00:00 Jeffery Webber: I mean, I think you made a good picture of the basic state of affairs: concentration of — natural concentration of property [?] in media, whether it's television, which is very important in some places, print media, very specific media. And one of the ironies of the critique of Rory Carroll that I do is this fixation on supposed state control in Venezuela, where you had massive concentration of opposition [?] private channels. And this is repeated throughout.
00:33 I think one of the ways of understanding the importance of the media, and maybe the intensified role [?] of the media in the last period, has been in part the weakness of the party organisations of the right after the neoliberal crisis. And in effect the media often plays the role of an oppositional right-wing party in the absence of an oppositional right-wing party, or at least a coherent oppositional right-wing party. So notoriously, you know, and thankfully, the Venezuelan right has been massively incompetent up until the present. And even in the current moment Maduro, despite governing in a very, very serious crisis, has something like twenty-two per cent support, which is extraordinary given the levels of inflation and so on, and only one per cent more for the opposition, and then the rest deciding for neither option. So there are limits to media control as well. I don't think it's all-consuming.
01:34 But the opposition to it, or the alternative to it, in Venezuela and Ecuador, which was the most advanced in my view, was the wrong alternative. Their alternative was explicitly state-owned media, with very little [?] — and at regional media, TeleSUR [?] — in lieu of, say, state-financed, community-oriented and community-controlled independent networks, which is what was being called for from the bases [?] and [?] places. Because when you have the now established state media, or the regional media TeleSUR, is effectively an apologia for every move that Maduro makes, every move that Correa makes, even when they make those that are obviously and categorically wrong, and that is not the media that is needed, an effective alternative to the private concentration. So it's very clear that there needs to be some kind of expropriation [?] of major media outlets [?], but I think it's equally clear that a state monopoly on the alternative is a very false move, wrong move.
03:10 In response to [?]'s question at the end, or comments and so on, mass mobilisation and governments, alternatives and so on: I mean, I think what was clear is that there needs to be, even in the most potentially radical situation, fierce protection of the independence of popular organisations, even when they are supporting a government, which is one of the crucial problems. And it's easier to say this in retrospect [?] than to achieve this, but nonetheless one of the real issues in Bolivia would be incorporation fully into the party and into the apparatuses of the state. And then when it was necessary for them to act independently, to pressure the government, they were totally unable to do so.
04:15 This happens with all of the key social movement leaderships, all the key trade union leaderships and so on. So the Bolivian Workers' Central didn't hold an election for the first five years of the [?]…, which is an extraordinary thing, and it's because the MAS [?] couldn't [?] win the leadership in the middle of elections [?]. Elections [were held?] regularly throughout the peasant movements; when they couldn't win elections they split the main organisations and the state financed massively the officialist organisation and then ostracised or repressed the independent one.
04:46 So I agree you can't ignore electoral cycles, governmental questions of office and so on, but there needs to be a recognition that if you become subsumed in these relationships you will just be absorbed by the government, as the disciplining power of capital on the reproduction of a state that you are occupying but not controlling. So I guess, in short — I mean, this isn't meant as a slogan, but I don't have much time — so I think it's conceivable and probably [necessary?] to accept that, if we can foresee these things, any kind of challenge that might lead to some kind of post-capitalist situation in the present in Latin America, it's very difficult to imagine that this wouldn't proceed in the first instance through elections, at least in the current context.
05:46 But it's also equally clear that if it didn't quickly move beyond the constraints of liberal democratic institutions, it would be overturned by the right, which — to get to [?] your question on class hatred — it takes something very short of a radical move to mobilise the right in an extra-institutional way. Manuel Zelaya in Honduras was an extremely modest left populist, who had been a member of one of the two traditional ruling-class parties of the country, and in fact is a major landowner himself. But when he [took] very modest measures, they mobilised everything they could to unseat him [?]. So if you come to power through liberal democratic institutions and the objective is to move beyond capitalism, you ought to be prepared to [mobilise?] outside of those democratic institutions if this is going to last even a short period. So I mean, that's not a recipe, but I think it needs to be kept in mind in the current very tense [?]… Thanks for the questions [?].
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