Re: [Marxism] Russia Draws Closer to Venezuela

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yossi wrote:
>  The interview with Forrest Hylton in Monthly Review
>
>How many errors can  make in one simple article ?.
>
>Monthly Review is not some unknown magazine. It  is the magazine associated
>with the theories Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy  who were apologetics for
>Stalinism a very common attitude among the middle class who considered
>themselves Marxists.

Hylton's politics are not those of the Monthly Review. He is an 
autonomist as this should make clear:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/03/13/leftforum-2006/

At 12PM, I attended a panel discussion on "Evo Morales and the New 
Bolivia" that was organized by North American Congress on Latin 
America (NACLA). It opened my eyes to an emerging ideological 
tendency to invest the Bolivian radical movement with the themes 
present in Zapatista support literature, John Holloway and 
autonomism. I had been obviously aware of the differences between 
people like James Petras, Jorge Martin of the Grant-Woods tendency 
and Gerry Foley on one side (representing varieties of ortho-Marxism 
or ortho-Trotskyism) and enthusiastic supporters of Morales like 
Roger Burbach on the other.

I tended to associate Forrest Hylton, a frequent contributor to 
Counterpunch and Znet and critic of Morales and who spoke at the 
panel, with the "ortho" camp but now see him much more clearly as a 
defender of autonomism rather than Marxism. His frequent allusions to 
"radical democracy" and "the social movements" in past articles might 
have alerted me to this, but I was focused more on his reportage. His 
talk yesterday did not get into these questions, but dealt more with 
the history of Bolivian indigenous resistance going back to Tupac 
Amaru. It was a bit superficial but useful.

It was up to NYU professor Sinclair Thomson to lay out the autonomist 
perspective. Describing himself as a colleague of Hylton (they 
co-authored a Counterpunch article), Thomson described the indigenous 
movement in Bolivia as best seen in terms of the EZLN and/or 
anarchism and as a rejection of "Bolshevism". Hostility toward 
Morales had as much to do it seems with a distrust of the state as it 
did with whether he was willing to nationalize the energy resources, 
etc. In the Counterpunch article cited above, Hylton and Thomson 
recommend the following for Bolivia's indigenous peasantry and workers:

"The Assembly could help redraw state-society relations to reflect 
Bolivia's new historical conditions. It could recognize the enduring 
non-liberal forms of collective political, economic and territorial 
association by which most rural and urban Bolivians organize their 
lives. It could democratize the political relations that throughout 
the republican era have limited the participation of indigenous 
peoples in national political life, forcing them to resort to costly 
insurrectionary struggles."

I would say that it is impossible to truly "democratize?political 
relations" without an insurrectionary struggle, but what the heck, I 
am one of those Brontosaurus Bolsheviks I guess.

During the q&a, I asked Thomson why anybody would try to superimpose 
Zapatismo on the Bolivian mass movement, since the EZLN is basically 
defunct. (I could have also made the point that Cuban doctors from 
the dreaded Bolshevik island are saving the lives of more Chiapas 
babies than anybody from the EZLN, but these conferences frown on 
speech-making.) Thomson simply ignored my question. I don't blame 
him, since he obviously had no answer.

The final speaker, Anibal Quijano, a Peruvian academic and World 
Systems theorist, endorsed the idea of Andean capitalism as put 
forward by Morales's vice president. He hailed the idea of energy 
profits being siphoned off to fund community-based projects.

A word or two about NACLA might be useful in understanding the 
political meaning of this panel discussion, which might not be 
obvious to many of the attendees. Basically, NACLA is hostile to 
state socialism. Although it was formed as a nonprofit research 
institute in the 1960s by young scholars in solidarity with Cuba and 
the guerrilla movements, it has evolved into a combination of State 
Department liberalism and autonomist post-modernism. When Laurie 
Berenson was arrested by the Peruvian cops for supporting pro-Cuba 
guerrillas, NACLA said something like, "tsk-tsk?she should have been 
making better use of her time." God knows what that might have meant. 
Working for a Soros-funded NGO, I suppose. NACLA has also falsely 
accused the FARC of murdering Indians. In the current issue, there's 
a letter complaining about their bias on Cuba. I suppose that NACLA 
is trying to demonstrate its evenhandedness by printing the letter, 
but it would be better advised to adopt a more objective outlook, 
especially in light of Cuba's role in helping to stiffen Latin 
American resistance to neoliberalism today. But that would take a 
different editor and a different board of directors and different 
funding. So, in other words, don't expect any change. 


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