Caracas Chronicles

“The state needs, on the contrary, to be very sternly educated by the people” —Karl Marx

No one expected such a landslide victory as the one obtained by Donald Trump on November 5^th. Far from being a conventional electoral triumph, this victory now leaves the American leader and his allies —even after trying to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election with unfounded accusations of fraud— in a position to control the three branches of government, with scenarios that were unthinkable in the past now on the table.

It seems that autocracies have won the epic struggle that, according to current President Joe Biden, they were waging against democracies. And how!

Not only did the majority of American voters support the autocracy in that supposed fight, but so did the Biden administration itself, which firmly backed the government of Bibi Netanyahu, considered an autocracy by many sectors inside and outside Israel, in a military offensive on Gaza that, according to the United Nations, “is consistent with genocide.” When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on November 21^st  for war crimes, Biden called the order “outrageous.”

Meanwhile, further south, the dismantling of the remnants of universal suffrage in Venezuela coincides with these processes of democratic backsliding that are also occurring in other countries and regions, revealing what may well be a global trend.

In a period of global democratic backsliding such as the one we are witnessing, the democratization of Venezuela is an extremely complex issue. Is it even possible? Would the reconstruction of infrastructure, including republican and liberal institutions, be enough to achieve it? Do we have any truly democratic tendency in Venezuelan politics at this time?

To begin with, liberal democracy and liberalism are not exactly the same. What defines democracy is the ability of ordinary people to actively shape the public sphere —not just the existence of liberties, basic rights, or the division of powers, as important as these are. Democratization appears when ordinary people acquire a certain capacity to “rule over their rulers”, as in the exemplary cases of the conquest of the right to strike and universal suffrage that totally changed the political game by giving ordinary people a leverage they did not previously have.

But in Venezuela traditionally, as we have pointed out before, democracy is taken as the pact between elites that represent a passive citizen who is a sort of eternal child.

With the opposition primaries, unexpectedly, began a process of radical rejection of the dictatorship and the country’s situation by ordinary people started to be expressed in political discourse and activity, leading to the paradoxical victory of July 28 which, at the same time, implied the naive belief that the government would fall under the weight of the votes and a wave of unprecedented activism and politicization. María Corina Machado, without an apparatus and facing an autocracy clinging to power, sought the empowerment of ordinary people who, many times, ended up paying a high price for it.

Both this wave and the response of the Madurato —broad-based repression— have caused a certain democratic radicalization in the opposition, which forces it to place greater emphasis on struggle and citizen mobilization. In fact, the traditional party-based discourse, which tended toward collaboration with the regime, emerged greatly weakened from the electoral situation. As shown by the widespread rejection of Foro Cívico and, in general, of the idea of “turning the page,” the political culture of Puntofijismo —liberal but oligarchic and centered on the party, its cogollo and its great men— seems to be bankrupt. This, even in the context of “hyper-repression,” represents an invaluable opportunity.

Elections —which used to be the core of a culture centered on the party apparatus, the candidate and the demagogic campaign— were the scene for the unusual prominence of the comanditos and the polling station witnesses, who shifted the focus from the party machinery to more horizontal and social forms of organization, with a more activist character and less focused on party militancy, in a kind of “electoral rebellion” that began with the primaries and in fact lasted until two days after the elections, with protests and symbolic decapitations of statues of Hugo Chávez.

For a truly democratic transition to occur, and not just a restoration of liberal and republican institutions (assuming, of course, that all this is possible), a similar dynamic would be needed, but much more durable and less evanescent: at the very least, a totally new ecosystem of parties would have to emerge, as well as a plurality of non-partisan political and social organizations. The Constitution, which has major design flaws, would have to be —at the very least— reformed and, as in the rest of a changing planet, new institutions would have to be invented: unprecedented ones.

For example, unprecedented in our context would be a decentralization focused more on municipalities and cities than on states, establishing real-time monitoring of public spending or a particularly strong Ombudsman’s Office, along with other more radical proposals: a social security system adapted to these times when wage labor tends to disappear —with institutions such as a basic income that could begin with women and retirees— and severe forms of social control over parties and elected “representatives” in a context of daily struggle to control the flow of public money.

The essential thing is to understand that simply rebuilding the liberal-republican institutionality —however utopian that may seem now— is not enough to democratize the country. If we take the term “democracy” seriously and rigorously, it will be necessary to build the means both to pressure and disjoint the dictatorship, and to collectively shape the public sphere: before, during and after a hypothetical transition.

And these means have to do, first of all, with creating the capacity to make whoever is in power respond and define the field of action: that is, with creating means for accountability and putting pressure on historically arbitrary, corrupt and inefficient authorities and rulers.

The situation of the detained teenagers and the horrible death of the electoral witness Jesús Martínez not only express the brutality of an authoritarian offensive, but also the exacerbation of the predatory relationship between the police and the military with the civilian population that has existed for decades, in a certain sense since the founding of the republic, and that was tolerated and permitted by all the civilian governments of the 20th century before being encouraged by the autocracy of the 21st century.

Changing this has to do, of course, with a reconstruction of the judiciary and the Ombudsman’s Office and with profound reforms not only in police institutions, but also in military ones. That, alongside the construction of structures of activism and civil disobedience that we do not have, the full recovery of freedom of expression and the invention of formal and informal systems of consequences and punishments for the authorities and rulers —whoever they may be.

To the extent that, with Trump’s victory, some seek to renew the recurring fantasies of an external solution to internal problems, we must keep our eyes on the ball of internal politics —of social organization— and try to separate the imagination that can change reality from the fantasy that evades it. And the political imagination that we need, here and now, is to find ways to change not only the Madurato but the Venezuelan state and its entire political class: to make them respond and obey.

If we do not develop for ourselves the ability to govern those who govern us, then no one will do it.