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The director of the Venezuelan Electoral Observatory, Luis Lander, considers that the totalitarian left has not yet understood that liberal democracy is a people’s conquest and not a bourgeois imposition.

The Venezuelan case exemplifies what has occurred with the diverse experiences of leftist governments with a totalitarian tendency in Latin America, in which the countries that had such regimes have suffered serious economic difficulties, at the same time that they have seen the depletion of their institutions and democratic mechanisms. That is how Luis Lander, director of the Venezuelan Electoral Observatory, sees it. He believes the region is living an analogous situation to the one at the end of the decade of the 80s in the 20th Century when the denominated Eastern Bloc fell, which since World War II had fervently competed for the world’s domination vis-à-vis the Western capitalist countries.

“In Venezuela, the government of Nicolás Maduro has accentuated those negative aspects, and in that sense one could create an analogy in which the left is in a similar situation to what occurred with the fall of the Berlin Wall that started the dismantling of the Socialist Eastern European Bloc, the dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the rejection of socialism by the majority of the countries in that bloc; and where the project of the left was weakened”, expressed Lander in an interview with TalCual.

Lander considers that, in general, the past experiences in Latin America of so-called progressive governments are not very flattering. “They have poor economic management, which has created an array of issues in different countries; they have an extremely damaged democracy; they have had strong authoritarian inclinations; they have depleted public institutions and in the majority of cases there has been an accentuated personalist rule, and then there are things that, as a leftist, one would not have thought that governments of this tendency would ever do, namely corruption scandals and violations of human rights”, assured the director.

Division

Luis Lander, who received us in the study of his residence in Caracas, pointed out a dichotomy that has existed between the factions of the international Left, given that there is a tendency that opposes a totalitarian version of Socialism, and that admits the social and political successes of liberal democracy.

With deliberate speech, and with the occasional smile while addressing complex topics, Lander highlighted that there were highly important factions of the Left that severely criticised the Soviet model. That tendency to the primacy of reason also reveals itself as one of the two paintings that surround him in the walls of his library. It is the drawing of El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The dream of reason produces monsters), by Goya, an emblematic piece about the pre-fascist context that Europe lived during his times.

“You are in TalCual and Teodoro (Petkoff, its founder) was a key actor in the global debate surrounding the problem of Stalinism in the Left and the need to overcome it. However, and though that kind of Left with a strong critic to Stalinism existed, the fall of the Berlin Wall brought a halt to the international Left for a while. Afterwards, somehow, the Left began to recover and had an important re-emergence in Latin America that translated into various electoral victories; but the result of those triumphs put us in this situation that we are in now, where there are very significant cases in which those aspired political tendencies were reverted electorally, within permanent sections of the Left.”

– Reverend Pedro Trigo, a researcher for Centro Gumilla, spoke recently in a forum on the Left, organised by Provea. He asserted that there is an inefficient Left, that tries to make some reforms from the State but does not overcome the system imposed by the dominant economic sector, and he believes that there must be a new Left that is created with social movements from below to achieve those changes. Is that the real dichotomy that we are facing?

– I believe that there is a crucial definition in the current thing, which is the stance of the Left towards democracy. Understanding democracy with great measure, which is something that the traditional Left has underestimated, is understanding liberal democracy. There is an old discourse from the Left which identifies it as the bourgeois democracy, but there is no awareness there about the idea that liberal democracy is a conquest of the peoples, it is not a thing that the bourgeoisie imposed on the people.

– It was with the French Revolution

– The French Revolution and before that the Cromwell Revolution in England, which put a stop to the monarchy and opened up democratic spaces in society. In the 20th Century, we were fighting for women’s suffrage, votes for the illiterate, the conquest of the vote as a basic human right; nowhere was this a kind concession, it was a product of a lot of marching. That democracy “thing”, which the Left, Lenin, talked about with absolute vigour, said that it was about consolidating the dictatorship of the Proletariat. Therefore, it is not about democracy. But democracy as an idea had and has been widely spread, in a way that no one says that they are not democratic, no one says in their speech that they are against it, even if in practice they might be for more radical practices that are by no means democratic; but there is a debate in the Left that creates demarcations between one that believes in democracy, and by believing in it they place suffrage as a central element, the separation of power, pluralism, the switch in the exercise of power, elements of a democratic system.

According to Lander, the experience of Venezuela is an example of that: “It is evident that the PSUV and the government do not believe in pluralism, or taking turns in office. They say it every time they get asked, ‘we are here forever’, after Chávez they are the ‘anointed’ by destiny to be the legitimate heirs of chavismo and the only ones with the right to govern.

– Paradoxically we go back to the beginnings of monarchy

– They end up being “the heir”. This of course somehow has to do with what you were mentioning that Pedro Trigo said the other day because the top-down imposition is not democratic, meanwhile the plurality from below and the pluralistic expression that we are diverse would be democratic.

New debates

– The opposing experiences of liberal democracy, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba, China (which had to roll back everything done by Mao to end up on the side of the free market), North Korea, which is not a model of progress and industrialisation either. Has it not been proven that this totalitarian Left does not bring about the wellbeing for people, nor it fulfils the promises of a better future for the people?

– That is why I was saying that we are in a similar situation to that which the Left experienced with the fall of the Berlin Wall, a leftist project, which demonstrated that is not capable of doing anything.

– We are experiencing what Europe lived.

– Not only Europe but the international Left. On the other hand, the deeper reasons for there to be a rise of different progressive alternatives are there and have been profound. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, global inequality has been accentuated in these areas.

– “The fact that there was a different option to capitalism in the world meant strong excesses; without the alternative, the boundaries of the market, which is unregulated, were blurred and therefore produced very large unregulated inequities.”

Luis Lander pointed out that there are problems that add up to these factors behind the search for an alternative to capitalism, which is perhaps not new, but about which there is a greater awareness, namely the environmental, which has become a very important part of the agenda. “I don’t know if there (in the debate) there is Left and Right, but for instance, Trump says he does not believe in it. There are also the problems of gender inequality, which has become an increasingly important political debate. The approach to the issue has been innovative and makes this thing about left and right to become more complex. I would like to think, being optimistic, that the authoritarian version of the Left in Latin America has received enough bad press in order to be put a stop, and this does not mean that there is no space for a non-capitalist alternative that is progressive, because (as the saying goes) “capitalism and liberalism are the only option”, is a really bad choice.

Lack of blueprint

– If we have faced these experiences of the Left and, in some countries that turn to the Right and end up worse with free-market measures, with inflation… What do the people face? Do we need to leave aside these 19th Century ideas and think anew? Or is it simply a problem of application of the model, as they say in the Left?

– There is a clear deficiency in the implementation of the thing, and that is unquestionable. Is it possible that we create a better alternative from the basic ideas of the Left? There is an English historian, Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, who said that a serious issue with Socialism, in general, is that it has not had an alternative project, it has not said what you ought to do, what is the opposing model to capitalism. One sees that the attempts of leftist governments to attack some things of capitalism, in the majority of cases end up becoming projects that are profoundly statist and undemocratic, because everything concentrates in the State. Hobsbawm says that the market is neither socialist nor capitalist. Of course that an unregulated market creates distortions, but without a market there would not be any economy, and various people, including Teodoro, said that the aim is to build a society with as much market as possible and as much State as necessary; he is not saying anything, there is no precision, but is the idea that it is necessary the existence of a strong market, that works with vitality, but with a State that regulates the economy to defend those who are most vulnerable. If a political transition ensues, there will be a big debate about what to do with the oil industry, whether to privatise it or leave it as it is (nationalised). In Norway the oil industry is not private but it does not belong to the government either. Since 1976, we had a successful national oil company in Venezuela, but in my opinion, it worked better as a private business.

– Coming back to the topic of human rights and the totalitarian Left. Chavismo is still a force to reckon with, even though it is clearly a minority, but people that follow the Bolivarian project despite the evidence such as the report by the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet… do you think they do it because they do not have a clear democratic consciousness or because the State has imposed its thoughts by dominating the media through hegemony?

-Clearly, the government has a very decisive control of media. There are some sectors of society that are less affected by it because, with these little gadgets (smartphones), computers, internet, WhatsApp, they manage to keep themselves informed bypassing the State controls. However, there is another sector of the population that does not have access, not only to information but to entertainment channels, because they can only count on the State channels, which are not pluralistic. There is an increasing tendency to deceive, and the impunity with which it is done is impressive. The member of the Constituent Assembly, Pedro Carreño said yesterday, “that idiot Bachelet”. When she was proclaimed the High Commissioner (for Human Rights) many people in Venezuela, of the opposition of course, said “now they put a Chavista in there” and I said “it is a relief they chose her” because I had trust in that she was an honest woman and that she had suffered human rights violations, and that she was sensitive to the topic.

Luis Lander thinks that Bachelet’s report has a greater strength internationally, but also for the international Left, given that this report is precisely given by the socialist Michelle Bachelet. “There is where the debate is stuck in the Left. I was a university student when they assassinated Jorge Rodríguez’s father, who I met, even though we were not close friends, but I remember that the funeral, in the Aula Magna (Auditorium of the Central University of Venezuela), it was very moving because it was flooded with teachers and students, and there was a protest at the front of the coffin, that carried it by foot from there to the Cementerio General del Sur (General Cemetery of the South). It was a hard blow to the Left in Venezuela and it showed that the government back then was a perpetrator of human rights violations. So then, what happened now with the case of Captain Acosta Arévalo? The same people, many of whom attended that funeral, who defend the government of Maduro now, does it not cause short circuit there? One might say something similar about corruption. The flag fervently waved by Chávez was the one of fighting against corruption, and now what? Those are questions to which I have no answer.

Successful script

– In the 70s and 80s the debate was about dictatorships of El Cono Sur (the Southern Cone region), Operation Condor, and here in Venezuela the David Nieves imprisonment, to see this situation now and not do anything about it is like saying, I do not care because it is the Left doing it, and back then was criticised because it was the Right? We go back to the question, are we lacking democratic culture?

– It is not an easy question that can be answered with yes or no. If one pays attention to the studies of public opinion, the value given to the right to vote is higher in Venezuelans. The people are still, and this appears in one of the Catholic University’s portals, given current conditions, 70% says that they would still go out to vote, although they say that what makes them distrustful the most is the CNE (National Electoral Council). Of course, this is not the only thing that defines democracy, but it is an important part of it. If there are no elections, of course, there cannot be a democracy, but even when there are elections one must ask the question, how good are them, and the other thing is the separation of power, the turns in office, freedom of expression, respect for human rights. How did we get here? A terrible but proven thing is that the Venezuelan citizen, with regards to corruption, tends to be tolerant in times of bonanza. “There is enough for everyone” but when you are in a situation like the current one, where there are people that scavenge for food, it is absolutely terrible, and then corruption acquires scandalous trimmings, which leads the population to be more intolerant towards it. The corruption with impunity incites this.

– The National Constituent Assembly established a commission to see the possibility of bringing forward the date of parliamentary elections. What scenario do you see coming? If it is done outside of a deal between the opposition and government, what scenario are we going towards?

– The government’s official party is repeating the script that until now has been successful from their perspective. It is not any different to the presidential election of 2018, the Constituent Assembly, that does not hold the power to call for elections, imposed some early presidential elections, but they were also called with very little notice, they were extremely rushed and this means that the fact that the majority of the opposition ended by deciding to not participate, one of the reasons why this happened, it was because they did not have time to agree. If the elections had been in December, they would have been able to reach some agreement.

– Do you support participating in elections despite the conditions being unchanged?

– I do not like the yes or no question. It is a dynamic process. There are a series of specific things that we must understand. If they told me that we must fulfill all, then we would have perfect elections, I do not aspire to that, but to understand several of them. If we make it work halfway is better than what we have now. Let’s wait to get to that bridge to see if we cross it or not.

– We have the successful experiences of the Left in Chile and Uruguay, why do you think these models are not mimicked but the Cuban instead?

– It has to do with Lenin’s book, Reform and Revolution. Hobsbawm says that the Left must be a continuum, that there must not be a rupture between reform and revolution, but that there are sections of the Left that see with disdain progressive proposals that somehow respect liberal institutions, and they accuse these of reformism and say that they are not in their field.

There remain exceptional situations, namely that of Uruguay, where the experience of Frente Amplio (Wide Front), which is truly wide and there is a diversity of stances and democratic dynamic. In other cases, like Mexico, I would allow some time to assess it. There are those of the opinion that (the management of Andrés Manuel López Obrador) is going in the direction of chavismo although I think this is an exaggeration, we must allow it to exist for a bit. But then there are cases like Nicaragua and Cuba, which are old news. Bolivia is not exactly like the rest because there are non-partisan organisations which are solid and reclaim spaces, and they do not allow themselves to be fully bulldozed.

Luis Lander foresees that in the Argentinian case, where the return to power of Cristina Fernández is practically a given, in this opportunity as vice-president, will call for a lot of debate. “There was the government of the Kirchner, which was seen as a horrible thing by a part of Latin American society; then Macri offered an alternative and there you have the opinion of Argentinian people about that alternative. Apparently, they did not like it. What will happen if it happens what looks like it’s going to happen if the Fernández win the October election?