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How should revolutionists respond to the current
electoral shift to the left in Latin America? A series of elections in
Latin America—including Brazil, Nicaragua and Venezuela—have led or are expected
to lead to victories of left or neopopulist candidates. The most
polarized vote will undoubtedly be in Venezuela on Dec. 3.
All of these cases reflect a rejection of
the right-wing economic policies and capitulation to imperialism that
have devastated the region in the past 20 years and longer. They all
reflect a general turn to the left on the part of the masses and anger
against imperialism. To that extent, this process is positive and
promising.
However, none of these populist
candidates and parties is either consistently socialist or based on the
organization and education of the working class to take power. And
therefore they pose the danger of deflecting or dissipating the mass
radicalization that has been developing.
That includes the Hugo Chavez regime in
Venezuela, which is the most radical of them. Chavez's party, the
Movement for the Fifth Republic, is a typical populist
formation—electoralist and multi-class—which makes little effort to
politically organize the workers and poor of the country.
Hugo Chavez himself—although he has made
promising statements in support of socialism, as well as strong
denunciations of U.S. imperialism, and instituted a number of government
programs that benefit the poor masses—has not mounted any fundamental
attack on the capitalist system as such, although he has been in office
for almost a decade.
We defend the democratic right of these
populist and reformist figures to assume office, as in the recent
presidential election in Mexico, when they are popularly elected and when
right-wing elements seek to negate their electoral victories by fraud or
brute force. We also defend them against all slanders and attacks by the
local bourgeoisies and imperialism.
But we do not give them political
confidence and therefore do not call for a vote for them in elections to
determine the political leadership of the countries concerned. A long and
tragic history of failed reformist experiments in Latin America
demonstrates the dangers of relying on such figures and political
formations.
There is hope that the present process of
radicalization will lead to a real change in the situation of the poor
masses and that of the countries dominated by imperialism. But
significant change will only happen when the masses in these countries
become dissatisfied with populist rhetoric and half-way measures and
refuse to be diverted from the perspective of independent organization
and socialist revolution.
Therefore, revolutionary socialists have
no interest in fostering illusions in politicians who have no such
revolutionary perspectives.
One of the populist figures in whom the
most hopes were placed was Luis Ignacio "Lula" da Silva in
Brazil, who had been a leader of a radical trade-union movement and the
bogeyman of the bourgeoisie. However, to win an electoral victory, Lula
capitulated to the capitalists, taking a direct representative of the
capitalist class as his running mate. And in office, he has followed a
basically neoliberal (or pro-capitalist) agenda with some concessions to
greater social welfare.
Therefore, a large section of those who
had hoped that Lula would lead radical change broke from his party and
ran against him in the recent elections. The most well known left
candidate, Heloisa Helena, got more than 6 million votes nationally and
17 percent of the total vote in the strategic state of Rio de Janeiro.
She and her party did not even call for a
critical vote for Lula in the run-off election, arguing—correctly, in our
view—that there was no essential difference between him and his
right-wing opponent. It is symptomatic, with regard to Hugo Chavez, that
he supported a vote for Lula and criticized the left for creating
divisions by not backing Lula. This is a telling indication of Chavez’s
political perspectives.
In Nicaragua, as we go to press, former
FSLN guerrilla leader and elected president Daniel Ortega has won the
presidential election. But in order to achieve an electoral victory, he
has dumped all revolutionary perspectives and even the progressive
measures that were instituted under the previous Sandinista government.
Therefore, Ortega’s election is a
double-edged sword. It reflects both capitulation to bourgeois pressures
and a broad popular reaction against the failures of the capitalist economic
policies that have been followed since the ouster of the Sandinista
government. We can hope that the vote for Ortega represents a shift of
the masses to the left, but to call for a vote for him would mean giving
support to his surrender of revolutionary and working-class political
principles.
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