Uncle Hugo & the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela

12 Responses to Uncle Hugo & the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela

1. grumpy cat says:

   February 13, 2009 at 1:00 am

   Hi @ndy

   Since I am often so critical I thought I should take the time to say ‘hey, this is a really good blog entry… except…’

   Except Zizek also has made a number of critiques of Chavez as well… and Critchley’s book is awful… it’s some form of anarcho-reformism that is pretty gross.

   rebel love
   Dave
2. @ndy says:

   February 13, 2009 at 1:34 am

   Hi Dave,

   I’ve not read many critical comments on Chávez by Žižek. This comment (a footnote to his essay ‘Against the Populist Temptation’) relates to a dependence upon oil revenue:

   Many people sympathetic to the Hugo Chavez’ regime in Venezuela like to oppose Chavez’ flamboyant and sometimes clownish caudillo style to the vast popular movement of the self-organization of the poor and dispossessed that surprisingly brought him back to power after he was deposed in a US-backed coup; the error of this view is to think that one can have the second without the first: the popular movement needs the identificatory figure of a charismatic leader. The limitation of Chavez lies elsewhere, in the very factor which enables him to play his role: the oil money. It is as if oil is always a mixed blessing, if not an outright curse. Because of this supply, he can go on making populist gestures without “paying the full price for them,” without really inventing something new at the socio-economic level. Money makes him possible to practice inconsistent politics (populist anti-capitalist measures AND leaving the capitalist edifice basically untouched), of not acting but postponing the act, the radical change. (In spite of his anti-US rhetoric, Chavez takes great care that Venezuelan contracts with the US are regularly met – he effectively is a “Fidel with oil.”)

   Dunno what Žižek is dependent on, but whatever it is, I want some:

   
3. @ndy says:

   February 13, 2009 at 1:41 am

   Oh yeah.

   This is kinda funny…

   Zizek Needs an Intervention
   Guy Benjamin Brookshire
   Super Collide
   January 7, 2009

   

   …Zizek is not successful because he is informative or enlightening. He is successful because he is entertaining. By way of contrast, Noam Chomsky may be many things, but fun isn’t one of them. Zizek can take detours from reason explaining why people should stop whining about the gulags, or why holocaust revisionism is less kooky than you think, but then he makes a point about Kung Fu Panda and the crowd goes wild. He is academia’s drunkle. Or as Mike Johnson has noted, he bears more than a passing resemblance to Bruce Villanch, pictured above, but Slovenian and marginally less interested in his personal appearance. Bruce Villanch is a regular on Hollywood Squares. Zizek is a one man Marxist Hollywood Square.
4. grumpy cat says:

   February 17, 2009 at 5:57 pm

   Hey @ndy

   Here

   Many people sympathetic to the Hugo Chavez’ regime in Venezuela like to oppose Chavez’ flamboyant and sometimes clownish caudillo style to the vast popular movement of the self-organization of the poor and dispossessed that surprisingly brought him back to power after he was deposed in a US-backed coup; the error of this view is to think that one can have the second without the first: the popular movement needs the identificatory figure of a charismatic leader. The limitation of Chavez lies elsewhere, in the very factor which enables him to play his role: the oil money. It is as if oil is always a mixed blessing, if not an outright curse. Because of this supply, he can go on making populist gestures without “paying the full price for them,” without really inventing something new at the socio-economic level. Money makes him possible to practice inconsistent politics (populist anti-capitalist measures AND leaving the capitalist edifice basically untouched), of not acting but postponing the act, the radical change. (In spite of his anti-US rhetoric, Chavez takes great care that Venezuelan contracts with the US are regularly met – he effectively is a “Fidel with oil.”)

   and here

   Another case of acting multitude is the crowd that brought back into power Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. However, can we forget the obvious fact that Chavez functions as a Latino-American caudillo, the unique Leader whose function is to magically resolve the conflicting interests of those who support him? “Multitude in power” thus necessarily actualizes itself in the guise of an authoritarian leader whose charisma can serve as the “empty signifier” able to contain the multitude of interests (it was already Peron who was a militaristic patriot to the Army, a devout Christian to the Church, a supporter of the poor against oligarchy on behalf of workers, etc.)
5. El Libertario says:

   February 24, 2009 at 7:04 am

   See the English section on El Libertario’s website. We have a lot of stuff about Venezuela & Venezuelan anarchists.
6. @ndy says:

   February 28, 2009 at 11:30 pm

   El Liberatario,

   Cheers. As a general rule, I almost always provide a link to the zine whenever the topic of Venezuela arises; there’s one in the post above too.

   grumpy,

   I just bought a copy of Critchley’s Infinitely… On page 5 he places Durruti in the same category as Lenin, Blanqui, Mao, Baader-Meinhof and bin Laden. That is, neo-Leninism.

   Žižek’s critique of Hugo Boss — at least insofar as the above passages are concerned — is not so much ‘critique’, I think, as it is tepid criticism. First, a possible over-reliance on oil revenues to fund his populism; secondly, and more significantly, on reflection, his status as Great Sage, Equal of Heaven. I think the problem lies in Žižek’s apparent embrace of this figure as a logical necessity for radical social change, to which there is no (credible) alternative. Still, an interesting essay, which asks many good questions.
7. grumpy cat says:

   March 1, 2009 at 11:32 pm

   Hi @ndy.

   I thought you would find Critchley’s response to historical anarchism pretty ridiculous. I am already looking forward to reading what you think of the entire book…

   rebel love
   Dave

   ps I haven’t had time to read this properly (two jobs and working seven days a week!) but this seems to be an interesting piece about Venezuela…Even if my first response is to disagree with it…
8. @ndy says:

   March 9, 2009 at 12:07 am

   Moaron Žižek:

   …In a damning article last year in The New Republic, Adam Kirsch, one of its senior editors, accused Zizek of moral corruption, asking whether his audience was too busy laughing at his jokes to hear what he really had to say. Under the cover of comedy, Kirsch argued, Zizek was trying to “undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse”. What, after all, are we to make of Zizek’s apparently absurd argument in his recent book In Defence of Lost Causes (Verso Books) that Stalin, author of some of the most monstrous crimes of the 20th century, “saved the humanity of man”?

   Clearly bruised by Kirsch’s assault, Zizek denounces his US critic as “stupid”. He then sets about trying to clarify his apparently ambiguous attitude towards Stalinism. First, he readily acknowledges all the human suffering that occurred in Stalin’s time and trots out a series of “nice, horrible” stories illustrating the exceptional cruelty of the times. But, he insists, we should make more efforts to understand Stalinism. “One can argue that there was more violence than under Hitler,” he says. “But Hitler was a bad guy who announced he would do bad things and did them. The true tragedy of Stalinism is that it started as a popular explosion of emancipatory equality. We don’t have a good theory as to why this turned into an even worse nightmare.”

   What we often fail to understand, he argues, is how Stalinism was a counter-revolution, reacting against the extreme “post-human” utopian ambitions that were championed by Bolshevik leaders in the 1920s. Communist extremists predicted the day when workers would live in a perfect society with no need for emotions, or even names, and all sexuality and family life would be suppressed. But Stalin was far more conservative, reacting against experimental art and insisting on the sanctity of family life. “Stalinism reacted against these negative dystopias that were even more terrifying. Stalinism was, in that sense, a return to normal life. People forget that.” ~ The modest Marxist, John Thornhill, Financial Times, March 7, 2009

   Also: The Deadly Jester, Adam Kirsch, The New Republic, December 3, 2008.

   Kinda reminds me of the bullshit surrounding ‘Melbourne Conferences on Soviet and Australian History and Culture’ in July 2006. On the one hand, Communist apologists; on the other, liberal critics.

   The anarchists remain frozen out, as ever.

   …Shalamov tells us, ‘the eternally frozen stone and soil of the merzlota rejects corpses. The rock has to be dynamited, hacked away. Digging graves and digging for gold required the same techniques, the same tools, the same equipment, the same workers. An entire brigade would devote its days to cutting out graves, or rather ditches, where the anonymous corpses would be thrown fraternally together … The corpses were piled up, completely stripped, after their gold teeth had been broken off and recorded on the burial document. Bodies and stone, mixed together, were poured into the ditch, but the earth refused the dead, incorruptible and condemned to eternity in the perpetually frozen earth of the Great North …’

   Yesterday, when I read those lines — that is, not yesterday, but the day before that spring ten years ago in London — when I read those lines yesterday, that image burned itself into my eyes: the image of those thousands of stripped corpses, intact, trapped in the ice of eternity in the mass graves of the Great North. Graves that were the construction sites of the new man, let us not forget!

   In Moscow, at the Mausoleum at Red Square, incredible, credulous crowds continue to file past the incorruptible corpse of Lenin. I even visited the mausoleum myself once, in 1958. At that time, Stalin’s mummy kept Vladimir Ilyich company. Two years before, during a secret session of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev set fire to the idol, which, like all his peers, he had worshipped and venerated. And in 1960, in Bucharest, Khrushchev suggested to Peng Chen that Stalin’s bloody mummy be taken to China. It was finally removed from the mausoleum after the Twenty-second Congress of the Soviet Party. But in the summer of 1958, Stalin was still in his red marble tomb beside Lenin. I can testify to that. I saw them both. At peace, intact, incorruptible: all they lacked was the power of speech. But, fortunately, they did not have the power of speech. They just lay there, the two of them, silent, lit up like fish in an aquarium, protected by members of the Guards, standing motionless like bronze statues.

   Ten years later, in London, after reading that passage in Varlam Shalamov’s book, I remembered the tomb in Red Square. It occurred to me that the true mausoleum of the revolution was to be found in the Great North, in Kolyma. Galleries might be dug through the charnel houses — the construction sites — of socialism. People would file past the thousands of naked, incorruptible corpses of prisoners frozen in the ice of eternal death. There would be no guards; those dead would not need guards. There would be no music, either, no solemn funeral marches playing in the background. There would be nothing but silence. At the end of the labyrinth of galleries, in a subterranean amphitheater dug out of the ice of a common ditch, surrounded on all sides by the blind gazes of the victims, learned meetings might be organized to discuss the consequences of the ‘Stalinist deviation,’ with a representative sprinkling of distinguished Western Marxists in attendance.

   And yet the Russian camps are not Marxist, in the sense that the German camps were Nazi. There is a historical immediacy, a total transparency between Nazi theory and its repressive practice. Indeed, Hitler seized power through ideological mobilization of the masses and thanks to universal suffrage, in the name of a theory about which no one could be in any doubt. He himself put his ideas into practice, reconstructing German reality in accordance with them. The situation of Karl Marx, vis-à-vis the history of the twentieth century, even that made in his name, is radically different. That is obvious enough. In fact, a large segment of the opponents of the Bolsheviks, at the time of the October Revolution, claimed allegiance to Marx no less than did the Bolsheviks themselves: it was in the name of Marxism that not only the Mensheviks, but also the theoreticians of the German ultra-left criticized the authoritarianism and terror, the ideological monolithism and social inequality that spread over the USSR after the October victory.

   The Russian camps are not, therefore, in an immediate, unequivocal way, Marxist camps. Nor are they simply Stalinist. They are Bolshevik camps. The Gulag is the direct, unequivocal product of Bolshevism.
9. @ndy says:

   March 9, 2009 at 12:15 am

   An innocuous building
   for so monumental
   a task!
   behind iron gates
   & anonymous
   windows
   technicians
   in white smocks
   toil like
   busy
   little
   bees
   investigating
   in electromicroscopic
   detail
   the vinegrated cerebrums
   of late soviet luminaries
   to determine
   what made
   their heads
   tick
   this is
   their mission
   in its 67th
   & final year
   long rumored
   now uncovered in
   Room 19 at the
   Brain Institute
   of Moscow
   former reputed
   capital
   of Marxism-Leninism
   historical materialism
   & militant atheism

   Row upon row
   of bowls of
   pickled gray
   matter
   the cranial
   entrails of
   Lenin
   Sergei Eisenstein
   Maxim Gorky
   Vladimir Mayakovsky
   Kirov
   Kalinin
   the famous Pavlov
   but not his celebrated
   dog
   various generals of
   the Red Army &
   forgotten members
   of the Central
   Committee
   their noodles
   excavated under the
   orders of
   the boss
   of all bosses
   Joseph Djugashvili
   who tells ’em
   in the cerebellums
   the secret to
   the data:
   mind is matter
   ideology is
   phrenology
   she is no witch
   who
   tied with rocks
   sinks

   That’s the theoretical premise
   of the Brain Institute
   from the organ
   itself
   its flesh
   its cells
   can be deduced
   the source of
   political clarity
   artistic creativity
   military technique
   will &
   genius
   which if found
   could be reproduced
   tested &
   ingested
   thus advancing the
   formation of the
   new soviet man
   by leaps & bounds
   especially at the
   pinnacle of
   collective social life
   forgetting
   however
   Lenin declared
   with that
   not as yet fully
   paralyzed brain
   of his still
   functioning:
   “Stalin
   having become
   General Secretary
   has concentrated
   enormous power
   in his hands
   & I am not sure
   that he always
   knows how to
   use that
   power
   with sufficient
   caution.
   I propose to
   the comrades
   to find a way
   to remove Stalin
   from that position
   & appoint
   another man
   more loyal
   more courteous
   & more considerate
   to comrades
   less capricious, etc”
   Or that
   the last act
   of Mayakovsky’s
   tortured noggin
   was to
   pull its plug
   rather than submit to
   the muse
   of police art
   unaware that it would
   float in a jar of
   the people’s formaldehyde
   for six decades
   scrutinized under
   advanced
   detection methods
   sibling to
   astrology
   vitalism
   numerology
   aka existing socialism

   Watch them
   bustle & scurry
   each night
   sealing
   the locked doors of
   Room 19 & its
   vaulted booty
   with paraffin
   carefully eyed
   by dutiful
   disciplined
   Lydia Malofeyeva
   comrade chief deputy
   of brainkeeping
   no peeking
   no sneaking
   watch them put chunks
   of the tissue into a
   block of wax
   then sealing off
   a patina of brain
   with a motorized
   razorblade
   a veg-o-matic
   type device
   to finely slice
   the subject of slides
   hundreds of thousands of
   slides
   of head cheese
   for the big cheese
   under the close &
   quiet supervision of
   the latest & last
   incarnation of the
   Central Committee
   Gensec &
   KGB
   their ultimate act
   of skullduggery
   still fresh in
   brine
   scooped
   from Sakharov’s
   late pate
   (the technicians
   unsure which morsel
   is his
   engage in polemics
   simultaneously
   piling up shavings
   since they are paid
   piecework)
   30,000 slides
   alone of
   Lenin’s brain
   30,000!
   how many cases
   of carpal
   tunnel
   syndrome &
   other
   repetitive
   motion
   infirmities
   befell
   the unionized
   workers
   at the Brain Institutes
   to get Lenin’s
   key
   organ
   reduced to its
   physiological essence?
   each synapse
   individually wrapped
   here is what
   is to be done
   there is state &
   revolution & the
   right of oppressed
   nations to
   self-determination
   all obviously assimilated
   by comrades
   as indicated by
   recent events

   In 67 years
   of rigorous
   scientific inquiry
   the earnest cadres
   discovered
   they had absolutely
   nothing to learn
   at all
   “They
   thought maybe
   the political figures
   would have some type
   of specific
   brain structure”
   Leonid Khaspekov
   vicedirector of the
   Brain Institute
   says of the commissars
   “that their brains
   would differ greatly
   from those of
   other people
   but of course
   that’s hardly possible”

   The narcotic
   monotony of
   the tasks
   the automatic lullaby
   of the machine
   the routine
   exponential
   accumulation of cells on
   glass
   the fixed aroma of
   the crypt
   measured the
   seemingly immutable
   atmosphere
   its fog
   obscuring
   the historical
   u-turn
   the reverse of
   the pendulum
   the dystrophic
   conquests of the
   apparently eternal
   politbureau & its
   perennial catechism:
   they thought
   that maybe
   the political
   figures
   would have
   some type
   of specific
   brain
   structure
   that their
   brains
   would differ
   greatly from
   other
   people
   but
   of course
   that’s hardly
   possible

   But
   of course
   that’s
   always been
   the
   whole
   point
   comrades

   ~ Jon Hillson, Room 19
10. Asdrubal Rodriguez says:

    August 7, 2009 at 9:58 am

    [Glorious] Supreme Com[m]ander Chavez is the more important [socialist] leader after Comrade Iosef Stalin! He is true socialist democrat but also has hard hand, steel fist for the Enemies of the People! We will not tolerate insult or criticis[m]. Our [revolution] is pa[c]ific but also strongly armed to defend ourself against the oligar[ch]y, retrograde intel[l]ectuals and middle class, also Colombia and USA. Live our [glorious] Supreme Com[m]ander! He is our divine hope for our people!
11. @ndy says:

    August 7, 2009 at 6:06 pm

    Glory to Chávez in the highest
    and peace to his people on earth.
    Lord Chávez, heavenly King,
    Almighty God and Father,

    we worship you, we give you thanks,
    we praise you for your glory…
12. Dr. Cam says:

    August 8, 2009 at 10:17 am

    There’s an interesting article about academic public speakers that mentions Zizek in that newspaper I gave you on Thursday, @ndy.

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