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by Staughton Lynd

I

In Home from the Dark Side of Utopia, Clifton Ross offers an account of his personal pilgrimage through several varieties of religious extremism, counter-cultural life in Berkeley, and Latin American radicalism.

Ross’s journey began with a childhood on military bases. It appears to have left him with an image of a ­hermetically-sealed world of close-cropped lawns and unrepealable dictates from above. Ross discerns a kinship between what he experienced growing up and a vision entertained by both the Right and Left that is Utopian and apocalyptic. Accordingly, his version of the Emerald City is, first, a world in which decision making is decentralized and communal, but also, and just as important, a world in which the desired social transformation comes about in a spirit of experimentation, with an understanding in advance that what happens will be a patchwork of failures as well as successes.

These are problematic objectives in the United States. To begin with, America is home to three hundred million people who are notoriously non-communal: a “lonely crowd” (David Riesman) of individuals who increasingly “bowl alone” (Robert Putnam).

Moreover, too many Americans believe that the good life will be achieved suddenly, almost magically, as a “world turned upside down” or in a miraculous moment of “rapture.” Even the most inspiring of our home-grown prophets on the Left tend to imagine the coming of the Good Society as a rush of events that will produce a qualitatively different state of affairs in a very short period of time. James Baldwin and Malcolm X seem to have anticipated some version of a fire that would sweep through established institutions. The Wobblies’ theme song, “Solidarity Forever,” imagines a new world coming into being, after such a fire, from “the ashes of the old.” I think that fire is a form of violence, a hoped-for shortcut to social change that doesn’t work. My own daydreams are of little green things that poke up after a fire through the blackened forest floor.

What can be distressingly rapid, in my experience, is the collapse of Left organizations. Having lived through the disintegration of Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Panthers, I am left with a sad but stubborn belief that it is just as important to try to understand our defeats as to clarify the character of the new world to which we aspire.

Through a number of initial chapters Ross struggles with the conflict between the hope for a Kingdom of God that would materialize all at once (“when the stars begin to fall”) and the common-sense delays of ordinary life. For example, a visit to Berkeley by Daniel Berrigan gave rise to an epiphany. Berrigan cut through clouds of “cosmic millenarian reverie” to call for confrontation with the nuclear arms race and with a demonic, cold, rational utopia, as well as for empathy with the needs of the poor. Yet Berrigan in his own way fixed his gaze on “the end” and “embodied the prophetic voice of the apocalyptic vision.”

A by-product of this state of mind for many young radicals is a quest for a particular society in which the promise of the future is, at least for the moment, displayed. Lest I seem to be exempting myself from this generalization, let me be clear. In high school and the first years of college I supported the Soviet Union. This ended when a friend quoted Trotsky’s ultimatum to the Kronstadt rebels (“surrender or I will shoot you down like pheasants”) and Bukharin’s abject response when accused in the purge trials of the 1930s of being a “running dog” of imperialists who wished to destroy the USSR (“Citizen Prosecutor Vishinsky, you have found the words”). After reading Martin Buber’s Paths in Utopia I held out the incipient State of Israel as a model of decentralized socialism until another friend told me, “Staughton, they stole the land.”

My wife and I used our two- or three-week summer vacations to make five short trips to Sandinista Nicaragua in the 1980s. I was resolved not to deceive myself again this time. But I did. Not until I read Margaret Randall did I fully grasp what it signified that the highest official in the Sandinista women’s organization, AMNLAE, was not elected by the membership but was appointed by the predominantly male Sandinista directorate.

I still view Zapatismo through a reddish haze but I fear I may have much to learn. I may discover that young people in the Zapatista villages still leave for the coast or for el Norte. Alcoholism and male chauvinism may remain stronger than one is led to believe. Above all, the Leftists who shepherded the emergence of Zapatismo in those wet mountains may have had, and may continue to have, a good deal more influence than they let on, just as in Sandinista Nicaragua.

II

This brings us to the question of Venezuela, which takes up the second half of Home from the Dark Side of Utopia.

I have never been to Venezuela. I do not speak or read Spanish well enough to learn very much at a distance. I am unable to offer a reliable assessment.

Nevertheless, I think the compendium of facts about contemporary Venezuela that Clifton Ross has assembled demand attention. In The Dark Side he tells us how he acquired them, year by year, visit by visit, friend by friend. They are most conveniently available in another of his recent books, The Map or the Territory: Notes on Imperialism, Solidarity, and Latin America in the New Millenium (New Earth Publications, 2014).

Leaving aside currency manipulation, which I do not pretend to be able to summarize intelligibly, the following are facts offered by Ross (in one or the other of these two books) about the Chavista years:

1 Agricultural production has declined significantly. Articles such as coffee, rice, and white corn are now imported. Food is increasingly scarce and its cost has increased.

2 Industrial production in the nationalized industries has declined across the board, including the production of cement, aluminum, steel, and oil. Oil and gas are imported in significant quantities.

3 The government has created new trade unions parallel to existing unions. Arrangements that the government calls “co-management” and “workers’ control” have been resisted by the elected officials of existing unions. Union demands for collective bargaining contracts governing the wages, benefits, and working conditions of employees have been disregarded.

4 Many co-operatives have been created but only 10 or 15% of these are “active.”

5 Many announced projects were never built or were abandoned when halfway complete. An example is the national paper company, Pulpa y Papel, CA, for which more than half a billion dollars was appropriated but that remains “an empty field with a fence and a cleared space and nothing else.”

6 Between 1998 when Chávez became head of the government and 2014 the percentage of those living in poverty rose from 45 to 48%, and the number of those found to be living in “extreme poverty” rose from 18.7% to 23.6%. A 2015 study by the same agency, after the drop in the price of oil began, reported 73% of Venezuelan households living in poverty (see pages 320–321 of the present work).

7 Health care in hospitals has suffered. Of 6,700 neighborhood clinics that were founded in 2003 to bring health care closer to the people, 2000 or almost 30% had been abandoned by 2009.

8 Street violence in Venezuela is now second only to Honduras in Latin America.

9 I have left to last the propositions that are most difficult to prove because they are non-quantitative but are also obviously the most important. They include claims that many government subsidies go only to those who support government directives; that the essential rights of free speech and free association are severely restricted; and that elections may be efficiently conducted but that election results are mani­pulated, as when the polls are kept open at times and places when the government is losing to allow party members to be brought in to vote.

From my perspective as an historian forced out of the university and turned lawyer, these allegations call for what lawyers call “shifting the burden of proof.” That is, one or more among those who believe that Clif Ross distorts reality should bring forward the evidence that they consider rebuts or explains numbers like those set forth above.

III

More important than the critique of anything existing is careful discernment as to where we should be going.

Clifton Ross and his wife Marcy Rein have edited still another book, made up of oral histories by participants in the new social movements of Latin America, entitled Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements (PM Press, 2014). In it they argue that too much uncritical attention has been lavished on leaders like Subcomandante Marcos (Chiapas), “Lula” (Brazil), Evo Morales (Bolivia), and Hugo Chávez (Venezuela). In one country after the next, Ross and Rein found persons with names unknown to readers in the United States who, in the manner of indigenous decision making through the ages, sit in a circle when they meet, seek consensus, and are prepared to act as well as talk.

In The Map or the Territory there are some paragraphs near the end that express, as well as I know how, the spirit in which those of us disappointed by the various versions of “real existing socialism” should proceed.

Clifton Ross says that we must build resistance to power by means that are “autonomous, critical, often oppositional.” The solidarity sought must be of two kinds.

One is localist, focusing on our own communities. The other is international: organizing low-wage workers in the United States and reaching out to workers in the countries from which so many come; the climate justice movement; the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions effort. I would add: encouraging soldiers of all nations engaged in meaningless, aggressive wars to lay down their arms and join hands.