I find it amazing that, with less than two months to go, nobody but nobody seems to be talking about the December 4th National Assembly elections. If the opposition slate has a campaign, it must be one of the best kept secrets in Venezuela.
What little talk there is seems to be stuck in an endless, totally barren debate on the Elections Council. And it's no wonder: the one thing the oppo leadership succeeded at over the last year was in convincing their own supporters that CNE stole the recall referendum. Never mind that the "evidence" of electronic manipulation was circumstantial at best (more like entirely speculative, if you ask me), never mind that the oppo leadership had an obvious motivation to pass the buck after having bungled the RR campaign so badly. They spared no effort to trash CNE. They made their bed, now they get to lie on it.
The opposition leadership's big problem is no longer how to win over chavistas, but how to mobilize a base they've spent over a year demobilizing through their strident claims of fraud.
The tragic part is that all of this comes at a time when Chavez is again sliding in the polls, when the initial euphoria over the misiones has decidedly faded, when the government has launched a radical drive against private property that even chavistas reject, when increasing numbers of chavistas are dissatisfied with the government, when even Lina Ron and Ramon Machuca are getting restive...all of this at a time when a minimally organized, minimally competent election campaign could rock the chavista establishment to the core.
Instead, we'll get a qualified chavista majority in the AN that will waste no time amending the constitution to make Chavez endlessly re-electable.
Ugh!
October 8, 2005
October 7, 2005
Revolution without institutions
I've been rereading Political Order in Changing Societies, the book Samuel Huntington should be famous for, and would be, if he hadn't gone and mucked up his legacy with the horrid Clash of Civilizations. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on his earlier book, and go back to it now and then for insight.
His chapter on revolutions is pretty lucid. "Revolution," he writes, "is one means of political development, one way of creating and institutionalizing new political organizations and procedures, of strengthening the political sphere. Every major revolution of the twentieth century has led to the creation of a new political order to structure, to stabilize and to institutionalize the broadened participation in politics. It has involved the creation of a political party system with deep roots in the population. The triumph of the revolution is the triumph of party government."
He is thinking of Mexico, the USSR, China, Turkey and Yugoslavia - cases where, love it or loathe it, the political system that the revolution brought about was highly institutionalized and stable.
The problem, though, is that it doesn't always work. "Not all revolutions end in triumph, and not all triumphs are irreversible. It is possible for a society to suffer the agonies of revolutionary dislocation without achieving the stability and integration a revolution might bring."
It's worth thinking about the Chavez era in these terms, because the personalism and institutional fragility of the Fifth Republic is so obvious. For all the dislocation of the last few years, the revolution has not innovated in institutional terms at all. Instead, it has bulldozed all institutional structures in its path and replaced them with Chávez's personal will.
Huntington suggests that revolutions that do not manage to institutionalize themselves usually end up as footnotes in their country's histories. His paradigmatic example of a revolution that failed at the institutional game is Bolivia's MNR period in the 1950s...and who on earth gets worked up about that one anymore?
His chapter on revolutions is pretty lucid. "Revolution," he writes, "is one means of political development, one way of creating and institutionalizing new political organizations and procedures, of strengthening the political sphere. Every major revolution of the twentieth century has led to the creation of a new political order to structure, to stabilize and to institutionalize the broadened participation in politics. It has involved the creation of a political party system with deep roots in the population. The triumph of the revolution is the triumph of party government."
He is thinking of Mexico, the USSR, China, Turkey and Yugoslavia - cases where, love it or loathe it, the political system that the revolution brought about was highly institutionalized and stable.
The problem, though, is that it doesn't always work. "Not all revolutions end in triumph, and not all triumphs are irreversible. It is possible for a society to suffer the agonies of revolutionary dislocation without achieving the stability and integration a revolution might bring."
It's worth thinking about the Chavez era in these terms, because the personalism and institutional fragility of the Fifth Republic is so obvious. For all the dislocation of the last few years, the revolution has not innovated in institutional terms at all. Instead, it has bulldozed all institutional structures in its path and replaced them with Chávez's personal will.
Huntington suggests that revolutions that do not manage to institutionalize themselves usually end up as footnotes in their country's histories. His paradigmatic example of a revolution that failed at the institutional game is Bolivia's MNR period in the 1950s...and who on earth gets worked up about that one anymore?
October 6, 2005
A time honored Venezuelan tradition: botching the oil cycle
Between 1936 and 1978, the Venezuelan economy grew faster than any other anywhere on earth. From 1978 onward, it shrunk faster than almost any other in the world. What happened?
The standard explanation is all about corruption.
Most economists, however, see it differently. The wonkish take centers on the instability of the world oil market. Starting with the 1973 oil crisis, what had been a relatively stable energy market went all out of whack. Prices became much more variable.
For oil exporters, the result was dizzying macroeconomic instability. Money would flood into the country during booms, internal consumption would grow fast, and in time, the economy would overheat. When the bubble burst, demand would collapse and severe recessions followed. Each turn of this merry-go-round would leave people poorer than the last.
The fault is not just with impersonal global forces, though. Since the 1970s, every government Venezuela has had has mismanaged the oil cycle, and all in the same way. Instead of evening out the highs and lows, they accentuated them. Instead of saving during booms, they went into debt to spend even more than they were taking in. Instead of going into debt during busts to stimulate the economy out of crisis, they were forced to spend less because, by then, they had tapped out their creditors.
Lots of petrostates have suffered through this kind of mismanagement, and all have ended up poorer than they started.
Now, it's happening again. Once again oil prices are sky high. Once again the government is rushing to spend every dollar it gets its hands on, and then some. Once again the economy is overheating.
For now, times are good - just like they were in 73, 79, and 91. GDP is way up. Nothing surprising about that. The question is, what happens when the bust comes? Care to hazard a guess?
The standard explanation is all about corruption.
Most economists, however, see it differently. The wonkish take centers on the instability of the world oil market. Starting with the 1973 oil crisis, what had been a relatively stable energy market went all out of whack. Prices became much more variable.
For oil exporters, the result was dizzying macroeconomic instability. Money would flood into the country during booms, internal consumption would grow fast, and in time, the economy would overheat. When the bubble burst, demand would collapse and severe recessions followed. Each turn of this merry-go-round would leave people poorer than the last.
The fault is not just with impersonal global forces, though. Since the 1970s, every government Venezuela has had has mismanaged the oil cycle, and all in the same way. Instead of evening out the highs and lows, they accentuated them. Instead of saving during booms, they went into debt to spend even more than they were taking in. Instead of going into debt during busts to stimulate the economy out of crisis, they were forced to spend less because, by then, they had tapped out their creditors.
Lots of petrostates have suffered through this kind of mismanagement, and all have ended up poorer than they started.
Now, it's happening again. Once again oil prices are sky high. Once again the government is rushing to spend every dollar it gets its hands on, and then some. Once again the economy is overheating.
For now, times are good - just like they were in 73, 79, and 91. GDP is way up. Nothing surprising about that. The question is, what happens when the bust comes? Care to hazard a guess?
October 5, 2005
Berenjenal Chronicles
Guaicaipuro Lameda's take on the here-and-now...
For now, the opposition trumpets a precarious unity, shorn of political purpose, forced into being by reality and meant only to place a few people in "winning positions" on the election lists, and so much so that only the most daring venture to assure us that they will deny the revolution a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.
And so, its clumsiness in the face of traps, its cowardice when the time comes to defend itself against powerplays, its lack of concrete achievements and its naivete when it comes to responding to the nature of its adversary have disqualified this leadership which neither acknowledges past failures nor learns from them and, as a result, the voters who oppose the revolution find themselves fragmented and confused as they drown in a mix of feelings that range from anger and frustration to disappointment and hopelessness.
Today, the opposition people, without a discernible future or a winning spirit and having lost faith in themselves, have given themselves over to prophecizing about coming revolutionary events. Thus we hear people who go as far as to say they'll lose their homes or have to share them with those the revolution imposes. This is a sign that defeatism is imposing itself on the opposition while triumphalism becomes the real adversary of the revolutionaries. They have no one left to fight with, and to cover up their mistakes they're reduced to blaming the problems their incompetence bars them from solving on those who haven't been anywhere near power for seven long years.
And so, and "for now", it seems the revolution is here to stay and to inflict terrible damage on Venezuelan society, enslaving it to a government that deifies poverty as an instrument of domination and subjugation that allows it to keep itself in power. We shall have to see if those who have lived in poverty and exclusion are willing to suffer through such a fate while a revolutionary oligarchy grows in an opulence that magnifies the inequalities that brought forth its own birth.
For now, the opposition trumpets a precarious unity, shorn of political purpose, forced into being by reality and meant only to place a few people in "winning positions" on the election lists, and so much so that only the most daring venture to assure us that they will deny the revolution a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.
And so, its clumsiness in the face of traps, its cowardice when the time comes to defend itself against powerplays, its lack of concrete achievements and its naivete when it comes to responding to the nature of its adversary have disqualified this leadership which neither acknowledges past failures nor learns from them and, as a result, the voters who oppose the revolution find themselves fragmented and confused as they drown in a mix of feelings that range from anger and frustration to disappointment and hopelessness.
Today, the opposition people, without a discernible future or a winning spirit and having lost faith in themselves, have given themselves over to prophecizing about coming revolutionary events. Thus we hear people who go as far as to say they'll lose their homes or have to share them with those the revolution imposes. This is a sign that defeatism is imposing itself on the opposition while triumphalism becomes the real adversary of the revolutionaries. They have no one left to fight with, and to cover up their mistakes they're reduced to blaming the problems their incompetence bars them from solving on those who haven't been anywhere near power for seven long years.
And so, and "for now", it seems the revolution is here to stay and to inflict terrible damage on Venezuelan society, enslaving it to a government that deifies poverty as an instrument of domination and subjugation that allows it to keep itself in power. We shall have to see if those who have lived in poverty and exclusion are willing to suffer through such a fate while a revolutionary oligarchy grows in an opulence that magnifies the inequalities that brought forth its own birth.
Groping for a Coherent Stance on CNE
The political opposition (i.e. the anti-Chavez political class) has painted itself into a strange corner over the upcoming elections. After months of saying there was massive fraud in the recall referendum, they've turned on a dime and put together a single slate of candidate for Dec. 4th's parliamentary vote. But there was no very coherent explanation for the turn-around, because they've never renegued on their original fraud allegations. So their line, as it stands, goes something like "CNE cheated last year, and now CNE is even more chavistified, and just a couple of months ago we were telling you not to vote because CNE would cheat again...ergo, please go vote for us on Dec. 4th."
Huh!?
Teodoro Petkoff, who understood the longer-term implications of claiming fraud on not-much-evidence earlier than almost anyone else, is taking a much more constructive position. No grandiloquent declarations about bolichoros at CNE, just a set of basic demands on the elections authorities scrupulously grounded in law.
This little list will hardly get oppo pulses raising, it just makes some basic demands while forthrightly accepting CNE's right to run the election.
QUE HORROR! people will say, HE ACCEPTS CNE's LEGITIMACY?!!??
Well yeah...and so do the oppo politicos, from the moment they decide to run candidates in the election.
Huh!?
Teodoro Petkoff, who understood the longer-term implications of claiming fraud on not-much-evidence earlier than almost anyone else, is taking a much more constructive position. No grandiloquent declarations about bolichoros at CNE, just a set of basic demands on the elections authorities scrupulously grounded in law.
- 1- Quit running out the clock on inviting an EU observer mission.
2- Open communication channels between local election boards and local opposition representatives (i.e. local boards can't continue talking only with chavistas.)
3- Enforce the legally-established role of the military at voting centers (i.e. men with guns are there to provide security, not to run the voting center.)
4- Apply the legal requirement that vote tallying to be open to the public (i.e. no more counting votes behind closed doors.)
This little list will hardly get oppo pulses raising, it just makes some basic demands while forthrightly accepting CNE's right to run the election.
QUE HORROR! people will say, HE ACCEPTS CNE's LEGITIMACY?!!??
Well yeah...and so do the oppo politicos, from the moment they decide to run candidates in the election.
October 4, 2005
The Strong Oil Card is a Bluff
People see it as the "nuclear option" in Chávez's escalating pissing match with the Americans. Chávez himself calls it his "strong oil card," and likes to threaten to use it. If things get out of hand, the story goes, Chávez could stop selling oil to the US and then the brown stuff would really hit the fan.
Problem is, the story is based on faulty economic reasoning. Oil is fungible. The only way Venezuela can cause a supply shock is by pulling out of the oil market altogether.
To see why, imagine Venezuela cuts off the US tomorrow and starts selling all its oil to China. (Not that the Chinese would go for this, but this is a thought experiment.) China would find itself buying an extra 2 million barrels per day. Logically, they would then buy 2 million fewer barrels per day from other suppliers. And the 2 million barrels the Chinese free up would eventually find their way to the US.
In the short run, this would mean some added costs as US and Chinese refineries are tweaked to process different crudes, and of course shipping would get more expensive for everyone involved. But, in the long run, world supply wouldn't change, so the Law of One Price would kick in. There's no reason to think the "strong oil card" would even push up prices, let alone cause some sort of crisis for the US.
So don't be fooled. The price of oil is set by the interaction of global supply and global demand. The only way Venezuela can cause a supply shock is by selling oil to no one. But this is the ultimate empty threat, because Chávez needs his oil revenue far more than the world needs our oil.
Problem is, the story is based on faulty economic reasoning. Oil is fungible. The only way Venezuela can cause a supply shock is by pulling out of the oil market altogether.
To see why, imagine Venezuela cuts off the US tomorrow and starts selling all its oil to China. (Not that the Chinese would go for this, but this is a thought experiment.) China would find itself buying an extra 2 million barrels per day. Logically, they would then buy 2 million fewer barrels per day from other suppliers. And the 2 million barrels the Chinese free up would eventually find their way to the US.
In the short run, this would mean some added costs as US and Chinese refineries are tweaked to process different crudes, and of course shipping would get more expensive for everyone involved. But, in the long run, world supply wouldn't change, so the Law of One Price would kick in. There's no reason to think the "strong oil card" would even push up prices, let alone cause some sort of crisis for the US.
So don't be fooled. The price of oil is set by the interaction of global supply and global demand. The only way Venezuela can cause a supply shock is by selling oil to no one. But this is the ultimate empty threat, because Chávez needs his oil revenue far more than the world needs our oil.
October 3, 2005
Venezuela Feverishly Strives for Axis of Evil Membership
Chavez, we have to conclude, will be bitterly disappointed if Venezuela doesn't make the next Axis of Evil list. Really, he's done everything he can think of:
Make provocative noises about developing nuclear energy? Check
Support Iran's proliferation effort? Check
Support the "creeping coup" to bring the Sandinistas back to power in Nicaragua? Check
Threaten to pull Venezuela's reserve holdings out of dollar-denominated bonds? Check
Build relations with North Korea? Check
What do these items have in common? None of them make any economic or strategic sense, unless you've decided "antagonizing the State Department" is your main strategic goal...
Honestly, I have this image of the guy heading a brainstorming session in Miraflores, pounding the table with his fist and shouting "Come on! people! there must be some other way to piss off the gringos! think damn you! THINK!!"
Make provocative noises about developing nuclear energy? Check
Support Iran's proliferation effort? Check
Support the "creeping coup" to bring the Sandinistas back to power in Nicaragua? Check
Threaten to pull Venezuela's reserve holdings out of dollar-denominated bonds? Check
Build relations with North Korea? Check
What do these items have in common? None of them make any economic or strategic sense, unless you've decided "antagonizing the State Department" is your main strategic goal...
Honestly, I have this image of the guy heading a brainstorming session in Miraflores, pounding the table with his fist and shouting "Come on! people! there must be some other way to piss off the gringos! think damn you! THINK!!"
October 2, 2005
The blog is back!
Partly because I have a bit of time on my hands, partly because I just got a snazzy new net connection at home, but mostly because, erm...how to put this? JESUS H. CHRIST does it look like Chávez is out of control these days!
La Marqueseña, Walter Martinez, urban expropriations, the weird Pyongyang-Tehran-Caracas axis, escalating summit hissy fits, escalating gringophobia...scary stuff.
What I want to do (OK, try to do) is emulate the gringo blogger style by writing much shorter, more frequent posts picking up on little news items that often go unnoticed...I'm thinking of undercommented news like these two gems:
La Marqueseña, Walter Martinez, urban expropriations, the weird Pyongyang-Tehran-Caracas axis, escalating summit hissy fits, escalating gringophobia...scary stuff.
What I want to do (OK, try to do) is emulate the gringo blogger style by writing much shorter, more frequent posts picking up on little news items that often go unnoticed...I'm thinking of undercommented news like these two gems:
Getting technical on "forced disappearances"
Think Pinochet and Videla invented the "desaparición forzosa"? Think again.
José Vicente Rangel wants us to believe that Rómulo Betancourt invented the "forced disappearance." Not to get too pedantic about this, but isn't it well known that Pérez Jiménez disappeared people too? Adecos and communists and copeyanos together? Why doesn't J.V.R. want to inquire into those deaths?
My guess: there's no political gain to be made from pointing out that once Adecos and Commies made common cause against dictatorship and to establish democracy. The sooner that can be swept under the historical rug, the better.
José Vicente Rangel wants us to believe that Rómulo Betancourt invented the "forced disappearance." Not to get too pedantic about this, but isn't it well known that Pérez Jiménez disappeared people too? Adecos and communists and copeyanos together? Why doesn't J.V.R. want to inquire into those deaths?
My guess: there's no political gain to be made from pointing out that once Adecos and Commies made common cause against dictatorship and to establish democracy. The sooner that can be swept under the historical rug, the better.
Psychopath autocrats of the world, unite!
Mindless radicalization, anyone?
More...
Deputy Foreign Minister William Izarra received Yang Hyong Sop in Caracas and discussed the possibility of energy cooperation between Venezuela, the world's fifth largest oil exporter, and North Korea.
Hyong Sop, who was in Cuba earlier Wednesday, applauded "the important achievements in the process of constructing 21st-century socialism" in Venezuela while the oil-rich country works toward the "economic and political integration of Latin America," the statement said.
North Korea's commerce minister plans to visit Venezuela in November to discuss trade, Hyong Sop said.
More...
July 25, 2005
The Hidden Middle Class
Picture a Venezuelan middle class family. What image comes into your head?
If you're like most people, you're thinking of the Mavesa family. You know, the one in the commercial. Husband comes home, tie loosened on the car ride home from the office, to meet his dashing young wife in their beautiful Caracas apartment. Bima furniture. Cocina empotrada. Cell phones. Mayonnaise. That sort of thing.
We all know what that middle class is about. The Venezuelan dream. It's an image. A set of associations. A lifestyle. It hardly needs much elaboration. We all know what we're talking about when we say "middle class." Don't we?
Well...don't we?
But what if...what if that image distorts as much as it reveals? What if the associations we've built up around it blur out whole groups of people who, on closer scrutiny, should be seen as middle class?
What is this Mavesa family like, anyway? For one, they live in the city. Almost certainly in Caracas. In the Mavesa scheme of things, there is no such thing as a rural middle class. What's more, the Mavesa middle class is professional. It has a university degree. It's made up of managers, lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers. It wears a tie to work every day, and depends on its salary. Most pointedly, the Mavesa middle class has money. Not too much money, granted - we are not talking about the rich here - but certainly more than the vast majority of people in Venezuela. All those nice kitchens and cars and cell phones, those are expensive. Having the money to buy these things has become a marker of middle classness.
In day-to-day speech in Venezuela, then, middle class has become more an income category than an occupational grouping. Roughly, when you say middle class what you mean is "not rich, but certainly better off than most." This image of the urban, professional, educated, employed, relatively well off middle class is so ingrained in public discourse in Venezuela it's difficult for people to see beyond it. It takes a bit of sociology to realize just how badly the Mavesa image distorts our understanding of who is and who is not middle class.
What you do, not what you earn
To start to see the problems with the Mavesa image of the middle class, you have to stop thinking just about income and focus instead on people's relationship with the world of work.
For Marx, your class affiliation has nothing whatsoever to do with income; it has everything to do with your relationship to the world of work. Those who own the inputs that generate wealth are capitalists, those who make a living by selling their work to the capitalists are proletarians. That's that. By this reckoning, of course, the Mavesa middle class is not actually middle class at all: that flawlessly groomed husband sells his labor to an employer. For Marx, at least, he is merely a privileged member of the working class.
The problem is that this kind of understanding leaves no space at all for the middle class as such, as a class distinct from both owners and workers. Seen in this way, what we think of as "middle class" is merely a group of particularly privileged proletarians or particularly pela-bola capitalists. Marxists have always presumed that these people "in the middle" would eventually have to choose sides between the two dominant classes. In fact, Marxist sociology tends to erase the middle class from the picture altogether. Marx presumed that the conflict between capitalists and proletarians would be the driving motor of history, so why waste time examining the position of the residuals in the middle?
Marx did recognize the existence in Europe of a large number of people that occupied a somewhat paradoxical position between capitalists and proletarians. These were the armies of small time shop-owners and small-fry manufacturers working in the tiny workshops that proliferated in 19th century Europe. The por-su-cuenta squad.
Marx thought of these people basically as capitalists. They certainly own the means of production they use, and since this was the key litmus test for Marx, he labeled this group the "petty bourgeoisie", the small-time capitalists.
But thinking of this strata as being "just like" regular capitalists, just on a smaller scale, misses the particularity of their position. The day-to-day reality of working life for very small-scale producers and traders often has more in common with the day-to-day life of the traditional working-class than with that of capitalists. They may own the means of production they use, but they basically work for a living. Unlike capitalists, they can't rely on their capital to keep them fed. Unlike workers, they have no access to a steady quince-y-ultimo salary, or collective bargaining, or statutory vacation pay. Their position, if anything, is more precarious than that of the organized working class: if they work, they earn; if they don't, they don't. They are not small-time capitalists as much as they are owner-workers.
Now, it won't have escaped an alert reader that this group that Marx described as the petty bourgeoisie corresponds, in contemporary Venezuelan terms, to the informal sector. An owner-worker class does indeed exist in Venezuela, and a big one...it's just that, in Venezuela, this part of society earns its living beyond the scope of the law.
Here we begin to see why the Mavesa family image is such a lousy reference point when you're trying to picture the Venezuelan middle class. Because Venezuela's current petty-bourgeoisie, Venezuela's genuine occupational middle class, has almost nothing in common with the Mavesa family. It is a nation of buhoneros. Of mata-tigres. Of taxi-drivers and conuqueros. Of people who can't get proper jobs, but they own a tiny little bit of capital, and they try their best to make a living out of it.
That middle class, that occupational middle class, has always lived beyond the reach of the state. It shares none of the characteristics of the Mavesa family. It is more likely to come home with a gunshot wound the neighborhood tough than it is to come home smiling from a nice air-conditioned day at the office.
Venezuela's informal economy - its real middle class - is huge. Since 1994 has made up roughly half the country's work force. It is by no means solidly urban. It counts as members hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers, as well as owner-workers in small-scale agricultural input and processing activities in the countryside. It far from professional. Informal economy workers are, statistically, less educated than formal sector workers. And its members are certainly not relatively well-off: according to a 2002 UCAB Poverty Project study, 9 out of 10 informal sector workers earn less than the legal minimum wage.
When you start to think of the informal economy as the hidden middle class, you're hit by the startling realization that Venezuela's occupational middle class - its owner-workers - has long been worse off than its working class. The post-1958 political system, with its corporatist emphasis on balancing the demands of capitalists and workers, systematically excluded the ranks of the owner-workers from political power.
This structural exclusion is made dramatically visible in the composition of the old tripartite commissions that, before Chavez, were charged with negotiating wage policy. The system formally included capitalists (Fedecamaras) and workers (CTV) in wage-bargaining, but did not even recognize the existence of a sprawling universe of small scale owner-workers. The por-su-cuentas had no seat at the table. The fourth republic had no structures for including or empowering the hidden middle class. In the end, it was the small-scale owner-workers' anger at their marginalization that propelled Hugo Chavez into power.
From this perspective, the 2001-2004 alliance of CTV and Fedecamaras against the government played perfectly into Chavez's game plan. Relying on exploiting the sense of resentment of the excluded against the included, Chavez had no trouble painting CTV and Fedecamaras as the Enemy. His main constituents - who had always been shut out of the legal economy and therefore had no personal stake in the outcome of tripartite commission negotiations - applauded his refusal to deal with either of the two bodies.
The weirdly counterintuitive conclusion, if such a reading is correct, is that what Chavez is leading is a revolution of the middle class. It sounds strange to put it that way because the images we associate with middle classness are based on images based on income rather than occupation. Whatever sociological theory says, most of us will always have a hard time looking at a buhonero or a conuquero and thinking of them as archetypes of middle classness. In income terms, buhoneros and conuqueros are among the poorest people in Venezuela, what's "middle" about that?
What's middle about it is the dual nature of owner-workers' relationship to capital and work. Those who live off their capital and do not work are capitalists, those who live off their work and have no capital are workers, and those who both own their capital and work to make a living are, well, in the middle.
The hidden middle class and the East Asian Economic Miracle
This whole stream of unorthodox thoughts occurred to me while reading "Discipline and Development : Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America", the startlingly lucid new book by MIT historical sociologist Diane Davis. The book's starting point is one of the hottest debates in development economics today: why have East Asian economies outperformed Latin American economies so decisively over the last fifty years.
To make sense of Davis' thinking, you need to take a little side-trip into the history of the East Asian economic miracle. Davis focuses on just two countries: South Korea and Taiwan.
In the four decades after 1960, the South Korean and Taiwanese economies grew faster than any economy ever in the history of the world. In forty years, these countries went from having the per capita income of today's Haiti to having the per capita income of today's Spain. This success brought them more than a little bit of attention from development economists. What they found made uncomfortable reading for many of them.
Even the most superficial look at the economies of South Korea and Taiwan showed major differences with the standard, "Washington Consensus" style recipe for development. Though many US trained economists saw liberalism as a kind of divinely ordained absolute good, it didn't take long to realize South Korea and Taiwan had in no way given free rein to the "invisible hand" of the market during their economic take-off years. Instead, they relied on peculiar combinations of private enterprise and public planning. Industrial production was in the hands of capitalists, certainly, but industrial financing was controlled by state-owned banks. Foreign direct investment was essentially banned in South Korea until the late 1980s. Technology transfer provisions were prominent, and the state had a clear strategy to help local companies crack into particular export markets.
The industrial development vision was based on exporting manufactures for the world market, certainly, but companies were often pushed to participate in the export drive by government fiat. In some cases, the government literally forced companies to enter particular export markets by threatening to withold financing if they did not. Governments made special efforts to help private companies produce for the export market, rewarding successful exporters with further directed credit and subsidies while punishing unsuccessful exporters by witholding such facilities. Companies that could not compete in export markets were simply allowed to fail.
South Korea and Taiwan, then, relied on a highly peculiar combination of private and public institutions to achieve their development gains. They did not, as the Washington Consensus crowd might have wished, minimize government intervention in the economy. Just the opposite. South Korean and Taiwanese bureaucrats identified the most promising industrial markets for export growth, coordinated the financing and know-how for local companies to enter those markets, they administed financial resources to foster them and systematically sought to reward capitalists who acted in accordance with their development priorities while punishing those who did not. Both civil servants and businessmen in East Asia have always understood and accepted that it is the public sector that is in the development driver's seat, with capitalists acting within the narrow bounds allowed to them by the state's development policy.
Autonomous states?
A very big literature now exists on how exactly these East Asian states managed to launch their countries on the path to self-sustaining economic growth. Scholars like Linsu Kim, Alice Amsden, Robert Wade, Chalmers Johnson and Margaret Woo Cummings are among the most prominent in this field. The policy-mix the East Asians used has been labeled "state-led, export-oriented development," and the type of state able to pull off this kind of policy has been described as the "developmental state."
Studies of the developmental state have traditionally stressed "state autonomy" as the key to the success of the east asian development model. Following Berkeley sociologist Peter Evans, they've highlighted the East Asian state's ample authority, its space to act autonomously of pressures brought to bear by various social groups.
It's not hard to see why such autonomy from vested interests is important. In Latin America, where states have been much less autonomous from social pressures, efforts at state-led industrialization have generally morphed into giant corruption rackets. States beholden to the interests of capitalists seek to accommodate their clients: a state that cannot act autonomously of capitalists is most unlikely to work to discipline them.
Instead, capitalists' work to use their privileged access to the state to get their hands on state resources. Venezuela's post 1973 history is one long case-study of this dynamic. Similarly, states beholden to the narrow interests of workers lack the autonomy to discipline the working class's wage demands. Peru and Argentina, with their long histories of hyperinflation, are classic examples of the economically catastrophic consequences of continually seeking to accommodate the working class to the detriment of other segments of society.
The suggestion, then, is that the East Asian states had a special ability to discipline rather than accommodate both capitalists and workers, and that's how they managed to resist corruption.
The Middle Class core of the developmental state
It's a this point that Davis' fascinating book picks up the story. The question she wants to ask is not so much how the East Asian Developmental State operates, but rather what the social foundations of such a state might be. What are its key constituencies? What is its "social base"? Who does the government play to? Whose values does it encarnate? And how did those values allow a few countries to turn the remarkable trick of setting up a professional state able to plan and coordinate Export-Oriented Development without becoming hopelessly corrupt?
Davis' answer, you will not be surprised to hear, is all about the middle class. And what she understands by "middle class" is much closer to the informal-economy model of owner-workers than to the Mavesa image that predominates in Venezuela.
Davis questions the very notion of an "autonomous state." States cannot act in a social vacuum, with no organic rooting in the society where they operate. Not even dictatorial states. All states need some form of social base, and the base they choose will, to some degree, determine the kinds of values they embody and the forms of policies they will apply.
In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, she explains, South Korea and Taiwan were overwhelmingly rural countries. Both implemented wide-ranging, successful, US-backed land reform programs aimed at creating a kind of Jefersonian society of small-scale farmers. By the early 1960s, 70% of South Korea's population lived in the countryside, and 90% of farmers were owner-workers. They were South Korea's conuqueros - a class created by land reform, and demographically dominant over the rest of the country. That they were poor - very poor, even - nobody could deny. But they owned the capital they used to make a living, so Davis labels them the rural middle class.
In the pages that follow, Davis traces the hidden history of the relationship between rural owner-workers and export-oriented industrialization. Going directly against the grain of almost all development theorizing on East Asia, she argues that it was the state's decision to privilege rural development over urban development, and rural middle class values over urban capitalist or working class values, that allowed the East Asian states to become autonomous enough from capitalists and workers to discipline them properly. Based on a close reading of the political history of South Korea and Taiwan, she stresses the way both governments saw small-scale rural producers as both a key constituency and a moral reserve for the nation.
At the heart of Davis' contribution is a discussion about values. Much has been made about the supposed role of the protestant ethic and of "Asian Values" to account for the first and last waves of industrialization. Indeed, the values claimed for protestants and Asians in turn are remarkably similar: hard work, thrift, individual responsibility, respect for authority, a high propensity to save rather than consume. For Davis, however, both labels are wrong...the values that Weber pinpointed over a century ago and Lee Kwan Yew highlighted in the last decade are neither uniquely protestant nor especially Asian. What they are, she says, are middle class values, and in particular, rural middle class values.
For Davis, owner-workers, particularly rural owner-workers, tend towards certain values by virtue of their relationship to work. Small-scale farming, in particular, is an occupation that virtually demands self-discipline, hard work, thrift, and forward planning in order to be viable at all. The vicissitudes of the weather and the ever-looming possibility of crop failure makes it imperative to save rather than consume whenever possible. The long lag times between sowing and reaping force small scale farmers to plan ahead. And the sheer botanics of the job demand very long hours of very hard work.
In the Korean case, Davis stresses the life history of Park Chung Hee, the country's military ruler from 1961 through 1979. General Park himself grew up in a small-scale farming household, and remained ideologically committed to the values of the rural middle class throughout his career. His emphasis, once in power, was both to symbolically honor its values and to orient South Korea's development to the service of small farmers. As Davis puts it (p. 83),
"Park initially conceived of industrialization as a means to an end, not an end in itself, and not necessarily as his principal development goal. 'Whatever else we may consider at this moment,' Park proclaimed in 1962, 'the most urgent and fundamental need is that the rural communities should have precedence over everything else. It is the top priority.'"
Unearthing seldom recognized parts of the history of South Korea's breakneck development, Davis shows us how it was this ideological commitment to farmers that kept the government in a strong position vis-à-vis industrialists and workers in the cities. Unlike Latin American leaders, who sought to accommodate capitalists and/or workers by protecting urban industry from imports, General Park's industrialization was all about keeping his rural base happy. Exports were promoted for the purpose of earning foreign exchange to finance rural development plans. Park's export-oriented development strategy was based not on some ideological commitment to urban development, but on the need to export manufactures in order to earn dollars that could be spent on importing agricultural inputs.
Park was in a strong position in relations to urban capitalists and workers precisely because they were NOT its main constituencies. Since his main concern was to accommodate the values and lifestyles of the rural middle class, he could afford to play hardball with urban constituencies, to discipline them rather than accommodate them. And it was this discipline, meted out both to capitalists and workers, that laid the groundwork for the spectacular success of the country's urban development, which would end up completely outstripping the gains made in the countryside.
Unintended industrialization
The story of South Korea's development, then, is paradoxical on several counts. It took a government concerned chiefly with the values and priorities of small farmers to set the stage for the quickest industrialization in human history. The law of unintended consequences is, perhaps, the single biggest driver of Davis' theory. Governments, she suggests, are seldom aware of the ultimate consequences of their actions. The runaway industrialization in East Asia in the 80s and 90s was, from the point of view of the rulers who engineered the development miracle, a kind of accident.
What's important for development, she suggests, is the way the state in South Korea and Taiwan adopted the values of hard-work, forward-planning, fair play and thrift into their ideological DNA. The East Asian state, in this perspective, is not so much "autonomous" as it is embedded in the values of a class that prizes hard work and thrift above all else. This has not often been recognized simply because middle classes have become invisible to development theorists used to a marxian, class-polarized vision of society as a contest between capitalists and workers.
These are dangerous thoughts for a Venezuelan antichavista to harbor. The Chavez government is, in many ways, a middle class embedded regime. And middle class embeddedness seems to be a key ingredient for successful industrialization. Certainly, the Chavez government has dealt harshly with both organized labor and the organized business class. And while export-led development is obviously not Chavez's stated aim, we have already seen that intentions and outcomes can diverge very widely in such settings.
Could it be that, in the most bizarre way imaginable, Chavez has stumbled into something like a Latin Americanized version of the Asian development state?
Frankly, I doubt it. All sorts of studies of the East Asian Miracle specify what is meant by "discipline" in this context. "Disciplining capitalists" does not mean badgering them out of insistence, intimidating them into submission, or persecuting them through the courts. Disciplining capitalists means setting out a clear, stable, predictable set of institutions and incentives designed to allign capitalist's private interests with wider social interests, with a view to attenuating corruption. Similarly, disciplining workers does not mean randomly abusing them, imprisoning their leaders, and declaring their organizations enemies of the state. It means bringing them into a broader framework for development where their own interests are balanced off against those of the nation as a whole.
In short, what Chavez does is not to discipline capitalists and workers, but to brutalize them. His random, arbitrary treatment does little or nothing to allign their incentives with those of society as a whole. More importantly, it's based on a set of values that - although it has been widely adopted by the Venezuelan owner-worker class - stands in sharp contrast with the traditional values of the rural middle class.
And here, Venezuela's peculiar history of owner-worker exclusion and petrostate clientelism plays an important role in explaining the path the country is transiting now. Though the Venezuelan has a huge number of owner-workers, those owner-workers have not learned the same experiences from their day-to-day relationship to work as their South Korean counterparts in the 1960s learned.
Venezuela's recent history of sharp macroeconomic instability brought on by successive oil-market boom-and-bust cycles has weakened owner-workers' perception that their success depends on hard work, discipline and thrift. Instead, the only reasonable lesson an informal worker in Venezuela can draw from his or her work experience is that success depends on the inscrutable workings of the international oil market or, more precisely, on the waves of government spending that come in the wake of sporadic oil booms. Failure is equally beyond the control a Venezuelan owner-workers' success - again and again, oil market busts have led to collapses in demand that overwhelm any efforts to prepare.
Meanwhile, the only exit from this cycle seems to lie in building clientelist relationships with those in power, an old and terrible habit Chavez has not been shy about exploiting.
The bad news for the opposition is that it has alligned itself with organized workers and capitalists against the one class whose values could conceivably serve as a springboard to development. The good news is that the Venezuelan middle class is far bigger than commonly believed. Learn to communicate with them, learn to put them at the center of a development vision and discourse, and the opposition has a nearly limitless pool of potential supporters.
What is to be done?
How, then, do we woo back the owner-worker class and, at the same time, lay the foundations for meaningful development? This is a political question, requiring political vision and political leadership.
The first thing to accept is that, more than anything else, Venezuela's owner-workers crave a government that will show a little backbone when dealing with its capitalists (and to a lesser extent, its organized workers.) They are disgusted by the perception - often justified - that the traditional elite wants to re-take control of the state only in order to go back to accomodating capitalists and organized workers, marginalizing owner-workers once again in the process. In light of the South Korean and Taiwanese experience, this middle class thirst for a government that disciplines capitalists rather than accommodating them is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Unfortunately, much of the opposition's discourse serves to convince this urban middle class that it wants to return to an accommodationist posture if it retakes power. Each time an opposition leader decries Chavez's "scaring away investors" he simply reinforces this perception. Such a discourse will never mobilize the owner-worker class around an alternative vision. And it's a good thing, because chavistas may never have heard of Diane Davis, but their seat-of-the-pants feeling that handing decision-making over to capitalists would be a disaster for the country's development prospects is spot on.
What the opposition needs to do, then, is to re-gain the confidence of Venezuela's hidden middle class, of the group of owner-workers who have always underpinned rapid development experiences. That this key constituency now overwhelmingly supports Chavez is an alarming first realization. But armed with Davis' brilliant critique of East Asian growth, we can suggest some tentative themes for a successful drive to woo the owner-worker class.
First things first: Chavez, in seeking to solidify his base of support, has always charged the opposition with having a secret-agenda to go back to the system of accommodating capitalists and organized workers. Venezuela's owner-workers viscerally reject this idea, and Chavez has been brilliant at exploiting that rejection. Any alternative leader needs to make it abundantly clear that there will be no going back to the tripartite model of corporatist accommodation. Instead, the purpose will be to discipline capitalists more fairly, effectively and constructively than is possible under Chavez's chaotic authoritarianism.
Secondly, Chavez has managed to build up a huge reservoir of owner-worker good will by playing to some owner-worker values, while ignoring others. The reality - which you would never guess from listening to Chavez - is that Venezuelan owner-workers work incredibly hard, with little outside help, relying mostly on themselves. Any challenger to Chavez should emphasize these values - which coexist with those Chavez exploits - in seeking to make an emotional connection with those voters.
"You, Mr. Buhonero, you live off of your work. You get no special deals from powerful people, you don't get wined and dined by politicians, you don't get to influence decisions at the highest levels. You work, and if you work hard and do things well, you get some money. If you don't, you don't. Those rules, which have always applied to you, are the ones we're going to apply to Shell and Polar and General Motors and the Cisneros."
That is the basic message.
From my point of view, only a politician of the left has any reasonable chance to carry off such a strategy. Only someone with real left-wing credentials can be taken seriously when he says that opposing Chavez does not mean giving the country away to the capitalists. In fact, the political project Davis' work suggests to me could well be labeled "reformismo de avanzada." And there's just one Venezuelan with a real prospect of carrying it off: Teodoro Petkoff.
If you're like most people, you're thinking of the Mavesa family. You know, the one in the commercial. Husband comes home, tie loosened on the car ride home from the office, to meet his dashing young wife in their beautiful Caracas apartment. Bima furniture. Cocina empotrada. Cell phones. Mayonnaise. That sort of thing.
We all know what that middle class is about. The Venezuelan dream. It's an image. A set of associations. A lifestyle. It hardly needs much elaboration. We all know what we're talking about when we say "middle class." Don't we?
Well...don't we?
But what if...what if that image distorts as much as it reveals? What if the associations we've built up around it blur out whole groups of people who, on closer scrutiny, should be seen as middle class?
What is this Mavesa family like, anyway? For one, they live in the city. Almost certainly in Caracas. In the Mavesa scheme of things, there is no such thing as a rural middle class. What's more, the Mavesa middle class is professional. It has a university degree. It's made up of managers, lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers. It wears a tie to work every day, and depends on its salary. Most pointedly, the Mavesa middle class has money. Not too much money, granted - we are not talking about the rich here - but certainly more than the vast majority of people in Venezuela. All those nice kitchens and cars and cell phones, those are expensive. Having the money to buy these things has become a marker of middle classness.
In day-to-day speech in Venezuela, then, middle class has become more an income category than an occupational grouping. Roughly, when you say middle class what you mean is "not rich, but certainly better off than most." This image of the urban, professional, educated, employed, relatively well off middle class is so ingrained in public discourse in Venezuela it's difficult for people to see beyond it. It takes a bit of sociology to realize just how badly the Mavesa image distorts our understanding of who is and who is not middle class.
What you do, not what you earn
To start to see the problems with the Mavesa image of the middle class, you have to stop thinking just about income and focus instead on people's relationship with the world of work.
For Marx, your class affiliation has nothing whatsoever to do with income; it has everything to do with your relationship to the world of work. Those who own the inputs that generate wealth are capitalists, those who make a living by selling their work to the capitalists are proletarians. That's that. By this reckoning, of course, the Mavesa middle class is not actually middle class at all: that flawlessly groomed husband sells his labor to an employer. For Marx, at least, he is merely a privileged member of the working class.
The problem is that this kind of understanding leaves no space at all for the middle class as such, as a class distinct from both owners and workers. Seen in this way, what we think of as "middle class" is merely a group of particularly privileged proletarians or particularly pela-bola capitalists. Marxists have always presumed that these people "in the middle" would eventually have to choose sides between the two dominant classes. In fact, Marxist sociology tends to erase the middle class from the picture altogether. Marx presumed that the conflict between capitalists and proletarians would be the driving motor of history, so why waste time examining the position of the residuals in the middle?
Marx did recognize the existence in Europe of a large number of people that occupied a somewhat paradoxical position between capitalists and proletarians. These were the armies of small time shop-owners and small-fry manufacturers working in the tiny workshops that proliferated in 19th century Europe. The por-su-cuenta squad.
Marx thought of these people basically as capitalists. They certainly own the means of production they use, and since this was the key litmus test for Marx, he labeled this group the "petty bourgeoisie", the small-time capitalists.
But thinking of this strata as being "just like" regular capitalists, just on a smaller scale, misses the particularity of their position. The day-to-day reality of working life for very small-scale producers and traders often has more in common with the day-to-day life of the traditional working-class than with that of capitalists. They may own the means of production they use, but they basically work for a living. Unlike capitalists, they can't rely on their capital to keep them fed. Unlike workers, they have no access to a steady quince-y-ultimo salary, or collective bargaining, or statutory vacation pay. Their position, if anything, is more precarious than that of the organized working class: if they work, they earn; if they don't, they don't. They are not small-time capitalists as much as they are owner-workers.
Now, it won't have escaped an alert reader that this group that Marx described as the petty bourgeoisie corresponds, in contemporary Venezuelan terms, to the informal sector. An owner-worker class does indeed exist in Venezuela, and a big one...it's just that, in Venezuela, this part of society earns its living beyond the scope of the law.
Here we begin to see why the Mavesa family image is such a lousy reference point when you're trying to picture the Venezuelan middle class. Because Venezuela's current petty-bourgeoisie, Venezuela's genuine occupational middle class, has almost nothing in common with the Mavesa family. It is a nation of buhoneros. Of mata-tigres. Of taxi-drivers and conuqueros. Of people who can't get proper jobs, but they own a tiny little bit of capital, and they try their best to make a living out of it.
That middle class, that occupational middle class, has always lived beyond the reach of the state. It shares none of the characteristics of the Mavesa family. It is more likely to come home with a gunshot wound the neighborhood tough than it is to come home smiling from a nice air-conditioned day at the office.
Venezuela's informal economy - its real middle class - is huge. Since 1994 has made up roughly half the country's work force. It is by no means solidly urban. It counts as members hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers, as well as owner-workers in small-scale agricultural input and processing activities in the countryside. It far from professional. Informal economy workers are, statistically, less educated than formal sector workers. And its members are certainly not relatively well-off: according to a 2002 UCAB Poverty Project study, 9 out of 10 informal sector workers earn less than the legal minimum wage.
When you start to think of the informal economy as the hidden middle class, you're hit by the startling realization that Venezuela's occupational middle class - its owner-workers - has long been worse off than its working class. The post-1958 political system, with its corporatist emphasis on balancing the demands of capitalists and workers, systematically excluded the ranks of the owner-workers from political power.
This structural exclusion is made dramatically visible in the composition of the old tripartite commissions that, before Chavez, were charged with negotiating wage policy. The system formally included capitalists (Fedecamaras) and workers (CTV) in wage-bargaining, but did not even recognize the existence of a sprawling universe of small scale owner-workers. The por-su-cuentas had no seat at the table. The fourth republic had no structures for including or empowering the hidden middle class. In the end, it was the small-scale owner-workers' anger at their marginalization that propelled Hugo Chavez into power.
From this perspective, the 2001-2004 alliance of CTV and Fedecamaras against the government played perfectly into Chavez's game plan. Relying on exploiting the sense of resentment of the excluded against the included, Chavez had no trouble painting CTV and Fedecamaras as the Enemy. His main constituents - who had always been shut out of the legal economy and therefore had no personal stake in the outcome of tripartite commission negotiations - applauded his refusal to deal with either of the two bodies.
The weirdly counterintuitive conclusion, if such a reading is correct, is that what Chavez is leading is a revolution of the middle class. It sounds strange to put it that way because the images we associate with middle classness are based on images based on income rather than occupation. Whatever sociological theory says, most of us will always have a hard time looking at a buhonero or a conuquero and thinking of them as archetypes of middle classness. In income terms, buhoneros and conuqueros are among the poorest people in Venezuela, what's "middle" about that?
What's middle about it is the dual nature of owner-workers' relationship to capital and work. Those who live off their capital and do not work are capitalists, those who live off their work and have no capital are workers, and those who both own their capital and work to make a living are, well, in the middle.
The hidden middle class and the East Asian Economic Miracle
This whole stream of unorthodox thoughts occurred to me while reading "Discipline and Development : Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America", the startlingly lucid new book by MIT historical sociologist Diane Davis. The book's starting point is one of the hottest debates in development economics today: why have East Asian economies outperformed Latin American economies so decisively over the last fifty years.
To make sense of Davis' thinking, you need to take a little side-trip into the history of the East Asian economic miracle. Davis focuses on just two countries: South Korea and Taiwan.
In the four decades after 1960, the South Korean and Taiwanese economies grew faster than any economy ever in the history of the world. In forty years, these countries went from having the per capita income of today's Haiti to having the per capita income of today's Spain. This success brought them more than a little bit of attention from development economists. What they found made uncomfortable reading for many of them.
Even the most superficial look at the economies of South Korea and Taiwan showed major differences with the standard, "Washington Consensus" style recipe for development. Though many US trained economists saw liberalism as a kind of divinely ordained absolute good, it didn't take long to realize South Korea and Taiwan had in no way given free rein to the "invisible hand" of the market during their economic take-off years. Instead, they relied on peculiar combinations of private enterprise and public planning. Industrial production was in the hands of capitalists, certainly, but industrial financing was controlled by state-owned banks. Foreign direct investment was essentially banned in South Korea until the late 1980s. Technology transfer provisions were prominent, and the state had a clear strategy to help local companies crack into particular export markets.
The industrial development vision was based on exporting manufactures for the world market, certainly, but companies were often pushed to participate in the export drive by government fiat. In some cases, the government literally forced companies to enter particular export markets by threatening to withold financing if they did not. Governments made special efforts to help private companies produce for the export market, rewarding successful exporters with further directed credit and subsidies while punishing unsuccessful exporters by witholding such facilities. Companies that could not compete in export markets were simply allowed to fail.
South Korea and Taiwan, then, relied on a highly peculiar combination of private and public institutions to achieve their development gains. They did not, as the Washington Consensus crowd might have wished, minimize government intervention in the economy. Just the opposite. South Korean and Taiwanese bureaucrats identified the most promising industrial markets for export growth, coordinated the financing and know-how for local companies to enter those markets, they administed financial resources to foster them and systematically sought to reward capitalists who acted in accordance with their development priorities while punishing those who did not. Both civil servants and businessmen in East Asia have always understood and accepted that it is the public sector that is in the development driver's seat, with capitalists acting within the narrow bounds allowed to them by the state's development policy.
Autonomous states?
A very big literature now exists on how exactly these East Asian states managed to launch their countries on the path to self-sustaining economic growth. Scholars like Linsu Kim, Alice Amsden, Robert Wade, Chalmers Johnson and Margaret Woo Cummings are among the most prominent in this field. The policy-mix the East Asians used has been labeled "state-led, export-oriented development," and the type of state able to pull off this kind of policy has been described as the "developmental state."
Studies of the developmental state have traditionally stressed "state autonomy" as the key to the success of the east asian development model. Following Berkeley sociologist Peter Evans, they've highlighted the East Asian state's ample authority, its space to act autonomously of pressures brought to bear by various social groups.
It's not hard to see why such autonomy from vested interests is important. In Latin America, where states have been much less autonomous from social pressures, efforts at state-led industrialization have generally morphed into giant corruption rackets. States beholden to the interests of capitalists seek to accommodate their clients: a state that cannot act autonomously of capitalists is most unlikely to work to discipline them.
Instead, capitalists' work to use their privileged access to the state to get their hands on state resources. Venezuela's post 1973 history is one long case-study of this dynamic. Similarly, states beholden to the narrow interests of workers lack the autonomy to discipline the working class's wage demands. Peru and Argentina, with their long histories of hyperinflation, are classic examples of the economically catastrophic consequences of continually seeking to accommodate the working class to the detriment of other segments of society.
The suggestion, then, is that the East Asian states had a special ability to discipline rather than accommodate both capitalists and workers, and that's how they managed to resist corruption.
The Middle Class core of the developmental state
It's a this point that Davis' fascinating book picks up the story. The question she wants to ask is not so much how the East Asian Developmental State operates, but rather what the social foundations of such a state might be. What are its key constituencies? What is its "social base"? Who does the government play to? Whose values does it encarnate? And how did those values allow a few countries to turn the remarkable trick of setting up a professional state able to plan and coordinate Export-Oriented Development without becoming hopelessly corrupt?
Davis' answer, you will not be surprised to hear, is all about the middle class. And what she understands by "middle class" is much closer to the informal-economy model of owner-workers than to the Mavesa image that predominates in Venezuela.
Davis questions the very notion of an "autonomous state." States cannot act in a social vacuum, with no organic rooting in the society where they operate. Not even dictatorial states. All states need some form of social base, and the base they choose will, to some degree, determine the kinds of values they embody and the forms of policies they will apply.
In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, she explains, South Korea and Taiwan were overwhelmingly rural countries. Both implemented wide-ranging, successful, US-backed land reform programs aimed at creating a kind of Jefersonian society of small-scale farmers. By the early 1960s, 70% of South Korea's population lived in the countryside, and 90% of farmers were owner-workers. They were South Korea's conuqueros - a class created by land reform, and demographically dominant over the rest of the country. That they were poor - very poor, even - nobody could deny. But they owned the capital they used to make a living, so Davis labels them the rural middle class.
In the pages that follow, Davis traces the hidden history of the relationship between rural owner-workers and export-oriented industrialization. Going directly against the grain of almost all development theorizing on East Asia, she argues that it was the state's decision to privilege rural development over urban development, and rural middle class values over urban capitalist or working class values, that allowed the East Asian states to become autonomous enough from capitalists and workers to discipline them properly. Based on a close reading of the political history of South Korea and Taiwan, she stresses the way both governments saw small-scale rural producers as both a key constituency and a moral reserve for the nation.
At the heart of Davis' contribution is a discussion about values. Much has been made about the supposed role of the protestant ethic and of "Asian Values" to account for the first and last waves of industrialization. Indeed, the values claimed for protestants and Asians in turn are remarkably similar: hard work, thrift, individual responsibility, respect for authority, a high propensity to save rather than consume. For Davis, however, both labels are wrong...the values that Weber pinpointed over a century ago and Lee Kwan Yew highlighted in the last decade are neither uniquely protestant nor especially Asian. What they are, she says, are middle class values, and in particular, rural middle class values.
For Davis, owner-workers, particularly rural owner-workers, tend towards certain values by virtue of their relationship to work. Small-scale farming, in particular, is an occupation that virtually demands self-discipline, hard work, thrift, and forward planning in order to be viable at all. The vicissitudes of the weather and the ever-looming possibility of crop failure makes it imperative to save rather than consume whenever possible. The long lag times between sowing and reaping force small scale farmers to plan ahead. And the sheer botanics of the job demand very long hours of very hard work.
In the Korean case, Davis stresses the life history of Park Chung Hee, the country's military ruler from 1961 through 1979. General Park himself grew up in a small-scale farming household, and remained ideologically committed to the values of the rural middle class throughout his career. His emphasis, once in power, was both to symbolically honor its values and to orient South Korea's development to the service of small farmers. As Davis puts it (p. 83),
"Park initially conceived of industrialization as a means to an end, not an end in itself, and not necessarily as his principal development goal. 'Whatever else we may consider at this moment,' Park proclaimed in 1962, 'the most urgent and fundamental need is that the rural communities should have precedence over everything else. It is the top priority.'"
Unearthing seldom recognized parts of the history of South Korea's breakneck development, Davis shows us how it was this ideological commitment to farmers that kept the government in a strong position vis-à-vis industrialists and workers in the cities. Unlike Latin American leaders, who sought to accommodate capitalists and/or workers by protecting urban industry from imports, General Park's industrialization was all about keeping his rural base happy. Exports were promoted for the purpose of earning foreign exchange to finance rural development plans. Park's export-oriented development strategy was based not on some ideological commitment to urban development, but on the need to export manufactures in order to earn dollars that could be spent on importing agricultural inputs.
Park was in a strong position in relations to urban capitalists and workers precisely because they were NOT its main constituencies. Since his main concern was to accommodate the values and lifestyles of the rural middle class, he could afford to play hardball with urban constituencies, to discipline them rather than accommodate them. And it was this discipline, meted out both to capitalists and workers, that laid the groundwork for the spectacular success of the country's urban development, which would end up completely outstripping the gains made in the countryside.
Unintended industrialization
The story of South Korea's development, then, is paradoxical on several counts. It took a government concerned chiefly with the values and priorities of small farmers to set the stage for the quickest industrialization in human history. The law of unintended consequences is, perhaps, the single biggest driver of Davis' theory. Governments, she suggests, are seldom aware of the ultimate consequences of their actions. The runaway industrialization in East Asia in the 80s and 90s was, from the point of view of the rulers who engineered the development miracle, a kind of accident.
What's important for development, she suggests, is the way the state in South Korea and Taiwan adopted the values of hard-work, forward-planning, fair play and thrift into their ideological DNA. The East Asian state, in this perspective, is not so much "autonomous" as it is embedded in the values of a class that prizes hard work and thrift above all else. This has not often been recognized simply because middle classes have become invisible to development theorists used to a marxian, class-polarized vision of society as a contest between capitalists and workers.
These are dangerous thoughts for a Venezuelan antichavista to harbor. The Chavez government is, in many ways, a middle class embedded regime. And middle class embeddedness seems to be a key ingredient for successful industrialization. Certainly, the Chavez government has dealt harshly with both organized labor and the organized business class. And while export-led development is obviously not Chavez's stated aim, we have already seen that intentions and outcomes can diverge very widely in such settings.
Could it be that, in the most bizarre way imaginable, Chavez has stumbled into something like a Latin Americanized version of the Asian development state?
Frankly, I doubt it. All sorts of studies of the East Asian Miracle specify what is meant by "discipline" in this context. "Disciplining capitalists" does not mean badgering them out of insistence, intimidating them into submission, or persecuting them through the courts. Disciplining capitalists means setting out a clear, stable, predictable set of institutions and incentives designed to allign capitalist's private interests with wider social interests, with a view to attenuating corruption. Similarly, disciplining workers does not mean randomly abusing them, imprisoning their leaders, and declaring their organizations enemies of the state. It means bringing them into a broader framework for development where their own interests are balanced off against those of the nation as a whole.
In short, what Chavez does is not to discipline capitalists and workers, but to brutalize them. His random, arbitrary treatment does little or nothing to allign their incentives with those of society as a whole. More importantly, it's based on a set of values that - although it has been widely adopted by the Venezuelan owner-worker class - stands in sharp contrast with the traditional values of the rural middle class.
And here, Venezuela's peculiar history of owner-worker exclusion and petrostate clientelism plays an important role in explaining the path the country is transiting now. Though the Venezuelan has a huge number of owner-workers, those owner-workers have not learned the same experiences from their day-to-day relationship to work as their South Korean counterparts in the 1960s learned.
Venezuela's recent history of sharp macroeconomic instability brought on by successive oil-market boom-and-bust cycles has weakened owner-workers' perception that their success depends on hard work, discipline and thrift. Instead, the only reasonable lesson an informal worker in Venezuela can draw from his or her work experience is that success depends on the inscrutable workings of the international oil market or, more precisely, on the waves of government spending that come in the wake of sporadic oil booms. Failure is equally beyond the control a Venezuelan owner-workers' success - again and again, oil market busts have led to collapses in demand that overwhelm any efforts to prepare.
Meanwhile, the only exit from this cycle seems to lie in building clientelist relationships with those in power, an old and terrible habit Chavez has not been shy about exploiting.
The bad news for the opposition is that it has alligned itself with organized workers and capitalists against the one class whose values could conceivably serve as a springboard to development. The good news is that the Venezuelan middle class is far bigger than commonly believed. Learn to communicate with them, learn to put them at the center of a development vision and discourse, and the opposition has a nearly limitless pool of potential supporters.
What is to be done?
How, then, do we woo back the owner-worker class and, at the same time, lay the foundations for meaningful development? This is a political question, requiring political vision and political leadership.
The first thing to accept is that, more than anything else, Venezuela's owner-workers crave a government that will show a little backbone when dealing with its capitalists (and to a lesser extent, its organized workers.) They are disgusted by the perception - often justified - that the traditional elite wants to re-take control of the state only in order to go back to accomodating capitalists and organized workers, marginalizing owner-workers once again in the process. In light of the South Korean and Taiwanese experience, this middle class thirst for a government that disciplines capitalists rather than accommodating them is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Unfortunately, much of the opposition's discourse serves to convince this urban middle class that it wants to return to an accommodationist posture if it retakes power. Each time an opposition leader decries Chavez's "scaring away investors" he simply reinforces this perception. Such a discourse will never mobilize the owner-worker class around an alternative vision. And it's a good thing, because chavistas may never have heard of Diane Davis, but their seat-of-the-pants feeling that handing decision-making over to capitalists would be a disaster for the country's development prospects is spot on.
What the opposition needs to do, then, is to re-gain the confidence of Venezuela's hidden middle class, of the group of owner-workers who have always underpinned rapid development experiences. That this key constituency now overwhelmingly supports Chavez is an alarming first realization. But armed with Davis' brilliant critique of East Asian growth, we can suggest some tentative themes for a successful drive to woo the owner-worker class.
First things first: Chavez, in seeking to solidify his base of support, has always charged the opposition with having a secret-agenda to go back to the system of accommodating capitalists and organized workers. Venezuela's owner-workers viscerally reject this idea, and Chavez has been brilliant at exploiting that rejection. Any alternative leader needs to make it abundantly clear that there will be no going back to the tripartite model of corporatist accommodation. Instead, the purpose will be to discipline capitalists more fairly, effectively and constructively than is possible under Chavez's chaotic authoritarianism.
Secondly, Chavez has managed to build up a huge reservoir of owner-worker good will by playing to some owner-worker values, while ignoring others. The reality - which you would never guess from listening to Chavez - is that Venezuelan owner-workers work incredibly hard, with little outside help, relying mostly on themselves. Any challenger to Chavez should emphasize these values - which coexist with those Chavez exploits - in seeking to make an emotional connection with those voters.
"You, Mr. Buhonero, you live off of your work. You get no special deals from powerful people, you don't get wined and dined by politicians, you don't get to influence decisions at the highest levels. You work, and if you work hard and do things well, you get some money. If you don't, you don't. Those rules, which have always applied to you, are the ones we're going to apply to Shell and Polar and General Motors and the Cisneros."
That is the basic message.
From my point of view, only a politician of the left has any reasonable chance to carry off such a strategy. Only someone with real left-wing credentials can be taken seriously when he says that opposing Chavez does not mean giving the country away to the capitalists. In fact, the political project Davis' work suggests to me could well be labeled "reformismo de avanzada." And there's just one Venezuelan with a real prospect of carrying it off: Teodoro Petkoff.
July 7, 2005
The Killing Machine
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
From The New Republic
Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs, hoodies, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandannas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and of course those omnipresent T-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda, of the socialist heartthrob in his beret during the early years of the revolution, as Che happened to walk into the photographer's viewfinder--and into the image that, thirty-eight years after his death, is still the logo of revolutionary (or is it capitalist?) chic. Sean O'Hagan claimed in The Observer that there is even a soap powder with the slogan "Che washes whiter."
Che products are marketed by big corporations and small businesses, such as the Burlington Coat Factory, which put out a television commercial depicting a youth in fatigue pants wearing a Che T-shirt, or Flamingo's Boutique in Union City, New Jersey, whose owner responded to the fury of local Cuban exiles with this devastating argument: "I sell whatever people want to buy." Revolutionaries join the merchandising frenzy, too--from "The Che Store," catering to "all your revolutionary needs" on the Internet, to the Italian writer Gianni Minà, who sold Robert Redford the movie rights to Che's diary of his juvenile trip around South America in 1952 in exchange for access to the shooting of the film The Motorcycle Diaries so that Minà could produce his own documentary. Not to mention Alberto Granado, who accompanied Che on his youthful trip and advises documentarists, and now complains in Madrid, according to El País, over Rioja wine and duck magret, that the American embargo against Cuba makes it hard for him to collect royalties. To take the irony further: the building where Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, a splendid early twentieth-century edifice at the corner of Urquiza and Entre Ríos Streets, was until recently occupied by the private pension fund AFJP Máxima, a child of Argentina's privatization of social security in the 1990s.
The metamorphosis of Che Guevara into a capitalist brand is not new, but the brand has been enjoying a revival of late--an especially remarkable revival, since it comes years after the political and ideological collapse of all that Guevara represented. This windfall is owed substantially to The Motorcycle Diaries, the film produced by Robert Redford and directed by Walter Salles. (It is one of three major motion pictures on Che either made or in the process of being made in the last two years; the other two have been directed by Josh Evans and Steven Soderbergh.) Beautifully shot against landscapes that have clearly eluded the eroding effects of polluting capitalism, the film shows the young man on a voyage of self-discovery as his budding social conscience encounters social and economic exploitation--laying the ground for a New Wave re-invention of the man whom Sartre once called the most complete human being of our era.
But to be more precise, the current Che revival started in 1997, on the thirtieth anniversary of his death, when five biographies hit the bookstores, and his remains were discovered near an airstrip at Bolivia's Vallegrande airport, after a retired Bolivian general, in a spectacularly timed revelation, disclosed the exact location. The anniversary refocused attention on Freddy Alborta's famous photograph of Che's corpse laid out on a table, foreshortened and dead and romantic, looking like Christ in a Mantegna painting.
It is customary for followers of a cult not to know the real life story of their hero, the historical truth. (Many Rastafarians would renounce Haile Selassie if they had any notion of who he really was.) It is not surprising that Guevara's contemporary followers, his new post-communist admirers, also delude themselves by clinging to a myth--except the young Argentines who have come up with an expression that rhymes perfectly in Spanish: "Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué," or "I have a Che T-shirt and I don't know why."
Consider some of the people who have recently brandished or invoked Guevara's likeness as a beacon of justice and rebellion against the abuse of power. In Lebanon, demonstrators protesting against Syria at the grave of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri carried Che's image. Thierry Henry, a French soccer player who plays for Arsenal, in England, showed up at a major gala organized by FIFA, the world's soccer body, wearing a red and black Che T-shirt. In a recent review in The New York Times of George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, Manohla Dargis noted that "the greatest shock here may be the transformation of a black zombie into a righteous revolutionary leader," and added, "I guess Che really does live, after all."
The soccer hero Maradona showed off the emblematic Che tattoo on his right arm during a trip where he met Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. In Stavropol, in southern Russia, protesters denouncing cash payments of welfare concessions took to the central square with Che flags. In San Francisco, City Lights Books, the legendary home of beat literature, treats visitors to a section devoted to Latin America in which half the shelves are taken up by Che books. José Luis Montoya, a Mexican police officer who battles drug crime in Mexicali, wears a Che sweatband because it makes him feel stronger. At the Dheisheh refugee camp on the West Bank, Che posters adorn a wall that pays tribute to the Intifada. A Sunday magazine devoted to social life in Sydney, Australia, lists the three dream guests at a dinner party: Alvar Aalto, Richard Branson, and Che Guevara. Leung Kwok-hung, the rebel elected to Hong Kong's Legislative Council, defies Beijing by wearing a Che T-shirt. In Brazil, Frei Betto, President Lula da Silva's adviser in charge of the high-profile "Zero Hunger" program, says that "we should have paid less attention to Trotsky and much more to Che Guevara." And most famously, at this year's Academy Awards ceremony Carlos Santana and Antonio Banderas performed the theme song from The Motorcycle Diaries, and Santana showed up wearing a Che T-shirt and a crucifix. The manifestations of the new cult of Che are everywhere. Once again the myth is firing up people whose causes for the most part represent the exact opposite of what Guevara was.
No man is without some redeeming qualities. In the case of Che Guevara, those qualities may help us to measure the gulf that separates reality from myth. His honesty (well, partial honesty) meant that he left written testimony of his cruelties, including the really ugly, though not the ugliest, stuff. His courage--what Castro described as "his way, in every difficult and dangerous moment, of doing the most difficult and dangerous thing"--meant that he did not live to take full responsibility for Cuba's hell. Myth can tell you as much about an era as truth. And so it is that thanks to Che's own testimonials to his thoughts and his deeds, and thanks also to his premature departure, we may know exactly how deluded so many of our contemporaries are about so much.
Guevara might have been enamored of his own death, but he was much more enamored of other people's deaths. In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his "Message to the Tricontinental": "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine." His earlier writings are also peppered with this rhetorical and ideological violence. Although his former girlfriend Chichina Ferreyra doubts that the original version of the diaries of his motorcycle trip contains the observation that "I feel my nostrils dilate savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood of the enemy," Guevara did share with Granado at that very young age this exclamation: "Revolution without firing a shot? You're crazy." At other times the young bohemian seemed unable to distinguish between the levity of death as a spectacle and the tragedy of a revolution's victims. In a letter to his mother in 1954, written in Guatemala, where he witnessed the overthrow of the revolutionary government of Jacobo Arbenz, he wrote: "It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches, and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in."
Guevara's disposition when he traveled with Castro from Mexico to Cuba aboard the Granma is captured in a phrase in a letter to his wife that he penned on January 28, 1957, not long after disembarking, which was published in her book Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara in Sierra Maestra: "Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and bloodthirsty." This mentality had been reinforced by his conviction that Arbenz had lost power because he had failed to execute his potential enemies. An earlier letter to his former girlfriend Tita Infante had observed that "if there had been some executions, the government would have maintained the capacity to return the blows." It is hardly a surprise that during the armed struggle against Batista, and then after the triumphant entry into Havana, Guevara murdered or oversaw the executions in summary trials of scores of people--proven enemies, suspected enemies, and those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: "I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain.... His belongings were now mine." Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim "was really guilty enough to deserve death," he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: "He had to pay the price." At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture.
Luis Guardia and Pedro Corzo, two researchers in Florida who are working on a documentary about Guevara, have obtained the testimony of Jaime Costa Vázquez, a former commander in the revolutionary army known as "El Catalán," who maintains that many of the executions attributed to Ramiro Valdés, a future interior minister of Cuba, were Guevara's direct responsibility, because Valdés was under his orders in the mountains. "If in doubt, kill him" were Che's instructions. On the eve of victory, according to Costa, Che ordered the execution of a couple dozen people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where his column had gone as part of a final assault on the island. Some of them were shot in a hotel, as Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas, another former revolutionary who later became a journalist, has written--adding that among those executed, known as casquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment.
But the "cold-blooded killing machine" did not show the full extent of his rigor until, immediately after the collapse of the Batista regime, Castro put him in charge of La Cabaña prison. (Castro had a clinically good eye for picking the right person to guard the revolution against infection.) San Carlos de La Cabaña was a stone fortress used to defend Havana against English pirates in the eighteenth century; later it became a military barracks. In a manner chillingly reminiscent of Lavrenti Beria, Guevara presided during the first half of 1959 over one of the darkest periods of the revolution. José Vilasuso, a lawyer and a professor at Universidad Interamericana de Bayamón in Puerto Rico, who belonged to the body in charge of the summary judicial process at La Cabaña, told me recently that
Che was in charge of the Comisión Depuradora. The process followed the law of the Sierra: there was a military court and Che's guidelines to us were that we should act with conviction, meaning that they were all murderers and the revolutionary way to proceed was to be implacable. My direct superior was Miguel Duque Estrada. My duty was to legalize the files before they were sent on to the Ministry. Executions took place from Monday to Friday, in the middle of the night, just after the sentence was given and automatically confirmed by the appellate body. On the most gruesome night I remember, seven men were executed.
Javier Arzuaga, the Basque chaplain who gave comfort to those sentenced to die and personally witnessed dozens of executions, spoke to me recently from his home in Puerto Rico. A former Catholic priest, now seventy-five, who describes himself as "closer to Leonardo Boff and Liberation Theology than to the former Cardinal Ratzinger," he recalls that
"there were about eight hundred prisoners in a space fit for no more than three hundred: former Batista military and police personnel, some journalists, a few businessmen and merchants. The revolutionary tribunal was made of militiamen. Che Guevara presided over the appellate court. He never overturned a sentence. I would visit those on death row at the galera de la muerte. A rumor went around that I hypnotized prisoners because many remained calm, so Che ordered that I be present at the executions. After I left in May, they executed many more, but I personally witnessed fifty-five executions. There was an American, Herman Marks, apparently a former convict. We called him "the butcher" because he enjoyed giving the order to shoot. I pleaded many times with Che on behalf of prisoners. I remember especially the case of Ariel Lima, a young boy. Che did not budge. Nor did Fidel, whom I visited. I became so traumatized that at the end of May 1959 I was ordered to leave the parish of Casa Blanca, where La Cabaña was located and where I had held Mass for three years. I went to Mexico for treatment. The day I left, Che told me we had both tried to bring one another to each other's side and had failed. His last words were: "When we take our masks off, we will be enemies."
How many people were killed at La Cabaña? Pedro Corzo offers a figure of some two hundred, similar to that given by Armando Lago, a retired economics professor who has compiled a list of 179 names as part of an eight-year study on executions in Cuba. Vilasuso told me that four hundred people were executed between January and the end of June in 1959 (at which point Che ceased to be in charge of La Cabaña). Secret cables sent by the American Embassy in Havana to the State Department in Washington spoke of "over 500." According to Jorge Castañeda, one of Guevara's biographers, a Basque Catholic sympathetic to the revolution, the late Father Iñaki de Aspiazú, spoke of seven hundred victims. Félix Rodríguez, a CIA agent who was part of the team in charge of the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia, told me that he confronted Che after his capture about "the two thousand or so" executions for which he was responsible during his lifetime. "He said they were all CIA agents and did not address the figure," Rodríguez recalls. The higher figures may include executions that took place in the months after Che ceased to be in charge of the prison.
Which brings us back to Carlos Santana and his chic Che gear. In an open letter published in El Nuevo Herald on March 31 of this year, the great jazz musician Paquito D'Rivera castigated Santana for his costume at the Oscars, and added: "One of those Cubans [at La Cabaña] was my cousin Bebo, who was imprisoned there precisely for being a Christian. He recounts to me with infinite bitterness how he could hear from his cell in the early hours of dawn the executions, without trial or process of law, of the many who died shouting, 'Long live Christ the King!'"
Che's lust for power had other ways of expressing itself besides murder. The contradiction between his passion for travel--a protest of sorts against the of the nation-state--and his impulse to become himself an enslaving state over others is poignant. In writing about Pedro Valdivia, the conquistador of Chile, Guevara reflected: "He belonged to that special class of men the species produces every so often, in whom a craving for limitless power is so extreme that any suffering to achieve it seems natural." He might have been describing himself. At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over other people's lives and property, and to abolish their free will.
In 1958, after taking the city of Sancti Spiritus, Guevara unsuccessfully tried to impose a kind of sharia, regulating relations between men and women, the use of alcohol, and informal gambling--a puritanism that did not exactly characterize his own way of life. He also ordered his men to rob banks, a decision that he justified in a letter to Enrique Oltuski, a subordinate, in November of that year: "The struggling masses agree to robbing banks because none of them has a penny in them." This idea of revolution as a license to re-allocate property as he saw fit led the Marxist Puritan to take over the mansion of an emigrant after the triumph of the revolution.
The urge to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of others' territory was central to Guevara's politics of raw power. In his memoirs, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser records that Guevara asked him how many people had left his country because of land reform. When Nasser replied that no one had left, Che countered in anger that the way to measure the depth of change is by the number of people "who feel there is no place for them in the new society." This predatory instinct reached a pinnacle in 1965, when he started talking, God-like, about the "New Man" that he and his revolution would create.
Che's obsession with collectivist control led him to collaborate on the formation of the security apparatus that was set up to subjugate six and a half million Cubans. In early 1959, a series of secret meetings took place in Tarará, near Havana, at the mansion to which Che temporarily withdrew to recover from an illness. That is where the top leaders, including Castro, designed the Cuban police state. Ramiro Valdés, Che's subordinate during the guerrilla war, was put in charge of G-2, a body modeled on the Cheka. Angel Ciutah, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War sent by the Soviets who had been very close to Ramón Mercader, Trotsky's assassin, and later befriended Che, played a key role in organizing the system, together with Luis Alberto Lavandeira, who had served the boss at La Cabaña. Guevara himself took charge of G-6, the body tasked with the ideological indoctrination of the armed forces. The U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 became the perfect occasion to consolidate the new police state, with the rounding up of tens of thousands of Cubans and a new series of executions. As Guevara himself told the Soviet ambassador Sergei Kudriavtsev, counterrevolutionaries were never "to raise their head again."
'Counterrevolutionary" is the term that was applied to anyone who departed from dogma. It was the communist synonym for "heretic." Concentration camps were one form in which dogmatic power was employed to suppress dissent. History attributes to the Spanish general Valeriano Weyler, the captain-general of Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century, the first use of the word "concentration" to describe the policy of surrounding masses of potential opponents--in his case, supporters of the Cuban independence movement--with barbed wire and fences. How fitting that Cuba's revolutionaries more than half a century later were to take up this indigenous tradition. In the beginning, the revolution mobilized volunteers to build schools and to work in ports, plantations, and factories--all exquisite photo-ops for Che the stevedore, Che the cane-cutter, Che the clothmaker. It was not long before volunteer work became a little less voluntary: the first forced labor camp, Guanahacabibes, was set up in western Cuba at the end of 1960. This is how Che explained the function performed by this method of confinement: "[We] only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail ... people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals, to a lesser or greater degree.... It is hard labor, not brute labor, rather the working conditions there are hard."
This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and other such scum, under the banner of Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded into buses and trucks, the "unfit" would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros's wrenching documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.
So Time magazine may have been less than accurate in August 1960 when it described the revolution's division of labor with a cover story featuring Che Guevara as the "brain" and Fidel Castro as the "heart" and Raúl Castro as the "fist." But the perception reflected Guevara's crucial role in turning Cuba into a bastion of totalitarianism. Che was a somewhat unlikely candidate for ideological purity, given his bohemian spirit, but during the years of training in Mexico and in the ensuing period of armed struggle in Cuba he emerged as the communist ideologue infatuated with the Soviet Union, much to the discomfort of Castro and others who were essentially opportunists using whatever means were necessary to gain power. When the would-be revolutionaries were arrested in Mexico in 1956, Guevara was the only one who admitted that he was a communist and was studying Russian. (He spoke openly about his relationship with Nikolai Leonov from the Soviet Embassy.) During the armed struggle in Cuba, he forged a strong alliance with the Popular Socialist Party (the island's Communist Party) and with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, a key player in the conversion of Castro's regime to communism.
This fanatical disposition made Che into a linchpin of the "Sovietization" of the revolution that had repeatedly boasted about its independent character. Very soon after the barbudos came to power, Guevara took part in negotiations with Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet deputy prime minister, who visited Cuba. He was entrusted with the mission of furthering Soviet-Cuban negotiations during a visit to Moscow in late 1960. (It was part of a long trip in which Kim Il Sung's North Korea was the country that impressed him "the most.") Guevara's second trip to Russia, in August 1962, was even more significant, because it sealed the deal to turn Cuba into a Soviet nuclear beachhead. He met Khrushchev in Yalta to finalize details on an operation that had already begun and involved the introduction of forty-two Soviet missiles, half of which were armed with nuclear warheads, as well as launchers and some forty-two thousand soldiers. After pressing his Soviet allies on the danger that the United States might find out what was happening, Guevara obtained assurances that the Soviet navy would intervene--in other words, that Moscow was ready to go to war.
According to Philippe Gavi's biography of Guevara, the revolutionary had bragged that "this country is willing to risk everything in an atomic war of unimaginable destructiveness to defend a principle." Just after the Cuban missile crisis ended--with Khrushchev reneging on the promise made in Yalta and negotiating a deal with the United States behind Castro's back that included the removal of American missiles from Turkey--Guevara told a British communist daily: "If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our defense against aggression." And a couple of years later, at the United Nations, he was true to form: "As Marxists we have maintained that peaceful coexistence among nations does not include coexistence between exploiters and the exploited."
Guevara distanced himself from the Soviet Union in the last years of his life. He did so for the wrong reasons, blaming Moscow for being too soft ideologically and diplomatically, for making too many concessions--unlike Maoist China, which he came to see as a haven of orthodoxy. In October 1964, a memo written by Oleg Daroussenkov, a Soviet official close to him, quotes Guevara as saying: "We asked the Czechoslovaks for arms; they turned us down. Then we asked the Chinese; they said yes in a few days, and did not even charge us, stating that one does not sell arms to a friend." In fact, Guevara resented the fact that Moscow was asking other members of the communist bloc, including Cuba, for something in return for its colossal aid and political support. His final attack on Moscow came in Algiers, in February 1965, at an international conference, where he accused the Soviets of adopting the "law of value," that is, capitalism. His break with the Soviets, in sum, was not a cry for independence. It was an Enver Hoxha-like howl for the total subordination of reality to blind ideological orthodoxy.
The great revolutionary had a chance to put into practice his economic vision--his idea of social justice--as head of the National Bank of Cuba and of the Department of Industry of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform at the end of 1959, and, starting in early 1961, as minister of industry. The period in which Guevara was in charge of most of the Cuban economy saw the near-collapse of sugar production, the failure of industrialization, and the introduction of rationing--all this in what had been one of Latin America's four most economically successful countries since before the Batista dictatorship.
His stint as head of the National Bank, during which he printed bills signed "Che," has been summarized by his deputy, Ernesto Betancourt: "[He] was ignorant of the most elementary economic principles." Guevara's powers of perception regarding the world economy were famously expressed in 1961, at a hemispheric conference in Uruguay, where he predicted a 10 percent rate of growth for Cuba "without the slightest fear," and, by 1980, a per capita income greater than that of "the U.S. today." In fact, by 1997, the thirtieth anniversary of his death, Cubans were dieting on a ration of five pounds of rice and one pound of beans per month; four ounces of meat twice a year; four ounces of soybean paste per week; and four eggs per month.
Land reform took land away from the rich, but gave it to the bureaucrats, not to the peasants. (The decree was written in Che's house.) In the name of diversification, the cultivated area was reduced and manpower distracted toward other activities. The result was that between 1961 and 1963, the harvest was down by half, to a mere 3.8 million metric tons. Was this sacrifice justified by progress in Cuban industrialization? Unfortunately, Cuba had no raw materials for heavy industry, and, as a consequence of the revolutionary redistribution, it had no hard currency with which to buy them--or even basic goods. By 1961, Guevara was having to give embarrassing explanations to the workers at the office: "Our technical comrades at the companies have made a toothpaste ... which is as good as the previous one; it cleans just the same, though after a while it turns to stone." By 1963, all hopes of industrializing Cuba were abandoned, and the revolution accepted its role as a colonial provider of sugar to the Soviet bloc in exchange for oil to cover its needs and to re-sell to other countries. For the next three decades, Cuba would survive on a Soviet subsidy of somewhere between $65 billion and $100 billion.
Having failed as a hero of social justice, does Guevara deserve a place in the history books as a genius of guerrilla warfare? His greatest military achievement in the fight against Batista--taking the city of Santa Clara after ambushing a train with heavy reinforcements--is seriously disputed. Numerous testimonies indicate that the commander of the train surrendered in advance, perhaps after taking bribes. (Gutiérrez Menoyo, who led a different guerrilla group in that area, is among those who have decried Cuba's official account of Guevara's victory.) Immediately after the triumph of the revolution, Guevara organized guerrilla armies in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Haiti--all of which were crushed. In 1964, he sent the Argentine revolutionary Jorge Ricardo Masetti to his death by persuading him to mount an attack on his native country from Bolivia, just after representative democracy had been restored to Argentina.
Particularly disastrous was the Congo expedition in 1965. Guevara sided with two rebels--Pierre Mulele in the west and Laurent Kabila in the east--against the ugly Congolese government, which was sustained by the United States as well as by South African and exiled Cuban mercenaries. Mulele had taken over Stanleyville earlier before being driven back. During his reign of terror, as V.S. Naipaul has written, he murdered all the people who could read and all those who wore a tie. As for Guevara's other ally, Laurent Kabila, he was merely lazy and corrupt at the time; but the world would find out in the 1990s that he, too, was a killing machine. In any event, Guevara spent most of 1965 helping the rebels in the east before fleeing the country ignominiously. Soon afterward, Mobutu came to power and installed a decades-long tyranny. (In Latin American countries too, from Argentina to Peru, Che-inspired revolutions had the practical result of reinforcing brutal militarism for many years.)
In Bolivia, Che was defeated again, and for the last time. He misread the local situation. There had been an agrarian reform years before; the government had respected many of the peasant communities' institutions; and the army was close to the United States despite its nationalism. "The peasant masses don't help us at all" was Guevara's melancholy conclusion in his Bolivian diary. Even worse, Mario Monje, the local communist leader, who had no stomach for guerrilla warfare after having been humiliated at the elections, led Guevara to a vulnerable location in the southeast of the country. The circumstances of Che's capture at Yuro ravine, soon after meeting the French intellectual Régis Debray and the Argentine painter Ciro Bustos, both of whom were arrested as they left the camp, was, like most of the Bolivian expedition, an amateur's affair.
Guevara was certainly bold and courageous, and quick at organizing life on a military basis in the territories under his control, but he was no General Giap. His book Guerrilla Warfare teaches that popular forces can beat an army, that it is not necessary to wait for the right conditions because an insurrectional foco (or small group of revolutionaries) can bring them about, and that the fight must primarily take place in the countryside. (In his prescription for guerrilla warfare, he also reserves for women the roles of cooks and nurses.) However, Batista's army was not an army, but a corrupt bunch of thugs with no motivation and not much organization; and guerrilla focos, with the exception of Nicaragua, all ended up in ashes for the foquistas; and Latin America has turned 70 percent urban in these last four decades. In this regard, too, Che Guevara was a callous fool.
In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, Argentina had the second-highest growth rate in the world. By the 1890s, the real income of Argentine workers was greater than that of Swiss, German, and French workers. By 1928, that country had the twelfth-highest per capita GDP in the world. That achievement, which later generations would ruin, was in large measure due to Juan Bautista Alberdi.
Like Guevara, Alberdi liked to travel: he walked through the pampas and deserts from north to south at the age of fourteen, all the way to Buenos Aires. Like Guevara, Alberdi opposed a tyrant, Juan Manuel Rosas. Like Guevara, Alberdi got a chance to influence a revolutionary leader in power--Justo José de Urquiza, who toppled Rosas in 1852. And like Guevara, Alberdi represented the new government on world tours, and died abroad. But unlike the old and new darling of the left, Alberdi never killed a fly. His book, Bases y puntos de partida para la organización de la República Argentina, was the foundation of the Constitution of 1853 that limited government, opened trade, encouraged immigration, and secured property rights, thereby inaugurating a seventy-year period of astonishing prosperity. He did not meddle in the affairs of other nations, opposing his country's war against Paraguay. His likeness does not adorn Mike Tyson's abdomen.
From The New Republic
Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs, hoodies, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandannas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and of course those omnipresent T-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda, of the socialist heartthrob in his beret during the early years of the revolution, as Che happened to walk into the photographer's viewfinder--and into the image that, thirty-eight years after his death, is still the logo of revolutionary (or is it capitalist?) chic. Sean O'Hagan claimed in The Observer that there is even a soap powder with the slogan "Che washes whiter."
Che products are marketed by big corporations and small businesses, such as the Burlington Coat Factory, which put out a television commercial depicting a youth in fatigue pants wearing a Che T-shirt, or Flamingo's Boutique in Union City, New Jersey, whose owner responded to the fury of local Cuban exiles with this devastating argument: "I sell whatever people want to buy." Revolutionaries join the merchandising frenzy, too--from "The Che Store," catering to "all your revolutionary needs" on the Internet, to the Italian writer Gianni Minà, who sold Robert Redford the movie rights to Che's diary of his juvenile trip around South America in 1952 in exchange for access to the shooting of the film The Motorcycle Diaries so that Minà could produce his own documentary. Not to mention Alberto Granado, who accompanied Che on his youthful trip and advises documentarists, and now complains in Madrid, according to El País, over Rioja wine and duck magret, that the American embargo against Cuba makes it hard for him to collect royalties. To take the irony further: the building where Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, a splendid early twentieth-century edifice at the corner of Urquiza and Entre Ríos Streets, was until recently occupied by the private pension fund AFJP Máxima, a child of Argentina's privatization of social security in the 1990s. The metamorphosis of Che Guevara into a capitalist brand is not new, but the brand has been enjoying a revival of late--an especially remarkable revival, since it comes years after the political and ideological collapse of all that Guevara represented. This windfall is owed substantially to The Motorcycle Diaries, the film produced by Robert Redford and directed by Walter Salles. (It is one of three major motion pictures on Che either made or in the process of being made in the last two years; the other two have been directed by Josh Evans and Steven Soderbergh.) Beautifully shot against landscapes that have clearly eluded the eroding effects of polluting capitalism, the film shows the young man on a voyage of self-discovery as his budding social conscience encounters social and economic exploitation--laying the ground for a New Wave re-invention of the man whom Sartre once called the most complete human being of our era.
But to be more precise, the current Che revival started in 1997, on the thirtieth anniversary of his death, when five biographies hit the bookstores, and his remains were discovered near an airstrip at Bolivia's Vallegrande airport, after a retired Bolivian general, in a spectacularly timed revelation, disclosed the exact location. The anniversary refocused attention on Freddy Alborta's famous photograph of Che's corpse laid out on a table, foreshortened and dead and romantic, looking like Christ in a Mantegna painting.
It is customary for followers of a cult not to know the real life story of their hero, the historical truth. (Many Rastafarians would renounce Haile Selassie if they had any notion of who he really was.) It is not surprising that Guevara's contemporary followers, his new post-communist admirers, also delude themselves by clinging to a myth--except the young Argentines who have come up with an expression that rhymes perfectly in Spanish: "Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué," or "I have a Che T-shirt and I don't know why."
Consider some of the people who have recently brandished or invoked Guevara's likeness as a beacon of justice and rebellion against the abuse of power. In Lebanon, demonstrators protesting against Syria at the grave of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri carried Che's image. Thierry Henry, a French soccer player who plays for Arsenal, in England, showed up at a major gala organized by FIFA, the world's soccer body, wearing a red and black Che T-shirt. In a recent review in The New York Times of George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, Manohla Dargis noted that "the greatest shock here may be the transformation of a black zombie into a righteous revolutionary leader," and added, "I guess Che really does live, after all."
The soccer hero Maradona showed off the emblematic Che tattoo on his right arm during a trip where he met Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. In Stavropol, in southern Russia, protesters denouncing cash payments of welfare concessions took to the central square with Che flags. In San Francisco, City Lights Books, the legendary home of beat literature, treats visitors to a section devoted to Latin America in which half the shelves are taken up by Che books. José Luis Montoya, a Mexican police officer who battles drug crime in Mexicali, wears a Che sweatband because it makes him feel stronger. At the Dheisheh refugee camp on the West Bank, Che posters adorn a wall that pays tribute to the Intifada. A Sunday magazine devoted to social life in Sydney, Australia, lists the three dream guests at a dinner party: Alvar Aalto, Richard Branson, and Che Guevara. Leung Kwok-hung, the rebel elected to Hong Kong's Legislative Council, defies Beijing by wearing a Che T-shirt. In Brazil, Frei Betto, President Lula da Silva's adviser in charge of the high-profile "Zero Hunger" program, says that "we should have paid less attention to Trotsky and much more to Che Guevara." And most famously, at this year's Academy Awards ceremony Carlos Santana and Antonio Banderas performed the theme song from The Motorcycle Diaries, and Santana showed up wearing a Che T-shirt and a crucifix. The manifestations of the new cult of Che are everywhere. Once again the myth is firing up people whose causes for the most part represent the exact opposite of what Guevara was. No man is without some redeeming qualities. In the case of Che Guevara, those qualities may help us to measure the gulf that separates reality from myth. His honesty (well, partial honesty) meant that he left written testimony of his cruelties, including the really ugly, though not the ugliest, stuff. His courage--what Castro described as "his way, in every difficult and dangerous moment, of doing the most difficult and dangerous thing"--meant that he did not live to take full responsibility for Cuba's hell. Myth can tell you as much about an era as truth. And so it is that thanks to Che's own testimonials to his thoughts and his deeds, and thanks also to his premature departure, we may know exactly how deluded so many of our contemporaries are about so much.
Guevara might have been enamored of his own death, but he was much more enamored of other people's deaths. In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his "Message to the Tricontinental": "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine." His earlier writings are also peppered with this rhetorical and ideological violence. Although his former girlfriend Chichina Ferreyra doubts that the original version of the diaries of his motorcycle trip contains the observation that "I feel my nostrils dilate savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood of the enemy," Guevara did share with Granado at that very young age this exclamation: "Revolution without firing a shot? You're crazy." At other times the young bohemian seemed unable to distinguish between the levity of death as a spectacle and the tragedy of a revolution's victims. In a letter to his mother in 1954, written in Guatemala, where he witnessed the overthrow of the revolutionary government of Jacobo Arbenz, he wrote: "It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches, and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in."
Guevara's disposition when he traveled with Castro from Mexico to Cuba aboard the Granma is captured in a phrase in a letter to his wife that he penned on January 28, 1957, not long after disembarking, which was published in her book Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara in Sierra Maestra: "Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and bloodthirsty." This mentality had been reinforced by his conviction that Arbenz had lost power because he had failed to execute his potential enemies. An earlier letter to his former girlfriend Tita Infante had observed that "if there had been some executions, the government would have maintained the capacity to return the blows." It is hardly a surprise that during the armed struggle against Batista, and then after the triumphant entry into Havana, Guevara murdered or oversaw the executions in summary trials of scores of people--proven enemies, suspected enemies, and those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: "I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain.... His belongings were now mine." Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim "was really guilty enough to deserve death," he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: "He had to pay the price." At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture.
Luis Guardia and Pedro Corzo, two researchers in Florida who are working on a documentary about Guevara, have obtained the testimony of Jaime Costa Vázquez, a former commander in the revolutionary army known as "El Catalán," who maintains that many of the executions attributed to Ramiro Valdés, a future interior minister of Cuba, were Guevara's direct responsibility, because Valdés was under his orders in the mountains. "If in doubt, kill him" were Che's instructions. On the eve of victory, according to Costa, Che ordered the execution of a couple dozen people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where his column had gone as part of a final assault on the island. Some of them were shot in a hotel, as Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas, another former revolutionary who later became a journalist, has written--adding that among those executed, known as casquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment.
But the "cold-blooded killing machine" did not show the full extent of his rigor until, immediately after the collapse of the Batista regime, Castro put him in charge of La Cabaña prison. (Castro had a clinically good eye for picking the right person to guard the revolution against infection.) San Carlos de La Cabaña was a stone fortress used to defend Havana against English pirates in the eighteenth century; later it became a military barracks. In a manner chillingly reminiscent of Lavrenti Beria, Guevara presided during the first half of 1959 over one of the darkest periods of the revolution. José Vilasuso, a lawyer and a professor at Universidad Interamericana de Bayamón in Puerto Rico, who belonged to the body in charge of the summary judicial process at La Cabaña, told me recently that
Che was in charge of the Comisión Depuradora. The process followed the law of the Sierra: there was a military court and Che's guidelines to us were that we should act with conviction, meaning that they were all murderers and the revolutionary way to proceed was to be implacable. My direct superior was Miguel Duque Estrada. My duty was to legalize the files before they were sent on to the Ministry. Executions took place from Monday to Friday, in the middle of the night, just after the sentence was given and automatically confirmed by the appellate body. On the most gruesome night I remember, seven men were executed.Javier Arzuaga, the Basque chaplain who gave comfort to those sentenced to die and personally witnessed dozens of executions, spoke to me recently from his home in Puerto Rico. A former Catholic priest, now seventy-five, who describes himself as "closer to Leonardo Boff and Liberation Theology than to the former Cardinal Ratzinger," he recalls that
"there were about eight hundred prisoners in a space fit for no more than three hundred: former Batista military and police personnel, some journalists, a few businessmen and merchants. The revolutionary tribunal was made of militiamen. Che Guevara presided over the appellate court. He never overturned a sentence. I would visit those on death row at the galera de la muerte. A rumor went around that I hypnotized prisoners because many remained calm, so Che ordered that I be present at the executions. After I left in May, they executed many more, but I personally witnessed fifty-five executions. There was an American, Herman Marks, apparently a former convict. We called him "the butcher" because he enjoyed giving the order to shoot. I pleaded many times with Che on behalf of prisoners. I remember especially the case of Ariel Lima, a young boy. Che did not budge. Nor did Fidel, whom I visited. I became so traumatized that at the end of May 1959 I was ordered to leave the parish of Casa Blanca, where La Cabaña was located and where I had held Mass for three years. I went to Mexico for treatment. The day I left, Che told me we had both tried to bring one another to each other's side and had failed. His last words were: "When we take our masks off, we will be enemies."
How many people were killed at La Cabaña? Pedro Corzo offers a figure of some two hundred, similar to that given by Armando Lago, a retired economics professor who has compiled a list of 179 names as part of an eight-year study on executions in Cuba. Vilasuso told me that four hundred people were executed between January and the end of June in 1959 (at which point Che ceased to be in charge of La Cabaña). Secret cables sent by the American Embassy in Havana to the State Department in Washington spoke of "over 500." According to Jorge Castañeda, one of Guevara's biographers, a Basque Catholic sympathetic to the revolution, the late Father Iñaki de Aspiazú, spoke of seven hundred victims. Félix Rodríguez, a CIA agent who was part of the team in charge of the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia, told me that he confronted Che after his capture about "the two thousand or so" executions for which he was responsible during his lifetime. "He said they were all CIA agents and did not address the figure," Rodríguez recalls. The higher figures may include executions that took place in the months after Che ceased to be in charge of the prison. Which brings us back to Carlos Santana and his chic Che gear. In an open letter published in El Nuevo Herald on March 31 of this year, the great jazz musician Paquito D'Rivera castigated Santana for his costume at the Oscars, and added: "One of those Cubans [at La Cabaña] was my cousin Bebo, who was imprisoned there precisely for being a Christian. He recounts to me with infinite bitterness how he could hear from his cell in the early hours of dawn the executions, without trial or process of law, of the many who died shouting, 'Long live Christ the King!'"
Che's lust for power had other ways of expressing itself besides murder. The contradiction between his passion for travel--a protest of sorts against the of the nation-state--and his impulse to become himself an enslaving state over others is poignant. In writing about Pedro Valdivia, the conquistador of Chile, Guevara reflected: "He belonged to that special class of men the species produces every so often, in whom a craving for limitless power is so extreme that any suffering to achieve it seems natural." He might have been describing himself. At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over other people's lives and property, and to abolish their free will.
In 1958, after taking the city of Sancti Spiritus, Guevara unsuccessfully tried to impose a kind of sharia, regulating relations between men and women, the use of alcohol, and informal gambling--a puritanism that did not exactly characterize his own way of life. He also ordered his men to rob banks, a decision that he justified in a letter to Enrique Oltuski, a subordinate, in November of that year: "The struggling masses agree to robbing banks because none of them has a penny in them." This idea of revolution as a license to re-allocate property as he saw fit led the Marxist Puritan to take over the mansion of an emigrant after the triumph of the revolution.
The urge to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of others' territory was central to Guevara's politics of raw power. In his memoirs, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser records that Guevara asked him how many people had left his country because of land reform. When Nasser replied that no one had left, Che countered in anger that the way to measure the depth of change is by the number of people "who feel there is no place for them in the new society." This predatory instinct reached a pinnacle in 1965, when he started talking, God-like, about the "New Man" that he and his revolution would create.
Che's obsession with collectivist control led him to collaborate on the formation of the security apparatus that was set up to subjugate six and a half million Cubans. In early 1959, a series of secret meetings took place in Tarará, near Havana, at the mansion to which Che temporarily withdrew to recover from an illness. That is where the top leaders, including Castro, designed the Cuban police state. Ramiro Valdés, Che's subordinate during the guerrilla war, was put in charge of G-2, a body modeled on the Cheka. Angel Ciutah, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War sent by the Soviets who had been very close to Ramón Mercader, Trotsky's assassin, and later befriended Che, played a key role in organizing the system, together with Luis Alberto Lavandeira, who had served the boss at La Cabaña. Guevara himself took charge of G-6, the body tasked with the ideological indoctrination of the armed forces. The U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 became the perfect occasion to consolidate the new police state, with the rounding up of tens of thousands of Cubans and a new series of executions. As Guevara himself told the Soviet ambassador Sergei Kudriavtsev, counterrevolutionaries were never "to raise their head again."
'Counterrevolutionary" is the term that was applied to anyone who departed from dogma. It was the communist synonym for "heretic." Concentration camps were one form in which dogmatic power was employed to suppress dissent. History attributes to the Spanish general Valeriano Weyler, the captain-general of Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century, the first use of the word "concentration" to describe the policy of surrounding masses of potential opponents--in his case, supporters of the Cuban independence movement--with barbed wire and fences. How fitting that Cuba's revolutionaries more than half a century later were to take up this indigenous tradition. In the beginning, the revolution mobilized volunteers to build schools and to work in ports, plantations, and factories--all exquisite photo-ops for Che the stevedore, Che the cane-cutter, Che the clothmaker. It was not long before volunteer work became a little less voluntary: the first forced labor camp, Guanahacabibes, was set up in western Cuba at the end of 1960. This is how Che explained the function performed by this method of confinement: "[We] only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail ... people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals, to a lesser or greater degree.... It is hard labor, not brute labor, rather the working conditions there are hard."
This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and other such scum, under the banner of Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded into buses and trucks, the "unfit" would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros's wrenching documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.
So Time magazine may have been less than accurate in August 1960 when it described the revolution's division of labor with a cover story featuring Che Guevara as the "brain" and Fidel Castro as the "heart" and Raúl Castro as the "fist." But the perception reflected Guevara's crucial role in turning Cuba into a bastion of totalitarianism. Che was a somewhat unlikely candidate for ideological purity, given his bohemian spirit, but during the years of training in Mexico and in the ensuing period of armed struggle in Cuba he emerged as the communist ideologue infatuated with the Soviet Union, much to the discomfort of Castro and others who were essentially opportunists using whatever means were necessary to gain power. When the would-be revolutionaries were arrested in Mexico in 1956, Guevara was the only one who admitted that he was a communist and was studying Russian. (He spoke openly about his relationship with Nikolai Leonov from the Soviet Embassy.) During the armed struggle in Cuba, he forged a strong alliance with the Popular Socialist Party (the island's Communist Party) and with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, a key player in the conversion of Castro's regime to communism. This fanatical disposition made Che into a linchpin of the "Sovietization" of the revolution that had repeatedly boasted about its independent character. Very soon after the barbudos came to power, Guevara took part in negotiations with Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet deputy prime minister, who visited Cuba. He was entrusted with the mission of furthering Soviet-Cuban negotiations during a visit to Moscow in late 1960. (It was part of a long trip in which Kim Il Sung's North Korea was the country that impressed him "the most.") Guevara's second trip to Russia, in August 1962, was even more significant, because it sealed the deal to turn Cuba into a Soviet nuclear beachhead. He met Khrushchev in Yalta to finalize details on an operation that had already begun and involved the introduction of forty-two Soviet missiles, half of which were armed with nuclear warheads, as well as launchers and some forty-two thousand soldiers. After pressing his Soviet allies on the danger that the United States might find out what was happening, Guevara obtained assurances that the Soviet navy would intervene--in other words, that Moscow was ready to go to war.
According to Philippe Gavi's biography of Guevara, the revolutionary had bragged that "this country is willing to risk everything in an atomic war of unimaginable destructiveness to defend a principle." Just after the Cuban missile crisis ended--with Khrushchev reneging on the promise made in Yalta and negotiating a deal with the United States behind Castro's back that included the removal of American missiles from Turkey--Guevara told a British communist daily: "If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our defense against aggression." And a couple of years later, at the United Nations, he was true to form: "As Marxists we have maintained that peaceful coexistence among nations does not include coexistence between exploiters and the exploited."
Guevara distanced himself from the Soviet Union in the last years of his life. He did so for the wrong reasons, blaming Moscow for being too soft ideologically and diplomatically, for making too many concessions--unlike Maoist China, which he came to see as a haven of orthodoxy. In October 1964, a memo written by Oleg Daroussenkov, a Soviet official close to him, quotes Guevara as saying: "We asked the Czechoslovaks for arms; they turned us down. Then we asked the Chinese; they said yes in a few days, and did not even charge us, stating that one does not sell arms to a friend." In fact, Guevara resented the fact that Moscow was asking other members of the communist bloc, including Cuba, for something in return for its colossal aid and political support. His final attack on Moscow came in Algiers, in February 1965, at an international conference, where he accused the Soviets of adopting the "law of value," that is, capitalism. His break with the Soviets, in sum, was not a cry for independence. It was an Enver Hoxha-like howl for the total subordination of reality to blind ideological orthodoxy.
The great revolutionary had a chance to put into practice his economic vision--his idea of social justice--as head of the National Bank of Cuba and of the Department of Industry of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform at the end of 1959, and, starting in early 1961, as minister of industry. The period in which Guevara was in charge of most of the Cuban economy saw the near-collapse of sugar production, the failure of industrialization, and the introduction of rationing--all this in what had been one of Latin America's four most economically successful countries since before the Batista dictatorship.
His stint as head of the National Bank, during which he printed bills signed "Che," has been summarized by his deputy, Ernesto Betancourt: "[He] was ignorant of the most elementary economic principles." Guevara's powers of perception regarding the world economy were famously expressed in 1961, at a hemispheric conference in Uruguay, where he predicted a 10 percent rate of growth for Cuba "without the slightest fear," and, by 1980, a per capita income greater than that of "the U.S. today." In fact, by 1997, the thirtieth anniversary of his death, Cubans were dieting on a ration of five pounds of rice and one pound of beans per month; four ounces of meat twice a year; four ounces of soybean paste per week; and four eggs per month.
Land reform took land away from the rich, but gave it to the bureaucrats, not to the peasants. (The decree was written in Che's house.) In the name of diversification, the cultivated area was reduced and manpower distracted toward other activities. The result was that between 1961 and 1963, the harvest was down by half, to a mere 3.8 million metric tons. Was this sacrifice justified by progress in Cuban industrialization? Unfortunately, Cuba had no raw materials for heavy industry, and, as a consequence of the revolutionary redistribution, it had no hard currency with which to buy them--or even basic goods. By 1961, Guevara was having to give embarrassing explanations to the workers at the office: "Our technical comrades at the companies have made a toothpaste ... which is as good as the previous one; it cleans just the same, though after a while it turns to stone." By 1963, all hopes of industrializing Cuba were abandoned, and the revolution accepted its role as a colonial provider of sugar to the Soviet bloc in exchange for oil to cover its needs and to re-sell to other countries. For the next three decades, Cuba would survive on a Soviet subsidy of somewhere between $65 billion and $100 billion.
Having failed as a hero of social justice, does Guevara deserve a place in the history books as a genius of guerrilla warfare? His greatest military achievement in the fight against Batista--taking the city of Santa Clara after ambushing a train with heavy reinforcements--is seriously disputed. Numerous testimonies indicate that the commander of the train surrendered in advance, perhaps after taking bribes. (Gutiérrez Menoyo, who led a different guerrilla group in that area, is among those who have decried Cuba's official account of Guevara's victory.) Immediately after the triumph of the revolution, Guevara organized guerrilla armies in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Haiti--all of which were crushed. In 1964, he sent the Argentine revolutionary Jorge Ricardo Masetti to his death by persuading him to mount an attack on his native country from Bolivia, just after representative democracy had been restored to Argentina.
Particularly disastrous was the Congo expedition in 1965. Guevara sided with two rebels--Pierre Mulele in the west and Laurent Kabila in the east--against the ugly Congolese government, which was sustained by the United States as well as by South African and exiled Cuban mercenaries. Mulele had taken over Stanleyville earlier before being driven back. During his reign of terror, as V.S. Naipaul has written, he murdered all the people who could read and all those who wore a tie. As for Guevara's other ally, Laurent Kabila, he was merely lazy and corrupt at the time; but the world would find out in the 1990s that he, too, was a killing machine. In any event, Guevara spent most of 1965 helping the rebels in the east before fleeing the country ignominiously. Soon afterward, Mobutu came to power and installed a decades-long tyranny. (In Latin American countries too, from Argentina to Peru, Che-inspired revolutions had the practical result of reinforcing brutal militarism for many years.)
In Bolivia, Che was defeated again, and for the last time. He misread the local situation. There had been an agrarian reform years before; the government had respected many of the peasant communities' institutions; and the army was close to the United States despite its nationalism. "The peasant masses don't help us at all" was Guevara's melancholy conclusion in his Bolivian diary. Even worse, Mario Monje, the local communist leader, who had no stomach for guerrilla warfare after having been humiliated at the elections, led Guevara to a vulnerable location in the southeast of the country. The circumstances of Che's capture at Yuro ravine, soon after meeting the French intellectual Régis Debray and the Argentine painter Ciro Bustos, both of whom were arrested as they left the camp, was, like most of the Bolivian expedition, an amateur's affair.
Guevara was certainly bold and courageous, and quick at organizing life on a military basis in the territories under his control, but he was no General Giap. His book Guerrilla Warfare teaches that popular forces can beat an army, that it is not necessary to wait for the right conditions because an insurrectional foco (or small group of revolutionaries) can bring them about, and that the fight must primarily take place in the countryside. (In his prescription for guerrilla warfare, he also reserves for women the roles of cooks and nurses.) However, Batista's army was not an army, but a corrupt bunch of thugs with no motivation and not much organization; and guerrilla focos, with the exception of Nicaragua, all ended up in ashes for the foquistas; and Latin America has turned 70 percent urban in these last four decades. In this regard, too, Che Guevara was a callous fool.
In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, Argentina had the second-highest growth rate in the world. By the 1890s, the real income of Argentine workers was greater than that of Swiss, German, and French workers. By 1928, that country had the twelfth-highest per capita GDP in the world. That achievement, which later generations would ruin, was in large measure due to Juan Bautista Alberdi.
Like Guevara, Alberdi liked to travel: he walked through the pampas and deserts from north to south at the age of fourteen, all the way to Buenos Aires. Like Guevara, Alberdi opposed a tyrant, Juan Manuel Rosas. Like Guevara, Alberdi got a chance to influence a revolutionary leader in power--Justo José de Urquiza, who toppled Rosas in 1852. And like Guevara, Alberdi represented the new government on world tours, and died abroad. But unlike the old and new darling of the left, Alberdi never killed a fly. His book, Bases y puntos de partida para la organización de la República Argentina, was the foundation of the Constitution of 1853 that limited government, opened trade, encouraged immigration, and secured property rights, thereby inaugurating a seventy-year period of astonishing prosperity. He did not meddle in the affairs of other nations, opposing his country's war against Paraguay. His likeness does not adorn Mike Tyson's abdomen.
March 22, 2005
Towards a critical theory of chavismo
or...
Very early attempt to build an account of chavismo on the basis of J.M. Briceño Guerrero's insights
It is perhaps ironic that the most insightful book yet by a Venezuelan intellectual on the Chávez era was written years before Hugo Chávez rose to national prominence. J.M. Briceño's "The Laberinth of the Three Minotaurs" presents itself as a critical theory of Latin American culture in historical perspective. It is, however, much more than this. More because the word "analysis" hardly does justice to Briceño Guerrero's sumptuous, poetic style, or to the playfulness of his intellect. More also because Briceño Guerrero's prose, while drawing inspiration from such famously impenetrable French critical theorists as Derrida, Lacan and Foucault, has produced a curiously relevant, almost accessible text.
Critical theory will never be "light reading", but in Briceño Guerrero's hands, it can be a delight. Most impresively, in the two decades since its creation, The Laberinth has gained rather than lost relevance - a contemporary reader will be startled again and again by the creeping sense that such analysis might well have been produced last week. The challenge is use Briceño Guerrero's insights as a springboard to a critical theory of chavismo, one that goes beyond the partisan posturing on either side and captures the historical specificity of the Chávez era.
Discourses at war
A starting point for a Briceño Guerrerista reading of the last six years is that chavismo is not a left-wing ideology. That does not mean that chavismo is a right-wing ideology. It means that the categories of left and right are ill-suited to capturing what has been happening in Venezuela since 1999. In fact, the tendency by chavistas and their opponents alike to place the experience of the last six years within familiar right vs. left terms obscures far more than it enlightens.
Briceño Guerrero interprets Latin American culture as a melding of three separate, mutually incompatible strains, which following Derrida he refers to as "discourses." They are the Western Rationalist discourse, the Mantuano (or hispanic colonial) discourse and the Savage discourse. For Briceño Guerrero, the three are irreducibly incompatible, and eternally doomed to struggle fruitlessly for supremacy over the other two. As he explains, "it's easy to see that these three discourses penetrate one another, acting as parasites on each other, encumbering one another in a tragic combat where no victory is possible."
In Briceño Guerrero's view, both the left and the right are strains within the Western Rationalist discourse. They may be radically at odds with one another - surely they are - yet they share the same basic faith in reason, in rational analysis, as the key to understanding and changing social reality. Marx was not a savage, and neither was Adam Smith. They may disagree on almost everything, but they share a faith in instrumental rationalism as a privileged method for ascertaining reality.
Chavismo does not. Unlike both the traditional left and right, chavismo represents a rejection of western rationalism's claim to supremacy over the public sphere. In a fundamental way, chavismo cannot be placed on right-left axis without massively distorting both it and the axis. In fact, Chavismo not only falls outside that axis, it represents a rejection of the axis, a revolt of the epistemological order that sustains it.
All the way back in 1982, Briceño Guerrero had noted the "verbalist political impulse of the savage discourse." It's a devastating phrase. It gets, in just a few words, at the basic chavista determination to privilege words over reality. And by linking it to one of the deep strains in our culture, it explains not only why chavismo exists, but also why it succeeds.
Chávez's political appeal is based on the emotional bond his rhetoric creates with an audience that profoundly resents its historic marginalization. It works by echoing the deep undercurrent of rage on the part of the excluded, a rage Briceño Guerrero captures powerfully. Chávez's rhetoric is based of a deep intuitive understanding of the un-western/anti-rational discourse in Venezuela?s culture, a discourse that has been alternatively attacked, discounted and denied by generations of european-minded rulers. Chávez validates the savage discourse, reflects it, and affirms it. He embodies it. Ultimately, he transmits to his audience a deep sense that the savage discourse can and should be something it has never been before: a discourse of power.
?The magical power of words
In the Savage Discourse, Briceño Guerrero sets out a framework for understanding chavismo's otherwise baffling belief in the magical power of words. Of words in isolation, that is, words abstracted from any point of contact with non-verbal reality, with anything outside discourse itself.
Looked at from a western rational point of view, this stance seems like mere superstition, if not lunacy. Because, in a sense, western rationalism is a method for ensuring that a reliable link is built between word and world. To reject this part of it is to reject the whole.
Yet this is precisely chavismo's trick. In front of a microphone, Chávez does not talk about reality, he creates it. You only start to understand the staggering, savage radicalism of chavismo when you begin to appreciate this dynamic.
You only have to watch Aló, presidente for 10 minutes or so to grasp this point. But just to illustrate, consider a real world example of the chavista belief in the magic of words. There are dozens that would serve the purpose, but there?s one that stands out, precisely because it drives the opposition positively batty:
Every year or so, with an expression of grave concern, President Chávez "discovers" that there's a terrible problem with unemployment in Venezuela. Every year, to much fanfare, he announces radical solutions to this problem. The employment plans he creates out of words vary in name, but not in nature. Each comes with a specific, wildly improbable, numerical target of jobs to be created. Each is announced with pride and revolutionary fervor. Each seems to consist of nothing beyond the announcement of its creation.
Twelve months later, the ritual repeats itself.
Now, the opposition can hardly contain its baffled anger at this game. It seems obvious, too obvious, to us that this is a giant scam. Not surprisingly, each year, at employment-plan-announcement time, opposition newspapers fill up with irate commentary about the rise in unemployment statistics. Bursting with principled outrage, pundits point out that nary a peep was heard about the previous year's employment plan at the announcement of the new one. They note the absence of follow-up, they pour vitriol on the wildly unrealistic targets set.
A deep current of baffled exasperation runs through such commentary. The Roberto Giustis and Marta Colominas and Maxim Rosses and Teodoro Petkoffs of the world work themselves up into a furious lather trying to force the government to establish some point of contact between the president's words and reality as it exists beyond his discourse.
They insist on this. They cannot, will not, countenance the possibility that, for Chávez as well as for his supporters, the announcement is its own justification. The expression of will is reality enough, and no point of contact between it and the reality outside the discourse is needed. This is more than the opposition punditocracy can handle. They cannot imagine, let alone understand, that millions of excluded Venezuelans actively want the nation's affairs to be run on the basis of a savage (non-western/anti-rational) discourse, that they crave leaders who adopt such a stance, and that they are thrilled to reward Chávez with their votes because, not despite, his rejection of rationalism, of the demand for word and world to match.
Western rationalism imagines itself to be the only valid basis of political action. Few in the opposition are willing to probe this belief, because it seems so foundational to them. Their commitment to a rationalist ethic has some costs, though, which have become increasingly obvious over time. It blinds them to the deep historical roots of the savage discourse, to its profound venezuelanness, its staying power.
Armed with Briceño Guerrero's analysis, however, the verbalist political impulse of chavismo can be placed within a framework of deeper cultural-historical meaning. Once you understand his framework, chavismo finds its place within the broad sweep of Latin American history. One comes to see that Chávez's political genius stems from his ability to intuit something Briceño Guerrero understands well and the opposition not at all: that the non-western/anti-rational Savage discourse is one of the fundamental building blocks of Venezuela?s culture, and serves as the primary discourse for millions of poor Venezuelans.
Opposition blindspots
From a western rationalist point of view, the savage discourse looks basically like non-sense. For those schooled in the rationalist ethic, it's nearly impossible to shake this feeling, and its consequence, that non-sense must be seen very much as the ideological heart of the chavista project. That non-sense is the basis of its street credibility. That non-sense, Chávez's ideological commitment to non-sense, is the basis of his popular appeal. That chavismo cannot give up non-sense and remain chavismo.
And yet, that which looks like mere non-sense to the rationalist ethic constitutes the primary discourse for millions of Venezuelans, the basic springwell of their identity, the heart of their understanding of Venezuelaness.
Briceño Guerrero's analysis helps make the rationalist reader aware of his own discursive blindspots, where they come from, why they are so hard to get around.
Consider this: How often have you heard an opposition supporter decry the fact that "none of this craziness was a problem before Chávez came to office?" How often have you seen the current government blamed for the entirety of the class resentment that now marks public life? For the sudden outbursts of anger and violence that mark the have become such a frightening aspect of public life? How often have you felt this was so?
And yet, all the anger, all that barely suppressed rejection of the west and its isms, all that mindless revanchismo, all that barbarous rejection of rational ways of being and thinking, all that thirst for chaos, all that secret loathing for all that is thought and done, all that faith in magic, all of it was out there, visible, a quarter of a century ago...visible enough to be analysed with brilliant clarity all the way back then. To his great credit, Dr. Briceño Guerrero saw it and understood it and wrote it up twenty years before it finally found its electoral vehicle in the megalomaniac from Sabaneta and took power for itself.
The problem is that the opposition?s commitment to western rationalism prevents it, almost precludes it, from quite appreciating that the non-western/anti-rational aspects is one of the basic pillars of Venezuelans' identity. There is a current of profound denial about the barbarous aspects of Venezuela?s culture, of its people's culture, a panicked sense that to admit its existence is to surrender to it, a desperate will to suppress it. That denial is ongoing, it is visible even now. Even after six years with a non-western/anti-rational discourse entrenched in Miraflores.
Roberto Giusti cannot, will not accept it. Marta Colomina will go to her grave resisting it. Marcel Granier would stop being Marcel Granier if he could understand it. Much, much of the sifrino opposition is defined by its inability to grasp it. But it's true: resentment against privilege runs wide and deep among poor Venezuelans, and it expresses itself not just as a deep loathing for the privileged, but also as a guttural rejection of the rationalist discourse of privilege (and of the privileged.)
This rejection elevates non-sense - what looks to a rationalist like Non-sense - into a cardinal political virtue. That is what Chávez knows and the rationalist opposition doesn't. That is why the last thing the opposition needs is "country consensus" plans prepared by technocrats and experts. And that, sad to say, is why he wins - and is likely to keep on winning.
The Missing Discourse
Absent from this discussion so far is the third part of Briceño Guerrero's overall framework: the Mantuano Discourse, which "governs individual conduct and interpersonal relationships, as well as the sense of dignity, honor, grandeur and happiness." A medieval holdover conveyed to Latin America through colonization, the Mantuano discourse is the basis of the patron-client pattern of interpersonal relationships that serves as the basis for so much social interaction in Venezuela.
It's easy to see the influence of the Mantuano discourse in things like Chávez's plane, Danilo Anderson's jetskis, Tobías Nobrega's crooked real estate deals, Francisco Carrasquero's familial clan-based recruiting and the dozens of other seemingly counterrevolutionary outbreaks of corruption that persist within the purported revolution.
The staying power of the Mantuano discourse is startling. For 60 years after the death of Gómez, Venezuelan politicians spoke like rationalists and acted like Mantuanos - using the state's coffers the way elites always had, as a sort of petty cash box. This dissonance between discourse and behavior was one of the most jarring aspects of the pre-Chávez era. It served, in time, to build up the pervasive sense of disenchantment that eventually led to the election of Hugo Chávez.
Since 1999, the government has switched the discourse that governs public statements, jettisoning rationalism in favor of savagery. But in terms of behavior, startlingly little has changed. The sense of seigniorial entitlement over public monies remains, the willingness to set aside purported principles for the sake of clan-based material interests remains. The mantuano discourse remains. If you bracket the statements made by public officials and focus on official behavior, the last six years show surprising continuity with what came before.
And here, at last, comes a glimmer of hope. In time, Venezuelans got fed up with the evident distance between the elite's rationalist talk and its mantuano walk. In time, they could well get sick and tired of the gap between Chávez's savage talk and his government's mantuano walk.
This dissonance does not create a revolt right away, because the mantuano attitudes are deeply embedded in all Venezuelans. Mantuano attitudes feel Venezuelan to most Venezuelans and, in a deep sense, they are. Moreover, due to the long history of dissonance between the old elite's talk and its walk, the opposition is in a very weak position to capitalize on the dissonance at the heart of chavismo. It just has very little credibility on the matter, a fact Chávez has brilliantly exploited with all his scare mongering about how the opposition only wants to turn back the clock.
It will take time to undo the damage - the damage Chávez has inflicted on rationalism, as well as the damage the rationalist opposition has inflicted on itself by systematically devaluing and attacking the discourse millions of Venezuelans primarily identify with. Even today, after six years, the opposition has yet to understand the deep cultural roots of Chávez's appeal, to see them as anything beyond a series of baffling outbursts of senselessness. Taking stock of such realities is never easy, but it is vital.
Very early attempt to build an account of chavismo on the basis of J.M. Briceño Guerrero's insights
It is perhaps ironic that the most insightful book yet by a Venezuelan intellectual on the Chávez era was written years before Hugo Chávez rose to national prominence. J.M. Briceño's "The Laberinth of the Three Minotaurs" presents itself as a critical theory of Latin American culture in historical perspective. It is, however, much more than this. More because the word "analysis" hardly does justice to Briceño Guerrero's sumptuous, poetic style, or to the playfulness of his intellect. More also because Briceño Guerrero's prose, while drawing inspiration from such famously impenetrable French critical theorists as Derrida, Lacan and Foucault, has produced a curiously relevant, almost accessible text.
Critical theory will never be "light reading", but in Briceño Guerrero's hands, it can be a delight. Most impresively, in the two decades since its creation, The Laberinth has gained rather than lost relevance - a contemporary reader will be startled again and again by the creeping sense that such analysis might well have been produced last week. The challenge is use Briceño Guerrero's insights as a springboard to a critical theory of chavismo, one that goes beyond the partisan posturing on either side and captures the historical specificity of the Chávez era.
Discourses at war
A starting point for a Briceño Guerrerista reading of the last six years is that chavismo is not a left-wing ideology. That does not mean that chavismo is a right-wing ideology. It means that the categories of left and right are ill-suited to capturing what has been happening in Venezuela since 1999. In fact, the tendency by chavistas and their opponents alike to place the experience of the last six years within familiar right vs. left terms obscures far more than it enlightens.
Briceño Guerrero interprets Latin American culture as a melding of three separate, mutually incompatible strains, which following Derrida he refers to as "discourses." They are the Western Rationalist discourse, the Mantuano (or hispanic colonial) discourse and the Savage discourse. For Briceño Guerrero, the three are irreducibly incompatible, and eternally doomed to struggle fruitlessly for supremacy over the other two. As he explains, "it's easy to see that these three discourses penetrate one another, acting as parasites on each other, encumbering one another in a tragic combat where no victory is possible."
In Briceño Guerrero's view, both the left and the right are strains within the Western Rationalist discourse. They may be radically at odds with one another - surely they are - yet they share the same basic faith in reason, in rational analysis, as the key to understanding and changing social reality. Marx was not a savage, and neither was Adam Smith. They may disagree on almost everything, but they share a faith in instrumental rationalism as a privileged method for ascertaining reality.
Chavismo does not. Unlike both the traditional left and right, chavismo represents a rejection of western rationalism's claim to supremacy over the public sphere. In a fundamental way, chavismo cannot be placed on right-left axis without massively distorting both it and the axis. In fact, Chavismo not only falls outside that axis, it represents a rejection of the axis, a revolt of the epistemological order that sustains it.
All the way back in 1982, Briceño Guerrero had noted the "verbalist political impulse of the savage discourse." It's a devastating phrase. It gets, in just a few words, at the basic chavista determination to privilege words over reality. And by linking it to one of the deep strains in our culture, it explains not only why chavismo exists, but also why it succeeds.
Chávez's political appeal is based on the emotional bond his rhetoric creates with an audience that profoundly resents its historic marginalization. It works by echoing the deep undercurrent of rage on the part of the excluded, a rage Briceño Guerrero captures powerfully. Chávez's rhetoric is based of a deep intuitive understanding of the un-western/anti-rational discourse in Venezuela?s culture, a discourse that has been alternatively attacked, discounted and denied by generations of european-minded rulers. Chávez validates the savage discourse, reflects it, and affirms it. He embodies it. Ultimately, he transmits to his audience a deep sense that the savage discourse can and should be something it has never been before: a discourse of power.
?The magical power of words
In the Savage Discourse, Briceño Guerrero sets out a framework for understanding chavismo's otherwise baffling belief in the magical power of words. Of words in isolation, that is, words abstracted from any point of contact with non-verbal reality, with anything outside discourse itself.
Looked at from a western rational point of view, this stance seems like mere superstition, if not lunacy. Because, in a sense, western rationalism is a method for ensuring that a reliable link is built between word and world. To reject this part of it is to reject the whole.
Yet this is precisely chavismo's trick. In front of a microphone, Chávez does not talk about reality, he creates it. You only start to understand the staggering, savage radicalism of chavismo when you begin to appreciate this dynamic.
You only have to watch Aló, presidente for 10 minutes or so to grasp this point. But just to illustrate, consider a real world example of the chavista belief in the magic of words. There are dozens that would serve the purpose, but there?s one that stands out, precisely because it drives the opposition positively batty:
Every year or so, with an expression of grave concern, President Chávez "discovers" that there's a terrible problem with unemployment in Venezuela. Every year, to much fanfare, he announces radical solutions to this problem. The employment plans he creates out of words vary in name, but not in nature. Each comes with a specific, wildly improbable, numerical target of jobs to be created. Each is announced with pride and revolutionary fervor. Each seems to consist of nothing beyond the announcement of its creation.
Twelve months later, the ritual repeats itself.
Now, the opposition can hardly contain its baffled anger at this game. It seems obvious, too obvious, to us that this is a giant scam. Not surprisingly, each year, at employment-plan-announcement time, opposition newspapers fill up with irate commentary about the rise in unemployment statistics. Bursting with principled outrage, pundits point out that nary a peep was heard about the previous year's employment plan at the announcement of the new one. They note the absence of follow-up, they pour vitriol on the wildly unrealistic targets set.
A deep current of baffled exasperation runs through such commentary. The Roberto Giustis and Marta Colominas and Maxim Rosses and Teodoro Petkoffs of the world work themselves up into a furious lather trying to force the government to establish some point of contact between the president's words and reality as it exists beyond his discourse.
They insist on this. They cannot, will not, countenance the possibility that, for Chávez as well as for his supporters, the announcement is its own justification. The expression of will is reality enough, and no point of contact between it and the reality outside the discourse is needed. This is more than the opposition punditocracy can handle. They cannot imagine, let alone understand, that millions of excluded Venezuelans actively want the nation's affairs to be run on the basis of a savage (non-western/anti-rational) discourse, that they crave leaders who adopt such a stance, and that they are thrilled to reward Chávez with their votes because, not despite, his rejection of rationalism, of the demand for word and world to match.
Western rationalism imagines itself to be the only valid basis of political action. Few in the opposition are willing to probe this belief, because it seems so foundational to them. Their commitment to a rationalist ethic has some costs, though, which have become increasingly obvious over time. It blinds them to the deep historical roots of the savage discourse, to its profound venezuelanness, its staying power.
Armed with Briceño Guerrero's analysis, however, the verbalist political impulse of chavismo can be placed within a framework of deeper cultural-historical meaning. Once you understand his framework, chavismo finds its place within the broad sweep of Latin American history. One comes to see that Chávez's political genius stems from his ability to intuit something Briceño Guerrero understands well and the opposition not at all: that the non-western/anti-rational Savage discourse is one of the fundamental building blocks of Venezuela?s culture, and serves as the primary discourse for millions of poor Venezuelans.
Opposition blindspots
From a western rationalist point of view, the savage discourse looks basically like non-sense. For those schooled in the rationalist ethic, it's nearly impossible to shake this feeling, and its consequence, that non-sense must be seen very much as the ideological heart of the chavista project. That non-sense is the basis of its street credibility. That non-sense, Chávez's ideological commitment to non-sense, is the basis of his popular appeal. That chavismo cannot give up non-sense and remain chavismo.
And yet, that which looks like mere non-sense to the rationalist ethic constitutes the primary discourse for millions of Venezuelans, the basic springwell of their identity, the heart of their understanding of Venezuelaness.
Briceño Guerrero's analysis helps make the rationalist reader aware of his own discursive blindspots, where they come from, why they are so hard to get around.
Consider this: How often have you heard an opposition supporter decry the fact that "none of this craziness was a problem before Chávez came to office?" How often have you seen the current government blamed for the entirety of the class resentment that now marks public life? For the sudden outbursts of anger and violence that mark the have become such a frightening aspect of public life? How often have you felt this was so?
And yet, all the anger, all that barely suppressed rejection of the west and its isms, all that mindless revanchismo, all that barbarous rejection of rational ways of being and thinking, all that thirst for chaos, all that secret loathing for all that is thought and done, all that faith in magic, all of it was out there, visible, a quarter of a century ago...visible enough to be analysed with brilliant clarity all the way back then. To his great credit, Dr. Briceño Guerrero saw it and understood it and wrote it up twenty years before it finally found its electoral vehicle in the megalomaniac from Sabaneta and took power for itself.
The problem is that the opposition?s commitment to western rationalism prevents it, almost precludes it, from quite appreciating that the non-western/anti-rational aspects is one of the basic pillars of Venezuelans' identity. There is a current of profound denial about the barbarous aspects of Venezuela?s culture, of its people's culture, a panicked sense that to admit its existence is to surrender to it, a desperate will to suppress it. That denial is ongoing, it is visible even now. Even after six years with a non-western/anti-rational discourse entrenched in Miraflores.
Roberto Giusti cannot, will not accept it. Marta Colomina will go to her grave resisting it. Marcel Granier would stop being Marcel Granier if he could understand it. Much, much of the sifrino opposition is defined by its inability to grasp it. But it's true: resentment against privilege runs wide and deep among poor Venezuelans, and it expresses itself not just as a deep loathing for the privileged, but also as a guttural rejection of the rationalist discourse of privilege (and of the privileged.)
This rejection elevates non-sense - what looks to a rationalist like Non-sense - into a cardinal political virtue. That is what Chávez knows and the rationalist opposition doesn't. That is why the last thing the opposition needs is "country consensus" plans prepared by technocrats and experts. And that, sad to say, is why he wins - and is likely to keep on winning.
The Missing Discourse
Absent from this discussion so far is the third part of Briceño Guerrero's overall framework: the Mantuano Discourse, which "governs individual conduct and interpersonal relationships, as well as the sense of dignity, honor, grandeur and happiness." A medieval holdover conveyed to Latin America through colonization, the Mantuano discourse is the basis of the patron-client pattern of interpersonal relationships that serves as the basis for so much social interaction in Venezuela.
It's easy to see the influence of the Mantuano discourse in things like Chávez's plane, Danilo Anderson's jetskis, Tobías Nobrega's crooked real estate deals, Francisco Carrasquero's familial clan-based recruiting and the dozens of other seemingly counterrevolutionary outbreaks of corruption that persist within the purported revolution.
The staying power of the Mantuano discourse is startling. For 60 years after the death of Gómez, Venezuelan politicians spoke like rationalists and acted like Mantuanos - using the state's coffers the way elites always had, as a sort of petty cash box. This dissonance between discourse and behavior was one of the most jarring aspects of the pre-Chávez era. It served, in time, to build up the pervasive sense of disenchantment that eventually led to the election of Hugo Chávez.
Since 1999, the government has switched the discourse that governs public statements, jettisoning rationalism in favor of savagery. But in terms of behavior, startlingly little has changed. The sense of seigniorial entitlement over public monies remains, the willingness to set aside purported principles for the sake of clan-based material interests remains. The mantuano discourse remains. If you bracket the statements made by public officials and focus on official behavior, the last six years show surprising continuity with what came before.
And here, at last, comes a glimmer of hope. In time, Venezuelans got fed up with the evident distance between the elite's rationalist talk and its mantuano walk. In time, they could well get sick and tired of the gap between Chávez's savage talk and his government's mantuano walk.
This dissonance does not create a revolt right away, because the mantuano attitudes are deeply embedded in all Venezuelans. Mantuano attitudes feel Venezuelan to most Venezuelans and, in a deep sense, they are. Moreover, due to the long history of dissonance between the old elite's talk and its walk, the opposition is in a very weak position to capitalize on the dissonance at the heart of chavismo. It just has very little credibility on the matter, a fact Chávez has brilliantly exploited with all his scare mongering about how the opposition only wants to turn back the clock.
It will take time to undo the damage - the damage Chávez has inflicted on rationalism, as well as the damage the rationalist opposition has inflicted on itself by systematically devaluing and attacking the discourse millions of Venezuelans primarily identify with. Even today, after six years, the opposition has yet to understand the deep cultural roots of Chávez's appeal, to see them as anything beyond a series of baffling outbursts of senselessness. Taking stock of such realities is never easy, but it is vital.
January 7, 2005
The Savage Discourse
[These selected passages are translated from El Laberinto de los Tres Minotauros by J.M. Briceño Guerrero, available at the better Caracas bookstores.]
The Labyrinth of the Three Minotaurs
Prologue:
Three great, underlying discourses govern Latin American thinking. This can be seen in the history of ideas, the observation of political events, and the examination of artistic creativity.
First there is the European rationalist discourse, imported at the end of the eighteenth century, structured by instrumental reason and its outcomes in science and technology, driven by the possibility of deliberate and planned social change tending to realize universal human rights, expressed in the texts of constitutions as well the platforms of political parties and in the scientific conceptions of humanity and their consequent collective manipulation, and invigorated verbally by the theoretical boom of the various positivisms, technocracies, and of socialism, with its doctrinaire rousing of civil or military or paramilitary movements of revolutionary intent. Its key words in the nineteenth century were modernity and progress. Its key word in our time is development. This discourse acts as a screen onto which the aspirations of large sectors of the population, as well as the collective psyche, are projected - but also as an ideological vehicle for the intervention of the great foreign powers in the region and is, in part, a result of that intervention; only in part, however, because it is also, powerfully, a function of Latin American identification with rationalist Europe.
In parallel, there is the Christian-hispanic discourse, or mantuano discourse, inherited from imperial Spain, in its Latin American version, typical of the criollos (white elite) and the Spanish colonial system. This discourse affirms, in the spiritual dimension, the transcendence of man, his partial belonging to a world of metacosmic values, his communion with the divine through the Holy Mother Church, his ambiguous struggle between transient interests and eternal salvation, between his precarious terrestrial citadel and the firm palace of multiple celestial mansions. But, in material matters, it is linked to a social system of inherited nobility, hierarchy and privilege that found its theoretical justification in Latin America as paideia (the dissemination of western culture to the Americas) while, in practice, it left as the only route for socioeconomic improvement the remote and arduous path of race whitening and cultural westernization through miscegenation and education, exasperatingly slow twin paths, strewn with legal obstacles and incremental prejudices. But, while access to equality with the criollo class was in practice closed off to the majority, the discourse entrenched itself over centuries of colonialism and persists with silent strength in the republican period up and into our time, structuring aspirations and ambitions around the personal and familial (or clan-based) striving for privilege, noble idleness through kinship rather than merit, built on relationships of seigniorial loyalty and protection, grace rather than function and territory rather than official service, even on the fringes of power. The mantuano ethos survives in a thousand new forms and extends through the entire population.
Finally, there is the savage discourse, executor of the wound produced in the pre-European cultures of the Americas by their defeat at the hands of the conquerors, and in African cultures by their passive transfer to the Americas under slavery, executor also of the resentments produced in the pardos (mixed bloods) by the indefinite postponement of their aspirations. It is a vehicle for the nostalgia for non-European, non-Western ways of life, a refuge for cultural horizons apparently closed off by the imposition of Europe on Latin America. To this discourse, both the rationalist European and the hispanic-colonial discourses are foreign and strange, strata of oppression, representatives of an alterity that cannot be assimilated and cannot rid itself of the savage's apparent submission, occasional rebelliousness, permanent mischievousness and dark nostalgia.
These three great underlying discourses are present in every Latin American, though with intensities that vary according to social class, place, psychic level, age, and the time of day.
The European Rationalist discourse predominantly governs official declarations, thoughts and words that express views on the universe and society, the governing projects of officials and parties, and the doctrines and programs of revolutionaries.
The mantuano discourse predominantly governs individual conduct and interpersonal relationships, as well as the sense of dignity, honor, grandeur and happiness.
The savage discourse is lodged in the most intimate corners of emotion, and relativizes the other two, manifesting itself in humor, in drunkenness, and in a kind of secret loathing for all that is thought, said, and done, to the point that the most authentic friendships are not based on shared ideals or interests, but in a complicity of shame, felt as inherent to the condition of being Latin American.
It's easy to see that these three discourses penetrate one another, feeding as parasites on each other, encumbering one another in a tragic combat where no victory is possible, and that they produce for Latin America two lamentable consequences.
The first is practical: none of the three discourses manages to impose itself over public life to the point of tilting it towards coherent and successful forms of organization, but each is strong enough to frustrate the other two, and the three are mutually incompatible and irreconcilable. While international circumstances reinforce the European Rationalist discourse and magnify the clamor for accelerated development towards a rational order based on science and technology, the mantuano discourse hides behind the European Rationalist discourse and negotiates its continuity with the interests of the foreign powers that benefit from the status quo, while the savage discourse corrodes all projects as it moans contentedly.
The other consequence is theoretical: the three-way contradiction makes it impossible to create permanent spaces for thought, knowledge and reflection. The researchers and thinkers of Latin America either identify with European rationalism, turning their work into a subsidiary of powerful interests located outside the region, or they consume themselves in political activities governed by the mantuano discourse, or they yield to the verbalist political impulse of the savage discourse. The scientific efforts of universities collapse into mantuano intrigues, anachronistic mantuano scheming can find no contact with reality beyond what's needed to survive, a kind of chaos-generating nihilism makes it impossible to bring continuity to effort, and the entire situation takes the Latin American ever farther from reaching a complete consciousness of himself, of his social reality, of his place in the world, let alone genuinely confronting the problems that the universe in general, the human condition in general, pose to the woken man.
Faced with this panorama of discourses at war, with no victory in sight, one is left only, from a current perspective, with the cathartic esthetic frisson of contemplating a tragedy, and, facing the future, with technocratic genocide or the hope for a planetary catastrophe that may allows us to start the ancient game anew.
Note: The book proceeds in three parts: the first two explore the European rationalist and the mantuano discourses, their logic and history, and their role in shaping Latin American culture. Both are fascinating, but I will skip to the last section, what he calls The Savage Discourse. The reason is simple - most of my readers have a pretty good handle on rationalist and mantuano values, behaviors, and ideas. We are western, after all. It's the savage discourse that baffles us, confuses us, it's the non-western strand of our culture we tend to repress, and therefore can't formulate explicitly or understand. So this is the section that struck me as most surprising, lucid, iconoclastic and valuable. As in the other two sections of the book, the style morphs gradually as the essay progresses: what begins as an academic treatise on the nature of Latin American identity has dissolved, by the end, into a poetic, first person defense of the discourse. This gradual, initially barely perceptible, but by the end complete, shift in the narrator's standpoint is, I think, what makes the work so thrilling.
The Savage Discourse
1.
Identity and Discontent
Before starting to observe ourselves, to recognize ourselves and know who we are, before we were old enough to be curious about our identity and the means of formulating it, before that interrogative longing, the answer was given to us: we are western.
When we were a colony, we were a European colony, a geographical expansion of the European cultural orbit. When we constituted ourselves into republics, we did so for European reasons, with European methods, based on European values. Our liberators wielded swords made in Europe and spoke European words carrying European concepts, feelings, impulses, ideals and fires.
Currently, our countries are a part of the great western family. Our language and dress, our schools and cemeteries are testimony to our lineage. Our political institutions, scientific activities and individual aspirations openly proclaim our heritage. Particularly our writing - that level of humanity where one's degree of self-knowledge becomes verb - unequivocally points to our familial belonging.
Our dependence and backwardness do not cast doubt on our cultural kinship. A poor relative is still a relative. What's more, we all decided long ago that the fundamental task of our generation is development and our plans and projects in this regard conform strictly to the western style. The development gap will be bridged within the family.
Europe is our essence and our end.
Amen.
And yet...no. No "and yets." The answer, previous to any question about our identity, is not up for debate: we are western.
It's just that the answer - and this is not meant to cast doubt on it - comes hand in hand with a lament that rings like the disharmony of a musical note. A gripe, a discontent when it comes to "these people" (esta gente, este pueblo.) So, you hear people say, for instance, "party, party, (bochinche, bochinche) all these people know how to do is party." "You can't get anything serious done here because these people don't have any discipline." "They're scared of work and water: they're lazy and dirty." "Without a strong government, you get corruption, anarchy and chaos." "We will have to change the entire socioeconomic and political structure and create a new man, because these people are corrupted." "The crooks are the least stupid ones." Etc.
The discontent about "these people" ("esta gente, este pueblo") seems to point towards the absence of virtues that characterize western culture. An absence only? Or could it be also the presence of non-western factors, elements and powers?
Sometimes the blame contained in this complaint is externalized, projected on foreign countries, neocolonial powers, responsible for a certain - though unconfessed - diminished potency of westernness; the externalization of blame is carried out either through manichean arguments or with an analysis borrowed from political economy.
Or else the gripe is explained by reference to our history, to ethnic superstitions, or through vestiges of geographical determinism.
When we note this disharmony in the affirmation "we are western" we do not deny the statement. It could well be, quite honorably, that ours is a identity in combat. But then we would have to ask, "against what? against whom?"
So our early and agile answer about our identity is spared: we are western. But it is still worth questioning the tacit subject: we. We are western. Who says so? Who says "we"? "We" is a pronoun: what noun does it refer to?
It is the same voice that says "we are western" that issues the complaint about "these people." Yet it is those same people we are identifying as western.
At the same time that they are identified as western, they are reproached for not being western.
It's as though we were speaking rather in the imperative: "be western" - layered over an unspoken "it would be unbearable not to be so", all to conceal the strongly repressed sense that "horror, we aren't!", which only bolsters the imperative: "become western right now!" which again becomes indicative, but is now rendered superstitious, magical: "we are western."
Is it that our consciousness of being western is under siege by extraneous forces? Or is it that the will to be western is countered by a barbarous resistance, unravelled by an actively different strain of human reality?
4.
Tribulation of the European in America
A European visiting our America finds western style republics, purveying western culture - he also finds backward aspects and areas, but aspects and areas of western backwardness, backward manifestations of his own western culture; at worst, a sense of marginality or colonialism, not of exteriority. If the visitor stays to live in our America, he begins to see and feel something strange, unexpected, undefinable, incalculable in the behavior and the aims of these people, something foreign to his cultural horizon. His friends, whose thoughts, emotions and goals are clear in ordinary western communication, friends who socialized with confidence and assuredness, even his closest friends can suddenly turn opaque, enigmatic, impenetrable, totally other - only to later recover their "normality." There's no kind of explanation for those unpredictable changes. "What is that? Who is that?" asks the befuddled foreigner, staggered like someone who has just caught a peak, through the evanescent parting of a curtain, into an unsuspected landscape, faced with the friend who is now once again smiling, welcoming, inspiring his trust.
At the same time, the European of America, responsible for public order, for making political decisions, for implementing plans, for managing businesses, or the church, finds always a mischievous resistance from those delegated to carry out any task. They find, in these people, an undercover opposition to order, to discipline, to study, to work, to responsibility, to punctuality, to truth, to morality, to any commitment, an indefatigable, opportunist, stalking, treacherous opposition, as though the effort needed to maintain civilization seemed oppressive to them.
The European of America, whether he runs a guerrilla column or an army barrack, a whorehouse or a convent, a band of robbers or a business, parliament or the horse racing workers' union, a cabinet meeting or a seminar on political economy, the noble European of America, buttress of the culture of these people, confronted incessantly with that deaf, cowardly, unnegotiable, hypocritical, surreptitious opposition, the virtuous European of America says to himself during his sleepless nights "we've got to hold this place together moment by moment, without a break...otherwise, it comes apart at the seams, it dissolves" and he wonders "what do these people want? It isn't the end of civilization, because they never push quite hard enough to destroy it. Could it be that they want to hold it to a minimum, and no more? but why?" But he doesn't question himself far beyond that, or not seriously. Ultimately, he doesn't much care about the cause of that opposition, it's enough for him to know how to crush it, it's enough to know his duty and carry it out.
6.
The situation seen from the other side.
Let us question farther.
We are western, no doubt about it, but we have to accept the presence of a non-western resistance in Latin America. The majestic sweep of Western discourses in the institutions and the history of Latin America has found interference, here and there, has at times been encumbered and even disfigured, though never truly interrupted, by what seem to be discourses of a barbarous nature.
What does this situation look like from the other side?
A great defeat, now sunk almost entirely out of memory, has left us with the oppression we now suffer. We know the whip of the victor, and continually we recognize his superiority, tried and tested every single day.
It's not difficult to shake off this or that official, this or that policeman, but long ago we realized that they represent a larger power. When they die, others come to take their places, and in larger numbers, if need be. Behind them lie armies, headquarters, barracks, fortresses, the firepower of armored divisions, splendidly decked out halls where chiefs make decisions. The cop on the beat is only the farthest sensor of an acute nervous system, the last reach of a robust musculature. I bow my head when I see him, or I walk down a different street. Even if I've done nothing wrong, I carry an original fault that justifies any aggression at any time: the fault of having defeated ancestors.
That priest, those old nuns who watch over me tirelessly - I can't say to them "I will do what I find good and just, I will do what gives me pleasure, what wells up in me spontaneously, I will do what the joy of life dictates." No, they represent official morality based on a catechism I never quite learned, and they have the means to impose it. Plus, they have God on their side, the undisputed source of eternal punishment. All pleasure is banned, hidden, underground - its home is the night. I confess, repent, and even so I'm always dirty, blameworthy. When the priest dies, another priest will come, when the nuns die, other nuns will come. Behind them lie the bishops, the archbishops, the cardinals, the pope, the celestial throne, the hordes of angels and an invisible sword that secretly wounds the organs of my body to distribute the various forms of death. When I see the priest, I kneel, "bless me, father", when I see the nuns, I bow my head, "yes, doña María, yes doñita." Their benevolence can alleviate the disgrace of being who I am, it can make my condition less intolerable.
Penetrating in his domination more than all the others is the school teacher, because he oppresses from within, he reaches into the intimacy of my consciousness to sweep away and reconstruct according to the interests of the victor.
His most efficient weapon is the alphabet, when he teaches me to read and write he opens a breach in the soul that allows the lords of logos, the subtlest spirits of conquest, to invade and take over: science, literature, philosophy. Spirits that don't live out in the open air of the spoken word, but in an artificial sphere constructed by writing, a monstrous expansion of memory. All that lives, all that has been lived, turns spectral through the alphabet. It accumulates, it builds up in layers over centuries and it interposes itself with growing density between man and life, between man and man, between man and his acts.
The rain comes and goes in cycles, the tides ebb and flow, the ardor of passions wanes like the full moon and is appeased, but the growth of the written word knows no limits, the avenue of what is registered has no end, the hypertrophy of mechanized memory will require, in time, city-sized libraries, country-sized libraries, planetary libraries.
From those registers flow norms, trials, technologies, progress and the words of wisdom and poetry that say beautifully, for me, everything I would want to say, even if I say it I can only say it badly, even if I can't say it completely and it ends up half stammered.
From those files emanates an exhaustive array of possibilities concerning every problem, the end of all suspense, the solution to captivating enigmas, an ancient fount of millenarian experience that knows all ways and end-points; but I want to play the game of life without cheating, I want to lose my way and wander, I want to fight my struggles with no rear guard and no caution, I want to die my death rather than live another's life, a life run by others.
Science, literature, philosophy: three unextinguishable intruders entering the soul through the breach opened by the school teacher, ripping us apart wantonly, with malicious intent, with his alphabet, exploiting the vulnerability of childhood. But it would do no good to kill him, the reproductive organ of the subtler spirits of the empire reproduces itself continually and has the ever-renewed backing of academic texts and testicles, of research, explorers, map-makers, computers.
The teacher is strong, his blow astute. He turns my world into a screen, he turns my life into string of concepts, my songs into notation systems, he trades my innocence for the possibility of survival. Those who have not suffered his violence barely manage to survive within the conditions created by the empire.
And I, when I see his abominable face, sheepishly say "yes, teacher. Yes, professor. Yes, master. Yes, doctor. Yes, poet!" as I stalk him. Sunk in the shame of my defeat, smeared by mental sperm, broken and bowed, I gaze at him, I stalk him over time, even if all I can do for the moment is put thumb-tacks on his chair and water in his ink bottle.
---
The hills, the forests, the fields, the animals and the plants have masters, they have owners. I walk on someone else's land, where I am tolerated as a servant; and there is no place I can call my own. With my work I barely manage to pay for the things I consume and the rent of the ones I use. I use and consume the worst there is, and even so I barely survive. All things are exchanged for money; my work as well. But the amount of money I get isn't enough to buy the things I need. I walk around in rags and I raise sickly children fated to sell their blood.
Sometimes the masters have the faces of landowners, or bosses. I say to them "yes, master, yes boss, whatever you say, chief, right away Don Ra-amón." But more and more often they have no face and they're called corporation, ministry, institute, central committee, transnational corporation - I deal only with foremen or officials. It does me no good to kill the masters because their heirs come to take possession; it does me no good to kill any foremen or officials because they immediately appoint others, who could be worse; to say nothing of the punishments and reprisals.
I know my presence is repugnant to them, that I disgust them, that if they could do without my work (replacing me with machines, for instance) they would eliminate me physically, they'd exterminate me like a rat.
I walk shrunken, with my head bowed, reverent, as though I must apologize for existing on the land where my ancestors walked proud and breathd in deep the air of their world in the comfort of their homeland; but there was a combat, and they were defeated. They fought and they lost; we inherited the shame of their defeat just as they, the others, the ones from on high, those at whose mercy we serve, inherited the privileges of victory. Can we set the stage for another combat, to get our own back, an open battle, horns and all, on a brilliant day of flags and shining metal, or shall we persevere in this sordid resentment, this sabotage, this duplicity, this repressed hatred, this envy, this charade?
What we are, what we were, what we can be is not found in the memory and the hands of God, but rather in files; there must be a file on God himself. IDs, contracts, property titles, diplomas, protocols, mortgages, appointments, wills, dismissals, permissions, receipts, bills, decrees, resolutions, authorizations, sentences, letters, safe-conducts, credentials, resumes, work records, court briefs, payment rolls, black lists, bank cards, credit cards, military cards, hanging folders, memos, forms, applications, notices, citations, agreements, bulletin boards, orders (of payment, arrest, eviction) certificates (of birth, marriage, death.)
Our destiny has a face of paper, a tint of registry, a smell of drawers, the voice of a bureaucrat; its threads are ink, it flies with pens, walks with printing press feet; its house is the bureaucratic labyrinth. Can I light a fire and burn it?
---
I want that fire now. Violent revolution. Spilled blood. The destruction of that entire order. Break down the chains. Victory or death.
But this ardent desire makes me the victim of a new form of oppression and exploitation which adds itself cruelly to the others as it promises to suppress them: the revolutionary struggle.
To understand the mechanism of the revolutionary trap, let's take a bird's eye view of our society. It's made up, first of all, of the lords, the powerful, the ones on high, the masters; let us call them whites. Second, there are those who, even if they are not masters, have varying stakes in society's well-being, they're the foremen, managers, teachers and professors, small businessmen, policemen, professionals: let us call them pardos. They can rise within their category, and some can even leave it to reach the ranks of the whites. Third, there's us, that is, "the indians and the blacks", those below and outside.
Quite often, fights break out between whites - fights between lords. Then they use us, they organize us politically or militarilly with a revolutionary ideology, with revolutionary plans, with promises of radical changes. They make us fight and when they've achieved their goals, when they've settled their white men's scores, they get rid of us little by little through delays, deferrals, intrigues, divisions, partial rewards and, sometimes, with the help of their now reconciled adversaries.
Also quite often, ambitious pardos want to quicken their ascent within their category, they want to reach the upper echelons through extraordinary means. Then they use us, they organize us politically or militarilly with a revolutionary ideology, with revolutionary plans, with promises of radical changes. They make us fight and, when they manage to reach important positions where they can be comfortable, they distance themselves from us or keep us organized in the lower levels of reformist political parties, as clients and shock troops.
In the effort I make on behalf of this struggle I commit myself more fully than in my work in the fields, domestic service, construction or the factories; I give myself over completely, I risk everything. My wages are the illusion of triumph, that fleeting exaltation, the catharsis of the momentary assaults and its cries. But I can't realize my longing. On the contrary, my rebelliousness is co-opted by the dynamism of the system of oppression, it serves and strengthens it. The danger I embody is only diminished and retarded by that periodic masturbation.
But they, they manage to reach their goals; not only do they keep me under control, but they channel my torrent towards their mills, they use me like a stepladder.
Revolutionary leaders mint my fury to buy themselves power. They stuff their pockets with the surplus value from that business known as the revolutionary struggle, where I exhaust my combat strength, my capacity for sacrifice, my agony. Revolutionary surplus value.
Haven't you noticed how the revolutionary leaders are always whites or pardos? Black and indian revolutionary caudillos have always been "antelopes working for alligators."
I've also seen - and I wish I hadn't - that the revolution, when it's carried out seriously and succeeds, brings forms of injustice and oppression even more abominable than the current ones. I've seen those new forms of injustice and oppression in the eyes and the words of the most sincere, hardest working, most loyal revolutionary leaders. They feel themselves messianic saviors, avatars of history; they think they know my interests, my wishes, my needs, better than I do; they don't consult me or listen to me; they've struck off on their own as my representatives, as vanguards in my struggle; they are paternalist tutors; they pre-configure today that future olympus where they will make all decisions for my well-being and my progress; they'll make the decisions and they'll impose them on me in my name, through fire and blood in my name. I bow my head saying "yes, comrade, yes, compañero, that's what we must do, you're right, viva." I play along so they don't strike me and so they don't get discouraged: they can produce those moments of disorder, of chaos, when the vigilance of the gendarmes slackens, when the foundations of order shake, when I can unload my rancor, my repressed fury, my hatred without punishment; after all, that sporadic relief makes up the meager wages I get from the revolutionary tumult, as I await worse days - the days of revolutionary triumph.
---
13.
Nostalgia for barbarism and catastrophe
The thing is that there's a nostalgia for the pre-western past, a nostalgia that allies itself with the nostalgia for childhood and for paradise lost, a nostalgia - I want to return, return, return - that grows as the difficulties of today and the uncertainties about tomorrow grow.
Together with that nostalgia for the pre-western past, there is a longing for catastrophe formulated in the story that the west will end, whether through atomic war, or any other armageddon, or ecological chaos, or massive earthquakes or astronomical accidents; expressed in the expectation of total desertion, of the irresistible aversion of westerners towards their own culture, and in the trivial observation that in the long term the west will end because everything comes to an end. Some with impatience, others with very much patience, the hopeful nostalgics sit by the door of their pained souls expecting to see the corpse of the west and to dream for a new beginning, for the game of history to start from scratch.
They are right, in part. Evolution and progress are high-risk pursuits. The west is not shielded from some exogenous catastrophe, nor can it guarantee that its momentum will not run out. Moreover, one can be sure it will continue to transform itself, it will change, its current form will perish just as pre-western cultures have perished.
But today's embittered rebels fantasize like unjustly grounded children. The hated father can be run over by a train, murdered by criminals, die in a fatal duel, commit suicide; it is also true that even if no such tragedy befalls him, one day he will die and we will remain alone with the mother. But in the meantime, it is he who holds the scepter of power, the keys to its origin, the mother's bed, and it is grand and beautiful and intensely loved.
The apocalyptic fantasy secreted by nostalgia works as evasion and consolation, but it can't change the real situation or diminish its horror: the real isolation of a culture is, today, impossible; the west has interlinked all the regions of the planet; the food depots of big business and the cargo of heavy industry have penetrated all cultures; all cultures want to consume western products and allow themselves to be consumed by the west. The destiny of the earth dissolves into the destiny of the west; the destruction of the west would mean the destruction of humanity.
---
24.
Western progress as domination
The development plans, projects, programs and policies are expressions of the will of the west, e pluribus unum, panta hen. We recognize them right away. They can't understand why we won't collaborate with them, seeing how they're meant for our benefit, they pretend not to understand our resistance. They are their plans, projects, programs and policies. We are forced laborers; since we don't like the enterprise, we don't take care of it, instead we sabotage it, as much as our condition of domination allows.
Dominated. Faced with the superior strength of the west, our defeated ancestors had to choose between slavery and death. Many died fighting. Others accepted servitude, they bowed, knee to the ground, they lowered their gaze to survive. It is from they that we descend, it is from they that we inherited that disgraceful love of life, greater than our love of liberty and honor. We don't understand heroic values, we can't comprehend how anything can be more important than life. To live on your knees is still to live, and while there's life there's hope. We inherited the cowardly rejection of death, but also the mischievousness, the astuteness, the long term resistance masquerading as servitude, the careful aggressiveness always ready for a coup de grace or a retreat. Dominated, but existing. We conserve our identity. We are us. Other, different from them, the dominators; such that they haven't truly dominated us, they haven't assimilated us, they haven't integrated us into their being. They oppress us, repress us, compress us, depress us and squeeze us, but ultimately they can't impress themselves upon us or suppress us. And there's a light at the end of the tunnel. We can dream of the splendorous day when the roofs of the greenhouses will cave in and the zoo cages will burst open; the plants and animals will escape their taxonomies; all machines will start their long, slow return to their home in mother earth and through the broken fragments of conceptual buildings we will see the growth of myth and song liberated.
---
30.
The fourfold path (rebellion-submission-astuteness-return to the home country) and the way of walking
My rejection of the west has followed a fourfold path
First: open rebelion. As a "black", "indian", and "zambo" I've recurred, throughout the history of Latin America, to risings, to armed revolt, assault, confrontation on an open battlefield with no rear guard and no caution. I've been decimated and defeated. In some regions I've been physically exterminated. But this path is and will always be open. Those who propose our death and organize expeditions to destroy us act lucidly: so long as we exist there'll be the threat of violent rising.
Second: submission. By accepting a lord and master one affirms one's existence, one's difference through servitude, guaranteeing one's cultural identity and safeguarding the channels of creativity. Hegel missed this harmonic variant in his master/slave dialectic, even though history is strewn with examples of it.
The last two hundred years, marked by ideologies and wars of "liberation", have obscured the fact that the master-slave relationship is not always and necessarily disgraceful. The good master and the good slave have been forgotten. The good slave accepts his lot without rancor and without any sense of sacrifice or injustice; he longs not for the advantages of the master, he wouldn't know what to do with them, he has other tastes. The good master respects the slave's culture, his idiosyncrasy, his creativity, he recognizes him as other, he doesn't butt into his private life and he doesn't mistreat him.
The master-slave relationship, and the consequent stratification of society, may be in the future - it already has been in the past at various times and places - the most adequate solution to the problem of coexistence in society. These days the clamor of the ideologists and propagandists of equality, the agitation for democracy, hides the virtues of slavery; but he who wants to truly know the reality of this world must dare to look beyond the prejudices of his century. In pre-columbine America, in Africa, Asia, in Europe itself there were successful and satisfactory forms of servitude, far superior as a form of coexistence to the gulag or the worker-owner relationship, whether the owner comes in the guise of a private business or a socialist state.
I must recognize, however, that our good slaves often have not found the good masters needed to build a successful system of servitude on a society-wide level. But they doggedly seek him and at times they find him, at least as an individual solution. There's nothing exceptional about the loyal maid, who's like part of the family; the noble farm-hand, who you can depend on always, onto death, even without if you don't pay him; the devoted and efficient secretary, who remains a celibate spinster through love of her boss, willing to give him her savings and even help him with his erotic adventures; the volunteer body-guard, loyal and sleepless watch-dog, untouchable, undoubting. Isn't there something profoundly human, moving, beautiful in all of this?
The good slave is anti-western because he rejects the work-salary nexus. The good master is anti-western because he prefers the loyalty-protection nexus, but these terms are poor, insufficient to sketch out the relationship. The good master is like a good shepherd, the good shepherd looks lovingly over his sheep; he will gives his life for them.
In our violent uprisings, one of the motivations is the longing, the painful nostalgia for the good master, the absence of that hard, soothing, paternal shelter, of that trusted destination that the western world has only limpid and inefficient substitutes for, cancerous placebos called political leader, revolutionary leader, manager, commissary, dean, congressman...
We are not impressed by the mean-spirited western slander against slavery; we understand that the path of submission to a good master is not sterile but bountiful for our survival and actualization, so we seek it with indefatigable tenacity.
It was necessary to write at length on this much-maligned path. These days anyone can understand rebelliousness, because it's fashionable. Only a chosen few understand submission. Believing themselves free and rebellious, most assiduously serve unworthy masters.
Third: Rise within the ranks and false assimilation. A poor animist, lost in a strange society and subjected to its laws, its dynamics, its mechanisms, I've decided to appropriate it for myself, to take it from the inside.
As a pardo, accepting whitening and transculturation, in fact actively seeking it, I slowly penetrate the entire structure of that society, I rise little by little through all its strata.
And I've achieved noteworthy results. At the top, more than a few blond heads of hair have been curled by me. My hands, long and flexible, very flexible (I can bend my joints over backwards) sign decrees in the centers of power. From the depths of blue eyes I inspect (I inspect, note it carefully, I inspect) important public works. I've definitively imposed my very own hip and shoulder movements throughout the dance floors. I set the agenda for a thousand meetings, and I make sure they aren't followed in nine hundred and eighty two. I set stains and double over figures in the works of painters. I enthusiastically embrace the ideas of the Europeans, I bring them so close to my heart, I make them so mine that they can't recognize them when they see them again. In the poems the poets write you find my rhythms, my cadences. I inhabit the literary forms of the west as lord and master, I turn them into latrines. I sneak also into the labs - look at me in my white coat - and I make scientific discoveries, inventions, I the animist appropriating the society where I am lost, from the inside, all the while remaining myself, without allowing myself to be assimilated. I imprint a new sense on that culture, on that society, without destroying it. I imprint my sense on that enormous, alien machinery that imprisoned me in a trap and can now become a vehicle for my soul. I, son of the traitor, son of the slave, son of a whore, loosening the shackles, changing around the measures, redistributing the materials, until I manage to turn my straightjacket into a suit, a suit suitable to the freedom of my movement, to my natural elegance.
Brother of all or nothing, humble brother, pure brother, do not judge harshly that transitory contamination. It is a form of appropriation. The house I conquer is also for you.
Fourth: Return to the home country. I want to return to my origins. I want to return, return, return. I undertake my return riding on songs, scientific studies, on board secret magical rituals handed down to me by my ancestors, pushing forth political projects. In the house of the father, work and bread, even when bitter, are sweet because they are ours. Enough exile. Let us abandon that metallic womb to these foreign cities. Let us part.
Towards the east. The home country where the sun rises. Hence we were brought over by force. May we now complete, voluntarily, the return journey, enriched by several centuries worth of experience. Let us bring stories and exotic gifts to the elephants and gazelles. Let us bring weapons to the old gods. Crystal balls for the dawn.
Towards the west. The home country where the sun sets. Hence we came in multicolored canoes. Let us return with the sun, to scatter among the islands and the coral reefs until night brings us the rest of depth.
Downward. From every point in the compass, countering winds and currents our voyage is towards the earth, hence we came, from which we are made up. Village. Hamlet. Cattle. Field. Home country. The jungles, the prairies; the coasts, the mountains; the rivers big and small. Maize and yuca. Tapir and llama. The jaguar. Towards the clay and the place we were kneaded, towards the home and the hearth where the vessel of our soul was forever shaped.
Backwards. Towards the past. Let us sail against the current of time, or invert it. Each year, each generation, has taken us farther from the source. The home country is located back before the bayonet. Towards the islands of primordial reality that history has not dragged and corrupted, towards the unblemished relatives. I will say to them, "we have returned. We are your brothers. May the ties that bound us to illusions and lies burn. We return naked. Welcome us."
Upwards. The home country shines beyond the clouds, in the Presence. Hence we fell. Hence came the instructors. Hence shall come our succor. Hence come the gods when we invoke them. Let us prepare our return: all that is not light is a burden. Let us concentrate our longing and our will so we do not backslide or lose our way among the clouds.
Forward. The home country lies in the future. We have no homeland, we are not yet born. The home country is a burning desire and a project, not a memory. We exist as potential, we seek our arrival. Radically foreign, foreign in all worlds, we must engender our world. What is the womb, when is the birth? Everything is foreign, nothing belongs to us. We are not heirs, but we are and we must give being. To future. Let us future the home country. Let us world. Let us ancestor.
---
The fourfold path is the sphere of my rejection and my assertion. Rebelliousness, submission, astuteness and nostalgia are its four dimensions and they guarantee its availability. And so, my way of walking is not pathetic except in extreme situations, and only for a short while; in general, it's a joyful strut, a festive, humorous, playful walk. A profound seriousness based in the radical, mortal seriousness of my situation which makes everything else lose seriousness and then that radical, mortal seriousness itself becomes funny. I'm left only with symbolic objects. I can shuffle, switch, bewitch. I am the master of formlessness. My ultimate weapon, perhaps my only real weapon, is laughter, so boisterous at times that it can soften the ire of destiny, so understated at times that you see it only as a small thunder in the depths of my eyes.
---
31.
Seismic doubt and its antidote
There is, however, a seismic doubt, a doubt that shakes me sometimes, that blunts my laughter, that darkens the depths of my eyes: the possibility that the west may be, if not the end-point of humanity, at least a necessary stage in human development, necessary if transitory; the possibility that the west may be the necessary stage of human development in our times, that we shall all have to westernize to go forward, that today the choice given us is between westernness and stagnation, or perhaps between westernness and chaos.
But when I'm shaken by this doubt I pull myself together telling myself that, if that's the case, I would choose stagnation and chaos. I feel myself whole again and sharpen my laughter again thinking of heterodox or banned currents and coherences. Then, once again, lightning zigzags through my eyes.
---
32.
Residences
As far as residences go, I'm proud to have many. I live not only in the "indians" and the "blacks" and the pardos of every skin tone, but also the mantuanos and the rationalist whites and, most particularly, those who hate me and persecute me in others because they cannot extricate me from their own hearts.
I don't want to exercise power continuously. I'm content to take it by storm, suddenly, paralyze some actions, introduce some perturbances, dazzle with flashing revelations, and then retreat to my stalking grounds, where I revel in my visceral existence, digest my venom and lick my wounds.
---
33.
Final screed
The non-western in Latin America feels closer to the lizards and the rocks than to European rationalism. It is unstable, rough, omnipresent. It claims unjustifiable license with the language to make plays on words that are not just innecessary but ugly and incorrect. It happily contradicts itself. Are we facing another mask? Couldn't all of this hide something more terrible and flammable than a defense of cultural identity, something deeper than cultural differences? Doesn't it express with symbolic ambiguity something less respectable and more dangerous than the rebelliousness of the oppressed? May not those strings be pulled by some unnamed, frightful will?
Perhaps.
But we would then enter, if not into the ineffable, at least into the unwritable.
There are secrets that can only be revealed in the integral communion of two friends during some form of drunkenness, but such experiences leave only imprecise memories. Or between two enemies in the lucidity of hand-to-hand combat onto death or orgasm.
Beyond that abyss, however, we can say without ambages: we are western, cómo no.
The Labyrinth of the Three Minotaurs
Prologue:
Three great, underlying discourses govern Latin American thinking. This can be seen in the history of ideas, the observation of political events, and the examination of artistic creativity.
First there is the European rationalist discourse, imported at the end of the eighteenth century, structured by instrumental reason and its outcomes in science and technology, driven by the possibility of deliberate and planned social change tending to realize universal human rights, expressed in the texts of constitutions as well the platforms of political parties and in the scientific conceptions of humanity and their consequent collective manipulation, and invigorated verbally by the theoretical boom of the various positivisms, technocracies, and of socialism, with its doctrinaire rousing of civil or military or paramilitary movements of revolutionary intent. Its key words in the nineteenth century were modernity and progress. Its key word in our time is development. This discourse acts as a screen onto which the aspirations of large sectors of the population, as well as the collective psyche, are projected - but also as an ideological vehicle for the intervention of the great foreign powers in the region and is, in part, a result of that intervention; only in part, however, because it is also, powerfully, a function of Latin American identification with rationalist Europe.
In parallel, there is the Christian-hispanic discourse, or mantuano discourse, inherited from imperial Spain, in its Latin American version, typical of the criollos (white elite) and the Spanish colonial system. This discourse affirms, in the spiritual dimension, the transcendence of man, his partial belonging to a world of metacosmic values, his communion with the divine through the Holy Mother Church, his ambiguous struggle between transient interests and eternal salvation, between his precarious terrestrial citadel and the firm palace of multiple celestial mansions. But, in material matters, it is linked to a social system of inherited nobility, hierarchy and privilege that found its theoretical justification in Latin America as paideia (the dissemination of western culture to the Americas) while, in practice, it left as the only route for socioeconomic improvement the remote and arduous path of race whitening and cultural westernization through miscegenation and education, exasperatingly slow twin paths, strewn with legal obstacles and incremental prejudices. But, while access to equality with the criollo class was in practice closed off to the majority, the discourse entrenched itself over centuries of colonialism and persists with silent strength in the republican period up and into our time, structuring aspirations and ambitions around the personal and familial (or clan-based) striving for privilege, noble idleness through kinship rather than merit, built on relationships of seigniorial loyalty and protection, grace rather than function and territory rather than official service, even on the fringes of power. The mantuano ethos survives in a thousand new forms and extends through the entire population.
Finally, there is the savage discourse, executor of the wound produced in the pre-European cultures of the Americas by their defeat at the hands of the conquerors, and in African cultures by their passive transfer to the Americas under slavery, executor also of the resentments produced in the pardos (mixed bloods) by the indefinite postponement of their aspirations. It is a vehicle for the nostalgia for non-European, non-Western ways of life, a refuge for cultural horizons apparently closed off by the imposition of Europe on Latin America. To this discourse, both the rationalist European and the hispanic-colonial discourses are foreign and strange, strata of oppression, representatives of an alterity that cannot be assimilated and cannot rid itself of the savage's apparent submission, occasional rebelliousness, permanent mischievousness and dark nostalgia.
These three great underlying discourses are present in every Latin American, though with intensities that vary according to social class, place, psychic level, age, and the time of day.
The European Rationalist discourse predominantly governs official declarations, thoughts and words that express views on the universe and society, the governing projects of officials and parties, and the doctrines and programs of revolutionaries.
The mantuano discourse predominantly governs individual conduct and interpersonal relationships, as well as the sense of dignity, honor, grandeur and happiness.
The savage discourse is lodged in the most intimate corners of emotion, and relativizes the other two, manifesting itself in humor, in drunkenness, and in a kind of secret loathing for all that is thought, said, and done, to the point that the most authentic friendships are not based on shared ideals or interests, but in a complicity of shame, felt as inherent to the condition of being Latin American.
It's easy to see that these three discourses penetrate one another, feeding as parasites on each other, encumbering one another in a tragic combat where no victory is possible, and that they produce for Latin America two lamentable consequences.
The first is practical: none of the three discourses manages to impose itself over public life to the point of tilting it towards coherent and successful forms of organization, but each is strong enough to frustrate the other two, and the three are mutually incompatible and irreconcilable. While international circumstances reinforce the European Rationalist discourse and magnify the clamor for accelerated development towards a rational order based on science and technology, the mantuano discourse hides behind the European Rationalist discourse and negotiates its continuity with the interests of the foreign powers that benefit from the status quo, while the savage discourse corrodes all projects as it moans contentedly.
The other consequence is theoretical: the three-way contradiction makes it impossible to create permanent spaces for thought, knowledge and reflection. The researchers and thinkers of Latin America either identify with European rationalism, turning their work into a subsidiary of powerful interests located outside the region, or they consume themselves in political activities governed by the mantuano discourse, or they yield to the verbalist political impulse of the savage discourse. The scientific efforts of universities collapse into mantuano intrigues, anachronistic mantuano scheming can find no contact with reality beyond what's needed to survive, a kind of chaos-generating nihilism makes it impossible to bring continuity to effort, and the entire situation takes the Latin American ever farther from reaching a complete consciousness of himself, of his social reality, of his place in the world, let alone genuinely confronting the problems that the universe in general, the human condition in general, pose to the woken man.
Faced with this panorama of discourses at war, with no victory in sight, one is left only, from a current perspective, with the cathartic esthetic frisson of contemplating a tragedy, and, facing the future, with technocratic genocide or the hope for a planetary catastrophe that may allows us to start the ancient game anew.
Note: The book proceeds in three parts: the first two explore the European rationalist and the mantuano discourses, their logic and history, and their role in shaping Latin American culture. Both are fascinating, but I will skip to the last section, what he calls The Savage Discourse. The reason is simple - most of my readers have a pretty good handle on rationalist and mantuano values, behaviors, and ideas. We are western, after all. It's the savage discourse that baffles us, confuses us, it's the non-western strand of our culture we tend to repress, and therefore can't formulate explicitly or understand. So this is the section that struck me as most surprising, lucid, iconoclastic and valuable. As in the other two sections of the book, the style morphs gradually as the essay progresses: what begins as an academic treatise on the nature of Latin American identity has dissolved, by the end, into a poetic, first person defense of the discourse. This gradual, initially barely perceptible, but by the end complete, shift in the narrator's standpoint is, I think, what makes the work so thrilling.
The Savage Discourse
1.
Identity and Discontent
Before starting to observe ourselves, to recognize ourselves and know who we are, before we were old enough to be curious about our identity and the means of formulating it, before that interrogative longing, the answer was given to us: we are western.
When we were a colony, we were a European colony, a geographical expansion of the European cultural orbit. When we constituted ourselves into republics, we did so for European reasons, with European methods, based on European values. Our liberators wielded swords made in Europe and spoke European words carrying European concepts, feelings, impulses, ideals and fires.
Currently, our countries are a part of the great western family. Our language and dress, our schools and cemeteries are testimony to our lineage. Our political institutions, scientific activities and individual aspirations openly proclaim our heritage. Particularly our writing - that level of humanity where one's degree of self-knowledge becomes verb - unequivocally points to our familial belonging.
Our dependence and backwardness do not cast doubt on our cultural kinship. A poor relative is still a relative. What's more, we all decided long ago that the fundamental task of our generation is development and our plans and projects in this regard conform strictly to the western style. The development gap will be bridged within the family.
Europe is our essence and our end.
Amen.
And yet...no. No "and yets." The answer, previous to any question about our identity, is not up for debate: we are western.
It's just that the answer - and this is not meant to cast doubt on it - comes hand in hand with a lament that rings like the disharmony of a musical note. A gripe, a discontent when it comes to "these people" (esta gente, este pueblo.) So, you hear people say, for instance, "party, party, (bochinche, bochinche) all these people know how to do is party." "You can't get anything serious done here because these people don't have any discipline." "They're scared of work and water: they're lazy and dirty." "Without a strong government, you get corruption, anarchy and chaos." "We will have to change the entire socioeconomic and political structure and create a new man, because these people are corrupted." "The crooks are the least stupid ones." Etc.
The discontent about "these people" ("esta gente, este pueblo") seems to point towards the absence of virtues that characterize western culture. An absence only? Or could it be also the presence of non-western factors, elements and powers?
Sometimes the blame contained in this complaint is externalized, projected on foreign countries, neocolonial powers, responsible for a certain - though unconfessed - diminished potency of westernness; the externalization of blame is carried out either through manichean arguments or with an analysis borrowed from political economy.
Or else the gripe is explained by reference to our history, to ethnic superstitions, or through vestiges of geographical determinism.
When we note this disharmony in the affirmation "we are western" we do not deny the statement. It could well be, quite honorably, that ours is a identity in combat. But then we would have to ask, "against what? against whom?"
So our early and agile answer about our identity is spared: we are western. But it is still worth questioning the tacit subject: we. We are western. Who says so? Who says "we"? "We" is a pronoun: what noun does it refer to?
It is the same voice that says "we are western" that issues the complaint about "these people." Yet it is those same people we are identifying as western.
At the same time that they are identified as western, they are reproached for not being western.
It's as though we were speaking rather in the imperative: "be western" - layered over an unspoken "it would be unbearable not to be so", all to conceal the strongly repressed sense that "horror, we aren't!", which only bolsters the imperative: "become western right now!" which again becomes indicative, but is now rendered superstitious, magical: "we are western."
Is it that our consciousness of being western is under siege by extraneous forces? Or is it that the will to be western is countered by a barbarous resistance, unravelled by an actively different strain of human reality?
4.
Tribulation of the European in America
A European visiting our America finds western style republics, purveying western culture - he also finds backward aspects and areas, but aspects and areas of western backwardness, backward manifestations of his own western culture; at worst, a sense of marginality or colonialism, not of exteriority. If the visitor stays to live in our America, he begins to see and feel something strange, unexpected, undefinable, incalculable in the behavior and the aims of these people, something foreign to his cultural horizon. His friends, whose thoughts, emotions and goals are clear in ordinary western communication, friends who socialized with confidence and assuredness, even his closest friends can suddenly turn opaque, enigmatic, impenetrable, totally other - only to later recover their "normality." There's no kind of explanation for those unpredictable changes. "What is that? Who is that?" asks the befuddled foreigner, staggered like someone who has just caught a peak, through the evanescent parting of a curtain, into an unsuspected landscape, faced with the friend who is now once again smiling, welcoming, inspiring his trust.
At the same time, the European of America, responsible for public order, for making political decisions, for implementing plans, for managing businesses, or the church, finds always a mischievous resistance from those delegated to carry out any task. They find, in these people, an undercover opposition to order, to discipline, to study, to work, to responsibility, to punctuality, to truth, to morality, to any commitment, an indefatigable, opportunist, stalking, treacherous opposition, as though the effort needed to maintain civilization seemed oppressive to them.
The European of America, whether he runs a guerrilla column or an army barrack, a whorehouse or a convent, a band of robbers or a business, parliament or the horse racing workers' union, a cabinet meeting or a seminar on political economy, the noble European of America, buttress of the culture of these people, confronted incessantly with that deaf, cowardly, unnegotiable, hypocritical, surreptitious opposition, the virtuous European of America says to himself during his sleepless nights "we've got to hold this place together moment by moment, without a break...otherwise, it comes apart at the seams, it dissolves" and he wonders "what do these people want? It isn't the end of civilization, because they never push quite hard enough to destroy it. Could it be that they want to hold it to a minimum, and no more? but why?" But he doesn't question himself far beyond that, or not seriously. Ultimately, he doesn't much care about the cause of that opposition, it's enough for him to know how to crush it, it's enough to know his duty and carry it out.
6.
The situation seen from the other side.
Let us question farther.
We are western, no doubt about it, but we have to accept the presence of a non-western resistance in Latin America. The majestic sweep of Western discourses in the institutions and the history of Latin America has found interference, here and there, has at times been encumbered and even disfigured, though never truly interrupted, by what seem to be discourses of a barbarous nature.
What does this situation look like from the other side?
A great defeat, now sunk almost entirely out of memory, has left us with the oppression we now suffer. We know the whip of the victor, and continually we recognize his superiority, tried and tested every single day.
It's not difficult to shake off this or that official, this or that policeman, but long ago we realized that they represent a larger power. When they die, others come to take their places, and in larger numbers, if need be. Behind them lie armies, headquarters, barracks, fortresses, the firepower of armored divisions, splendidly decked out halls where chiefs make decisions. The cop on the beat is only the farthest sensor of an acute nervous system, the last reach of a robust musculature. I bow my head when I see him, or I walk down a different street. Even if I've done nothing wrong, I carry an original fault that justifies any aggression at any time: the fault of having defeated ancestors.
That priest, those old nuns who watch over me tirelessly - I can't say to them "I will do what I find good and just, I will do what gives me pleasure, what wells up in me spontaneously, I will do what the joy of life dictates." No, they represent official morality based on a catechism I never quite learned, and they have the means to impose it. Plus, they have God on their side, the undisputed source of eternal punishment. All pleasure is banned, hidden, underground - its home is the night. I confess, repent, and even so I'm always dirty, blameworthy. When the priest dies, another priest will come, when the nuns die, other nuns will come. Behind them lie the bishops, the archbishops, the cardinals, the pope, the celestial throne, the hordes of angels and an invisible sword that secretly wounds the organs of my body to distribute the various forms of death. When I see the priest, I kneel, "bless me, father", when I see the nuns, I bow my head, "yes, doña María, yes doñita." Their benevolence can alleviate the disgrace of being who I am, it can make my condition less intolerable.
Penetrating in his domination more than all the others is the school teacher, because he oppresses from within, he reaches into the intimacy of my consciousness to sweep away and reconstruct according to the interests of the victor.
His most efficient weapon is the alphabet, when he teaches me to read and write he opens a breach in the soul that allows the lords of logos, the subtlest spirits of conquest, to invade and take over: science, literature, philosophy. Spirits that don't live out in the open air of the spoken word, but in an artificial sphere constructed by writing, a monstrous expansion of memory. All that lives, all that has been lived, turns spectral through the alphabet. It accumulates, it builds up in layers over centuries and it interposes itself with growing density between man and life, between man and man, between man and his acts.
The rain comes and goes in cycles, the tides ebb and flow, the ardor of passions wanes like the full moon and is appeased, but the growth of the written word knows no limits, the avenue of what is registered has no end, the hypertrophy of mechanized memory will require, in time, city-sized libraries, country-sized libraries, planetary libraries.
From those registers flow norms, trials, technologies, progress and the words of wisdom and poetry that say beautifully, for me, everything I would want to say, even if I say it I can only say it badly, even if I can't say it completely and it ends up half stammered.
From those files emanates an exhaustive array of possibilities concerning every problem, the end of all suspense, the solution to captivating enigmas, an ancient fount of millenarian experience that knows all ways and end-points; but I want to play the game of life without cheating, I want to lose my way and wander, I want to fight my struggles with no rear guard and no caution, I want to die my death rather than live another's life, a life run by others.
Science, literature, philosophy: three unextinguishable intruders entering the soul through the breach opened by the school teacher, ripping us apart wantonly, with malicious intent, with his alphabet, exploiting the vulnerability of childhood. But it would do no good to kill him, the reproductive organ of the subtler spirits of the empire reproduces itself continually and has the ever-renewed backing of academic texts and testicles, of research, explorers, map-makers, computers.
The teacher is strong, his blow astute. He turns my world into a screen, he turns my life into string of concepts, my songs into notation systems, he trades my innocence for the possibility of survival. Those who have not suffered his violence barely manage to survive within the conditions created by the empire.
And I, when I see his abominable face, sheepishly say "yes, teacher. Yes, professor. Yes, master. Yes, doctor. Yes, poet!" as I stalk him. Sunk in the shame of my defeat, smeared by mental sperm, broken and bowed, I gaze at him, I stalk him over time, even if all I can do for the moment is put thumb-tacks on his chair and water in his ink bottle.
---
The hills, the forests, the fields, the animals and the plants have masters, they have owners. I walk on someone else's land, where I am tolerated as a servant; and there is no place I can call my own. With my work I barely manage to pay for the things I consume and the rent of the ones I use. I use and consume the worst there is, and even so I barely survive. All things are exchanged for money; my work as well. But the amount of money I get isn't enough to buy the things I need. I walk around in rags and I raise sickly children fated to sell their blood.
Sometimes the masters have the faces of landowners, or bosses. I say to them "yes, master, yes boss, whatever you say, chief, right away Don Ra-amón." But more and more often they have no face and they're called corporation, ministry, institute, central committee, transnational corporation - I deal only with foremen or officials. It does me no good to kill the masters because their heirs come to take possession; it does me no good to kill any foremen or officials because they immediately appoint others, who could be worse; to say nothing of the punishments and reprisals.
I know my presence is repugnant to them, that I disgust them, that if they could do without my work (replacing me with machines, for instance) they would eliminate me physically, they'd exterminate me like a rat.
I walk shrunken, with my head bowed, reverent, as though I must apologize for existing on the land where my ancestors walked proud and breathd in deep the air of their world in the comfort of their homeland; but there was a combat, and they were defeated. They fought and they lost; we inherited the shame of their defeat just as they, the others, the ones from on high, those at whose mercy we serve, inherited the privileges of victory. Can we set the stage for another combat, to get our own back, an open battle, horns and all, on a brilliant day of flags and shining metal, or shall we persevere in this sordid resentment, this sabotage, this duplicity, this repressed hatred, this envy, this charade?
What we are, what we were, what we can be is not found in the memory and the hands of God, but rather in files; there must be a file on God himself. IDs, contracts, property titles, diplomas, protocols, mortgages, appointments, wills, dismissals, permissions, receipts, bills, decrees, resolutions, authorizations, sentences, letters, safe-conducts, credentials, resumes, work records, court briefs, payment rolls, black lists, bank cards, credit cards, military cards, hanging folders, memos, forms, applications, notices, citations, agreements, bulletin boards, orders (of payment, arrest, eviction) certificates (of birth, marriage, death.)
Our destiny has a face of paper, a tint of registry, a smell of drawers, the voice of a bureaucrat; its threads are ink, it flies with pens, walks with printing press feet; its house is the bureaucratic labyrinth. Can I light a fire and burn it?
---
I want that fire now. Violent revolution. Spilled blood. The destruction of that entire order. Break down the chains. Victory or death.
But this ardent desire makes me the victim of a new form of oppression and exploitation which adds itself cruelly to the others as it promises to suppress them: the revolutionary struggle.
To understand the mechanism of the revolutionary trap, let's take a bird's eye view of our society. It's made up, first of all, of the lords, the powerful, the ones on high, the masters; let us call them whites. Second, there are those who, even if they are not masters, have varying stakes in society's well-being, they're the foremen, managers, teachers and professors, small businessmen, policemen, professionals: let us call them pardos. They can rise within their category, and some can even leave it to reach the ranks of the whites. Third, there's us, that is, "the indians and the blacks", those below and outside.
Quite often, fights break out between whites - fights between lords. Then they use us, they organize us politically or militarilly with a revolutionary ideology, with revolutionary plans, with promises of radical changes. They make us fight and when they've achieved their goals, when they've settled their white men's scores, they get rid of us little by little through delays, deferrals, intrigues, divisions, partial rewards and, sometimes, with the help of their now reconciled adversaries.
Also quite often, ambitious pardos want to quicken their ascent within their category, they want to reach the upper echelons through extraordinary means. Then they use us, they organize us politically or militarilly with a revolutionary ideology, with revolutionary plans, with promises of radical changes. They make us fight and, when they manage to reach important positions where they can be comfortable, they distance themselves from us or keep us organized in the lower levels of reformist political parties, as clients and shock troops.
In the effort I make on behalf of this struggle I commit myself more fully than in my work in the fields, domestic service, construction or the factories; I give myself over completely, I risk everything. My wages are the illusion of triumph, that fleeting exaltation, the catharsis of the momentary assaults and its cries. But I can't realize my longing. On the contrary, my rebelliousness is co-opted by the dynamism of the system of oppression, it serves and strengthens it. The danger I embody is only diminished and retarded by that periodic masturbation.
But they, they manage to reach their goals; not only do they keep me under control, but they channel my torrent towards their mills, they use me like a stepladder.
Revolutionary leaders mint my fury to buy themselves power. They stuff their pockets with the surplus value from that business known as the revolutionary struggle, where I exhaust my combat strength, my capacity for sacrifice, my agony. Revolutionary surplus value.
Haven't you noticed how the revolutionary leaders are always whites or pardos? Black and indian revolutionary caudillos have always been "antelopes working for alligators."
I've also seen - and I wish I hadn't - that the revolution, when it's carried out seriously and succeeds, brings forms of injustice and oppression even more abominable than the current ones. I've seen those new forms of injustice and oppression in the eyes and the words of the most sincere, hardest working, most loyal revolutionary leaders. They feel themselves messianic saviors, avatars of history; they think they know my interests, my wishes, my needs, better than I do; they don't consult me or listen to me; they've struck off on their own as my representatives, as vanguards in my struggle; they are paternalist tutors; they pre-configure today that future olympus where they will make all decisions for my well-being and my progress; they'll make the decisions and they'll impose them on me in my name, through fire and blood in my name. I bow my head saying "yes, comrade, yes, compañero, that's what we must do, you're right, viva." I play along so they don't strike me and so they don't get discouraged: they can produce those moments of disorder, of chaos, when the vigilance of the gendarmes slackens, when the foundations of order shake, when I can unload my rancor, my repressed fury, my hatred without punishment; after all, that sporadic relief makes up the meager wages I get from the revolutionary tumult, as I await worse days - the days of revolutionary triumph.
---
13.
Nostalgia for barbarism and catastrophe
The thing is that there's a nostalgia for the pre-western past, a nostalgia that allies itself with the nostalgia for childhood and for paradise lost, a nostalgia - I want to return, return, return - that grows as the difficulties of today and the uncertainties about tomorrow grow.
Together with that nostalgia for the pre-western past, there is a longing for catastrophe formulated in the story that the west will end, whether through atomic war, or any other armageddon, or ecological chaos, or massive earthquakes or astronomical accidents; expressed in the expectation of total desertion, of the irresistible aversion of westerners towards their own culture, and in the trivial observation that in the long term the west will end because everything comes to an end. Some with impatience, others with very much patience, the hopeful nostalgics sit by the door of their pained souls expecting to see the corpse of the west and to dream for a new beginning, for the game of history to start from scratch.
They are right, in part. Evolution and progress are high-risk pursuits. The west is not shielded from some exogenous catastrophe, nor can it guarantee that its momentum will not run out. Moreover, one can be sure it will continue to transform itself, it will change, its current form will perish just as pre-western cultures have perished.
But today's embittered rebels fantasize like unjustly grounded children. The hated father can be run over by a train, murdered by criminals, die in a fatal duel, commit suicide; it is also true that even if no such tragedy befalls him, one day he will die and we will remain alone with the mother. But in the meantime, it is he who holds the scepter of power, the keys to its origin, the mother's bed, and it is grand and beautiful and intensely loved.
The apocalyptic fantasy secreted by nostalgia works as evasion and consolation, but it can't change the real situation or diminish its horror: the real isolation of a culture is, today, impossible; the west has interlinked all the regions of the planet; the food depots of big business and the cargo of heavy industry have penetrated all cultures; all cultures want to consume western products and allow themselves to be consumed by the west. The destiny of the earth dissolves into the destiny of the west; the destruction of the west would mean the destruction of humanity.
---
24.
Western progress as domination
The development plans, projects, programs and policies are expressions of the will of the west, e pluribus unum, panta hen. We recognize them right away. They can't understand why we won't collaborate with them, seeing how they're meant for our benefit, they pretend not to understand our resistance. They are their plans, projects, programs and policies. We are forced laborers; since we don't like the enterprise, we don't take care of it, instead we sabotage it, as much as our condition of domination allows.
Dominated. Faced with the superior strength of the west, our defeated ancestors had to choose between slavery and death. Many died fighting. Others accepted servitude, they bowed, knee to the ground, they lowered their gaze to survive. It is from they that we descend, it is from they that we inherited that disgraceful love of life, greater than our love of liberty and honor. We don't understand heroic values, we can't comprehend how anything can be more important than life. To live on your knees is still to live, and while there's life there's hope. We inherited the cowardly rejection of death, but also the mischievousness, the astuteness, the long term resistance masquerading as servitude, the careful aggressiveness always ready for a coup de grace or a retreat. Dominated, but existing. We conserve our identity. We are us. Other, different from them, the dominators; such that they haven't truly dominated us, they haven't assimilated us, they haven't integrated us into their being. They oppress us, repress us, compress us, depress us and squeeze us, but ultimately they can't impress themselves upon us or suppress us. And there's a light at the end of the tunnel. We can dream of the splendorous day when the roofs of the greenhouses will cave in and the zoo cages will burst open; the plants and animals will escape their taxonomies; all machines will start their long, slow return to their home in mother earth and through the broken fragments of conceptual buildings we will see the growth of myth and song liberated.
---
30.
The fourfold path (rebellion-submission-astuteness-return to the home country) and the way of walking
My rejection of the west has followed a fourfold path
First: open rebelion. As a "black", "indian", and "zambo" I've recurred, throughout the history of Latin America, to risings, to armed revolt, assault, confrontation on an open battlefield with no rear guard and no caution. I've been decimated and defeated. In some regions I've been physically exterminated. But this path is and will always be open. Those who propose our death and organize expeditions to destroy us act lucidly: so long as we exist there'll be the threat of violent rising.
Second: submission. By accepting a lord and master one affirms one's existence, one's difference through servitude, guaranteeing one's cultural identity and safeguarding the channels of creativity. Hegel missed this harmonic variant in his master/slave dialectic, even though history is strewn with examples of it.
The last two hundred years, marked by ideologies and wars of "liberation", have obscured the fact that the master-slave relationship is not always and necessarily disgraceful. The good master and the good slave have been forgotten. The good slave accepts his lot without rancor and without any sense of sacrifice or injustice; he longs not for the advantages of the master, he wouldn't know what to do with them, he has other tastes. The good master respects the slave's culture, his idiosyncrasy, his creativity, he recognizes him as other, he doesn't butt into his private life and he doesn't mistreat him.
The master-slave relationship, and the consequent stratification of society, may be in the future - it already has been in the past at various times and places - the most adequate solution to the problem of coexistence in society. These days the clamor of the ideologists and propagandists of equality, the agitation for democracy, hides the virtues of slavery; but he who wants to truly know the reality of this world must dare to look beyond the prejudices of his century. In pre-columbine America, in Africa, Asia, in Europe itself there were successful and satisfactory forms of servitude, far superior as a form of coexistence to the gulag or the worker-owner relationship, whether the owner comes in the guise of a private business or a socialist state.
I must recognize, however, that our good slaves often have not found the good masters needed to build a successful system of servitude on a society-wide level. But they doggedly seek him and at times they find him, at least as an individual solution. There's nothing exceptional about the loyal maid, who's like part of the family; the noble farm-hand, who you can depend on always, onto death, even without if you don't pay him; the devoted and efficient secretary, who remains a celibate spinster through love of her boss, willing to give him her savings and even help him with his erotic adventures; the volunteer body-guard, loyal and sleepless watch-dog, untouchable, undoubting. Isn't there something profoundly human, moving, beautiful in all of this?
The good slave is anti-western because he rejects the work-salary nexus. The good master is anti-western because he prefers the loyalty-protection nexus, but these terms are poor, insufficient to sketch out the relationship. The good master is like a good shepherd, the good shepherd looks lovingly over his sheep; he will gives his life for them.
In our violent uprisings, one of the motivations is the longing, the painful nostalgia for the good master, the absence of that hard, soothing, paternal shelter, of that trusted destination that the western world has only limpid and inefficient substitutes for, cancerous placebos called political leader, revolutionary leader, manager, commissary, dean, congressman...
We are not impressed by the mean-spirited western slander against slavery; we understand that the path of submission to a good master is not sterile but bountiful for our survival and actualization, so we seek it with indefatigable tenacity.
It was necessary to write at length on this much-maligned path. These days anyone can understand rebelliousness, because it's fashionable. Only a chosen few understand submission. Believing themselves free and rebellious, most assiduously serve unworthy masters.
Third: Rise within the ranks and false assimilation. A poor animist, lost in a strange society and subjected to its laws, its dynamics, its mechanisms, I've decided to appropriate it for myself, to take it from the inside.
As a pardo, accepting whitening and transculturation, in fact actively seeking it, I slowly penetrate the entire structure of that society, I rise little by little through all its strata.
And I've achieved noteworthy results. At the top, more than a few blond heads of hair have been curled by me. My hands, long and flexible, very flexible (I can bend my joints over backwards) sign decrees in the centers of power. From the depths of blue eyes I inspect (I inspect, note it carefully, I inspect) important public works. I've definitively imposed my very own hip and shoulder movements throughout the dance floors. I set the agenda for a thousand meetings, and I make sure they aren't followed in nine hundred and eighty two. I set stains and double over figures in the works of painters. I enthusiastically embrace the ideas of the Europeans, I bring them so close to my heart, I make them so mine that they can't recognize them when they see them again. In the poems the poets write you find my rhythms, my cadences. I inhabit the literary forms of the west as lord and master, I turn them into latrines. I sneak also into the labs - look at me in my white coat - and I make scientific discoveries, inventions, I the animist appropriating the society where I am lost, from the inside, all the while remaining myself, without allowing myself to be assimilated. I imprint a new sense on that culture, on that society, without destroying it. I imprint my sense on that enormous, alien machinery that imprisoned me in a trap and can now become a vehicle for my soul. I, son of the traitor, son of the slave, son of a whore, loosening the shackles, changing around the measures, redistributing the materials, until I manage to turn my straightjacket into a suit, a suit suitable to the freedom of my movement, to my natural elegance.
Brother of all or nothing, humble brother, pure brother, do not judge harshly that transitory contamination. It is a form of appropriation. The house I conquer is also for you.
Fourth: Return to the home country. I want to return to my origins. I want to return, return, return. I undertake my return riding on songs, scientific studies, on board secret magical rituals handed down to me by my ancestors, pushing forth political projects. In the house of the father, work and bread, even when bitter, are sweet because they are ours. Enough exile. Let us abandon that metallic womb to these foreign cities. Let us part.
Towards the east. The home country where the sun rises. Hence we were brought over by force. May we now complete, voluntarily, the return journey, enriched by several centuries worth of experience. Let us bring stories and exotic gifts to the elephants and gazelles. Let us bring weapons to the old gods. Crystal balls for the dawn.
Towards the west. The home country where the sun sets. Hence we came in multicolored canoes. Let us return with the sun, to scatter among the islands and the coral reefs until night brings us the rest of depth.
Downward. From every point in the compass, countering winds and currents our voyage is towards the earth, hence we came, from which we are made up. Village. Hamlet. Cattle. Field. Home country. The jungles, the prairies; the coasts, the mountains; the rivers big and small. Maize and yuca. Tapir and llama. The jaguar. Towards the clay and the place we were kneaded, towards the home and the hearth where the vessel of our soul was forever shaped.
Backwards. Towards the past. Let us sail against the current of time, or invert it. Each year, each generation, has taken us farther from the source. The home country is located back before the bayonet. Towards the islands of primordial reality that history has not dragged and corrupted, towards the unblemished relatives. I will say to them, "we have returned. We are your brothers. May the ties that bound us to illusions and lies burn. We return naked. Welcome us."
Upwards. The home country shines beyond the clouds, in the Presence. Hence we fell. Hence came the instructors. Hence shall come our succor. Hence come the gods when we invoke them. Let us prepare our return: all that is not light is a burden. Let us concentrate our longing and our will so we do not backslide or lose our way among the clouds.
Forward. The home country lies in the future. We have no homeland, we are not yet born. The home country is a burning desire and a project, not a memory. We exist as potential, we seek our arrival. Radically foreign, foreign in all worlds, we must engender our world. What is the womb, when is the birth? Everything is foreign, nothing belongs to us. We are not heirs, but we are and we must give being. To future. Let us future the home country. Let us world. Let us ancestor.
---
The fourfold path is the sphere of my rejection and my assertion. Rebelliousness, submission, astuteness and nostalgia are its four dimensions and they guarantee its availability. And so, my way of walking is not pathetic except in extreme situations, and only for a short while; in general, it's a joyful strut, a festive, humorous, playful walk. A profound seriousness based in the radical, mortal seriousness of my situation which makes everything else lose seriousness and then that radical, mortal seriousness itself becomes funny. I'm left only with symbolic objects. I can shuffle, switch, bewitch. I am the master of formlessness. My ultimate weapon, perhaps my only real weapon, is laughter, so boisterous at times that it can soften the ire of destiny, so understated at times that you see it only as a small thunder in the depths of my eyes.
---
31.
Seismic doubt and its antidote
There is, however, a seismic doubt, a doubt that shakes me sometimes, that blunts my laughter, that darkens the depths of my eyes: the possibility that the west may be, if not the end-point of humanity, at least a necessary stage in human development, necessary if transitory; the possibility that the west may be the necessary stage of human development in our times, that we shall all have to westernize to go forward, that today the choice given us is between westernness and stagnation, or perhaps between westernness and chaos.
But when I'm shaken by this doubt I pull myself together telling myself that, if that's the case, I would choose stagnation and chaos. I feel myself whole again and sharpen my laughter again thinking of heterodox or banned currents and coherences. Then, once again, lightning zigzags through my eyes.
---
32.
Residences
As far as residences go, I'm proud to have many. I live not only in the "indians" and the "blacks" and the pardos of every skin tone, but also the mantuanos and the rationalist whites and, most particularly, those who hate me and persecute me in others because they cannot extricate me from their own hearts.
I don't want to exercise power continuously. I'm content to take it by storm, suddenly, paralyze some actions, introduce some perturbances, dazzle with flashing revelations, and then retreat to my stalking grounds, where I revel in my visceral existence, digest my venom and lick my wounds.
---
33.
Final screed
The non-western in Latin America feels closer to the lizards and the rocks than to European rationalism. It is unstable, rough, omnipresent. It claims unjustifiable license with the language to make plays on words that are not just innecessary but ugly and incorrect. It happily contradicts itself. Are we facing another mask? Couldn't all of this hide something more terrible and flammable than a defense of cultural identity, something deeper than cultural differences? Doesn't it express with symbolic ambiguity something less respectable and more dangerous than the rebelliousness of the oppressed? May not those strings be pulled by some unnamed, frightful will?
Perhaps.
But we would then enter, if not into the ineffable, at least into the unwritable.
There are secrets that can only be revealed in the integral communion of two friends during some form of drunkenness, but such experiences leave only imprecise memories. Or between two enemies in the lucidity of hand-to-hand combat onto death or orgasm.
Beyond that abyss, however, we can say without ambages: we are western, cómo no.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)