We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution

Conclusion. Dual Power against the Magical State

Conclusion. Dual Power against the Magical State Dispersed people, dispersed hearts, dispersed struggles, let us find the reasons . . . Why not unite, if the rifle and the gospel have already united in Camilo’s hands? I ask, I ask, why do we divide ourselves, if this only makes our enemies happy? Why do we insist on isolating our struggles, the struggles that should lead us to final victory? —Alí Primera In many ways, this people’s history has been a history of the dispersal of a people: the failure of the Venezuelan guerrilla war, a struggle that represented the people in its aspirations but never in its constituency, led to a dispersal of popular forces. This dispersal then gave rise to a period in which a multiplicity of movements and struggles developed autonomously across Venezuelan society, in factories, barrios, schools, homes, parties, and a multitude of revolutionary organizations and political formations. However, while this period of dispersal and autonomous development has been crucial to the consolidation of Afro, indigenous, and women’s identities, few would consider this dispersal of the movement to be an unambiguously positive development, an end in itself. Thus, although I disagree with Primera ’s suggestion that any division of the struggle necessarily constitutes a weakness, and certainly with the idea that there might be such a thing as a ‘‘final victory,’’ I nevertheless take his point that these dispersed struggles dual power against the magical state 235 must ultimately seek some sort of reunification if any victory is to be won. After all, reunification of the struggle is also a part of this history, as those many dispersed and diverse movements were eventually bound together in an explosive chain of events: the Caracazo, the pair of failed coups in 1992, and Chávez’s election in 1998. This reunification, moreover, was more than the mere negation of their dispersal, marking instead a clear dialectical progression: the movements of today are much more powerful and developed than they would have been had they not ‘‘dispersed’’ in the first place. Nevertheless, I wonder how to square Alí Primera’s lamentation of dispersal with, for example, Raúl Zibechi’s recent insistence on ‘‘dispersing power.’’ Reflecting on recent rebellions in the Bolivian community of El Alto, the radical Uruguayan theorist argues for the construction of a nonstate power that, in its horizontalism and absence of institutions, leadership, and singular logics, ‘‘disperse[s] the state without re-creating it.’’∞ Do Primera and Zibechi stand fundamentally opposed to one another on the question of how to create revolutionary change? Would Primera allow any dispersal of forces in the present? Would Zibechi see the struggle of the future as requiring any reunification of our power at all? For Enrique Dussel, the ‘‘dissolution of the state’’ (what Zibechi calls the dispersal of power) is— much like the classless society—a normative postulate that serves to orient our strategy for the present.≤ But he insists that a grave error is committed when we confuse or substitute that ideal, that ultimate horizon toward which we aim, for strategy itself, deeming the destruction of the state our immediate task in the present. The mortal danger posed by such an error can be seen in the position that some contemporary anarchists assume toward the process underway in Venezuela: blinded by the perceived need to destroy the state now, they fail to see the revolutionary forest for the trees. Prioritizing our ultimate aims in the present can lead to a blindness to how it is that revolutionary change occurs and how it has been occurring in Venezuela . Rather than the revolution underway in Venezuela, then, some see merely the continuity of the state, of corrupt institutions, of charismatic leaders. It is in contrast to this view—the blind insistence that all power must be immediately dispersed in the here and now—that Primera describes his people as Wood fragrant of jasmine and co√ee, precious wood, precious wood, wood of hope, wood of song. Let us make this wood into a hand 236 conclusion to strike powerfully at those who forever strike, strike, strike at us. In other words, we must first strategically accumulate, consolidate, and develop our own power if we are ever going to be in a position to ‘‘disperse’’ the power of our enemies later. Lest this distinction provoke anxiety (as I am certain it will), I will...