Redeemers (61 page)

Marx's assault on Bolívar stems directly from his devastating critique of Louis Bonaparte (who reigned as Napoléon III of France between 1852 and 1870). Marx compared Bonaparte's huge bureaucratic and military apparatus to “a frightful parasitic organism that, like a net, constricts the body of French society and stops up all its pores.” He felt that Bolívar showed similar authoritarian tendencies, and his criticism has always been a nightmare for the Latin American left. How to explain it? And what to do now that President Chávez has decreed Bolívar a prophet of “twentieth-century socialism”? In 2007 a book was published in Caracas,
El Bolívar de Marx,
which consists of facing texts by two serious Venezuelan writers of opposing views—the liberal historian Inés Quintero and the Marxist philosopher Vladimir Acosta. They conduct an elegant debate on the subject of Marx's portrait of Bolívar.

Quintero documents the authoritarian side of Bolívar, which has served as an ideological inspiration not only for the Latin American and Venezuelan right, but also for Italian and Spanish fascism. Both Mussolini and Franco identified themselves with Bolívar's Caesarism. The Latin American left had a great need to rehabilitate him—but given its own authoritarian history, it had little to say on this essential point, and could only continue to cite the errors in the text or its Europeanist slant. Then a new apologetic strategy developed, meant to reclaim the hero under the rubric of Ibero-Americanism, and slowly proceed (except for a few isolated objections) toward an anti-imperialist Bolívar. The next step came with the rise to power of Hugo Chávez: “the Return of the Condor.”

Acosta and Quintero both honor the empirical truth of the past. But when they turn to the present, and to the use that the Chavista regime makes of history, their views radically diverge and become a reflection of the intellectual polemic now raging in Venezuela. Acosta explains Marx's reasons for attacking Bolívar, but he does not explain his own reasons for adopting Chávez's Bolivarian narrative. The omission triggers a contradiction. After justifying Bolívar's concentration of power into himself as a wartime imperative, Acosta maintains that historians “on the Right” have denied Bolívar his historical reality—and then he immediately goes on to deny Bolívar the same protection on the left by validating Chávez's idiosyncratic interpretation and appropriation of the Liberator. Acosta calls the Chavista act of faith a “rescuing for the people” of the “human political greatness and enduring Ibero-American significance of Bolívar.” He fails to note the resemblance between his president's “Bolivarian” project and the ahistorical and “sacralizing” perspective for which he takes the rightists to task. He speaks for
his
Bolívar and
his
Chávez:

 

His exploits and much that survives of his thought have been actively incorporated into this struggle of the majority of the Venezuelan people and other South-American peoples to achieve the democracy, equality, independence and sovereignty that his liberating actions offered them and that were denied them by the Creole oligarchies, the only ones that benefited from the process of Independence and whom now it seems possible to defeat.

 

In response, Quintero cites a speech by President Chávez in which he scolds those who take Marx's
Capital
as gospel, divorced from its temporal context. “You have to realize,” said Chávez, “that this was written over there in eighteen-something . . . you have to realize that the world has changed.” The words of Chávez himself underline a contradiction implicit in the use that he has tried to make of Bolívar as a prophet of twenty-first-century socialism. Quintero then offers detailed evidence of Chávez's “arbitrary, selective, and anachronistic use of Bolívar's discourse, without considering the specific historical circumstances Bolívar had to live through.”

This dispute between Acosta and Quintero is not merely academic. Acosta completely understands what Chávez is doing with the memory of Bolívar, and he defends it. In his view it is an objective, genuine, and historically valid renewal of an old process, the interrupted liberation of the continent. For Quintero, the problem is not just the falsified and self-interested use that Chávez makes of Bolívar's life and ideas, but something more pervasive: the ever increasing political application of Chávez's version of the Liberator:

 

If Bolívar serves to justify the “socialism of the twenty-first century,” he can just as usefully endorse the end of the democratic transfer of power and the installment of a dictatorial regime, based on the claim that the example and the word of the father of the nation are being implemented point by point.

 

Beyond the specifics of this polemic, it is clear that Karl Marx, the critic of power, saw the concentration of power in the hands of one man as a historical aberration, in whatever context, whether “bourgeois” France or “barbarous” Latin America. Since his doctrines presupposed a collective affirmation of civil society that would be emancipating and egalitarian, Marx not only rejected personalized political power, he refused any hint of it for himself. Much later in time than his book on Napoléon III and his article on Bolívar, he wrote to his friend Guillermo Bloss in November 1877:

 

Engels and I wouldn't pay a penny for popularity . . . because of my repugnance toward any cult of personality, during the existence of the International, I never permitted them to publish the numerous and bothersome messages I used to receive from many countries, in recognition of my merits. We never answered, except to reprimand them. The first affiliation of myself and Engels to the secret society of communists involved the single condition that they eliminate from their statutes anything that might contribute to the superstitious prostration before authority . . .

 

Marx had been much more than a historical visionary; he had changed the history of the world. But the far-reaching role he played did not include the cult of individual power, or anything resembling Carlyle's cult of heroes, still less any cult of himself. For that reason, despite its prejudices and errors, the polemical text of Marx on Bolívar can be explained by his political convictions against the concentration of authority. And they are valid for any time and place.

 

III

“I don't know anything about Marxism, I never read
El Capital
, I'm not a Marxist or an anti-Marxist,” Hugo Chávez said in 1995. He was telling the truth. Chávez was never, in any strict sense, a Marxist, nor was he familiar with what would have been the uncomfortable side of Marx for him, the critique of power. And Marx had also specifically criticized a political use of the past: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future . . . In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury its dead.”

Whether he knows it or not, Chávez is the progeny not of Plekhanov or Marx, but of Thomas Carlyle. It was Carlyle's historical and political doctrine, condensed in 1841 in the series of lectures published as
On Heroes and Hero-Worship
, that envisioned and legitimated charismatic power in the twentieth century, the same power that Chávez represents, with unequaled incandescence, in the Latin American twenty-first century. Despite what the post-Marxist theorists who now focus upon him might wish to be the truth, Chávez comes from a more anachronistic tradition of ideas. He does not see history in terms of the struggle of classes or masses, or of races or nations, but of heroes who guide “the people,” who incarnate them and redeem them.

Bolivarian Venezuela and its maximum leader have a number of reasons to recognize themselves in Thomas Carlyle. Unlike Marx, Carlyle admired Bolívar, whom he dubbed “the Washington of Colombia”:

 

Melancholy lithographs represent to us a long-faced square-browed man: of stern . . . consciously considerate aspect, mildly aquiline form of nose, with terrible angularity of jaw, and dark deep eyes, somewhat too close together (for which latter circumstance we earnestly hope the lithograph alone is to blame) . . . Bolivar has ridden, fighting all the way, through torrid deserts, hot mud-swamps, through ice-chasms beyond the curve of perpetual frost—more miles than Ulysses ever sailed; let the coming Homers take note of it . . . Under him was gained the finishing “immortal victory” of Ayacucho in Peru, where old Spain, for the last time, burnt powder in those latitudes and then fled without return. He was dictator, liberator, almost emperor, if he had lived. Some three times over did he in solemn Columbian parliament lay down his dictatorship . . . and as often, on pressing request, take it up again, being a man indispensable . . .

 

The writings of Thomas Carlyle were a strong influence on Latin American authoritarian thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His relevance to the Bolivarian regime, and to the thinking of its leader, lies in his concept of the hero as a central actor in history. Revolutions, Carlyle insisted, require a hero to give new meaning to collective life. On the subject of his transcendent faith in great men (inspired by Fichte, who maintained that the “Divine Idea” manifests itself in only a few individuals), Carlyle coined his famous phrase: “ ‘Hero-worship' becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at present . . . No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.” And in
Sartor Resartus
he summed up his philosophy of history:

 

Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History; to which inspired Texts your numerous talented men, and your innumerable untalented men, are the better or worse exegetic Commentaries . . .

 

Through the many speeches by the maximum leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, traits originally ascribed to Bolívar have been gradually transferred to the man who seems to be Chávez's greatest hero: himself. Chávez too believes in modern Latin American history as a Sacred Text populated by heroes on a holy and urgent mission, for which they are gifted with divine fire. In our time, they have been Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Since his youth, Chávez has felt that the history of his country and the hopes for its future (at least until his arrival, until “the return of the condor” and the “national resurrection”) are reflected in the biography of Bolívar. And in his inaugural address of 1999, an apotheosis of his principles and of himself, one more life story was inscribed in the Sacred Text: his own.

From the end of the nineteenth century, the positivist historical schools of Latin America invoked Carlyle to justify the military
caudillos
that the region—supposedly “ungovernable” through “Anglo-Saxon” democracy—“required” to make any significant progress. José Enrique Rodó had applied (in his
Motivos de Proteo
) that idea in relation to Bolívar. In the no less influential book
Las democracias latinas de América
(1912), the Peruvian Francisco García Calderón also had found the heroic key to Latin American political history in Carlyle. But it was in 1919, with the Venezuelan sociologist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, that the use of Carlyle reached its apogee. In his book
Cesarismo democrático
(Democratic Cesarism) he presented the theory of the “necessary gendarme,” with reference to the Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez (who was termed “Carlyle's man” by the historian José Gil Fortoul).

But in the 1930s a new political dimension was added to the “cult of the hero.” It was Jorge Luis Borges who discovered a troubling key to Latin America in Carlyle. As a young man, Borges learned German, inspired by Carlyle's Germanophilia. More than thirty years later, rereading the last lecture in
On Heroes and Hero-Worship
, he noted that “Carlyle reasons like a South American dictator in his defense of the dissolution of the English parliament by Cromwell's musketeers.” Borges was referring to the passage in which Carlyle describes how, in 1653, four years after the beheading of King Charles I, the Puritan revolutionary Oliver Cromwell—Carlyle's favorite hero—loses patience with Parliament, made up of “little legalistic pedants” with their “worn-out constitutional formulas” and their “right of Election,” and finally dissolves it to become, with the “power of God,” the Lord Protector of England.

Borges read Carlyle with Latin American eyes, detecting Cromwell's resemblance to our antidemocratic prototypes:
caudillos,
revolutionaries, dictators. Curiously enough, Carlyle would find his next great hero in one of the most remote corners of Latin America. During the years in which he compiled the unpublished speeches of Cromwell, Carlyle bemoaned the fact that the nineteenth century had not produced a leader like that “great, earnest, sincere soul who always prayed before his great undertakings.” “Our age shouted itself hoarse,” Carlyle wrote, “bringing about confusion and catastrophe because no great man did heed our call.” Then suddenly, around 1843, Carlyle discovered, by chance, a “hero” worthy of the name, a “savior of his age,” a “phoenix of resurrection”: José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the lifelong dictator of Paraguay (from 1814 to 1840) after it won independence from Spain. Francia was at first a fervent Jacobin, who in some ways modernized his country and then locked it away in paranoid and destructive isolation. He was probably insane and his absolute personal rule, accompanied like a dirge by random and unrelenting cruelty, threw his country into a slough of backwardness from which it is barely emerging in this, the twenty-first century.

Based on a few reports by German travelers, Carlyle began to write a biography, the only one he wrote that dealt with a contemporary: the biography of that “one veracious man,” the “Cromwell of South America,” a “man sent by Heaven,” a “fierce condor.” Carlyle admired Francia's scorn for the intellectual forms and political institutions of eighteenth-century rationalism. And, above all, he applauded the tyrant's desire to perpetuate himself: “My lease of Paraguay . . . is for life,” Francia had said. Through him, Carlyle declared, “Oliver Cromwell, dead two hundred years . . . now first begins to speak.” A South American dictator had given Carlyle new faith in the present and future possibility of heroes.