What is a Social Structure? Please, anyone!!

Over the years I've become convinced that this is one of the central questions in all social sciences. If I didn't know it would be a counterproductive strategy, I would simply stop everything else to work on it. I think this is the heart of the distinction between "Continental" and "Anglo-Saxon" social theory and of many other crucial questions. Problem is, I don't think I'm getting any closer to a satisfactory solution. This is really the first of a bunch of posts that are little else than a cry of despair.

Human life (and, for that matter, non-human life as well) flows through structures. In my University, we just changed President, recently in our school we changed Dean and we will soon have a new Department Chair. No one believes that these new individuals will remake the University, the School or the Department in ways that will make the current ones unrecognizable. We experience our surroundings, the institutions around us, the organizations to which we belong, even our familiar life as structures where individuals are replaceable at least to some degree. 

This is nothing new. Phenomenologists have made a living out of this (at least since Berger and Luckmann if not since Husserl himself), this is Sociology 101. 

The problem is that, to my knowledge, we don't have:

a. A good definition of what IS a structure.

b. A good account of how structures emerge, change and collapse.

I'm enough of a rational-choice theorist to try a crack at b. In that capacity, I could try to show that structures are necessary for social life because they, for instance, reduce our cognitive demands. In a world of bounded rationality, it is easier to navigate our social milieu if we are surrounded by structures so that we don't have to start from scratch everything each time the teller at a bank calls in sick. But this may explain why we need structures, not how they emerge. Similarly, Searle has argued that institutional facts (a topic akin to what I have in mind) operate on the basis of our Background abilities. (Here "Background" is capitalized because it is a technical term for Searle.) But, again, this doesn't tell us why we have this structure or that one, and not the other one out there. 

Continental social theorists may say that the very question is unintelligible. After all, they point out that these things exist, in the elegant phrase, "always already." In other words, it may seem futile to try to DERIVE a structure from something else because everything exists within a structure. There is nothing prior to a structure. For people who believe this, and, to be sure, it is a good point, the exercises we do in economics of imagining exchanges between two agents, economies with one or two goods, two or three traders and so on, are pointless because they will never be able to generate a structure; those traders, agents, citizens, voters, what have you, always already exist against a structure that makes them traders, agents, citizens, voters and what have you.

Granted. But if we take this to its logical conclusion, it means that we can never offer an account for the emergence of structures. I can offer a "genetic account" that is, I can tell how one specific structure in history developed out of another one. But notice what we are giving up if this is all there is to it: we are giving up the possibility of knowing the roads not taken. A full understanding of a structure should tell us what other possible forms it might take and why it doesn't take them.

Let me illustrate with a nagging question I've been pondering about. Bourdieu convinced me that power is the central social phenomenon. And, sure enough, power always exist within a structure. There is no power outside of a structure, except perhaps for the power of brute force. So, as far as I can follow it, the literature influenced by Bourdieu has taken up the task of describing how power is transformed from one type of capital to the next, from one field to the next. I like the way Bourdieu makes power fungible so that you can transform physical capital into symbolic capital and into political capital and so on. He does it much better than what I just said, of course. 

But the question that, as far as I can tell he cannot answer is: what determines the total amount of power/capital? Is power like matter-energy that it can only be transformed? That seems unlikely. More likely is that different structures generate different amounts of power. I surmise that modern bureaucracies have enormous levels of power that were undreamed of in previous eras. But if we want to know how this happens, we need to know how is power generated, how is capital generated. But this is not a historical question. It is an analytical one. We need an analytical account of how structures come into being to answer this.

It's getting late and I'm not coming across as lucid as I thought I would. Anyway, I'm sure I'll keep wrestling with this for a long time so there's no harm in stopping now.

A Philosophical Take on "Liberal Condescension"

Oh well, I though I would just sit this one out because it involves a colleague I admire and like but, since no one reads this, then what the heck. I can make some other philosophical point in the process. Gerard Alexander recently published a high-visibility piece in the Washington Post which you can find here. If you ask me, I think it is an appalling piece of nonsense and many other liberals and progressives are saying that. Now, before I go on, I should add that I have mixed feelings about the whole affair. At some level, I'm glad that Gerard is getting notoriety. I honestly like him. On the other hand, I don't think this is the notoriety he deserves. Probably I'm not in the best position to evaluate his work, but I've interacted with him in several professional settings and, believe me, he is one very smart and articulate scholar. It somehow pains me that he is coming under fire as if he were a regular party hack. (Well, the piece definitely reads as if it was written by a party hack, there's nothing I can do about it.) 

I don't want to spend a lot of time commenting on the obvious problems of the piece but there are a few that stand out. First, Gerard lumps all "liberals" and all "conservatives" together. So all liberals have the same narrative about all conservatives. Baloney. For instance, Thomas Frank has generated a lot of discussion among liberals. Larry Bartels, who I suspect is a liberal, and has definitely influenced Krugman, has little time for Frank's thesis. Then, whenever a liberal says something rather untoward, even if it refers to one specific conservative, it is presented as the ultimate liberal gospel. But if a conservative says that, I don't know, that liberals are traitors (as Ann Coulter does for a living), that's just an occasional "media gadfly". Gerard cries foul because liberals accuse conservatives (some conservatives, I would hasten to add) of practicing the "paranoid style of politics." But when Jim De Mint says that under Obama the US is in a situation reminiscent of Germany in 1933, isn't that paranoia? When James Inhofe gets waist-deep in conspiracy-theory territory to deny climate change, isn't that paranoia? What is one supposed to do? If Gerard is concerned about the style of debate, he could have told Senator De Mint to S.T.F.U. Gerard is an expert on Western European politics, and I mean it. (Again, he is a serious intellectual.) He could have told De Mint what it really was like in Germany in 1933. 

Then, at the end of the day, Gerard's complaint is that liberals don't listen to conservatives. Let's see. The stimulus package included 30% of tax cuts suggested by conservatives. The health care reform bill is designed to keep intact the employer-provided system and, from the get-go, avoided single-payer. At every turn, the health care reform effort of the Democrats has tried to give as much as possible to the market. The cap-and-trade plan is the mainstream, textbook, market economics solution to an externality problem. You may disagree with the specific contents of these policies, but they have an unmistakeable input from conservative thought. 

I guess the problem Gerard has with liberals is that they are not as conservative as he is. Well, that's hard because most people aren't. I also whine that liberals are not as socialist as I am and, again, most people aren't. But that's my problem. And Gerard's. But then neither he nor me should go on hectoring liberals to stop being... liberals.

Anyway, that stuff has already been picked apart by many commentators. What I'm interested in is something else. There is definitely something to the self-perception of liberals and, in general, the left-of-center as the "party of reason." 

I am a leftist, but also a social scientist, so I don't want to take the facile view that "well, you know, the left is rational because it's rational and so, by exclusion, the right isn't." I want to probe the idea that there are some socio-historical reasons that ground this.

First, the left is over-represented in academia (yours truly being an example) at least in the US but also, I believe, in many other countries. It's not that leftists are smarter. It has to do with well-known facts. For instance, leftists are less likely to go into the private sector. (This was a point made by Hayek and I'm shocked that Gerard didn't mention it.) In many places academia was a relatively free and secure outlet for left-wing political expression. Whatever the causes, yes, a lot of science is done by people a bit to the left of their respective citizenry. 

Second, and here I get more to what I believe is not often remarked, there is a strong tradition in the left that tries to make up for lack of political and economic resources by marshaling intellectual resources as a legitimizing device. The early generations of socialists resembled a bit the early Christians in that they had to burnish their scholarly credentials in front of an establishment that was very hostile and that looked down on them as an unwashed and uneducated rabble. 

Notice what I'm trying to do here: I'm trying NOT to take for granted that appeals to reason are sufficient grounds for legitimation. Precisely that is the interesting question. I'm trying to avoid taking for granted the primacy of reason, something that is hard for me to do because I am, to the bone marrow, a social scientist and rationalist. But the fascinating thing here is that social sciences as a vehicle for legitimation are a relatively recent thing. 

As a matter of fact, sometimes I wonder if the left isn't too secular and too rationalistic. There was a time, not too far back, when Catholicism was a hotbed of socialist mobilization, led by the Liberation theology. As much as I am a secular bourgeois, I have to admit that it was a potent force and the socialist movement is all the poorer for its lost.

This leads me to another consideration. Both the left and the right can try to appeal to rationality to legitimize their views. Both the left and the right can try to appeal to some notion of religion to do the same although, at least in the current Western culture it is more the right that does so. But there is one source of legitimation that is available only to the right: the appeal to tradition and it so happens that that is particularly salient in the US. As a foreigner I'm always amazed at how far you can go in American political discourse simply by saying "here we don't do that." Just stating, without any further argument, that, say, nationalizing banks is "not American" is good enough. The same goes for things such as "class warfare," "socialism," "equality of outcomes" and so on. Unlike Gerard, I'm not claiming that all conservatives appeal to this kind of thing, but some do. And not because of some particular perfidy, but because it works, because it is a respectable way of legitimizing your own discourse in American society. If I was not so intent on playing nice, I would even call this "volkisch" because to some extent it coincides with the old, innocent definition of the word. I know that "volkisch" is now a contaminated term so I'll drop it here. But the point is that, given the way American political culture works, it is no wonder that one side is disproportionately more "rational" than the other one. After all, one side has more choices of legitimizing language than the other for which rationality is almost the only game in town.

Concepts of Rationality

This is really a "note to self." (Well, this entire blog is a note to self, I know.) It's an idea that I've been thinking for a long while and whose implications are, I think, potentially far-reaching. 

A few days ago I was teaching my seminar on "Rationality and Collective Action" and we got to the inevitable question of what is rationality. The answers I got were not surprising, or wrong. The odd thing was that they were the answers an economist would give, and this in a room where most students were not Economics majors. So, they would fall back to the standard definition of rationality in economics that equates it to maximizing behavior or, if you like "thinking outside the box", "bounded optimization" a la Herbert Simon.

Like I said, there's nothing wrong with this notion of rationality. The problem is that it is a recent historical creation and it is crowding out many others. Whatever happened to the definition of "rational" as "logical"? There used to be a time when we said that an argument was "rational" if it followed from the premises. Whatever happened to the definition of "rational" as "grounded on careful examination"? When we talk about an "irrational fear of spiders" we're not saying that there's anything suboptimal about running away from spiders if one is afraid of them. We're saying that the fear itself is not grounded on any realistic assessment of what spiders are.

I think none of this would be a problem if we were thinking about economic issues. But economic discourse keeps penetrating other spheres (and, for the record, I don't think that's entirely bad; I myself do it) so we should be mindful that in those other spheres it would be very limiting to equate rationality to efficiency. 

For example, in the seminar we were trying to make sense of what Hegel could mean about "rational laws" in his essay "On the English Reform Bill." He was clearly using the idiom of the XVIIIth Century enlightened thinkers in which rational laws are laws that derive from some process of reasoning that is transparent, open to scrutiny, not driven by fear of some hidden deity and so on. In that sense, a "rational law" is not necessarily efficient. Moreover, I can think of many laws that I would call rational that are inefficient. (Don't they always say that us socialists love screwing up the economy?)

If we want to understand politics and, more broadly, to build a "rationalist" social theory, something I'm committed to, we must start by addressing the fact that rationality is much more than efficiency. One place where this is particularly notorious is in the debate about deliberation in politics. Politics, like it or not, requires language. You don't have to agree with everything Habermas has ever said to recognize that. So, a rationalist research program of politics must be able to make sense of language as a rational activity. Which it is. Right now as you read these lines (well, no one is, but just pretending), you are trying to make sense of them using rationality. You're not optimizing anything in the process. You're simply trying to go from premises to conclusions in a way that makes sense. That is every bit as rational as maximizing a profit function.

I still don't have the faintest idea of the implications this might have. But it's been nagging me for long enough to put it here.

Waxing Philosophical about the Health Care Debacle (II)

Democratic fetishism, you may call it or, given that I'm thinking about Marx, I guess his own expression is also apposite: "parliamentarian cretinism." This is how I see what's going on and, if I'm right, it has profound implications for the notion of democracy. 

Before I go on, some background. At this point it is pretty obvious to anyone not in Washington that the Democratic Party needs to vote for the Senate Health Care bill, send it to the President's desk and take it from there. Anything else invites disaster. Now, as much as I've been trying to find out, it's hard to know who exactly in the House is digging in his/her heels against this plan. One House member is on record: Progressive Caucus member Grijalva. If I had him near, I would slap his face trying to bring some sense into him. But, disagreements and all, Grijalva and left-wing opponents of the bill are not incurring in "democratic fetishism." Theirs is a different kind of problem, probably just plain old wishful thinking.

The ones I'm thinking of right now are the self-styled "moderates" that claim that with the election of Brown "the people have spoken" against health care reform. Sure, that's what people like Evan Bayh would say to justify themselves. But, at a deeper level, isn't there something wrong with our notion of democracy when a special election in Massachusetts, again the state that has more consistently than any other supported health reform, so much so that they have one of their own, is taken to represent "the will of the people"? 

It's plain nuts to believe that the will of the people can be found this way. OK, in the case of Bayh it may be bad faith, but in the case of those who believe him, it's idiocy. Trying to determine the will of the people on the basis of the latest election, or the latest poll, or the latest pundit-approved interpretation of the latest poll about the latest election is just chasing ghosts. So, why is the Democratic party in the business of chasing ghosts?

I think the answer is because it is not a party, it just plays one on TV. The Democratic party is a confederation of politicians that on some occasions happen to hang out together. But else than that, it has shown repeatedly that it has no coherence of its own, it doesn't stand for anything. I thought that it stood for universal health care (an important goal but, in the scheme of things, a modest one) but now apparently not even that. So instead of defending its core values it has to be constantly seeking the "will of the people."

I could go on venting about the US Democratic Party but I think there is a deeper problem at hand. The institutions of modern democracies resemble market institutions in several ways. That much is clear and has been noted at least since Schumpeter or Anthony Downs. Within that structure, it is possible to think of the "will of the people" as some aggregate of preferences akin to the consumer preferences in economic markets. 

There are many problems with this way of thinking, problems that hit close to home in my case because they pertain the way rational-choice models of politics are built. The first and most salient problem is that, although political preference may be represented, for analytical purposes, in much the same way we represent consumer preferences, such representation captures just the end product of a much deeper and more complex process.

To see what's wrong with this, let's look first at a non-democratic regime, say, the long-disappeared East Germany. People, even political scientists, operate under the stereotype that dictatorships do not consult the preferences of the populace. But this is inaccurate. In fact, the East German regime went to great lengths to consult the citizenry. It created an elaborate system of "Eingaben" which were, at least nominally, input offered by the people about how to improve the regime. An apolitical East German could, without risk or harm, write letters about this or that complaint affecting his daily life and on some occasions the complaint would be processed which is more than you can say of many democracies. 

The trick here was how to operate within the limits of the acceptable. In terms of form, it would help if you prefaced your complaint explaining how it would help in the "construction of socialism" or something to that effect. More importantly, in terms of contents, there were some things off-limits. Suggesting multi-party elections, or freedom of travel, or the introduction of free markets would not be welcome and could land you in trouble. But there were lots of "safe" issues as long as you were not questioning the pillars of the regime.

The point of this example is that you can have a political system that relies on the "preferences of the populace" but that makes sure that those preference are rather flat and simple. Stuff like reporting pot holes in the streets, the appalling food at the factory's canteen, etc. But a vigorous democracy needs more than this. A vigorous democracy needs to take into account preferences that pertain to deep, structural aspects of the social pact. Health care is a good example. In the US the social pact does not include right now a principle of universal availability to health care; it is not considered a right. Health care reform is, above anything else, about that. Cost and deficit issues aside, the question is whether the US will ever become a society where health care is a right. There might be good arguments on both sides (although you can imagine where I stand on this issue), but the point is that a democracy needs to be able to have such kind of debate.

To some extent, the American democracy IS having such debate, although a lot gets obscured. But the thing is, and here I am getting into more speculative territory, regular citizens don't often go to work thinking "gee, it's amazing the ways in which the deep, structural aspects of the social pact we live in are screwing up my life." To pose deep, structural questions and, even worse, to come up with deep, structural answers requires an elaborate process of political socialization, it requires deliberation and collective action. In other words, it needs social movements, parties, things of the like. 

That's what's so problematic about the American party system. If the Democratic party gets out of the business of bringing people together to arrive at a collective view of where they want to take society, if it insists on just chasing the latest polls, over time it becomes a kinder, gentler and more efficient version of the East German SED, a party that is good at keeping the customers satisfied. (The SED could only keep the customers satisfied for 40 years until they decided that they wanted an altogether different menu.)

Without political organizations and institutions that can bring citizens together to question the social structure they inhabit, democracy becomes inherently conservative and that, I believe, is the reason why many sectors in the left have been uneasy with democracy. These days in the US you hear a lot that "you need 60 votes in the Senate for anything." That's not exactly true. If you want to cut taxes for the rich, illegally invade countries, spurn global efforts at tackling global warming, wiretap and torture suspects, and other great accomplishments of the Bush administration, you don't need supermajorities. It's only progressive change that needs them. And the reason this is so is, again, because the Democratic Party is not a true party or, if it is one, it is every bit as conservative as the Republican only that it strikes a classy pose every now and then. 

Have I become a Naderite? Oh, my. I don't know. I think that, given the institutional constraints of the US electoral system, the best shot for leftists in the US is still to collaborate with the Democratic Party and sometimes probably to work within it, much in the way they have done it. I still believe that it was folly for Nader to run in 2000, let alone in 2004. But I'm with the usually mild-mannered Ezra Klein that has been working himself into a rage these days: if the Democratic Party drops the ball on health care this time, the right thing to do for leftists might be just to sit on their hands in November and send it back into minority status.

Since I'm not a political blogger (well, we already established that I'm not a real blogger, but that's another thing) but rather a social scientists, my issue of the day is not electoral strategy. What I'm trying to argue is that those of us who work within the rational-choice paradigm must acknowledge that the concept of political preferences, while useful for some purposes, is badly flawed. 

I'm proud to say that this is not a sudden epiphany for me. I've been thinking about this for a while only that the current crisis brings my thoughts into focus. I have a whole book to prove it. You'll have to wait for it, though, it's gonna be spectacular!

Waxing Philosophical about the Health Care Debacle

Like most left-wing intellectuals, I belong to the upper decile of the income distribution and, since I've always worked for big employers (universities), I have very good health care. So, the health care debate doesn't affect my pocketbook. Maybe that's why I can afford to get philosophical about it unlike all the people who struggle without health care for which this is a real disaster. So here I go.

In Colombia we have a saying to describe the attitude of the Democratic Party: they killed the tiger and ran scared from the hide. It is still possible that the Dems will pass the Senate bill and accomplish something. But the more time passes, the more unlikely it seems. So, for the purpose of intellectual stimulus, I'm writing as if they had dropped the ball because, even if that doesn't transpire, the very fact that it was a possibility says a lot.

The Democratic party has majorities that would be the envy of most parties in the advanced, industrialized democracies. It has majorities that are larger than anything it has enjoyed in the past 30 years and, probably, it will take another 30 years before they have something like it again. And still they can't get through the single most important initiative they've come with which, when all is said and done, is basically a set of incremental changes designed to preserve as much as possible the status quo of health care. It's not like they are nationalizing the banking sector, or dismantling the military-industrial complex or abolishing private property. They were just changing, nudging to be more precise, health care delivery a little bit in the direction of other industrialized democracies. The level of impotence is just breathtaking. 

Before I get into the crux of my arguments, I'll vent a bit more. Let's consider first the disproportion between cause and effect. A handful of voters in Massachusetts give a Republican a slim margin of victory and, next thing you know, THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE PEOPLE HAVE REJECTED HEALTH CARE REFORM!! 

To repeat what others are saying: Massachusetts already has health care reform. And they love it. If they wanted to reject it, they would have killed it in their own backyard. Furthermore, they've been voting for Ted Kennedy since forever. If that doesn't count like supporting health care reform, I wonder what counts. Even the guy they elected supports health care. So, of all the times that Massachusetts has spoken about the issue, of all the times when it has consistently sent the message that it likes universal health care, the one time it waffles a little bit is the one that counts. 

In any private matter, this would be considered completely ridiculous and irrational. So, why is it that this can happen in "the world's greatest democracy"?

They're kicking me out of the cafe so I'll answer this question in my next post.

Poll ratings, Schmoll ratings

I've tried to stay away from American politics in this blog because I don't think I have much to contribute that you can't find anywhere else. But since yesterday's special election in Massachusetts, lost by the Democrats, there has been a huge uptick in political idiocy that now I feel that even I can contribute something.

Basically, the Democratic party has a few hours (probably not more than 100) to show that it deserves being a major party. So far its reaction to the defeat is one of the most embarrassing things I've seen in politics (and, remember, I'm Colombian, I've seen a lot!)

Since the dust hasn't settled yet and the Democratic party may, against its best instincts, pull itself together and by dumb luck do the right thing, I'll comment on a related issue that actually predates the election: the allegedly alarming fall of Obama's approval rate.

A few days ago some wag said that with his approval ratings, Charlie Manson could defeat him. Baloney. The Democrats have nothing to fear so far about Obama's approval ratings. Let's see why.

At his inauguration he had approval ratings above 70%. But he won the election with something like 53% of the vote (as opposed to whatever people say to a pollster). Just like any other recently inaugurated president, he generated a lot of good will even among people who voted (again, voted, not responded to a poll) against him. That's normal. Now his approval ratings are comparable to the vote share he got. In essence he has alienated two types of people: some who voted for Mc Cain but were hoping against hope that he would not be a Democrat (what were they thinking?) and some to his left that got all worked up over the new Community-Organizer-in-Chief. 

This second group (and yes, that would include me if I had the right to vote) has nowhere to go. Many things would have to go horribly wrong for the Obama presidency for we to have a significant challenge from the left come 2012. In the US incumbent presidents run, period. So in 2012 it will be Obama vs. some variant of Palin-Limbaugh-Beck you name it. I wonder how many leftists will not vote for Obama in that contest. 

The first group could swing things against him if it were large enough. But so far it isn't. Again, Obama is still having above majority approval rates. And everybody else is doing much worse. It is fair to say that right now he is the most popular politician in the US and that, were the US to hold elections today he would win again. 

So, Dems, chill out! You're guy is still running the country and the country still loves him back. What the Democratic party cannot afford is to cripple his presidency with the kind of tantrum they're throwing today. Because if they do, not only they will lose, they will deserve to lose. 

Real Bloggers Don't Take Holidays...

...then again, I'm not a real blogger.

That said, I'm back.

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.)