Congratulations to the Venezuelan nation, which yesterday spontaneously took to the streets to celebrate, with concern, yes, but with irrepressible joy, the fall of the Chavista dictatorship. Meanwhile, the left-wing press mourned the intervention as a blatant violation of international law or an attack on Venezuela’s national sovereignty. “Coup d’état,” the writers at El Salto Diario even called it, that circle of sages.
The clash in this story between the protagonist’s joy, however tempered, and the worry and alarm of the external left-wing narrator can only be explained by the ideologues’ position, that can be boiled down to: what matters are ideas, not people’s lives. So yesterday, the left’s anti-imperialist ideology knew it was losing a battle, while Venezuelan citizens could see, clearly, that a U.S. “turbo-capitalist, neoliberal regime” could not possibly be worse than the current Chavista tyranny.
This is not only because poverty in the United States is lower even than in Spain (the country I’m writing from), and therefore practically subterranean compared with Venezuela’s; but also because under the U.S. political system, you can write what you think without being kidnapped by the state. That’s what they call the rule of law.
If ideas are what matter, then the most worrying things will be symbolic acts. And that is what produces two stark contradictions in the left-wing ideologue here: first, the inconsistency of listening to the victim. Second, the inconsistency of refusing to analyze reality.
The anti-capitalist left is always with the people, always on the people’s side. Ever since Marx framed the working class as the subject of history, but especially since the 1960s with the development of what came to be called Feminist Standpoint Theory, the left has waved the flag of listening to the marginalized, the oppressed, the lumpen; while, it has very carefully selected which oppressed, which marginalized person, which lumpen it will listen to. Because if the people contradict the communist, then the people are wrong.
On the other hand, in order not to betray its own fantastical story, it is forced to abandon any analysis of reality. Take, for example, The Shock Doctrine, where the journalist Naomi Klein lamented that after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans schools were privatized under the “charter” model. Her entire narrative centered on the fight against privatization, and once the schools were privatized… the story ended. Ended? Shouldn’t the story begin there? What happened afterwards? Naomi isn’t interested, because the symbolic battle was lost. And remember: all the left cares about are symbols, appearances, (fachadas, in spanish). Who cares if the population could keep getting an education, if dropout rates didn’t rise, and if even marginalized communities (low-income people or those with special needs) achieved better academic results on average than before privatization. That’s what later academic studies show. But none of that matters: “the symbol fell, reality no longer matters,” Naomi seems to suggest.
In the same way, the left-wing press now laments the American “invasion” of Venezuela (do we yet know how many hundreds of civilians have lost their lives?). Will they bother to study poverty in the country over the coming years? No. What worries them is losing the symbolic battle against “Yankee imperialism”.
You can’t live outside the dialectic of states and empires, gentlemen. Not being aligned with the U.S., as Venezuela wasn’t, doesn’t mean being free and sovereign, it means falling under the tutelage of China and Russia. Is the Chinese empire better than the American one? I don’t know—tell me.
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This piece reflects the author’s views, not necessarily the entire magazine. We welcome a range of pro-liberty perspectives. Send us your pitch or draft.
