Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today

by D.L Raby

Overview

Shows how Cuba and Venezuela provide inspiration for anti-capitalist movements -- and how the Left must win power on a democratic basis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745324357
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	09/20/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x (d)

About the Author

D.L. Raby is Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of Liverpool, and also holds the rank of Professor Emeritus in the History Department of the University of Toronto. Raby has written many studies of Latin American and Iberian History and Politics, and is a long-standing activist in solidarity campaigns with Latin American struggles and social movements in the UK and Canada.

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CHAPTER 1

The Disinherited Left: From Dogmatic Orthodoxy to Romantic Anti-capitalism

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Left has been in crisis. The orthodox Communist model was discredited even among its traditional supporters, and as the Eastern European countries were seduced one after another by the siren song of capitalist consumerism, it soon became clear that Western Social Democracy had also lost its way. The ideological victory of supply-side economics and monetarism paved the way for what we now know as neo-liberalism, and with Tony Blair and 'New Labour' leading the way, Social Democratic parties ceased to defend even a minimal degree of public ownership and became advocates of 'Thatcherism lite': the supremacy of the market with only a limited social safety net to protect the most vulnerable. Neo-liberal globalisation appeared to make the viability of any kind of socialism problematic: could any state, even the most powerful, resist or control market forces? With some transnational corporations being bigger than the GDPs of all but the largest countries, it was said that the state could no longer even regulate the economy, let alone control it.

In these conditions even traditional left-wing critics of Stalinism like the Trotskyists failed to benefit politically from the implosion of 'really existing socialism', and the neo-liberal consensus seemed to rule the roost in both East and West. The electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua early in 1990 seemed to confirm that even Latin America, with its vigorous independent revolutionary tradition, was not immune to the debacle of socialist values. Although Communist regimes survived in China and Vietnam, they appeared to be adopting capitalist market mechanisms with indecent haste, while the other case of East Asian socialism, North Korea, seemed to be locked in a Stalinist time-warp. It was in this context that Francis Fukuyama could write about 'The End of History' (Fukuyama 1992), presenting liberal capitalism as the final and universal goal of humanity, and in Latin America Jorge Castañeda could produce Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War (Castañeda 1994), which amounted to a repudiation of that continent's revolutionary heritage in the name of Blairite Social Democracy (and perhaps not surprisingly, Castañeda later became a minister in the government of right-wing Mexican President Vicente Fox).

Of course, the triumphalism of the neo-liberal advocates of the 'New World Order' was soon tempered by the rise of vigorous mass movements in opposition to the negative impact of market reforms. In Latin America the ink was scarcely dry on Castañeda's book when in January 1994 the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas showed that the region's revolutionary heritage was not dead and that popular opposition to the neo-liberal consensus could take militant forms. In Europe and North America the anti-globalisation movement revealed the hostility of a significant minority to the new orthodoxy and their allegiance to collective, egalitarian and anti-capitalist values. The rise of the PT (Workers' Party) in Brazil and its innovative practices of local participatory democracy with such original initiatives as the 'participatory budget' was another hopeful sign, and within a few years the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre became the symbol of the convergence of the new Latin American popular movements with the anti-globalisation movement in the North, by hosting the first three World Social Forums. But none of these new movements presented a coherent alternative strategy: their strength was based on contestation and disruption of the neo-liberal consensus, and if they had a strategy it was almost anti-political or neo-anarchist, rejecting political parties and (as the Zapatistas explicitly proclaimed) repudiating the struggle for state power on principle, whether by armed or peaceful means. The spirit of the times is radically democratic and suspicious of self-proclaimed vanguards, or indeed of vanguards of any kind – but the apparent alternative favoured by many in the anti-globalisation, anti-war and anti-capitalist movements is a kind of idealistic anarchism, a conception which has not ceased to be profoundly problematic. Without a doubt the great strength of these movements, which have achieved such an impressive degree of support in Europe and North America, has been their loose, decentralised and flexible character. But such a structure (or lack thereof) may be very effective in an oppositional or contestational movement, yet thoroughly dysfunctional for a coherent political project, let alone a government exercising state power. Those who defend the actions and vision of Chávez in Venezuela or Lula in Brazil, or indeed of the Cuban government, are constantly greeted with the refrain that liberation, or socialism, or popular democracy, has to be the work of 'the people themselves' or 'the working class itself', begging the question of what kind of structure and leadership the Promethean people or working class might need in order to implement their sovereign will. Insistence on direct, unmediated popular protagonism is admirable, but it becomes a futile distraction if it is elevated to the status of absolute dogma, evading questions of representation, leadership, organisation and structure which are crucial to the success of any alternative movement. This romantic but ultimately defeatist approach has since been formulated in more elaborate philosophical form by John Holloway in Change the World Without Taking Power (Holloway 2002).

Today, 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the neo-liberal consensus is increasingly questioned and the 'End of History' thesis is thoroughly discredited. The new geo-political polarisation in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the aggressive strategy of the Anglo-Saxon powers in the so-called 'War on Terror' has created a much more problematic situation not just for the Left but for the future of humanity as a whole. This has provoked the emergence of an unprecedented mass anti-war movement throughout the world, and particularly in Europe, which has merged with the anti-globalisation or anti-capitalist movement to produce the embryo of a real alternative. But it still lacks a political strategy, a strategy for taking power and an alternative socio-economic model. This book will attempt to address the problem of a political alternative for the Left and the popular movement, an alternative which is not limited to cosmetic reforms of neo-liberal capitalism. Such an alternative is scarcely likely to emerge from within existing Social Democratic parties, which are so thoroughly incorporated into the system as to be incapable of renewal. Equally, in those countries where Communist parties still retain a residual strength and adhere to a traditional anti-system line (the Portuguese party is a good example), they may constitute admirable bastions of resistance to neo-liberal hegemony, but their almost total lack of theoretical renovation shows that they have failed to come to terms with the lessons of the Soviet collapse and have nothing creative to offer. With some exceptions, this also applies to most of the Communist offshoots – the many varieties of Trotskyists and Marxist-Leninists – who are still wedded to variations on the theme of the democratic centralist party, the ideological monopoly of dialectical and historical materialism and the centralised model of state socialism. This does not by any means imply a complete rejection of Marxism or indeed of some aspects of Leninism, but it does mean that it is essential to recognise that no single ideology, much less a single partisan organisation, can any longer lay claim to a monopoly of wisdom. Marx's analysis of capitalism and of the dynamics of class struggle remains extraordinarily accurate, much of Lenin's analysis of the state and of the need for a political vanguard remains convincing, but they cannot provide exclusive formulae for political organisation, strategy and tactics in today's world, or for the alternative society to which we must still aspire.

It is here that many in the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements, and indeed in other social movements from the Zapatistas to the Argentine piqueteros or the Brazilian MST (Movement of the Landless), proclaim that a party or a vanguard is not necessary and that 'the movement is everything'. Leadership is not necessary, the movement will constantly throw up new leaders and rotate them at will, or will function on the basis of spontaneous unanimity: 'We are all Marcos!' as the Zapatistas and their sympathisers declared when the Mexican government claimed to have discovered the true identity of their semi-clandestine and media-conscious spokesperson. But a decade later, not only have they failed to undermine the Mexican state or to dissolve its power from below, they have achieved only very modest results in terms of autonomy or improved rights for the native people of Chiapas who continue to be their main social base. The Argentine barrio movement has been very impressive in its capacity for non-partisan mobilisation and has contributed to the downfall of five presidents, but when a serious political alternative finally emerged in that chronically divided country, it did so from a totally unexpected source: an establishment politician, Nestor Kirchner, who as President surprised almost everyone by adopting an independent foreign and financial policy and going some way to meet the demands of the barrio movement, which now gives him critical support while remaining suspicious of his ultimate intentions. The classic vanguard party and the Marxist-Leninist model of socialism may have produced unsatisfactory results, Social Democracy may have been completely assimilated by capitalism, but to proclaim the superiority of non-politics or Holloway's 'anti-power' is in practice to leave the power of corporations and the capitalist state untouched: myriad particular struggles and mass movements may come and go, and may in the best of cases achieve results on specific issues, but the power of the state – of the nearly two hundred nation-states around the world – and of the global economic system will continue as before. There is no alternative to the search for an alternative.

Another consequence of the fall of the Soviet bloc was the apparently universal conversion to 'democracy', and the conclusion of Communists and Marxists – again, with rare exceptions – that the road to power must henceforth be democratic. The Marxist critique of bourgeois democracy had too easily become an excuse for bureaucratic despotism in the name of socialism. But does this mean that the critique of bourgeois democracy has no relevance? Is the concept of revolution now to be consigned to the dustbin of history, now that the only revolutions that attract attention are those that overthrow bureaucratic state socialist regimes? We are all democrats now – advocates of democracy on the Western liberal model – and so revolution, or any political change that implies the use of force or direct action, is apparently out. In Latin America, with its rich revolutionary heritage of armed guerrilla struggle, where in the 1960s and '70s the debate over the armed or peaceful roads raged fiercely, the same is apparently now the case: with the failure of the Central American insurgencies, the defeat of Sendero Luminoso in Peru and the peaceful transitions to democracy in the Southern Cone, only the Colombian guerrillas (the FARC, ELN and others) still hold out - and they are now unmentionable in polite company (or else they are dismissed as 'narco-guerrillas', a convenient distortion which permits US interventionism to disguise itself as counter-narcotics policy). The universal assumption that democracy is the only valid regime – accepted even by most ex-Communist parties – obscures the question of what democracy really means, of whether Western liberalism is the only valid form of democracy, and of whether revolutionary change is possible by democratic means. These are also central questions which will have to be addressed in the search for a political alternative.

At this point we come to the binary pair of revolution and reform: revolutionaries have traditionally been scornful of reform as an instrument of the system, as a means of assimilating and neutralising popular struggle. Social Democrats are by definition reformist. But the violent seizure of power does not guarantee revolutionary change, and in most countries the technological capacity of the modern state makes defeat of the regular military an extremely costly, if not impossible proposition. But in countries with a vigorous revolutionary tradition, 'reform' is not necessarily seen as incompatible with revolution – and revolution is not necessarily equated with total armed struggle. In Cuba and Nicaragua – countries with a weak state, with corrupt personalist dictatorships – outright military victory was possible. But in most countries (even, in fact, in the two just mentioned) revolution has implied 'the combination of all forms of struggle', with an emphasis frequently on methods which are neither completely peaceful nor completely violent: militant demonstrations, political strikes, sabotage, occupations of landed estates, public offices and factories. Accumulation of reforms or of popular pressure may lead to a situation of rupture with revolutionary implications; rather than overt confrontation with the military there may be splits within the armed forces and sections of the military may identify with the reformist/revolutionary process. In Latin America, when an individual is described as revolutionary, it does not mean that he/she is hell-bent on taking up arms: it means that they are morally committed to the struggle for a better world, that they are prepared to accept any sacrifice necessary, that they will refuse to abandon the struggle. In this conception being revolutionary does not exclude negotiation and compromise; it does exclude acceptance of compromise as a permanent solution. Reforms are perfectly acceptable, indeed essential; reformism, on the other hand, means limiting the struggle to reforms within the system. On this basis, the debate on democracy and revolution acquires new meaning: democratic campaigns on specific issues have a validity of their own, and whether they become reformist or revolutionary depends on the broader strategic perspective. If a process of democratic change threatens to undermine the established system of power it will eventually lead to ruptures which imply at least some degree of violent confrontation, but the precise form this will take is unpredictable and cannot necessarily be determined by the movement or its leadership. Here, surely, closer attention to Gramsci and to his concepts of 'hegemony' and of the 'historical bloc' is in order (Golding 1992).

But the issue of democracy goes beyond this: it has also to address the question of direct and participatory democracy as opposed to liberal parliamentarism. In the nineteenth century democracy was not equated with liberalism: it was understood that liberalism was an elitist system of constitutional rule and division of powers, guaranteeing civil rights but not popular sovereignty as implied by democracy. One of the most telling aspects of the retreat of the Left in the past 30 years has been the way in which democracy has come to be seen as synonymous with parliamentary liberalism, and any idea of direct or participatory democracy is automatically dismissed as equivalent to the sham of the so-called 'popular democracies' of Eastern Europe. But if democracy does not include direct participation by workers, the poor, the marginalised and excluded of capitalist society, then it excludes all possibility of real change, of a genuine political alternative. As recently as the 1960s C.B. Macpherson could write his now classic Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Macpherson 1962), demonstrating how from its seventeenth-century origins liberalism was based on a market society of individual proprietors, and arguing that this was no longer an adequate basis for a theory of political obligation. But in the last two decades, in all the now fashionable literature on 'democratic transition' and 'consolidation', it is as if Macpherson (not to mention Marx!) had never existed. In recent decades parliamentary liberalism has assimilated the Left in the name of democracy, when the real task is for the Left to reclaim democracy from liberalism.

It follows from this discussion that the collapse of the Soviet and Eastern European models should not be taken as proof of the failure or irrelevance of all socialist or revolutionary experiences. Few would want to defend the Stalinist rigidity of North Korea, and the apparent acceptance of many aspects of robber-baron capitalism by China and Vietnam is cause for grave doubts about their continuing socialist credentials (although it has to be recognised that the jury is still out on their long-term evolution). But Cuba is still widely admired for its social achievements and its valiant resistance to US hostility, and its former association with the Soviet Union should not be taken as proof that its social and political model is identical or that it will suffer a similar fate. If Cuba has survived, it is precisely because its socialism differs in important respects and its revolution had different origins and characteristics; indeed, it will be argued in Chapter 4 that the true originality of the Cuban revolution has yet to be appreciated, and that its political relevance for the Left today is much greater than is normally assumed.

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2006 D.L. Raby.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

1. The Disinherited Left: From Dogmatic Orthodoxy to Romantic Anti-Capitalism

2. Democracy, Formal or Substantive: When Liberalism Becomes Counter-Revolutionary

3. Socialism or Popular Power: Revolutionary Reality in a Globalised World

4. Originality and Relevance of the Cuban Revolution

5. Hugo Chßvez and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela

6. Revolutions Aborted: Chile, Nicaragua, Portugal

7. Leadership, Movement and Representation: Populism and Revolutionary Strategy

Editorial Reviews

'A useful corrective to the mountain of lies published in the media and circulated by New Labour toadies.' --Tariq Ali

'A thoughtful examination of the revolutionary experience and traditions of Latin America.' --Richard Gott, author of Cuba: A New History, and Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution

From the Publisher