Democracy and Revolution

D.L Raby

Description

Is socialism dead since the fall of the Soviet Union? What is the way forward for the Left? This book argues that Cuba and Venezuela provide inspiration for anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist movements across the world. Another world Is possible, but only through an effective political strategy to win power on a popular and democratic basis.



D. L. Raby argues that the way forward for progressives is not the dogmatic formulae of the Old Left, nor in the spontaneous autonomism of John Holloway or Tony Negri. Instead, it is to be found in new, broad and flexible popular movements with bold and determined leadership. Examining the relationship of key leaders to their people, including Hugo Chávez and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Raby shows that it is more necessary than ever to take power, peacefully where possible, but in all cases with the strength that comes from popular unity backed by force where necessary.



In this way it is possible to build democratic power, which may or may not be socialist depending on one’s definition, but which represent the real anti-capitalist alternative for the twenty-first century.
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 Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela

6. Revolutions Aborted: Chile, Nicaragua, Portugal

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

8. The Way Forward: Democracy, Popular Power and Revolution

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Comparative Politics
• Political Science

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849642927
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Democracy and Revolution Latin America and Socialism Today

D.L. RABY

P Pluto Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI

and Between the Lines TORONTO

First published 2006 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com

and

Between the Lines 720 Bathurst Street, Suite 404, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2R4, Canada 1-800-718-7201 www.btlbooks.com

All rights reserved. In Canada no part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1 E5.

Copyright © D.L. Raby 2006

The right of D.L. Raby to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN ISBN

0 7453 2436 3 hardback 0 7453 2435 5 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Democracy and revolution : Latin America and socialism today / D.L. Raby. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–897071–20–5  1. Socialism––Cuba. 2. Socialism––Venezuela. 3. Cuba––History––Revolution, 1959. 4. Venezuela––History––1974–1999. 5. Venezuela––History––1999– . 6. Socialism–– Latin America. 7. Revolutions––Latin America. I. Title. HX110.5.R33 2006 320.53'15098 C2006–903132–0

Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges assistance for its publishing activities from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

This book is dedicated to Presidents Fidel Castro Ruz, Hugo Chàvez Frías and popular movements throughout the world

Acknowledgements Preface

Cont

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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 Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela 6. Revolutions Aborted: Chile, Nicaragua, Portugal 7. Leadership, Movement and Representation: Populism and Revolutionary Strategy 8. The Way Forward: Democracy, Popular Power and Revolution

Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost I have to acknowledge the constant support and assistance of Luisa, whose love and encouragement were fundamental in keeping me going. Secondly I have to thank all my Cuban friends, beginning with the staff and former staff of the Instituto de Historia de Cuba, especially Luis Serrano, Luis Rosado, Manuel Rosado, Gladys Marel García and Amparo Hernández;José Tabares del Real, now sadly deceased, and Sergio Guerra Vilaboy of the Instituto de Altos Estudios Don Fernando Ortiz in Havana; María del Pilar Díaz Castañón; Manuel Mencía of the Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado in Havana; Guillermo Santisteban, Juana María Meza, Sunia Santisteban and family of Havana. In Venezuela there are many friends and colleagues who have been extremely helpful, notably Dick Parker of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Deputy Elvis Amoroso and his wife Melania, Carolus Wimmer, Freddy Gutiérrez, Silvio Villegas, Gilberto Giménez, Maximilien Arbeláiz, Alex Main, Aurelio Gil Beroes, Blanca Eekhout, Carlos Pino, Zuraima Martínez, Pedro Morejón, Maritza Mendoza and Reinaldo Quijada of Clase Media en Positivo, Francisco González and Eluz Paredes and others of the Coordinadora Popular de Caracas, Hans Lorenzo and family, Juan Romero of the Universidad del Zulia, and the staff or former staff of the Universidad Bolivariana, Ernesto Wong, Adrián Padilla and others, especially those who participated in my guest seminar in September 2004. In Portugal thanks are due to Iva Delgado, João Arsénio Nunes, Fernando Rosas, Mário Tomé, António Costa Pinto, João Mário Mascarenhas, António Reis, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Alípio de Freitas, Miriam Halpern Pereira and the staff of the ISCTE, and many others. In Britain I have to thank Alistair Hennessy, Tony Kapcia, Ken Cole, James Dunkerley, Francisco Domínguez, Andy Higginbottom and other friends of the Colombia Solidarity Campaign, and the staff of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Liverpool. In Canada I am also grateful to many friends and former colleagues, notably Carlos Torres, Luis Aravena, Liisa North, Peter Blanchard, Keith Ellis, Judith Teichman, Dieter Misgeld and Claude Morin, and many others at the University of Toronto, York University and elsewhere. In Colombia I have to thank Lilia Solano, Gloria Gaitán, Francisco Ramírez, Jairo Iván Peña,Amalfi Serpa and several others. A special word of thanks

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is due to Marta Harnecker and Michael Lebowitz, whether in Caracas, Havana or elsewhere. Recognition is also due to José Nun, Miguel Murmis and Naguy Marcilla in Argentina, and many others in Latin America, North America and Europe whom I cannot mention by name for lack of space. Finally, a word of recognition to my son Chris who has also shown constant interest in my work. Doubtless some of those mentioned will have radical disagreements with my conclusions, but if this were not the case the book would not have been worth writing. D.L. Raby Liverpool, February 2006

Preface

This book brings together ideas which I had been working through for many years, but it is above all a response to a sense of the urgency of finding a way forward for the Left and progressive popular movements in today’s ‘globalised’ neoliberal world. The main focus is on Latin America, above all Cuba and Venezuela, but the theses put forward are of global significance. My interest in Latin America has always been not only professional or even cultural but also political; for a number of reasons it was and is the world region which has generated the most original and vigorous popular and revolutionary movements, and which continues to offer inspiration to those struggling for a better world in Europe, North America and elsewhere. In my view the Cuban revolution, for all its faults, continues to represent the most advanced attempt to build socialism anywhere in the world; but this makes it all the more important both to defend Cuba and to analyse it critically. It also makes it essential to understand just why this island nation has been able to achieve so much and why it survives, which most friends of Cuba do not. As for Venezuela, its prominence in the (limited) coverage granted by the British media to Latin America makes its relevance obvious, although those who rely on the mass media for their information will be more than a little surprised by my positive, indeed enthusiastic and passionate, view of current developments in that country. The brief attention given in Chapter 6 to Chile and Nicaragua is justified by the book’s concern above all with successful revolutionary processes, although much can be learnt from these regrettably aborted processes; the same applies to Portugal, which is given somewhat more attention because it brings the argument home to Europe. My conclusions are (guardedly) positive: a new, nondogmatic, popular Left is emerging, with a clear political perspective. It can draw inspiration from all the experiences mentioned (and others), but above all from Cuba and Venezuela, which demonstrate that another world is indeed possible, but only if the enormous energy of popular resistance is ultimately directed to achieve political power. The state may have been weakened by capitalist globalisation, but it has not disappeared, and indeed part of the neoliberal conjuring trick has been to create the illusion that it has.

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One more preliminary remark: I have relied heavily on Latin American (and Portuguese) sources, both in order to let the protagonists speak for themselves and because I believe a great deal of creative theoretical work is being produced in these countries which tends to be ignored in the AngloSaxon world. In order to convey what I believe to be the correct meaning of these authors, all translations from Spanish, Portuguese or French are mine unless otherwise indicated. D.L. Raby

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 produceUtopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War(Castañeda 1994), which amounted to a repudiation of that continent’s revolutionary

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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