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.
Preface
“…living in a world without any possible escape… there was nothing for it but to fight for an impossible escape.”
—Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary
This is the story of a “heroic quest” to find a hidden door that opens into a better world. In that sense, there are two major elements to the story: the hero, and the door. In this narrative, each time the door opens a different place is revealed, and each time the hero passes through door he is transformed. The final doorway opens into the book you hold in your hands. Now it’s your turn to pass through the door.
Readers familiar with the archetypal heroic narrative structure will know that it is circular: the hero (who we’ll now call “the protagonist,” to avoid the unwanted connotations of the word “hero”) leaves home on a search into the unknown for a treasure. The protagonist faces, and wins, challenges, and then, after a series of adventures, returns home. And then, in a dream, the location of the treasure is revealed to be, of all places, buried beneath his bed.
The context from which the protagonist sets out is offered in the first chapter, but something should be said here about the more exotic waypoints to make the journey more comprehensible. I spent some thirty-five years (at the time of this writing) writing about, and doing solidarity with, revolutionary movements in Latin America. This memoir lays out the story of how I came to that work, and how my understanding of an anti-imperialist struggle has evolved over the years.
My first contact with Latin America happened when I landed in Nicaragua in 1982 as a rather naïve (I should say, very naïve) Christian solidarity activist. The Sandinista Revolution had been in process for nearly three years at that point, and it was responsible, in ways I didn’t even understand at the time, for revolutionary upheaval that seized the entire region in those years. My story also took me through work with the Zapatista struggle, primarily translating, co-editing and publishing what was the first book of their material to appear in English.
However, the bulk of this book concerns my work with the Bolivarian process of Venezuela, and this is the point that my understanding of the work of an anti-imperialist solidarity activist began to change. The section on Venezuela encompasses roughly half of the book, and it was the epiphany and denouement of a very long journey.
I am approaching, again, the beginning of my journey where I discover that the world isn’t at all what it appears to be. It is the responsibility of all of us who understand that to look beneath the surface for the truth concealed there. That is the treasure, the location of which only our dreams will reveal.
Clifton Ross
Berkeley, CA
February 2016
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my anonymous home group: you know who you are. Thanks also to many of the people mentioned in this book who read or skimmed it and offered helpful suggestions, in particular, Garry Lambrev, Ben Jesse Clarke, and Michael Duffy. Special thanks to Kevin Rath, who helped me wrestle some of the ideas down and bend them to the will of the manuscript. Our many Saturday discussions were not in vain. Finally, eternal gratitude to my partner-in-life and all that goes with it, including good-natured arguments, disagreements, refutations, and blissful evening peace agreements. Truly, without Marcy Rein this book would not have been possible.
Introduction: On Base with G.I. Jesus
This story would make very little sense to the reader without some context, which in my case was apocalyptic, utopian, millenarian, and military. Those were the constellating forces of my consciousness, almost like a blueprint for the way my thinking would be ordered for my whole life. Since they play such a pivotal role in my thinking, and hence my intellectual development, it seems appropriate to start there, with what those elements signify. If you think you’ve got it, and you already know what I mean by those gangling terms, you can skip to chapter one where the story starts. What follows for the next few pages is what you might call the cultural, intellectual background to my story.
I was born and raised in the Air Force, growing up, in that sense, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The bases were all designed according to the same ordered logic, and regimented down to the detail, even if the details changed from base to base.
The bases were conceived as a uniformly ubiquitous utopia (u+topia: “no where”) circumscribing the planet Earth. Even the lawns and shrubs had military haircuts, the traffic flowed at a precise pace, and the men all wore the same blue uniforms, with only slight differences to indicate rank.
Life on the base was directed and regulated with sirens, bells and a strict discipline from which no deviation was permitted. It was a Manichaean1 world that distinguished itself from the civilian world, demarcating its utopian territory with the fenced base perimeter. The fences, always topped by barbed wire and defended by regular patrols, also reflected a state of mind: within, the allies, those submitted entirely to the military code in utter and total obedience to the Nation and its Mission.
Outside, beyond the base, was, if not the enemy, at least the “other,” either the occupied, or the defended, civilian world: undisciplined, lazy, disordered, and aimless. It was always there, offering evidence of a “locale” outside the gates of the base: a medieval church tower, quaint village houses or possibly a long shopping strip, or series of bars, often with a few derelict women hoping to snag some hapless GI to buy them a drink. It all depended on the location of the base how the civilian world surrounding it took form, but it was always “the civilian world” or “the Economy,” populated by “civilians,” and it had none of the regularity and uniformity of the military base. The Economy was a strange and mostly foreign world but I adapted, as “brats” do, and grew up bicultural, able to adeptly move between the Base and the Economy with relative ease.
Central to the military was a sense of family, community, team, in short, the aim to be a single united force. The military was, as Lewis Mumford so aptly pointed out, the “first machine,” a human machine. And central to that unity was the idea of “The Mission,” which entailed an absolute faith in, and total obedience to, superior authority, especially those with superior rank. Although you might never truly understand what the Mission was, it was, nevertheless, everything. It defined your life. The military was, in short, a form of civil religion. Combined with