Maius noster
Regarding what happened that spring of 1968, which we now designate with double metonymy as the French May, people speak “with anxieties and fears” – as Darío would say – not just in Paris and France but anywhere in the world. Before and after those events there were others identified or distinguished to the degree of the mood of whoever evokes or revives them. Sometimes we speak about May as a revolution and other times, we ourselves, each one and all of us, speak of a social explosion or the ephemeral realization of a utopia.
And yet, as soon as we stop at each of these comparisons, we find the historical figure of May is different from those other references in that it continues to be permanently discussed everywhere on Earth. It’s true this doesn’t happen with other events we’ve stumbled upon in our lives: insurrections, mutinies and revolutions; exoduses, discoveries and conquests; explosions of horror or of collective festivity, these are all events that present themselves (and represent us) at specific moments; always with the same traits: they’re documents and also monuments with the solemnity, the precision and the distance of what already happened and occurred in the way we tend to see it now, almost always with the same feelings. Alternately, the French May always comes back to anyone who lived it or stumbled upon it at some moment, with different faces and profiles that awaken within us again, within each one of us, anxieties and fears, but also always in a different manner.
The French May, more than any other genre of historical event most resembles those novels that fiction readers turn into “their novels,” those they’ve never been able to abandon because they’ve never been able to master them completely. Each moment provides an impulse to engage in a new reading and discover the possibility of reading. It’s a matter of seeing the entire work as one reads any work, that is, by discovering new themes and elements, as well as a new hierarchy based on interests and affections between those new elements we’ve just discovered.
May always offers the possibility of affirming today the exact opposite of what we negated yesterday and what we’ll be able to reaffirm tomorrow. Today, for example, I think May is the only revolution that remains alive, absolutely alive, precisely because it never triumphed, in the sense that those who rebelled never reached power. Other revolutions died and will be seen as cadavers, even if unburied, because those who took power made sure to murder them. We will continue to talk about May because each person has his own, Maius noster.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 9 May 2008 }
Showing posts with label Oswaldo Barreto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oswaldo Barreto. Show all posts
5.10.2008
4.29.2008
Aimé Césaire, creador de libertades (fin) / Oswaldo Barreto
Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (Conclusion)
The fact that these days people all over the world are talking about the death of Aimé Césaire as an event that has repercussions on the political and cultural actions now taking place in almost every corner of the planet, this is related to the way that man linked his life with those of all black people and, through them, with that of all the earth’s pariahs.
We want to say that what a young colonized man of the Antilles, educated in the European metropolis, forged as a personal project continues to be a program for a struggle that belongs to millions simultaneously grouped together and spread all over the world. And this project, that Césaire forged during the years preceding the explosion of the First World War and that he himself baptized as “negritude,” is an endeavor that involves “assuming the social and cultural consequences of being from black Africa or a descendant of black Africans.” And assuming that modality of “being in the world” – as was already said in that era – meant for the artist and politician with a vast knowledge and a stubborn will to autonomy that Césaire already was, giving himself over to a search for the paths of liberty, lost liberty or a liberty yet to be reached.
To seek liberty, as with the search for independence, is relatively easy. What is costly, as we well know, is to maintain them, to avoid above all that they be confiscated from us precisely in the name of liberty and independence. And Aimé Césaire, as an artist and politician, regardless of the genre in which he worked within both fields (poetry, drama or essays, as an artist; mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of his island, for over 50 years, or member of the French Parliament during numerous periods, as a politician; and promoter of innumerable forums, encounters, congresses and publications, where he tended to fuse his aptitudes for accomplishment in both), was always willing to pay the necessary price for maintaining the search for liberty. In this way he adhered to the communist movement when it seemed like the only true path toward achieving the emancipation of mankind. And when it became evident that actually existing communism had become the complete opposite: the path toward the dominance of a single man over masses that are submissive to him, Césaire publicly renounced his condition as a member of the French Communist Party (“I don’t betray or deny, I want doctrines and political parties to be built to serve mankind, not for mankind to serve doctrines or political parties.” Letter of Resignation from the CP) and formed a political party in his native country and for his native country, with no pretensions other than to undertake a “Copernican revolution against that entrenched custom of political parties on the left and right, of acting for us, planning for us, thinking for us (and in this way seizing from us) the initiative in everything, which is a primary condition for exercising liberty.”
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 28 April 2008 }
The fact that these days people all over the world are talking about the death of Aimé Césaire as an event that has repercussions on the political and cultural actions now taking place in almost every corner of the planet, this is related to the way that man linked his life with those of all black people and, through them, with that of all the earth’s pariahs.
We want to say that what a young colonized man of the Antilles, educated in the European metropolis, forged as a personal project continues to be a program for a struggle that belongs to millions simultaneously grouped together and spread all over the world. And this project, that Césaire forged during the years preceding the explosion of the First World War and that he himself baptized as “negritude,” is an endeavor that involves “assuming the social and cultural consequences of being from black Africa or a descendant of black Africans.” And assuming that modality of “being in the world” – as was already said in that era – meant for the artist and politician with a vast knowledge and a stubborn will to autonomy that Césaire already was, giving himself over to a search for the paths of liberty, lost liberty or a liberty yet to be reached.
To seek liberty, as with the search for independence, is relatively easy. What is costly, as we well know, is to maintain them, to avoid above all that they be confiscated from us precisely in the name of liberty and independence. And Aimé Césaire, as an artist and politician, regardless of the genre in which he worked within both fields (poetry, drama or essays, as an artist; mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of his island, for over 50 years, or member of the French Parliament during numerous periods, as a politician; and promoter of innumerable forums, encounters, congresses and publications, where he tended to fuse his aptitudes for accomplishment in both), was always willing to pay the necessary price for maintaining the search for liberty. In this way he adhered to the communist movement when it seemed like the only true path toward achieving the emancipation of mankind. And when it became evident that actually existing communism had become the complete opposite: the path toward the dominance of a single man over masses that are submissive to him, Césaire publicly renounced his condition as a member of the French Communist Party (“I don’t betray or deny, I want doctrines and political parties to be built to serve mankind, not for mankind to serve doctrines or political parties.” Letter of Resignation from the CP) and formed a political party in his native country and for his native country, with no pretensions other than to undertake a “Copernican revolution against that entrenched custom of political parties on the left and right, of acting for us, planning for us, thinking for us (and in this way seizing from us) the initiative in everything, which is a primary condition for exercising liberty.”
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 28 April 2008 }
4.25.2008
Aimé Césaire, creador de libertades (II) / Oswaldo Barreto
Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (II)
With Notebook of a Return to the Native Land Aimé Césaire went back to the communitarian life of Martinique and entered the Parnassus of French poetry, with André Breton as his godfather (though not his discoverer), one of the founders of surrealism as we all know. That double condition already made him an important black man and even a guide for the black community of Martinique, as well as for black poets writing in French. But Césaire started to become the Fundamental Black Man and the great creator and attendant of liberties after his encounter with Haiti during World War II, the only independent black nation at the time.
“Haiti is the first black colony to have fought for its independence and, once that independence was achieved, to have adopted a republican regime. That happened at the end of the 18th century and yet the Haitian people are one of the most dissatisfied. Haiti fascinated me because it’s a magnifying glass through which we can view the entire Antilles as well as Africa, and if we study Haiti’s history we can become aware of all the problems of the Third World.
The fight for independence is glorious, it costs a great deal of blood and tears. It is an epic. But I would say that independence is relatively easy. After independence comes tragedy, since it is at that moment – people should already realize this – when the difficult struggle begins and the struggle for liberty takes on its true meaning. And there’s no possible alibi, since independent man has to work things out with himself alone.” (Interview with Jalid Chrabi, 1961)
At the beginning of the 1940s, during his first stay in Haiti, the Martinican poet became aware that his problem as a black man and as a poet was also the fundamental problem of all those who struggle or had struggled for independence: what to do with the liberty conquered, how to consolidate and maintain it within artistic creation and community-based life.
From that moment of consciousness – as people tended to say in the realms of the Left during those 1960s we evoke so often – Césaire dedicated himself to a major struggle, on the political plane as well as on the plane of artistic creation, in order to affirm that each man, no matter his color, faith or ideology, is responsible for conquering and affirming the liberty he seeks. With his actions and his verb, Césaire dedicated himself to showing that the right to liberty is a matter of personal struggle for each individual and not something given by leaders, parties or doctrines. That one has to mistrust all of them, especially because they often stifle liberties under the well-worn pretext of defending them. Starting from these coordinates of personal responsibility and a search for liberty, we will see how Césaire built his life, his work and those of millions and millions of his contemporaries.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 24 April 2008 }
With Notebook of a Return to the Native Land Aimé Césaire went back to the communitarian life of Martinique and entered the Parnassus of French poetry, with André Breton as his godfather (though not his discoverer), one of the founders of surrealism as we all know. That double condition already made him an important black man and even a guide for the black community of Martinique, as well as for black poets writing in French. But Césaire started to become the Fundamental Black Man and the great creator and attendant of liberties after his encounter with Haiti during World War II, the only independent black nation at the time.
“Haiti is the first black colony to have fought for its independence and, once that independence was achieved, to have adopted a republican regime. That happened at the end of the 18th century and yet the Haitian people are one of the most dissatisfied. Haiti fascinated me because it’s a magnifying glass through which we can view the entire Antilles as well as Africa, and if we study Haiti’s history we can become aware of all the problems of the Third World.
The fight for independence is glorious, it costs a great deal of blood and tears. It is an epic. But I would say that independence is relatively easy. After independence comes tragedy, since it is at that moment – people should already realize this – when the difficult struggle begins and the struggle for liberty takes on its true meaning. And there’s no possible alibi, since independent man has to work things out with himself alone.” (Interview with Jalid Chrabi, 1961)
At the beginning of the 1940s, during his first stay in Haiti, the Martinican poet became aware that his problem as a black man and as a poet was also the fundamental problem of all those who struggle or had struggled for independence: what to do with the liberty conquered, how to consolidate and maintain it within artistic creation and community-based life.
From that moment of consciousness – as people tended to say in the realms of the Left during those 1960s we evoke so often – Césaire dedicated himself to a major struggle, on the political plane as well as on the plane of artistic creation, in order to affirm that each man, no matter his color, faith or ideology, is responsible for conquering and affirming the liberty he seeks. With his actions and his verb, Césaire dedicated himself to showing that the right to liberty is a matter of personal struggle for each individual and not something given by leaders, parties or doctrines. That one has to mistrust all of them, especially because they often stifle liberties under the well-worn pretext of defending them. Starting from these coordinates of personal responsibility and a search for liberty, we will see how Césaire built his life, his work and those of millions and millions of his contemporaries.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 24 April 2008 }
4.24.2008
Aimé Césaire, creador de libertades (I) / Oswaldo Barreto
Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (I)
Aimé Fernand David Césaire, one of the great contemporary French poets, politician and playwright, tenacious anti-colonial fighter, born on June 26, 1913 in Basse Pointe on the northeastern end of Martinique, died on April 17 in the island’s capital, Fort-de-France.
Those words, which we find with little variation among the infinity of obituaries published in European and American newspapers, themselves justify these other words we find on the Web page: www.cesaire.org, dedicated to the funeral rites celebrated in Fort-de-France:
Le negre fondamentale s’en est allé
La Martinique et tous les damnés de la terre lui rendent hommage
(The fundamental black man has left us
Martinique and all the wretched of the earth pay homage to him)
No, the former speak of someone who has already died while the latter words, which could serve as an epitaph, speak of what Aimé Césaire was as a man and of the world he desired for his fellow humans. The Fundamental Black Man, among all the black people of the earth, those in Africa, in the United States and those belonging to the diaspora dispersed throughout the other Americas. All of them belonging to the wretched, to the condemned of the earth.
But just as not all the wretched are black, neither was Aimé Césaire just a fundamental black man. Césaire, a member of a “subaltern” race, has been what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was, a member of a ruling and hegemonic race for his time, the fundamental man. Simply and proudly, the man, without distinguishing between races, cultures or credos. Just as Goethe was fated to live through the vicissitudes that were imposed on liberty, that is, on the liberties of all men, by the French Revolution, and the actions of its defenders and its gravediggers, in this manner Césaire lived in order to face similar vicissitudes, the ones that were imposed on the liberties of the entire planet by the communist and Marxist revolutions that began in 1917, when our poet was beginning his life.
And this movement in search of the paths of liberty begins right at the start of a small book: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939):
As there are hyena-men and panther-men, I would be
a Jew-man
a Kaffir-man
a Hindu-man-from-Calcutta
a Harlem-man-who-doesn’t-vote
It was a colonized black man who began this search in a world where all black people were still colonized. Despite Haiti, as we shall see.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 23 April 2008 }
Aimé Fernand David Césaire, one of the great contemporary French poets, politician and playwright, tenacious anti-colonial fighter, born on June 26, 1913 in Basse Pointe on the northeastern end of Martinique, died on April 17 in the island’s capital, Fort-de-France.
Those words, which we find with little variation among the infinity of obituaries published in European and American newspapers, themselves justify these other words we find on the Web page: www.cesaire.org, dedicated to the funeral rites celebrated in Fort-de-France:
Le negre fondamentale s’en est allé
La Martinique et tous les damnés de la terre lui rendent hommage
(The fundamental black man has left us
Martinique and all the wretched of the earth pay homage to him)
No, the former speak of someone who has already died while the latter words, which could serve as an epitaph, speak of what Aimé Césaire was as a man and of the world he desired for his fellow humans. The Fundamental Black Man, among all the black people of the earth, those in Africa, in the United States and those belonging to the diaspora dispersed throughout the other Americas. All of them belonging to the wretched, to the condemned of the earth.
But just as not all the wretched are black, neither was Aimé Césaire just a fundamental black man. Césaire, a member of a “subaltern” race, has been what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was, a member of a ruling and hegemonic race for his time, the fundamental man. Simply and proudly, the man, without distinguishing between races, cultures or credos. Just as Goethe was fated to live through the vicissitudes that were imposed on liberty, that is, on the liberties of all men, by the French Revolution, and the actions of its defenders and its gravediggers, in this manner Césaire lived in order to face similar vicissitudes, the ones that were imposed on the liberties of the entire planet by the communist and Marxist revolutions that began in 1917, when our poet was beginning his life.
And this movement in search of the paths of liberty begins right at the start of a small book: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939):
As there are hyena-men and panther-men, I would be
a Jew-man
a Kaffir-man
a Hindu-man-from-Calcutta
a Harlem-man-who-doesn’t-vote
It was a colonized black man who began this search in a world where all black people were still colonized. Despite Haiti, as we shall see.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 23 April 2008 }
1.15.2008
Adriano, Señor y siervo / Oswaldo Barreto
Adriano, Sir and Serf
Today, second Sunday of January this year, I know people from all over Venezuela are mourning the death of Adriano González León.
I first heard about this man, who, with utmost courtesy and elegance, passed on Saturday afternoon at the bar of a restaurant in Las Mercedes, the neighborhood where he had lived for decades, when I got to Valera sixty years ago, the least cultured of the Andean cities where one could study secondary school. As soon as I registered at Rafael Rangel school – the high school the city had just opened that year, 1946 – I knew I would have as a classmate, in a higher grade, the city’s most arrogant, tremendous and ingenious kid. Adriano, the best first baseman for the admittedly precarious baseball teams in a city that didn’t even have stadiums yet; the founder and leader of the “La Silenciosa” gang, a precursor to the Hooligans, who made commercial establishments pay for the failures they suffered during exam season; and, above all, the only kid to whom the Director of the Carmen Sánchez de Jelambi Library gave access to the serious books of literature and philosophy.
Still unable to find him among the two hundred high school students, I started to familiarize myself with his ability to transform everything that happened to him into brief chronicles or sonnets that appeared every week on the school’s newspaper murals. So, from the time he was fourteen years old, Adriano showed himself to be a master of the written word.
Chance or destiny, that gift of Adriano’s began to manifest itself at a time when our most local events and experiences could become confused with what humanity was living as an entity, those years in the mid forties when the giant transformations provoked by the Second World War were added to those brought on by the Venezuelan revolution of 1945. From that point on, Adriano’s faculty of being able to poeticize, against prescriptions and sanctions, tedious Chemistry lessons in 11-syllable lines (“I would like to resolve an equation of kisses / with your electro-positive lips / and my electro-negative lips”), began the terrible task of converting his experiences and those of his society into short stories, chronicles, essays and novels that today belong to universal literature.
To convert people’s problems and dreams into words. Such was our dear friend’s power. Such was also his servitude, since in order to practice such alchemy as work, he had to consecrate himself to conquering the freedom to do that. And that’s what Adriano González León did until yesterday afternoon when death overtook him with pen in hand.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 14 January 2008 }
Today, second Sunday of January this year, I know people from all over Venezuela are mourning the death of Adriano González León.
I first heard about this man, who, with utmost courtesy and elegance, passed on Saturday afternoon at the bar of a restaurant in Las Mercedes, the neighborhood where he had lived for decades, when I got to Valera sixty years ago, the least cultured of the Andean cities where one could study secondary school. As soon as I registered at Rafael Rangel school – the high school the city had just opened that year, 1946 – I knew I would have as a classmate, in a higher grade, the city’s most arrogant, tremendous and ingenious kid. Adriano, the best first baseman for the admittedly precarious baseball teams in a city that didn’t even have stadiums yet; the founder and leader of the “La Silenciosa” gang, a precursor to the Hooligans, who made commercial establishments pay for the failures they suffered during exam season; and, above all, the only kid to whom the Director of the Carmen Sánchez de Jelambi Library gave access to the serious books of literature and philosophy.
Still unable to find him among the two hundred high school students, I started to familiarize myself with his ability to transform everything that happened to him into brief chronicles or sonnets that appeared every week on the school’s newspaper murals. So, from the time he was fourteen years old, Adriano showed himself to be a master of the written word.
Chance or destiny, that gift of Adriano’s began to manifest itself at a time when our most local events and experiences could become confused with what humanity was living as an entity, those years in the mid forties when the giant transformations provoked by the Second World War were added to those brought on by the Venezuelan revolution of 1945. From that point on, Adriano’s faculty of being able to poeticize, against prescriptions and sanctions, tedious Chemistry lessons in 11-syllable lines (“I would like to resolve an equation of kisses / with your electro-positive lips / and my electro-negative lips”), began the terrible task of converting his experiences and those of his society into short stories, chronicles, essays and novels that today belong to universal literature.
To convert people’s problems and dreams into words. Such was our dear friend’s power. Such was also his servitude, since in order to practice such alchemy as work, he had to consecrate himself to conquering the freedom to do that. And that’s what Adriano González León did until yesterday afternoon when death overtook him with pen in hand.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 14 January 2008 }
11.27.2007
Inversiones dialécticas / Oswaldo Barreto
Dialectical Inversions
Those who have taken the words and actions of President Chávez very seriously have highlighted, without exception, his desire to proclaim himself the direct or indirect inheritor of Marx’s world vision and methodology. Among his abundant doctrinaire speculations, particularly those related both to his desire to create 21st century socialism and the profound reasons that have guided his other great decisions, there are those who seek and even find the reflection of his dialectical vision of the world.
That’s why any observer of Venezuela’s political events knows about the consecration of the jealous caretakers of the Marxist dialectic – such as the frequently cited German-Mexican professor Dietrich or the very Venezuelan and very versatile Jerónimo Carrera – in discovering the threads of Marxist orthodoxy underlying the Chávez phenomenon in its most diverse facets. Without pretending to emulate or contradict these researchers of Chávez’s thought and works, I confess that on more than one occasion I too have perceived in one and the other a few glimmers of a dialectical vision of the world. Except, the dialectic I perceive is that other dialectic against which Marx opposed his own. We should recall, in relation to this, the philosophical manifesto found in Capital: “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” And we should also recall what would turn out to be the most famous example of the opposite results to which these methods lead: “For Hegel the State creates society for dialectical materialism (Marx’s); the opposite is true, it is society that creates the State.” It has occurred to us, then, that these seemingly indelible remembrances from our Marxist formation have come to mind when we’ve faced the president’s firm conviction that he will, as an incarnation of the State, rebuild Venezuelan society in all its components. From Chávez (master of the State) will emerge, first Venezuelan society and then, with a bit of luck and good oil prices, Latin American society and who knows? Maybe even a new multipolar world.
And if this brief comparative sketch might seem extravagant, let’s look at what’s happening now with Colombia. When Chávez affirms that relations between Venezuela and Colombia “have turned sour” because Uribe rejected him as a mediator with the FARC, he once again ratifies his idea that anything affecting him personally is a matter of importance for Venezuelan society, thus surpassing that other famous dialectical inversion by Louis XIV: “L'État, c'est moi.” And – representing a dialectical inversion of graver consequences – after he exposes that things have gotten bad, he declares, he manifests his disposition not to work toward improving them, but instead toward worsening them as much as his will permits.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 26 November 2007 }
Those who have taken the words and actions of President Chávez very seriously have highlighted, without exception, his desire to proclaim himself the direct or indirect inheritor of Marx’s world vision and methodology. Among his abundant doctrinaire speculations, particularly those related both to his desire to create 21st century socialism and the profound reasons that have guided his other great decisions, there are those who seek and even find the reflection of his dialectical vision of the world.
That’s why any observer of Venezuela’s political events knows about the consecration of the jealous caretakers of the Marxist dialectic – such as the frequently cited German-Mexican professor Dietrich or the very Venezuelan and very versatile Jerónimo Carrera – in discovering the threads of Marxist orthodoxy underlying the Chávez phenomenon in its most diverse facets. Without pretending to emulate or contradict these researchers of Chávez’s thought and works, I confess that on more than one occasion I too have perceived in one and the other a few glimmers of a dialectical vision of the world. Except, the dialectic I perceive is that other dialectic against which Marx opposed his own. We should recall, in relation to this, the philosophical manifesto found in Capital: “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” And we should also recall what would turn out to be the most famous example of the opposite results to which these methods lead: “For Hegel the State creates society for dialectical materialism (Marx’s); the opposite is true, it is society that creates the State.” It has occurred to us, then, that these seemingly indelible remembrances from our Marxist formation have come to mind when we’ve faced the president’s firm conviction that he will, as an incarnation of the State, rebuild Venezuelan society in all its components. From Chávez (master of the State) will emerge, first Venezuelan society and then, with a bit of luck and good oil prices, Latin American society and who knows? Maybe even a new multipolar world.
And if this brief comparative sketch might seem extravagant, let’s look at what’s happening now with Colombia. When Chávez affirms that relations between Venezuela and Colombia “have turned sour” because Uribe rejected him as a mediator with the FARC, he once again ratifies his idea that anything affecting him personally is a matter of importance for Venezuelan society, thus surpassing that other famous dialectical inversion by Louis XIV: “L'État, c'est moi.” And – representing a dialectical inversion of graver consequences – after he exposes that things have gotten bad, he declares, he manifests his disposition not to work toward improving them, but instead toward worsening them as much as his will permits.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 26 November 2007 }
10.17.2007
Independencia y libertad de la nación / Oswaldo Barreto
The Nation’s Independence and Liberty
Hugo Chávez has just reiterated with his reverent words in salutation to Fidel Castro that “Venezuela has two presidents (Fidel Castro and himself). But we are one single government.” And Raúl Castro (Raúl, not his brother), in the most prosaic context of the signing of cooperation treaties between both countries, has manifested with equal clarity that these new agreements “are a significant contribution to the growing process of union and integration between the two countries.”
Since we first heard of these declarations, we’ve anxiously searched for the coverage given of them by the international press. And it turns out that up until now, though we have found discrete information and commentary on the public acts that made up the encounter’s agenda, we haven’t perceived the slightest observation of what these declarations represent as real and imminent threats looming over the independence of both nations. This time, neither the BBC nor the International Herald or Le Monde, nor the great dailies here in Latin America – who habitually pick up the big news items on their front covers, even if they’re about the most abandoned underdeveloped nations – even mention the single government that now rules in both nations. It is true that the other declarations by Chávez, and by the usually more thoughtful Fidel Castro, were so scandalous and universally bellicose that the revelation of the danger that threatens Cuba and Venezuela was relegated to the sidelines after the joint announcement that many new Vietnams are being gestated everywhere, or the firm conviction Fidel Castro says to have that there is “a new world war” on the horizon. Facing hecatombs of a global scale, our national tragedy is pushed to the sidelines by international opinion.
But this can’t be the case for us. The threats against our national independence are the equivalent of the threats that can arise against the life of an individual. To lose independence is to lose liberty, which means ceasing to exist as a nation. And if unfortunately the Cuban brothers and sisters have been forced to endure the suppression of liberty for nearly half a century already for the supposed sacrifice of affirming their independence, we Venezuelans are obliged to fight so as to not fall in a similar trap. Independence and liberty are inseparable.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 16 October 2007 }
Hugo Chávez has just reiterated with his reverent words in salutation to Fidel Castro that “Venezuela has two presidents (Fidel Castro and himself). But we are one single government.” And Raúl Castro (Raúl, not his brother), in the most prosaic context of the signing of cooperation treaties between both countries, has manifested with equal clarity that these new agreements “are a significant contribution to the growing process of union and integration between the two countries.”
Since we first heard of these declarations, we’ve anxiously searched for the coverage given of them by the international press. And it turns out that up until now, though we have found discrete information and commentary on the public acts that made up the encounter’s agenda, we haven’t perceived the slightest observation of what these declarations represent as real and imminent threats looming over the independence of both nations. This time, neither the BBC nor the International Herald or Le Monde, nor the great dailies here in Latin America – who habitually pick up the big news items on their front covers, even if they’re about the most abandoned underdeveloped nations – even mention the single government that now rules in both nations. It is true that the other declarations by Chávez, and by the usually more thoughtful Fidel Castro, were so scandalous and universally bellicose that the revelation of the danger that threatens Cuba and Venezuela was relegated to the sidelines after the joint announcement that many new Vietnams are being gestated everywhere, or the firm conviction Fidel Castro says to have that there is “a new world war” on the horizon. Facing hecatombs of a global scale, our national tragedy is pushed to the sidelines by international opinion.
But this can’t be the case for us. The threats against our national independence are the equivalent of the threats that can arise against the life of an individual. To lose independence is to lose liberty, which means ceasing to exist as a nation. And if unfortunately the Cuban brothers and sisters have been forced to endure the suppression of liberty for nearly half a century already for the supposed sacrifice of affirming their independence, we Venezuelans are obliged to fight so as to not fall in a similar trap. Independence and liberty are inseparable.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 16 October 2007 }
10.12.2007
Apostilla sobre el Che / Oswaldo Barreto
Annotation About Che
In the text published by Tal Cual about my conversations with Che Guevara in Algeria (Monday, October 8th), surely because of limited space, no mention is made of a few of my observations that, so as to not implicate Che Guevara or the journalist who interviewed me in any way, I now consider convenient to publish here in my Pórtico column:
“President Chávez only incorporated the figure and myth of Che Guevara in his rhetoric a short time ago, just when he announced that he’d made the decision of imposing the construction of socialism on Venezuela. With all the scandalous liberties Chávez takes in order to use history, mythology or religions, it was an uphill climb for him to associate the image of Che with what has been his style of governance and the means he employs in order to achieve his political goals. Che’s behavior in his public life was not only identical to the one he led in his private life but it was also what he demanded of all the revolutionaries of the world and, above all, of the Cubans. He was markedly austere and discrete in everything, whether this was learned or natural, I don’t know: in his speech, his way of dressing or when he spoke of his past, his ideals or personal ambitions. He managed to portray himself as just another person, not as a chosen being and much less a Messiah or savior. That was one side of him, and on another, Che wasn’t looking to seduce anyone with material goods, nor with any other type of resources beyond reasons, ideas or moral principles. That refusal to manipulate individuals or peoples with material resources marked his life, not only in front of Fidel Castro and other revolutionaries, but in front of the entire world. One felt that Che was always looking to raise the consciousness of his interlocutors, not trying to turn them into accomplices, much less into dependents or servants of any type. His figure would not lend itself, then, to legitimize either ostentation or self-aggrandizement, just like it wouldn’t help legitimize the “revolutionary” use of petroleum resources for buying people’s consciousness. But instead, anyone who swears themselves to the purpose of changing the mentality and behavior of individuals or entire peoples can claim to use Che, who also believed, it seems in very good faith and with very noble reasons, that this was possible.”
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 10 October 2007 }
In the text published by Tal Cual about my conversations with Che Guevara in Algeria (Monday, October 8th), surely because of limited space, no mention is made of a few of my observations that, so as to not implicate Che Guevara or the journalist who interviewed me in any way, I now consider convenient to publish here in my Pórtico column:
“President Chávez only incorporated the figure and myth of Che Guevara in his rhetoric a short time ago, just when he announced that he’d made the decision of imposing the construction of socialism on Venezuela. With all the scandalous liberties Chávez takes in order to use history, mythology or religions, it was an uphill climb for him to associate the image of Che with what has been his style of governance and the means he employs in order to achieve his political goals. Che’s behavior in his public life was not only identical to the one he led in his private life but it was also what he demanded of all the revolutionaries of the world and, above all, of the Cubans. He was markedly austere and discrete in everything, whether this was learned or natural, I don’t know: in his speech, his way of dressing or when he spoke of his past, his ideals or personal ambitions. He managed to portray himself as just another person, not as a chosen being and much less a Messiah or savior. That was one side of him, and on another, Che wasn’t looking to seduce anyone with material goods, nor with any other type of resources beyond reasons, ideas or moral principles. That refusal to manipulate individuals or peoples with material resources marked his life, not only in front of Fidel Castro and other revolutionaries, but in front of the entire world. One felt that Che was always looking to raise the consciousness of his interlocutors, not trying to turn them into accomplices, much less into dependents or servants of any type. His figure would not lend itself, then, to legitimize either ostentation or self-aggrandizement, just like it wouldn’t help legitimize the “revolutionary” use of petroleum resources for buying people’s consciousness. But instead, anyone who swears themselves to the purpose of changing the mentality and behavior of individuals or entire peoples can claim to use Che, who also believed, it seems in very good faith and with very noble reasons, that this was possible.”
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 10 October 2007 }
10.08.2007
Frente a frente con el Che / Carlos Crespo
Face to Face with Che
On the 40th anniversary of the death of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the sociologist Oswaldo Barreto narrates his experience of three days alongside the polemical guerrilla fighter.
They were times of revolutionary effervescence. The movements of national liberation and the guerrilla armies were at their peak, while the Cuban revolution still wore a vigorous 7-year-old face. It was precisely in that context that Oswaldo Barreto met Ernesto “Che” Guevara the man, the one no one seems to want to remember 40 years after his death, in the distant land of Algeria.
Barreto attributes it to “chance” that he met the mythical Argentine guerrilla fighter. And yet, as he himself tells it, chance has a name and surname: the French language. Guevara was looking for a translator who could help him take his speech from Spanish to Balzac’s tongue, for the occasion of the Afro-Asiatic Economic Seminar that would take place in Algeria. When he heard about a short Venezuelan who – besides obtaining weapons for the guerrillas in his country – was fluent in French, he asked the Cuban ambassador in Algeria, Jorge Serguera, to invite him to the diplomatic headquarters so he could meet him.
This circumstance would provide the communist Venezuelan militant the chance to speak with Guevara for three days during the month of February 1965. The experience included a long 12-hour talk face to face with the most universal of Argentines, during which he got an in-depth glimpse of his ideas about revolution, as well as the idiosyncrasies of his personality.
CHE SINGING NANAS
“When I arrived, I saw a character over there (Che), playing a game of chess with Serguera. It was hard for me to identify him because beyond what had I thought, that he was a weakling like me, he was a corpulent guy, well-built, very serene, deeply concentrated on his game. I didn’t see an important figure, I saw a man who was taking a game of chess too seriously and was singing some nanas (French nursery rhymes). He was singing them in French and he pronounced it quite well.”
This is the description Barreto gives of his first encounter with the guerrilla fighter. Once the game was finished, Guevara spoke to the Venezuelan in a “solemn” tone to greet him and ask him for help in translating the speech, not before clarifying that his impeccable French pronunciation came from the lessons he received from a nanny, whom he had mostly forgotten.
Che’s speech was about the relationships between the communists who were in power with the emerging movements that aspired to it. And it was precisely the translation of its 15 pages that allowed the Venezuelan to get to know the thought of his fellow South American.
That conversation has left an indelible mark on Barreto’s memory. When he remembers his conversations with Guevara, his gestures become animated, he remembers almost every word the guerrilla fighter pronounced and even imitates the way he expressed himself and the gestures he made.
Regarding Ernesto Guevara’s personality, the Venezuelan highlights “his studied despotism. It was a chosen manner of being. He didn’t want to become complicit or empathetic with his interlocutor but instead every day was a permanent demand with anyone he met. (…) He wasn’t a friendly character at all. From the very beginning he assumed his authority – not authoritarianism – as ascendant over the other.”
Barreto eventually finished the translation of the speech that was given the title “The Anti-Imperialist Fight” and presented on February 27th, 1965. It was considered a success because of the polemic it unleashed within the international socialist movement.
CHE’S CONTRADICTIONS
Barreto’s time with Guevara not only served him as a chance to know his personality but also to get to the bottom of his thought, an element that has become entangled in the web of his myth.
When he was 25 years old, Guevara still hadn’t developed any social conscience or political interests, according to what he confessed to Barreto: “I was apathetic, lazy, adventurous. Reality only interested me as a subject for photography, but I didn’t give a shit about transforming it,” Che said to the Venezuelan revolutionary. But everything changed when he encountered Fidel Castro in Mexico and saw “for the first time that someone was proposing that he could make a revolution if he wanted to do it.”
Barreto says that at first he saw Che as one of the greatest humanists to ever live, for placing not God but man himself as a central force of creation, one capable of creating an ideal state and achieving it: “But little by little I realized what that meant: Che was willing to impose that. In the act of imposing a change in man, Che was much closer to the Nazis.”
The Venezuelan revolutionary warns, moreover, that the entire theory of creating the “new man” proposed a type of imposition of a superior race: “From that point on I thought about the terror that would be a revolutionary process led by people like Che.”
His famous “Letter to the Tri-Continental” is a good example of the contradictions in Che’s thought. This text includes a combination of libertarian ideals with authoritarian methods for achieving them. This is how in the document Guevara assures us that “a people without hatred cannot triumph over a brutal enemy.”
After Ernesto Guevara’s death the myth of “Che” was consolidated, a phenomenon that seems to have gone through various stages, beginning as a symbol of armed struggle until degenerating into a mere commercial logo. For Barreto, myths follow their own logic and continue to change with cultural changes. “Every era reinvents the myth, although the central nucleus maintains itself.”
PETROLEUM CHE
Even though it defines itself as a “Bolivarian revolution,” the current national government didn’t openly use the Guevara rhetoric and myth until just recently, with the announced “radicalization of the process.” For Barreto, the use of the figure of Che doesn’t make any sense within the frame of an economy based on petrodollars: “The mythical trait that’s highlighted with Che Guevara is in complete opposition to the figure that Hugo Chávez works to forge for himself. Che never abandoned his absolute modesty or the austerity of his behavior.”
According to the sociologist, the Government only promotes one aspect of Guevara’s thought (the authoritarian conception of society’s transformation) because it coincides with its political interests. In that sense, Barreto concludes: “Anyone who decides to change by force the mentality and behavior of individuals and entire peoples can pretend to use Che, who also believed, seemingly in very good faith and with very “noble” reasons, that this was possible.” In the end, “each person fabricates his own Che Guevara depending on his needs and desires.”
*
COLLECTIVIST CIGAR
Che’s ideology about the “new man” was a concept directed at eliminating any “individualist” vestige from the mind of the revolutionary, who should let go of feelings such as fear and personal worries. Even the cigar Che smoked wasn’t part of an individualistic vice, but rather a form of identifying himself with the Cuban collective: “He smoked the cigar. You could tell it had been hard for him to learn the habit. But why did he smoke the cigar? Because a Cuban smokes cigars. That’s the level his acquiescence to particular details reached,” Barreto points out. He concludes by saying that Che was “a frightening example” of the machine-like rigorousness of the new revolutionary.
{ Carlos Crespo, Tal Cual, 8 October 2007 }
On the 40th anniversary of the death of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the sociologist Oswaldo Barreto narrates his experience of three days alongside the polemical guerrilla fighter.
They were times of revolutionary effervescence. The movements of national liberation and the guerrilla armies were at their peak, while the Cuban revolution still wore a vigorous 7-year-old face. It was precisely in that context that Oswaldo Barreto met Ernesto “Che” Guevara the man, the one no one seems to want to remember 40 years after his death, in the distant land of Algeria.
Barreto attributes it to “chance” that he met the mythical Argentine guerrilla fighter. And yet, as he himself tells it, chance has a name and surname: the French language. Guevara was looking for a translator who could help him take his speech from Spanish to Balzac’s tongue, for the occasion of the Afro-Asiatic Economic Seminar that would take place in Algeria. When he heard about a short Venezuelan who – besides obtaining weapons for the guerrillas in his country – was fluent in French, he asked the Cuban ambassador in Algeria, Jorge Serguera, to invite him to the diplomatic headquarters so he could meet him.
This circumstance would provide the communist Venezuelan militant the chance to speak with Guevara for three days during the month of February 1965. The experience included a long 12-hour talk face to face with the most universal of Argentines, during which he got an in-depth glimpse of his ideas about revolution, as well as the idiosyncrasies of his personality.
CHE SINGING NANAS
“When I arrived, I saw a character over there (Che), playing a game of chess with Serguera. It was hard for me to identify him because beyond what had I thought, that he was a weakling like me, he was a corpulent guy, well-built, very serene, deeply concentrated on his game. I didn’t see an important figure, I saw a man who was taking a game of chess too seriously and was singing some nanas (French nursery rhymes). He was singing them in French and he pronounced it quite well.”
This is the description Barreto gives of his first encounter with the guerrilla fighter. Once the game was finished, Guevara spoke to the Venezuelan in a “solemn” tone to greet him and ask him for help in translating the speech, not before clarifying that his impeccable French pronunciation came from the lessons he received from a nanny, whom he had mostly forgotten.
Che’s speech was about the relationships between the communists who were in power with the emerging movements that aspired to it. And it was precisely the translation of its 15 pages that allowed the Venezuelan to get to know the thought of his fellow South American.
That conversation has left an indelible mark on Barreto’s memory. When he remembers his conversations with Guevara, his gestures become animated, he remembers almost every word the guerrilla fighter pronounced and even imitates the way he expressed himself and the gestures he made.
Regarding Ernesto Guevara’s personality, the Venezuelan highlights “his studied despotism. It was a chosen manner of being. He didn’t want to become complicit or empathetic with his interlocutor but instead every day was a permanent demand with anyone he met. (…) He wasn’t a friendly character at all. From the very beginning he assumed his authority – not authoritarianism – as ascendant over the other.”
Barreto eventually finished the translation of the speech that was given the title “The Anti-Imperialist Fight” and presented on February 27th, 1965. It was considered a success because of the polemic it unleashed within the international socialist movement.
CHE’S CONTRADICTIONS
Barreto’s time with Guevara not only served him as a chance to know his personality but also to get to the bottom of his thought, an element that has become entangled in the web of his myth.
When he was 25 years old, Guevara still hadn’t developed any social conscience or political interests, according to what he confessed to Barreto: “I was apathetic, lazy, adventurous. Reality only interested me as a subject for photography, but I didn’t give a shit about transforming it,” Che said to the Venezuelan revolutionary. But everything changed when he encountered Fidel Castro in Mexico and saw “for the first time that someone was proposing that he could make a revolution if he wanted to do it.”
Barreto says that at first he saw Che as one of the greatest humanists to ever live, for placing not God but man himself as a central force of creation, one capable of creating an ideal state and achieving it: “But little by little I realized what that meant: Che was willing to impose that. In the act of imposing a change in man, Che was much closer to the Nazis.”
The Venezuelan revolutionary warns, moreover, that the entire theory of creating the “new man” proposed a type of imposition of a superior race: “From that point on I thought about the terror that would be a revolutionary process led by people like Che.”
His famous “Letter to the Tri-Continental” is a good example of the contradictions in Che’s thought. This text includes a combination of libertarian ideals with authoritarian methods for achieving them. This is how in the document Guevara assures us that “a people without hatred cannot triumph over a brutal enemy.”
After Ernesto Guevara’s death the myth of “Che” was consolidated, a phenomenon that seems to have gone through various stages, beginning as a symbol of armed struggle until degenerating into a mere commercial logo. For Barreto, myths follow their own logic and continue to change with cultural changes. “Every era reinvents the myth, although the central nucleus maintains itself.”
PETROLEUM CHE
Even though it defines itself as a “Bolivarian revolution,” the current national government didn’t openly use the Guevara rhetoric and myth until just recently, with the announced “radicalization of the process.” For Barreto, the use of the figure of Che doesn’t make any sense within the frame of an economy based on petrodollars: “The mythical trait that’s highlighted with Che Guevara is in complete opposition to the figure that Hugo Chávez works to forge for himself. Che never abandoned his absolute modesty or the austerity of his behavior.”
According to the sociologist, the Government only promotes one aspect of Guevara’s thought (the authoritarian conception of society’s transformation) because it coincides with its political interests. In that sense, Barreto concludes: “Anyone who decides to change by force the mentality and behavior of individuals and entire peoples can pretend to use Che, who also believed, seemingly in very good faith and with very “noble” reasons, that this was possible.” In the end, “each person fabricates his own Che Guevara depending on his needs and desires.”
*
COLLECTIVIST CIGAR
Che’s ideology about the “new man” was a concept directed at eliminating any “individualist” vestige from the mind of the revolutionary, who should let go of feelings such as fear and personal worries. Even the cigar Che smoked wasn’t part of an individualistic vice, but rather a form of identifying himself with the Cuban collective: “He smoked the cigar. You could tell it had been hard for him to learn the habit. But why did he smoke the cigar? Because a Cuban smokes cigars. That’s the level his acquiescence to particular details reached,” Barreto points out. He concludes by saying that Che was “a frightening example” of the machine-like rigorousness of the new revolutionary.
{ Carlos Crespo, Tal Cual, 8 October 2007 }
10.03.2007
Prédicas para débiles mentales (fin) / Oswaldo Barreto
Sermons for Mental Weaklings (end)
It is surely under the influence of what Marx wrote in that famous first chapter of his magnum opus that all the world’s dictionaries today define merchandise as the Larousse does in all its languages: “product that is sold and bought.” Consequently, from the air of Paris or less exotic mechanical pencils to the most sophisticated scientific knowledge or surgical techniques, at the moment they’re produced to be sold, they become merchandise. But this is where Mr. Monedero has arrived to reveal for us that this isn’t true, that the real truth and, moreover, the truly revolutionary truth is, there are products “that are public: electricity, water, food, health, a basic education, banks” and others that are not, such as the means of production. And to build the new gospel on the base of this revolutionary axiom: Above all, he asks us to accept without hesitation that “The State has to regulate public goods,” since “it is barbaric for there to be obstacles for accessing essential goods because their production and distribution is privatized by determined companies who in an inhumane manner have merchandised elements essential for human development.” And, as a fundamental reason to fervently support the firm crusade to which his gospel invites us, he spits out this other luminous axiom with candor: “Common sense itself tells us that the right to eat is above the right to private property.”
So then, during this phase of the construction of 21st century socialism, we should abhor and persecute the private property of public goods such as health care, at the risk of unleashing the anger of you know who and of Monedero himself who can also get very angry (since for him “those businesses are enemies of humanity and I have no sympathy for them”). Against all the fears that tend to be induced by evangelical sermons, we should merely remind Monedero that the real problem facing humanity for a while now is not the lack of awareness that “the right to eat is above the right to private property” but that instead, unfortunately, private property has been revealed as indispensable for satisfactorily providing food to any type of people.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 2 October 2007 }
It is surely under the influence of what Marx wrote in that famous first chapter of his magnum opus that all the world’s dictionaries today define merchandise as the Larousse does in all its languages: “product that is sold and bought.” Consequently, from the air of Paris or less exotic mechanical pencils to the most sophisticated scientific knowledge or surgical techniques, at the moment they’re produced to be sold, they become merchandise. But this is where Mr. Monedero has arrived to reveal for us that this isn’t true, that the real truth and, moreover, the truly revolutionary truth is, there are products “that are public: electricity, water, food, health, a basic education, banks” and others that are not, such as the means of production. And to build the new gospel on the base of this revolutionary axiom: Above all, he asks us to accept without hesitation that “The State has to regulate public goods,” since “it is barbaric for there to be obstacles for accessing essential goods because their production and distribution is privatized by determined companies who in an inhumane manner have merchandised elements essential for human development.” And, as a fundamental reason to fervently support the firm crusade to which his gospel invites us, he spits out this other luminous axiom with candor: “Common sense itself tells us that the right to eat is above the right to private property.”
So then, during this phase of the construction of 21st century socialism, we should abhor and persecute the private property of public goods such as health care, at the risk of unleashing the anger of you know who and of Monedero himself who can also get very angry (since for him “those businesses are enemies of humanity and I have no sympathy for them”). Against all the fears that tend to be induced by evangelical sermons, we should merely remind Monedero that the real problem facing humanity for a while now is not the lack of awareness that “the right to eat is above the right to private property” but that instead, unfortunately, private property has been revealed as indispensable for satisfactorily providing food to any type of people.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 2 October 2007 }
10.02.2007
Prédicas para débiles mentales (I) / Oswaldo Barreto
Sermons for Mental Weaklings (I)
These catechization campaigns for “21st century socialism” that the government feverishly deploys have the unquestionable virtue of taking us back in time, at least for those of us Venezuelans who were educated in eras of pre-Chavista regimes, to the sermons the Spanish conquerors preached when they decided to take control of the newly discovered continent. Sermons that, in good or bad faith, were spoken by human beings who possessed an absolutely true knowledge to impart to other beings of diminished humanity, both in their stature as well as in the functions of their bodies and intellectual capacities. Sermons for mental weaklings.
This regression to five centuries ago, to the era of the conquest and colonization of Indians by Spanish soldiers, merchants and missionaries can be glimpsed when we venture to read the long interview with Mr. Juan Carlos Monedero in yesterday’s Sunday El Universal, which announced in its front page headline: “Food and basic services should be in the hands of the people.” In that text, J.C. Monedero, who leads the supreme commission in charge of “defining the path of the process of transition towards 21st century socialism,” teaches us what capitalism and socialism should be, have been and will be as modes of living in society, contradicting everything we Venezuelans thought we knew in our reasoning on such matters. Thus, we are taught that “there are goods that are public: electricity, water, food, health, a basic education, banks. I think those are public goods that don’t need to be understood as merchandise. That is nonsense planted by capitalism.” Oh shit, Marx was so mistaken when he thought, precisely, that capitalism emerges in a society from the specific moment when its members produce merchandise and, what’s more, when everything they produce becomes merchandise! (Capital, Volume I) And, exactly in contradiction to the nonsense Monedero preaches (whether it’s because he takes his interlocutors for mental weaklings or because, in good or bad faith, he assumes such a condition for himself), Marx demonstrated in those, his most famous economic-philosophical pages, that if it is true that all goods can become merchandise it is because all goods are susceptible to possessing two different values, a use value and an exchange value.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 1 October 2007 }
These catechization campaigns for “21st century socialism” that the government feverishly deploys have the unquestionable virtue of taking us back in time, at least for those of us Venezuelans who were educated in eras of pre-Chavista regimes, to the sermons the Spanish conquerors preached when they decided to take control of the newly discovered continent. Sermons that, in good or bad faith, were spoken by human beings who possessed an absolutely true knowledge to impart to other beings of diminished humanity, both in their stature as well as in the functions of their bodies and intellectual capacities. Sermons for mental weaklings.
This regression to five centuries ago, to the era of the conquest and colonization of Indians by Spanish soldiers, merchants and missionaries can be glimpsed when we venture to read the long interview with Mr. Juan Carlos Monedero in yesterday’s Sunday El Universal, which announced in its front page headline: “Food and basic services should be in the hands of the people.” In that text, J.C. Monedero, who leads the supreme commission in charge of “defining the path of the process of transition towards 21st century socialism,” teaches us what capitalism and socialism should be, have been and will be as modes of living in society, contradicting everything we Venezuelans thought we knew in our reasoning on such matters. Thus, we are taught that “there are goods that are public: electricity, water, food, health, a basic education, banks. I think those are public goods that don’t need to be understood as merchandise. That is nonsense planted by capitalism.” Oh shit, Marx was so mistaken when he thought, precisely, that capitalism emerges in a society from the specific moment when its members produce merchandise and, what’s more, when everything they produce becomes merchandise! (Capital, Volume I) And, exactly in contradiction to the nonsense Monedero preaches (whether it’s because he takes his interlocutors for mental weaklings or because, in good or bad faith, he assumes such a condition for himself), Marx demonstrated in those, his most famous economic-philosophical pages, that if it is true that all goods can become merchandise it is because all goods are susceptible to possessing two different values, a use value and an exchange value.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 1 October 2007 }
8.26.2007
La palabra en crisis / Oswaldo Barreto
The Word in Crisis
The two terms that make up our title, so often used separately, are rarely found together. Of course, people speak of all types of crises, but these always occur in the world of things, of events. Economic crisis, financial crisis, petroleum crisis and the like, ad infinitum. And yet, it’s enough for us to focus for a substantial amount of time on any aspect of our social and cultural reality to realize that not only are we effectively living a crisis of the word, but also that this type of crisis can have even more nefarious effects than any other. Everything indicates for us that in the world of the word in Venezuela we are living a situation similar to the one we’re living in the financial world, the world of currency, that other instrument of relation or exchange among humans. Given that the monetary avatars are more familiar to us than these other verbal avatars, it’s worth trying to develop a quick comparative analysis between them.
Regarding our currency, every day we speak in terms of crisis: the devaluation of currency, the recycling of the diminished bolívar into the strong bolívar, the shortage or overabundance of currency – which quite often determines the rhythm of inflation. And that’s not to mention the difficulties that arise when we try to exchange our currency with those from other countries. So then, analogous phenomena occur to us permanently in the sphere – even more decisively in social life – of the word. There are words that are no longer worth anything and there are words whose real meaning (whose real value) is the object of controversy and doubt. And there is, correlatively, a scarcity of words, an absence of them for naming what happens within and beyond our selves. How do we name, for example, the regime that Hugo Chávez is imposing on us: dictatorship, fascism, communism or participatory democracy? And, regarding the latter, what exactly does participation mean? It’s possible the need to resolve the meaning of these terms doesn’t present itself to everyone but, on the other hand, knowing the exact meaning of socialism, communism or asymmetrical war has become a genuine social necessity. As it’s become an imperious existential necessity for an infinity of individuals to know if today is a moment of the left or of the right, or to know if being a patriot means being sheep and submissive.
Next to these problems that belong, as academics say, to the field of semantics, to the meaning of words, other no less serious ones appear concerning the word itself. Today we’re forced to ask ourselves, not just what meaning this or that word might have, but rather what value the word itself has in Venezuela, what value the president gives to his own words and what value he attributes to the words of others.
Nonsense? Sophisms? Exquisiteness? Am I the only one, then, who has witnessed the fulminating insults a normal citizen has hurled against another when he calls him “squalid” or the great debates surrounding the meaning of “solidarity” and the meaning of “manipulation.” Isn’t it true what one of my best students at the School of Education, Mercedes Álvarez, means when she says: “It’s not the verb, but is it something verbal?”
And the problem, regardless, is not that the word is in crisis, but that even the simplest and most innocuous words begin to lose the supreme character of the verb among us, which is to be a common good for an entire people. We should remember the blessed Tower of Babel.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 24 August 2007 }
The two terms that make up our title, so often used separately, are rarely found together. Of course, people speak of all types of crises, but these always occur in the world of things, of events. Economic crisis, financial crisis, petroleum crisis and the like, ad infinitum. And yet, it’s enough for us to focus for a substantial amount of time on any aspect of our social and cultural reality to realize that not only are we effectively living a crisis of the word, but also that this type of crisis can have even more nefarious effects than any other. Everything indicates for us that in the world of the word in Venezuela we are living a situation similar to the one we’re living in the financial world, the world of currency, that other instrument of relation or exchange among humans. Given that the monetary avatars are more familiar to us than these other verbal avatars, it’s worth trying to develop a quick comparative analysis between them.
Regarding our currency, every day we speak in terms of crisis: the devaluation of currency, the recycling of the diminished bolívar into the strong bolívar, the shortage or overabundance of currency – which quite often determines the rhythm of inflation. And that’s not to mention the difficulties that arise when we try to exchange our currency with those from other countries. So then, analogous phenomena occur to us permanently in the sphere – even more decisively in social life – of the word. There are words that are no longer worth anything and there are words whose real meaning (whose real value) is the object of controversy and doubt. And there is, correlatively, a scarcity of words, an absence of them for naming what happens within and beyond our selves. How do we name, for example, the regime that Hugo Chávez is imposing on us: dictatorship, fascism, communism or participatory democracy? And, regarding the latter, what exactly does participation mean? It’s possible the need to resolve the meaning of these terms doesn’t present itself to everyone but, on the other hand, knowing the exact meaning of socialism, communism or asymmetrical war has become a genuine social necessity. As it’s become an imperious existential necessity for an infinity of individuals to know if today is a moment of the left or of the right, or to know if being a patriot means being sheep and submissive.
Next to these problems that belong, as academics say, to the field of semantics, to the meaning of words, other no less serious ones appear concerning the word itself. Today we’re forced to ask ourselves, not just what meaning this or that word might have, but rather what value the word itself has in Venezuela, what value the president gives to his own words and what value he attributes to the words of others.
Nonsense? Sophisms? Exquisiteness? Am I the only one, then, who has witnessed the fulminating insults a normal citizen has hurled against another when he calls him “squalid” or the great debates surrounding the meaning of “solidarity” and the meaning of “manipulation.” Isn’t it true what one of my best students at the School of Education, Mercedes Álvarez, means when she says: “It’s not the verb, but is it something verbal?”
And the problem, regardless, is not that the word is in crisis, but that even the simplest and most innocuous words begin to lose the supreme character of the verb among us, which is to be a common good for an entire people. We should remember the blessed Tower of Babel.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 24 August 2007 }
8.09.2007
El bolivarianismo / Oswaldo Barreto
Bolivarianism
The omnivorous use the regime makes of the figure of Simón Bolívar (his image, his words, his actions) has led more than one of our thinkers and political leaders to assume it as a new manifestation of the already studied cult of the hero. Updating one of our well-established collective representations which has been judged very closely and wisely by one of today’s historians as “the transformation of ‘a people’s cult’ into ‘a cult for the people’ ” (Germán Carrera Damas, in a conference given on 11/25/05).
A cult for the people or “a second religion,” as it’s also designated by the author himself, the fact that this manipulation of Bolívar’s figure doesn’t seem to have limits and is destined, for now at least, to expand throughout the corners of our conscience and the national process. And a type of resignation before the irresistible rise of Bolivarianism is also anchored in our conscience, in the conscience of all Venezuelans. That’s why at this point, none of us are scared about everything being called Bolívar or Simón Bolívar, nor does it pain us or make us lose sleep that everything is enacted directly and without any mediation whatsoever, all the works, fantasies and hallucination of the Great Man. As we’ve all seen, people have even started to talk about “21st Century Socialism” as a project rooted in the Socialist thought and action of The Liberator.
But we think this reception the cult of Bolívar has found in our diverse social and cultural strata overlooks what might be the fundamental reason for its existence, which is basically what normally underlies any cult, religion or myth: the projection of Hugo Chávez’s desires, passions or ambitions in the figure of Bolívar, so that what appears to be generous and altruistic fervor about The Liberator is nothing but the camouflaging of a most extreme and egotistical cult of self. Everything the flesh and bone man who governs us thinks of conceals itself under the guise of the disappeared hero still firmly anchored in our people’s history. And as a necessary corollary, as a perverse effect of that already perverted metamorphosis, we contemplate various forms of homage and adoration for Chávez that claim to praise Simón Bolívar.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 6 August 2007 }
The omnivorous use the regime makes of the figure of Simón Bolívar (his image, his words, his actions) has led more than one of our thinkers and political leaders to assume it as a new manifestation of the already studied cult of the hero. Updating one of our well-established collective representations which has been judged very closely and wisely by one of today’s historians as “the transformation of ‘a people’s cult’ into ‘a cult for the people’ ” (Germán Carrera Damas, in a conference given on 11/25/05).
A cult for the people or “a second religion,” as it’s also designated by the author himself, the fact that this manipulation of Bolívar’s figure doesn’t seem to have limits and is destined, for now at least, to expand throughout the corners of our conscience and the national process. And a type of resignation before the irresistible rise of Bolivarianism is also anchored in our conscience, in the conscience of all Venezuelans. That’s why at this point, none of us are scared about everything being called Bolívar or Simón Bolívar, nor does it pain us or make us lose sleep that everything is enacted directly and without any mediation whatsoever, all the works, fantasies and hallucination of the Great Man. As we’ve all seen, people have even started to talk about “21st Century Socialism” as a project rooted in the Socialist thought and action of The Liberator.
But we think this reception the cult of Bolívar has found in our diverse social and cultural strata overlooks what might be the fundamental reason for its existence, which is basically what normally underlies any cult, religion or myth: the projection of Hugo Chávez’s desires, passions or ambitions in the figure of Bolívar, so that what appears to be generous and altruistic fervor about The Liberator is nothing but the camouflaging of a most extreme and egotistical cult of self. Everything the flesh and bone man who governs us thinks of conceals itself under the guise of the disappeared hero still firmly anchored in our people’s history. And as a necessary corollary, as a perverse effect of that already perverted metamorphosis, we contemplate various forms of homage and adoration for Chávez that claim to praise Simón Bolívar.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 6 August 2007 }
8.02.2007
El socialismo irreal
[Oswaldo Barreto & Teodoro Petkoff, Caracas, 17 July 2007. Photo: Saúl Uzcátegui for Tal Cual]A couple weeks ago I attended the presentation for Teodoro Petkoff’s new book, El socialismo irreal (Caracas: Editorial Alfa, 2007), at the Alejandría III bookstore in Chacaíto, Caracas. The book was presented by Petkoff’s friend and colleague at his newspaper Tal Cual, the sociologist and professor Oswaldo Barreto. Petkoff also spoke about El socialismo irreal [Unreal Socialism], which is a republication of two texts from the 1970s, Checoeslovakia, el socialismo como problema (1971) and Proceso a la izquierda (1976). These essays were very influential when they were first published and have been out of print for several years. They represent Petkoff’s effort to forge a theoretical path away from the armed insurrection he led in the 1960s, as well as his formal break with the Venezuelan communist party (PCV) after his repudiation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As Barreto and Petkoff both pointed out, the topic addressed in these essays, namely, the possibility of creating a space for democratic socialism, remains a vital issue in Venezuela, as the country endures a prolonged political labyrinth under Chavismo with no foreseeable resolution.
The small bookstore was packed for the event, yet another sign of Venezuela’s thriving literary world, with bookstores full of new publications, reading groups sprouting up, and presentations & readings taking place on a weekly basis. Among the poets, novelists, historians, journalists and political figures in attendance that night (that I noticed) were Elizabeth Burgos, Inés Quintero, Ibsen Martínez, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Rafael Cadenas, Pompeyo Márquez, Manuel Caballero, Sergio Dahbar, Elías Pino Iturrieta, Mayé Primera Garces, Alonso Moleiro and Américo Martín. The large and enthusiastic audience reflects Petkoff’s ability to gather an astonishing array of writers around his small newspaper, which in seven years has become a crucial forum for critiques of Chavismo from the left and center. Petkoff’s daily editorials, along with the op-ed pieces of Tal Cual’s columnists, continue to offer insights on Venezuela’s convoluted political and cultural landscape. Although the Venezuelan government has already tried to silence Tal Cual, the newspaper remains a vibrant reference point for many Venezuelans on all sides of the political divide.
I’ve been a close reader of Barreto’s two Tal Cual columns, “Pórtico” and “Balanza de Palabra,” and I've been translating selections from them into English at this blog for several years now, so it was a pleasure to have the chance to hear him speak. Standing with Petkoff on a banister overlooking the audience, he read from a three-page essay with a slow cadence attuned to his rich and allusive prose style. He began with a comment citing Petkoff’s demand of his Tal Cual writers that their texts be succinct. He evoked a decades-long friendship with Petkoff, dating back to their clandestine efforts against the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the 1950s and their militancy as members of the PCV and the guerrilla insurgency during the presidency of Rómulo Betancourt in the 1960s. Barreto spoke of these essays as crucial moments that signaled a shift away from armed combat for many Venezuelan communists, as well as a lucid critique of Soviet policy in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. For him, these two essays are now autonomous entities, free from their author and the period from which they sprouted. They now exist in this new edition to help create problems and solutions for readers, particularly for those of us from younger generations.
Without being nostalgic, Barreto described the utopian ideals that moved them in the 1950s and 60s and how those values underwent a gradual transformation that has yet to conclude. He finished his essay, read with a cadence and intonation that at times brought to mind declaimed poetry, with an anecdote about Petkoff’s friend Gabriel García Márquez. It concerned a Venezuelan graduate student who visited García Márquez in Barcelona, Spain to discuss her dissertation on his work. In response to her questions about his novels, García Márquez told her that his character Colonel Aureliano Buendía was a “son of a bitch” and that he didn’t really like him, that his characters weren’t always under his control. Barreto’s anecdote was a way to remind us of a text’s independence from its author, how our own words can shift and take on a life of their own.
In his Friday column later that week, Barreto addressed the book further, writing:
“ (...) In the end every book is always susceptible to new readings, even on the part of a single person, since, parodying the most famous of Heraclitus’s fragments and inverting it, we can be sure that no book presents itself twice in front of the same pair of eyes. Thus, today we can find in the pages of El socialismo irreal what we didn’t see back then or what we didn’t suspect until today might be hidden within them.
For example, we can read luminous observations about the fatal nexus between imposed socialism and dictatorial forms of government, or about the inevitable rise and expansion of enormous state bureaucracies to which the government adjudicates the task of building intended forms of socialist life that no one is seeking or desiring.
(...) What El socialismo irreal highlights with unquestionable rigor and depth, is fundamentally aligned with the relations that exist between ideas and the possibility of realizing them, or between thought and will. The imagined project is one thing and the possibility of its realization another. What Teodoro saw in his passionate analysis and what he has communicated to us about situations with no exit, the great failures to which we can be led by the desire to impose certain ideals where the material and spiritual conditions don’t exist for men to experience them as their own, well, of course this speaks to directly and eloquently to all of us Venezuelans today.” (“Actualidad de El socialismo real,” Tal Cual, 20 July 2007)
Petkoff’s comments began with an observation on the generational gap he sees in Venezuela, and that he hoped these two essays might serve as an entry point for younger people to study the debates surrounding socialism, a concept now being used for authoritarian purposes by the Venezuelan government. He mentioned the experience of his daughter, in attendance that night, who was born in Bulgaria (Petkoff is the son of Bulgarian immigrants to Venezuela). When she left Bulgaria in her teens she was forced to endure an excruciating and Kafkaesque series of interviews and bureaucratic travails in order to be issued a passport. For him, Kafkaesque is a word that describes much of what’s happening in Venezuela under Chavismo. He wondered if the word “socialism” could ever be recovered from the horrible uses it was given throughout the 20th century. Petkoff suggested that socialism would carry the weight of its past mistakes for a long time, making an exploration of its definition a painful and difficult process.
In the prologue to this new edition, he situates his two essays within the context of Venezuela’s political map and what he sees as a disappearance of the ideal of a humane socialism:
“El socialismo irreal speaks, then, of what could have been socialism with a human face which was tragically frustrated in Prague and vanished definitively from the historical horizon, once the vices we’ve addressed here were not able to be corrected – without, on the other hand, any pretense of originality, but with the will to reveal them completely, even if their nakedness might cause us pain and fear.” (8-9)
Petkoff’s introduction to the 1991 edition of Checoeslovakia, el socialismo como problema, included in this volume, addresses the danger of the authoritarian impulse in socialist experiments of the 20th century. He notes a continuity of themes leading from the Prague spring of 1968 to the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989. In his words, one finds the uncanny repetition of history that equates aspects of Prague and Moscow then to Caracas today:
“An autocratic political regime, but, above all, totalitarian, according to the Soviet model, inexorably leads to the isolation of leaders from their own people. The lack of democratic and plural institutions for deliberation makes a dialogue with the nation impossible. The leader only hears his own voice, reproduced in monochromatic parliaments, which gather a few days per year to approve, always unanimously, what the leaders--when not the leader--have decided. No feedback exists between government and nation. No institutional mediation exists between the masses and the heights of power which might create a canal that allows for the circulation of information in both directions. If we factor in the uniformity and control by the state of the means of communication, what is then achieved is the disarticulation of public opinion, which ceases to exist as an operative force of society. It becomes clandestine. At the same time, the regimentation of cultural life drowns the critical role that, in general, is usually played by intellectuals. With this situation the system loses one of its most important vaccines against sclerosis. Intellectuals then become either conformists or they “exile” themselves within their own country, or they abandon it. Or they invent the samizdat, which like a dark spinning top continues to feed the spirit that suddenly produces “springtime” explosions.” (30)
A week after the presentation of El socialismo irreal, the lawyer and analyst León Arismendi wrote about the evening for Tal Cual. He brought up the issue of generational conduits and history’s vicious repetitions.
“ (...) Teodoro’s brief words for this event couldn’t have been more heartrending and in them, as in Oswaldo’s, I can’t help noticing the existential drama of a generation that, to say it with one of Alfredo Padilla’s genial “self-critical” phrases, spent half a life fighting on behalf of communism and the other half, having realized the failure of that endeavor, toiling for a rectification.
It’s significant and seems to be the result of a fatality, that after long and torturous debates, after so many encounters and separations; after the majority of the Venezuelan left had broken ranks with the Soviet anachronisms and had understood that democracy and socialism should integrate into an inseparable juncture; after a great deal of intellectual and practical effort, we now see the rebirth of the totalitarian specter and its deeds, as if everything that had been said and done had fallen into an abyss.
The spokesmen for Chavismo, with their leader at the front, repeat the old communist discourse as though they were reinventing the wheel and they have all the intentions of imposing such a thing on Venezuelan society. All you have to do is listen to the young defenders of the proceso speaking to discover the source that inspires them. Even the tone of their voices sounds Cuban. Would it be too much to ask them to read El socialismo irreal?” (“El socialismo irreal,” Tal Cual, 23 July 2007)
I’ve just begun reading the book, so it will be a while before I can comment on it here. What remains indelible for me is the enthusiasm in the bookstore that evening, as people bought books, drank wine and talked. My father recognized many faces he hadn’t seen since his days as a student at UCV in the 1960s. People were laughing & smiling, unphased by the TV and radio cameras there to record the presentation. My father and I left the mall as the event was dwindling, walked through the trees and benches of Plaza Brión and went to eat arepas at a late-night café a few blocks away. Literary production and conversation as two modes of understanding an irremediably convoluted country.
6.28.2007
Lenguaje indirecto / Oswaldo Barreto
Indirect Language
Anyone who has listened to the speech Chávez delivered to commemorate the Battle of Carabobo or has read the version of it that’s been circulating throughout the world by means of the Efe news agency, will have noticed two facts that characterize it. The first is that this oratorical piece condenses the same preoccupations, the same themes that always seem to be present in the thought of its author, for a long time now. The second thing is that this condensation of president Chávez's principal themes is presented under the form of opaque expressions or ones that carry different, even opposing meanings.
On the one hand, the obsessive presence of Fidel Castro and his "revolutionary" process: “Fidel Castro has told me that if I die this revolution will vanish with the wind (...) He's told me this many times and I still resist accepting it, but when I think and see the realities around me I realized that sadly Fidel Castro, once more, is right (...) because we still haven't been able to build a single party.”
On the other hand, the equally obsessive desire of mimicking (not just mimicking, but imitating, aping and copying every last detail) each and every one of the vicissitudes Fidel Castro's “revolution” has known. To live through the terror of war, above all: “We are strengthening Venezuela’s military power not to attack anyone but to avoid, precisely, imperial lunacies and to assure peace for ourselves.” A desire to exorcise the fascinating presence of that specter in the same manner: “They try to infer in our relations with Russia, which are profound and strategic, because what we’re going to speak about there (in the encounter that began today) has to do with the sovereignty, defense and integrity of our homeland.” And, at the risk of contradicting his own affirmation that he’s done very little to ensure the masses will follow him in this desire, an exposition of the decisive force he counts on to defeat the specter: “We don’t need the atomic bomb because we already have it, and it is the revolutionary masses of Venezuela, who have the force of 100 atomic bombs..”
Masks and contradictions, if we take these texts as expressions of his thought in the common language of mortals. But there are other languages, such as the indirect language in which mimetic creations tend to express themselves along with the over-determinations that arise from the unconscious. We’ll look into this further here in Pórtico.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 27 June 2007 }
Anyone who has listened to the speech Chávez delivered to commemorate the Battle of Carabobo or has read the version of it that’s been circulating throughout the world by means of the Efe news agency, will have noticed two facts that characterize it. The first is that this oratorical piece condenses the same preoccupations, the same themes that always seem to be present in the thought of its author, for a long time now. The second thing is that this condensation of president Chávez's principal themes is presented under the form of opaque expressions or ones that carry different, even opposing meanings.
On the one hand, the obsessive presence of Fidel Castro and his "revolutionary" process: “Fidel Castro has told me that if I die this revolution will vanish with the wind (...) He's told me this many times and I still resist accepting it, but when I think and see the realities around me I realized that sadly Fidel Castro, once more, is right (...) because we still haven't been able to build a single party.”
On the other hand, the equally obsessive desire of mimicking (not just mimicking, but imitating, aping and copying every last detail) each and every one of the vicissitudes Fidel Castro's “revolution” has known. To live through the terror of war, above all: “We are strengthening Venezuela’s military power not to attack anyone but to avoid, precisely, imperial lunacies and to assure peace for ourselves.” A desire to exorcise the fascinating presence of that specter in the same manner: “They try to infer in our relations with Russia, which are profound and strategic, because what we’re going to speak about there (in the encounter that began today) has to do with the sovereignty, defense and integrity of our homeland.” And, at the risk of contradicting his own affirmation that he’s done very little to ensure the masses will follow him in this desire, an exposition of the decisive force he counts on to defeat the specter: “We don’t need the atomic bomb because we already have it, and it is the revolutionary masses of Venezuela, who have the force of 100 atomic bombs..”
Masks and contradictions, if we take these texts as expressions of his thought in the common language of mortals. But there are other languages, such as the indirect language in which mimetic creations tend to express themselves along with the over-determinations that arise from the unconscious. We’ll look into this further here in Pórtico.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 27 June 2007 }
6.27.2007
Máscaras y contradicciones / Oswaldo Barreto
Masks and Contradictions
When we try to understand Hugo Chávez’s performance as president of the Republic we feel irreverently impelled to parody a glorious verse by Baudelaire. It occurs to us that, just as nature presented itself to the poet as “a forest of symbols,” Hugo Chávez’s speeches, ideas and works present themselves to us as a forest of masks and contradictions. It’s been that way since the very moment he “solemnly” assumed the presidency “swearing” before a “moribund Constitution.” And this profusion of masks and contradictions has increased, exactly in proportion to how Hugo Chávez has increased and extended his powers, and it’s no longer just myself and my fellow citizens who observe and comment on this fact, it’s now done in all instances that have any type of interest in Venezuela.
And yet, the problem isn’t that Chavismo displays itself to us masked and, quite often, with two opposing faces. If it were only this, we’d be facing a perfectly regular regime since, as great philosophers like Machiavelli or Hegel have demonstrated, political life enjoys presenting itself under figures removed from everyday man. And what’s more important, if we take into account that we’re facing an enthusiastic apprentice of Marxism and of historical materialism, there are and have been, throughout all civilizations, leaders who think political action is only able to advance if it moves between contradictions and very occult intentions. Thus, from the classic Roman phrase: “Achieve peace by preparing for war” to Clemenceau’s well-known recommendation: “War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military,” many behaviors of heads of State, in peace as in war, have found justification in that “dialectical” and “contradictory” vision of the march of history.
However, we repeat, that’s not the problem Chávez’s political performance presents us, rather it’s another one of a clearly opposite sign. Do actual masks and actual contradictions exist in what president Chávez’s does and says? We will try to answer this question in successive editions of this column, Pórtico, in relation to the masks and contradictions of his recent speech from February 24, now famous all over the world.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 26 June 2007 }
When we try to understand Hugo Chávez’s performance as president of the Republic we feel irreverently impelled to parody a glorious verse by Baudelaire. It occurs to us that, just as nature presented itself to the poet as “a forest of symbols,” Hugo Chávez’s speeches, ideas and works present themselves to us as a forest of masks and contradictions. It’s been that way since the very moment he “solemnly” assumed the presidency “swearing” before a “moribund Constitution.” And this profusion of masks and contradictions has increased, exactly in proportion to how Hugo Chávez has increased and extended his powers, and it’s no longer just myself and my fellow citizens who observe and comment on this fact, it’s now done in all instances that have any type of interest in Venezuela.
And yet, the problem isn’t that Chavismo displays itself to us masked and, quite often, with two opposing faces. If it were only this, we’d be facing a perfectly regular regime since, as great philosophers like Machiavelli or Hegel have demonstrated, political life enjoys presenting itself under figures removed from everyday man. And what’s more important, if we take into account that we’re facing an enthusiastic apprentice of Marxism and of historical materialism, there are and have been, throughout all civilizations, leaders who think political action is only able to advance if it moves between contradictions and very occult intentions. Thus, from the classic Roman phrase: “Achieve peace by preparing for war” to Clemenceau’s well-known recommendation: “War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military,” many behaviors of heads of State, in peace as in war, have found justification in that “dialectical” and “contradictory” vision of the march of history.
However, we repeat, that’s not the problem Chávez’s political performance presents us, rather it’s another one of a clearly opposite sign. Do actual masks and actual contradictions exist in what president Chávez’s does and says? We will try to answer this question in successive editions of this column, Pórtico, in relation to the masks and contradictions of his recent speech from February 24, now famous all over the world.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 26 June 2007 }
5.29.2007
Desestabilizar / Oswaldo Barreto
Destabilize
Destabilize is the key word spoken by high officials within Chavismo when they judge any display of rejection by Venezuelans against president Chávez’s political decisions. Save in electoral moments, the opposition doesn’t exist for them except as a form of permanent destabilizing plotting, condemned ahead of time, as we well know, by democratic laws and principles. This systematic practice by the government has resulted in a real paradox which has characterized Hugo Chávez’s regime throughout its various periods. We’re referring to Chavismo’s reiterated practice of considering the opposition to clearly undemocratic or evidently unconstitutional governmental dispositions – such as the procedures that have been followed while constituting the CNE [National Electoral Council], the Judicial Power or the military high command – as actions that should be considered undemocratic and unconstitutional, since they “conceal destabilizing intentions.” In this manner, for Chavismo there’s only one democratic way of opposing the government’s measures: to not oppose them.
And regardless of how much it jars and offends our democratic conscience, we should admit that up until now the government has been successful with this aberrant procedure. Measures such as granting the President faculties that normally belong to the Legislative Power in a state with a perfectly normal social order, which in any country with a Constitution establishing the separation and independence of powers would be understood as a self-coup d'état, here these go by unperceived – up until now at least, the government hasn’t “uncovered” a destabilizing plan to force the government to return to legality.
So then, it is the government’s practice of destabilizing the situation, in order to blame the opposition for such an occurrence, which has reached a low point with the disgraceful process leading to the closure of RCTV. Chavistas can’t claim that a plot has been created by the 80% of Venezuelans who have expressed their opposition, using the means at their disposal, to an absolutely tyrannical measure, which shows no respect toward laws and the democratic spirit. At this point even the majority of Chavistas can identify the source of the destabilization that permanently threatens the regime.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 28 May 2007 }
Destabilize is the key word spoken by high officials within Chavismo when they judge any display of rejection by Venezuelans against president Chávez’s political decisions. Save in electoral moments, the opposition doesn’t exist for them except as a form of permanent destabilizing plotting, condemned ahead of time, as we well know, by democratic laws and principles. This systematic practice by the government has resulted in a real paradox which has characterized Hugo Chávez’s regime throughout its various periods. We’re referring to Chavismo’s reiterated practice of considering the opposition to clearly undemocratic or evidently unconstitutional governmental dispositions – such as the procedures that have been followed while constituting the CNE [National Electoral Council], the Judicial Power or the military high command – as actions that should be considered undemocratic and unconstitutional, since they “conceal destabilizing intentions.” In this manner, for Chavismo there’s only one democratic way of opposing the government’s measures: to not oppose them.
And regardless of how much it jars and offends our democratic conscience, we should admit that up until now the government has been successful with this aberrant procedure. Measures such as granting the President faculties that normally belong to the Legislative Power in a state with a perfectly normal social order, which in any country with a Constitution establishing the separation and independence of powers would be understood as a self-coup d'état, here these go by unperceived – up until now at least, the government hasn’t “uncovered” a destabilizing plan to force the government to return to legality.
So then, it is the government’s practice of destabilizing the situation, in order to blame the opposition for such an occurrence, which has reached a low point with the disgraceful process leading to the closure of RCTV. Chavistas can’t claim that a plot has been created by the 80% of Venezuelans who have expressed their opposition, using the means at their disposal, to an absolutely tyrannical measure, which shows no respect toward laws and the democratic spirit. At this point even the majority of Chavistas can identify the source of the destabilization that permanently threatens the regime.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 28 May 2007 }
5.16.2007
El otro escándalo / Oswaldo Barreto
The Other Scandal
The ubiquitous and stentorian call to sign up immediately with the Party [PSUV] is perceived by the masses as a scandal. Whether it be at the entrance of a supermarket, at the doors of any public or private institution or on the corners at the outskirts and center of cities, we’ve all experienced the amazement, the outbursts of mockery or anger and, finally, the intrigue and curiosity awakened by this type of situation.
Why so much noise and so much nonsense to call attention to a party, something that has always been done in this country with the moderation and the prudence motivated by the act of launching an enterprise which, in the end, is very particular and thus not easily received with enthusiasm and approval by the entire population? To call for a massive inscription in a party whose creator pretends to be the fruit of the highest political and social conscience that can be acceded to at this moment in Venezuela, the conscience that it’s necessary to make a revolution here and that in order to make it the creation of a party is indispensable, can one sensibly hope that in today’s Venezuela there exists such an enormous mass of people willing to join that party for its promoters to speak in terms of millions when calculating its possible members? Millions of members for the party of the revolution in Venezuela, a country of 25 million inhabitants, when the activists of the party that was at the head of the revolution that shook that Russian empire of more than 150 inhabitants, never reached beyond the dozens of thousands!
But, when we try to dispel the mystery the actual foundations of these scandalous aspirations might have, we inexorably end up noticing an even greater scandal.
Surely, it’s not Hugo Chávez’s conscience that there are millions of Venezuelans who want to make a revolution that has led him to the creation of this Party, but rather his bad conscience for going around promoting a revolution, when no one elected him for such an enterprise. Now he wants to turn his idea into a plebiscite, he wants the whole world to know that there are millions and millions of Venezuelans who, with their inscription in the party of the revolution, have demonstrated that they’re in agreement with his revolution. This is the true scandal we’re now living.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 15 May 2007 }
The ubiquitous and stentorian call to sign up immediately with the Party [PSUV] is perceived by the masses as a scandal. Whether it be at the entrance of a supermarket, at the doors of any public or private institution or on the corners at the outskirts and center of cities, we’ve all experienced the amazement, the outbursts of mockery or anger and, finally, the intrigue and curiosity awakened by this type of situation.
Why so much noise and so much nonsense to call attention to a party, something that has always been done in this country with the moderation and the prudence motivated by the act of launching an enterprise which, in the end, is very particular and thus not easily received with enthusiasm and approval by the entire population? To call for a massive inscription in a party whose creator pretends to be the fruit of the highest political and social conscience that can be acceded to at this moment in Venezuela, the conscience that it’s necessary to make a revolution here and that in order to make it the creation of a party is indispensable, can one sensibly hope that in today’s Venezuela there exists such an enormous mass of people willing to join that party for its promoters to speak in terms of millions when calculating its possible members? Millions of members for the party of the revolution in Venezuela, a country of 25 million inhabitants, when the activists of the party that was at the head of the revolution that shook that Russian empire of more than 150 inhabitants, never reached beyond the dozens of thousands!
But, when we try to dispel the mystery the actual foundations of these scandalous aspirations might have, we inexorably end up noticing an even greater scandal.
Surely, it’s not Hugo Chávez’s conscience that there are millions of Venezuelans who want to make a revolution that has led him to the creation of this Party, but rather his bad conscience for going around promoting a revolution, when no one elected him for such an enterprise. Now he wants to turn his idea into a plebiscite, he wants the whole world to know that there are millions and millions of Venezuelans who, with their inscription in the party of the revolution, have demonstrated that they’re in agreement with his revolution. This is the true scandal we’re now living.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 15 May 2007 }
5.05.2007
Totalitarismo y cibernética (II) / Oswaldo Barreto
Totalitarianism and Cybernetics (II)
In the first part of this Balanza de Palabra column, published last Friday April 27th, we wrote that we’d venture “to write about a novelty such as what could be the temptation of cybernetics for (the) totalitarian dictatorship that president-elect Hugo Chávez is ready to build.” And since on that occasion we specifically mentioned the old ties that exist between cybernetics, as it was understood by the Greeks (the art of directing men), and politics, we should now clarify, so as to be precise about the meaning we give to the phrase “the temptation of cybernetics,” the opportunity that exists today, thanks to the prodigious development this science has achieved and its application to information technology and diverse communication systems, of considerably strengthening direct relations between governors and governed. This temptation – to say it in concrete terms which have been used for a long time now in studies on totalitarianism – is none other, today in Venezuela, than the one that presents itself to Hugo Chávez of furnishing himself with computer systems to establish an “official ideology,” create “a single party of the masses,” exercise “control of the means of communication,” as well as “control of the country’s economy,” along with the possibility of shortening as much as possible the distance between the will and power of he who governs and the private life of each one of the individuals he governs.
It’s well known that the determination to accomplish each one of those aims is what has characterized in equal measure the totalitarian regimes so different from one other in various aspects as were Hitler’s Nazism, Mussolini’s fascism or Stalin’s communism. All of them were determined, with more or less skill and with varied and particular strategies for accomplishing such goals, but in that determination, none could forego having human beings who inexorably served as intermediaries between the will of the supreme leader and that of his subjects. And, as has been revealed by the variegated fauna of researchers into those three political regimes, these human intermediaries, despite their declared utter identification with the führer, il duce, or the comrade secretary general, were political men with ideological, moral and philosophical nuances, or with pragmatic behavior that differentiated them from and even placed them in opposition to the chief, to the extent that they interfered between him and the tyrannized masses. The ministerial cabinets while they held meetings, the political-administrative institutions while they functioned effectively, the single parties themselves that were shown to be so decisive for attaining power, all these were the work of the thoughts and actions of political men who, regardless of what post they held in the hierarchy of power, ended up being irreplaceable for the dictator, even if it was only for ephemeral moments. The supreme conductor of the government could not exercise Executive power without counting on collaborators who were also political men. Of the other public powers, the Legislative and the Judicial, the history of totalitarianism teaches us they either disappeared (as was the case in Germany with the burning of the Reichstag and the imposition of the Enabling Law) or were composed of men who had lost the personal will and capacity to act with freedom (as with the soviets or the Soviet judges). In those times, there were no “situation rooms” or “computational teams,” made up of human beings who serve as cybernetic instruments of the utmost competence and effectiveness, without necessarily being political or, better yet, who should be essentially apolitical. They now exist and are in place and the institutions they make up could already be enabled; if this were to be the case, in what new political situation would we find ourselves?
{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 4 May 2007 }
In the first part of this Balanza de Palabra column, published last Friday April 27th, we wrote that we’d venture “to write about a novelty such as what could be the temptation of cybernetics for (the) totalitarian dictatorship that president-elect Hugo Chávez is ready to build.” And since on that occasion we specifically mentioned the old ties that exist between cybernetics, as it was understood by the Greeks (the art of directing men), and politics, we should now clarify, so as to be precise about the meaning we give to the phrase “the temptation of cybernetics,” the opportunity that exists today, thanks to the prodigious development this science has achieved and its application to information technology and diverse communication systems, of considerably strengthening direct relations between governors and governed. This temptation – to say it in concrete terms which have been used for a long time now in studies on totalitarianism – is none other, today in Venezuela, than the one that presents itself to Hugo Chávez of furnishing himself with computer systems to establish an “official ideology,” create “a single party of the masses,” exercise “control of the means of communication,” as well as “control of the country’s economy,” along with the possibility of shortening as much as possible the distance between the will and power of he who governs and the private life of each one of the individuals he governs.
It’s well known that the determination to accomplish each one of those aims is what has characterized in equal measure the totalitarian regimes so different from one other in various aspects as were Hitler’s Nazism, Mussolini’s fascism or Stalin’s communism. All of them were determined, with more or less skill and with varied and particular strategies for accomplishing such goals, but in that determination, none could forego having human beings who inexorably served as intermediaries between the will of the supreme leader and that of his subjects. And, as has been revealed by the variegated fauna of researchers into those three political regimes, these human intermediaries, despite their declared utter identification with the führer, il duce, or the comrade secretary general, were political men with ideological, moral and philosophical nuances, or with pragmatic behavior that differentiated them from and even placed them in opposition to the chief, to the extent that they interfered between him and the tyrannized masses. The ministerial cabinets while they held meetings, the political-administrative institutions while they functioned effectively, the single parties themselves that were shown to be so decisive for attaining power, all these were the work of the thoughts and actions of political men who, regardless of what post they held in the hierarchy of power, ended up being irreplaceable for the dictator, even if it was only for ephemeral moments. The supreme conductor of the government could not exercise Executive power without counting on collaborators who were also political men. Of the other public powers, the Legislative and the Judicial, the history of totalitarianism teaches us they either disappeared (as was the case in Germany with the burning of the Reichstag and the imposition of the Enabling Law) or were composed of men who had lost the personal will and capacity to act with freedom (as with the soviets or the Soviet judges). In those times, there were no “situation rooms” or “computational teams,” made up of human beings who serve as cybernetic instruments of the utmost competence and effectiveness, without necessarily being political or, better yet, who should be essentially apolitical. They now exist and are in place and the institutions they make up could already be enabled; if this were to be the case, in what new political situation would we find ourselves?
{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 4 May 2007 }
2.17.2007
El Marx nuestro de cada día / Oswaldo Barreto
Our Daily Marx
I, who spent my entire youth reading Karl Marx, the young Marx, the adult one and the one who barely reached old age; who learned one or another language so I could read his texts that still hadn’t been translated into Spanish; who performed work for academic ascent and wrote journeying essays about one of the theses he sustained, with the same vehemence and surety that characterized him; well, I have never been moved to think again about such an august character by a love of the evocations that Hugo Chávez tends to bring up about him – something that now happens on a daily basis, for which each one of us can provide testimony. In effect, none of the curious ties the loquacious president tends to establish between Karl Marx and socialism, religion or poverty have brought back to my memory the controversial and prolific texts of that brilliant thinker.
On the other hand, each time the President declares his will (always firm and irrevocable) to take a measure, whatever the affected field might be – economy, politics, education or international relations – I feel myself inevitably dragged towards that man who spent his life “devouring the books of others from all eras in order to transform them into new ideas.”
And because of how much the transforming will of Hugo Chávez manifests itself at each instant, I speak here of our daily Marx. And this happens to me, not by chance nor because of any personal whim or reason, but simply and clearly because Marx’s thought, what in philosophy, in economy, in anthropology or in politics tends to be designated as Marxism, is nothing other than a rigorous and profound diatribe against the centrality of the will, against the claim that man (individual man or the human species) can do whatever he wants, whenever or however he wants.
By the time he was twenty-five years old, Marx sustained that it was in fact man who made his own history. So when he wanted to explain to himself in a concrete situation how human beings managed to make their own history, he wrote the following: “My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel (…) embraces within the term "civil society"; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy. The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarized as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. (…) It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (Prologue to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859)
Unprecedented words, in the philosophical world as much as in the political one, but which I believe can be understood when translated into everyday language: Marx sustains that it is not systems of laws and forms of governing (democracies, dictatorships, separation of powers, popular participation, etc.) that establish the conditions of the lives of men (ownership of goods, means of producing and negotiating those goods, means of distributing and commercializing them), but that on the contrary, it is the conditions of people’s lives that allow certain political regimes, certain forms of government, along with the characteristics of the laws and constitutions that can be applied healthily and peacefully in those societies.
Words that contain an original thesis on the relations between the way men think, their will, and the material conditions in which they live.
A thesis which has not been refuted to this day and which, had it been heeded by those who tried to create revolutions where the material conditions for changing things did not exist, would not have led to the failures we all know.
Warnings, finally, that reveal to us the grave mistake of those who believe that from one day to the next they can fix the economic, political and cultural relations a nation can have with other nations, or that they can decree the means of producing meat, sugar and poultry, what prices should be charged for these products and who the owners and administrators of the establishments that sell them should be.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 16 February 2007 }
I, who spent my entire youth reading Karl Marx, the young Marx, the adult one and the one who barely reached old age; who learned one or another language so I could read his texts that still hadn’t been translated into Spanish; who performed work for academic ascent and wrote journeying essays about one of the theses he sustained, with the same vehemence and surety that characterized him; well, I have never been moved to think again about such an august character by a love of the evocations that Hugo Chávez tends to bring up about him – something that now happens on a daily basis, for which each one of us can provide testimony. In effect, none of the curious ties the loquacious president tends to establish between Karl Marx and socialism, religion or poverty have brought back to my memory the controversial and prolific texts of that brilliant thinker.
On the other hand, each time the President declares his will (always firm and irrevocable) to take a measure, whatever the affected field might be – economy, politics, education or international relations – I feel myself inevitably dragged towards that man who spent his life “devouring the books of others from all eras in order to transform them into new ideas.”
And because of how much the transforming will of Hugo Chávez manifests itself at each instant, I speak here of our daily Marx. And this happens to me, not by chance nor because of any personal whim or reason, but simply and clearly because Marx’s thought, what in philosophy, in economy, in anthropology or in politics tends to be designated as Marxism, is nothing other than a rigorous and profound diatribe against the centrality of the will, against the claim that man (individual man or the human species) can do whatever he wants, whenever or however he wants.
By the time he was twenty-five years old, Marx sustained that it was in fact man who made his own history. So when he wanted to explain to himself in a concrete situation how human beings managed to make their own history, he wrote the following: “My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel (…) embraces within the term "civil society"; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy. The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarized as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. (…) It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (Prologue to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859)
Unprecedented words, in the philosophical world as much as in the political one, but which I believe can be understood when translated into everyday language: Marx sustains that it is not systems of laws and forms of governing (democracies, dictatorships, separation of powers, popular participation, etc.) that establish the conditions of the lives of men (ownership of goods, means of producing and negotiating those goods, means of distributing and commercializing them), but that on the contrary, it is the conditions of people’s lives that allow certain political regimes, certain forms of government, along with the characteristics of the laws and constitutions that can be applied healthily and peacefully in those societies.
Words that contain an original thesis on the relations between the way men think, their will, and the material conditions in which they live.
A thesis which has not been refuted to this day and which, had it been heeded by those who tried to create revolutions where the material conditions for changing things did not exist, would not have led to the failures we all know.
Warnings, finally, that reveal to us the grave mistake of those who believe that from one day to the next they can fix the economic, political and cultural relations a nation can have with other nations, or that they can decree the means of producing meat, sugar and poultry, what prices should be charged for these products and who the owners and administrators of the establishments that sell them should be.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 16 February 2007 }
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