Bolívar und Marx / Mario Di Giacomo

Bolívar und Marx

Arendt affirmed that foundational moments are encountered over the abyss separating the previous "no more" from the future "not yet." What is arduous to visualize in such critical moments of freedom is the lineage of the castes who take the political vanguard into their own hands. Reformations can mean a radical rupture with the past or also, if loyalty to the memorable things of the past is maintained, a continuity of a process of civic consolidation on a higher scale. But reformations run the risk of being built out of adventurous readings that attempt to join within a single discourse disparate figures, whose ideologies did not in the least coincide. In the case of Bolivarian Venezuela, today withered by the dregs of a very old and obsolete Marxist wine pouch (neither Althusser, Gramsci, Lukács nor Francfort), an attempt is being made to establish a thread of continuity between the liberal thoughts of Bolívar and the socialist ones of Marx. Like the foundational neofathers, they either lie or their skulls are plagued by endogenous nightmares. It suffices to fleetingly read the unpolite epithets Marx bestowed upon the father of our latitudes to undertsand this symbiosis is impossible and disguises the aspiration to coagulate an autocratic project. Among the subtleties Marx attributes to Bolívar are the following: handing Francisco de Miranda over to Domingo de Monteverde; being incapable of long-term effort; irresolute, lacking any presence of spirit; Napoleon of retreats; a tendency toward despotism; a friend of receiving honors; racist. However, at the risk of falling prey to premature disqualifications, it is worth asking oneself why the militaristic house that rides the nation today insists on a syncretic thesis with such political tones. In order to try to provide an answer beyond the obsessive ideas of those febrile heads, one could say the presence of Bolívar inside the current discourse runs along the route of a delinguistization [deslingüistización] of the collective formation of political consensus. In other words, Bolívar allows us to exempt ourselves from thinking ourselves (Luis Castro Leiva dixit). But, moreover, if he is treated religiously (pace Alí Primera), the communicative processes within society for building collective action plans are sterilized, remaining suspended or simply annulled: Bolívar serves, in an antidialogical manner, the purposes of the quiet introduction of an autocracy of the left, whose State propaganda ends up legitimating that praxis by means of the conculcation of the social subject through the constant appellation to the Bolivarian cult. There is no doubt this utilization to introduce as contraband one of the two lefts, the Jurassic one, intellectually sedentary, sanguine in relation to human rights, bureaucratic to the point of negating individuals, is a recourse that ends up thrashing as much Bolívar as Marx. But that is of no importance to the caste, since what is important is to deform as much the conscience as history so as to maintain power against the grain: what do history, freedom, Bolívar and Marx matter, if we have cash and mediocre missions to regulate the limelight here? While society looks in another direction and history is distorted, the dignity of our nation is in grave danger with the ascendance of such refomers. And no, they weren't brothers.

One of them, Marx, had no esteem for the other, Bolívar.




{ Mario Di Giacomo, TalCual, 9 September 2005 }