On 22 October, at the age of 96, one of the key figures of liberation theology passed away. Gustavo Gutiérrez was born and died in Lima, Peru. He was a philosopher, theologian and Dominican priest. Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation, published in 1971, remains a pivotal text, not only for Christianity, but for all theological reflection. Faith in the infinite justice of a god and their compassionate and loving solidarity with the downtrodden runs through many religious traditions and movements.
In my youth, I was a liberation theologist. We arrived in Australia exiled from Chile, and at a certain point our family’s lives inevitably became intertwined with the Catholic Church. Not just for food packages and other financial support, but for community and a sense of mission. Far from Latin America, while active in St Vincent de Paul Society as a teenager, I discovered Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Christian mission of liberation.
I was already familiar with many of the radical priests who had emerged in the context of postwar national liberation movements. I especially remember having many conversations as a kid with my father about Camilo Torres, an ordained Colombian priest, communist revolutionary and, together with Orlando Fals Borda, co-founder of the sociology faculty at the National University of Colombia. Torres died in 1966 in combat, as a member of the guerrilla organisation Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army).
By the mid-1960s, the Second Vatican Council had opened the door to a widespread radicalisation among Christian communities throughout Latin America. The effects of this on the church hierarchy were almost immediate. In 1968, the bishops’ Second Episcopal Conference of Latin America recognised poverty and inequality as “institutionalised violence” and sanctified the church’s “preferential option for the poor”.
Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation explored the tensions in Christian theology between spiritualist and rationalist traditions, much as his Marxist contemporaries focused on debating subject versus structure. Gutiérrez drew on the so-called humanist Marxism of intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre to argue for the centrality of the subject. The “preferential option for the poor” was a theological argument for revolutionary praxis:
“The social praxis of contemporary humankind has begun to reach maturity. It is the behaviour of a humankind ever more conscious of being an active subject of history, ever more articulate in the face of social injustice and of all repressive forces which stand in the way of its fulfilment; it is ever more determined to participate in the transformation of social structures.”
Liberation theology was part of the rise of the anti-Stalinist left throughout the continent. It aligned itself with movements that rejected the class collaborationist politics of the old Communist parties and sought to bring to bear the leadership of the working classes. Gutiérrez regarded “developmentalism” as “synonymous with reformism and modernization, that is to say, synonymous with timid measures, really ineffective in the long run and counterproductive to achieving a real transformation”. 
In a sense, and perhaps knowingly, Gutiérrez interpreted the Christian mission through the lens of historical materialism. He understood that “to a large extent due to Marxism’s influence, theological thought, searching for its own sources, has begun to reflect on the meaning of the transformation of this world and human action in history”.
The “preferential option for the poor” was not just a moral or spiritual commitment. Gutiérrez understood class. He concurred with Marx that consciousness is “indissolubly linked to the transformation of the world through work”.
Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation was a revolutionary text, a call to arms:
“Attempts to bring about changes within the existing order have proven futile. Only a radical break from the status quo, that is, a profound transformation of the private property system [and] a social revolution that would break this dependence would allow for the change to a new society, a socialist society ... The goal is not only better living conditions, a radical change of structures, a social revolution; it is much more: the continuous creation, never ending, of a new way to be human, a permanent cultural revolution.”
In that postwar era of revolutions, many of the new left in Latin America, like Camilo Torres, interpreted the “option for the poor” as a calling, not just to guerrilla struggle but to a life lived for emancipation, echoing the words of Che Guevara:
“Vanguard revolutionaries must idealise this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice ... There is no life outside of the revolution.”
Many years after I read Theology of Liberation, I would come across a similar sense of conviction and commitment, written decades earlier. The American communist James P. Cannon never had any time for dilettantes. You cannot visit the revolutionary cause every now and then, descending from the comforts of another class. Revolutionaries must “merge themselves completely” with the working class, turning their “back on the bourgeois world and joining the proletarian revolutionary camp, that is, by ceasing to be a petty bourgeois”.
Capitalism has certainly changed in the last half century, but only now to reveal fully the human and ecological catastrophe it leads to. The sense of revolutionary mission seems as relevant to me as it did 40-odd years ago.
Jorge Jorquera is a Maribyrnong City councillor and member of the Victorian Socialists.

Jorge Jorquera

Gustavo Gutiérrez’s revolutionary mission

This year marks 50 years since the military coup and bloody crushing of the Chilean workers’ movement in September 1973, and the beginning of the Pinochet dictatorship, which lasted until 1990. The dress rehearsal for the 11 September coup happened on 29 June and is often referred to as the Tanquetazo (for the military’s use of tanks).
Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Souper, who a week earlier had been discovered to be part of a coup conspiracy, led a column of sixteen armoured vehicles, including six tanks from the 2nd Armoured Regiment, into downtown Santiago. They encircled La Moneda Presidential Palace and the Ministry of Defence. Just before 9am, the tanks opened fire.
At 9:30am, President Salvador Allende gave a national radio address announcing his decision to defend the government and calling on the workers of Santiago to occupy the factories “and be ready in case it is necessary to fight alongside the [constitutionalist] soldiers of Chile”.
The Tanquetazo signalled the final, decisive turning point in the struggle for power that had emerged since the election of the Allende Unidad Popular government.
Below are abridged translations of declarations from the Movement of the Revolutionary Left between May and July 1973. The MIR was founded during a radicalisation in the mid-1960s and consisted of a range of political tendencies— Miguel Enriquez, the group’s leader, called it a “a bag of revolutionary cats”.
The MIR’s assessment and perspectives best capture the emerging situation in Chile and the challenge before the workers’ movement and the left.
TO FACE THE CIVIL WAR 
Miguel Enriquez, general secretary of the MIR, May 
The fundamental task is to accumulate the necessary mass forces to prevent the civil war. This accumulation of forces can be ensured only through the development of a Revolutionary Program of the People, arising from the discussions of the working class and the masses [pueblo] themselves, in industry, agriculture, housing, education; revitalising, arming and uniting the masses; developing and strengthening mass organisations that, incorporating all sectors of the people, organically allow the working class to exercise its vanguard role over the various layers among the masses, with the perspective of the development of an alternative popular power to the bourgeois order and independent of the government: the Workers Communal Commands.
THE TASKS OF THE PEOPLE AGAINST THE COUP OFFENSIVE 
Public Declaration of MIR, 29 June
[In the face of the Tanquetazo] the masses responded with immediate mobilisation, occupying factories, landed estates, workplaces; driving forward Popular Power through the creation of Workers Communal Commands.
The working class and the masses must now unleash a thorough offensive against the Chilean reactionaries and ultra-reactionaries. The masses have more than enough strength to resolve the crisis in their favour. Only the mobilisation and independent organisation of the workers and determined and immediate combat against the bosses’ and imperialist reaction can definitively defeat this coup attempt and any subsequent attempt. 
The working class and the masses are clear that the current crisis cannot be resolved by forces other than the forces of the working class itself. It is the working class organised in the Communal Commands and the Self-Defence Committees of the Communal Commands that must take control of the local government areas, the neighbourhoods, the cities and the countryside.
That is why we call on the working class and the masses to stay alert and mobilised. To maintain the occupation of the factories, farms and workplaces; reinforcing the Self-Defence Committees and developing the massification and organisation of the Surveillance Brigades. To not give back any of the big companies taken over by the workers and to impose workers’ control on the rest.
The MIR calls for the immediate handover of all factories with more than 14 million escudos [former currency] of capital to the power of the workers, to put into the hands of the workers all large landed estates, to expropriate all the large distributors and warehouses, and that the masses immediately take into their hands the distribution and supply of goods to the population. Close, expropriate and pass into the hands and control of the masses all the radio stations, newspapers and television channels that today are at the service of the coup.
The MIR calls for a vast revolutionary and popular offensive against the enemies of the people, against the bosses’ reaction and the coup. The MIR calls to fight for the People’s Revolutionary Program, a platform aimed at solving the most urgent problems of the masses. To create and strengthen Popular Power, creating Workers Communal Commands in all the local government areas, assuming control and surveillance of the local areas and leadership of the struggles of the working class and the people. To push forward harder than ever with the struggle to replace the bourgeois parliament with the Assembly of the People and to impose the establishment of a true workers’ government.
RADIO SPEECH 
Miguel Enríquez, 6 July
The levels of activity, organisation, awareness and willingness to fight that the working class has achieved are immense: the working class is today a constituted army, determined to fight for their interests and to resist the reactionary onslaught. The working class and the masses from within the factories and landed estates, from the communal commands and from the peasant councils, have given notice to their political leaders that the fight has left the corridors of parliament and that they will not allow setbacks or concessions. It is here and now when the vanguards, the leaders and the parties will be subjected to a trial by fire.
The working class and the masses are not so naive as to fall for the propaganda and wavering; they know they are strong and determined to continue their counter offensive. The workers will not back down, they will not disorganise, they will not abandon the positions they have taken.
It is not necessary to take a step back to take steps forward. The working class and the masses do not need a truce or a respite. It’s the bosses’ class that needs a truce to develop their tactics. Nothing today would be more dangerous and more suicidal than abandoning the positions taken up and to open a truce. That would mean, like it or not, to demoralise, disorganise and divide the working class and fall prey to the bloodthirsty force of the capitalist class.
For all these reasons, the task of revolutionaries and workers is to develop and extend the popular and revolutionary counteroffensive now under way, in a way that allows the working class and the masses to express their strength and fundamentally multiply it.
Let’s take on the call of the Communal Commands of Santiago and promote a national strike that allows us to give a definitive turn to the political situation, that gives the coup leaders notice of the workers’ willingness to fight, that tells the blackmailers that the working class will not capitulate, that they will not return the companies taken over and that they will continue to take up positions in factories and farms. 
Let’s promote a national strike during which we strengthen and multiply the communal commands. Let’s promote a national strike that demands of the government that they carry out, through the direct struggle of the masses, the task of ending private ownership of all the factories with more than 14 million escudos, of all the farms between 40 and 80 hectares, and expropriate the distribution firms and once and for all establish egalitarian and equitable distribution.
The days that are coming will be decisive. The working class and the masses must maintain the positions conquered, and reach for others. The workers must demand a revolutionary and determined leadership, they must reject the backsliding of the vacillators.

Movement of the Revolutionary Left in 1973

My only lasting memories as a young child are associated with the military coup in Chile in 1973. I remember a mixed collection of facts, experiences and emotions. All of them have in common a sense of loss, of being denied a happiness which could have been.
As a child, one of three at the time, I can’t say I knew who Allende was back then. But I do remember the first house we had of our own. It was actually two little prefabricated houses we put up with our grandparents, on some rural land in Melocoton, a small village near Santiago.
These mediaguas, as they were called, were given to many workers and poor by the Allende government. They were four walls and a roof made of heavy cardboard covered with weatherproof paint. We put ours up in Melocoton on some spare land of distant relatives.
Many other Chilean workers and their families did not have such land, but they organised themselves, sometimes armed, to take over land from wealthy landowners and landlords. My father and uncles would sometimes help with such takeovers—assisting families moving in and providing protection from the thugs that landlords hired to evict people.
I remember as a kid visiting some of these urban barrios set up by working people, when we were looking for places to live and set up our mediagua. The houses people put up in a day were always so colourful. I like to think now that these colours represented the happiness people felt when they had a little house of their own.
I remember helping my mum, dad and grandparents put up our little mediagua in Melocoton. We put it right next to a little stream, from which we ran a hose to get our water. I remember how cold it was at nights. The mediaguas did not have a floor; ours had the dirt floor we swept every day and some rugs. Mum used to cover us up in what blankets we had plus newspaper, to try to keep us warm when we slept.
But it was our little house, something like the litre of milk a day that Allende’s government had given to the poor and working people of Chile. Most of all though, the Allende government gave our family and many more something you can’t really understand as a kid, but you can feel it—hope. It came from a sense of power over our destiny—as if we could really shape the world we were living in. We could make things the way we wanted.
It wasn’t going to be easy, though. My dad used to argue with his brothers about it all the time. Two of his brothers were members of the Communist Party and Socialist Party. They both believed that we could change things a little bit at a time, supporting the Allende government to make small reforms while trying to keep the wealthy class of Chile onside.
But my dad and his oldest brother, a member of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), did not agree with their brothers. They believed that the wealthy would do whatever it took, violence included, to keep their privileges. My dad and his brother Tito thought that you needed to smash all the old structures of power in Chile and build a whole new and different society—in which councils of workers could make the decisions, not political parties and the wealthy who backed them.
I remember how much fun it was playing in the backyard of my other grandparents’ house in Poblacion Juan Antonio Rios, in Santiago. I especially recall the great fun we had playing on the big cement tube they had in their backyard. As it turned out, this tube had an important purpose. This is where my uncles hid their weapons and documents when the repression started in the lead-up to and after the coup.
The Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) had a slogan: “Pueblo, Consciencia, Fusil ... MIR, MIR, MIR!” It means “Working people, Consciousness, Gun ...” The MIR believed that to change Chile, working and poor people had to take their destiny into their own hands, organise themselves, become conscious of their own collective power and creative potential and be prepared to fight against the wealthy class, who would not allow working people to build a new equal and just society.
On the day of the military coup, 11 September 1973, like thousands of Chilean workers, my father did not return home from work. We had no idea what would happen to him. In his factory, like in hundreds of workplaces, the workers debated what to do.
His factory had ample supplies of petrol, and some workers argued to use this in an attempt to engage in armed battle with the tanks and soldiers invading the streets of Santiago. Hundreds of thousands of workers heeded President Salvador Allende’s call that morning of 11 September: “I call on all workers to occupy their workplaces ... the people must be alert and vigilant. You should not allow yourselves to be provoked nor to be massacred; but you must also defend your gains”.
In their factories the workers hung on every word from Allende. He told them he would not resign and would pay with his life defending the “Chilean revolution”. The workers waited for direction—how were they to resist? Allende sent a message through his daughter, Tati, to Miguel Enriquez, general secretary of the MIR. “It’s the hour of Miguel”, Allende said.
After that morning, everything changed. We were now living in Santiago with my other grandparents. We couldn’t play or do much. Every night at 6pm the curfew would start. We would hear army sirens and everyone still on the streets would run into their homes, or wherever they could to get indoors. After that, as it got dark, you would hear the gunshots. These were the workers being killed by the Pinochet military regime. These were the workers like Miguel Enriquez, who would not give up their dreams for a better society. They kept fighting. On some days you could see their bodies float by on the river Mapocho, through the city centre of Santiago.
Now everyone was on the run. Three of my uncles were being followed by the military. One of them, Rafael, had been in training to be on Allende’s bodyguard staff. He was at one of Allende’s homes with Allende’s family when the coup happened. They managed to get Allende’s family out. Rafa, as my uncle was and is known, was now on the run.
One night, my dad and another uncle helped Rafael get to the Mexican embassy and jump its walls. I remember trying to visit him at the embassy. They wouldn’t let us in, but I could see hundreds of people in the embassy grounds. It was just packed. Mum told me later that I argued with the soldiers who would not let us in. They made me very angry, and I suppose people like this still do.
I also remember visiting my uncle Tito in jail. Dad told me years later about the day he was caught. Dad was visiting Tito at his workplace—a bank in central Santiago. Tito ignored him and gave him a signal. That’s when dad knew the military were in the bank and had come to get Tito. It was very lucky dad was there. Our family was able immediately to report Tito’s arrest to journalists and foreign authorities. Otherwise Tito might have become one of the many “disappeared”—people who were arrested and never taken to prison but shot instead.
I remember Tito’s jail quite well. To this day, I think I could sketch the detail of the prison walls. I remember also all the little things—handmade jewellery and stuff—that Tito made in jail and sometimes gave us on our visits. My uncle Tito has passed away now, after living in exile in France for three decades. I sometimes think about how much he was tortured in jail and how he never gave the names of any of his comrades. He was like Miguel Enriquez—a fighter to the end.
It took the Pinochet regime over a year to catch up with Miguel Enriquez. Miguel and the MIR leadership had been organising the resistance against Pinochet and his military regime. Pinochet’s brutal secret police, the DINA, learned of Miguel’s whereabouts in late September 1974. Miguel and some other MIR leaders were in a safe house in Santiago.
The military moved in on 5 October, with more than 500 troops, armed vehicles and air support. Miguel and a handful of MIR leaders fought them off in combat. He and the others were able to fight their way out, but he went back to aid a wounded comrade, Carmen Castillo. He was subsequently killed by a grenade, and Castillo was captured.
A year later, and we were also on the move. We could no longer live in Chile. I left my friends behind, some of whom later died fighting in the resistance against Pinochet. I remember when we left Chile, my dad insisted on wearing a red tie and handkerchief—to symbolise his continued support for revolution and his opposition to Pinochet. After that plane trip, I don’t remember much.
This piece was written for my sons Miguel Enriquez and Inti Pablo, on the 40th anniversary of el golpe militar. They are both named after important and valiant fighters for justice and equality: Miguel Enriquez, the leader of the MIR; Inti Peredo, who fought alongside Che Guevara, and Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet and revolutionary who died twelve days after the military coup in Chile.

Recollections of the Chilean coup

Much has been said about COVID-19 and its impact on children. How are they affected and what responsibilities do they and the adults around them have in the context of this historic crisis? I make no claims to any new meaningful health knowledge in this regard, but I do want to say something about the impact of this health and social crisis on the psychology of children and young people.
Like with any crisis that is social, and not always felt immediately at an individual level, there are many ways children, the young and adults can react. One of the most common is some variation of denial and repression. It’s an understandable way of coping. But children and young people are usually more curious than adults – whom life often forces to become professional “deniers”. As they say, ignorance is bliss. Given the individual challenges of living in a capitalist world, this is all pretty obvious.
As children and young people – still learning about the world and how to live in it – the default tends to be to soak in experiences, unless discouraged by the influential adults around you. Again, it is understandable that this is precisely what many families do: shield and shepherd their children from the crises around them.
But should we?
I want to reflect on my own experience and hopefully contribute something to this conversation.
As a child, I experienced a social trauma that engulfed my whole country – Chile in the 1970s. My parents never shielded me from what was going on, either at the time or in the important and formative years that followed. On the contrary, my childhood was dominated by an ongoing conversation about this social and political crisis. And I am extremely confident that I turned out the better for it.
My parents might not have had all the “formal” pedagogical tools that parents get bombarded with in modern parenting bibles, but they did have the simple and very effective approach of treating me like someone who should know and seek out truth. They didn’t just talk about the what, where, when and how; they kept coming back to the “why”.
This is the very least we owe our children, I believe.
This crisis the world is living is not because of some rampant virus. It is not the making of some phenomenon we have no control over. This is a narrative capitalist culture has been pushing on us for decades now – the idea that any such crises are somehow external to society: an alien invasion, a genetic mutation, a freak universe event. We’ve all seen the movies and read the books.
No. Thousands are dying because capitalism kills. No country currently experiencing the pandemic has enough ventilators available for patient care, because health care is a money-making industry and not based on human need. Millions are losing their jobs not because of a virus, but because we work for the profit of companies, not for the wellbeing of society. Capital moves to where it can make money, regardless of what humanity needs – even when those needs are a matter of life and death.
Capitalism is going through a profound crisis. Tens of thousands of people are likely to die, and tens and possibly hundreds of millions will lose their jobs and livelihood. With this will come a new culture of fear and insecurity, and likely a new wave of repression.
But if we fight, and if we make the case, we can set the basis for an alternative. We can start to prepare for the world we need if we are going to save our planet and have a future that is more like a utopia than a dystopia.
This is the conversation children and young people need to be part of. And it’s a responsibility of adults to encourage it.

Getting kids through the crisis

Sunday a week ago, Bolivia experienced a coup orchestrated by the most reactionary forces of the country’s ruling class. The workers of Bolivia will not accept the coup or the rule of those elites who want to reassert their direct, unrestrained dominance in the Bolivian state. What exact power arrangements emerge over the next weeks and months, and the degree to which the political ambitions of these elites can be suppressed, will depend on the ability of the workers’ and social movements to elaborate a political agenda not compromised by the corporatist, social democratic politics of the government that was just overthrown: that of Evo Morales and his political party, the Movement for Socialism, or MAS.
The reactionary violence of the last week bears witness to the words of the French revolutionary Saint Just: Those who make only a half revolution do no more than dig their own graves.
Morales and the MAS rose as a hegemonic national political force on the back of a five-year-long insurrectional wave of popular protest, dating back at least to the Cochabamba Water War of 1999-2000, when the privatisation of a municipal water company led to protests that became a localised uprising. The nationwide, prolonged, very combative struggles against the old neoliberal governments changed the balance of class forces. They drove the ruling class into retreat, drowning out its political voices and creating a political vacuum.
In 2003, the businessman-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was ousted after the bitter conflict known as the “gas wars”. Morales was a prominent figure then. By that time, MAS was already consolidated as an electoral option rather than a party of struggle: it channelled the demands of the movement toward a new redistribution of the national wealth rather than a new order. In 2005, Evo Morales was elected first Indigenous president of Bolivia, and MAS gained a majority in the lower house of parliament.
The program of the MAS did not fundamentally challenge capitalist relations. In fact, in many respects it was weak even compared to the sort of bourgeois-democratic reforms familiar to Latin America’s nationalist governments in the first half of the 20th century. The MAS government pursued “shallow” nationalisations basically imposed larger taxation on multinationals in exchange for stability for their investments, which in Bolivia is an especially rare commodity.
Unlike some of the forgotten nationalist reforms of pre-neoliberal times, Morales did not carry out an agrarian reform of any substance or fundamental reforms in areas like education, where resources and opportunity remained the preserve of the private schools for the elite, despite the construction of thousands of new educational centres. The MAS nationalised only some thirty or so companies, most of which had been state-owned before they were privatised by preceding governments.
But in the context of the prolonged neoliberal theft of all of the resources of Latin America, the MAS government’s reforms did provide a contrast. Instead of managing the surplus for the enrichment of the top 10% of the population and further lining imperialist pockets – like in Chile, where in a similar period 80% of annual growth went to this upper middle class – “Andino capitalism”, to use Vice-President Linera’s ideological characterisation, invested in productive sectors that generated income and jobs. 
According to a report by the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics, the first MAS administration’s reforms managed to redistribute back into the general Bolivian economy an estimated $74,000 million USD, roughly equivalent to twice the nation’s GDP. Over ten years, the MAS government gained $31.5 billion USD from state interests in mining, oil, energy and other companies, compared to $2.5 billion USD during the previous ten years of neoliberal governments. This surplus was then invested through manufacturing, agriculture, construction, tourism and in the services sector, creating some 670,000 jobs.
Over the first two MAS administrations not only did Bolivia’s growth rate outstrip its much larger neighbours such as Brazil: it also managed the highest international reserves in Latin America, low government debt and inflation, and an over 300% increase in average income.
When I visited Bolivia earlier this year, the transformation compared to our visit in the lead up to the fall of Lozada in the early 2000s was palpable. There are roads where before there were none. Public transport in La Paz is now better than in many much richer countries, and worker and pensioner incomes provide an embarrassing contrast to countries like Argentina and Chile, which previously towered over Bolivia as economic examples.
You could say that the MAS administration saved Bolivian capitalism from itself. But this is exactly the fallacy of social democratic thinking: the idea that capitalism can in any way be meaningfully tamed and brought under control. Contradictions can be suppressed or their consequences redirected but only to re-emerge in other ways and usually – especially in an era of long term decline – with more venom.
The redistribution of income expanded domestic demand and buttressed a middle class otherwise severely short on opportunity. Some 3 million people were lifted from the dire poverty typical of Bolivia throughout its history; extreme poverty went from 38.4% in 2005 to less than 15%, and what is referred to as “moderate” poverty decreased from 61% to 34%. Monthly average wages increased from $60 USD to $310 USD.
This redistribution – while undeniably improving the life of millions – recreated the country’s class contradictions along more modern neoliberal forms. In a way, under the MAS, Bolivia experienced a similar socio-economic “modernisation” as Chile, but in a compressed period of time. This was made possible by the social peace the MAS government achieved, restraining class struggle.
The MAS was always a profoundly rural and peasant-based party – moreso than organisations like Ecuador’s CONAEI, which were more built around an Indigenous identity. It effectively used its social weight, and its potent mix of anti-imperialist and Indigenous rhetoric, to smother and co-opt the voices of the urban (and rural) organisations that had previously been at the vanguard of the workers and campesino (peasant) movements.
Over the last decade and a half, the MAS has channelled popular demands and leaders into parliament and used all sorts of privileges, corrupting policies and intimidation to tame and effectively demobilise organisations such as the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), the Single Trade Union Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB), the National Confederation of Indigenous Peasant Women (CNMCIOB), the Indigenous Central of the Bolivian East (CIDOB), the Trade Union Confederation of Intercultural Communities (CSCIB), the National Council of Ayllus and Markas del Qollasuyo (CONAMAQ), as well as many other local and grassroots organisations.
The MAS government was not able to suppress all social protest, coming into conflict over several issues. Land, indigenous and ecological issues have flared up: for example, when Morales attempted to build a resource highway through the forests of the protected native community land of TIPNIS. There have been student protests and demands over education, and dissent over the new coca laws by the cocaleros (coca leaf growers); and the handing over of the Chiquitania (tropical savanna) to Brazilian agro-industrial capital.
The Morales/Linares MAS might have taken some decisions away from the old “Golf Club”, but only at the cost of a corporatism that sought to tame the trade union and other mass organisations, and exclude any social movements and groups that would not bow to its political project, such as some of the miners’ organisations, the “ponchos rojos” and the cocaleros of Los Yungas.
In this way, the MAS government dug its own grave. It raised the economic and socio-cultural expectations of the working and middle classes (urban and rural), tied to the uncertain fortunes of “Andino capitalism”. The middle classes, who benefitted from MAS reforms, have increasingly sensed a decline in these fortunes; fearing such, they have been progressively turning on the MAS, as reflected in election results, where the MAS have dropped support by 20% since the high of the 2009 vote. The most recent elections demonstrate the changing balance of forces: Morales 47%, Mesa 36.5% and Chi Hyun Chung 8.78%. A combined majority for the right and a boost to the most reactionary populist forces, as represented by the religious right, Luis Camacho and the cruceña elite.
Most tragically, the politics of the MAS have undermined the effective political power of the organised Bolivian working class: demobilising, demoralising and depoliticising workers and handing a new influence to the mass media and the right wing (religious and racist) populism they promote.
The timid, misguided and ultimately reactionary response of the COB union federation - who in the face of the right wing claims of electoral fraud called for Morales’ resignation in order to bring “peace” – demonstrates the results of the MAS’s domesticization of the workers movement.
Morales and the MAS, pursuing the same political perspective that got them into this situation, assumed that they could save themselves by leaning on those powers who had granted them some previous license, the Organization of American States and those sections of the national bourgeoisie more motivated by their basic economic interests than their political ambitions. But after a relatively tight election result and seeing the opportunity, the cruceña oligarchy seized the initiative.
The Army’s military command took the cue, calling on Morales to resign: “Given the escalation of conflict that the country is going through and ... after analyzing the conflictive situation, we ask that the president resigns”.
It’s a sign of the political bankruptcy of the MAS, that even with an overwhelming majority of parliament’s both houses, it found itself totally isolated at the critical moment, as the forces of reaction rallied to stage the coup.
The vanguard forces of this coup are made up of the most savage, racist and reactionary elements of the Bolivian ruling class and their vengeful response is already being felt by the indigenous people as a whole and all the frontline campesinos and workers opposing the coup.
While the police and military roll into El Alto, the heartbeat of working class resistance in the outskirts of La Paz, and confrontations lead to deaths in Cochabamba, the MAS is responding with attempts to organise a roundtable dialogue with the opposition, to “bring peace” and call for new elections. “We do not want confrontation, we want peace," said the deputy of the MAS, Betty Yañiquez.
While at the same time the self-appointed new president, Jeanine Añez, has already named a new director of the National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH), Luis Fernando Valverde; with the specific instructions of restoring fuel supplies in regions and areas where worker and campesino blockades have stopped their flow.
At this stage it looks likely that the MAS will continue down the same road that led it here, effectively amplifying the power and influence of the opposition forces and debilitating the forces organising against the coup on the ground.
The workers, campesino and indigenous organisations of Bolivia have long and deep traditions of independent, combative struggle. They will not be left out of the equation in any attempted negotiations and arrangements. Their continuing resistance to the coup and the advance of the reactionary forces will be a determining factor in the days to come. We will not have to wait long for Bolivia’s workers to rise again, and stamp their power on the future of the country.
 
Also on Red Flag: <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6960">Excuse-makers for the Bolivian coup are enemies of democracy</a>

Bolivia's 'Movement for Socialism' and the coup

On the day of the military coup in Chile, 11 September 1973, Victor Jara heard the brief radio transmissions on the Communist Party’s Radio Magallanes. Probably some of Salvador Allende’s final words: “This will surely be the last chance I can address you. The Air Force has bombed the towers of Radio Portales and Radio Corporación. My words have no bitterness, but disappointment ... I can only tell the workers: I will not resign! I will pay with my life the loyalty of the people”.
Victor and his wife Joan exchanged the same realisation hundreds of thousands of workers had been aware of for months: “This seems to be it”. Victor decided to keep his commitment and headed off to the Universidad Técnica del Estado, where Allende had been scheduled to speak at the same event that day. Like most of his Communist Party comrades, and Allende himself, Victor seemed resigned to a political course destined to fail, and at the same time deeply committed to the lives and hopes of Chilean workers. He set off that morning, knowing he too would pay with his life.
Earlier that year Victor had written his last song, “Manifesto”, a testament of sorts: “My song has found a purpose. My guitar is not for the rich. My song is of the ladder we are building to reach the stars. For a song has meaning when it beats in the veins of a man who will die singing, truthfully singing his song”.
Within a few days, rumours were spreading about Victor’s fate. My parents said they had cut off his fingers and forced him to play guitar. Word got out that he had been beaten and tortured, his fingers and hands smashed. Taunted to sing, he let out one last verse, from the song “Venceremos”. I always imagined it was the most rousing: calling on farmers, soldiers, miners, women, students and workers to sow the lands of a socialist future.
Four days after his capture, Victor was murdered. Machine-gunned, his body was found riddled with more than 40 bullets. By chance, he was recognised by workers in the neighbourhood where his body was first dumped. When his body was taken to the morgue, a worker there risked his life to get word out to Joan.
It is a measure of how impervious Chile’s ruling class is to any sense of morality that only last year – 45 years on – in July, eight retired Chilean military officers were sentenced to 15 years for the murder of Victor and his comrade Littre Quiroga.
It is fitting that a year on, Chile’s most significant popular rebellion since the early ’70s has made Victor Jara one of its cultural beacons.
Like most of the membership of the Communist Party he joined, Victor came from humble roots. He was born to a peasant family in southern Chile and was already working the land by the age of six. His mother, a self-taught musician, encouraged his education. After her death when he was 15, Victor studied accounting but soon moved to a seminary to join the priesthood, where he lasted only a couple of years before becoming disillusioned with the Catholic Church. He later joined the University of Chile Choir in Santiago, and subsequently the university’s theatre program.
Victor, the actor, theatre director, poet, songwriter, musical director and singer, encapsulated the rich cultural explosion that accompanied the revolutionary yearnings of the Chilean working class.
In 1965, while their already well-known mother, Violeta Parra, was exhibiting in Paris, the siblings Angel and Isabel formed the Peña de los Parra, much more than a venue at 340 Carmen Street in central Santiago. The idea was to encourage the folk arts, which were hidden from the screens, radios and venues of the mainstream. By 1967, Peñas were sprouting all over Chile.
One weekend in the winter of 1966, Victor was at a Peña in the port city of Valparaiso, near Santiago. He was called over to a table with Eduardo and Julio Carrasco and Julio Numhauser. These three bearded young men formed the beginnings of Quilapayún (meaning “three beards” in the Mapuche language). Together with Sergio Ortega, Quilapayún would go on to compose one of the most emblematic songs of the Chilean revolution, “¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!” (The people united will never be defeated!) The three beards convinced Victor to become their musical director, which he did between 1966 and 1969.
By the late ’60s, the young musicians emerging from the radicalising university campuses were beginning to understand the importance of fusing their ideas and talents with the growing workers’ movement. Victor, who had joined the Communist Party in the first half of the decade, and whose roots and life experience made him especially sensitive to the hopes of the toiling classes, was well positioned to provide leadership to the emerging young artists. 
Victor argued for a revolutionary cultural propaganda, believing neither that middle class artists could bring “culture” to the masses, nor that political art was simply about reflecting working class culture as it was. As Joan Jara said, Victor “believed that a true popular culture took time to mature and an artist should be less concerned with producing the transcendental work, than with being a kind of craftsman whose work would be as useful as a nail in making a house or a drop of oil to make a machine run smoothly”.
Victor saw the artist’s role as a pedagogue and organiser: “In every place where we perform, we should organise and, if possible, leave functioning a creative workshop. Our job is to give [people] what belongs to them – their cultural roots – and the means of satisfying the hunger for cultural expression”.
In 1968 the Communist Party Youth founded the Discoteca del Cantar Popular, which soon became an important album label. By the late ’60s, young groups like Quilapayún and Inti Illimani – with whom Victor established close ties and a special affinity – were no longer performing just for Peña audiences of the progressive movements. Trade unions were inviting them to factories, protests and celebrations.
In July 1969, at the Universidad Catolica, the first Festival de la Nueva Canción Chilena [New Song Movement] was organised. The festival’s best song prize was awarded to two songs, one of them being Victor’s “Plegaria a un Labrador” (Prayer to a labourer):
Rise up and look at your hands,
to grow, hold it out to your brother.
Together we will go united in blood, 
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
Victor was a product not only of Chile’s class struggle but also of the worldwide radicalisation. His “El derecho de vivir en paz” – now sung by thousands in Chile’s current protests – was written as a tribute to Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese revolution. His “El Aparecido” – which caused some disquiet among the Stalinist Chilean Communist Party – was a comment on the important example of Che Guevara and the Cuban revolutionary experience.
As part of the global cultural rebellion, and of the Chilean New Song and its many associated trends in the arts, Victor helped give expression to some of the most advanced thinking about the political role of artists. He argued that “the commercialisation of so-called ‘protest music’ and the creation of ‘idols’ of protest music who obey the same rules and suffer from the same constraints” meant that “the term ‘protest song’ is no longer valid because it is ambiguous and has been misused. I prefer the term ‘revolutionary song’”.
He lived, performed and sang among the revolutionary workers of Chile, and he died alongside them also. His last poem, written in the Estadio Chile, shared in the agony of Chilean workers and called out in hope of a new day:
Suddenly my conscience awakes and I see that this tide has no heartbeat, only the pulse of machines and the military showing their midwives’ faces full of sweetness.
We are ten thousand hands which can produce nothing.
How many of us in the whole country? The blood of our president, our compañero, will strike with more strength than bombs and machine guns!
So will our fist strike again!

The legacy of Victor Jara, Chile's martyred musician

National Assembly speaker Juan Guaidó swore himself in as Venezuela’s interim president on 23 January and was duly recognised by all and sundry right wing governments in South America. Jair Bolsonaro and Iván Duque, who head two of the most reactionary governments, in Brazil and Colombia, have joined the Trump administration in the US and Venezuela’s right wing, to bring down the government of Nicolás Maduro.
Democratic and left forces worldwide must lend every effort to oppose the imperialist intervention and help give Venezuelan workers every chance to bring their might to bear on the government and crush the opposition’s coup attempt.
What began to unfold as a revolutionary process in Venezuela more than two decades ago, and which reawakened the dignity and consciousness of Venezuelan workers, is now threatened with a reactionary conclusion.
The clamouring of the opposition and inflammatory speeches by foreign diplomats are nothing new, surprising or especially worrisome. Venezuelans have seen it all before. The right wing opposition has had imperialist support since at least the beginning of the new millennium. In fact, imperialism has waged a low intensity conflict in Venezuela since 2002. Trump has been no more bullish to date than the previous US president, Barack Obama.
There is now, however, a significant difference.
In 2002, coup plotters confronted a working class uniquely unshackled by reformist politics and growing in consciousness and combativeness. The April coup against popular president Hugo Chávez was defeated by a radicalised mass movement; the government turned left and a period of revolutionary gains was inaugurated.
Today, after several years of retreat, defeat, political compromise and ideological mystification, Venezuela’s working class is disarmed, demoralised and saddled with a political leadership that has not untangled itself from the insidious capitalist bureaucracy of which the Maduro government is a puppet.
The links between the vanguard elements among the class struggle unions and organisations and the mass of the Venezuelan working class have been massively strained by years of economic hardship and a government that, while claiming the mantle of Chavismo, has dismantled much of Chavez’s extra-governmental political infrastructure and increasingly leans on a policy of concessions to capitalist interests and patronage of the military’s high ranks.
Events over the last year are reminiscent of Salvador Allende’s final months as president of Chile in 1973. His government, instead of mobilising and organising the working class, sought increased compromise with Chile’s capitalist forces and the military high command. Only days before the 11 September coup, general Augusto Pinochet was declaring his loyalty to Allende’s government.
Following what was a likely assassination attempt on Maduro in August, and with rumours of new destabilisation plans by the right wing opposition and the US, Maduro tried to combat the economic and political crisis by further conceding to capitalist interests and trying to win favour with potential foreign investors. 
In October, the government announced its “Guidelines for Implementation of Labour Agreements Within the Framework of the Program for Recovery, Growth and Economic Prosperity”. Faced with continued hyperinflation, major shortages fabricated by capitalist hoarding and growing impoverishment, the government’s plan amounted to a set of measures and recommendations to restrict wage growth and water down existing labour agreements. 
The Guidelines emerged from government consultation, which, according to most – including sections of the left that have given conditional support to Maduro, such as the Venezuelan Communist Party – involved no one outside the inner government circles and presumably various capitalists. The government justified its new labour policies with the familiar language of “redistribution” and talk of groups of “privileged workers”.
These policies come on the back of Maduro’s dismantling of the public distribution network for foodstuffs, created by Chavez following the 2002-03 capitalist oil lockout. Rather than democratise the control and administration of these services, which like all government operations have been plagued by corruption and inefficiency, Maduro has handed many of their functions to private operators.
Attempts to restructure the administration of the 700 state enterprises have done nothing to undermine the proto-capitalist state bureaucracy, the so-called boliburguesía. Maduro’s continued attempts to use the state to lever the workings of the market have proved even more disastrous than they were for Allende: being ineffectual in curbing capitalist hoarding, capital flight and generalised economic subversion, while bloating a bureaucracy already engorged on petrol dollars and hostile to democracy and working class power.
Just as Allende refused to enlist the power of the Cordones Industriales – the industrial belts controlled by workers – and tried instead to appease capitalist firms with various guarantees, Maduro has been nurturing the re-privatisation of political spaces brought into the public sphere. This includes new agreements regarding the all-important state oil company PDVSA. Both PDVSA and the conglomerate of companies controlling important mineral and hydroelectric production in the state of Guayana – the Empresas Básicas de Guayana – are administered by a nepotistic bureaucracy and directed by government and reformist union officials whose responsibilities often overlap with management.
Much like Allende and more recently Lula da Silva in Brazil, the Maduro government has retained a set of social policies to provide a safety net for the most vulnerable sections of the population. However, the impact of such policies is greatly limited by the crisis of the economy, including growing shortages of skilled labour and collapsing social services. In the current context, such policies prove especially moribund, substituting for a political strategy based on working class mobilisation, and leaving the strategic initiative in the hands of the political forces that represent not just big capital but also the middle classes. 
The latter, increasingly desperate to cling to their privileges, are driven into the hands of the most reactionary political forces. The Venezuelan opposition, like the forces that rallied around Bolsonaro against Lula, reflect this far right. The likely vicious campaign of victimisation that a Guaidó government would carry out is a significant factor that may yet mobilise enough forces to defeat the coup leaders and their imperialist backers. 
Already the opposition has been unleashing its brown shirts and creating violence in the poor and working class neighbourhoods to spread fear.
Maduro is pinning his hopes on the backing of the military high command, which for now remains loyal. However, unlike Chavez, Maduro has not prioritised the politicisation of the army’s ranks, instead offering financial and political privileges, leaving the middle ranking officers especially vulnerable to imperialist bribes and threats. If they sow such doubts and fear, this may well spill over to the generals.
As the general secretary of the Chilean Movement of the Revolutionary Left, Miguel Enriquez, observed of the downfall of the Allende government, it “imprisoned itself in the bourgeois order … with the hope of achieving an alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie, it didn’t base itself on the revolutionary organisation of the workers, on their own organs of power. It refused an alliance with the soldiers and junior officers; it preferred trying to fortify itself within the capitalist state apparatus and the officer corps of the armed forces”.
Few expected the combativeness of Venezuelan workers that defeated the reactionaries in 2002. If they can rise again, it may give the Venezuelan left the chance to reorient and rebuild the organisations and movements that can challenge the corrupt and reformist forces that control the Maduro government.

The battle for Venezuela

The notion of lifelong learning is now ubiquitous. In the Golden Age of capitalism – the decades following the Second World War – middle class dreams were couched in terms of material gain, mid-life affluence and early retirement. Today, middle class illusions rest on the promises of education, reskilling and lifelong learning.
Privatisation has expanded the education market and the teaching industry. As profits have grown, so has the integration of education with other industries and products, especially media, entertainment and consumer technologies.
This dynamic has fostered a new education ideology, driven by the culture of corporatisation and increasingly fanned by communications technology, which, like all inventions under capitalism, has been progressively gutted of its democratic potential and honed to sell products and profitable services.
In the education market, the consumer spotlight is on students, not as agents of social progress and change as they were 50 years ago in the streets of Paris, but as paying customers. 
For a student who learned to read with phonics, sat countless school exams, pays tens of thousands for a university course and works 20 hours a week while doing a degree, education is a very functional endeavour. This student-customer demands a “quality educational product” – delivered efficiently and guaranteeing success in the labour market.
The education industry peddles this “demanding customer” as the model student and a driver for promoting an education product built to comply with all the right market specifications: work-ready, adaptable, entrepreneurial.
The time-poor customer-student is focused on assessment. They don’t need “old fashioned” teachers, but instructors who can help them “navigate” their careers rather than challenge them to think deeply and critically. This education product may not even need much human interaction. Online courses and automated marking may soon restrict teachers to video presentations.
This is all glossed up with the liberal language common to the new education gurus. Students are “empowered” by learning being put in their hands.
But if you’re a teacher who believes that empowerment is about challenging students to engage with the world and the big ideas that shape and change it, then you don’t need to flip the classroom, you need to flip the system and fight to increase students’ contact with you, with each other and with the communities they are part of.
A good teacher needs to slow things down. In today’s world, where students are forced to rush from task to task, browser tab to browser tab, there is probably no better advice a teacher can give than Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s: “Don’t spread yourself too thin!”
“I can only advise them not to hurry, not to spread themselves thin, not to skip from one topic to another, and not to pass on to a second book until the first has been properly read, thought over, and mastered.”
Here is the crux of the matter: only through in-depth, systematic and meticulous study can we grasp connections and dynamics. And only as we do this can we come to know and understand “how to study and learn”.
“In the ideological sphere, just as in the economic arena, the phase of primitive accumulation is the most difficult and troublesome”, wrote Trotsky. 
“And only after certain basic elements of knowledge and particularly elements of theoretical skill (method) have been precisely mastered and have become, so to speak, part of the flesh and blood of one’s intellectual activity, does it become easier to keep up with the literature not only in areas one is familiar with, but in adjacent and even more remote fields of knowledge, because method, in the final analysis, is universal.”
There is something we need to add to Trotsky’s advice, which, given his audience and his era, he would have taken for granted. You cannot learn without opinion and argument. We can thank Socrates for making this obvious.
We might say that the dialectical method is innate in human existence. We are social beings and when we engage – which capitalism does its utmost to discourage – we learn through the clash of ideas and perspectives. 
The best learning environment is a community of debate, where teachers encourage and challenge their students, as Brazilian educator Paulo Freire said, to the point of being uncomfortable.
How else could you possibly have “deep learning”? To see not only what is, but also what has been and what could be, requires a “restless pursuit” of knowledge.

How much can you learn in a neoliberal education system?

A good case can be made for Latin America being both the birthplace of neoliberalism and where the first shots were fired against it. Chile became the laboratory for neoliberal thought on the back of the crushing defeat of the working class in September 1973. A decade and a half later, the Venezuelan working class put neoliberalism on notice. Like the 1948 Bogotazo in Colombia, the Caracazo ushered in a wave of working class struggle that, after more than 8,000 major protests, led to the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998.
The street democracy of the newly organised workers found political representation in the Movimiento V [Quinta] República (MVR), established in 1997 as an electoral outlet for the Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario 200, whose central leader, Chavez, originated from the profoundly democratic aspirations of a generation of junior officers drawn from the poor masses.
Chavez’s government was radicalised from below and forced to make choices from above. It was progressively isolated by the international capitalist class and the especially parasitical Venezuelan bourgeoisie and its social democratic allies, Acción Democrática and the Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela. Nationalist and democratic aspirations, rooted in the plebeian masses, increasingly came into conflict with the social and political forces of Venezuelan capitalism. The election of the Constituent Assembly and adoption of the new Bolivarian Constitution in 1999 set the government on a collision course, further politicising Chavez, many of his MVR supporters and the proletarian elements in the military. In November 2001, Chavez’s government introduced 49 “revolutionary” laws that struck at the heart of Venezuelan capital: in particular, the distribution and ownership of land and other natural resources and control of oil production and rents.
A period of revolutionary possibility opened up, but it did so in conditions characterised by a working class still raw in political experience and saturated in the politics of clientelism. This was not Chile in 1970, where, despite the weight of Stalinism, tens of thousands of workers were organised in class conscious political organisations and where the struggle created a vanguard layer of the working class contesting for ideological and political leadership.
While commentators such as Marta Harnecker have hailed the “the growth of the revolutionary subject” in Venezuela, it is precisely the stunted growth of this subject that has been the key characteristic and limitation of the revolutionary struggle. 
The militant class organisation and action of the working class have been decisive at key points – most notably in defeating the 2002 coup and capitalist lockout – but have not managed to build a “political instrument” rooted in its class interest.
An important accumulation of class struggle experience occurred between April 2002 and 2006, which Chavez himself sought to consolidate by disbanding the thoroughly corrupt and discredited MVR and regrouping the more radical elements in forming the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV). The new party and its massive membership may have sidelined some of the old bureaucratic swamp of the MVR, but it incorporated new parasitic elements, fanned the culture of clientelism and did nothing to cohere those in the vanguard. Eight months after the founding of the PSUV, the Chavez government lost the referendum for further constitutional change.
A period of stalemate ensued. On the one hand, the working class and poor in Venezuela continued to grow in class consciousness, bolstered by the impact of the social, economic and democratic reforms of the Chavez government and radicalised also by the actions of a capitalist class acutely aware of the stakes. There was an extraordinary, rich experience of social and political organisation at the base: Venezuelan workers begun to take on aspects and elements of state-type control and administration in health, education, telecommunications, urban land management and numerous centres of production, distribution and public services, involving millions. The solidarity, confidence and combativeness of workers grew massively. 
On the other hand, this process often remained reliant on the patronage of the government and hostage – directly and indirectly – to a capitalist state bureaucracy. The political consciousness and organisational capacity of the advanced sections of the working class were not enough to meet the challenges of regular new government initiatives and the influx of raw and newly organised workers into the revolutionary process.
While defeats in 2002-03 set back the capitalist class, the Chavez government was encouraged to continue extending the Bolivarian hand into the old state and rolling out the agenda of “21st century socialism” through government initiative. 
Pursuing a political strategy anchored on electoral contests and dependent on the political power afforded it by its capacity to redistribute oil rents, the Bolivarian revolution was subjected to a constant and heavy bureaucratic pull. For every old bureaucrat quashed, there emerged a new one; for every old corruption, a new type.
By and large, the historic authority of Chavez and his loyalty to the more radical aspects of the Bolivarian process, favoured the vanguard elements. But with Chavez’s death, coinciding with the collapse of oil prices and a general downturn in the continental struggle against neoliberalism, the Venezuelan bourgeoisie seized on its best chance to date.
The context provided the Venezuelan capitalist class the opportunity to wage an especially vicious economic war and to use a new wave of terror to break the resolve of the less conscious working class forces and those middle class sectors that had backed the government.

Venezuela, unfinished revolution

In the days to come, Fidel will be remembered and praised among workers and youth throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe. In Miami, among the same proto-fascists that helped get Trump elected, he will be mocked and vilified.
I have a number of family and friends whose revolutionary careers managed them a photo opportunity with Fidel; they hang higher than any crucifix. I also have family who “escaped” Allende’s Chile for the United States and whose Cuban friends think Castro ordered the assassination of everyone from Camilo Cienfuegos to Kennedy. One thing is for sure, Fidel will be remembered.
I consider myself fortunate to have lived for a short while in Cuba. In 1999, we arrived on the eve of a massive protest calling for the return of Elian Gonzalez. In 2002, we returned for a longer stay. We attended many more such mobilisations and we met with all sorts. I will probably never see a May Day like the one I was part of in Cuba. I have yet to meet the sort of teachers and doctors I talked with in Cuba, willing to go anywhere in the world that could do with their help.
I will never get the chance again to meet the revolutionaries I met there from the world over. Unlike Fidel, many of these will be forgotten, exiled for life, wanted by right wing governments and abandoned by history. Like Fidel, many of these revolutionaries emerged from a generation that has yet to be replicated. Like Fidel, these revolutionaries represent an anger and rebellious spirit too much of the contemporary left has abandoned. Like Fidel, they should be remembered because, as Brecht most eloquently said, “Those who are weak don’t fight. Those who are stronger might fight for an hour. Those who are stronger still might fight for many years. The strongest fight their whole life. They are the indispensable ones”.
For a global left with no living memory of socialist revolution, we would do best to remember Fidel not for the state he presided over but for the revolutionary epoch his voice echoed.
In the Americas, there is no doubt: 26 July 1953 opened the door. Everything before that date was a story of retreat, defeat and betrayal. The Soviet aligned communists of the first half of the 20th century are not remembered fondly by many living workers. These were the years when communists forgot how to make revolutions. As he did in the Second Declaration of Havana, Fidel reminded them: “The duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution. It is known that the revolution will triumph in America and throughout the world. But it is not for revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by”.
We may debate the limits and contradictions of the Cuban revolution, but the force of its example is crystal clear. It inspired a whole generation of Latin American revolutionaries to forge their own path, to believe in the power of ordinary people against the power of capital and to commit themselves in the spirit of Fidel’s cry, “socialism or death”.
Just as Che and Fidel called for two, three and many Vietnams, we could do with two, three and many Cubas; not because it’s a model of socialism, but because its people have shown it to be a model of resistance, struggle and the power of historical perspective and ideals. Capitalism has not proven to be the end of history, but it has proven remarkably successful at blurring historical memory. Even among us revolutionaries, impressionism too often prevails. For all their mistakes, Fidel and the Cuban revolution have never wavered from the long view of history.
This has made Cuba the living example of idealism – the dream that history has much better to offer than what it has so far delivered. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said of Fidel, “I believe he is one of the greatest idealists of our time … he has the nearly mystical conviction that the greatest achievement of the human being is the proper formation of consciousness and that moral incentives, rather than material ones, are capable of changing the world and moving history forward”.
We cannot wait for the economic corpse of capitalism to pass by; we must put our shoulders to the wheel and fight to put an end to business as usual.
Comandante Fidel, Hasta la victoria siempre!

Gustavo Gutiérrez’s revolutionary mission

Movement of the Revolutionary Left in 1973

Recollections of the Chilean coup

Getting kids through the crisis

Bolivia's 'Movement for Socialism' and the coup

The legacy of Victor Jara, Chile's martyred musician

The battle for Venezuela

How much can you learn in a neoliberal education system?

Venezuela, unfinished revolution

Fidel

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