(1. part of a series of 3.)
The World Revolution Advances Through Hugo Chávez
Rebelión - March 22, 2005
Translated from Spanish by John Manning
1. Chávez, Simon Rodriguez, and Napoleon Bonaparte
Hugo Chávez has placed himself at the head of the world revolution by defining as a necessity of world theory and world practice the "invention of the socialism of the XXI century". With this pronouncement the Venezuelan President transcends the Historic Project of The Liberator Simon Bolívar and approaches the Historic World Project of his teacher, Simon Rodriguez.
The class character of Simon Bolivar's liberation project reflected the most advanced programmatic ideas of the progressive European bourgeoisie of his times, but with a subcontinental configuration and "with the essence of America on the march", that is, adjusted to the particular conditions of Latin America. It addresses the anticolonial liberation of Latin America and the integration of its liberated fragments in one great progressive republic.
Simon Rodríguez shared this project of regional anticolonial transition, but he added to it a universal and strategic dimension, the liberation of humanity through socialism. The bourgeois regional project was the only one possible in his time, while the socialist project was utopian, which is to say, unrealizeable. Today, however, the two dimensions coincide in the New Historic Project (NHP) of the Regional Latin American Power Block (RLAPB) and of the "21 Century Socialism".
Virtual strategic reality and present reality as status quo and potential, coincide. Two hundred years after Don Simon Rodriguez, the Angelus Novus of History finally folded his wings to alight before the tragedy of humanity and intervene to the aid of the victims of capital and, in particular, of the"little human race", “el pequeńo genero humano”, the Latin Americans, as Simon Bolívar used to say.
In this exciting historic scenario, Hugo Chavez not only transcends the geopolitical reach of the praxis of liberation of Simon Bolívar, but acts objectively similarly to Napoleon Bonaparte, although in a different class project and with other media. Bonaparte was the terrestrial “manager of the world spirit” (Weltgeist), said the philosophical genius G.W.F.Hegel. But in his theologizing language, "world spirit" was nothing else but a code for "world bourgeoisie", and in this sense, the Frenchman from Corsica was no more than the Commander-in-chief of the joint interests of the emerging world bourgeoisie.
Bonaparte figured as the regional sword of the French bourgeoisie in the center of power of his time, Central Europe. It was this setting that allowed him to transcend the regional-French European-national role and convert himself into the sword of the world bourgeoisie in its global struggle against all pre-capitalist systems of production and social relations.
Chávez has been, up to now, the regional sword of the anti-monroeist liberation of Southern America but, with his pronouncement in favor of the construction of the Socialism of the XXI century, his New Historic Project assumes the dimension of that of Simon Rodriguez: the liberation of humanity, from the perspective of a classless society, that is to say, a participative postcapitalist democracy. The Weltgeist (world spirit) ceases to be, therefore, bourgeois, and in a beautiful dawn transforms himself into the self-determined subject of post-bourgeois society.
2. Chávez and Marx
The french Jacobins were born in the bloody chaos of feudal dissolution. And as they cut off the heads of the nobility with the "humanizing invention" of Dr. Guillotine, they put a head of their own on the anti-feudal-globalizer movement of their time. A head not with two faces, like the Roman God Janus, but with three: "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality". In this manner an orienting sunlight emerged from the darkness of the genesis, which converted itself into the center of gravity of the new bourgeois social order, which reorganized all the elements of the ancién régime and the emerging elements into a new civilization: bourgeois-capitalist democracy. Napoleon was its first Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Hardly 60 years later, those excluded charged Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with the development of a new theory for humanity which would be capable of lighting the road toward a society without oppressed or oppressors. The new sunlight of emancipation, the Communist Manifesto, was born: the theoretical head of a torso of hundreds of millions who, without the "eyes of reason" (Hegel) ---scientific-critical theory--- had no hope of subverting and inverting the perverse world of capital. Lenin was its first executive.
With the death of Lenin, the sunlight of Marx and Engels temporarily darkened. Stalin shut it off entirely and his successors did not know how to find the new road in the darkness. Without the 'eyes of reason' the leaders of the Soviet Union missed the road. The grandiose work, built with the superhuman effort of a grandiose people, collapsed ignominiously. Oppressed humanity went back to being a torso without a theoretical head or skill for the final offensive.
The long night of revolutionary antibourgeois theory lasted fifteen years before the revolutionary Hugo Chavez publicly rehabilitated it and returned it to its emancipatory status, not only in defense of humanity, but for its definite liberation. It is in this sense that the phrase, "The Revolution Advances Through Hugo Chavez" is justified.
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=13030
