"In a very short time, we have begun to advance over all of that which was reversed over the past 80 years" in Latin America, argues Argentine author Luis Bilbao. "Many revolutionary militants and leaders in Latin America and the world are left perplexed and don't understand what is happening in this region today."
This is because, he told Green Left Weekly, "this revolutionary project is cloaked in new political forms quite different from the traditional political forms, and completely alien to certain dogmatic visions, certain non-Marxist, non-dialectical visions of the social and political reality of the revolution today".
For much of the left internationally, the idea of a military figure (Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, a former lieutenant colonel) leading a "Bolivarian revolution" — named after the man Karl Marx wrote a scathing criticism of, Simon Bolivar — or an indigenous- and campesino-led revolution that talks of "Andean capitalism" (Bolivia) are seen as the antithesis of Russia's 1917 socialist revolution. Yet for Bilbao, this new situation can be understood in the light of the impact that the reversal of the Russian revolutionary process in the 1920s, under the weight of counter-revolutionary Stalinism, has had on the world revolutionary movement.
According to Bilbao, since that time the world revolution has not been able to "retake this initial starting point and project itself as an ideological vanguard, a political force that is the concrete expression of a social force" (the working class).
This has led to divisions between different revolutionary forces that have continued to grow. Bilbao explained that this "manifests itself in a very particular way in Latin America, where the vanguard is divided not only into different organisations, but, at the level of this new Latin American process, is divided in its very expression".
Bilbao outlined to GLW his idea of the three vanguards of the Latin American revolution reflected today in the revolutionary processes unfolding in Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba: "The Venezuelan revolutionary process, which is the most advanced, acts as a political vanguard. But if we look at it from the ideological viewpoint, it demonstrates many signs of heterogeneity, weaknesses, confusion — all of which are covered over to a certain extent by the extraordinary speed of the political revolutionary process, but which posit very serious problems for the revolution in the middle- to long- term."
"In the case of Bolivia", which Bilbao defines as the "social" vanguard, "we have a social movement that is very organised, very conscious, very militant, but that has not been able to organise itself politically with the sufficient force to confront the tasks of the socialist revolution and therefore has left flanks open for the enemy to penetrate and put at risk the revolutionary process there".
Meanwhile, "in the case of Cuba, the lighthouse for the revolution in Latin America and a good part of the world, it is evident that after five decades it has a clarity and consistency, an ideological solidness, that surpasses by far the experiences I have just mentioned, but for objective reasons cannot occupy the role of political vanguard nor social vanguard".
What is crucial therefore is "the effort, conscious in some cases, unconscious in others, towards the strategic unification of the social, political and ideological vanguards into a new vanguard that would not just be the vanguard of Latin America".
An important step forward in this process has been Chavez's initiation of the construction of the "United Socialist Party of Venezuela" (PSUV), a process that represents the "extraordinary social demand by Venezuelan society for social and political unification after a long process of disintegration of the left, political corruption and organisational corruption expressed through the continuous splintering over tiny issues".
For Bilbao, "the possibility of carrying out this battle in a scenario of 5.7 million people who want to construct a revolutionary party changes the political face of the planet".
Bilbao pointed out that in an August 15 speech, Chavez spoke of the challenge of unifying the Latin American vanguard and argued it was necessary to construct a new revolutionary international in Latin America. This shows that there is an awareness of this fragmentation and an understanding "that the success of the Latin American revolution is conditioned on whether we are capable or not of surpassing it".