Re: [A-List] Who's revolting now?

["Anne Williamson" <annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

  The New Statesman Essay - Who's revolting now?
Mark Almond
Monday 22nd April 2002



Once, we all knew where we stood on people's uprisings. But as Venezuela
shows, you can't trust them any more. By Mark Almond

H L Mencken called revolutions "the sex of politics". He meant not only that
they were exciting to be involved in (or even to watch, presumably as the
pornography of politics), but that they aroused the same mixture of
fascination and revulsion that sex does. People found revolutions liberating
or disgusting, but they were rarely indifferent - at least until recently.

For two centuries after 1789, the world lived in anticipation or dread of
revolution. Gustave Flaubert joked in his Dictionary of Received Ideas: "Age
of revolution - not over yet because every government promises to end it."
For a century, Marxism, the quintessential radical ideology of modernity,
replaced Jacobinism in people's hopes and fears. But Marxism died in 1989.
Can revolutionary impulses survive in a postmodern age?

We still regularly awake to news of revolutions, uprisings and coups. Far
from marking the end of upheavals, the implosion of the Soviet bloc began a
period of profound instability. Yet for all the talk of "people power",
there is something unsatisfactory about contemporary revolutions compared
with the cataclysms of the past. The events of 1789 and 1917 were
earth-shattering developments, and recognised by contemporaries as such.
They had a resonance that went far beyond the politically active. Although
people sometimes at first misunderstood the meaning of 1789 (the House of
Lords welcomed the storming of the Bastille and declared a national
holiday), they nearly always, in subsequent years, knew where they stood.
The right was against revolution and the left in favour.

But over the past decade, it is the right that has adopted the word
revolution. Partly by appealing to the American revolution as a model,
conservative American organisations such as the Heritage Foundation flaunt
their commitment to a "global democratic revolution" while taunting moribund
Marxists with the revolutionary triumphs of anti-communism. So is revolution
just a designer label to be stitched on any upheaval as a value-added
come-on to the gullible consumer? Is the postmodern revolution the same
animal as the tried and tested modern variety?



The weekend of 12-14 April saw the fall and resurrection of Hugo Chavez,
president of Venezuela. What was striking about this upheaval was the
failure of the western media to question the US State Department's "facts"
about Venezuela: the resignation of Chavez, his vice-president and cabinet;
and the ousted president's request to fly to Cuba. All this was denied in
local media at the time.

Since 1989, a new conform-ism has spread through the US media and the
western press in general which recalls the early cold war era - except that
then, there was a plausible rival to the western model, with its own
apparatus of disinformation. Nowadays, controversies about foreign events
scarcely exist in our media. Compare the Guardian's reporting of the alleged
unpopularity of Chavez and the relief of Venezuelans at his fall with what
was printed in the Financial Times or Daily Telegraph. Sadly, there is no
contrast.

There is an interesting parallel with Muhammad Mossadeq, prime minister of
Iran in 1953. He was the victim of a coup co-ordinated by the CIA in August
that year. It put a stop to Mossadeq's campaign to use Iran's vast oil
wealth for domestic development schemes at the expense of western oil
companies which, in collusion with the corrupt elite grouped around the
shah, were milking the country. The west's fear then was that radical
nationalists would seize control of Iranian oil; this month, a Middle
Eastern crisis coincided with Chavez's restrictions on oil output to the
United States.

In 1953, as now, reporters detected growing opposition to a recently elected
leader who was flouting US interests. The western press reported a popular
uprising against Mossadeq and ignored the presence of American intelligence
officers, partly because some journalists were actually passing on
CIA-produced propaganda and cash to the anti-Mossadeq forces. The CIA chief
Allen Dulles was better informed about Iran than newspaper readers, because
those journalists who relayed romantic tosh about the "quasi-religious
devotion" of Iranians to the shah were actually sending Dulles more detailed
reports. The only contemporary mention of any CIA connection was Newsweek's
charming report about the excitement in the shah's temporary refuge in Rome
at Mossadeq's fall. The "hubbub" was such that, when Dulles arrived at the
Excelsior, "no one paid any attention to him".

The New York Times called Mossadeq "a rabid self-seeking nationalist" and
"an appalling caricature". Its editorials decided that the events
surrounding his fall "bring us hope"; but they warned that "now Iran's big
task is to salvage her economy". This, apparently (though it was not
mentioned), was to be achieved by selling oil at knockdown prices to a new
US-led consortium. Change the name to Chavez and substitute links to Cuba
for Mossadeq's alleged links to Moscow, and the New York Times could have
reprinted its 49-year-old material in 2002 without anyone noticing.

There is one big difference, however, between Iran then and Venezuela now.
Iranians took another 25 years to topple the shah, during which their
anti-Americanism was nurtured with well-known consequences. But hundreds of
thousands of Venezuelans - always derided as "poor" in the western media -
took only 48 hours to reverse the oil barons' putsch. Representatives of the
paragovernmental International Republican Institute, which channelled money
and expertise most recently to Serbia in 2000 and Peru last year, described
the change in Caracas to a regime of oilmen, bankers and generals as the
triumph of "people power" and "civic society" and (most Orwellian) as "a
restoration of normal democracy". The price of Venezuelan crude slid to its
natural, good-neighbourly market level again. The new regime made it clear
that it would adopt IMF prescriptions - more poverty for the many, more
exports of capital for the few. Joy all round!

But the usually reticent US technicians of regime change had celebrated too
openly and too quickly. Real crowds, rather than the synthetic variety,
stormed the Miraflores Palace and ousted the successor regime before it even
had time to finish toasting itself with champagne. There is still work to be
done if the Venezuelan people are to correct their unfortunate failure to
accept the verdict of "people power".

Chavez is certainly not out of the woods yet. It was only because the shah's
subordinates bungled an earlier attempt to topple Mossadeq that Dulles had
to send in the experts to settle things in August 1953. George Bush's
national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, warned: "I hope that Hugo
Chavez takes the message that his own people are sending him." This is
people power lite, with no nonsense about majorities, certainly not sweaty
ones.

Don't be surprised if the Mossadeq model is played out in full and that,
next time, the anti-Chavez forces manage to suppress protests from the
barrios. And don't be surprised if the overall Iranian model is played out
in full. A post-Chavez regime, ruthlessly suppressing dissent, could well
provoke a Latin American equivalent of the 1979 Iranian revolution.

The Americans seem oblivious to the disastrous consequences of going down
the path of instigating coups, as they did at the height of the cold war.
After the post-Watergate revelations of CIA skulduggery everywhere from
Guatemala to Chile in the western hemisphere alone, the CIA stepped back,
under congressional and public pressure, from the cynical methods of Allen
Dulles. The west did not fall as a result. On the contrary, a bigger threat
to its security was the bitter legacy of popular discontent in those
countries "saved" from communism by such coups and by the west's backing for
"our sons of bitches" in the Middle East.



But haven't we seen huge expressions of genuine people power, starting in
the Philippines in 1986 and climaxing in central Europe in 1989? As Timothy
Garton Ash, the most eloquent author of the theory of people power, wrote
describing 1989: "A few thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of
thousands went on to the streets. They spoke a few words, 'Resign!' they
said . . . And the walls of Jericho fell."

This is an attractive fairy story which is only partially true. Regimes
fall, but they are also pushed.

Even revolutionaries need money, particularly if they are full-time
activists. Just as Lenin had his Parvus Helphand to fund his devotion to the
cause, so the dissidents of 1989 received cash from the west while nominally
working as factory floor sweepers in the "normalised" Czechoslovakia or
Poland. (I remember helping to carry US$30,000 in spring 1989 to a group in
Hungary, including leading candidates in that country's current general
elections.)

By 1989, people in the east had lost whatever illusions they may ever have
had about the benefits of communism. But without a split in the communist
elite, and without western aid to dissidents, popular discontent would have
been crushed, as it was in 1956, 1968 and 1981. Even during the velvet
revolution, people power needed a leg-up.

In many ways, the most corrosive charge against the nomenklatura was that
they lived like a red bourgeoisie while preaching socialism. Self-indulgence
by the rulers of poor countries angers people more easily than ideological
differences. Imelda Marcos and Marie Antoinette may have had little in
common apart from the number of their shoes, but contempt can kill a regime.
People can understand corruption, and resent it. But it is mistaken policies
that cause poverty - although many regimes promote both.

Without an ideology that offers a promise of a better future, upheaval is
unlikely. Ideas, however, tend to come from elites; so without splits in the
elite, revolutions are impossible. Then there are the political and
administrative skills needed to take charge of the opposition and to give a
voice and organisation to mass protests - these, too, must usually come from
some discontented faction within the elite.

Alexis de Tocqueville antagonised left and right alike by pointing up the
continuity between the methods of the old regime and the new after 1789.
Legitimists and Jacobins in de Tocqueville's France could agree only on one
thing: that the revolution had created a chasm between past and present. For
good or ill, everything began anew in Year One.

But whether or not there was a year one in 18th-century France, there
certainly wasn't one in late 20th-century eastern Europe. In post-communist
states today, ex-apparatchiks such as Poland's current president, Aleksander
Kwasniewski, or the Russian ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin, have risen to the
very top. You could say it was like the Vicar of Bray in 17th-century
Britain who sailed through all the upheavals and kept his living - but at
least he did not get promoted by each successive regime. The metamorphosis
of yesterday's Marxist-Leninists into what Russians call (without irony)
market-Leninists, waving the banner for Nato and EU expansion, is an
extraordinary triumph of opportunism as well as a triumph of western
ideology.



So is global revolution dead? I suspect that the widely propagated belief
that there is only one viable socio-economic model - the one that works
tolerably well in the northern hemisphere - will prove to be an illusion. It
is not just that the 1989 victory promotes complacency; it is also that what
westerners mean by the market is not always what cynical power-brokers
elsewhere mean when they mouth our rhetoric.

Western ideologists of the market revolution seem to have forgotten their
Marx and Engels - which is odd, for a generation of leaders and commentators
that contains so many ex-1968 radicals. The Communist Manifesto was a paean
to the destruction that the new market economics and the new industrial
methods would inflict on age-old agricultural feudal societies - not just in
Europe, but around the world. In 1848, Marx and Engels expected
globalisation to destroy social cohesion and spawn revolution, as the
capitalists' blind pursuit of profit and empire turned the world into a
single, seething mass of discontent.

Yet after the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin disengaged the Soviet economy as
far as possible from the capitalist world. Other states that followed the
Soviet model of restricted access to markets and rigorous exchange controls
(plus state control of pretty well all the means of production) actually
delayed what Marx saw as the essential global precondition for a communist
revolution: a worldwide market vulnerable to the same crisis simultaneously.

Over the past decade, ex-communist governments and even the Chinese national
party have embraced open markets and free exchange. What a quaint irony:
while the old right celebrates its cold war triumph, the precondition of
revolution, as laid out in the Marxist scriptures, has been coming to pass.
In those ex-communist and developing-world countries that have adopted the
one-size-fits-all model of economic development, won't the strains of
reality create new social and economic tensions? Has that not already become
visible in Argentina, for instance?

The International Monetary Fund's model is based on the experience of
exchange rate stability in northern countries with highly developed
economies and reasonably honest politicians. It does not easily transfer
south. As Argentina recently showed, the IMF's obsession with predictable
exchange rates (as crude as US$1 = 1 peso) can have revolutionary
consequences. This is not only because absurdly high fixed exchange rates
choke economies and enrage the poor by throwing them out of work and forcing
down their living standards. It is also because the corrupt political elites
of such states adopt the IMF's "tough medicine" not in order to stabilise
their economies, but in order to make their ill-gotten gains, stolen from
the rest of the population, easily transferable abroad.

This is the ultimate effect of IMF currency policies. They have proved to be
a bonanza for the controlling mafias, politely called "reform-minded"
politicians. Unlike their predecessors, who operated irresponsibly
inflationary rackets, they have been able to squirrel away their swag in
western banks without any loss on the exchange. In Argentina, the implosion
came and the regime could not control the tumult. In Russia, which embarked
on a similar journey after 1991, Boris Yeltsin closed down the parliamentary
opposition and sent in tanks to suppress dissent on the streets in October
1993, while Bill Clinton cooed: "Boris, you just get stronger and stronger."

Exhausted by decades of Soviet-style communism and, with their low birth
rates, hardly able to replenish the population, Russians and other east
European peoples may lack the vitality to rebel against further decades of
western-imposed austerity - particularly as so many believed that the
western model would make them all rich quickly. Poles used to rise when the
price of sausages went up, as they did in 1956, 1970, 1976 and 1980. But
since 1989, post-communism, with its deflation of expectations, has knocked
the stuffing out of them.

With vast sections of the once militant working class on the dole or reduced
to penury, wives of ministers talk like arriviste Marie Antoinettes, one
remarking that conversation in Polish society has become so advanced that
people ask not what sort of mobile phone you have, but whether you have an
ISDN connection. (What is the Polish for "Let them eat broadband instead"?)

But the teeming masses of the south are less tamed by their recent history,
as Venezuela and Argentina show. They have not accepted the single ideology,
and so are not deflated by its failure to produce the goods. The right in
the west may yet fall out of love with revolution if the people of the south
do not lose hope.

Mark Almond is lecturer in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford. His book
Uprisings! is published by Mitchell Beazley next month


This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current
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