Chavez, Allende...From Democratic Socialism to Democratic Eco-Socialism in the 21st Century!

Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, made an enduring mark on the short history of Democratic Socialism.  From 1999-2013, Chavez opened a new chapter for left politics. His tragic death, due to cancer, has been mourned by progressive forces all over the world and his legacy has been defended from the outright propagandistic distortions of the Western media. In a world increasingly subject to the tyranny of transnational capitalist power, Chavez dared to confront neoliberal financialised capitalism with a ‘21^st Century socialism’. This Bolivarian project was anti-imperialist, unstinting in its use of democracy against capitalism (not just electoral democracy  and democratic rights, but also neighbourhood councils in Barrios or urban slums, worker run factories, solidarity economy cooperatives and direct democratic action in the streets) and about state intervention in the economy. There were both redistributive and transformative elements to the Bolivarian Revolution. However, this was not without challenges and neither was it free of mistakes.

Moreover, Chavez was not the first in Latin America to challenge capitalism in this way. Salvador Allende, President of Chile, from 1970-73 did the same. Allende confronted capitalism in the midst of the Cold War and courageously experimented with a peaceful and democratic path to socialism. On September 11, 1973, Allende’s democratically elected government was overthrown in a CIA sponsored military coup and he killed himself before being captured by fascist soldiers. Allende’s democratic socialism was replaced with the first brutal experiment of neoliberal market adjustment, under a fascist military dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet. This ruthless General was a close ally of Reagan and Thatcher, crucial Western leaders championing neoliberalism ( a class project of transnational capital) in the heartlands of capitalism in the 1980s.

Both the Democratic Socialisms, of Chavez and Allende, shared certain common challenges. While they both did not have absolute majorities in their parliaments, both attempted to use state power to initiate radical reforms from above, based on the democratic mandates achieved. These state led projects, from above, threw up challenges of bureaucratisation and corruption. Another challenge shared was the resource base and dependency of their countries economies. Chavez was dependent on rents earned from oil, Allende depended on copper mines. However, both needed to use the wealth created by these commodities to manage international trade and ensure  redistribution. These resource dependencies made their Democratic Socialisms vulnerable to commodity price changes, sabotage and even right wing worker strikes.

In the process of deepening social transformation both were forced to mobilise a democratic bloc of social forces against  a pro-capitalist and imperialist bloc of domestic forces bent on blocking change. This deeply polarised their societies. Moreover, both faced imperialist destabilisation and US sponsored opposition.  Allende tried to ensure this did not escalate into  civil war and maintained a principled commitment to legality and constitutional democracy. At the same time, the democratic left in Chile rallied to late to build and institutionalise peoples power in defense of their democratic revolution. Chavez on the other hand ensured early on and through constitutional reform that popular power was entrenched in driving democratic transformation from below. This proved to  be a crucial defense against the US sponsored military coup in 2002.

A democratic path to socialism is not an easy road, but neither is it impossible. Actually, it is the only way forward for the left in the 21^st Century.  Allende and Chavez have given us valuable historical experience to learn from.

First, building, institutionalising and deepening peoples power has to come before electoral power. Electoral and state power must merely strengthen whats already happening from below. In this context the solidarity economy, community owned renewable energy, localised food sovereignty, participatory budgeting in communities, local community controlled media, democratically managed schools, community policing forums and so on,  become important.  This means the state must be embedded or surrounded by peoples power to ensure it can be held accountable, prevent corruption and can also be defended against imperialist destabilisation. Even losing electoral power or even not having it does not  stop such a project from continuing from below. More democracy, not less is the key! This also means grass roots collective leadership drives and coordinates change with left forces in the state.  

Second, we live in an age in which capital is given policy concessions, enabling conditions to make super profits and power to lead. This has led to obscene wealth for the few, a crisis ridden world and unviable societies. Patrice Motsepe, Cyril Ramaphosa, for example, are part of this super-rich sometimes called ‘billionaires’ or ‘plutocrats’. Their wealth is the result of the inequality of the majority.  This has to end, while appreciating the future does not lie with the rich but with workers, the poor and the middle class. It is time to turn popular power against these elites and ensure popular classes lead society. This means the impulse for transformation, anchored below, must form the basis for a new symbolic politics of alternatives for society and which  needs to be presented to the country. These actual experiences of advancing alternatives have to be the content for a national dialogue for unity and advancing the interests of all South Africans. Put differently, national unity has to be actively promoted on the terms of workers and the poor as the basis to call for capital and the rich to make sacrifices. For example, capital must be blocked from making profits in renewable energy so that feed in tariffs can be put in place to enable poor households to benefit from renewable energy generation and for community owned renewable energy to come to the fore. The ‘sacrifice’ of capital means society benefits, particularly the workers, the poor and the middle class. Another example will be public transport: capital out, the state in to ensure all of South Africa benefits.

Third, besides grounding socialist change in radical democracy, pluralism and ethical values there is a need to deal with the challenge of imperialism differently. Instead of confronting imperialism, in the context of a unipolar world order, the redistribution of power going on in the world today holds out the prospect for a post-hegemonic world in which multiple centres of power co-exist. This requires a new transformative regionalisation, strategic state alliances, strengthening of multi-lateralism and transnational solidarity across global civil society.

Finally, it is important to have a democratic plan  to move beyond commodity dependent economies. In the case of South Africa we have to advance a transition beyond a carbon based economy, dependent on the minerals energy complex, and which is contributing to green house gases and global warming. Human induced climate change will  effect workers, the poor and the middle class the most.  In this context, Democratic Socialism has to be a Democratic Eco-Socialism in the 21^st Century!

Interview With Real News - Platinum Mineworkers and Political Rupture

See interview with Real News about struggles in platinum  mining and how this is is realigning South African politics.

SA Platinum Miners Struggle Creates Political Rupture

Searching For Sugarman Sixto Rodriguez : A South African and now ‘American Legend’?

The wonderful documentary by Malik Bendjelloul, Searching for Sugarman, , functions in various ways. It brings to life the elusive and unknown story of Sixto Rodriguez, popularly known as ‘Sugarman’ or ‘Rodriguez’. It addresses itself to the fiction of the tragic demise of Rodriguez  and in the end the reality of where Rodriguez ended up, since his disappearance, after he recorded his last album in 1971. It is investigative, revealing and heart rending. Its power lies in demonstrating that Sixto Rodgriguez was a folk musician who did not clinch a commercial and cultural following in the United States, but unknown to him, he was a celebrated musician in South Africa.  For South African writer Rian Malan (See Mail and Guardian, February 8 to 14, Friday section, pp. 8&9) understanding Rodriguez through the lens of South African hippiedom, there is a simple essentialist and binary explanation for this. On the one hand, South African hippies were not racist ( really? How many shared a Rodriguez album with a non-white during apartheid?) while middle class white hippie America was  and could not  appreciate the subversive message of an American Latino (born of Mexican migrant workers). Hence the likes of Bob Dylan thrives and becomes the leading cultural icon of America’s hippie generation and an American commercially constituted legend.  While there might be an element of truth about racism prevalent in hippie America, Malan’s generalisation of the non-racial orientation of South African hippies, gives us a very simplistic appreciation of why Rodriguez chose to abandon his musical career and why he was celebrated in South Africa.

Malan’s narrative fails to appreciate two realities in Rodriguez’s existence. The first the political economy of a commercialised music industry in the US, assimilating and blunting the subversive edge of sixties folk music. Those who survived and came out on top, tamed their radical folk roots and even in the end abandoned it to be commercially successful. This is where Bob Dylan ended up.  Rodriguez, chose a harder path, informed by  a sense of fidelity to what his music was all about.  Rodriguez in acknowledging his commercial failure, actually chose at the same time, to affirm his radical, existentially authentic and anti-establishment message. He chose the path of conviction and authenticity, themes very strong  in his lyrics. This is what lives on in South Africa; the authenticity of the subversive folk musician Rodriguez. This is what was capsuled and celebrated in South Africa for the past four decades.  

Moreover, Malan fails to accept, which Sugarman the documentary touches on superficially, that Rodriguez also chose to live within the realities of his situation. He was the child of Mexican migrant workers, a working class child, who understood that the reproduction of his own family and himself as a human was based on him working to earn an income. If music, as work, could not generate such a life supporting income, he was going to find it through being a construction worker. In a sense, Malan fails to appreciate the deeper existential philosophy of Rodriguez the worker and how this informed his choice to abandon the life of a worker in music.

 In addition, Searching for Sugarman functions  as a bridge between the star struck universe of a predominantly white  and South African hippy following and  its hero. Such a following yearned to venerate the legend they constructed, in their midst. It was about experiencing the celebrity spectacle. Sugarman had to be consumed, live, on stage.  More specifically, South African hippies wanted the fairytale,  they wanted the ‘knight in shining armour’,  Cinderalla or Arthur to appear before them. It was in essence all about experiencing the commodified celebrity spectacle.  This is  a challenge to Malan’s rather one sided reading of  Sugarman as merely  ending  Sixto Rodriguez’s ignorance about being a superstar in South Africa and conferring such a status on him.  The bridging role of Sugarman is about bringing together these two parallel universes: a celebrity struck mainly white progressive audience (and for Malan mainly hippies) and a Latino construction worker called Sixto Rodriguez, who was also, at one point in his life a music worker.

Malan goes further to suggest that Sugarman functions to achieve a crucial part of the American dream. It constitutes Sixto Rodriguez as an American legend, mainly through South African hippie veneration. This is what Sugarman and in the end Sixto Rodriguez is all about. An American legend whose time has come and who can now make money and live happy thereafter…a sort of superficial hippyish ending to his life! One cannot help feeling that Malan and his hippyish understanding and appropriation  of Rodriguez misses the deeper and real Rodriguez.

It is important for Sixto Rodriguez, a radical folk musician whose two albums Cold Fact and Coming From Reality informed a sub-culture in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle, be recognised and celebrated. As a young anti-apartheid activist in the 1980s I experienced him together with the more radical Dylan (the  non-commercial Dylan), Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen and later Tracy Chapman, amongst others. And of course there was also Bob Marley and the message of Reggae. We should not let Malan’s reading of Sugarman take away from this function the movie plays. More importantly, we do not need Rodriguez to be a commercialised American legend to be celebrated.  The awards received by this documentary are well deserved and resurrection of the radical folk music of Rodriguez it achieves through mainstream and social media, through rocketing album sales, a few more concerts and well deserved income for the music worker Rodgriguez are all heartening.

However, Sugarman begins something which can only be accomplished by a deeper appreciation of the real Rodriguez. According to one of his co-worker mates in the documentary, he was a ‘silk worm who translated the raw material of reality into poetry’. This begs deeper questions about the ideological and existential make up of Rodriguez the ‘silkworm’. What prompted him as a construction worker to dress up with a tuxedo in worksites? What  kind of philosophy did he read and enjoy? Why did he invite militant ‘Latino activists’ on to the stage when he performed in California during the short span as a music worker? What are the social conditions and understandings that inform the militant humanism running through his music? What were the social and political questions that prompted Rodriguez to enter an electoral race to be the mayor of Detroit? What ethical values informed Rodriguez’s politics? Why did Rodriguez ensure his class location never became a barrier to giving himself and his family a culturally rich existence? The lyrics in Rodriguez’s songs challenge  the in-authencity of capitalist individualism, the cruelty of the powerful, exploitation and the deep alienation of  capitalist modernity. Despite the importance of Sugarman it does not assist  us in understanding the  sub-soil of Rodriguez’s existential consciousness that gave birth to his captivating and poetic lyrics. We encounter  a working class Rodriguez  but without  a full appreciation of his intellectual depth. This can only come to the fore with a serious biography on Rodriguez, involving him in clarifying who he is, what life experiences and what perspectives of the human condition engendered his songs. To reach such depths such a biography  should not be written by a hippie. Lets hope someone with the time, energy and commitment to the real Rodriguez comes forward to write  a biography which would be an important  part of 20^th century music history.

Moreover, Sugarman prompts us to take Rodriguez beyond hippie nostalgia and veneration and to ask what does the radical Rodriguez, the authentic voice of folk music, mean for us today. For workers engaged in struggles for improved wage and living conditions  in South Africa’s winelands and on the mines, these words from the song Cause in the album Coming From Reality have a profound resonance.

‘Cause I lost my job two weeks before Christmas

And talked to Jesus at the sewer

And the Pope said it was none of his God damn business…

Cause they told me everybody’s got to pay their dues

And I explained that I had overpaid them…

Cause how many times can you wake up in this comic book and plant flowers?’

For the deepening inequalities of our time, brought about by capitalist fat cats, including American and South African hippies occupying managerial boardrooms in transnational corporations,   Rodriguez’s song Sandrevan Lullaby, for instance, highlights the importance of a capitalist civilisation, centred in the US, being in a state of decline. These lyrics from the song make the point poetically:

‘Judges with metermaid hearts

Order supermarket justice starts

Frozen children inner city

Walkers in the paper rain

Waiting for the knights that never came

The hijacked trying so hard to be pretty…

America gains another pound

Only time will bring some people around

Idols and flags are slowly melting

Another shower of rice

To pair it for some will suffice

The mouthful asks for a second helping…’

The radical voice of Rodriguez  speaks to our contemporary human condition. It is a voice that chimes with the message of the Occupy movement in the US against the  1 per cent and  the movements struggling against the oppressions of a post-apartheid South Africa. His universal militant humanist message will continue to speak to the ongoing struggles of the oppressed all over the world.

Finally, for Sixto (if ever he gets to the read this) if there is a third album in the making, please don’t abandon your authentic and militant humanist voice for commercialised legendary status.  In South Africa whether white or black, that have encountered you, you have in the end given us a genuine transformative  experience, as we kept your militant humanist voice alive. We love you, as  the authentic  voice that comes through your lyrics, as you exist and in how you bring us into confrontation with  the realities of our time. On the stage you are a music worker, this is a cold fact in our common reality. I am confident you will not  surrender!!!