Trinicenter.com - Food for Thought About Crossing the Socialist Rubicon in Venezuela

By: Franz J. T. Lee

Totally love-sick, caught up in the ferocious social tentacles of feudal illusions, Shakespeare's Juliet desperately yelled into a closed, deaf and dumb universe:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet." -- From William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2.

Of course, we do not think in words, words do not think for us. However, there are certain words that we have to use very carefully and responsibly. Nobody will speak about my new Nazism, my Nazi love. Similarly, it is ridiculous to differentiate Zulu socialism, Maya socialism, Moon socialism, African socialism, Arab Socialism or even National Socialism. What would Zulu capitalism, Maya capitalism, Arab capitalism, ... be? Surely, we would not talk about Jesus "down-sizing" his apostles. Also, Jesus and Mary Magdalena and Jesus would not be "surfing on the web" or communicate with each other via cell-phones.. Surely, Napoleon Bonaparte was not interested in launching "full spectrum dominance" in Europe. Socialism was not born in Nazareth; according to historic documents, probably Nazareth did not even exist at the birth of Jesus Christ. The European conquistadores told us a hell of a lot of lies. We have to be extremely careful what we say, we need a stringent transhistoric political class consciousness.

One thing is the real, true historic birth, existence and life of that what a concept connotates, anotherf thing is our a posteriori extrapolations and hijacking of a scientific term. Jesus Christ had nothing to do with socialism, and socialism does not concern Jesus Christ. African Ujamaa is not socialism, and socialism only concerns modern Tansania as anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism.

Every country and leader in the world could call its or his revolution anything, but please, socialism cannot withstand more defamations, farces and caricatures. Not to confuse anybody, let us call our revolution in Latin America, in Venezuela, what it is: The Bolivarian Revolution. It surely is already construct a New Bolivarianism of the 21st Century. Nothing wrong with this, we are all doing it already. Why call our goal a New Socialism? Why downgrade Marxism, or at least, why are we trying to christianize Marxism? Why copy Heinz Dieterich's concept? Also, nothing wrong with this, we are sovereign, but call it by any other name.

There is no substitute for thinking, thought, theory and philosophy. Also not for Marxism and flowing scientific and philosophic socialism, the true negation of capitalism, the anti-capitalist arm of global emancipation. If we do not think and act, of, by and for ourselves, then others will do it for us, will formulate "revolutionary" concepts for us; and we will have no intellectual platform for critique and criticism, because we will be aliens to ourselves, totally alienated. In fact, we would become lost souls. In this way, socialization, ideology, indoctrination and manipulation could impregnate us with anything, with master-servant relations, with a slave mentality, with religious illusions and spiritual fantasy, in few words, with ruling class culture, with education for barbarism.

In any closed system, logically there are physical limits and intellectual barriers; in a closed capitalist world order, in a universal corporate holocaust, guarded by formal logical and dialectical modes of thought, there is no escape. The downtrodden, the wage slaves, in globalization internalize the system, defend it with their very lives, reproduce the ideological and religious strychnine forever.

What is in a name? Call anything socialist, the word would sound as liberal, equal and fraternal; as French, bourgeois, as democratic; as religious, Christian, as Catholic.

Thinking, thought, theory, philosophy and wisdom are social dons, are specifically human, humanist. They are dialectical, contradictions, relations. They move, are alive, change, they are not at rest, static and absolute, prophetic. Across history, in natural and social processes which permanently change, flow, over-flow, there is no stationary zig-zag for absolute truths, no perennial tic-tac for eternal paradigms.

In our universal prison, everything is determined; internally, everything moves according to the tendential laws of capitalism, according to the astuteness of the Hegelian dialectical phenomenology of the capitalist world spirit. This simply means that all labor processes, all perverted natural and social relations, come into being, evolve, reach their peak, then they pass away, involve into self-destruction.

Each stage of economic and political development brings forth its specific social and cultural peculiarities. There is a huge difference between the evolution and realization of something, of its involution and dying away, of its transvolution and exvolution towards other transversal spheres.

We do not construct modern twin towers with the technology of building pyramids. The United Nations do not govern the world by means of the Ten Commandments.Socialism does not exist intact across 50 or 100 million years. In fact, it cannot exist without its Siamese twin brother, Capitalism.

Surely, capitalism originated in the Mediterranean region, in Miletus, which is at the same time the birth place of the dialectical negation of capitalism, that is, of socialism.
Capitalism and socialism concern certain relations of production, concern certain class struggles. The burning slave torches on the plazas of Miletus tell us who were exploited and who were the bosses ab ovo. They tell us who were dominated, discriminated, murdered and alienated. There we can study the real, true seeds of capitalism and socialism, the birth, climax, involution and transvolution of history, right up to our times.

Simple, original socialist seeds sprung forth in various ancient slave-holding societies, germinated as primitive accumulation of capital by producing various social classes and class struggles. However, none of two was a dominant formation of production as yet. In fact till the 17th century, both capitalism and socialism were still dominated politically by the European feudal clergy and nobility which found themselves in death agony.

The victory of capitalism in the French and Industrial Revolutions marks the real birth of capitalism as a dominant mode of production, and therewith also gave birth to its own negation as scientific and philosophic socialism, as Marxism.

Before 1840, scientific and philosophic socialism did not exist as anti-capitalism, as inherent negation of a dominant mode of production, which was revolutionizing itself towards global hegemony. It could not come into existence before the Industrial Revolution. It presupposed the application of a new logic, dialectics, a new science, proletarian práxis, a new theory, historical materialism. To bring this revolutionary weapon about, it had as sine qua non the dialectical unity and contradiction of the three major accomplishments, precisely French, British and German utopian socialism, English national economy, and German objectivist philosophy. In this spirit the major works of Marx and Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, and others were written, and they reflect the levels and degrees of world capitalism and imperialism in their times.

The bourgeois, capitalist, democratic revolution toppled all feudal regimes by the grace of God. With its mechanical materialism and natural science it successfully replaced the feudal Roman Catholic God with Reason alias Capital, which was a precondition for capitalism to be victorious.

That was in the 18th century, now just imagine toppling a highly developed corporate imperialism of the 21st century, armed to the teeth with mortal, fatal and lethal arms of mass destruction, with Christian Socialism, Socialist Christianity, utopian socialism and socialist utopias. To be victorious, the Bolivarian Revolution has to offer much more than to preserve religious lies and racist myths of the age of Conquest, much more than intrasystemic formal and dialectical logics of the age of Imperialism, and much, much more than anti-Marxism, anti-communism and vague, empty socialism. We have a tremendous problem.

President Hugo Chavéz Frias and his executive are not magicians, prophets or messiahs, they have to face the alba, the horizon, the new like all of us. The new is experimental, is engineering, is detective. It is logical, scientific, philosophic and sapient. Modern, globalized socialism is threefold, is micro-, meso- and macro-cosmic. For the first time on planet earth, it is human being, existence and transcendence, it is the sacred trinity of doing, thinking and transcending problems of, by and for ourselves.

This is crossing the Rubicon, this is jacta alea est. This is the emancipatory panacea against great lies, vile back-biting, heinous character assassination, evil cowardice, "revolutionary" charlatans and global Orwellian fascism.