Speaking of socialism

By Juan Carlos Monedero

From Público.es

Chávez faces Chávez

One year ago, when Hugo Chávez’s illness seemed to put an end to the Bolivarian process, serious analysts agreed that, whatever the outcome might be, the achievements of the Bolivarian process could not be reversed.

The politicization of the people – from the time that a society with a huge rate of illiteracy was able to discuss, amend and approve a new Constitution – translated into the ability to demand their rights. Listening to candidate Henrique Capriles during the campaign, anyone who did not know him might have though he was listening to a genuine representative of the left.

In any case, Chávez had brought the social issue back to the Venezuelan political agenda, something that those who have opposed the Comandante have forgotten in at least 30 years. Now, the Venezuelan people have once again reminded those opponents, with a historical turnout at the polls and an almost 10-point advantage over the opposition candidate.

Will Chávez be entitled to govern with that result? In France, Francois Hollande edged out Nicolas Sarkozy with barely three percentage points. Chávez got 10 points more than Capriles. What will the sorrowful world press say to this?

Chávez has brought the social issue back to Venezuela’s political agenda. While in Europe democracy is deflating, in Venezuela it wins points, election after election.

Europe’s electoral common sense no longer allows voters to choose between different models. If the existing model appears to be at risk, a technician appears (Italy’s Mario Monti or Greece’s Lucas Papademos) or the alternative candidate and his supporters are threatened with the seven plagues (as in the case of Greece’s Syriza Party.)

In Venezuela, elections deserve that name because each candidate implies a radically different type of society. And it would never occur to Chávez, if he saw he might lose the election, to summon a technician to safeguard the model.

But Álvaro Vargas Llosa, like a frozen fool, thinks that the opposite is true, that democracy is in danger in Venezuela, and the sympathetic media amplify his statements. The brilliance of his speech seems to exhaust his intelligence for the rest of his tasks. Don’t even think about someone below Vargas Llosa. Since they didn’t kill Chávez, they go back to the old-fashioned tactics … the Bolivarian dictator.

Chávez’s victory – and that’s what the Right should think about – implies fulfilling his program. When it comes to fulfilling election promises, Chávez has demonstrated until today that he’s not like Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. Chávez’s program, now popularly endorsed, deals with socialist solutions.

A sign of Chávez’s radical honesty, never sufficiently acknowledged, has to do with his pronouncement in 2005, at Gigantinho Stadium in Porto Alegre, that the solution to the problems of his country and the world could come only from socialism. Nothing more sensible, from another logic, than to propose a model based on “Chavismo.”

If, as hollow criticism claims, Chávez were an abusive populist – an odd populist who began his government with a new Constitution and increased to five the powers of the State (adding a moral power and an electoral power), while those in Spain who accuse him of being a populist are dismantling their own Constitution in silence and without a referendum – he would hardly have renounced the construction of a one-man regime.

If that were so, there could be right-wing Chavists and left-wing Chavists, which would make no sense when we’re talking about “socialism.” To bet on socialism takes away support. Does anyone recall some president who was willing to lose votes before losing ideas?

Those in Spain who accuse him of being a populist are dismantling their Constitution, silently and without a referendum. But Chávez didn’t stop there. In addition, he said that 21st-Century socialism could not repeat the errors of 20th-Century socialism. That is why lines of discussion were opened – where the Miranda International Center had a starring role – that had to identify what aspects of 20th-Century socialism should be preserved and which should be surpassed.

Walls and wire fences, citizens’ mistrust, re-education camps, indoctrination, confusion in the State and the Party, authoritarianism, nationalization of all the means of production, a single-party system, the priority of the ends over the means and the disrespect for diversity (let’s recall the treatment given to homosexuals in many socialist or how the Comintern went to Peru to chastise José Carlos Mariátegui for talking about an indigenous socialism in that country) are some of those aspects that during the 20th Century distanced socialism from freedom and the people’s support.

However, devotion and sacrifice (it was the Red Army that stopped the Nazis), economic efficacy (Russia and China emerged from feudalism), the conquest of social and political rights, decolonization, pacifism, and respect for the ecology, all these are achievements by the Left.

To propose socialism in an oil-rich, affluent country where consumerism is almost a religion, with an army formed over 40 years to fight the Leftists, with a weak and “anarchic” State (Macondo insists on moving to Venezuela), at a moment when the world Left is in crisis and the neoliberal model is on the upswing is a stroke of either genius or tropical madness. But don’t they have much in common? Chávez connects with his people. And it so happens that Venezuela is in Venezuela.

That consistency hurts a lot of ears. While neoliberalism can survive only as long as it can convince people that there is no alternative, Bolivarian Venezuela is excessively solvent. It is a pebble in the shoe of logic, big and free, like Allende’s Chile, Fidel’s Cuba, the Popular Front’s Spain, Lenin’s Russia, the Paris Commune, Pétion’s Haiti or Spartacus’ Rome.

In the case of Spain, the hatred of those who make a living of hating comes from way back. In 1998, Prime Minister José María Aznar sent to Venezuela his future son-in-law, Alejandro Agag, his political adviser Pedro Arriola, the Popular Party’s chief of communications, Francisco García Diego, and the then-unknown businessman Francisco Correa (the Gürtel network was in its inception), to put together a presidential campaign for Irene Sáez, a former Miss Universe, who, while unable to solve the problems of a country with a 60-percent poverty rate, might at least bring glamour into it. (If that had happened, Boris Izaguirre wouldn’t have come to Spain to drop his trousers on television and shout statements that upset retirees.)

But Chávez already was showing the way and he swept those elections. He beat Aznar’s candidate by more than 50 percentage points. It is not surprising that in 2002, during the coup d’état against Chávez, Aznar told the Spanish ambassador to recognize the coup’s leader, who was then head of the oil workers’ union. Talk about excess. (The unions staged a coup and put the boss of bosses in charge. Can you picture Cuevas or Díaz Ferrán as head of government after Feb. 23? Well, the question was rhetorical.)

With regard to the PSOE [Socialist Workers Party of Spain], the breakdown came from the relationship between Felipe González with Carlos Andrés Pérez, the corrupt president (according to the Congress, which judged him long before Chávez came on the scene) who ordered the soldiers to fire against the people during the Caracazo of February 1989. The Socialist International engages in complicated friendships.

Let me add that González, who was checking the road that would take him to work for Carlos Slim (the richest man in Latin America), was introduced by Carlos Andrés to businessman Gustavo Cisneros, who owned one of the biggest fortunes in Venezuela. That should have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship, because González would have sold to Cisneros the [department store chain] Galerías Preciados for 1.5 billion pesetas.

After money-laundering the deal with 48 billion pesetas in public money, the shrewd businessman would sell the company five years later for 30.6 billion pesetas, i.e., 20 times the purchase price. No wonder Cisneros, Carlos Andrés and Felipe González were angry at Comandante Chávez.

Stranger still is why they had to turn their personal anger into a political issue. Although maybe the anger was also political. What remained to be seen was the PSOE’s position in the Left, which has always had trouble processing what’s outside the communist parties. It’s still dealing with the issue. Forty years of military dictatorship have generated some antibodies against anything that has to do with the military.

Nevertheless, as Prof. Boaventura de Sousa Santos says, we must begin to learn from the South. Not to repeat the mistake of importing models willy-nilly, the way they did in the past.

In this situation, as the social and democratic States crumble in Europe under the neoliberal onslaught, it may be interesting to know how Latin American countries suffered the same 30 years ago (with privatizations, loss of infrastructures and rail transportation, shutdowns of hospitals and schools, bank bailouts, risk premiums, general impoverishment of the population) and emerged thanks to constituent processes that set the foundations for a new social pact.

That’s where a different Chávez can surface. A Chávez who will help us to see ourselves in a different manner. A mixed-blood military man from the South. Dare we at least to understand him?