1. In the preparatory notes for his Book of Passages, Walter Benjamin referred to the overcoming of the concepts of decadence and progress as two sides of the same coin. As for the latter, his critique was directed specifically at the “bourgeois way of thinking.” Under its influence, the concept of progress “lost many of the critical functions that had characterized it from the outset.” It ceased to be used “as a yardstick for measuring specific historical changes” and instead began to “measure the distance between a legendary origin and a legendary end of history.”1
In his “Theses on History,” Benjamin establishes a connection between the rise of fascism and the “stubborn faith” of social democratic politicians in this concept of progress, their confidence in their “mass basis,” and “their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus.” He writes this at a time when those very politicians, “in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause.” Consequently, he expressly sets out to “disentangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them” (X).2
Benjamin seeks to unshackle what he considers the “depository of historical cognition,” which is none other than “struggling, oppressed class itself” (XII). For in order to fight, one must escape the snares of “conformism” in which social democracy feels so at home, glorifying labor and “technical progress” while setting aside the exploitation of the working class. For social democratic politicians, what matters is “progress in the mastery of nature, not the regression of society,” thus foreshadowing the “technocratic features later encountered in Fascism” (XI).
In short, social democracy embraced the idea that “progress… was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and knowledge).” Furthermore, “it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind.” Finally, progress was “irresistible.” Thus, it became trapped in a conception of humanity’s movement through history as “progression through a homogenous, empty time.” (XIII).
2. Ours is not a decadent era, in the sense that what defines it is not what is separating us from a future of progress. That said, it is equally true that the very concept of progress that was the target of Benjamin’s critique informs and structures the discourse of politicians in general. US imperial discourse about Venezuela speaks of three phases (stabilization, economic recovery, political transition). The discourse of the Venezuelan ruling class speaks of “a process of political, economic, and spiritual change through structural reforms for the rebirth of Venezuela, for the rebirth of our nation, for the rebirth of our people.” The second discourse amounts to a “free version” of the first, as free as one can be in a country that has ceased to be independent.
It is a discourse that, in the name of “a just and lasting peace, with dignity for all parties,” empathizes not with the nation, not with the people, not with the oppressed class that is fighting, but with the victor. If “all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them,” continued Benjamin, then “empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers” (VII). “To the victor belongs the spoils,” Donald Trump repeated during the United Nations General Assembly, referring to Venezuelan oil.
But that is not the only imperial spoils. Trump, like Netanyahu and his accomplices, paraded through the UN as if in a “triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession.” For Benjamin, these spoils “are called cultural artifacts,” which “owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” (VII). When the oppressed class fights, it does so “for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist.” When the people fight, these latter things are no longer “spoils which fall to the victor” in the form of culture, but “manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude.” (IV). Trump at the UN declared that he is “working closely with the leaders of Venezuela to forge a much better future for the Venezuelan people.” He asserted that the military aggression of January 3 demonstrates that “the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western hemisphere,” effectively threatening to use his “military might.” His intention was thus to show off the spoils, namely the pitiful status quo of a nation that, fearful and bereft of self-confidence, has accepted the conditions imposed by the empire. It will not be the first time that a document of barbarism has used the “better future” of a people as a trap.
3. Our time is not homogeneous and empty, as the narratives of the boastful and menacing victors, or the weak-willed conformists, would have us believe. But certainty is of little value if we are unable to draw the appropriate practical conclusions. For it is also true that this narrative, as we have already seen, paves the way for the rise of new forms of fascism or, as it is often called today, the far right. Let us not feign surprise: “The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical,” Benjamin asserted (VIII).
The story that progress or a “better future” is just around the corner – or its more conformist version promising the lesser evil outcome given the circumstances — is falling apart at the seams. But that’s not enough. Donald Trump’s cynical remark that “The people are happy; they’re dancing in the streets,” made just hours after the June 24 earthquakes, was countered weeks later by a Venezuelan woman during a protest in Cojedes State over constant power outages: “Tell President Donald Trump that this is how we Venezuelans dance.” However, it is very likely that such a display of dignity will not be enough to prevent the announced privatization of the electrical system, which is being touted as a panacea.
Perhaps as a reaction to the fact – which some find impossible to accept – that the ruling class has remained in power since January 3, the phrase “twenty-seven years of tragedy” has become commonplace, often accompanied by the naming of culprits. Detractors would reduce the Bolivarian Revolution to a homogeneous, empty span of time, only in this case, a time of prolonged decline. A temporal oxymoron: an endless snap of the fingers. A time without incidents, without disruptions, without turning points. A continuum of tragic events. A time without happenings.
4. But the truth is that the Bolivarian Revolution disrupted the continuum of history, insofar as it saw the popular classes take center stage in the struggle. In reality, it marked a temporary interruption of the catastrophe.
5. This is as true as the fact that our time is not homogeneous and empty, but rather saturated and overloaded. It is a time in which various times coexist: it is the slow time of the popular classes and the dizzying time of the counterrevolution, which is advancing by leaps and bounds, legally sanctioning the reversal of the progressive changes of the revolutionary past. It is the time of Caracas full of neon signs and the suspended, dark time of the rest of the country. It is the time of the chosen few and the time of the invisible majority. It is the time of the privileged and the time of those left to fend for themselves.
It is no coincidence that we so often feel as though time stands still, as if waiting for the many discordant timelines to converge. Benjamin noted, “Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.” At times, when passing through a “configuration pregnant with tensions,” thought “suddenly stops” (XVII). However, this is not something that happens overnight. It would be easier to adopt the grandiloquent tone of moral judges. Instead, faced with “a constellation of dangers that threatens both what has been handed down through tradition and its recipient,” critical historiography “must demonstrate its fortitude.” It is the tradition of the oppressed that is under threat. The continuum of history is that of the oppressors, while the tradition of the oppressed is its discontinuum. The danger is “becoming a tool of the ruling classes.” It falls to us “to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.” (VI).
Our purpose is to reclaim the memory of the Bolivarian Revolution just “as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” (VI). There was a time when the mere mention of Chavismo posed a threat to the ruling class and was therefore treated as a virtually unspeakable phenomenon. Today, with the continuum of history restored, the victor uses Chavismo to label everything that is decadent. Calling everything Chavismo in order to reduce it to nothing. Incidentally, it should be understood that there is no point in celebrating the current catastrophe in the name of Bolívar, Chávez, and Chavismo itself.
However, an analysis limited to the question of the efficacy or lack thereof of these narratives is not enough. While this is certainly relevant, it is entirely insufficient if, as we have already noted, we fail to draw practical conclusions from them. Perhaps the most important of these conclusions is that these are narratives that, at best, attempt to convey a reality that is very difficult to represent. For many reasons: because this is a society that has experienced successive and enduring traumas over the past decade; because we are living in an era of profound crisis in political representation, which manifests itself not only as a loss of trust in politicians, but primarily as a steadfast reluctance on the part of the popular classes to embrace identities that no longer speak to them, since those identities long ago ceased to express their interests; because being part of a nation that has lost its independence won through blood and fire more than two hundred years ago is a circumstance that borders on the unassimilable. As has rarely been the case in our history, and perhaps never before, this set of circumstances has produced what Bolivian Marxist thinker René Zavaleta Mercado defined as “a state of ideological vacancy, that is, a void in the representation of the world.” Put another way, “there is an ideological shift of massive proportions; that is, there is a radical upheaval, and, for a moment, the masses are left with an empty soul.”
6. The image is undoubtedly powerful, and the question is obvious: What representation of the world will fill that void? It is at this point that Walter Benjamin’s warning flashes like lightning in our present time: the success of fascism lay in answering the call to fill that void in the soul of the German people. But we have also seen that, for Benjamin, the rise of fascism was far from inevitable. Nothing could be further from his conception of history. On the contrary, his purpose was to provide the oppressed class with the keys that would enable it to free itself from the snares of conformism. There are always alternatives. Zavaleta Mercado’s image can be effective in grasping reality only if one understands that the soul of a people is not a vessel. It may be available or, to use Zavaleta Mercado’s own expression, it may be in a state of “ideological availability.”
Therefore, there is no such thing as the empty soul of the Venezuelan people: it is vacant in the sense that it experiences a void in its representation of the world, in this case, due to ideological saturation. Ours is a heavy time. As in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, our popular classes are traversing a desert, like beasts of burden, carrying the full weight of established values. The Venezuelan people need to lighten their load. They need to rediscover themselves. Nietzsche wrote about the three transformations of the spirit: it becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion a child. The camel is the beast of burden, the lion is freedom, and the child is a new beginning.3 There is no version of the dominant narrative that does not offer the latter: a “better future,” a Venezuela reborn. It is a narrative that finds no resonance because the reality of the popular classes is a desert. Because the Venezuelan people continue to bear the entire burden. Because there must first be freedom for there to be a new beginning.
It will become clear why the popular majority considers the debates that currently distract minority political groups – which, all such groups are without exception – to be a waste of time: because they view them as an additional burden. There will be no politics with revolutionary efficacy and quality until what is happening at the very core of the people’s soul is fully understood.
7. In his German Meditation, Mariano Picón Salas, the great Venezuelan essayist, left an account of his time in Germany under fascist rule: “German intemperance and excess, their dark, aimless tenacity, a sort of persecutory psychosis, permeate every possible public manifestation of the Nazi spirit.” He turned to none other than Nietzsche to provide the necessary contrast to that almost indescribable reality: “It was in the last third of the nineteenth century when the cannons that had thundered at Sedan, the complacent comfort of the bourgeoisie, scientific materialism, and the illusion of a popular culture lulled European man into a dream of false power. Coated in the grease of his vulgar optimism, credulous in indefinite Progress… the world was turning to stone. From the mountain, from his Alpine retreat, where the air is still clean, the new prophet descends with his heroic and intellectual lesson.” Regarding the Nazis’ attempt to appropriate the figure of the German philosopher, the Venezuelan asked: “What would Nietzsche have thought of this kind of distorted devotion now professed toward him by those in power in Germany? The misfortune of every prophet is that he encounters his antiprophet, his Antichrist.” And he concluded with these words: “‘Beware of confusing strength with the illusion of strength; beware of confusing the eternal with the temporal,’ Friedrich Nietzsche went on to say. ‘To the cult of strength,’ he asserts in *The Gay Science*, ‘we must oppose, as a complement and remedy, that of Culture.’ And when the victory over France in 1870 blinded the souls of his compatriots with pride and intense nationalist passion, he offered some words that, seventy years later, are once again relevant: ‘It is at this moment,’ he wrote, ‘that Germany needs fighters.’”4
In the face of barbarism, let us arm ourselves with culture, as it is expressed in the people’s struggle: as confidence in ourselves and in our own strength, as courage, humor, cunning, and unwavering loyalty to the memory of those who lie buried in this land of ours.
References
1 Walter Benjamin. Libros de los Pasajes. Ediciones Akal. España. 2007. Págs. 463, 479, 480-481.
2 Walter Benjamin. Theses on the Philosophy of History. Schocken Books. New York. 1968. https://seansturm.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/benjamin-theses-on-the-philosophy-of-history.pdf. From here on, to make reading easier, the number of each thesis referenced will be indicated in parentheses.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche. Así habló Zaratustra. Alianza Editorial. Madrid, España. 2003. Págs. 53-55.
4 Mariano Picón Salas. Meditación alemana, en: Viejos y nuevos mundos. Biblioteca Ayacucho. Caracas, Venezuela. Págs. 353,354,355.
Reinaldo Iturriza López is an activist, writer, and sociologist with a degree from Venezuela’s Central University. He is the director of the Center for Studies on Socialist Democracy (CEDES) and has authored several books, including 27 de Febrero de 1989: interpretaciones y estrategias and El chavismo salvaje.
Iturriza López, father of Sandra Mikele and Ainhoa Michel and Venezuelan baseball enthusiast, is a former Culture Minister and Communes and Social Movements Minister. He also headed the Audiovisual Production School at Ávila TV. He writes regularly for the blog Saber y Poder.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.
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