A letter to intellectuals who deride revolutions in the name of purity

  A letter to intellectuals who deride revolutions in the name of purity




Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Ana Maldonado
 Pilar Troya Fernández
Vijay Prashad


Revolutions do not happen suddenly, nor do they immediately transform a
society. A revolution is a process, which moves at different speeds
whose tempo can change rapidly if the motor of history is accelerated by
intensified class conflict. But, most of the time, the building of the
revolutionary momentum is glacial, and the attempt to transform a state
and society can be even more slow.

Leon Trotsky, sitting in his Turkish exile in 1930, wrote the most
remarkable study of the Russian Revolution. Thirteen years had elapsed
since the Tsarist empire had been overthrown. But the revolution was
already being derided, even by people on the Left. ‘Capitalism’, Trotsky
wrote in the conclusion to that book, ‘required a hundred years to
elevate science and technique to the heights and plunge humanity into
the hell of war and crisis. To socialism its enemies allow only fifteen
years to create and furnish a terrestrial paradise. We took no such
obligation upon ourselves. We never set these dates. The process of vast
transformation must be measured by an adequate scale’.

When Hugo Chavez won an election in Venezuela (December 1998) and when
Evo Morales Ayma won an election in Bolivia (December 2005), their
critics on the left in North America and in Europe gave their
governments no time to breathe. Some professors with a leftist
orientation immediately began to criticise these governments for their
limitations, and even their failures. This attitude was limited
politically—there was no solidarity given to these experiments; it was
also limited intellectually — there was no sense of the deep
difficulties for a socialist experiment in Third World countries
calcified in social hierarchies and depleted of financial resources.


    Pace of Revolution

Two years into the Russian Revolution, Lenin wrote that the newly
created USSR is not a ‘miracle-working talisman’, nor does it ‘pave the
way to socialism. It gives those who were formerly oppressed the chance
to straighten their backs and to an ever-increasing degree to take the
whole government of the country, the whole administration of the
economy, the whole management of production, into their own hands’.

But even that—that /whole/ this, and /whole/ that—was not going to be
easy. It is, Lenin wrote, ‘a long, difficult, and stubborn /class
struggle/, which, /after/ the overthrow of capitalist rule, /after/ the
destruction of the bourgeois state…. does not disappear…. but merely
changes its forms and in many respects becomes fiercer’. This was
Lenin’s judgment /after/ the Tsarist state had been taken over, and
/after/ the socialist government had begun to consolidate power.
Alexandra Kollantai wrote (such as in /Love in the Time of Worker Bees/)
about the struggles to build socialism, the conflicts within socialism
to attain its objectives. Nothing is automatic; everything is a struggle.

Lenin and Kollantai argued that the class struggle is not suspended when
a revolutionary government takes over the state; it is in fact,
‘fiercer’, the opposition to it intense because the stakes are high, and
the moment dangerous because the opposition—namely the bourgeoisie and
the old aristocracy—had imperialism on its side. Winston Churchill said,
‘Bolshevism must be strangled in its cradle’, and so the Western armies
joined the White Army in an almost fatal military attack on the Soviet
Republic. This attack went from the last days of 1917 to 1923—a full six
years of sustained military assault.

Neither in Venezuela nor in Bolivia, nor in any of the countries that
turned to the Left over the past twenty years, has the bourgeois state
been totally transcended nor has capitalist rule been overthrown. The
revolutionary processes in these countries had to gradually create
institutions of and for the working-class alongside the continuation of
capitalist rule. These institutions reflect the emergence of a unique
state-form based on participatory democracy; expressions of this are the
/Misiones Sociales/ among others. Any attempt to fully transcend
capitalism was constrained by the power of the bourgeoisie—which was not
undone by repeated elections, and which is now the source of
counter-revolution; and it was constrained by the power of
imperialism—which has succeeded, for now, in a coup in Bolivia, and
which threatens daily a coup in Venezuela. No-one, in 1998 or 2005,
suggested that what happened in Venezuela or Bolivia was a ‘revolution’
like the Russian Revolution; the election victories were part of a
revolutionary process. As the first act of his government Chavéz
announced a constituent process for the re-foundation of the Republic.
Similarly, Evo affirmed in 2006 that the Movement to Socialism (MAS) had
been elected into the government but had not taken power; it was later
that a constituent process was launched, which was itself a long
journey. Venezuela entered an extended ‘revolutionary process’, while
Bolivia entered a ‘process of change’ or—as they called it—simply the
‘process’, which even now—after the coup—is ongoing. Nonetheless, both
Venezuela and Bolivia experienced the full thrust of a ‘hybrid war’—from
sabotage of physical infrastructure to sabotage of the ability to raise
funds from capital markets.

Lenin suggested that after capturing the state and dismantling
capitalist ownership, the revolutionary process in the new Soviet
republic was difficult, the stubborn class struggle alive and well;
imagine then how much more difficult is the stubborn struggle in
Venezuela and Bolivia.


    Revolutions in the Realm of Necessity

Imagine, again, how hard it is to build a socialist society in a
country, in which—despite its wealth of natural resources—there remains
great poverty, and great inequality. Deeper yet, there is the cultural
reality that large parts of the population have suffered from and
struggled against centuries of social humiliation. Little surprise that
in these countries, the most oppressed agricultural workers, miners, and
the urban working class are either from indigenous communities or from
communities that descend from Africans. The crushing burdens of
indignity combined with the lack of easy to access resources makes
revolutionary processes in the ‘realm of necessity’ all the harder.

In his /Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts/ (1844), Marx makes a
distinction between the ‘realm of freedom’—where ‘labour which is
determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases’—and the
‘realm of necessity’—where physical needs are not met at all. A long
history of colonial subjugation and then imperialist theft has drained
large parts of the planet of its wealth and made these regions—mainly in
Africa, Asia, and Latin America—appear to be permanently in the ‘realm
of necessity’. When Chavez won the first election in Venezuela, the
poverty rate was an incredible 23.4%; in Bolivia, when Morales won his
first election, the poverty rate was a staggering 38.2%. What these
figures show is not just the absolute poverty of large sections of the
population, but they carry inside them stories of social humiliation and
indignity that cannot be made into a simple statistic.

Revolutions and revolutionary processes seem to have been rooted more in
the realm of necessity—in Tsarist Russia, in China, in Cuba, in
Vietnam—than in the realm of freedom—in Europe and the United States.
These revolutions and these revolutionary processes—such as in Venezuela
and Bolivia—are made in places that simply do not have accumulations of
wealth that can be socialised. The bourgeoisie in these societies either
absconds with its money at the moment of revolution or revolutionary
change, or it remains in place but keeps its money in tax havens or in
places such as New York and London. This money, the fruit of the
people’s labour, cannot be accessed by the new government without
incurring the wrath of imperialism. See how quickly the United States
organised for Venezuela’s gold to be seized by the Bank of London, and
for the US to freeze the bank accounts of the governments of Iran and
Venezuela, and see how swiftly investment dried up when Venezuela,
Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia refused to abide by the World Bank’s
investor-State settlement mechanism.

Both Chavez and Morales tried to take charge of the resources in their
countries, an act treated as an abomination by imperialism. Both of them
faced rebuke, with the accusation that they are ‘dictators’ because they
want to renegotiate the deals cut by previous governments for the
removal of raw materials. They needed this capital not for personal
aggrandizement—no one can accuse them of personal corruption—but to
build up the social, economic, and cultural capacity of their peoples.

Every day remains a struggle for revolutionary processes in the ‘realm
of necessity’. The best example of this is Cuba, whose revolutionary
government has had to struggle against a crushing embargo and against
threats of assassinations and coups from the very beginning.


    Revolutions of Women

It is admitted—because it would be foolish to deny it—that women are at
the centre of the protests in Bolivia against the coup and for the
restoration of the Morales government; in Venezuela as well, the
majority of people who take to the streets to defend the Bolivarian
revolution are women. Most of these women might not be /Masistas/ or
/Chavistas/, but they certainly understand that these revolutionary
processes are feminist, socialist, and against the indignity visited
upon the indigenous and the Afro-descendants.

Countries like Venezuela and Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina, faced
immense pressure from the International Monetary Fund through the 1980s
and 1990s to make deep cuts in state support for health care, education,
and elder care. The breakdown of these crucial social support systems
put a burden on the ‘care economy’, which is largely maintained—for
patriarchal reasons—by women. If the ‘invisible hand’ failed to take
care of people, the ‘invisible heart’ had to do so. It was the
experience of the cuts in the care economy, that deepened the
radicalisation of women in our societies. Their feminism emerged from
their experience of patriarchy and structural adjustment policies;
capitalism’s tendency to harness violence and deprivation hastened the
journey of working-class and indigenous feminism directly into the
socialist projects of Chávez and Morales. As the tide of neoliberalism
continues to wash over the world, and as it engulfs societies in anxiety
and heartache, it is women who have been the most active in the fight
for a different world.

Morales and Chavez are both men, but in the revolutionary process they
have come to symbolise a different reality for all of society. To
different degrees, their governments have committed themselves to a
platform that addresses both the cultures of patriarchy and the policies
of social cuts that burden women with holding society together. The
revolutionary processes in Latin America, therefore, must be understood
as deeply cognizant of the importance of putting women, the indigenous,
and the Afro-descendants at the centre of the struggle. No-one would
deny that there are hundreds of errors made by the governments, errors
of judgment that set back the fight against patriarchy and racism; but
these are errors, which can be rectified, and not structural features of
the revolutionary process. That is something that is deeply acknowledged
by indigenous and Afro-descendent women in these countries; the proof of
this acknowledgement is not in this or that article that they have
written, but by their active and energetic presence on the streets.

As part of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, women have been
essential in re-building social structures eroded by decades of
austerity capitalism. Their work has been central to the development of
people’s power and for the creation of participatory democracy.
Sixty-four percent of the spokespersons of the 3,186 communes are women,
so are a majority of the leaders of the 48,160 communal councils;
sixty-five percent of the leaders in the local supply and production
committees are women. Women not only demand equality in the workplace,
but demand equality in the social domain, where the /comunas/ are the
atoms of Bolivarian socialism. Women in the social domain have fought to
build the possibility of self-government, building dual-power, and
therefore slowly eroding the form of the liberal state. Against
austerity capitalism, women have shown their creativity, their strength,
and their solidarity not only against neoliberal policies, but also for
the socialist experiment and against the hybrid war.


    Democracy and Socialism

Left intellectual currents have been badly bruised in the period after
the fall of the USSR. Marxism and dialectical materialism lost
considerable credibility not only in the West but in large parts of the
world; post-colonialism and subaltern studies—variants of
post-structuralism and post-modernism—flourished in intellectual and
academic circles. One of the main themes of this seam of scholarship was
to argue that the ‘State’ was obsolete as a vehicle for social
transformation, and that ‘Civil Society’ was the salvation. A
combination of post-Marxism and anarchist theory adopted this line of
argument to deride any experiments for socialism through state power.
The state was seen as merely an instrument of capitalism, rather than as
an instrument for the class struggle. But if the people withdraw from
the contest over the state, then it will—without challenge—serve the
oligarchy, and deepened inequalities and discrimination.

Privileging the idea of ‘social movements’ over political movements
reflects the disillusionment with the heroic period of national
liberation, including the indigenous peoples’ liberation movements. It
also discards the actual history of people’s organisations in relation
to political movements that have won state power. In 1977, after
considerably struggle indigenous organisations forced the United Nations
to open up a project to end discrimination against the indigenous
population in the Americas. The La Paz-based South American Indian
Council was one of these organisations, which worked closely with the
World Peace Council, the Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom, as well as a number of national liberation movements (African
National Congress, the South-West Africa People’s Organisation, and the
Palestinian Liberation Organisation). It was from this unity and this
struggle that the UN established the Working Group on Indigenous
Populations in 1981, and that it declared 1993 as the UN International
Year of Indigenous Peoples. In 2007, Evo Morales lead the push for the
UN to pass a /Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples/. This was
a very clear example of the importance of unity and struggle between
people’s movements and fraternal states—if not for both the people’s
movements struggles from 1977 to 2007, aided and abetted by fraternal
states, and if not for the Bolivian government in 2007, this
Declaration—which has immense importance to take the struggle
forward—would not have been passed.

Indigenous intellectuals from the Americas have understood the
complexity of politics from this struggle—that indigenous
self-determination comes from a struggle through society and the state
to overcome bourgeois and settler-colonial power, as well as to find
instruments to prepare the transition to socialism. Amongst those
forms—as recognised by Peru’s José Carlos Mariátegui and Ecuador’s Nela
Martínez almost a century ago—is the /comuna/.

The revolutions in Bolivia and Venezuela have not only politically
sharpened the relations between men and women, between indigenous
communities and non-indigenous communities, but they have also
challenged the understanding of democracy and of socialism itself. These
revolutionary processes not only have had to work within the rules of
liberal democracy, but they at the same time built a new institutional
framework through the /comunas/ and other forms. It was by winning
elections and taking charge of state institutions that the Bolivarian
revolution was able to turn resources towards increased social
expenditure (on health, education, housing) and towards a direct attack
on patriarchy and racism. State power, in the hands of the left, was
used to build these new institutional frameworks that extend the state
and go beyond it. The existence of these two forms—liberal democratic
institutions and the socialist-feminist institutions—has led to the
bursting of the prejudice of fictitious ‘liberal equality’. Democracy if
reduced to the act of voting forces individuals to believe that they are
citizens with the same power as other citizens, regardless of their
socio-economic, political, and cultural positions. The revolutionary
process challenges this liberal myth, but it has not yet succeeded in
overcoming it—as can be seen in both Bolivia and Venezuela. It is a
struggle to create a new cultural consensus around socialist democracy,
a democracy that is rooted not in an ‘equal vote’, but in a tangible
experience of building a new society.

One of the textbook dynamics of having a left government is that it
takes up the agenda of many social and political movements of the
people. At the same time, many of the personnel from these movements—as
well as from various NGOs—join the government, bringing their various
skills to bear inside the complex institutions of modern government.
This has a contradictory impact: it fulfils the demands of the people,
and at the same time it has a tendency to weaken independent
organisations of various kinds. These developments are part of the
process of having a left government in power, whether it be in Asia or
in South America. Those who want to remain independent of the government
struggle to remain relevant; they often become bitter critics of the
government, and their criticisms are frequently weaponised by
imperialist forces towards ends that are alien even to those who make
such criticisms.

The liberal myth seeks to speak on behalf of the people, to obscure the
real interests and aspirations of the people—in particular of women, the
indigenous communities, and the afro-descendants. The left inside the
experiences of Bolivia and Venezuela has sought to develop the
collective mastery of the people in a contentious class struggle. A
position that attacks the very idea of the ‘State’ as oppressive does
not see how the state in Bolivia and Venezuela attempts to use that
authority to build institutions of dual power to create a new political
synthesis, with women at the front.


    Revolutionary Advice with no Revolutionary Experience

Revolutions are not easy to make. They are filled with retreats and
errors, since they are made by people who are flawed and whose political
parties must always learn to learn. Their teacher is their experience,
and it is those amongst them who have the training and time to elaborate
their experiences into lessons. No revolution is without its own
mechanisms to correct itself, its own voices of dissent. But that does
not mean that a revolutionary process should be deaf to criticisms; it
should welcome them.

Criticism is always welcome, but in what form does that criticism come?
These are two forms that are typical of the ‘left’ critic who derides
revolutions in the name of purity.

 1. If the criticism comes from the standpoint of perfect, then their
    standard is not only too high, but it fails to understand the nature
    of class struggle that must contend with congealed power inherited
    over generations.
 2. If the criticism assumes that all projects that contest the
    electoral domain will betray the revolution, then there is little
    understanding of the mass dimension of electoral projects and dual
    power experiments. Revolutionary pessimism halts the possibility of
    action. You cannot succeed if you do not allow yourself to fail, and
    to try again. This standpoint of critique provides only despair.

The ‘stubborn class struggle’ inside the revolutionary process should
provide someone who is not part of the revolutionary process itself to
be sympathetic not to this or that policy of a government, but to the
difficulty—and /necessity—/of the process itself.

In
MRonline
https://mronline.org/2019/11/20/a-letter-to-intellectuals-who-deride-revolutions-in-the-name-of-purity/?fbclid=IwAR3hCN1_oFpBDrCgMjd7KCijqkYMM2D9B4YDbnwdtTCY04DBO4-sfrvxM-o
Nov. 20, 2019