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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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href="https://mronline.org/2019/11/20/a-letter-to-intellectuals-who-deride-revolutions-in-the-name-of-purity/">https://mronline.org/2019/11/20/a-letter-to-intellectuals-who-deride-revolutions-in-the-name-of-purity/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">A letter to intellectuals who deride
revolutions in the name of purity</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Ana
Maldonado, Pilar Troya Fernández, and Vijay Prashad</div>
<div class="meta-data">
<div class="reader-estimated-time">November 20, 2019<br>
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<p>Revolutions do not happen suddenly, nor do they
immediately transform a society. A revolution is
a process, which moves at different speeds whose
tempo can change rapidly if the motor of history
is accelerated by intensified class conflict.
But, most of the time, the building of the
revolutionary momentum is glacial, and the
attempt to transform a state and society can be
even more slow.</p>
<p>Leon Trotsky, sitting in his Turkish exile in
1930, wrote the most remarkable study of the
Russian Revolution. Thirteen years had elapsed
since the Tsarist empire had been overthrown.
But the revolution was already being derided,
even by people on the Left. ‘Capitalism’,
Trotsky wrote in the conclusion to that book,
‘required a hundred years to elevate science and
technique to the heights and plunge humanity
into the hell of war and crisis. To socialism
its enemies allow only fifteen years to create
and furnish a terrestrial paradise. We took no
such obligation upon ourselves. We never set
these dates. The process of vast transformation
must be measured by an adequate scale’.</p>
<p>When Hugo Chavez won an election in Venezuela
(December 1998) and when Evo Morales Ayma won an
election in Bolivia (December 2005), their
critics on the left in North America and in
Europe gave their governments no time to
breathe. Some professors with a leftist
orientation immediately began to criticise these
governments for their limitations, and even
their failures. This attitude was limited
politically—there was no solidarity given to
these experiments; it was also limited
intellectually — there was no sense of the deep
difficulties for a socialist experiment in Third
World countries calcified in social hierarchies
and depleted of financial resources.</p>
<h2>Pace of Revolution</h2>
<p>Two years into the Russian Revolution, Lenin
wrote that the newly created USSR is not a
‘miracle-working talisman’, nor does it ‘pave
the way to socialism. It gives those who were
formerly oppressed the chance to straighten
their backs and to an ever-increasing degree to
take the whole government of the country, the
whole administration of the economy, the whole
management of production, into their own hands’.</p>
<p>But even that—that <em>whole</em> this, and <em>whole</em>
that—was not going to be easy. It is, Lenin
wrote, ‘a long, difficult, and stubborn <em>class
struggle</em>, which, <em>after</em> the
overthrow of capitalist rule, <em>after</em>
the destruction of the bourgeois state…. does
not disappear…. but merely changes its forms and
in many respects becomes fiercer’. This was
Lenin’s judgment <em>after</em> the Tsarist
state had been taken over, and <em>after</em>
the socialist government had begun to
consolidate power. Alexandra Kollantai wrote
(such as in <em>Love in the Time of Worker Bees</em>)
about the struggles to build socialism, the
conflicts within socialism to attain its
objectives. Nothing is automatic; everything is
a struggle.</p>
<p>Lenin and Kollantai argued that the class
struggle is not suspended when a revolutionary
government takes over the state; it is in fact,
‘fiercer’, the opposition to it intense because
the stakes are high, and the moment dangerous
because the opposition—namely the bourgeoisie
and the old aristocracy—had imperialism on its
side. Winston Churchill said, ‘Bolshevism must
be strangled in its cradle’, and so the Western
armies joined the White Army in an almost fatal
military attack on the Soviet Republic. This
attack went from the last days of 1917 to 1923—a
full six years of sustained military assault.</p>
<p>Neither in Venezuela nor in Bolivia, nor in any
of the countries that turned to the Left over
the past twenty years, has the bourgeois state
been totally transcended nor has capitalist rule
been overthrown. The revolutionary processes in
these countries had to gradually create
institutions of and for the working-class
alongside the continuation of capitalist rule.
These institutions reflect the emergence of a
unique state-form based on participatory
democracy; expressions of this are the <em>Misiones
Sociales</em> among others. Any attempt to
fully transcend capitalism was constrained by
the power of the bourgeoisie—which was not
undone by repeated elections, and which is now
the source of counter-revolution; and it was
constrained by the power of imperialism—which
has succeeded, for now, in a coup in Bolivia,
and which threatens daily a coup in Venezuela.
No-one, in 1998 or 2005, suggested that what
happened in Venezuela or Bolivia was a
‘revolution’ like the Russian Revolution; the
election victories were part of a revolutionary
process. As the first act of his government
Chavéz announced a constituent process for the
re-foundation of the Republic. Similarly, Evo
affirmed in 2006 that the Movement to Socialism
(MAS) had been elected into the government but
had not taken power; it was later that a
constituent process was launched, which was
itself a long journey. Venezuela entered an
extended ‘revolutionary process’, while Bolivia
entered a ‘process of change’ or—as they called
it—simply the ‘process’, which even now—after
the coup—is ongoing. Nonetheless, both Venezuela
and Bolivia experienced the full thrust of a
‘hybrid war’—from sabotage of physical
infrastructure to sabotage of the ability to
raise funds from capital markets.</p>
<p>Lenin suggested that after capturing the state
and dismantling capitalist ownership, the
revolutionary process in the new Soviet republic
was difficult, the stubborn class struggle alive
and well; imagine then how much more difficult
is the stubborn struggle in Venezuela and
Bolivia.</p>
<h2>Revolutions in the Realm of Necessity</h2>
<p>Imagine, again, how hard it is to build a
socialist society in a country, in which—despite
its wealth of natural resources—there remains
great poverty, and great inequality. Deeper yet,
there is the cultural reality that large parts
of the population have suffered from and
struggled against centuries of social
humiliation. Little surprise that in these
countries, the most oppressed agricultural
workers, miners, and the urban working class are
either from indigenous communities or from
communities that descend from Africans. The
crushing burdens of indignity combined with the
lack of easy to access resources makes
revolutionary processes in the ‘realm of
necessity’ all the harder.</p>
<p>In his <em>Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts</em> (1844), Marx makes a
distinction between the ‘realm of freedom’—where
‘labour which is determined by necessity and
mundane considerations ceases’—and the ‘realm of
necessity’—where physical needs are not met at
all. A long history of colonial subjugation and
then imperialist theft has drained large parts
of the planet of its wealth and made these
regions—mainly in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America—appear to be permanently in the ‘realm
of necessity’. When Chavez won the first
election in Venezuela, the poverty rate was an
incredible 23.4%; in Bolivia, when Morales won
his first election, the poverty rate was a
staggering 38.2%. What these figures show is not
just the absolute poverty of large sections of
the population, but they carry inside them
stories of social humiliation and indignity that
cannot be made into a simple statistic.</p>
<p>Revolutions and revolutionary processes seem to
have been rooted more in the realm of
necessity—in Tsarist Russia, in China, in Cuba,
in Vietnam—than in the realm of freedom—in
Europe and the United States. These revolutions
and these revolutionary processes—such as in
Venezuela and Bolivia—are made in places that
simply do not have accumulations of wealth that
can be socialised. The bourgeoisie in these
societies either absconds with its money at the
moment of revolution or revolutionary change, or
it remains in place but keeps its money in tax
havens or in places such as New York and London.
This money, the fruit of the people’s labour,
cannot be accessed by the new government without
incurring the wrath of imperialism. See how
quickly the United States organised for
Venezuela’s gold to be seized by the Bank of
London, and for the US to freeze the bank
accounts of the governments of Iran and
Venezuela, and see how swiftly investment dried
up when Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and
Bolivia refused to abide by the World Bank’s
investor-State settlement mechanism.</p>
<p>Both Chavez and Morales tried to take charge of
the resources in their countries, an act treated
as an abomination by imperialism. Both of them
faced rebuke, with the accusation that they are
‘dictators’ because they want to renegotiate the
deals cut by previous governments for the
removal of raw materials. They needed this
capital not for personal aggrandizement—no one
can accuse them of personal corruption—but to
build up the social, economic, and cultural
capacity of their peoples.</p>
<p>Every day remains a struggle for revolutionary
processes in the ‘realm of necessity’. The best
example of this is Cuba, whose revolutionary
government has had to struggle against a
crushing embargo and against threats of
assassinations and coups from the very
beginning.</p>
<h2>Revolutions of Women</h2>
<p>It is admitted—because it would be foolish to
deny it—that women are at the centre of the
protests in Bolivia against the coup and for the
restoration of the Morales government; in
Venezuela as well, the majority of people who
take to the streets to defend the Bolivarian
revolution are women. Most of these women might
not be <em>Masistas</em> or <em>Chavistas</em>,
but they certainly understand that these
revolutionary processes are feminist, socialist,
and against the indignity visited upon the
indigenous and the Afro-descendants.</p>
<p>Countries like Venezuela and Bolivia, Ecuador
and Argentina, faced immense pressure from the
International Monetary Fund through the 1980s
and 1990s to make deep cuts in state support for
health care, education, and elder care. The
breakdown of these crucial social support
systems put a burden on the ‘care economy’,
which is largely maintained—for patriarchal
reasons—by women. If the ‘invisible hand’ failed
to take care of people, the ‘invisible heart’
had to do so. It was the experience of the cuts
in the care economy, that deepened the
radicalisation of women in our societies. Their
feminism emerged from their experience of
patriarchy and structural adjustment policies;
capitalism’s tendency to harness violence and
deprivation hastened the journey of
working-class and indigenous feminism directly
into the socialist projects of Chávez and
Morales. As the tide of neoliberalism continues
to wash over the world, and as it engulfs
societies in anxiety and heartache, it is women
who have been the most active in the fight for a
different world.</p>
<p>Morales and Chavez are both men, but in the
revolutionary process they have come to
symbolise a different reality for all of
society. To different degrees, their governments
have committed themselves to a platform that
addresses both the cultures of patriarchy and
the policies of social cuts that burden women
with holding society together. The revolutionary
processes in Latin America, therefore, must be
understood as deeply cognizant of the importance
of putting women, the indigenous, and the
Afro-descendants at the centre of the struggle.
No-one would deny that there are hundreds of
errors made by the governments, errors of
judgment that set back the fight against
patriarchy and racism; but these are errors,
which can be rectified, and not structural
features of the revolutionary process. That is
something that is deeply acknowledged by
indigenous and Afro-descendent women in these
countries; the proof of this acknowledgement is
not in this or that article that they have
written, but by their active and energetic
presence on the streets.</p>
<p>As part of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela,
women have been essential in re-building social
structures eroded by decades of austerity
capitalism. Their work has been central to the
development of people’s power and for the
creation of participatory democracy. Sixty-four
percent of the spokespersons of the 3,186
communes are women, so are a majority of the
leaders of the 48,160 communal councils;
sixty-five percent of the leaders in the local
supply and production committees are women.
Women not only demand equality in the workplace,
but demand equality in the social domain, where
the <em>comunas</em> are the atoms of
Bolivarian socialism. Women in the social domain
have fought to build the possibility of
self-government, building dual-power, and
therefore slowly eroding the form of the liberal
state. Against austerity capitalism, women have
shown their creativity, their strength, and
their solidarity not only against neoliberal
policies, but also for the socialist experiment
and against the hybrid war.</p>
<h2>Democracy and Socialism</h2>
<p>Left intellectual currents have been badly
bruised in the period after the fall of the
USSR. Marxism and dialectical materialism lost
considerable credibility not only in the West
but in large parts of the world;
post-colonialism and subaltern studies—variants
of post-structuralism and
post-modernism—flourished in intellectual and
academic circles. One of the main themes of this
seam of scholarship was to argue that the
‘State’ was obsolete as a vehicle for social
transformation, and that ‘Civil Society’ was the
salvation. A combination of post-Marxism and
anarchist theory adopted this line of argument
to deride any experiments for socialism through
state power. The state was seen as merely an
instrument of capitalism, rather than as an
instrument for the class struggle. But if the
people withdraw from the contest over the state,
then it will—without challenge—serve the
oligarchy, and deepened inequalities and
discrimination.</p>
<p>Privileging the idea of ‘social movements’ over
political movements reflects the disillusionment
with the heroic period of national liberation,
including the indigenous peoples’ liberation
movements. It also discards the actual history
of people’s organisations in relation to
political movements that have won state power.
In 1977, after considerably struggle indigenous
organisations forced the United Nations to open
up a project to end discrimination against the
indigenous population in the Americas. The La
Paz-based South American Indian Council was one
of these organisations, which worked closely
with the World Peace Council, the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom, as
well as a number of national liberation
movements (African National Congress, the
South-West Africa People’s Organisation, and the
Palestinian Liberation Organisation). It was
from this unity and this struggle that the UN
established the Working Group on Indigenous
Populations in 1981, and that it declared 1993
as the UN International Year of Indigenous
Peoples. In 2007, Evo Morales lead the push for
the UN to pass a <em>Declaration on the Rights
of Indigenous Peoples</em>. This was a very
clear example of the importance of unity and
struggle between people’s movements and
fraternal states—if not for both the people’s
movements struggles from 1977 to 2007, aided and
abetted by fraternal states, and if not for the
Bolivian government in 2007, this
Declaration—which has immense importance to take
the struggle forward—would have been passed.</p>
<p>Indigenous intellectuals from the Americas have
understood the complexity of politics from this
struggle—that indigenous self-determination
comes from a struggle through society and the
state to overcome bourgeois and settler-colonial
power, as well as to find instruments to prepare
the transition to socialism. Amongst those
forms—as recognised by Peru’s José Carlos
Mariátegui and Ecuador’s Nela Martínez almost a
century ago—is the <em>comuna</em>.</p>
<p>The revolutions in Bolivia and Venezuela have
not only politically sharpened the relations
between men and women, between indigenous
communities and non-indigenous communities, but
they have also challenged the understanding of
democracy and of socialism itself. These
revolutionary processes not only have had to
work within the rules of liberal democracy, but
they at the same time built a new institutional
framework through the <em>comunas</em> and
other forms. It was by winning elections and
taking charge of state institutions that the
Bolivarian revolution was able to turn resources
towards increased social expenditure (on health,
education, housing) and towards a direct attack
on patriarchy and racism. State power, in the
hands of the left, was used to build these new
institutional frameworks that extend the state
and go beyond it. The existence of these two
forms—liberal democratic institutions and the
socialist-feminist institutions—has led to the
bursting of the prejudice of fictitious ‘liberal
equality’. Democracy if reduced to the act of
voting forces individuals to believe that they
are citizens with the same power as other
citizens, regardless of their socio-economic,
political, and cultural positions. The
revolutionary process challenges this liberal
myth, but it has not yet succeeded in overcoming
it—as can be seen in both Bolivia and Venezuela.
It is a struggle to create a new cultural
consensus around socialist democracy, a
democracy that is rooted not in an ‘equal vote’,
but in a tangible experience of building a new
society.</p>
<p>One of the textbook dynamics of having a left
government is that it takes up the agenda of
many social and political movements of the
people. At the same time, many of the personnel
from these movements—as well as from various
NGOs—join the government, bringing their various
skills to bear inside the complex institutions
of modern government. This has a contradictory
impact: it fulfils the demands of the people,
and at the same time it has a tendency to weaken
independent organisations of various kinds.
These developments are part of the process of
having a left government in power, whether it be
in Asia or in South America. Those who want to
remain independent of the government struggle to
remain relevant; they often become bitter
critics of the government, and their criticisms
are frequently weaponised by imperialist forces
towards ends that are alien even to those who
make such criticisms.</p>
<p>The liberal myth seeks to speak on behalf of
the people, to obscure the real interests and
aspirations of the people—in particular of
women, the indigenous communities, and the
afro-descendants. The left inside the
experiences of Bolivia and Venezuela has sought
to develop the collective mastery of the people
in a contentious class struggle. A position that
attacks the very idea of the ‘State’ as
oppressive does not see how the state in Bolivia
and Venezuela attempts to use that authority to
build institutions of dual power to create a new
political synthesis, with women at the front.</p>
<h2>Revolutionary Advice with no Revolutionary
Experience</h2>
<p>Revolutions are not easy to make. They are
filled with retreats and errors, since they are
made by people who are flawed and whose
political parties must always learn to learn.
Their teacher is their experience, and it is
those amongst them who have the training and
time to elaborate their experiences into
lessons. No revolution is without its own
mechanisms to correct itself, its own voices of
dissent. But that does not mean that a
revolutionary process should be deaf to
criticisms; it should welcome them.</p>
<p>Criticism is always welcome, but in what form
does that criticism come? These are two forms
that are typical of the ‘left’ critic who
derides revolutions in the name of purity.</p>
<ol>
<li>If the criticism comes from the standpoint
of perfect, then their standard is not only
too high, but it fails to understand the
nature of class struggle that must contend
with congealed power inherited over
generations.</li>
<li>If the criticism assumes that all projects
that contest the electoral domain will betray
the revolution, then there is little
understanding of the mass dimension of
electoral projects and dual power experiments.
Revolutionary pessimism halts the possibility
of action. You cannot succeed if you do not
allow yourself to fail, and to try again. This
standpoint of critique provides only despair.</li>
</ol>
<p>The ‘stubborn class struggle’ inside the
revolutionary process should provide someone who
is not part of the revolutionary process itself
to be sympathetic not to this or that policy of
a government, but to the difficulty—and <em>necessity—</em>of
the process itself.</p>
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