Jaime Pérez, socialism and spirituality

8.8.22

By Stephen Valenti

One of the greatest errors, if not the greatest of all, of the two main authors of socialism, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, (1) is to have concentrated the definition of human beings in such a way in their economic and social relations, that they crushed Spirituality.

This was later expressed not only in a theoretical error, but in deep political errors, such as the relationship with the State, with the leaders, with the party and even with the means of production, and above all in the most complete relationships between human beings themselves, in history in general and in “real socialism” itself.

There are very outstanding authors of socialism who, without thoroughly criticizing this serious error, undoubtedly made fundamental contributions, among others Antonio Gramsci, George Lukcas, Jean Paul Sartre and Rosa Luxemburg among others. An important note: Gramsci would never have been able to write, and above all keep intact and publish later, his jail notebooks

if he had been free in Stalin’s USSR. What a paradox. I’m going to take a quote from Norbeto Bobbio…

“An island surrounded by mystery. I know that we are surrounded by mystery. That is what I call the religious sense of man, the feeling that we are surrounded by an impenetrable mystery. Today we have the support of science to understand the solar system and galaxies: we have assimilated thousands, millions of facts of which the ancients have no knowledge”

However, the world is increasingly incomprehensible to us, less transparent. The more we know, the more aware we are of our ignorance. The entire history of science is made up, after all, of timid hypotheses. That is why I speak of the religious sense of man: of a religious position in the face of the unfathomable, the indecipherable, of the infinite. Although it is not possible to transform this meaning into a doctrine, a catechism, a system” I apologize for the length of this quote from another Italian, from Gramsci, but it seems fundamental to me:

“We must lose the habit and stop conceiving culture as encyclopedic knowledge in which man is only seen in the form of a container that must be filled and supported with empirical data, with raw and unconnected facts that he will have then to pigeonhole in the brain with the columns of a dictionary to be able to respond, on each occasion, to various stimuli from the external world”

“This form of culture is truly harmful, especially for the proletariat, it only serves to produce disoriented people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have accumulated in memory a certain amount of data and dates that they reel off each time to raise a barrier between himself and others.”

“Culture is a very different thing. It is organization, discipline of the inner self, empowerment of one’s own personality, conquest of higher consciousness by which one comes to understand one’s historical value, one’s function in life, one’s rights and duties. But all this cannot happen by spontaneous evolution, by actions and reactions independent of the will of each one, as occurs in plant and animal nature… Man is above all spirit, that is, historical creation and not nature.” …

“Every revolution has been preceded by an intense work of criticism, cultural penetration, permeation of ideas through human aggregates at first refractory and only attentive to solving day by day, hour by hour, and by themselves their economic problems and politicians, without bonds of solidarity with others who were in the same conditions.” …”The same phenomenon is repeated today for socialism. The unitary consciousness of the proletariat has been formed or is being formed through criticism of capitalist society; and criticism means culture, and no longer spontaneous and naturalistic evolution. “

“Criticism means precisely that conscience of the self that Novalis put as the purpose of culture. The self that opposes the others that differentiates itself and after creating a goal, judges the facts and events, as well as in itself and for itself as values ​​of propulsion or repulsion. Knowing oneself means being what one is, it means being master of oneself, distinguishing oneself, going out of the case, being an element of order, but of one’s own order and discipline. And that cannot be obtained if others are not also known, their history, the course of the efforts that others have made to do what they are, to create the civilization that they have created and that we want to replace with ours. , means having a notion of what nature and its laws are, to know the laws that govern the spirit and offer everything without losing sight of the ultimate goal, which is to know oneself better through others and others through through himself.”

It is an exciting topic and it is not abstract, it has a direct relationship between human beings and politics, with political organizations, with the projection of humanist values, not in discourse, but above all with religious faith and its contradictory relationships with social changes, which in Latin America had and still have a very important theoretical and practical issue. Not only as one more participation, but as an original and characteristic contribution of progressive and advanced Christian morality to the ideas and practices of the great transformations.

The derivations that this error of defining human beings above all and almost exclusively in terms of their role in relation to production in history, also had a lot to do with the factors that led to the fall of “real socialism” and, Delving into many fundamental texts of the doctrine, one can find the explanation for pathological processes such as Stalinism and its various national versions and for the hypertrophy of the State and the Party in almost all the countries of socialism. What necessarily implied and implies the suppression or extreme limitation of freedoms and democracy, in its deepest sense.

Knowing concrete experiences within the “real” socialist countries and that of many human beings, outstanding intellectuals and artists, it is clear that the epic of socialism largely surpassed this theoretical and political error – on many occasions – and wrote very intense pages of humanism , of sacrifice and delivery. But in the process as a whole, the impact of the homogeneity of human beings in their social and production relations affected and devastated humanist values ​​and the “real socialist” regimes themselves, and the final balance is in sight. But the millions of examples of the power of that spirituality in the fighters of real socialism, is precisely the proof of that lack of theory, ideology, nurtured for decades. I am going to refer this contradiction to a much more current and national issue: the ferocity, the fierce ideal and historical persecution of a left-wing party, the PCU, against one of

its main figures, without a doubt the one who in Uruguay suffered throughout his life the greatest physical and mental torments defending his ideas and his comrades in struggle: Jaime Pérez and he came out of prison alive.

It is not enough to be indignant, to express all the anger at certain attitudes, such as the one that occurred a few days ago in the Departmental Board of Montevideo, to avoid, with the absence of the councilors, the words that a mayor of the Front wanted to pronounce Wide, precisely remembering Jaime Pérez.

It is simply one more example of the many acts carried out in this sense by the members of that party and followed by others, without explanation, without argument and as an expression of the deepest denial of humanism. It is very difficult to explain.

There is not, there could not be on the left, for someone who calls himself on the left, any justification for committing acts of this kind, which in addition to being a serious political error, because they expose an unacceptable intolerance in the vision of human relations, is a gesture of profound denial of spirituality, of humanity.

The differences of ideas, however deep they may be, if they trigger this type of reaction, it is because at the base there is a dose of fanaticism, of an exclusive vision of those who think differently and especially if they were part of that political community. Also done with extreme ferocity, with hatred.

The history of the PCU provides lessons: in a very difficult moment of its existence, during the dictatorship it adopted a very sharp and inflexible resolution on the behavior of its members in the face of torture.

When we returned to democracy, this subject, very painful, full of nuances and that severely tested humanity, sensitivity and many other things, emerged with great force and urgency. A special commission was appointed to analyze the hundreds, possibly thousands of cases.

And a controversial resolution was adopted, in the leadership and in its Congress, but that took into account in the first place humanism, understanding for the suffering and tragedy faced by these men and women. And with wounds, with very harsh controversies, he managed to get ahead. Some wounds never healed and truly heroic and very valuable companions were lost along the way, who did not accept that resolution.

We expelled a few who were really traitors, proven traitors and, in other cases with nuances and complex situations, we privilege humanism and understanding over the epic and a supposed and rigid doctrine. We must also assume it, we did not give a conceptual, ideological basis and a deep explanation to this resolution. We did it and voted for it by very large majorities.

Simultaneously it was decided that very few people, who remained inside the party, could not enter the directing organs of the PCU.

Among the various people who were included in that comprehensive vision, several were important leaders of the current PCU. And they, those who are still alive, know it perfectly.

Therefore, the attitude towards Jaime Pérez that if he had broken under torture, could have destroyed organizationally but above all morally the PCU in the midst of the dictatorship, should deserve respect and recognition, when they were so generous in other cases so close to them .

It was precisely because of that resistance, because it didn’t break, that Jaime Pérez was savagely tortured. They failed to break him through the various stages of his captivity.

There are quotes that are worth more than any personal contribution, they come from someone who gave her life for her socialist ideas, Rosa Luxemburg. They murdered her.

«As for the rest, everything would be easier to bear if I didn’t forget the fundamental law that I have fixed for myself as a rule of life: to be good, that is the essential thing. Being good, very simply. That is what encompasses everything and is worth more than all the pretense of being right»

And how I understand that she is in love “with love”! For me, love has been (or is it?…) always more important, more sacred than the object that arouses it. Because it allows us to see the world as a splendid fable, because it makes what is most noble and beautiful emerge from the human being, because it elevates what is most common and humble and adorns it with diamonds, and because it allows us to live drunk, in the ecstasy…»

Some in Uruguay today would have condemned her with ferocious words and gestures. And on that sand, that dark soul there is nothing solid that can be built, much less use the word “companion”. Obviously, for these ferocities they do not resort by far to the error in the genesis of the thought of Marx and Lenin, nor do they know them, simply their fanaticism, their primitivism, their intellectual and moral poverty. To a phrase that a great communist leader, who was not Jaime Pérez, said to me one day before an assembly at the end of the dictatorship: “what primitivism.”

It is easy to talk about humanity in the abstract, it sounds good, the problem is when it has a first and last name.

(1) I am not talking about Marxism or Leninism, because neither Marx nor Lenin ever accepted that definition together or separately.


Stephen Valentine. Glass worker, cooperative member, political activist, journalist, writer, director of Bitácora (www.bitacora.com.uy) and Uypress (www.uypress.net), columnist in the information portal Meer (www.meer.com/es ), from Other News (www.other-news.info/noticias). Member since 2005 of La Tertulia on Thursdays, En Perspectiva (www.enperspectiva.net). Uruguay

Jaime Pérez, socialism and spirituality – 8.8.22 / Bitacora online