezuela crumbled?</em></p>
<p>The question is loaded because the answer is implicit. Chávistas (as
supporters of Chávez are often called), Carroll implies, have allowed
themselves to be deceived by an ‘<a
href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/dbf99356-871b-11e2-9dd7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2NXtcwKUv">illusionist</a>’
who made them believe that things were improving when they were
actually getting worse. The left critique has, quite understandably,
focused upon exploding this myth by pointing out that Venezuela is
anything but crumbling and that, in fact, Chávez’s supporters are
making very rational decisions based on their material self-interest.</p>
<p>There is a great deal of truth to this argument. <a
href="http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/venezuelan-economic-and-social-performance-under-hugo-chavez-in-graphs">Growth
in Venezuela has averaged 4.3% over the last ten years</a> and the poor
and marginalised are in a better position than most to appreciate this
having ‘<a
href="http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela-2009-02.pdf">experienced
a dramatic improvement in their material conditions</a>’. But the
trouble with this argument is that it accepts the malign premise of
Carroll’s question; that politics and political consciousness are
reducible to an objective appraisal of a government’s performance. This
is an entirely bourgeois conception of politics which we must discard
in order to understand what Chávez and Chávismo really represent.</p>
<p><strong>Estoy con Chávez</strong></p>
<p>Alain Badiou insists that a genuine politics must proceed at a
distance from that ‘state’ and the ‘economy’. By ‘state’ Badiou means
not just the institution, but the governmental ‘democratic’ logic by
which it functions. By ‘economy’, he means not just the realm of
economic activity but the laws of capital and associated standards of
measurement (growth, flexibility, sustainability etc). This is often
portrayed as a departure from Marxism, but it shouldn’t be.</p>
<p>Karl Marx’s great discovery was not that politics stems from the
‘state’ and ‘economics’, but that the ‘state’ and ‘economics’ are a
result of the balance of forces in an ongoing class war. If the state
system and market economy is really congealed class power, then a
genuine political sequence does not seek recourse in its abstract logic
and measurement standards. Rather, the starting point is the conflict
itself and the challenge is to shift this political and economic
‘logic’ in a new direction.</p>
<p>Let us begin with the ‘state’. Much is made of Chávez’s attempted <em>coup
d’état</em> in 1992. It is used by the right to present him as an
aggressor against ‘democracy’. The Western left commentariat tend to
respond to this with evasion. ‘Yes he did attempt a coup but then he
learned to seek power legitimately through democratic procedures’. This
response fails for two reasons: It ignores what Chávez said in the wake
of the failed coup, and it ignores the popular response to it.</p>
<p>In the speech Chávez uttered the words ‘<a
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJQHmzW9Jlg"
rel="shadowbox[sbpost-17442];player=swf;width=640;height=385;">por
ahora</a>’ (‘for now’). A translation in English would be something
like ‘We have not achieved our objectives… for now’. Self-evidently,
the objectives meant taking power, and the phrase ‘for now’ meant he
was not done yet. I am not aware of any moment since when he has
recanted these words or expressed regret for his actions.</p>
<p>Many Venezuelans interpreted the coup attempt and the speech exactly
for what it was. Not a declaration of war, but a recognition that a war
was already going on and he, Chávez, was <a
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXN5mWJbEQY&t=11m57s"
rel="shadowbox[sbpost-17442];player=swf;width=640;height=385;">committed
to fighting back</a>. It is not difficult to understand why Venezuelans
would have resisted the elite interpretation of Chávez as the
aggressor. Chávez had attempted to overthrow a government that, just
three years before, had responded to a popular rebellion by deploying
the army and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDZNNPvBsRM"
rel="shadowbox[sbpost-17442];player=swf;width=640;height=385;">shooting
dead thousands of people</a>.</p>
<p>The war did not come to an end when Chávez assumed the presidency in
February 1999. The right use this fact to, once again, paint Chávez as
the aggressor—the elected dictator that fires judges, closes down media
stations, and arrests those politicians who oppose him. The reflex of
the left is either to point out the hypocrisy of the right in
concentrating on Venezuela; or to argue that Chávez’s actions were, in
fact, ‘democratically’ legitimate in the first place. Once again both
responses are inadequate. The first because it preserves the myth that
the judges, media stations, and politicians as neutral arbiters of the
democratic ‘state’; the second because it presents Chávez and his
government as the upholders of an abstract ‘democratic logic’.</p>
<p>The reality is that it is precisely the ‘democratic logic’ that is
being contested in this sequence. This isn’t easy to see if your
encounter with the Bolivarian process is through a discursive framework
that takes the state’s ‘democratic logic’ as a point of departure. It
is easier to see if you are a Venezuelan caught up in the ongoing class
war; if your encounter with the logic of the state is not primarily
discursive, but non-discursive practices of force that make no pretence
at being fair or just (the police, the army, the prison system etc).
One understands that the same logic that cries foul when a rich judge
is not granted his full legal rights is basically silent <a
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6258">when thousands of poor
peasants are being murdered by private militias hired by rich landlords</a>.</p>
<p>We can observe the same problems in the realm of economics. While
the right points out the corruption, inefficiencies and inflation that
have dogged the Chávez presidency, the left points out the spectacular
economic growth and the improvements in health and education outcomes.
To augment their argument, the left cite positive reports from the
World Bank, IMF and UNICEF. Partly this has to do with using sources
the right respects. But it’s not just that. If your encounter with
poverty is through economic reports and articles invariably you will
articulate poverty in the same discourse. In the process you wind up
appealing to ‘objective’ criteria of economic success and failure that
are nothing of the sort.</p>
<p>Venezuelans living the experience of poverty are less likely to
pinpoint historic macro-economic policy ‘failures’ so much as a series
of ‘successful’ victories by a government of rich against the poor. The
reductions in poverty and improvement in health and social outcomes
that followed the election of Chávez are interpreted in similarly
partisan terms. <a
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXN5mWJbEQY&t=4m51s"
rel="shadowbox[sbpost-17442];player=swf;width=640;height=385;">These
are the words</a> of Maria Machado, a community organiser in La Vega, a
poor district in Caracas:</p>
<p><em>Chávez</em><em> is the best, because over these ten years we’ve
seen how he has recognised the struggles of the poor and he has given
us what we’ve always lacked; education housing. In this process we
shouldn’t be afraid because we have a humane President who believes in
the poor and in bringing peoples together.</em></p>
<p>The point is in both cases the principal question is not whether the
Chávez government is conforming to an objective standard of ‘good
governance’. The question is whose side is the Chávez government on.
The irony is that it is those not educated in sophisticated political,
legal and economic discourses who are asking the right question.</p>
<p><strong>Soy un Chávista</strong></p>
<p>Of course, Chávez supporters are not oblivious to the problems of a
movement <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXN5mWJbEQY&t=34m45s"
rel="shadowbox[sbpost-17442];player=swf;width=640;height=385;">overly
dependent on a single figure</a>. When asked what had really changed
since Chávez came to power, Joel Linares, a community activist in El
Winche, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXN5mWJbEQY&t=58m25s"
rel="shadowbox[sbpost-17442];player=swf;width=640;height=385;">responded
accordingly</a>:</p>
<p><em>The greatest achievements of this government can be summarised
in two words. Number one, ‘inclusion’ and number two, ‘consciousness’.
If this process can’t transcend the figure of Hugo Chávez </em><em>then
we would have achieved nothing. We’re working to enable people to
complete the development of their consciousness so that they’ll be
capable of carrying on the revolutionary process </em><em>even if Hugo
Chávez isn’t here.</em></p>
<p>These are the kind of remarks the Western left uses to combat the
charge from the right that Chávez supporters are simply dupes. The
danger of reducing Joel’s words to a platitude about the importance of
‘independent’ thought is that once again we fail to appreciate Chávez’s
real significance. Read more closely Joel’s words. He is talking about <em>completing</em>
the development of consciousness without Chávez. In other words it is
as much a recognition of the role Chávez has played in awakening
people’s political consciousness in the first place.</p>
<p>Alain Badiou <a
href="http://www.lacan.com/symptom9_articles/badiou19.html">addresses</a>
Joel’s point about leadership in more detail in his reflection on
‘mastery’. ‘Masters’, he insists, are essential in order to navigate
our way out of our ideological malaise (from which we <em>all</em>
begin). They present us with radically new ways of seeing the world,
force us to reframe the boundaries of what is possible to think and
inspire us to reconsider our own limitations. To undergo such a process
of ‘mastery’ requires a temporary dependence upon them. Badiou is
referring to a process in which, we temporarily forgo our critical
voice. If we disagree with them we assume that we are wrong and they
are right. Mastery is then the process of finding out why. It is a kind
of intuition of discovery designed to change ourselves and the way we
think.</p>
<p>Chávez was a leader and educator. Even before he came to power he
had made a name for himself as a popular teacher in the army academy.
Once he came to power he harnessed these skills further. During the
making of another documentary, <a
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2363"><em>The War on
Democracy</em></a>, John Pilger accompanied Chávez on his political
travels:</p>
<p><em>He [would] arrive at a school or a water project where local
people are gathered and under his arm will be half a dozen books –
Orwell, Chomsky, Dickens, Victor Hugo. He’ll proceed to quote from them
and relate them to the condition of his audience. What he’s clearly
doing is building ordinary people’s confidence in themselves.</em></p>
<p>For the right this is less a testament to Chávez’s pedagogy so much
as of his demagoguery. Similarly his prominence on Venezuelan state
media is cited as evidence of him as an <a
href="http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/2008/12/heeeres_hugo_1.html">elected
dictator</a>. I think this is an argument that makes the Western left
uncomfortable. Our usual response is to point out that private media
still dominate the Venezuelan airwaves and that much of the state
funding for media has gone into community media outlets. But the
significance of Chávez’s media skills, particularly on his television
show <em>Alo Presidente</em>, is not something we should shy away
from. In his biography of Chávez, Richard Gott doesn’t:</p>
<p><em>Chávez</em><em> is a master communicator, and he speaks every
Sunday morning on his own radio programme (later transferred to
television) called ‘Alo Presidente. The entire country is familiar with
his pedagogic formulations. He talks like a teacher and listens like a
teacher, picking up an implicit question and throwing it back at the
questioner. On the radio, he is at his didactic best, illustrating,
explaining, and arguing, with all the sophistry at his command. This is
a world with which he has always been familiar, and it is no accident
that one of his great nineteenth century heroes is Simón Rodríguez,
sometimes called Samuel Robinson, who worked as the organiser of a
radical programme of education—in Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile and
Ecuador—for the poor, the Indians, and the blacks.</em></p>
<p>Badiou insists, similarly to Joel, that devotion to one’s master is
not enough; ‘masters’ must ultimately be ‘surmounted’. But this is not
the same thing as denying them, as we in the West are often wont to do.
In fact, to deny our ‘masters is disastrous’ precisely because it
precludes our independence from them; condemning us to endless
repetitions of what they have already said, all the while thinking it
is <em>we</em> who are speaking.</p>
<p>It is only by recognising our debt to our masters that we place
ourselves in a position to move beyond them. We should be cautious,
therefore, of too easily equating approbation and admiration for
figures like Chávez with political immaturity. Our hostility to it
might well belie our own arrested political development.</p>
<p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
<p>Members of the Western left commentariat are fond of demonstrating
their own critical independence by mixing a defence of Chávez and the
Bolivarian process with specific criticisms of it. The Trotskyist left
decries the process for falling short of a true revolution that can
overthrow capitalism. This is true if a bit a pompous; considering the
abject failure of revolutionaries in this country to even mount a
challenge to neoliberalism. Others have criticised Chávez’s largely
rhetorical support for repressive regimes in Iran and Syria. This is
also fair, but if his support for third world regimes under threat from
US attack were ill judged they should be understood in the context of
his <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXN5mWJbEQY&t=18m57s"
rel="shadowbox[sbpost-17442];player=swf;width=640;height=385;">principled
opposition to imperialism and war</a>.</p>
<p>I make a brief nod to these criticisms because I probably wouldn’t
have written this essay if I thought the limitations of Western left
commentary on Venezuela were simply a result of the constraints of
critique. I suspect, in fact, that the limitations run deeper and are
symptomatic of the class privilege that the Western left commentariat
enjoy.</p>
<p>Commentators on the right and left, whose contact with the world is
largely through computer screens, do tend to see politics primarily as
a battle of ideas. The kinds of qualities that come to the fore in
actual conflicts and struggles—personal qualities that Chávez embodied
and his supporters so admired such as courage, loyalty, honesty and
leadership—tend to be easily dismissed by this commentariat as either
politically naive or irrelevant.</p>
<p>Similarly I don’t think it is any coincidence that the heroes of
this same commentariat, tend to be figures whose engagement with the
world is in the realm of ideas and who observe it largely from the
sidelines; figures like <a
href="http://chomsky.info/onchomsky/20130315.htm">Chomsky</a> and
Foucault (two of my heroes) who were renowned for their independence of
thought, detachment and dissidence. Working-class heroes who stand out
more for the way they sought to change the world than the way they
interpreted it, remain the target of suspicion. Chávez and Chávismo,
are things we in the West, even on the left, remain inherently
ambivalent about.</p>
<p><em>[*Unfortunately, despite writing for a nominally left-of-centre
paper, the Guardian, Carroll is very much a disseminator of right-wing
bluster.]</em></p>
<div class="clearfix">
<p><em><strong>Samuel Grove</strong> is a PhD candidate at the
University of Nottingham, a co-editor of the New Left Project, and a
union activist.</em></p>
</div>
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