[ Revolutions do not happen suddenly, nor do they immediately
transform a society. A revolution is a process, which moves at
different speeds whose tempo can change rapidly if the motor of
history is accelerated by intensified class conflict.]
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A LETTER TO INTELLECTUALS WHO DERIDE REVOLUTIONS IN THE NAME OF
PURITY   [[link removed]]

 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Ana Maldonado, Pilar Troya Fernández, and
Vijay Prashad
November 20, 2019
MR Online
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_ Revolutions do not happen suddenly, nor do they immediately
transform a society. A revolution is a process, which moves at
different speeds whose tempo can change rapidly if the motor of
history is accelerated by intensified class conflict. _

In this Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2019 photo, a supporter of former
President Evo Morales holds a Bolivian flag during clashes with police
in La Paz, Bolivia., AP Photo // MR Online

 

But, most of the time, the building of the revolutionary momentum is
glacial, and the attempt to transform a state and society can be even
more slow.

Leon Trotsky, sitting in his Turkish exile in 1930, wrote the most
remarkable study of the Russian Revolution. Thirteen years had elapsed
since the Tsarist empire had been overthrown. But the revolution was
already being derided, even by people on the Left. ‘Capitalism’,
Trotsky wrote in the conclusion to that book, ‘required a hundred
years to elevate science and technique to the heights and plunge
humanity into the hell of war and crisis. To socialism its enemies
allow only fifteen years to create and furnish a terrestrial paradise.
We took no such obligation upon ourselves. We never set these dates.
The process of vast transformation must be measured by an adequate
scale’.

When Hugo Chavez won an election in Venezuela (December 1998) and when
Evo Morales Ayma won an election in Bolivia (December 2005), their
critics on the left in North America and in Europe gave their
governments no time to breathe. Some professors with a leftist
orientation immediately began to criticise these governments for their
limitations, and even their failures. This attitude was limited
politically—there was no solidarity given to these experiments; it
was also limited intellectually — there was no sense of the deep
difficulties for a socialist experiment in Third World countries
calcified in social hierarchies and depleted of financial resources.

Pace of Revolution

Two years into the Russian Revolution, Lenin wrote that the newly
created USSR is not a ‘miracle-working talisman’, nor does it
‘pave the way to socialism. It gives those who were formerly
oppressed the chance to straighten their backs and to an
ever-increasing degree to take the whole government of the country,
the whole administration of the economy, the whole management of
production, into their own hands’.

But even that—that _whole_ this, and _whole_ that—was not
going to be easy. It is, Lenin wrote, ‘a long, difficult, and
stubborn _class struggle_, which, _after_ the overthrow of
capitalist rule, _after_ the destruction of the bourgeois state….
does not disappear…. but merely changes its forms and in many
respects becomes fiercer’. This was Lenin’s judgment _after_ the
Tsarist state had been taken over, and _after_ the socialist
government had begun to consolidate power. Alexandra Kollantai wrote
(such as in _Love in the Time of Worker Bees_) about the struggles to
build socialism, the conflicts within socialism to attain its
objectives. Nothing is automatic; everything is a struggle.

Lenin and Kollantai argued that the class struggle is not suspended
when a revolutionary government takes over the state; it is in fact,
‘fiercer’, the opposition to it intense because the stakes are
high, and the moment dangerous because the opposition—namely the
bourgeoisie and the old aristocracy—had imperialism on its side.
Winston Churchill said, ‘Bolshevism must be strangled in its
cradle’, and so the Western armies joined the White Army in an
almost fatal military attack on the Soviet Republic. This attack went
from the last days of 1917 to 1923—a full six years of sustained
military assault.

Neither in Venezuela nor in Bolivia, nor in any of the countries that
turned to the Left over the past twenty years, has the bourgeois state
been totally transcended nor has capitalist rule been overthrown. The
revolutionary processes in these countries had to gradually create
institutions of and for the working-class alongside the continuation
of capitalist rule. These institutions reflect the emergence of a
unique state-form based on participatory democracy; expressions of
this are the _Misiones Sociales_ among others. Any attempt to fully
transcend capitalism was constrained by the power of the
bourgeoisie—which was not undone by repeated elections, and which is
now the source of counter-revolution; and it was constrained by the
power of imperialism—which has succeeded, for now, in a coup in
Bolivia, and which threatens daily a coup in Venezuela. No-one, in
1998 or 2005, suggested that what happened in Venezuela or Bolivia was
a ‘revolution’ like the Russian Revolution; the election victories
were part of a revolutionary process. As the first act of his
government Chavéz announced a constituent process for the
re-foundation of the Republic. Similarly, Evo affirmed in 2006 that
the Movement to Socialism (MAS) had been elected into the government
but had not taken power; it was later that a constituent process was
launched, which was itself a long journey. Venezuela entered an
extended ‘revolutionary process’, while Bolivia entered a
‘process of change’ or—as they called it—simply the
‘process’, which even now—after the coup—is ongoing.
Nonetheless, both Venezuela and Bolivia experienced the full thrust of
a ‘hybrid war’—from sabotage of physical infrastructure to
sabotage of the ability to raise funds from capital markets.

Lenin suggested that after capturing the state and dismantling
capitalist ownership, the revolutionary process in the new Soviet
republic was difficult, the stubborn class struggle alive and well;
imagine then how much more difficult is the stubborn struggle in
Venezuela and Bolivia.

Revolutions in the Realm of Necessity

Imagine, again, how hard it is to build a socialist society in a
country, in which—despite its wealth of natural resources—there
remains great poverty, and great inequality. Deeper yet, there is the
cultural reality that large parts of the population have suffered from
and struggled against centuries of social humiliation. Little surprise
that in these countries, the most oppressed agricultural workers,
miners, and the urban working class are either from indigenous
communities or from communities that descend from Africans. The
crushing burdens of indignity combined with the lack of easy to access
resources makes revolutionary processes in the ‘realm of
necessity’ all the harder.

In his _Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts_ (1844), Marx makes a
distinction between the ‘realm of freedom’—where ‘labour which
is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases’—and
the ‘realm of necessity’—where physical needs are not met at
all. A long history of colonial subjugation and then imperialist theft
has drained large parts of the planet of its wealth and made these
regions—mainly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—appear to be
permanently in the ‘realm of necessity’. When Chavez won the first
election in Venezuela, the poverty rate was an incredible 23.4%; in
Bolivia, when Morales won his first election, the poverty rate was a
staggering 38.2%. What these figures show is not just the absolute
poverty of large sections of the population, but they carry inside
them stories of social humiliation and indignity that cannot be made
into a simple statistic.

Revolutions and revolutionary processes seem to have been rooted more
in the realm of necessity—in Tsarist Russia, in China, in Cuba, in
Vietnam—than in the realm of freedom—in Europe and the United
States. These revolutions and these revolutionary processes—such as
in Venezuela and Bolivia—are made in places that simply do not have
accumulations of wealth that can be socialised. The bourgeoisie in
these societies either absconds with its money at the moment of
revolution or revolutionary change, or it remains in place but keeps
its money in tax havens or in places such as New York and London. This
money, the fruit of the people’s labour, cannot be accessed by the
new government without incurring the wrath of imperialism. See how
quickly the United States organised for Venezuela’s gold to be
seized by the Bank of London, and for the US to freeze the bank
accounts of the governments of Iran and Venezuela, and see how swiftly
investment dried up when Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia
refused to abide by the World Bank’s investor-State settlement
mechanism.

Both Chavez and Morales tried to take charge of the resources in their
countries, an act treated as an abomination by imperialism. Both of
them faced rebuke, with the accusation that they are ‘dictators’
because they want to renegotiate the deals cut by previous governments
for the removal of raw materials. They needed this capital not for
personal aggrandizement—no one can accuse them of personal
corruption—but to build up the social, economic, and cultural
capacity of their peoples.

Every day remains a struggle for revolutionary processes in the
‘realm of necessity’. The best example of this is Cuba, whose
revolutionary government has had to struggle against a crushing
embargo and against threats of assassinations and coups from the very
beginning.

Revolutions of Women

It is admitted—because it would be foolish to deny it—that women
are at the centre of the protests in Bolivia against the coup and for
the restoration of the Morales government; in Venezuela as well, the
majority of people who take to the streets to defend the Bolivarian
revolution are women. Most of these women might not
be _Masistas_ or _Chavistas_, but they certainly understand that
these revolutionary processes are feminist, socialist, and against the
indignity visited upon the indigenous and the Afro-descendants.

Countries like Venezuela and Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina, faced
immense pressure from the International Monetary Fund through the
1980s and 1990s to make deep cuts in state support for health care,
education, and elder care. The breakdown of these crucial social
support systems put a burden on the ‘care economy’, which is
largely maintained—for patriarchal reasons—by women. If the
‘invisible hand’ failed to take care of people, the ‘invisible
heart’ had to do so. It was the experience of the cuts in the care
economy, that deepened the radicalisation of women in our societies.
Their feminism emerged from their experience of patriarchy and
structural adjustment policies; capitalism’s tendency to harness
violence and deprivation hastened the journey of working-class and
indigenous feminism directly into the socialist projects of Chávez
and Morales. As the tide of neoliberalism continues to wash over the
world, and as it engulfs societies in anxiety and heartache, it is
women who have been the most active in the fight for a different
world.

Morales and Chavez are both men, but in the revolutionary process they
have come to symbolise a different reality for all of society. To
different degrees, their governments have committed themselves to a
platform that addresses both the cultures of patriarchy and the
policies of social cuts that burden women with holding society
together. The revolutionary processes in Latin America, therefore,
must be understood as deeply cognizant of the importance of putting
women, the indigenous, and the Afro-descendants at the centre of the
struggle. No-one would deny that there are hundreds of errors made by
the governments, errors of judgment that set back the fight against
patriarchy and racism; but these are errors, which can be rectified,
and not structural features of the revolutionary process. That is
something that is deeply acknowledged by indigenous and
Afro-descendent women in these countries; the proof of this
acknowledgement is not in this or that article that they have written,
but by their active and energetic presence on the streets.

As part of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, women have been
essential in re-building social structures eroded by decades of
austerity capitalism. Their work has been central to the development
of people’s power and for the creation of participatory democracy.
Sixty-four percent of the spokespersons of the 3,186 communes are
women, so are a majority of the leaders of the 48,160 communal
councils; sixty-five percent of the leaders in the local supply and
production committees are women. Women not only demand equality in the
workplace, but demand equality in the social domain, where
the _comunas_ are the atoms of Bolivarian socialism. Women in the
social domain have fought to build the possibility of self-government,
building dual-power, and therefore slowly eroding the form of the
liberal state. Against austerity capitalism, women have shown their
creativity, their strength, and their solidarity not only against
neoliberal policies, but also for the socialist experiment and against
the hybrid war.

Democracy and Socialism

Left intellectual currents have been badly bruised in the period after
the fall of the USSR. Marxism and dialectical materialism lost
considerable credibility not only in the West but in large parts of
the world; post-colonialism and subaltern studies—variants of
post-structuralism and post-modernism—flourished in intellectual and
academic circles. One of the main themes of this seam of scholarship
was to argue that the ‘State’ was obsolete as a vehicle for social
transformation, and that ‘Civil Society’ was the salvation. A
combination of post-Marxism and anarchist theory adopted this line of
argument to deride any experiments for socialism through state power.
The state was seen as merely an instrument of capitalism, rather than
as an instrument for the class struggle. But if the people withdraw
from the contest over the state, then it will—without
challenge—serve the oligarchy, and deepened inequalities and
discrimination.

Privileging the idea of ‘social movements’ over political
movements reflects the disillusionment with the heroic period of
national liberation, including the indigenous peoples’ liberation
movements. It also discards the actual history of people’s
organisations in relation to political movements that have won state
power. In 1977, after considerably struggle indigenous organisations
forced the United Nations to open up a project to end discrimination
against the indigenous population in the Americas. The La Paz-based
South American Indian Council was one of these organisations, which
worked closely with the World Peace Council, the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom, as well as a number of
national liberation movements (African National Congress, the
South-West Africa People’s Organisation, and the Palestinian
Liberation Organisation). It was from this unity and this struggle
that the UN established the Working Group on Indigenous Populations in
1981, and that it declared 1993 as the UN International Year of
Indigenous Peoples. In 2007, Evo Morales lead the push for the UN to
pass a _Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples_. This was a
very clear example of the importance of unity and struggle between
people’s movements and fraternal states—if not for both the
people’s movements struggles from 1977 to 2007, aided and abetted by
fraternal states, and if not for the Bolivian government in 2007, this
Declaration—which has immense importance to take the struggle
forward—would have been passed.

Indigenous intellectuals from the Americas have understood the
complexity of politics from this struggle—that indigenous
self-determination comes from a struggle through society and the state
to overcome bourgeois and settler-colonial power, as well as to find
instruments to prepare the transition to socialism. Amongst those
forms—as recognised by Peru’s José Carlos Mariátegui and
Ecuador’s Nela Martínez almost a century ago—is the _comuna_.

The revolutions in Bolivia and Venezuela have not only politically
sharpened the relations between men and women, between indigenous
communities and non-indigenous communities, but they have also
challenged the understanding of democracy and of socialism itself.
These revolutionary processes not only have had to work within the
rules of liberal democracy, but they at the same time built a new
institutional framework through the _comunas_ and other forms. It
was by winning elections and taking charge of state institutions that
the Bolivarian revolution was able to turn resources towards increased
social expenditure (on health, education, housing) and towards a
direct attack on patriarchy and racism. State power, in the hands of
the left, was used to build these new institutional frameworks that
extend the state and go beyond it. The existence of these two
forms—liberal democratic institutions and the socialist-feminist
institutions—has led to the bursting of the prejudice of fictitious
‘liberal equality’. Democracy if reduced to the act of voting
forces individuals to believe that they are citizens with the same
power as other citizens, regardless of their socio-economic,
political, and cultural positions. The revolutionary process
challenges this liberal myth, but it has not yet succeeded in
overcoming it—as can be seen in both Bolivia and Venezuela. It is a
struggle to create a new cultural consensus around socialist
democracy, a democracy that is rooted not in an ‘equal vote’, but
in a tangible experience of building a new society.

One of the textbook dynamics of having a left government is that it
takes up the agenda of many social and political movements of the
people. At the same time, many of the personnel from these
movements—as well as from various NGOs—join the government,
bringing their various skills to bear inside the complex institutions
of modern government. This has a contradictory impact: it fulfils the
demands of the people, and at the same time it has a tendency to
weaken independent organisations of various kinds. These developments
are part of the process of having a left government in power, whether
it be in Asia or in South America. Those who want to remain
independent of the government struggle to remain relevant; they often
become bitter critics of the government, and their criticisms are
frequently weaponised by imperialist forces towards ends that are
alien even to those who make such criticisms.

The liberal myth seeks to speak on behalf of the people, to obscure
the real interests and aspirations of the people—in particular of
women, the indigenous communities, and the afro-descendants. The left
inside the experiences of Bolivia and Venezuela has sought to develop
the collective mastery of the people in a contentious class struggle.
A position that attacks the very idea of the ‘State’ as oppressive
does not see how the state in Bolivia and Venezuela attempts to use
that authority to build institutions of dual power to create a new
political synthesis, with women at the front.

Revolutionary Advice with no Revolutionary Experience

Revolutions are not easy to make. They are filled with retreats and
errors, since they are made by people who are flawed and whose
political parties must always learn to learn. Their teacher is their
experience, and it is those amongst them who have the training and
time to elaborate their experiences into lessons. No revolution is
without its own mechanisms to correct itself, its own voices of
dissent. But that does not mean that a revolutionary process should be
deaf to criticisms; it should welcome them.

Criticism is always welcome, but in what form does that criticism
come? These are two forms that are typical of the ‘left’ critic
who derides revolutions in the name of purity.

* If the criticism comes from the standpoint of perfect, then their
standard is not only too high, but it fails to understand the nature
of class struggle that must contend with congealed power inherited
over generations.
* If the criticism assumes that all projects that contest the
electoral domain will betray the revolution, then there is little
understanding of the mass dimension of electoral projects and dual
power experiments. Revolutionary pessimism halts the possibility of
action. You cannot succeed if you do not allow yourself to fail, and
to try again. This standpoint of critique provides only despair.

The ‘stubborn class struggle’ inside the revolutionary process
should provide someone who is not part of the revolutionary process
itself to be sympathetic not to this or that policy of a government,
but to the difficulty—and _necessity—_of the process itself.
 

_[ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ [[link removed]] is a long-time
activist, university professor, and writer. In addition to numerous
scholarly books and articles, she has written three historical
memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie
[[link removed]] (Verso, 1997), Outlaw Woman: Memoir of
the War Years, 1960–1975
[[link removed]] (City Lights,
2002), and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War
[[link removed]] (South End Press,
2005) about the 1980s contra war against the Sandinistas; and is
author most recently of An Indigenous People’s History of the
United States
[[link removed]]._

_ANA MALDONADO is in the Frente Francisco de Miranda (Venezuela)._

_PILAR TROYA FERNÁNDEZ works at the Tricontinental: Institute for
Social Research._

_VIJAY PRASHAD is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a
writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter
[[link removed]], a project of
the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord
Books [[link removed]] and the director of
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more
than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History
of the Third World
[[link removed]] (The
New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the
Global South
[[link removed]] (Verso,
2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution
[[link removed]] (University
of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World
[[link removed]] (LeftWord,
2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick,
AlterNet and BirGün.]_

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