Marta Harnecker: `Socialism is a Search for a Fully Democratic Society'

Bolivians mobilise. ``If our government officials are to be wise, they must be pushed by popular initiatives so that the people can feel they are doing it themselves. The state's paternalism, in building socialism, may help at first, but we must create popular protagonism.'' Photo by Ben Dangl.

Marta Harnecker

interviewed by

Edwin Herrera Salinas

For the Bolivian newspaper La Razón. Translation by MRZine's Yoshie Furuhashi.

Posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission

March 28, 2010

Edwin Herrera Salinas: What is the characteristic of the Latin American left today?

Marta Harnecker: Twenty years ago, when the Berlin Wall fell, there was no revolution foreseeable on the horizon. However, it didn't take long before a process began to emerge in Latin America with Hugo Chávez. We have gone on to form governments with anti-neoliberal programs, though not all of them are putting an anti-neoliberal economics in practice.

We have created a new left. A majority of victories are not due to political parties, except in the case of Brazil with the Workers' Party. In general, it has been due to either charismatic figures who reflect the popular sentiment that rejects the system or, in many cases, social movements that have emerged from resistance to neoliberalism and that have been the base of these new governments.

The governments that have done most to guarantee that there be a real process of change to an alternative society are the ones that are supported by organised peoples, for the correlation of forces is not idyllic. We have a very important enemy who is far from dead. It is preoccupied by the war in Iraq, but the power of the empire is very strong and is seeking to hold back this seemingly unstoppable process.

And what is happening to political thought?

What's happening is a renovation of left-wing thought. The ideas of revolutions that we used to defend in the 1970s and 1980s, in practice, have not materialised. So, left-wing thought has had to open itself up to new realities and search for new interpretations. It has had to develop more flexibility in order to understand that revolutionary processes, for example, can begin by simply winning administrative power.
The transitions that we are making are not classical ones, where revolutionaries seize state power and make and unmake everything from there. Today we are first conquering the administration and making advances from there.
Would you say that we are riding a revolutionary wave?

I believe that, yes, we are in a process of that kind. That there will be ebbs and flows, too, is true. It's interesting to look at the situation in Chile. Here we lost, but it was one of the least advanced processes.  Chile always privileged its relation with the United States; the socialist left was not capable of understanding the necessary links that we have to have in this region and betted on bilateral treaties.

During the era of [dictator] Augusto Pinochet national industry was dismantled, and the left didn't know how to work with people. The left went about getting itself into the leadership, political spaces, the political class, while the right went to work among people.