Now Is Not the Time To Deny What is Happening

With the Arab revolts, the global systemic crisis is entering a new phase, more unpredictable and increasingly out of control. Until now, the principal actors have been the financial oligarchies and large multinational corporations, the major governments, including the United States and China, and far behind, some institutions such as the G-20.

Now, there has been a major shift with the arrival onto the scene of the popular sectors around the world, led by the Arab people, causing the deepening and acceleration of the ongoing changes.

The first wake up call came from the Greek youth in their revolt of December 2008. When financial capital was looking to escape inevitable depreciation that was awaiting it through speculation in food commodities, the precarious situation of millions of people around the world became untenable. That things have exploded in the Arab world is not unexpected, we well know that something similar could happen in any part of the planet, as evidenced by the occupation of the capitol of Wisconsin in the United States. The question is not what will happen, but where the “hydra of the revolution” – the title of one of the best analyses of history from below – will appear.

The increased systemic disruption ahead will take down many governments and also some states, be they conservative, progressive or whatever color they want to paint themselves. We are entering a phase of generalized lack of control, in which the old borders of left-right, center-periphery and even hegemonic ideologies will tend to blur together.

The activation of the popular sectors changes the analytic axes and above all requires ethical choices. The scenario of interstate relations will increasingly clash with emancipatory struggles. Concretely: popular struggles for freedom may remove governments and regimes that seemed to fight against imperialism and the uni-polar world headed by the United States and the western Multinationals. While the revolts of those below threaten governments favorable to the West, as happened in Egypt, they usually form broader fronts against tyranny that include the more diverse left. But when these same revolts are directed against tyrants that are more or less anti-United States, this front fractures and calculations of convenience appear. This is the case in Lybia.

For us Latin Americans, it is time to learn from the Arab revolt. The struggle of people for their freedom is sacred for anyone on the left, if that still means something. On this point, there is no space for speculations or calculations. We leave this for Berlusconi, concerned with the Italian investments in Lybia and the supposed arrival of thousands of refugees in Mediterranean Europe. It is true that some have fallen as low as the Roman child molester, but in truth we couldn’t expect any better from Daniel Ortega.

The Arab revolt urges us to debate three themes on which we struggle for profound changes in the world system and in each of our immediate realities. The first and the most painful for those of us who come from the struggles of the 60s is that we must look in the mirror so that we can’t deny what is happening. The heroic struggles of the past half-century have their counterparts in terrible things that we have become accustomed to sweep under the rug. Roque Dalton is not an exception. The murderer Muammar Kadafi was at one time an ally of the anti-imperialist camp and continues to be for some. No one is free of sins, but all of us should look to the horror in front of us. The author of these lines was a fervent supporter of the Cultural Revolution in China, regardless of the enormous damage that it was causing to ordinary people.

We think about what led us at the time, that we did not want to see, nor hear, nor understand the pain of those below who were sacrificed on the alter of revolution. It does nothing to hide behind in the “didn’t know” because it is the same response that the Germans gave when they were faced with their passivity in the face of Nazism.

The second is to understand that we are before something different, that isn’t simply the repetition of the known. What is new is the rupture in the system, the entrance into a chaotic period in which all of the certainties and lessons are being tested. The fall of the system will affect us all. The debris will fall, too, over our heads. In Marx and Underdevelopment, Immanual Wallerstein reminds us that “a controlled and organized transition tends to imply a certain continuity of exploitation.” And it tells us that “we lose fear of a transition that takes the appearance of collapse, disintegration, that which is uncontrolled in one way may be anarchic, but not necessarily disastrous.”

We’re entering a period of systemic chaos in which at any moment a new order will shine, perhaps better, perhaps worse than the capitalist. This system was born connected to a demographic catastrophe akin to the black plague, which killed one third of the population of Europe in a couple of years. It won’t surrender on its tippy toes and with good manners, but in chaos and barbarism as the regime of Gaddafi.

Third, we are forced to make deep ethical choices that will change our lives. There is no way to be unconditionally with those below, because they are the ones who most need a new world. Now that they are emerging as actors in the systemic crises, we should accompany them without directing them, practicing more than ever lead by obeying. The rebellious people have demonstrated more knowledge than the “leaders” and the militants. They learned not to confront when they shouldn’t, to surround the tanks and sleep beneath them to immobilize them, protect and to involve the soldiers to disable their destructive capacity and to use women’s abilities to change war into an art of winning without killing.

Original en Español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2011/02/25/index.php?section=opinion&article=027a2pol