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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/24/hugo-chavez-and-maoism-a-conversation-with-chris-gilbert/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/24/hugo-chavez-and-maoism-a-conversation-with-chris-gilbert/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Hugo Chávez and Maoism: A Conversation with Chris Gilbert<br></h1>
<span class="gmail-post_author_intro">by</span> <span class="gmail-post_author"><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/cira-pascual-marquina/" rel="nofollow">Cira Pascual Marquina</a></span>- December 24, 2020<br></div>
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<p><em>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 </em><a href="https://monthlyreview.org/product/venezuela_the_present_as_struggle/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Venezuela, the Present as Struggle</a><em> (Monthly Review Press, 2020).</em></p>
<p><strong>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? </strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>So would you say that, if there is a common ground between Maoism and Chavismo, it is more a question of parallel evolution?</strong></p>
<p>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: <em>the army is the people who can actually do things</em>. Bolívar’s phrase could also be translated: <em>the army is the people with power</em>.
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.</p>
<p><strong>That brings us to Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Process. What can you tell us about Chávez, his Chinese allies, and Mao Zedong?</strong></p>
<p>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<em> Little Red Book</em>. 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!</p>
<p><strong>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?</strong></p>
<p>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 <em>Inside a People’s Commune: Report from Chiliying</em>, the book by Chu Li and Tien Chieh-yun.</p>
<p>In fact, in his last substantial discourse, the so-called “<a href="https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/strike-at-the-helm/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Strike at the Helm</a>”
[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.</p>
<p><strong>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!</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Hence, more like a parallel evolution here too?</strong></p>
<p>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 <em>bourgeois practices </em>and <em>capitalist tendencies</em> (in spite of the fact that the bourgeoisie had been defeated and removed in China).</p>
<p>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 <em>Beyond Capital</em> [1995] that even though a society might no longer be capitalist, it might be governed by the <em>logic of capital.</em> The latter – the logic of capital – is metabolic and it permeates every space in society.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>This is all very interesting, but the communes are rather
embattled in Venezuela today. They often find themselves in
contradiction with the government…</strong></p>
<p>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: <em>Commune or Nothing!</em>) 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!</p>
<p><strong>Anything else about Chavismo and Maoism?</strong></p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<em><strong>Cira Pascual Marquina</strong> is a teacher and political organizer in Caracas, and a writer for for </em><a href="http://.venezuelanalysis.com/"><em>Venezuelanalysis.com</em></a><em>.</em>
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