The Left is Democratic Otherwise it isn’t the Left

By Pedro Campos

HAVANA TIMES — Recent events in Venezuela have served to expose this State-Stalinist “Left” which, entrenched in “anti-US imperialism” and its alleged attack “on the revolutionary process in Venezuela”, have turned their back on the struggle of the masses to uphold the democracy that was built under Chavez’s government.

At the head of this movement, we find the Castro dictatorship, its followers and this whole group of “communists and socialists” who continue to, essentially, believe that socialism was “built” from the State in Latin America and Europe. A state led by an erudite elite who knows what needs to be done, starting off with nationalizing large, medium and small-sized companies, “controlling” the market, creating a “new man” and “destroying the bourgeois state to build a new socialist one.”

There have been two more significant features of these “Communists’” ideas:

1- The concentration of property and State control of the economy, at the expense of free, private and associated modes of production and capitalist models.

2- The substitution of a democracy which they call “bourgeois” by another so-called “dictatorship” which is apparently proletarian, the only class within capitalism who has never held power and then has been kept under the chains of wage slavery, but for the State, in its name. Making a perfect base for the authoritarian system.

What does this have to do with collectivization, freedom and emanicipation, Socialism’s great catchphrases?

This Left who sit in meeting rooms and drink capuccino coffees have never understood a single word of Marxism. They have never understood that for Socialism to exist, first you need a social-economic base where free, private or associates modes of production need to dominate, like Classic theorists have pointed at time and time again, which can be never replaced by paid work, nor can it ever be built from the top nor from outside the nation.

This “Left” has never read Marx’s “Capital”, where it explains how in the previous capitalist system which was defined by wage labor as its mode of production, other forms of production are born, grow and develop, on the back of free work, especially associated work, which can be seen in cooperatives. How societies make up the first form of breaking down capitalism with their actions is exposed within this book.

These “communists” don’t understand the fact that it is only via the greater democratization and freedoms which are possible within capitalism that a new post-capitalist, socialist, or whatever you want to call it society, can be born. And that’s because full democracy and freedoms, especially the free market, are what allow the unobstructed progress of free and associated work, a phenomenon which has seen progress in high and medium developed capitalist countries.

In previous writings, I showed that the concept of the Left was intimately linked to the birth of democracy, of power being given to the people and their representatives, in the struggle against the King, during the French Revolution and then with what has always been linked to power and the wellbeing of the masses. Therefore, it is wrong to think that there can be “Left-wing dictatorships”. As a matter of principle, etymologically-speaking, all dictatorships are Right-wing.

It’s simple: a government like Maduro’s can neither be considered Left-wing nor democratic, which is trying to ignore a large popular election in favor of a National Assembly, because it’s controlled by the opposition, which manipulates the election of a Supreme Court; which strangles the private economy financially-speaking; which puts power in the hands of a few bureaucrats; which violates the democratic Constitution voted in during Chavez’s government’; which is refusing to call for a referendum which is recognized by this Constitution and to hold elections for mayors and governors and, on top of this, wants to revoke this democratic constitution and impose another constitution in true Castro-Stalin style by fire and blood, violently repressing those who defend it.

Today, Venezuela is the showcase which defines who is and isn’t the Left. Go there, put your credentials under it and you will be able to identify yourself. Good Luck.

The Left is always democratic or it isn’t the Left.

Notes.

1-1- Capital, Volume 3 (Chapter XXVII “The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production)