Reinaldo Iturriza López
Bolivia Resists
Reviewing the different accounts of the situation of the Venezuelan economy, I pointed out that they tended to be subordinate to the logic of the three minorities. I then tried to give an account of the political implications of this circumstance, and of some of the risks and challenges it entails.
At the time of writing, the Bolivian government, victorious in the October 20 presidential elections, still faced attempts to overthrow it. Once the coup d’état was over, the Bolivian people remained in the streets resisting the dictatorial regime, demanding the return of democracy. The supremacist right-wing that has just assaulted power, as disgraceful as its Venezuelan counterpart, has responded with a systematic effort to symbolically annihilate both Evo Morales and the people who support him, and with savage repression that has now left more than 20 people dead. The governments that have rushed to recognize the dictatorship, including the ineffable Venezuelan “interim president,” of course maintain an ominous silence regarding these crimes.
In this context, I consider it necessary to provide some clarifications on what I have called the logic of the three minorities, pointing out, in general terms, the way it is expressed in the Venezuelan and Bolivian cases.
First of all, it should be remembered that politics are relations of force. Radically democratic politics consists, among other things, in the accumulation of sufficient forces to guarantee the legitimacy of the transforming project. As Chavez said, building legitimacy depends on convincing, not imposing. That would be, fundamentally, the socialist democracy of the 21st century.
The exercise of politics subordinated to the logic of the two minorities is what happens when lines of force within the two great historical forces in conflict abandon the task of convincing the popular majorities, and are limited to the diatribe of power. Power is then conceived as an end in itself, and no longer as a precondition for the radical democratization of society, a process through which the popular majorities begin to be able to exercise their power effectively.
If radically democratic politics is, by definition, an agonistic politics, which not only does not shy away from conflict, but vindicates it as the engine of social transformation, politics subordinated to the logic of the two minorities is a mimicry of conflict, its caricature version.
To affirm that there is a type of exercise of politics subordinated to the logic of the two minorities does not in any way mean to subscribe to the theory of the two demons. During the 1970s, in Argentina, some authors defended the idea that the military dictatorship was the inevitable result of political chaos, the clearest expression of which was the armed conflict between two demons: the leftist guerrilla and the ultra-right groups.
In the Venezuelan case, and also in the Bolivian case, subscribing to the theory of the two demons is what creates a third minority, even more minuscule, that equates the two opposing forces, denounces the political polarization and cries out for the necessary depolarization. This third minority seems to orbit around the other two minorities, although in reality it ends up yielding to the force of attraction for one of them, as we shall see.
The detail is that, when two great historical forces are confronted, as in fact happens today in Venezuela, politics is necessary and unavoidably polarized. Faced with any sign of crisis of polarization, it is up to the forces engaged in the exercise of a radically democratic policy to repolarize the conflict and not depolarize it.
Repolarizing the political conflict means that it once again expresses the interests, desires and aspirations of the popular majorities, and not simply the interests of minority lines of force within the two great historical forces: in the case of Venezuela, Chavismo and Anti-Chavismo. It means, therefore, to account for the false polarization, not to be satisfied with the policy reduced to the logic of the two minorities.
The problem with this third “depolarized” minority is that, instead of challenging it or questioning it radically, it ends up reinforcing the logic of the two minorities, basically in two ways: 1) by trying to equate the government with the forces that seek to overthrow it, which invariably ends up manifesting as criticisms and invectives directed fundamentally at the first, practically saving the second from any responsibility, “who only do their job”, with which they legitimize any dismissal attempt through the de facto route: the two demons end up being only one; and 2) by reaffirming themselves as a testimonial minority almost as a matter of principle, without any will to build political mediations with the popular majorities, in whose name, however, they speak. It is, therefore, a minority without the will of real power, whose ultimate purpose seems to be to play the role of judge of the really existing power, with an astonishingly short-sighted predilection for government.
The coup d’état against the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia has exposed the miseries of certain intellectuals and militants of the left who not only attribute the responsibility for the defeat to Evo himself and to the majority forces that support him, mentioning only, as if it were an anecdotal fact, the supremacist minority that ignored his electoral victory, with the evident support of U.S. imperialism, but even go so far as to deny the existence of a coup d’état. This situation eloquently illustrates the serious losses that a “depolarized” minority can incur.
Repolarizing the conflict requires an exercise of politics that is no longer subordinated to the logic not of two, but of three minorities, who seek a monopoly of politics in general and of criticism in particular, always with their backs to the popular majorities. And it is on this last aspect that I feel it is necessary to focus attention.
Once again, politics is a relationship of power. And a radically democratic policy consists of convincing the majorities. Contrary to the position of the most skeptical, I defend the idea that Chavismo demonstrated amply, and repeatedly, that it is possible to exercise an eminently popular policy, with the vocation of building democratic hegemony, to express it once again with Chávez.
The place of enunciation of the critique of officialism, as I have called the set of lines of force within Chavismo prone to the logic of the three minorities, will always have to be the place occupied by the popular majorities, which is under no circumstances the place occupied by either of the other two minorities. Both the critique that identifies itself with the supremacist minority that seeks to assault power and the one that subscribes to the theory of the two demons, only to end up demonizing the government, are completely ineffective politically.
From the foregoing, it also follows that the critique of officialism cannot replace the critique of the other two minorities. Not because officialism is the “lesser evil”, but because, even though the three minorities are essentially anti-popular, none is more radically anti-democratic than the anti-Chávez, deeply classist, racist and neoliberal minority.
Is it necessary to point out that the absence of criticism of officialism is equally ineffective? More than ineffective, it is deadly: it is digging our own grave. And the experience goes back to the vocation of gravedigger for the most lucid aspects of Chavism.
Beyond criticism, in general the exercise of radically democratic politics, assuming that we have not renounced the will to power, involves identifying fully with the popular majorities, which by the way is far from being a simple abstraction.
Identifying ourselves, recognizing ourselves as part of the popular majorities, demands a fluid and permanent dialogue, which will necessarily be conflictive: to listen and accompany them instead of believing that we are called to “protect” them, to understand where they get their strength from, but also to assimilate their deep anger, the reasons for their identity disaffiliation. When an exchange relationship with such characteristics weakens, to the point of becoming almost non-existent, a crisis of polarization is produced. If we are not convinced of the need for communication with the popular majorities, how would we be able to convince them?
A crisis of badly conducted polarization induces the progressive weakening of the revolutionary forces, and eventually the strengthening of the reactionary forces. This is not necessarily the case in Venezuela: the defect of origin of the anti-Chávez minority, which consists of its radically anti-popular nature, has prevented it time and again from capitalizing on popular unrest.
In any case, the crisis of polarization can become so deep that it paves the way for the anti-Chávez minority to seize power, in which case we would have to do exactly what we are called upon to do today: repolarize, recompose forces to be able to build a powerful pole of patriotic, national and popular forces that will allow us to carry forward the project of democratic radicalization of Venezuelan society. Everything else, including the lamentations, the reduced criticism of the distribution of blame, the supposedly equidistant observation, is an absolute waste of time.
Preserving power at all costs, preventing the right from regaining power, or repolarising: such a thing is a false dilemma. Repolarizing, which means that politics once again expresses the interests of the majority of the Venezuelan population, is not only the best guarantee for preserving political power, and therefore the most effective way, but it is also the only form of exercising politics that gives meaning to remaining in power.
If repolarization is what needs to be done in the field of relations of force, then in the specific case of the discussion on the economy, repoliticizing is the right thing to do, and the objective can be no other than an economic policy at the service of a radically democratic policy.
The radically democratic policy is, by definition, refractory to the redoubts, to the closed spaces, to the leadership, to the encounters where only the convinced dialogue, and therefore reinforce the disagreement with the popular; to the soliloquies, to the self-indulgent diagnoses sprinkled with false heroism, to the speeches that demand loyalty to a people that has shown more than enough loyalty with the way of doing politics that they learned together with Chávez.
We must repolarize, repoliticize and, as Chavez added, symbolically reinforce the first of the tasks: reunify. In fact, it may be worthwhile to return to the term he used before leaning toward the latter: recover. Placing ourselves in the place of the popular majorities, and recovering, creating and defending from there the only policy that really makes sense: the one in which the people are the protagonists.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
