SOLIDARITY FOR VENEZUELA - The difference between solidarity and patronizing

The difference between solidarity and patronizing
nchamah miller
www.insumisos.com

I wish to challenge that section of the Canadian left which is taking a patronizing stance over the analysis of Latin America, specifically Venezuela.

The claim is being made that a closed session has to be held at a University in Canada in order to freely discuss material presented at that specific session because such a discussion could not be held openly. One has to ask whether the problem is in Canada or in Venezuela, without any consideration being given to a potential injustice to the presenters or those who could have debated them. Even worse, one is left to seriously question the sanity or the information of those making the veiled insinuation that the ghost of Stalin is not far away because there is no room for open debate in Venezuela. To even hint that those who want to challenge specific information are Stalinists is a malicious and perverted manipulation of the image of a tyrant we all deplore, and to use this as an example of the type of censorship taking place in Venezuela must be challenged. Prove it. Do not hang around your corridors muttering under your breath making these insinuations and at the same time tarnishing the name of those who stand up to you and call you – fools.
Have any of those making this extraordinary claim ever picked up a news paper of any part of Venezuela where the demonizing of the government, the President, his friends, even his estranged friends is the sine qua non diet of the bourgeois & right- wing press?

Building solidarity for Venezuela is being attentive to the competing, opposing and contradictory and political discourses. It means having an open debate and it may get heated as all hell, but it should never ever be closed. That is exactly what the bourgeois opposition wants you to do, and you have fallen in their trap. What will become readily evident is that in Venezuela there is no want of opinions and they are freely given by anyone. At the same time there is no shortage of clear thinkers whose voices get muffled by the incessant ruckus of political opportunists and their partisan myopia. Everyone wants to be the advisor of the President, this particularly includes the full spectrum Marxists and now it is more evident than ever that the battle for hegemony of specific strands of Marxism is being fought around Venezuelan analysis because the prize is huge: access to the corridors of power and the President. The last exchanges in Aporrea prove it - the attacks on the Marxist advisors to the President is led by other Marxists who have been ousted or who hope to return to the sanctum sanctorum and hopefully get their stipends as consultants, once paid in US dollars in foreign accounts, reinstated and if this does not happen they immediately claim foul play, and Machiavellian plots.

This incessant jockeying by courtesans of power when their access to the corridors of power is blocked for whatever reason, falling out of grace either through incompetence or sheer lack of ability to read the political, social or economic scenario is a pill few like to swallow especially if it hits their pockets. The claim is made through interlocutors outside of Venezuela, and never directly to the face of the President that right-wing opportunists flying under the Chavez banner surround the President of Venezuela. Which means that we must define what is being meant in the context of Venezuela what a Chavista right-winger is and what a Chavista left-winger is and who are those in the middle?
Those fallen from grace in Venezuela have a vested interest in proving to the world at large, which happens to be completely indifferent to their ramblings, that the Administration of President Chavez, really is a right wing beehive and its drones a group of Bolivarchians attached to their privileges (the supposed new oligarchy from the Bolivarian revolution). This being the case why in the name of reason would they want to be associated with this group, well because they want to be there themselves. President Chavez has stated time and again that the state is permeated with corruption: and this is the fate attached to the immense wealth that the oil economy provides. Does this mean that the Venezuelans are bereft of logic and decency and cannot found their revolution on anything other than lust or greed?
Who then is the left in Venezuela? It happens to be that there is no litmus test for this, but there are some key political indicators: (a) an unconditional commitment to the process including its political flaws, its social warts, its cultural contradictions, (b) the commitment to a moral compass that enounces the community as the social base (c) the recognition that the current institutions, all of them, still deeply imbricate with the world market economy. To be clear, neither do members of political parties nor members of the communal councils alone solely comprise the left. The left is an amalgamation and accumulation of social forces, not the sum of its integers, which means internally there is overlapping and disjuncture, and nobody has the sceptre of its narrative, only fools pretend that they do, which is why many a foreign analyst has failed to grasp the reading of the topography of its body politic.
So who are those in the middle? Actually if we follow the history of other nations, this is the fastest growing sector, because it includes the disaffected from both the left and the right: their discourse is heavily impregnated with the jargon of either side but there is absolutely no commitment to stand politically with what in Venezuela is known as the process of the Bolivarian revolution. They are the charlatan soothsayers who with their crystal balls interpret events as they ensue, unable to distinguish between cause and effect or to distinguish between political mistakes, or policy blunders, both the most human of conditions. The middle seems incapable of moving beyond a mere judgemental stance. These are the carpetbaggers who swim for the lifeboats, first and unfortunately in Venezuela this is becoming a sizeable group. The question is can they peddle their influence? - To the circle of their local and international posses and because of their self -delusions they must trade in political favours to stay on the scene.

What if we extricate these three groups from the general populace who remains – well, those who occupy what I call political autonomous spaces and who have the ability to deploy with regularity into the various forms of institutionalized politics that have emerged in Venezuela, they are called the people and they happen to have a President, Governors of States, Mayors of their cities and they interact with them as much as the current constitution allows.
This is an ethical call because it is their revolution and the solidarity they need is that which allows them to make their own mistakes, that rejoices in their ability to build new political, social and economic spaces of which we cannot even dream in the North. And allows them to present their own case before international audiences. Latin Americans know this why can’t Canadians understand this simple concept? It does not matter who has the political upper hand, now defined by polls. Solidarity has nothing to do with how the outsider defines left or right, and whether support should be given, and who decides what sets the limiting conditions of solidarity. Because if it is, some Canadians of the left would be better off giving their conditioned solidarity to the right-wing bourgeois sectors of Venezuela who can make bargains in which the face of humans responsible for their destiny is effaced.

For Latin America, solidarity cannot signify attachment to particular outcomes, it is the respect for the human beings who are at the cross roads of an event (as in philosophy) without precedent in Latin America. For Canadians your freedom is that you do not have to join in the spirit of this struggle if we do not have your respect or trust in our moral compass.