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NLR 120, NOV DEC 2019
JUAN CARLOS MONEDERO
SNIPERS IN THE KITCHEN
State Theory and Latin America’s Left Cycle
The question of state power is one of the most complex issues for
emancipatory politics. Even when popular parties with redistributive
agendas have won electoral majorities and gained, in principle, access
to the governmental levers of power, they face a host of obstacles in
implementing their campaign promises. They do not enter into full
possession of the state, as if it were a new home: the rooms may be
booby-trapped, the stairs barricaded; there may be snipers in the
kitchen—shooters who are unseen because they are taken for granted, and
all the more effective because unseen. As Lenin reminded Kautsky, even
if they have been ejected from office, ‘the exploiters’ still retained
many practical advantages: money, property, superior education,
knowledge of the ‘secrets’ of rule, norms of organization, close
connections with higher officialdom and so forth.footnote1 In liberal
democracies, enormous pressures can be brought to bear upon radical
administrations, whether at municipal, state or federal level. The
mainstream media, the judiciary, the intelligence services, opposition
parties may all come into play, with scandals whipped up out of trifles,
judicial harassment, dirty tricks or political manoeuvres—and this even
before market pressures are taken into account. If we are not to become
trapped in a permanent state of melancholy, we need a careful analysis
of the state’s enormous capacity for reaction in defence of capital’s
interests.
These questions are central for an assessment of the cycle of left
governments in Latin America that opened with Chávez’s victory in
Venezuela in 1998—followed by the advent of Lula in Brazil, Néstor
Kirchner in Argentina, Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia
and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. The end of the cycle might be dated to the
2015 victory of Mauricio Macri in Argentina, followed by the victories
of Sebastián Piñera in Chile and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. But at the
time of writing this political landscape remains fiercely contested,
with new rebellions against neoliberal orthodoxy in Chile and Colombia,
counter-revolution in Bolivia, successive attempts to overthrow Maduro
in Venezuela and new victories of the centre-left in Mexico and Argentina.
full: https://newleftreview.org/issues/II120/articles/snipers-in-the-kitchen
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