Venezuela in the framework of the globalization of fascism

The ongoing war against the late Hugo Chávez’s contra-hegemonic policies

25/02/2014
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“Military interventions are the tip of the imperialist iceberg.” David Harvey.
 
In Venezuela we are in the presence of a qualitative leap in the attacks on the Bolivarian Revolution, in the framework of a new period beginning with the physical absence of President Chávez and in which the limits of national rentier capitalism have become highly visible. This attempt to restore the status quo ante and its reactionary policies is not only the expression of a domestic crisis, but is profoundly connected and determined by the systemic capitalist crisis, and the reconfiguration of war as the overwhelming mechanism of the world order, in the context of neoliberal globalization.
 
In the same sense in which world capitalism has become trans-national since the crisis of the 1970s, as never before in its history, and is integrating and interconnecting the whole planet on the basis of capitalist (over) exploitation, war itself has become transnational, it has become the key factor in the organization of global societies, intruding into all spaces, all areas and all subjective perceptions, becoming a temporal continuum, a bio-political regime of social control that intensified after the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. To speak of war in the context of neoliberal globalization is to speak of “world war”, with a more world-encompassing character than all its antecedents.
 
The notion of war as a global bio-political regime, and as a “permanent war” as it is considered under the “Bush Doctrine”, involves looking at the way that war intrudes in all areas of life. Here the ideas of Michel Foucault and Luis Britto García are worth recalling: Foucault turns upside down the famous saying of Karl von Clausewitz at the beginning of the nineteenth century (“war is the continuation of politics by other means”), for Foucault “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (1); Britto, reflecting on the economic war in Venezuela expressed it this way: “War is the continuation of economics by other means.”(2) Contemporary forms of systemic belligerence result in a state of affairs in which different areas of life become continuations of war, and transform war into the prolongation of these areas of life.
 
Since 2001, Venezuela appears to have become one of the principal laboratories of multi-factorial war in the world. The Bolivarian Revolution represented an obstacle to the increased accumulation by dispossession that had taken place since the 1980s in Venezuela (that is, fundamentally a kind of capitalist accumulation through war).  This involved a process of changes in the country that not only imposed a barrier to [foreign] access to national resources, but a dangerous example in the face of a world system that increasingly seeks deregulation, and the opening and integration of (capitalist) markets.
 
The economic war, the national and international media war, the strategy of localized conflicts in Venezuela, to mention only the principal characteristics, make up a strategic and counterinsurgent scope of the permanent war to facilitate and expand processes of accumulation through dispossession in the country. The progressive intensification and exacerbation of these factors indicate dangerous scenarios of social shock that allow, from situations of social concussion, the formation of neoliberal restructuring, as one form of what Naomi Klein has called “disaster capitalism” (3).
 
Neoliberal pressure towards the globalization of fascism
 
Fascism finds fertile ground in moments of crisis. As in the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s, which opened the way to German Nazism and Italian fascism, together with many other expressions of this kind in the world, the present crisis (2007 to the present) has served as a breeding ground for the (re) appearance, genesis or rise of extreme right-wing groups of a fascist slant in many parts of the planet.
 
Some threaten to take over the State, others make a place for themselves in the networks of established policy, while yet others take to the streets and function as shock troops and forces of counter-insurgent intimidation. Their world-wide deployment indicates that fascism can adapt to the new historical conditions of globalized capitalism, and to world cultural diversity, so we are not speaking of an anachronism, or an overly rigid definition (4).
 
Some of the more clear and recent expressions of this rising global fascism may be found in the political action of groups such as the Golden Awakening in Greece, Svoboda in Ukraine (one of the five main political parties in the country); the Tea Party in the United States and the political
map of Sarah Palin with the iconography of rifle targets on democratic figures (recall the shooting in Arizona in 2011, leaving six dead and where the Democratic representative Gabrielle Giffords, a supporter of immigration reform, was shot in the head); the shock capacity of extreme right fundamentalists in the so-called Arab Spring and their political action in these processes; the psychotic action of Anders Behring Breivik assassinating 77 persons in a Labour Party youth camp in Norway; the active participation of conservative movements, the extreme right and skinheads in Brazil in June of 2013, who physically and verbally attacked people bearing shirts or flags of political parties; the gains in electoral surveys in France of the extreme right candidate Marine Le Pen, for the elections of the European Parliament scheduled for May 2014; and, to mention Venezuela, the rise, during the period of the Bolivarian Revolution, of fascists and neo-nazi groups such as Orden, who vindicate the anticommunist dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez[5].
 
The neoliberal project involves a systematic frontal attack on workers, peoples, territories and nature, and is part of a complex geopolitical dispute, such that one of the mechanisms for the maintenance of these forms of accumulation is the installation of a complete and sophisticated world-wide police strategy, in which the globalization of fascism appears as one of their aims. The progressive worsening of the systemic capitalist crisis is likely to make social contracts more precarious in the so-called “democratic systems”, creating conditions for the increase of fascism.
 
The factors that led to the global economic and financial crisis since 2007-2008 are not only maintained now, but in some senses have worsened. At the end of January, the executive director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, warned of new economic risks such as deflation in the advanced economies (6). The consequences of reducing the economic stimulus of quantitative easing, by the Federal Reserve of the United States, by some 20 billion US dollars since December of 2013 (7), and of a crisis in emerging markets, or the possibility of a deepening in the fall of economic growth in China, could open the doors to a new and stronger global financial crisis, with a recessionary trend, which has an enormous significance for the Bolivarian Revolution, already immersed in a new wave of fascist attacks and a new phase of the permanent war.
 
The extreme right has taken the lead in the opposition. Counter-hegemonic “Chavism” is the key to this chess game, the vital element in the attempt to change course.
 
Counterhegemonic “Chavism” and the prolonged crisis of rentier capitalism
 
The intensification of the transnational dispute now taking place in Venezuela, whether for the control of petroleum income, or because of imperialist interests in access to “natural resources” is now moving in the context of the decaying structures of national rentier capitalism, which is now in a state of crisis that began some 30 to 40 years ago. We are in the presence of the exhaustion of our most contemporary historic model.
 
The notable economic and social imbalances in the country today have a profound relation to the rise of fascism in Venezuela: the severe maladjustment of rentier capitalism reflects the economic war, in the sense that in the state of permanent war, the multi-factor war concentrates on attacking our vulnerabilities in order to weaken our strengths. The worsening of the problems afflicting the national rentier model has made some areas more vulnerable, such as the food supply, the financial sector, the real economy, territorial occupation, areas that can hardly be responded to with the broken-down tools of rentier capitalism.
 
In any scenario of a permanent war against the Bolivarian Revolution, the counter-hegemonic strategy of Chavism has been the key to resistance, the force for creating new possibilities, the power of each political victory in this intense period of fifteen years; hence the present constant attack on the generality of the term “collectives”. The popular alliance, obeisance to the popular mandate, is the only possible path of resistance to the hyper-intensive war machine, not only because the popular counter-hegemonic bloc is the constitutive force in anti-capitalist transformations, but also because it is conscious of being the principal target of the permanent war.
 
The political dilemmas in the country, above all in the fact of this attack on the Bolivarian Revolution, are hardly simple. Nevertheless it is fundamental to deal with the following:
 
- Various social movements and popular organizations have proposed alternatives and concrete solutions in the face of almost any situation, even concerning structural factors of our capitalist/rentier model. It is literally of vital concern to integrate these alternatives into the course of the Bolivarian Revolution, making it a live and popular force that can recover its counter-hegemonic impulse.
 
- A bio-political war attacks every area of life. In the measure in which we connect more with capitalist globalization, we connect more to the mechanisms of action of this systematic war. It is extremely important that we deal with our principal structural vulnerabilities. Taking on forms of selective disconnection, with regional mechanisms such as those proposed in ALBA-TCP, with a plan of government that provides incentive to social organization and production “from below” (the communes) and in agreement with the 4th objective of the “Fatherland Plan 2013-2019”, should be a priority, looking for all the possibilities to put into action these forms of national and popular resistance.
 
- Open the way for autonomous, broad-based and organic people’s linkages, in which social organizations and movements can create their own agenda and alternatives, and establish forms of fruitful relationship between the people and the government.
 
- It is essential to “de-activate fascism” (as Roland Denis has put it) and together attenuate hatred, as the members of the collective “El Cayapo” put it: “The hero in this war will not be the one who shoots the most bullets, but the person who contributes the most to winding down situations of war.”
(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)
 
 
- Emiliano Teran Mantovani is a researcher with the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos and is a member of the promotion team of the Thematic World Social Forum Venezuela.
 
Sources consulted:
 
- BRITTO García, Luis. ¿Guerra económica no mata gobierno? Aporrea.  Sunday, 22/09/2013. http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a173940.html. [Consulted: 23/09/2013].
 
- CNN Expansión. Lagarde advierte riesgo de deflación.. Saturday, 25/1/2014.  http://www.cnnexpansion.com/economia/2014/01/25/lagarde-advierte-riesgo-de-deflacion.
[Consulted: 27/01/2014].
 
- DEUTSCHE Welle. La Reserva Federal vuelve a recortar estímulos a economía de EE.UU. 29.01.2014.  http://www.dw.de/la-reserva-federal-vuelve-a-recortar-est%C3%ADmulos-a-econom%C3%ADa-de-eeuu/a-17395038  [Consulted: 12/02/2014].
 
- FOUCAULT, Michel.Defender la sociedad. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Segunda reimpresión. Buenos Aires, 2001. En: http://primeraparadoja.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/1976-defender-la-sociedad.pdf. [Consulted: 11/05/2008].
 
- HARVEY, David. El nuevo imperialismo. Ediciones Akal S.A. Madrid,
2007.
 
- KLEIN, Naomi. La doctrina del shock. El auge del capitalismo del desastre. Paidós, 1ra. Ed. Argentina. 2008.
 
 
Notes:
 
[1] FOUCAULT, Michel. Defender la sociedad. p. 29.
 
[2] BRITTO García, Luis. ¿Guerra económica no mata gobierno?
 
[3] Cfr. KLEIN, Naomi. The shock doctrine. The rise of disaster capitalism.
 
[4] In spite of the enormous cultural and anthropological diversity in the world, and the fact that some of these extreme-right groups fight among themselves to rigidly define their characteristics, rejecting others, global fascism can be defined by the merging of all or some of the following traits: ultranationalists, chauvinists, xenophobes and racists, anti-communists, fundamentalists and ultra-conservatives; and with militarized or organized shock troops using extreme violence.
 
[5] The characteristics of paramilitary groups or private counter-insurgency military forces remains for another analysis.
 
[6] Cfr. CNN Expansión. Lagarde advierte riesgo de deflación.
 
[7] Cfr. DEUTSCHE Welle. La Reserva Federal vuelve a recortar estímulos a economía de EE.UU.
 
 
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