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<H1>Beware Venezuela's 'False Anarchists'</H1></DIV>
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<DIV class=cat-date-line><SPAN class=cat-date-line2><A
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rel="category tag">Educate!</A></SPAN> <SPAN class=cat-date-line3><A
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</SPAN><BR><SPAN class=cat-date-line4>By George Ciccariello-Maher, <A
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target=_blank>www.roarmag.org</A><BR>March 31st, 2014</SPAN><BR></DIV>
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<H2><STRONG>Not everyone who calls themselves anarchists are worthy of the name.
Before expressing our solidarity, we should be clear who it is we are
supporting.</STRONG></H2>
<P>When it comes to the Venezuelan protests of recent weeks and months,
misinformation reigns supreme. Just as liberals and progressives have been
misled by desperate hashtags like #SOSVenezuela and simplistic comparisons to
Occupy, so too has the radical left been tempted by the some self-described
Venezuelan anarchists, and <A href="http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/">El
Libertario</A> in particular.</P>
<P>This is not a critique of anarchism in general or even of all Venezuelan
anarchists (I will discuss others below). I have always been very close to the
anarchist milieu and, while frustrated by <A
href="http://libcom.org/library/between-infoshops-insurrection-us-anarchism-movement-building-racial-order">certain
anarchist blindspots</A>, I am influenced by anarchism as a doctrine of
revolutionary struggle that understands the inherent contradictions of the
state. The liberal, middle-class anarchism of El Libertario, however, represents
not the fulfillment but the betrayal of this revolutionary anarchist vision.
Condescending toward the poor and utterly absent from concrete struggles, it has
instead allied itself—as it does today—with <A
href="http://www.thenation.com/article/178496/lasalida-venezuela-crossroads">reactionary
elite movements</A>.</P>
<P>In a recent piece published in English both by <A
href="http://libcom.org/news/express-summary-venezuela’s-situation-curious-people-andor-poorly-informed-22022014">Libcom.org</A> and <EM><A
href="http://roarmag.org/2014/02/anarchist-perspective-protests-venezuela/">ROAR
Magazine</A></EM>, El Libertario figurehead Rafael Uzcátegui (not to be confused
with the <A href="http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n240159.html">former
guerrilla</A> of the same name), put forth a highly misleading but also
revealing account of the recent protests to provide an “anarchist perspective”
for the “poorly informed.” Unfortunately, the piece leaves us even more poorly
informed than before, and lacks any anarchist perspective whatsoever. (While
this is not the time to fully dissect Uzcátegui’s book, translated into English
as <EM>Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle</EM>, let’s just say that—as the
title suggests—it’s more Debord than Magón or Bakunin.)</P>
<P>What is misleading is that Uzcátegui repeats mainstream misrepresentations of
how the protests started, claiming police repression when the police only acted
in response to a <A
href="http://www.laverdad.com/politica/45875-encapuchados-atacan-casa-del-gobernador-del-tachira.html">February
6th </A><A
href="http://www.laverdad.com/politica/45875-encapuchados-atacan-casa-del-gobernador-del-tachira.html">attack</A> on
the governor of Táchira’s house. He uncritically reports arrests and torture
allegations, despite the fact that most of these were never actually reported to
the competent agencies, and <A
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10536">some are under
investigation</A>. While rightly mentioning the role of intelligence officials
in deaths of both protesters and Chavistas on February 12th, he fails to mention
that the officers responsible were promptly arrested and charged (the number of
officials arrested for excessive force <A
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10536">has now reached 17</A>).</P>
<P>He invokes a common refrain that there is no press freedom in Venezuela while
noting that it was the most important Venezuelan newspaper, <EM>Últimas
Noticias</EM>(which is sympathetic to the government) that released a <A
href="http://www.ultimasnoticias.com.ve/noticias/actualidad/investigacion/video---uniformados-y-civiles-dispararon-en-candel.aspx">crucial
video investigation</A> showing the actions of security officials on
February 12th. He critiques president Nicolás Maduro’s suggestion that a coup
plot similar to the one that briefly overthrew Hugo Chávez in 2002 might be in
the works, but leaves out El Libertario’s own ambivalence toward that coup when
it happened (see below).</P>
<P>What is revealing, however, is the fact that Uzcátegui positions El
Libertario as “simple spectators” and condescendingly blames “low levels of
political culture” for the absence of a truly independent left. For anyone who
has spent even a week in Venezuela, and especially for those of us from the US
who have lived there extensively, this last statement is utterly
incomprehensible, since the political culture of Venezuela, the constant flurry
of vibrant critical revolutionary activity, is at times overwhelming. But this,
alongside Uzcátegui’s demonization of popular revolutionary organizations
(<EM>colectivos</EM>) as “militia groups” speaks volumes about El Libertario’s
opposition to popular struggles and the self-activity of the poorest Venezuelans
and support for middle-class notions of social change that are ultimately
complicit with the right.</P>
<H2>Who Are El Libertario?</H2>
<P><STRONG>1. A middle-class organization…</STRONG></P>
<P>As one former member puts it, El Libertario’s constituency and membership
consists of “total upper-class snobs (<EM>sifrinos</EM>), <EM>unos hijitos
de papá</EM>, pampered rich kids.” Uzcátegui himself comes from a family with
money and became even more “gentrified through student politics in the
university.” (Uzcátegui has even worked a day job under the former mayor of
Baruta in wealthy eastern Caracas, none other than right-wing opposition leader
Henrique Capriles, formerly of the <A
href="http://books.google.com/books?id=k51AwjhxmekC&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=primero+justicia+iri&source=bl&ots=zDfAsaVnxg&sig=ZlE3kLc-Jm8uvoFmIYyeW2Jjx7o&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Lkw0U-7SLMLjsATzoYFo&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=primero%20justicia%20iri&f=false">US-funded
opposition party</A> Primero Justicia). Origin is not a curse, however, and
many a revolutionary has committed “<A
href="http://libcom.org/library/amilcar-cabrals-theory-class-suicide-and-revolutionary-socialism-tom-meisenhelder">class
suicide</A>” to join the struggle—not so for El Libertario.</P>
<P><STRONG>2. … with liberal, middle-class politics…</STRONG></P>
<P>In the words of a former member, El Libertario “operates more like an NGO
than a group, it’s not a grassroots movement,” and this should be no surprise
since members have close relations to liberal human rights NGOs like
PROVEA, <A href="http://www.derechos.org.ve/organigrama-de-provea/">where
Uzcátegui works</A>. Whereas revolutionaries worldwide have become increasingly
aware of the limitations and even dangers of human rights discourse—which in
recent years has been strategically co-opted by right-wing forces worldwide—El
Libertario has seemingly moved in the opposite direction. All of which raises an
interesting question for self-professed “anarchists”: when the all-out class war
comes, will El Libertario be there to defend the human rights of our enemies?
This is not to celebrate repression: I have been tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed,
attacked with concussion grenades, arrested, and assaulted by police—but I have
never heard this described as a “human rights violation.”</P>
<P>Inherent limitations of human rights discourse aside, Uzcátegui and PROVEA
have gone further in recent weeks by circulating <A
href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/advocacyciat/ZFqP6Z47COw">one-sided
denunciations</A> of the Maduro government that make no mention of
the <A
href="http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/venezuela-who-are-they-and-how-did-they-die">many
deaths</A> at the hands of the opposition protesters. You would have no
idea that two motorcyclists had been decapitated by barbed wire seemingly hung
for that purpose, or that bystanders had been attacked and even killed when
crossing barricades to get to work. Thankfully, a number of human rights
defenders—some formerly working with PROVEA and Amnesty
International—have <A
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10536">recently
denounced</A> this manipulative use of human rights discourse.</P>
<P><STRONG>3. … that upholds middle-class leadership…</STRONG></P>
<P>Even more astonishingly, in a country in which the poor majority—both the
traditional working class and the informal sector—have become increasingly
organized and revolutionary, Rodolfo Montes de Oca from El Libertario <A
href="http://www.analitica.com/va/sociedad/articulos/3308428.asp">even openly
supports the idea</A> that it is the middle class that should lead the
struggle. In an article replete with the obligatory references to
“counter-power” and citations of Graeber and Holloway, we find the astounding
suggestion that it is “the college-educated middle class, and perhaps owners of
small means of production and service providers, who are the best suited to
assume leadership within emerging organizations and social movements, since
their basic necessities are covered and their autonomy won’t be put at risk
[<EM>hipotecada</EM>].”</P>
<P>Montes’ choice of words is revealing, as <EM>hipotecada</EM> refers
literally to mortgages, implying that the poor will simply sell their political
loyalties to the highest bidder. In <EM>On Revolution</EM>, Hannah
Arendt <A
href="http://books.google.com/books/about/On_Revolution.html?id=C8GoV3xOVbIC">argued</A> that
the French Revolution was doomed by “necessity and poverty” because its
supporters were drawn from “the multitude of the poor.” Here we have so-called
“anarchists” trotting out the same tired argument: the poor, it seems, can’t be
trusted to lead their own social struggles, since their empty stomachs will only
get in the way. El Libertario aspires to be, in the <A
href="http://kaosenlared.net/america-latina/item/12234-la-farv-la-revolución-bolivariana-y-los-despropósitos-de-el-libertario.html">words
of one critic</A>, “The boss in the workplace <EM>and</EM> the boss in
the revolution.”</P>
<P><STRONG>4. … and is absent from popular struggles…</STRONG></P>
<P>As a result of this middle-class composition, liberal middle-class ideology,
and emphasis on middle-class leadership, it is little surprise that El
Libertario would be absent from popular grassroots struggles and allied instead
with the more middle-class struggles of increasingly conservative students in
elite and private universities. In the words of a former member, El Libertario
“has never had a presence in the barrio,” and when small projects were attempted
in the past, their vanguardist method of work—in which they sought to enlighten
the poor—was “self-isolating” in practice. Other Venezuelan anarchists <A
href="http://kaosenlared.net/america-latina/item/12234-la-farv-la-revolución-bolivariana-y-los-despropósitos-de-el-libertario.html">similarly
insist</A> that El Libertario is “never seen by communities in struggle.”
Even El Libertario sympathizers <A
href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2005/07/que-se-vayan-todos-venezuelas.html">have
observed</A> that “they have only the most marginal presence in many key
sectors of social struggle,” a characterization which fits Uzcátegui’s admission
that they are “simple spectators.”</P>
<P>For example, when revolutionary organizations engaged in direct action in
2004, tearing down a statue of Columbus in Plaza Venezuela in the name of
decolonization, some were arrested and Chávez denounced the organizers as
“anarchists.” Rather than participating in the action or showing solidarity with
those arrested, El Libertario instead chose to mock the action as somehow—here
revealing their longstanding obsession—simply a spectacle, and <A
href="http://es.scribd.com/doc/76617639/El-Libertario-nº-40-noviembre-diciembre-2004">blamed
those arrested</A> for naively presuming the government would support them.
In the complex dialectic of the revolutionary process, it’s worth pointing out
that despite Chávez’s initial denunciation, these and other radical direct
actions pushed the Bolivarian government toward emphasizing indigenous genocide
and eventually declaring October 12th the “Day of Indigenous Resistance.”</P>
<P>After a similarly combative action on the anniversary of the Caracazo in 2008
which Chávez similarly criticized as “anarchistic,” again El Libertario did not
express solidarity but instead issued a <A
href="http://divergences.be/spip.php?article1065&;lang=fr">statement
insisting</A> that Chávez did not know what the word meant. <A
href="http://kaosenlared.net/america-latina/item/12234-la-farv-la-revolución-bolivariana-y-los-despropósitos-de-el-libertario.html">According
to participants,</A> he had evidently “touched their sacred word,” and they
couldn’t allow anyone else to be accused of anarchism, and so they
misrepresented the slogan of the action—“we don’t want them to govern us: we
want to govern”—as simply a demand for state power.</P>
<P><STRONG>5. … and more likely to join forces with the right…</STRONG></P>
<P>The list goes on and on: while revolutionaries (who supported Chávez) were
repressed by the National Guard while participating in a 2008 caravan to support
indigenous Yukpa rights, El Libertario was <A
href="http://kaosenlared.net/america-latina/item/12234-la-farv-la-revolución-bolivariana-y-los-despropósitos-de-el-libertario.html">nowhere
to be seen</A> (despite paying lip service to the Yukpa struggle), but was
instead in the streets with middle-class students, defending the
right-wing <A
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/01/12/not-about-free-speech/">TV station
RCTV</A>. This all points to a troubling trend: instead of submerging themselves
in revolutionary popular struggles, El Libertario has moved increasingly toward
student struggles that tend toward the right. This trend has only been confirmed
in recent weeks, as members of El Libertario have openly celebrated the
middle-class and largely right-wing protest movement. Uzcátegui has even gone so
far—<A href="https://twitter.com/fanzinero/status/434763219144437760">according
to his tweets</A>—as to mistake this middle-class crowd (which other
“libertarians” <A
href="http://www.aporrea.org/autores/roland.denis">argue</A>is hegemonically
fascist) for the networked multitude, thereby committing the cardinal error of
forgetting that <A
href="http://multitudes.samizdat.net/spip.php?page=imprimer&id_article=269">for
old Antonio Negri</A>, the multitude is above all a “class concept.”</P>
<P><STRONG>6. … due to a caricatured “three-way fight” politics…</STRONG></P>
<P>El Libertario like to position themselves as being equally opposed to both
Chavismo and the right. While this invokes in some ways the “three-way fight”
logic in the form of the <EM>lucha tripolar</EM>, or “tripolar
struggle”, it is in a brutally caricatured form (although, let’s be real,
three-way fight is capable of its own <A
href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2007/08/notes-on-xxist-century-socialism.html">ridiculous
caricature</A>). This was as clear during the right-wing coup of April 2002 as
it is today: confronted with a coup that removed not only Chávez but also the
progressive 1999 Constitution, and which left dozens dead in the streets before
it was reversed through popular mass rebellion, El Libertario again stood on the
sidelines, unwilling to even condemn this quasi-fascist assault on the people.
(<A href="http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/archivoliber.html">Issues 26 and
27</A> of El Libertario, published around the time of the coup, are
conveniently missing from the web archive, but I have myself interviewed former
members who left El Libertario after it took this “reactionary position”).</P>
<P><STRONG>7. … making any mass-revolutionary outlook impossible.</STRONG></P>
<P>Uzcátegui insists that “The Revolutionary Independent Venezuelan Left
(anarchists, sectors that follow Trotsky, Marx, Lenin and Guevara)” are “simple
spectators”—but what about revolutionary socialists like the Marea Socialista
current? What about revolutionary anarchist-libertarian militants like Roland
Denis, who rather than admiring the networked creativity of these protesters
urges us instead to take radical measures to “<A
href="http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a182411.html">deactivate fascism</A>”?
And what about revolutionary Guevaraists like the new <A
href="http://www.kaosenlared.net/america-latina/item/82835-*corriente-bolivariana-guevarista-nacimos-para-construir-el-socialismo.html">Bolivarian-Guevaraist
Current</A> or the La Piedrita Collective, one of those popular collectives
that Uzcátegui smears as a blindly Chavista militia, despite the fact that they
predated Chávez by decades and frequently clashed with the government in
practice.</P>
<P>Rather than humbly seeking a basis in mass work, El Libertario
condescendingly insists that if the masses don’t join them, so much the worse
for the masses. Accordingly, it smears those who disagree
as <EM>oficialistas</EM>, supporters of the government, in an attempt to
erase the <A
href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/We-Created-Ch-and-aacute-vez/">very real
history of revolutionary autonomy</A> within the Bolivarian movement. Thus
while El Libertario parrots tired mantras of the opposition that there is no
press freedom in Venezuela (<A
href="http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/2010_12_venezuela_media.pdf">which
is a blatant lie</A>, incidentally), it ignores the flourishing of popular
grassroots media in recent years, as well as the fact that
revolutionaries <A
href="http://kaosenlared.net/america-latina/item/12234-la-farv-la-revolución-bolivariana-y-los-despropósitos-de-el-libertario.html">were
demanding</A> that media be “neither private nor state-run.” Anyone who
happens to also support the Bolivarian process, or to see it as worth defending
despite its limitations and defects, is according to El Libertario a sell-out
and a pawn.</P>
<P>But this view is not revolutionary and certainly not anarchist. Any anarchist
revolution will be a mass, class-based phenomenon or it will be nothing at all.
This doesn’t mean that anarchists and anti-authoritarians should simply
uncritically toe the Chavista line, but instead engage directly in building
revolutionary movements, spaces, and ruptures within and against the mainstream
of the Bolivarian movement, as thousands of Venezuelan revolutionaries have been
doing for years if not decades.</P>
<H2>Will the Real Anarchists Please Stand Up?</H2>
<P>While capital-A anarchism has never been a major force in Venezuela, the
liberal anarchism of El Libertario does not enjoy the monopoly on the term that
it would like you to believe. A good example was the Revolutionary Anarchist
Federation of Venezuela (FARV), which unfortunately dissolved last year. The
FARV represented the voice of revolutionary, decolonial, class-struggle
anarchism in Venezuela, but like most non-middle-class movements, this was not a
voice that was amplified by translated books or US speaking tours, and so I will
quote at length from the FARV to compensate.</P>
<P>In a 2012 article, Luis from the FARV provided an exhaustive analysis of the
“<A
href="http://kaosenlared.net/america-latina/item/12234-la-farv-la-revolución-bolivariana-y-los-despropósitos-de-el-libertario.html">absurdities
of El Libertario</A>” and, rejecting El Libertario’s attempts to “hoard” and
“monopolize” the name anarchism, sketched the parameters for a truly
revolutionary anarchist alternative. This alternative sets out from a firm
rejection of the middle-class ideology and leadership that defines El
Libertario. Noting that “we have always been under the leadership of the
privileged classes,” the FARV insists that to uphold middle-class leadership is
to maintain the traditional reproduction of the system whereby academic
institutions legitimate those “predestined to guide the country… this is exactly
the same as the opposition discourse that speaks of a so-called meritocracy,
loaded with racism, classism, liberalism, colonialism, and fascism.”</P>
<P>Further, suggesting that those possessing the means of production are
rightful movement leaders is to “validate exploitation, difference, and
privileges rather than combating them, which we understand to be the reason we
are anarchists to begin with… Proudhon cried ‘property is theft,’ and so that
small property… is therefore a small theft, a small parasitic action.” Worst of
all, to openly celebrate middle-class origins by embracing middle-class politics
is to contribute to discrediting of anarchism itself by reinforcing the oldest
caricature of anarchism in the books, “sustain[ing] the fallacies Bolsheviks
have woven about anarchism… that anarchism is a petit-bourgeois ideology.” For
the FARV,</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>The anarcho-liberals [of El Libertario] are part of the middle class and
proud of it, so we know that they will never work against their own interests…
[But] fortunately, the popular movement doesn’t let anyone act in its name,
much less the middle class. Fortunately, social movements are not the same as
the popular movement. Fortunately, the popular movement continues to advance
toward collective forms of leadership.</P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>The correct position toward these popular movements is not of course the
passivity of “simple spectators” as Uzcátegui would have it, and the FARV
rejects the three-way fight insofar as it represents “the posture of the
‘enlightened third way’… which does not participate in struggles but only
watches, criticizes, and pretends to give the orders because it believes it
possesses a luminous truth. An arrogant and authoritarian ‘anarchism’ that we do
not share.”</P>
<P>The FARV “expresses ourselves from the position of concrete popular
struggles. It is from this difference that all other differences stem.” They
spread libertarian ideas “not only with the word, but with everyday constructive
action alongside the children of the people. With humility and as equals, since
there is much we have to learn from communities in struggle.” As the FARV
recognized in a <A
href="http://farvespecifistas.blogspot.com/2012/09/por-una-sociedad-libertaria-y.html">2012
communiqué</A>, to position oneself alongside concrete communities in struggle
is not to oppose the Bolivarian process—understood as something that began long
before Chávez and will continue long after him—but to embrace aspects of it
while pressing it in ever more revolutionary directions:</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>Our struggle is for libertarian communism, and so we are not willing to go
back to a ‘state of affairs’ in which: we will be persecuted, where
alternative media will be closed, where lands and businesses today under
communal control will be returned to large landholders and businessmen, where
there will be systematic violations of human rights, where the juridical
instruments that can help the popular cause [i.e., the 1999 Constitution] and
the future construction of truly horizontal and assembly-based communal spaces
will disappear… to regress to a past that, scarcely concealed, awaits a
fascist backlash.</P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>Instead, from this position in concrete popular struggles, the FARV embraces
a different sort of three-way fight:</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>We are equally against those supposedly ‘leftist’ positions that want us to
believe that ‘this is more of the same’ as we are against those top-down
accommodationists who insist that ‘this is a true revolution’… and even more
certain ‘personalities’ who take refuge in anarchist ideas (and certain
Trotskyist positions) to cover up the fact that they speak from a bourgeois
perspective, and thereby to invisibilize struggles and processes of change… We
also say to these anarchists-turned-hucksters, commercializers and tourists of
ideas, that fascism shall not pass.</P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>This does not mean that the state is not powerfully dangerous and
contradictory, of course: according to <A
href="http://farvespecifistas.blogspot.com/2012/09/por-una-sociedad-libertaria-y.html">the
FARV</A>, “no state is revolutionary,” but “as anarchists we know that this
process… is constituted as a collective and common task of the Venezuelan
people, and therefore that the conditions of possibility today posed by
connecting tactically to the Bolivarian state must not be abandoned.” Anarchism
can only be built through the collective struggle of the masses, and for reasons
both defensive (avoiding repression) and offensive (laying claim to new spaces
opened by the process), this mass struggle emerges through the Bolivarian
process (although in a tense and often conflictive relation to the
government).</P>
<P>This means resisting the automatic solidarities and stifling confines of a
capital-A anarchism that limits itself to those self-described anarchists:</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>In the present moment there exist many examples of spaces that, while not
defining themselves as anarchist, are nevertheless engaged in everyday
libertarian practices: communities that possess a certain degree of social
production, self-government, and self-defense… [like] Collectives in 23 de
Enero, Alexis Vive Collective, Montaraz Collective, among
others.</P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>El Libertario, faithful to their class background and class politics, “are
more afraid of Chavismo and the revolution than fascism, the oligarchy, and the
Venezuelan right-wing, with which they gladly march.” So it is no surprise that
these collectives celebrated by the FARV for their tacitly anarchist activity
are the very same collectives that are today demonized by a fearful bourgeoisie
as well as their anarchist collaborators who mimic elites in their denunciation
of “militia groups.”</P>
<P>The FARV’s reply to El Libertario’s strange right-wing bedfellows is
blunt:</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>No, we have nothing in common with the bourgeoisie. El Libertario and the
FARV are not the same thing. It is very different to say ‘social movements’
(meaning NGOs and foundations) vs. ‘popular movement’ (collectives and working
groups, campesino fronts, land occupation movements, indigenous movements,
health committees, land committees, etc). Bakunin is right, the middle class
is one thing, with its aspirations and conceits; the children of the people
with their struggles, dreams, and victories are another thing entirely… As
children of the people we don’t hope for anything of the middle class, and
much less its leadership… We choose not to be on the side of a class that
fears the revolution…</P>
<P>We prefer instead to be with the popular movement, with its rebellious,
disobedient, and ungovernable temperament; with its self-managed experiments,
with its steps toward socialism, with its libertarian yearnings and its
anarchist intuition… we need to look for [this anarchist impulse]—not in the
middle class, not in the communiqués of the bourgeoisie, not on the internet
or in the official speeches of university professors, not on television or in
Chávez’s statements or actions, but in the <EM>barrios</EM>, in the
communities in struggle, at the heart of the popular movement.</P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>In <EM><A
href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/We-Created-Ch-and-aacute-vez/">We Created
Chávez</A></EM>, I wrote that “Far too often, discussions of contemporary
Venezuela revolve around the figure of the Venezuelan president. Whether from
opponents on the conservative right or the anarchist left or supporters in
between, the myopia is the same.” Similarly, the FARV argue that:</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>The acolytes of Chávez-centrism, whether Chavistas or from the opposition,
share the determination to circumscribe everything in the figure of Chávez,
either by denying the accomplishments of the Bolivarian process and saying
that everything bad is due to the <EM><A
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zambo">zambo</A></EM> of their
nightmares, or by fomenting the idea that these accomplishments are the gifts
of power or the result of Chávez’s benevolence.</P>
<P>We, on the other hand, consider these accomplishments to be the product of
the historic struggles of the popular movement, which have cost us and
continue to cost us blood and sacrifice… Although El Libertario, along with
the right-wing opposition and the red [Chavista] bureaucracy attempt to erase
all traces of the autonomy of popular action, we the children of the people
will continue organizing, they will hear our voices more often and will have
to get used to seeing our faces.</P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>Not everyone who calls themselves anarchists are worthy of the name, and
before revolutionaries in the U.S. or elsewhere re-post articles, translate
books, or organize speaking tours, we should be clear what it is we are
supporting. Especially in Latin America, moreover, we must be attentive to
the thousands engaged in revolutionary anti-state activity that don’t even call
themselves “anarchists.” To support middle-class, liberal anarchists like El
Libertario is to be against the revolution, against concrete popular struggles
of the Venezuelan poor, <EM>and even against anarchism itself</EM>.</P>
<P><EM><STRONG>George Ciccariello-Maher</STRONG> is the author of <A
href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/index.php">We Created Chávez: A People’s
History of the Venezuelan Revolution</A> (Duke University Press,
2013).</EM></P></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>