Revolución al revés / Demetrio Boersner

Reverse Revolution

The "Bolivarian revolution," recently remade as "socialist," has the peculiarity of ignoring the lessons of previous attempts toward an emancipatory or fair structural transformation. Instead of traveling through the stages that define the progressive experience of other latitudes, the chavista process jumps over these very moments and, in this way, it becomes historically reactionary.

When the bourgeois classes (tied to commerce and urban life) of medieval Europe fought to emancipate themselves from the asphixiating domination of the feudal lords, they intuited the necessity of allying themselves with another sector, of different but coinciding interests against the feudal powers. That natural tactical ally of the ascendant bourgeoisie was the centralizing national monarchy. Only after having created States and national markets in alliance with absolute kings, the bourgeoisie revolted against these in revolutions already oriented toward liberalism.

In the subsequent era of the syndicated and political rise of the working classes anxious to eliminate unfair labor relations and establish social democracies, the most outstanding theorists and leaders of this movement always recommended searching out tactical allies in the heart of the democratic bourgeoisie: to fight side by side with the least exploitative middle classes, those most open to the idea of social justice, against the most recalcitrant and oppressive managerial sectors.

In the historical process of national and social emancipation of Latin America during the XX century, facing the foreign economic hegemony allied with internal oligarchies and dictatorships, the interest of popular sectors to count on the effective support of our "national bourgeoisie" was obvious: progressive managerial sectors, promoters of national industrialization projects in cooperation with democratic public powers, in order to create modern homelands where stages of advanced social democracy could be projected later on. Such strategies were accomplished with partial but effective success in several Latin American countries.

Before president Hugo Chávez and his volunteer and anti-dialectical advisors, the idea did not occur to any Latin American "revolutionary" to direct the attacks, not against the principal adversary (which is surely transnational and globalizing capital), but rather against the national bourgeoisie, the creator of spaces for independent industrial progress and, consequently, a natural ally of a nation with aspirations for a better life. But that has been the conduct of the "reverse revolution" we are now living: the incessant politics of aggression and threats against the Venezuelan private sector (including the agricultural managers who are not "latifundistas" but rather national capitalists), destroys the achievements of forty previous years of modernizing transformation and worsens the nation's dependency before transnationals and imperial power.




{ Demetrio Boersner, TalCual, 14 October 2005 }