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Please come join us in a webinar this Monday, November 3rd at 4 p.m. PST on zoom to celebrate the publication of my revised political memoir in Spanish, El lado oscuro de la utopía (earlier version published in English at AK Press in 2016 as Home from the Dark Side of Utopia). The Spanish translation of the book is now available print on demand but you can get a free PDF at the webinar.
Filmmaker Arturo Albarrán will be present to talk about his experiences living in the US and why he decided to leave. Arturo figures prominently in the final pages of my revised memoir and his work as co-director of In the Shadow if the Revolution, was crucial to getting that film out.
Also joining me will be fanzinero, human rights activist and Venezuelan writer-in-exile, Rafael Uzcátegui. He continues to advocate for democracy in Venezuela and to denounce the growing number of political prisoners of the Maduro dictatorship.
This event will be bilingual, in Spanish and English.
The Backstory
I stepped out of the media cycle and left my years-long “beat” on Venezuela and Latin American politics at KPFA, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Upsidedownworld.org and other places in 2013. My publications, translations, reviews and articles, especially from 2004 to Summer of 2013, were part of the usual fare offered at that time in the anti-imperialist Latin American solidarity left circles. I’d translated and published Sandinista poetry, Zapatista communiques, and by the early 2000s I was doing solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela, crowning my work with a film that continues to make the solidarity circuit, Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out (2008, PM Press). I was an avid supporter of the “Pink Tide” of Latin America and after work on my film I began traveling through the region to see what I could learn from social movements about life under progressive and left governments. What I learned would soon change the course of my life.
People from the Southern Cone to Mexico described the challenges of confronting anti-liberal democratic governments of the right and the left. They convinced me as a solidarity activist that I needed to be in solidarity with people’s movements for democracy, whether they be in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, or any number of countries with right wing governments. They helped me see that the primary binary in politics is not left or right, but top and bottom, up and down. In April 2013 I was in Venezuela finishing work on our book just as Nicolás Maduro was taking power, and viewing the situation through this social movement lens allowed me to realize that I could no longer support him or the “Bolivarian” project of Chávez. I reconsidered how I’d done politics for thirty years and how I’d defined “solidarity” as looking for a vanguard that’s taken power at the level of the state and then supporting it against all attacks, right or wrong. I’d already begun to let go of that Leninist model, but now I had to do more than that. I had to offer my solidarity with the Venezuelan peoples’ movement and actually oppose a “left wing” government.
I came to understand that in fact the social movements never had a place in any vision of a socialist or communist utopia. Indeed, socialist vision of the 20th century had always been for the State to take over those movement and make their concerns its own. In practical terms, that effectively meant neutralizing them, either literally, as in physically destroying them, or simply rendering them impotent. We see this in Lenin’s revolution in Russia, and it continued as policy in every socialist-communist revolution thereafter. Mussolini and Hitler did the same things in their socialist-fascist revolutions. In Venezuela and elsewhere in the Pink Tide social movements were especially vulnerable to being co-opted, bought out or crushed in brutal frontal attacks by “colectivos” or paramilitaries.
Social movements, as such, had always been a phenomenon of liberal democratic societies, like the US and European nations and their former colonies which had managed to achieve some form of liberal democracy. Only in that open space could people find the safety and security necessary to begin to organize social organizations to address their concerns.
The results of my work, joined by the work of my wife, Marcy Rein, with her extraordinary editing abilities, sharp mind and years of experience in US social movements, finally bore fruit in January 2014 when PM Press published our book, Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements.
On our book tour Marcy and I presented in fifty or sixty community centers, churches, universities, bookstore, and anywhere else we could gather a few people together in the US. We went on to Europe and did dozens of presentations there, traveling through thirteen countries in the process. I wrote and self-published a companion volume I entitled The Map or the Territory: Notes on Imperialism, Solidarity and Latin America in the New Millennium, which outlined some things I’d begun to learn from the social movements. In 2016 I wrote about the psycho-socio-political process I had undergone, moving from a left socialist to… something else, in Home from the Dark Side of Utopia (2016, AK Press). I did a much shorter tour with that book and spent more time showing the movie Arturo Albarrán and I made, In the Shadow of the Revolution ” (2017, PM Press/Caracas Chronicles).
The first edition of the Spanish translation of my political memoir, El Lado Oscuro de la Utopía, revised and updated, appeared in pdf in summer 2024, published by Ediciones Actual of the Universidad de Los Andes. Unfortunately it made its appearance just in time to be quashed by the Maduro dictatorship when it refused to recognize the results of the election that gave the Venezuelan Presidency to Edmundo González Urrutia (there's a link below to download the first Spanish edition of the book published by Ediciones Actual). Ultimately, it became impossible to distribute the book in those conditions. For that reason, I began working with a group of Venezuelans to form Ediciones Quipu to publish the Spanish language version of my memoir outside of Venezuela.
Now it’s available. I hope it finds its rightful, modest space as a resource for people tired of arguing left-and-right politics and ready to begin finding ways we can all join forces to build real democracy and bring the autocratic oligarchies that rule us to an end.