by Clifton Ross
But in fact, the entire situation of left governments in Latin America is also extremely complicated in this age of globalized capitalism when the U.S. continues to be a major imperial “enforcer” but is now joined by other imperial actors, some of them traditionally “left.” Chinese corporations are building the mega-canal through Nicaragua, destroying the land and displacing tens of thousands of Nicaraguans and quietly taking over land and resources all over the developing world.39 In the long run, China’s competition with Latin American exports pose a particular threat to Latin America’s economic development, arguably a greater threat than any the U.S. might offer at this historical juncture.40 Meanwhile, in Venezuela, the Cuban government directs intelligence operations for the unpopular Bolivarian elite.41
The solidarity left that has traditionally seen its role as supporting vanguard revolutionary organizations (often uncritically) taking state power in national liberation struggles needs to rethink its presuppositions. Should anti-imperialists support the “left-wing” governments like those of Daniel Ortega and Nicolás Maduro or rather the thousands of environmentalists, indigenous people, and campesinos opposing their destructive extractivist or developmentalist policies?42 What is the proper stance to take toward left governments that collude with Chinese communist imperialists (or corporations like Chevron) and cede huge territories to be “sacrifice zones” for the extraction of resources?43 When we ally ourselves with those left governments, are we not collaborating with imperialism and the destruction of the earth? Is covering up this ugly reality and the complicated conflicts the role of a “solidarity activist”? But even these governments’ apparently positive social programs raise questions about clientelism, the inculcation of dependency in the population, and, when funded by the extraction of resources, questions about environmental costs and sustainability.
All these contradictions and, the corruption that characterized many of the left governments of Latin America during the commodities boom in the first decade of this century—corruption “uncovered” just as the boom went bust—have apparently brought an end to the “Pink Tide.”44 In its moment the left turn in Latin America could have represented a positive break from poverty, underdevelopment and other ills associated with neoliberalism. But as Noam Chomsky said of the Pink Tide, “a lot of great opportunities, to a great degree, have been wasted in very disagreeable ways.” In Venezuela, he specified that “there were significant proposals, efforts, and initiatives … little related to popular initiatives, and with some participation, but they came principally from above.” And he also noted that “the tremendous corruption and incompetence of the country never allowed them to free themselves from near-total dependence on its sole export, oil.” He said that “Latin America has been plagued by a type of Bonapartism,” and so “the model of Chávez has been destructive. South America needs massive popular movements that would take the initiative to bring about extensive social change. And to a certain degree this has happened.” He offered as a prime example of the latter, the indigenous movement.45
Chomsky confirmed what I heard from so many thoughtful activists in the social movements throughout Latin America about the nature and limitations of the Pink Tide governments. In the globalized world economy of the twenty-first century, governments of the right and left alike are less free than ever to set social agendas and national policies. Such agendas and policies are increasingly set by an emerging, globalized, transnational capitalist state to which Lusbi Portillo referred when he said that there had indeed been a revolution in Venezuela, but that it was a “capitalist revolution.” And the only force that could stand in its way, as Lusbi noted, were social movements.
Epilogue: Journey to the Earth
Since my childhood Sundays in Air Force base chapels I’ve lived in the apocalyptic-utopian-millenarian matrix (AUMM), rarely giving much thought to what that meant. Then in April 2013, when I unexpectedly found myself in the dark side of utopia, I realized I needed to take a deeper look into what turned out to be a very complex phenomenon.
The positive side of the AUMM is, I think, fairly obvious. As we live in an imperfect world—some might go so far as to call it “degenerate” and the religious fundamentalist might even see it as irredeemably evil—visions of utopia provide relief, hope, and possibilities the present world fails to offer, dreams toward which we might strive. Utopia, especially since Thomas More, has been a transcendent vision by which we often judge our world and the shortcomings of all our human institutions. Utopia inspires us to push against the limits of the “reality” our society wishes to impose upon us. It was the pursuit of utopia, the glittering chimera of the “Sixties,” that motivated my entire generation to set out on the road on a great search, and I believe much good came from that process.
But when we try to realize that “nowhere” somewhere, or, more accurately, when we attempt to impose it in our imperfect world, its shadow inevitably emerges. There’s an enormous difference between the freely chosen, “limited” worker or living cooperative, and the “unlimited” project often undertaken in a revolution. While in the former case, utopia is an opening path to liberation, in the latter it is the closing door of a jail cell or a gulag. Yet while the utopian path to liberation can sometimes end up leading into a jail cell or a gulag, never has a jail cell or a gulag opened a path to liberation.
Nicholas Berdyaev, who was a participant in the Revolution of 1905 and a witness (and prisoner) of the Revolution of 1917, saw the “forces of revolution…opposed to the value of personality, of freedom, of creativeness and, indeed, to all spiritual values.” A revolution, for him, was a “rationalistic madness, a rationalized irrationality” in which “the irrational submits to the tyranny of the rational, and the rational, in imposing the tyranny, becomes irrational.”1 Karl Popper echoed this idea when he said that the utopianism revolutions proposed was “the wrong kind of rationalism.” As an “all too attractive theory” he considered it therefore “dangerous and pernicious” and inevitably leading to violence.2
Those processes of a revolutionary utopian sort often require the fanatical adherence of its activists. Here the communist and fascist revolutions of the twentieth century come to mind, but one could also look back to the Jesus of the Book of Revelation who says of the vacillators, the critical, the uncertain, the hesitant, the doubting—in the end, the normal, everyday moderates—that he would prefer them to be “hot or cold” but “since ye are lukewarm I will spew thee out of my mouth.”3 This fanaticism was present from the beginnings of Christianity and, indeed, it could already be seen in the original Zealots of the Maccabean revolts nearly two centuries before the birth of Christianity. But with Christianity came the assault on pagans and “heathens,” leading to crusades against infidels and heretics, inquisitions, witch-hunts, and pogroms against Jews, a genocidal conquest of the Americas, all culminating in the bloody internecine religious wars that wracked Europe until the middle of the seventeenth century. Even as the Christian West secularized, but within the same AUMM, the slaughters continued: European colonization that brought “light” (and death) to Africa, Asia, and the Americas; the genocide of Native Americans in the US to build the “American Dream”; and finally, the class extermination and gulags of Communism.
Certainly nothing I witnessed in Nicaragua or in Bolivarian Venezuela (up to the time of this writing) has come close to the brutality of earlier attempts to realize “the Kingdom of God” or some version of utopia. But the brutality was still there, in the militant Manichaean conception of the world that saw no middle ground between the armies of the Good and the forces of Evil.4
But the middle ground is what most of the world calls “home.” And this home turf where the majority attempt to engage in civil politics is increasingly encroached on from every side by fanatics who not only refuse to listen to those viewed as “enemies,” but also believe that those enemies shouldn’t be granted the right to speak. The middle ground is the world of skeptics, doubters, agnosti
cs, critics, and those with questions, uncertainties, and hesitations, that is, the terrain guarded by philosophers, scientists, artists, poets, mystics, and ordinary people attempting to understand a very complex world, guided only by their own inner light. To disregard the voices of thoughtful, cautious people is to disrespect, if not a majority, at least a significant, and crucial, part of humanity: that part of humanity grounded not in the utopia, but in the “real world.”
On the other hand, as my old friend William Everson impressed upon me, expressing a basic Jungian truth, everything has its shadow. And so the “middle,” too, has its shadow, and we know it as “mediocrity.” The flat, plain, ordinary, “middle,” the tepid, temperate, moderate, and lukewarm: Most of us, and certainly I, can understand why the Jesus of the Apocalypse, living with such passionate intensity, would spew this sector of society out of his mouth. My generation fled the middle ground, middle-America with its middle class, to find a way into burning deserts or freezing altitudes where we could experience life on the edge and in the margins. It is, I suppose, my own enantiodromia now to seek balance, temperance, moderation, and sobriety after a lifetime of extremes.
Anyone who has witnessed or participated in a revolution or other similar utopian project knows how intoxicating the experience can be. Everything seems possible, and that’s part of the problem. Those of us who are in recovery from intoxicants of various types can recall a parallel experience: We feel “heady” and capable of anything in that state of mind, like driving cars, shooting guns, and so on. The problem, as both Berdyaev and Popper point out, is that people in these irrational states of revolutionary intoxication usually end up making and guiding the construction of utopia. And they’ll stop at nothing to ensure its realization.
I’m not saying that we don’t need deep and radical change in our world. Quite the contrary: We really do need to change everything about how we live on our planet. But I’m convinced that some sort of sober spiritual practice needs to guide our political activism, and I’m not the first one to come to this conclusion: The American Indian Movement (AIM), especially as it has evolved from a “strictly political force, now defends itself as a religious movement and strongly advocates abstinence from all intoxicants for its members.”5 At its website, AIM describes itself as “first, a spiritual movement, a religious re-birth, and then the re-birth of dignity and pride in a people…”6 The Six Nations, Iroquois Confederacy or Haudenosaunee people, in their historic document, A Basic Call to Consciousness, write that “In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics” and “the destruction of the natural world and its peoples is the clearest indicator of mankind’s spiritual poverty.” 7
From the Six Nations people emerged one known as “the Peacemaker” and under his influence the nations gathered in a council to draft the Great Law of Peace. At the core of this law, the first principle was the recognition that “vertical hierarchy creates conflicts” so “they dedicated the superbly complex organization of their society to function to prevent the rise internally of hierarchy.” The document, drafted in 1977, was a “call to a basic consciousness which has ancient roots and ultra-modern, even futuristic, manifestations.”8
These are the ones Lusbi calls the “vanguard in the current phase of struggle.” Many of the original people have managed to maintain a non-apocalyptic view of the world and keep the idea of “progress” at bay through rituals that affirm cycles, unchanging processes, and ways of life. I find the same deep spiritual non-apocalyptic clarity in the Tao Te Ching and other ancient masterpieces of world spiritual literature. This view of life, as Wade Davis has pointed out, was precisely what so offended the English settlers arriving in Australia and finding that the Aboriginals “had no sense of progress.”9 Bruce Chatwin also remarked on the difference between the white settlers and the Aboriginals, saying, “The Whites were forever changing the world to fit their doubtful vision of the future. The Aboriginals put all their mental energies into keeping the world the way it was. In what way was that inferior?”10
For obvious reasons, we can’t return to an original or Aboriginal past: after all, most readers, I suspect, aren’t original or Aboriginal people. But neither is the world the world in which the Aboriginal people lived. Whether we like it or not, we already live in “the future.” But we can learn from the wisdom of original peoples and grapple with how we might apply that understanding in a late modern context where “degrowth” is a necessity and we find it necessary abandon “progress” for survival. In the light of their wisdom we can consider not only what we need to change, but also what we need to preserve.
The project of socialism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was, in theory, and in some sense, an attempt to retrieve a sense of human values and provide an alternative to “savage capitalism.” Many, if not the majority, of those who fought and gave their lives for this project were no doubt sincere, convinced that the new [utopian] order would be adequate to restore what they considered endangered human values. But those leading this struggle, the “vanguards” of those revolutions, were guided by the same messianic spirit that guided apocalyptic and totalitarian movements of Christianity before them.11
The moral foundation of the modern vanguards turned out to be made of purely utilitarian sand, since “good” and “evil,” “right” and “wrong” were defined exclusively in terms of what advanced the revolutionary cause as defined by the “vanguard.” As Leszek Kolakowski wrote of Lenin, “if law, for instance, is ‘nothing but’ a weapon in the class struggle, it naturally follows that there is no essential difference between the rule of law and an arbitrary dictatorship. If political freedoms are ‘nothing but’ an instrument used by the bourgeoisie in its own class-interest, it is perfectly fair to argue that communists need not feel obliged to uphold these values when they come to power.”12
What Kolakowski wrote of Trotsky’s interest, or more accurately, lack of interest, in “democracy as a form of government, or of civil liberties as a cultural value” has also proven true for the Bolivarians, especially as the support for their project erodes down to a “hard core” of perhaps a quarter of the population. As long as power was in the hands of the vanguard, Kolakowski wrote, “then by definition this was an authentic democracy, even if oppression and coercion in every form were otherwise the order of the day… but from the moment that power was taken over by a bureaucracy that did not represent the interests of the proletariat, the same forms of government automatically became reactionary and therefore ‘anti-democratic.’”13 In this logic of the double-standard, one had the “right to be indignant and to attack democratic states when they infringe the principles of democracy and freedom but one must not treat a Communist dictatorship in this way…”14
This is the heritage of the Marxism-Leninism of the twentieth century, and it guides the Bolivarian government today. It explains why independent, autonomous social movements never emerged under Left governments of this kind since all social bodies were coopted or in some way forced to submit to the will of the vanguard. Unquestionably, social movements haven’t had an easy task organizing themselves under liberal democratic governments in capitalist countries, but they’ve at least done better there than, ironically, under the “peoples’ democracies” of communism and socialism.
This is no minor problem. Social movements, in my thinking, are not ancillary to the work of social and political transformation: they are at the core of that process.15 If the indigenous movement is “the real ‘vanguard’—or “anti-vanguard”—of the struggles of the world” (Lusbi Portillo, p. 286), then the social movements in general are the “little green things that poke up after a fire through the blackened forest floor” (Staughton Lynd, p. 2). It’s a fitting image, since the unregulated market seems destined to leave behind a scorched earth, but peoples’ movements will only come back more forcefully in that Polanyian double-movement.
But social movements are also crucial to “monitoring” and correcting popular
governments, which is why some argue that democracy should have greater priority over other social changes.16 Partly for this reason, and also for my basic belief in the “Golden Rule,” I decided in 2013 that I could no longer support the Bolivarians when I saw them treating people in the opposition in ways they themselves would refuse to be treated, and certainly in ways I would refuse to be treated. Damian Prat brought that lesson home to me with dramatic effect when he said we [North Americans, Europeans] support governments in Latin America that we’d never tolerate in our own countries.
As a result of my disillusionment with the Bolivarian process I’ve grown more cautious as I recognize the possibility for unintended consequences in all actions, and the need for constant vigilance and self-correction even when we act with the best of intentions. It may seem that such an approach is inappropriate for the present, given the really “apocalyptic” situation we find ourselves in as we face climate change. It’s quite possible, at this point, that we don’t have time to make the dramatic changes that will ensure our survival. But every drug addict has to face a similar problem when he or she hits bottom: At the bottom the damage may already be too great to be healed. Nevertheless, it is at “the bottom” that one also recognizes that, no matter how dark or impossible a situation may appear, while there’s life, there is still the possibility for renewal and transformation. Yet this transformation runs counter to the ecstatic intoxication of a life immersed in the AUMM, and that’s because genuine transformation comes from spiritual practice based on steady, balanced, and consistent discipline, one day at a time.
John Gray may be correct when he says, “Ditching the myths of historical teleology and ultimate harmony is highly desirable, but it is also extremely difficult. The western belief that salvation can only be found in history has renewed itself again and again. The migration of utopianism from Left to Right testifies to its vitality.” He goes on to say that “an irrational faith in the future is encrypted into contemporary life, and a shift to realism may be a utopian ideal.”17 Berdyaev would agree when he said that utopias have been “brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonizing problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realization?”18