Twenty-First Century Socialism

The Unión Civica Democratica (UCD), a far right organization in Honduras funded by the US government, is holding a conference in Tegucigalpa today called "Antidote to Twenty-First Century Socialism" with Roberto Micheletti Bain as the keynote speaker. We have not yet explored what it is they want to cure us of.

Twenty-first century socialism is the brainchild of Heinz Dietrich Steffan, a German professor, in his book "El Socialismo del Siglo XXI" published in 2000. It was popularized outside of scholarly circles by Hugo Chavez starting in 2005. It is currently said to be the basis of reforms in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

So what is twenty-first century socialism? According to Dietrich, neither capitalism nor real socialism have managed to solve the urgent world problems. To resolve this, Dietrich proposes a new kind of socialism with four basic institutions.

The first institution is the equivalence economy, based on Marx's theory of labor and value. Under this system, value is determined by those who create it, instead of the market. Dietrich proposes creating an economy of values based on the idea that something derives its value from the work put into it, not the law of supply and demand. Value replaces price.

The second institution is participative democracy, which uses the plebiscite to decide important questions that concern its citizens. Dietrich calls for a high quality democracy that slowly moves from representative to participative democracy. Key is self-determination via everyone participating in the decision making process.

The third institution is basic organizations, that is, the political or social organizations closest to the community that they serve. These in turn are assisted by larger organizations, such as political parties or NGOs.

The fourth institution is development or structuralism, an economic theory that holds that the core industrial center with an agricultural periphery produces underdevelopment and increases the gap between developed and underdeveloped nations. The industrial development of raw materials (such as wheat, soy, wood) adds value to these exportable materials, and their use internally instead of imports leads to less of a development gap between the industrialized and developing nations. This economic theory has its roots in dependency theory, which holds that the current world economy is rigged in favor of the developed nations.

Dietrich refined twenty-first century socialism down to a single phrase in a 2007 interview, saying

"it's when the majority have the greatest historically possible degree of control of the decision making in the economic, political and cultural and the military institutions that govern their lives."

We've seen Micheletti's antidote: stage a coup and trample civil rights. Which one would you prefer?

"Explosive, but no longer set in stone"

That's how Upside Down World subtitled a post by Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle on the effects and reception of recent action by the Honduran Congress.

As we wrote in a previous post, the Honduran Congress passed a law that, once ratified by being passed by the next session of Congress, explicitly makes it legal to hold public referenda on constitutional reform. We wrote that what the Honduran congress did

is in no way a substitute for what the Zelaya government was proposing, and what the Frente de Resistencia has continued to advocate. Both the Zelaya government and the Frente have pursued completely revisiting the constitution through a participatory forum, an assembly, not [just] via amendment by the Congress, which these bodies argue is not truly representative of the will of the Honduran people or its broader interests and needs.

In a separate post, we pointed out the hypocrisy involved, since merely talking about asking the populace if they wanted to be asked their opinion about constitutional reform was equated, after the coup d'etat, to advocating for changes to the "set in stone" articles of the constitution, while this new legislative move was defended from the same charges.

But only an insider to Honduran politics like Pastor Fasquelle could provide a clear analysis of who wins, who loses, and the opportunities that this legislative move provides.

Pastor Fasquelle notes that Lobo Sosa had spoken in favor of constitutional reform before the coup. Lobo Sosa has made statements in the same vein since his election as president. So from that perspective, his advocacy for this is not entirely surprising, and in the present situation, it is politically expedient.

As Pastor Fasquelle writes

It should also be obvious at this stage that the National Party believes it has created the superficial changes necessary to prevent real, profound change from taking place.

This is the side of the argument that sees the congressional action as an attempt to preempt real constitutional change emerging from the will of the people.

But Pastor Fasquelle thinks that the political establishment has unleashed more than it intended:

A critical analysis of the amendment, in context, needs to take into account the dangers and should recognize its opportunistic and partisan intent. At the same time it must also recognize there has been an opening and that opportunism has created an actual opportunity.

He points to the endorsement by former President Zelaya of the action by the Honduran Congress as part of his evidence that the unintended consequences may be broader than the intended ones:

The amendment has changed the rules, and opened possibilities for the Resistance, despite the intentions of its authors.

Writing as a member-- not a spokesman-- of the Resistance, Pastor Fasquelle notes the FNRP

needs no official recognition to call for a referendum for a Constituent Assembly and to demand the repeal of amnesty for human rights violators on the day the law is officially passed. And soon the Congress may be facing an even bigger challenge: a drive to collect the one hundred thousand signatures needed to call a referendum on the abolition of the Armed Forces has already been announced.

This is where the experience that the Resistance gained in mobilizing a drive for signatures on a petition for a constitutional assembly might be seen, in retrospect, as a more significant form of political action than forming a conventional political party would have been.

Not that Hondurans can expect that the consequences of this legislation will unroll without additional drama. The right-wing Unión Civica Democratica has voiced fierce opposition to the measure, and has every possibility of being more influential in Washington than any of the other positions Pastor Fasquelle outlines, because as he notes the UCD

also has increased its presence in Washington, where it has now ever more powerful congressional allies, to pressure the Obama Administration against what its members believe to be an action as criminal as they claimed Zelaya’s poll to be.

US policy toward Honduras has hardly been coherent or progressive even before the elevation of a more right wing House of Representatives brought about by the 2010 elections. The indications that House members will politick on an overly simplified storyline of right wing nightmares are already clear. How will the recent action of the Honduran Congress that has been promoted by the US right as guarantors of constitutional integrity factor into this going forward?

Thanks to Quotha for reposting Pastor Fasquelle's published essay and ensuring it came to our attention quickly.

Culture, Peace and Contested National Identity

“Normally, the traditional politician has in his house a beautiful bar, but he does not have a library, they are enemies of the written word, they do not know Honduran music, they are fans of the narco-corrido, of ranchera and música procaz, and the proof of this is that this is the music they use in their political campaigns because it is the best representation of them and best identifies them...."

So, who might we imagine made this provocative statement? One of the Artists in Resistance who have kept the spotlight on the erosion of public culture that began with the appointment of Myrna Castro by the de facto regime, to replace Minister of Culture Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle?

Would you believe maybe a cartoonist who was elected to the Honduran Congress in 2009 as a Liberal representative in Congress?

Ángel Darío Banegas has been a political cartoonist since 1985. His work appears in La Prensa, and has been recognized internationally.

When he began his run for the Congreso Nacional in 2008, he was quoted as saying that he wanted to clear out the "monsters and dinosaurs that have discredited politics for years". He also made an apparently serious proposal at that time that Congress members receive only minimum wage.

Starting in 2000, Banegas began to teach courses on drawing and painting, especially for children. His latest move, described as "a permanent cultural activity to stimulate youth so that they stay away from idleness and violence", seems to be closely related.

It also highlights the contested nature of "culture" in the aftermath of a coup and a de facto regime that made cultural institutions central targets for attack.

As announced in La Tribuna this weekend, using his new position in Congress as head of its "Commission on Culture" Banegas has promoted the first Honduran "Festival de las Artes, Congreso, Cultura y Paz" (Festival of the Arts, Congress, Culture and Peace). Taking place in Danlí, it is supposed to be the first of a series in all departments of the country, "to convert public areas into spaces of expression that will contribute to the formation and consolidation of peace, as a culture".

Invoking "peace" as a culture echoes a public discourse in Honduras that predates the coup, but is strongly linked to it. Public concerts and marches as early as May, 2008, explicitly framed as attempts to persuade young people not to take drugs or become involved in street gangs, were organized with the support of the Catholic hierarchy and the business community.

In July 2008, we watched one of these marches in the former colonial capital city of Comayagua, ending at stages set up in front of the cathedral where inspirational speeches were given and Garifuna musicians and dancers performed, explicitly urging teenagers to adhere to "peace". The crowd included large numbers of people dressed in white.

Both before and after the coup, marches using similar rhetoric and clothing were mobilized against President Zelaya and later in support of the de facto regime by the right-wing Unión Civica Democratica and its allies. The rhetoric used in these marches equated "peace" with more intensive policing. As press coverage on June 5, 2009 of a demonstration in Choluteca organized by the Chamber of Commerce described it, marchers were "in favor of peace, security, and democracy and therefore asked for an end to high indices of violence and insecurity that afflict the country".

Banegas' campaign advances a second emphasis, on national identity. The first event in Danlí, and the other festivals of arts to follow, are described as intended to help identify students with artistic talent "who will contribute to local and national culture in the forge of identity".

Banegas personally emphasizes the link between art, national identity, and the outsider political stance on which he ran:

“Because of my critical attitude towards traditional politics, I committed myself strongly to not be the same and to be different; ...I was charged with presiding over the Commission of Culture and Arts, for which we are pledged with a group of partners to make a meaningful effort to manage to fortify national identity."

The first program to this end is the festivals of art. The second is equally ambitious:

"we have created an National Identity Prize that will be given every year, on the 20th of July, in the City of Gracias, Lempira, with the honor in 2010 going to the singer/songwriter Guillermo Anderson."

What is left unstated here is what stands as national identity.

Both programs represent incursions by Congress onto terrain of the executive branch's Ministry of Culture. Banegas seems to be directly taking aim at the Ministry through the Casas de Cultura it coordinates, saying that he will promote congressional initiatives

related to strengthening the Casas de la Cultura in all the country that... in many cases are empty shells, entities abandoned to their own luck.

Banegas repeatedly defines cultural activity as aimed at reinforcing a uniform national agenda and a singular national identity:

“culture is fundamental for the development of a country since it contributes to national identity and we ourselves regain faith in what we do, what he have and our own way of being".

The original mission of the Casas de Cultura was something quite different: "to provide conditions for the flourishing of local culture" through a "policy of decentralization of cultural material".

The Casas de Cultura were central to efforts under the Zelaya administration to promote pluralistic cultural identity; as Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle notes:

we almost tripled the number of Casas de la Cultura in capitals and important towns with their own identity and in remote ethnic communities, Garifuna, Cusuna, or Tawaka, each with bilingual libraries.

Politicization of culture is nothing particularly new, in Honduras or elsewhere. Pastor Fasquelle begins a review of governmental intervention in Honduran culture with the proposition that "the organizations of Honduran cultural institutionality, the Instituto de Antropología e Historia (I.H.A.H) and la Secretaria de Cultura (S.C.A.D.), were creatures of dictatorship":

The Institute was founded with the idea of glorifying ancient Copan as the historic navel of the nation, paradoxically by foreign inspiration, while the Secretariat was established with the primordial aim of co-opting intellectuals and creators. And it ended up deposited in the hands of the military, whose vision amalgamated a folk concept of the culture of the people and an elitist vision of bourgeois High Culture. These were its sins of origin.

Pastor Fasquelle writes that in his first term as Minister of Culture starting in 1994, he began "the professionalization [of these organizations] and the articulation of policy lines: decentralization, democratization, ethnic rescue and support for creators".

When he returned to that role in 2006 he again pushed forward an agenda of "diffusion [of information], rescue of the national patrimony, diversity, direct assistance to creators and decentralization of functions and resources".

Rather than aim to produce a single national identity by promoting a uniform culture, the Ministry of Culture in the Zelaya administration promoted projects designed to exemplify Honduras' cultural diversity.

Pastor Fasquelle argues (as does the former director of the Institute of Antropology and History, Dario Euraque) that the very direction of these policies-- pluralistic, democratizing, decentralizing-- is what brought on the de facto regime's suspicion, embodied memorably in the appointment of Myrna Castro, who denounced book distribution, labeled the Casas de Cultura "Casas de ALBA", and redirected funding to Fashion Week in Tegucigalpa.

But, Pastor Fasquelle argues, all of this "underlines as the moral that our principal function-- institutionally-- is to secure that the people appropriate their own patrimony". He notes that only when culture is locally produced and controlled can it actually survive, a principle that guided policies of the Ministry that encouraged mobilizing local historians and local stakeholders in presenting their own culture.

In stark contrast to the implicit argument that culture is weaker in Honduras today, Pastor Fasquelle suggests that resistance to the coup has awakened creators of the arts in Honduras to their role in public life:

the brave involvement of the great majority of the best thinkers and artists in the country in civic life is one of the unexpected fruits [of the coup], surprising and hopeful. ... our artists and intellectuals have subscribed-- for decades-- to skepticism, not just towards the public cultural institutions, but also towards the State and politics. This skepticism has been a problem for the culture and a headache for the public cultural institutions. But worse, it has been part of the civic problem. Because, to the degree that the critical and creative spirits absented themselves from the forum, politics remained orphaned of intelligence and imagination. The flourishing of culture in the Resistance has engendered a new consciousness, a new type of commitment, critical for the opposition and for the future reconstruction of a deeper and more authentic democracy.

So we have laid out for us a series of contrasts: decentralization versus centralization; State projects versus local appropriation of patrimony; an idealized culture of "peace" versus culture as the expression of critical consciousness.

A telling detail: the time and place cited for the new "National Identity Prize", on the Día de Lempira in the heartland of the Lenca people, implicitly invokes a national imaginary of mestizaje, but now stripped even of the nominal and token brandishing of the Lenca as the primordial people of Honduras.

In the aftermath of a coup that polarized the Honduran people, two models of cultural production are now in open competition. One argues for promoting a common Honduran national identity; the other to recognize the multiplicity of Honduran identities. In the absence of any coherent cultural policy emerging from the new Minister of Culture, the nationalist project enjoys the advantage of energetic promotion by a Congressional novice with a public profile and the means now to promote his own agenda on a national stage. Yet we cannot help wonder if it will prove so easy to put the genie of Honduran diversity back in the bottle of a uniform national culture.

What's all this talk of "Injerencia"?

The Instituto de Defensa de Democracia (a small group of self-described intellectuals) is worried about the injerencia of the G-16 countries in Honduran internal affairs. The Unión Civica Democratica is concerned with the injerencia of the executive branch in the judicial branch. Roberto Micheletti is concerned about the injerencia of foreign ambassadors in Honduras. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

What is injerencia? The Collins dictionary definition is interference or meddling. Despite all the concern by the far right in Honduras about foreign interference, or injerencia, nothing could be further from the truth. What they call injerencia is having an opinion about events in Honduras that is different from their opinion. Thus, the G-16 raising concerns about the Honduran Supreme Court's firing of some judges, or Porfirio Lobo Sosa stating that that the decision to fire the judges complicated the international relations of Honduras is not injerencia, it is having an opinion contrary to what those raising the concern about injerencia believe.

Canadian Ambassador, Neil Reeder, noted that the G-16 stated its position in a press release and that they have the right of freedom of expression; that isn't interference in the internal affairs of Honduras. "We are not a pressure group," Reeder said.

But no one made it clearer that the Spanish Ambassador, Ignacio Ruprez Rubio, who called it a stupidity of some Honduran sectors to criticize the international community for expressing an opinion about Honduran national affairs.

"This is stupid. All the world's problems are ours, the problems of Honduras, the problems of Israel, the problems of any country. There are no internal affairs or external affairs, this is something that has been amply revised for many years in international law and in international relations. Human rights are the rights of everyone; we are talking about questions that are of all humanity and this talk of interference and all this, I repeat, is stupid."

UCD Condemns Lobo Sosa

The right-wing, coup-supporting Unión Civica Democratica (UCD) has awakened from its deep sleep (tired, no doubt, from all that marching to support Micheletti) only to condemn Porfirio Lobo Sosa for interfering in the Public Prosecutor's office and with the Supreme Court's autonomy.

It seems they don't like Lobo Sosa's announcement that he is willing to go to the Dominican Republic and bring Manuel Zelaya Rosales back, and to guarantee he will not be arrested on the spot once he returns to Honduras. After all, Jimmy Dacaret, the UCD president, reminds us, there are 3, count them 3, separate arrest orders for Zelaya; one for political crimes, and two for corruption.

Lobo's announcement caused an emergency meeting of the UCD governance. Dacaret, a rotary member, member of the administrative council of ANDI, and a bread magnate, complained that Lobo Sosa was interfering in the institutional independence of the Supreme Court and the Public Prosecutor since he was going to guarantee Zelaya would not be arrested.

"It would appear as if there is a pact or arrangement between the people related to the case of Zelaya, to give him freedom without him presenting himself to the corresponding courts."

Dacaret continued

"The statements of the President leave a great preoccupation in the society because the primordial reason for the founding of the UCD is to protect the Constitution of the Republic, the respect for the laws in all senses."

The UCD is funded in part by the US State Department.

The UCD also requested that the Supreme Court hand over its decision on the four judges and one magistrate dismissed for anti-coup activity to the Inspector General of the government so that the international community can see the basis on which the court dismissed those individuals.

"With this we can determine if they proceeded on the basis of law, or if there was some kind of mistake that the Court could rectify, but not with pressure from the Executive branch or interference from foreigners because Honduras needs to proceed on the basis of respect for its laws."

With that, the UCD rolled over and went back to sleep. This was something it could not get excited enough about to put on its white shirts and march in the streets!