The Search for a Political Practice: Venezuela 2000-2015
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- Published on Sunday, 11 October 2015 23:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1171 .... October 12, 2015
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The Search for a Political Practice:
Venezuela 2000-2015
Chris Gilbert
It is common to understand the diverse "processes" in Latin America -- in the period marked initially by Zapatismo in the mid-1990s and later by the emergence of left or popular governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador along with center-left governments in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina -- within the theoretical framework of a return or recuperation of the left following the fall of the East Bloc. This kind of formulation has a number of problems. On the one hand, it is too optimistic (since the left is still in retreat and the tide of the neoliberal counterrevolution has not been turned). On the other hand, it misses the specificity of the processes: the way in... which they were notable attempts to reinvent or rediscover left politics after the eclipse of strategic political thinking shared by both official Marxism and by the "end-of-history" view that emanated from the right wing.
The left loves to cite V. I. Lenin to the effect that without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary practice and vice versa, without doing justice to the specifically political mediation between theory and practice that is one of Lenin's most important contributions to Marxism. That is to say, Lenin understood that it is strategic politics -- always with an important degree of autonomy from the economic and even social spheres -- that must mediate between theory and practice. Lenin's argument in What Is To Be Done?, in which he twists Kautsky's words while apparently paying homage to him, is that politics and political consciousness must come from outside of the economic struggle.