Who will accuse the accusers? - Response to the "Call" of intellectuals against the Boliva
Under an implicit "I accuse" formula, and a few hours before the OAS meeting that would once again discuss intervention in Venezuela, more than a hundred Latin American, European and American intellectuals and academics recently signed a petition entitled "Urgent international call to stop the escalation of violence in Venezuela”. This "Call" constitutes a declaration of principles of their position regarding the Bolivarian situation, formulating diagnoses, attributing responsibilities, and prescribing an exit to the crisis that is taking place in the Caribbean country.
We will not offend the intelligence or morale of the subscribers (some true "sacred cows" of the critical academic world) by questioning their political commitment or their interpretive powers. We will take each statement of the "Call" for what it is-- an erroneous thesis on the nature of the Bolivarian process of Venezuela. And as such, we will submit it to analysis, realizing also that the accusers can and should be accused.
Furthermore, intellectuals, in addition to pontificating from the lofty heights of academies, must account for their own successes and their errors in this dramatic continental impasse: an impasse which may well mean the conservative closure of an ascending political cycle, or which may merely constitute the backwater before a possible progressive and leftist second wave in the region.
A defeat of the Latin American popular classes will not stop the peppering of intellectuals for their organic abstention, their pedagogical incapacity, or their misunderstandings when it comes to calibrating accurate judgments.
The concept of "fourth-generation war" or "low-intensity warfare" is much more than a hyperbole to describe the intensity of a specific juncture. Rather, it is the description of an entire insurrectional strategy of US imperialism to gnaw on the hardest jewel in the crown -- the defiance of a Venezuelan revolution which, as did the Cuban one, offends the United States in relation to what they consider to be their own backyard. And even more so if we consider the vital economic and geopolitical importance of Venezuela for the recent Republican administration of Donald Trump.
What is evident is the Venezuelan ability to connect with progressive and leftist experiences and to mesh them as tightly as possible with a bold policy of Latin American integration, as well as Venezuela's sovereign control over important strategic resources so critical to the development projects of the central countries such as oil and biodiversity. Only Venezuela, midwife of this new historical cycle, can, with its fall, seal its irremediable closure. The United States has understood this, but it seems some of our most prestigious scholars do not.
Venezuela seems to be in the precise and painful transit between two stages as analysed by Antonio Gramsci in his situation and balance of power analysis : that is, in the analysis of the degree of organization, self-consciousness and homogeneity reached by antagonistic social groups.
Venezuela has long moved effectively from a merely economic-corporate moment to a political moment, with the formation of a popular identity common to all the popular classes (Chavism) and its global confrontation with the ruling classes. The failed 2002 coup, the disrupted oil strike, and the assumption of a Socialism for the 21st century point to this path. However, this political moment lasting up to 2013, and its consequent hegemonic connection with social blocs, began to crumble with the death of Hugo Chávez Frías, and was consummated with the imposition of the international blockade after the electoral defeat of Kirchnerism in Argentina and the institutional blow to Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.
The third moment analysed by Antonio Gramsci-- the inevitable political-military moment in which we are participating-- was, paradoxically reached not only because of the endogenous radicalization of Chavism, but also because of the emboldened reaction of a local and transnational right disposed to the cruellest of vengeances.
However, analysing this budding political-military moment implies considering the opposition guarimbas, the assassination of iconic Chavez supporters in the countryside and in the city, the constant infiltration of Colombian paramilitaries, the formation of Bolivarian militias, the strengthening of the military wing incarnated in Diosdado Cabello and the military patrol of the Venezuelan coasts by the emerging powers, and are much more than testimony to the overflowing Caribbean passion. They are symptoms of an entire stage that merits specific categories of analysis to understand the militaristic radicalization of US imperialism in its long but irrepressible global decline.
In our opinion, ignoring the dimension of this process leads to superficial analyses that intuitively discern authoritarian drifts, presumed self-coups, or casual militarization of the political class of Latin American governments. Such analyses derive from the optics of intellectuals who are prone to describe "deficit" of democracy in these latitudes, always with the bar of Eurocentric and supposedly universal conceptions about what democracy is to be.
Of course, there is a process of militarization and escalation of violence, but far from being the result of internal factors, this militarization is permanently induced by imperialist aggression at all levels (diplomatic, political, economic, military, media, financial). Or do we need to list the coups d'état in Honduras, Paraguay and Brazil that preceded the present onslaught?
The coarse use of the theories of the "two demons" to analyse the causes of Venezuelan violence is worthless: what does the "complex and shared origin of violence" pointed out by the "Call" mean? Or the apparently symmetrical identification of right-wing extremists and left-wing totalitarians, which, at the end of the text, results in the signalling of a single and unprecedented entity responsible for violence -- the state and the Bolivarian government! Pray tell, who is it that is insisting on a strategy of peace?
According to these intellectuals, what should Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolutionaries have done in the face of the invasion of Playa Giron? Sit down to parley with non-existent diplomats while the bombs thundered in the Bay of Pigs? Face the mercenary rifles with ballot papers? Cautiously petition before the OAS?
The most elementary of critical analyses must be able to separate the straw from the wheat, to distinguish the founding violence and the mere reactive violence of the popular classes and the popular governments, and to understand, like Antonio Gramsci, that there is no peaceful or democratic resolution (in the strictly liberal sense of the term) to the class struggle. Sooner or later, the ruling classes, in their electoral impotence, will resort to soft coups commanded by judicial or media corporations, and when these also prove useless, they will again sound the hour of the sword.
That is why the purported "beyond polarization" position, that vain attempt to detect a clear reality behind the fog of a barracks-less political struggle, proves impossible. What is required, again with Gramsci, is "taking sides": which does not mean blindly supporting a political process or its eventual conduct, but rather choosing the field from which criticism is enunciated and from which the specific tasks of the intellectual praxis are completed.
The "organic" intellectual is not a model of a leftist intellectual, but is, in the strict sense, the only intellectual: that is, the intellectual who reflects together, side by side, without the mediation of hateful pedestals, with organized popular subjects.
It is surprising that a petition signed by academics of such a high standard dispenses with the most elementary categories of analysis of the critical political arsenal, giving ground with the attempt to found a certain characterization about the Bolivarian process. Neither social classes, nor structural dependency, nor imperialism, are even mentioned in the "Call", while these are tools that any common Venezuelan has long incorporated into their political vocabulary, in what constitutes another facet of a radical process of democratization (and socialization of power).
We believe that we find in the "Call", instead, a remarkable fetishization of democracy in its liberal formats. For, from what other concept of democracy is it possible to judge as undemocratic a process that fights a Legislative Assembly that has been held in contempt by the Supreme Court for having sworn in members who were elected fraudulently, and that has tried, without the constitutional powers to do so, to remove President Maduro four times, which undoubtedly constitutes an attempted coup? From where can an undemocratic drift be detected in a process that still actively mobilizes hundreds of thousands of people and sustains and expands qualitative democratic elements such as Communes and Communal Councils? Where are the authoritarian elements of a government that responds to institutional aggression and street violence with the most protagonistic of the answers, that is to say, with a re-constituent call that moves forward the radicalism of a process long stalled by external siege and internal errors?
Returning to historicizing democracy, splitting the ideal of its imperfect institutional realizations, de-fetishizing its formal elements and understanding its new emergent modalities, is essential if we are not to fall prey to a liberal-republican and, in a word, colonial, assessment of what is democratic. Moreover, we believe that even from a consistent liberal view it should be possible to constructively criticize the Bolivarian process that, like no other project, knew how to take, deepen and radicalize formal liberal democracy with absolutely unprecedented consultative, plebiscitarian and revocatory mechanisms.
There is no undiluted democracy, pure democracy, democracy apart from history and the class, national, ethnic and sex-generic determinations of the political struggle. There is, or will be, democracy of the workers, peasants, poor, indigenous people, Afro-descendants, students, migrants, retirees, women. And this will only be achieved when the interests of the popular classes are imposed: no matter what it takes, by customary or violent methods, by electoral means or through a painful civil war. It will be decided as always, by those who have everything to lose, but also everything to gain in Venezuela and throughout Our America.
