AUT: Three viewpoints on Venezuela and revolution

[Scott Hamilton <s_h_hamilton@xxxxxxxxx>]

Here are three different viewpoints on the crisis in
Venezuela. All of them are attempts to deal with the
problem of creating revolution in a semi-colonial
nation whose domination by capital from the
imperialist countries has stopped functioning
bourgeois democracy and democratic rights being won,
and therefore made the idea of 'national liberation'
seem plausible, and made nationalism a powerful
political force.

In the thread on Palestine, I argued that the strategy
of two stage revolution, the ultra-left strategy and
the strategy of permanent revolution comprised the
three basic answers to this problem given over the
decades by the revolutionary left. Just to recap, the
ultra-left strategy treats nationalism as wholly
reactionary, and calls on workers to forget about
winning bourgeois democratic rights and fight
independently for socialist revolution.

The two stage strategy, on the other hand, calls on
workers to ally themselves in a 'political bloc' with
the progressive parts of other classes to win power
for a 'new democratic' national capitalist government
that can give bourgeois democratic rights to workers
that will help them fight for an eventual 'second
stage' socialist revolution.

The strategy of permanent revolution can be seen, in a
way, as an attempt to combine aspects of the other two
strategies. It says that winning bourgeois democratic
rights is important, and calls for workers to ally
themselves with those organisations of other classes
actively fighting foreign capital, but says that
workers must keep their own political independence,
and use that independence to turn the struggle to get
rid of imperialist domination into a socialist
revolution, because only socialism can give bourgeois
democratic rights to a semi-colony (of course, to
survive socialism must also spread from the
semi-colony where it first appears - in particular, it
must spread to the imperialist countries themselves).

I think that the three pieces on Argentina can be
linked to these three strategies. Anarchist Al
Giordano is effectively advocating a two-stage
strategy, as his uncritical support for Chavez shows;
the Argentinean Venezuealan group is taking an
ultra-left line, in refusing to offer any support for
Chavez; and Workers Power Global tries to combine a
bloc with Chavez against the US with an insistence
that his working class supporters keep their
independence and be ready to overthrow him when he
inevitably fails to give them what they want.

I believe that the ultra-left approach to revolution
in the semi-colonies will disintegrate, if it hasn't
already, as national liberation movements, which were
stymied in the 90s, come back into their own as part
of the response to the War of Terror and as part of
the worldwide revival in class struggle we are now
seeing (?) The danger is that many anarchists, amongst
others, will go straight from ultra-leftism to
stagism, and we'll end up back in the 70s, with the
sort of uncritical attitude to national liberation
that was reflected in chants like 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi
Minh!' Giordano's heart is in the right place and he
is obviously correct when he warns that a coup would
turn a lot of the anarchist critics of Chavez into
corpses, but his illusions in Chavez and in Lula show
that he is being sucked in by the stagism of the WSF
(interesting that he uses Negri as justification!).

Here is the 'Venezuelan anarchist viewpoint on Chavez'
http://www.ainfos.ca/02/dec/ainfos00310.html

Here is the take of Workers Power
http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/chavez6.html

And what follows is an interview with Giordano
(apologies for the length of it, I couldn't find a
link)

http://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos10712.html


IMC Interviews Al Giordano on Venezuela, the media,
and anarchism
by nessie,  Friday December 20, 2002 at 12:10 PM

Like most gringos, I know very little about Venezuela.
Since things seem to be heating up there, I figured it
was time to lay at least some of my ignorance to rest.
So I asked an expert. Al Giordano is the publisher of
The Narco News Bulletin reporting on
the drug war and democracy, from somewhere in a
country called América. That is, the América with an
accent, South of the Border. A former political
reporter for the Boston Phoenix, Giordano has also
written for The Nation, The Washington Post, American
Journalism Review, Evergreen Review, IndyMedia, and
scores of other periodicals. He is
also a veteran radio, TV, and Internet journalist.

A year ago, Giordano, Narco News, and Mexican
journalist Mario Menendez, won a precedent-setting
decision from the New York Supreme Court
after they were sued by the National Bank of Mexico
(Banamex, a subsidiary of Citigroup) for publishing
photos and evidence of cocaine trafficking
by the banks owner. The Court ruled in Giordano's
favor, establishing, for the first time, that Internet
journalists have the same First Amendment rights as
the New York Times under U.S. law. The precedent
applies to IndyMedia, too. The court order appears on
the website of the Bay Area's own Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF), which had filed an amicus brief in
defense of Narco News and Giordano.

When he won that landmark case, Giordano, who was at
the time in the Amazon Chapare region of Bolivia
investigating the assassination of coca
growers'union leader Casimiro Huanca, chose to give
his exclusive interview on the Court victory to New
York City IndyMedia: The quality of Giordano's
journalistic work from Latin America has been
praised by many of the leading media critics and
journalists in the world. He spent part of this year
in Venezuela, where he reports he was
inspired by that nation's Community Media movement,
with 25 Community TV and radio stations that have
broken the monopoly of the Commercial Media,
to form the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism
on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

Narco News, widely credited with breaking the
information blockade on last April's coup d'etat in
Venezuela, is again in the thick of it: A
bulwark against the Commercial Media's disinformation
on the battles in that Latin American nation of 24
million people. With 120,000 readers a day, Narco News
continues to refuse commercial advertising.
Giordano owns no property, no house, no car, and no
credit card. You can read Narco News'coverage of the
Battle of Venezuela, and other reports from
Latin America.
This week, he granted an exclusive interview with San
Francisco Bay
Area IndyMedia, in part to offer his response to some
stories posted on SF
IMC by a group calling itself'Anarchist'regarding the
situation in
Venezuela.

Giordano, as can be seen in his passion for social
anarchism; in this interview,asserts;The only
respectable anarchist position is to fight
tooth and nail against these coup attempts.He also
said, "When I have something important to say, I like
to grant the interview to IndyMedia, because it is the
one place North of the Border where I know my words
won't be censored. And SFIMC has been, for the past
year, one of the leading lights on breaking the
information blockade from Venezuela."
nessie:

So Al. You're the closest thing we have to a guy on
the ground there.We need your input. Care to enlighten
us as to what's really happening?

Al Giordano: In fact, we (and that 'we' includes
IndyMedia) have an enormous network of friends and
allies on the ground there who are the
ones Venezuelans proudly call Community Journalists.
The independent media movement in Venezuela is the
most advanced in the hemisphere, probably in the
world. There are 25 Community TV and Radio stations in

Venezuela, many of which began as "pirate stations,"
one dating back to the 1960s, that were legalized
under the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999.
There are movement also includes important print and
Internet publications.  The Popular Revolutionary
Assembly has one of the best online centers of
information I've ever seen at:
"http://www.aporrea.org/";

It updates every hour or more often for 24 hours a
day. In recent days it has been invaluable. Anyone who
has been reading the Aporrea site for the past two
weeks has witnessed, time and time again, how the
people from the grassroots are leading and pushing
Chávez to resist the coup, not vice versa.

Nessie:  How does their work compare to the corporate
media?

Al Giordano: There's something very racist in the
reporting of simulators like the British journalist
Phil Gunson, a freelance mercenary who
has published knowingly false stories recently in
Newsweek/MSNBC, the Christian Science Monitor and the
daily newspaper of coup-plotters everywhere, the Miami
Herald.

There's something positively sleazy about this guy and
his work. I observed him in action down in Venezuela
during a presidential press conference - him and this
little clique of boy reporters from England and the
U.S., and their snobby superiority complex, who would
be more comfortable with Chávez as their gardener than
as president of an oil-rich nation of 24 million
people.

You can see the frustration on their faces of having
to report on this dark-skinned hawk-nosed soldier who
is smarter and more popular than they are, and who
during a five hour press conference answers all their
snotty questions in great detail - Imagine Bush or
Gore or Clinton ever doing that! - and he beats them
on the facts and they have to call him "president" in
their reports. And the press conference itself is
broadcast on national TV, and the Venezuelan people
get to see just how snotty and clueless the U.S. and
European press corps, as a group (because there is
always the occasional good one or two in their midst;
they know who they are), get completely beaten at
their own game by Chávez.

If your sympathies are with the working class, and you
distrust the commercial media correspondents as I do,
it's great entertainment, and
it's part of the educational process underway there.
You can see them,
these divine caste "reporters," wince as it happens
because they know
that Chávez is not the buffoon they try to portray him
to be. He's smarter
than they are. In fact, if anything, he's very suave
and smooth, which
is why his five-hour live TV shows every Sunday - "Alo
Presidente!" -
are the most popular or at least one of the most
popular programs in the
country. Whole families gather every Sunday to watch
the show, on which
he takes live phone calls.

I could just see the Gunsons and others like him
sitting there,
thinking to them selves, "if this guy were my gardener
or chauffeur, he'd be a
lot of fun." Oh, it's a sad thing, what happens to
U.S. and British and
Spaniard correspondents when they enter lands with
oligarchies, because
they start to think of themselves as landed gentry.
They move into the
wealthy neighborhoods and live behind walls, they send
their kids to
private schools with the other oligarchs, and from
that perspective flows
their reporting.

They also develop very unhealthy parasitic
relationships with US and European Embassy, and
multinational corporate, spin-doctors. But back to
Gunson, because he's
got this coming.
 Gunson, interviewed last week on NPR, gave an example
of this inherent
racism and snobbery when he said, and I quote:  "I
think it's important
to point out that last night what we saw was perhaps
the worst example
so far of something, a phenomenon that we've seen
before, which is
concerted attacks on different media organizations by
mobs that are clearly
organized by the government. For example, the mobs in
most places were
led by deputies, by congresspeople, belonging to the
ruling party."  Gunson said that, not me.  The idea
that the people -
who Gunson calls "mobs" - would only protest at
Commercial TV stations
if "organized by the government" has a racist ring to
it. He suggests
that the people aren't smart enough or organized
enough to think of it or
do it themselves.
But anyone who has been reading the Aporrea website
and following the
Community Media coverage in Venezuela, as I do,
watched the process in
the days before the TV station protests last Monday
night, December 9th.

For days the popular organizations, from the
neighborhoods and towns,
were writing open letters to Chávez and the
government, demanding that
he do something about the constant stream of lies and
bile being spread
by the Commercial TV stations as the media invented a
so-called
"strike" that was not happening in the majority of
Venezuelan neighborhoods or
towns! The people were seeing one portrayal on TV that
did not reflect
the reality on their streets, where shops were open,
where people were
working, and working hard, as is another trademark
of poor Venezuelans. They have to work hard in order
to eat!
I sometimes think these First World reporters have no
life experience
to understand that reality.  For days these community
groups had called
upon Chávez to revoke the licenses of the simulating
TV stations that,
after all, do use the "public airwaves" and therefore
ought to have
public responsibility and be open to all the public,
not just the paying
class. And Chávez did nothing at all to the TV
stations, so the masses
came down from the hills and surrounded them, as they
had last April.
In both cases, in April and in December, the
surrounding of the TV
stations marked the turning points against coup
d'etat. The TV owners cry
"intimidation" and the racist simulators like Gunson
claim these "mobs"
of poor and working people were pushed to do it from
above. But the
reality is that at all moments they are the ones
running the show, pushing the government, pushing
Chávez, pushing the
media, as the people should do in every land.
Gunson sees some Congressmen and women in these
demonstrations and
says, from his little pea brain, "aha! they're the
ringleaders!" He
profoundly misunderstands the dynamic at work in
Venezuela. The congress
members were dragged by the masses to come with them,
not vice versa! If you
believe in Authentic Democracy, it's a wonderful
process to watch and
participate in.  The saddest thing of all - and this
is where I feel a
tinge of pity for Gunson, for T. Christian Miller of
the *LA Times*, for
Juan Forero of the NY Times and the other professional
simulators - is that the correspondents are missing
the story of a
lifetime because of their upper-class fear of the
people.

The real story is going on in the barrios, in the
hills, in the poor
and working neighborhoods and towns. It is a
revolutionary process,
sweeping away decades of a caste system and its
injustices. It's part of
what I think Tony Negri meant when he referred to
self-valorization" in
his book "Marx After Marx," so wonderfully formed by
the Northern Italian
autonomy movement of the 1970s. The first step to
economic
self-valorization by workers is the process of
psychological self-valorization.

Nessie:  Since you lack that upper-class fear of the
people, you must be privy to the real story. So help
us out up here. Tell us what's really happening in the
barrios, the hills, and the poor and working
neighborhoods and towns. What has changed that has
brought about this upheaval.

Al Giordano: What has changed most markedly among
Venezuela's poor majority is the same thing that
changed among the indigenous communities of
Chiapas and much of Mexico beginning in 1994: the
people's view of themselves. When I first walked
through the popular barrios of Caracas and
talked to every stranger in sight my first thought
was: "This is just like what I lived in Chiapas."
I had known Chiapas before and after the Zapatista
uprising and therefore had a yardstick by which to
measure what had occurred. And the same
thing has occurred with the masses of Venezuela.

They're not available any more to sign up for duty as
slaves. And this is what drives the former ruling
class crazy. The gardener, the cook, the maid,
the nanny, the tutor, the chauffeur, and of course the
farmer and factory worker, no longer have to pretend
that the master is god.
The self-valorization process in Venezuela - like that
in Chiapas - has
caused a personality crisis for the upper classes.
It's hard to
maintain the illusion that one lives on Olympus with
the gods - and if you've
ever spent any time among the oligarchies in Third
World outposts, you
know about this attitude I'm describing - when you no
longer have
adoring minions, or when the plebes stop faking the
adoration.
And this is only the first stage of self-valorization;
the
psychological transformation. Karl Marx (who once
cried out "I am not a Marxist!")
and Tony Negri referred more concretely to the
economic stage; to the
worker as his and her own subject and no longer the
object of the ruling
elite. Which is why you hear the crazy oligarchs
screaming so loudly
about the "Bolivarian Circles," because that is the
mechanism by which
the Venezuelan revolution begins to do what the
oligarchs find unforgivable: to organize this new
positive self-image
among the people into neighborhood and economic
entities.
nessie:  What exactly are the Bolivarian Circles?

Al Giordano: To hear the oligarchs and the Commercial
Media screech
about the Bolivarian Circles, you would think they are
armed paramilitary
organizations of vampires coming to drink their
precious children's
blood. I went and spent time with these Circles. Do
you what they're
really doing? The old guy in every neighborhood who
loves the architecture,
the history, you know him, these guys even exist in
San Francisco and
New York, the one who goes and spends hours at the
library researching
the construction of the local church? Well, this guy
is now in the
Bolivarian Circle. And for the first time he has an
eager audience of
children and adults and elders all excited to study
and learn the history of their barrio. And the lady
who understands
herbs and natural medicine is holding very popular
workshops and training
sessions to help everyone understand it. She's the
Bolivarian Circle,
too. So is the neighborhood baseball team, and kids
who do rap or
theater. They're the Bolivarian Circles, too. That's
what they are "armed"
with: library books, herbal remedies, boomboxes and
baseball gloves.
 And, you know, the upper classes have a point in
their fear of this,
which is why the Commercial Media preys on this fear:
the family using
herbal remedies is no longer spending a week's pay on
expensive
pharmaceuticals. It's healthy without them. There's a
self-led reorganization
of the economy from the bottom up. Everything is
changing.
 So the Commercial Media yelps "Beware! Vampire
Bolivarian Circles are
coming to kill you!" This is why the most popular
chant in Caracas
today is "Chávez Makes Them Crazy!" Because the people
watch these former
ruling class members railing all their fears on TV,
and they really do
have psychological problems with the loss of their
illusory power over others.
 Meanwhile, the psychology
of the majority has never been healthier or more
positive than it is
today. The concept of 'Psy-war', thank you, Venezuela
and Chiapas, is no
longer a strictly top down phenomenon. If there's any
gringo reading
this who is spending hundreds of dollars on a shrink
to cope with the
post-9/11 insanity up there, I say, save your money
and go to Venezuela,
to the popular neighborhoods, you probably just need a
good dose of
"self-valorization" yourself!

nessie:  How does Community Media fit in?
Al Giordano: Many thousands of people are now involved
in Community
Media. If only we had this connection with the masses
at all the IMCs and
other "independent media" in the United States! To me,
they are our
teachers in how to make independent media popular with
the masses, and how
to deflate the convocatory power of the corrupt
Commercial Media.
For me, as a veteran journalist, I feel like their
student: the
Venezuela Community Media people have showed us a new
way to fight. This is
where Phase II of Zapatismo has popped up and been
developed. Phase III
is coming in Brazil. Narco News will, next year, be
making a major move
to cover the process in Brazil, too, where the
sleeping giant of
América has awakened.


Nessie:  Neither the Bolivarian Circles nor Community
could have
arisen in a vacuum, could they?

Al Giordano: You have to look at these things
historically, how one
process builds on another. We had 13 years of
unchallenged globalization
and then, surprise!, the Mexican indigenous movement
carved out the
stage from which to challenge it. And the final
chapter of that process has
not been written yet. I think 2003 will be a very
interesting year in
Mexico. The guy with the pipe and the pen is beginning
to speak again.
Zapatismo, beginning in 1994, caused a ripple all over
the world,
including in South America.

Consider this: The 1998 election of Chávez in
Venezuela would not have
been possible without Mexico's Zapatismo. Marcos -
with his belts of
bullets, his uniform, and often photographed with a
gun - showed through
his actions and behavior that being a soldier does not
always equal
being "bad" or authoritarian.
His communiqués - remember, it's not just him, he is
the talented and
humorous pen and voice of a group - over the past
eight, coming on nine,
years have been the spear of an educational process.
Suddenly, four
years into that process, in 1998, Chávez pops up with
his red beret and
uniform in Venezuela and, wham!, in Caracas and other
cities we begin to
see the manifestation of what Peter Lamborne Wilson
predicted, back in
1996, would be an "urban Zapatismo."
nessie:  But this past year has different. Things seem
to be coming to
a head.

What changed?

Al Giordano: This past year, three key things
happened:
1. The April coup in Venezuela: It was turned back by
urban Zapatismo
tactics, led from below, by the masses. Chávez was
being held
incommunicado at gunpoint by the coup-plotters. And
here's the fatal flaw in
Gunson's claim that the "mobs" are organized from
above. It was during
those days in April, while the figurehead of the
revolution was cut off
from communication, that the masses first surrounded
the TV stations and
Commercial newspapers - nobody can blame that on
Chávez. He was tied up
at the moment, probably literally.
 For almost 48 hours, nobody, but nobody, in the
English language news
world except for Narco News was predicting his return
to power. All the
"experts" - including many left academics - thought it
would go the way
of Chile 1973. The people - including the primarily
poor rank-and-file
members of the Armed Forces - literally rose up and by
the time he was
restored we were living in a new América, healed,
finally, from the
29-year-old wound of the 1973 Chile coup.
2. Last October, Brazil - clearly emboldened by this
turn of events in
neighboring Venezuela - elected Lula da Silva of the
Workers Party.
Now, Lula is very seasoned. He's been at this for
decades. He and his team
are as ready to govern as any new president in the
hemisphere has been
in modern history. He is a man with a plan. How is it
that he can,
right now, play Bush like a Stradivarius? And he plays
the Euro against the
Dollar to create spaces for Brazil. And he begins to
make, as his first
major move, an open play for a joint currency with
Argentina. And he
doesn't even take office until January!

The seeds of a South American Union are beginning to
sprout.  It was
Chávez in Venezuela who first brought Simón BolÌvar's
dream of a united
Latin America back into the datasphere, the
international public
discourse, as a possibility. And the globalized
economic forces, led
by Washington and Wall Street, have placed him and
Venezuela under a
savage attack.
In order for Lula and Brazil to have the elbow-room to
concretize this
process, the Venezuela process must survive. What do
you think will
happen if Chávez is toppled by coup - whether military
coup or economic
coup or media coup (by coup I mean a non-democratic
imposed solution that
doesn't come from the Venezuelan masses) - from
outside or
above? Lula and Brazil will begin to have to absorb
all the attacks
that currently go toward Chávez and Venezuela. The
Brazilian process is
only possible because Chávez and the Bolivarian
Revolution in Venezuela
survive. If the forces of money and power from above
blast through
Venezuela, they'll march straight into Brazil and
again in Argentina and
everywhere else. That is what is at stake here.
 3. The third big event of 2002 was November's
"surprise" election of
Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez in Ecuador.Again, the positive
military symbol,
exorcising, like Marcos and Chávez before him, the
ghosts of the
military juntas of the late 20th century. And as with
the processes in a
straight line from Chiapas to Venezuela to Brazil to
Ecuador, we see a very
strong indigenous component at every step, and
increased coherency as
it builds.
nessie:  I like your version of the events, Al. Not
being on the ground
there myself, I have to rely on what I hear. So far,
of all of them,
you sound the most trustworthy and clearheaded.
Thanks. I needed that.
Perhaps you would also permit me to avail myself of
your technical
expertise as a professional journalist. recently this:

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/12/1550624_comment.php
appeared on the A-INFOS listserv. Personally, I'm
skeptical, if only
because I've never heard of these people before, and
there are an awful
lot of faux anarchists out there. What do you think?
Al Giordano: Somebody claims to be an "anarchist" and
we have to take
them seriously? What have they ever done? Frankly, I
find it offensive,
since I am one of many who have paid a price again and
again and again
for being a true-to-life anarcho-syndicalist of strong
Situationist
tendencies. But I've gone to jail for it. I've been
sued for it. I've lost
jobs because of it.
This "libertario" group is nothing more than a few
dilettantes who have
never accomplished anything. Serious revolutionaries
and anarchists
down here laugh at them, and suspect their motives.  I
don't think this
group is showing any leadership, intelligence, or
analysis, at this hour
of moral crisis and I can't help but wonder about
their motives.  If
you're in the White House "situation room" and
watching your coup in
Venezuela fall apart, in part because of actions on
IndyMedia like the
hundreds of signatures adding up on DC IndyMedia
against the Bush coup
plot, what do you do? If you're the White House, and
you've failed to
divide the left from the right, you try to divide it
from the left. Don't
you? It seems very transparent to me.
If you'll recall, the same kind of group pops up from
time to time to
attack the Zapatistas in Mexico. It's a standard
element of disinfo
campaigns. It pisses me off, too. How dare these
non-entities use the word
"anarchist" to try and divide us on a basic issue: Are
we for
a coup d'etat or not? Once one makes the decision
that, no, we're not
for a coup d'etat, whatever differences in shades we
have with the
elected government - and of course you, I, and most
other people have
differences with any government!- become irrelevant.
  The issue right now is the coup: yes or no. I
distrust protagonists
like those in this libertarios group who want to
confuse people right
now. In many ways, they are worse than the overt
coup-mongers, because
they are less honest about their true agenda.
And I say that as one who has, in the battles among
tendencies, always
sided with the true anarchists against the statist.
But that is not the
issue at hand in Venezuela today.
 nessie:  So you don't think that post was
constructive?
Al Giordano: I think the post by these so-called
"anarchists," and
their timing, is a cowardly act of aggression against
the progress of all
Latin American social movements right now. If
Venezuela falls to a U.S.
coup, it's going to turn the clock back 30 years in
the entire
hemisphere. We'll be right back in Santiago de Chile,
September 11, 1973.
Pinochet rounded up and shot all the anarchists, too,
you know. Remember
that the Chile coup led to Operation Condor and
military dictatorship
terror in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and
Bolivia among other
places. The cancer spread all the way to Mexico. THAT
is what is being
attempted right now. The people whining about Chávez
today are like those
who whined about Allende in the early 70s
. . . he wasn't politically perfect enough for them.
Well, look what
they got. Chile 1973 wasn't about Allende, and
Venezuela 2002-2003 is not
about Chávez. It's the entire social process in all
América that rides
on this one.
 nessie:  Just as there are more than one kind of
so-called anarchists,
there are more than one kind of real anarchist.
Personally, I don't
think every faction grasps current events with the
same degree of clarity.
What's your take on that?
  Al Giordano: If you put aside some of the personal
bile in Murray
Bookchin's dialectic of "lifestyle anarchism" vs.
"social anarchism," he
in fact made a very good point. There is this kind of
incoherent version
of anarchism that relates more to punk rock (and I
like punk rock, but
that is an aesthetic, not a political, taste), nose
rings, dyed hair
and other superficial fashion statements than it does
to Workers Councils
or Bolivarian Circles.
I mean, I recently got an email from a colleague, the
economic
libertarian Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam who
addressed me as "fellow
anarchist." And Alex of course was joking because he's
not an anarchist and
certainly not an anarcho-syndicalist. The word
'anarchist' is often poorly used. Some other prominent
left
intellectuals have gotten into problems by trying to
define themselves as
anarchists but then backing away from the term. I
don't back away from it. I am
an anarchist, and it goes way beyond my lifestyle
- which, as Flores Magón said, "The true revolutionary
is an illegal
par excellence. The man who adjusts his actions to the
Law can be, in the
end, a good domesticated animal; but not a
revolutionary" - and I guess
after 27 arrests, various border problems and getting
my ass sued by
billionaire narco-bankers I feel very much a
Magonista. You know, he was
an Authentic Journalist, too.
 But anarchist thought and action have to confront the
single biggest
shift of our times in State Power. State Power has
shifted from
governments to economic institutions. I addressed this
on page one of my 1997
work, "The Medium is the Middleman: For a Revolution
Against Media." I
said, basically, that Media has become The State. It
has
supplanted Churches, Governments and even Productive
Industry as Tyrant
Number One on this earth.  After five years of keeping
that document
off the Internet, I finally broke down and published
it last year on
Narco News: http://www.narconews.com/themedium1.html";
And it was the masses in Venezuela surrounding the TV
stations that
convinced me to do that, and also to add some
footnotes with some changes
in my thinking, the major one being that the only
solution right now to
this tyranny of media and economic power is a class
struggle from
below.  The thoughtful anarchist might not use the
same words as I do, and
that's just fine, we're pluralists, but she and he
does recognize that
"The State" is today in a different form than simply
"Government."
Globalization is The State. Money is The State.
Commercial Media is this larger, more powerful, form
of The State's
number one police force.  So the entity that
previously was "The State,"
the governments of formerly sovereign countries, are
now subsidiaries of
that global State.
 And, yes, governments are always horrible. They can't
help themselves,
it is in their genetic coding.  And at this crucial
juncture, some
confused "lifestyle anarchists" who are still stuck in
this outmoded view
of where State Power really lies, can't understand
that in
the larger war against this Globalized Media-Economic
Beast that is
conquesting all life on earth at great expense for the
majority of people,
The State has morphed into a much meaner and more
powerful global
entity.
nessie:  I don't think it's just "life style
anarchists" who
misunderstand where the real power lies on this
planet. A lot of "social
anarchists" also have trouble seeing the strings on
which the governments
dance.  And a lot of what passes for "life style
anarchism" isn't even
anarchism, even when practiced by otherwise real
anarchists. It's nothing
but subcultural chauvinism. It stems from pride, a
mind clouding emotion,
and not from the cold, clear logic of rational
analysis. Other people,
myself for one, say that the dichotomy between "life
style anarchism"
and "social anarchism" is a false one in that it is
self imposed
unnecessarily. We can go beyond "life style anarchism"
without leaving it
behind, much as we can go beyond "anarchist
syndicalism" without leaving it
behind either. We must build on our past, not discard
it arbitrarily.
What do you think? Can modern
anarchists retain our culture(s), of which we are
justly proud, and
still grow as internationalists to the point where our
political analysis
is consistent with the undeniable facts on the ground?
Can we
synthesize what we know already with what we are
learning today? Or is the best
we can come up with is a handful of bohemian enclaves,
scattered across
the globe?
Al Giordano: Hakim Bey was, I think, very unfairly
labeled a "lifestyle
anarchist" by Bookchin. That was very sad, because it
personalized and
cheapened what was otherwise a very solid dialectic -
"lifestyle
anarchism" vs. "social anarchism" - put forward by
Bookchin. Unfortunately,
as ever, personal rivalry got in the way of a cleaner
analysis. But in
the late 1990s, Hakim Bey wrote an essay - I'm sorry,
I don't have it
here in my nomadic newsroom, I've lost or given away
almost every book
I've ever read - I think it was in the last chapter of
his book
*Millennium*, published by Autonomedia. And in that
essay,
Hakim Bey surprised a lot of people by pointing out a
great truth: that
in an age when the State has become this global
economic machine,
previous enemies - religions and governments, among
them - may become tools
that can be used against this larger State.
 I don't expect any interlocutor to be a Saint or
perfect. I like to
find the truth from whomever states it, the part of
what they say that
rings true to me, or that helps me understand the
situation better. And
Bookchin's analysis helped me to understand a
frustration I have with a
certain type of person who calls himself or herself an
anarchist
but ends up being a sap for the ruling class.
  When I used to volunteer at Blackout Books, the late
anarchist
bookstore on New York's Lower East Side, I was shocked
to find that most of
the people who came to committee meetings had not read
the books on the
shelves! I basically volunteered there so I could read
the books for
free. I had no money, no job, I've never owned
property, I had left the
Boston Phoenix, had left journalism, and was trying to
understand and
put words to my instinctual revulsion at what had
happened to journalism
in my lifetime. For me, it was like going
back to school.
 One of the works that definitely changed my way of
thinking was part
of Sylvere Lotringer's Semiotext(e) series:
"Nomadology: The War
Machine," by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Later,
when my girlfriend's
patience ran out and I was homeless and jobless with
$800 to my name and headed to Chiapas, the thinking in
that book was
crucial to helping me understand the Zapatistas. "The
war machine," said
Deleuze and Guattari, "is exterior to the State
apparatus."   nessie:
What, exactly, can anarchists learn from the
Zapatistas?
Al Giordano: The Zapatista Army of National Liberation
(EZLN) is a 'war
machine. It doesn't call itself anarchist, but as many
good anarchists
have observed, it has very strong anarchist
tendencies. At the same
time, the Zapatistas speak of "nation" and carry the
Mexican flag. Their
major battle of 2001 was on behalf of an Indigenous
Rights Law. Despite
the inherent contradictions, this does not generally
upset the
lifestyle anarchists. They still have their Marcos tee
shirts. And good.
 nessie: That's Marcos. What about Chávez?
Al Giordano: Chávez makes some of these people
uncomfortable,
especially when he has taunted the former ruling class
by calling them
"anarchists," some self-described anarchists have
claimed (I think they are
incorrect in thinking it's about them; they're not
exactly at center stage
in Venezuela) that this was an attack on "anarchists."
There is also
(at least in this Libertario magazine bunch) a
transparent willingness to
play along with the former ruling class game. They pop
up at moments
like this to get attention for themselves and
destabilize the situation.
  Hey, when the battle is joined, in times of crisis,
people really
show their true colors. Remember that in Spain the
anarchists fought
against fascism. They didn't claim neutrality during
an hour of moral
crisis!  I have read the "analysis" that this group
claims to offer. It's
quite rote. They claim to offer reporting on what is
going on in
Venezuela, but they're not reporting any news. They
just complain. Somebody
called them "beautiful losers." I'd say that shoe
fits.
  And the arguments they use against Chávez could be
used against
Marcos and the Zapatistas, too: use of uniforms,
national flags, appeals to
government. But the Zapatistas don't upset these types
because, well,
the neoliberals are still in power in Mexico. These
types of "lifestyle anarchists" get most upset about
one thing:
Winning.
That Chávez has won, that he is popular, that really
bothers them. They
are positively insulting toward the poor, toward the
masses. One
professor affiliated with them wrote to me his view
that the poor of
Venezuela had no real political development or
consciousness. Huh? Has he left
his office lately?
nessie:  Are you saying that, win or lose, Chávez is
being driven from
below, by the ordinary working people themselves, that
the Bolivarian
Circles are the wave that is sweeping society, and
Chávez is surfing it?
Al Giordano: The Bolivarian Circles are very similar
to the Workers
Councils of Paris 1968. There's also a Situationist
tendency in some of
what we see in the Venezuelan revolution. One of my
best writers recently
put that word, revolution, in quotation marks, but I
don't. The
surrounding of the TV stations, the confrontation with
"the spectacle,"
Chávez's own willingness to confront the corrupt
Commercial Media and
legalize Community TV and radio, these things are
showing the entire world a
way out of this media mess. I love it.
None of this means I think that a Chávez government or
a Lula
government or a Lucio government or any other
government is all honey over
cornflakes. But the insistence that any movement be
"perfect" or "correct"
is the quickest route to a permanent state of defeat.
What we've seen in
Venezuela is that the government (the classic concept
of the state) has
taken very key actions, like legalizing Community
Media as a
Constitutional right, and smashing to bits the
previous corrupt two-party system,
has opened a space for more anarcho-syndicalist
and self-valorized activity to gain a foothold in
society, where
previously it had none.
 And this is the change that will outlast the Chávez
government. Even
the "squalid ones," the former ruling class, admits
this over and over
again in its discourse: that the damage is already
done and every month
that goes by and these tendencies (non-governmental
tendencies, popular
and cultural tendencies) grow, the door slams on
tyranny from
establishing a foothold ever again.
 nessie:  When I see the army occupying police
stations to keep the
police off the backs of the people, I can't help but
wonder. It's a fairly
mind boggling sight, for a gringo, anyway. How do
Venezuelan feel about
that?
Al Giordano: Today, in Venezuela, the uniformed Armed
Forces build
housing and infrastructure. It's interesting; one of
the key demands of the
'opposition' is to prohibit the army from building
houses! The poor
cheer when the military enters their neighborhoods,
because they're
usually coming to build some houses. Not, like before,
when they came to
round up the dissidents and repress the social
movements.       Chávez's
reform of the military, his purge of the "School of
the Americas" trained
coup-plotters, his opening the spaces for Community TV
and radio, his
political movement's creation of and support for the
Bolivarian Circles,
this, no one can deny, is a revolution by any
standard.  I'm not going
to hold it against him or them that they
did it via an electoral path. To the contrary, the
Venezuelan "war
machine" has drawn a new map for how to navigate
government power to fight
the larger global State. In April, the battle forever
changed the
military. In December, the battle forever changed the
oil apparatus and
economic structure. Next up: the revolution in Media.

 So when Washington or Wall Street or the
multinational oil companies
come, as they do this month, to destroy this process,
there is no
neutral ground for the serious social anarchist. One
either fights against
the coup, or is part of it. The only respectable
anarchist position is to
fight tooth and nail against these coup attempts. Who
was it that said,
"the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who
remain neutral
at times of moral crisis." People who sit on
the sidelines today, make themselves deservedly
irrelevant tomorrow. I
don't want to share a foxhole with people like that. I
say to them,
"see ya across the barricades. I'll be on the side
with the masses."




=====
"Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

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