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Related: About this forumEl Libertario: Beware Venezuela’s False ‘Anarchists’
El Libertario: Beware Venezuelas False Anarchists
Written by George Ciccariello-Maher
Sunday, 30 March 2014 14:51
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.
Source: ROAR Magazine
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 El Libertario in particular.
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 certain anarchist blindspots, 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 itselfas it does todaywith reactionary elite movements.
In a recent piece published in English both by Libcom.org and ROAR Magazine, El Libertario figurehead Rafael Uzcátegui (not to be confused with the former guerrilla 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 Uzcáteguis book, translated into English as Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle, lets just say thatas the title suggestsits more Debord than Magón or Bakunin.)
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 February 6th attack on the governor of Táchiras house. He uncritically reports arrests and torture allegations, despite the fact that most of these were never actually reported to the competent agencies, and some are under investigation. 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 has now reached 17).
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/4770-el-libertario-beware-venezuelas-false-anarchists
Judi Lynn
(160,631 posts)Who Are El Libertario?
1. A middle-class organization
As one former member puts it, El Libertarios constituency and membership consists of total upper-class snobs (sifrinos), unos hijitos de papá, 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 US-funded opposition party Primero Justicia). Origin is not a curse, however, and many a revolutionary has committed class suicide to join the strugglenot so for El Libertario.
2. with liberal, middle-class politics
In the words of a former member, El Libertario operates more like an NGO than a group, its not a grassroots movement, and this should be no surprise since members have close relations to liberal human rights NGOs like PROVEA, where Uzcátegui works. Whereas revolutionaries worldwide have become increasingly aware of the limitations and even dangers of human rights discoursewhich in recent years has been strategically co-opted by right-wing forces worldwideEl 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 policebut I have never heard this described as a human rights violation.
Inherent limitations of human rights discourse aside, Uzcátegui and PROVEA have gone further in recent weeks by circulating one-sided denunciations of the Maduro government that make no mention of the many deaths 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 defenderssome formerly working with PROVEA and Amnesty Internationalhave recently denounced this manipulative use of human rights discourse.
3. that upholds middle-class leadership
Even more astonishingly, in a country in which the poor majorityboth the traditional working class and the informal sectorhave become increasingly organized and revolutionary, Rodolfo Montes de Oca from El Libertario even openly supports the idea 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 wont be put at risk [hipotecada].
Montes choice of words is revealing, as hipotecada refers literally to mortgages, implying that the poor will simply sell their political loyalties to the highest bidder. In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt argued 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, cant 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 words of one critic, The boss in the workplace and the boss in the revolution.
4. and is absent from popular struggles
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 workin which they sought to enlighten the poorwas self-isolating in practice. Other Venezuelan anarchists similarly insist that El Libertario is never seen by communities in struggle. Even El Libertario sympathizers have observed that they have only the most marginal presence in many key sectors of social struggle, a characterization which fits Uzcáteguis admission that they are simple spectators.
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 somehowhere revealing their longstanding obsessionsimply a spectacle, and blamed those arrested for naively presuming the government would support them. In the complex dialectic of the revolutionary process, its worth pointing out that despite Chávezs 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.
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 statement insisting that Chávez did not know what the word meant. According to participants, he had evidently touched their sacred word, and they couldnt allow anyone else to be accused of anarchism, and so they misrepresented the slogan of the actionwe dont want them to govern us: we want to governas simply a demand for state power.
cont'd
Last edited Fri May 2, 2014, 08:14 PM - Edit history (1)
March 30: http://www.democraticunderground.com/110828470
April 8: http://www.democraticunderground.com/110828873