[Marxism] 3 books on Venezuela

[Louis Proyect]

LRB November 1, 2007
Baseball’s Loss
Geoffrey Hawthorn

Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope by Tariq Ali

Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today by D.L. Raby

Venezuela: Hugo Chavez’s Revolution, Latin America Report No. 19 
www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=4674&l=1

In Venezuela at the end of June, Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez and Diego 
Maradona, three heroes of the people in Latin America, kicked off the 
Copa América. Morales, pleased with his dribbling, kept possession for 
rather longer than might have been thought polite. When he passed, 
Chávez, instinctive politician that he is, at once flicked the ball on 
to the feet of the Hand of God. (He originally wanted to be a baseball 
player. Football is not his game.) What was important was that his 
largesse had secured the Copa for his country, thereby strengthening his 
popular appeal at home, enhancing his determination to be a presence in 
Latin America, and allowing him to cast a mote, as he likes to do, in 
the eye of the United States.

Chávez’s election in Venezuela in 1998 and his repeated victories since, 
Morales’s in Bolivia in 2005 and Rafael Correa’s in Ecuador in 2006, 
together with governments of a more moderately leftish inclination in 
Brazil, Argentina, Chile and, it now seems, Nicaragua, have excited wide 
attention. Washington is nervous of the more extreme leaders, all of 
whom gain easy support at home by attacking it, and makes no secret of 
its particular distaste for the new Venezuela. Two years ago, in her 
list of ‘outposts of tyranny’, Condoleezza Rice included only one 
country in the Americas, Cuba. Chávez, already close to Cuba, has 
responded by supporting two more of those Rice deplored, Zimbabwe and 
Iran; has persuaded a fourth, North Korea, to move its one Latin 
American embassy to Caracas; and has gone so far as to describe a fifth, 
Lukashenko’s beleaguered Belarus, as ‘a model social state of the kind 
that we are trying to create’. Sober liberal observers, like the 
International Crisis Group, an NGO founded by Mark Malloch Brown in 
1995, more quietly worry about the absence of checks on presidential 
power in Venezuela and the possibility that Bolivia will actually fall 
apart. Enthusiastic radicals, like Tariq Ali and Diana Raby, suggest 
that a truly popular socialism has been reborn in these places. And 
rebirth, Ali thinks, is half the battle. Raby, convinced that the battle 
can be won, and whose hopes for it extend even to Europe, believes that 
when it is won, the new politics, having a sounder base, will prove to 
be more resilient than the old. Of others with an interest in the 
matter, the Foreign Office may not be alone in believing that we have 
nothing at all to learn from such countries.

Notwithstanding his compliment to Lukashenko, Chávez might say he has 
little to learn from us. Simón Bolívar, the hero of the liberation of 
several South American territories from Spain at the beginning of the 
19th century and Chávez’s own rhetorical inspiration, insisted that 
those he was trying to carry with him were not just the criollos, of 
Spanish descent. There were Indians and Africans also, and each group 
had been affected by its relations with the others. The new republics 
should not therefore try to imitate what was being achieved in Europe 
and the United States. ‘If we do not invent,’ Bolívar’s tutor, Simón 
Rodríguez, had impressed on him, ‘we err,’ and Chávez repeats the point. 
One can nonetheless see why the European left has the hopes it has. All 
three presidents are in favour of the poor and against foreign support 
for the rich. And Chávez, who, his opponents like to say, has no brain 
in his tongue, does like the old language. He has mentioned Trotsky, 
talked of teaching Marxism, and after his recent re-election, announced 
a ‘socialism for the 21st century’. One can also see why liberals are 
nervous. There is no doubt about the elections. Each president gained 
between 53 and 63 per cent of a large vote, and apart from some doubts 
about null and spoiled ballots in the second round in Ecuador, where 
voting is compulsory, the process in each was declared to have been 
fair. Each government also respects civil and political rights. 
Constitutionally, however, they are all unsettled. Morales, the former 
leader of coca growers who comes from one of the two large indigenous 
groups in Bolivia, and Correa, a dissident finance minister in the 
short-lived previous administration who describes himself as a Catholic 
humanist, both face obstruction from their congresses. Both are fighting 
to reduce their opponents’ constitutional advantages. Chávez has been 
more fortunate. He was able to promulgate a new constitution in his 
first year. This extended the scope of referendums, ended the exclusion 
of the military from politics, and increased the power of the centre. 
But he does not now think it enough. There is to be a referendum in 
December on moving in a more determinedly ‘socialist’ direction, and the 
assembly has meanwhile granted him power of decree until next summer. He 
is, for the moment, secure. The other two, as yet, are not.

full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n21/hawt02_.html