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“«Political life is combat, ceaseless struggle; which means that political society is obliged to delimit itself in order to delimit the adversary or the enemy»
— Julien Freund
In politics, defining who we are and what we are up against is a major issue. When a term is abused, applying it without descriptive rigor, the outcome will be like what happens in the story of the little shepherd and the wolf: nobody will take us seriously.
Although we are told, with great concern, about a return to communism, something that brings us back to the horror of the Cheka and the Gulag, the phenomenon that occurs in much of the Western world has more to do with accelerating the decomposition caused by postmodernism and globalism than with reediting the excesses of the last century.
According to Gustavo Bueno’s taxonomy, the lefts, roughly speaking, can be defined and undefined. The former share rationalist universalism as a common trait and exercise – not only theorize – a political project linked to the State; while the latter lack a clear political project related to the State, flagging causes such as human rights and feminism.
With the exception of Cuba -which is a relic, a museum piece, a collection of debris from a failed utopia-, the regional trend is clearly towards an undefined, woke and liquid left (in the Baumanian sense). The Venezuelan and Nicaraguan regimes have been abandoning the veneer of competitive authoritarianism, but even so they don’t come anywhere close to the rigidity of Castroism. They are, to a large extent, hybrids. And they even incorporate certain “progressive” elements.
Today’s furious anti-communists -writes Adriano Erriguel with derision- resemble those Japanese soldiers lost in the jungle who, heedless of Hirohito’s surrender, continued to “fight” long after 1945. Regardless of how far behind Latin America is on the political agenda, it would be good to assume that the Cold War ended 30 years ago. The Communism vs. Capitalism approach is, at best, insufficient to explain the phenomena that threaten it today; at worst, it is a paranoid anachronism. It seems unlikely that the dictatorship of the proletariat will be instituted. Instead, what is happening is a redefinition of life, family and sexuality. Social engineering is even more aggressive and more sophisticated than before.
The New Left has by far no unified political subject. It is a collection of minorities, of (pseudo) dissidences, of victimisms. It does not fight for the rights of an entire class; it does not seek to articulate a more or less homogeneous social group. It is more hedonistic than revolutionary. Its anthropological model is not that of the Marxist homo oeconomicus, but rather the homo festivus described by Muray. It is all about chaos and disintegration. It is the child of this era of emptiness which, according to Lipovetsky, is characterized by the retraction of universal objectives in favor of miniaturized interests. It does not “aspire to storm the skies” in the Leninist manner, but to impose the governance of supranational institutions under the protection of “experts”.
Chile as a lab
This New Left we have outlined has made Chile the center of its efforts, its favorite target. In the Constitutional Convention all its “isms” seem to converge, all its ideological derivations: Indigenisim, ecofeminism, animalism… The process, of clear re-foundational aspirations, has a gallery of grotesque characters. Among them, a middle-aged woman who disguises herself as Pikachu and a singer of satirical songs who quotes Chayanne, stand out. Even the Communist Party seems serious and institutional compared to the People’s List and the green organizations.
Then there is Boric, the newly elected president. A professional agitator. After his stint as a “student leader”, he has associated himself with groups that receive funds from the meta-capitalist George Soros. Although he is accompanied by nominal communists, he seems more Popperian than red. His insistence on mandatory vaccination has turned him into Pfizer’s best spokesman, and there is no woke topic he does not slip into. Piñera, with his open borders and his concessions to the violent, had paved the way for him. After all, progressivism is transversal and not explicitly leftist.
The Gordian knot
It is very tempting to proclaim, with an impostured epic, that we are fighting a battle against communism. However, as Hásel Paris Álvarez explains, this distracts us from the new struggles that define our times: patriotism vs. globalism, for example.
The liberal-progressive exaggerates the threat posed by the modern left on the economic plane to hide the coincidences it has with it on the value and cultural plane.
Latin America is trapped in a vicious circle, in a Kafkaesque dynamic, where wayward progressivism passes the bill of its excesses to timid technocrats and liberals. Those timid technocrats and liberals implement adjustment measures, but they accept without question the social paradigm shift they have inherited. When a climate of discontent develops, everything returns to the beginning.
Calling any State intervention communism, or parading a serial loser like Leopoldo Lopez on TV sets to warn that if you vote wrong you are condemned to inevitably become a new Venezuela clearly does not work. The non-left needs a mobilizing narrative, to fight the cultural battle and to stop stirring up old ghosts.
Silvio Salas, Venezuelan, is a writer and Social Communicator, with an interest in geopolitics, culture war and civil liberties // Silvio Salas, venezolano, es un comunicador social interesado en temas de geopolítica, libertades civiles y la guerra cultural.
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