Newsletter CLT 5 (April 2013)
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Interview with George Ciccariello-Maher
By Joe Drexler-Dreis
George Ciccariello-Maher is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drexel University,
having taught previously at U.C. Berkeley, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan
School of Planning in Caracas. He publishes widely on radical thought, social movements,
race, and the “decolonial turn” in political thought, the moment of epistemic and political
interrogation that emerges in response to colonialism and global social inequality. His book,
We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution, was just published
by Duke University Press.
CLT: You’ve recently completed a book on the historical development of Venezuela’s
continuing Bolivarian Revolution, out of which Hugo Chávez emerged. Despite the
Catholic Church’s criticisms of leaders like Chávez and the movements that support
leaders like him, have you found that religion and peoples’ spirituality played a role in
these movements?
Faith has played a fundamental role both in Chávez’s own development and discourse and in
the decades-long struggles by revolutionary movements that created the conditions for the
Bolivarian Revolution and eventually catapulted Chávez to power. The failure of the guerrilla
struggle of the 1960s led many Venezuelan militants to interrogate their received wisdom
regarding Marxist orthodoxy, and one form this took was the rediscovery of local radical
traditions, many of which were spiritually infused. Whether it was the Peruvian communist
José Carlos Mariátegui, who resisted Soviet-imposed revolutionary strategy and sought to
rethink Marxism locally and in part through a spiritualization of socialism, or a figure like the
Venezuelan cult of María Lionza, which syncretically joins indigenous, Afro, and Catholic
spiritualities, faith has played a powerful role in this process.
CLT: Speaking to Brazilian bishops in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI said, regarding
liberation theology: “The more or less visible consequences of that approach characterized by rebellion, division, dissent, offence and anarchy - still linger today,
producing great suffering and a serious loss of vital energies in your diocesan
communities.” As a political theorist who has studied the impacts of leftist movements
in Latin America, and also spent considerable time in Venezuela talking with those
within the Bolivarian Revolution, how would you respond to this claim?
What is most strange about the former Pope’s statement is the suggestion that liberation
theology “produced great suffering,” because the objective of liberation theology was
precisely to re-center what should have been a priority of the church from the beginning:
namely, the centrality of and option for the suffering of the poor and oppressed. Of course, in
the course of addressing this suffering, especially in repressive regimes that were often
backed by the church hierarchy, “rebellion, division, [and] dissent” were the result. But what
is urgent—and this goes for Venezuela as well, where Chavistas are smeared as “divisive”—
is to recognize that this division already existed, it was simply hidden. Those who draw back
the curtain on such divisions in a way that disrupts the order of things will always be, as
Frantz Fanon among others teaches us, accused of producing a violent division.
CLT: In an article for Counterpunch in early March, Daniel Kovalik analyzed a number
of Wikileaks cables concluding, “the U.S. very much views Liberation Theology, and
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those that adhere to it, as enemies. And, it views itself as aligned with the Vatican in
their mutual efforts to destroy this philosophy. Of course, this has real-world
consequences.” From a political perspective, what do you see as some of the real-world
consequences of liberation theology and the suppression of liberation theology?
I think the consequences of suppressing liberation theology speak for themselves: hundreds
of thousands dead and fascist dictatorships empowered to use the iron heel of the state as a
means to make permanent the very same division that adherents of liberatory faith were
accused of fomenting. It says a great deal, too, about the U.S. government and the Vatican
hierarchy that such blood and fire would be poured onto what even they identify as a
“philosophy.” The consequences of the faith that provoked this backlash have been lasting,
albeit subsumed in the face of such brute force: while open professions of radical Catholicism
will continue, many have also been driven outside the church, and this liberatory “theology”
has also entered into productive dialogue with political and social thought, as in the work of
Enrique Dussel among others.
CLT: You’ve translated a number of texts by Enrique Dussel, whose work falls within
the domains of theology and church history, but also decolonial theory, history, and
moral and political philosophy. Your work is concentrated in the latter domains, but do
you see theology to be able to make important contributions to contemporary struggles
for liberation? Where might these contributions come?
Dussel is a fundamental and increasingly important thinker who, alongside Frantz Fanon, has
had a powerful influence on my own thought. This is precisely because theology is not a
separate realm of Dussel’s thought, but is interwoven into his political, economic, and ethical
writings as well. When Dussel set to re-reading Marx, it was on the basis of the philosophical
categories initially provided by theology, and particularly the foregrounding of the absolutely
poor prior to incorporation into capitalism. It is important to bear in mind that, when Dussel’s
apartment in Argentina was bombed by the far right, forcing him into exile, he wasn’t even a
Marxist yet: theology and philosophy were threatening enough. Theology is and will be
fundamental to struggles of the future, even if only in the less obvious guise of the necessary
spritualization and radicalization of faith in leftist movements.
CLT: In the late 1960s and early 70s, Gustavo Gutiérrez spoke of the “irruption of the
poor” as the place where liberation theology emerges. Recent liberation theologians
have been critical of the concept of “the poor” as an overly sanitized and constructed
concept, both in the way the first generation of liberation theologians employed the
term, and especially in the western appropriation of liberation theology. From your
experiences with revolutionary movements in Venezuela and the U.S., from where does
liberation theology need to emerge in the contemporary context? Who and what do
liberation theologians need to be paying attention to?
The concept of the poor is certainly one that needs to be complicated, as many have argued,
but we should also recognize that it also served as an important corrective to strict Marxist
understandings that by tying political subjectivity to economic productive relations was both
very limiting in general but also arguably irrelevant to Latin America given the prevailing
class structure. The poor centered suffering rather than strict exploitation, and therefore the
complications we need to introduce are in many ways facilitated by the concept itself, which
is intrinsically expansive. Liberation, theologically oriented or not, will emerge from those
with the most chains regardless of their economic position, it will emerge and is emerging in
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the confluence of those resisting racism, patriarchy, the heavy vestiges of colonialism, and
those increasingly relegated to the informal sector of the economy, which constitutes the
majority in many Latin American countries today.
CLT: What does your research within Latin America teach the rest of the world, and
especially the Western European context where KU Leuven sits? Does Europe also need
a Chávez, or other forms of leftist activism? Do you see this to be emerging anywhere?
Do you see forces, academic or popular, to be suppressing such movements?
We always need to be attentive to context if we hope to grasp phenomena, and so I would
caution against efforts to simply export something like Chavismo to a very different context
like Europe. Here’s why: you could interpret the rise of Hugo Chávez as a reason to engage
in electoral politics, but a closer look makes it clear that Chávez could only be elected in
Venezuela amid the collapse of the two-party system of corrupt representative democracy.
That collapse, in turn, was provoked in large part by the massive anti-neoliberal rebellion in
1989 known as the Caracazo, in which the country saw rioting and looting for a full week
before the government massacred the population in response. Those are the conditions for
emergence for Chávez, who attempted a 1992 coup in response to the repression of the
Caracazo, and was elected later in 1998, and these conditions in turn relied on the decades
long struggle that I chart in We Created Chávez. Any effort to take lessons from the
Venezuelan experience needs to ask: can we create those conditions in the U.S. or Europe?
How can we so fundamentally shake political life to the point where we can make a
meaningful intervention?