So-Called ‘Civil Society’ in Post-Chávez Venezuela
So-Called ‘Civil Society’ in Post-Chávez Venezuela
Written by George Ciccariello-Maher
Wednesday, 03 April 2013 16:55
There is a powerfully dangerous and condescending myth circulating about so-called ‘civil society’ in Venezuela, which goes something like this: as Daniel Levine put it on a recent radio program, “there’s just not independent groups as we conceive of civil society” in Venezuela. Focusing above all on the Communal Council phenomenon, Levine portrays these directly democratic institutions not as the radically participatory experiment they claim to be, but instead as little more than a cynical ruse by the late Hugo Chávez and his movement to enforce political objectives from above.
~snip~
Firstly, the concept of civil society as we conceive it emerged and was cemented in struggles against dictatorship in the Southern Cone and against Soviet bureaucracy in Eastern Europe, displacing the far more critical variant associated with Gramsci. This new version privileges autonomy from the state as the criterion, systematically obscuring other crucial forces from which organizations might want to remain autonomous: imperial powers, the capitalist market, etc.
As a result, many accept as nominally ‘independent’ many forces that are nothing of the sort: private economic interests, NGOs with powerful funders, and foreign-backed political parties. Such forces constituted the bulk of the organized Venezuelan opposition, whose ‘civil’ credentials are questioned by few. Some have therefore described the 2002 coup against Chávez (which was reversed after 48 hours) as a “civil society coup,” and rightly so. It was this appropriation of an uncritical concept of civil society more than anything else that led many Venezuelan Chavistas to abandon the language of civil society at the same time that the anti-Chavistas seized upon it: this concept doesn’t describe what we’re doing, so let them have it.
Secondly, however, and more importantly, this idea that independent organizations do not exist in Venezuela contains a willful neglect of and indeed contempt for the many thousands of popular organizers who have been struggling and continue to struggle autonomously and independently to determine the future of the Revolution. In my recently released book, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution, I buck this trend of conceptual imperialism by talking to these organizers directly and researching their decades-long struggles.
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http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/so-called-civil-society-in-post-chavez-venezuela
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It perfectly illustrates this phenomenon (in Venezuela and beyond) of right-wing associations and individuals acting through covert ways so they can claim "impartiality" and "non-partisanship" and present themselves as representatives of "civil society".
Reminds me of a "popular movement" (elitist whining, in fact) created in Brazil in 2007 named "Cansei" ("I'm tired"
which intended to create popular dissatisfaction with the Worker's Party's government.
"Cansei" was an elitist movement composed by socialites, businessmen and media celebrities (actors, actresses, TV hosts, singers, most of them working for Globo TV), wealthy enough to pay for several ads on TV, billboards, radio, media in general, urging people to protest against the government. The ads consisted of white ridiculously rich people dressed in black and with mourning faces holding signs or wearing T-shirs saying that they were "tired".
Of course, they quickly became a joke, being mocked by the entire population, and some months after insisting in humiliating themselves, they dropped the "movement'.
Several parodies such as the one above were created. The text reads: "We are tired! Tired of not being able to dodge taxes any longer, tired of losing one election after the other, tired of the high cost of botox injections, tired of the bankruptcy of Daslu (fancy boutique-department store investigated for fraud in importation procedures and tax evasion), tired of this lower middle class that now dares to travel by airplane and are starting to think they are people! Ahhhh... we're tired. Enough, enough, enough!"
It's difficult to mock corporate "up with people" campaigns. They make a mockery of "the people" every day with almost every commercial ad, and when they create mock "front-people" for political campaigns, their ideas creak with hypocrisy and falsity.
However, the parodists succeeded in this case.
The Corporate Rulers want a society in which they can buy NGOs, and manufacture them at will, to control the political dialogue, cuz they've got the billions of dollars with which to do so. The chavistas-- the vast poor majority in Venezuela--answer this by organizing and electing a government that helps THEM create REAL public advocacy groups, and the Corporates and their Academics and, of course, their Media "black hole" the entire phenomenon, as if it didn't exist.
This is related to a very big "black hole" I've noticed in ALL Corporate Media articles on Venezuela: The people of the country are missing from the articles! This has been so amazing to me, since the PEOPLE of the Venezuela ARE the news story in almost every case, whether it's an election the Chavez government has won, or a problem the Chavez government hasn't solved that has gotten the Corporate Media all a-lather but that the PEOPLE of Venezuela DON'T seem panicked about, in opinion polls and elections, or whether it's some policy that the PEOPLE of Venezuela elected Chavez to implement (such as kicking Exxon Mobil out of the country and getting a better oil deal for Venezuela, or nationalizing bad actor corporations that break the law, or fair taxation, or fighting hoarding and price fixing, etc.) that the Corporate Rulers hate, the PEOPLE are NOT THERE, in the articles, as the real drivers of beneficial policies, WHO demanded such policies of their government.
Now I see both how they made those demands--through their own self-organized advocacy groups, long before they had a government to encourage and fund them--and WHY the Corporate 'news' articles NEVER mention the PEOPLE of Venezuela and their awesome grass roots organizing. It's not because they don't know what's going on--they surely do--it's because they are scared shitless of the ORGANIZED POOR. They don't even dare mention them, lest the rest of us in the western world get ideas. It's not individuals whom they fear. They can always marginalize individuals. It's the GROUP POWER that now--due to its own efforts--has a government "of, by and for" THE PEOPLE backing these groups that oppose Corporate Rule!
George Ciccariello-Maher provides the missing part of the picture in that Corporate 'news' "black hole" that even I didn't see (and I'm good at peering into Corporate 'news' "black holes" : It is the government-supported GROUPS OF POOR PEOPLE that they dread and hate--and hide, hide, hide from their 'news' consumers. REAL people power! The government backing the People!
And also, as Ciccariello-Maher points out, this power of poor people organization PRE-DATED the Chavez government, and a lot of it remains independent of the government.
Make them all not exist.
