Don’t Pray for Venezuela
Weekend Edition March 14-16, 2014
The Struggle Against Contemporary Fascism
Don’t Pray for Venezuela
by CHRIS GILBERT
Caracas.
The progressivist view of history often goes hand in hand with the faith that a new class – sometimes the proletariat, at other times “the people” – has a privileged perspective or consciousness. If scientific (as opposed to vulgar) Marxism debunks this idea on a theoretical level – showing how commodity and money fetishism’s inversions of reality affect all classes alike – then fascism belies the progressivist faith on a practical level, showing that neither in the streets nor in the social networks do progress and reason have to reign.
The fascists who operate today in Venezuela – to say nothing of those active in the Ukraine, Greece or Colombia – are by no means a historical aberration. Only if we take one of capitalism’s key myths at face value must we imagine that our current society is the wondrous culmination of a teleological evolutionary process and cannot just as well contain a host of violent and irrational elements that, far from being “atavistic,” are simply part and parcel with capitalist modernity. In fact, capitalism’s historical tendency, if any such thing exists, is not toward growing illustration but rather toward increasing barbarism.
In the Bolivarian Republic, easygoing tropical culture notwithstanding, young people and students have recently taken to the streets, donning ski masks and white shirts to defy public order with the typical fascist combination of destructiveness and repudiation of intellect(fighting shortages by destroying stocks, solving educational bottlenecks by burning institutions of learning, and overcoming insecurity by attacking the police). The beleaguered government, which is clumsy and paternalistic but well-meaning, organizes a national Peace Conference that incorporates opposition politicians and businessmen. At this conference literally everybody is welcome, but the response of the students is (in practical terms): Viva la muerte!
During the course of the past century the left’s response to an upsurge in fascism has generally taken one of two basic directions. The Popular Front tactic aims to group many non-fascist sectors into a large antifascist bloc. The alliance with the national bourgeoisie, so dear to the hearts of communist parties, comes into play here. All the progressist forces including center and liberal organizations are lumped together. They are heaped into the same messy but presumably powerful grab bag, the direction of which is left in some measure to “historical forces.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/14/dont-pray-for-venezuela/
