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<h1 class="reader-title">Confront Imperialism and Don’t Make
Concessions: A Conversation with Nestor Kohan (Part 1)</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Cira Pascual Marquina -
February 23, 2019</div>
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<p><em>More than any other living thinker, Argentinian
intellectual Nestor Kohan has worked to recover the
tradition of Latin American revolutionary Marxism, a
trajectory that he argues stretches from Julio
Antonio Mella and Jose Carlos Mariategui to Che
Guevara, Fidel Castro </em><em>and</em><em> Manuel
Marulanda. Kohan has also developed a reading of
Marx that considers commodity </em><em>fetichism</em><em>
to be the centerpiece of Capital: Critique of
Political Economy at the same time as it emphasizes
the political and revolutionary character of all of
Marx’s texts. Kohan has supported the Bolivarian
Process from its beginning. In this interview, we
asked him questions about crisis engulfing the whole
continent, with Venezuela as its epicenter.</em></p>
<p><strong>What is happening right now in Latin America
seems to have a lot in common with <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor">Operation
Condor</a>, that aimed to rollback the
revolutionary tide of the 1960s and ‘70s. Today, US
imperialism wants to wipe out the “Pink Tide” that
began at the start of the current century. Do you
think the analogy is relevant?</strong></p>
<p>In the decade of the 1970s Operation Condor was born.
There is a lot of investigation about it and a lot of
evidence. An Argentinian investigator, Stella Calloni,
wrote a very good book about the Operation, and a
Paraguayan victim of political persecution found
documents in Paraguay that prove its existence.
Intelligence agents of the Pinochet dictatorship also
made declarations that ratify its existence, and
finally there are declassified documents of the CIA
that confirm it too. In effect, there was a
coordinated international project put in place to
carry out repression on a continental scale. In other
words, there was a right-wing internationalism, a
counter-revolutionary internationalism.</p>
<p>On a rhetorical level, the counterrevolution traded
in nationalist language. In every country they even
talked about defending the “national self” (<em>el ser
</em><em>nacional</em>). That was their preferred
jargon, but their practice was internationalist, and
their combatants and agents operated in many
countries. For instance, the terrorist of
Cuban-American descent Felix Rodriguez not only
assassinated Che Guevara. He later participated in the
counterinsurgency in El Salvador. There are films of
Felix Rodriguez on a helicopter shooting at the troops
of the <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuerzas_Populares_de_Liberaci%C3%B3n_Farabundo_Mart%C3%AD">Farabundo
Marti National Liberation Front</a> in El Salvador.</p>
<p>Another terrorist of Cuban-American descent, Luis
Posada Carriles, put a bomb in a commercial airplane,
killing many civilians. He also operated in several
countries. Many of these terrorists did their work in
several countries. The bomb that killed [Chilean
economist] <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_Letelier">Orlando
Letelier</a> in the US itself was set off by agents
of the Chilean intelligence. They were, arguably,
internationalists.</p>
<p>The “clandestine detention centers” – that was the
juridical terminology used in Argentina – also worked
on an international level. In Buenos Aires, there was
an extermination camp, a torture camp. (I call it
that, because there’s no reason to use the juridical
terminology, let’s speak without euphemisms.) Well,
one of those camps for torturing and “disappearing”
people was called “Automotores Orletti,” because it
was run from an auto repair shop. They gathered there
the foreigners they had kidnapped from countries
nearby Argentina (Chileans, Uruguayans, Paraguayans),
and they sent them back to their respective
dictatorships. In other words, Operation Condor worked
on a continental scale. Who directed it? The United
States. One of its main heads was Henry Kissinger.
That is a well-known fact.</p>
<p>So where did Operation Condor come from? The National
Security Doctrine, that is how they called it, which
was nothing other than a counterinsurgency doctrine,
imported from the French torturers in Algeria. The
United States applied it in Vietnam… The practice used
by the US in Vietnam, for instance, of throwing
prisoners alive from airplanes, which was part of the
<a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program">Phoenix
Program</a>. Well, that same practice was used in
Argentina. They threw the revolutionaries captured by
the military and the navy from airplanes into the Rio
de la Plata. And they also combined it with the same
form of massive torture that was used in Algerian
torture camps – including the systematic rape of men
and women – during the French occupation.</p>
<p>So those were the two doctrines, French and North
American, that were taught in the counterinsurgency
schools in Panama (run by the US military’s SOUTHCOM),
and in the war school in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil,
after the 1964 coup, and in Buenos Aires too.</p>
<p>So what was Operation Condor trying to do in the
broad sense? It was [imperialism’s] reaction to three
things. First, to the huge revolutionary insurgency,
the huge “social rebellion” of the 1960s, which went
from the Vietnamese Revolution to the Algerian
Revolution and the Cuban Revolution. It also included
the youth rebellions that took place in Mexico, Tokyo,
Rome, Berlin, Berkeley and Paris (which was the most
famous one). So Operation Condor was a response to the
1960s social rebellion. It was a response, as well, to
the emergence of Third-World national liberation
movements, because many countries, nations and
communities that had been French, English, Dutch, US,
or Japanese colonies, gained independence between the
end of World War II and the late 1960s, or even the
end of 1970s, if we consider the case of Angola.</p>
<p>So this counterinsurgency doctrine that expressed
itself in Operation Condor (but not only in it) was an
organized response. First, it was a reaction to the
“social rebellion” of the 1960s and the global
emergence of Third World national liberation
movements. Second, it was a response to the declining
profit rate which was felt especially sharply with the
oil crisis, or “petrodollar crisis,” of 1973 and 1974.
That economic crisis was itself the outcome of the
rebelliousness in the workforce. In effect,
counterinsurgency tries to curb the consequences of
the falling profit rate. Thirdly, there was the
overall aim of disciplining the workforce, imposing
mechanisms of super-exploitation on Third World
workers, and finishing off with the welfare state (the
so-called “golden age of capitalism” that had lasted
little more than 30 years in Western Europe: from the
end of World War II through the crisis of the early
70s). The aim was to be able to make a
capitalism-in-crisis function again.</p>
<p>In sum, Operation Condor was imperialism’s political
reaction to these three issues… It was a project that
produced a strong social response and a lot of
conflict. In other words, imperialism did not have an
easy time implementing it.</p>
<p><strong>Are we seeing the same thing today then? Is
there an Operation Condor of the twenty-first
century?</strong></p>
<p>Today, the counterinsurgency project continues. There
is some continuity and some discontinuity. I believe
that we are seeing a new attempt to apply the [old]
counterinsurgency doctrine in different conditions.
Why does this happen? Because rebellions reemerged, as
responses to neoliberalism, which was applied at the
end of the 1970s. The rebellions emerged after twenty
or so years of neoliberalism.</p>
<p>First, there was the Zapatista rebellion in 1994.
Then came Chavez’s emergence in Venezuela. There was
also the ongoing political-military insurgency in
Colombia and the survival of non-capitalist relations
in Cuba. That wave of rebelliousness against
neoliberalism extended to the World Social Forums in
the early twenty-first century. And it got more
radical when Chavez declared the Bolivarian Revolution
to be socialist...To the Zapatista’s question, ”Is
there a world where all other worlds fit?,” the World
Social Forum responded: “Another world is possible.”
Then Chavez raised the stakes. He said that other
possible world must be a socialist one. And he added,
it’s “Twenty-First Century Socialism.”</p>
<p>So what is “Twenty-First Century Socialism”? The
question was an open one. In my opinion, it is a
weakness of the progressive movements to not have
defined Twenty-First Century Socialism, to have
stopped short. However, I think we should be cautious
in our answers, because from my point of view there
are no pre-established models about to how to make the
transition from capitalism to socialism, of how to
initiate the transition to socialism. There are no
models.</p>
<p>Many paths were proposed to Chavez. Some people
suggested that using self-managed industries was the
right path, as was done in Yugoslavia. Others proposed
to follow the path of market socialism, as Deng
Xiaoping had done in China. Still others, including
me, suggested working with Che Guevara’s project and
his <a
href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/yaffeh/che-critic.htm">Budgetary
Finance System</a>. In other words, a transition to
socialism based on Popular Power, on participative
democracy, but also with a centralized economy.
Venezuela has an apparatus that offers certain
advantages when it comes to applying this system. Its
situation is more favorable than Cuba’s, where the
economy was based only on sugar.</p>
<p>Venezuela has nothing less than [state oil company]
PDVSA, which could, with its oil resources, coordinate
a series of activities – not only those relating to
the oil profits – but of collective, centralized
socialist production, with a centralized banking
system and a nationalizing [network of] large
enterprises. But that had to be done not only in one
isolated country, Venezuela. The proposal was that
from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALBA">ALBA</a>,
the Budgetary Finance System could be put in practice
on a continental scale. If not in all of the
countries, at least in a great many of them.</p>
<p>Hence I believe that President Chavez and Bolivarian
Venezuela only went halfway, not because they were
lukewarm or didn’t understand Marxism, or there was a
shallow reading of it. They did so because there was
and there continues to be an open debate. The debate
is about the transition to socialism. It is not a new
discussion. There have been at least three stages.</p>
<p>The first stage took place in the 1920s in Bolshevik
Russia, where not everybody was in agreement as to how
to move forward. On the one hand, <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Bukharin">Nicolai
Buharin</a> proposed market socialism. On the other
side was <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeni_Preobrazhensky">Yevgeni
Preobrazhensky</a>, who proposed an economy with
centralized planning. Meanwhile, Lenin tried to find a
political solution, reconciling the two.</p>
<p>That very rich debate [about the transition to
socialism] from the 1920s reemerges in the decade of
the 1960s in Cuba, where <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bettelheim">Charles
Bettleheim</a> proposes market socialism together
with Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, who had a somewhat more
pro-Soviet attitude. On the other hand, Che Guevara,
supported by <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Mandel">Ernest
Mandel</a>, proposes the Budgetary Finance System.
As Lenin had done before, Fidel opts for a political
solution that tries to maintain the alliance between
the two tendencies as Lenin had done in the Bolshevik
Russia of the 1920s… He tried to keep the pro-market
current and the central planning current both within
the revolution’s sweep.</p>
<p>The third phase of this debate is the one that exists
now. It’s the one that has been going on in Venezuela
and I think in the Bolivian process too. It’s a debate
that is going to happen in any Third World or
peripheral country that wants to leave capitalism
behind. It is an open debate. It’s not a failing or a
problem that the debate is there. The progressive
governments in Latin America – in the Venezuelan case
it’s a government that stands out for it socialist
intentions – have raised this debate. It is still an
open one and has not been resolved.</p>
<p><strong>Following up on that, let’s look critically
at our movements and political process in Latin
America, which are all in crisis now. Would it be
fair to say that these progressive movements are in
trouble because of their failure to connect with the
Latin American revolutionary tradition and with the
practices that derive from Marxist theory?</strong></p>
<p>Are you asking whether Marxism guarantees that we
will have successes and triumphs? Is that what we are
talking about? I believe that Marxism is a political
identity, a conception of the world and of life. It is
a multilinear and materialist conception of history, a
philosophy of praxis, and a dialectical method, but in
itself it does not assure [that we are on a]
revolutionary path.</p>
<p>Marxism is a tremendous tool that allows us to
understand how capitalism works and understand what
are the elements that bring it into crisis. It allows
us to understand the mechanisms of exploitation,
domination, dependency, and imperialism. Yet merely
appealing to Marxist texts does not guarantee a
revolutionary outcome.</p>
<p>As an Argentinian, I know a tremendous number of
Marxist intellectuals who can quote from classical
Marxist works, but in practice they have reformist
positions! And as far as Venezuela is concerned, they
have very ambiguous positions! Some don’t know if they
should support the Bolivarian Process. Or they don’t
want to admit it because they are embarrassed by their
own positions, but they support the imperialist
offensive using quotes taken with tweezers from Marx’s
texts. They don’t define themselves clearly against
imperialism, and yet they employ apparently Marxist
rhetoric. For that reason, appealing to Marxist texts
is not sufficient to confirm that you’re going in a
revolutionary direction.</p>
<p>I believe that revolutionary Marxism must be
accompanied by a firm revolutionary project and not
just a reading of the texts. In that sense, I believe
that Bolivarianism is an emancipatory continental
project that could [fill that role]. That is what
Chavez tried and it what the Colombian insurgency
tried to do (along with a lot of other people in the
continent). I believe that the synthesis of Marxism
and Bolivarianism is the best assurance that we can
have a leftist solution to the crisis, one that
questions capitalism. In other words, confront
imperialism and not make any concessions. And that is
not going to be achieved only by quoting the classical
works of Marxism.</p>
<p>It is necessary to study Marxism, but it’s not
enough. Marxism is needed because it makes things
clear. It is necessary because it is a theoretical and
scientific tool and critical method, but it must go
hand on hand with clear political positions. Again, in
Argentina there are political currents that quote
Marxist texts, but when imperialism attacked Syria and
Libya and now Venezuela, they have very ambiguous
positions. They declare Maduro to be a tyrant. They
declare Gaddafi to be a tyrant, whom they lynched!
They say Saddam Hussein was a tyrant! In other words,
in the name of Marxism they end up being the shock
troops of imperialism. So studying Marxism is
necessary, but it has to go hand on hand with
revolutionary positions.</p>
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