A ascenção e queda de "La Causa Radical" venezuelana

Great Promise, but Poor Performance:Understanding the Collapse of Venezuela’s Causa Radical[PDF], por Daniel Nogueira-Budny (Jornal of Politics in Latin America, 1/2014):

Rising meteorically to national prominence amidst the collapse of Venezuela’s ossified two-party system, the leftist Radical Cause (LCR) seemed poised to ease the country’s crisis of representation and win the presidency in 1993. Instead, it imploded, paving the way for radical populist Hugo Chávez. How can the poor performance of a party with such great promise be explained? This article explains LCR’s initial success and eventual failure through the party’s adoption of internally democratic mechanisms. Its highly participatory approach attracted progressive groups, helping LCR’s early “meteoric” success. But it also sowed the seeds of LCR’s collapse: the absence of formalized decision-making rules and hierarchical leadership hindered the resolution of a political impasse. Internal democracy proved harmful to institutional growth and prevented the party from confronting factional conflict and instituting muchneeded reforms in the long run. It is not only a heavy hierarchy and bureaucracy that prevent political change, but also the opposite in a base democracy.

Contexto: La Causa Radical é um partido venezuelano, inicialmente de extrema-esquerda (atualmente talvez entre o centro e o centro-esquerda), criado em 1971 por dissidentes do Partido Comunista Venezuelano; no final dos anos 80 e príncipio dos 90 (nomedamente na sequência dos protestos de 1989 contra a austeridade) pareceu estar à beira do poder, mas depois perdeu quase toda a influência. Em 1997 a sua ala mais radical cindiu, criando o Partido Patria para Todos. Enquanto LCR desde sempre se opôs a Chavez e integra a coligação opositora, o PPT tem oscilado entre apoiar e opôr-se aos governos de Chavez e Maduro - nas últimas eleições legislativas concorreu, em aliança com os trotskistas, como uma força alternativa tanto ao chavismo como à aliança da oposição, mas mais tarde os tribunais venezuelanos entregaram o PPT à facção pró-Chavez, tendo a facção anti-Chavez criado os partidos Avanzada Progressista e Movimiento Progresista de Venezuela (que, tal como a LCR original, fazem parta da aliança da oposição).

O autor do artigo considera que os problemas que a Causa Radical começou a ter quando começou a ganhar influência resultam de uma organziação interna em que "LCR did not 1) write any formal documents, 2) have any way to expel unruly or disloyal members, 3) create a professionalized staff wth specialized roles, 4) have a hierarchical leadership structure, or 5) put decisions up to a vote (decision-making was done by consensus)":

LCR did not author any founding documents, such as a constitutive act, binding rules, or statutes to tie the party down. Norms, procedures, and patterns of behavior are important for the institutional survival of parties, as they foster stable, valued, and recurring patterns of behavior and provide for agreed-upon ways to handle conflicts and issues as they arise (Huntington 1968: 12). LCR members were required to write up a formal statute for the CSE in order to register as an official party, which they got around to doing in 1978. However, this document was widely considered a meaningless formality that most members did not even know existed. As such, there was little correspondence between established norms and the actual party. LCR’s operations were based on the immediate concerns of its members. In the beginning, when the party was an intimate group of like-minded individuals in Ciudad Guayana, informal and flexible party rules were changed as needed. Contrast this with the case of the PPT, which ended up learning from the mistakes of its predecessor: PPT immediately formalized itself with a constitutive act, rules and regulations, and formal statutes.

The fact that LCR had no founding documents or organic rules led to organizational inertia because it meant that there was no established way to effect institutional change. In its early years, LCR dealt with whatever issues that arose on an ad hoc basis. This worked well enough when the party was a small, homogenous group of individuals living in the same city. However, such an informal arrangement outlived its usefulness and remained in place long after the party had begun to expand geographically, diversify socio-economically, and broaden ideologically.

Interrogo-me se os problemas derivariam de todas as características apontadas pelo autor, ou se o mal estaria sobretudo nos pontos 1 (ausência de normas formais) e 5 (decisão por consenso e não por votação) - talvez os pontos 2, 3 e 4 por si só não fossem problemáticos, desde que houvesse uma maneira de decidir "o que fazer?" quando o partido se começou a dividir em tendências com projetos distintos.

Ou talvez seja um indício que um movimento político não consegue, ao mesmo tempo, organizar-se internamente como uma democracia radical enquanto participa no jogo político da democracia representativa.