Vargas Lleras: A palabras necias...

Y dale con el temita. Ahora es Vargas Lleras, fundador del uribismo vergonzante, el que sale a decir que el Polo Democrático se ha identificado con las FARC. En principio el asunto no tendría mayor importancia, y de pronto no la tiene. Al fin y al cabo, es la esencia del uribismo, su justificación existencial. Si el uribismo no se presenta como el único baluarte anti-FARC, pierde sentido. 

Pero en este caso me molesta particularmente por la pregunta que en el artículo le hacen a Vargas Lleras acerca de la posibilidad de que el Polo Democrático acoja la política de "seguridad democrática." No por la respuesta de Vargas Lleras que es correcta: si el Polo lo hace, no tiene credibilidad. Me preocupa es porque de pronto esa pregunta responde a algún intento dentro del Polo de cometer precisamente ese disparate. Al fin y al cabo el mismísimo candidato Petro se ha pronunciado en ese sentido.

A mi juicio, el Polo debería dejar en claro tres puntos básicos en este debate:

1. Nadie que venga del uribismo tiene autoridad moral para criticar nexos políticos con grupos armados. Ninguna fuerza política ha hecho tanto como el uribismo para legitimar milicias irregulares. No existen ni 5 senadores de las FARC, mientras que hay más de 30 de los paramilitares, casi todos en partidos uribistas. Si a Vargas Lleras le preocupa la "combinación de formas de lucha" hay que recordarle que tiene un retraso de ocho años en ese tema. Si le preocupa que un grupo político tenga afinidades con las FARC, pero le parece bien que las tenga con los paras, entonces que lo diga de frente.

2. El Polo no tiene nexos con las FARC. Probablemente habrá miembros individuales que los tienen, pero el Polo, como partido, no tiene nexos con las FARC. Si alguien confunde una agenda de reformas sociales y económicas con un apoyo a la lucha armada, esa persona no tiene nada que hacer en una consulta interpartidista. 

3. El Polo no debe tratar de "uribizarse" con gestos como el de apoyar la "seguridad democrática." Obvio, nadie está en contra ni de la seguridad ni de la democracia. Pero la política de "seguridad democrática" tal como la ha concebido y ejecutado el gobierno Uribe no tiene por qué estar en la plataforma del Polo. El Polo debe producir su propia política de seguridad y mostrar en qué se diferencia de la actual. Lo demás es tratar de contemporizar con el uribismo sin obtener ningún beneficio a cambio. En eso tiene razón Vargas Lleras: si el Polo trata de moverse en esa dirección, se queda sin credibilidad.

Tilly y Venezuela

Limpiando mi oficina ayer (estamos de trasteo) me encontré con un ensayo de hace algún tiempo por el eminentísimo y recientemente fallecido Charles Tilly acerca de la "Democracia Bolivariana." Naturalmente vale la pena leerlo. Contiene una reflexión muy interesante sobre las condiciones socioeconómicas necesarias para la construcción de un Estado democrático. Es relativamente breve de modo que no lo voy a resumir aquí. 

Lo que me llama la atención es que Tilly comienza adoptando una postura muy crítica contra Chávez pero luego el ensayo toma un giro que, probablemente sin que Tilly se lo propusiera, socava dicha posición. En efecto, durante buena parte del ensayo Tilly reproduce el punto ya bastante conocido de que un "Estado rentista" en posesión de abundantes recursos propios (digamos, petróleo) no tiene que negociar con la ciudadanía lo cual entorpece la democratización. Pero al final Tilly especula con la posibilidad de que una revolución pueda combatir sus propios impulsos autoritarios y conducir a una apertura y democratización del sistema político. 

Es una lástima que esta sea la última reflexión del ensayo ya que esa es la pregunta clave. A mi juicio el proceso político venezolano es tan complejo y polifacético que todavía hay muchas alternativas sobre la mesa. 

No hay duda de que muchas de las actitudes de Chávez y del gobierno venezolano sugieren que, como dice Tilly, el proceso de reforma política ha sido "de arriba hacia abajo" atrofiando los mecanismos de consulta y de intermediación política que toda democracia necesita. Pero a veces pareciera (o al menos le parece a este observador distante) que a la sombra del chavismo se han activado (o reactivado) muchos movimientos populares que quieren asumir un papel más activo y autónomo que el de simples acólitos del coronel. No hay que olvidar que dentro del PSUV hay voces que critican a la "derecha endógena" precisamente por su carácter autoritario, no pocas veces corrupto, y por su intención de que la V República se convierta en una enorme red de petro-clientelismo. Si este segundo proceso se consolida, se estarían dando, justo en medio del chavismo, las condiciones que planteaba Tilly de una revolución democratizadora. 

El problema es que es muy difícil saber si realmente hay una revolución en Venezuela o no. Y si la hay, es muy difícil saber si entrará de lleno en su fase jacobina, volviéndose autoritaria, militarista y, luego, burocrática, o si conducirá a una verdadera democratización. Siempre he creído que uno de los acertijos más grandes de la política es ese: empezar revoluciones es relativamente fácil, comparado con lograr llevarlas a puerto seguro.

Yo no sé la respuesta en el caso de Venezuela. Por eso no puedo ser chavista ni anti-chavista. Pero si los sectores populares del PSUV logran salirse con la suya, adquieren una identidad política propia más allá de la de Chávez y logran que la V República consolide lo que ha ganado, Venezuela habrá logrado un tipo de revolución que no se ha conocido en América Latina.

Irónicamente, para poder aclarar que está pasando en Venezuela se va a necesitar que el chavismo reciba ciertas derrotas electorales. Solo así se podrá saber qué dirección toma el PSUV en momentos de dificultad. En la época de bonanza, cuando hay para todos, no hay necesidad de tomar decisiones. Todo apunta a que en las próximas elecciones el PSUV va a perder participación. Habrá que ver quiénes salen fortalecidos y cuáles son los sectores en los que Chávez va a buscar apoyo. Pero para eso se necesitaría que la derrota no sea catastrófica porque entonces el proceso en su conjunto colapsa. Es triste que la suerte de un país dependa de que el capricho de la aritmética electoral produzca un resultado tan finamente calibrado.

The American Right, that most singular bird.

Way before beginning this blog I was wondering if I should spend some time discussing the recent writings of the American right. I have mixed feelings about the thing. On the one hand, it can become addictive but with little benefit. I can't remember who said that Ann Coulter's pieces were fascinating in the same way a gruesome car accident is: you can't avert your eyes although you know how ugly is what you're looking at. Same for some other people. On the other hand, the American right is an interesting and important ideological phenomenon and, as such, a social scientist should pay attention to it. 

American conservatism often combines free-market ideology, religious faith and patriotism in ways that you can hardly find anywhere else. Conservatism in other latitudes often has to compromise in one of these. Just for that, it's interesting to think about it. 

Anyway, the point of all this throat-clearing is that today I succumbed to temptation. This piece by Charles Krauthammer is just the kind of train-wreck that one cannot stop noticing. So, what the heck, I'm gonna start every now and then yielding to the guilty pleasure.

Even by Krauthammerian standards, this is pretty deranged. I don't have time for a point-by-point take-down. I think the piece is pretty much self-combustible. What I want to single out is how Krauthammer reaches back into the old topic of the "hardworking citizens of democracies" taxed by the Third World. You know, those cunning, brown peoples that always find a sneaky way to make hard-working, civilized Westerners to feel guilty and part from their hard-earned money! And to think that those people in the Third World have it easy! They don't suffer from low-back pain, or carpal tunnel syndrome as those of us in the industrious West do because all they do is to lay in their hammocks all day long. While we produce the world's wealth, they enjoy toiling in the outdoors, watching beautiful landscapes and rare animals (often vultures, but never mind), spending quality time with their kids that help them rummage through heaps of the products of civilization that they, ingrates that they are, call "garbage" and so on.

I could pile more sarcasm, but what matters is something else: seemingly there is no such thing as a defeated ideology. There was a time when I thought that plain ol' imperialism, justified with unapologetic racism was gone for good. A while back I wrote of Leopold II as the mass-murder version of a defunct ideology. I was wrong. That ideology is not dead. You can find it brought to you by the Washington Post.

A Rationalist Mea Culpa

Since long I've regarded myself as a critical member of the rationalist tradition, especially of that nasty, uncouth tribe called rational-choice theory. So it doesn't pain me at all to say that rational choice theory is wrong about certain things. I've said it before about many topics and will say it again. But there is one topic I didn't see coming and that reading Zizek helped me get straight. (I've slowed down my progress with Zizek's book so, instead of one review, I'll comment little by little.)

You see, one of the standard tricks we rational-choice theorists use to entice young, impressionable minds is the magic word of "microfoundations." We tell our students that, unlike other paradigms in social theory, ours do have them, that is, we can explain social phenomena all the way down to the actions of individuals. (This is a topic I'm thinking about a lot these days so I'll post much more on this.) 

There are many difficulties with the microfoundations we rationalists proffer and that is a subject of lengthy debate. (For the record, I don't think the problems are so damaging as people often think. In fact, in my work I am fairly orthodox in this regard.) But one thing I had not realized fully, but should have suspected is that microfoundations are not the monopoly of rationalists.

It is a bit embarrassing for me to say it, but before reading Zizek's book I had no serious exposure to the work of Lacan and other social theorists influenced by psychoanalysis. Yes, I am a long-standing sympathizer of the Frankfurt School, but that's mostly with regards to the new generation, especially Habermas, that has little use for Freud. (By the way, whatever happened to Alfred Schmidt? His book on Marx's concept of nature was pretty good and I imagine that now, with all the talk about the environment, could use a rereading.) 

One thing that becomes pretty clear from reading Zizek's book, and his presentation of Lacan's ideas, is that these people, like it or not, DO have microfoundations. Lots of them. Their theories of society are based on an account of how the self develops. It doesn't get any more "micro" than that.

That is not to say that I agree with their microfoundations. I'm very much doubt that they are getting the mechanisms right and sometimes I just can't understand what's going on. So, don't worry, I'm not going to become a convert to post-modern, Lacanian, psychoanalitic social theory any time soon. But one thing I will do is to change my sales pitch. I promise I will never again tell my students that the good thing about rational-choice theory is that it has microfoundations. I'll try to argue that it has the right ones (or the less wrong ones) but not that it has the only ones.

Memo para la Administración Uribe: Colombia no es USA

Mientras más lo pienso, más me convenzo de que la Administración Uribe se cree a pie juntillas el discurso de la "guerra contra el terrorismo" tal como lo formuló Bush. A veces esto es comprensible pero hay momentos en los que se pregunta uno qué está pensando el gobierno.

Si un grupo de personas ataca intereses vitales de Estados Unidos y, como resultado, el gobierno americano lo clasifica como un grupo terrorista, nadie revira. No hay ningún país del mundo que se atreva a considerar a Al Qaeda como un grupo de "luchadores por la libertad." Pero eso era de esperarse. En sus discursos Bush decidió maquillar el asunto diciendo que ahora todo grupo irregular que atacara cualquier gobierno legítimo sería unánimemente considerado como terrorista y combatido como tal. Pocos nos creímos ese cuento. Era claro que ese principio fundamental de la "guerra contra el terrorismo" nunca se iba a aplicar al pie de la letra. 

Pero, sorpresivamente, el gobierno Uribe se lo creyó. Entonces, cada que surgen señales de que en otros países algunos sectores, e incluso sus respectivos gobiernos, tienen una actitud indulgente hacia las FARC, el gobierno colombiano cree que puede invocar la "doctrina Bush" y lograr que a dichos gobiernos los condenen internacionalmente como cómplices del terrorismo. La verdad, gústenos o no, es que esa es una prerrogativa de Estados Unidos y, si acaso, de un selecto grupo de países al cual los países del Tercer Mundo no pertenecen.

En estos días estamos otra vez repitiendo la misma película. El Ministro Silva sale ahora a decir que un país que reconozca a las FARC como beligerantes es inmediatamente cómplice de ellas. No entiendo por qué Uribe, que le encanta regañar a sus funcionarios, no les dice de una vez y por todas que los pronunciamientos en materia de relaciones internacionales son competencia exclusiva del Presidente y el Canciller.

La situación que se está configurando entre Colombia, Venezuela y las FARC es, sin duda, delicada. Pero no es algo único en el mundo y sin precedentes. Es normal que un gobierno NO declare enemigo a un grupo insurgente que ataca a otro gobierno "amigo." Muchos gobiernos europeos reconocieron al FMLN como grupo beligerante durante la guerra civil salvadoreña. La Venezuela de Carlos Andrés Pérez, si mal no estoy, apoyaba públicamente al FSLN en su lucha contra Somoza. Ni El Salvador bombardó a Bonn y a Estocolmo, ni Nicaragua le declaró la guerra a Venezuela. La verdad, así nos duela, es que si uno no es una superpotencia mundial, tiene que aguantarse esa clase de cosas. Ni El Salvador ni Nicaragua estaban en condiciones de imponerle al resto del mundo su propia guerra interna. 

Incluso a países poderosos les pasa. A la China no le agrada en lo más mínimo el trato deferencial que recibe el Dalai Lama en el resto del mundo. Pero se lo tiene que aguantar y no le declara hostilidad a los países que lo reciben. Incluso en Colombia recibimos y homenajeamos dirigentes políticos que en otros países son considerados delincuentes políticos. A Colombia va Carlos Alberto Montaner y el gobierno cubano entiende que sería un despropósito protestar. Pedro Carmona se paseaba por los salones más exclusivos de Bogotá con todo y que participó en un golpe de Estado contra Chávez.

Es obvio que esa clase de situaciones afectan las relaciones entre países. Pero para eso los países tienen gente especializada en diplomacia y relaciones internacionales que se encargan de evitar que las cosas se salgan de control. No me cabe duda de que en la Cancillería colombiana debe haber gente que entiende estas cosas. Pero primero hay que explicarle al Ministro Silva que él no es el Secretario de Defensa de los Estados Unidos.

Random Thought of the day (Moral Evolution and Mass Murder)

I was walking down an aisle in my building and saw an announcement of a course on Mass Murder (the name was different but never mind) and it reminded me of something I've been thinking for a long while. I'm not sure it makes entire sense.

One of the defining features of humankind since the mid 19th Century was that we learned to do things in a much bigger scale than before. The obvious case is technology: the steam boats of the 19th Century were much bigger and powerful than anything before. We began to build cross-continental railroads, dams, the works. But there are other cases that are just as striking and a bit less obvious such as bureaucracy (of course, Weber beat me to it by more than 100 years). The modern nation state is able to mobilize human resources in ways that no previous political entity could. 

The problem is that, although we as a species learned how to do stuff in a much grander scale, thanks to impersonal, anonymous mechanisms, we didn't evolve simultaneously an equivalent sense of moral responsibility. So, when we discovered total war we were not prepared to it. We had the technology to kill millions of people, even in the form of an assembly line, but did not have sorted out the issues of agency and accountability to stop it. That's why, to go back to the tired example, one of the great mass killers of the 20th Century could be just a punctilious bureaucrat like Eichmann that would not have been out of place working for a shipping company. 

Now it turns out that we also have the technology to cook the planet, drown or displace possibly millions of Bengalis and starve some other millions of Sub-Saharian Africans and we don't have the tools of collective moral responsibility to handle this. No one, of its own accord would allow this to happen. But as a collective with control over huge resources we do. 

Which raises the question: is it possible that we have some kind of "evolutionary mismatch" where our abilities have vastly outpaced our moral senses? If that is the case, can the human species evolve in a reasonable timeframe the moral sense adequate to this era of mass mobilization of resources?

Seguridad Democrática y Rendimientos Decrecientes

Debido a mi deformación profesional de economista, hace años vengo diciendo que en algún momento la "seguridad democrática" de la Administración Uribe va a entrar en una fase de lo que denominamos rendimientos marginales decrecientes, es decir, en la etapa en la que más recursos no se traducen en mejores resultados. Como no soy experto en asuntos militares, nunca he tratado de atinarle a la fecha. Pero, según este informe, parece que ya se acerca.

El informe de Nuevo Arco Iris merece varios comentarios. Primero, hay datos sorprendentes. En lo que va corrido del 2009, las FARC han acometido 1429 acciones militares (!). Obviamente, el numero de acciones puede sen engañoso ya que no nos informa acerca de la magnitud de las mismas. Pero cualquier insurgencia del mundo que pudiera lanzar casi 5 acciones por día se consideraría bastante activa. 

Más asombroso que el número de acciones es su comparación con los promedios históricos. Según el gráfico, este número está bastante cerca (y un poco por arriba) del número de acciones promedio desde 1997. Es decir, tras ocho años de "seguridad democrática" estamos igual que en los 90s. Si uno quita de la serie de datos el año 2002, el año de la "contratoma del Caguán," es casi imposible distinguir los años de Uribe de los anteriores. 

Como ya dije, esto es un poco engañoso. Al fin y al cabo los ataques de las FARC en El Billar y Patascoy fueron algunos de los ataques más exitosos de cualquier guerrilla en la historia de Colombia (incluídas las guerrillas de los 50s). Es poco probable que las FARC lancen un ataque similar en este momento. En ese sentido puede resultar exagerado decir que estamos como en 1997. 

Pero 1992 sí que me suena. Basándome en pura evidencia impresionista (es decir lo que yo me alcanzo a acordar de aquella época) me da la impresión de que la capacidad de perturbación de las FARC hoy en día es similar a la de comienzos de los 90 y en esa época todos estaban de acuerdo en que las FARC eran un factor perturbador serio. 

Todo esto nos sirve para poner en perspectiva la "seguridad democrática." Esta ha producido, no hay para qué negarlo, un importante repliegue de las FARC. Pero este repliegue se produce partiendo de un nivel anómalo que era, en últimas, insostenible. Las FARC, en una decisión bastante inusual para cualquier guerrilla del mundo, trataron de tomarse la iniciativa militar en un momento en el que no estaban en condiciones de ganar la guerra. 

Dado eso, era de esperarse que el gobierno, cualquier gobierno, reaccionara y forzara a las FARC a retroceder. De hecho, cuando se escriba la historia de la guerra con las FARC, el punto de quiebre va a ser la Batalla de Mitú de 1999, recién iniciada la Administración Pastrana. Esa fue la primera vez que las FARC trataron de mantener control militar sobre una capital departamental y fracasaron, perdiendo centenares de combatientes. De haber tenido éxito las FARC allí, hubiera cambiado totalmente la dinámica de la guerra. El gobierno Uribe, con todo y su retórica, nunca ha podido asestarle un golpe similar a las FARC. Esto no lo digo para elogiar a la Administración Pastrana (que no me gustó por muchísimas razones) sino para mostrar que buena parte de los éxitos del gobierno contra las FARC obedecen a procesos político-militares más que van más allá de Uribe y su gobierno. 

Un paréntesis importante: una cosa que no deja de asombrarme es la capacidad del gobierno Uribe para reescribir la historia reciente. Encuentra uno en Colombia gente que ya eran adultos en los 90s y que están convencidos de que antes de Uribe las FARC estaban a punto de tomarse el poder. Nada más descabellado. Sin duda, para finales de los 90s las FARC tenían una gran capacidad de perturbación pero no estaban ni cerca de poder controlar ningún núcleo poblacional importante.

Resumiendo, el logro de la "seguridad democrática" consiste en: 1. inflar ante la opinión una amenaza seria pero controlable hasta darle el status de amenaza existencial para el país, con base en esto, 2. generar el clima para inyectar más recursos para la guerra de modo que 3. la insurgencia vuelva a lo que históricamente había sido, es decir, un factor de perturbación constante pero relativamente periférico. 

Pero en economía a uno le enseñan que los logros se deben medir comparados con el costo. Es ahí cuando uno se pregunta si valió la pena el enorme gasto militar, la erosión de las instituciones y del equilibrio entre poderes, la legitimación del poder local de los "señores de la guerra" (paras y "neo-paras"), todo esto para conjurar una amenaza insurgente que hubiera podido combatirse de otra manera incluyendo justamente lo que este gobierno nunca ha querido contemplar: un componente de negociación política.

Random Thought of the Day (Consumption and Freedom)

This is really a propos nothing. It's just an idea that I've been having for a long time and never got around working through. So I guess a blog is the right place to test it.

A lot of the differences between ideological views boil down to differences about what does it mean to lead a "good" life. This much is pretty clear. But sometimes I feel as if we can get a lot of mileage in this direction by focusing on a surprisingly narrow set of elements. 

Take consumption, for example. The ability of individuals to make their consumption choices is, as far as I can tell, one of the key elements of the libertarian (and sometimes conservative) view of what a "good" life is. If you believe that, then you value institutions that preserve the scope of choice per se, regardless of the final outcome. 

Before I trash this (and, to some extent, I will), I want to pause to take it seriously. Conservatives think that socialism somehow infantilizes citizens by offering them a lot of goods and services without choice. I can see how this would be hurtful if you have to live on state-provided rations of everything including clothing and food. In that sense, yes, part of what it means to be a fully developed human being is the ability to make choices over consumption. That is an undeniable element of agency and, in a pinch, I would say that it belongs to the list of Rawlsian "bases of self-respect."

But I don't understand why this particular value ought to take precedence over everything else. All my professional life I've been working in American universities, typical big employers, which means that I don't get to choose my health plan, or have a very limited set of choices. It hasn't bothered me at all. Not that I am thrilled with my health plan (it could be better), but I don't feel demeaned in any serious way by having it handed down to me by the university's administration. In fact, I wouldn't know how to choose if they suddenly sent me out to the jungle of private competition. 

From a slightly more philosophical point of view, it is hard to see why consumption should be the central locus of individual freedom. If we decided to make a list of activities that elevate us and promote human flourishing, consumption would not be on the top of the list. It would be on the list, for sure. I, for one, consider myself a decent home cook and take pride on preparing a nice meal. You can say that, for me, cooking a good meal is one of those activities that help me reach my Aristotelian excellence. (I exaggerate, of course, I don't do it all the time, but you get the point.) But it is exceedingly reductionist to consider the agency involved in consumption as paramount, above and beyond, say, the agency involved in enjoying the products of high culture.

I know the objection: I am assuming that there is one definition of what it means to lead a good life and, therefore, I am already prejudging that consumption doesn't rise to the top whereas under other definitions it might. In that sense, I am a perfectionist (in the ethical sense of the word), unsuited to live in a pluralist society with different views of what the good life is. 

But not so fast. Isn't there a saying that an unexamined life is not worth living? I think people from different philosophical persuasions ought to be able to agree that, whatever else belongs to the definition of a "good" life, it would include a reflexive component whereas we not only form our own plans for a "good" life, but also can revise them and subject them to scrutiny. From that point of view, hitching our definition of a good life to a static end-product such as consumption seems too limited. 

In that regard, I think that the Aristotelian-Marxist view that work is the source of the highest form of human flourishing, whereas limited, is superior. Craftmanship is an open-ended process. Intuitively, there is a deeper sense of human excellence in a work than in consumption. I now have a more jaundiced view than I used to in this regard. Probably Marx was too upbeat in considering work (non-alienated work, that is) as the ultimate manifestation of human excellence. In that sense, a doses of pluralism is a good thing. Rather than try to find exactly what is it that makes us human, and therefore, what is the most authentic form of excellence, it might be better simply to admit that human beings will form all sorts of plans and will find excellence and flourishing in the most unexpected places.

But, although this may sound libertarian, it is a specific type of libertarianism: left-wing libertarianism. If you agree with what I just said, then you should conclude that maximizing opportunities for human flourishing is not the same as maximizing opportunities for consumption because consumption is itself only one particular site of self-realization, albeit a non-trivial one. So, a society that enables individuals to pursue a "good" life will sometimes limit their choice of consumption if it is the price to be paid for other types of opportunities. 

Nothing here is earth-shattering. It's been said a lot. I just think that it's nice to be able to restate all this starting from a serious consideration of what consumption is. We don't do that systematically, either from the left or from the right.

Random thought of the day (Climate Change)

I was just checking the news and got my daily fix of the debate around climate change and its deniers. There's one thing I don't get. Why is it that deniers, who overwhelmingly tend to be rightists, have to view climate change as a left-wing hoax? If you want to take it from this ol' pinko, climate change came up as a real bummer for us. We wanted to soak the rich so that we could use all that money into our socialist pet projects (free schools, free universities, free hospitals, free indoctrination camps, you name it) and now turns out that we have to spend money in cutting carbon emissions, planting trees and other boring stuff like that. It's not fun. Really, how I wish I could be a climate-change denier. 

Wait, could it be that what they are saying is that those of us on the left are so deranged as to let science stand on the way of our ideology? I stand accused.

Tocó hablar de Chávez

Resulta que en estos días en América Latina uno tiene que tener una posición sobre Chávez, especialmente si es colombiano. Así que, en vez de darle largas al asunto, aquí va mi "pronunciamiento oficial" sobre Chávez. Claro, siguiendo el carácter libérrimo de este blog, si mañana me da la gana cambiar de opinión, lo haré. Aclaro, eso sí, que nunca he pisado Venezuela (excepto una vez el aeropuerto de Caracas) aunque estoy loco por ir y que mi conocimiento sobre el tema es limitado. Pero eso nunca ha impedido a otra cantidad de gente opinar sobre la "Revolución Bolivariana" así que no veo por qué a mi sí me lo va a impedir. Hoy en día, como dije, todo el mundo opina sobre Chávez.

Resumiendo, me considero un "anti-anti-chavista." Si fuera venezolano, probablemente no sería parte del movimiento chavista ni del PSUV. Hay muchas cosas que no me gustan del chavismo. 

Pero antes de entrar en críticas, creo que uno debe aclarar varios puntos. Pocos países han sufrido el declive de Venezuela entre 1975 y el 2000. En esos 25 años el PIB per capita de Venezuela se redujo en casi un 40% (si se cree en los datos de este artículo basados en una buena fuente: las "Penn tables"). En estos temas puede haber distintas mediciones pero todas las que yo he visto coinciden en que el desempeño económico de la segunda mitad de la "IV República" fue peor que mediocre. Durante ese tiempo, un país que debería haber prosperado muchísimo gracias a sus enormes recursos minerales, retrocedió en materia económica y social. Al mismo tiempo, los "cogollos" y sus aliados se enriquecieron desmedidamente mientras que los sectores más pobres se estancaron. Sí, ya sé que los países petroleros sufren de una "enfermedad holandesa" crónica pero esa excusa no le sirve al venezolano promedio para echar a la olla. 

Por lo tanto, en consciencia no me siento capaz de criticar al chavismo sin antes criticar a la "IV República." Y ese es mi problema fundamental con el anti-chavismo, por lo menos con el anti-chavismo más vociferante y visible: que suele ser restauracionista en un país en el que esa postura es, a mi juicio, un imposible moral. La IV Rep'ublica murió y no hay que añorarla. 

El gobierno de Chávez ha cometido muchísimos errores que Venezuela deberá corregir hacia el futuro. Hasta donde alcanzo a percibir, su manejo de la seguridad ciudadana ha sido un desastre, tiene problemas de gestión y corrupción en muchos de sus programas bandera, incluídas las "misiones" y, lo que a mí más me preocupa, se comporta con autoritarismo de cara a algunas voces opositoras (no todas, por cierto). 

Distingamos. El mal manejo de la economía es algo indeseable pero no es para rasgarse las vestiduras, ni para llamar al cambio de régimen. Nadie pidió cambio de régimen cuando la IV República dilapidaba los recursos del petróleo dejando a los más pobres a la deriva, así que no me vengan ahora con el cuento de que los errores económicos del chavismo son razón para derrocarlo. En cambio el problema de las libertades políticas sí es serio. Pero los atropellos del gobierno venezolano en este sentido tampoco son tan graves como para lanzar una guerra fría regional. No me interesan las lágrimas de cocodrilo que vierten por las libertades de los pobres venezolanos los derechistas que justificaron a Pinochet, a Videla, a Ríos Montt, a Banzer y tantos otros. El tema de los derechos humanos es serio pero Venezuela está en una etapa en la que se podría tener un diálogo constructivo al respecto. Si Estados Unidos dejara claro que respeta el proceso político interno venezolano, se podrían ir bajando los ánimos y se podría llegar a que el gobierno vaya modificando sus actitudes a veces un tanto paranoides. 

El movimiento chavista, gústenos o no, es el movimiento más popular de Venezuela en este momento. El PSUV es el partido más grande. Además, esta popularidad se ha mantenido durante toda una década. Por lo tanto, esas posturas extremistas que se ven en Colombia que salivan ante la idea de un nuevo golpe de Estado en Venezuela, o una nueva conspiración, o incluso una guerra, son un delirio peligroso y antidemocrático.

Por otro lado, aparte de sus errores y tendencias preocupantes, el proceso político venezolano ha generado experimentos interesantes que ojalá se extiendan. En ningún otro país del mundo (que yo sepa) se tiene un gobierno que incentiva activamente la propiedad cooperativa de las empresas. Muchas fallarán, sin duda. Pero todos los días en todo el mundo fallan muchas experiencias "ortodoxas" entonces, por qué no experimentar un poco en otro sentido? Además, el gobierno venezolano ha sido pragmático en este sentido. En vez de socializar toda la economía, ha optado por avanzar poco a poco, esperando resultados. Eso es comprensible e incluso, digámoslo, loable. 

Del mismo modo, las famosas "misiones" aunque tienen problemas, han reducido la pobreza. Que son paternalistas? Puede que sí. Pero ahora están ahí y le corresponde a la oposición formular un esquema mejor. Cuando oigo a los defensores de la IV República criticando las misiones me acuerdo de los colombianos que critican a los equipos nor-europeos por no "jugar bonito." Alemania, Inglaterra, Holanda y tantos otros puede que no jueguen con la "picardía y la alegría" colombianas, pero van a los mundiales y ganan. Las misiones chavistas tienen defectos, pero por lo menos dan resultados. 

Mi peor temor es este: en 1955 cayó el gobierno de Perón en Argentina, víctima en parte de sus errores y excesos. Pero al momento de su derrocamiento el peronismo era la fuerza política más popular del país. Sin embargo los golpistas se empeñaron en borrar al peronismo del mapa, en actuar como si fuera posible que las "masas entraran en razón" y volvieran a la sumisión de antes. El resultado fue una crisis de gobernabilidad que duró más de veinte años y que le costó a Argentina terribles bandazos económicos y horribles episodios de dictaduras militares. Ojalá el anti-chavismo venezolano no cometa ese error el día que llegue al poder. Ojalá que Venezuela pueda reconciliarse en torno a la V República, mejorar lo que se ha ganado y corregir los errores cometidos. 

The "Twin Evils": My Not-so-final Verdict (3)

OK, like I said, there's a lot of stuff going on in Colombia and I want to blog about that. So, for the time being, I'm going to wrap up this thread.

The more I think about it, the more I stand by what I wrote before: the verdict between Fascism and Communism is not something you can just base on facts. Thus, I will take here the luxury of being ideological. But I won't do the usual thing of equating Communism with the Left and Fascism with the Right. At least not without qualifications. Although that framework has some truth to it, for some purposes it is too simple.

There is a standard joke among history professors that, no matter which country you want to cover, you can safely start some unit in 1945. That's pretty much the year the world hit the reset button. The 30 years before that are probably the worst historical cataclysm ever (or at least one of the two or three worst ever). Fascism and Communism were both born out of that period of iron and fire and were responses to the crises of the time. 

During the late 19th Century, the socialist workers' movement came of age but also entered its stagnant era: by the early 1900s it is becoming clear in country after country that the workers will not take over the means of production. The employers have made abundantly clear that they are willing to make concessions in terms of redistribution (taxes) as long as they don't loose the control over the "commanding heights" of the economy. Such is the pact on which social democracy is based. To be sure, it will be several years before social democratic parties and governments come of age. But I surmise that by 1910 the capitalists of Western Europe and the US are sleeping soundly. 

World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution put an end to this. The first one destroyed the old order, the second one showed that another order could be brought about. Fascism and Communism are, to a large extent, the reaction to such historical earthquake.

Although we now classify Fascism as a "right wing" reaction, let's not forget that it was, in its own terms, quite revolutionary. This is one of the strong points of Zizek: he acknowledges that, to come to terms with Fascism, we must understand that it was, at least in theory, a potential overhaul of the liberal-capitalist order that had brought about the disaster of WWI. At the end of the day, and here, again, Zizek is right, Fascist regimes became, so to speak, bastardized into defenders of the establishment. But this is not the way it was supposed to happen. 

Am I saying that, just as Stalinism "betrayed" Communism, so did Hitler's cozying up of the German industrialists "betrayed" Fascism? Well, yes and no and it doesn't matter. Yes because, like it or not, Fascism was anti-establishment. The mass movements that signed on to it were sick of the liberal plutocracies they wanted to overthrow. No because, since Fascism was viscerally anti-Communist, it was clear to anybody that, whatever the outcome of its victory, at the end of the day the business interests would be better off than under the wholesale expropriations of the Communists. (Although, ironically, two years after Mussolini comes to power, the Soviet Union is looking for some accommodation of private property under the NEP.) And, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter because my ultimate point is a different one.

For my purposes, what matters is that I cannot imagine a "Fascism with human face" while the search for a "socialism with human face" is a task worth pursuing. Sure, it is a thankless task and an elusive goal. But I, for one, cannot tolerate the idea of a world in which Fascism would have carried the day in WWII and where we would now be searching for a kinder, gentler version of it. 

Once you strip Fascism of its anti-Semitism (which, remember, infected mostly its German version),  you are left with a view of society ruled by order and loyalty. In short, at its best, a Fascist society is an oversized military barrack. There are worse things in life, for sure. You can live, grow old and die peacefully in such a place. But I hope (and am not alone in this hope) that it is possible a better view of society, one based on liberté, egalité, fraternité and that said society will be rightly called socialist.  

Back from Bogota

I spent a week in Bogota, enough to convince me that a lot of stuff is going on and that I shouldn't spend too much time blogging about historical hair-splitting. I'll try to finish that stuff and move on to blog about Colombia (in Spanish probably) ah, and my promised to dimes on Zizek.

The "Twin Evils": My Not-so-final Verdict (2)

Funny how I tried to argue that maybe the whole business of comparing Communism and Fascism is overrated and yet I get caught into it myself. It's hard to resist it. At the end of the day, it is one of those topics that seems historical and factually-based but is in fact quite ideological. In that sense, no amount of argument will settle the issue: if you are comfortable with the European right in its pre-liberal manifestations (see how polite that came out?), you will claim that Fascism was better than Communism and that, if anything, it was the understandable reaction to Communism. I get the impression that this same stance is sort of the "secret handshake" of the American hard-right. People in the far right of the American conservative movement excoriate Roosevelt not only for his "big government" domestic agenda but also for his foreign policy. As far as I now, whenever things get explicit, they veer of instead of saying what really is in their mind: that Roosevelt should have backed Hitler. (I remember that back when I still dignified Ann Coulter with my reading she once came the closest you can find, by saying that liberals loved Roosevelt because he "saved Mother Russia". But I kicked the Coulter habit long ago and won't bother commenting.) 

If you are part of the non-American left, you feel compelled to claim that Communism was better than Fascism. (For historical reasons, the current factions of the American left are, by and large, staunchly anti-Communist and do not have any "sin" to atone for.) Finally, if you want to belong to the large group of "right-thinking, serious people" be it as a neoliberal or a Third Way social democrat, then you will claim that both were "Twin Evils" and that you have nothing to do with them. (That's part of the reason I've spent time blogging about this "foundational myth.")

So what about this particular, non-American leftist? Like I said long ago, I feel that probably I shouldn't have a dog in this fight. "I am not and have never been" a Stalinist but seems like sooner or later somebody will call me one (that's standard operating procedure in Colombia these days) so I better have my answer ready.

Fascism was a type of regime that flourished in Europe between 1922 (Italy) and 1976 (Spain). Of those 54 years, the Nazi era covers only 12 (1933-1945). (I know very little of, and will say close to nothing about, Japan's militaristic regime of the 1930s.) The Nazi variant of Fascism, the most prominent one, for sure, never quite knew "normality" of any kind. It was always on a war footing, be it fighting its domestic enemies, or engaged in that foreign policy nuisance we call WWII. After 1945, European Fascism is reduced to the Iberian Peninsula and survives in one way or another until the mid-70s. But, of course, by that point it has been transformed in many ways. 

Communism, instead, lasted from 1917 to 1989 (although, of course, one percent of mankind belongs to the Chinese Communist Party). It ruled over many different countries in four continents. In some countries it reached the "normalization stage" and lasted for a while (Eastern Europe, for instance). 

So, comparing Fascism and Communism is a bit of apples and oranges. Are we supposed to compare Italy in 1936 with Angola in 1976? Or Yugoslavia in 1977 with Nazi-occupied Belarus in 1942? That's why the conventional approach is to compare both regimes in their most horrific manifestations: Hitler and Stalin. At this point it should be clear that we are unlikely to learn anything clear from this exercise but let's get into it.

Probably we'll never know if Hitler killed more people than Stalin. For what it's worth, I have the feeling, without any claim to authority, that it's a bit of a toss up. The claim that Stalin killed 20 million people sounds to me a bit iffy. It depends on exactly how we define a "victim" (do famine casualties count?). At any rate, the numbers game can quickly become distasteful. Sooner or later somebody will try to find in it grounds for an exoneration. Just to get a feel, remember the times when it was uncertain the number of victims of the Holocaust. I don't see why it would be less criminal to gas 2 million people than 6 million.

So, if we want to keep going with this, we need to make our minds based on nebulous criteria. Here's one that I had been toying with for a while and envy Zizek for having the guts for putting it out: there is something especially monstrous about Hitler's annihilationist drive. Stalin's crimes were the result of some kind of cold iron logic (remember, the guy's nickname came from "steel") that is, in its own perverted way, similar to the logic of modern nation states. In any modern state, a person allied with foreign interests plotting for the government's overthrow, would be treated harshly. Likewise, to this day many governments implement economic plans that they know will impoverish dramatically many of their citizens. No government with a claim to be civilized will nowadays take these two lines of logic to the extreme that Stalin took them. No government will simply execute hundreds of thousands of dissidents accusing them of all sorts of fabricated charges. (I'm going by the "official" number of people directly killed in the Great Purge. Not that I entirely believe it, but a. it's backed by hard data and b. it is enough to make my point.) No modern government will engineer a famine and plunge all its working masses into barely-subsistence conditions just to meet some industrialization goal. (Remember, Stalin was murderous with the peasantry, but the urban proletariat was also reduced to abysmal levels of consumption.) 

But there is nothing in our modern sensibilities that connects with Hitler. We just cannot envision the line of reasoning that could lead to the decision to exterminate millions of people on purely ethnic and bogus "biological" grounds. If the Soviet kulaks could have "somehow" survive on their rations, Stalin would not have sent the troops just to shoot them. For Hitler, there was nothing his targeted victims could have done to be spared. 

If Stalin is the perverse extreme of some notions of the 20th and 21st Century State, Hitler is, at best, the perverse extreme of organicist notions of society from the 19th Century, notions that, although not entirely dead, should be dead. Hitler's view of racial minorities was one shaped by the idea of society as a body in need of therapy. This view immediately reduces large swathes of the population to the role of vermin or viruses. I cannot find anything worth rescuing in that type of thought. 

(It is not dead, like I said. Some other day I will rant about the damage inflicted by hate-monger Orianna Fallaci. In the meantime, I should just say that her pamphlets were straight from that same kind of mind frame and that it was shameful that she was given a pass in spite of that. While I'm at it, this type of "organicist" thinking often finds its way into public discourse in Latin America. Many coups have been justified as a kind of "social chemotherapy.")

I thought this would be my last post on this but no. There's a third coming up soon. Stay tuned! (Well, it's an inside joke where "inside" means between me and me. I know that nobody is reading this.)

The "Twin Evils": My Not-so-final Verdict (1)

What the heck, if I want to keep talking about socialism in the transition between the 20th and the 21st Century, sooner or later I will have to write a post with some "comparison" between Fascism and Communism. So I might as well do it now. Plus, I just read some of the relevant chapters from Zizek's book so this can save me some comment time later on.

Why this shouldn't matter. The combination of anniversaries (the 70th of WWII, the 60th of the Chinese Revolution, the 50th of the Cuban Revolution, the 20th of the Eastern European Revolutions, just to name a few) have generated a lot of reflections about the comparative evils of Fascism and Communism. It now seems as if every thinking person should have an opinion about this. Stepping back, this is a bit overwrought. 

1. The "Body Count" Effect: Supposedly, the reason we should all care about this is because Fascism and Communism were the greatest man-made disasters of our time. Hitler, Stalin and Mao are regarded as the greatest mass murderers of the 20th Century. 

There are problems, though. The first one comes from, of all places, Brussels. People in the know claim that the reign of terror imposed by Leopold II of Belgium on the Congo costed the lives of probably more than 12 million people. If you add to this the lives it destroyed and adjust by population, Leopold II quickly rises to rival the other mass killers of the 20th Century. This is one of humankind's most unacknowledged genocides. Yet it didn't have anything to do with Fascism or Communism. It was an exercise of plain, old imperialistic ideology. 

The Rwandan Interahamwe killed 800 thousand people in little over 100 days, with a lethal efficiency that would put Reinhardt Heydrich to shame, and without his materiel. Again, it was a genocide that does not fit in the bilateral framework of Fascism or Communism. (It also has a Belgian connection, though, if you think of colonial history. But I have very good Belgian friends and don't want to beat this horse.) 

In accounting for human tragedies, it is hard to see why we shouldn't adjust for population. Hitler, Stalin, and to a much larger extent, Mao, had control over huge chunks of the human race. Once you take this into account, the picture gets more and more complicated. 

At around the time that Stalin's "dekulakization" plan was in full swing, wreaking havoc over the Soviet peasantry, in little, forgotten El Salvador Maximiliano Hernandez crushed a peasant revolt by killing around 20 thousand people (or even 30 thousand), most of them indigenous. It may seem small change compared to Stalin's debauchery until you keep in mind that El Salvador is much smaller than the Soviet Union. Once you adjust, the murderous record of the modest mestizo general begins to match that of Stalin. 

There are other ways of complicating matters. For instance, why should we just focus on violent deaths? In fact, when it comes to Stalin and Mao, we don't. In both cases, the indictment includes their role in the famines that ravaged their countries. Sure enough, they deserve much of the blame for this. Stalin's procurement quotas were nothing short of criminal. Mao's case might be a bit trickier. In retrospect it is clear that his Great Leap Forward was a monumental economic folly but, at least by some authoritative accounts, he was egged on by a massive failure of information resulting from the desire of lower-ranking officials to dress up their economic reports. Obviously, that they felt they had to do this was, to a large extent, result of the atmosphere that Mao had created. So, yes, guilty as charged. 

But, then, in this stage of human history, every famine is to some extent man-made. They are, invariably, the result, whether immediate or cumulative, of policies. So, shouldn't we count among the scourges of the 20th Century all the other famines? If we do so, wouldn't we have to bring the British Raj some notches up the list of recent disasters? 

We can even up the ante a bit more. Why stopping at famines? Why only deaths? When I run down the list of Stalin's victims, I don't think just of the lives he finished, but also of those he destroyed (e.g. through decades-long imprisonment in the Gulag). Throughout the 20th Century millions of lives in the Third World have been destroyed by the daily grind of poverty. Even to this day, in the era of greatest technological achievements ever, millions of children who have never heard of Communism or Fascism die or become stunted because of malnutrition or lack of access to elementary medical care and clean water. If we are making an inventory of man-made tragedies in our time, shouldn't this be at least as high as the Holocaust or the Great Purge? 

2. Guilt by association. These days hardly a week go by when I do not open a Colombian newspaper to find a denunciation of some elements of the left as Stalinists. (These days, usually the major source of the accusation comes from the left itself.) This is baffling. Stalin died in 1953 and was denounced in 1956. It's been more than 50 years since it is even "officially sanctioned" in the left to speak of his crimes. Except for Russia (for clear, historical reasons) I cannot think of any single place where politicians on the left are trying to rehabilitate Stalin's memory. I cannot imagine any scenario under which, in any country, Stalin's policies will be repeated. Couldn't we just bury the guy? 

Apparently not. Seems that, as I already said in a previous post, these days if you are a socialist, you ordered the collectivization of land, you set up the tribunals in Moscow and you signed the orders for Katyn. 

3. The "Black Book." Part of the explanation for this exercise in guilt by association can be found in the belief of many that there is something inherently murderous about Communism and, by extension, any type of Socialism. This type of thinking probably reached its apex with the publication of "The Black Book of Communism" an attempted inventory of all the crimes of Communist regimes. I will have more to say about this but let's start with a few observations. 

First, as I already mentioned, Communist regimes differed across time and space. The genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia is something with virtually no parallel in the history of Communism. (Can we mention that it was stopped by the invasion of the pro-Soviet Vietnamese and that the Khmer Rouge managed to get their chestnuts out of the fire thanks to the diplomatic aid of the United States and China? Can we mention that the Khmer Rouge was, to a large extent, a virulently racist regime and that much of its genocide was driven by anti-Vietnamese hatred?) Some Communist leaders in some Communist countries enjoyed certain degree of popularity and legitimacy, allowing the regime to relax and give some breathing space to civil society: Gomulka in Poland, Tito in Yugoslavia are examples that come to mind and, judging by the relative tolerance of dissident opinions, Kadar in Hungary in the 70s. 

Second, it is often said that, in every country Communism was the most murderous period in its history. This is dubious (more on that some other time). But even if true, it is also true that in many countries that were never Communist, their most murderous periods were those of anti-Communist dictatorships. True, Pinochet's body count (around 10 thousand) is small change compared to Stalin. But it is the most violent period in Chile's history, much, much more than anything Allende's regime might have thought about committing. Same for Argentina's military (20 thousand killed or disappeared). Suharto cemented his regime on the massacre of the Indonesian Communist Party, killing around 600 thousand people. (Proportionally, it makes Stalin's Yezhovshina pale by comparison.) If I had been a grown up in 1974, I would have much rather carry a book of Milton Friedman in Budapest than one of Marx in Santiago.  

One of the advantages of a blog is that I can stop whenever I damn please. It's late, I'll continue tomorrow.

The "Twin Evils" as Modern Foundational Myth (3)

Chronos: Yes, our modern mythology presses Greek gods into service. Chronos is part of our current understanding of the 20th Century. As you may already know, what makes Chronos useful is that he devoured his own children and, we now constantly repeat, that's exactly what revolutions do. (Heck, I myself have used the metaphor. You can find it here if you look hard enough.)

Arguably, the Bolshevik Revolution, as we all know,  acted like Chronos and devoured many of its children. It is a useful figure of speech. But it is misleading. It gets both Chronos and the Revolution wrong.

For the Ancient Greeks, Chronos was the "god of time" (as in chronometer). It was time the one that devoured its creations, that is, everything was subject to it. The myth of Chronos was the Ancient Greek version of the later Latin dictum of "sic transit gloriae mundi." Of course, when we see visual representations of it (as Goya's famous painting) we think of the devouring act as happening all at once.

But, Greek mythology aside, this also gets important aspects of the Revolution wrong. Or, to be more precise, it gets them right but organizes them in a peculiar way. One fact that we now tend to forget very easily is how determined the Western powers were in the late 10s and early 20s in rolling back the Russian Revolution. By 1920 there are already British, French and even American expeditionary forces there. From the start, they allied with the White Russians in the Civil War that ensued. This set off a well-known pattern: a revolutionary regime, facing external aggression, becomes radicalized, suspicious of internal dissent, repressive and, in due course, murderous. 

There are plenty of examples of this. In the build-up to the Terror during the French Revolution the Jacobines played on the all too real fears of foreign intervention. Louis XVI was decapitated not for being king, the revolution had already accepted his role, but for trying to escape and form an alliance with the Austrians and the Prussians. The Iranian revolution began with a large coalition but the islamicist among them became bolder and ended up eliminating all other elements (including, you guessed it, the Communists) as Saddam Hussein (with American backing) began to bomb Iran viciously (mmmm, was Saddam a neocon?). Even the American Revolution could have turned into a dictatorship during the crisis of the Alien and Sedition Act, itself the reaction of the Federalists to what they perceived (with reason) as the attempts of the French and the British to kill the Revolution in its cradle. The (justified) fear of American intervention played a crucial role in radicalizing the Cuban Revolution. You get the picture. In fact, one revolution that did not have to contend with attempts at suppressing it from outside and that "normalized" over time was the Mexican Revolution.

So, yes, it is easy to conclude that revolutions always turn on themselves in a self-destructive rampage and, of course, the bloodletting of Stalin's Great Purge fits this to a t. But we should not forget that the strain of siege mentality that Stalin represented, his vision of events, always finding "imperialist conspirators" under any bed, were reactions that received an air of reasonableness because of the real attempts from the West at strangling the Bolshevik snake in its nest.

In every polity you will always find sectors with the most radical and deranged views only that, normally, they remain marginalized. But the circumstances in the then-nascent Soviet Union were not normal, quite the opposite, those circumstances led to a situation where Stalin was, so to speak, vindicated by the facts. 

What made Stalin a world-historical criminal, as opposed to just another cadre in the Bolshevik party, is precisely that, on key issues, his threat assessment was correct. He was obsessed with a German attack and considered the forced industrialization of the Great Leap Forward as a necessity to stop it, and, sure enough, the German attack came.

Between this and my previous post I want to bring out one fact: liberal democracy did not simply emerge pure and clean from the cesspool of the 20th Century. It was part of that cesspool. Western politicians were involved in the making of the "twin evils." Many of them egged on Hitler because they saw him as the world's greatest anti-Communist. Many of them had their fingers in the Russian pie from the very beginning.

In fact, one politician that managed to avoid one of these, was Winston Churchill. A dyed-in-the-wool anti-Bolshevik if there ever was one, instrumental in the early attempts at suppressing the Russian Revolution, later decided that, in his words, if Hitler invaded hell he would ally with the devil. That's precisely what makes him a 20th Century great, the fact that, unlike many others of the time, he escaped the traditional mold and did not allow his Toryism to blind him to Hitler's danger.

(For what it's worth, I believe that the real giant is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but that's for some other post. I think that Americans don't commemorate him enough.) 

The "Twin Evils" as Modern Foundational Myth (2)

The Apologist: This is another character important for the myth of modern liberal democracy. He is the one that, although not himself a participant in the crimes of Communism, spent the Cold War making excuses for them, denouncing only the penultimate atrocity when it was already safe to do so, finding "moral equivalents" and so on. Coward, weak-kneed, you name it, a despicable character. Compare him to the morally pure liberals of our time that never hesitate to defend human life and that have no association whatsoever with any of the great criminal regimes of the 20th Century. 

To repeat, like any mythological character, this one is based on true experiences. But the key of the myth is not the fiction but the reorganization of facts. This myths reconstructs as a "moral space" what was in fact the outcome of brutal events that left little choice to all those involved. 

To appreciate this, imagine that the Soviet Army had lost in Stalingrad in 1943. Imagine that Hitler prevails on the Eastern Front and, as a result, forces peace terms upon the Western democracies. France remains a satellite under Petain, the UK and the US barely save their skin, protected by their respective bodies of water. Communism is eradicated from the face of the Earth and the vast expanses of Russian land are "Germanized." All this exercise has been pretty well imagined by many. But keep going. Of course, at some point the "years of iron and fire" would be over. At some point, Hitler's murderous rampage would have stopped, probably Hitler himself would have died of natural causes somewhere in the late 50s or early 60s. The time would have come for "normalization" under, say, Chancellor Albert Speer who would be regarded in the English-speaking media as a "moderate" and a "pragmatic." He would tone down the anti-Semitic rhetoric, saying that it belonged to a past that did not need to return. He would probably introduce more market mechanisms in the German economy, abandoning many of the interventionist policies that dated back to the war years. The time would have come to bury the hatchet and look for reconciliation with the US and the UK. 

This way, a new creature would have been born: the "liberal apologist," the intellectual that would say that, for all its criminal past, the civilized peoples of the world should acknowledge that Germany had stopped the totalitarian danger of Communism. He would explain how the Holocaust was an aberration of Nazism, that was finally overcome by the new generation. He would explain how the plight of the Eastern provinces of the German empire, groaning under enslavement, would over time come to an end with the introduction of market mechanisms and lower procurement quotas. 

In other words, the events of World War II, specifically the destruction of Nazism as the most formidable anti-Communist force, created the "moral space" where modern liberalism can now afford its luxurious and unblemished deontological commitments to human rights. Just like in my previous post, this is something to celebrate. But we must understand how we came to where we are.

The "Twin Evils" as Modern Foundational Myth (1)

No historically grounded discussion of modern liberalism is complete without coming to terms with Fascism and Communism. They are the "twin evils" defeated by liberalism, in its battle and ultimate victory against them, liberalism acquired its identity and, more importantly, its inevitability. Let's think critically about this; there is a lot of myth-making involved here. A good way to illustrate it is by looking at the characters involved in this myth. Like any other myth, this one is based on reality. "Unmasking" the myth and its characters is not a job of showing that they are false, it's a matter of showing how that reality came to be seen the way it is. I won't go in any particular order.

The Innocent Victim. Hitler and Stalin were mass murderers. There is no question about that. They killed millions and destroyed the lives of many, many more. On purely statistical grounds, an inordinate amount of victims were ordinary human beings guilty of nothing else but standing on the way of their project, be it the racially pure lebensraum or the "de-kulakized" Soviet fatherland. But our collective reconstruction of these crimes tends to gloss over the guilty victims, those that were sent to prison, torture and death on entirely accurate charges. (Count von Stauffenberg, reenacted by Tom Cruise, seems to be the exception.)

When the Moscow trials come up, people immediately resort to the irrational, to Stalin's putative paranoia. It's a bit like the Greek myth of the "battle against the giants." The foundation of a new, civilized order must be the defeat of a purely irrational one that existed before. Surely, we are told, Stalin must have been crazy (and with him, all of Communism).

I don't understand this rush to exculpate the victims. I prefer to believe that some of them were actually guilty. Probably not of the exact charges brought against them, but that they were either on their way to plot against Stalin or that the dynamic of events was leading them in the direction of plotting against him. In my book, that would make them true heroes. So, why is it that the usual perception of Stalin's purges is that it was a pure act of paranoia? Don't we all like a good hero story? Isn't that one of the key points of any legend?

I venture that there is a reason for this: the most visible victims of Stalin's purges were true-blooded, convinced Communists. By the 1930s, when Stalin rains terror and destruction on the Soviet Union, any true "liberal democrat" of the type that our current consensus would want to celebrate is already either dead or in exile. The ones that were left, the ones killed by Stalin were hard line Bolsheviks that, if given the chance, would have gone on to install their version of socialism in the Soviet Union. Moreover, had they lived in a Western democracy, they would have been persecuted and probably killed. In fact, Stalin killed many dissenting members of Communist parties from other countries and yet, to my knowledge, not one of those governments ever raised a squeak of protest. As far as they were concerned, they were all to happy of being rid of those undesirables, international conventions be damned. Overall, probably the greatest killer of Communists in the 20th century was none other than Joseph Dzugashvilli Stalin. 

So, the innocence of the victims is fundamental. Otherwise we would have to acknowledge that Stalin was not foreordained by the Bolshevik revolution. That some truly horrible stuff had to happen before he became the only viable leader and that, along the way, he crushed all other alternatives. 

Something similar happens with Hitler. Not all his victims were innocent. Some were guilty as charged and were a true menace to the Nazi state. Let's salute them! Yes, there are few worst cases of suicidal idiocy as that of the German Communist Party up to 1934. (Also courtesy of Uncle Joe and his marching orders against the "social fascism" of Weimar.) But when they were sent to the concentration camps, the German Communists were, belatedly, becoming an opposition to Hitler. Same goes for the vast legions of Socialists of German politics at the time. (Actually many of them had read Hitler correctly before the Communists did.) But somehow we now prefer to remember Count von Stauffenberg, a conservative aristocrat, as the "true" opposition to Hitler. Else than that, all the other victims were, we prefer to believe, "innocent." 

(A side note: these days popular imagination sees Hitler as a killer of Jews, reducing his crimes to the Holocaust. A few months ago, I still remember my shock, I had to explain a German student, that Hitler killed much more than Jews. As it happens, this myth of the "innocent victim" is wrong and hurtful for many Jews. It reduces the Jews to passive victims, forgetting that many of them were fighting Hitler from the very beginning, sometimes politically, sometimes even with militias during the war.)

There is another sense in which the "innocent victim" is instrumental to our current understanding of liberalism. It underlines the fact that every regime rests upon the raison d'etat according to which it is entitled to dispose of the "guilty victims." In other words, even liberal democracies may, on some occasions, resort to killing subversives and that is fine. 

Don't get me wrong. There is something inherently monstrous in a regime that targets innocent civilians and, without a doubt, this is one dimension in which liberal democracies are better than the alternatives. Winston Churchill said that in a democracy, a knock in the door at dawn is the milkman. But this emphasis on "innocent victims" helps to mask the fact that in no regime this can be taken for granted; this is a hard won battle in many countries. 

More on November 9 (somehow I can't stop)

Well, this blog is NOT going to be "all Communism all the time," promise. There are lots of other things I want to write about. But not only we've been in the famous 20th anniversary, I just picked up Zizek's latest book "In Defense of Lost Causes." So I'm in the mood. Plus, after procrastinating so much with this blog, I have some accumulated backlog of stuff to say. I'm not done with Zizek yet so I won't comment on the book right now. That'll come.

One good thing about Nov. 9 is that it relates in many ways to the spirit of this blog. After the collapse of communism, it seemed that all of a sudden the only plausible view of society was a combination of free market capitalism and democracy. One of my goals is to ask questions about both. Criticisms of capitalism are a dime a dozen. But we are all democrats, including me. Sure, no right thinking person has now any stomach to propose a return of totalitarian dictatorship. But as social scientists we have the duty to be inquisitive about everything, even about ideas we like. So, one of the things I want to get started here is a reflection about democracy and its connections to markets. 

Before I put my ideas in order, I want to discuss facts as much as I know them, and some of their implications. That'll take a while so check the upcoming posts. 

Cafe Blogging

Before the internet, there was a decision to be made: either you spent your time in cafes, impressing your friends with your wit like a typical French film student, or you decided to find a tribune from which to address the masses. Now you can do both! I'm writing this in a cafe. Makes me wonder why I waited so long to start my blog. Just saying.

November 9 and "The End of History" (not what you think it is).

Yes, OK, we all know that Fukuyama pronounced 1989 as the end of history. I remember feeling angry at the essay (without directly reading it) but before I could muster much resentment, history decided to restart on its own without asking for Fukuyama's permission. So I won't say more about it (at least not until I actually read the essay).

Instead, now that I think back, November 9, 1989 meant the end of history in a different sense. It brought about, at least for many people, in many places, the end of historical consciousness. Up to 1989, socialism had a history. A checkered one, with triumphs, defeats, tragedies and, yes, monstrous crimes, but a history anyway. It had a tradition and a future, no matter how embattled. It was the work of historical agents. This meant, of course, that capitalism also had a history, a past, a present and a future, all of them resulting from concrete actions. For some people, especially those on the "winning side" of 1989 (and those who jumped ship), all this came to an end on November 9. From that point on, socialism in all its variants stopped being a historical entity and became, well, a ghost (to paraphrase the Manifesto). Let me count the ways.

First, let's look toward the past. The "Communist era" is now a shorthand reference that lumps together 40 years (or 70, depending of where you look) in the life of millions of people. In some sense, that generalization is accurate. Every communist country experimented with central planning, eliminated much of private property, was ruled by a single-party regime that limited severely the basic freedoms of its citizens and so on. But there were significant differences across time and space. Hungary went from the ultra-Stalinism of Rakosi to the "goulasch communism" of Janos Kadar in no small part thanks to the heroic 1956 Revolution. Czechoslovakia went in the other direction, from having some degree of openness (where "some" is the instrumental word) that culminated in the Prague Spring to become a political wasteland after its crushing. Poland had in Gomulka a rather popular leader and ended in Jaruselski's martial law. (OK, Albania was always...Albania). These 40 years were full of attempts in different directions, of roads not taken. Some times, in some places, Communist regimes enjoyed a degree of legitimacy and acceptable standards of living. Apparently these days you cannot say that, but it is a fact. It is not a glorious fact, many right-wing dictatorships pull that same trick off. But it is a fact. Instead, these days Communism is seen as an alien entity (alien as in "from a different planet") that was crushing everything in sight. The notion that the citizens of Eastern Europe could form worthy endeavors in their lives, could at times forget about repression, could think of ways in which to improve the regime and (horror of horrors!) like it, is something that cannot be said now in polite company. 

The point is not to defend Communism. I never lived it and am happy I didn't. As far as I'm concerned, it is a page of history that we should not repeat. The point is that, precisely, it is a page of history. It resulted from many decisions, it related to aspirations and fears of millions of people and...isn't there a saying somewhere about what happens to those who don't know history?

The second sense in which November 9, 1989 meant the end of historical conscience is one I know a bit more closely and pertains to the future. History is about human action. Up to Nov. 9, Communism was a historical instance of socialism. Those of us who didn't like many of its aspects could keep thinking of a day when, thanks to historical agency, it would be transformed. But from that day on we are not supposed to think that way: socialism has no evolution, there is no possibility of learning from mistakes, no point in trying anything, no agency. 

In some parts of the world this predates 1989. In my corner of the woods, Colombia (as in much of the Third World), the Cold War was rained upon leftists as a huge exercise in guilt by association which is a way of denying agency. If you were a leftist, born thousands of miles away from Moscow, several years after Stalin's death, you had the blood of the Ukrainian kulaks in your hands as much as if you had signed the order yourself. As far as I remember, of all the Colombian leftists I knew back in the 80s, I can't remember anyone that was entirely uncritical of the Soviet Union. Most of them would admire this or that aspect, often many that turned out to be quite shabby once we knew better, but each one would have a pet peeve about it. (Most often the degree of repression and the appalling quality of consumer goods.) The "Communist paradise" was just a straw man of the right. As far as I could tell, Colombian leftists didn't want to turn Colombia into "Communist Russia" but into "Communist Colombia," into something different. (Not to mention the fact that Colombians had the stereotype, false as it happened, of Russians as not fond of partying...) But none of this mattered. In the witch hunts of the time, these people were not seen as agents, but as simple tools of the Soviet empire. Their views, their criticisms, their love for Colombia and its traditions was entirely irrelevant. Again, Communism did not exist in history and, therefore, its future was not part of human affairs. 

The events of 20 years ago didn't create this state of affairs, but certainly solidified it even further. To this day those of us on the left still get the same treatment. Nobody wants a return of the Gulag, but the right often sounds as if we did. (Note to self: right that superbrilliant entry you've been thinking about "slippery slope arguments.") One of the goals of this blog is, precisely, to study the possibility of regaining a sense of history for socialism, both looking to the past (with all honesty) and to the future.

November 9 as I saw it back then.

OK, I began making a big fuss about starting this blog on November 9, 2009. Why? In case you haven't noticed, today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of Berlin's Wall. As it happens, this event shattered my intellectual life in many ways that will become apparent as I post more. There's no way I will cover all the round in one post. Today I'll just ruminate on the anniversary and take it from there.

I'm 40 (almost 41). This means I was in my early 20s back then. In my late teens I had become a convinced Marxist (though I never belonged to any organization) of a relatively hard line but was taking some intellectual distances and was already convinced that the regimes of "really existing socialism" were unjustifiably authoritarian. When Gorbachev was elevated to the leadership of the Soviet Union I was among the many convinced that he would be able to steer the leaky boat of the Communist bloc to the safe haven of democratic socialism. Eastern Europe would democratize, Western Europe would maintain, and over time deepen, its commitment to the welfare state, the "House of Europe" would become the beacon of socialism for mankind. What was not to like? 

The events of 1989 laid waste on this scenario. I spent 1989 (and 1990, and 1991) making incremental forecasts of how quickly things would  unravel just to realize that the events were moving faster than anything I could imagine. The Communist bloc was much more decrepit than I had imagined in my more skeptical moments. The economies were poorer than I thought, the population was much more desperate than I thought, the leadership was much more cynical than I thought, and so it went. 

This had several consequences for me. The most obvious one is that I learned never, ever again to make political forecasts. OK, I exaggerate, sometimes I do make them. But ever since I feel very leery and don't put much stock on them. 

First Entry

Welcome to my blog. I've been meaning to start one for years and finally decided that today was the day, in no small part because today's date (November 9) has much to do with what I hope this blog will be about. (See below.)

You will find mostly two types of things on this blog:

1. My own speculations on social theory, philosophy, political economy, sociology, etc. (pretty nerdy stuff)

2. My thoughts on political events of the moment, especially in Colombia (my country of birth) and the US.

Please keep both separate. Of course there is a connection between them; my opinions on one are related to those of the other and most likely yours will also be. But I want Type 1 threads and discussions to be COMPLETELY civil, scholarly, good-natured. If you want to be opinionated and abrasive, Type 2 threads is what you're looking for.