The New Dark Age

The debates about Venezuela on the left today leave a great deal to be desired in many respects. However, one of the most symptomatic pitfalls, in my view, has been the excessive focus on the question of whether Delcy Rodríguez’s government, in the wake of the January 3 attacks, has made a tactical retreat of the Brest-Litovsk type or not.

In these debates, “Brest-Litovsk” has become a kind of shorthand. It refers to V. I. Lenin’s decision, in the months immediately following the October Revolution, to make a separate peace with Germany that involved ample concessions, doing so as a way to save the revolution.

For many, this historical example is taken as the model of correct revolutionary decision-making from the Venezuelan leadership. For this group, Lenin’s decision serves to justify the concessions that Rodríguez has made under duress to US imperialism, as a means for guaranteeing the revolution’s survival and buying time.

By contrast, there is a second group that is skeptical. They claim that a tactical retreat of the Brest-Litovsk kind is impossible in Venezuela, allegedly because there is no strategic vision or the concessions are too substantial. Instead of a retreat, they believe there has been capitulation.

One symptomatic feature of this debate is how both groups’ excessive focus on the Brest-Litovsk dilemma—which centers on the question simply of whether to fight or make a tactical retreat—erroneously compares Venezuela today, which is a relatively longstanding revolutionary process, to the Russian situation just four months after the October Revolution had taken place. The Russian Revolution was glorious and extraordinary (arguably it was the most important event of the twentieth century), but it was just getting going at the time of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

Thus, the focus on Brest-Litovsk amounts to a failure to accurately locate the historical moment, and it effectively denies that the Bolivarian Revolution has had substantial material and organizational achievements over the past quarter of a century. On a theoretical level, we see how focusing the debate on a “Brest-Litovsk moment” completely sidelines Hugo Chávez’s claims about the revolutionary “irreversibility” that had been achieved over the course of the revolution.

Unfortunately, this is typical of how intellectuals from the global North—even sympathetic ones—tend to perceive events in Venezuela, to say nothing of their perspective on the rest of Latin America. For many years, a large group of global North intellectuals insisted that the Bolivarian Revolution had made no real progress because it had failed to liquidate the bourgeoisie and nationalize all the major means of production.

Another common claim was that the popular movement in Venezuela and the government were in a relation of “dual power.” Since dual power refers to the period in Russia between February and October 1917, before the October Revolution, this implicitly suggests that Chávez (and later Maduro) were simply “Kerenskys,” and the real revolution is still to take place! All of this, along with other related positions, implies that there has been no real revolution in Venezuela, and therefore no substantial revolutionary trajectory or transformations.

Chávez’s view, of course, was the complete opposite of those sketched above. Right or wrong, the Venezuelan leader believed he was carrying out a real revolution, and he believed that, during the course of it, the leadership was passing power and social control over to the people through a variety of mechanisms.

Chávez repeatedly argued that these steps toward grassroots control of production and other aspects of social life—the popular power that has come to exist in the community councils, the civilian-military alliance, the communes, and the popular militias—all also constitute steps toward what he called irreversibility.

Two Perspectives

Who is right here? Is it the intellectuals who imagine themselves perpetually seated at the Brest-Litovsk negotiating table, deciding whether to fight or retreat, just months after the taking of power? Or is it Hugo Chávez, who thought that the longstanding Bolivarian Revolution could be something real, deep-rooted, and hard to undo?

It is worth observing that Comandante Chávez, with whom those engaged in this debate so systematically disagree, had most of the verdicts of history on his side. That is because history has shown that once working-class people gain participation in decision-making about production, territorial control, and national defense, it always takes an extraordinary effort to roll it back. Although popular participation may not be absolutely irreversible, it does take significant effort to eradicate a revolutionary process that has undergone substantial steps in social transformation.

That is why, in the former Eastern Bloc countries after 1991, educational systems were profoundly changed to promote recolonization, and workers’ rights were systematically destroyed. In the post-Soviet states, the cruelest kind of shock treatment was applied. Fortunately, extreme as this shock therapy was, it was not sufficient to fully terminate Russia’s hard-won and deeply ingrained delinking from the imperialist world economy. That is what has allowed a newly sovereign and anti-imperialist (even if no longer socialist) Russia to emerge under the leadership of Vladimir Putin.

What history has shown, then, is that if you want to break the back of a revolution, you need to destroy its bases in popular power. This requires work and dedication. It usually involves extensive and sustained violence, along with powerful cultural campaigns that wipe out historical memory.

Need it be observed that there is little evidence of this in Venezuela in the past few months? The Bolivarian army remains intact; the PSUV and its leadership are the same as ever; and the 5,000-plus communes and communal circuits are still functioning and receiving more, not less, financial support.

Yes, it is true that Venezuela’s oil industry, and especially its commercial side, has partly passed out of the country’s control. However, it should be remembered that this new situation also represents a de facto easing of the blockade, which was a longstanding aspiration of Maduro’s government, even if no one imagined it would take the form it has.

Locating the Historical Moment

In revolutions, timing is everything. That is something that both Lenin and Fidel Castro agreed on, the latter going so far as to say that “Revolution means understanding the historical moment.”

What historical moment are we in now: one similar to Brest-Litovsk, or is there a better comparison?

In fact, given that we are twenty-five years into the revolutionary process and the bulk of the Bolivarian Revolution’s organizational achievements remain intact, we should not turn so hastily to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty for comparison. Instead, we need to look for different historical references. In this respect, both China and Vietnam’s openings to the world market and foreign investment—each of which took place after an extended period of revolutionary consolidation—are much more relevant examples to consider.

Of course, many foreign intellectuals at the time of these openings insisted that the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions were being abandoned by their leadership. There was no shortage of claims about restorations or Thermidor-type reversals taking place.

However, today most of those skeptical voices—except for the most entrenched and incapable of self-criticism—would recognize that history has proved them wrong: the steps taken by China in the late 1970s, with its Reform and Opening Up, and by Vietnam in its Renovation process in the next decade, were actually what saved these revolutions in the face of the imperialist neoliberal counterrevolution taking place at the time.

At present, history seems to repeat itself, as a large group of international observers falls into defeatism or myopia with regard to Venezuela. This manifests in how they show surprisingly little interest in the current status of the revolution’s main organizational pillars—most of which appear very stable and thus have much future potential in an emancipatory process that is far from dismantled.

In sum, many in the cosmopolitan intellectual sector seems to think that the Venezuelan state is like a car stalled at an intersection that is called Brest-Litovsk: the car could go left, right, backward, or forward. Like self-appointed traffic police, they eagerly observe the vehicle.

It never occurs to most of these observers that, after twenty-five years of revolutionary construction, the Venezuelan state-vehicle might be politically or socially different from any of the other state-vehicles that exist on the planet. They do not recognize that its inner workings might be distinct, that it may have been rewired in new, relatively irreversible ways, and that changing all that would require concerted and significant counterrevolutionary efforts.

In so doing, these observers repeat the patterns of bourgeois ideologues by seeming to deny that a revolution has ever taken place in the country—and that it therefore has to be reckoned with.

Cosmopolitan Internationalism

Recently we have seen the emergence of a new generation of anti-imperialist intellectuals who are organized mostly in online networks and collectives. This should be seen, in most respects, as a welcome development. It is likely a reaction to the socialist currents and magazines that emerged in the global North following the 2008 crisis, one of whose main weak points was their failure to be sufficiently anti-imperialist. It was a weakness that became evident to all as the US-Israeli genocide in Palestine unfolded.

A correction of course was necessary. The downside, however, was that the new anti-imperialist intellectuals, who correctly understand that the main contradiction today is between US imperialism and oppressed nations, have frequently replaced the earlier generation’s blind spot with regard to imperialism with an anti-imperialism that is too cosmopolitan, too little rooted in concrete struggle. To the extent that this limitation has become ingrained, it reflects a failure to overcome their own class position and material conditions—which include easy air travel, privileged passports, and financial independence or flexible work conditions—that facilitate visits and virtual monitoring of developments across a wide range of countries and regions.

The main problem is that, on the spectrum that extends between “free-floating” and “organic” intellectuality, this group tends too much toward the former position. Undoubtedly, a revolutionary internationalism focused on anti-imperialism is an urgent necessity in our time, but it should be driven by people organically engaged with, even embedded in, a concrete revolutionary project or struggle. From that situated engagement (and the praxis, commitment, and self-critical reflection it calls for), an intellectual can then reach out and engage with other projects, theoretical claims, and social imaginaries.

Amilcar Cabral insisted that “rice is cooked inside the pot, not outside,” meaning that revolutions require a profound understanding of local subjective and objective conditions. Without such rootedness, and the understanding that goes with it, facile comparisons, made from the middle-class stratosphere, will replace productive, mutual learning processes. One set of leaders or one form of struggle will be held out as better than another, more combative, more heroic, and so on, without consideration of the material situation and history from which they emerged. For that reason, access to a multiplicity of processes and projects in diverse national conditions needs to be accompanied by an understanding that the times and character of each revolutionary process will be distinct and should be respected.

This is what Chávez himself insisted on, never allowing his internationalism to degenerate into cosmopolitanism. It can be observed that those actively participating in the defense of Iran, Cuba, or Palestine, and doing so from their respective territories, do not engage in the same invidious and facile comparisons as the cosmopolitan sector is inclined to do. That is because people with a rooted praxis of national or popular emancipation understand that the main project is not to sort out the good from the not-so-good, and then “criticize” the latter. In fact, the central project is to win: to defeat US imperialism.

That in turn requires respect for differences in timeframes, local conditions, and methodologies among various peoples and nations, all of it in the name of building the amplest anti-imperialist movement, which is the only one with a prospect of victory.