Excerpt titled
“Chávez: A Model for Obama?”
As we have
seen, the problem for U.S. neoliberalism is that South America’s weak
communism, guided by Chavez, has become an “emergency,” that is, an effective
economic and political alternative to framed democracies. The Venezuelan
president has managed to help the region elect other politicians who enacted
communist models in favor of the weak, and he has also attracted Western social
movements unsatisfied with their left-wing reformist politicians. Fukuyama must
have noticed all of this, because he recently felt compelled to express that
the idea that contemporary Venezuela represents a social model superior to
liberal democracy is absurd. Contrary to Fukuyama, Greg Grandin, in a recent
article for The Nation (which covered the increasing U.S. militarization of
South America under Obama’s administration), instead emphasizes how throughout
Latin America
“a
new generation of community activists continues to advance the global democracy
movement that was largely derailed in the United States by 9/ 11. They provide
important leadership to US environmental, indigenous, religious and human
rights organizations, working to develop a comprehensive and sustainable social
justice agenda. Latin America does not present a serious military danger. No
country is trying to acquire a nuclear weapon or cut off access to vital
resources…. Obama is popular in Latin America, and most governments, including
those on the left, would have welcomed a demilitarized diplomacy that downplays
terrorism and prioritizes reducing poverty and inequality-exactly the kind of
“new multilateralism” Obama called for in his presidential campaign…. Unable or
unwilling to make concessions on these and other issues important to Latin
America-normalizing relations with Cuba, for instance, or advancing immigration
reform-the White House is adopting an increasingly antagonistic posture.”
The reasons
for concluding this book by directing our attention to the recent South
American revolutionary examples, in particular that of Chavez, should be quite
evident to anyone who is unsatisfied with framed democracies. Chavez, together
with his allies, provides an alternative and a model we could follow. However,
our attention has been drawn not only by South American social politics but
also by the excessive interest that the Obama administration (from which we are
all still waiting for innovative changes)’° is putting into improving,
consolidating, and establishing the U.S. military presence in South America.
The recent U.S.-supported coup in Honduras, together with the new and powerful
bases being opened in Colombia, are alarming, considering that none of these
states, as Grandin explains, represents any military danger to the United
States. This brings to mind “Operation Condor,” that is, of those politics that
in the 19708 sustained the worst South American military dictatorships.” It is
clear that the U.S. obsession with this region is motivated not only by
strategic interest, that is, fear of extra capitalist political and economic
formations, but also by a fear of the democratic example that these communist
states provide.
If
“hermeneutic communism” must be proven practically we are convinced that it can
be found in these Latin American democracies that have constructed themselves
along the lines of the Cuban resistance. This explains the particular tenacity
that characterizes U.S. foreign policy toward Venezuela, which has become the
guiding force in Latin America. Although Venezuela’s exemplary social and
democratic model is presented only here, at the end of our book, it constitutes
the key of our thesis.
Hermeneutic
communism is not a theoretical discourse aiming merely to offer philosophical
perspectives on those ideas of revolution or radical transformation of society
that still manage to survive in our imaginary and imaginations. Rather, it is a
theory capable of both updating classical Marxism and again rendering
believable the effective possibility of communism. While at a theoretical level
we have argued that a revolution may be correctly thought about only outside
the scientific and metaphysical horizons that still dominate classical Marxism,
at the practical level such a theoretical possibility can be linked to the
effective examples of “new” communism in Latin America. In sum, this theory is
nothing other than a reevaluation of our Marxist inheritance, stimulated and
inspired by those realities that have been outlined in the “real America” of
Chavez, Morales, and Lula; it must be pointed out that although Lula had to
deal with Brazil’s vast and complex history which forced him to apply the
same communist ideals in a much more circumscribed way he still became an
alternative voice in international affairs.
Although we
are not certain, it is quite possible that Cuban resistance, after fifty years
of U.S. terrorist attacks and embargos, made possible the birth of Chavez’s
Bolivarian socialism and the other political transformations in Latin America.
As Noam Chomsky explained:
“Cuba
has become a symbol of courageous resistance to attack. Since 1959 Cuba has
been under attack from the hemispheric superpower. It has been invaded,
subjected to more terror than maybe the rest of the world combined-certainly
any other country that I can think of-and it’s under an economic stranglehold
that has been ruled completely illegal by every relevant international body It
has been at the receiving end of terrorism, repression and denunciation, but it
survives.”
The Cuban
revolution represents a small country’s triumphant resistance to moral
exploitation, through which U.S. imperialism and the Batista regime forced it
to become the “brothel for American businessmen.” Just like Cuba, our weak or
ghost-like communism is capable of resisting the dominant capitalist world.
Belief in these effective alternative Latin American politics renders
hermeneutic communism a seed of philosophical resistance to the impositions of
conservative realist philosophies (and not the other way around); philosophical
positions still convinced that the only possible order of the world is the
capitalistic one are always prepared to exploit and dominate with a “human
face,” as Žižek often emphasizes. And it is just through this human face that
the excessive manipulation of the media (dependent and compromised by European
pseudo-leftist parties) has rendered unthinkable the idea of political
transformations through communism. Such a possibility can only be thought about
in those regions where European colonial dominance is resisted by original
communities, in other words, where it is possible to construct true alternatives
upon the ruins of Western industrial capitalism.
Many might
object that indicating this communicative spirit, which is still alive in so
many regions of South America, is simply “mythologizing” the third world. But
such a claim forgets that the origins of our financial crisis are also rooted
in Western modernity that is, in the spirit that dominated European
colonialism. This spirit involves the exploitative capitalist relation with
natural resources and also a wider issue that concerns general culture and the
way we relate to others. Although Chinese or Indian societies could also
function as a model for the West, what we see in them now are not new forms of
capitalism, socialism, or communism but rather the incarnation of Max
Weber’s “iron cage of capitalism.” If these societies have assimilated and
rendered neoliberal practices more effectively than the West, it is not because
they have applied a better method but because they function within much more
rigid frames. Without venturing into a comparative anthropological analysis of
different cultural models, South American socialism appears to be the realm in
which a possible alternative to the dominant capitalist vision of the world can
take place, because it is not framed within a disciplinary or, as we have
called it throughout this book, metaphysical vision of the world.
The idea that
has guided us throughout this text is rigorously materialistic: the structural
changes we ascertain in South American societies are inseparable from a
collective culture and structure that are very different from the one that
characterizes the West. But thinking that this difference is only an expression
of underdevelopment or the incomplete assimilation of modernity would be a
prejudiced result of colonial beliefs. Regardless of its actuality today; it is
the postmodern thinking of Lyotard, Derrida, and others that liberated us from
those modem dogmas that imposed the Western form of development on
“underdeveloped” populations. If international institutions such as the IMF
continue to conceive of their aid to the third world as following just this
idea of development, the South American alternative shakes up this modern,
Eurocentric frame.
The
democratically elected governments of South America are also an indication of
how Western democracies have submitted to those private interests without which
politicians could not finance their political campaigns. The intention of our
book, though it explores the status of communism, is also to provoke a
reflection on the value of democracy as it is practiced in the West. We should
stop considering as scandalous the idea that a revolution can occur without a
previous authorization by the citizens as expressed in a referendum; after all,
no modem constitution was ever born “democratically” starting with that of
the United States, whose constitution was drafted by a group of
progressive intellectuals. Although it is a tricky argument, one should
ask oneself whether, today U.S. citizens are actually freer than Cubans. After
all, the freedoms that Cubans have missed in these recent years are not
constitutional but rather depend on the limitations imposed on their
economy by years of U.S. embargo. This is why progressive American public
figures such as Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, and Noam Chomsky have repeatedly
emphasized how the effective possibilities of a fair life are all in favor of
Cubans today. Although these South American governments have not yet betrayed
parliamentary democracy we are convinced that they ought to be defended even if
eventually they do have to violate these rules. As Mao said: “A revolution is
not a dinner party or writing an essay or painting a picture, or doing
embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate,
kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection,
an act of violence by which one class overthrows another?”
We do not
know how the relationship between the armed capitalism of framed democracies
and Latin American governments will develop, but we must all hope it will not
become a violent conflict, even though the United States seems to countenance
this option. The problem we must ask ourselves at the end of this book, which
tries to regain faith in a radical transformation of our current order, is well
summarized in Mao’s affirmation: “a revolution is not a dinner party.”
Regardless of our admiration for a vision of history that progressively
excludes violence, we are not very hopeful, as the recent social, economic, and
military levels of inequality caused by capitalism continue to increase,
threatening any project of social transformation.
History as
the dialectical conflict of authorities, classes, or entire populations, has
not ended. Neither has the universal proletarianization (upon which Marx made the
communist revolution depend) been exorcised by the well-being spread by
globalization, because globalization has not spread wealth. With the pretext of
possible terrorist attacks, the intensification of control will end by
forcing us to live in the “imprisoned” world that Nietzsche called
“accomplished nihilism”: a world where in order to survive as human beings we
must become übermensch, that is, individuals capable of constructing our own
alternative interpretation of the world instead of submitting to the official
truths. This is also why the bisheriger Mensch, “the man so far,” is the
man of modernity who needs to emerge from his enslavement to metaphysics in
order to encounter other cultures of the world and propose alternative ways of
life.
Contrary to
metaphysical conservative realism, hermeneutic communism allows other cultures
to suggest different visions of the world, visions not yet framed within the
logic of production, profit, and dominion. Although the revolt of colonial
populations is still largely dominated by Western capitalism, these revolts are
increasingly aware of the possibility of becoming a cultural revolt rather than
a method for an equal redistribution of wealth. While European modernity
claimed to be the bearer of universal values and therefore viewed with
suspicion any demand from individual communities or identity populations, today
we cannot believe anymore in the necessity of say international proletarianism,
that is, of a universal value. The world will not cease to be alienated by
finding its identity but rather by being open to the multiplicity of
identities. Nevertheless, if in order to construct such a world we must “unite
all the proletarians of all the world,” then it will eventually become
necessary to plan the foundation of a Fifth International, as Chavez has
recently suggested.” While we also endorse Chavez’s suggestion, the communist
project must always bear in mind its hermeneutic inspiration against all those
metaphysical temptations and the horrors of those universalisms that have shed
blood throughout the world.
Unfortunately
hermeneutic communism cannot assure peaceful existence, dialogue, or a tranquil
life, because this “normal” realm already belongs to the winners within framed
democracies. In these democracies, the weak have been discharged so that the
winners may preserve a life without alterations; this, after all, must be why
the word “stability” or “bipartisanship” is so often used by Obama and other
presidents in international and domestic summits. But, as the recent economic
crisis has demonstrated, the so-called stable world is not stable at all. As
this instability increases, so do the possibilities of world revolution, a
revolution that hermeneutic communism is not waiting for at the border of
history but rather is trying (paradoxically) to avoid. If we prefer to
circumvent such revolution, it is not because we do not believe in the
necessity of an alternative but rather because the powers of armed capitalism
are too powerful both within framed democracies and in its discharge. As we
have seen above, these same territories at the margins of framed democracies
are also part of the mechanism of armed capitalism and are therefore subjected
to what Danilo Zolo calls “humanitarian wars” in order to guarantee stability.
As we
indicated in chapter 3, hermeneutics is not an assessment of tradition but most
of all an ontology of the event, a philosophy of instability. In this context,
communism’s dialectical conception of history is not dominated, as in the
metaphysical systems, by the moment of conciliation but rather by the awareness
that Being as event continuously questions again the provisional conciliations
already achieved. As a dialectic theory hermeneutic communism does not consider
itself the bearer of metaphysical truths or a metaphysics of history as
conflicts and clashes. Instead, it is convinced that in the current situation
of increasing universalization, lack of emergency and the impossibility of
revolution, philosophy has the task of intensifying the consciousness of
conflict, even though everything (“stability” cultural “values,” and analytic
philosophy’s “realism”) seems to prove it wrong.
In sum,
hermeneutic communism proposes an effective conception of existence for those
who do not wish to be enslaved in and by a world of total organization.
Although we are not thinking about the professional revolutionary figure as the
only possibility for authentic existence, we are not going to exclude that such
an idea is interesting. Heidegger’s thesis, according to which existence
is a thrown project, is the only one we manage to suggest as an alternative to
the pure static discipline of the politics of descriptions, founded on dominion
in all its forms. That the transformation of the world cannot be projected in the
form of a violent engagement, which would only provoke increased repression,
makes much more difficult the goal of resistance and opposition and therefore
communism. After all, great revolutions of the past, such as the Russian and
Chinese revolutions, seem today like events that had to adopt the arms of their
enemies, leading to regimes as violent and repressive as the ones that they had
set out to destroy But we do not accept the desperate vision of Sartre in his Critique
of Dialectical Reason, according to whom any form of renovation, after the
great experience of “groups in fusion,” must fall again into the routine of
dominion, in a triumph that he regarded as “practico-inert.”
Today the
global integration of the world offers different forms of resistance than the
armed revolts of the past. Examples of nonviolent methods, from Gandhi to the
“pressure” exerted by the simple existence of the communist democracies of
Chavez and Lula, may operate to limit the current dominion of the great empire
of capitalism. These are the most productive alternatives at our disposal today
Other forms of passive resistance, such as boycotts, strikes, and other
manifestations against oppressive institutions, may be effective, but only if
actual masses of citizens take part, as in Latin America.” These mass movements
might avoid falling back again into the practico-inert, which is the natural
consequence of those revolutions entrusted to small and inevitably violent
avant-garde intellectuals, that is, those who have only described the world in
various ways. The moment now has arrived to interpret the world.
