[This is a translation of Hugo Chávez en 4 preguntas, published by Rafel Uzcátegui at the blog for El Libertario, a Venezuelan anarchist newspaper; it’s the first of a several articles from El Libertario that I hope to translate over the next few days. Inline links are added, and editorial notes are in footnotes or in square braces like these. –CJ]

The journalist Eduardo Sklarz, as part of the preparations for an article on Venezuela, sent me these questions by e-mail. The published article can be found at http://infosurhoy.com/cocoon/saii/xhtml/en_GB/features/saii/features/main/2013/03/06/feature-04.

Q1. What actions do you consider fundamental in Chávez’s political trajectory?

A. When he brought the military into the [failed] coup attempt [against Pérez] in February 1992, and took responsibility for it all in front of television cameras; when he took an accurate reading of the political moment in 1998, abandoning insurrectionary strategies in order to join the electoral battle, during a viable moment for an outsider in politics; the proposal of a constituent process to reform the Constitution in 1999; his performance during the [failed] coup attempt [against him] in 2002; the announcement of the social programs and the missions, in 2004; the development of international politics from 2005-2008; his second presidential re-election.

Q2. Which factors explain his striking consolidation of power?

A. Besides his charisma, he very ably brought back the main sociopolitical matrices of 19th century Venezuelan culture.

Q3. How would you characterize chavismo?

A. A nationalist-populist movement of the left, attuned with economic globalization.

Q4. What legacy has Chávez left to Venezuela?

A. Four things: the myth of saving the poor through redistributing corporate oil profits; a popular cult around his personality with political characteristics; the devastation of the independence of Venezuelan social movements; the senselessness^[1] of left-wing discourse.

— Rafael Uzcátegui (March 7, 2013)

1. ^[1]Lit. emptiness/emptying-out of meaning or meaning vacuum.↩

So it’s a beautiful Sunday in the bright, sunny South. And I know it’s been a while, but Shamelessness is like riding a bike. If you’ve been here a while, you’ll know what to do. If you’re new to these parts, you should be able to pick it up pretty quick.

So, how’s things where you are? Got anything big coming up? Anything you've been working on lately? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

Good news, everyone. From Crispin Sartwell’s blog comes the announcement that his study on Political Aesthetics is now available for free online:

cornell tells me we can’t expect a paperback of political aesthetics anytime soon, so i’m putting the pdf of the proofs up onlne. i really think this is my best book.

— Crispin Sartwell at cheese it, the cops! (25 February 2013)

PDF is available here through Google Docs, and I’ve mirrored a copy here. Contents and a bit of the thesis:

Crispin Sartwell, Political Aesthetics

• Introduction: The Idea of Political Aesthetics
• Ch. 1. Leni Riefenstahl Meets Charlie Chaplin: Aesthetics of the Third Reich
• Ch. 2. Artphilosophical Themes
• Ch. 3. Dead Kennedys and Black Flags: Artpolitics of Punk
• Ch. 4. Prehistory of Political Aesthetics
• Ch. 5. Red, Gold, Black, and Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics
• Ch. 6. Arthistorical Themes
• Ch. 7. Political Power and Transcendental Geometry: Republican Classicism in Early America
• Ch. 8. Conclusion: Political Styles and Aesthetic Ideologies
• Appendix: Suggestions for Further Study

Introduction: The Idea of Political Aesthetics

There are, of course, many connections between art and politics. For example regimes of all sorts–democratic, monarchical, communist, and all the rest–use and repress the arts in various ways for propagandistic purposes, to control or deflect public opinion. And much of what we take as fine art has explicitly political themes; this is truer now than ever, or was truer twenty years ago than ever, as artists expressed feminist, antiracist, animal rights, or AIDS activist ideology in their work, for example. These are important areas for investigation. But what I am calling the program or inquiry of political aesthetics begins with a claim that I think is stronger and more interesting.

Not all art is political, but all politics is aesthetic; at their heart, political ideologies, systems, and constitutions are aesthetic systems, multimedia artistic environments. The political content of an ideology can be understood in large measure actually to be–to be identical with–its formal and stylistic aspects. It’s not that a political ideology or movement gets tricked out in a manipulative set of symbols or design tropes; it’s that an ideology is an aesthetic system, and that this is what moves or fails to move people, attracts their loyalty or repugnance, moves them to act or to apathy. But the political function of the arts–including various crafts and design practices–is not merely a matter of manipulation and affect: the aesthetic expression of a regime or of the resistance to a regime are central also to the cognitive content and concrete effects of political systems. . . .

— Crispin Sartwell (2010), Political Aesthetics

• Neutron Bomb Urbanism, from Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth: in which Babatunde Fashola, arbitrary but energetic State Governor of Lagos, Nigeria, possessed of a gleaming vision and infrastructure and housing projects for Lagos, cordons off and destroys 10,000 people’s homes in the shantytown neighborhood of Badia East. This comes on the heels of his government’s destruction of homes and displacement of more than one million people in largely unannounced, government slum clearances [sic]. The same government has also demolished squatter communities in Makoko, razed street markets and criminalized street selling in the name of his gleaming visions and the socioeconomic cleansing that will scour his city of poor people’s homes, lives and livelihoods.

• You will be assimilated: State of Illinois vs. Technological Progress and Human-Scale Trade, from Cameron Scott at SocialTimes. The company behind the Square credit-card processor — one of the single most beneficial developments in years for small-scale sellers, ranging from storefront small businesses to informal hawkers and yard sales (I use it myself for ALL Distro tabling events — is being targeted with a cease-and-desist order and a threat of massive overkill fines from the State of Illinois, because they offer an unlicensed alternative to existing businesses for transmitting money under the State of Illinois. Since they haven’t complied with the right paperwork for a state license that they couldn’t possibly have known they needed, based on the State Government of Illinois’ arbitrary declaration that it will classify them in the category of transmitting money rather than a merchant payment processor, the State of Illinois will now shake them down for a no-doubt expensive and certainly legally burdensome licensing settlement, or else it will assess a fine of $1,000 per transaction, $1,000 per day, and 4?@c3;2014; the transaction amount for continuing to process credit card payments for individuals and small businesses. As usual, the state’s mad insistence on compliance at all costs, with a maddeningly complex, largely arbitrary and in practice completely unpredictable set of bureaucratic requirements, means an assault on any disruptive technology or low-overhead upstart, even those that maintain a superficially respectable corporate front; the only way to survive is to call in yet more lawyers, fill out more forms, and to sink yet more time and money into making yourself indistinguishable from every other financial business in operation. Before the Law stands a doorkeeper, and you must be made to see that he is mighty; after all, the clash-of-the-titans competition between oligopolistic bureaucratically managed, government regulated finance industry has of course served us all so well that its business model must be locked in and secured against upstart alternative business models, at every opportunity, no matter the cost to low-overhead alternatives and infrastructure and services that community businesses and human-scale commerce have come to depend on.

Also.

• Charles Johnson (December 2007), Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty As We Know It
• GT 2007-09-15: Free Riders
• GT 2009-02-19: How local government in Las Vegas and Clark County deals with the worst joblessness crisis in a generation
• GT 2009-08-28: The War on the Informal Sector (cont’d)
• GT 2010-02-04: Against legalization (cont’d)
• GT 2010-03-30: Scratching By (cont’d): The Government Land Cartel Vs. Costs Savings and Urban Living
• GT 2012-09-19: Well then I suppose they will lose their waffle cones as well as their principal.

In which President Obama’s I.C.E. plan some new tactics for escalating their deportations of undocumented immigrants — destroying lives and separating families — for the sake of keeping up their stats. To keep up their stats, they implement a combination of the worst sorts of profiling and police-state dragnets. From USA Today (emphasis added):

WASHINGTON – U.S. immigration officials laid out plans last year that would ratchet up expulsions of immigrants convicted of minor crimes as part of an urgent push to make sure the government would not fall short of its criminal deportation targets, new records obtained by USA TODAY show.

Among those new tactics – detailed in interviews and internal e-mails – were TROLLING STATE DRIVER'S LICENSE RECORDS for information about foreign-born applicants, DISPATCHING U.S. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT (ICE) AGENTS TO TRAFFIC SAFETY CHECKPOINTS CONDUCTED BY POLICE DEPARTMENTS, and PROCESSING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS [sic] WHO HAD BEEN BOOKED INTO JAILS FOR LOW-LEVEL OFFENSES. Records show ICE officials in Washington approved some of those steps.

President Obama's administration has made deporting convicted criminals a central feature of its immigration policy, while also saying it would halt some efforts to remove low-priority immigrants who pose little risk to public safety. [sic — see above; see below] . . . By the time the government's fiscal year ended in September, ICE had deported 225,390 criminal immigrants [sic] – a record, and well above the agency's target of 210,000. ICE has not specified how many of those deportations were based on minor offenses; the year before, it reported that MORE THAN A QUARTER OF THE PEOPLE IT CLASSIFIED AS CRIMINALS HAD BEEN CONVICTED ONLY OF TRAFFIC OFFENSES. . . .

— Brad Heath Immigration tactics aimed at boosting deportations, in USA Today (17 Feb 2013)

Now I should take a moment to say that even if this sort of quota-filling violence, data-mining surveillance and police-state dragnets only netted people guilty of major criminal offenses (and not bullshit traffic offenses or drug beefs), then this would still be absolutely appalling, because the police-state means are appalling whatever results you might be able get from them; and also because there is no reason at all other than pure discrimination for immigrants convicted of crimes to be punished not only by the usual jail sentence, but also by then being exiled from their homes and banished from the country, when non-immigrants convicted of similar crimes are not.

However, as it stands, the claim that the administration's tactics are targeting those who pose a risk to public safety are purely propagandistic lies. In either case, adopting these tactics in order to destroy people's lives and livelihoods, for the sake of meeting bureaucratic statistical targets is despicable.

This story comes via Flavia Isabel’s A Really Complicated Chart About Deportation Policy, which is also great, and well worth reading.