http://blogdaboitempo.com.br/2013/03/11/a-heart-larger-than-life/
[…]
We all know
that, in today’s global capitalism with its spectacular but deeply uneven
development, there are more and more people who are systematically excluded
from active participation in social and political life. The explosive growth of
slums in the last decades, especially in the Third World megalopolises from
favelas in Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa (Lagos,
Chad) to India, China, Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial
geopolitical event of our times. Since, sometime very soon (or maybe, given the
imprecision of the Third World censuses, it already happened), the urban
population of the earth will outnumber the rural population, and since slum
inhabitants will compose the majority of the urban population, we are in no way
dealing with a marginal phenomenon.
These large
groups are of course one of the favored objects of humanitarian care and
charity for the liberal elites – recall emblematic images like the one of Bill
Gates embracing a crippled Indian child. We are constantly solicited to forget
our ideological divisions and do something about it – even when we go to
Starbucks for a cup of coffee, we learn that we already are doing something,
that a part of the price we pay goes for Guatemala children or whatever.
But Chávez saw that this is not
enough. He saw the contours of a new apartheid on the horizon. He saw what was
once class struggle re-emerging in the guise of new and even stronger
divisions. And he did something here. He was the first who not only “took care
of the poor” in the old populist Peronist style, to speak for them, but
seriously put all his energy into awakening them and effectively mobilizing
them as active and autonomous political agents. He saw clearly that, without
their inclusion, our societies will gradually approach a state of permanent
civil war. Remember the immortal line from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane,
when Kane, accused of speaking for the underprivileged against his own class,
answers: “If I don’t defend the interests of the underprivileged, somebody else
will – maybe somebody without any money or any property and that would be too
bad.” This “somebody else” was Chávez.
So while we hear the prattle about
Chávez’s “ambiguous legacy,” about how he “divided his nation,” when we expose
him to an often deserved criticism, let us not forget what it all was about. It
was simply about the people, about the government of, for, and by the people.
All the mess was the mess created by the difficulty of realizing such a
government. With all
his theatrical rhetoric, in this Chávez was sincere, he really meant it. His
failures were ours.
[…]
