Yes
in literacy, said Lenin, we are excluded from politics and are fodder for “rumors, gossip, fairy tales and prejudices.”
More than 10 days have passed since the attack by North American imperialism against Venezuela and the fog is clearing, allowing some lights to peek through so much debris.
The noise of the bombs that woke up Caracas at midnight was replaced by the noise of speculation, plots and rumors. The blood of the crime gave way to the horror of the screens. The horror of intrigue. The cognitive war found its highest moment in the impact and its aftermath. We woke up with the images of low-flying helicopters and their fire exploding over the darkness of Caracas and, from then on, everything was thick. A maelstrom of confusing information where noise mixes with reality and what is true is not distinguished from what is false.
The gaps of the event generate anxiety to know and that urgency generates its monsters. In those moments of unease, hours are centuries and the need to respond to the gaps becomes saturated with hypotheses that fly through the networks without space-time to sift through. Some, spread by the owners of the bombs and the terror, others, by ourselves.
The United States struck and retreated with two good preys, but without control or presence in the territory. Controlling a country requires something more. The attack amputates the head of state and government, but has no capacity to replace it. That leaves Corina Machado out of the game and Trump launches an attack. His wife in Caracas is now Delcy Rodríguez. How to interpret the play? Some as proof of their conjectures, others as intelligent trickery, many as megalomaniacal madness.
His harangue was not so crazy because it activated, as he intended, the air of doubt. The spontaneism of networks and virtual interaction would do the rest. Not everything is spontaneous disorder in the production of chaos. The pseudo-natural tendency to gossip as a search for answers is supported by a systematic machinery born from the sewers of capital.
The international media feeds, despite its contradictions, the Trump story. Within the foreseeable. And what about the left? What happened these days shows that we are not alien to the logic of the rumor. The pain that the attack produced in those of us who see in Venezuela a light for another possible life, favors what Venezuelans call stories of the road. There are other reasons; We will not dig into them. Apologists for the truth, let us elaborate our version of what happened. The gaps are being filled. Betrayal. Infiltration. INC. Transition underway. Delivery.
The main void that should have worried us is the one left by the kidnapping of the president, which was resolved as Trump well knew: through constitutional channels. Three key elements to preserve the process. One, the continuity of the executive through the unity of political leadership. Two, the loyalty and unity of the armed forces. Three, popular mobilization. The three resist the attack. The Chavista people flood the streets of Caracas and other cities day after day and international solidarity does its part in the avenues of the planet. Calm and calm reflection are found. Theories, hypotheses and rumors continue, however, to saturate networks and paths.
The old factory of narratives for domination is supported by the advance of digital technology. The algorithm rewards the grotesque, but it does not move at random. Its design has a face of class. Lenin also said it more than a century ago: “the progress of technology and science means in capitalist society progress in the art of maximum exploitation.”
The digital age multiplies the devices for expropriation of critical thinking. The objective, to avoid the spread of “an integral conception of the world.” Necropolitics needs confusion and paranoia for its desire for accumulation through dispossession. Their interests shape our senses. The fragmentation of consciences produces, also in our field, diffuse, lukewarm, conspiratorial responses that end up adding to the other side.
The levels of illiteracy of Lenin’s time are far away. In the time of artificial intelligence, a new political-virtual literacy is urgently needed to digest chaos and anxiety, emptiness and emptiness.
A good antidote to paralysis can be a dose of Marxism. Not only as a critical analysis of the phenomena, but as a combat weapon that helps read the context and foresee the priorities, the class enemy and the focus of our criticism. Perhaps this is how we understand that in this historical moment in which necropolitics articulates bombs and gossip, the priority of the popular field is to defend the Bolivarian process and its revolutionary communal transition to socialism. And that today means fighting imperialism, trusting the Venezuelan political leadership and fighting for the release of the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and the first combatant, Cilia Flores.
* Anthropologist and communicator of Vocesenlucha
