Venezuela charts a post-neoliberal future
Mother: O my son … an evil and pernicious death.
Rebel: Mother, a verdant and sumptuous death.
Mother: From too much hate.
Rebel: From too much love.
–Aimé Césaire
Two deaths with diametrically opposite meanings, evident from the immediate responses they provoked. One was greeted by millions of mourners packing the streets of Caracas, waiting for days to catch a glimpse of their departed leader. The other prompted spontaneous street parties in Brixton and Glasgow and a barrage of comical send-ups about the impending privatization of hell. But while revelers gathered spontaneously to celebrate the physical death of the Iron Lady of neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, voters in Venezuela are heading to the polls to drive nails into her coffin and bury her legacy by electing a revolutionary successor to Hugo Chávez.
The Fourth World War started in Venezuela, and it was a war against Thatcher and her ilk. In February of 1989, Ronald Reagan had only recently handed the baton over to George H.W. Bush, and Thatcher was gearing up to impose the Poll Tax, which would see epic riots in Trafalgar Square the following year. Meanwhile in Venezuela, a seemingly different sort of government was taking power with a surprisingly similar outlook. Centrist social democrat Carlos Andrés Pérez had been elected on an anti-neoliberal platform that promised debtor-nation resistance and derided the IMF as a “bomb that only kills people.”
Once in power, however, the bait was switched and Pérez did an abrupt about face, instituting the neoliberal Washington Consensus to the letter: sweeping privatization and deregulation and the certainty that, for the poorest at least, things were about to get much worse. But while the populations of the United States and Britain were busily swallowing the bitter pill of neoliberalism under the illusion that there was no alternative, poor Venezuelans unexpectedly spat it back out and set about burning and looting to make the impossible suddenly possible.
In what was deemed the “Caracazo,” mass popular rebellion in the streets smashed in an instant the deceptive myth of Venezuelan exceptionalism and its illusory stability. It destroyed the prevailing system of corrupt two-party democracy and tossed forth Hugo Chávez himself as a political crystallization of demands unmet and aspirations unrealized. As graffiti in Caracas puts it: “We are children of 1989 in revolution.”
But Chávez is gone and the war against neoliberalism continues. If Chávez was rarely respected by the foreign press in life – indeed, here was a figure about whom literally anything could be said, written, and published – why would we expect anything different in death? Thus alongside the popular ebullitions of grief over Chávez and joy over Thatcher, there were the reactions to the deaths of Chávez and Thatcher in the nominally progressive Guardian.
Whereas the paper’s obituary for Thatcher was polite to a fault, that pinnacle of absurdity that is Rory Carroll had only one month earlier granted a veneer of respectability to those who would bid the late Venezuelan President “good riddance.” Carroll is still evidently smarting from the day that Chávez himself subjected the journalist to a stinging history lesson. Despite the fact that he tells this story constantly, however, he can’t seem to remember what actually happened.
The bastion of U.S. liberalism that is The New Yorker has hardly fared better. Staff writer and apparent bully Jon Lee Anderson has found himself embroiled in a scandal that, while ostensibly about fact-checking, was in reality something far worse. The New Yorker eventually corrected two of Anderson’s more straightforward errors, in which he erroneously claimed that Venezuela led Latin America in homicides, and his utterly baffling suggestion that Chávez came to power in a coup rather than an election. But there is little recourse to be had regarding Anderson’s most rhetorically slippery phrases, much less his overarching narrative in which Venezuela’s poor are “victims of their affection” for Chávez.
After all, when it comes to the late Comandante, no holds are barred.
It was this double-bind that led to the utterly hubristic coup against Chávez exactly eleven years ago today, which was reversed within 47 hours by the same masses that coup planners had so thoroughly underestimated. By attempting a coup, the opposition effectively handed the mantle of democratic legitimacy to the Chávez government, and many anti-Chavistas have spent years attempting to shed the label ofgolpistas, coup-mongers, with only limited success. Since Chávez wiped the floor with Manuel Rosales in 2006, the majority of the opposition has accepted the results of elections, casting their lot in with the ballot only because the bullet had failed so miserably.
Simply choosing to contest elections, however, did not solve the challenge of electability, and while attempting to silence the abstentionists in their ranks, the anti-Chavistas have simultaneously sought to move toward the center, in words at least.
But how mixed is the opposition’s message in reality? Perhaps it is too generous to take Capriles at his word. After all, Capriles must himself see the contradiction: if he critiques the electoral system as unfair, he discourages his own voters from participating, but if he encourages them to participate, he delivers them into the hands of defeat. While it is certainly fitting revenge that this election falls on the anniversary of Chávez’s triumphant return, we should never let triumphalism blind us to the persistent vultures that circle Venezuela’s socialist democracy. Amid a backdrop of domestic and international chatter seeking to discredit the democratic credentials of the Venezuelan electoral system, sectors of the Venezuelan opposition have begun to maneuver in ways that suggest something else might be afoot.
Frantz Fanon once argued, somewhat notoriously, that “For the colonized, life can only spring from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.” To celebrate an enemy’s death by necessity carries within it, however negatively, a positive political program, and those who took to the streets to spontaneously celebrate Thatcher’s demise were invariably firing shots at neoliberalism itself.
But unfortunately for those gathered in Brixton, neoliberalism and its ideological partner, austerity, are today on the offensive in Britain and much of the global core. In no way does Thatcher’s death mark the destruction or even decline of her ideological legacy, and in this sense the celebrations are as catharthic as they are premature. It is across the globe that the greatest strides have been made to destroy Thatcher’s legacy in the intransigent insistence that there is, in fact, an alternative to neoliberalism.
As I argue in We Created Chávez, far less interesting than Chávez the man are the decades of revolutionary struggle that preceded him, crystallizing around Chávez as a symbol of and a mechanism for driving forward the struggle against neoliberalism and capitalism. Even in life, Chávez was far more than the sum of his acts, he was a vessel into which the popular sectors of Venezuela deposited their post-neoliberal aspirations. But the vessel’s shape was soon determined by its content, as Chávez became a socialist battering ram propelled by forces he did not himself control. To paraphrase C.L.R. James’ description of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Chávez did not make the revolution, the revolution made Chávez.
The Bolivarian Revolution has lost something powerfully important in this individual that was Hugo Chávez, but perhaps it is better that he departed us physically amid the upswing of the historic movement he embodied, and to which he can still lend his image to press forward the momentum of the struggle. This certainly seems preferable to death amid the decadence of a flailing system, the death of Thatcher, out of whose rotting corpse the post-neoliberal world must invariably bloom.
George Ciccariello-Maher, teaches political theory at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is the author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Duke University Press, May 2013), and can be reached at gjcm(at)drexel.edu.
