GISELA KOZAK ROVERO
Two recent documents
in the social media, one from Red Conceptualismo Sur (“The situation in
Venezuela”), and the other from the board of directors of Consejo
Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), can only provoke surprise with
the reedited manicheism of the cold war expressed by academic, intellectual and
artistic circles in which we supposed that the failure of the real socialisms
of the twentieth century had been fully admitted. These circles were certainly hegemonic within
what is conventionally called the social sciences and the humanities, and after
this failure they directed their attack toward neo-liberalism and the enemy par
excellence – North American hegemony.
One of the main objectives of post-Marxism, whose authors include
Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt,
Toni Negri, among others, is to go beyond such schematic concepts as class
struggle within the context of historical materialism, a theory which
presupposed socialism as the inevitable destination of capitalism. True to its nature and organization, the World
Social Forum assumes the impossibility of the national state as a means of
transformation of the society and the notion of social movements substitutes
the magical term, revolution. Both Jesus Marti Barbero and Nestor Garcia
Canclini have taught us that our multiple cultures and world views surpass
national identity, the impact of the mass media, and North American cultural
hegemony, and clearly reveal that we are not automats managed by the dominant ideology. In the terrain of cultural critique, the most
radical of this period to the beginning of the twentieth century was the
determination of a sector of the so-called cultural studies, with figures such
as John Beverley, (with great influence on a number of Venezuelans who have
studied literature in the United States) in underlining the colonialist, racist,
patriarchal and hegemonic strength of literature. In Berverly's view, critics like the Argentine
Beatriz Sarlo are classified as neoconservatives because they conceive culture
as not only the ideological arm of the hegemonic power to crush the subalterns
but also as the expression of the complexities inherent in all societies.
This period of
political and theoretical redefinition has not shown results of a meaningful
transformation judging from the communities mentioned above. How soon certain commonplaces of the past are
brought to bear again, and how enthusiastically certain members invoke the left
to side with the anti North American discourse of the Venezuelan government and
its consistent recourse to lying regarding the history of my country and the
struggle of popular sectors. This particular
left feeds on the anti-capitalism fantasies frequent in Latin America, and at
the same time defines the whole continent as a single bloc through which all
phenomena can be interpreted and explained alike. Rather than (post) Marxist, this left could be
called “galeanista”, for it seems to depict each country as an illustration of
the tendentious pamphlet Las venas abiertas de America Latina written
by the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano. Instead
of studying each national reality with intellectual depth and honesty, it remains
the prisoner of a discourse about our continent inherited from the 20th
century, whose genesis goes back to the support given to the Cuban revolution,
the new hope for this radical left after the sad history of blood and poverty
of Stalinism. For these dogmatic and
real neo-Stalinists – even if they pretend to follow Laclau or Hardt – the
principle of pleasure, that is, an easy ideological satisfaction, asserts
itself over the principle of reality. As
Raymond Aron (how terrible, a liberal thinker) would say, “ideocracy” is more
important than democracy. For this left
then Venezuela is a substitute for Cuba and Nicaragua, and hence the term
Disney left used by many Venezuelans in the social network: Latin America, as seen by them, resembles a
park of anti-hegemonic tendencies.
Although a number of men and women within its ranks live in Latin
America, frequently they have settled in the United States or Eastern Europe,
since doubtless it is always better to work there than live permanently in either
Cuba or Iran or stay in Venezuela and have access only to miserable salaries in
the world of academia. No. Being a chavista in a university from the
empire is much better. Would this be
because of the “analytical distance”?
From the perspective
of this left, 49% of Venezuelan opposition votes (a figure confirmed by the
National Electoral Council in the presidential elections of April 2013), who
protest daily against the world's highest inflation, insecurity and scarcity of
basic supplies, are the members of a white supremacy and descendants of
European immigrants, who before 1998 practiced a sort of “apartheid” against Afro-descendants,
Indians and mestizos. Such horror
stories as held by the Disney left would imply that slightly more than 7
million people (the 49% mentioned above) which belong to the upper middle
classes and the bourgeoisie have consistently exploited the other seven million
of the population, hated and despised for matters of class and race. Moreover, there is in Venezuela one exploiter
for each person exploited – an unprecedented circumstance in the world. Furthermore, it is assumed that Venezuela
serves the interests of the United States and the Colombian right through white
fascist leaders who once in power would immediately cancel public education,
health programs, public pensions and transfer to transnational companies the
control of the oil industry, because naturally nothing in Venezuela occurs
unless it is in the interest of the United States.
This perspective
satisfies the racial and pseudo-progressive orthodoxies of the failed
twentieth-century communist revolutions, which appropriated legitimate claims
in a globalized world threatened by ecological damage, violence and
poverty. But they represent an insult to
all men and women of a confronted and divided nation who day after day must
live with the ominous consequences of the Bolivarian revolution. It is an insult and a lie, a LIE in capital
letters, that covers Venezuelan history, its economy and its social and
political struggles with a dense ideological mantle. The Venezuelan opposition, just as the
pro-government sector, is made up of people of all social strata and color,
regardless of whether a certain academy associated with the Disney left tries
to impose its analysis on Latin America.
It is only an absurd Puritanism which would center the discussion of all
Venezuelan problems on skin color. When
in the United States Afro-American people were not allowed to sit in the same
seats used by Anglo Americans in their buses during the forties of the last
century we could boast already of a black minister of education, Luis Beltran
Prieto Figueroa. Moreover, voting has
been universal and secret since 1947.
Education and public health are free, public pensions and social
programs (now known as missions) have existed for years and were not created by
the revolution. Venezuela had an economy
which depended on the oil industry and the main administrator of this income
was the state. This model entered into
crisis in the 80s of the past century due to the fluctuations of oil prices and
because governments irresponsibly assumed debt to satisfy a non-productive
populism, history that repeats itself now in spite of the very high oil prices
with the disastrous consequences for the population and without the results in
public works and services of previous governments. The “right” in Venezuela is a coalition of
the center-left, with organizations such as Voluntad Popular (party of Leopoldo
Lopez), Avanzada Progresista, MAS, Alianza Bravo Pueblo and AD, registered in
the Internacional Socialista. Maria
Corina Machado is a liberal democrat and Henrique Capriles, of Primero
Justicia, defines himself as a social democrat.
Fascism? Of course not. From 1958 Venezuela has a democracy based on
political parties. In regard to the
United States, it is more occupied in other matters. I would suggest, above all to my U.S. colleagues,
that they cease to think that everything revolves around their country. Although in their neo-Stalinist blindness,
the Disney left does not believe it, things in the world take place that have
nothing to do with the US because, in the Venezuelan case, we have our own
history and problems. It would not
appear to be sensible to believe the revolutionary government in its position
that half of the voters are lackeys of the empire.
Those who have been
busy with trying to construct a corporate and authoritarian state are the red
leaders of the Bolivarian revolution, who promote through educational, cultural
and communicational channels a very expensive personality cult of the Supreme
Commander, a cult that has the characteristics of a state religion that mixes
Christ, Simon Bolivar and Chavez in a holy revolutionary trinity that occupies
the highest domestic altars. The members
of the Disney left should ask themselves if a government that to discredit an
adversary says that he is homosexual, as has been done with Capriles Radonsky,
is the progressive government, the “rosy” tide that meets its desire for
change. If the alternative to the
transnationals of information is the strict monopoly of the Venezuelan
government over the channels of the state used as propaganda instruments
against the enemy, in the best Cuban and soviet style, I stay with the
informational systems of the offended liberal democracies in which it is
possible to find radically distinct positions.
What for the Disney left are anti-hegemonic diversions is for us
suffering, poverty and exclusion. And
please, before thinking of April 11, 2002, I must indicate that the military
coup in Venezuela was the route with which Chavez began to appeal to his future
votes and that the people, for example Pedro Carmona, who carried out the
authoritarian circus that returned the Supreme Commander to the presidency from
which he had resigned, more closely resemble Chavez than the current Venezuelan
opposition.
Moved by the
community experiences fed with the petroleum income, the Disney left gives
credit to a fantasy of direct democracy inspired in Rousseau that conceals the
drama of living off state revenues, authoritarianism and economic failure. Great intellectuals and artists of the XX
century were dazzled with the Soviet Union, China and Cuba with many
disillusioned along the way, but among people of ideas and words dreams abound
to influence social change and we commit a sin as old as philosophy to want to
guide the tyrants in the style of Plato in Syracuse. Now it is done in the name of the “people”, the
“subordinates”, the “multitude”, but as always, freedom is expelled as with the
poets in the platonic republic and it is necessary to conform ourselves with
food three times a day, a miserable scholarship or fifth-rate education: in sum, with a super state that distributes
crumbs from the income. As our young
minister of education, Hector Rodriguez, said (declaration available in
YouTube): “We will not convert them into
middle class so that they become a part of the squalid ones” (dissidents). The revolution does not follow the example of
good public policies of Mujica, Rousseff and Bachelet, whose interests and
formation – it has to be said – lead them to act as intermediaries of the
Bolivarian revolution in the name of their radical followers, the economic
interests of their countries and the militant anti-U.S. that makes
dictatorships like the Cuban one possible but not like that of Pinochet in Chile,
an unacceptable double standard that no true democrat can defend.
To conclude, and as
the Brazilian philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger would say in La alternativa de la izquierda, the desire for change requires a realistic
option that gives free rein to all the liberating potentialities existing in
the world within the framework of a global market economy. Capitalism is not a homogenous system that is
manifested in the same way throughout the planet: Sweden, Angola, United States and China are
very different. Socialism, if we continue
to use a word so discredited when based on the facts yet so full of hope,
cannot be a machine of public beneficence as in Venezuela, where submission is demanded
in exchange for subsidies. It is
necessary to say goodbye to neo-Stalinism and goodbye to the Disney left that
appropriate the desire for change in order to convert us into slaves of abstractions
that are supplied from the prestige of university courses. The great enemy of this authoritarian left is
the legacy of political liberalism:
pluralism, human rights, individual creativity, diverse visions of the
common good. Our duty as people of study
and writing is to help formulate the reinvention of democracy and make freedom
the force of change, not regress to the ramshackle archive of philanthropic
state control through distribution of poverty or conform to a bureaucratic and
spiritless social democracy. Venezuela
does not require a hegemonic bloc that persuades the population that is unconvinced
of the virtues of the revolution.
No. It requires a project able to
move the country forward, respect minorities, overcome living from state
revenues and assume the challenge that state policies collaborate with the
capacities of the people in such a way as to permit them to assume the reins of
their personal life in terms of a better collective existence. We are and shall continue to be in this since
even though the Bolivarian revolution is an elected despotism sustained on
electoral victories (increasingly more doubtful and related to a blatant
opportunism), Venezuelans who do not support the chavista movement have the
right to exist and to be represented in the government. I invite the colleagues of the international
academy who still have to analyze the serious errors of the revolution not to
cease to support it, but rather to view the dissident sector with greater
realism and to question the tall tales of the chavista propaganda that is so
well-oiled with the resources of each and every man and woman of Venezuela.
@giselakozak
PHD Literature. Full Professor (Central University of
Venezuela). Writer
Traduccion:
Ana Maria Fernandez
Ralph Van Roy