The spectre of socialism for the 21st century

Posted by Radical Notes July 11, 2008 at 11:54 am in Venezuela, Working Class, Marxism

Michael Lebowitz

The following is the keynote address to the annual meeting of the Society for Socialist Studies, Vancouver, June 5, 2008. It was originally titled “Building socialism for the 21st century”. To hear an audio recording of the speech, click HERE.

A spectre is haunting capitalism. It is the spectre of socialism for the 21st century. Increasingly, the characteristics of this spectre are becoming clear, and we are able to see enough to understand what it is not. The only thing that is not clear at this point is whether the spectre is real – i.e., whether it is actually an earthly presence.

Consider what this spectre is not. It is not the belief that by struggling within capitalism for reforms that it is possible to change the nature of capitalism — i.e., that a better capitalism, a third way, can suspend the logic of capital (except momentarily). Nor is it a focus upon electing friendly governments to preside over exploitation, oppression and exclusion — i.e., to support barbarism with a human face. Indeed, this spectre does not accept the premise that you can challenge the logic of capital without understanding it. Very simply, the spectre of socialism for the 21st century is not yesterday’s liberal package — social democracy. Further, this spectre is not a focus upon the industrial working class as the revolutionary subjects of socialism, a privileging whereby all other workers (including those in the growing informal sector) are seen as lesser workers, unproductive workers, indeed lumpenproletariat. Nor does it suggest that those industrial workers by virtue of the difference between their productivity with advanced means of production and their incomes (i.e., the extent of their exploitation) have a greater entitlement to the wealth of society than the poor and excluded.

In the conception of socialism for the 21st century, socialism is not confused with the ownership of the means of production by the state such that (a) it is thought that all that is necessary for socialism is to nationalise and (b) that everything not nationalised is an affront. Indeed, this spectre does not emphasise the development of productive forces without regard for the nature of productive relations (such that gulags, dictatorship and indeed capitalism can all be justified because they develop the productive forces and thereby move you closer to socialism and communism).

Nor, for that matter, does it think of two post-capitalist states, socialism and communism, separated by a Chinese wall; in the concept of socialism for the 21st century, there is no separate socialist principle of “to each according to his contribution’’ which must be honoured. Rather, there is simply the recognition that the development of the new society is a process and that this process necessarily begins on a defective basis — in other words, with defects such as self orientation. Precisely for this reason, this recognition of existing defects, the battle of ideas — an ideological battle against the old world — is central to the concept of socialism for the 21st century.

Finally, socialism for the 21st century is not based upon democracy in the classic sense. By that, I mean that it is not based upon the concept of representative democracy — that institutional form in which rule by the people is transformed into voting periodically for those who will misrule them. All these fall into what I call yesterday’s socialist package.

Marx and the centrality of human development

So, if the spectre of socialism for the 21st century differs from yesterday’s liberal and socialist packages, what is it?

First of all, it is a stress upon the centrality of human development. In this respect, it is a restoration of the focus of 19th century socialists. It is the vision of a society with the goal (according to Saint-Simon) of providing to its members “the greatest possible opportunity for the development of their faculties’’, a goal to which Louis Blanc referred as ensuring that everyone has “the power to develop and exercise his faculties in order to really be free’’ and of a society in which, according to Friedrich Engels, “every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society’’. This vision of human development which is central to socialism for the 21st century was unquestionably Marx’s vision (Lebowitz, 2006: 53-60)

The Young Marx envisioned a “rich human being’’ — one who has developed their capacities and capabilities to the point where they are able “to take gratification in a many-sided way’’ — “the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses’’ (Marx, 1844: 302). “In place of the wealth and poverty of political economy’’, he proposed, “come the rich human being and rich human need’’ (Marx, 1844: 304). But, it was not only a young, romantic, so-called pre-Marxist Marx who spoke so eloquently about rich human beings. In the Grundrisse, Marx returned explicitly to this conception of human wealth — to a rich human being — “as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations’’; real wealth, he understood, is the development of human capacity — the “development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption’’ (Marx, 1973: 325).

Could anything be clearer? This is what Marx’s conception of socialism was all about — the creation of a society which removes all obstacles to the full development of human beings. He looked ahead to that society of associated producers, where each individual is able to develop her full potential — i.e., the “absolute working-out of his creative potentialities’’, the “complete working out of the human content’’, the “development of all human powers as such the end in itself’’ (Marx, 1973: 488, 541, 708). In contrast to capitalist society in which we are the means to expand the wealth of capital, Marx in his book Capital pointed to that alternative society, “the inverse situation in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development’’ (Marx, 1977: 772).

The workers’ own need for development — there is the spectre, there is the impulse for a new society. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx projected that in the cooperative society based upon the common ownership of the means of production, the productive forces would have “increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly’’ (Marx, 1875: 24). As he described it in the Communist Manifesto, our goal is “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’’ (Lebowitz, 2003: 202-5). Our goal, in short, cannot be a society in which some people are able to develop their capabilities and others are not; we are interdependent, we are all members of a human family. Thus our goal must be the full development of all human potential.

`These ideas live today’

There’s more here than a 19th century view. That these ideas live today can be seen very clearly in the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela. In its explicit recognition (in Article 299) that the goal of a human society must be that of “ensuring overall human development’’, in the declaration of Article 20 that “everyone has the right to the free development of his or her own personality’’ and the focus of Article 102 upon “developing the creative potential of every human being and the full exercise of his or her personality in a democratic society’’ — this theme of human development pervades the Bolivarian Constitution.

Further, there is something there that you don’t find in the liberal conceptions of human development underlying the UN Human Development Index. This constitution also focuses upon the question of how people develop their capacities and capabilities — i.e., how overall human development occurs. Article 62 of the Bolivarian Constitution declares that participation by people in “forming, carrying out and controlling the management of public affairs is the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective’’. The necessary way. And, the same emphasis upon a democratic, participatory and protagonistic society is present in the economic sphere, which is why Article 70 stresses “self-management, co-management, cooperatives in all forms’’ and why Article 102’s goal of “developing the creative potential of every human being’’ emphasises “active, conscious and joint participation’’.

This focus upon practice as essential for human development was, of course, Marx’s central insight into how people change. It’s not a matter simply of spending more on education, health and social services. Remember Marx’s early comment on Robert Owen’s conception that what was needed to change people was to change the circumstances in which they exist. Marx (1845) emphatically rejected the idea that we can give people a gift, that if we just change the circumstances in which they exist they will be themselves different people. You are forgetting, he pointed out, that it is human beings who change circumstances. The idea that we can create new circumstances for people and thereby change them, he insisted, in fact divides society into two parts — one part of which is deemed superior to society. It is the same perspective that Paulo Freire (2006: 72) subsequently rejected in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed — the concept that “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing’’.

In contrast, Marx introduced the concept of revolutionary practice — “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change’’ — the red thread that runs throughout his work. He talked, for example, of how people develop through their own struggles — how this is the only way the working class can “succeed in ridding itself of the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew’’. And he told workers that they would have to go through as much as 50 years of struggles “not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power’’. And, again, after the Paris Commune in 1871, over a quarter of a century after he first began to explore this theme, he commented that workers know “they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historical processes, transforming circumstances and men’’ (Lebowitz, 2003: 179-84).

Always the same point — we change ourselves through our activity. This idea of the simultaneous change in circumstances and self-change, however, is not limited to class struggle itself. It is present in all activities of people — i.e., every process of activity has two products — i.e., joint products — the change in circumstances and the change in the actor. This obviously applies in the sphere of production as well. As Marx commented in the Grundrisse, in production “the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, …new needs and new language’’. Here, indeed, is the essence of the cooperative society based upon common ownership of the means of production — “when the worker cooperates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species’’.

How far, of course, this is from the idea that what you have to do is build up the productive forces and thereby transform the conditions in which people exist, transforming their being and their consciousness! But what other inferences flow from these principles — the focus upon human development and upon revolutionary practice, that simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change? Let me suggest that these two principles constitute the “key link’’, the key link we need to grasp (in Lenin’s words) if we are to understand the concept of socialism for the 21st century.

Consider, for example, what this means for the process of production. If people are prevented from using their minds within the workplace but instead follow directions from above, you have what Marx described as the crippling of body and mind, producers who are fragmented, degraded, alienated from “the intellectual potentialities of the labour process’’. There’s no surprise that Marx looked forward to the re-combining of head and hand, the uniting of mental and physical labour — i.e., to a time when the individual worker can call “his own muscles into play under the control of his own brain’’. But, more than a simple combination of mental and manual labour within the sphere of production is needed. Without “intelligent direction of production’’ by workers, without production “under their conscious and planned control’’, workers cannot develop their potential as human beings because their own power becomes a power over them (Marx, 1977: 450, 173).

`Protagonistic’ democracy

What kind of productive relations, then, can provide the conditions for the full development of human capacities? Only those in which there is conscious cooperation among associated producers; only those in which the goal of production is that of the workers themselves. Clearly, though, this requires more than worker-management in individual workplaces. They must be the goals of workers in society, too — workers in their communities.

After all, what is production? It’s not something that occurs only in a factory or in what we traditionally identify as a workplace. When we understand the goal as that of human development, we recognise that production should not be confused with production of specific use-values; rather, as Marx noted, all specific products and activities are mere moments in a process of producing human beings, who are the real result of social production. And, that points to the importance of making each moment a site for the collective decision making and variety of activity that develops human capacities.

Implicit in the emphasis of the concept of socialism for the 21st century upon human development and how that development can occur only through practice is our need to be able to develop through democratic, participatory and protagonistic activity in every aspect of our lives. Through revolutionary practice in our communities, our workplaces and in all our social institutions, we produce ourselves as ‘rich human beings’ — rich in capacities and needs — in contrast to the impoverished and crippled human beings that capitalism produces.

In contrast to the hierarchical capitalist state (which Marx understood as an “engine of class despotism’’) and to the despotism of the capitalist workplace, only a revolutionary democracy can create the conditions in which we can invent ourselves daily as rich human beings. This concept is one of democracy in practice, democracy as practice, democracy as protagonism. Democracy in this sense — protagonistic democracy in the workplace, protagonistic democracy in neighbourhoods, communities, communes — is the democracy of people who are transforming themselves into revolutionary subjects.

How else but through protagonistic democracy in production can we ensure that the process of producing is one which enriches people and expands their capacities rather than crippling and impoverishing them? How else but through protagonistic democracy in society can we ensure that what is produced is what is needed to foster the realisation of our potential?

If there is to be democratic production for the needs of society, however, there is an essential precondition: there cannot be a monopolisation of the products of human labour by individuals, groups or the state. In other words, the precondition is social ownership of the means of production: this is the first side of what President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has called the “elementary triangle’’ of socialism: (a) social ownership of the means of production, which is a basis for (b) social production organised by workers in order to (c) satisfy communal needs and communal purposes.

Let us consider each element in this particular combination of distribution - production - consumption.

A. Social ownership of the means of production

Social ownership of the means of production is critical because it is the only way to ensure that our communal, social productivity is directed to the free development of all rather than used to satisfy the private goals of capitalists, groups of individuals or state bureaucrats. Social ownership is not, however, the same as state ownership. Social ownership implies a profound democracy — one in which people function as subjects, both as producers and as members of society, in determining the use of the results of our social labour.

B. Production organised by workers

Production organised by workers builds new relations among producers — relations of cooperation and solidarity. As long as workers are prevented from developing their capacities by combining thinking and doing in the workplace, they remain alienated and fragmented human beings whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things. And, if workers don’t make decisions in the workplace and develop their capacities, we can be certain that someone else will. Protagonistic democracy in the workplace is an essential condition for the full development of the producers.

C. Satisfaction of communal needs and purposes

Satisfaction of communal needs and purposes focuses upon the importance of basing our productive activity upon the recognition of our common humanity and our needs as members of the human family. Thus, it stresses the importance of going beyond self-interest to think of our community and society. As long we produce only for our private gain, how do we look at other people? As competitors or as customers — i.e., as enemies or as means to our own ends; thus, we remain alienated, fragmented and crippled. Rather than relating to others through an exchange relation (and, thus, trying to get the best deal possible for ourselves), this third element of the elementary triangle of socialism has as its goal building a relation to others characterised by our unity based upon recognition of difference; through our activity, then, we both build solidarity among people and at the same time produce ourselves differently.

And, this concept of solidarity is central because it is saying that all human beings, all parts of the collective worker, are entitled to draw upon our “communal, social productivity’’. The premise is not at all that we have the individual right to consume things without limit but, rather, that we recognise the centrality of “the worker’s own need for development’’. Further, our claim upon the accumulated fruits of social brain and hand is not based upon exploitation. It is not because you have been exploited that you are entitled to share in the fruits of social labour. Rather, it is because you are a human being in a human society – and because, like all of us, you have the right to the opportunity to develop all your potential.

At the same time as a human being in a human society you also have the obligation to other members of this human family — to make certain that they also have this opportunity, that they too can develop their potential. As a member of this family you are called upon to do your share — a concept also present in the Bolivarian Constitution: Article 135 notes “the obligations which by virtue of solidarity, social responsibility and humanitarian assistance, are incumbent upon individuals according to their abilities’’.

Look at the direction that this key link — human development and the simultaneous changing of circumstance and self-change takes us:

- to democratic decision making in the workplace and the community

- to a focus upon building solidarity and new socialist human beings rather than relying upon exchange relations and material self-interest (which Che Guevara — whose 80th birthday would have been today — warned us leads to a blind alley)

- to a new conception of the state as one which is not over and above civil society (i.e., a state of the Paris Commune-type) — i.e., a state which Marx wrote is our own “living force’’, our own power, rather than a power used against us

- and, for that matter, this key link of human development and revolutionary practice leads us to recognise the need for a political instrument which respects the creative energy and revolutionary practice of masses rather than substitutes its own wisdom. In short, a political instrument which embraces the revolutionary pedagogy of Rosa Luxemburg when she argued: “The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn in the dialectic of history. Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.’’

Is the spectre real? Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

The outlines of the spectre, socialism for the 21st century, become increasingly clear. The question remains, however, is the spectre real? Does it have an earthly presence? Especially, since this vision of the spectre draws so much upon the discourse of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, it is important to ask what the reality is there.

Certainly, socialism for the 21st century has been explicitly on the agenda in Venezuela since Chavez’s closing speech at the January 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, when he surprised many people by saying, “We have to re-invent socialism.’’ At that time, Chavez emphasised that “It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition.’’ Capitalism has to be transcended, he argued, if we are ever going to end the poverty of the majority of the world. “But we cannot resort to state capitalism, which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything.’’

Without question, there has been progress in this direction. Starting in 2004, oil revenues from the newly recaptured state oil company were directed to new missions which have been providing people with basic prerequisites for human development — education, health care, adequate and affordable food. Important steps, too, have been taken to develop each side of the elementary socialist triangle:

A. Social property: There has been an expansion of state property, which can be a threshold to socialist property (because it is possible to direct state property to satisfy social needs). In addition to the expansion of state sectors in oil and basic industry, to last year’s acquisition of strategic sectors such as communications, electric power and the recovery of the dominant position for the state in the heavy oil fields has been added this year so far a major dairy company and most recently the steel company (SIDOR) that had been privatised by a previous government. Further, the offensive against the latifundia has resumed with several land seizures (or “recoveries’’), and new state companies (including joint ventures with state firms from countries such as Iran) have been created to produce means of production like tractors.

B. Social production: While the government has continued to seek ways to encourage worker-management, in particular by supporting cooperatives and recovered factories, this side of the triangle is the least developed so far. In part, this is because of opposition within the state to worker-management in strategic sectors such as oil and energy, and in part because of opposition from traditional trade unions to co-management structures and workers’ councils. What has been happening is a continued search for forms, and the government has moved from exploring cooperatives as the desired form, to EPS, companies of social production (which made commitments to workers and communities), and now to the exploration of the concept of socialist companies. Everyday, I hear of new ideas in this direction. At this point, this aspect is a work in process. However, it does appear that a previous model of 51% state ownership and 49% ownership by a workers’ cooperative is being replaced by focus upon 100% state ownership with workers’ control. Progress in this area, unfortunately, has been held up by the chaos and intense battles between Chavist trade union currents, and that has been a source of incredible frustration for many — including Chavez. In this process, Chavez continues to exhort the working class to play a leadership role. After this year’s takeover of the dairy producer Los Andes, he argued that “workers’ committees must be created, socialist committees, in order to transform the factory from inside. The workers must know what is happening in the company, participate in decision-making in the firm.’’ And, after the decision to nationalise SIDOR, he announced that the government was a government of the working class. At this very point, the nationalisation of SIDOR after major struggles by the steel workers has re-animated the organised working class; and our institute (Centro Internacional Miranda) has organised roundtables between tendencies and currents that would not have been possible several months ago.

C. Production for social needs: Throughout the country, there are many experiments attempting to link producers and consumers directly — especially in the sphere of agricultural products and in local trading with local currencies. To be able to identify social needs, though, continuing social institutions are required; and the most significant advance that has occurred is the development in 2006 of the new communal councils which are able to identify the needs of their communities. These councils are an extraordinary experiment in bringing power to people in their neighbourhoods — creating an institutional form in which they can diagnose their needs collectively and determine the priorities for their communities. Of course, the idea of participatory diagnosis and budgeting is not unique to Venezuela; that is occurring in a number of communities elsewhere (and the most famous example is Porto Alegre in Brazil). But what is unique in Venezuela is the size of the units in question. Communal councils are formed to represent in urban areas 200-400 families (which can be 1000 people) and in rural areas as few as 20 families. It means that the councils are choosing not distant representatives but, rather, their neighbours, people they know well — and not as representatives but as voceros, spokespersons for the ultimate decision-making body, the general assembly (which, of course, meets in the neighbourhood, thus allowing everyone to participate). In the communal councils you have the embryo for a new state from below. And that was recognised explicitly by Chavez last year when he proclaimed “All Power to the Communal Councils’’. Now, of course, the communal councils are small, and the problems of society go well beyond those that can be resolved at the neighbourhood level. That is understood, and Chavez has called the councils themselves the cell of a new socialist state. They are seen as the building blocks — essential because they are allowing people to develop confidence and capacities in dealing with problems they understand. (Observing the sense of pride in these communities is very moving.) However, it is obviously necessary to begin to combine the communal councils into larger associations in order to deal with larger problems. And that is precisely what is happening now with the creation of pilot projects to combine some of the more advanced groups of councils into socialist communes. The process envisioned is very clearly one of trying to build a new state from below.

So, is this spectre of socialism for the 21st century, with its focus upon human development and practice, real? Clearly, it is not just words. There is truly an attempt to make socialism for the 21st century real. But, can it succeed?

Can socialism for the 21st century succeed?

You might wonder, why am I even posing this question — given evidence that the desire is there and knowledge that the great oil revenues available provide the means!

Three years ago, I gave a talk in Venezuela called “Socialism doesn’t drop from the sky’’, which has been very widely circulated in Venezuela (largely because Chavez has talked about it a number of times on television); it is also a chapter in my book, Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century. One aspect of the title of that essay refers to the obvious point that socialism obviously is necessarily rooted in particular societies — which is to say that it must be developed in societies with particular histories. To understand the possibilities for success in Venezuela, you have to know something about the nature of that society.

Now, I can’t give you a complete, balanced account of Venezuela in the time left. So, I’ll just stress just some of the characteristics which suggest significant obstacles to building socialism for the 21st century in Venezuela.

When you talk about Venezuela, you have to begin with oil. Not only the effect of oil exports upon the hollowing-out of the economy such that local manufacturing and agriculture effectively disappeared as the result of an exchange rate which made it much cheaper to import everything rather than to produce it domestically. It’s an extreme example of what is called the “Dutch disease’’: despite rich agricultural land, Venezuela was importing 70% of its food. So, massive migration from the countryside to live in the cities, e.g., in the hills surrounding Caracas — 80% of the population is urban, maybe 10% engaged in agriculture. And as for industry, it was largely import processing — processing food, assembling cars and assorted other import-related sectors. Oil production itself doesn’t generate many jobs, so we have to think about unemployment, an informal sector (about 50% of the working class) and poverty — extreme social debt and inequality.

Add to that economic effect, the effect upon state and society. Unlike the classic picture of a state resting upon civil society, upon the social classes, in Venezuela, civil society rests upon the state. Contrary to Engels’ sneers at Tkachev, in Venezuela the state indeed has been suspended in mid-air — or, more precisely, suspended upon an oil geyser. Thus, the state has been the supreme object of desire — or, more precisely, access to the state for the purpose of gaining access to oil rents has been a national preoccupation. And, in this orgy of rent seeking within a poverty-stricken society — a culture of corruption and clientalism, parasitic capitalists who don’t invest, a labour aristocracy with trade union leaders who sell jobs, a party system which functions as an alternating transmission belt for elections and access to state jobs, a state which mostly does not work because it is filled with incompetent sinecurists but, when it does, is completely top-down. These are just a few characteristics worth mentioning.

All of this was present in Venezuela when Chavez was elected in 1998. And, you would have to be truly naïve to think that it disappeared when Chávez came to office. On the contrary, it pervades Chavism — the corruption, the clientalism, the nature of the state, the nature of the party (including the new party – PSUV — currently being built), the gap between the organised working class and the poor in the informal sector — it’s all there! And, you will recognise that it is entirely contrary to everything in the concept of socialism for the 21st century.

Socialism doesn’t drop from the sky. It is necessarily rooted in particular societies. And, these two souls which currently beat in the breast of Venezuela are clearly at war. Chavez often cites [Italian Marxist Antonio] Gramsci about how the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born (although he leaves out the part about how a great many morbid symptoms appear at that time). Precisely because of these two opposed tendencies, when I write about Venezuela, I always stress the internal struggle within Chavism as the main obstacle to the success of the Bolivarian Revolution. Obviously, it is not the only obstacle — there is the existing oligarchy, the latifundists (who are the most reactionary and violent part of the opposition), the existing capitalists in their enclaves of import processing, finance and the media (which has been their main weapon) and, of course, US imperialism. Not only was the US complicit in the 2002 coup which briefly removed Chavez and in the oil lockout and sabotage later that year, but it also funds and trains the opposition, orchestrates the international media blitz against Venezuela (currently with the assistance of magical laptop computers produced by its Colombian clients), and it is in the process of bringing the US navy back to patrol the waters off Venezuela.

Imperialism is no paper tiger. And, clearly, solidarity with the Bolivarian process is essential by those outside the country who value the concepts and developments I have described. However, I stress the internal obstacles to socialism within Chavism — the emerging new capitalists (the “bolibourgeoisie’’), the high officials (both from military and vanguardist traditions — it is difficult to see the distinction) who are opposed to power from below in workplaces and communities (and, thus opposed, in this respect, to human development and revolutionary practice), the party functionaries and nomenklatura. Why do I stress this? Because I consider this the ultimate contradiction of the revolution; and, I think the struggle between this “endogenous right’’ (the right from within) and the masses who have been mobilised is the ultimate conflict which will determine the fate of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Who will win?

Who will win? I have to tell you honestly that I don’t know. My daily mantra in Venezuela is “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’’. I can tell you that Venezuela is no place for a revolutionary who suffers from bipolar disorder. There are the days of depression and despair; there are the days of manic exultation. In the end, it will all depend upon struggle, class struggle, and when it comes to class struggle, there are no guarantees.

But let’s assume a worse-case scenario — that the process in Venezuela degenerates, that it proceeds to demoralise its supporters, is defeated in one way or another by defectors, domestic capitalists, the military or imperialism. Let’s assume, in other words, that this particular earthly manifestation of the spectre of socialism for the 21st century is no more.

What will be left? A spectre — but one with much more substance than Marx and Engels could write about in the Communist Manifesto in the mid-19th century. A spectre — but one which is capable of becoming a material force by grasping the minds of masses. A spectre — but one which is absolutely essential to our survival because of another spectre.

Think about this concept of socialism for the 21st century. About the focus upon human development as the goal, upon a democratic, participatory, protagonistic society as the necessary way for the complete development of people, individually and collectively. Think about the idea of communal councils in which people can collectively decide upon their needs, where they simultaneously change circumstances and themselves. Think about democracy in the workplace, about ending the divide between thinking and doing and being able to draw upon the tacit knowledge of workers to be able to produce better. Think in general about this concept of revolutionary democracy which is central to the concept of socialism for the 21st century.

This is not a concept just for Venezuela or Latin America or for the poor of the South. Why is this not a spectre that can appeal to Canadians in their communities and workplaces? Why is there not the potential for a political instrument here that can focus upon these aspects, that can put forward a vision and that can be a medium for coordinating these struggles from below?

I suggest that this is not just a nice wish — it is a necessity. Because there is another spectre out there — a spectre which is haunting humanity, the spectre of barbarism.

Think about capitalism. Its very essence is the drive to expand capital. The picture is one of capital constantly generating more surplus value in the form of commodities which must be sold, constantly trying to create new needs in order to make real that surplus value in the form of money. That constant generation of new needs, Marx noted already in the mid 19th century, is the basis of the contemporary power of capital.

Thus, a growing circle — a spiral of growing alienated production, growing needs and growing consumption. But how long can that continue? Everyone knows that the high levels of consumption achieved in certain parts of the world cannot be copied in the parts of the world which capital has newly incorporated into the world capitalist economy. Very simply, the Earth cannot sustain this — as we can already see with the clear evidence of global warming and the growing shortages which reflect rising demands for particular products in the new capitalist centers. Sooner or later, that circle will reach its limits. Its ultimate limit is given by the limits of nature, the limits of the Earth to sustain more and more consumption of commodities, more and more consumption of the Earth’s resources.

But well before we reach the ultimate limits of the vicious circle of capitalism, there inevitably will arise the question of who is entitled to command those increasingly limited resources. To whom will go the oil, the metals, the water — all those requirements of modern life? Will it be the currently rich countries of capitalism, those that have been able to develop because others have not? In other words, will they be able to maintain the vast advantages they have in terms of consumption of things and resources — and to use their power to grab the resources located in other countries? Will newly emerging capitalist countries (and, indeed, those not emerging at all) be able to capture a “fair share’’? Will the impoverished producers of the world — producers well aware of the standards of consumption elsewhere as the result of the mass media — accept that they are not entitled to the fruits of civilisation? How will this be resolved?

The spectre of barbarism is haunting humanity. And, what is the alternative to it? Yesterday’s liberalism — social democracy — has never understood the nature of capital and offers, accordingly, only barbarism with a human face. And, yesterday’s socialist package, with its promise of more rapid development of productive forces, its privileging of industrial workers and, its premise of a stage based upon a principle that we all must get in accordance with our contribution — this is no alternative to the crisis humanity faces.

Whatever the ultimate fate of the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela, its principal contribution has been to restore hope; it has done this by revealing that there is an alternative to neoliberalism and the logic of capital. The alternative offered by socialism for the 21st century points to the need to understand that, regardless of the luck of our birthplaces or our own past contributions, the accumulated fruits of social brain and hand belong to us all. Internationally, its alternative is ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, which has created links between Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia based upon solidarity rather than exchange relations. At the core of the alternative offered by socialism for the 21st century is the idea of building a society based upon relations of solidarity — solidarity between producers, e.g., in formal and informal sectors, solidarity between those of the North and those of the South. At its core is the idea of producing consciously for communal needs and purposes and thereby building a society in which the free development of all is the condition for the free development of each.

So, let me conclude with a point that is completely unoriginal but which, so significantly, is being heard more and more these days: the choice before us is — socialism or barbarism.

Let me add, though, that socialism doesn’t drop from the sky — you have to struggle to make it real.

Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and director of the Centro International Miranda, Caracas, Venezuela.

Bibliography

Freire, Paulo. 2006. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum).

Lebowitz, Michael A. 2003. Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

Lebowitz, Michael A. 2006. Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century (New York: Monthly Review Press).

Marx, Karl. 1844. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx and Engels (1975b), Collected Works, Vol. 3.

Marx, Karl. 1845. ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Marx and Engels (1976), Collected Works, Vol. 5.

Marx, Karl. 1875. Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx and Engels (1962), Selected Works, Vol. II.

Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books).

Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital, Vol. I (New York: Vintage Books).

Courtesy: Links

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Perspectives on the US Financial Crisis

Posted by Radical Notes July 11, 2008 at 11:21 am in Finance, USA, Imperialism, Economy

Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch

It is time to take stock. The centrality of the American economy to the capitalist world – which now literally does encompass the whole world – has spread the financial crisis that began in the U.S. housing market around the globe. And the emerging economic recession triggered in the U.S. by that financial crisis now threatens to spread globally as well.

Capitalism has had an incredible run – politically and culturally as well as economically – since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. The resolution of that crisis required, as economists put it at the time, ‘reducing expectations’ of the kind nurtured by the trade union militancy and welfare state gains of the 1960s. This was accomplished via the defeats suffered by trade unionism and the welfare state since the 1980s at the hands of what might properly be called capitalist militancy. This was accompanied by dramatic technological change, massive industrial restructuring alongside labour market flexibility and the over – all discipline provided by ‘competitiveness.’

That discipline brought with it an enormous increase in economic inequality, the spread of permanent working class insecurity and the subsumption of democratic possibilities to profitable accumulation. But this did not mean capitalism was no longer able to integrate the bulk of the population. On the contrary, this was now achieved through the private pension funds that mobilized workers savings, on the one hand, and through the mortgage and credit markets that loaned them the money to sustain high levels of consumer spending on the other. At the centre of this were the private banking institutions that, after their collapse in the Great Depression, had been nurtured back to health in the postwar decades and then unleashed the explosion of global financial innovation that has defined our era.

The question begged by the current crisis is whether capitalism’s capacity to integrate the mass of people through their incorporation in financial markets has run out of steam. That the fault line should have appeared in ’sub-prime’ mortgage loans to African-Americans is hardly surprising – this has always been the Achilles’ heel of working class incorporation into the American capitalist dream. But an economic earthquake will actually only result if there is a devaluation of working class assets in general through a collapse of housing prices and the stock and bonds in which their retirement savings are invested.

The state and financial crises

We are by no means there yet. The role being played to prevent just this by the Federal Reserve, very much acting as the world central bank in light of the global implications of a U.S. recession, should once and for all dispel the illusion that capitalist markets thrive without state intervention. It was through the types of policies that promoted free capital movements, international property rights and labour market flexibility that the era of free trade and globalization was unleashed. And this era has been kept going as long as it has by the repeated coordinated interventions undertaken by central banks and finance ministries to contain the periodic crises to which such a volatile system of global finance inevitably gives rise.

The Fed has repeatedly poured liquidity into its financial system at the first sign of trouble. The question is whether the capacity of the system to go on integrating ordinary Americans though the expansion of investor and credit markets in this way has reached its limit. This was indeed suggested by the Bush administration’s sudden (non-military) Keynesian turn with a $150 billion fiscal stimulus. However, that fiscal stimulus at the federal level may be undone at the state level, especially with municipal government cutbacks, given their massive dependence on property taxes. The way financial institutions that specialized in selling risk insurance on municipal bonds were enveloped in the credit crisis has further compounded the problem. This indeed brings to mind the extent to which it was municipal governments that were on the front lines of the Great Depression.

But while the U.S. may very well move into a recession, which even when it ends may mark the beginning of a new era of slower growth, this is very different from a Depression. While there is no doubt that mortgages in black communities and for the working poor more generally will be tightened, it seems most likely that banks, competing for markets, will continue to extend credit to working families more generally. we need to remember that the top twenty per cent and their families are extravagant consumers. While growing inequalities are grotesque, the left has consistently underestimated the extent to which the rich can sustain overall spending. The ‘correction’ in the dollar (alongside the strength of U.S. manufacturing in the higher-tech sectors) has already led to offsetting growth in markets abroad; U.S. exports have been growing at double-digit rates over the past few years.

Finally, the U.S. state may revive its capacities for substantive infrastructural spending, if only to stimulate the construction industry now that the housing boom is over. Indeed, even from the perspective of competitiveness and accumulation there is a long-neglected need to rebuild U.S. infrastructure – as the collapsed levies of New Orleans and the collapsed bridges of Minneapolis dramatically showed. The type of state intervention that brought us financial globalization is not well suited to this, but this crisis may finally force some renewal of state capacities in this respect, even within the overall framework of neoliberalism.

Finance and Neoliberalism

There is an understandable tendency on the left to take hope in capitalism’s current dilemmas. The extreme liberalization of finance (and along with it the era of neoliberalism) seems discredited. Finance today appears as no more than high-flying speculation – absurdly wasteful and ultimately not sustainable. U.S. corporations remain profitable, but with the credit crunch, who will buy the goods? Discredited as well, it therefore appears, is the U.S. capacity to keep its own house in order, never mind lead the process of globalization. Yet before we assume that the openings created by this crisis place us on the verge of a matching new oppositional politics, we need a more careful reading of our times. While the new openings provide the space for a new politics, we need to soberly appreciate the problematic link between such openings and a radical response.

To begin with, as immoral and irrational as finance might seem, financialization has been absolutely essential to the making and reproduction of global capitalism. Second, the growing consensus that finance must be re-regulated is hardly an attack on finance or neoliberalism more generally. Rather, it is about the engineering of finance so it can continue to be ‘innovative’ in the service of both itself and non-financial capital. Third, whatever problems the U.S. currently faces, its dominance will not fade because of a crisis in housing or a lower exchange rate; it does us no good to underestimate the staying power of the American capitalist empire.

It is not only finance but capitalism in general that rests on speculation. Behind a new firm or a new product rests the ’speculation’ that it can be sold at a cost and price that generates profit. Behind the distinction between finance and the ‘productive sector’ is therefore something else: the notion that finance speculates in pieces of paper, not in providing goods or real services; it is a parasitic drain on the economy, not a constructive addition to it.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it mistakes what is rational from the perspective of certain moral criteria with what is rational within capitalism. The financial system is necessary to capitalism’s functioning. The discipline finance has imposed in the neoliberal era on particular capitalists and workers has forced an increase in U.S. productivity rates by way of increased exploitation, the more efficient use of each unit of capital, and the reallocation of capital to sectors that are most promising - all from the standpoint of profits, of course.

The penetration by American finance of foreign countries and the inflow of foreign capital into the U.S. has given the U.S. access to global savings, shored up its role as the greatest global consumer and reinforced the U.S. state’s power and options. Especially important, financial markets have come to provide non-financial corporations with mechanisms for managing their risks, and comparing and evaluating diverse investment opportunities in a highly complex global economy. Absent this role, globalization – at least to the extent we have experienced it - would not have been possible. Finally, as emphasized earlier, the ‘democratization’ of American finance has given workers access to finance as savers and debtors, thereby contributing to their integration into, and dependence on, each of capitalism and finance.

This does not mean that the explosion of finance is not a highly contradictory process. Highly volatile financial markets inevitably generate financial crises. Rather, it shifts the question from whether financialization is irrational to whether its contradictions can be managed insofar as the crises can be contained. What working classes do in this context will be crucial to answering this question.

The Dialectics of Regulation

Finance cannot exist without regulation and the U.S. financial sector, even before the latest crisis, was the most heavily regulated of any section of the U.S. economy. In fact, the dynamics of finance cannot be understood apart from how regulation shapes financial competition, how banks and other financial institutions try to escape or reshape that regulation, and the state’s subsequent counter-responses. The current dilemma for American regulatory institutions lies in how to re-regulate finance so as to overcome its costly and dangerous volatility without undermining finance’s needed innovative capacity.

We need to be clear that this is about re-engineering finance to strengthen capital accumulation, not control it in the name of a larger public interest. To place democratic regulation of finance on the agenda would require asking: ‘regulation for what purpose?’ and so would mean going far beyond finance itself. It would mean raising the fundamental question of social control over investment and therefore get to the heart of power in a capitalist society.

In the context of the failed promises of the past quarter century and the current crisis, to see the above issue go completely unmentioned in the Democratic primary debate may not be surprising given the absence of even a trade union campaign around this, but it bespeaks an impoverishment of American politics that in fact goes all the way back to the New Deal. The issue of economic democracy that had been placed on the political agenda alongside the New Deal’s public infrastructure projects was set aside for the remainder of the century after the FDR administration’s self-described ‘grand truce with capital’ in the late 1930s.

It will, therefore, not do to resort to the abstractions and obfuscations of calling for ‘re-regulation’ or a ‘new, new deal.’ It is the undemocratic power of private control over investment that needs to be put on the agenda.

American Empire in Crisis

Four particular aspects of the limited fall-out from the present crisis demand more serious reflection on the left. First, the fact that this crisis surfaced in the context of strong profits and low debt loads in the non-financial sector is important, and this accounts for the limited damage thus far.

Second, it is notable that despite the IMF calling this the most serious banking crisis since the Great Depression, we have not seen a series of banks failures. This is certainly linked to the interventions of the U.S. Fed, but it also speaks to the strength of private U.S. financial institutions. In no other country could such a crisis have unfolded without massive financial bankruptcies.

Third, it is especially worthy of note that no major state saw an opportunity in the crisis to challenge or undermine the American state. Rather, their integration into global capitalism meant that they identified this crisis as their crisis as well. They effectively recognized the U.S. central bank as the world’s central bank and cooperated with it in coordinating internationally repeated provision of liquidity to the banks. As in the previous instances of financial crises during the 1980s and 1990s, this reproduced and extended the American state’s leading role in managing global capitalism.

The fourth, and most important factor is the remarkable ‘imperial flexibility’ the U.S. has by virtue of the weakness of its working class. Had, for example, U.S. workers insisted on higher wages to compensate for rising food and oil prices and the devaluation of their homes and taken advantage of the competitive space offered by a falling dollar, the Fed would have had to cope with the fear of inflation and this might have meant higher rather than lower interest rates. And that could very well have aggravated the crisis and risked a financial meltdown. But rather than the working class demanding more, it in fact showed restraint or, in the case of the autoworkers, accepted the greatest concessions the union has ever made.

The more important question is, therefore, not the economics of crisis but its politics. How will the working class respond to the crisis? If credit continues but becomes more costly; if the loss of private pensions, negotiated health care, and the devaluation of homes force people into having to reduce consumption to shore up their savings; if food and oil prices leave less discretionary spending – if this is the near-term future, will workers rebel? Or will workers once again tighten their belts to preserve what is left from their past gains? And if frustrations are expressed politically, will the politics be limited to a longing for the good-old days before the crisis or before Bush?

Absent what Alan Sears, at the recent Great Lakes Graduate Students Conference at York, called ‘an infrastructure of resistance’, any opposition that does surface is most likely to be localized and contained rather than built on. A coherent alternative is no just a set of economic policy proposals but a political movement that can develop the popular appreciation and capacities for radical democratic control over investment. There should be no illusion that a recession, or even a depression, will necessarily bring the issue of economic democracy back onto the U.S. political agenda. It would require a transformation of American politics to do so – and that, like the current economic crisis, would as well have global implications.

Sam Gindin teaches political economy at York University.
Leo Panitch teaches political economy at York University and is editor of The Socialist Register.

Courtesy: The Bullet

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President Chavez and the FARC: State and Revolution

Posted by Radical Notes July 4, 2008 at 10:22 am in Latin America

James Petras

When President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela called on the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, to end their armed struggle and declared the ‘guerrilla war is history’, he was following a path taken by many revolutionary leaders in the past.

As far back as the early 1920’s, Lenin urged the nascent Turkish communist to sacrifice their revolutionary independence and to support Attaturk; his successor, Joseph Stalin encouraged the Chinese communists to subordinate their revolutionary movement to the nationalist party led by Chiang Kai Chek. Mao Tse Tung prioritized coalitions in which the Communist Party of Indonesia submitted to the leadership of the nationalist leader General Sukarno.

During the French-Indochinese Peace Agreements in Geneva in 1954, Ho Chi Minh agreed to the division of the country and urged the South Vietnamese communists to end the guerrilla war and work to re-unify the country through electoral means. During the new millennium Fidel Castro stated that ‘armed struggle’ was a thing of the past and that, under present conditions, new forms of political struggle were at the top of the agenda.

Hugo Chavez frequently urged Brazilians leftists to support the social-liberal regime of President Lula da Silva despite his embrace of free market economics at the World Social Forum of 2002. He also called on Latin American social movements to support a number of pro-capitalist regimes in Latin America, despite their defense of foreign investment, bankers and agro-mineral exporters.

These experiences of revolutionary governments calling on their radical co-thinkers to collaborate with non-revolutionary regimes and to submit to their political constraints have generally had disastrous consequences: The Kuo Ming Tang of Chiang Kai Shek turned on the Communist Party and massacred the majority of its workers and drove it into the mountains of the interior. The aboveground, legal Indonesian Communists and their supporters and family members suffered anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million deaths when Sukarno was overthrown in a CIA coup. The South Vietnamese communists who attempted to participate in electoral politics were assassinated or jailed and eventually, their survivors were forced to revert to underground guerrilla struggle.

The reformist electoral regimes which came to power in Latin America have rescued capitalism from the crises of the 1990’s, demobilized the Left and opened the door for the resurgence of the hard right throughout most of the continent.

In the case of Colombia, Venezuela’s President Chavez apparently chose to ignore the FARC’s earlier experience in attempting to shift from armed struggle to electoral politics. Between 1984-89 thousands of FARC guerrillas disarmed and embraced the electoral struggle. They ran candidates, elected congressmen and women and were decimated by the death squads of the Colombian military, paramilitary and private armies of the oligarchy. Over 5,000 militants and leaders were murdered. What is especially striking is that Chavez urgings to join the electoral process takes place under Colombia’s bloodiest and most brutal violator of human rights in recent history.

Why then do radical leaders who themselves led armed struggles, once in office, call on their revolutionary counterparts to abandon guerrilla warfare and engage in electoral processes which have such dubious prospects?

Several kinds of explanations have been put forth at different times to explain what appears to be a political ‘U-turn’.

The Moral Explanation

Some critics of the ‘U-turn’ explain the shift to a ‘moral degeneration’ – the leaders become autocratic, bureaucratic and seek only to consolidate their rule in their own country. This is the common position adopted by the Left Opposition to Stalin’s policies with regard to Russian policy toward the Chinese revolution. Defenders of the ‘U-turn’ in China claimed it resulted from a recognition of ‘changing times’ and ‘objective opportunities’ on a world scale, arguing that the emergence of the ‘world-wide anti-colonial revolution in the aftermath of World War II created a symmetry of purpose between nationalists and communists, which would evolve over time to a non-capitalist state.

That these alliances were fragile, led to regime breakdown and to the emergence of right-wing ‘strong men’ regimes suggests that this line of argument was itself of limited duration. There were and still are numerous variations on these explanation for the political ‘U-turns’ but any structural-historical explanation must come to terms with the difference between a revolutionary movement in the process of coming to power and a revolutionary leadership holding state power.

In the latter case, the revolutionary state must deal with a generally hostile environment, military pressures and interventions, economic boycotts and diplomatic isolation from imperial states and their clients. In this context the revolutionary or radical regime has a continuum of policy choices to enhance its international position, ranging from outright support of overseas radical or opposition movements to attempts to demonstrate moderation, conciliation and accommodation to imperial concerns. Several factors influence the foreign policies of the revolutionary regime. They are likely to pursue a revolutionary policy if:

1. Revolutionary movements are on the upswing and show promise of early success, in either toppling pro-imperial clients or putting in place a progressive or sympathetic government.
2. The revolutionary regime has recently come to power and confronts an imminent military threat to its consolidation, facing an all or nothing situation.
3.The revolutionary regime faces a solid bloc of intransigent opposition led by imperial powers, which show no willingness to negotiate a modus vivendi and are not eager to make any compromises.

In contrast, revolutionary regimes are more likely to downplay or renounce links to revolutionary movements overseas if:

1.There are definite opportunities to pursue diplomatic relations, market, trade and investment agreements with capitalist regimes;
2.The radical movements are on a downslide, losing support or being eclipsed by electoral parties, which promise recognition and improved relations.
3.Internal socio-economic changes within the revolutionary regime evolve toward an accommodation with emerging local or foreign private investors whose future growth is dependent on associating with overseas business elites and dissociation from radical anti-capitalist forces.
In practice, at different time and places, the two polar positions are combined, according to a series of attenuating circumstances. For example, the revolutionary regime may pursue an accommodating position with a large, potentially economically important capitalist regime, while continuing to support revolutionary movements in a smaller, less significant capitalist country.

In other cases, the revolutionary regime may dissociate itself from revolutionary movements, in order to diversify its markets and trade and, at the same time, continue to adopt ‘revolutionary rhetoric’ for domestic consumption and to maintain the allegiance of overseas reformist movements.

Foreign policy, revolutionary or not, is the prerogative of the diplomatic corps, which tends to contain many professionals who have no revolutionary standing and who are holdovers from pre-revolutionary times. Their understanding of foreign policy is to draw on previous ties and relations with their counterparts in the capitalist countries and with the past business elites of their country. Hence, by and large, they are constantly in a ‘negotiating mode’, immune to the internal revolutionary dynamics and look to maximize the greatest number of diplomatic ties and minimize overseas linkages to revolutionary movements which compromise their day-to-day relations with their foreign counterparts.

Government and Party : Solidarity and ‘Interests of State’

It is conceivable to envision a situation in which a revolutionary government pursues a moderate policy of accommodation, while the revolutionary party or parties/movements supporting the government expresses solidarity with overseas revolutionary parties and movements. This presumes that the state and party are mutually supportive but politically and organizationally independent. This dual approach is possible if the political party decides its policies through its own deliberative forums, in consultation with its membership and is not a ‘transmission belt’ of the state and its executive branch.

Unfortunately in the overwhelming number of cases, the party-state tend to merge, leaders of the party and mass social movements take positions in the government and the movements lose their autonomy and become mechanisms to implement state policy. Henceforth the diplomatic maneuvers of the Foreign Office, override the party/movement’s principles of revolutionary solidarity, reducing the latter to inconsequential abstract rhetoric.

While the post-revolutionary state has the responsibility of ensuring the day-to-day security, employment and provision of necessities to its people and therefore must find ways of dealing with existing regimes as they find them, the revolutionary parties and movements have as one of their prime goals the deepening and extension of the revolutionary changes embedded in their programs.

In other words, there is an inevitable tension between ‘reasons of state’ and the ‘revolutionary program’ of the mass movements. With the consolidation of the post-revolutionary state, the dominant tendency of the governing class is to stabilize external relations. This involves two related processes: to limit the revolutionary party to moral support of their overseas counterparts and to dissociate or disown any ties to overseas revolutionary movements. International radical and revolutionary rhetoric remains ritualized for anniversaries of historic victories, heroic revolutionary personalities, denunciations of immediate imperial aggressors; while on a day-to-day basis, all sorts of agreements with capitalist regimes are pursued. To the degree that capitalist countries reach diplomatic, economic and political agreements with revolutionary regimes, the latter recasts their new partners as ‘progressive’, part of a new wave of ‘anti-imperialist’ governments, or as adopting an ‘independent’ position. What is noteworthy of these new re-definitions of capitalist diplomatic/economic partners is that they are not based on any internal structural, class, property changes, nor even any break in relations with imperial countries. The change in political labeling occurs almost exclusively as a result of the country’s foreign relations with the revolutionary regime.
Venezuela: The Paradox of Revolutionary Changes and Conservative Foreign Policy

The Chavez government follows a policy practiced by the great majority of previous revolutionary or radical leaders faced with hostile imperial powers – adopting radical socio-economic policies to weaken internal allies of empire while seeking diplomatic allies externally among reformist and even conservative capitalist regimes. Chavez has backed the neo-liberal Lula regime in Brazil (and urged the popular social movements to do likewise) even as the ex-trade union boss slashed public employee pensions, imposed an IMF stability pact and favored agro-mineral exporters over landless rural workers. Likewise Chavez financially backed the Kirchner regime in Argentina via the purchase of state bonds even as it refused to challenge the illicit privatization of the 1990’s, maintained the socio-economic inequalities of the past, refused to grant legal recognition to the independent trade union confederation CTA. For Chavez, the key issue was Argentina’s opposition to US intervention against Venezuela and opposition to US-promoted integration via ALCA.

Chavez’ foreign policy toward Colombia, the principle US political and military ally in the region has alternated between ‘reconciliation’ and ‘rejection’ depending on the immediate threats to its sovereignty. The points of conflict revolve around several Colombian blatant interventions into Venezuela: In 2006, the Colombian military kidnapped a Venezuelan citizen of Colombian origin who was a FARC foreign affairs representative in downtown Caracas. Prior to that the Venezuelan military captured 130 Colombian armed paramilitary forces in Venezuela less than 100 kilometers from the capital. Following the kidnapping, Venezuela briefly suspended economic relations, but they were renewed shortly after a meeting following an amicable diplomatic meeting between Colombia’s death squad President Uribe and Chavez. Subsequently in 2008, when Chavez attempted to broker a prisoner release and open peace negotiations between the FARC and the Uribe regime, the latter launched a murderous military attack on the FARC’s lead negotiator operating out of Ecuador’s frontier. In the face of Uribe’s defense of his violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty in pursuit of the guerrillas, Chavez was forced to denounce Uribe and mobilize the Venezuelan armed forces and to raise the matter before the Organization of American States. Uribe launched a diplomatic offensive claiming a guerrilla computer, captured in the raid, contained evidence of Chavez ties to the FARC. Subsequently Uribe and Chavez negotiated a temporary settlement on the basis of a half-hearted understanding that Uribe would refrain from future cross-border military attacks. In this context of high military threats and diplomatic tensions, Chavez chose to publicly denounce the FARC, put distance between his government and the revolutionary left and call for its unilateral disarmament to gain diplomatic favor from Colombia, Europe and North America. Clearly Chavez believed that appeasing Uribe would lessen threats to Venezuela’s borders and lessen the chances that Colombia would grant the US use of its border territory as a launching base for an invasion.

Chavez’ decision was deeply influence by the military and political weakening of the FARC over the previous 5 years, the advance of the Colombian military and the calculation that the effectiveness of the FARC as a counter-weight to Uribe was in decline. In this context, Chavez probably considered an immediate diplomatic détente with US-backed Colombia more important that any past solidarity or future tactical recovery of the FARC. In general terms, when revolutionary governments perceive or confront a situation of weakening or defeated revolutionary movements abroad and increasing political threats by imperial powers and their satellites, they are more likely to build diplomatic bridges to centrists or rightist regimes. In order to pursue diplomatic support, the most likely confidence-building measure is to sacrifice any identification with the radical left, including public repudiation of any extra-parliamentary initiatives.

Since the 1990’s economic crises, Cuba has pursued close diplomatic and economic relations with all Latin American states (including Colombia) and has opposed all guerrilla movements and refrained from criticizing center-right regimes, except those which publicly attack Cuba, as happened with US clients such as ex-President Fox of Mexico and his former Foreign Minister, George Castaneda, a notorious mouthpiece of the CIA and Cuban exiles in Miami.

Conclusion

The dilemmas of revolutionary governments revolves around the problem of managing the state, which involves maximizing international economic and diplomatic relations to develop the economy and defending its security in an imperial world order, while living up to its revolutionary ideology and solidarity with popular movements in the capitalist world. The risks of solidarity are lessened when new leftist regimes come to power or popular movements are in the ascent. The risks are greater when the resurgent right is in ascendancy. The dilemma is especially acute because the revolutionary state and the revolutionary party are tightly integrated – and identified as such: The party is led by the President of the State and there is overlap at all levels between government office holders and the party and the latter’s activities reflect the priorities of the government. In the case where there is no independent space between Party and State, diplomatic moves, necessary for everyday policy, undermine the possibility that the Party based in its internal deliberations and principles could act independently in support of their international counterparts. In contrast, the existence of an independent revolutionary party – supportive of the state but with its own internal life – could resolve the dilemma by making overseas class solidarity central to its ‘foreign policy’. By rejecting the role of being a government foreign policy transmission belt, the revolutionary party would operate parallel to the state, conveying their opposition to imperialism and internal class enemies but independent in choosing overseas allies and tactics. Given the different composition of the foreign affairs bureaucracy and diplomatic corps and the radical mass base of a revolutionary party, such a separation of state and movements would reflect the class-political differences inherent between a diplomatic corps developed under previous reactionary regimes and accustomed to conventional modes of operation and newly radicalized popular activists, tested in class struggle and accustomed to exchanging ideas in international forums with overseas revolutionaries.

The risks of diplomatic dependence on unreliable capitalist allies and even riskier fragile temporary accommodations need to be balanced with the gains from solidarity and support from reliable, principled class-based opposition mass parties and movements engaged in extra-parliamentary politics.

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Public Hearing at Munsiyari, Uttarakhand

Posted by Rahul Choudhary June 16, 2008 at 11:59 am in Displacement, Politics

Recently held Public Hearing for Rupsiabagar – Khasiabara Hydro Electric Project at Munsiyari District of Uttarakhand is an example of the establishment and corporate playing farce with the provisions of public hearing provided in the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006 (EIA Notification). The EIA Notification provides for conducting Public Hearing in the project-affected areas for the projects which fall under the schedule of the EIA Notification. The Public Hearing is a platform where the persons who have any objection to the project can register the same, and the proceedings of the public hearing with objections of the public are sent to the Ministry of Environment & Forest to decide over granting Environmental Clearance to the project.

The Project proponent of Rupsiabagar – Khasiabara Hydro Electric Project, National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) scheduled the public hearing on 11.06.2008 when most of villagers are out to higher altitude of mountains to collect ‘Yarsagumba’ ( or cordyceps sinesis is a rare herb and grows above 3,500 meters of the Himalayas) knowing very well that most of the villagers will not be able to participate in the public hearing. The NTPC scheduled the public hearing at this time to complete the formality of conducting public hearing without any opposition. The way this public hearing was conducted shows that NTPC and the State Machinery did not want Public Hearing to be conducted in fair manner.

The number of families who will be losing land is almost 1362, according to the NTPC, which is generally careful not to reveal the true figures. It is true for other projects and will happen in this project also that the villagers who are dependant on agricultural land for livelihood are paid very less compensation for their land, and the money given is not sufficient to buy similar kind of land. The money given as compensation does not last long and the farmers end up becoming labourers on the construction site or working in small hotels or dabhas in Delhi and living a miserable life. The government has developed a great law for acquisition of land, where under Section 17 of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, invoking urgency clause it can acquire the land without entertaining any objection, but at the same place there is no proper policy about the rehabilitation of the person affected by the project.

This situation is similar as stated by Karl Marx in Capital Vol-1, referring to legislations against the expropriated of France, Netherland and Holland, that “Thus where the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded by laws grotesquely terrible, into discipline necessary for wage system”.

The Public hearing held on 11.06.2008 was opposed by the local people on the grounds that:

* Almost all the villagers of 8-9 villages of the project area would go to collect ‘Yarsa Gumba’
* The other villagers were not informed about the project properly.
* No sufficient information about the public hearing.
* The executive summary of the project was not made available.
* The Environment Impact Assessment report of the project was available almost at the distance of 150 K.M from the project site, which was not possible for the villagers to access.
* The Procedure of conducting Public Hearing has not been followed as provided in the EIA Notification, 2006.

The Public Hearing was scheduled at 11 AM, and just at the start of public hearing the locals got hold of dais and asked from the panel members of the public hearing to postpone the hearing. There were villagers like one Gram pradhan and Block Head who wanted to continue the public hearing for the reasons that they will get petty contracts from the NTPC during the construction of project. For almost three hours the hearing was stalled and the panel of the Public Hearing decided to postpone it. However the NTPC gave the presentation highlighting the benefits of the project and very obviously missing out the impacts of the projects. No questions or objections were raised to the panel members as the public was told that this public hearing is postponed and it will be held again in October when the villagers are back. Only two-three persons who were expecting favour from the NTPC in terms of getting contracts spoke in support of the project, to which the NTPC personnel were not tired of clapping.

The very next day on June 12, 2008 it was reported in the newspaper like ‘Amar Ujala’ and ‘Rashtriya Sahara’ that the public hearing was postponed due to protest. But the NTPC did not allow the media to ruin their plan to show the public hearing of June 11 as the final hearing to get the Environmental Clearance. The very newspaper ‘Amar Ujala’ which reported that the Public Hearing was postponed published an advertisement in its 13th June edition, that the public hearing was held for the Rupsiabagar – Khasiabara Hydro Electric Project amidst protest. This is clearly an indication that the NTPC will submit this as a final Public Hearing, showing the Ministry of Environment & Forest that the project was supported by the locals.

To paraphrase Marx, capitalism flourishes only by breaking down all resistance. Evidently, this public hearing is also an example of a strong corporate-state-media nexus, which undermines public objections and opposition, looking for every means to breakdown the resistance of the maginalised people.

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On the way back from Dhinkia

Posted by Radical Notes June 16, 2008 at 6:34 am in Displacement

Anti-POSCO struggle - Some Questions

Shahina

“If you are living in a state which is rich in mineral wealth, you will have but a fragile democracy”. Desperately commented an activist fighting against the proposed iron ore project by POSCO in Orissa.While having tea together on the way back from Dhinkia, he abysmally expressed no hope for a change in the way by which democracy has been functioning. At the same time, adding to my embarrassment he categorically ruled out the possibility of the POSCO project getting materialised. He says the chances are very low and he attributes several reasons for the same. He is not only an activist belonging to PPSS (POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti) but also a local leader of the Communist Party of India (CPI), the party which has taken a significant role in the upsurge against POSCO.

On the way back from Dhinkia, the hot bed of anti-POSCO struggle in Orissa, I repeated the same question to all the people I met there from different strands of life. I wished to know how far they believed that the project would really be materialised. The answer was not in affirmative. Neither the cream of activists who are involved in the struggle nor the NGOs who support the movement believe that the project has reached the threshold and the stage is well set for a mass scale displacement of tribes as it has been claimed throughout the struggle. Obviously the question is then why somebody is keeping the villagers of Dhinkia, Nuagaon and Gadakunjanga constantly sleepless, vigilant, alert and even armed against the foe who is sometimes visible and at other times invisible. I find the phenomena complex and abstruse in which the whole civil society initiatives including political parties and NGOs who support the struggle are playing a part of their own. There might be people who think that the time is not ripe to raise critic against a historic struggle which is on its way bloodied yet ahead. Never ever being a cynic, I believe no struggle, people’s movement or any kind of political resistance could be taken for granted. Hence there is no harm in debating over the political undercurrents of the anti-POSCO movement in Orissa.

A brief account on what had happened in the past in the phase of the struggle against POSCO, the Korean Steal giant is indeed necessary to understand what the current situation is there in the affected villages. Let me take a hairpin deviation from the questions or apprehensions raised above to the recent past of the historic struggle led by the people of Jagatsinghpur district.

The anti-POSCO struggle was triggered soon after the notorious MoU had been signed between the Govt of Orissa and the Korean steal company POSCO three years back in 2005. The people in the three Panchayats of Erasama block in Jagatsinghpur district, where 6000 acres of land is proposed to be acquired for the project, organised under the banner of POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti, an umbrella organisation which is predominantly led by CPI. Abhay Sahoo the chairman of PPSS is the state secretariat member of the party. Nobody could evade appreciating CPI for its organisational investment to energise a movement which is a genuine uprising of the people against a multinational project which may take away their land and livelihood. Since the struggle started, there had been a number of bloody attacks over PPSS activists by goons employed by the company as well as police who were playing an explicitly partisan role throughout the scene. In November 2007 the camp set up by the PPSS activists was set ablaze. There were constant efforts to manhandle the activists, intimidate and thus destabilize the movement. The Naveen Patnaik Government more or less used the state machinery to throw the people away from the proposed land irrespective of all the prevailing laws which speaks in favour of the people. The government was in a hurry to move ahead even before getting the environmental clearance for the project. Anyhow the movement against POSCO, learning lessons from Kalinganagar, successfully grabbed national attention which resulted in the large scale intervention by human right activists and organisations all over. On 1st April, which is the foundation day of Orissa called Utkal Divas in Oriya, Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti organised a massive rally against the project which was blocked by the police. A great number of men, women and children broke the barricade and reached Balitutha the venue of the public meeting conducted thereafter. Over 2000 people participated in the rally which was a powerful expression of their determination and will against the proposed project for mining.

We, a group of six women from Delhi coming from different strands of social life sharing the common thought of upholding the politics of resistance against the spate of development without a human face, reached Dhinkia on the eve of Utkal Divas. The driver of the cab by which we managed to reach the place was detained and badly beaten up by the police next day alleging that he transported a group of Maoists who gave arms training to the villagers! We spent a whole night with the villagers and shared the agony and sense of loss in their lives. Next day we walked with hundreds of people who were marching in the rally, shouting slogans against the political project of washing out the indigenous people, marginalising the poor and displacing farmers for the corporate desires of a powerful ruling class.

On the way to Balitutha, the venue of the public meeting, we were interrogated by a journalist who introduced himself as the correspondent of Samaj, one of the leading Oriya newspapers. I revealed my identity as a journalist (an identity which I never tried to hide!) and introduced others. The story which was carried next day in Samaj was similar to the pretext used by police to torture our taxi driver - that a group of women maoist leaders camped in Dhinkia and gave arms training to the villagers! It added that the whole scene of the rally reflected the presence of Maoists who maintain the flavour of militancy in their each and every move! Being a journalist from Kerala, it was of course not an eye opener but a sharp reminder for me on how Maoists are born. Alleging Maoist presence is the easiest way to make cracks in a struggle if it is essentially against the state.

The rally, breaking the barricade, shouting slogans and taking the oath to resist up to the last breath was immensely inspiring. I was deeply disturbed by the imminent catastrophe shadowing over their lives. Hence I talked to many people who were playing a leading role in the struggle as well as those who came from outside in support of the struggle. I got more and more perplexed to see their stake in the issue. None of them really think that the project would materialise in the immediate future. The reasons are many. The hardest obstacle in the way of the project is the recently notified forest rights act. It is not hard to find that the project in its present form is a blatant violation of the scheduled tribes and other traditional forest dwellers (Recognition of Forest rights Act 2006). It is not amenable to my reason to think that any Government would take a suicidal step to go ahead with the project irrespective of the fierce reaction from the public especially when the general election is approaching. It was said by some ‘highly placed sources’ that the Chief Minister, Naveen Patnaik is not even willing to have a face-to-face meet with the POSCO officials. As far as he is concerned, the game is over at least for the time being because the mood for assembly election has already been set. It is alleged that the political leadership, the bureaucracy and even the judiciary are playing harmoniously well to bargain with the multinationals which are fascinated by the immensely rich natural wealth of the state. ‘Nobody is loosing the game’ a CPI leader and PPSS activist remarks, ‘all those who were playing in the field as well as sitting in the gallery have gained maximum monetary benefits’. He adds that, in fact the ruling front is happy to see the struggle gaining momentum, because the more the struggle is strengthened, the more they could bargain with the POSCO people! It is alleged that not only the ruling BJP-BJD front but even the leadership of Congress, which has a rather weak position in the current political scene, could not be absolved for the complicity of being a part of the biggest corruption story in the history of Orissa.

Now the focus and priority have shifted from the bargaining game to the forthcoming assembly election for which they have already started the game of winning hearts. Whatever may be the reason, I am happy that no more police actions will be there in Orissa at least for the time being. The April 1st rally itself was a clear indication of the changing attitude of the Government. The Government has strictly instructed the police not to get provoked even at the worst.

It is quite obvious that POSCO has already spent crores of rupees to grease the palm of the political and bureaucratic bosses. But you are blatantly wrong if you jump into the conclusion that POSCO is the looser in this game. POSCO has already started bargaining with Brazil which categorically denied any chance of selling its mineral wealth for an amount which is lower than the current market rate. POSCO won the game in coercing Brazil to bring down the price. The MoU signed is a powerful weapon for the company by which they could successfully conquer the market.

CPI will be regarded for being with the people in their struggles for survival. Even when bearing the brunt of the UPA rule, the party stands out by making its stake clear in such issues. But is this enough to absolve the party for being an accomplice in the game of using any kind of people’s interests for its own political gains? The answer is a big blatant NO. The ground reality is that all those who have a major role in leading the anti-POSCO struggle know well that the project is not an immediate threat. The NGOs in and out of Orissa also are not exempted from this.

I left Bhubaneswar the day after, leaving the question unanswered. Is it very necessary to keep the innocent poor villagers sleepless, alert even armed as if they have to go into a war at any point of time? They are struggling hard to make both ends meet. Don’t they have the right to sleep peacefully without the scaring boot steps? Will it be ‘politically incorrect’ to advocate for their right to take a breathing space before plunging into bloodier battles?

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The End of the Middle Class?

Posted by Radical Notes May 26, 2008 at 12:49 pm in Poverty, Economy

A growing middle-class is considered to be an indicator of prosperity. According to one of the proponents of the neoliberal capitalist euphoria in India, Gurcharan Das (India Unbound) - “the most striking feature of contemporary India is the rise of a confident new middle class”. According to him the middle-class in India is 20% of the population now, obviously under the impact of “open economy”. Further, “If our country’s economy grows 7% over the foreseeable future and if the population increases annually by 1.5%, if the literacy rate keeps rising and if we assume the historical middle-class growth rate of the past 15 years, then half of India will turn middle class between 2020 and 2040. Das concludes that “to focus on the middle class is to focus on prosperity. This is unlike in the past, when our focus has been on redistributing poverty. This does not mean that we are becoming callous. On the contrary, the whole purpose of the enterprise is to lift the poor — and lift them into the middle class”. And how is this growing middle-classness measured? Obviously the measurement “is ownership of consumer products”.

If the secret of the billionaires’ wealth is not more gadgets and things at home, but their ability to control over the majori