Derrotar una involución histórica / Pompeyo Márquez

To Defeat an Historic Involution

Throughout my life I have learned that each society establishes for itself the tasks that its development and progress demand. The current regime has become a shackle for that evolution. This is precisely where we find the truly revolutionary content. Humanity marches toward the liquidation of poverty, toward the equality of the sexes (it was marching with only one foot, the incorporation of women accelerates its social development); toward the defense of the environment, among other major goals for the millennium outlined by the United Nations.

Within that perspective of development, it’s an extremely grave error to want to build the future on a base of the destruction of everything now in existence. That constitutes a reversal. What experience teaches is to conserve those advances that have been made and to project them toward new stages of development. For instance, wanting to ignore that Venezuelan society was advancing and wanting to erase all of it is primitivism, it’s an involution.

Let’s check several facts: the progress in education, the productive apparatus that was being developed, the advances in farming, the leap away from centralization and caudillismo represented by the process of decentralization, the election of governors, mayors and neighborhood associations. There were new demands that went beyond the so-called partyocracy, corruption, bureaucracy, and matters relating to Judicial Power and jails. And so on, successively.

What was needed were new advances, the correction of vices and solutions for the new problems that the combination of misery and poverty presented. That’s what Chávez offered. But now we see the opposite: a militaristic autocracy, the desire to squash pluralism and decentralization. In the name of a “21st century socialism” that’s a near carbon copy reproduction of the monstrous mistakes of the cult of personality, of centralization and wanting to sweep away everything from the past. In sum, a copy of so-called “actually existing socialism,” whose remains are to be found in Cuba and North Korea.

None of what’s happening in India, in China, in Vietnam; none of what’s occurring in Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Chile) is being acknowledged. They are read in a backwards manner. To say that advances happen without national and foreign investment, while simultaneously fighting savage capitalism, is to place oneself outside reality.

Alright, I’ll finish this commentary by pointing out with necessary emphasis that it’s indispensable we defeat this historic involution. And this must be done at the same time we prepare ourselves for the November elections, when we have to present the best candidates, ones who can create consensus and who have proposals that pay attention to the central necessities of regional and local communities.




{ Pompeyo Márquez, Tal Cual, 25 April 2008 }