Pepe Mujica: The Left Failed to Implement Self-Managing Socialism
by John Horvat II May 22, 2025
Nothing heartens a counter-revolutionary more than the confessions of leftists who lament the errors of their Revolution. A leftist’s frank admission of failure serves to encourage those who oppose the left’s agenda. It shows that success is possible.
The late Uruguayan president and Marxist guerrilla José “Pepe” Mujica is one such case. His recriminations about the left’s failure to implement self-managing are particularly insightful. He shows how socialism stalled in the eighties and failed to take the next step forward. Before his death on May 13, the former Tupamaro terrorist, who was convicted of killing a police officer, had to admit that the left stagnated.
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His statements vindicate the efforts of the Societies for the Defense of Tradition, Family, Property (TFP), which opposed self-managing socialism when it was introduced in France in 1981. Back then, few realized the importance of this movement to the leftist cause.
The Importance of Culture
However, it was very important since this brand of socialism radically attacked Western culture in its minute details.
In an upcoming book1 written with American leftist author Noam Chomsky, Pepe Mujica complains that his generation made a “naïve error.” It mistook the control of institutions and the nationalization of modes of production and distribution as substitutes for culture. Leftists failed to see that culture dealt with those “unspoken values” that determine the way “millions of anonymous people” relate to each other in their daily lives.
He claimed these values are stronger than any army or even an atomic bomb. Indeed, he believes these “unspoken values” keep today’s capitalist and consumer society in power. All the efforts of the left have not defeated capitalism’s “culture of selfishness.”
Failure to Form a Culture
The admission of failure is curious, given the ex-Uruguayan president’s impact on the nation’s culture. During his tenure as president, from 2010–2015, he legalized marijuana, approved abortion and same-sex marriage and imposed other radical changes upon the country.
However, he made the “naïve error” of not conquering the hearts and minds of the nation’s citizens. He claims that his generation failed to understand the need to construct a contrary “culture of solidarity” to control these “unspoken values.” The left presented cold, pragmatic programs and legislation instead of considering that the heart often motivates these most powerful human values.
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Yet worse, the left immersed itself in today’s consumerist culture and failed to be coherent with its socialist cause. Leftists became sick and adopted capitalist ways, unfaithful to their socialist diktats. He claims the left ended up doing “the same as capitalism but with more equality.”
Stuck in the Past
Thus, today’s left lacks creativity and has “run out of ideas.” It failed to implement the kind of socialism that would enter into the minutiae of daily life and culture. This proposal of integrating socialist thought into the smallest details of society was the essence of French self-managing socialism proposed by then-President Francois Mitterrand in 1981.
The Uruguayan ex-president claims this brand of socialism is lacking in the uncreative left.
“It means to live as you think. Otherwise, we end up thinking as we live. The struggle is for a self-managing society, to learn to be our own bosses and to lead our common projects.”
He claims that a “new left” will need to discuss these ideas. After all these years, it must start anew to adapt to changing times. He finds the old left “lives too much on nostalgia,” “finds it hard to realize why it failed,” and “has great difficulty in imagining new ways forward.”
Indeed, the decadent left has failed worldwide because it could not advance its program beyond tired Marxist versions that are unlinked to reality. It needed to follow the process by implementing self-management and beyond.
The TFP Campaign Against Self-Management
In 1981, the TFPs in thirteen countries published a message against self-managing socialism as a six-page advertisement in dozens of major newspapers worldwide. The message was written by Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira and was titled “What Does Self-Managing Socialism Mean for Communism? A Barrier? Or a Bridgehead?”
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The TFP message denounced this “cultural” aspect of self-managing socialism that would eventually control people’s lives, extending even to the decoration of homes. It would invade the family, schools and industry. The proposal was truly a cultural revolution of colossal proportions that Pepe describes.
What Worked Was Not Socialist
The massive TFP effort contributed greatly to self-managing socialism’s spectacular failure. After a short time in office, President Mitterrand abandoned the path to self-management.
According to John Vinocur, writing for The New York Times, the fall of self-managing socialism represented what he called the “failure of a method, the abandonment of an economic theory and a crisis of the myth and ideology that dominated French intellectual life for nearly 100 years.”2
President Mitterrand backtracked to such an extent that French socialist economist Laurent Joffrin admitted: “What was socialist did not work and what worked was not socialist.”3
A Failed Left
Pepe Mujica died without seeing his Revolution win. The cause that he fought so hard for in his youth as a terrorist languishes. Indeed, he was forced to admit that changing “a system without facing the problem of a change in culture is useless.” He died, leaving behind a failed left with no plan for the future.
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Footnotes
- Noam Chomsky and José Mujica, Surviving the 21st Century, ed. Saúl Alvídrez, forthcoming from Verso in September 2025.
- John Vinocur, “France’s Leftist Leaders Veer From Chartered Path,” The New York Times, Dec. 24, 1983, p.1.
- Ibid.