Socialist Outlook : SO/11 - Spring 2007

Review

No More Haloes

Tariq Ali, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, London: Verso, 2006 £12.99
Andrew Kennedy

Ali’s tongue-in-cheek title is of course inaccurate. His new book surveys the social processes in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia and everyone knows Bolivia isn’t in the Caribbean. The ironic postmodern references to popular culture are compounded by the addition of a halo to the image of Fidel Castro on the front cover. As Ali has pointed out in a recent interview, Castro is a resolute atheist - and of course the author is (normally) a resolute anti-postmodernist.

Nonetheless, this is a very useful introduction to Latin American politics for anyone seeking a deeper historical understanding of the role of imperialism in that continent and why, since Tupac Amaru’s uprising in the 18th century, its peoples have fought so consistently against foreign domination. We are given a convincing explanation of how events in recent years in Venezuela and Bolivia have created an impetus towards a radical break with neo-liberalism.

Understandably, Venezuela occupies centre-stage in this account. The extensive appendices, which take up over a third of the book and give it an authoritative bulk which it would otherwise not possess, include interviews with leading Chavistas and also Chavez’s famous Bush-baiting speech at the UN.

Ali’s combination of historical and literary erudition, revolutionary recollections and mordant wit is, as so often, a real pleasure to read. Who else would have found an anti-imperialist diatribe by D.H. Lawrence (in Mornings in Mexico)? And his criticism of the rightward direction chosen by Lula and the Workers’ Party in Brazil is typically sharp and bracing (on the corrupt Jose Dirceu: ‘The Cubans changed his face, but even they with their advanced medical technology cannot transplant a new brain’).

That halo notwithstanding, Ali is surely right to allot a prominent place to Castro and Cuba both on the cover and in the text of his book. Cuba is again playing a key, positive role in the Latin American revolution. A recent British SWP pamphlet on Venezuela ignores this massively inconvenient fact - quite understandably, since in their theory Cuba is a state capitalist country. But for the rest of us, as Ali says (quoting Marquez), ‘It’s love in the time of cholera’. Capitalist restoration in Cuba would be a massive blow to revolutionary hopes in Latin America and the Caribbean

In the section on Bolivia, Ali (once again) movingly draws on memories of his 1967 visit, which took place when US-backed Bolivian state forces were hunting down Che Guevara. He gives a welcome, if succinct, account of the little-known 1952 revolution. But he is perhaps over-generous to the new government of Evo Morales. Granted, Morales had only been a power a few months when this book was being completed, but Ali spends little time discussing the tasks and potential problems that the administration must grapple with, declaring baldly that ‘it became obvious that Morales was determined to implement his programme’.

Actually, in the past year Morales has been pushed this way and that by the forces of left and right, as Jim Jepps explains in the January Socialist Resistance. But even before his election, as Ali must know, leaders of Bolivia’s powerful social movements were openly suspicious of Morales’ ability to deliver.

Ali makes the correct point that attempts at significant social reforms in the underdeveloped countries of Latin America have the potential to unleash hugely radical anti-imperialist and revolutionary dynamics - they cannot be summarily dismissed as ‘mere’ welfare statism. But he misses the opportunity to explain why these processes can only be pushed to their conclusion by broad revolutionary socialist parties, constructed on a democratic basis. His hero Chavez has now in fact called for a unified socialist party, although whether it will operate democratically is another question.

No doubt Ali wishes to avoid the old leftist ‘party’ rhetoric, redolent of what, in a 2003 interview, he has called the ‘arrogance’ of the sixties and seventies. There is a further clue as to his thinking in the same interview, where Ali talks of Arab nationalist revolutions in the late fifties: ‘The Iraqis proposed one Arab nation with three concurrent capitals - Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus - run as one entity, to be funded by Iraqi oil. Now, to my mind, if that had happened, it would have taken that world onto a different level altogether in terms of modernization, education of the population, etc., etc.’

It may be that Ali, understandably frustrated by the failure of secular anti-imperialist forces in the Islamic world, sees the possibility of this scenario being played out in Latin America, with Venezuela taking the role that Iraq failed to take after 1958, resourcing the continent’s economic and political unity. This might only be a temporary halfway house towards the goal of social revolution, but it would still constitute a major challenge to what Ali calls the ‘Washington Consensus’.

Admittedly, Ali himself notes the new Bolivarianism’s combination of ‘continental nationalism and social-democratic reforms fuelled by oil revenues’ creates an unstable and contradictory situation, which can only be resolved by ‘empowering the poor’. But he fails to discuss the full implications of what this ‘empowerment’ means - who, anyway, will do this apart from the poor themselves, through their own organisations - and parties?

Given that most marxists refused to acknowledge the significance of Cuban revolution when it was happening, Ali may be afraid that marxists today, still fixated on the ‘classical’ model of 1917, will also miss the boat. But Cuba, which had no Bolshevik party leading the revolutionary movement, has so far proved to be an historical exception. There is no need as yet to throw out the Leninist baby with the sectarian bathwater.

Ali knows that there is still everything to play for in Venezuela and Bolivia. He is right that the old Venezuelan oligarchy has lost political, but not economic power (we will have to see whether Chavez’s recent announcements of nationalisations represent the beginning of a move towards a radically different economic model). But it is misleading to say, as he does, that the social movements in these countries have ‘found’ their ‘political instruments’. These are processes in which nothing has assumed its final form. Just as in Brazil and Mexico, ‘the search is still on’.

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