 Today, we are meeting here to basically, here Professor Ejaza Ahmad and the occasion for that is the publication by Leftward Books of the New Mole, the Paths of the Latin American Left by Amir Sader. Now, this is a book that was first published by Verso and we are doing the Indian edition of it. So, after the talk, conversation etcetera, you can pick up your copies if you so wish. So, let us begin with the book itself and as we well know, there is a whole lot of literature available on what is unfolding right now in Latin America, both from the left and from the right perspectives. What do you think sets Amir Sader's book apart from a whole lot of other literature? I, in my view, Amir Sader and Eduardo Galliano are the two most important intellectuals in Latin America, one from Hispanic America, one from Brazil. Secondly, I think in the English language, great deal of literature is available on Latin America, most of it and some very good literature is available. Most of it is about particular countries, about particular histories, particular this. There are three general books available in English, I believe, which are seminal books. The first one was The Open Wains of Latin America by Eduardo Galliano and the second, I think, was Grandin's book, Latin America Empire's Workshop and the third one in the English language, I believe, is The New Mall. The one of the, what sets this book apart from both of those, both of them, very, very important books is that those books tell us what has been done too late in America by imperialism primarily the United States and so on. This is the book that, in fact, summarizes the dynamics for revolutionary aspiration and radical change in Latin America. I think it's the most succinct account available in the English language, which takes this whole sort of view and Amir Sader brings to it 50 years of direct involvement. He was the man who when Chavez went to Brazil to address the World Social Forum, Amir Sader was the person who basically organized that reception by the MST, by the very famous reception and so on. So it's very close involvement in the revolutionary processes, not only in Brazil, but all over Latin America, certainly Venezuela, I believe. So it's a very fine book, it's extremely well written, we can talk about the contents of the book. It's a short summary of Latin American history really of the last 60, 70 years, if not before. I think it's a wonderful book. I offer one minor correction that it was not first published by Verso, it was published in English for the first time by Verso, in 2009 in Portuguese, in Brazil, 2011 in by Verso in English, and now we have done it. As I have the most immediate context of this conversation is of course Chavez's recent win in Venezuela, and to my mind there are, I mean there's a whole lot that can be said about it, but what struck me most immediately were at least three important things. One is of course the margin of the victory, which you know 11 percent. Now in any other country, in any other, in any western democracy for instance, this would be considered a landslide, and for Chavez, I mean given his previous victory, which was 25 percent margin, this was considered something of a close, not a close call, but a much closer margin. Then what struck me also was the fact that for the first time in Venezuela, we have had an opposition that has tried to position itself not from the right wing as being right wing opponents of Chavez, but in some senses trying to position themselves as in a sense the more authentic left or trying to attack Chavez from something of a left wing kind of a position. And thirdly that after the verdict, the verdict has not been challenged by the opposition unlike in the past, and unlike in the past again there has been no violence on the streets. What does all of this and the other sort of processes in Venezuela, what does that tell us about what is happening there? You are absolutely right, 11 percent is a very, very convincing margin of victory, anywhere else in the world, for Chavez it is supposed to be a decline. I think it is very important to realize that in all of these left oriented governments that have come into being in Latin America, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and to a lesser extent leftist Argentina and even less of a leftist one in Brazil, in all of them none of them have nationalized the media, have taken over the media. The media continues to be in the hands of the oligarchy and secondly expropriation of private wealth has been minimal, what has been nationalized in very many in several cases is the national resources, oil, gas, now take over of part banking in Argentina, things of that kind, but not expropriation of wealth. Any election has to be fought against this oligarchic media, very powerful as well as immense amounts of private wealth, so that's one thing we have to understand what you're up against and that media is just, I've been to Venezuela, I know that media that is just ruthless, anyway I won't go into that, so that's one thing that you're up against a lot. Secondly I would say that behind the reduced margin is the fact that I think, I read it in a very particular way, all the political forces ranged against Hugo Chavez and his particular way of building socialism, united against one candidate. One reason why the margins were so much greater in the past was that the opposition was very much more disunited and fractious, even when they would formally unite they would not actually work together and so on. So this is actually a sense of despair on the power of the left, on the right opposition that our only chance of winning against him or even mounting a credible challenge is if we all unite together. So this was the first time that they put up one united candidate and actually worked for it. Thirdly the candidate himself. He is a very upper class fellow. He was the mayor of one of the richest townships in Caracas, very wealthy, he's very much representative of the oligarchy. The fact that he tried to position himself as a center-left candidate, I will cut off the subsidies for all these oil subsidies that Chavez is offering to Brazil and Argentina and countries of the Caribbean and so on. We don't need to do any of that, but I will keep the social programs, I'll just make them more inclusive, right now these social programs benefit only the followers of Chavez, I'll make them more inclusive, things of that sort. Speaking of himself as a center-left candidate, completely oligarchic coalition, this to my mind is an evidence that after 12, 13 years the Chavistas now occupy hegemonic ground. Even the oligarchs have to speak the language of center-left. They can no longer go on speaking their own language. Their language has been taken away from them and this is as Amir Sardar very beautifully says in his book one place that three great monopolies in the world are arms, finance and words. That monopoly in Venezuela has been broken, so it really is a hegemonic pressure forcing the oligarchs to speak the center-left language. There is something else you are asking, margin of victory? Margin of victory and the fact that after the elections there has been very violence as well as the almost easy kind of acceptance of. The fact of the matter is that there was fear of violence from both sides, not from the Chavistas but from the left. Jimmy Carter whose Carter center has not supervised but observed 92 elections in the world, makes two statements in a period of two weeks, it is quite extraordinary. I mean the Carter center won a Nobel Prize for this, for their work. He says on the one hand that the Venezuelan electoral process is the best in the world, in the world. And two weeks later he says that the electoral process in the United States has been distorted by money to such a degree that any kind of democratic whatever, that money has just completely ruined the democratic process in the United States. Anyway, more than 200 credible organizations from all over the world watching those elections, all over the country. I won't go into these machines which the Venezuelans are now using, completely foolproof. You cannot then charge fraud. 11% is convincing enough, had it been 2%, 1%, it would be a different matter. But again I would say that this is hegemony. Over a period of 12 years, through God knows how many elections, not just elections, elections and referendums. He keeps winning, he keeps winning, he keeps winning by all these margins. And the world keeps certifying that the process is entirely fair. You finally the oligarchs learn that crying wolf doesn't work anymore. And if you use violence now, you only do damage to yourself. You can't do damage to Saristas. So that is why there has been neither charges of fraud, nor charges of nonviolence. That young man is 40 years old, he knows that all the elder oligarchs will go. And he has time on his side, he'll come back to fight another election 4-5 years later. And Hugo Chavez will still be there to fight that election, or he may have to fight the election against someone else. In a different context, I remember you were once saying that liberal democracy is a form of organized crime. This is one of the two primary forms of organized crime. But here, not just in Venezuela, but in fact across the continent, there seems to be a slightly different picture emerging. We all have to go through the crime. And we have to win the battle of the crime. And the left can win these battles. You don't have a choice but to fight it. You have a choice. You think Maoists are going to make it? I doubt it. You're a party to the crime. This is the greatest success that capitalism has. And this is a thing on which Marx's theory from Gramsci onwards has been struggling with this fact. How do you make a revolution? One subjewa subjectivity has been created among the masses who come to believe in this particular form of representation. This thing, I really believe that in our time it has become the biggest organized crime in the world other than capitalism itself. But this is a constant theme in Marxist and leftist theory actually, from Marx onwards. Marx says very first major work, critique of Hegel's doctrine of riot, engages actually precisely with this question, these forms of representation, this claim of the bourgeois state to be represented. And yet this is what you have to go through. Corporate capital is a form of crime. Workers have to work in their factories. Nothing you can do about it. There's a lovely little instance that Amir Sader cites in his book where he says that in 2001 I think it was, at some meeting of heads of states of Latin America, Fidel Castro passes a note to Chavez saying, you know I am glad I am not the only devil in this room anymore. And in fact, I mean in the last, what may be a dozen years actually the picture has changed completely. In other words, now you find that there are many, many devils across Latin America and the continent from being in a sense sort of a workshop for neoliberalism, a laboratory for neoliberalism has in some senses transformed itself into being a crucible for experiments against neoliberalism. Could you speak a little bit about this larger continental shift and also what do these experiments actually comprise of? Fidel said to a friend of mine who was interviewed, who was interviewing Fidel, Fidel said to him very early 2004, 2005 that when Israel is the first break we have got. So this friend asked him, well, what about Chile? And he said, well, had it lasted another five years, had it arrived at a superior stage, might have become a break for us. In other words, it's not that they killed him or put an end to that, but that the point at which it had arrived was not a breakthrough for him already, this is the first break. And in that sense ultimately he is the only devil. Many Bolivia, I doubt if the rest of them are really devils in that sense. And the difference is the kind of revolutionary process that is being attempted organizationally at the base in Venezuela, organizing the base, organizing in the barrios, in the communities of the poorest of the poor, the kind of that is a different kind of process. And that is unique. You don't have that kind of thing even in the case of Bolivia, where in fact more and more of the social movements that were the base for moralists are coming in conflict with him, and so on, and mass is, all right, the background to it, in fact I should talk more systematically on this, but let me just clarify this point, that the background to it is that when the elections came, the first elections, when Morales was elected in Bolivia, it was an ad hoc coalition of a huge number of social movements, movements of the indigenous various kinds of movements, which gave his political party the weight to win the elections. Now, very many of those are now coming in conflict with the Morales government, and the essential conflict is between rights of ecology and needs of development, we can talk about that, but anyway, all right, so what kind of experiments are these, and that phrase which we at some point can discuss, socialism of the 21st century. Then the one devil who has a coherent vision of it is Chavez, and he has it now it has become his own, but he has it precisely because he took it from the real devil, one of the things about Chavez is his very close relationship with Fidel, and it is very interesting that Fidel would want this kind of a revolutionary process in Venezuela, and it is an integrated one. First, you have to go through the liberal democratic process, and you in order to do that, you have to deliver as fast as you can to keep expanding the loyalty of the base. How do you do this, three or four different things in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, the constitution itself has been rewritten and passed through referendums, they fought elections with that promise, and they implemented that promise, and into the constitution is written what you might call a social contract, what the state must do for the people, very elaborate set of promises. So, the programmatic vision, the basis for it has actually been incorporated in the constitution, that is one thing. And then you look at the actual record, and on the way Brigadier and I were talking about it, and I was saying that all right, Chavez talks about socialism of the 21st century, well Mrs. Kirchner does not, nor did Néstor, her husband when he was there, and yet they have both basically achieved in terms of delivering to the people, essentially the same thing. Dramatic rise in incomes at the lowest 40 percent, I mean incomes for the lowest 40 percent of the population, dramatic decline of poverty, even more dramatic decline for absolute poverty, something like 70 percent of the absolute poverty according to government statistics in both countries seems to have, I mean it seems to have fallen by about 70 percent, the international agencies figures are somewhat different, they say about 40 percent, but that is very impressive already. So, you have that incomes, then what you would call is social wage, not only money incomes, but health, housing, education, transport, the social goods that you require to live a secure life, visible expansion of it, various kinds of experiments, health, dramatic, I mean the Venezuelans are actually paying for Cuban doctors all over Latin America. Hundreds of thousands of people have got free eye operations and this operation and that operation, I mean I've seen this in Caracas for the kind of, and that is all based in communities and barrios and poor neighborhoods and so on. Around that and then involving the masses of people in the process of actually building this infrastructure of change, lesser or greater degree, this is what has happened in each one of them. And therefore, each one of them has one elections, very convincingly re-elections with convincing margins, Correa and Ecuador and Morales, the Kushners, first the husband, then just Mrs. Kushner and then Lula won two elections and then after that Dilma, her his successor won the elections, one. Second, the vision of a Latin American integration, practical implementation of it. Cuba has a lot of petroleum, petroleum is given to a variety of countries, all the members of Elba, the organization of these countries had subsidized prices. When the take off from great crisis and when Néstor Kushner took over in Argentina and there was a whole question of debt and Argentines were going to did repudiate the IMF debt. Venezuela bought one billion dollars worth of debt, 100 billion, I forget what the some amazing magnitude of the debt that they bought. This kind of thing and now a Banco, they're creating a bank which in their vision will replace the IMF. Now you have, this is very interesting, now the latest is a new organization of 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries which have come together in an organization whose next meeting will be in Havana and Cuba therefore would be chairing it this whole year. Now remember, organization of American states, under the US, where keeping Cuba out was the big thing, now you have the entire continent going to Havana in Latin American solidarity. Economic integration, integrations of various sorts, therefore a practical shape for anti-imperialism. Now, Chavez is saying that they will build a gas and oil pipeline across the continent up to the Pacific where they will deliver petrol and gas for Asian trade, basically means China and reorient their economies as much away from North America as possible. Economic integration of Latin America as against North America. So very elaborate and very practical ways of dissociating yourself from America and Germany. It's a long-term process in which they are all participating. So it's a kind of a unity of the progressive forces across a very large part of Latin America, not all of Latin America, their reactionary regimes but some of the biggest countries, Argentina, Brazil, the wealthiest Venezuela, Venezuela now it turns out has more oil than Saudi Arabia. So struggle over Venezuela is a struggle over an enormous amount of wealth. Who's going to win the elections means who's going to control this enormous wealth. So integration of all of this and a very clear-headed sense that a process of North American, European but primarily North American domination of the continent which has been built for the last 200 years cannot be undone easily or quickly and it cannot be undone by closing yourself up in some autarchic world of your own that it really is a struggle, it's a war of position in that sense. So Latin American integration, some very similar processes going on in all of them and you know I mean it's remarkable precisely when Europeans are imposing upon their working classes, upon their low-middle classes, 50% or more of their populations in country after country, certainly in southern part of Europe a kind of poverty that Europe has not known in I don't know 78 years and yes certainly not since the Second World War. I mean the kind of poverty you now have in not only just in Greece but in countries like Spain in the name of austerity the perfection of neoliberalism of the worst sort precisely at that time what you have in these Latin American countries is the absolutely the opposite model. I was just looking at front line that J.R.T. Ghosh has written an article which is has the title on Argentina wage-led growth exactly you raise the wages you go for full employment the state takes over takes charge of the national resources builds a social state increases the social wage etc. Precisely at this time when advanced capitalism is going in the opposite direction and that is happening in country after country that is what the cement is. I'll read a quote from Slavoj Gizek who first talks about how already the promise of 2011-2012 has basically you know disintegrated in some senses the whole occupy movement is going nowhere the Arab Spring has resulted in sort of fundamentalist ways he was coming into power he talks about how in Venezuela you have basically a populist clique led by Chavez and in increase the increase the defeat of Sirica and so on and then he ends the article by saying that the main victim of the ongoing crisis is thus not capitalism which appears to be evolving into an even more even more pervasive and pernicious form but democracy not to mention the left whose inability to offer a viable global alternative has again been rendered visible to all it was the left that was effectively caught with its pants down it is almost as if this crisis was staged to demonstrate that the only solution to a failure of capitalism is more capitalism. It appears to me that this is an excessively bleak and pessimistic outlook of the world today. In the current issue of social scientists I have published the text of a lecture I gave in Calcutta three returns to Marx Derrida, Badiou and Gizek. The real answer to this is actually in that article. Gizek is a very peculiar character he's a lord of this ladenist bluster but when he comes down from that ladenist bluster of his which is a way of legitimating your position on the left or something it's quite extraordinary what he says what you need to really fight for or fight against so anyway look I was I had two weeks of excitement about the so called Arab Spring I certainly did two at the most three weeks of excitement and after that it became quite clear that it was a very dangerous moment in the life of the Arab people. So that I never thought there was much of a promise there. In Europe in the United States in the United States occupy movement it has it has lost its spectacular side the sort of thing in which Gizek could fly out fly out to New York and make a speech and so forth you know that phase is gone and what now people like that have seen in there is that there really is no alternative to building long-term things of some sort. Let me sort of put it conceptually something that I say again and again in various fora the defeat of communism as a world project and the assimilation of social democracy by neoliberalism ended two great lineages revolutionary lineages from the 19th century. So this is the moment of the third one which is anarchism this is the moment of Bakunin remember in the first international there's Marx and Engels and there were Proudhon and Bakunin and their followers and the basic argument was between Marxists and anarchists and in my view they were such opponents of each other because at least in half of what they were saying they resembled each other. I think this is the moment in which anarchism is rising in various forms or inspired by the anarchist critiques of the old revolutionary projects new kinds of organizations are arising. I have been saying I have written this published that look there was a period in my own lifetime when one third of humanity lived under some kind of a socialist government that's not a small number in 1970 75 it was quite clear to me that by the end of my life at least half the world will be living under social disturbance so the defeat has not been small a certain history has ended and it is logical that people who still have revolutionary commitments will try to think how to revive a revolutionary project by not simply repeating them but also through invention of various kinds in other words we have reached we have arrived at a period of great radical experimentation it is not at all clear any longer how socialism is to be built as it was for the generation of Lenin and Luxembourg and so on as while those great states existed in the communist movement certainly there's an absolute consensus that this is how you build socialism and then in whatever way for whatever reasons it collapses so you begin to experiment now rejects problem is that is very excitable so if the excitable phase is gone you know if the indianos in the glorious moment are not doing in spain what they did in those few weeks then somehow it has all gone in spain you know it's not true you know the first thing he should know is that every revolutionary beginning has to go through the processes of riots and riots have a short life they don't last long their consequences last uprisings cannot be maintained for months and years they leave consequences and then the historical process slows down but the process has been changed the other thing is that putting all this in one bag latin america and arab spring and so forth is a very peculiar way of approaching all this in latin america for example the motor of all the change is the state and you can't reverse neoliberalism except through the state you're not talking of just you know popular uprisings people who have neither great big parties nor access to a state where the state is actually against them where the state will not let them grow so the the latin american process is of a completely different order than this one and it has longevity even if you know tomorrow some of the elections may be lost or whatever but it has created new actors in history the issue of racism in latin america is as old as the first landing of the spaniards and the portuguese on that continent it took them 400 years to elect the first indigenous president iber moreles the issue of the rights of the indigenous has been posed in latin america and country after country and is being organized politically in ways which are completely historically and president in countries like bolivia peru guatemala to a certain extent ecuador country after country the the discussion really is between the socialists and the indigenous the two political forces out there in the field in the what you might call the left formations now this is a completely new historical agent on the on the scale which these developments have thrown up morales may lose the next elections but the political landscape of latin of bolivia has been altered and this is not just i mean linera the vice president has a wonderful theoretical work on this right um you know what what should be the marxist understanding of all this