chebol
26th July 2006, 06:32
Weighty Alternatives for Latin America
Discussion with Heinz Dieterich
Carsten Schiefer
The following is a conversation with Heinz Dieterich about his
friendship with Hugo Chávez, irregular war, the new Venezuelan
military doctrine, and an account of the Bolivarian revolution in
Latin America.
Heinz Dieterich is a sociologist and economist. He has been a
professor at Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City since
1977. Since the 1990s, he has been working on "Socialism in the 21st
Century," also called the "New Historical Project." He has published
more than 20 books in 15 countries. He participated in the Rosa
Luxemburg Conference this year.
The following is part of an interview with Dieterich conducted by
Carsten Schiefer for Unsere Zeit, the German Communist Party
newspaper, which appeared in complete form in December as Number 21 of
the "Marxistische Blätter Flugschriften" series: Uprising in Venezuela
(Essen: Neue Impulse Publishers, 2006. 32 pp., 3 Euros.
[email protected]). -- Dave Wagner
------------------------------------------
Q: One hears tales of your close friendship with Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez, that he listens closely to your advice. Is that true?
How did it happen?
HD: The whole thing developed after the publication of documents on
Simón Bolívar that were thought to be lost and which I published in
book form after they were recovered. Chávez read the book while he
was imprisoned after the failed rebellion of 1992.
In 1999, I learned that Chávez had been elected president of Venezuela
from my friend Ali Rodriguez, who was formerly the minister of energy
and is now the foreign minister. I resolved to fly to Venezuela to
see for myself whether a serious alternative for Latin America was
really developing there or merely another new bourgeois government had
come to power. When I attempted to contact the new president, he
called me. He said he was indebted to me because he had read my
Bolívar book in prison and had drawn strength from it. That led to a
series of meetings and an extended interview.
Out of this encounter a longer friendship developed, and I traveled to
Venezuela a number of times. In December 2001, I sent him a paper in
which I predicted that the military would conduct a putsch against
him. Unfortunately, he did not take the prediction seriously. Later
we developed other ties, and I produced some theoretical material
which he came to regard as quite plausible and helpful in that
concrete situation. Nevertheless, the term "graduate civil servants
[assessors]," used by the Venezuelan public, is misused. We were once
close to agreeing upon cooperation on an institutional level. In the
end, however, I did not do so, because I never wanted to leave Mexico
just as a functionary, a politically integrated intellectual, nor did
I want to become an analyst bound to limit his liberty to criticize
the process. Thus it remained a beautiful friendship, out of which
Chávez takes what appears useful to him. For example, he adopted the
concept of the "Latin American Power Bloc -- Regional Block of Power,"
which I developed. I also contributed the idea of a "socialism of the
21st century," along with a few other things, in which my modest
theoretical contributions can probably help to positively support the
process.
Q: The news magazine Der Spiegel hinted that you have a say in
Venezuela's military strategy. And in fact, over the last year a new
military doctrine has been put in place. What is new about it and how
large was your role in it?
HD: Venezuela's new military doctrine is what we call an integrated
national territorial defense, but since the year 2000 it has been
better known as the doctrine of irregular war. It's the same strategy
used by everyone who is faced with an enemy that is much stronger
technologically, economically, and demographically. The tendency
toward this defense doctrine has been worldwide. Brazil has also made
this change.
What's new about it is that it was forged out of experiences since the
war in Vietnam, the military resistance in Iraq, and the understanding
that extraordinary military power like that of the United States
cannot be broken with conventional forces but rather only through what
Mao called a long and continuous people's war. Irregular war also
refers to a situation in which the front and the rear are mixed
together, with civilians, militias, and soldiers creating a single
fighting unit using a lower level of technology. Essentially, one
needs only six or seven weapons systems. All of that is the condensed
version of 2000 years of military doctrine of the weak, updated in
response to new forms of aggression by the U.S. It's only logical
that Venezuela would adopt this doctrine in view of the real military
threats coming from the U.S. There is no other way to survive a
military conflict with the U.S.
What did I have to do with all that? Der Spiegel probably did me too
much honor. Since 1999, I have gotten to know some of the military
people quite well. I am friendly with people who participated in the
military-civilian rebellion at that time, e.g. today's Tourism
Minister, Lieutenant Colonel Wilmar Castro, and the present Commander
in Chief of the Army, General Raúl Baduel. I also know the Commander
in chief of the Navy. I have thus rather many acquaintances and even
some friends among high-ranking military commanders. . . .
Q: In 2005, Venezuela introduced a new national bank. What's the plan there?
HD: The key idea involves the modernization of the role of the central
bank, to get rid of an outdated monetarism that has blocked the
economic and social development of Venezuela.
There are basically two notions of what a central bank should do. One
is the orthodox monetarist view, which restricts itself to the
manipulation of liquidity in an effort to control inflation. That's a
role abandoned by larger nations years ago. The prototype of the
newer interpretation of the role of the central bank is that of Alan
Greenspan, who on the one hand acts as a guardian of the value of
currency and on the other gives equal weight to unemployment, all the
while keeping an eye on the business cycle.
The central bank in Venezuela was occupied by people opposed to the
Bolivarian project. They refused to accept that the democratically
elected government had the right to restructure the institution
according to the new requirements. They blocked attempts to use
surpluses for capital investment, and they blocked every kind of
productive assistance of the sort that Greenspan or the European
Central Bank would provide. . . .
Q: How would you characterize the direction of the Bolivarian
revolution in Latin America? How far has it come?
HD: I would say that one could characterize the process in terms of
five macrodynamics. The first is the development of a state
capitalism of the kind Friedrich List propagated in Germany 180 years
ago and in Venezuela is designated as indigenous development. That's
nothing new. The English invented it; the Germans and Japanese copied
it. Today, China and the Asian tigers are following this path because
it's the only kind of development that is possible today within the
context of world capitalism. One could speak of a kind of state
capitalism of a Keynesian character that includes national dignity.
The second tendency is the defense against the Monroe Doctrine, which
is automatically invoked by this development strategy. The third
macrodynamic is the intention to arrive at a kind of socialism, in
other words to begin the creation of structures and attitudes that can
lead to the transition to socialism.
The fourth is based on the fact that neither a democratic
socio-economic development nor a defense against U.S. and European
interests or even the separate development of socialism in Venezuela
is possible. It's possible only in the context of a Latin American
regional bloc. Venezuela surely will not be able to develop
economically along social-democratic lines or make a transition to
socialism without a regional bloc that includes Cuba, Brazil,
Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay.
The result of all is that the emphasis of the measures taken by the
government is based on the development perspective of market
economics. Venezuela is naturally a capitalist third world economy,
completely distorted in its structure of production because everything
depends upon oil; it is completely distorted as well in its lack of
diversification in the global market, without a single technology for
the future, and so forth.
On the one hand, the government must concentrate its efforts on
remedial action, while on the other improving the level of labor power
and combating outright poverty. From the latter come measures such as
the literacy campaign, the opening of new schools and universities and
health clinics. That is at the center of the political task.
At the same time, one attempts to make some headway at the socialist
project, first of all by beginning to think collectively. In January
2005, Chávez did not tell the World Social Forum, "We are building
socialism"; instead, he invited people to think about what a socialism
of the 21st century might look like. Together with the Latin American
Power Bloc, that takes up 90 per cent of the activities and resources
of the government.
The last large dynamic is the bourgeois counter-revolution advanced by
the domestic oligarchy and the reactionary sectors of world
capitalism.
Q: You state that, in middle range and in the long run, it is the
economic elite who set the political course for a country. You are
advocating a new kind of Keynesian development. But your Keynesianism
proposes to stabilize capitalism rather than dispose of it. One could
deduce from that that you want to strengthen the private economy
rather than prepare the way for socialism, which seems paradoxical.
HD: We'll have to see which sectors of the economy are strengthened.
If the subsidies flow to large industry, transnational corporations,
or wealthy landowners, that would of course strengthen international
capital and the oligarchy. Some of these concerns of course have hung
on to some subsidies; that is simply a question of their power. For
example, Chávez is not in a position to break from the large oil
concerns. The great oil companies of the U.S. and Russia are in
place, and oil concessions are one method of applying the brakes to
pressures from the U.S. But the bulk of the economic development must
be organized around the small producers.
In my view, one can only do today in Venezuela what Lenin did in the
New Economic Policy. Every other attempt to make steps toward
socialism under today's conditions would lead rapidly to the collapse
of the system because there is no basis of power from which to execute
it. The bourgeois state has not been destroyed, it has merely
reorganized itself into a new way of governing. The church has not
lost its influence. Eighty percent of the mass media are in the hands
of large companies opposed to the government. Also, the kind of
correlation of power that would allow for a repetition of what
happened in Cuba or the Soviet Union is lacking.
The new economic policy must be arranged in such a way that the social
sectors that until now have been sidelined are strengthened: small
farmers, industrial workers, small businesses. Naturally, that does
not lead automatically to socialism. But a parallel development is
made by devising structures for an economy of equivalence. That's the
decisive difference: It's not going to be a matter of making a
democratic revolution first and following it sometime later with a
socialist revolution. It's a matter of doing both at the same time
along parallel paths. That is the new, Latin American solution:
safeguard against the Monroe Doctrine for survival while introducing
socialist development.
In other revolutions, how was the step toward socialism taken? Lenin
defined different requirements for different times. First, there was
electrification. That meant the insight that the objective conditions
for socialism did not exist -- they could be only created. That
allowed for the collectivization of agriculture. The whole movement
of farm collectives was a result of the political necessity, for the
future of the revolution, of bringing under party control the
potential within the population of making a decision for it. That was
the deciding factor. And Lenin realized, of course, that the Soviet
Union would remain bourgeois in the medium term if the peasants were
not brought under the ideological direction of the party and the
workers.
With the great leap forward, Mao tried the same thing. Against an
"ocean of individual properties," he was supposed to be able to
establish, in the mid-1950s, an economically and culturally
collectivized economy. He failed in the attempt, and that opened the
doors in the medium term for a resurgence of the market economy.
That's the situation in every transitional phase, one that Chávez,
too, cannot escape. He found an established power structure that had
the two previously mentioned strategies for development, and to them
he attached a third: socialism. He is making the attempt. Whether
finally the social-democratic capitalist or the socialist direction
will predominate, we don't know. In the Soviet Union and in China,
the bourgeois direction was taken. Until now, all socialist
transitions have broken up in the second phase. In the first phase,
the seizure of power succeeded, but the construction of the new
socialist institutions in economics, politics, etc. did not function
in the end. And Chávez is in this crucial situation. The seizure of
power to a large extent succeeded, though not as decisively as we
wish.
The question is whether we will be more successful in the formative
stage than the Soviet Union and China, or whether we will also fail.
We have one advantage over both of these historical examples: we are
clear today about what a non-market economy is, and we have technical
capacities that did not exist in the other two examples. For that
reason I would say that today, for the first time, the objective
conditions exist that can be used to convert this transition phase
into a decision for socialism.
But in any case it must all be done democratically. If at some point
the people say, "We have reached the level of development of Costa
Rica and that's good enough for us, we don't want any socialist
experiments in Venezuela," then there is nothing to be done.
Democracy means that the majority rules. If the majority is satisfied
with quasi-first world social conditions and does not wish to go any
farther, socialism cannot be imposed.
Discussion with Heinz Dieterich
Carsten Schiefer
The following is a conversation with Heinz Dieterich about his
friendship with Hugo Chávez, irregular war, the new Venezuelan
military doctrine, and an account of the Bolivarian revolution in
Latin America.
Heinz Dieterich is a sociologist and economist. He has been a
professor at Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City since
1977. Since the 1990s, he has been working on "Socialism in the 21st
Century," also called the "New Historical Project." He has published
more than 20 books in 15 countries. He participated in the Rosa
Luxemburg Conference this year.
The following is part of an interview with Dieterich conducted by
Carsten Schiefer for Unsere Zeit, the German Communist Party
newspaper, which appeared in complete form in December as Number 21 of
the "Marxistische Blätter Flugschriften" series: Uprising in Venezuela
(Essen: Neue Impulse Publishers, 2006. 32 pp., 3 Euros.
[email protected]). -- Dave Wagner
------------------------------------------
Q: One hears tales of your close friendship with Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez, that he listens closely to your advice. Is that true?
How did it happen?
HD: The whole thing developed after the publication of documents on
Simón Bolívar that were thought to be lost and which I published in
book form after they were recovered. Chávez read the book while he
was imprisoned after the failed rebellion of 1992.
In 1999, I learned that Chávez had been elected president of Venezuela
from my friend Ali Rodriguez, who was formerly the minister of energy
and is now the foreign minister. I resolved to fly to Venezuela to
see for myself whether a serious alternative for Latin America was
really developing there or merely another new bourgeois government had
come to power. When I attempted to contact the new president, he
called me. He said he was indebted to me because he had read my
Bolívar book in prison and had drawn strength from it. That led to a
series of meetings and an extended interview.
Out of this encounter a longer friendship developed, and I traveled to
Venezuela a number of times. In December 2001, I sent him a paper in
which I predicted that the military would conduct a putsch against
him. Unfortunately, he did not take the prediction seriously. Later
we developed other ties, and I produced some theoretical material
which he came to regard as quite plausible and helpful in that
concrete situation. Nevertheless, the term "graduate civil servants
[assessors]," used by the Venezuelan public, is misused. We were once
close to agreeing upon cooperation on an institutional level. In the
end, however, I did not do so, because I never wanted to leave Mexico
just as a functionary, a politically integrated intellectual, nor did
I want to become an analyst bound to limit his liberty to criticize
the process. Thus it remained a beautiful friendship, out of which
Chávez takes what appears useful to him. For example, he adopted the
concept of the "Latin American Power Bloc -- Regional Block of Power,"
which I developed. I also contributed the idea of a "socialism of the
21st century," along with a few other things, in which my modest
theoretical contributions can probably help to positively support the
process.
Q: The news magazine Der Spiegel hinted that you have a say in
Venezuela's military strategy. And in fact, over the last year a new
military doctrine has been put in place. What is new about it and how
large was your role in it?
HD: Venezuela's new military doctrine is what we call an integrated
national territorial defense, but since the year 2000 it has been
better known as the doctrine of irregular war. It's the same strategy
used by everyone who is faced with an enemy that is much stronger
technologically, economically, and demographically. The tendency
toward this defense doctrine has been worldwide. Brazil has also made
this change.
What's new about it is that it was forged out of experiences since the
war in Vietnam, the military resistance in Iraq, and the understanding
that extraordinary military power like that of the United States
cannot be broken with conventional forces but rather only through what
Mao called a long and continuous people's war. Irregular war also
refers to a situation in which the front and the rear are mixed
together, with civilians, militias, and soldiers creating a single
fighting unit using a lower level of technology. Essentially, one
needs only six or seven weapons systems. All of that is the condensed
version of 2000 years of military doctrine of the weak, updated in
response to new forms of aggression by the U.S. It's only logical
that Venezuela would adopt this doctrine in view of the real military
threats coming from the U.S. There is no other way to survive a
military conflict with the U.S.
What did I have to do with all that? Der Spiegel probably did me too
much honor. Since 1999, I have gotten to know some of the military
people quite well. I am friendly with people who participated in the
military-civilian rebellion at that time, e.g. today's Tourism
Minister, Lieutenant Colonel Wilmar Castro, and the present Commander
in Chief of the Army, General Raúl Baduel. I also know the Commander
in chief of the Navy. I have thus rather many acquaintances and even
some friends among high-ranking military commanders. . . .
Q: In 2005, Venezuela introduced a new national bank. What's the plan there?
HD: The key idea involves the modernization of the role of the central
bank, to get rid of an outdated monetarism that has blocked the
economic and social development of Venezuela.
There are basically two notions of what a central bank should do. One
is the orthodox monetarist view, which restricts itself to the
manipulation of liquidity in an effort to control inflation. That's a
role abandoned by larger nations years ago. The prototype of the
newer interpretation of the role of the central bank is that of Alan
Greenspan, who on the one hand acts as a guardian of the value of
currency and on the other gives equal weight to unemployment, all the
while keeping an eye on the business cycle.
The central bank in Venezuela was occupied by people opposed to the
Bolivarian project. They refused to accept that the democratically
elected government had the right to restructure the institution
according to the new requirements. They blocked attempts to use
surpluses for capital investment, and they blocked every kind of
productive assistance of the sort that Greenspan or the European
Central Bank would provide. . . .
Q: How would you characterize the direction of the Bolivarian
revolution in Latin America? How far has it come?
HD: I would say that one could characterize the process in terms of
five macrodynamics. The first is the development of a state
capitalism of the kind Friedrich List propagated in Germany 180 years
ago and in Venezuela is designated as indigenous development. That's
nothing new. The English invented it; the Germans and Japanese copied
it. Today, China and the Asian tigers are following this path because
it's the only kind of development that is possible today within the
context of world capitalism. One could speak of a kind of state
capitalism of a Keynesian character that includes national dignity.
The second tendency is the defense against the Monroe Doctrine, which
is automatically invoked by this development strategy. The third
macrodynamic is the intention to arrive at a kind of socialism, in
other words to begin the creation of structures and attitudes that can
lead to the transition to socialism.
The fourth is based on the fact that neither a democratic
socio-economic development nor a defense against U.S. and European
interests or even the separate development of socialism in Venezuela
is possible. It's possible only in the context of a Latin American
regional bloc. Venezuela surely will not be able to develop
economically along social-democratic lines or make a transition to
socialism without a regional bloc that includes Cuba, Brazil,
Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay.
The result of all is that the emphasis of the measures taken by the
government is based on the development perspective of market
economics. Venezuela is naturally a capitalist third world economy,
completely distorted in its structure of production because everything
depends upon oil; it is completely distorted as well in its lack of
diversification in the global market, without a single technology for
the future, and so forth.
On the one hand, the government must concentrate its efforts on
remedial action, while on the other improving the level of labor power
and combating outright poverty. From the latter come measures such as
the literacy campaign, the opening of new schools and universities and
health clinics. That is at the center of the political task.
At the same time, one attempts to make some headway at the socialist
project, first of all by beginning to think collectively. In January
2005, Chávez did not tell the World Social Forum, "We are building
socialism"; instead, he invited people to think about what a socialism
of the 21st century might look like. Together with the Latin American
Power Bloc, that takes up 90 per cent of the activities and resources
of the government.
The last large dynamic is the bourgeois counter-revolution advanced by
the domestic oligarchy and the reactionary sectors of world
capitalism.
Q: You state that, in middle range and in the long run, it is the
economic elite who set the political course for a country. You are
advocating a new kind of Keynesian development. But your Keynesianism
proposes to stabilize capitalism rather than dispose of it. One could
deduce from that that you want to strengthen the private economy
rather than prepare the way for socialism, which seems paradoxical.
HD: We'll have to see which sectors of the economy are strengthened.
If the subsidies flow to large industry, transnational corporations,
or wealthy landowners, that would of course strengthen international
capital and the oligarchy. Some of these concerns of course have hung
on to some subsidies; that is simply a question of their power. For
example, Chávez is not in a position to break from the large oil
concerns. The great oil companies of the U.S. and Russia are in
place, and oil concessions are one method of applying the brakes to
pressures from the U.S. But the bulk of the economic development must
be organized around the small producers.
In my view, one can only do today in Venezuela what Lenin did in the
New Economic Policy. Every other attempt to make steps toward
socialism under today's conditions would lead rapidly to the collapse
of the system because there is no basis of power from which to execute
it. The bourgeois state has not been destroyed, it has merely
reorganized itself into a new way of governing. The church has not
lost its influence. Eighty percent of the mass media are in the hands
of large companies opposed to the government. Also, the kind of
correlation of power that would allow for a repetition of what
happened in Cuba or the Soviet Union is lacking.
The new economic policy must be arranged in such a way that the social
sectors that until now have been sidelined are strengthened: small
farmers, industrial workers, small businesses. Naturally, that does
not lead automatically to socialism. But a parallel development is
made by devising structures for an economy of equivalence. That's the
decisive difference: It's not going to be a matter of making a
democratic revolution first and following it sometime later with a
socialist revolution. It's a matter of doing both at the same time
along parallel paths. That is the new, Latin American solution:
safeguard against the Monroe Doctrine for survival while introducing
socialist development.
In other revolutions, how was the step toward socialism taken? Lenin
defined different requirements for different times. First, there was
electrification. That meant the insight that the objective conditions
for socialism did not exist -- they could be only created. That
allowed for the collectivization of agriculture. The whole movement
of farm collectives was a result of the political necessity, for the
future of the revolution, of bringing under party control the
potential within the population of making a decision for it. That was
the deciding factor. And Lenin realized, of course, that the Soviet
Union would remain bourgeois in the medium term if the peasants were
not brought under the ideological direction of the party and the
workers.
With the great leap forward, Mao tried the same thing. Against an
"ocean of individual properties," he was supposed to be able to
establish, in the mid-1950s, an economically and culturally
collectivized economy. He failed in the attempt, and that opened the
doors in the medium term for a resurgence of the market economy.
That's the situation in every transitional phase, one that Chávez,
too, cannot escape. He found an established power structure that had
the two previously mentioned strategies for development, and to them
he attached a third: socialism. He is making the attempt. Whether
finally the social-democratic capitalist or the socialist direction
will predominate, we don't know. In the Soviet Union and in China,
the bourgeois direction was taken. Until now, all socialist
transitions have broken up in the second phase. In the first phase,
the seizure of power succeeded, but the construction of the new
socialist institutions in economics, politics, etc. did not function
in the end. And Chávez is in this crucial situation. The seizure of
power to a large extent succeeded, though not as decisively as we
wish.
The question is whether we will be more successful in the formative
stage than the Soviet Union and China, or whether we will also fail.
We have one advantage over both of these historical examples: we are
clear today about what a non-market economy is, and we have technical
capacities that did not exist in the other two examples. For that
reason I would say that today, for the first time, the objective
conditions exist that can be used to convert this transition phase
into a decision for socialism.
But in any case it must all be done democratically. If at some point
the people say, "We have reached the level of development of Costa
Rica and that's good enough for us, we don't want any socialist
experiments in Venezuela," then there is nothing to be done.
Democracy means that the majority rules. If the majority is satisfied
with quasi-first world social conditions and does not wish to go any
farther, socialism cannot be imposed.