Reassessing The Pink Tide: Lessons From Brazil And Venezuela [1st Edition] 981158673X, 9789811586736, 9789811586743

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
1 Introduction......Page 7
Contextualizing the Left Turn in Latin America......Page 8
The Evolution of Latin American Left in the Twentieth Century......Page 12
The Rise of the Pink Tide......Page 24
The Crisis of the Pink Tide......Page 27
Plan of the Book......Page 35
References......Page 42
2 Lenin in Caracas......Page 50
Lenin’s World: Plebian Power and the Quest for Socialism......Page 54
Neoliberalism Against Democracy: Venezuela’s Lost Decades......Page 64
The Chávez Years......Page 72
Venezuela After Chávez: The Unfolding Crisis......Page 82
Revisiting the Organizational Question......Page 92
References......Page 104
3 The PT Experiment in Brazil: Reform and Revolution Reconsidered......Page 111
The State and Revolution Revisited......Page 119
The Origins and Rise of PT in Brazil......Page 131
PT in Power......Page 137
The Demise of the PT Experiment......Page 143
References......Page 149
4 Rearming the Left......Page 155
Lenin’s Analysis of Imperialism......Page 162
Imperialism After Lenin......Page 172
“New” Imperialism?......Page 178
Beyond Developmentalism......Page 184
Beyond Utopian Impulses......Page 193
References......Page 197
Index......Page 205

Citation preview

Reassessing the Pink Tide Lessons from Brazil and Venezuela Rahul A. Sirohi Samyukta Bhupatiraju

Reassessing the Pink Tide

Rahul A. Sirohi · Samyukta Bhupatiraju

Reassessing the Pink Tide Lessons from Brazil and Venezuela

Rahul A. Sirohi Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, India

Samyukta Bhupatiraju University of Hyderabad Hyderabad, Telangana, India

ISBN 978-981-15-8673-6 ISBN 978-981-15-8674-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8674-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

To my parents, for their tireless commitment to the left movement. —Sirohi, Rahul A. To my parents, for always setting an example worth emulating —Bhupatiraju, Samyukta

Contents

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1

Introduction

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Lenin in Caracas

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The PT Experiment in Brazil: Reform and Revolution Reconsidered

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Rearming the Left

151

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The spectacular resurgence of left movements across Latin America in the early 2000s baffled even the most seasoned students of Latin America. In a region where traditional leftist movements had been all but destroyed by brutally repressive authoritarian regimes and where governments of all hues and colours had unquestioningly adopted thoroughgoing structural adjustment reforms aimed at reintegrating Latin American economies into the neoliberal world economy, this “laboratory of neoliberal experiments”1 was the last place anyone would have expected to witness large-scale political success of anti-systemic movements. But starting from Hugo Chávez’s electoral victory in 1998 to the resounding victory of the Bolivian indigenous leader Evo Morales in 2006, a sequence of leftist governments with explicitly anti-neoliberal programs rose to power in various regions of Latin America. If the initial scale of this pink tide wave was not surprising enough the fact that these governments survived, and in fact prospered, in the face of stiff political opposition and the threat of 1 Sader (2009).

This chapter is a modified version of our previously published article titled “Is the Pink Tide Ebbing? Achievements and Limitations of the Latin American Left”, published in 2017 in the Economic and Political Weekly, 52(6). The article is available at: https://www.epw.in/journal/2017/6/special-articles/% E2%80%98pink-tide%E2%80%99-ebbing.html. © The Author(s) 2021 R. A. Sirohi and S. Bhupatiraju, Reassessing the Pink Tide, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8674-3_1

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imperialist interventions from their North American neighbour was even more noteworthy. All these achievements notwithstanding, since 2012 the leftist regimes have started to unravel. In country after country the delayed impact of the global financial crisis and the steep decline in commodity prices world over, increased economic pressures on these fledgling experiments. The problems began in Argentina when growth slowed down and mobilizations from the right picked up. The Kirchner government eventually lost support and was defeated in the 2012 elections only to be replaced by a blatantly pro-business regime. In Brazil, after a decade of robust growth, recessionary clouds gathered over the economy and brought it to a virtual halt. In countries like Venezuela economic chaos was of a much larger magnitude. Inflation rates skyrocketed, production of oil ground to a halt and with all of this, poverty rates increased dramatically (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean 2014). To make things worse, this period coincided with massive elite mobilizations which were successful in uniting the splintered opposition. The untimely death of Hugo Chávez opened up new opportunities for the resurgence of proneoliberal forces and in Brazil, Dilma Rousseff’s government found itself squeezed between a powerful financial sector on the one hand and dwindling growth rates on the other. Having completely isolated her, the opposition then drummed up sufficient support to impeach Rousseff on completely flimsy grounds. It is in this context that this book seeks to evaluate the broad changes that have been occurring within Latin America over the pink tide decade and seeks to understand the limitations and contradictions within these projects. The book focusses on the cases of Brazil and Venezuela.

Contextualizing the Left Turn in Latin America For most of the nineteenth century, Latin American economies though nominally sovereign, remained within the orbit of influence of British imperial rule. This was not surprising as Latin American economies were important markets for Western manufactures, and perhaps more importantly, they were important sources of primary goods like cotton, sugar, rubber and coffee. As exporters of primary commodities Latin American nations were successful in capturing global markets and these international linkages were crucial for incipient economic growth, but the reliance on primary commodity exports also meant that these economies were

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extremely dependent on American and European markets and remained vulnerable to exogenous price volatilities (Kohli 2004). Apart from giving foreign investors untrammelled control over economic decisions, the deepening pattern of economic dependency also strengthened the political clout of the agro-exporters, much to the detriment of industrial classes. As a result, industrialization remained muted and the sort of structural change that advanced capitalist nations were undergoing, completely bypassed Latin America (Bagchi 1972, 1982). In this context the global commodity slump of the 1930s proved to be a game changer (Franko 2007). In the face of falling demand from major export markets, Latin American economies began to face severe balance of payments problems. As primary commodity prices fell and foreign finance dried up, Latin American economies were forced to experiment with protectionist policies. In addition to external changes, this period also coincided with the growth of economic nationalism in the region. There was growing resentment against the export oriented pattern of development and by the early decades of the twentieth century several voices had begun to openly criticize the excessive dependence on foreign trade, which they argued, had restricted Latin American economies to being producers of raw materials and had allowed foreign capital to gain a foothold in domestic economy to the detriment of local capitalists (O’Toole 2014; Ocampo 2006; Burns 1968). Moreover, faced with dwindling international prices it was felt that the only way these economies could hope to develop themselves was by espousing an autocentric development strategy based on state interventionism, protectionism and across-the-board industrialization. This provided the backdrop to the adoption of the import substitution industrialization policies (ISI) across the continent. In terms of economic performance, the developmentalist policy-stance proved to be successful on several dimensions. For instance, between 1950 and 1980 GDP growth rates averaged 5.5% (Ocampo 2006). During the same period the growth rates of the manufacturing sector were around 6% (Ffrench-Davis et al. 1994). As an indicator of the extent of import substitution we may note that “For Latin America as a whole, the share of imported capital goods in total capital formation fell from 28 per cent in 1950 to 15 per cent in 1973” (Ffrench-Davis et al. 1994: 192). Therefore, what was striking about the rapid rate of growth in the region was that it was the industrial sector that played an important role in the process. Manufacturing became the leading “…engine of growth,

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reaching a peak share of 26% of GDP in 1973, seven percentage points more than in 1945, a feature shared by all countries” (Ocampo 2006: 68). As can be expected much of this growth was fuelled by high rates of investment which grew at an average rate of 7.4% per year in 1951-80 for the region taken as a whole (Ffrench-Davis et al. 1994). Underlying all these achievements were some glaring flaws which had started to become apparent by the 1970s. Despite all the rhetoric, most countries avoided radical changes in the economy’s income and asset distribution structure and thus the size of the home market remained very narrow and inequalities remained high. Added to this, the capital intensive nature of industrialization meant that industrial growth far outstripped the rates of labour absorption (Baer 1972; Prebisch 1978; Tokman 1982). As a result, large sections of the society were effectively excluded from formal sector jobs and since most social security benefits were linked to formal sector jobs, only a few could enjoy the welfare benefits that the state provided. On the whole therefore the developmentalist project became locked into a self-defeating cycle of inequality, informality and limited industrialization. The inability to address income concentration was reflective of a larger malaise in the institutional structure of Latin American economies. Unlike in Asia where anti-colonial movements successfully pushed states and native bourgeoisie to seek greater autonomy from foreign capital, in Latin America the entire institutional structure retained a dependent character which severely restricted the state’s reach and power (Kohli 2009). The dependent nature of economic development meant that not only were politically contentious reforms avoided but the Latin American variant of ISI also came to be heavily dependent on foreign capital. By the 1970s this dependence increasingly took the form of debt. Initially because foreign capital was easily accessible and interest rates were low, the unsustainability of debt did not seem to concern policymakers.2 Eventually however this entire process of funding growth via foreign finance ran into problems when the United States hiked its interest rates in 1979 causing a sudden increase in interest payments. Between 1979 and 1984 interest payments on debt jumped by over 300% (Chodor 2014). To make things worse, as these economies started to stumble massive capital flight added fuel to the fire. In Venezuela capital 2 One high ranking Latin American policy maker confidently declared, “debts are not paid, debts are rolled” (Quoted in Galano III 1994: 330).

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flows worth 131.5% of total external debt flew out of the economy in the five-year period from 1979 to 1984 alone, while in Argentina and Mexico the numbers were 76.9 and 73.3%, respectively (Franko 2007). The explosion of external debt and sudden capital flight pushed these over-indebted economies into a grave economic crisis as GDP growth fell, industrial development faltered and inflation skyrocketed (reached four digit figures in Peru, Nicaragua, Brazil and Argentina). This formed the backdrop to the adoption of neoliberal policies. Faced with this crisis of daunting proportions, defaulting countries turned to the IMF and the World Bank for assistance. As a part of loan conditionalities set forth by the multilateral institutions, defaulting economies were forced to adopt neoliberal policies in return for loans. It may be noted that the manner in which structural adjustment was imposed differed from one country to another. In countries like Chile, liberalization had already begun in the 1970s under Pinochet’s military dictatorship. For others, like Brazil, liberalization was relatively late in the sense that it followed the debt crisis of 1982. Whether imposed by the IMF or by military rulers, what was common to all these regions was that structural adjustments were essentially deflationary in nature. The logic behind this was that immediate problems facing Latin American economies stemmed from a mismatch between expenditure relative to resources. Since debt was a reflection of “too much” expenditure, it would follow—or so it was argued—that income deflation could provide a corrective to this situation by squeezing domestic demand and bringing it in line with available resources (Franko 2007). In the short term this structural adjustment would also release sufficient funds for repaying debt to all those financial institutions that faced massive exposure due to sovereign default. At a broader level, neoliberals argued for deeper reforms in the economy. In their opinion the economic crisis of the region was not a one-off incident but rather it was a reflection of the malaise of statist development models. The “irrational” and market “distorting” policies associated with ISI were simply unsustainable. What was required was a shift towards a more market-oriented growth strategy (Edwards 1995). Two important aspects of neoliberal adjustment may be noted. First, from the very beginning there was a stress on reducing the role of the state in the social sector. Adjusting economies witnessed massive cuts in government expenditure especially on social spending and also witnessed wholesale privatization of state-owned enterprises. According

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to Franko (2007: 170) “Seventy seven percent of all privatizations in developing countries in 1998 took place in Latin America; in 1999 the region accounted for more than half of such privatizations”. The entire burden of neoliberal adjustments therefore fell on the poorest classes. In the name of rationalizing costs and removing “distortions”, minimum wages were slashed dramatically, with countries like Mexico and Brazil witnessing major reversals in the 1980s and 1990s.3 The liberalization of trade and the introduction of labour market flexibility caused a huge increase in the ranks of unemployed and forced a number of people into the informal sector. In Brazil informality increased by 10% between 1990 and 2000 while in Argentina urban informality alone increased by 10% between 1992 and 2003 (Bosch et al. 2007). Similar trends were visible in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela as well (Jutting and de Laiglesia 2009). The second salient feature of the entire process relates to the political environment within which reforms took place. In early liberalizers like Chile, unaccountable military dictatorships were instrumental in imposing liberalization policies but in many late liberalizers the transition towards neoliberalism occurred under democratic regimes where governments were subject to electoral pressures. The expansion of “associational spaces” that occurred in the wake of this wave of democratization had brought about an unprecedented politicization of the working classes and there were explosions of popular anti-neoliberal movements all across Latin America (Silva 2009; Chodor 2014; Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012). Therefore, what was striking about the introduction of austerity policies was that despite the restoration of democracy and the massive groundswell opposition to neoliberalism, the political class remained staunchly wedded to imposing the austerity agenda. Major economic initiatives were insulated from popular pressures and were instead pushed through executive decrees causing severe disenchantment with established parties (Silva 2009; Chodor 2014). The institutionalization of equality in the political sphere and the continuous exclusion in the economic sphere created major tensions within the neoliberal model.

3 See CEPAL Database.

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The Evolution of Latin American Left in the Twentieth Century 1998 saw the victory of Chávez in Venezuela, and that started off a train of left regimes across the region. To understand these left experiments that began in the early 2000s, to appreciate their initiatives, their failures and their achievements, they must be seen in the context of a long cycle of popular mobilizations that date back to the early twentieth century (and perhaps even earlier). It is therefore necessary to reflect on the longer roots of popular mobilization in the region. The emergence of the left in Latin America during the twentieth century has to be seen first and foremost in the context of the region’s relationship with the United States. In the early nineteenth century European powers had become embroiled in a bitter rivalry for Latin American markets. The main aim of the United States, whose industrialization was in full swing by this time, was to prevent its own backyard from being infiltrated by European powers and to retain the region for itself. As early as 1811 the United States’ “no transfer principle” made clear its hostility towards “any transfer of European territory in the Western Hemisphere to another Old World state” (Langley and Schoonover 1995: 17). In 1823 the Monroe Doctrine designated as national security threats, any attempt by Latin Americans to forge relationships with European powers or any attempt by them to establish non-American political systems in the region. To put this in context, we may note that Latin America during this time was proving to be absolutely essential for American development. By the middle of the nineteenth century for example, several private players including the Vanderbilt family made their fortunes through investments in railways, mines and various public utilities in Central America. A steady supply of cheap raw materials, food and other natural resources fed American industries and in times of economic crisis it was Latin American markets that provided a safe haven for American investors to cling onto (Langley and Schoonover 1995). By the beginning of the twentieth century it controlled large swathes of the Latin American economy, absorbed a large share of Latin American exports and provided a huge quantity of the region’s imports. As a source of capital, United States had begun to eclipse Britain as the largest investor in the region and American companies had come to acquire large stakes in various public utilities, in mining and in oil. Thus in Brazil, Americans accounted for almost 50% of all foreign direct investments in 1950 and in

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Mexico the figure stood at 60% by 1940 (Hewlett 1975; Twomey 2001). American banks increased their operations in the region and several Central American and Caribbean countries became tied to American debt. With this deepening economic link, also came greater desire to exert control over the region militarily (Grandin 2006). As American economic interests grew and as its companies penetrated every nook and corner of the continent, the United States increasingly started to view Latin America as its own backyard and it increasingly sought to control the region’s affairs. From this point on, United States’ relationship with Latin America came to be based on the basic idea that any and all decisions made by states in the region had to be in accordance with American economic and political interests, failing which United States could and would interfere in the domestic affairs of said nations to preserve its dominance in the region. The aim of American foreign policy well before the Cold War began, became focussed on the creation of a network of pliable states in the region that would do America’s bidding. By the early twentieth century the Americans used their self-designated position of Latin America’s watchman to militarily intervene in Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Granada and Dominican Republic on several occasions. The extroverted nature of Latin American development and its dependent ties with United States created a very lopsided growth process in which American investors and their agro-exporter collaborators reaped all the gains while workers and peasants in Latin America suffered through chronic unemployment, low wages and cyclical shortages of food and basic commodities. As a result of this, by the end of the nineteenth century itself Latin America was teeming with labour movements and worker’s organizations in the form of trade unions, mutual aid societies etc. that began springing up in many urban centres of Cuba, Chile, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil.4 By the end of the First World War growing unemployment and rising costs of living ignited a continent wide burst of labour unrest. In the summer of 1917, 45,000 workers participated in work stoppages in Sao Paulo and soon after, strikes spread to Rio de Janeiro as well. “Even larger mobilizations took place in Argentina between 1917 and 1921. In each of those years more than 100,000 workers participated in strikes in the city of Buenos Aires alone. During 1919, the peak year, 308,967 workers carried out 367 strikes there” (Hall 4 See the discussion in Collier and Collier (2002), Hall and Spalding (1986) and Pérez (2006).

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and Spalding 1986: 357). In Chile too the same cycle was repeated. After a burst of militant labour activities from 1903 to 1907, Chile once again experienced increase strike activities in 1917–1919. In 1919 labour activism reached a peak as major Chilean cities were brought to a standstill (Collier and Collier 2002). In Cuba too working class organizations developed at great pace during this period. Like in other parts of the region, strike activity picked up in 1917 and reached its heights in 1919. “Between January and February 1919, there was a strike somewhere in Cuba almost daily” (Pérez 2006: 182). In 1920 workers organized themselves into a political party, the Partido Socialista Radical and by 1925, 82 Cuban trade unions united themselves under a single nation-wide federation, the Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba (Pérez 2006). Over all, this period of urban unrest provided to be crucial in radicalizing the urban working class. And although this phase of militancy died out soon after, this early upsurge saw the spread of communist ideals in the labour movement as communist parties made considerable gains within emerging trade unions.5 Unionization itself increased in strength, collective bargaining became widespread and under increasing pressures from the working class, the state too came to recognize the need to regulate working conditions. If urban Latin America was on fire, in the countryside the situation was as volatile if not more. Vast amounts of land needed for setting up largescale agricultural projects and for establishing profitable mining units had led to massive dispossession of the peasantry. The indigenous population was the worst affected as governments passed laws to privatize communal lands and used its might to ensure that the most fertile areas were brought under the control of large land owners and foreign investors. When peasants resisted, they were met by brutal repression. In Mexico the conditions in the countryside precipitated a decade long peasant revolt against Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship between 1910 and 1920. In what was perhaps the first major indication of the insurrectionary mood that had caught a hold of Latin American masses, peasants and urban workers in Mexico armed themselves and fought government forces, at one point even taking control of the capital city. By the end of the protracted confrontation, anywhere between one to two million people lost their lives (Minns 2006). Similarly, in Nicaragua, in 1926, a strike by workers 5 The Communist Parties of Brazil and Chile for example were established in 1922 and the Argentine Communist Party was established in 1920.

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of the United Fruit Company would snowball into a full-fledged uprising against Emiliano Chamorro’s regime that had come to power through a coup in 1924 (NACLA 1976). Drawing on disaffected peasants and workers, Augusto Cesar Sandino, would head a decade long guerrilla insurgency in the region. The movement would demand land reforms and greater national sovereignty. Threatened by its radical stance, the US army would wage what would become “its first anti-guerrilla war in Latin America” (NACLA 1976: 5). The war would continue for almost a decade eventually and the uprising would be defeated but only after an unceremonious assassination of Sandino during a formal peace negotiation in 1934. At around the same time as this phase of Nicaraguan unrest was coming to an end, a similar story would repeat in El Salvador in 1932, when the country would witness agricultural workers and peasants marching onto the streets demanding wage increases and greater political rights. The protestors, organized by the Communists, would occupy town halls, attack National Guard units and even invade coffee estates. But unlike in Mexico and Nicaragua, the peasant rebellion here would be swiftly defeated, with the massacre of thousands of mostly indigenous peasants, making it “one of the largest acts of state-sponsored repression in the twentieth century in the Western Hemisphere” (Almeida 2008: 46). Scenes like this would play out across Latin America and it would be these enormous mobilizations that would force dominant classes to accede to far reaching political and economic reforms. By the end of the Second World War several Latin American countries like Venezuela that were under authoritarian rule transitioned towards a more liberal political framework. In countries that already had some semblance of democratic governance, political liberties and civil rights were further deepened. “Thus, almost all the countries of the region moved in the direction of political liberalisation and partial democratisation. No Latin American country moved in the opposite direction” (Bethell and Roxborough 1988: 170). Indeed, it was these pressures from below that inspired the region-wide adoption of developmentalism that we discussed in the previous section. By the end of the Second World War, several large Latin American countries began to implement expansive demand management programs including activist industrial policies, land reforms in some cases, sweeping welfare programs, and so on to placate popular movements (Grandin 2006). The lynchpin of these developmentalist experiments was the promise that the state in alliance with the domestic bourgeoisie would

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recapture national sovereignty and would wield this power to once and for all deliver the masses from their misery and back-breaking poverty. Developmentalism was in this sense, a political bargain that dominant classes struck with the masses which promised them deliverance from hunger and inequality in return for them acquiescing to maintain social peace. As ambitious as these experiments were and for all the ruptures that they entailed from Latin America’s past, developmentalism from the very beginning was built on shaky grounds. For one thing, the early success of these projects occurred at a peculiar global conjuncture marked by economic crisis in the advanced economic world and the outbreak of intense inter-imperialist rivalries both of which weakened imperialist grip on Latin America6 ; a conjuncture, however, that could not hold on forever and was therefore bound to pass. So although the combined blows-of the War and the Great Depression—were undoubtedly important because they opened up a window for nationalist forces to emerge in Latin America, given the temporary nature of these global correlation of forces, in the long run the sustainability of these projects depended on the extent to which domestic elites were willing to face up to imperialist powers and carve out an independent sphere of action for themselves. Indeed, the central assumption that undergirded the industrial policies of Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and the other Latin American nations was that the domestic industrial bourgeoisie would live up to this task and become the harbinger of economic modernity to the region. But this optimism was misplaced. Late development in regions like Latin America entailed a very peculiar situation in which the development of capitalism unfolded in a context where the power of the agricultural oligarchy was largely intact and where imperialism had a firm grip over their economies. Unlike its European counterparts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who smashed the power of feudalism, Latin American capital was too hesitant to allow the peasantry to take on the agricultural oligarchs because of the fear that such an assault may rebound into an all-out attack on all forms of private property (Frank 1974, 1979; Baran 1957). Neither was it 6 During the inter-War years, the United States acquiesced to Cuban appeals to repeal the Plat Amendment that had given it extensive powers to intervene in Cuban political affairs. Further in return for Cuban co-operation during the Second World War, United States provided soft loans, preferential access to US markets amongst other incentives (Pérez 2006). Similarly, in Brazil, the threat of German competition was used by Getulio Vargas to push North Americans to provide generous help to their fledgling industries (Wirth 1970).

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intent on taking on imperialism in any major way since it perceived that an alliance with foreign capital would actually be beneficial to its own interests. What the capitalists wanted was to derive greater concessions from imperialism and thus to find a suitable accommodation within the existing parameters rather than take on the mantle of an ambitious national reconstruction (Mariátegui 1929; Guevara 1960, 1965). Thus the kind of reforms required to unleash economic energies in the economy and to usher capitalist development of the classical kind, the Latin American bourgeoisie was unwilling to support by virtue of its “late-late” development. In practice therefore, most of the gains won by the working class and the peasantry turned out to be only transitory and by the 1950s and it became increasingly clear that the “national” bourgeoisie was intent on reneging on its end of the developmentalist bargain. With time it become more and more obvious that the dominant classes especially the domestic industrial bourgeoisie, were never really averse to collaboration with foreign capital but what they wanted was for this collaboration to be done on advantageous terms. They wanted freedom enough to grab larger shares of imperialist rents that accrued from the super exploitation of Latin American masses, but what they were not ready to give into were the kinds of freedoms that the masses aspired for. Thus in the decades that followed the end of the Second World War, industrialization did take firm root, but not without massive doses of foreign investments, external debt and foreign doses of technology. And thus as Latin American economies grew so did their ties to global capital (Franko 2007; Baer and Sirohi 2013). All the while this unfolded, economic and political marginalization of the workers and the peasantry only worsened. In the midst of Cold War politics, country after country in Latin America experienced the return of brutal authoritarian regimes which cracked down on peasantry and labour movements. The deafening arrival of these conservative turns was sounded in Guatemala in 1954 when a democratically elected reformist president Jacobo Arbenz was deposed by the Guatemalan oligarchy with the help of the North Americans. Cycles such as these would continue across the continent undermining reformist impulses at every step, so that by the end of the Cold-War era, in terms of the distribution of economic resources, the developmentalist experiments would have very little to boast about. Land inequalities would remain stubbornly high especially in Central America and very few Latin American countries would actually end up implementing meaningful land reforms. In some cases, where such reforms would be implemented, they would eventually be reversed in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably as in the case of Chile (Kay 2001).

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It was these multiple failures to enact even the most basic reforms that ultimately radicalized the masses and pushed them further to the left. In Cuba where the contradictions of peripheral capitalism took their most concentrated form, guerrilla forces led by Fidel Castro toppled the corrupt and repressive regime of Fulgencio Batista in 1959.7 The Cuban revolution took observers by surprise not because of the toppling of the regime itself—this was a common occurrence in Cuba ever since it gained its formal independence from Spain in 1898—but because of the pace with which reformist measures taken by Fidel turned into a revolutionary fire. Ever since its colonial days, Cuba had been heavily reliant on export of primary commodities and politically, even though it obtained its independence from Spain, it remained nothing more than a protectorate of the United States. The latter intervened extensively in Cuban political affairs throughout the first half of the twentieth century and backed its political domination with economic one as it invaded the Cuban economy with its capital. Local planters were more than happy to acquiesce to the state of affairs and even the domestic bourgeoisie that had started to emerge during the First World War, did not seek to transform Cuba’s status in any meaningful manner. By the eve of the 1959 revolution, the economy was in a mess with the brunt of the effects being borne by the workers and peasants. It was in this kind of context in 1956, that Fidel and his associates began organizing an armed uprising in the countryside. Despite early failures, by 1958 the guerrilla movement developed a large mass base amongst rural and urban poor who rallied towards the revolutionaries in their thousands. As other anti-Batista forces joined the fray, the resistance acquired a mass character and Fidel encouraged this by appealing for broader unity within the anti-Batista forces.8 The Sierra Maestra Manifesto (July 12, 1957), for example, only called for free elections, better governance, emphasized the need for improving education and health attainments of Cubans, industrialization and job creation.9 It had no mention of any major socialist demand which could have driven a wedge between the resistance forces. On 1 January 1959, the Batista regime

7 For this description of the Cuban experience I draw extensively on Pérez (2006). 8 See Faber (2019) for this point. 9 Available at: [Viewed 14/10/20].

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cuban-rebels/manifesto.htm

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was finally overthrown and in its place there appeared a broad coalition consisting of liberals, representatives of traditional political parties on the one hand and revolutionary elements led by Fidel on the other. But in what appeared to be almost a Cuban version of “dual power”, the moderates and liberals grew increasingly distant from Fidel and his armed guerrillas, who in turn sought refuge with the masses. By mid1959, with these elements largely sidelined, it was Fidel with the assistance of the Communist party that came to the helm of affairs on the island. At first, all that Fidel sought to do was fulfil basic economic demands like increase wages, pass rent ceiling laws, enact land reforms, etc. that the masses had been demanding for a number of years. These reforms although barely anti-capitalist by themselves, polarized the country as propertied classes revolted with the United States and foreign capital in tow. Sabotage, armed violence and even armed invasions by American mercenaries became the order of the day. And as this opposition hardened, the fledgling leftist regime increasingly retreated into its mass base for support, which in turn pushed the regime further to the left than anyone thought it would go. “The radicalization of the revolution quickly assumed an internal logic of its own. As fidelista policies lost favor among liberals and moderates, it became necessary to find new political allies…. This is precisely what the radicalization of revolutionary programs and policies accomplished: the incorporation and mobilization of vast sectors of the population, including the poor, dispossessed, and unemployed. But it was also true that the mobilization of this population to defend the revolution added new pressures within the revolution. The broader the social base of the revolution, the greater the demand for radical change. It was a process that thrived on its own determination to survive, and that once started could not be reversed easily” (Pérez 2006: 250–251). By 1961, the Cuban regime declared itself to be socialist and formally aligned itself with the Soviet bloc. The revolution sent shock waves across the United States and Latin America because of the sheer symbolic effect it had. A country barely 150 kilometres off the shores of the most powerful capitalist power in the world, had successfully overturned imperialist rule and had fought all kinds of odds to inaugurate the first victorious socialist revolution in Latin America. North Americans, who had seemed just so invincible until then, were shown up by a people that they had always considered inferior to them; a people that were never thought capable of governing themselves let alone establishing a socialist order. But more than the embarrassment

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15

of it all, the Cuban example indicated that the path towards the kind of freedom that Latin Americans had yearned for since the nineteenth century ran through socialism (Sader 2011). As Che Guevara (1965) put it, “The struggle against imperialism, for liberation from colonial or neocolonial shackles, which is being carried out by means of political weapons, arms, or a combination of the two, is not separate from the struggle against backwardness and poverty. Both are stages on the same road leading toward the creation of a new society of justice and plenty”. The effect of this was not lost on the North Americans and definitely not on Latin American workers and peasants. In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban revolution armed guerrilla uprisings sprung up all across Latin America (Brands 2010). Brazil, Chile, Guatemala and Peru witnessed a massive wave of rural unrest as peasants invaded land, burnt crops and even took up arms to press forward their demands for land reforms. In each of these cases it was the Cuban experience that became a central reference point for radical movements (Brands 2010). The Americans were rattled by what had happened in Cuba and were certain that the rest of Latin America would follow suit unless prevented by timely action from their side. Thus beginning with Kennedy’s government, United States began to pour millions of dollars into counterinsurgency operations in Latin America to prevent another Cuba from taking place in the region (Grandin 2006). It provided training and equipment to anti-communist governments, planned coups, organized military invasions and used the CIA to assassinate political opponents. It is also worth noting that the Cuban revolution came on the eve of major shifts in the global economy. For two decades after the War, Western economies flourished, recording high growth rates and near full employment levels. But by the mid-1960s this phase of capitalism was drawing to an end. As recessions and inflation became the order of the day, a major restructuring of capitalism came to be placed on the cards. Neoliberalism as this process came to be called, entailed a wholesale attack on labour rights, an unbridled financialization of the economic sphere and a deeper incorporation of the Global South into international trade and finance networks. Latin America was the first of the regions in the Global South to receive the neoliberal treatment, but before this large-scale restructuring could be rolled out, it was necessary for civil society to be cleansed of subversive elements (Klein 2007). Purging communism, then, would not only serve political ends of the Cold War but also lay ground for economic ones.

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The odds stacked up against the left were indeed tall, but the Latin America of the 1960s and 70s was not the Latin America of the 1950s. By this time the Cuban revolution had had an electric effect throughout the region and after the coup against Allende in 1973, la via armada came to be seen as a model of sorts to be replicated across the continent. As democratic spaces eroded and as windows for debate and negotiations shut down, trade unions, students, peasant organizations and left flanks of populist parties, inspired by what the Cubans had accomplished, thronged in their thousands towards guerrilla movements in the Cold War years. In each case Cuba stood as the shining example of what could be achieved but at a fundamental level it was also the rigid authoritarianism and the inability of peripheral capitalism to accommodate basic political and economic demands of the masses that pushed these sectors towards armed insurrection. The first wave of insurgencies hit Central America in the 1960s where armed guerrillas organized into small bands called focos, tried to take on the state by precipitating a revolution in the countryside. These early forays were largely defeated and in their place came urban-oriented guerrilla movements in the Southern Cone region (Ellenbogen 1991). The Tupamaros in Uruguay, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) in Chile, the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) and Montoneros in Argentina, the National Liberation Action (ALN) in Brazil were all products of this insurrectionary cycle. But as with the earlier wave, by the end of the 1970s these movements were also wiped out. In both the cases, insurgent movements prioritized military goals over political ones and participants were driven by the belief that a “small initial group of enlightened revolutionaries” could precipitate a revolution (Ellenbogen 1991: 88). Eventually however insurgent movements in both cycles ended up losing touch with their popular base thus becoming easy targets for counter-insurgencies. A third and final wave of insurgencies began in the 1980s, once again in Central America, but far more bloody and brutal than any of the ones before. The civil war in El Salvador erupted in 1981 and only concluded in 1992 but not before the country witnessed the murder of thousands of people at the hands of the state (Almeida 2008). In Guatemala, Peru and Colombia the same cycle of insurgency, violence and state-repression would replay itself without any definite conclusion. The victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua would raise hopes for a while, but after their defeat the tide would take a definitive turn against the left. By the 1990s the third wave would end either in military stalemates or in complete defeats for the left.

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17

In a complete turn of events, then, two decades after the Cuban revolution had raised hopes of a continent-wide socialist victory, the left in Latin America was bludgeoned beyond recognition. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of the third wave of insurgencies in countries like Nicaragua completely shattered the hopes of those who still held on to the possibility of victory through la via armada. On the other end, the experiment with a “peaceful” transition to socialism in Chile ended with the demise of Allende’s government and the subsequent battering that the mass movements took under Pinochet’s regime meant that left there had barely any legs to stand on. These multiple blows weakened the left and paved way for the drastic economic restructuring that was to come. These tumultuous experiences of the short twentieth century, left an indelible impact on the working class and the peasantry. The leftist movements that emerged from the ruins left behind by counter insurgencies and North American-backed military regimes were deeply influenced by what had transpired in the decades before them. From the few victories it scored, the left learned that while disciplined bands of armed revolutionaries can make a difference, the ultimate guarantee of the revolution lies in the support of the masses. Marx had singled out the proletariat to lead the socialist revolution in Western Europe and Lenin had envisaged an alliance of workers and peasantry would do the same in the context of Russia. Both however were united in their belief that the oppressed classes and they alone would have to spearhead the transition towards socialism. As the twentieth century came to an end, the left recognized that if it were to have any future in the continent, it would have to heed this lesson going forward. From its many losses, it recognized the need to innovate and reinvent itself. There emerged a widely shared belief that the global conjuncture that the left now faced—with the defeat of the Soviet Union and with the shift towards neoliberalism—required new forms of struggles, new revolutionary slogans and that therefore, there was an urgent need to reconceptualize leftist strategies to fit the new circumstances that confronted popular movements (Harnecker 2005; Ellner 2004; Linera 2014; Chávez 2012). For one, globalization and economic liberalization entailed very different economic realities. The expansion of informal sector and the associated fragmentation of the working class required new ways of mobilizing the poor that went beyond traditional shop floor organizations, that incorporated concerns of the peasantry and that widened the notion of class struggle to include in it the identitarian demands raised

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by indigenous communities and others. Added to this were the challenges thrown up by political changes that Latin America was undergoing. With possibilities of armed insurrection slowly but surely fading away and with the transition from authoritarian rule to liberal democracies, new opportunities awaited the left and so did new threats. In a land where even the most basic forms of representative democracy never really took root, the post-1990 period saw a wave of democratic transitions, which opened up associational spaces in a manner that was quiet novel. Yet the fact also remained that however democratic, the left still faced a capitalist state, which as Latin American history had shown quiet clearly, could never be an ally of the working class and even under a democratic shell it was unlikely that it could be relied upon to alter the gross inequalities and deprivations of the masses. The debates that have been ongoing within Latin America on the nature of the state, the costs and benefits of electoral participation and on the weight to be given to direct class based action are reflective of the dilemmas that the left has had to tackle in the context of a rapidly changing economic and political environment.

The Rise of the Pink Tide The economic and political context described above was the background within which neoliberal reforms were rolled out in Latin America. The ruinous policies executed under the tutelage of IMF and other multilateral agencies left Latin American economies in a mess. According to one estimate the net resource outflow from the region was a staggering 100 billion USD during the 1990s alone (Quoted in Veltmeyer and Petras 2014a). On the industrial front, the slow but steady gains made during the ISI era were all but wiped out as economy after economy fell prey to de-industrialization (Rocha 2002).10 Apart from a slowdown in growth and investment, the attack on labour created large-scale misery and deprivation. “By the end of the 1980’s, chronic hunger was killing 40,000 people a day and 55 million were undernourished, while mortality due to chronic, non-infectious diseases doubled” Chodor (2014: 74). Poverty rates increased from 40.5% in 1980 to 43.8% in 1999 (Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012). This large-scale devastation proved to be politically unsustainable as neoliberalism came under increasing attack. 10 The term, de-industrialization, has to be used carefully. Here we use it to refer to the reduction in industrial share in total employment and GDP.

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From the Caracazo riots in Venezuela in the late 1980s to the Bolivian Water Wars in the early 2000s, the neoliberal social bloc was under severe pressure from disgruntled public. Left responded to these multiple crises by framing and articulating common demands in opposition to neoliberalism, by forging broad alliances between industrial workers, indigenous movements, informal workers and even the middle classes all of whom had borne the brunt of austerity. On the ideological front there were attempts to broaden the notion of class struggle to include concerns raised by identity-based movements and to incorporate the demands of indigenous people. These tactics were a major factor in weakening the hegemony of markets and in ensuring groundswell support for the left’s political agenda (Silva 2009; Riethof 2004). Before proceeding it is necessary to point out that there was no single left in Latin American pink tide upsurge; Rather, the pink tide phenomenon was highly heterogeneous. This heterogeneity of course, was no coincidence since the very success of left forces in Latin America stemmed from their ability to adapt to historical, political and institutional peculiarities of their constituencies. Despite whatever differences that existed, however, the pink tide governments shared a “…central programmatic objective, to reduce social and economic inequalities” (Levitsky and Roberts 2011: 5). Across the Latin American region, left governments initiated massive redistribution programs and developed comprehensive safety nets for the poorest and most vulnerable. Even the targeted schemes tended to cover large sections of the population (Huber and Stephens 2012). The Plan Equidad of Uruguay, for instance, reached around 50% of children while in Brazil the Bolsa Familia cash transfer program benefited 57.8 million individuals in 2012 (Huber and Stephens 2012; Weisbrot et al. 2014). In Argentina, the Universal Child Benefit program reached 4 million households, consisting of those mainly employed within the informal sector (Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012). In Venezuela health coverage increased sixfold between 1998 and 2007 benefiting as many as 20.5 million individuals (Chodor 2014). In addition to strengthening social security nets, these left leaning states extensively intervened in labour markets by increasing minimum wages, reducing vulnerable employment and increasing the bargaining power of unions.11 As a result,

11 Informality rates continue to be high in many of these countries (Jutting and de Laiglesia 2009).

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wage shares which were on a decline in the 1990s, increased in many leftgoverned countries even while unemployment declined to historic lows. All these changes allowed for reductions in poverty levels and improvements in income distribution as measured by the Gini coefficient (see Table 1.1). Along with explicit economic policies that defied policy orthodoxy, pink tide governments also initiated an ideological attack on neoliberalism by re-conceptualizing the very notion of development and questioning the TINA doctrine (There is No Alternative). Speaking at a conference in 2007 Brazil’s president Lula explained that increasing growth in itself was a meaningless pursuit. Instead, true development required that the fruits of growth be distributed to “all without exclusion and without perpetuating historical inequalities be they of gender, race, or any other type” (Quoted in French and Fortes 2012: 7). In a similar vein, drawing on indigenous cultures the Ecuadorian constitution defined the prime objective of development to be sumak kawsay or “good living”: In the new Constitution, sumak kawsay implies more than improving the population’s quality of life, [it also involves] developing their capabilities and potentials, relying upon an economic system that promotes equality through social and territorial redistribution of the benefits of development, guarantees national sovereignty, promotes Latin American integration, and protects and promotes cultural diversity. (Quoted in Radcliffe 2012: 241– 242)

Table 1.1 Standard of living indicators Countries

Argentina Bolivia Brazil Ecuador Venezuela

Gini

Unemployment

1990

2000

46.8* 42.04 60.5 – 45.3¶

51.1 63 59.3** 56.4 48.2**

2010 44.5 49.6*** 53.9*** 49.3 –

Poverty (% of pop. below 1.9$ PPP)

1991

2000

2010

5.8 2.9 6.9 4 9.5

15 4.8 9.5 7.2 13.2

7.7 3.3 7.9 5 8.6

1990

2000

2010

1.1* 5.7 2.05 8.2 29.7 11.9*** 20.6 13.6** 6.2 7.05 17.13* 28.2 4.31* 9.59** 9.24#

Source World Bank Database; CEPAL Database *Data refers to 1991 for Argentina, 1992 for Venezuela and 1994 for Ecuador **Data for 2001 ***Data for 2009 #Data for 2006 ¶ Data for 1989

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Development, according to sumak kawsay, was a process that prioritized the well-being of human beings and nature. More importantly, as a concept it went beyond paternalistic concerns typical of capitalist welfare regimes and instead focussed on “capabilities and potentials” of citizens. sumak kawsay therefore entailed nothing short of a revolution in the state–citizen relationship, where the state was seen as being subordinated to popular pressures and where citizens were conceptualized as agents actively engaged in governing their own futures. In practice the implementation of participatory forms of governance differed across countries. In Brazil, prior to the electoral victory of Lula in 2002 the Worker’s Party (PT) was at the forefront of experiments in participatory budgeting. In the city of Porto Alegre the local government headed by the PT gained international fame for organizing large assemblies in which the public had an opportunity to be involved in decisions related to local governance. The electoral victory in 2002 raised hopes that these experiments would be replicated at the national level as well, but that did not happen (Hunter 2011). Though the PT continued to maintain strong links with trade unions, grass root movements, NGO’s and other stakeholders but its approach was more “consultative” rather than “deliberative” (Goldfrank 2011). On the other end of the spectrum, Venezuela experienced an “explosion of communal power” (Ciccariello-Maher 2007, 2013). Here the government has gone to great extents to delegate decision-making powers to local-level “communal councils” (CCs) consisting of 150–400 families (smaller numbers required for registering CCs in rural areas), in an attempt to construct a countervailing power structure to the state. As of 2013, reports suggested that as many as 40,000 such councils were registered by the government (Foster 2015). Participation rates have been very high with over 8 million people being involved in these initiatives and according to a survey held in 2007, an estimated 35% of those surveyed claimed to have taken part in one or more CCs (Quoted in Goldfrank 2011).12

The Crisis of the Pink Tide Despite all the massive progress that was made in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the demise of left governments in many countries and the rise of right-wing forces have called into question the policies

12 For further details see Chapter 2.

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implemented by the left. These criticisms must be seen in the light of the severe economic crisis that hit the region after 2012. From 2012 onwards as global economic growth became sluggish, exports to China—one of the main markets for Latin America—dwindled and primary commodity prices fell, Latin America started to experience severe downturn. These external changes adversely affected economic growth in the region and, perhaps more importantly, it completely paralyzed the social agenda that the left had taken up so vigorously since it came to power in the early 2000s. Given the scale and extent of the crisis, and given the demise of many left governments at the ballots, there have been raging debates about the nature of the current crisis, and more broadly, about the inherent limitations of the leftist project in Latin America. The fact that many of these criticisms have been raised by trade unionists and representatives of popular social movements points to the urgency of the situation. From an orthodox perspective, the abandonment of free market principles and the associated rise of economic “populism” is the most important flaw in the pink tide model. This is especially true for the more radical regimes (like Venezuela) where the political leadership has been “more intent on maintaining popularity at any cost, picking as many fights as possible with Washington, and getting as much control as they can over sources of revenue, including oil, gas, and suspended foreign-debt payments” (Castañeda 2006: 38–39). The problem according to neoliberals, is that while this policy stance makes for good political sloganeering it does not make for sensible economic policy. Sooner rather than later governments have to face up to the facts that populist policies are simply unsustainable (Edwards 2010).13 Instead, neoliberals argue that Latin American economies would have been better served had they deepened neoliberal reforms that began three decades ago, though perhaps tempering the social impact of neoliberalism with “smart” (i.e. targeted) social policies (Edwards 2010; Fukuyama 2008). While simplistic in its diagnosis, the position taken by the neoliberals does not provide an adequate analysis of the problems afflicting Latin American economies and neither does it give us any insight into the nature of the current logjam. The problem with the orthodox line of 13 Left’s economic populism, according to Edwards (2010), is not primarily rooted in expansive fiscal and monetary policies. In his opinion it is rooted in excessive and unproductive state intervention in the economic sphere.

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reasoning is twofold. First it ignores the elephant in the room—neoliberalism, far from being a solution to the current woes of Latin American economies, has been an absolute failure in the 1990s. It failed not simply because it did not provide room for growth but also because it completely failed to deliver broad-based development in the region. In this context it hardly makes sense to criticize governments for trying to break away from such a discredited development model. Second, the entire debate about economic populism is theoretically inaccurate and completely ahistorical. If anyone deserves to be accused of economic and financial irresponsibility it is the neoliberal governments of the 1990s which doled out large sums of money to upper classes by privatizing publicly held resources at throwaway prices (including something as basic as water in Bolivia) and who in the name of free markets supported draconian austerity policy which entailed massive transfers of funds from public coffers to rentier classes. To argue that the left has been irresponsible for having attempted to stem this massive drain of funds and for having tried to repay the social debt owed to the citizens of the country is problematic to say the least. Moreover, at a theoretical level the entire accusation of populism is steeped in neoclassical orthodoxy which equates state intervention of any sort with economic mismanagement. In fact, looking at the record of growth and industrialization it is abundantly clear that most Latin American economies performed much better in the dirigisme period than they have in the decades when neoliberalism was adopted (Ocampo 2006). If for neoliberals the problem with the pink tide governments were the heterodox nature of its economic policies, for the left critics the problem is exactly the opposite; namely, that the left governments were not heterodox enough. While there are a number of shades of criticisms coming in from the left by far the most virulent ones are those that claim that pink tide regimes are essentially neoliberal or at least that they share such striking continuity with their predecessors that they don’t really deserve the label of “left” in the first place (Saad-Filho 2019; Webber 2010, 2017; Gonzalez 2018; Petras and Veltmeyer 2009, 2011; Veltmeyer and Petras 2014a, b). From this perspective, the revolutionary ardour of the extra-parliamentary movements that emerged in the early 2000s were largely diluted by centre-left governments that subsequently came into power. These governments maintained a rhetoric of change, but basically functioned as a safety valve for neoliberalism. Land reforms were more or less shelved, nationalizations were minimal, private sector remained dominant in most economies and capitalist property rights

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were barely touched. Even their social policies which everybody was busy celebrating, were nothing more than “petty handouts” to the poor as they did nothing to change underlying class structures that were the root cause of the deprivations that the masses face (Webber 2017: 17). Worse still, these social policies created a “layer of consumers” while doing nothing to “generate productive activities” (Gonzalez 2018: 113). The result was that while the state’s surpluses grew larger and larger during the commodities boom, “there was little attempt to divert part of that surplus into alternative areas of production. Instead it was channelled into consumption” (Gonzalez 2018: 163). In sum, the pink tide regimes, even the more radical ones diffused pressures from below through material and ideological means, even as they deepened the neoliberal economic structure. “In effect, these governments carried out what Italian Marxist theorist and politician Antonio Gramsci referred to as passive revolution, whereby dominant groups undertake reform from above that defuses mobilization from below for more far-reaching transformation. The pink tide governments were ‘progressive’ insofar as they introduced limited redistribution and restored a role for the state, less in regulating accumulation than in administering its expansion in more inclusionary ways. When we cut through the rhetoric, many of the pink tide states were able to push forward a new wave of capitalist globalization with greater credibility than their orthodox and politically bankrupt neoliberal predecessors” (Robinson 2017). Perhaps nowhere were the continuities with neoliberalism more visible than the massive dependence of Latin American economies on primary commodity exports during left rule. On this aspect, the pink tide model that was implemented in countries ranging from Brazil to Venezuela, it is argued, did not really provide an alternative to the neoliberalism. Even as the industrial sector stagnated, the left regimes allied with foreign capital and local agro-exporting classes to exploit their natural resource bases, dispossessing scores of people and marginalizing the indigenous communities. The deeper problem with extractivism, as Veltmeyer and Petras (2014b) see it, is that natural resource extraction entails a high composition of capital and appropriates but little to labour. They cite the example of Bolivia where although all their natural resources were declared as belonging to the people, the share of mining wealth that accrued to labour was a pittance—only a tenth of the exported mineral wealth. To make things worse, in all these countries extractivism exposed economies to international price volatilities in a way that was reminiscent

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of earlier periods of Latin American history and also led to a depletion of natural resources causing extreme environmental losses (Sankey 2014). The practice of “soyazation” in Argentina, for example, has not only led to monocropping that leads to huge losses in times of price fluctuations, but it also resulted in contamination of soil and water resources, in turn affecting the health of local populations. Similarly, open pit mining in Argentina has led to degradation of biodiversity and glacial resources (Giarracca and Teubal 2014). According to critics this environmental costs should be accounted for, far more seriously than is being currently done. This book follows the lead of this leftist criticism of pink tide governments by locating the problems that have afflicted these regimes in their inability to move beyond neoliberal capitalism. These incisive and relevant criticisms raised by observers, provides a rich framework to analyse the losses of the left and to draw lessons for the future. Having said this, there is also a need to draw a nuanced picture of the pink tide regimes and on this front the left critics seem to have overstated their case. There can be little doubt that the deepening crisis today reflects the inability of the left governments to initiate a truly post-neoliberal economic project. Yet one cannot but help wonder if the “continuity thesis” which blurs the lines between the pink tide and the neoliberal regimes that preceded them, does not oversimplify the situation in the region (Katz 2015; Ellner 2019; Fuentes 2010, 2011; French and Fortes 2005, 2012). The coups against Chávez and Maduro in Venezuela, the illegal impeachment of Dilma and the subsequent imprisonment of Lula, the attacks on Evo Morales stand in stark contrast to the claim that these regimes have been hand in glove with dominant classes or that they have sold out to neoliberalism. There are obviously several striking continuities that connect the leftist era with the one that preceded it, but it is also important to underscore the few but significant ruptures that these governments were able to put into effect. In this regard two points are worth considering. Firstly, implicit in the left criticisms described above, is a certain disdain for social policies which are viewed as “petty handouts” and are seen as diversions from more productive uses of country’s resources. This disdain it is worth emphasizing has strong parallels within Marxist literature which has tended to downplay the paucity of consumer demand as a core contradiction of capitalism, though Marx himself was keenly aware of its centrality (Desai 2010). Politically this devaluation of consumer demand has found expression in divorcing revolutionary politics from reformist demands with the

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result that social policies have tended to be given lesser importance than is their due (Patnaik 2017; Rooksby 2011, 2018). To some extent this goes back to the split in the socialist movement that occurred during the First World War which witnessed the division of the left into reformist and revolutionary camps. Reformists like Eduard Bernstein during this time sought to redirect socialist movements away from the final goal of overturning capitalism, towards more mundane struggles for economic betterment of the working class within capitalism. Revolutionaries on the other hand were aghast at the prospect of this redirection and from the late nineteenth century itself, the leading lights of the socialist movement trained their guns on reformist tendencies amidst their ranks (Sassoon 2010). The differences exploded into a deep schism during the First World War. Now it is worth emphasizing that this split itself occurred for a number of complex reasons and the dividing lines between the two camps were on multiple levels (Lih 2008). Nevertheless, the very fact that reformists emphasized economic reforms, social policies, etc., has since then led to a simplistic equation of struggles for social reforms with reformism and as constituting a diversion from revolutionary goals. This watertight separation between reformist demands and revolutionary politics however is erroneous as it misses crucial links between the two. A brief look around world history suggests that whether it was Russia in 1917 or Cuba in 1959, reformist demands have played a very central role in revolutionary movements. In the run-up to October 1917, for example, the Bolshevik war cry was simply “Peace, Land and Bread”; And again in the years leading up to the Cuban revolution, Fidel and his compatriots only raised demands that one may call reformist today. And yet in both these cases these demands, simple and seemingly non-radical as they were, were demands that the dominant classes were not willing to acquiesce to and they thus pushed up against the boundaries of the system. In the neoliberal era the boundaries of capitalism have narrowed down even more. In fact, they have shrunk to such an extent that most basic social policies like those implemented by the pink tide governments have provoked immense opposition from conservative sectors. The dividing lines between reformist demands and revolutionary goals have therefore become all the more porous. Secondly, any critical analysis of the pink tide must begin by placing the governance record of these regimes in a historical and political context. The left came into power at a time when neoliberal institutional structures had already been deeply entrenched in Latin American societies

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and economies. Thus Latin America’s external dependence was not a new phenomenon and neither was the deeply entrenched domination of finance capital. In fact, when the left acquired power in various parts of the continent it found itself face to face with an institutional structure that was at once exclusionary, and simultaneously one that was deeply rooted in the society and had successfully reproduced itself for years. Keeping this in mind several voices on the left recognized that the entire process of transcending neoliberal capitalism would most likely be a process full of contradiction and conflicts; a process wherein left movements while seeking to transcend the system, would nonetheless be forced to start their project within existing structures (Lebowitz 2006; Linera 2013; Harnecker 2015; Catacora 2011). So the gradualism that left critics complain about is actually a reflection of tactical difficulties involved in breaking away from historically generated path dependencies and not something that can simply be wished away by radical movements. This is important to emphasize because there has been a tendency in recent debates to downplay these complexities and thus overlook how, for example, the “economic war” unleashed by the opposition on the pink tide governments has shaped and constrained the left’s responses. Given the viciousness of the political and economic attacks, it would be hard to ignore the fact that the current logjam stems not simply from the left’s policy errors, but also from a concerted effort by national and transnational capital to squeeze these governments in an attempt to regain the ground that they have lost in the last few years. On the political front there were numerous attempts to destabilize governments in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela through organized violence and armed coups, many of which have been linked to government agencies in the United States of America. In this context, the Brazilian case is particularly interesting because it reiterates the strength of elite mobilizations and the kind of threats that the left has been subjected to in the region. A complete report card of the PT administration in Brazil will be left for later but a few points may be noted here.14 After coming to power in 2002, PT found itself in an unenviable position of having to shore up support by forming a broad coalition in order to secure its government. In the following years it largely failed to disassociate itself from hawkish monetary policies of previous periods, but 14 This discussion is based on Sirohi (2016). See Saad-Filho (2016) and French and Fortes (2005, 2012) for a further analysis.

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the administration was nonetheless successful in using the commodity export bonanza to introduce a semblance of flexibility within the system. For a while things seemed rosy for big capital as credit policies were eased, investment increased and growth rates soared. But as its hold on the government tightened, the PT administration also unleashed a series of poverty alleviation schemes which were successful in reducing poverty and inequality. What was even more threatening to the country’s elites was that with every success, the government turned more and more radical—first minimum wages were increased, labour regulations were strengthened and if this was not enough, the government went onto weaken deficit targets as well. In a country where finance capital dominates and where there is a long history of socio-economic hierarchies, even these pithy changes were not acceptable to the elites who saw these policies as a precursor to more radical shifts in the country. The dampening of international markets provided the perfect opportunity for a reassertion of elite power. Mired in corruption scandals, facing imminent economic slowdown and under fire from a highly mobilized opposition, the PT was brought under tremendous pressure. Even though the government decided to impose austerity measures in the hope that this would restore investor’s confidence, the government’s constant backtracking on this issue and its hesitation to scale back its social security policies angered the financial elites. Finally, in 2017 the opposition garnered enough numbers in the legislature to press for the suspension and impeachment of PT’s presidential candidate, Dilma Rousseff, despite the fact that she had received a popular mandate from the Brazilian people to be the country’s president till 2018. Her alleged crime was that she had broken fiscal responsibility laws of the country. Now PT’s collapse has a number of explanations and indeed the left’s moderation is a big part of the story as we shall see later on in this book, but surely it must also be seen in the context of the asymmetric balance of power between class forces in the region. While the Brazilian case shows the political difficulties faced by pink tide governments, the economic assaults on the left have been equally vicious. In the case of Venezuela politically motivated production disruptions and artificial shortages have weakened the government considerably and have been a major factor behind the crisis that the country faces today. Such actions, of course, are not a new phenomenon. Ever since Chávez was elected to power, the government faced bitter opposition from the traditional oligarchy. During the early days of

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Chávez’s tenure, brutal economic assaults by big capital in the form of hoarding, disinvestment and production disruptions had become commonplace (Levingston 2014). At one point the shortages were so bad that the country was even forced to buy oil from abroad (Camacaro and Mills 2015). What was even more interesting was that inflationary surges and shortages tended to follow the electoral cycle suggesting that these were intentional acts of disruption rather than a simple case of “rational actors responding to the opportunities for arbitrage” (Levingston 2014). In response to this the government initiated a series of measures to bring back a semblance of control over the economy. It outlawed hoarding and cracked down heavily on violators. As a part of an economic overhaul the government established price controls and set up a multiple exchange rate system that allowed basic commodities to be imported at low prices. These policies seemed feasible initially because of the huge inflow of oil revenues from abroad, but in the recent period the government’s ability to provide cheap dollars has become more limited due to the decline in oil prices (Wilpert 2015). Added to this, the importation of basic goods is still undertaken by the private sector and this has meant that unscrupulous elements have had ample opportunity to bilk the system. In one recent case reported by Telesur, it was discovered that “135 tons of detergent, 5,000 packs of diapers, 94,000 razors, 50 tons of milk, 38 tons of rice, and 158,000 cans of tuna” had been hoarded away in a warehouse.15 The fact that these hoarders are openly associated with opposition parties cannot come as a surprise. To make things worse private companies have diverted huge sums of foreign exchange—meant for the imports of basic commodities—to offshore accounts. According to a Telesur report the “Central Bank’s own figures show that between 2003 and 2013, the Venezuelan private sector increased its holdings in foreign bank accounts by over US$ 122 billion, or almost 230 percent”.16

15 “In Venezuela, Opposition-Linked Firm Hoards Millions of Goods”, Telesur, 14 January 2015. Available at: https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/In-Venezuela-Opposi tion-Linked-Firm-Hoards-Millions-of-Goods-20150114-0053.html [Viewed 14/10/20]. 16 “Behind the Food Lines in Venezuela”, Telesur, 14 May 2016. Available at: https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/Behind-the-Food-Lines-in-Venezuela20160514-0035.html [Viewed 14/10/20].

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Plan of the Book This book aims to reassess the record of the pink tide in Brazil and Venezuela. It takes as its starting point the debates that have emerged within the left on the achievements and limitations of the decade and a half long era of leftist rule in the region. It argues—like many voices on the left today—that the waning of the pink tide in the region must be viewed in the context of the left’s inability to initiate radical structural changes in its constituencies. At the same time however, the chapters that follow make the case for a more nuanced and balanced evaluation of the development record of the left than is often done. In particular, they argue that by blurring the lines between the pink tide regimes and its neoliberal predecessors, many existing left critics end up drawing rigid boundaries between reformist demands and revolutionary goals, thus failing to recognize the dialectical relationship between the two. For one thing, it is always possible to find traces of reformism and pragmatism in any leftist experiment if one draws the definitional net wide enough. From the Bolshevik Revolution (even in its early days) to the Cuban one, it is not hard to identify continuities with capitalism in each of the cases. Not surprisingly some of the voices critiquing the pink tide today and labelling them neoliberal have also reserved similar characterizations for far more radical regimes like that of Cuba.17 None of this however gets us too far. If our analysis is not to reduce to mere tautologies, then it must begin by appreciating the institutional obstacles within which the left came to power and must point to the viable alternatives that were available for the left to take in the context of the constraints it was up against. A balance sheet of the left cannot just restrict itself to a check list of “things” that were or were not achieved. One must remember that what sets the left apart from other political formations is not simply that it doggedly pursues one set of policies over another or that it prioritizes one set of tactics over another, but the fact that unlike other formations which see no need to transcend capitalism and thus remain content with working in the present, the left is forced to traverse multiple temporalities. It mobilizes, strategizes and devises tactics in the context of the particular conjuncture that it finds itself in, but these actions are also guided by some vision of an ultimate socialist goal that it seeks to achieve. The ultimate goal moreover is not some given, fixed ideal 17 Binns and Gonzalez (1980).

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but is itself constantly evolves and learns from everyday struggles (Gorz 1968). But this then means that for the left, the pre-revolutionary present and the post-revolutionary future are not distant, disconnected Cartesian dualities. To judge the left based on some abstract maximalist notion of revolution would be to miss the most crucial issue confronting left movements which is to connect the present as it exists, with all its flaws and failures, with the socialist future that the left would like to build. To put it differently, it is one thing to perform a comparative static exercise between two distinct constellations and make a case that one is superior to another, but it is a completely different ball game to work out the possible routes to get from the present constellation to the most preferred one (Rooksby 2011, 2018; Toscano 2014). As Lenin pointed out in his critique of the moderate wing of the European socialist movement, the object of left critique of capitalism cannot just be to juxtapose the present state of affairs with the future one, because to stop merely at this would be to ignore the central, burning issue confronting the left of how to bridge the gap between the two temporalities. It would be like saying “at present we are an opposition; what we shall be after we have captured power, that we shall see” and all the while one does that, the “Revolution has vanished!” (Lenin 1917: 491). It is here that much of the recent criticism from the Latin American left has floundered. Despite providing profound insights, left critics have tended to put forth tautological explanations for the left’s current crisis. By focusing on the moderation of the leftist governments, these studies have failed to recognize the dialectical relationship between reform and revolution and have thus ended up providing a laundry list of goals that were not achieved while telling us preciously little about what precise alternatives were available to the left in the first place. To re-evaluate the left experiences in Brazil and Venezuela in light of these concerns, this book returns to old debates that raged on within socialist circles in Europe in the early twentieth century. Perhaps more than anyone else it was Lenin who brought the dilemmas and complexities of socialist transition to the forefront of Marxist debates and thus it is to his writings that this book turns to in its analysis of contemporary left-wing regimes. This choice of course requires some more explanation. To begin with, Lenin was one of the tallest leaders of the first successful Red Revolution in the world and given his role in the Russian worker’s movement, his writings were always composed with an eye on praxis. If theory takes on its highest form when it weaves itself into praxis, then this is exactly what Lenin’s writings represent (Lukács 1997). It is precisely

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because of this that the Leninist framework with its careful attempt to incorporate the questions of imperialism into leftist politics, its profound insights on state power, its emphasis on political organization and its insistence on working-class independence, provides a potent base from which to begin an evaluation of left-wing governance in the region. This is of course reason enough to choose his writings as a departure point for the kind of evaluation that this book intends to undertake. But there is a second and more profound reason to adopt a Leninist perspective and that is the fact that Lenin spent a large part of his political life, battling the bifurcation of reform from revolution into distinct watertight categories. Before expanding on this, it is important here, at the very outset, to emphasize that the term “Leninism” has to be approached with great caution. Lenin’s works have often been associated with the stigma of the authoritarianism that the Soviet experiment degenerated into. Fortunately, in the last decade or so, there has been a flurry of works that have sought to break away from the orthodox reading of Lenin and in the process these studies have completely demolished old myths about Leninism. By throwing light on aspects of Lenin’s works that have never received substantial attention in traditional economics, history, political science literature, the vibrant field of “Lenin studies” has not just rescued Lenin from the margins of history but has also provided important clues to his economic and political thought (Lih 2008; Krausz 2015; Nimtz 2014a, b; Shandro 2014). These recent studies belong to a longer line of revisionist takes on Lenin (Magdoff 1979; Harding 1983; Liebman 1975; Le Blanc 2015; Mandel 1970). From these reconstructions what emerges is a portrait of a radical democrat who had immense confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the oppressed classes and who had a keen strategic sense of melding reformist demands with revolutionary struggles. Lenin of course bitterly opposed reformist trends within the European socialist movement, but what Lenin railed against was not the raising of reformist demands itself but rather the tendency within these movements to become consumed by them. Whereas the reformists saw the struggle for reforms as an end in itself, for Lenin they served to illuminate the limits of capitalism and thus served to hasten its transcendence (Lenin 1897, 1916a).18 But for reformist struggles to flow 18 Here of course, Lenin was not the only one to have made this connection nor was he the last. See Trotsky (1938) for a nuanced formulation of the dialectics of reform and revolution.

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into revolutionary goals, the oppressed classes, Lenin argued, had to forge themselves into a cohesive and politically independent force. And this required, amongst other things, the construction of a programmatic political organization (Lenin 1902), whose program would, by necessity, recognize the centrality of imperialism (Lenin 1916b) and would recognize the class basis of the capitalist state (Lenin 1917). It is these core theoretical concerns that this book takes as its starting point for its evaluation of the pink tide. Like many studies on the record of left governance that have come out in recent years, this book draws on secondary literature and secondary data to analyse their achievements and shortcomings. It focusses on the experiences of Brazil and Venezuela, two important components of the pink tide wave. While both countries have had leftist governments during the 2000s, the left in Venezuela has been far more radical and far more resilient than the one in Brazil. Analysing the two cases therefore helps capture the diversity of leftist experiences in the regions and thus provides a deeper and more generalizable insight into the central problems affecting leftist governance. The rest of the book is divided into three chapters. Chapter 2 studies the record of left rule in Venezuela. It argues that while the country did not experience sweeping changes of the kinds that one associates with socialist revolutions, the emergence of Hugo Chávez did mark an important turning point in the region. For one thing, the left government massively increased social spending and as a result the country took gigantic strides in improving the quality of lives of its citizenry. But the left did more than just this. Drawing on Lenin’s writings, the chapter argues that socialism at its core is a project of radical democratization, a project which seeks to turn oppressed classes from passive objects of history to active agents of change. In Venezuela this is precisely where the achievements of the left lie (Ciccariello-Maher 2013). The changes made in the last decade have seen the poorest and most marginalized sectors of society come to the forefront of politics. The proliferation of organs of deliberative democracy, the stress on popular power and the attempts made by the left to create a communal state, must all be seen as a crucial rupture from neoliberalism. Having said this, despite the several important changes that were initiated in Venezuela, the chapter argues that left also committed a number of blunders. Most importantly, as a number of recent left criticisms have pointed out, it failed to develop a coherent response to the parameters of globalization with the result that even after two decade

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left rule, its economy has remained heavily dependent on global trade and finance networks. This external dependence made left’s achievements extremely vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of global markets. Thus for example, it rolled out very ambitious social policies but the very existence of these policies was tied to export revenues from abroad and when global commodity markets declined starting from 2012, so did Venezuela’s economy and with it, the left’s ambitious attempts towards social development came to a crashing halt. Here Lenin’s analysis tells us what alternatives the left could have taken. Venezuelan left’s strategy stands in stark contrast with the Leninist inspired proposals that animated much of the left thinking in the post-war years. For a generation of anti-imperialist writers and activists who drew inspiration from Lenin’s theoretical formulations of imperialism, socialism in the Global South was impossible without “delinking” these countries from world markets (Amin 1990). The Leninist notion of imperialism and the strategy of “delinking” that it spawned have immense relevance even today and overlooking them, as the Latin American left has, has only served to weaken their political experiments. Related to the point raised above is crucial organizational question. A central contribution of Lenin to Marxism was his analysis of working-class consciousness and his insistence in building a programmatic political organization of workers and peasants (Lenin 1902). In contrast to many of his fellow socialists, Lenin recognized the several splits that existed within the working classes and was keenly aware of how unevenly workingclass consciousness was spread amongst the poorest sectors of society (Lih 2008). Under these conditions he emphasized the need for workers to organize themselves. A political organization was seen by Lenin as an indispensable vehicle for solving collective actions problems within the working classes and for converting their spontaneous anti-capitalist instincts into a mature working-class consciousness. Taking this cue, the chapter draws on the recent accounts of organizational building by the left and argues that in the case of both Brazil and Venezuela, but especially the latter, the left has lagged behind in its organizational efforts and as a result, it has lost momentum at critical junctures. Chapter 3 shifts attention to Brazil’s experiences. Here the focus of the chapter is on the strategy adopted by the left towards state power. Here again the chapter draws on Lenin’s works, especially his magnum opus, State and the Revolution (1918). As stated in this work and elsewhere, Lenin believed that socialism could never be built from above via

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a benevolent state, but had to be fought for by the oppressed classes themselves and thus had to be a process from below (Draper 1966). The centrality of oppressed classes as the main agents of change led him to argue that socialist movements must not just seek to take state power but also “smash” it and replace it with a higher form of proletarian democracy (Lenin 1917). Taking this cue, Chapter 3 argues that the inability of the Brazilian left to empower working classes and its rigid adherence to a statist, top-down “welfarist” model of governance lies at the heart of its failures. Unlike many on the left who find fault in the PT’s moderate and pragmatic policies, this chapter takes a deeper look at the Brazilian left’s flaws and argues that the problem with the PT was not that it took up reformist demands but that it did so in a reformist manner. Throughout the decade and a half long tenure the PT implemented ambitious social policies, but it did absolutely nothing to democratize the state, to develop parallel organs of rank and file democracy or to mobilize its social allies in extra-parliamentary field of play. Its fetish of the parliamentary arena became so acute that even when the opposition and big capital turned the screws on the government, it refused to ignite the streets and thus lost popular backing, eventually crumbling within and outside the legislature. The final chapter collates the achievements and failures of the pink tide in order to highlight important lessons for the left. One of the most important challenges that the left has had to face is that of having to implement progressive policies and of having to make structural changes under the pressures generated by capitalist globalization. These challenges must be seen in the context of the traditional theories of imperialism which viewed capitalism as a global system marked by sharp power differentials and economic asymmetries; a system that necessarily produced polarization of the world economy into cores and peripheries. In this context, taking a cue from Lenin’s own analysis of imperialism and the scores of thinkers that he inspired in the 1960s and 70s this chapter makes the case that his category of imperialism with its emphasis on core– periphery divergences continues to remain as relevant today as it did a century ago. The world has of course undergone several changes since then, but the fact remains that even today inequalities at the global level remain persistent and continuously reproduce themselves, though they do so in new and variegated ways. In this context, drawing on Leninist theories of imperialism as developed by figures like Samir Amin, the chapter

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makes a case for the left in developing countries to seek a clean and thorough economic “delinking” of peripheral economies from global markets as a first, necessary step towards constructing a post-neoliberal future. Such a strategy of course brings with it its own set of tensions the most important of which is to do with the state. The strategy of “delinking” must necessarily begin by weaponizing the state. But herein also lies a major dilemma for the left because while it must rely on the state to take forward its post-neoliberal project, the existing capitalist state with its hierarchical structures and with its bureaucracies, prisons and its armies cannot really be expected to assist in such a task. The state after all is not some neutral instrument that can be wielded by well-meaning politicians to introduce progressive transformations in the economy. It is, as Lenin argued, an organ of the wealthy, an institution so deeply implicated in economic reproduction of capital, that it is incapable of leading the kind of meaningful changes that the left intends to implement. Precisely because of this, Lenin and an entire generation of socialist luminaries argued that the left must not only work towards acquiring state power, but if it is to really succeed in its project, it must go beyond this by smashing the state machinery and replacing it with a very different kind of institution; one that is capable to assisting the left to reach its desired goals. Taking this cue, the chapter concludes by asserting the necessity for socialist “delinking” to move beyond developmentalist illusions by seeking to combine nation state base strategies of development with bottom up strategies based on radical decentralization of decision-making.

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Radcliffe, S. A. (2012). Development for a Postneoliberal Era? Sumak Kawsay, Living Well and the Limits to Decolonisation in Ecuador. Geoforum, 43(2), 240–249. Riethof, M. (2004). Changing Strategies of the Brazilian Labor Movement: FROM Opposition to Participation. Latin American Perspectives, 31(6), 31–47. Robinson, W. I. (2017). Passive Revolution: The Transnational Capitalist Class Unravels Latin America’s Pink Tide. Available at: https://truthout.org/ articles/passive-revolution-the-transnational-capitalist-class-unravels-latin-ame rica-s-pink-tide/ [Viewed 14/10/20]. Rocha, G. M. (2002). Neo-Dependency in Brazil. New Left Review, 16, 5–33. Rooksby, E. (2011). Towards a ‘Revolutionary Reformist’ Strategy: Within, Outside and Against the State. Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 39(1), 27–51. Rooksby, E. (2018). ‘Structural Reform’ and the Problem of Socialist Strategy Today. Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 46(1), 27–48. Saad-Filho, A. (2016). A Coup in Brazil? Jacobin. Available at: https://www. jacobinmag.com/2016/03/dilma-rousseff-pt-coup-golpe-petrobras-lavajato/ [Viewed 21/07/2016]. Saad-Filho, A. (2019). Varieties of Neoliberalism in Brazil (2003–2019). Latin American Perspectives, 47 (1), 9–27. Sader, E. (2009). Postneoliberalism in Latin America. Development Dialogue, 51(1), 171–179. Sader, E. (2011). The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left. London: Verso. Sankey, K. (2014). Colombia: The Mining Boom: A Catalyst of Development or Resistance? In H. Veltmeyer & J. F. Petras (Eds.), The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century? London: Zed Books. Sassoon, D. (2010). One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century. London: I. B. Tauris. Shandro, A. (2014). Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle. Leiden, Boston: Brill. Silva, E. (2009). Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sirohi, R. A. (2016). The Impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff: A “Political Coup” in Brazil. People’s Democracy, 40(23). Available at: http://peo plesdemocracy.in/2016/0522_pd/impeachment-president-dilma-rousseff-a% E2%80%9Cpolitical-coup%E2%80%9D-brazil [Viewed 21/07/2016]. Tokman, V. E. (1982). Unequal Development and the Absorption of Labour: Latin America 1950–1980. Cepal Review, 17, 121–132.

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Toscano, A. (2014). Transition Deprogrammed. South Atlantic Quarterly, 113(4), 761–775. Trotsky, L. (1938). The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Mobilization of the Masses Around Transitional Demands to Prepare the Conquest of Power. Marxists.org. Available at: https://www.mar xists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/. Twomey, M. J. (2001). A Century of Foreign Investment in Mexico (UMDeardon Economics Working Paper, 98). Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. F. (2014a): Theses on Extractive Imperialism and the Post-Neoliberal State In H. Veltmeyer & J. F. Petras (Eds.), The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century? London: Zed Books. Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. F. (2014b). A New Model or Extractive Imperialism? In H. Veltmeyer & J. F. Petras (Eds.), The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century? London: Zed Books. Webber, J. R. (2010). From Rebellion to Reform: Image and Reality in the Bolivia of Evo Morales. International Socialist Review, No. 73. Webber, J. R. (2017). The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Weisbrot, M., Johnston, J., & Lefebvre, S. (2014). The Brazilian Economy in Transition: Macroeconomic Policy, Labor and Inequality (CEPR Report). Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. Wilpert, G. (2015). The Roots of the Current Situation in Venezuela. Venezuelaanalysis. Available at: http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11716 [Viewed 21/07/2016]. Wirth, J. D. (1970). The Politics of Brazilian Development 1930–1954. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Lenin in Caracas

During the worldwide socialist upsurge of the early twentieth century, the lines demarcating the socialists from the non-socialists were very evident. Those that opposed the World War and those that supported revolutionary insurrections against the capitalist system stood in one camp while those who took an opposing stance on any of these issues stood in the other. Colonial horrors and the devastation caused by the great wars of that time made the choice before political movements a straightforward one: you were either on the side of socialism or you were a votary of barbarism, as Rosa Luxemburg put it. By contrast defining what constitutes the left in the twenty-first century has been far harder and the dividing lines between radicals and reformists have been far less obvious. Venezuela for example, represents the most radical of left movements in Latin America but in comparison to reverberating socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, its achievements remain miniscule. Neither has there been a sweeping nationalization program in place nor has private property in the rural countryside been attacked in any decisive manner whatsoever. The economy remains tightly controlled by the private sector and the country remains dependent on foreign trade for even basic commodities like food. Not surprisingly the left turn in Latin America and in Venezuela in particular has been subject to virulent criticism by radicals for failing to make deeper inroads against capital. The pink tide has been likened to a passive revolution wherein parties that were seemingly leftist and © The Author(s) 2021 R. A. Sirohi and S. Bhupatiraju, Reassessing the Pink Tide, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8674-3_2

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that seemingly used the rhetoric of socialism, in reality turned out to be nothing more than wolves in sheep’s clothing. From Bolivia to Brazil the left governments, according to this line of reasoning, only softened neoliberalism and if anything they have turned out to be, in some ways, bigger bulwarks of capital than their predecessors. Not only did they deepen Latin American global integration but they also flung their countries down an ecologically destructive, extractivist pattern of development that has hurt the most vulnerable sections of their society. While one can hardly fault these arguments based on simple empirical facts, there is in some senses something that is truly leftist about these Latin American projects even if most have ended up affecting only modest changes in their respective countries. Recognizing these achievements is important not only for setting the record straight but also for setting the agenda for the future of the left in the twenty-first century. It must be remembered that the context in which the left governments came to power has been very different from those that ushered in the great revolutions of the twentieth century. The left in Latin America today has emerged through the electoral road. Unlike its predecessors, it has not come to power at a time of bloody wars as was the case with Russia, nor in the context of national liberation movements that provide openings for revolutionary changes in China and Cuba. There was no smashing of the state by workers nor any mass expropriation of landed estates by armed peasants. Instead, the left in the region today has had to function in a society where organized labour has been in disarray and where the peasantry is no longer an organized force. Further, given the electoral path to power, the left has had to function within the limits of the institutional framework that it has inherited from its predecessors while still advancing ahead an alternative to neoliberal capitalism. The inherent contradictions involved in such a project have obviously limited the kind of transformations that it has been able to introduce. The measuring scales that we use to gauge the achievements of the left have to also take into consideration the global economic conjuncture today. Neoliberalism has unleashed enormous destruction of our natural and ecological resources and the consequent environmental damage has taken such extreme proportions that we today face the prospect of planetary extinction. On the social front, globalization of our economies has made it so that unemployment and low wages have become the norm even as states across the world have steadily retreated from their most

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basic social responsibilities (Palley 2013; Stockhammer 2013; Patnaik and Patnaik 2017). In the Global South which have successfully attracted large volumes of foreign capital, the very basis of accumulation has come to be associated with draconian assaults on labour rights and consequently a sharp deterioration in wages and labour standards. Even as corporate profits have soared, misery and deprivations have mounted for vast majority of the workforce. Under these circumstances welfarism even of the most limited, reformist kind has turned into an anathema to neoliberal interests. This is why the characterization of the pink tide regimes as being neoliberal or as orchestrators of passive revolutions is misplaced. Whereas welfarism in the immediate post-War era was in some senses complementary to the accumulation process and was therefore tolerated by capital, in the neoliberal era where the process of growth has come to depend primarily on predation and dispossession, even the most modest of demand management policies like the ones that the left implemented while in power in countries like Brazil and Venezuela have had to face intense political opposition. This is why, even though the social policies implemented by the left in neoliberal Latin America have been moderate, they cannot be equated with reformism of the older kind. In an era of finance capital where even the most basic welfare spending runs contrary to the interests of an inflation-fearing financial oligarchy, the left’s attempts to strengthen social policies have to be viewed as constituting a sharp attack on neoliberal interests and therefore cannot be easily waved off as an elite conspiracy to build hegemony- a passive revolution—as many have sought to do. Defining what constitutes a genuine leftist project therefore cannot be done based on hypothetical scales or by making ahistorical comparisons. There is no doubt a moderation in the kind of changes that have been made by the left in Latin America but there is also a profound sense in which these incipient projects have also turned the screws on the system. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the manner in which the contemporary left in Venezuela at least, has approached the role of the masses in the left’s project. To put this in perspective, for revolutionaries from Marx, Lenin down to Che Guevara, socialism in its most elemental form was always conceptualized in terms of human development (Eley 2002; Lebowitz 2006; Nimtz 2014a, b). But human development for these revolutionaries meant much more than just the provision of adequate amounts of goods and services necessary for people’s biological well-being. It entailed, above all, replacing a system

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that subjected people to “pitiless” and invisible economic laws, with a free social order where human beings could lead rich, fulfilling lives as active subjects of change (Guevara 1965b). The basic prerequisite for a socialist revolution and its ultimate aim, they repeatedly stated, had to be the recognition of the oppressed classes as the central agents, and indeed, the historically determined heroes of revolutionary change. Socialism itself, broken down to its most elementary particles, consisted of the most extreme devolution of decision-making down to the grassroots of society. The quest for another world had to be therefore interpreted and measured along these scales. From this perspective, the stand out feature of the Venezuelan left has been precisely the relationship that has materialized between grass-root movements and the left government in power. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, the Venezuelan left has been able to develop deep links with those at the bottom of the social pyramid. It is these deep links that have protected the government from opposition onslaughts and the devastating US sanctions that are currently ravaging the nation. The unfurling of direct democracy and attempts to build a communal state which have been a central goal of the Venezuelan left, have set it apart from the rest of the pink tide movement. Thus despite all the policy moderation, it is in Venezuela that Lenin’s vision of oppressed classes becoming central agents of change has taken the clearest form amongst all the pink tide nations. The leftist experiments here are facing increasingly daunting odds at the moment, but looked at as a dynamic process there is something incredibly radical about its achievements. It is in this context, that this chapter revaluates the Venezuelan experience and takes the Leninist perspective as its starting point for its analysis. Lenin’s extension of Marxism to twentieth-century Russia and his political role in shaping the Bolshevik revolution make his rich theoretical framework a useful guide to understanding the achievements and limitations of the Venezuelan left today. In doing so, this chapter takes a cue from Giovanni Arrighi’s magnum opus, Adam Smith in Beijing, which takes Adam Smith as its starting point for evaluating alternatives to neoliberal capitalism (Arrighi 2007). Arrighi sees in China’s rise as an economic superpower, a distinct, non-capitalist path to economic development marked by extensive commercial development, an aversion to imperialism and most importantly by the existence of a benevolent state capable of reigning in the worst excesses of commercialism. Arrighi’s main contention is that whereas in capitalist economies it is the interests of

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capital that gets prioritized, in non-capitalist market economies as exemplified by China, accumulation relies extensively on the magic of markets but in a way that is very different from capitalist economies in that it is not the interests of a single group that is prioritized but those of the entire collective. The key difference between the “natural”, Chinese path and the “unnatural” Western path, in his view arises because of the presence of an autonomous, benevolent political system in the former. This unique Chinese political regime whose origins date back to the Song dynasty in the twelfth century, according to Arrighi, guides markets rather than restricts them and seeks to prioritize the long term welfare of the nation taken as a whole, rather than short term interests of a few. Arrighi points to what he feels is an unmistakable shift towards a China-centric world order and in this shift he sees the emergence of a viable alternative to the current neoliberal, imperialist world system. This chapter in contrast takes its cue from Lenin and searches for a viable alternative to capitalism, neither in the invisible hands of the market nor in the benevolence of a “developmental state”, but rather in the agency of the working classes. And it takes the incipient experiments of the Venezuelan left as an example of what such an alternative could look like in actual practice and what obstacles such alternatives are likely to face.

Lenin’s World: Plebian Power and the Quest for Socialism To understand Lenin’s ideal of a post-capitalist world and to appreciate his analysis of revolutionary movements it is necessary to place his work in some historical context. This section begins with a very brief historical overview of the kind of historical juncture that Lenin inhabited to get a better understanding of the kind of questions that animated his world. The Russia that entered into the early twentieth century was a country that was marked by sharp contrasts. With a population of over 120 million and a vast territory ranging from Poland in the West and the Pacific Ocean in the East, the Russian empire could boast of having one of the largest armies in Europe and of the fifth largest industrial economy in the world (Ascher 2004; Fitzpatrick 2001). Much of this economic modernization was rather new in the sense that it owed its origins to active state initiatives undertaken by the Minister of Finance, Count Witte in the 1890s. Under his supervision the Russian economy witnessed extensive infrastructural development, expansion of rail networks and a phenomenal increase in

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iron, steel and cotton-thread production (Ascher 2004). But despite these rapid changes, the Russian economy shared few commonalities with its Western European counterparts. Modern industries while significant in terms of their sophistication and degree of capital intensity, remained concentrated in a few urban pockets and even as late as 1914 the peasantry far outnumbered the industrial proletariat in the total workforce. As for rural Russia, it appeared as if time had remained still. While capitalism had transformed much of Western Europe’s countryside and had destroyed last vestiges of feudal rule very early on, in Russia serfdom was formally abolished only in 1861 and even then the manner in which serf “emancipation” was carried out, did little to change the structure of rural Russia. Productivity remained stagnant, average land holdings were economically speaking small and the peasantry continued to remain in the tight grip of the landed nobility. Those peasants who were lucky enough to receive land after 1861 were forced to make onerous “redemption payments” to the state in return for these rights. Others of course had to make do by renting land at exorbitant rates (Fitzpatrick 2001; Serge 1972). The vast majority of the peasantry, therefore were squeezed by the state as well as the landed nobility; “yesterday’s serfs discovered that, in becoming free, they were now hopelessly in debt” (Serge 1972: 24). The political structure of the empire reflected the peculiarities of its economic development. In the industrialized Western Europe strong labour movements had been able to wrest crucial democratic rights for themselves and despite regular bouts of repression, political climate remained relatively more liberal. In Russia on the other hand, the Monarchy ruled with an iron grip. Political opposition was dealt with severe repression. Lenin, Trotsky and many other activists spent much of their political lives in exile for their involvement in anti-Tsar agitations. Newspapers were heavily censored, trade unions were banned till 1905 and strikes were illegal. Arbitrary arrests, exiles and the use of torture by police were common place. “Indeed, the principle of freedom of association was not recognized…All gatherings of groups of a dozen or more people were suspect and required police approval. No public lectures could be delivered without formal permission by the police, which generally declined to issue permits” (Ascher 2004: 2). It was in an environment such as this that mass movements against the autocracy started to spring up across the Russian empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. Peasant uprisings, mostly unorganized and spontaneous in nature, became widespread in the 1870s and 80s.

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The first significant force that sought to tap into this volcano were the Narodnikis or “Populists”. The Narodnikis were made up primarily of middle-class activists who looked to the peasantry as a source of inspiration and believed that the village communes, mirs, could form a basis for a future socialist Russia (Serge 1972). They opposed capitalist modernization because of the adverse effects it had had on European peasants and believed that Russia could and should bypass capitalism completely and directly seek to build socialism (Fitzpatrick 2001). In practice, their early forays into rural Russia were unsuccessful in attracting the peasantry to their cause and they soon turned to violent terrorist tactics which culminated in the assassination of Emperor Alexander II in 1881. It was around this time that another significant force began to emerge in Russia but this time in its urban heartlands. While small in number, the urban workers were militant and rebellious. Unlike their western counterparts, Russian workers had few opportunities to organize into trade unions and neither could they pressurize the state through formal political institutions in Tsarist Russia.1 Instead the urban proletariat was forced to fight its way through direct action that pit it against not only its employers on a regular basis and but also against the arms of the Tsarist state (Fitzpatrick 2001; Figes 1997). The direct cause of worker resentment was economic but given the authoritarian curbs on collective action, worker mobilization on economic issues often took on political hues, making them a big threat to the monarchy. Not surprisingly the state attempted to bring workers under control from very early on by heavy-handed repressive tactics and where repression failed, the government even experimented with its own pro-Tsarist unions to mollify worker militancy (though these experiments did not last for too long). Some laws regulating of factory work were passed but for the most the working lives of the urban workers was brutish and the state did little to ameliorate these conditions. Long working hours that often reached 14 hours a day, low wages, terrible conditions of work created a deep sense of anger and from the late 1890s onwards urban centres of Russia reverberated with strikes. Between the mid-1880s and 1890s there were 33 strikes on an average each year and this number increased to 176 in the subsequent 10 years. By 1903 just a few years before the 1905 revolution, strike 1 The Dumas that were constituted after the 1905 revolution had very restricted role and even in those years where they were regularly convened, their decision-making power rested squarely with the Monarchy.

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activity had reached peak levels involving thousands of workers and scores of spontaneous work stoppages (Ascher 2004). It was in the fires of these early rebellions that Lenin received his baptism as a revolutionary activist and Marxist theoretician. Over the next decade or so Lenin would emerge as one of the leading spokespersons for the Russian workers and of the Bolshevik party. Given his immense political importance, substantial attention has been given to Lenin’s work over the years, but unfortunately, for the most, he has been painted out to be a raging dictator, as someone suspicious of working-class initiatives and as someone who introduced “a distinctly Russian dose of conspiratorial politics into a Marxist dialectic that would otherwise have remained passive” (Figes 1997: 146). Partly such interpretations stem from pure ideological gimmickry because anyone who takes a close look at his speeches and writings can’t miss his advocacy of radical democracy and his belief in the historical role of the working classes as the most unwavering agents of socialism. But to be sure, the weight of USSR’s record also hangs heavily around Lenin’s neck. The spiral towards authoritarianism that started during the days of War Communism when Lenin was still alive and the dark decades that followed his death, makes it tempting for contemporary scholars to draw straightforward links between the Stalinist purges, Gulags and mass murders that have come to be associated with the Soviet Union, with Lenin’s distinct theoretical viewpoints. Tempting as this interpretation may be, Lenin’s conduct in the run-up to the 1917 revolution and the volumes of writings that he has left behind, provides a portrait of an activist that is very different from the “text book” versions that have been depicted by historians and political scientists alike (Lih 2008). Lenin’s views were of course constantly evolving and he was never afraid to refurbish his theoretical standpoint when confronted with the changing realities of the world around him. But within this evolving body of ideas it is possible to decipher sharp continuities which reveal his unshakeable faith in the radical agency of oppressed classes, his deep conviction in democracy and a burning desire for economic justice. In his early days, Lenin placed himself well within the tradition of European social democracy and held the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as a model party whose program he wanted to modify and implement in the Russian context. There were of course crucial differences which we shall discuss later on, but in many ways Lenin’s thoughts coincided with the orthodox Marxism of his times (Lih 2008). The Marxism of European social democracy was based on the idea that

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the expansion of productive forces combined with increasing class polarization in society provided ripe conditions for industrial workers to lead a charge against capitalism. Socialism, however, was not an inevitable denouement of history. It had to be fought for through concrete political intervention. More precisely, it was argued that while there was a natural affinity between the toiling masses and socialism, an organized social democratic force could hasten the “merger” between the two and in doing so arouse in the workers a clear cut class consciousness which would indicate to the workers the irreconcilability of class interests (Lih 2008). Armed with such a world view the industrial proletariat could become an unstoppable force that would eventually overthrow capitalism. For Russian socialists the problem of replicating a program such as this in their own backyard was that the region had not yet fully transitioned to capitalism and therefore lacked the industrial proletariat that would lead such a struggle. The autocracy, allied with the landed nobility placed breaks on capitalism and thus Russia remained a giant sea of feudalism with islands of capitalist modernity within it. While “legal Marxists” took from this the lesson that workers should not really fight for the socialist cause and should rather subordinate themselves to the liberal bourgeoisie in a fight against autocracy, Lenin provided a much more radical and nuanced alternative which reflected his keen understanding of how reforms were linked to revolutionary politics. For Lenin (1897: 332) the battle for democracy and the battle for socialism were “inseparably connected in the activities of the SocialDemocrats as the two sides of the same medal”. Political democracy was the “light or air” of the workers’ movement (Lenin 1905a: 77) and thus establishing a democratic republic, even if it was to be a capitalist one, would go a long way in laying grounds for the ultimate goal of the workers, which was to establish socialism.2 And why would workers want to fight against the autocracy if it meant that this would empower their class enemies? Lenin’s (1899: 265–266) answer was emphatic, “under the autocracy the working class is not able to develop its struggle extensively, to gain for itself any stable positions in either the economic or political fields, to establish sound mass organizations and unfurl the banner of the social revolution before the masses of the working people and teach them to struggle for it…only under conditions of political liberty, when

2 See Lih (2008) for a discussion on the origins of the “light or air” phrase.

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there is an extensive mass struggle, can the Russian working class develop organizations for the final victory of socialism”. Here it needs emphasizing that the consensus across social democratic circles was that Russia would have to go through the capitalist stage of development before even beginning the quest for socialism. On this matter Lenin was in agreement with “legal Marxists”. But what is important to note is that even in these early, orthodox formulations the main agents of revolutionary change for Lenin, were workers and their peasant allies. As Lenin saw it, although a bourgeois-democratic revolution would strengthen the position of capitalists they were simply too pusillanimous to take decisive measures against the autocracy and thus paradoxically the mantel of fighting for a democratic republic had to be taken up by the workers—in alliance with the peasantry—because they alone were the most unwavering supporters of democracy. Thus whereas “legal Marxists” saw workers as passive appendages to the liberal bourgeoisie, Lenin placed his faith in an independent, politically organized working class of Russia who, along with the peasantry would build a powerful bulwark against reactionary forces. In Lenin’s words: the working class must single itself out, for it is the only thoroughly consistent and unreserved enemy of the autocracy, only between the working class and the autocracy is no compromise possible, only in the working class can democracy find a champion who makes no reservations, is not irresolute and does not look back. The hostility of all other classes, groups and strata of the population towards the autocracy is not unqualified; their democracy always looks back. The bourgeoisie cannot but realise that industrial and social development is being retarded by the autocracy, but it fears the complete democratisation of the political and social system and can at any moment enter into alliance with the autocracy against the proletariat. (Lenin 1897: 335)

What this insistence on the political independence of the working class did was that it implicitly placed socialism on the immediate agenda of workers and peasants. Whether or not this was explicitly recognized by Lenin at that time, by taking the position that he did Lenin was suggesting that capitalism may be historically inevitable in Russia, but that the oppressed class need not shy away from it as much as “welcome it as the condition and the premise of its own bitter struggle against the real protagonist of capitalism – against the bourgeoisie” (Lukács 1997: 12). This belief in the “actuality of revolution”, i.e. the realization of the fact

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that the “bourgeoisie has ceased to be a revolutionary class” would prove to be a defining feature of Leninist tactics and would give Leninism a mass following during the crucial 1917 uprisings (Lukács 1997: 13). The logic of this argument was already made explicit in 1905 in the context of the “first” revolution, when Lenin appeared to have momentarily made “a modification in his general conception of two clearly distinct revolutions” by accepting the possibility that the two stages could collapse into one; a stance that which Marcel Liebman describes as a “a quasi-‘Trotskyist’ standpoint” (Liebman 1975: 81). But it was only after 1915 and mainly during the months leading up to the 1917 revolution that Lenin would decisively revise his position on the sequencing revolutions and in doing so he would give his analysis a far sharper edge than it had during his younger days. For example, in 1915 Lenin had already begun to indicate that the battle against the autocracy could spill over into an anti-capitalist revolution. “The proletariat cannot be victorious except through democracy” Lenin (1915: 408) asserted. Given the changes within Russia and the terrible imperialist war that had broken out across Europe, Lenin was now far less optimistic that even the minimum program of workers and peasants could be implemented within the bounds of capitalism. Thus Lenin (1915: 408) continued, “We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary program and tactics on all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular election of officials, equal rights for women, the self-determination of nations, etc.” But, and here was the crux of his position, “While capitalism exists, these demandsall of them-can only be accomplished as an exception, and even then in an incomplete and distorted form. Basing ourselves on the democracy already achieved, and exposing its incompleteness under capitalism, we demand the overthrow of capitalism, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, as a necessary basis both for the abolition of the poverty of the masses and for the complete and all-round institution of all democratic reforms” (Lenin 1915: 408). From this he concluded that “The social revolution is not a single battle, but a period covering a series of battles over all sorts of problems of economic and democratic reform, which are consummated only by the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It is for the sake of this final aim that we must formulate every one of our democratic demands in a consistently revolutionary way” (Lenin 1915: 408). This line of reasoning grew even sharper in the run-up to the October revolution. In the aftermath of the fall of the Monarchy in early 1917 and the massive worker insurrections that followed it, Lenin (1917: 22) would

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declare in his famous April Thesis the necessity of “passing-from the first stage of the revolution-which, owing to the insufficient class consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie-to its second stage which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants”. That Lenin was able to visualize the “actuality” of this second revolution at a time when many Marxists—including those within the Bolshevik party—held firm to a stadial vision of development was primarily because of the centrality that Lenin gave to the oppressed classes. The belief in radical potential of working classes taken to its logical conclusion could only mean that the ultimate safeguard of democratic rights and the only power capable of ending imperialist wars were the oppressed classes themselves. The liberal bourgeoisie had proven to be completely impotent at introducing even the most basic alterations in Russian society even though they had been given the opportunity to do so in the months following the abdication by the Tsar. Political power had to therefore be placed squarely in the hands of workers. But if seizure of power by the workers was the only guarantee that even the most minimum demands—a democratic republic and an end to Russia’s involvement in the War—could be implemented and if capitalists had turned into fetters of even these most basic kinds of demands, it was imperative for workers to use their position to turn the first stage of the revolution into a full-fledged attack on capitalism itself. “All power to the Soviets!”, the war cry of the Bolsheviks, naturally followed from these conclusions. One consequence of Lenin’s formulations was that it made democracy itself an arena of class conflict. Capitalism was a terrible and parasitical system. It exploited the working classes, impoverished the vast majority of Russians and sent young men and women to their slaughter on the frontlines just so that a small bunch of capitalists could fill up their pockets. But the fact that capitalists could get away with such atrocities was precisely because capitalism was insufficiently democratic. This incompleteness, of course, was not a matter of this party being in power or that, this leader ruling the government or the other. The qualification of democracy was in the very genetic code of capitalism. Decision-making under capitalism had to limit democracy in order to allow capitalists to do what they did best— exploit. There could be no other way capitalism could function in Lenin’s view. This was true not only of autocratic Russia but even of more mature and more democratic countries like England where although “powerful popular control is exercised over the administration, but even there that

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control is far from being complete, even there the bureaucracy retains not a few of its privileges, and not infrequently is the master and not the servant of the people…we see that powerful social groups support the privileged position of the bureaucracy and hinder the complete democratisation of that institution” (Lenin 1897: 337). The state even in its most democratic parliamentary form “is undisplaceable, is privileged and stands above the people” (Lenin 1917: 68). Deepening democracy was therefore of utmost importance for socialist forces because in so much as democratic demands were acceptable to capitalists, workers would enjoy greater freedom to shape important political and economic decisions all of which would help spread their influence and ultimately organize them for their ultimate goal. But even in so far as worker’s democratic demands remained unfulfilled under capitalism, the very fact that this limit was binding would allow workers to see clearly the class basis of the existing society and see the necessity of transcending capitalism. Tamas Krausz (2015: 99) explains Lenin’s position as follows: Many who believed in the struggle against the system found even the mere formulation of bourgeois democratic demands pointless, that its realization was impossible under capitalist conditions. Lenin, on the other hand, saw the bourgeois democratic demands as important and specifically suited to the conditions of Russian capitalism. Not because it was possible to realize them in the ‘periphery’ of the Russian capitalist system, but for their potential to disrupt this framework.

For Lenin this also meant that any future socialist society could not just make do with older, limited forms of democracy. For socialism to truly thrive and provide an alternative to capitalism, democracy would have to be made direct and unqualified. Whereas the highest form of democracy under capitalism involved a form of government that prevented “independent political life of the masses, their direct participation in the democratic organization of the life of the state from bottom up”, socialism required a “higher type” of democracy where the masses themselves would take up the mantle of shaping their lives (Lenin 1917: 68–69). Enrichening democracy and raising it up to its most unqualified and unfettered form was the essence of socialism. As for the naysayers who thought such extreme devolution of power to be impracticable, Lenin (1917: 69) had the following to say:

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We are usually told that the Russian people are not yet prepared for the ‘introduction’ of the Commune. This was the argument of the serf-owners when they claimed that the peasants were not prepared for emancipation. The Commune, i.e., the Soviets, does not ‘introduce’, does not intend to ‘introduce’, and must not introduce any reforms which have not absolutely matured both in economic reality and in the minds of the overwhelming majority of the people. The deeper the economic collapse and the crisis produced by the war, the more urgent becomes the need for the most perfect political form, which will facilitate the healing of the terrible wounds inflicted on mankind by the war. The less the organisational experience of the Russian people, the more resolutely must we proceed to organisational development by the people themselves and not merely by the bourgeois politicians and ‘well-placed’ bureaucrats.

A final remark is worth making here. While Lenin’s writings from 1917 onwards, especially State and the Revolution have the most explicit statement of this kind of thinking, it would be wrong to see these as merely stemming from political expediency because one can find this thread running through his speeches and writings right from 1905 onwards. 1905 of course was a turning point in Russian history. The massacre of peaceful protestors on Bloody Sunday on January 9, 1905, “detonated”, to use Victor Serge’s (1972: 38) adjective, long-standing resentment against the Tsarist regime. As the liberals vacillated and struck deals with the autocracy, it was the workers in cities and peasants in the countryside that fought pitched battles against the police and army. The St. Petersburg workers organized themselves into a democratically elected, Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, to coordinate strikes and soon several cities had their own Soviet bodies. Some of these Soviets began to even take upon themselves local administrative responsibilities. The peak of unrest occurred in late 1905 when workers in Moscow attempted an armed insurrection and although it was summarily defeated, the enormity of these insurrections forced the Tsar to accede to the demand of establishing limited representative institutions. Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) throughout the period were active participants in these struggles but a large section of them were of the belief that workers should not try and acquire power should the Monarchy fall and should a provisional government come to take its place. Instead they argued that the workers ought to play second fiddle and leave political power in the hands of the liberals (Le Blanc 2015). Further they were of the view that workers ought to restrain popular insurrections and

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prevent them from becoming too revolutionary for any radicalism on their part would scare liberals and push them into an alliance with the monarchy. As can be expected the Bolsheviks led by Lenin disagreed with these views completely. For Lenin workers were the last and only bulwark against reaction and to leave power to the inconsistent bourgeoisie would have been akin to handing over the entire revolution to the monarchy on a plate. Instead Lenin (1905b: 21) suggested that the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies “be regarded as the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government ”. Such a body, he warned his comrades, ought not be reduced to an appendage of the RSDLP as some within the party had been demanding. Instead Lenin (1905b: 20) said, “It seems to me that the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, as an organization representing all occupations, should strive to include deputies from all industrial, professional and office workers, domestic servants, farm labourers, etc., from all who want and are able to fight in common for a better life for the whole working people”. And as far as Social-Democrats were concerned Lenin (1905b: 20) suggested that they do their “best, first, to have all our Party organizations represented on all trade unions as fully as possible and, secondly, to use the struggle we are waging jointly with our fellow proletarians, irrespective of their views, for the tire less, steadfast advocacy of the only consistent, the only truly proletarian world outlook, Marxism”. The Leninist framework outlined above provides us with an alternative theoretical framework to evaluate both the achievements and limitations of left rule in Venezuela. Most studies on the region-both critical as well as supportive- have focused on the state, the Presidency and on the personality of Chávez. The Leninist perspective however forces us to shift our attention outside these institutionalized channels thereby bringing into focus the driving role of oppressed classes (Ciccariello-Maher 2013; Azzellini 2018). “We shall fail in our duty”, Lenin (1906: 507) once said, “if we only gaze ‘up’, and miss what is going on, growing, approaching and impending below”. It is with this in mind that the recent Venezuelan experiences are analyzed below.

Neoliberalism Against Democracy: Venezuela’s Lost Decades To analyse the rise of the left in Venezuela after 1998, it is imperative to juxtapose it with the Punto Fijo regime that emerged in the 1950s. Like other Latin American nations in the immediate post-War period, Venezuela too adopted import substitution industrialization. As

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we had noted in the introduction ISI involved focusing investments into industries and it entailed the use of heavy trade protection and capital controls. The emergence of ISI occurred at a time when a tidal wave of economic nationalism had risen across the developing world. Political freedom from erstwhile colonial rulers, it came to be widely recognized, had to be backed up by economic autonomy for it to be meaningful. The structuralist idea that the global division of labour had restricted Latin America to the export of primary commodities in exchange for manufactured goods from the West and that unless this link was broken, Latin America would continue to remain under the boots of the West, gained immediate currency in the post-War period. For meaningful development to happen, Latin American nations would necessarily have to delink themselves from global markets and instead rely on an autonomous, inward looking strategy of industrialization. Further, since colonialism had completely fragmented economies in these countries the responsibility of the entire program had to be shouldered by the state. In the case of Venezuela, not only was the state called into intervene in the economy, indirectly, by subsidizing the private sector, by protecting it from foreign competition and by investing in social overhead capital, but it also ended up directly intervening in production through state-owned enterprises in a variety of sectors like steel, aluminium, telecommunications and, of course, oil. The Venezuelan ISI was aided by the fact that the country had some of the largest oil reserves in the world. Oil demand increased steadily between 1958 and 1980 and this meant that the state was flushed with funds that enabled it to make the kind of investments needed for the smooth functioning of ISI (Chodor 2014). Indeed, between 1920 and 1980 Venezuela emerged as one of the fastest growing Latin America economies so much so that its per capita GDP roughly doubled between 1950 and 1980 (Cardoso and Fishlow 1992; Di John 2014). The flexibility provided by oil revenues also allowed for a kind of consensual politics that other Latin American nations would never be able to achieve. Post-1958 Venezuela stands as one of the few Latin American nations that maintained a formal democracy throughout the ISI era. Stable-two party rule, regular elections and institutionalization of democratic norms, in a region marked by authoritarian rule, imparted an aura of exceptionalism to Venezuelan politics (Ellner 2008). At the heart of this was the fact that oil revenues allowed elites to solve collective action problems without significant taxation being imposed upon them even as resources were

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made available for expenditure on welfare schemes. The 1970s in particular witnessed significant expansion in social expenditure and this earned the regime wide spread approval. Yet the use of the adjective, consensual, of course must be carefully applied because underneath the democratic face of the country, politics remained for the most a “partyarchy” of two leading political parties—Acción Democrática (AD) and Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI). Popular movements within the country were either forced to accede to the rules of the game set by the two parties or were severely repressed by the state (Ellner 2008; Ciccariello-Maher 2013). The height of the post-1958 regime was in the 1970s when oil prices skyrocketed resulting in high growth rates and an enormous increase in welfare expenditures. Eventually of course like other economies in the region, Venezuela’s experiments with ISI reached their tipping point in the 1980s. Matters came to a head in the early 1980s when the Mexican debt crisis sent investors scurrying for cover. Venezuela, like other Latin American economies had accumulated extensive external debt in the 1970s. By the 1980s however not only did oil prices fall globally but following the debt crisis there was large-scale capital outflows from the region. The effect on the Venezuelan economy was as sudden as it was devastating. As oil revenues declined and foreign investors retreated, the economy found that it was unable to repay its loans. What followed was a tough period for Venezuela. Production collapsed in 1982 and 1983 leading to a sharp increase in poverty, a decline in wages and in public spending (Silva 2009). Mismanagement of the crisis by the governments of Campins (1979–1984) and Lusinchi (1984–1988) aggravated the matter and by 1988, inflation stood at about 30%, public external debt hit 27 billion USD and current account deficits amounted to 5.8 billion USD approximately (Lander and Fierro 1996). The final nail in ISI’s coffin however came in 1989 with the election of Carlos Andres Pérez. Pérez had stewarded Venezuela through one of its most successful periods in the 1970s, and in the 1988 elections Pérez sought to play up these credentials by promising a return to good old times. His election campaign packaged him as an anti-neoliberal candidate and this struck a chord with Venezuelans who voted him to power in a landslide electoral victory (Ciccariello-Maher 2013). But in keeping with many politicians of his era, within weeks of coming to power, Pérez turned around his entire policy stance and inaugurated a brutal neoliberal policy plan which included a reduction of welfare spending, deregulation

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of labour markets, removal of price controls, privatization of state-owned enterprises and drastic trade and financial liberalization. Pérez’s party, the AD had until then occupied a left-of-centre space in Venezuelan politics and had traditionally shared close links the country’s biggest labour unions. The about turn that Pérez made did not go down too well with many within the party and from very early on there was severe opposition to his proposed reform package (Di John 2005). In order to negate this opposition, Pérez sidelined rivals within the AD and “appointed a narrow group of free-market-oriented business people and technocrats to top cabinet positions” to formulate policies (Silva 2009: 201). Further, recognizing his difficult position in the legislature he “planned to push as many of the reforms as possible…through by decree” rather than through negotiations and consensus building (Silva 2009: 201). Pérez would eventually be impeached in 1993, but his strategy of stealthy neoliberalism would be followed by his successor, Rafael Caldera, as well. Like Pérez, Caldera too would run on an anti-neoliberal platform only to turn around and push ahead with a second set of neoliberal adjustments including some of the most aggressive privatizations in banking, oil and steel sectors. These political acrobatics aside, the record of these adjustments was disastrous. Unlike in Brazil where neoliberal reforms of Cardoso actually helped bring a modicum of price stability and thus helped legitimize his government in its early years, in Venezuela’s case policies adopted by Pérez and Caldera not only increased inflation but they also left the economy on the brink of collapse. Investment rates which averaged 34% in the 1970s and 21% in the 1980s fell to 16% in the 1990s. Manufacturing growth declined sharply from average growth of 5.8% in the 1965–1980 period to 1.5% in 1990–1998, even as per capita decelerated at an annual rate of 2.7% during 1990–1998 (Di John 2005). On the social front too, the effects of stagnation were evident. Towards the close of the 1990s, minimum wages and public spending had declined to 60% and 40% of the 1980s level, respectively (Silva 2009). The inability to stabilize the economy and the manner in which the reforms were implemented by both Pérez and Caldera undermined the legitimacy of neoliberalism and exposed the fragility of traditional political institutions. While democracy was always elitist in Venezuela’s “partyarchy”, it nonetheless was underwritten by pacts and well established consultative processes. The legitimacy of the traditional political establishment was thus based on an image of it being as a neutral arbiter overseeing

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social conflicts. It was this image that took a hit with the about turns of Pérez and Caldera. No longer could Venezuelan political elites claim to represent popular aspirations and no longer could the state be seen as an entity aloof from dominant class interests. Indicative of this breakdown were the growing abstention rates in national elections, which skyrocketed from 18% of the electorate in 1988 to almost 37% in the 1998 elections. Thus whereas in 1973, 46% of respondents to a national survey identified themselves with one of the main political parties, by 1998 the number had fallen to 14% (Flores-Macías 2012). The disarray within the traditional party system was also reflected in the growing factionalism within established political parties. Within the COPEI a clear divide emerged between the younger, market-oriented new guard and the statist, old guard. The 1993 elections Caldera, a one-time founder of the COPEI, actually split away from his party and fought the elections on the platform of his alternative Convergencia party. By comparison AD was more cohesive, but it too faced several high-level defections and debilitating splits in the late half of the 1990s (Buxton 2000; Di John 2005). Unions associated with the AD similarly lost face and increasingly became alienated from mass mobilizations. Unlike Brazil where labour unions associated with the PT played an important role in mobilizing masses against neoliberal reforms, in Venezuela, the largest trade union associated with the AD, the Confederación de Trabajdores Venezolanos (CTV), maintained a very ambiguous stance towards neoliberal governments. The CTV refrained from outright opposition to the policies of Pérez early on because it hoped that it could alter the terms of the structural adjustments through internal negotiations (Silva 2009). When it finally did call for general strikes in on two separate occasions in the 90s, it did so with great caution and care so as not to rock the government’s boat. During the presidency of Caldera, “AD labor leaders uncritically supported Caldera’s neoliberal policies, and participated in the drafting of neoliberal-inspired labor and social legislation promulgated in 1997. Specifically, the CTV accepted the privatization of the health system, which essentially legalized the practice of providing the poor, who lacked insurance coverage or ability to pay, with secondclass treatment in public hospitals. In another concession to neoliberal formulas, the CTV dropped its opposition to changes in the system of job severance payments and approved a reform that, in effect, reduced the large sums of money companies had to pay employees when they left the job” (Ellner 2005: 106).

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It was precisely the combination of increased economic upheavals and a loss of faith in traditional political actors that drove millions onto the streets throughout the 1990s. The first popular uprising broke out in February of 1989 in response to Pérez’s dilution of price controls. The government announced a 30% increase in transport prices and this was preceded by a 100% hike in oil prices. In Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, the morning on which the transport price hike took effect, spontaneous protests by students erupted across the city. Very soon these protests grew in numbers as scores of slum dwellers- the informal working class, so to speak- joined in (Ciccariello-Maher 2013). “Led by the students, men and women of all ages, and children, were yelling protests against the economic measures announced by President Perez” (Lopez-Maya 2003: 124). Slowly, what began as sporadic acts of violence and spontaneous anger against price increases, spilled over into citywide riots. Informal workers who depended on transport to and from the city to its peripheries formed the backbone of the uprising. Starting from the afternoon of 27 February rioters descended from the slums of Caracas into the city centre, blocking roads, damaging property and looting shops. As the gravity of the riots started sinking in and as disturbances started spreading to other cities, the government moved into action and the army was deployed in large numbers. On the 28th of February curfew was imposed in Caracas. Hundreds if not thousands of protestors were killed and injured in the ensuing days by the army and the police. Slums were raided and people were summarily executed in cold blood. “The nights of 1 and 2 March were terrifying for the working class districts of Caracas. Stories tell of police raids on homes and shoot-outs in some districts, buildings set on fire and corpses lying in the streets at the end of the curfew” (LopezMaya 2003: 129). While normalcy returned by the 3rd of March, the riots showed just how unpopular neoliberal policies were. The Caracazo riots marked the beginning of what was to become a decade of protracted and violent mobilizations. The three-year period after the uprisings itself saw nearly 5000 protests (Silva 2009). By the mid-1990s students, teachers, public sector workers and unions associated with leftist parties took part in militant protests. In August 1996, more than a million workers went on strike and this was repeated once again in November 1997 (Silva 2009). The reverberations of the Caracazo were felt within the army as well. Deeply affected by the riots and the repression that followed, a covert group that had existed within the army since 1982, the MBR-200, attempted a military coup against what

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they claimed was an illegitimate system in February 1992. The coup was badly planned and quickly defeated; its chief conspirator, Hugo Chávez, was arrested. However, a brief appearance that he made on national television before his surrender earned popular approval and instantly made him a national hero (Azzellini and Wilpert 2009). Chávez was released in 1994 as part of an amnesty granted by the new president, Rafael Caldera, and on his release Chávez immediately got to work on building a political network for the MBR-200. The civilian response to the abortive coup had been lukewarm and the MBR-200 activists therefore jumped headlong into developing a legal, mass movement to mobilize poor Venezuelans on an alternative political platform. Neoliberalism in Venezuela, from the inception, was on extremely shaky ground. Whereas in Brazil, Cardoso was able to earn popular approval for his reforms, in Venezuela the reforms were so badly managed and the popular reaction to them was so dramatic that it placed the country’s elites and its established political actors on a sticky wicket. There was of course a growing disillusionment within the upper and middle classes with the way reforms had played out and it was also clear that the policies of Perez and Caldera had had an adverse effect on them—especially on the middle class and sections of the national bourgeoisie. But despite this, when it came to actually proposing alternatives, time and again these sectors proved that were not “unwavering”—to use Lenin’s phrase- in their opposition to neoliberalism. Several middle-class associations that sprung up in the 1990s for example demanded greater democratization of the political system, but when it came to the crux of the matter they blamed Venezuela’s woes on a corrupt state and demanded greater private sector involvement in the economy and a deepening of structural reforms as a solution (Sanoja 2009). The traditional elites similarly, despite the losses that some of them suffered due to external liberalization, were afraid to demand a complete rollback of neoliberalism because “the masses and their resistance to neoliberal reforms became a threat to the civilized order” and this they feared more than the likes of Pérez and Caldera (Chodor 2014: 99). The masses, according to the elite discourse, were uneducated, uncivilized “hordes” and thus prone to “being easily manipulated and incapable of thinking rationally” (Cannon 2008: 742). Empowering them and accepting their demands would only serve to strengthen barbarism in Venezuelan society. After the Caracazo, the elites were convinced that the discipline of markets, however painful for them,

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was a necessary pill to swallow in order to put these radical social elements in their place (Chodor 2014). The MBR-200 entered into the political fray in such a context where none of the established political actors were willing to address the exclusion of the poor. The problem with Venezuela, reasoned the Bolivarianists, was that it was dominated by narrow class of elites of the Punto Fijo regime. For decades these classes had restricted popular participation in political processes, struck deals behind the backs of the electorate and had deprived the masses of their fair share of the national wealth. Neoliberalism was only the culmination of this corrupt system (Ellner 2008). What was therefore needed was a political system which allowed complete and unadulterated freedom for the masses to shape their own destinies. Unlike the condescending tone of traditional elites, Chávez upheld the masses as the most unwavering champions of freedom. Where the oligarchs saw laziness and passivity, Chávez saw in “popular protagonism”, “the fuel of history” and a collective power that “unleashed force, equal to the rivers” (cited in Cannon 2008: 741). The Bolivarianists demanded that a constitutional assembly be called and a new constitution be worked out; one that would finally allow the masses to shape their own lives. “MBR–200 stressed the necessity for a total transformation of all social structures, and they proposed the creation of five powers: executive, legislative, judicial, electoral, and moral” (Azzellini and Wilpert 2009: 3). Further, Bolivarianists invoked their country’s history and made use of popular cultural symbolism to popularize their program. This was aimed against the longstanding elite tendency of looking to the West for cultural inspiration. Drawing historical parallels, the Bolivarianists argued that the independence that the nation achieved in 1830 was a major achievement but it remained incomplete because the system that replaced colonialism was corrupt and exclusionary to its core. To clear up the rut that existed in the existing set up a second freedom struggle was required (Sanoja 2009). Just as then, the enemies of the people in neoliberal Venezuela were a pusillanimous set of elites that dithered and trembled in front of foreign forces like the IMF and the World Bank. The Bolivarianists invoked nationally rooted traditions of solidarity, equality, nationalism and freedom that Latin American stalwarts like Bolivar, Zamora and Rodriguez embodied (Chodor 2014). Bolivar represented the Venezuelan yearning for liberation while Zamora, “famous for his slogan of “land, elections and horror to the oligarchy” represented “not only the unity of military and the masses but also the promise of liberation and justice

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achieved through popular struggle” (Chodor 2014: 102). Rodriguez was placed “into the trinity by virtue of his emphasis on the redeeming value of education for the masses, and his conviction that Venezuela could not and should not follow European ways” (Sanoja 2009: 406). Not surprisingly the Bolivarian alternative immediately struck a chord with the poorest. In April 1997, the organization declared its intention to run for elections and in the 1998 national elections, under a new name of Movimiento Quinta República (MVR), the organization threw itself into the electoral fray. It drew up an alliance of leftist parties—the Patriotic Pole—and Chávez won the Presidential elections by a vote share of 56.2%, marking the beginning of a new phase in the country.

The Chávez Years The initial years of the Chávez Presidency was marked by heightened political conflict. On coming to power, Chávez immediately convened a series of referenda to elect a constituent assembly and draft out a new constitution. During this period his economic policies remained extremely moderate and despite the fiery rhetoric that got him into office, Chávez maintained a non-confrontational stance towards the traditional oligarchy, even including many of his predecessor’s representatives in his government’s key economic posts (Ellner 2008). Thus the National Development Plan 2001–2007 which encapsulated Chávez’s early policy stance, actually sought to develop a mixed economy in which the private sector was to play a large role. “The real focus of the proposal to transform the economy”, notes Lebowitz (2006: 91), “was to encourage private capital-both domestic and foreign” and the state’s job was seen as being that of a facilitator of private initiative. “The Plan rejected the neoliberal worship of the market, rejected privatization of oil and other state industries, and was determined to use the state actively. But, it was not a rejection of capitalism” (Lebowitz 2006: 91). Politically, however, Chávez sought to introduce some sweeping political and institutional reforms. The new constitution that was ratified by a whopping 72% of the Venezuelan electorate in December 1999, made major changes in the structure of the judiciary, military and the legislature (Wilpert 2007). Funding of political parties was delinked from state control as had traditionally been the case in Venezuela and the bicameral legislature was dissolved into a single, National Assembly. Health, education and employment were recognized as explicit rights to be guaranteed by the state and

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perhaps most significantly the new constitution laid emphasis on the “participation of the people in the formation, execution and control of public administration” (cited in Wilpert 2007: 53). This, Article 62 noted, was “the necessary means for achieving the involvement that ensures their full development, both individual and collective” (cited in Wilpert 2007: 53–54). These political reforms were significant enough to make the traditional elites insecure and almost immediately the opposition coalesced together to resist these changes. Matters came to a flashpoint in 2001 when 49 special laws were enacted by the National Assembly two of which were particularly contentious. The first was the Organic Hydrocarbon Law which sought to increase the state’s role in the petroleum sector and by doing so, threatened to reverse the privatization spree that began in the 1990s. The second and perhaps more radical of the decrees was the Land Law which provided the state with enhanced powers to expropriate idle or unproductively used land from the country’s large land holders (Ellner 2008; Wilpert 2007). Almost immediately, the country’s largest business representative the FEDECAMARAS, together with the AD and COPEI launched a scathing attack on the government. A series of crippling strikes were followed by violent street protests in which the representatives of opposition parties openly called for removal of Chávez. On April 11, 2002, sections of the army supported by the opposition arrested Chávez removed his government from power. The president of the FEDECAMARAS came to head the interim government and immediately withdrew all democratic rights, promising only that he would hold elections within a year. The 1999 Constitution was abolished and with it the 49 special laws were declared null and void. With the coup plotters in positions of authority, the ensuing hours could have very well have turned out to be the last gasps for the left but as it came to be, the events that followed played out very differently. Infighting within the ranks of the opposition regarding the allocation of ministerial posts created fissures amongst the coup plotters. Sections of the army that had led the coup felt sidelined as the Navy appeared to have gained the upper hand when it came to their representation in the interim government. Similarly, AD members felt slighted as the interim government elevated COPEI members to important positions while ignoring their own representatives (Ellner 2008). But more consequential than what was happening in the power corridors were the growing rumblings on the streets. Just as the curtains were

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coming down on Chávez, scores of poor Venezuelans marched towards the Presidential palace in support of the government. They were met with heavy repression but the sheer numbers that were mobilized, restrained the hands of the opposition. The mainstream media, for its part, tried its level best to obfuscate information and legitimize the takeover but this was without much success as local, neighbourhood level media sources sprung up almost instantaneously to provide news and information to slum dwellers in Caracas (Ciccariello-Maher 2013). As people poured into the streets, mid-level military officers who had from the very beginning refrained from taking part in the coup, organized a counteroffensive. After two days of tense manoeuvring and counter manoeuvring, the opposition crumbled and Chávez’s government was put back into power on April 13th. The coup and its defeat marked a turning point in the country. It laid bare the class basis of society for all to see and it brought to the fore the driving role of oppressed classes in the Bolivarian revolution: If 1989 marked its most concrete origins and 1992 its will to seize institutional manifestations of power, 2002 indicated a powerful refusal by the poorest sectors to stop there, to be content with seizing the state and nothing more, and, more than that, it indicated an insistence on picking up the pace in the forward march…But that is not all that was proven by the events of 2002. They also prove that “the people” are far more than the inert mass that many consider them to be…The failure of the coup derived in part from the oligarchy’s belief in this caricature, and the assumption that these poor “hordes”, the “scum” of the barrios, the mindless lumpen, would not fight for their leader and their revolution (especially once anesthetized by the media blackout). Not only are the popular masses the driving force behind the Bolivarian process…but they are the deciders: those who give and those who take away, those who put people in power and those who remove them. (Ciccariello-Maher 2013: 176, 177)

Equally importantly, the coup made it clear that the traditional oligarchy was unwilling to give even the smallest of concessions to the left and were ready to go to extremes to oppose even its most moderate social reform proposals. All those within the left who had hoped to civilize Venezuelan capitalism and had hoped to make it socially responsible, were suddenly faced with a sobering reality because on paper there should have been no reason for the opposition to have gone on an all-out war. “Considered one by one, these laws definitely were not socialist measures as opposed to

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attempts to reform Venezuelan capitalism”, notes Lebowitz (2006: 94– 95). “Measures to support cooperatives, provide for microfinance, and obtain greater revenues for the state from oil-these were not attacks on capitalism. Even the law expropriating idle land from latifundia for the purpose of distributing it to peasants was not a rejection of capitalism as such…” (Lebowitz 2006: 95). For all practical purposes “Capitalism in Venezuela could have absorbed these reforms, which could have brought more stability to an unstable society” (Lebowitz 2006: 95). But as Lenin had reminded us long ago, reform measures however benign, were something that capitalists were wont to oppose because the acceptance of the smallest compromises ran the risk of politicizing workers and weakening the discipline that the capitalist system is based upon. In Venezuela, capital came to recognize the subversive potential of Chávez’s reforms very well and this is why it reacted the way it did. Nationalization of oil or the investments that Chávez promised that the state would make on health and education, capitalists feared, could snowball into an allout demand for something more radical. Therefore, the screws had to be turned against the “hordes” before it was too late. The defeat of the coup blasted these plans. What the stance adopted by capital also did was to steer Chávez away from a path of reformism and compromises. The revolution had to move forward or stop right there on its tracks. Much of Chávez’s early tenure was filled with conflicts of these sorts, and at each critical juncture it was popular support that finally tipped the balance in his favour. The 2002 coup was followed by an oil lock out by the high-level executives of the state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A (PDVSA) which lasted from December 2002 to March 2003. Though this was one of several oil production stoppages that were organized after the passage of the 49 decrees, the 2002–2003 lock out was particularly devastating. Chávez’s response to the coup a few months before, had been to seek greater rapprochement with his enemies with the hopes of buying some breathing space for his fledgling government. This move however only emboldened the opposition and by late 2002 the locus of conflict shifted to the PDVSA. The PDVSA was a unique institution in many ways. Despite being publically owned, over the 1990s it had wrested far-reaching autonomy from the state and it used this freedom in turn to open up Venezuelan oil to foreign capital. Chávez’s attempts to reign its management in and to renationalize the company’s operations did not sit well with the upper management. The country’s largest trade union the CTV together with

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the FEDECAMARAS and the upper management of the PDVSA called for a nationwide strike in December with an aim to completely paralyze oil production (Ciccariello-Maher 2013; Wilpert 2007; Ellner 2008). Within days, oil production fell causing shortages of basic commodities and skyrocketing prices. As the strike spilled over into an all-out economic war, businesses withdrew investment and capital flew out of the country in large quantities (Levingston 2014). This time however the government responded aggressively. Imports of oil and food were stepped up to sustain supply domestically. The government introduced price controls, restricted capital outflows via new stringent capital controls and cracked down on food hording by traders. As for the PDVSA, several of its managerial staff who had spearheaded the lock out were fired. The government fell back on mid and low level employees—who had refused to join the strike—for the day to day functioning of PDVSA. These workers would later go onto form the National Union of Workers whose manifesto would emphasize the need for developing worker controlled enterprises (Lebowitz 2006). With these blue collared workers on their side and with the additional help of the army, retired workers and foreign technicians, the government retook the company and by mid-2003 the lock out was all but defeated. If the reversal of the coup marked Chávez’s political victory against his opponents, the failure of the oil lock out marked a small but consequential victory on the economic front. The political confrontations that Chávez had to face were consequential in two senses. First, it forced the regime to radicalize its demands and pick up the pace of its policies. By 2005 Chávez even began speaking of twenty-first-century socialism. The cut-throat attacks on the government pushed it to nationalize several companies, institute worker managed firms and encourage cooperatives in place of the established private sector. Land reform measures saw the confiscation of millions of hectares of private land and their redistribution that is said to have benefited well over half the rural population (Wilpert 2014). In addition, having acquired greater control over oil rents after the failed oil lock out, the government pumped money into social programs. Public spending on the social sector almost doubled between 1998 and 2011, with expenditures on health, education and housing receiving increased importance (Chodor 2014). Given intense opposition from the bureaucracy, many of these new social programs were implemented by bypassing traditional institutions and reaching out to the poor directly through community level

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POVERTY RATE

70.0

Brazil

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2002

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Fig. 2.1 Poverty trends in Brazil and Venezuela (Source CEPAL)

councils. The Barrio Adentro “mission” for example, established barriolevel health committees which were responsible for setting up healthcare centres and for training community health workers (Buxton 2014). Similarly, the Mision Mercal established “a network of popular supermarkets providing basic food products at up to 80 per cent discount to ensure all citizens had access to daily calorific requirements” (Buxton 2014: 24). Together with other social programs aimed at food security, the 15,726 food markets that had been established by 2006, ended up covering 43% of the population (Weisbrot and Sandoval 2007). As a result of these initiatives, the number of people living below the poverty line declined rapidly until around 2012.3 Figure 2.1 shows these declines for Brazil and Venezuela for the period of 2001–2012 (CEPAL Database). These changes went hand in hand with improvements in food security as the average daily calorie consumption increased by 45% between 1998 and 2011 (Wilpert 2014). By 2015 “Venezuela surpassed the first Millennium Development Goal of cutting hunger in half by 2015” (Felicien et al. 2018). In terms of the income distribution, between 1998 and 2011, the share of the top income quintile declined from 53 to 44.8% and that of the bottom 60% increased from 25.6 to 32.3% (Chodor 2014). It deserves mentioning here that many of these social policies especially those aimed at improving food access to the poor were funded through 3 After 2012 the crisis which hit Venezuela largely wiped off these achievements.

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windfall oil revenues. The government under Chavez not only increased taxes and royalties on oil extraction but also enacted reforms that would allow these resources to be directed towards the poor. One such reform was the Central Bank Act which empowered the government to divert a part of export earnings into the National Development Fund (FONDEN) which provided the regime greater flexibility to expand its social policies. In the second half of the Chavez tenure, an average of 7.5 Billion USD was funneled from the PDVSA into FONDEN (Vera 2015). The second and perhaps more important fallout of the opposition’s obduracy was the proliferation of participatory channels of decision-making. The resistance that Chavistas faced from the opposition controlled municipalities, the bureaucracy and traditional trade unions forced the left to rethink its relationship with the state. While Chávez undoubtedly won the national elections with thumping majorities, the state institutions that he was elected to, still remained resolutely opposed to his social project. This put Chávez in a strange position where formally he had come to be seated in the highest corridors of power in the state but paradoxically it was not within the state but rather out on the streets where the locus of his government’s power actually rested. Recognizing this, the left began establishing parallel, participatory institutions based on direct democratic principles, where popular classes rather than the squalid bureaucracy would have the upper hand in making decisions. The earliest attempts towards institutionalizing direct democracy can be traced back to the 1999 Constitution which laid out several mechanisms to foster public participation. The new Constitution, for the very first time, introduced the possibility of recalling elected representatives. The significance of this has to be understood in the context of the widespread disillusionment that had developed amongst Venezuelans with traditional representative forms of democracy. In a country where it had become common for politicians to renege on the electoral promises once in power, the right to recall was designed specifically in order to ensure that people could “impose their will between regular elections” rather than once every four years (Wilpert 2007: 55). In addition to this, the new Constitution also initiated participatory budgeting processes by establishing organs like the Local Councils of Public Planning (CLPP). The CLPPs were municipal level bodies made up of mayors, members of city councils, representatives of neighbourhood committees, representatives of various civil society organizations, etc. Influenced by the Porto Alegre experiments of the PT, these bodies were meant to foster public

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participation in decisions regarding local finances but they also went beyond the Porto Alegre model by empowering CLPPs to take decisions regarding the planning and execution of community projects (Azzellini 2018). In fact, the CLPPs were viewed as the lowest link in what was to be a longer chain of planning bodies stretching out from the state to the national levels. While ambitious in their intent, the CLPPs never really took off. This was partly because of the opposition that they faced from the entrenched bureaucracy, and it was also due to the fact that the CLPPs were never given sufficient teeth, in the sense that their decisions were not binding in nature and could always be overturned by mayors (Wilpert 2007). Thus in 2006, a new law was promulgated with an aim to establish more powerful participatory institutions in the form of the Communal Councils (CCs). “The CCs were empowered to develop and execute projects, receive and administer finances directly from the state and its institutions, avoiding in this way economic dependence on local administrations” (Azzellini 2018: 96). The CC’s central decision-making body, according to the new law, was to consist of a Citizens Assembly which was taken to include all community residents above the age of 15. Spokespersons to the CC were to be elected by community members through clearly identified electoral procedures and each of these elected members were to work in pre-specified committees (health, housing, finance, etc.) identified by the Assemblies. CC spokespersons were to work without any pay and were to have a fixed two-year term, which was subject to recall. Given the background of the CLPPs, the CCs were expected to place forward project proposals directly to central government agencies rather than to municipal level institutions. In the first year of their existence the government funneled almost a billion USD into CCs and this increased to 2.79 billion USD by 2007 (Azzellini 2018). In 2010, the CCs were given greater teeth by encouraging local CCs to combine with each other to form “a higher level of self-government”, communes (Azzellini 2013: 27). By 2013 Venezuela had 45,000 CCs and 1546 communes that were registered and functioning (Ciccariello-Maher 2016). In the long run, communes were to “stretch their authority upwards” by forming communal cities and eventually a communal state (Ciccariello-Maher 2016: 26; Azzellini 2013). Governance, including the responsibility for organizing local security was to rest completely in these communes and what was more was that they were given the right to confiscate private property as well. In addition, the communes were also tasked with the

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responsibility of fostering a “social economy”, where community needs rather than profits were to guide production. The prime vehicles for achieving these goals were the social production enterprises (EPS) which were to be run by the communes themselves. As far as the functioning and effectiveness of CCs in promoting popular participation is concerned there have been heated debates, with critics suggesting that these bodies are nothing more than mechanisms of distributing patronage aimed at co-opting popular movements to keep Chavistas in power (Rhodes-Purdy 2015; Lopez-Maya 2014). Others however find such claims to be caricatures of what has been an intensely conflictual and complex process of popular participation in CCs. CCs from this perspective are not finished products but models that are still in the process of being made. While they undeniably suffer from several flaws they remain pregnant with radical possibilities as well (Ellner 2009). For Azzellini (2018), CCs were the result of pressures from below but they nonetheless depend on the state for their survival. The institution of CCs by the state necessarily produces contradictions because whereas the state is driven by the logic of centralization, the CCs by their very construction are based on decentralizing decision-making to popular classes.4 Yet Azzellini argues that such a “two-track” strategy is not as dysfunctional as it may seem. Despite bureaucratic hurdles that communities face, he highlights the effectiveness of the CCs in managing these constraints when 4 As an example of these contradictory tendencies, Hetland (2014) highlights the example of how “Venezuela’s first socialist city” came to be. In the mayoral elections held in Torres in 2004, a local radical activist, Julio Chávez of the Patria Para Todos (PPT) was brought to power on the back of a hard fought electoral campaign, defeating the establishment candidate from the MVR. The latter had known associations with the AD and like his predecessor, was a businessman, not an active member of the left. Having upset the local Chavista leadership and having refused to bow down to the local agrarian elites, the newly elected mayor, Julio Chavez, embarked on a program of radical participatory budgeting. Despite the fact that the city council was dominated by MVR and despite his party the PPT being formally allied to MVR at the national level, these proposals were obstructed by the city council. Frustrated by MVR’s attempts to throttle his participatory experiments, Julio Chávez was pushed to find support in social movements, labour and student activists and from within his own small party base. It was with the help of these grassroots organizations that he was eventually able to implement one the most radical participatory budgeting experiments in the country. Julio Chávez would later go on to be invited as a member to the Presidential Commission on Popular Power and would even go on to join the PSUV, but the stormy beginnings of his political experiments highlight the tensions and contradictions inherent in the decentralization project.

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it comes to execution of community level developmental projects. He also stresses that despite reliance on government funds, “CCs in their majority, have learned to maintain their independence” (Azzellini 2018: 113). On a slightly different note Wilde (2017: 14) points to “a notable gap between the state’s drive for participation and the real-world ability and willingness of locals to dedicate their time to the communal councils” with the result that CC spokespersons often end up substituting themselves for the community, thereby reinforcing a statist logic. Yet Wilde (2017) also highlights the positive empowering effects that CCs have on communities and argues that CCs ought to be viewed as “contested spaces” which provide communities with new opportunities but where conflicting motivations and interests collide with each other, producing uncertain outcomes. The Venezuela of today is not a socialist economy. Property rights apart from being tinkered around with have not really changed too much; the private sector remains predominant; economic activity remains dependent on oil exports and hence on external markets. The Bolivarian revolution, in short, has not come close to effecting the kind of structural shifts that twentieth-century revolutions in Russia and China were able to produce. And yet, there is no denying that there is a certain audacity, a deeply radical quality of what has been accomplished during the two odd decades of left rule in the region. A Leninist perspective allows us to pin point exactly what makes Venezuela’s experiments so worthwhile. The subversive quality of left’s experiments, lies in the empowerment of popular classes and in their transformation from objects of history into active subjects. The transfer of decision-making power is still a process that is ongoing, contested and incomplete, but the changes that have already been brought about in the last two decades are nonetheless extremely consequential. But despite all these achievements, as with all transformatory projects, Venezuela’s experiments have not been without there own contradictions. Seen from a Leninist perspective, two in particular are worth mentioning here and we shall take these up in some detail in the two sections that follow. The first has to do with the position taken by the left vis-a-vis the phenomenon of globalization. The entire Bolivarian experiment has come to rely extensively on oil exports and despite two decades of left rule this external dependence has remained a constant fixture of the economy. The dominance of oil extraction in turn has led to a complete distortion of the country’s economic structure and has made the economy extremely

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vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of international markets. The overvalued exchange rates that have gone hand in hand with the oil boom, combined with capital controls and a complicated maze of price controls have opened up avenues for unscrupulous entities to divert public monies into private pockets. The extreme reliance on global supply chains must be seen in the context of the political and economic upheavals in the country but it also represents a deeply problematic stance of the left towards globalization. A second concern in this respect is with regard to the “organizational question”. Here again we can take the lead of Lenin to frame the problem. Lenin as we have noted believed in the need to decentralize power to workers and peasants. Democracy of the radical kind was seen by him as the only full proof bulwark against imperialist wars, Tsarist authoritarianism and several ills that were affecting Russia taken as a whole. Yet Lenin was also very aware that popular power was not an undifferentiated mass and because of the several gradations that existed within popular ranks, collective action could not be assumed a priori, but had to be built through arduous organizational work (Lukács 1997). Given the deep social, occupational and regional shadings, there were multiple ways in which class struggle was experienced by workers and as a result spontaneous activity of the poorest did not always translate into a common socialist consciousness (Shandro 2014; Mandel 1970). The function of a socialist organization was to provide popular classes with a platform where these differences could be hashed out and where conditions for collective action could be prepared for. The organizational question led to fiery debates and disagreements within European social democratic circles during Lenin’s days but most socialists, accepted the necessity of a democratic, cohesive party organization. This included even figures like Rosa Luxemburg who is widely known for her critique of Lenin’s conceptualization of the party (Le Blanc 2015). By contrast, Latin American today has seen few debates on the question. And yet, the fact is that the importance of political organization remains as relevant today as it did a century ago and indeed many of the left’s weaknesses in the region today are rooted in these questions. In Venezuela, for example, the PSUV’s organizational might notwithstanding, it was Chávez that played a crucial mediating role by acting as a bridge between his government and grassroots movements across the country (Azzellini 2018: 112). With his death in 2013, the left lost a major link with the people with the result that the PSUV has had to take up Chávez’s mantle and this transition has not come without its own share of problems.

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Venezuela After Chávez: The Unfolding Crisis Despite its phenomenal achievements, in hindsight the golden years of the Bolivarian Revolution were based on very shaky foundations and as time went by many of the simmering tensions started to come out to the fore. The most widely commented feature of the Venezuelan left’s policies was its increasing reliance on oil revenues. The Chávez era coincided with a massive global commodity boom in which oil prices increased from 8$ per barrel in January 1999 to almost 150$ per barrel by the summer of 2008 (Hammond 2011). For the Venezuelan left which was being battered by opposition strikes and production sabotages, this boom provided immense flexibility to the fledgling government and allowed it to initiate its massive social programs. To put things in perspective, the idea of “sowing the oil” back into the economy always had deep roots in Venezuelan history, but Chávez’s government played a very important role in renationalizing oil and channeling its rents towards the poorest members of Venezuelan society in a manner that was unprecedented. The point however was that this reliance on oil revenues was not backed up by a concerted effort to structurally transform and diversify the economic base, with the effect that the Venezuelan economy’s stability and the left’s entire agenda became deeply tied to the performance of extractive sectors. For example, export earnings from oil increased from around 68% of total exports revenues to 96% between 1998 and 2016 (Hetland 2016a); and while income taxes barely rose, as a percentage of total revenues, the share of oil increased by 60% between 1998 and 2008 (Orhangazi 2014). This extreme dependence on oil exports resulted in grave structural imbalances as manufacturing and even agricultural production lagged far behind the country’s oil sector which became the locus of economic activity. “When oil is plentiful…and prices are high”, explains Mike Gonzalez, “it is easier and cheaper to buy your goods abroad than invest in production at home” (Gonzalez 2018: 113). One of the most far-reaching effects of this over reliance on oil sector was the economy’s rising import dependence for even the most essential commodities like food. The dynamics of this “Dutch disease”, were amplified by the government’s exchange rate policies. Since 2003 the government introduced a slew of capital and price controls in the face of increasing political and economic instability. As a part of these measures, the Venezuelan bolivar was pegged at 2.15 Br to the US dollar and strict import controls were levied. These new measures were implemented to tame inflation and ensure the availability

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of essential goods to the population but the use of exchange rate by the Chavez regime in this manner also led to a constant overvaluation of the currency, which “never fell below 200% and reached peaks of 400%” (Kornblihtt 2015: 65). The result of such unrealistic exchange rates was to make imports much cheaper that they “ought” to have been resulting in a destruction of local industrial and agricultural production capabilities. What was worse was that the entire maze of capital controls and import restrictions gave plenty of room to private capital to make hay as the exchange rate regime literally handed them cheap US dollars on a plate. As cases of “sacks full of stones being registered as imports of coffee and an exponential rise in the fraudulent import of meat” came to public attention it became clear that scarce foreign exchange meant for imports were instead diverted into the pockets of importing monopolies (Purcell 2017: 304). Overvaluation of the currency, then, meant “an expanded capacity for the import sector and capitalists that transfer their profits…abroad” (Kornblihtt 2015: 65). This of course was only made possible because of the explicit collusion between capital and unscrupulous elements within the government and the ruling party (Gonzalez 2018). The entire edifice that the left had built therefore sat on a knife-edge of international oil markets. The contradictions between a decrepit domestic productive base on the one hand and the entire gamut of exchange rate and import controls on the other were sustained on the basis of high oil prices abroad (Gonzalez 2018; Webber 2017). But despite this precarious situation, the government functioned as if it expected global prices to remain buoyant forever and thus never really focused on pumping money into non-oil sector to diversify the economy. But starting from 2009, the era of high prices came to an end and while they stabilized for a while, from 2014 onwards prices began a sharp, irreversible slide. As global oil prices fell the economy’s external balances began haemorrhaging. The country’s international reserves started to decline and with it so did its ability to import goods (Vera 2015). In the midst of these pressures the government reacted by a series of confused policy twists. In 2010 the monetary authorities established a multiple exchange rate system to prioritize imports of important goods, but by 2011 this was once again harmonized into a single exchange rate. Further, in order to keep up its social programs, the government increased taxes on oil revenues but given declining oil revenues it was also forced to use monetary policies to accommodate fiscal expansion (Vera 2015).

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This was the context in which Nicolás Maduro came to the helm of affairs. With international reserves down to their lowest levels, shortages of inputs and basic commodities started to appear. These shortages of course were further fueled by deliberate hoarding and sabotage of production by domestic and foreign capital (Ellner 2019b). As the economy was sent into a lurch, the Maduro government found itself in a fix. It on the one hand sought to expand its social policies and wanted to desperately inject demand through expansive fiscal policies, but in the end its hands were tied by the declining foreign exchange earnings which hurt imports and thus led to sharp restrictions on supply of inputs and essential goods (Vera 2015). In this context, growth rates fell precipitously so that between 2013 and 2016 real GDP declined by a quarter and inflation rates skyrocketed to hyperinflationary levels (Weisbrot and Sachs 2019). The left did of course take several steps to counter supply shortages, especially to shore up subsidized food supplies to poor families (Felicien et al. 2018). But even as the government scampered to get things under control, buoyed by the declining oil prices and ensuing chaos the opposition found the perfect opportunity to add fuel to fire, quite literally. In 2013 when Nicholas Maduro won the elections by a slim margin, the opposition accused the left of electoral manipulation and refused to recognize the government. As a “spontaneous” reaction to Maduro’s electoral victory, armed guarimbas were deployed to wreak havoc on the streets. The first cycle of rioting occurred in 2014 followed by several rounds in subsequent years. The predominantly white, middle-class rioters attacked public transport, government hospitals and torched government buildings with impunity. During the 2014 round of violence, “Forty-three people, mostly civilians and security personnel, were killed. Entire communities were walled in, their residents blocked from accessing food, transport, gas and even necessary medical services. Buildings were set alight with people inside, hundreds were injured” (Rojas 2016). In terms of infrastructure, “Especially hard hit was the state agrifood apparatus, as the National Institute of Nutrition was set ablaze, laboratories for the production of ecological farming inputs were vandalized, and supplies destined for government food programs were burned-including one on the order of 40 tons of food-along with vehicles associated with these programs” (Felicien et al. 2018). These opposition mobilizations it is worth noting have received enormous support from the United States, which has funneled millions of

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dollars to prop them up (Webber 2017). Moreover, in the name of upholding human rights and democracy, the US government has imposed harsh sanctions on the economy which has worsened the economic crisis (Antonopoulos and Cottle 2018). In August 2017, the Trump administration issued an executive order preventing Venezuela from borrowing from US financial markets. It also froze profit repatriations from PDVSA’s US subsidiary, CITGO. Both these moves had extreme consequences for the PDVSA’s functioning and led to a sharp decline in oil production. The sanction imposed in January 2019 were a further step in the same direction. The new round of sanctions prohibited PDVSA and its subsidiaries from supplying oil to the United States, the largest market for Venezuelan oil. “The January sanctions also froze many billions of dollars of Venezuelan assets that could have been sold in order to maintain essential and life-saving imports, or to stabilize the economy. These included most of the government’s $9 billion in reserves that are in gold; trade credits worth an estimated $3.4 billion; and CITGO, with estimated net assets of $5.2 billion” (Weisbrot and Sachs 2019: 3). These sanctions have to be viewed in the context of the large amounts of oil that US imports from Venezuela. As of 2015, the United States was the largest export market for Venezuelan oil, generating about 15 billion USD worth of revenues (Antonopoulos and Cottle 2018). No modern-day economy can weather tough sanctions from the United States, but in Venezuela’s case the effects have been devastating because of its deep reliance on American markets. In an import-dependent economy, these internal and external disruptions opened up new opportunities for profiteering, speculation, largescale fraudulence and sabotage. As the economy crumbled, the country’s large business houses found that the economic crises held immense benefits for them. Ever since 1998, the country’s elite had been slowly but steadily pushed out from the highest echelons of political power, but this did not in any way mean that their stranglehold over the economy was diminished. Despite nationalization of oil, telecom and electricity, vast swathes of the economy remained in the hands of private capital. The import supply chains in particular were private monopolies (Hetland 2016a; Felicien et al. 2018). Thus when the economic crisis hit, the state’s weak control over the economy made it hard for the governing party to implement necessary measures to regulate the supply of goods and private capital in turn found itself in a powerful position as it controlled key levers of the economy. In the economic chaos that has ensued, several big private

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companies have been caught hoarding essential commodities (Harnecker 2016). Tonnes of food have been diverted from supermarket shelves into a booming black markets where suppliers have made a killing. Further, as we noted above, these private players have also duped the government by manipulating the multiple exchange rate system that the government had in place since 2003. In one sense none of what has transpired in Venezuela should be too surprising to those who know the history of Latin America. From Cuba to Nicaragua, whenever the left has sought to initiate progressive transformations, it has had to deal with the very same kind of opposition that the Venezuelan left is facing today. These are reflective of the deep contradictions that are inherent in any socialist project that on the one hand seeks to move beyond capitalism but must perforce begin its journey from within an environment that is wholly capitalist. As Lenin once explained it, “when a revolution takes place, it does not happen as in the case of the death of an individual, when the deceased is simply removed. When the old society perishes, its corpse cannot be nailed up in a coffin and lowered into the grave. It disintegrates in our midst; the corpse rots and infects us…A socialist revolution can never be engendered in any other way; and not a single country can pass from capitalism to socialism except in an atmosphere of disintegrating capitalism and of painful struggle against it” (Lenin 1918: 434). Venezuela’s case presents an additional layer of complications as its revolutionary project has had to be undertaken through the electoral road which has meant that the left has had to work within the confines of a capitalist state even as it has had to work to go beyond it (Ellner 2013, 2014). This is why price controls, exchange rate controls and the whole gamut of measures that the government has taken, have come to naught because at the last instance they represent actions taken by the left, against capital, using capitalist institutions within a capitalist economy dominated by capitalist relations. Having said this, it is undoubtedly true that the economic crisis also reflects a failure on the part of the Venezuelan left to develop a concrete strategy towards globalization. It is well known that in the sphere of international diplomacy the Venezuelan left played a very important role in countering US imperialist aggressions and it also spearheaded the creation of alternative trade blocs in Latin America, but viewed in light of what has transpired these were scattered responses to perceived threats from US imperialism and they did not amount to a concrete strategy to deal with the parameters of neoliberal globalization as such. The result was

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that despite its many attempts at countering the power of the North at a diplomatic level, its own economic trajectory remained heavily tied to the fortunes of global markets. It is possible to argue, as many seem to have, that the left got itself trapped in this situation because it was reformist, i.e. because pumping oil revenues from abroad and propping up the economy from these proceeds seemed easier than doing so via a radical socialization of national surplus which would have required a thoroughgoing assault on the country’s elites. While there is indeed an element of truth here, such a line of argumentation is too simplistic and it falls short in many ways because it does not explain why the left did not take the equally pragmatic path of utilizing the oil revenues that accrued to it to finance and develop an indigenous production base. After all, an oft-used strategy by capitalist states across the developing world to promote self-sufficiency in key sectors has been the deployment of state-owned industrial enterprises for local industrial development and this was definitely something that even a moderate leftist party could have pursued. And yet the Venezuelan left did not pursue this path. Pragmatism, at least in the terms defined above, therefore doesn’t seem to be the crux of the matter. Looking at it from a broader perspective, the Venezuelan left has not been alone in its inability to develop a strategic response to economic globalization. From Greece to India there are several examples where the left has stuttered and fallen when confronted with precisely the same dilemma (Patnaik 2016; Lapavitsas 2019). The ambivalence of the Venezuelan left with respect to globalization should be seen in this perspective. It is well known for example, that there are influential currents within the Venezuelan left that “do not oppose globalization per se in spite of their critique of the phenomenon, nor do they favor returning to a previous era when the predominance of the nation-state went unquestioned” (Ellner 2008: 188–189). In place of the antiimperialism of the old left, the “grassroots approach” advocates for “international alliances and network of social movements…as a sine qua non for real transformation” (Ellner 2008: 189). The deep rooted suspicion of the nation state in turn has meant that the “grassroots approach” does not view old-fashioned anti-imperialist strategies of the twentiethcentury left which gave primacy to achieving national sovereignty, as relevant in the contemporary age (Ellner 2008). This particular stance on globalization of course has been reflective of a larger trend within the contemporary thinking even within those quarters that have otherwise been extremely critical of neoliberalism. Caught between what they

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see is a narrow cage of the nation state and the cosmopolitan possibilities inherent in capitalisms’ global expansion, prominent voices who have otherwise been critical of neoliberalism, have tended to celebrate globalization as a harbinger of new emancipatory openings (Hardt and Negri 2000). From this perspective, any “nostalgic option of retreating into the sovereign impotence of the overrun nation” is not just outmoded, but downright disastrous because the “political fragmentation of a nevertheless economically integrated world society” that such a nationalist stance entails, “would undermine the ability to cooperate” (Habermas 2015: 89–90). It is important to emphasize that many of those who hold these views are acutely aware of the asymmetries of the existing pattern of globalization but these voices nonetheless view a retreat from globalization as economically and politically, very regressive. Stiglitz’s book, Making Globalization Work (2006) is a classic example of this kind of globalization-as-cosmopolitanism stance and while Stiglitz himself is far from a Marxist, his arguments are reflective in many ways of the views entertained by sections of the left as well. In it, Stiglitz critically analyses how contemporary globalization has deepened poverty and economic insecurities for working masses around the world. He also points out how neoliberal restructuring under the aegis of multi-lateral institutions like the World Bank, IMF and WTO has adversely affected economies in the Global South. Yet, while underscoring the asymmetries and injustices of actually existing globalization, Stiglitz also goes to great lengths to highlight the enormous potential inherent in economic globalization. “Globalization” he stresses “does not have to be bad for the environment, increase inequality, weaken cultural diversity, and advance corporate interests at the expense of the well-being of ordinary citizens” (Stiglitz 2006: XV). Rather than a retreat from globalization, what is needed for the great potential of globalization to yield fruits, is a set of robust global institutions that are capable of regulating and directing the global economy in a more humane and egalitarian direction. This precise theme is also the underlying motivation for Keith Griffin’s influential argument which has generated considerable debate since it was first published in 2003 (Griffin 2003). The dilemma that Griffin confronts is the same as the one that Stiglitz presents; namely the gap between the potential gains from globalization on paper and its actual dismal record in practice. The problem as Griffin sees it is not with globalization itself but with the fact that economic globalization has been partial in the sense that it has not gone hand in hand with the construction of a global state working on the same

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democratic principles that liberals expect nation states to adhere to. Given the immense benefits of economic integration, the way ahead for Griffin is “greater liberalization, not less, and this in turn requires more democratic decision-making at the global level” (Griffin 2003: 792). We will have an occasion to discuss these themes in great detail in Chapter 4 and link them to Lenin’s own analysis of imperialism, but a few points are worth emphasizing right away. The powerful logic of these arguments notwithstanding, there are at least two issues to consider with respect to the pro-globalization proposals outlined above. The first has to do with the conceptualization of capitalism itself. The problem with the heroic conceptualization of globalization is that it downplays the role that nation states continue to play in the contemporary world economy and more dangerously it relegates the question of imperialism- that was so central to revolutionary praxis during Lenin’s times- to the background of leftist strategies and debates (Desai 2013; Foster 2001, 2015). To argue in favour of a more rational, equal and humane version of capitalism on a global scale is to miss an essential characteristic of how the system functions. Capitalism is not and has never been a closed system; and as Marxists and dependency theorists had reminded us not too long ago, it constantly requires non-capitalist peripheries to exploit, underdevelop and invade to keep up the tempo of activity at home (see Chapter 4). Thus imperialistic tendencies within the world economy whether in the form of an invasion here and there, a coup plot in one country or another, or the tilting of global trade and finance rules to favour the North through one institution or the other, are not choices that are made by individual politicians, countries or parties, but are essential characteristics of the way capitalism works. To demand a more egalitarian and humane global economy within the capitalist framework is to assume a systemic malleability that does not exist; it is to miss a crucial historical condition of the existence of capitalism. Now, while the rejection of imperialism blinds even the most careful commentators it must be noted that the acceptance of imperialism in itself does not rule out the possibility of working towards a radical globalization project. For example, one can accept the nature of capitalist globalization as an inherently unequal and exploitative system, and one could still aspire for a globalized democratic alternative. In other words, the emancipatory project of the left could at once recognize the nature of the capitalist world system as it currently exists but it could also seek a global rather than national solution to overcome it. In this scenario however the

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case for “delinking” actually becomes stronger. Because just “as mankind can arrive at the abolition of classes only through a transition period of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, it can arrive at the inevitable integration of nations only through a transition period of the complete emancipation of all oppressed nation…” (Lenin 1916: 147). Or as Storm and Mohan Rao (2004: 576) put it in their rebuttal to Keith Griffin’s proposals: If we accept that, for a long time to come, greater market-led globalization will make it more difficult to achieve ‘deep democracy’, we must reject Griffin’s argument in favour of more market liberalization in combination with step-by-step attempts to impose a new, democratic global regulatory system. Not because democratic control of global market forces is impossible-it certainly is not- but because a pre-condition to achieve it is less, not more, market-led liberalization. This is yet another, indeed fundamental, instance of a ‘second-best’ reason against leaving things to (global) markets. If one is serious about democracy in the global order, this requires (at a minimum) that economic globalization become considerably less market-led by a restoration of the policy autonomy of nation-states.

The “grassroots approach” in this sense stands in contrast to the older variety of leftist thinking that emerged in the 1960s and 70s. Deeply inspired by Leninist proposals, scores of thinkers and anti-imperialist activists that the post-War decades developed a clear cut critique of global capitalism, based on which they advocated a strategy of economic “delinking” for peripheries (Amin 1990; Guevara 1960). From their perspective, the division of the world into the rich and poor was an inherent, structural feature of capitalism. Attached to the global division of labour, societies in the South had little or no chance of constructing a more egalitarian social order. “Delinking” obviously required that international alliances be struck up and that workers and peasants build networks of solidarity with their counterparts across the world. But at the very same time such a strategy required each country to close itself off from the economic logic that dominated global capitalism (Guevara 1960, 1965a). The aim was not so much to isolate developing countries from the world around them but rather to work towards the “organization of a system of criteria for the rationality of economic choices based on a law of value, which has a national foundation and a popular content, independent of the criteria of economic rationality that emerges from the domination of the law of capitalist value that operates on a world

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scale” (Amin 1987: 436). Moreover, unlike the developmentalist variety of thinking which sought merely to build a humane version of capitalism, “delinking” was seen as setting the stage for socialism; and while this approach advocated planned economic development, the process of planning itself was seen as being completely compatible with radical decentralization of decision-making (Chandrasekhar 2001; Amin 1990). It is this strategy that was espoused by an entire generation of antiimperialist movements that has to be brought back on the left’s agenda in the twenty-first century. Imperialism may have changed its form in several crucial ways and any analysis of the phenomenon must obviously take into consideration these developments. But while recognizing the novelties, the fact remains that the polarizing dynamics of global capitalism have continued to function in higher, and in some senses, more brutal ways and ignoring these realities can only straightjacket the field of leftist strategies. As Patnaik (1990: 76) reminds us, “theoretical concepts are not like a pair of old shoes that you can discard when you like; they come back to haunt you”. Indeed, the experiences of the left in Latin America underline the significance of this cautionary note. It goes without saying that “delinking” today cannot be a standalone process. It must be seen as being part of a broader agenda of progressive change. It must for example, steer clear of the centralism and bureaucratization that a number of socialist countries got trapped into. In place of the state, delinking ought to make the grassroots of society the driving force of economic transformation (Bello 2013). As Che Guevara (1960) put it, “The people cannot even dream of sovereignty unless there is a power that defends their interests and aspirations. People’s power means not only that the Council of Ministers, the police, the courts and all other government bodies are in the hands of the people. It also means that economic bodies are being transferred to the people. Revolutionary power or political sovereignty is the instrument for the conquest of the economy and for making national sovereignty a reality in its broadest sense”. Further in the context of the developing world where deprivations faced by the most marginalized sections have deep-rooted social foundations, delinking must be seen as a part of a larger project of social and cultural reform linked at eradicating social oppression as well (Mariátegui 1928, 1929; Ambedkar 1936).

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Revisiting the Organizational Question Speaking of the rich lessons that the past has left behind for us, the role of a revolutionary vanguard party ranks as one of the most important— and misunderstood—legacies of the European socialist movement. The notion of a vanguard party may seem like an anachronism today, but in the late nineteenth century as working-class movements spread like wildfire across Europe, the necessity of forging a programmatic political organization came to be widely accepted within socialist circles; and here Lenin’s writings proved to be immensely influential. Today of course, vanguardism has turned into a bad word within the left. It has come to be associated with all the ills of actually existing socialism and many have drawn a straight line connecting Lenin’s emphasis on a vanguard party with the authoritarianism that the Soviet Union degenerated into. So much so that the pendulum now seems to have swung to the complete opposite direction with prominent voices questioning the very need for “elaborate national or international bureaucracies” (Klein 2000). Instead, these voices argue for a “model of laissez-faire organizing” of social movements which “responds to corporate concentration with a maze of fragmentation, to globalization with its own kind of localization, to power consolidation with radical power dispersal” (Klein 2000). The unfortunate fact has been that the Latin American left too has not been particularly innovative on this front. In defining their vision of twenty-first-century socialism as a “reappraisal of past leftist strategies based on long-held assumptions and an acknowledgment of the mistakes of previous efforts at socialist construction in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere”, they have firmly rejected “the purported role of a vanguard party” (Ellner 2012: 106). Here the Venezuelan left’s experience is telling. If one were to compare Venezuela in the run-up to Chávez’s elections, and Russia during Tsarism’s last breaths, what stands out is not just the differences in the scale of social unrest that had gripped either countries but also the roles played by political organizations. Whereas the run-up to the February and October Revolutions witnessed extensive campaigning and careful grassroots mobilization of peasants and workers by liberal, moderate and extreme left parties, the upsurge in Venezuela during the 1990s occurred in the context of a complete collapse of political parties. The electoral fortune of Chávez himself was not a result of any extensive organizational groundwork. Chávez’s charisma, his anti-establishment

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reputation and of course his anti-neoliberal economic program won him a mass following at a time when most established parties had been tainted by their association with neoliberal policies. As far as his own views were concerned, Chávez was averse to traditional political organizations and his own electoral platform, the Movimiento Quinta República (MVR) “was consciously set up as a political ‘movement’ rather than a party” (Hetland 2016b: 2). Over the early years of Chávez’s tenure, the MVR remained marginal in the scheme of things. Each time the presidency was threatened by opposition assaults, spontaneous action by the poor came to his rescue. But there was “no grassroots party which could convert their revolutionary energy into a sustainable force. There was no organisation which could help ensure that the governance of historical events by the majority might become something typical and every day. There was no group which could provide a centre around which the workers and peasants might rally, organizing on the ground to take control of societies economic organs” (McKenna 2009: 130). With the increasing frequency of opposition assaults however, the left did come to recognize the need for building an organization and this was what led to the formation of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in 2007. However, the fact of the matter was that PSUV was never conceptualized of as a party of the vanguard kind, i.e. a party that was to be “of but not in the working class neither separated from, nor dissolved within, but in constant interaction with the working class movement” (Vanaik 2019: 115). It “was conceived of as a mass-based and not vanguard party as it enrolled over five million voters without imposing ideological requirements” (Ellner 2011: 252). More than anything the PSUV was an umbrella coalition formed to create some basic electoral unity amongst all those parties that were supporting the left government; a “new organization…capable of carrying out electoral tasks but… too loose and unstructured to qualify as a steerable boat” (Gilbert 2016). The PSUV therefore from its very inception was a loose-knit political organization whose base was split into multiple tendencies which often work against each other.5 It was “fragmented and factionalized along the same lines as the wider Chavista movement” (Buxton 2016: 14). While internal democracy and diversity of opinions within socialist parties should be seen as a source of vitality 5 See Hetland 2016b for a discussion on the different ideological and political trends within the PSUV.

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and has always been considered a cornerstone of revolutionary parties, in the case of PSUV the differences between the conflicting streams were not simply restricted to tactics alone but on account of profound ideological differences. It is worth noting that while Lenin encouraged difference of opinions, emphasized united front tactics and was an advocate of the greatest possible internal democracy, he thought it impossible for a socialist party to be split along programmatic lines. Even while being inspired by the SPD during his early political days he was opposed to its toleration of revisionism within its ranks, which he believed was a repudiation of the Marxism (Le Blanc 2015). That the SPD eventually floated towards chauvinism and completely isolated its left wing, while the Bolsheviks split from the Mensheviks and went onto become the extreme left wing of the working class in 1917 is worth emphasizing. Lenin as is well known was instrumental in sparking the split. In Venezuela’s case by contrast, both Chávez and his successor Maduro have prioritized tackling the opposition as the most important aim of the PSUV and hence they have tolerated the diverging programmatic orientations within the party in the name of unity. “Indeed, one of Chávez’s favorite slogans was ‘Unity, Unity, and More Unity’” (Ellner 2019a: 7). Indeed, it is also on this altar of unity that radical elements within the party have been repeatedly dissuaded from forming autonomous currents/factions within the organization (Hetland 2016b). In this context it is worth revisiting Lenin’s views on party organization. Leninist ideas on hegemony, working-class consciousness and vanguard parties have been severely criticized by many on the left, to the extent that certain sections see the entire idea of the political organization as completely archaic. To them, organizations inevitably lead to bureaucratization and hierarchical decision-making and thus must be discarded. Yet a closer look at the history of the October revolution suggests a very different picture of the role that organizations play in revolutionary transformation. And when put in this proper historical context, Lenin’s views on the party, its structure and its links to society appear to be a far cry from the mutilated “textbook” versions of his thought that are often pedaled around in his name (Lih 2008). One can of course argue that the proof of the pudding is in its eating and that what the Bolshevik party became soon after 1917 is evidence enough to close the case on Leninist party ideals. But the problem with this simplistic equation is that it fails to adequately differentiate between historical antecedents and causal roots. Indeed, if one takes a telescopic view of history it is always possible to read

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history backwards and find strands of totalitarianism in Lenin’s project. But, to do so without uncovering the radically democratic nature of his thinking would be a gross error. As Victor Serge (1939) cogently states this point: It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse-and which he may have carried in him since his birth-is that very sensible?

In order not to caricaturize Lenin’s views on socialist organization it is imperative to see them in a historical context. By the time Lenin became politically active, Western Europe was teeming with socialist parties and Germany in particular had become the centre of social democratic activity. As we have noted earlier, the SPD in Germany by the late nineteenth century had successfully beaten back the anti-socialist laws of the Bismarck regime and was already on the road to becoming one of the most successful social democratic organizations in Europe. Boasting a galaxy of Marxist practitioners, it also had amongst its ranks the “pope” of Marxism, Karl Kautsky who with his eloquent writings was emerging as a prominent voice in the social democratic circles. To get an idea of the scale and scope of SPD’s activities we may note that by 1903 it garnered 30% of the Reichstag votes, up from 6% in 1881 and by 1912 it was the largest single party in Germany (Scott 2008). The organization had several newspapers with wide readership which in 1909 was estimated to be more than one million (Lih 2008). Well before Lenin’s works on working-class consciousness became a source of controversy, it was here in Germany that debates first raged on about the nature and necessity of socialist organizations. As we noted earlier, to be a social democrat in these times was to seek a “merger” between those professing scientific socialism and those involved in the most militant working-class movements (Lih 2008). According to the orthodox Marxist view as espoused by Kautsky, workers organically developed a sense of resistance against capitalist exploitation and while their position in the capitalist system attracted them to socialist ideas, class consciousness had to be introduced to them from the outside. This was

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not to suggest that workers would not inevitably do so themselves, but the process would be made faster and painless if they were made to realize their political goals early enough in their journey. The job of social democrats was to hasten the enlightenment of the working class and “make the workers aware of their own world-historical mission, namely, to conquer state power as a class and use it to introduce socialism” (Lih 2008: 6). In order to fulfil their roles, social democrats it was argued would have to be organized into a well-oiled party machinery which had a “clear commitment to the final goal of socialism…was centralised and disciplined…was as democratic as possible, and it was organised on a nation-wide scale, allowing effective use of specialisation and division of labour” (Lih 2008: 6). Thus the idea that a party machinery was necessary to bring consciousness from the outside to the working class was a well-established axiom within social democratic circles well before Lenin began his political career. Within this overall context, Lenin’s aim was to introduce the tried and tested social democratic formula within an autocratic Russia. Given the economic backwardness of his country and given the Tsarist regime in place, the formula obviously had to be modified to suit local circumstances but in essence Lenin was well within orthodox Marxist tradition in stressing on the importance of building a party functioning on Marxist lines. To say this is not to suggest that Lenin accepted all that Kautsky and the German SPD stood for. There were some crucial differences that Lenin had begun to develop very early on and it would only later become apparent to him and those around him the importance of these doctrinal distinctions. Kautsky for one, despite his emphasis on a separation between spontaneity and consciousness, saw a certain inevitable coming together of the working-class and Marxist ideals. According to his “unilinear historical logic” the conditions generated by capitalism not only created spontaneous working-class struggles, but also created conditions for their merger with scientific socialism (Shandro 2014). “The whole architecture of his thought dictated that the relation of Marxism and the working-class movement had to be harmonious and that challenges to this harmony were to be grasped in terms of either particularistic aberration or regression to an earlier stage of development” (Shandro 2014: 71). Lenin on the other hand, despite his enormous confidence in the working classes did not fetishize their association with Marxism. He was of course sure that workers would respond to the social democratic message and he excoriated his opponents for trying to restrict the scope of

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working-class movements solely to economic issues (Lenin 1902). But any social democratic mission, he recognized, would have to reckon with the unevenness and heterogeneities within the working classes and their allies, while attempting to spread its influence. It would also have to reckon with possible splits within working classes and with the fact that in the terrain of class conflict while the “working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism; nevertheless, most widespread (and continuously and diversely revived) bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class to a still greater degree” (Lenin 1902: 386). It is worth emphasizing here that Lenin viewed spontaneity and consciousness as two distinct, yet interrelated categories. Spontaneous actions of workers, he recognized, were capable of unleashing great force, force enough to change entire societies once and for all. Every strike, every work stoppage threw forward new worker intellectuals who with their lived experiences contributed to enrichening the content of socialist consciousness. Mass movements produced new innovations, led to new alliances, illuminated new problems, tasks and issues all of which indirectly added to the content of Marxism. But, and this was what was crucial, there was no reason to assume that spontaneity alone would always translate itself into working-class consciousness because consciousness required workers to gain an understanding “of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system” which was not possible simply from their self-activity alone (Lenin 1902: 375). To believe that spontaneity was enough would have been akin to leaving open the terrain of class conflict to the bourgeoisie and thus to losing out on the battle for hegemony before it had even begun. Thus for Lenin “a practical orientation toward working-class unity requires not mere willpower, but a dialectic capable of seizing the complex and uneven interplay of heterogeneous forces and concrete conjunctures defined thereby” (Shandro 2014: 78). This was what the working-class vanguard had to keep aware of and this is why they had to be organized into a programmatic party. Now the party that Lenin had in mind, could not “be confused, after all, with the entire class” (Lenin 1904: 258). It was by its very function to be spearheaded by the most conscious elements of the oppressed classes. But at the very same time the organization could not afford to become a sect of intellectuals completely divorced from workers either (Mandel 1970, 1975; Vanaik 2019). Contrary to the belief that Lenin wanted a party led solely by intellectuals, “No one in the international movement was more forceful or frequent than Lenin in decrying and combating the

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spread of intellectuals’ influence in the movement” (Draper 1990). Drawn from the most advanced sections of the workers the role of the socialist organization was a two-sided one, in which it was “both producer and product, both precondition and result of the revolutionary mass movement” (Lukács 1997: 25). Lenin was very clear that the party would have to draw deep roots in the working class if it was to be successful. This was because as the “history of the working-class movement in all countries shows that the better-situated strata of the working class respond to the ideas of socialism, more rapidly and more easily” (Lenin 1899: 280). These advanced sections of workers were the core of the party’s development because it is them “who can win the confidence of the labouring masses, who devote themselves entirely to the education and organisation of the proletariat, who accept socialism consciously, and who even elaborate independent socialist theories” (Lenin 1899: 280). In Russia, he noted that while the intellectual classes who were supposedly the ones to be guiding workers, were “losing interest in honest, illegal literature”, it was amongst the advanced working classes that there was “an impassioned desire for knowledge and for socialism” (Lenin 1899: 280). These sections who “despite their wretched living conditions, despite the stultifying penal servitude of factory labour, possess so much character and will-power that they study, study, study, and turn themselves into conscious Social-Democrats- ‘the working-class intelligentsia’” (Lenin 1899: 280–281). Lenin’s views on socialist organization and its relation to the working class had some important implications for the structure of the party (Le Blanc 2015). The counterpart to this separation between party and class was the requirement that a social democratic party be based on a Marxist program which at the very minimum insisted on the irreconcilability of classes, recognized the centrality of imperialism and insisted on the necessity of working-class political independence. In that sense “Lenin’s conception of the party…involved nothing more nor less than a collectivity of activists committed to the program of revolutionary Marxism, in which compromise on principles or dilution of analysis would be unnecessary and unthought-of and, in fact, self-defeating” (Le Blanc 2015: 65). The kind of revisionist streams that the SPD was willing to ignore within its ranks, was for Lenin, unthinkable (Le Blanc 2015). Having said this, strict adherence to party program was not taken to mean complete unity in outlook and homogeneity of tactical positions. Neither did it at any point rule out united front alliances with parties and movements that

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held differing views to those of the Bolsheviks. Lenin may not have been striving for a “multi-tendency party” but he by no means was trying to construct a homogenous, monolithic party of a “new” type either (Le Blanc 2012). The very nature of Marxism that Lenin held dear to was one which weaved itself into praxis and therefore his was a Marxism that had to be continuously updated and refreshed based on the ever-changing world realities. Given this conceptualization, in a revolutionary party there had to be scope for expressing divergent views, and disagreements on various tactical and theoretical questions were bound to arise for which the party had to provide space. This was indeed the experience of Bolsheviks in the months preceding the October revolution when the party was wracked with conflicting outlooks which led to vibrant internal debates on the question of insurrection (Liebman 1975). The leadership during this time was divided into those seeking to moderate the party’s radicalism and those seeking to push it further to the left. On crucial questions these two views clashed with each other often producing very bitter exchanges, threats of resignations and demands for expulsion. The vibrancy of internal debates was of course, part of a longstanding Bolshevik tradition which lasted well after the October insurrection and was only disbanded in the 10th Party Congress when internal groupings were completely disbanded in favour of a policy of homogeneity. But the point is this: despite constant clashes between the various factions, the common ideological cement that bound them within the party meant that these splits were precisely just theseconsisting of differences in “outlooks” and of “trends”, none of which were “concentrated in an organized group in the Party” (Liebman 1975: 149). This is not to say that the differences themselves were not of consequence but given their divisible nature, the positions held by various factions were flexible and amenable to change. Thus Lenin himself may have opposed armed action of the Bolshevik rank and file in July 1917, even as he vigorously pushed for an insurrection during the days leading up to the October revolution; a position towards which a majority of the Bolsheviks, despite their initial apprehensions, were won over to. Despite rancorous disagreements this programmatic cohesion meant that whereas other socialist parties disintegrated into fractious groups and eventually got absorbed into the liberal fold, the Bolsheviks stayed their course and finally gained hegemony over large sections of workers and peasants. The point of going over Lenin’s views here is not to treat what he said as the gospel of truth nor to suggest that the left everywhere ought to

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“apply” Leninist organizational principles. For one, Lenin’s views themselves were never static and partly because of this his thinking on this issue has invited widely different interpretations in recent years (Lih 2012a, b; Le Blanc 2012). More importantly, as the Russian experience prior to 1917 shows, the Bolshevik party bore little resemblance to the disciplined and organized machinery that is often associated with the image of the “Leninist party”. As 1917 drew close vast numbers of highly radicalized workers, peasants and army personnel drifted towards the party making the separation between party and class all that more tenuous.6 As revolution heated up, the decisions taken by the very top leadership were not always followed by the rank and file and very often it was those at the middle rung leadership and at the rank and file level that determined Bolshevik strategy on crucial stages of 1917, rather than the other way around (Hasegawa 1977; Rabinowitch 2015). The Bolshevik success during these years without doubt stemmed from its organic connections with the masses and more generally from its ability to keep up pace with the growing radicalization of Russian workers. What stood out during these days was not the brute efficiency or discipline of the party but its immense organizational flexibility and its vibrant internal democracy. Additionally, in the stormy currents and countercurrents of the Russian revolution the Bolsheviks refused to compromise on their program which stressed on the need to transcend capitalism, end imperialist annexations and which insisted on the complete independence of the toiling classes as a prerequisite to achieve these goals. Thus even as Bolsheviks stood accused of anti-nationalism and of being German spies during the “July days”, Lenin and his compatriots held firm to their opposition to the war and refused to get swept away by patriotic fervour that got the best of many other socialists. This programmatic clarity saw them through crucial phases of the revolution and finally this was what enabled them to win hegemony over the working classes. “It may well be that the Bolsheviks’ greatest strength in 1917 was not strict party organization and discipline…but rather the party’s stance of intransigent radicalism on the extreme left of the political spectrum. While other socialist and liberal groups jostled for position in the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet, the Bolsheviks refused to be co-opted and denounced the politics of coalition and compromise. While other formerly 6 By October 1917 the Bolsheviks had 340,000 members, up from 24,000 in February of the same year (Fitzpatrick 2001).

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radical politicians called for restraint and responsible, statesmanlike leadership, the Bolsheviks stayed out on the streets with the irresponsible and belligerent revolutionary crowd” (Fitzpatrick 2001: 42–43). Seen from this perspective Lenin’s contribution to Marxism was not so much about the nitty-gritty of this or that party rule, but about the dialectics between spontaneity and consciousness. During the 1917 upsurge the working classes were heavily radicalized and their class instincts were leading them towards a head-on collision with capital. But it was the Bolshevik party with its committed, battle-hardened cadres and with its star-studded line up of leaders, that gave this class instinct a clear political direction. It is worth quoting in full, the words of Victor Serge (1972: 55–56) here because it captures this dialectic so beautifully: The masses have a million faces: far from being homogeneous, they are dominated by various and contradictory class interests; the sole means by which they can attain a clear-sighted consciousness - without which no successful action is possible - lies in organization. The rebel masses of Russia in 1917 rose to a clear consciousness of their necessary tasks, of their means and the objectives, through the organ of the Bolshevik party. This is not a theory; it is a statement of the facts. In this situation we can see, in superb relief, the relations that obtain between the party, the working class and the toiling masses in general. It is what they actually want, however confusedly, the sailors at Kronstadt, the soldiers in Kazan, the workers of Petrograd, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Moscow and everywhere, the peasants ransacking the landlords’ mansions; it is what they all want without having the power to express their hopes firmly, to match them against the economic and the political realities, to formulate the most practical aims and choose the best means of attaining them, to select the most favourable moment for action, to extend the action from one end of the country to the other, to provide the exchanges of information and the necessary discipline, to coordinate the innumerable separate efforts that are going on - it is what they really want, without being able to constitute themselves into (in a word) a force of the requisite intelligence, training, will and myriad energy. What they want, then, the party expresses at a conscious level, and then carries out. The party reveals to them what they have been thinking. It is the bond which unites them from one end of the country to the other. The party is their consciousness, their organization.

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Today the fear of repeating past excesses has generated an aversion towards vanguard organizations in sections of the left and Venezuela is no exception to this trend. There are indeed dangers of bureaucratization that run deep in the Leninist project but this danger is not some iron law as the events of 1917 suggest very clearly. Given that Lenin’s views were never meant to be canonical formulations, there can be no blueprint for what organizational strategies ought to be employed today and one thing is for certain- the Bolshevik experience cannot serve as a prototype to be replicated everywhere and anywhere. But to say this is not to go to the other extreme and suggest that important lessons cannot be drawn from the Russian experience at all. Whatever the flaws of the “Leninist party” and however wrong the Bolshevik experiment turned out to be in the end, the Leninist contention about the indispensability of a programmatic, vanguard socialist organization remains relevant today. Lenin believed that a revolutionary party had to recognize the diverse aspirations of the masses and that the best organizational form to do so was one that was cohesive, centralized but also internally democratic. The precondition for integrating diversity into a higher unity, was that party members agreed on basic programmatic issues and that the party therefore drew on the most advanced, class conscious sections of the working classpeasant base. As he saw it, “the less wavering and instability there is within the Party, the broader, more varied, richer, and more fruitful will be the Party’s influence on the elements of the working-class masses surrounding it and guided by it” (Lenin 1904: 258). Lenin of course recognized the possibility that local circumstances and particular junctures may require prioritizing party unity as was the case in the immediate aftermath of the 1905 revolution when he made overtures to the Mensheviks in an attempt to repair the damaged relationship. Moreover, Lenin also emphasized the importance of drawing broad alliances with parties and movements that did not necessarily share with it its ideological program but with whom it had other commonalities that justified such alliances. The vanguard was never envisioned as a closed sect but as “the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects” (Lenin 1902: 423). But all the while he emphasized the necessity of being flexible, he never lost sight of the importance of maintaining the programmatic independence of the Bolsheviks. And while the historical record of Leninist parties has been marked by major failures the very fact remains that the experiences of broad, multi-tendency parties of the left that have

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come up in recent decades have not had much to offer in the form of viable alternatives (Percy 2013; Bloodworth 2013). Local class correlations and political circumstances will require the left to draw alliances with non-Marxist parties and there will arise circumstances where it will even have to prioritize unity over all other concerns within its own organization, but to elevate this “broadness” from a tactic into a principal, misses a crucial insight of the Russian revolutionary experiences. Indeed, in this regard, the feeling one gets while rereading the recent experiences of Venezuela is that the left’s organizational capacities have lagged behind the aspirations and desires of the Venezuelan masses. There is very little doubt that left has survived for as long as it has, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, because of its deep organic connection with the poorest and most oppressed sections of Venezuela. Yet the question of political mediation between the left and its base remains a problematic one; one that needs immediate answers.

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Buxton, J. (2000). Realignment of the Party System in Venezuela. Conference Presentation at the International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Miami. Buxton, J. (2014). Social Policy in Venezuela: Bucking Neoliberalism or Unsustainable Clientelism (UNRISD Working Paper, No. 2014-16). United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Geneva. Buxton, J. (2016). Venezuela After Chávez. New Left Review, 99(2), 5–25. Cannon, B. (2008). Class/Race Polarisation in Venezuela and the Electoral Success of Hugo Chávez: A Break with the Past or the Song Remains the Same? Third World Quarterly, 29(4), 731–748. Cardoso, E., & Fishlow, A. (1992). Latin American Economic Development: 1950–1980. Journal of Latin American Studies, 24(S1), 197–218. Chandrasekhar, C. P. (2001). Democratic Decentralisation and the Planning Principle: The Transition from Below. Social Scientist, 29(11/12), 41–56. Chodor, T. (2014). Neoliberal Hegemony and the Pink Tide in Latin America: Breaking Up with TINA? London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ciccariello-Maher, G. (2013). We created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution. Durham: Duke University Press. Ciccariello-Maher, G. (2016). Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela. New York: Verso Books. Desai, R. (2013). Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire. London: Pluto Press. Di John, J. (2005). The Political Economy of Anti-Politics and Social Polarisation in Venezuela 1998–2004. Crisis States Program (Working Paper Series No. 1). Available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/28158/1/wp76.pdf [Viewed 14/10/20]. Di John, J. (2014). The Political Economy of Industrial Policy in Venezuela. In R. Hausmann & F. R. Rodríguez (Eds.), Venezuela Before Chávez: Anatomy of an Economic Collapse. University Park: Penn State Press. Draper, H. (1990). The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of The Party” Or What They Did to What Is To Be Done? Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ draper/1990/myth/myth.htm [Viewed 14/10/20]. Eley, G. (2002). Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850– 2000. New York: Oxford University Press. Ellner, S. (2005). The Venezuelan Labor Movement Under Chávez: Autonomous Branch of Civil Society or Instrument of Political Control. A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social Y Literatura En América Latina, 2(3), 102–125. Ellner, S. (2008). Rethinking Venezuelan politics: Class, Conflict and the Chávez Phenomenon. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reiner. Ellner, S. (2009). A New Model With Rough Edges: Venezuela’s Community Councils. NACLA Report on the Americas, 42(3), 11–14.

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Ellner, S. (2011). Does the Process of Change in Venezuela Resemble a “Permanent Revolution”? Dialectical Anthropology, 35(3), 249–253. Ellner, S. (2012). The Distinguishing Features of Latin America’s New Left in Power: The Chávez, Morales, and Correa Governments. Latin American Perspectives, 39(1), 96–114. Ellner, S. (2013). Latin America’s Radical Left in Power: Complexities and Challenges in the Twenty-First Century. Latin American Perspectives, 40(3), 5–25. Ellner, S. (2014). After Chávez: The Maduro Government and the ‘Economic War’ in Venezuela. Venezuela Analysis. Available at: https://venezuelanalysis. com/analysis/11121 [Viewed 14/10/20]. Ellner, S. (2019a). Pink-Tide Governments: Pragmatic and Populist Responses to Challenges from the Right. Latin American Perspectives, 46(1), 4–22. Ellner, S. (2019b). Explanations for the Current Crisis in Venezuela: A Clash of Paradigms and Narratives. Venezuela Analysis. Available at: https://venezuela nalysis.com/analysis/14530 [Viewed 14/10/20]. Felicien, A., Schiavoni, C. M., & Romero, L. (2018). The Politics of Food in Venezuela. Monthly Review, 70(2), 1–19. Figes, O. (1997). A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution. London: Pimlico. Fitzpatrick, S. (2001). The Russian Revolution (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flores-Macías, G. A. (2012). After Neoliberalism? The Left and Economic Reforms in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press. Foster, J. B. (2001). Imperialism and “Empire”. Monthly Review. Available at: https://monthlyreview.org/2001/12/01/imperialism-and-empire/ [viewed 26/4/2020]. Foster, J. B. (2015). The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finance Capital: An Introduction. Monthly Review. Available at: https://monthl yreview.org/2015/07/01/the-new-imperialism-of-globalized-monopoly-fin ance-capital/ [viewed 26/4/2020]. Gilbert, C. (2016). Strike at the Helm? Clamors from a Makeshift Raft. Monthly Review. Available at: https://mronline.org/2016/05/06/gilbert06 0516-html/ [Viewed 14/10/20]. Gonzalez, M. (2018). The Ebb of the Pink Tide: the Decline of the Left in Latin America. London: Pluto Press. Griffin, K. (2003). Economic Globalization and Institutions of Global Governance. Development and Change, 34(5), 789–808. Guevara, C. (1960). Political Sovereignty and Economic Independence. Marxists.org. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1960/03/ 20.htm [Viewed 14/10/20].

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Guevara, C. (1965a). At the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria. Marxists.org. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/02/24.htm [Viewed 14/10/20]. Guevara, C. (1965b). Socialism and Man in Cuba. Marxists.org. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm [Viewed 14/10/20]. Habermas, J. (2015). The Lure of Technocracy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hammond, J. L. (2011). The Resource Curse and Oil Revenues in Angola and Venezuela. Science & Society, 75(3), 348–378. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harnecker, M. (2016). Venezuela: Economic war or Government Errors? Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Available at: http://links.org.au/ venezuela-economic-warfare-government-errors [Viewed 14/10/20]. Hasegawa, T. (1977). The Bolsheviks and the Formation of the Petrograd Soviet in the February Revolution. Soviet Studies, 29(1), 86–107. Hetland, G. (2014). Emergent Socialist Hegemony in Bolivarian Venezuela: The Role of the Party. In S. Spronk & J. R. Webber (Eds.), Crisis and Contradiction: Marxist Perspectives on Latin America in the Global Political Economy. Leiden: Brill. Hetland, G. (2016a). Chavismo in Crisis. NACLA Report on the Americas, 48(1), 8–11. Hetland, G. (2016b). From System Collapse to Chavista Hegemony: The Party Question in Bolivarian Venezuela. Latin American Perspectives, 44(1), 17–36. Klein, N. (2000). The Vision Thing. The Nation. Kornblihtt, J. (2015). Oil Rent Appropriation, Capital Accumulation, and Social Expenditure in Venezuela During Chavism. World Review of Political Economy, 6(1), 58–74. Krausz, T. (2015). Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Monthly Review Press. Lander, E., & Fierro, L. A. (1996). The Impact of Neoliberal Adjustment in Venezuela, 1989–1993. Latin American Perspectives, 23(3), 50–73. Lapavitsas, C. (2019). The Left Case Against the EU . Cambridge: Polity Press. Le Blanc, P. (2012). The Birth of the Bolshevik Party in 1912. Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Available at: http://links.org.au/node/ 2832. Le Blanc, P. (2015). Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Lebowitz, M. A. (2006). Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Lenin, V. I. (1897 [1972]). The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats. Lenin Collected Works Vol 2. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

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CHAPTER 3

The PT Experiment in Brazil: Reform and Revolution Reconsidered

The demise of the Worker’s Party’s (PT) left experiments has led to a flurry of debates on what went wrong in the region. To the neoliberals, what got the economy and the government into a mess were the expansive social and infrastructural programs rolled out by Lula and Dilma. While the motive behind these may have been benevolent, such extravagance according to the neoliberals was ultimately “irresponsible and unsustainable” in that they burdened the government’s coffers beyond repair, provided a large role to the state in economic activities and hurt economic freedom (Roberts and Castro 2018: 2). The economic crisis that the country is engulfed in today and PT’s defeats in the electoral arena are, from this perspective, a direct result of this “socialist” economic stance adopted by it in the last decade and a half.1

1 See for example: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/25/a-victoryagainst-socialism-in-brazil/.

This chapter draws some paragraphs from our previously published article, “From Neoliberalism to Post-Neoliberalism: Dilemmas, Strategies and Tactics of the Latin American Left”, published in 2018 in Social Scientist Volume 46, Issue 7–8, pp. 41–54. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26530817? seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents.

© The Author(s) 2021 R. A. Sirohi and S. Bhupatiraju, Reassessing the Pink Tide, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8674-3_3

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If the problem for the neoliberals is PT’s “socialism”, the view from the left is a very different one (Chapter 1). While arguments differ, as we noted in our introduction, an influential strand of thinking has blamed the current sorry state of the economy and of the Worker’s Party as a result of its moderate or rather reformist policy stance in its decade and a half long rule. According to this line of reasoning the PT despite all the rhetoric was essentially a wolf in sheep’s clothing—emphasizing socialism but implementing neoliberalism. From this perspective instead of trying to work around the neoliberal framework as the PT did, had the left turned the screws on capital, had it expropriated agricultural land from rural oligarchs and had it taken bolder steps to structurally transform its economy, neither would Brazil have entered the recession that it did nor would the PT have suffered political defeat of the kind it endured in 2016. PT at the end of its rule therefore turned out to be no different from any of its predecessors in matters of economic policy. Worse still, given its stature with trade unions and social movements, PT was able to orchestrate a passive revolution by taking the edge off neoliberalism while still retaining its core features. This chapter builds on this line of reasoning, but it stresses on the need for a more balanced analysis of left rule in the region. PT’s decade and a half tenure was filled with contradictory impulses some that led away from their ultimate project and some that took them closer to it. If our explanations are not to become mere tautologies it is necessary to analyse why these subversive impulses did not radicalize further and why instead it was the other impulses that came to dominate its agenda. To argue that the left failed to create a left alternative to neoliberalism because it was not left enough, hardly provides answers to any of these questions. For one, it is difficult to sustain the argument that PT was no different from its predecessors. Despite all its moderation, the one aspect that stands out about Lula and Dilma’s governments were the social and labour market policies implemented by them and indeed this ought to be highlighted as constituting a major shift that the PT brought in the economic trajectory of the nation. Now it is true that social policies have never really been seen as measures of left-wing radicalism, but in the age of dominance of finance capital where the most basic demand management strategies run against the interests of elites, even moderate minimum wage legislations or the smallest of conditional cash transfers are not easily accommodated within the system and can therefore serve subversive ends. One way to appreciate Brazil’s achievements is to view its trajectory in

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light of its oft-compared counterpart, India (Sirohi 2019). Like Brazil, India too began its liberalization process in the 1980s. But unlike its Latin American counterpart, the Indian economy grew at a rapid pace and experienced substantial macroeconomic stability. Measured in terms of progress on the human development front however, its performance was absolutely horrendous. Stubbornly high levels of malnutrition have persisted, poverty rates have increased and wealth and income inequalities have worsened during the post-1980 period in India. In comparison, Brazil’s trajectory under the left was very different. It registered modest growth rates under Lula and Dilma and its macroeconomic performance during this period was far from robust; and yet the period between 2003 and 2012 witnessed significant improvement in the quality of lives of millions of Brazilians as inequality declined, wage shares increased and millions benefitted from the government’s focus on education and health. Measured in terms of improvements in infant mortality, average years of schooling and malnutrition rates, Brazil’s performance far outstripped that of India during the same period (Sirohi 2019). What was remarkable here was that these changes were made possible due to a distinct shift in public policies which increased minimum wages, stepped up expenditure on social heads and managed to allocate subsidized credit to priority sectors of the economy. Seen in this perspective although the Brazilian left failed to make deeper inroads into the neoliberal framework that they found themselves in, their emphasis on social policies and more generally on demand management also makes it difficult to classify them in the same box as neoliberal regimes that have taken root elsewhere in the developing world. The tendency within left circles to equate the PT with run of the mill conservative parties fails to recognize these complexities. The emphasis on PT’s social policies needs to be put in perspective. It has become commonplace within the left today to treat reform and revolution as distinct, watertight categories. Historically speaking however until the First World War the differences between the more radical wings of European social democracy and their moderate counterparts were not all that obvious (Lih 2008; Sassoon 2010). Both streams after all accepted the need to transcend capitalism and both predicted that such a transition would be a long drawn out affair. But what began as a seemingly innocuous debate on the tenets of Marxism, turned into a deep political schism within the left in the years following the First World War. The victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution further sealed the fate of the “Second International Marxism”. And ever since then,

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reformist politics have been viewed as the anathema of revolutionary left politics in the eyes of many. The right-wing turn of erstwhile social democratic parties across Europe since the 1970s only seem to have confirmed further the dangers of reformist politics. Indeed, much of the recent discussion on the pink tide regimes have implicitly used these frames for measuring the achievements of the left governments. The weight of history makes it clear that “third way” politics inevitably degenerates into opportunism, compromises and ultimately into a destructive co-optation of working classes. But despite this it is necessary to highlight that the relation between radical politics and reformist slogans is not all that straight forward. The Communist Manifesto for one is replete with what one would call reformist demands today and yet one can hardly accuse Marx’s politics of being reformist. Even in the case of Russia, for all the drama and action that unfolded during the fateful days of February 1917, it is hard to imagine today that the slogan that sparked off the February revolution was just one word: Bread.2 And then again in the months that followed the fall of Tsarism, it was the seemingly reformist Bolshevik slogan of “peace, land and bread” that would ultimately give Lenin and his associates the massive traction that they would need to organize an armed insurrection against the Provisional Government. In an ironical twist it was the Bolshevik’s commitment to carry through these reforms and the inability of reformist socialists who “turned their backs upon reform, sacrificing these to the twofold constraint of alliance with a conservative bourgeoisie and pursuit of the war” that ultimately pushed workers towards the extreme left of the socialist movement, eventually culminating in the October insurrection (Liebman 1975: 164). What was even more striking, was that on the face of it none of the demands—neither land, bread nor peace—were fundamentally anti-capitalist in any sense and yet these three words ended up being endowed with a subversive quality. As the Bolsheviks realized, what gave these demands their explosive character was that they illuminated the “point of impossible” of capitalism in Russian conditions; these three words represented a set of demands that one could “(in principle) do but de facto you cannot or should not do it-you are free to choose it on condition you do not actually choose it ” (Žižek 2016: 349). The subversive quality of the call for “peace, land and bread” lay in the fact that they

2 See Hasegawa (2018).

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could never be put into force within the parameters of Russian society and if by some chance they were, they would necessarily run up against the limits of Russian capitalism, thereby exposing the class nature of the existing state and baring for all to see, the class interests behind the imperialist wars. The Russian revolution in this sense was not a single, epic, dramatic insurrectionary act but can be interpreted very differently—as a “denouement of a persistent demand for reform on the part of the people which the system” was unable to meet (Patnaik 2017). From this perspective then, “pressing for reform and mobilizing people around a demand for reform is not “reformism”; it is itself a revolutionary task” (Patnaik 2017). The moderation and pragmatism of demands put forth by left movements therefore cannot be used as the defining scale to differentiate reformists from revolutionaries. Reformist demands and policies can, as the Russian case indicates, provide a powerful tool for revolutionary goals. What determines the subversive potential of reformist banners is not therefore the slogans themselves but the larger political project that they are tied to (Gorz 1968). Capitalism, Marx reminded us was an opaque system in which interactions between seemingly equal agents hid unequal social relations on which capitalism was built. The task of the working class was to unmask these relations and lead a movement for the overthrow of the entire capitalist system. What gave “peace, land and bread” its explosive potential was that the Bolsheviks sought to use it to unmask the class antagonisms in society and to indicate just how impotent the state was in the face of class interests of the war mongering bourgeoisie. That is, to show how the irreconcilability of class interests extended to the whole economic and political system. The implication being that the existing state had to be smashed and had to be replaced with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nothing short of systemic transcendence would bring land, bread and peace to the Russians. It was this political project that differentiated revolutionary politics of the Bolsheviks from the non-revolutionary streams within Russia and Europe. In the context of the questions raised here it may be worth going back to the important debates that occurred within Marxist circles in the early decades of the twentieth century between Eduard Bernstein and socialists like Luxemburg and Lenin. The key dividing lines between the two streams of thought would become clear only as time progressed but even in the early days, it was clear that what was at stake were a series of profound political questions with respect to the capitalist state.

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Put in a historical perspective, Marx had made several scattered references to the role of the state in capitalist economies but he never spelt out a full-fledged “theory” of his own. At the beginning of the twentieth century as revolutionary movements gained ground across Europe, the question of state power was pushed into the forefront of Marxist debates and broadly speaking, the revolutionary and reformist streams diverged substantially on the issue. On the reformist end of this divide were thinkers like Eduard Bernstein, a renowned Marxist and socialist activist who argued that capitalism could be reformed and made humane through progressive and gradual changes (Bernstein 1899). Rather than over throw capitalism through a revolutionary struggle, these piecemeal transformations would organically transform capitalism eventually laying the basis for socialism. In order to make his case, Bernstein criticized the traditional Marxist law of value which argued that the reproduction of capitalist economies depended on the ability of capitalists to extract surplus labour from workers. For Bernstein the subordinate status of workers in capitalist societies stemmed not from the inner economic logic of the system, but was largely a result of “a sociopolitical problem based on the unjust distribution of social wealth which could never be solved through economics alone” (Steger 2006: 128). It would follow therefore that capitalism could be made more sensitive to the needs to workers through gradual political changes. Unlike his revolutionary counterparts for whom capitalism was responsible for bringing the world on the brink of destructive wars and for whom nothing short of a systemic transcendence would suffice, Bernstein had a more optimistic belief in the rational mutability of capitalism. His political position was summed up best by his famous exhortation “the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing, but the movement is everything” (Bernstein 1899). On the other end of the debate were leading revolutionary leaders like Lenin and Luxemburg, who virulently criticized the reformist position that was being forwarded in Europe prior to the First World War. In the context of growing capitalist crisis and increasing military tensions, Lenin and Luxemburg argued that capitalism had become increasingly anarchical and that it had led to such massive concentration of capital that the system as a whole had begun to “decay”. Rosa Luxemburg, in her famous pamphlet Reform or Revolution concluded that the inner contradictions of capitalism made it so chaotic and crisis prone that no amount of reforms could suppress capitalism’s class antagonisms, its tendency to

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immiserize workers nor it’s susceptibility to commercial crises (Luxemburg 2007). The key difference between the Lenin–Luxemburg position and the reformist position was with regard to the role of the state in capitalist societies. Whereas Bernstein “perceived the state in pluralist terms as a potentially ‘autonomous’ arena which regulated the ‘common affairs’ of individuals” (Steger 2006: 132), Rosa Luxemburg were of the view that the capitalist state represented the interests of the dominant class and was therefore subordinate to its interests. Though there may be special periods where the state could enjoy autonomy from dominant classes and where it may be willing to make minor reforms or enact progressive legislations benefitting workers, “this harmony endures only up to a certain point of capitalist development” (Luxemburg 2007: 62). Eventually the state “loses more and more its character as a representative of the whole society and is transformed at the same rate, into a pure class state” (Luxemburg 2007: 64). Whenever the state’s ability to act in the common interest comes into conflict with its responsibilities towards the dominant classes, Luxemburg argued, that the state chooses the latter role. This holds true even when the state is formally subordinated to the public through regular elections because “as soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the real interests of the population, the democratic forms are sacrificed by the bourgeoisie, and by its state representative” (Luxemburg 2007: 64). Part of the conceptual divergence between the reformist and revolutionary views on the palliative capacities of the state lay in the manner in which each viewed the relation between the political and economic planes in capitalist societies. Capitalism is a unique mode of production because unlike earlier economic systems, the relationship between the appropriators of surplus and the direct producers of the surplus appears as if it is mediated through impersonal market forces alone, rather than through the state as was the case say with feudalism (Patnaik 2007). This specificity of the production organization then means that for all practical purposes it appears as if there exists an organic separation between a seemingly rational and orderly “ethical state” and a conflict-ridden and messy civil society (Mészáros 2015). While liberal thinking has been based on the acceptance of such an absolute separation, for radical Marxists this duality is problematic because historically capitalism has always required state intervention to uphold the basic property rights upon which it is based. “In fact without the immanent relationship of the two dimensions the established social metabolic order could not possibly function and survive

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for any length of time” (Mészáros 2015: 187). From this perspective, then, the state cannot take an absolutely autonomous stance from dominant classes because even while “capital is the extra-parliamentary force par excellence of our social order and yet at the same time completely dominates parliament from the outside while pretending to be a part of it …” (Mészáros 2015: 185). It would follow from this, that to ascribe any sort of global rationality to the state would actually serve to obfuscate the inner functioning of the system; to demand a more humane and equitable form of state intervention would be to ignore the fact that it “is a product and a manifestation of irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable” (Lenin 1917i: 392). In terms of political strategy these two very different conceptions of capitalism, translated into two divergent political strategies. Now it is worth repeating here that both the reformist and the revolutionary positions believed in the necessity of transcending capitalism and both emphasized the importance of reformist demands to achieve there aims. Nor, as is popularly suggested, was the crucial difference between the two positions merely one about the use of armed violence versus the use of peaceful means of revolution. The difference between the two really boiled down to whether socialism could be built from above or from below (Draper 1966). The reformists, because they viewed the political plane as being absolutely autonomous from the economic sphere, believed that socialism could be dropped down from above by winning positions in the state and filling it up with well-meaning socialist personnel who then could go on to build socialism for the masses. It seemed too utopian to reformists to “demand from a class, the great majority of whose members live under crowded conditions, are badly educated, and have an uncertain and insufficient income, the high intellectual and moral standard which the organisation and existence of a socialist community presupposes” (Bernstein 1899). And it was precisely here where the revolutionary perspective put forth by Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and others diverged. For them on the other hand precisely because the political plane was not completely autonomous from economic relations, the capitalist state could not be the central agent of socialist transformation. Socialism therefore had to be built from the bottom up by the initiative of the masses organized as a united political force. And while formal parliamentary institutions were

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an important arena of action, given that the state was implicated in capitalist exploitation, direct class-based action on the streets, on shop floors and out there in the fields—in the extra-parliamentary arena that is—was as, if not more, crucial for the fight against capitalism. To be a revolutionary Marxist therefore, it was not enough to just recognize the myriad forms of class antagonisms that existed in capitalist economies but it also required one to perceive the class basis of the state and as an extension of this, to perceive “That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”, as the General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association put it.3 In this context, it is worth quoting in full the words of Andre Gorz (1968: 124): “Reformists and socialists do have some wishes in common; but not for the same purposes or in the same way. For reformism, at stake in the reforming action is merely ‘things’ -wages, public amenities, pensions, etc.-which the state is to dispense from on high to individuals maintained in their dispersion and impotent with respect to the process of production and relations of production. For the socialist movement, the workers’ sovereign power to determine for themselves the conditions of their social participation, to submit to their collective intent the content, development and social division of their labour is as important, if not more so, than ‘things’. Hence the profound difference between reformism and socialism. It is the difference between granting reforms which perpetuate the subordination of the working class in factory and society; and reforms imposed, applied and controlled by the masses themselves, based on their capacity for self-organization and their initiative”.

It is precisely this perspective outlined here that we use to view the achievements and limitations of the PT regime in Brazil. In particular, we argue below that by looking at the political strategy of the Brazilian left vis-à-vis the state, we gain some insights into why the Brazilian left failed to sustain its project. It is to these questions that we turn our attention to in the following sections. Before doing so however, we build a theoretical framework by revisiting Lenin’s theory of the state.

3 Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/international/iwma/documents/ 1864/rules.htm [Viewed 27/4/2020].

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The State and Revolution Revisited On the morning of 23 February 1917 women in the Vyborg district textile mills of Petrograd struck work protesting against food shortages.4 For months prior to that, essential medicines, firewood and basic commodities like sugar, egg and milk had disappeared from market shelves. As prices rose, so did the anger amongst workers, especially women workers who bore the brunt of the long queues outside food stores and the cries of their starving children at home. As incensed women descended out onto the streets on the fateful morning of February, they called on fellow workers to join their protests and soon what was supposed to be a spontaneous strike limited to a few factories turned into a deluge of workers. By the end of the day anywhere between 78,000 and 128,000 workers were out on the streets fighting pitched battles against the police and the Cossacks. By the next day the number of strikers had increased to 158,000 across 131 factories. On February 26, the government turned the screws on the protestors and hundreds were killed by the police. As news of the massacre reached the army, soldiers were incensed and a contingent of soldiers from the Pavlovskii Regiment revolted. Tides turned on February 27 as large sections of the army joined the protesters and by the end of the day, the centuries old Monarchy was brought down to its knees. On March 2 the Tsar, Nicholas III abdicated his crown and invited his brother Grand Duke Michael to take over—an offer that the latter declined. And so began one of the most tumultuous periods of Russian history. The movement that produced the February revolution caught the Bolsheviks off guard and apart from middle-level Bolshevik activists, by and large the leadership lagged behind the masses (Hasegawa 1972, 1977).5 But with the end of the monarchy, the socialists were even less prepared for what was to come. Since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century the socialist movement believed that Russia would have to first go through the stage of capitalism before it could move onto the “higher” stage of socialism. This was an assumption shared by socialists of all stripes and colours. Thus with the end of the Tsar’s rule it was expected that the bourgeoisie and its liberal allies would be the natural 4 The following description of the February Revolution draws heavily from Hasegawa (2018). 5 This has been contested by Yanowitz (2019).

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leaders of the democratic republic that would replace Tsarism. The role of the socialist movement it was widely believed was to work within these parameters and only after a period of capitalist development could the question of socialism even be placed in front of the movement. As it turned out however the events that followed the fall of autocracy did not so much foreclose socialist revolution but actually provided a distinct opportunity for the urban working class and peasantry to seize power. Following the abdication of Nicholas III, the refusal of the moderate liberals to withdraw from the war and their inability to introduce reforms in the countryside, created sharp polarization in the country. Thus rather than producing a definite resolution as many socialists had predicted, the months following the February revolution led to a stalemate between the bourgeoisie organized under the banner of the Provisional Government on the one hand, and the peasantry and the working class organized under the leadership of the Soviets on the other. This peculiar “interlocking of two dictatorships”, Lenin (1917d) termed “dual power”. Now the interesting feature of this dual power was that although it arose from deep mutual suspicion between the two classes, at least in the early days the moderate leadership of the Soviets was eager to surrender all decision-making prerogatives to the Provisional Government. Russia after all, socialists had long argued, was not ripe for socialism. Further as Hasegawa (1972) reminds us, the February revolution had caught the entire socialist leadership by surprise and as the question of power came to the fore there appeared no viable force that was willing to take power in the name of the workers and peasants. Perhaps the most crucial of all was the uncertainty regarding the army. In the minds of both moderate as well as radical socialists, even if power were seized there was no guarantee that it would remain in their hands, as the army was not as yet completely under the control of the Soviets. This meant that the only option out was to build a broad coalition and place the liberals at the helm of affairs so as to “disguise the nature of the revolution as if it were a patriotic one, making it more palatable to the military leaders” (Hasegawa 1972: 621). The striking aspect of all this was the acquiescence of the Bolsheviks to the moderate strategy adopted by the Soviet leadership in these early days. Lenin, who was in exile during this phase had started developing an alternative political line which he would make explicit on his return to Russia in April. The crux of his argument was that the fall of the monarchy was just the “first revolution but certainly not the last” (Lenin 1917b: 297). The government set up by the liberals, Lenin (1917c: 322) noted,

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was “held in a vise”. It was on the one hand “bound by the interests of capital” which wanted the war to perpetuate and on the other hand it was “pressed by the bread-hungry and peace-hungry masses” (Lenin 1917c: 322). Under these widely divergent pressures, the “dual power” arrangement could not go on forever and had to resolve itself on one side or the other. In the mean while the Provisional Government given its class nature could only be expected “to lie, to wriggle, to play for time, to ‘proclaim’ and promise…as much as possible and do as little as possible, to make concessions with one hand and to withdraw them with the other” (Lenin 1917c: 322). It was therefore up to the workers and their allies to see through this ploy, to recognize that the government of the bourgeoisie was simply incapable of meeting the demands of the masses and to realize that they had no option but to move onwards and seize state power (Lenin 1917h). But—and this is what would become the crux of his analysis a few months later in The State and Revolution— the workers could not just be content in taking state power as it existed, instead they would have to go one step further and smash the existing state. In the early days following the February revolution, Lenin did not see the need for an immediate armed insurrection against the Provisional Government and believed that a peaceful transition of power to the Soviets was possible. He advocated “prolonged work” amongst the masses “to develop proletarian class-consciousness and to unite the urban and rural proletarians against the vacillations of the petty bourgeoisie” and ultimately win them over to the Bolshevik’s side (Lenin 1917e: 155). In the following months however the Provisional Government would turn more and more belligerent and with it would fade all chances of a peaceful resolution. In mid-June the Provisional Government in cahoots with the moderate leadership of the Soviets would intensify its war efforts only to suffer major defeats. In the midst of the crisis, rank and file Bolsheviks would organize a militant march egging on its leadership to take on the government once and for all. The Bolshevik leadership would try and restrain its militants, but the Provisional Government would nonetheless use this as an opportunity to unleash large-scale repression of the Bolsheviks, forcing Lenin to flee the capital. The alliance between the Provisional Government and sections of the army seeking an authoritarian solution to repress the left in August, would turn out to be the final straw. It would once and for all confirm in the mind of Lenin that the choice confronting Russian workers was either to defeat the Provisional Government and seize power by force or idly sit by and watch the Provisional Government

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drop its democratic façade and impose a political and economic system that had very little to do with the aspirations and desires of the masses. It was in this context that Lenin penned his famous pamphlet, The State and Revolution. Unlike his younger days, where Lenin still saw in capitalism a certain progressive tendency, in The State and Revolution (Lenin 1917i) one sees the glimpse of a socialist who perceives that capitalism has had its day and therefore perceives the need for an immediate break with the system as a matter of urgent necessity. Europe after all was in the midst of a terrible war and what was more was that parliaments even in the most democratic of nations had just turned into instruments of furthering this monstrous destruction. To top it all, socialist movements that were supposed to put a stop to this madness had in reality all but surrendered to the calls to defend the fatherland. The conditions staring Europe therefore put in front of the working class two very stark options—either they could go further down this road of destruction and murder fellow workers in the trenches or they could train their guns against their masters at home and turn the World War into a revolution against capital itself. Lenin called on his countrymen to take the second road. But if the revolutionary path was to be taken and if the workers were to turn the war that set one worker against the other into a civil war against their class opponents, the question of state power would have to be placed at the forefront of socialist strategy. This question of course had been discussed and debated extensively within European socialist circles since the early years of twentieth century. But even in the most developed form, the arguments put forth by tallest of European Marxists, argued Lenin (1917i), remained incomplete. Lenin here was primarily interested in Kautsky’s formulations. In his writings, Lenin found a view of the state which was just a sophisticated version of the crude reformist positions taken by Bernstein and others. More precisely, according to Lenin, Kautsky’s propositions boiled down to the simple idea that socialists could seize state power and use the capitalist state, as it was, to bring about a socialist transformation. Such a view translated into a conception of the capitalist state as a neutral instrument that could simply be taken a hold of and be wielded for the purposes of socialism. It also downplayed the initiative of the masses as the central agents of social change. This is where Lenin disagreed fundamentally with Kautsky because for him, socialist movements could not simply make do with seizing state power and making merely cosmetic changes to it.

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“The point”, he argued was not about “whether the ‘ministries’ will remain, or whether ‘committee of specialists’ or some other institution will be set up”, but instead the core issue was “whether the old state machine (bound by thousands of threads to the bourgeoisie and permeated through and through with routine and inertia) shall remain, or be destroyed and replaced by a new one” (Lenin 1917i: 491). For Lenin the answer was clear. The capitalist state had to be destroyed, broken and smashed by the workers. In its place, the workers would have to instal a new type of power, an institutional set up that would uphold the desires and aspiration of the most oppressed and exploited classes over those of the rich and wealthy. Whereas “all previous revolutions perfected the state machine”, for the proletariat to build a classless society, the state that they grab from their erstwhile masters “must be broken, smashed” (Lenin 1917i: 411). To understand this position, we may note that for Lenin capitalism was a system which pit workers against capitalists but what was more important for him was that this class conflict was a universal feature of the entire system. That is, class antagonisms were not restricted just to the sphere of production or distribution alone but they extended to the political sphere as well. Here Lenin invoked the authority of Marx to make his point. Marx, as Lenin understood him, suggested that the very existence of the capitalist state reflected the fact that opposing classes have “irreconcilable” interests and what was more was that the state itself was incapable of resolving these class antagonisms because it was “an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of ‘order’, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes” (Lenin 1917i: 392). This formulation of the state was so crucial, that for Lenin it formed the crux of Marxism: It is often said and written that the main point in Marx’s theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong…Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists… Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. (Lenin 1917i: 416–417)

Now in order to take on the reformist position that was being adopted in Europe, Lenin sought to underscore that this class character of the state had nothing to do with its external form. Reformists like Bernstein

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it may be noted had been trying to argue that the capitalist state with a parliamentary democracy, in essence, was “an absence of class government…the indication of a social condition where a political privilege belongs to no one class as opposed to the whole community” (Bernstein 1899). But what Lenin was trying to suggest was that even under a democratic political system with regular elections and clearly drawn out parliamentary procedures, there were myriad of ways that capitalist interests were prioritized by the state. The most obvious was outright bribery of state officials, which banks and other imperialist forces had turned into an “exceptional art” (Lenin 1917i: 397). Then there was also the fact that plum bureaucratic positions were either held directly by representatives of the bourgeoisie or gifted out to their petty bourgeois allies (Lenin 1917i: 428–429). Given the numerous invisible threads that tied capital to the state, having regular elections in itself did not do much to challenge the wage slavery and the oppression meted out to the toiling majority. Representative bodies even in the most advanced nations were mere “talking shops” (Lenin 1917i: 428) and democracy in these countries were so “hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation” that it was reduced to being “a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich” (Lenin 1917i: 465). The point here of course was not to blame the principle of representative democracy itself but to show that “under capitalism democracy is restricted, cramped curtailed, mutilated by all conditions of wage slavery and the poverty and misery of the people”, even in the most advanced bourgeois countries (Lenin 1917i: 491). The goal of the socialist movement therefore could not simply be to take control of this state in the hopes of building socialism from above. Instead, the workers would have to break down existing institutions and build by their own creativity and initiative, new institutions and new modes of governance. “The revolution consists not in the new class commanding, governing with the aid of the old state machine, but in this class smashing this machine and commanding, governing with the aid of a new machine” (Lenin 1917i: 491). This new kind of power would have to deepen democracy not just in a quantitative sense but qualitatively as well. It would have to wipe out the traditional lines between the governed and the governors, between the ruled and the rulers and would have to be based on principles of direct democracy where masses would actively involve themselves in everyday decision-making. All power to the Soviets!

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The State and Revolution was written by Lenin when he was in hiding and he never actually completed the pamphlet. A final chapter of the book that he intended to write was left unwritten because he had to jump headlong into the preparation for insurrection in October. The unfinished nature of Lenin’s arguments meant that there were several questions and gaps that were not entirely delved into by the author. Despite this, he felt the need to publicize his interpretation of the state question so much so that at one point he even wrote to his comrade to ensure its publication in the event of his assassination: “Entre nous: if they do me in, I ask you to publish my notebook: “Marxism on the State” (it got left behind in Stockholm). It’s bound in a blue cover. It contains a collection of all the quotations from Marx and Engels, likewise from Kautsky against Pannekoek. There are a number of remarks and notes, and formulations. I think it could be published after a week’s work. I believe it to be important, because not only Plekhanov but also Kautsky have bungled things. The condition: all this is absolutely entre nous!” (Lenin 1917g: 454). Unbeknownst to the author at the time was that his concise pamphlet would go on to become a founding document of the twentieth-century socialist movement and “his greatest contribution to political theory” (Colletti 1974: 224). For many however, the vision presented by The State and Revolution, has gaping holes in it and some see in this text the “seeds” of the kind of authoritarianism that socialism would become synonymous with, in the times to come. This interpretation appears not only in the works of mainstream thinkers but also in the writings of many Marxists. We may turn here to Poulantzas’s (2000) arguments because they have retained considerable amount of traction within the left even today and they are in many ways representative of the kind of criticism that has been levelled against Lenin by Marxists.6 To Poulantzas (2000) the most problematic aspect of Lenin’s conceptualization of revolution was his suspicion of parliamentary style of representative democracy. The revolution that Lenin had in mind was one in which the capitalist state was to be smashed and replaced by worker’s grassroots organizations. Since representative institutions were, according to Poulantzas, seen by Lenin as a counterpart to capitalism and hence a lower form of democracy, smashing the state also implied smashing the idea of representative democracy and putting

6 See for example Rooksby (2011, 2018).

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in its place rank and file organs. In other words, Lenin, in Poulantzas view, was guilty of creating a (false) binary between representative institutions and direct democracy. But herein lay the problem. Since the kind of decentralization that Lenin conceptualized would obviously require a central coordinating body of some kind for the system not to fall into complete disrepair and since this central institution—whatever it may be called—could not be modelled on the terms of representative institutions given Lenin’s ideological proclivities, the dictatorship of the proletariat had no other path but towards one-party rule: “Whether we like it or not, the original guiding thread of Lenin’s thought was, in opposition to the parliamentarianism … Was it not this very line (sweeping substitution of rank-and-file democracy for representative democracy) which principally accounted for what happened in Lenin’s lifetime in the Soviet Union, and which gave rise to the centralizing and statist Lenin whose posterity is well enough known” (Poulantzas 2000: 252). Now Poulantzas (2000) no doubt hits on a crucial issue here but he is only partially correct. He errs because he ends up telescoping history backwards—by reading Lenin from the lens of his own time, a time when the Soviet Union had degenerated into an authoritarian, one-party dictatorship. The picture he paints of Lenin’s views on representative democracy therefore misses the nuances and complexities of Lenin’s position as they developed over the years (Nimtz 2014a, b). Even in The State and Revolution where Lenin rails against the parliamentary system, he makes it clear that “the way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the electoral principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into ‘working bodies’” (Lenin 1917i: 428). A few months earlier, in drafting a new party program, Lenin would outline what a Soviet democracy would like a higher form of democracy where “supreme power in the state must be vested entirely in the people’s representatives, who shall be elected by the people and be subject to recall at any time, and who shall constitute a single popular assembly, a single chamber” (Lenin 1917f: 461). Smashing the state therefore did not imply the smashing of representative democracy but the destruction of those arms of the state that alienated themselves from popular power and that were defenders of the status quo. These quotations must also be placed in the context of the electoral strategy that Lenin had been advocating since 1906. It is well known now that Lenin viewed participation in Duma-like bodies as an absolutely essential part of revolutionary strategy,

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especially as these platforms provided a wide audience for the Bolshevik program (Nimtz 2014a, b). Pre-empting the debates ongoing on in Latin America today, Lenin argued that revolutionary politics required the left to use the parliament to support extra-parliamentary struggles.7 This two pronged strategy of combining direct action with struggles within representative institutions, Lenin termed “revolutionary parliamentarism” as distinct from the “‘ministeriable’ parliamentarism” of reformists which was motivated by “pure legalism, the legalism-and-nothing-but-legalism” (Lenin 1915: 256). From his view where the European socialists erred was that their entire energies were spent on capturing the parliament alone to the exclusion of non-parliamentary arena. This was the basic position the Lenin had developed and used well until 1917. But with the coming of the February revolution, the objective situation facing the Bolsheviks suddenly changed and while Lenin’s emphasis on Duma activity continued with great vigour, the focus now shifted elsewhere—the Soviets. In the context of Poulantzas’s claims we must note here that the Soviets were not Lenin’s direct creation and neither was the dual power situation. These were the conditions that were already in existence once Lenin arrived in Russia. The Bolsheviks and other socialist organizations of course did play an important role in radicalizing the masses even before the War,8 but the fact that class polarization grew to explosive levels in the months that followed the February revolution, that radical sections of the working classes wanted to bring down the Provincial Government and that they wanted to hand over power to the Soviets was an objective fact, and not some conspiratorial project led by Lenin as many make it out to be. In this context, his opposition to the Provisional Government was shaped not by some crude opposition to representative democracy but precisely the opposite. His criticism of the Provisional Government was that it had failed to heed the voices of the vast majority of the masses who were in favour of transferring power to the Soviets. “Such opposition means nothing but renouncing democracy! It means no more no less than imposing on the people a government

7 See for example Ciccariello-Maher (2007, 2013), Azzellini (2010, 2016, 2018), Raby (2014), Chávez (2012) and Katz (2007). For a theoretical discussion see also Oikonomakis (2019). 8 See Haimson (1964).

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which admittedly can neither come into being nor hold its ground democratically, i.e. as a result of truly free, truly popular elections” (Lenin 1917h: 155). It is worth underscoring here just how important it is to appreciate the context within which Lenin was writing this pamphlet. In this regard, one crucial aspect of Lenin’s writings must be noted here. All through the stormy months of 1917, Lenin believed that the juncture that Russia was in, was pregnant with radical possibilities and that it was the responsibility of the Bolshevik party to stay ahead of events and carve out tactical positions based on ever-changing political realities. This required immense flexibility on the part of the Bolsheviks and a keen awareness of altering circumstances and class correlations. Lenin’s theorizing therefore was always done with an eye on praxis. “None of Lenin’s writings have a ‘contemplative’ character. This is less than ever the case with State and Revolution” notes Colletti (1974: 226). Thus in order to evaluate Lenin’s analysis in the pamphlet and more importantly to derive legitimate conclusions from it, one has to remember the precise moment in which Lenin was developing his conjecture towards the problem of state power. This historically conditioned “Leninist conjecture” according to Patnaik (2016)—and without an appreciation of which it is not possible to evaluate Lenin’s thinking—consisted of the following: the rivalry between imperialist nations had placed in front of workers the choice to become cannon fodder or to band together and smash capitalism. “Europe is pregnant with revolution”, Lenin (1917a: 253) declared at a talk he delivered in Zurich in 1917, just a few weeks before he entered Russia. The fact that workers were not already walking down the road of revolution even after years of destruction and misery caused by the War, was because revisionism had taken hold within their ranks. Russia, given its position in the war and given the massive discontent brewing at home, had matured for revolution faster than any other European country and this window had to be seized even if it appeared premature in many senses. A Russian revolution, Lenin was certain, would set off proletarian victories all across Europe and beyond. The responsibility of the Bolsheviks was to recognize this “actuality” and raise the banner of Communism. “History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now” he declared (Lenin 1917j: 21), as he exhorted his comrades to take the initiative. Confident that the vast majority of workers were anyway with the Bolsheviks and that the class instinct of other vacillating sections of the poor would eventually kick in as well, the prospect of seizing power was ripe. Optimism

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also derived from the belief that once Russia turned Red, the European working class would respond by striking against their own bourgeoisies and would come to Russia’s aid. Given that this was all but a certainty for Lenin, once in power and until such time as this support became forthcoming, it was the Bolshevik party’s responsibility to hold the fort even if it meant forgoing parliamentary niceties for a while (Patnaik 2016). As it turned out, the Bolsheviks succeeded in taking power but the Europe-wide revolution that Lenin had hoped for did not materialize and socialist Russia found itself increasingly isolated from the world. The Bolsheviks defeated attempted blockade by foreign powers and emerged victorious from a bloody civil war, all of which considerably weakened working-class initiative and strengthened bureaucratic tendencies within the Bolsheviks. By the end of the Second World War the historical conditions that inspired the “Leninist conjecture”, had changed considerably (Patnaik 2016). In the years that followed, inter-imperialist rivalries were replaced by cooperation amongst the great powers, with the United States emerging as the hegemonic leader. The “Golden Age” of capitalism opened up an era of prosperity, full employment and wage growth in the West. With these changes any remaining prospects of a Europe-wide revolution, all but vanished. Capitalism recognized this and it changed according to these new parameters by experimenting with Fordism, by installing generous welfare states and by expanding worker’s political rights. But all the while these changes were happening around them, the socialists remained fossilized in an era that had bypassed them. The persistence of the one-party dictatorship was the result of a failure of socialists to reinvent themselves. Seen from this perspective, Poulantzas makes an important point by stressing on the importance of representative democracy in the socialist project. He is also correct in rejecting the binaries between direct and representative forms of democracy suggesting instead the need to develop both simultaneously. It is also true that Lenin’s State of Revolution seems to have a certain disdain for the manner in which parliaments functioned within capitalist societies. But to extend this and to say that Lenin suspected the principle of representative democracy itself is to take the State and Revolution completely out of context and to ignore all that Lenin had written on the subject. The point here is not just to mount a defence of Lenin but also to draw out lessons from his thinking. One has to remember that Lenin never intended to provide a blueprint of socialist

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strategies that could be used anywhere and everywhere, and to evince such a strategy from his writing goes against the open-ended Marxism that he espoused. Lenin’s political position was guided by his belief that capitalism had to be transcended and that the only agency capable of doing this was the working class. It followed from this conviction that socialism could not be built from above but would necessarily have to be a bottom up project; This was the sum total of Lenin’s views and this was what inspired his thinking on the state question. The Origins and Rise of PT in Brazil In 1964, a few days after the centre-left President João Goulart announced his plans to implement land reforms, the army backed by domestic and foreign capital, overthrew the democratically elected government. The coup inaugurated a particularly bloody period in Brazilian history (Alves 1988). The crackdown on political opponents began almost instantaneously as labour leaders were jailed and members of the legislature were stripped of their political rights. With civil liberties suspended, instances of disappearances, illegal detentions and torture became widespread. Labour unions, rural organizations, student organizations and any collective deemed to be subversive were crushed ruthlessly. Beneath these assaults on civil society was a grand attempt to reconfigure the Brazilian economy. The first phase of import substitution which began in the 1930s had run out of steam and Brazilian capital was desperately seeking some breathing space. The fundamental problem was that while Brazilian ISI required a robust domestic market to thrive, this was precisely what its hierarchical social structure was built to impede. Thus whereas countries in East Asia witnessed through going land reforms which laid the basis for further industrialization, such radical re-arrangements which would have expanded domestic markets in Brazil, were simply ruled out because of the clout held by Brazilian elites. It was here that the new regime came in with a novel solution (Seidman 1994). The military regime sought to bypass this problem by simply gearing local industries towards export markets thus weakening the link between capital accumulation and domestic demand. The demand constraint at home was to be made up by tapping to into what at that time seemed like an unlimited source of demand in foreign markets. Concomitantly, this export drive was to be backed by explicit attempts to shore up demand of the upper classes and an intense repression of incomes of the lower classes (Sirohi 2019).

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As a result of these combined changes, in the years that followed, the Brazilian economy experienced high growth rates and its industrial base massive expanded rapidly. But given the nature of economic development pursued by military leaders, the fruits of these developments did not percolate down to the poorest as the Brazilian economy and thus growth became more and more unequal (Evans 1979). As wages lagged and living conditions became unbearable urban workers, small and landless peasants began organizing in large numbers. As early as 1968 workers in Contagem and Sao Paulo organized massive strikes but these were repressed brutally. After a period of lull, on May 12, 1978 workers in automobile factories at São Bernardo do Campo struck work demanding higher wages (Seidman 1994). Within a week strikes spread throughout Sao Paulo region with almost 78,000 workers participating in work stoppages. These strikes inaugurated a period of massive labour unrest. By the end of that year itself metal and textile workers, teachers, bank employees and several other sectors followed suit. Half a million workers across six states participated in these strikes (Sader and Silverstein 1991). 1979 witnessed even larger strikes involving 3.2 million workers from 15 states. The military regime which until this point had largely staved off political opposition, was for the first time politically challenged and what was more this challenge came from the most unexpected quarters-urban workers. The labour movement until this point had been historically very weak. Ever since Getulio Vargas had inaugurated the Consolidated Brazilian Labour Law (CLT) in the 1930s, labour unions were kept under strict state control and had very little autonomy. It was this structure that the military regime took over and modified for its own needs. The strikes of the late 1970s changed all this. Apart from the sheer numbers involved, the new phase of mobilization inaugurated very new kind of unionism which stressed on the importance of political autonomy of workers and which called on the workers to exert greater say in matters of national decision-making. New unionists demanded the institutionalization of wage negotiations directly with employers rather than through Labour Courts. In addition, they demanded recognition of shop floor level union committees, the removal of all restrictions on the right to strike and an end to the military dictatorship (Sader and Silverstein 1991). The strikes also brought to the forefront the need to meld economic demands with political ones. In 1979, under pressure from opposition groups, the regime allowed formation of new political parties and while several parties emerged, none directly appealed to the demands of workers.

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Facing immense repression from the state and having little support from Congressional representatives, leaders of the labour movement increasingly felt the need to develop a party of their own. In Lula’s words, “it didn’t help to get a 10 per cent pay rise if those who control power have the means to decree a wage policy that takes away all the conquests of the working class” (cited in Sader and Silverstein 1991: 49). It was in the midst of this labour upsurge that the PT was born, as an autonomous political party representing political and economic interests of workers. PT of course was not the only organization that made headway. Perhaps the most significant development during these years was the emergence of landless workers across Brazil’s Southern states. Brazil’s industrial spurt created a perennial need to generate for foreign exchange and for this, the army opened up Brazilian agriculture to agro-exporters, chemical corporations and foreign grain companies to technically upgrade Brazilian agriculture and orient it towards exports (Branford and Rocha 2002). While the economic goals were met with great success, the lopsided nature of this “Green Revolution” and the bias towards monocultures, left smaller peasants economically vulnerable. As a result, indigenous communities were displaced, small peasants were driven to the brink of bankruptcy and landlessness increased steadily. Land concentration which had always been a constant feature of Brazilian countryside, worsened during the military rule so that by 1985, “less than 1 percent of farms occupied almost 44 percent of Brazil’s total farmland” (Robles 2018: 5). It was in this context that landless peasants in Southern Brazil began organizing themselves under the banner of the Pastoral Land Commissions established by Roman Catholic priests. On 7 September 1979, a group of 110 families began what became the first of several hundred occupations of agricultural land by landless families (Branford and Rocha 2002). In 1984 representatives from urban unions, rural unions and churches across the country, along with representatives of landless peasants from several states met in Cacavel, Parana and established the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) to take this movement forward. It was broadly within these parameters that the PT emerged to the political forefront. It drew on its deep roots in the worker’s movements but it also developed organic links with social movements like the MST, the organized left, erstwhile guerrillas, rural unions, various church organizations like the Christian Base Communities, Marxist intellectuals and the left-wing parliamentarians. Given its broad base, the early PT developed a highly democratic internal structure that provided room for

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extensive internal debates and for rank and file participation in party decisions. The basic building block of the PT organization were the local-level cells called “nucleo de base” (Sader and Silverstein 1991). Each of these cells was to consist of at least 21 members and was to be “organized by neighborhood, job category, workplace or social movement” (Keck 1992: 104). These grassroots cells were to discuss matters related to the organization, provide inputs to party decisions, provide political education to its members and while they did not have any decision-making powers, they did have extensive powers to hold the municipal leadership accountable. In this way the nucleos were to form the “primary site of political action by party members, reinforcing the party’s links with social movements” (Keck 1992: 104). In addition to this, major party decisions were arrived at through intensive debates in “pre-conferences” and only those decisions that were ratified by the rank and file at these meetings were adopted by delegates in the formal congresses of the party. The national leadership itself was elected through competitive elections and this held the upper echelons accountable to the party’s grassroots early on (Samuels 2004). This style of functioning set the PT apart from both the centrist parties as well as the traditional organized left. Ideologically the party espoused socialism since its early days, but its definition of socialism and its programmatic basis remained rather fuzzy (Bruera 2013). The party critiqued neoliberalism and called for a total repudiation of international debt. It called for deeper democratization of the state, spoke of class struggle, the need to end exploitation and emphasized the necessity of transcending the capitalist system. The party program however stopped short of any specifics. The PT leadership insisted that socialism could not be predefined and in Brazil any such concept would have to be built on local characteristics. There could be no question of importing models from abroad. The socialist program itself would have to be built from bottom up by its own rank and file (Lowy 1987). In practice this fuzziness meant that the PT from the very beginning emerged as an “open” party that incorporated “various ideological tendencies-from left of center social democrats to revolutionary Marxiststhat joined the party” (Guidry 2003: 92). From 1987 onwards the party formally institutionalized factions within it to accommodate these various strands of thinking.

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PT’s ideological stance had contradictory effects in the long run. On the one hand its ideological “openness” made it a political Noah’s ark blunting its programmatic edge which became visible with the gradual domination of the party by its moderate wing after the mid-1990s. Whereas radical left factions held the majority in the early party congresses of 1993 and 1995, their control reduced considerably thereafter to about a third in the subsequent congresses held towards the end of the 1990s (Ribeiro 2014). The dominant faction increasingly used its control over the party to curtail funds to radical factions and even suppressed their publications. Along with this shift to the centre, went a weakening of membership criteria. In keeping with its image of an “open” party, the “nucleos” were opened up to non-members in 2001. During the same year leadership election rules were altered in such a way as to weaken the role of experienced, mid-level vanguard elements. These changes “muddied the boundaries among activists, members and supporters and made internal elections more permeable to external influences” (Ribeiro 2014: 112). The dilution of membership rules and the shift from proportional to direct voting led “to the widespread adoption of practices, reported by the media and criticised within the party, such as mass membership sign-ups, the bussing of members to events, the bulk payment of individual dues and the registration of individuals who were unaware of their membership” (Ribeiro 2014: 113). The “nucleos” by the end of the 1990s became a pale shadow of their former selves and by the time the PT entered into the 2002 electoral fray, the organization was far more centralized and its leadership far more autonomous from its rank and file than it had ever been since its formation in 1980. While PT still managed to retain its difference from catch-all parties, there was also growing pressures of convergence that it had to deal with, as moderate factions led by Lula started to acquire greater hold on the organization. Having said that, the fuzzy and open nature of its program also helped it attract people from various walks of life and the organization succeeded in moving to the limelight of the national politics. In the 1986 elections it garnered only 3% of the total national vote share but by 1989 the PT presidential candidate, Lula won 16.5%. In the 1990s, PT emerged as the most important electoral opponent to the centrist coalition headed by the Fernando Henrique Cardoso-led PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party), with a vote share of around 27%. By 2002, Lula won 61.3% of the vote in the second round of the presidential elections (French and Fortes 2005). The broadening of PT’s support base must also be seen in

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the context of the neoliberal reforms that were adopted in the 1980s and 1990s. Like many other Latin American economies, the debt crisis hit Brazil in the early 1980s. The effects were devastating as unemployment soared, growth rates fell and inflation hit four digit levels. The combined effect of the economic crisis and civil society insurrections weakened the military regime which finally agreed to a controlled political opening culminating in democratic elections and a new constitution promulgated in 1988. On the economic front the primary aim of the post-authoritarian governments was to bring a semblance of stability back into the economy. A series of “heterodox shocks” starting from the mid-1980s sought to bring prices under control through administered price controls and wage freezes (Bresser-Pereira 1987). None of these moves however brought much relief to the Brazilians who were witnessing a complete evaporation of their purchasing power as prices continued their upward trend well into the 1990s. Finally, in 1994 it was Cardoso’s Real Plan that brought some relief to the population but as time would reveal, even this stability was bought at great cost. The adjustment plan sought to rein in inflation by adjusting nominal exchange rates in accordance with international price differentials. As an inflation fighting tool, the exchange rates were to be kept at overvalued levels (Amann and Baer 2003; Saad-Filho and Mollo 2002). But since this would no doubt aggravate balance of payment problems, exchange rate anchoring was to be supported through a policy of high interest rates meant to reduce domestic consumption and to attract foreign capital into the country. Further the Brazilian trade regime which had remained rather protected until then, was to be drastically liberalized so as to subject local producers to foreign competition with the hopes that this would further dampen domestic prices. In sum therefore, the Real Plan amounted to a plan of inflation control through an unprecedented integration of the Brazilian economy into foreign trade and financial networks (Sirohi 2019). The reduction of prices bought Cardoso immense good will as the erosion that people’s purchasing power was subjected to for over a decade, came to a stop. But in the long run, the adjustment plan was very prejudicial to the Brazilian economy. The high interest rate regime hurt investment rates and led to anaemic growth throughout the 1990s. Neoliberals had hoped that foreign investment inflows would counter the deflationary effects, when in reality all they did was worsen the situation because the more the economy attracted foreign investment the more its currency appreciated, devastating its external balances and making it even

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more indebted to foreign creditors. Worse still were the effects on industries that had been so arduously built up over the ISI decades. As cheaper goods from abroad flooded Brazilian markets, local firms got displaced. Foreign investors who were supposed to be “building new plants, so expanding production and boosting employment”, were in reality only interested in “acquiring existing ones, either by taking over private firms or buying up state enterprises put on the auction block”, resulting in a complete denationalization of the economy (Rocha 2002: 22). As the industrial sector tottered and as large swathes of the Brazilian state-owned sector went into private hands, informality increased several fold, unemployment doubled from 1990 to 1999 when it reached around 8% of the labour force and wages stagnated (Saad-Filho and Mollo 2002). It was in this sort a context that widespread disillusionment set in across the Brazilian society against Cardoso’s neoliberal policies. Workers and peasants faced the brunt of neoliberal reforms and constituted the core of the PT base, but sections of the middle class as well as industrial capital had also started to feel strangulated by the trajectory of neoliberalism and had begun to drift towards the PT (Morais and Saad-Filho 2003). It was to these broad constituencies that had lost out from neoliberalism, that the PT wanted to reach out to and in order to do so it’s leadership felt it had to be flexible enough to absorb distinct demands of these heterogeneous sectors. In the 2002 elections, the strategy paid off as the PT roared into office with a handsome electoral victory. PT in Power Having come to power, the fledgling government had to confront several pressing constraints. First, as the party’s vote base now consisted of a wide section of Brazilian voters, it had to not only accommodate interest of its traditional working class and social movement base but it was also forced to reach out to elements of the middle classes and industrial capital that had supported it extensively. The wide net cast by PT strategists worked wonders when it came to winning votes, but this very heterogeneity also tied down the hands of what the regime could and could not do. It became “impossible to synthesise the conflicting expectations of this ‘losers’ alliance’ into a coherent government programme” (Morais and Saad-Filho 2003: 21). This heterogeneity in its vote base was also reflected in its broadening alliance strategies. Despite its massive electoral victory, the PT lacked sufficient strength in the Congress to run a stable government. “Although the PT won the largest share of seats in

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the Chamber of Deputies, the Left was still far outnumbered by CenterRight parties in the National Congress. Even the broadest of definitions of ‘progressive parties’ would not account for one-third of the deputies, and the numbers were even worse in the Senate” (French and Fortes 2005: 28). The mixed nature of the electoral mandate was interpreted by many within the PT as an indication of the complex political terrain within which they were working. It appeared as if the masses had given the party a strong mandate but it was a mandate that could not as yet be considered a decisive ratification of its economic and political program (French and Fortes 2005, 2012). The results indicated that while Cardoso had indeed lost support, the Brazilian voters remained ambiguous when it came to core neoliberal policies. In a society where consumerism was rife, trade liberalization and the attendant availability of foreign imports were viewed positively by a large section of soceity (Hunter 2007). Moreover, the experiences of hyperinflation and destabilization of previous decades still weighed heavily on voters’ minds and while they expressed a desire for change theirs was not as yet a desire for a rupture from the neoliberalism tout court (Wylde 2012). Therefore, it became clear to many within the PT that while it had crossed what had seemed like an insurmountable barrier by winning the presidential polls, going forward, Lula “would have to prove that he would maintain, even rescue, such economic stability while seeking to mitigate its social costs and creating conditions for a new development project” (French and Fortes 2005: 23). The fixation on governability must also be seen in the context of the symbolism and cultural significance of Lula’s victory. This was the first time in Brazilian history that a person from the working class, with “less formal education than any previous president of Brazil, and…possibly…the least Caucasian President since Nilo Pecanha (1909-10)” had ascended to the highest political office in the country (Love 2009: 305). In a country where historically, race and literacy have been crucial markers of social status, his background often invited ridicule from the political elite, who scoffed at his lack of education and what was widely perceived as a lack of polish (French 2010). The ability to govern the country was therefore doubly important for the left given Lula’s subaltern status. As he emphasized repeatedly, “Any other president could fail but I can’t” (cited in French and Fortes 2005: 22). It was in this context that the PT strategists were compelled to water down their economic program and mollify domestic capital as well as foreign investors who were exiting the economy at the prospect of a PT

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led government. It was also in this context that they were forced to secure new alliance partners to shore up their government’s survival. Prior to the 1998 elections the PT had followed a “very restrictive alliance policy, joining exclusively with parties on the left” (Hunter 2007: 451). In the run-up to the 2002 elections, however, the PT considerably loosened this this alliance policy and as Lula won the presidential post it appeared that the alliance net would have to be cast even wider. We may also add here that the Brazilian political landscape as it developed over the 1990s had created a highly uneven party system consisting of two large parties— the PT and PSDB—within a sea of smaller, regional ones. These smaller “patronage parties” lacked clear ideologies and identities of their own and were often no more than reward-seeking machines on the lookout for the highest bidders (Boito and Saad-Filho 2016; Bruera 2013). It was precisely towards these parties that the PT turned to in order to secure its government. And secure it did, but at the cost of having to constrain its political ambitions. The first years of the PT administration were filled with disappointments. Not only did the PT renege on its radical economic commitments to landless peasants but its leadership frustrated any and all attempts at reshaping state–civil society linkages. A party that had championed the cause of participatory democracy not too long ago, did little to scale these programs up to the national level, once in power. What few channels it did open up, had little power to directly influence policy matters. The Conselho de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (CDES) formed in 2003 for example was formed with an aim of bringing greater dialogue between the PT and civil society. The CDES invited members of labour unions, NGOs, social movements and representatives of businesses to give inputs into policy making but it was from the very beginning dominated by business representatives. What was worse was that the manner in which the body was conceived of, made it toothless in that it only had consultative powers and had no power to formulate actual policies (Doctor 2007; Galvão 2014). It is worth emphasizing that the PT went to great lengths to incorporate its social allies into the government by setting aside key positions in the bureaucracy and even reserving cabinet positions for members of trade unions and social movements. In contrast with Cardoso’s regime that had completely shut out combative social organizations, the PT from the very beginning provided institutional and non-institutional spaces for negotiation and discussions with its allies (Galvão and Marcelino 2020). But even as it strengthened ties

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with its grassroots base, it did so not to unleash their subversive energies but quite the opposite. It distributed to the leadership of social movements and labour unions, plum positions in the government and allocated vast sums of public money towards their political activities, in return for their allegiance to the government (Bruera 2013). In turn the social movements and labour unions eschewed confrontational mobilization strategies and instead focused on institutional action to forward their demands (Galvão 2014). None of this is to say that the relationship between grassroots movements and the PT was always smooth sailing. There were indeed fundamental points of divergence and thus between 2004 and 2012 Brazil witnessed massive strike activity. But at each stage these mobilizations remained within bounds that the PT had set. “Rather than questioning the development model adopted by the government, the union centrals sought to improve it” (Galvão and Marcelino 2020: 8). All these changes were in line with the preferences of more moderate flank of the PT. Whereas the radical elements within the PT favoured social mobilization as a tool to counter the hold of conservative parties in the legislature, the moderate factions favoured an “elite-centered” strategy of governance which emphasized a politics of bargaining and accommodation with dominant political players (Bruera 2013). What was even more problematic was this focus on non-transparent dealmaking increasingly pushed the party to adopt corrupt tactics to buy support. Starved of corporate donations, the PT officials and municipal leaders “extracted kickbacks from private and public firms seeking municipal contracts … and then diverted these forced contributions to a secret campaign slush fund, the caixa dois” (Hunter 2007: 467). These funds in turn were used to fund its own electoral campaigns and more importantly to purchase support in the Congress on key legislative proposals (Samuels 2008). As the 2006 elections approached all signs seemed to point to PT’s demise. A corruption scheme that the PT leadership had centrally organized and orchestrated blew up in its face a year earlier, tarnishing its image as an ethical and clean party. It also led to the resignations of key PT officials including two presidential advisors and the president of the PT itself. As these revelations came to light Lula’s reputation took a nose dive and several opinion polls indicated him to be losing to his conservative opponents. Added to this the economy, while growing faster than it had in the late 1990s, was still caught in a rut. In the midst of this chaos, the administration rolled out moderate social policies like the Bolsa Familia cash transfer program which despite their meagre allowances

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were very well efficiently targeted reaching the poorest families in the country. Perhaps more significantly, Lula’s government hiked minimum wages by 75% in the second half of his administration. As a result of these interventions the proportion of the population below ‘line of misery’ fell by 5% between 2003 and 2005. “In certain states, misery diminished dramatically” (Hunter and Power 2007: 17). While none of these policies came even close to the bold promises made by PT in the run-up to its first electoral victory in 2002, they represented a major shift in Brazil’s public policy trajectory and provided a well needed boost to Lula’s electoral fortunes. In the 2006 elections the poorest and least educated voters overwhelmingly voted for the PT, pushing Lula over the finish line for yet another term. The voting patterns revealed an important shift in voter preferences. Whereas traditionally the PT had never fared too well in poorest regions of the country, in the 2006 elections a striking majority of voters in the impoverished North East voted for Lula (Hunter and Power 2007). Further in a first of many, “Lula’s vote was a negative linear function of income: the greater the income, the lesser was the likelihood of someone casting a vote for the incumbent” (Bohn 2011: 66). The decisive support from the poorest served to radicalize the government. Far from ending PT’s political ambitions, the 2006 electoral victory came as shot in its arm. More confident of its position, the PT now embarked on a more ambitious plank marked by extensive state intervention, active industrial policy measures and extensive social policies. In terms of macroeconomic performance, the 2006–2012 period witnessed an increase in growth rates. Economic growth had averaged around 2% in the 1990s but this increased to around 4% between 2006 and 2012. Industries in particular picked up steam as their growth increased from an average of 0.26% in the 1990s to around 3% in the 2006–12 period.9 This new found dynamism was partly on account of positive global cues including booming primary commodity demand. But it was also because of the policy changes introduced by the PT (Serrano and Summa 2015). The government maintained orthodox policies of its predecessors, but within these constraints it introduced several key changes that helped prop up the economy. It for example, eased fiscal constraints on the state by modifying the fiscal deficit targets, hiked investments in infrastructure through the “growth acceleration program” and

9 World Bank Database.

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it capitalized the largest state-owned banks with an aim to channelize credit “to employment-rich large firms and SMEs at a moment when private banks were weary of lending” (Ban 2013: 9). The government also pursued activist industrial policies by reorganizing state-owned firms on the one hand and by encouraging private sector firms to become more competitive through policies like the Industrial, Technological, and Foreign Trade Policy which aimed at increasing the competitiveness of Brazilian private sector so as to push the Brazilian economy into higher value added production niches while at the same time generating new employment and income for the work force (Wylde 2012). The steps initiated by Lula, were given an even more aggressive tinge to them by Dilma who, sought “to shift the engine of growth away from a faltering external sector and towards domestic investment and consumption” (Saad-Filho and Boito 2016: 219). Towards this end she let loose fiscal policies, emphasized industrial policy as she moved to strengthen state-owned enterprises, impose import duties on key goods in combination with local content requirement norms. On the external front the government mounted capital controls and sought to fix the overvalued exchange rate regime that the economy had been laden with ever since Cardoso implemented the Real Plan (Saad-Filho and Boito 2016). The most subversive dimension of Dilma’s new economic stance was her government’s attempts to bring down real interest rates which she reduced to historic lows. “By reducing interest rates and forcing down spreads, she broke the détente with rentierism” that had shackled Lula during his two tenures (Singer 2020: 4). Combined, these policy shifts represented the most “systematic intervention of the state in the economy for the first time in almost 40 years” (Singer 2020: 3). Nowhere was the PT’s shift from neoliberalism more obvious than in its social and labour market policies. The earliest and most celebrated social policy of the left was the Bolsa Familia conditional cash transfer program which aimed at providing poor families with monthly cash transfers conditional on them meeting basic requirements such as immunization of infants, adequate school attendance and so on. Originally planned as a part of much more radical policy package aimed at reducing hunger through wide ranging institutional reforms, it was modified and reduced to a simple cash transfer. But even in this weakened reform, it played very important role in reducing poverty and inequality. By 2012 almost a third of the population was a recipient of the conditional cash transfer schemes and while the amounts disbursed were a tiny proportion

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of GDP, they contributed to around 61% of the income of extremely poor households in 2011 (Weisbrot et al. 2014). In addition to policies such as these, the government hiked its spending on social protection programs such as pensions and unemployment insurance. It also enacted affirmative action laws called the “quota law” in 2012 to reserve 50% of publically funded federal university seats for underprivileged students. These social interventions were backed by aggressive increases in minimum wages which rose by 76% between 2003 and 2012 (Weisbrot et al. 2014; Berg 2009, 2011). The minimum wages were annually renewed based on a new adjustment policy which pegged them to inflation and GDP growth rates. The resulting increases had a dramatic effect on the economy and studies have shown that the hikes contributed to lowering wage inequality (Berg 2009). The effects of social policies and relatively robust growth rates was dramatic. In terms of employment generation alone, the PT era generated double the number of jobs that were generated in the 1990s and even more striking was the fact that 80% of these new jobs were in the formal sector (Saad-Filho and Morais 2013). Thus formal job generation outpaced informal employment growth so that at the aggregate level more and more Brazilian workers started entering the formal sector (Berg 2011). As labour conditions improved, poverty rates declined sharply from around 35% of the population in 2003 to around 15% by 2012 (Loureiro and Saad-Filho 2018). The Demise of the PT Experiment Yet, however impressive its achievements were, at the end of the day PT’s developmentalist experiments were built on contradictory class alliances and it was not too long before they started to show cracks. Throughout its tenure the left had tried to balance the interests of domestic capital, the middle classes and its traditional working class-peasant base, but as PT’s reforms grew more and more bold, it created grave tensions within its ranks. Even the modest changes that the government had initiated, irked upper classes who had until then enjoyed unparalleled social privileges and while PT’s economic program was anything but anti-capitalist, its tendency to meddle with fiscal deficits, ensure high levels of employment and keep wages buoyant threatened the discipline and hierarchical norms that underlay the stratified Brazilian society (Evans 2018; Webber 2020). “However well the macro-economy performed, the government’s social interventions ate away at the privileges enjoyed by the country’s

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elite. In educational institutions and in the bureaucracy, affirmative action programmes opened up spaces that were once preserved for a select few. Even the composition of the state changed as it increasingly drew on trade unionists and members of social movements thus further diluting the privileged position enjoyed by the rich” (Sirohi 2019: 166). Thus by 2014 as Dilma began her second term in office domestic capital which had reaped rich rewards under the left started to distance itself from the government, even as prominent industrial voices publicly decried the left’s “‘excessive’ state intervention and ‘lack of access’” to the regime (Loureiro and Saad-Filho 2018: 11; Braga and Purdy 2019; Singer 2020). Faced with increasing opposition to its reforms and with dark clouds hovering over the economy, PT was forced to shift gears. But rather than dig in its heels and push ahead with its reforms it chose a political line of pragmatism with the hopes that it could woo upper classes as it had always done and buy enough time for itself (Saad-Filho and Boito 2016). Thus, in 2013 when left-wing protesters took to the streets to demand a withdrawal of the transportation fare hikes in Sao Paulo, rather than embrace these demands and make use of them to push ahead its reforms, the PT and instead decried the protests and struck them down with heavy-handed tactics. In concert with renouncing the extra-parliamentary arena, it worked hard through back channels to shore up its support in the legislature through the usual combination of pork-barrel politics and corruption. Opaque political dealmaking replaced street demonstrations. This had worked in 2002 and once again in 2006 when PT had its back against the wall, but the situation now was a very different one. PT’s strategy of accommodation and all its clever management had worked well as long as commodity markets were booming internationally, but with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the subsequent slowdown of major export markets, the Brazilian economy was suddenly robbed of its external props. Domestically, until then national income had grown at healthy rates but private investment had failed to keep up pace. The gap had been temporarily filled by the state which as we noted above used its levers to prop up the economy by increasing public investments and by raising employment and income levels of millions of Brazilians (Loureiro and Saad-Filho 2018). This arrangement was aided by lowering of interest rate which increased the availability of cheap credit. But none of these conditions could be expected to hold out indefinitely given that the left had not engaged in a fundamental restructuring of the economy. Thus, as international cues weakened, gradually so did the economy’s

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engines. With the screws tightening, the newly elected Dilma government in 2014, having already renounced extra-parliamentary mobilizations, instead sought to buy itself some support from the country’s elites by announcing major spending cuts, freezes on minimum wages even as it drove to shore up its primary surpluses hoping that this would ease the nerves in the markets.10 These cuts were to be aided a variety of tax breaks and subsidies to the private sector (Serrano and Summa 2015; Loureiro and Saad-Filho 2018). But as it turned out none of these policy shifts worked to spur on the economy, as investment rates fell further and growth rates turned anaemic. As the economy slid into a recession and as the PT grew increasingly distant from its working class base, the transnational capitalist oligarchy which had always opposed the PT and its experiments saw an opportune moment to take on the government. In the legislature, the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democratic Party) which represents the transnational sections of the Brazilian bourgeoisie launched its attack, even as leading representatives of domestic capital openly called for Dilma’s impeachment (Boito and Saad-Filho 2016; Singer 2020; Webber 2020). When a sordid corruption scandal involving members of the PT government came to light, PT was put on the defensive. All this culminated in the 2015 impeachment charges against the President. The opposition charged her for violating fiscal responsibility clause that is considered a crucial pillar of neoliberalism and by the middle of 2016, in an unexpected turn of events Dilma Rousseff was ousted from her presidency bringing down the curtains on a decade and a half of PT’s rule. Its place was taken by an interim government led by Michel Temer which aggressively pursued the pro-corporate agenda that domestic and foreign capital had for very long been demanding (Sirohi 2019). The utter loss of political credibility of Temer and other mainstream parties combined with PT’s declining hegemony opened way for the electoral victory of Jair Bolsonaro in 2019, a far right candidate who had for most of his career remained on the fringes of Brazilian politics (Webber 2020). Now, there are a number of ways in which one can evaluate the failures of the PT. That its demise was directly related to its moderate economic stance, its reluctance to challenge neoliberalism in any substantial manner and its recurrent tendency to tread the path of least resistance on all policy matters, can barely be disputed. Yet any such evaluation also requires that

10 This has been developed in detail in Sirohi (2019).

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the PT’s experience be contextualized in the concrete conditions within which it found itself in. And therefore a balanced record of left rule in the region must emphasize and carefully weigh the dilemmas that the left here had to face (Fortes 2009). One has to remember, for instance, that the PT came into power not in an political and economic vacuum but in a situation where macro policies and political institutions were deeply shaped by what its predecessors had done. Its policy moderation has to be understood in this context because it was a response to the deep rooted inertia of existing institutions. The choices that it had in front of it when it came to choosing political alliances or maintaining legislative governability are further indications of the complexities of its political terrain and in this context here the usual binaries of reform-revolution do not adequately capture the dilemmas that the Brazil left was facing. For example, PT obviously had the option of not even considering forming a government under the unfavourable conditions that it faced in the first place in 2003. Many on the left have argued that taking part in electoral politics inevitably leads to left parties being absorbed into the institutionality of neoliberalism and in their becoming reformist (Petras 2005; Petras and Veltmeyer 2009, 2011). From this perspective, instead of forming a government in 2002 or at any time after that, PT could have remained a loyal opposition and could have continued the highly selective alliance strategies that it had adopted during its formative years. Had this been done however it is not entirely obvious if the Brazilian left would have been any better off. Here a comparison with the strategies adopted by the Indian left is instructive. Though the pink tide is used to describe the leftist resurgence in Latin America, India very well may have beaten Latin America to the punch on this front had the Communist Party of India-Marxist, CPI(M), accepted the offer for its stalwart leader, Jyoti Basu, to head a coalition government supported by regional parties and the Congress in 1996. In what has been described as a “historical blunder” by Jyoti Basu, the offer was rejected by the organization on ideological and political grounds. The understanding was that being a minority member of a coalition may make it impossible for the left to make pro-poor interventions. Ideologically, the idea of having to ally with bourgeois parties was also unacceptable to many within the left. And so it was that a historic opportunity of a communist leading the most populous democracy in the world was lost, that too precisely at a time when the Indian electorate was searching for political alternatives to the Congress. What followed as we know was a slow but

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steady drift towards the right in Indian politics culminating in the 2014 electoral victory of an outright Fascist regime. The Indian left today has become a shadow of its earlier self and while there are several factors underlying its current state-including and perhaps primarily its inability to take up radical extra-parliamentary mobilizations on a national scale—the decisions made during the critical juncture of 1996 have undoubtedly also weighed heavily. All this is not to suggest that the left in India would have been better off had it become more “moderate” or more “reformist”. The point is that while forming broad alliances and participating in the institutionality of neoliberalism runs the risk of becoming trapped in its logic, the alternative of remaining in the opposition and waiting for favourable conditions to emerge may be worse. In order to gain hegemony, the left must prove to the public that it is ready and capable of governing the country in less than ideal circumstances, where coalitional pressures matter, where the dominance of financial interests is deep rooted and where right-wing forces and elite mobilizations are likely to derail social stability. Had Lula in Brazil or for that matter Chávez in Venezuela opted out of governing their countries because the objective conditions were not ideal, it is not entirely clear if the left movement in their respective countries would have been any better off. For all the flaws, PT’s era in Brazil was important because it opened up radical possibilities that would simply have been unavailable had the left not taken up the mantle of governance at all. But if rejecting the institutional arena with all its risks does not necessarily serve the left, neither does a strategy that fetishizes it. As Lenin had reminded us long ago, it was possible and necessary for the left to fashion a revolutionary kind of parliamentarianism that combined parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggles. It is precisely here that the PT’s strategy faltered. The focus on the moderation of PT’s policies which have been commented upon extensively and have been the focus of stinging leftist critiques, misses the central point that PT’s failure lay not so much in its reformist program as much as it stemmed from the fact that it turned its back on reforms when things started to get rough. This in turn was a result of PT’s strategy of snubbing the extra-parliamentary arena. Even as it successfully charted the stormy waters of Brazilian politics and pushed the country in a more progressive direction, its entire project became inexorably tied to maintaining legislative majorities alone. As time went on it weakened its ties to social movements, dampened the demands of trade unions that it brought into its fold, purchased the

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loyalty of autonomous subaltern actors and during its decade and a half long tenure, it did nothing to alter the structure of the state nor did it make any attempt to develop parallel organs of direct democracy. This was of course a far cry from the PT that in its early days championed the cause of decentralization and participatory democracy. Its fetishism of the parliament took such extreme proportions that even as it faced its most uphill battle in 2015–16 it shied away from activating its grassroots allies and instead of hitting the streets, it backtracked, tried to buy time by bartering deals and negotiating behind the curtains with the powers that be. None of this ultimately worked. Having ignored the extra-parliamentary arena and having divorced itself from its grassroots allies the PT found itself completely isolated. A party that had won four consecutive presidential terms was ousted in a matter of months. Viewing its experiences from a Leninist lens one can see how its eventual demise was linked to its slow but steady infatuation with state power and its prioritization of institutional action over the streets. It was not just the fact that the PT relaxed its alliance strategies to sustain its legislative majorities nor simply that it moderated its economic program to the altar of governability, but the fact that it came to view governability as its end all goal, and that it came to view the state, not as an institution that had to be smashed, but as the final frontier of its political strategy. The fetishism of the institutional arena became so blinding that even as it faced an existential threat in 2015–16, it refrained from igniting its extra-parliamentary force in the mistaken hope that institutional action alone could help it turn the tides. The contrasting cases of Brazil and Venezuela here come out in stark relief. The Venezuelan left is teetering on the brink and faces tough odds. But the fact remains that it has been able to survive even as the left in Brazil has completely crumbled. The secret to the perseverance of the left in Venezuela lies in the ties that bind it to its grassroots base and in its emphasis on organizing alternative organs of popular participation. And while these ties may have become tense over time and the organs of deliberative democracy may not have achieved the kind of success that they were meant to, the left in Venezuela has continued to be deeply rooted with its mass base. What is important to note here is the “initial points” of both regimes were strikingly similar in that both Chávez and Lula began with very moderate economic platforms. Apart from attacking neoliberalism there was very little that was subversive in Chávez’s electoral platform when he first got into power. Yet as his government faced an increasingly obdurate opposition from the elites, he

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turned more and more radical in his stance. The fact that this was made possible was because of the programmatic linkages tying the masses to Chávez’s regime. That Venezuela was able to move from a moderate to a more radical stance when it faced an existential threat while Brazil opted for pragmatism even when it should have gone on the offensive thus can’t be blamed only on the moderating pull of electoral politics. The differing outcomes between the two lefts to a large degree stem from the fact that whereas Chávez was able to build programmatic connections with grass root movements and was able to prepare alternative channels of participatory democracy, Lula and Dilma’s PT shied away from unleashing its social allies and actively diluted participatory decision-making. As a consequence, whereas the popular sectors protected Chavez from opposition assaults during the 2002 Coup and pressurized his government to move from reform to revolution, PT lost touch with its base and found that it lacked the leverage needed to shift gears when it mattered. Thus when Dilma Rousseff was impeached—on completely flimsy grounds, one might add—not only had her allies in the legislature abandoned her party, but the distance that the PT created with its social allies meant that none of them came to her rescue either (Galvão and Marcelino 2020). The point is, that the fact that PT did not radicalize its course in face of an existential threat in 2015–16 may not have been a pre-given fact stemming from highly moderate economic stance early on or even because it began with a broad coalition of parties which no doubt must have diluted some of its radicalism. Looking at Brazil from a Venezuelan lens reveals that the failure of the Brazilian left should be understood as a result of its active policy of discarding the same popular power on whose coattails it rode to power.

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CHAPTER 4

Rearming the Left

The previous chapters have outlined the record of left governments in Brazil and Venezuela and have pointed to the challenges that they have faced since they first came to power in the early 2000s. In both countries the rise of the left has to be seen in the context of a long cycle of popular struggles that began in the early twentieth century. But the immediate spark that lit the path for the pink tide was the transition to neoliberalism that was initiated in the 1980s. In Brazil as we have noted, the transition towards neoliberalism occurred hand in hand with the demise of the military regime that had been in power since the early 1960s (Cook 2002). The interlacing of the neoliberal and democratic transitions meant that neoliberal reforms for their very inception took a very different form than they did in Venezuela. More precisely, in a newly minted democracy where social and labour movements were extremely well organized, neoliberal economic adjustments contained in them a heterodox touch which was visible in the deployment of structuralist recipes to tackle in inflation in the 1980s. By the early 1990s even as Cardoso’s Real Plan dropped these pretensions and wholeheartedly integrated the Brazilian economy deeper into the web of global markets, by steadying the economy and by bringing inflation under control it did reverse the erosion of purchasing power that had begun after the hyperinflationary episode which began in 1982. As a result of this, neoliberal reforms while wide ranging were nonetheless calibrated and thus retained a certain amount of legitimacy within society. That was until of course even these minimal benefits started to peter out © The Author(s) 2021 R. A. Sirohi and S. Bhupatiraju, Reassessing the Pink Tide, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8674-3_4

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by the end of the 1990s. But the point is that when the PT came into power it was in a situation where neoliberal policies retained a great deal of legitimacy in the eyes of people and where as a result, the political system did not really experience the kind of disarray and break down that occurred in Venezuela. In contrast, in Venezuela the left arose in a context where neoliberal reforms had from the beginning relied on coercion rather than hegemony. From the Caracazo riots to the coups in the early 1990s the political scene in Venezuela was marked by a complete disintegration of traditional channels of political bargaining and a general decline of confidence in traditional parties and political institutions. This was the background in which a complete political outsider in the form of Hugo Chávez roared to power in 1998. When he came to the helm of political affairs, not only were his political opponents disarray but the country’s access to vast oil reserves of which there was no equivalent in Brazil’s case, gave the governing left immense degrees of freedom in implementing its program. But that was about all Chávez had going for him. Paradoxically the very strength of Chávez’s position and the weakness of his opponents invited their unbridled wrath. Where PT was able to form alliances and barter for support with established political players, Chávez had few such channels open even if he had wanted to utilize them. Thus it became incumbent upon the left to either give in or doggedly pursue the reforms that their program had promised to the Venezuelan people. That the Venezuelan left chose the latter path was not merely because of the whip of counterrevolution but most crucially it stemmed from the popular support that the government had come to enjoy. Every instance that the opposition attacked it, popular mobilizations provided the left crucial leverage against their opponents and their support in turn pushed the left to become more radicalized at each step of its confrontations. This deep-rooted relation between the left and its support base explains both the subversive quality of the Venezuelan regime and its resilience in the face of extreme odds. It is precisely this feature that also explains the differing fortunes of the two lefts. Whereas Chavismo never forgot that the roots of its power lay in the streets, the PT prioritized institutional action and by the end of its tenure it had become so consumed by the parliamentary arena that it weakened its links to the grassroots and lost all its political leverage. The demise of the left government in Brazil and the chaos that has hit Venezuela have been the focal points of recent debates within the left with many suggesting that the root cause of the failures of the pink tide

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regimes lie in the reformist stances that they adopted during their decade and a half long tenures. This book in contrast has tried to show that the contemporary tendency to evaluate the left in terms of the binaries of reform and revolution does little justice to the complex evolution of the left in the region. The left in Brazil and Venezuela may not have affected major structural changes in their respective constituencies but even the most seemingly modest efforts had a subversive quality to them as detailed in Chapters 2 and 3. The questions that have been raised by their experiences therefore cannot be framed in a comparative static comparison between the world as it stands today and the future that the left would like to build. Rather the central question that the left must pose to itself is how to bridge the gap between everyday struggle and the final aim in the context an increasingly brutal form of global capitalism. It is in this context that this chapter attempts to collate the experiences of Brazil and Venezuela in a Leninist framework to chart out possible pathways for the left in the twenty-first century. And as we have seen in the previous chapters, one of the biggest challenges that the left has had to confront has been the task of implementing a radical project within the confines of a globalized world economy. Therefore, to begin the investigation that this chapter seeks to undertake, there is no place better to start than with Lenin’s writings on imperialism. Now the term, imperialism, does not appear in standard undergraduate macroeconomic textbooks and this should not be surprising because mainstream economics’ defence of capitalism relies on the identification of capitalism with free and competitive markets.1 For political economists like Adam Smith, market competition was the invisible hand that reconciled self-interest with larger social interests of the community taken as a whole. The very fact of competition prevented any single group from amassing too much power in the economy; it bound self-seeking behaviour within acceptable limits, turning something that was seen as a vice by many into a force of progress. It ensured for example, that no individual firm could charge exorbitant prices for their products without being undercut by others, it ensured that capitalists were constantly innovating in order to stay ahead of the herd, and above all it made sure that capitalist societies always strove to break down what was old and decaying and build in its place only that which could assist its forward motion

1 See Baran and Sweezy (1966), Foster (2009).

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(Schumpeter 1942). On the international level, it was the magic of competition that pushed capitalists to seek out new investment opportunities in the remotest corners of the world and in the process break down national barriers, transfer technical knowhow, infuse new regions with finance and more broadly diffuse development to all those parts of the world which lay outside its bounds. Just as “[n]ature abhors a vacuum” states Richard Baldwin (2019), “economies abhor imbalances”. Capitalism in other words is forced by its competitive nature to break down price differences, exploit institutional divergences and this horror vacui can only have one end result—complete and thorough convergence. The recent phase of globalization which has witnessed a tremendous expansion of international trade and an explosion of global financial flows, has once again resuscitated the belief in the universalizing power of competitive capitalism. Just to get a sense of what this globalization has meant we may note that global trade to GDP ratio which stood at around 39% in 1980, reached around 60% by 2018.2 FDI inflows which stood at around 54 billion USD in 1980, peaked at 1.8 trillion USD by 2007 and settled at 1.3 trillion USD in 2018. Further, from approximately 7000 MNEs in 1970, in 2008 the total number of MNEs functioning across the world stood at a staggering 38,000 (OECD 2018). Thus international investment stocks which averaged 22% of global GDP on the eve of the First World War, had by 2001 reached 75% of the global GDP (Schularick 2006). While these numbers do not adequately measure the kind of qualitative shift that has been occurring, it does give us a sense of the enormity of economic integration that the world has been undergoing. In the midst of all these changes what has truly captured global imagination is the economic “rise” of developing countries, China being the foremost example in people’s imagination (Wolf 2011; Zakaria 2008). The popular consensus seems to be that globalization has opened up new opportunities for the developing world to “catch-up” with the West and indeed the fact that the developing bloc has attracted much larger quantities of global financial flows than it had in the past and that it has cornered for itself a larger and larger proportion of global manufacturing exports, has only added to this perception (Lin and Monga 2017). Not surprisingly the shift towards this new phase of globalization has also produced an equally consequential intellectual transition. Whereas

2 World Bank Database.

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global inequalities and core–periphery dynamics had been at the centre of much of academic thinking and, to some extent even policymaking in developing countries during the post-War years, by the 1990s the entire vocabulary of imperialism had vanished from official and academic parlance, prompting Prabhat Patnaik (1990) to wonder how it was that the world had forgotten about imperialism precisely at a time when it appeared so strong. James Petras (1990: 108) underlined the same deafening silence in the context of Latin America when he pointed out how, just when Western economies were “engaged in a massive and sustained extraction of economic surplus” from the region, there was “not a single externally funded research centre in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia or Uruguay elaborating and deepening our understanding of the theory and practice of imperialist exploitation”. This silence he argued could be traced back to the growing importance of research organizations and think tanks funded by European and American agencies. Having acquired a considerable foothold within the academia especially in the context of widespread expulsions, purges and exiles of intellectuals undertaken by authoritarian regimes, these outlets helped generate a depoliticized stream of thinking within social sciences that completely obscured the issue of imperialism. His explanation while illuminating can only be a partial one because even in the West where such pressures rarely existed, academic thinking has not been immune to this trend. Brenner (1977) for example was one of the first to launch salvos against what he called “third-worldist ideology” which he argued downplayed the extent to which “any significant national development of the productive forces depends today upon a close connection with the international division of labour (although such economic advance is not, of course, determined by such a connection)” (Brenner 1977: 92). This was followed by Warren’s (1980) infamous contention that imperialism far from retarding the developing world was a “pioneer of capitalism”. And more recently, this theme has formed the basic premise underlying Harvey’s (2003, 2006) writings on “new imperialism” as well. It is in this context that this chapter seeks to relook at Lenin’s analysis of imperialism. Like many others before him, Lenin drew heavily on Marx’s writings to analyse imperialism. Now the problem that each of these theorists faced was that Marx never had a fully developed theory of imperialism himself. Remaining well within the bounds of classical political economy on this one matter, Marx took capitalism to be a closed system, one in which colonialism was conceptualized as belonging to

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a particular phase of capitalist development. The implication being that imperialism was not seen as a permanent feature of capitalist development; it was just a transient phase that belonged to the prehistory of capitalist development (Glassman 2006; Patnaik 2006). Such a perspective however fell desperately short of the concrete realities of the early twentieth century when a mad scramble for colonies began to generate grave military tensions amongst the European powers. It was therefore left to the twentieth-century revolutionaries to update Marxism and use Marx’s theoretical schema to explain capitalist activities on a global scale. But herein lay another difficulty. Buried within Marx’s writings were two very different conceptualizations of capitalist development. There was on the one hand Marx’s classic statement in Volume III of Capital in which he envisioned capitalism as a fiercely competitive system in which capital moved from sector to sector in its relentless pursuit of profits, invariably setting off economy-wide equalization of profit rates. The counterpart to this conceptualization was the image of a revolutionary capitalism that spread its wings evenly across the globe creating “a world after its own image” (Marx and Engels 1848). As opposed to this in Volume I of Capital, there was a very different kind of accumulation process that Marx described, one where larger units of capitals expropriated smaller ones leading to ever-increasing imbalances in the economy, an incessant tendency towards monopolization and a general erosion of competition.3 Associated with this imaginary, was a capitalism that on the international scale created “a new and international division of labor” which “converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field” (Marx 1990: 579–580). Lenin along with a whole cohort of revolutionary thinkers took this version of Marx’s conception of capitalism as their starting point and where others saw linearity, convergence and equalization, Lenin because of his emphasis on monopoly power saw decay, unevenness and persistent divergences. By drawing attention to these uneven tendencies on a world scale what Lenin was able to do, and what gives his analysis its everlasting relevance, was that he blasted through the myth of capitalist diffusionism that had been so central to the theories of imperialism that other socialists were forwarding in his times, i.e. the myth that imperialism was the pioneer of capitalist development

3 On the issue of competition see the discussion in Lebowitz (2009) and Foster (2009).

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in the peripheries (Blaut 1997). Thus even though Lenin did not develop a full-fledged theory of the kinds that Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin or Rudolph Hilferding had devised before him, what makes Lenin’s analysis so powerful is his attempt to bring the question of monopoly capital and by extension the issues of core–periphery divergences to the centre of Marxist thought. Moreover, by indicating the impossibility of “catch up” within the framework of capitalism, his analysis placed revolution on the agenda of the peripheries and thus well before nationalist movements would break out in Asia and Africa and well before the Cuban revolution would ignite Latin America, it was Lenin who recognized the revolutionary agency of oppressed classes in the colonial world. He “was the first major political theorist, Marxist or non-Marxist, to grasp the importance that anti-imperialist national movements would have for global politics in the twentieth century” (Anderson 2007: 128). This is precisely why the denial of imperialism is so problematic. The traditional versions of Third Worldism, as they were deprecatingly called, were deeply inspired by the Leninist concept of imperialism as a monopolistic, decaying and inherently moribund system. Flowing from this, was the central claim of the Third Worldists that capitalism was “both revolutionary and yet not quite revolutionary enough” (Patnaik 2006: 39). It was revolutionary to the extent that it broke “down the insulation of existing pre-capitalist societies” and to the extent that it pulled “them into the vortex of its own accumulation process but”, and here was the catch, it did so “not necessarily by creating within them, in a dominant form, the structures of the bourgeois mode of production itself” (Patnaik 2006: 39). Thus while the peripheries were “transformed by, and hegemonized by, metropolitan capitalism, but they themselves never get transformed into bourgeois societies” (Patnaik 2006: 39). “Catchup” or “convergence” of the South to the North therefore was simply inconceivable within the bounds of capitalism and thus the only salvation for the developing world was to be found in the transition towards socialism directly (Fuentes-Ramírez 2017). Not surprisingly throughout the twentieth-century major socialist revolutions broke out in peripheries, not in the advanced core of Europe; and here nationalism and socialism were so deeply intertwined that it was very difficult to separate one from the other. To deny imperialism in the name of some abstract cosmopolitanism, therefore, is to negate the “actuality of revolution” as far as the peripheries are concerned. It is akin to putting socialism on the back burner;

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“Marxism on credit” as Lenin (1915b: 107) would have put it. Indeed, it is not difficult to see the terrible implications of such a path. In India for instance, the left government in the state of West Bengal, inspired by the Chinese example, chose to embrace private capital and multinationals with the hopes that a pragmatic response to globalization would help initiate industrialization in this relatively poor part of the country. In reality of course, far from initiating any major structural change, this stance put the left in direct confrontation with the peasantry- from whom they tried to “acquire” land for industrial projects- and eventually led to its complete evisceration in the region. In Latin America too as we have seen, despite several key changes initiated by leftist governments, by and large the pink tide was unable to articulate a left strategy to deal with globalization and this as we have seen made the left experiments extremely vulnerable to fluctuating global cues. What is surprising here is even those voices on the left that have been accused of being too statist, have held a very ambiguous stance towards globalization. It is in this spirit that the section below seeks to uncover the radical implications of Leninist approach to imperialism. The next section focusses on the enormously influential pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (ITHSC ) and sets to map out its implications as brought out in the works of Marxists like Samir Amin and others.

Lenin’s Analysis of Imperialism Theoretically, the European socialist movement in the twentieth century from its very initiation was premised on Marx and Engel’s dictum that the proletariat had no fatherland and that the common experiences of bondage and exploitation far outweighed any differences that could have arisen based on national grounds. The short-lived First International formed in 1864 and its successor, the Second International, which was formed in 1889 gave voice to this internationalist sentiment. While always weakly defined, by 1907, socialist internationalism came to mean, at the very least, all-out opposition to inter-imperialist war should one ever break out. As the Resolution of Stuttgart Congress of the Second International held in 1907 put it: If an outbreak of war appears imminent, the workers and their parliamentary representatives in the countries concerned must do everything in their power to prevent war breaking out, using suitable measures which will

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differ and increase according to the intensifying of the class struggle and the general political situation. If war should still break out, they must take all steps to bring it to a speedy conclusion and make every possible effort to exploit the economic and political crisis brought about by the war to rouse the people and thereby accelerate the downfall of the rule of the capitalist class. (Cited in Harding 1983: 16)

On August 4, 1914 all this changed, as one social democratic party after the other voted for war credits in their respective parliaments, announcing once and for all the arrival of the First World War.4 The German SPD’s fall from being the model socialist party to a defender of the fatherland perhaps summarized the entire situation very well. From this point on, the socialist movement was split into three camps. To the right lay the position of defencism “positing a distinction between aggressive and defensive wars and invoking the need to defend the national sanctuary against unprovoked assault” (Nation 2009: 22). At the centre lay a group of socialists who demanded an end to the war and called for Europe wide peace, but who refused to break away from the right under any circumstances in the name of preserving left unity. The most important member of this camp was Kautsky who argued that the imperialist war that had broken out was a result of a particular policy being followed by European nations, and not some inevitable outgrowth of capitalism. This then meant that capitalists could be pressured into adopting peaceful means and indeed Kautsky argued that rather than protracted instability and conflict, “the result of the World War between the great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race” (Kautsky 1914). Finally, on the left were a small group of radicals including figures like Luxemburg and Lenin who called for working classes to convert the World War into a civil war against “their own” bourgeoisies. With a cohesive and relatively unified Bolshevik party behind him, Lenin was particularly well positioned as its leader to take on the mantle of the left Zimmerwaldists (Nation 2009). From 1914 onwards, Lenin leading the charge for the left trained his guns on centrists and defencists. For Lenin the latter had clearly betrayed the socialist movement and this was evident for all to see, but the centrists he felt were more dangerous because they continued to preach the gospel 4 There were a few exceptions. The Bolsheviks and the Serbian Social Democratic Party were two such cases.

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of Marxism while doing everything in their power to thwart social revolution. Lenin was convinced that the imperialist wars had opened up a unique opportunity for the socialist movement to make good on its cherished goal of destroying capitalism. But rather than recognizing this actuality, a large section of the social democratic leadership had essentially turned their backs on the ultimate goal. They did this in the name of objective conditions and in the name of Marxism, but for Lenin theirs was not an authentic, revolutionary Marxism. It was a “Marxism on credit, Marxism in promises, Marxism tomorrow, a petty-bourgeois, opportunist theory-and not only a theory-of blunting contradictions today” (Lenin 1915b: 107). In ITHSC, Lenin sought to provide a “popular outline” to the issue of imperialism. Although it derived heavily from previous works of Hilferding and Bukharin and although much of what he had to say about imperialism and the war had become common parlance within the socialist movement, ITHSC acquired an iconic status because it was able to convert this socialist common sense into a powerful political statement and a guide to praxis. In this regard, there were three central concerns that this pamphlet intended to address.5 First, ever since Eduard Bernstein’s reformist challenge, socialists had been divided on whether capitalism was reaching its limits and whether a systemic collapse of the system was in the offing. Lenin’s case against reformists in ITHSC was that the War, which was itself an outgrowth of capitalist contradictions, marked the “highest stage” of capitalism because it posed to the workers the choice of getting butchered on the front or turning their bayonets on their own bourgeoisies. Capitalism was nearing its end not because of some inevitable economic demise in the offing but because it presented workers with a choice between socialism or barbarism. Lenin “spoke about the ‘overthrow’ of capitalism rather than its disintegration, thus emphasizing, the active conscious element in the process” (Krausz 2015: 144). Workers, he was convinced, would listen to their instincts and take the path of socialism and thus the War was the eve of socialism. But here was the catch. That the working class had not done so already was because of the betrayal of the Second International leadership. The question of why social chauvinism had become so ingrained in European

5 I draw here on Patnaik (2000).

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worker’s movement was the second burning issue that ITHSC sought to uncover. Lenin had, in previous writings identified social chauvinism with the growth of petty-bourgeois influences in the movement during the relatively peaceful development of capitalism since the late nineteenth century (Patnaik 2000; Lenin 1915a). In ITHSC Lenin’s answer was a different one.6 He argued that the super profits generated by capitalist monopolies through their operations in colonies, allowed capitalists to bribe a thin upper stratum of the working class. This labour “aristocracy”, made possible by the measly crumbs thrown at the working-class leadership, was responsible for blunting class conflict and diverting the disgruntlement of the European workers towards chauvinist ends. That this bribing was intimately related to the monopolistic position held by advanced capitalist nations with respect to their colonies, was the third and most consequential question that Lenin’s pamphlet sought to take up. While Rosa Luxemburg before him had developed a theoretically dense analysis of the interrelationship between capitalist centres and non-capitalist peripheries, her hostile stance on the question national self-determination meant that her analysis lacked the political appeal that Lenin provided in ITHSC (see the discussion below). Lenin “not only placed the question of revolution in the East as much on the agenda as the revolution in the imperialist countries, but, what is more, he made the revolution in the East as much a business of the Communist International as that in the imperialist countries. It is in this respect that he broke completely new ground” (Patnaik 2000: 6–7). Central to Lenin’s argument in ITHSC was the idea that the centralization of capital had gone on to such extreme extents in advance European economies that capitalism there had lost the progressive competitive character it had in the early nineteenth century. It had come to be dominated by monopolies, so much so that such concentration had become “a general and fundamental law of the present stage of development of capitalism” (Lenin 1916b: 200). This concentration he argued existed not just in industries but also in the banking sector. In fact, the massive accumulation of monopoly power that European economies were witnessing was made possible because the financial sector had managed to fuse with industrial capital and together, this “finance capital” had come to acquire control over entire sectors, industries and indeed entire economies. Now

6 Here Bukharin’s (2010) thesis may have been influential in shaping Lenin’s analysis.

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Lenin was clear that the transition towards the monopoly stage did not mean that capitalism was no longer competitive—as many critics of Lenin seem to suggest—but rather Lenin argued that in the new stage of capitalism, competition itself had taken a very different form. Unlike in its earlier phases, competition now involved all manner of sabotage. From the cutting off of supplies of raw materials to competitors, to downright swindling and manipulation on the stock markets monopolies sought to do everything in their power to safeguard their profits. Externally it encouraged armed conflict between nations vying for economic supremacy and seeking their share of colonial regions. Thus he noted that “the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system…If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism” (Lenin 1916b: 266). The shift from one kind of competition to another had consequential implications for how socialists had to formulate their political strategy. Capitalism may have been a progressive force in its initial phases as it fought absolutism and feudalism, but the monopoly phase announced that capitalism had become reactionary (Harding 1983). The dominance of monopolies and the rise of pecuniary motives translated into the predominance of rentiers in the economy who lived off “clipping coupons” rather than any tangible production (Lenin 1916b: 277). Furthermore, monopolies killed all incentives to innovate and in fact pushed capitalists into “deliberately retarding technical progress” (Lenin 1916b: 276). Monopolies also exacted a cost from non-monopolized sectors as they heightened “the anarchy inherent in capitalist production as a whole” and more particularly increased the “disparity between the development of agriculture and that of industry” (Lenin 1916b: 208). What was more was that capitalism could not be counted as a progressive force globally either. This brings us to an important aspect of ITHSC. The focus on monopoly as a defining aspect of capitalism meant that unlike Luxemburg (2003) who visualized capitalism spreading over the

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entire world bringing pre-capitalist societies into its fold, Lenin’s analysis was far more cautious about the prospects of capitalist diffusion.7 Although recent evaluations of Lenin have downplayed this theme in ITHSC and have brushed it aside as being contradictory to many of his other statements,8 it is worth noting that Lenin consistently emphasized this aspect of imperialism in earlier formulations as well (Blaut 1997). Thus for instance, in one of his classic defences of rights of nations to self-determination Lenin stressed that the “program of SocialDemocracy…must postulate the division of nations into oppressor and oppressed as basic, significant and inevitable under imperialism” (Lenin 1916a: 147). In ITHSC as well Lenin repeatedly stressed on the uneven nature of global capitalist development and on the economic imbalances that it tended to generate across countries. He noted for instance, how “The uneven and spasmodic development of individual enterprises, individual branches of industry and individual countries is inevitable under the capitalist system” (Lenin 1916b: 241) and later argued that “Finance capital and the trusts do not diminish but increase the differences in the rate of growth of the various parts of the world economy” (Lenin 1916b: 274). Elsewhere he took on Kautsky’s “profoundly mistaken idea which only brings grist to the mill of the apologists of imperialism, i.e., that the rule of finance capital lessens the unevenness and contradictions inherent in the world economy, whereas in reality it increases them” (Lenin 1916b: 272). This theoretical perspective, while still underdeveloped at the time of writing ITHSC, would eventually allow him to recognize—as he did later in the preface to the French and German editions of ITHSC —how advanced economies, by exerting their monopolistic positions, extracted “superprofits” from colonies, defined as that part of their surplus “obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their ‘own’ country” (Lenin 1916b: 193). He would also go on to emphasize how “Capitalism has grown 7 Luxemburg (2003: 397–398) put her stance as follows: “Historically, the accumulation of capital is a kind of metabolism between capitalist economy and those pre-capitalist methods of production without which it cannot go on and which, in this light, it corrodes and assimilates. Thus capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist organisations, nor, on the other hand, can it tolerate their continued existence side by side with itself. Only the continuous and progressive disintegration of non-capitalist organisations makes accumulation of capital possible… This is the reason for the contradictory behaviour of capitalism in the final stage of its historical career: imperialism”. 8 Callinicos (2009).

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into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries” (1916b: 191). What is significant here is that Lenin was not only able to highlight the uneven nature of global capitalist development but in ITHSC he was also able to indicate an important channel through which these persistent divergences were maintained and fueled on a world scale. Namely, the super-exploitation of workers in the periphery. It is worth noting here that although Lenin’s analysis is often sidelined by contemporary Marxists for being derivative in nature and having no original theoretical analysis of imperialism, ITHSC did in fact mark a considerable shift in Marxist thinking. His entire analysis of the labour “aristocracy” in ITHSC was based on the assumption that the working class in the centre or at least its upper stratum, benefitted from colonial loot and that this loot was made possible because of the superexploitation of workers in the periphery. This theme of course had already been developed by Bukharin (2010), but unlike his analysis which asserted a tendency towards worldwide equalization of wages, Lenin in fact saw the possibility of persistent divergences in wages across the metropolitan and colonial countries. This idea was picked up by a number of post1960 theorists of imperialism under the garb of unequal exchange. Now of course in ITSHC itself this theme was still subterraneous and it was only in later writings that Lenin would provide much clearer statements about this hypothesis. For example, in a powerful defense of the rights of self-determination of nations Lenin (1916e: 55–56) would state: Is the actual condition of the workers in the oppressor and in the oppressed nations the same, from the standpoint of the national question? No, it is not the same. (1) Economically, the difference is that sections of the working class in the oppressor nations receive crumbs from the super profits the bourgeoisie of these nations obtains by extra exploitation of the workers of the oppressed nations. Besides, economic statistics show that here a larger percentage of the workers become “straw bosses” than is the case in the oppressed nations, a larger percentage rise to the labour aristocracy. That is a fact. To a certain degree the workers of the oppressor nations are partners of their own bourgeoisie in plundering the workers (and the mass of the population) of the oppressed nations.

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(2) Politically, the difference is that, compared with the workers of the oppressed nations, they occupy a privileged position in many spheres of political life. (3) Ideologically, or spiritually, the difference is that they are taught, at school and in life, disdain and contempt for the workers of the oppressed nations. This has been experienced, for example, by every Great Russian who has been brought up or who has lived among Great Russians.

This then brings us to a crucial aspect of Lenin’s analysis. What made Lenin’s analysis stand apart was not just his emphasis on the unevenness of capitalist development, though this was of course crucial, it was also his distinct understanding of the link between reform and revolution in the context of the so-called national question. The political implications of Lenin’s line of thought in ITHSC were tremendous because they presented European socialist movements and national liberation struggles as being intricately linked to one another. In his consistent support for national liberation movements in the peripheries, he in fact found himself pitted against radicals like Luxemburg and Bukharin who had a diametrically opposite stance to his. For his radical opponents—Luxemburg in particular—nationalism had become such a bad word that it could no longer be worthy of socialist support, even if it were nationalism of oppressed peoples (Kasprzak 2012; Lim 1995). Her condemnation of colonialism was unambiguous and forthright, but despite this she felt nationalism was a bourgeois ploy aimed at distracting the working class from its main goal which was to fight against class oppression. The demand for self-determination “was reactionary because it assumed freedom was possible through reform (not revolution)” (Whitehall 2016: 727). Moreover, with the phenomenal growth of imperialism, nation states had become so obsolete, the establishment of democracy in colonies so impossible and capitalism so global that there was little point in supporting national movements which would anyway only serve to strengthen local capitalist classes. The immediate aim of international socialist movement, these voices argued, ought to have been a worldwide call for a socialist revolution rather than for a dual slogan of socialism at home and national liberation abroad. A socialist revolution was, in their view, a sufficient and guaranteed solution to the problem of national oppression. Now this is where Lenin completely disagreed with his compatriots. For one thing, this view that the radicals were

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putting forth, he felt, suffered from a crude sort of economic reductionism. Lenin noted, in agreement with his radical counterparts that it was “impossible to abolish national (or any other political) oppression under capitalism, since this requires the abolition of classes, i.e., the introduction of socialism”. But at the very same time he cautioned that “while being based on economics, socialism cannot be reduced to economics alone” because by “transforming capitalism into socialism the proletariat creates the possibility of abolishing national oppression; the possibility becomes reality ‘only’—‘only’!—with the establishment of full democracy in all spheres, including the delineation of state frontiers in accordance with the ‘sympathies’ of the population, including complete freedom to secede” (Lenin 1916c: 325). Transition to socialism then was no magic wand that would once and for all solve national oppression of one nation by another and Lenin stressed that even after socialism was established, the working classes across the world would have to consciously strive towards “the practical elimination of even the slightest national friction and the least national mistrust” (Lenin 1916c: 325). Thus the fight for national liberation in the colonies intersected with the goals of the European socialist movement but at no point was this less important or less real than the struggle for socialism being waged in the West. Here again Lenin’s perception of uneven development of capitalism and his understanding of the unequal relations between advanced nations and colonies deeply shaped his thinking (Harding 1983). Given the different levels of development across the world, he argued, it was unrealistic to assume that socialist transitions in the colonies would take the same shape and form as those countries in advanced Europe (Lenin 1916a: 147). Given these realities there could be no grand blue print of socialism that could be implemented across the world and instead socialist transformations would take different paths shaped by local circumstances (Lenin 1916e: 58–63). Denying this diversity as his radical opponents did in the name of some abstract internationalism, was to “paint…the future in monotonous grey” (Lenin 1916e: 70). He felt that national liberation movements were to be supported because despite all their shortcomings they ultimately emancipated these countries from the yoke of colonialism and by doing so provided openings to the working classes in these countries to take forward the banner of socialism. It is worth noting here that in his early days in the socialist movement Lenin had pointed out on a number of occasions how the fight for democratic rights had to be placed at the centre of working-class strategy, even

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if this struggle were only to result in a capitalist republic. Acquiring democratic rights would assist the workers towards their final goals not only because it would open up associational spaces but such struggles would also show to the workers the limits of capitalism. Missing this crucial link between reform and revolution, as the “economists” did, was a fatal flaw according to Lenin, because it failed to see the importance of reformist political demands in the quest for socialism and by doing so it actually sidelined workers from the political stage (Chapter 2). This error that the “economists” had made decades ago, Lenin argued, was precisely the flaw in the argument of the radical critics of his stance on self-determination as well. At a time when imperialism was spreading reaction all across the world, the yearnings of freedom of oppressed minorities within Europe and colonial subjects abroad had to be seen in positive light (Lenin 1916e: 43–47). The movements for national independence may have stopped short of making socialist demands but even in their limited form, their objectives held immense revolutionary potential. To miss the importance of national liberation was to fail to “link the advent of imperialism with the struggle for reforms and democracy” (Lenin 1916d: 15); it was nothing short of an “imperialist Economism” which like its older variant “argued in this way: capitalism is victorious, therefore political questions are a waste of time. Imperialism is victorious, therefore political questions are a waste of time!” (Lenin 1916c: 322–323). To further strengthen his claim, Lenin argued that such movements by threatening the very colonial basis of imperialism actually strengthened the socialist movement in Europe. “The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene” (Lenin 1916c: 357). Thus, rather than viewing socialism and national liberation movements as two separate streams, for Lenin they were in fact they both were deeply related. And as far as nationalism itself was concerned, Lenin sought to differentiate between the emancipatory kind of nationalism that had brought capitalism into existence in Europe and that was being waged by the colonies at the time of his writing, with the reactionary kind of nationalism that advanced capitalist nations were deploying to scale up a bloody imperialist war. The first deserved socialist support and the other, its complete opposition (Lenin 1916e: 30–35).

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Imperialism After Lenin Given Lenin’s stance on imperialism and on the national question, the Bolsheviks acquired an unparalleled moral standing in the colonial world. Just after the Bolshevik Revolution, communist parties sprang up across the Global South and Lenin’s views became a rallying point for anticolonial activists (Prashad 2019). The premises of ITHSC came to be widely accepted and influenced a whole generation of thinkers. Characteristic of the high regard that the Russian revolutionaries were held in, are the words of Ho Chi Minh, who in 1960 recalled his path towards Leninism in the following manner (Minh 1960): The reason for my joining the French Socialist Party was that these “ladies and gentlemen” - as I called my comrades at that moment – ha[d] shown their sympathy towards me, towards the struggle of the oppressed peoples. But I understood neither what was a party, a trade union, nor what was socialism nor communism…What I wanted most to know - and this precisely was not debated in the meetings - was: which International sides with the peoples of colonial countries?… And a comrade gave me Lenin’s “Thesis on the national and colonial questions” published by l’Humanite to read. There were political terms difficult to understand in this thesis. But by dint of reading it again and again, finally I could grasp the main part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled into me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted out aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear martyrs compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!’ After then, I had entire confidence in Lenin, in the Third International.

The tidal wave of anti-imperialism that gripped the world in the early twentieth century produced with it a deluge of work on core–periphery dynamics. In the decades that followed the Russian Revolution, scholars and thinkers especially in the third world, began to associate underdevelopment in the periphery with the integration of these regions in a world economy on an unequal footing. In Latin America the analysis of ECLA under Raul Prebisch and the debates started by Marxists like Mariátegui provided the starting point for Latin American dependencistas

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(Mariátegui 1928, 1929; ECLA 1950). A few years later, the publication of Baran’s (1957) Political Economy of Growth marked an equally important watershed in this area. With a Leninist tinge to his argument, Baran argued that unlike advanced countries where capitalism had been built on the ruins of feudalism, in underdeveloped countries the native bourgeoisie—given the dependent nature of their economies—remained too weak to overhaul property relations and instead struck alliances with reactionary elements with the result that capitalist features developed in an environment dominated by agrarian oligarchs and foreign capitalists. This historical position of peripheral regions had two effects on it. First, the hold of imperialism meant that large surpluses were transferred away to core regions and full-fledged industrialization was effectively curtailed or at least slowed down. Added to this the socio-economic structure of underdeveloped regions was such that much of the retained surplus was frittered away on wasteful expenditure, luxury consumption and so on by the elites, resulting in very low levels of investment. He noted that even in cases where nations did attempt to structurally overhaul themselves, they faced major resistance from advanced capitalist nations. Baran’s analysis inspired subsequent theories of imperialism, of which the studies of Samir Amin (1977), Andre Gunder Frank (1974, 1979) and Arrighi Emmanuel (1972) were very influential. A constant recurring theme that ran through many of these writings was the monopoly position of advanced economic centres in the world economy. A decade after Baran’s path-breaking study, Baran and Sweezy (1966) decisively shifted the focus of Marxist analysis by studying the dominance of monopolies in twentieth-century capitalism. The rise of monopolies in advanced economies, they argued, curtailed investment opportunities on the one hand while at the same time throwing into the hands of the capitalists, ever-increasing surpluses. The result of this mismatch was a chronic tendency towards stagnation which could only be overcome through irrational and wasteful expenditures. Imperialism and militarism were directly related to the need to find outlets for their surpluses and to maintain monopoly positions in economies abroad. While Baran and Sweezy (1966) were largely focused on the advanced core and did not delve too much into the effect of monopoly capitalism on non-developed economies, voices from Latin America had already begun to develop a closely related argument. The Prebisch-led ECLA’s (1950) report for example, which made famous the declining terms of trade hypothesis, was one of the first to link together the monopoly

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power of advanced economies with the problem of primary commodity dependency in peripheries along these lines. The report argued that prices of primary commodities produced by the peripheries tended to decline relative to manufactured goods produced by the core, partly because prices—essentially, wages—were more rigid in the latter than in the former, indicating price making power for core economies visà-vis the peripheries. More precisely, during the upswing of business cycles, price increases in advanced countries bloated wages, whereas in the downswing the wages could not so easily be reduced due to better organization of workers there, with the result that the peripheries were forced to absorb the declining prices “with greater force than would be the case if, by reason of the limitations of competition, wages and profits in the centre were not rigid” (ECLA 1950: 13). On an average therefore wages remained unequal and prices tended to decline for the peripheries involved in primary good exports. The ECLA hypothesis therefore suggested that peripheral economies would consistently lose their economic surplus to the core regions and this loss would be primarily built on the backs of the workers in underdeveloped regions. What was more was that such a scenario would not be opposed by peripheral capital (Marini 1972). Capitalists in these regions would easily accommodate themselves with such an arrangement because in an extroverted economy where bulk of production is oriented towards foreign markets, the realization of their surplus would have little or no connection with domestic workers’ demand. Thus dependence, argued Sweezy (1981) and Marini (1972), would increasingly become characterized by a devaluation of worker’s consumption demand and would expose the peripheral workforce to brutal levels of exploitation. What all this then meant was that the possibility of catch-up for underdeveloped economies were very slim within the bounds of global capitalism. The constant flow of resources to the advanced core sucked these economies dry, and left them with few resources for their own economic development. Imperialism of course did not rule out growth or industrialization, but it ruled out large-scale changes of the mutated and dismembered economic structures of these economies. From this it followed that if the peripheries had any hopes of breaking out from this vicious cycle then the solution lay not in a deeper integration with global capitalism but precisely the opposite, in delinking from it. While the idea of delinking had a number of variants, on the left its most prolific advocate was Samir Amin (1990, 2011, 2014). Central to Amin’s argument was

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that the division of the world into centres and peripheries reflected not just a quantitative contrast but a qualitative one as well.9 Whereas accumulation in centres was “controlled principally by the dynamic of internal social relations, reinforced by external relations at their disposal”, at the peripheries it was “derived principally from the evolution of the centers, grafted and in some way ‘dependent’ on that evolution” (Amin 1990: 5). Echoing the works of Sweezy and Marini, he argued that while capitalism in the centres was able to link the pace of its accumulation with domestic demand, and was thus able to extend material benefits of growth to the working class as well, in the peripheries, owing to its extroverted development, this link remained weak. In a sense, then, capitalism did more than just draw out surpluses from the developing world, it set off two “inverse” processes—structural integration in the centre and structural disintegration in the peripheries (Amin 1990). To accept the realities as they were in the hopes that these divergences would eventually be wiped out and to simply seek to “adjust” to the global hierarchies of capitalism was too problematic a stance because it missed how these global inequalities were built into the DNA of capitalism. Capitalism no doubt was transnational, but it’s very functioning constantly reproduced the division of centres and peripheries in newer and higher forms. For peripheries therefore, the way out of the trap of underdevelopment was to escape from the global division of labour. To delink was not to revert to autarchy; it meant more than just reducing the quantitative reliance on world markets; it meant overturning the logic that drove accumulation in these parts of the world. Delinking implied “the refusal to submit national-development strategy to the imperatives of ‘worldwide expansion’… the organization of a system of criteria for the rationality of economic choices based on a law of value, which has a national foundation and a popular content, independent of the criteria of economic rationality that emerges from the domination of the law of capitalist value that operates on a world scale” (Amin 1987: 435–436). At the very least, delinking entailed a strategy of development that focused on raising consumption levels of the toiling masses and on explicitly creating industry-agriculture linkages on an egalitarian basis (Amin 2011).

9 Amin’s model is not a “functional” model of imperialism. Moreover, it is based on the assumption that competitive conditions exist in the global economy at least in the sense that capital is assumed to freely move from one region to another.

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The emphasis on balanced growth reflected Amin’s admiration of the Chinese revolution (Amin 2013), but more generally his vision was also shaped by a deep-seated aversion to linear, teleological conceptions of capitalist development. The received doctrine derived from the European experiences the lesson that the ruin of the countryside was an inevitable stage that had to be tread on by each and every economy seeking to develop itself and thus a deliberate prioritization of town over country, however painful in the short run, was a necessary evil that had to be implemented. For Amin however this view was based on a warped reading of the European experiences. While the European pattern of development was indeed inaugurated by a violent destruction of rural petty production and while many took from this the lesson that primitive accumulation was a necessary evil that all societies had to go through on their quest for economic development, this simplified view missed the fact that European industrialization and the subsequent improvements in the standards of living experienced by the European masses, were ultimately made possible because of the availability of colonies. Colonial dependencies not only absorbed the tangible costs of industrial development in the core but also absorbed massive chunks of European migrants who would have otherwise lingered on the edges of capitalist circuits (Amin 2011, 2017). But given this reality, the received doctrine that the ruin of petty production, and more generally, the violence of primitive accumulation was in some ways inevitable in the forward march of society had to be rejected. It was false because the European pattern of development was not just built upon primitive accumulation at home but also on the world wide web of imperialist relations that it headed. What the received doctrine hid therefore was the reality of imperialism which once recognized could only mean that the European path to development was foreclosed for the Global South. Given the widespread prevalence of petty production and the predominance of the poor peasantry in Southern workforce, any deliberate policy of prioritizing town over countryside could only wreck havoc and deepen the problems of the Global South. Thus the challenge in front of the peripheries was not so much to replicate the Western model of development which by its very nature was unrepeatable, as much as it was to visualize a pattern of development that was altogether novel. Thus Amin stressed on the need for balanced growth between town and country and in fact even suggested that the entire process of industrialization be subordinated to the rhythms of agriculture, rather than the other way around (Amin 2011). Such a project by necessity would have to

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emphasize domestic consumption demand, not so much in opposition to accumulation but as a complement to it. A radical delinking project would entail a thorough rejection of “the dominant reasoning that demands people to wait indefinitely until the development of the productive forces has finally created the conditions of a ‘necessary’ passage to socialism” (Amin 2014: 116). It would have to prioritize worker’s consumption today and not postpone it till some future date. Delinking in other words meant wiping out the dissonance that existed between consumption and accumulation in peripheral economies. Now any such project would require a solid political basis for its construction. In advanced countries capitalism was strong enough to build “internal alliances” between the ruling capitalist bloc and other sectors of society including the working classes (Amin 1990). The late arrival of capitalism in the peripheries however ruled out a repeat of such developmental coalitions. The peripheral nature of these economies meant that the local bourgeoisie was just too meek to take up the mantle of autocentric development. Locked into an alliance with propertied elements of all sorts and bound by the constraints of advanced centres of capitalism, the peripheral bourgeoisie had no revolutionary content and was definitely not capable of spearheading a project of autocentric development. It would follow therefore that the responsibility of introducing even the most basic alterations in the economic structure would fall on the shoulders of the oppressed classes. It would have to be the most wretched, the poorest and most deprived members of society that would have to take it upon themselves and overthrow both the imperialist yoke that had kept them bound for centuries, and in doing so they would have to battle their “own” national bourgeoisies as well. Socialism was on the menu. Delinking of course was not some sure shot recipe for the victory of socialism. As Amin saw it, the project of socialism would have to begin in the peripheries and delinking was an absolutely essential step that had to be taken by the left here. But while such a project would bring the masses a step closer to a classless society, it was by no means the only path forward. The problem as Amin (1990, 2014) saw it, was that delinking necessarily implied reassertion of the state. Even if such a reassertion were to be based on property expropriations, large-scale land reforms and so on, there was a very distinct threat that delinking could degenerate into a repressive kind of bureaucratized statism of the form that took root in

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many communist countries in the post-War era. There was also a possibility that delinking could come to become associated with some form of national capitalism although the local bourgeoisies would be far too weak to take this to its logical conclusion. Thus “delinking by ‘scraps’ detaching themselves from the system of global rationality of capitalist expansion will always remain the first chapter of a long evolution governed by the internal conflict of the socialist, national capitalist and statist tendencies” (Amin 1990: 25). But despite these inherent risks the importance of the state had to be seen in the context of global dynamics of capitalism which constantly served to undermine possibilities of development in the peripheries (Amin 1990). There was, in other words, no escaping the reassertion of the state given the glaring reality of unequal development on a world scale. “To reject it in the name of ‘absolute values’ whose immediate achievement one demanded, is to condemn oneself to desperate impotence…To accept it is also to understand that control of social destiny cannot be achieved at a stroke, with the wave of a magic wand” (Amin 1990: 25). Amin (2014) was however clear this radical project that he had in mind, had to be conceptually very different from the older state-led developmentalist project which relegated the masses to the margins and viewed them as mere pawns in the hands of the political and economic elite. Radical delinking, he insisted, “imposes a different conception of ‘modernization/industrialization’ based on genuine participation of the popular classes in the process of implementation, with immediate benefits for them at each stage as it advances” (Amin 2014: 115–116). Without democracy there could be no socialism and placing the masses in the driving seat was the only guarantee against a degeneration of state-led delinking into the kind of bureaucratized monstrosities that socialist regimes had eventually gotten reduced to.

“New” Imperialism? The message of Samir Amin and the entire cohort of anti-imperialist activists that the twentieth century produced, remains as relevant today as it did back then. This might sound rather strange given that the popular perception today is that globalization has flattened the world economy, that the immense capital flows and the diffusion of manufacturing to developing regions have resulted in a rising tide of development in the recipient economies and so on. The problem with these popular perceptions however is that they are not in a bit rooted in concrete empirical

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facts (Foster 2015). Measured in terms of income, for example, there has been little change in the nature of global hierarchies over the last few decades (Arrighi et al. 2003, Pritchett 1997). So much so that even after two centuries of sustained capitalist development, “the number of non-western countries which have become developed is less than ten” (Wade 2014: 3). What is more, these global asymmetries continue to be sustained by massive transfer of surpluses from Southern economies to Northern ones (Higginbottom 2014). One estimation by Ricci (2018) reveals that value transfers across the world stood at $453 billion in 1995 and then increased to $865 billion in 2007, the main beneficiaries of which were economies in Europe and North America. For developing countries by contrast the largest economies witnessed a net outflow of values. For China the transfers of value hovered between 10 and 20% of value added between 1995 and 2007, while for India they 17 to around 26% during the same period. Latin America’s figures ranged from approximately 4.98 to 6.4%. A large proportion—though not all—of these transfers Ricci (2018) notes, have been on account of international wage differentials. This is consistent with several recent studies that indicate that the massive volume of foreign capital inflows and offshoring related activities that have moved to emerging economies, have been on account of “global labour arbitrage”, i.e. the desire to profit from lower wages in emerging centres like China (Smith 2016, Suwandi 2019). This arrangement in turn has been made possible by two concomitant structural changes at the global level (Milberg and Winkler 2013). More precisely, in the South the simultaneous shift of major economies from ISI based strategies of development to export-led ones has generated intense competition amongst Southern firms for offshored industrial tasks and for foreign capital. In what has become a do or die struggle, accumulation in these recipient economies has become contingent on their maintaining a competitive edge be it through exchange rate devaluations, low taxes but most importantly via low wages. The other side of this process has been the consolidation of monopoly positions by MNCs largely based in the North in a manner that is quiet unprecedented. This precise combination of monopoly above and cut-throat competition below has led to a devastating spiral of low wages and declining labour standards in socalled emerging economies, even while the giant monopolies rooted in the North have been able to derive substantial surpluses on the backs of the super-exploited peripheral workforce. Thus even as some economies

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in the Global South have used export-led growth to pump up industrial growth, the pattern of industrialization itself has not reduced but merely changed the nature of value transfers to the North. As a result, while recipient economies like China have experienced robust growth the very nature of the economic trajectory based on low wages, high rates of unemployment and a general demand squeeze has also proved to be self-limiting as can be seen in the recent slowdown of emerging economies. To add to this, it is worth emphasizing that the globalization of manufacturing notwithstanding, for several countries in the Global South the neoliberal era has not been associated with spectacular growth rates, let alone industrialization nor even with any major shift from traditional primary commodity dependence. The average per capita income of all of Africa as a ratio of income per head in developed economies actually shrank from 10.5 in 1973 to 6.5 in 2001, while for Latin America the ratios declined from 33.7 to 25.5 during the same period (Nayyar 2013). Even more striking is the fact that many of these laggard economies continue to rely extensively on the agricultural sector and in many cases primary commodity exports continue to play a predominant role. According to one estimate cited in a UNDP (2011) report on the Millennium Development Goals for instance, an overwhelming majority of developing countries drew more than half their export revenues from primary commodities alone. Further, much of the trade between these agricultural peripheries and advanced capitalist economies continues to be highly asymmetric in the sense that the latter continue to be able to access disproportionate amounts of Southern natural resources without paying monetary equivalent for the bonanza in value terms (Rice 2007). Thus the salience of primary commodity dependence has as its corollary the familiar process of what scholars have called ecological unequal exchange in which “core countries utilize LDCs as resource taps in order to subsidize their own rates of material consumption, in the process arguably constraining resource consumption elsewhere” (Rice 2007: 59). It comes as a surprise therefore that precisely at a time when imperialism has taken on such enormous and brutal forms, there still remains a considerable hesitance, a refusal almost, to recognize the phenomenon within certain sections of the left. A long and illustrious list of Marxist thinkers have made it a point to reject the essence of imperialism. David Harvey’s stance in particular deserves some reflection because of the

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popularity of his writings and because of the dangerous political strategies that he derives from it.10 The two main works that bring out his ideas are the Limits to Capital (2006) and New Imperialism (2003). In Limits Harvey defines the basic problematic of capitalist accumulation as the tendency of over-accumulation of capital. Capitalism, argues Harvey, is so ferociously competitive (in a Schumpeterian sense) and so explosively productive that it constantly produces far more than can be absorbed within a closed economy. This mismatch produces a surplus of capital which must either be left to devalue itself or must seek more profitable pastures “outside” its own boundaries—a “spatial fix”. It is here that the issue of imperialism takes centre stage because export of goods and of capital to regions with higher expected profits provides a potential solution to this problem of over-accumulation. But herein also lies a fundamental contradiction of capitalism according to Harvey. Any such “spatial fix”, he notes, can only give a temporary solution to the problems generated by over-accumulation because even as the export of capital relieves pressures from the home economy in one sense it at the same time also diffuses development to the new centres and thus creates new economic rivals (Harvey 2003, 2006). Thus at the end, capitalist expansion into peripheries alleviates one problem only to raise another for the metropole.11 As a concrete example of these dynamics, Harvey (2017) cites the emergence of China and other industrializing nations in recent decades as proof of capitalism’s diffusing abilities. So powerful have these tendencies been that according to Harvey (2017: 169) “the historical draining of wealth from east to west for more than two centuries 10 See Patnaik and Patnaik (2017), Smith (2016) and Suwandi (2019). For a debate on Harvey’s denial also see John Smith’s comments in http://roape.net/2018/01/10/ david-harvey-denies-imperialism/ and Harvey’s reply: http://roape.net/2018/02/05/rea lities-ground-david-harvey-replies-john-smith/. 11 More precisely, once capital is exported from the core, it “contributes to the formation of new productive forces in other regions…Furthermore, the productive forces have to be used in a certain way if capital is to be reproduced. The social relations appropriate to capitalism—wage labour—have to be in place and capable of a parallel expansion. Geographical expansion of the productive forces therefore means expansion of the proletariat on a global basis…Export of the productive forces means export of the whole package of the capitalist mode of production which includes modes of distribution and consumption” Harvey (2006: 434). Or as he puts it in New Imperialism, “The general thrust of any capitalistic logic of power is not that territories should be held back from capitalist development, but that they should be continuously opened up” Harvey (2003: 139).

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has…been largely reversed over the last thirty years”. Harvey concludes that the “the idea of imperialism” ought to be shelved “in favor of a more fluid understanding of competing and shifting hegemonies within the global state system” (Harvey 2017: 171). Now, the political implications of this position are brought out most vividly in New Imperialism. Having completely disposed of the notion of imperialism, Harvey gets to his central political message that primitive accumulation and all that goes along with it deserve the left’s wrath but that there may be circumstances in which it has progressive dimensions to it as well and therefore not all forms of primitive accumulation deserve the same kind of opposition from the left.12 After all, “You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs, the old adage goes, and the birth of capitalism entailed fierce and often violent episodes of creative destruction” (Harvey 2003: 162). Harvey’s plea here is directed towards those sections of the left that have been mounting struggles against dispossession, who in his view ought to be mindful of the need to develop productive forces as well. Primitive accumulation from this perspective despite its violence and terror, potentially serves a broader goal of defeating pre-capitalist economic organization and bringing peripheries into the orbit of capitalist modernization. Seen in the larger context of his writings this has a more specific political connotation, which he makes clear when he proposes a solution to the current crisis of neoliberalism in “a return to a more benevolent ‘New Deal’ imperialism, preferably arrived at through the sort of coalition of capitalist powers that Kautsky long ago envisaged” (Harvey 2003: 209). For the left to accept such a possibility however would be to miss the polarizing effects of capitalism on a global scale; it would be to ignore the reality of the vast transfers of surpluses from the South to the North that sustain the system. Moreover, to accept such an understanding would also put the left in direct confrontation with its mass base-the poorest sections of society who bear the brunt of imperialism. This is precisely why a generation of anti-imperialist thinkers argued that the way out of underdevelopment and poverty that the peripheries were stuck in, was to break away from global trading and financial networks and not in the hope that imperialism could be made benevolent. Their preferred strategy was for

12 Here Harvey seems to be differentiating between “accumulation by dispossession”

on the one hand and “primitive accumulation” on the other. By doing so, even as he takes to task those versions of Marxism that relegate the violence of dispossession to the margins of capitalism and even as he asserts the continued relevance of such forms of accumulation, his reading nonetheless remains stuck in a stadial conceptualization of capitalism.

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peripheral regions to regain hold of the nation state and use the national sovereignty thus obtained to push against the boundaries of imperialism. Thus while radical critics of capitalism are correct in suggesting that only an “inner” transformation of our societies can provide lasting answers to the problems that we face today, for the Global South this process must begin first and foremost through an “outer” transformation of its external links. What is more is that this assertion of sovereignty does not necessarily have to come at the cost of socialist internationalism and indeed historically, the most vociferous demands for political and economic independence have gone hand in hand with heroic acts of internationalism. In a speech delivered in 1965, Che Guevara emphasized this relation as follows: “To raise the living standards of the underdeveloped nations, therefore, we must fight against imperialism. And each time a country is torn away from the imperialist tree, it is not only a partial battle won against the main enemy but it also contributes to the real weakening of that enemy, and is one more step toward the final victory. There are no borders in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, because a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory, just as any country’s defeat is a defeat for all of us. The practice of proletarian internationalism is not only a duty for the peoples struggling for a better future, it is also an inescapable necessity” (Guevara 1965). These words remain as true today. Countries like Brazil and India which have diversified industrial bases and major agricultural capabilities can afford to think of an ambitious project of delinking, but such a strategy is likely to be much harder for smaller economies without some sort of international or at least regional level cooperation. Moreover, countries of the Global South that seek to radically challenge capitalism in this way are bound to face the wrath of capital in imperial centres through sanctions, military interventions and so on, and thus the success of delinking in any one country no doubt can benefit from cooperation and support of workers and peasants across the world. Left forces in the North have a particularly important role to play in this regard and in some senses the new contours of the global world economy make such solidarity more possible than ever before. Because although imperialism today continues to rely on extracting super profits from the peripheries, this renewed cycle of imperialism today has gone hand in hand with an erosion of the welfare state in the North and an intense commodification of labour in these parts of the world, all of which have served to weaken the “internal alliances” between capital and labour; Alliances, one

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might add, that Samir Amin at one point saw as constituting a crucial feature of autonomous capitalist development in centres of world capitalism. Conditions such as these can serve to sharpen class conflict and raise working-class consciousness to an entirely new levels in the North, thus providing fertile soil for genuine socialist internationalism.

Beyond Developmentalism If the left in the Global South is to emphasize delinking, then such a strategy directly brings home the question of state power to the centre of discussion. It was Lenin’s major contribution to show how important it was for the left not to be satisfied merely by taking state power. In order for socialist movement to move forward and not get trapped within the boundaries of capitalism, the state would have to be “smashed”. And yet the very concept of “smashing” has been very fuzzy. Smashing the state did not for once imply a rejection of economic planning for instance. It was not some nihilistic strategy aimed at the destruction of all things that the state had its hands in. It did not for example mean that there was no room for provision of public services like health and education within socialist society.13 It however did mean destruction of the army, prisons and all those arms of the state that were bulwarks of status quo. It also implied a level of decentralization that the capitalist state could never dream of accommodating. Thus what Marxists implied when they sought the smashing of the state was the destruction of the alienating form that the state took; an institution that people create but one that nonetheless comes to dominate them as if it were an external force. This brings us to an important dimension of the Marxist critique of capitalism. Marx saw in capitalism a system that was at once productive beyond anything mankind had witnessed, but one that also prevented people from flourishing and developing their potentials to the fullest extent. Production under capitalist conditions was based on workers producing a surplus over and above what was necessary for their own social reproduction. To extract this surplus at ever-increasing rates capitalists were compelled to revolutionize production by introducing new

13 In fact, as Samir Amin (1990) suggests, it is not possible to conceptualize a future socialist society free from want and hunger without at the same time envisaging an important role for a centralized coordinating body.

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technologies, tapping into new markets and inventing novel organizational forms to strengthen labour discipline (Marx and Engels 1848). But this explosive productivity also came at the cost of undermining the quality of lives of workers. Each working day workers were compelled to sell their labour power to their employers but they had absolutely no say on how production was to be organized, what products were to be produced or how the surpluses generated would be distributed. Their labour and what they produced with it, appeared to confront them at the end of each day “as something alien, as a power independent of the producer” (Marx 1977: 68). Therefore, in addition to the explicit act of economic exploitation, capitalism dealt a double blow to workers by disempowering them, by turning their own labour power against them, by subjecting them to forces that were beyond their control and robbing them the ability of controlling their lives. Everyday work in capitalist economies, rather than providing an outlet for creativity and fulfilment of workers, crippled workers to the extent that, “the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself - his inner world - becomes, the less belongs to him as his own” (Marx 1977: 68). From Marx’s perspective in order for human beings to live a fulfilling life, it was essential that this alienation be reversed. Any alternative therefore had to not only ensure that people’s basic biological economic necessities were met, but above and beyond that it also had to ensure that people were transformed into captains of their fates and that they acquired the freedom to exercise their rational choice over the most pressing matters that concern them (Lebowitz 2010). In the economic sphere this required workers to direct production themselves through worker’s cooperatives and self-directed enterprises (Jossa 2015; Fishwick and Selwyn 2016). In the political sphere the existing state which towered over them smothering them with its bureaucracy and army, would have to be replaced by a communal state where decision-making—whether it be the budgetary allocations for the year, the foreign policy of the nation or decisions regarding where and how key infrastructure ought to be built— would be based on direct rank and file participation. Public deliberation was to replace the rule of a narrow developmental elite. In short, a good life had to be based on a radical democratization of economic and political spheres.

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From this perspective, while a strategy of delinking must necessarily rely on the state, it must seek to do so in a manner that is very different from existing developmentalist recipes (Bresser-Pereira 2010). From a Marxist perspective there are both epistemological and practical reasons to reject the development state paradigm and to want to move beyond its prescriptions. The entire developmentalist project—both old and new— is premised on the elitist assumption that the central goals of economic development can be best achieved by a bureaucratic, centralized state backed by a narrow class of “national” elites. Labour in this process is to play little role other than that of a passive cog in the production process (Selwyn 2016a, b). The problem here of course is that developmentalism despite critiquing conventional neoliberal orthodoxy ends up simply replicating its logic, because whereas the latter advocates that markets lead decision-making, old and new developmentalists advocate that states in alliance with capitalists be given that determining role instead. Both therefore suffer from an impoverished view of what constitutes economic development in that both camps seek to shift the locus of decision-making away from the masses. But if we widen our definition of economic development by including in it the freedom of citizens to exert their rational choice and if we consider the ability of citizens to shape their own future by participating in key economic decisions as an important dimension of what it means to lead a good human life, then the statist penchant for bureaucratic centralization must be flatly rejected (Sen 2001). Practically too the failure of developmentalist experiments point to the weaknesses inherent in a top-down, state-centred strategy of development. Here it may be worthwhile to very briefly take a look at the experience of South Korea which has been a prominent example of the developmentalist strategy. The development experiences of East Asian economies have attracted immense attention from scholars because in a sea of failed industrialization attempts, this region stands out for its spectacular economic progress. Between 1965 and 1980 East Asia emerged as one of the fastest growing regions in the world and it established itself as one of the most dynamic manufacturing hubs in the world economy (World Bank 1993). What was even more surprising was that these high rates of economic growth went hand in hand with improvements in poverty trends and in many cases even in reduction in inequality rates. While there were several contending explanations for the region’s spectacular economic performance, for statist political economists the success of these miracle economies was largely

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attributable to the nature of state intervention (Amsden 1989; Evans 1995; Evans et al. 1985). For statist political economists, the relative lateness of development in these regions meant that their economic success was governed by the speed with which they could shift away from primary commodity production towards more sophisticated manufacturing-based production. This structural change in turn required that these countries “learn” from and “borrow” foreign technologies and required that they defy, rather than heed their comparative advantage (Amsden 1989, 2001). Further, like in other less developed economies, markets themselves did not always function the way neoclassicals had hoped they would. The distortions arising from monopolies, the under-provision of public goods and the very fact that “the decisions of even the most carefully calculating profit maximizers” did not always “mesh into an optimal strategy for industrialization”, limited the use of laissez-faire strategies (Rueschemeyer and Evans 1985: 45). What all this meant was that whereas in earlier cases of successful development markets may have played a leading role in fostering development, given the historical conjuncture in which the East Asian economies found themselves in, it was the state that had to shoulder the responsibility of economic progress. From the statist perspective, the East Asian miracles succeeded in their quest for industrialization precisely because their states were able to implement developmentally oriented policies in the immediate postWar period. What gave these states this unique ability to direct their economies, according to statist political economists, was their exceptional bureaucratic capacity and a level of organizational cohesion that was rarely seen in other developing nations. East Asian bureaucracies were manned by highly trained and educated personnel and recruitment was done on meritocratic grounds. Because of their relative insulation from political pressures, bureaucrats could also expect to have long careers in the government and enjoyed adequate scope for promotions, all of which cultivated rule-based, as opposed to patrimonial forms of governance (Evans 1995; Kohli 2004; Leftwich 1995). In terms of organizational cohesion, East Asian states were therefore characterized by a highly centralized decision-making system, in which there was a clearly specified hierarchy where “nodal” policy agencies in charge of economic policies, were placed right at the top of the bureaucratic ladder (Chibber 2003). Now, in addition to their internal capacities perhaps the most important aspect of the East Asian development state was the immense external

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capacity they wielded vis-a-vis capital (Song 2011). This is crucial to the Weberian imaginary of developmentalism. The East Asian development states, it was argued, were effective because they were able to discipline dominant classes. This autonomy with respect to social classes allowed the state to subordinate myopic goals of private capital to the long term needs of capitalist development (Amsden 1989; Leftwich 1995). Thus for example, the South Korean state could demand that local capital meet production obligations or pre-established export targets in return for the subsidies and cheap credit that it provided to local firms. The Korean state owing to the disciplinary power that it wielded could also push domestic capital to forgo short-run profits and enter into sectors that it may not have otherwise been willing to enter without state prodding. Autonomy of course did not in any way imply aloofness or neutrality vis-a-vis society, in fact more often than not successful “development states” were likely to be deeply embedded through formal and informal ties with the business sector (Evans 1995). But what seemed to characterize these ties was that the balance of power was tilted towards the state, almost as if the state were independent of economic constraints posed by capital. While several statist political economists seemed to have taken the internal and external capacity of the East Asian states as a “permanent fixture” of these societies, looking back at the post-War period it would be hard to ignore the fact that the “development states” that emerged in East Asia were in some sense, exceptional, not only in terms of the specific historical circumstances which led to their establishment but also in terms of the worldwide environment within which they functioned (Yeung 2016: 4, 2017). This exceptional nature of the post-War period was brought into sharp focus in the 1980s as these economies began shedding the post-War consensus and started shifting towards a more “liberalized” accumulation regime. The pace and manner of the transition varied from region to region but what was common was that neoliberalism involved a complete alteration of the post-War, state–capital relation that statist political economists had taken for granted (Park 2013). Since the experiences of the South Korean miracle has deeply influenced developmentalist thinking, a brief look at it’s experience may be useful here to drive home the point. South Korea began its impressive industrialization project in the 1960s under an authoritarian regime headed by Park Chung Hee. Like in other East Asian miracles, Koreans combined infant industry protection while also developing their export capabilities (Kohli 2004). This unorthodox

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combination of policies was aided by an extremely effective development state and by the access that Korean firms had to American markets which was a result of South Korea’s important geopolitical location in the Cold War. The role of geopolitics can be gleaned by the fact that during the Vietnam War for instance, South Korea earned 30% of its foreign exchange in 1966–1969 as a result of having this special access to both the US and Vietnamese markets. The economy also benefitted from massive foreign aid disbursals from the United States which amounted to approximately 4.3 billion USD in 1953–1961 and 8.6 billion USD in 1962–1980 (Yeung 2016). At the heart of the Korean success however was the role played by the state. Shortly after leading the coup, Park’s government nationalized the banking sector and gained absolute control over the financial levers of the economy. Labour organizations were bludgeoned into submission and the bureaucracy was overhauled as indicated by the doubling of the size of its employees between 1960 and 1970 (Kohli 2004). On the economic front the state used its control over the country’s coffers to encourage industrial champions and when required it directly undertook production through its state-owned firms. But whereas statist political economists have often presented the link between state and private capital as one in which the latter enjoyed substantial autonomy and wielded considerable discipline over domestic capital, it is important to remember that the relationship between the two was far more complex. To begin with, despite being a decidedly authoritarian state the “military’s only claim to government was its ability to create a sustainable mechanism to raise national income” (Amsden 1989: 49). The Park regime despite all its muscle could therefore not afford to risk an economic crisis and it was this fragility that provided the South Korean chaebols with a de facto veto position in economic matters. It is of course true that private capital in the region had been severely weakened due to Japanese colonialism and the civil war that followed further dislodged the position of domestic capital in the economy. That these weaknesses allowed state managers a certain amount of leeway is undeniable, but what is equally true is that even within this context, the Korean state was essentially a capitalist state and was thus closely shaped by economic constraints posed on it by capital (Song 2011, 2013). Thus when in the 1960s the state signaled its intent to reign in financially insolvent companies or later when it tried to curb the monopoly powers of the chaebols it met with substantial opposition

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from capital and was quickly forced to retreat. Here, as on other occasions the “threat of economic collapse (or disorder) was, in fact, a key ‘weapon’ in the arsenal of South Korea’s chaebol” to limit state intervention (Lim 1998: 471). “The message” as far as South Korean capital was concerned “was clear enough: ‘push us too far, or in directions we don’t want to go, and the economy will collapse’” (Lim 1998: 471). This brings us to a second point. The fact that the state was able to make significant interventions in the economy and the fact that a regime such as this remained in place for over two decades was as much a reflection of state-capacity as much as it was a result of the fact that this form of statism was in line with the preferences of local capital. More precisely, as Chibber (2003) notes, South Korean capitalists owing to the geopolitical location of their economy, were in a unique position to launch into an export-oriented strategy of accumulation while retaining a protectionist cover for their economy. But to take advantage of this unique opportunity domestic capital required a disciplinary state and therefore “far from an encumbrance” it viewed the state as “a needed ally in the competitive battle” for export markets (Chibber 2003: 38). And thus while the state did play a major directing role in the process, it was because capital was on board with this. The state’s ability to play its developmentalist role was thus limited in the sense that it could not fundamentally flout the preferences of South Korean capital. Industrialization that followed the 1961 coup, occurred at a phenomenal pace as South Korea emerged as a major exporter of manufactured goods. As a result, per capita GDP quadrupled between 1960 and 1980 and what was perhaps most striking about all of this was that the South Korean regime was able to meld high growth rates with significant income equality and human development (Rao 1978; Amsden 1989; World Bank 1993). By the 1980s however the Korean strategy began to show strains and starting from the late 1980s growth rates slackened even as profitability of large firms dipped (Park 2013). To a large extent this was because of the rise of competitors from South-East Asia and Latin America, but it also stemmed from the fact that the preferential access that Korean capital had to Western markets began to be slowly choked off as advanced nations themselves started to face the pressures of growing trade deficits with East Asia. These external changes were met by equally significant shifts on the domestic front (Minns 2006). Internally there was growing labour unrest and more importantly big capital was now beginning to view the development state as a fetter and a limitation rather than

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as an ally. Declining growth rates and slowdown of profitability during the late 1980s had made private capital yearn for greater freedom from the “state cocoon” (Park 2013). The performance standards demanded by the South Korean state which at one point of time were the pivot of successful industrialization came to be viewed as unnecessary costs. In these circumstances leading representatives of Korean capital vociferously demanded for a more liberalized regime. Within the bureaucracy too, a neoliberal consensus began to take root (Pirie 2007). It was in this context during the 1980s and 1990s that there was substantial deregulation of the economy. Now it is true that by Latin American standards the pace of liberalization was much slower so much so that even until the early 1990s the state retained control over important sectors in the economy. But underneath this façade of continuity, the Korean economy was undoubtedly undergoing a significant transformation away from its post-War developmental regime. Most importantly, state control over the financial sector was beginning to dilute in the 1980s and the space vacated by the state was being increasingly taken up by big domestic and, later, foreign capitalists (Park 2013, Pirie 2007, 2016). Under pressure from private capital which viewed the government’s interest rate regulations and its tight grip over external borrowing as an obstacle to its own growth, the first democratically elected government undertook significant external liberalization of the financial sector in the mid-1990s and this proved to be the final nail in the development regime’s coffin. As state control waned in the financial sector and as regulations regarding foreign borrowing weakened, private capital’s access to finance was no longer bound by performance standards and as a result private debt gradually came to be delinked from the ability of the economy to repay loans to external borrowers (Ghosh and Chandrasekhar 2001). Despite formal attempts to reign in the Chaebols, in practice the government proved increasingly powerless to control the private sector. Instead of “disciplining the chaebol” it “increasingly put itself at the service of the chaebol, supporting their often feckless investment plans” (Pirie 2007: 99). The frenzied financialization that followed the opening up of Korean financial markets, ended up culminating in the 1997 crisis. But interestingly, rather than becoming a rallying point for reversing the growing dominance of private capital, the crisis blunted all opposition to big capital’s ambitions and in a matter of a few years the last remnants of the developmental state were completely repealed (Crotty and Lee 2002). The post-crisis economy witnessed further consolidation of big capital’s

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position in the economy as corporate profits rose significantly even as the social costs of this restructuring were borne by Korean workers. Inequality soared and labour market conditions turned increasingly insecure. Whereas, the earlier, developmental pattern involved a virtuous circle of growth matched by productivity increases and buoyant wages, in the post-crisis era, growth came to be associated with “the suppression wage growth and the capacity of capital to capture an increasing share of output” (Pirie 2016: 147). Investment rates remained higher than many other developing countries, but by and large accumulation in the Korean economy was no longer investment-led. Instead, growth came to be increasingly associated with debt-fueled consumption and exports which raised serious concerns regarding its sustainability. Household debt for example, “increased from 80 percent of net disposable income in 1996 to 161 percent in 2014” according to estimates cited by Pirie (2016: 149) even as export-GDP ratios doubled between 1996 and 2013. At the core of these ongoing changes which had begun in the 1980s was a gradual but perceptible shift in the “embedded autonomy” of the state. Despite all the rhetoric of free markets, the entire neoliberal reshuffle came to be associated not so much with a quantitative decline in state intervention as much as by a drastic change in the qualitative nature of the state: Although the state was reducing its direct intervention in production and distribution, its indirect role in the differential accumulation of capital remained as important as ever. What distinguishes liberalism from statism here is not the elimination of power, but its transformation. The state apparatus, which used to be subject to the sheer force of the military elite, was becoming increasingly subservient to dominant capital in the name of ‘business friendly’ policy. (Park 2013: 153, emphasis original)

Interpreted this way, the successful state-types that emerged during the post-War period may have been nothing more than transitionary institutions during a very special period of capitalism (Evans 1995; Fine 2005). The dismantling of these exceptional state forms due to processes that were endogenous to the developmental regime is important to note because it reiterates the importance, more than ever of “bringing capital back in” any serious analysis of developmentalism (Chibber 2003). It also brings into focus the significance of the Marxist views on the political economy of the state (Clarke 1991; Wetherly et al. 2008). The state undoubtedly has an important functional role in capitalism and given that

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capitalists do not themselves govern directly, the state by its very definition has room to take independent decisions (Poulantzas 2000). Were this not the case, the sort of deviations one sees in development policies across nations would not have existed. While recognizing this, the point that a number of Marxists have made is that the functioning of state and the class conflicts that underlie capitalist production are a tightly interwoven whole. Thus while formally the political and economic planes are indeed separated from each other in capitalist systems, in practice they are also deeply interrelated. From this perspective the central problem with developmentalist thinking in all its forms lies in the implicit assumptions that inform its view about state-capital relations. Like Keynesians in the early twentieth century, developmentalists today accept that market economies can be completely dysfunctional, but they are of the belief such contradictions are amenable to technocratic solutions from above. They also believe that capitalists can be called upon to assist state elites to correct markets. The experiences of the East Asian development states are usually cited as an example of this. Partially this view also stems from the sheer variety of institutional structures across the world. The Scandinavian model of capitalism after all has been very different from the American one. In the developing world too it is hard to miss the “varieties of capitalisms”. The very fact that the shape and structure of capitalist institutions can be very different from one region to another opens up the possibility that capitalist development can be associated with a wide range of institutional regimes. But while acknowledging this diversity, a “middle-range” analysis of institutions must also be sobered with a macrostructural perspective on how class conflicts and world system level forces shape institutions (Sirohi 2017; Song 2011, 2013). Structural constraints may vary with time and space and as we have seen there may be periods where institutions do gain autonomy from these constraints but the assumption that institutions are somehow fundamentally insulated from the destructive logic of capital and can therefore be molded and recreated to the liking of technocrats or that the capitalist class can be called upon as a reliable long term ally for the kind of inclusive economic development that peripheral economies need, is sheer voluntarism. It belies a basic spontaneity of capitalism.

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Beyond Utopian Impulses In wanting to move beyond old developmentalist formulae one must be clear about what exactly one is rejecting. A few final comments are therefore in order here. Moving beyond developmentalism entails a number of simultaneous processes. It involves empowering the poorest and most marginalized sectors of society and making them active subjects of history. It involves the replacement of the “special bodies of armed men placed above society and alienating themselves from it” by a truly popular body of a new kind, which derives its legitimacy from popular control (Lenin 1917: 394). None of this however lessens the importance of economic planning which has to be brought to the centre of the agenda of any decentralized strategy of development (Callinicos 2010). Early justifications of economic planning hinged on the idea that an allocation system based on atomistic decision-making was far too anarchic to meet the kinds of goals that a socialist society aspires towards (Dobb 1970). The problem as many saw it was that in a system where decisions made by private entities were driven solely by price signals, there was simply no coordination mechanism that ensured private actions met social goals. In the absence of planning therefore, atomistic decision-making could only result in wastage, unemployment and constant inter-sectoral disproportionalities (Baran 1957). It was here that planning was presented as a superior alternative—as a decision-making mechanism that did away with the “anarchy of production”, ensuring in the process a bigger say for society in what, how and for whom to produce (Dobb 1970). The actual experiences of planning in socialist countries of course turned out to be disastrous, but these failures in themselves do not negate the logic that informed these experiments. From this perspective, if decentralized modes of governance are not to replicate the anarchic atomistic allocation logic that capitalism is based upon, if they are to ensure full utilization of human resources, a just distribution of resources and a rational application of modern science, then decentralization has to go hand in hand with some measure of economic planning. Moving beyond developmentalism cannot therefore imply rejection of planning itself; rather what it implies is the need to construct a mode of economic planning which derives its impetus, goals and priorities from below (Chandrasekhar 2001). In this context there is a second crucial issue worth noting and that is the importance of a political organization. There has been a tendency on the left to fetishize the concept of popular power by treating it as a unified

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and harmonious entity defined by its opposition to a constituted power. By doing so however there has been a tendency to underplay the concrete conditions within which class struggles play out. In the context of the Global South where society is split along religious, racial and casteist lines, class struggle is perceived and interpreted in a wide variety of ways by those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Popular power is therefore no undifferentiated mass. Ambedkar, the mighty leader of the Dalit movement, once noted in his characteristically sharp tone, that it was naïve on the part of Indian communists to assume that the hungry, exploited masses would automatically unite together for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism because such an assumption did not address the fact that the toiling classes themselves were so deeply imprinted by caste striations. Annihilating caste hierarchies, from this perspective, was not some distant goal that could be safely left for the post-revolutionary society to accomplish, but instead was an urgent present task—a prerequisite, even—for a victorious socialist revolution. After all, “Men will not join in a revolution for the equalization of property unless they know that after the revolution they will be treated equally, and that there will be no discrimination of caste and creed” (Ambedkar 2015: 232). Ambedkar of course was not alone in grappling with these issues. Lenin too, as we have seen, recognized the importance of these cleavages and posed his own set of answers to tackle them. Spontaneous popular movements, he argued, were imbued with multiple, often contradictory instincts reflecting the heterogeneities of working classes. The grinding conditions of work, the exploitation and humiliation that workers and peasants faced in their daily lives, were all experiences that linked them together in bonds of solidarity and naturally pit them against capitalism. But at the very same time, one could not assume for an instance that an automatic fusion of workers and peasants towards a common cause would simply follow from their objective positions in society. “Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution” Lenin stated, “will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is” (Lenin 1916c: 356). The fight for socialist hegemony therefore had to be a daily battle to forge horizontal links amongst the poorest and to counter attempts by adversaries to co-opt them and prevent their independent political expression (Shandro 2014). An organization of some sort provided precisely such a platform for the oppressed to forge such a strategy.

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The entire notion of a “Party-less decentralization” in this context is a profoundly mistaken one, as Patnaik (2004) notes. While democratic decentralization provides necessary avenues for oppressed classes to push ahead towards an egalitarian future, the simple fact of autonomy that decentralization entails is no guarantee that this outcome will actually be realized. This is why an organized political movement of the left is crucial to ensure that decentralization of the kinds described above flows in a progressive direction and here Russia’s history perhaps more than any other points to the difference that a leftist political organization can make. It has become commonplace in the recent literature on Latin America to invoke the “dual power” imaginary to explain the emergence of the left in the region and to explain its failures. What is often forgotten however is that the Russian “dual power” situation which pit radicalized workers and peasants on the one hand against the bourgeoisie, organized under the Provisional Government on the other hand, could have played out in a number of different ways had it not been for the role played by the Bolsheviks. The “dual power” scenario had a spontaneous side to it—the War, the economic tribulations, the Tsarist repression and so on all added to the anger of the masses and brought them together for a common cause. But it is also worth emphasizing the groundwork that the Bolsheviks and other socialist organizations had done to radicalize workers and peasants even before the War had started out (Haimson 1964). After February 1917 it was these masses fed on revolutionary “propaganda” of the socialist parties that brought down the Tsarist regime and organized themselves into Soviets.14 The open and flexible nature of the Soviets provided a platform for the oppressed classes to raise a variety of radical demands, discuss political tactics and deliberate on burning issues of the time. But precisely because of their flexible nature, these bodies were also open to moderating influences which sought rapprochement with the bourgeoisie (Shandro 2014). Moderate Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries who controlled the Soviets during the early days were eager to pass on power to the Provisional Government and not only did they justify the continued involvement of their country in the World

14 One observer has gone to the extent of saying that “February was the product of concerted, concentrated effort by revolutionary socialist cadre from a number of groups. They planned for it. They agitated for it. They were accountable to each other and their organizations. They tried to generalize and extend every action of workers” Yanowitz (2019).

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War, during the “July Days” these moderate elements turned their guns, in cahoots with the bourgeoisie, against the Bolsheviks—hunting their leaders down and smashing their party organization wherever possible. That the Soviets would eventually turn into instruments of an anticapitalist revolution was not therefore inevitable. It was ultimately the failure of moderate leadership combined with the ability of the Bolsheviks to chart out a clear alternative tactical platform and provide decisive leadership to the radicalized masses that turned these embryos of revolution into its actual instrument. We of course know how the Bolshevik experiment turned out—a one party dictatorship. Thus while history furnishes us with several examples indicating the importance of political organizations, it tells us little about the kind of organizational structure best suited for socialist goals. Perhaps chasing this silver bullet is of little use in the first place because organizational forms must necessarily vary by local circumstances and thus it may be impossible—even dangerous—to try and even think in these terms. Having said this Lenin’s views on the party and the weight of the Bolshevik experiences can and must be used as guides and signposts. Lenin as we have noted earlier had in mind a party made up of the most advanced sections of the working class bound together by a revolutionary program; It was a party that was to be intransigent when it came to preserving working-class independence but one that was at the same time to be flexible: flexible enough to draw up alliances, to artfully make compromises, to lead when mass mobilizations waned and merge— though not tail—when they rose in revolutionary fervour. A party such as this could not but have been internally democratic and its leaders could not but have been drawn from the most conscious sections of mass movements. And while history has not been too kind to the Bolsheviks, what no one can take away from them is the fact that they did manage to lead a movement that constructed the first major worker’s state in the world. The Bolshevik experiment threw the greatest challenge to capitalism in over four centuries of its existence.

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Index

A Acción Democrática (AD), Venezuela, 61–63, 68, 75 Accumulation by Dispossession, Harvey, David, 178 Alliances, PT, Brazil, 135, 139, 142, 144 Ambedkar, B.R., 87, 191 April Thesis, Lenin, 56 Autocentric development, 3, 173

B Barrio Adentro policy, 72 Batista, Fulgencio (Cuba), 13 Bernstein, Eduard, 26, 111–114, 119–121, 160 Bolsa Familia, Brazil, 19, 136, 138 Bolsonaro, Jair, 141 Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), Brazil, 131, 135, 141 Bukharin, Nikolai, 157, 160, 161, 164, 165

C Caracazo, Venezuela, 19, 64, 65, 152 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 131, 132, 151 Castro, Fidel (Cuba), 13, 107 Catch up, convergence, 131, 154, 156, 157 Cold War, 8, 12, 15, 16, 185 Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI), Venezuela, 61, 63, 68 Commodity boom, oil, 78 Communal Councils (CCs), 21, 74–76 Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPIM), 142 Competition, markets, 60, 132, 153, 154, 156, 162, 170, 175 Consciousness, spontaneity, 34, 53, 77, 90–93, 97, 180 Conselho de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (CDES), Brazil, 135 Constitution, 20, 66–68, 73, 132

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. A. Sirohi and S. Bhupatiraju, Reassessing the Pink Tide, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8674-3

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202

INDEX

Cuban revolution, 13, 15–17, 26, 157

D Debt crisis, 5, 61, 132 Delinking, 34, 36, 86, 87, 170, 171, 173, 174, 179, 180, 182 Development state, 182–186, 189 Diffusion, diffusionism, 156, 163, 174 Dilma Rousseff impeachment, 2, 28, 141, 145 Dual power, 14, 117, 118, 124, 192 Dutch disease, 78

E Economic planning, 180, 190 Economic war, shortages, 27, 71 Exchange rate, 29, 77–79, 82, 132, 138, 175 Extractivism, 24

F February Revolution 1917, Russia, 110, 117, 124 Financialization, 15, 187 First World War, 8, 13, 26, 109, 112, 154, 159 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), 7, 154 Formal/informal sector, labour, 4, 6, 17, 19, 139

G Globalization, 17, 24, 33, 35, 46, 76, 77, 82–86, 88, 154, 158, 174, 176 Guevara, Che, 12, 15, 47, 48, 86, 87, 179

H Harvey, David, 155, 176–178 I Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), 3–5, 18, 59–61, 127, 133, 175 Industrial policy, PT, Brazil, 137 Inflation, hyperinflation, 2, 5, 15, 61, 62, 78, 80, 132, 134, 139, 151 Internationalism, 158, 166, 179, 180 K Kautsky, Karl, 91, 92, 119, 122, 159, 163, 178 L Labour arbitrage, 175 Labour aristocracy, 164 Land reforms, 10, 12, 14, 15, 23, 71, 127, 173 Luxemburg, Rosa, 45, 77, 111–114, 157, 159, 161–163, 165 M Mariátegui, José Carlos, 12, 87, 168, 169 Mensheviks, Russia, 90, 98, 192 Mexican revolution, 61 Minimum wage, 6, 19, 28, 62, 108, 109, 137, 139, 141 Monroe Doctrine, 7 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), Brazil, 129 Movimiento Quinta República (MVR), Venezuela, 67, 75, 89 N Nationalism, 3, 60, 66, 157, 165, 167

INDEX

New imperialism, 155, 177, 178 New unionists, new unionism, 128 Nucleos, PT, 130, 131 O October Revolution 1917, Bolshevik Revolution, Russia, 30, 48, 55, 88, 90, 95, 168 P “Peace, Land and Bread”, Bolshevik slogan, 26, 110, 111 Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), 70, 71, 73, 81 Poverty, 2, 11, 15, 18, 20, 28, 55, 61, 72, 84, 109, 121, 138, 139, 178, 182 Primitive accumulation, 172, 178 R Real Plan, Brazil, 132, 151 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), 58, 59 S Sanctions, 48, 81, 179

203

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), 52, 90–92, 94, 159 South Korea, foreign aid, geopolitics, 185, 186 South Korea, state-capital relationship, 184 Sumak kawsay, 20, 21 Super-exploitation, 12, 164

T Terms of trade, 169 Third Worldism, Third Worldist, 157

U United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), 75, 77, 89, 90

V Vanguard, Vanguard Party, 88–90, 93, 98, 131 Vargas, Getulio, 11, 128

W Water Wars, Bolivia, 19