Chávez
and the meaning of twenty-first century socialism
Where
Is Venezuela Going?
By
Lee
Sustar
VENEZUELA’S “BOLIVARIAN
Revolution” is moving
ahead fast. President Hugo Chávez’s government,
which began in 1999 with an attempt to implement Tony Blair’s “third
way,” now aims to build “socialism for the twenty-first
century.” Revenues from the state oil company, PDVSA,
have funded vast increases in social spending. Targeted outreach
to the poor via government “missions” have largely
bypassed the old state structures and have achieved spectacular
results.
These include a reduction of poverty from 55 percent of the
population to 34 percent as the share of gross domestic product
(GDP) on social spending has increased from 7.83 percent to
14.69 percent; the achievement of literacy for 1.5 million
adults; the virtual elimination of hunger through subsidized
grocery stores that service 13 million people; medical care
provided by Cuban doctors via free clinics in slums, reaching
18 million people, nearly 70 percent of the population; access
to higher education for the poor and working class; and special
affirmative action programs for indigenous people.1 The minimum
wage is now the highest in Latin America at $286 per month,
and the workweek is to be shortened from forty to thirty-six
hours by 2010.2 Land reform has shifted 8.8 million acres to
impoverished families, more than half of that from private
owners.3 Government seed money has increased the number of
cooperative enterprises from fewer than 800 to 181,000 to try
and provide more stable employment for the approximately half
of Venezuelan workers who toil in the informal sector of the
economy.4
All
this is being achieved despite the implacable hostility of
Venezuelan
capital and of U.S. imperialism, which supported
the failed 2002 coup against Chávez, and the subsequent
oil industry employers’ lockout that did enormous economic
damage. If the 2002 coup government—immediately recognized
by George W. Bush’s administration—had been successful,
Hugo Chávez would have been just another in a long list
of reformist Latin American leaders who were overthrown by
the U.S. or its local operatives in a roster of interventions
that stretches from the Mexican War of 1846 to the Contra war
against the Nicaraguan revolution in the 1980s. Instead, Chávez
looms ever larger on the world stage, having turned Venezuela
from one of the most compliant states in Washington’s “backyard” into
the cutting edge of the revolt against neoliberalism and a
laboratory for socialism in the twenty-first century—all
with oil money earned from exports to the United States. Oil
prices are high, of course, owing to the Iraq War, which has
also severely constrained the ability of the U.S. to contain
Chávez, let alone overthrow him.
As a consequence,
millions of workers in Latin America and beyond see Venezuela
as evidence that reforms are possible
despite corporate globalization and imperialism—and they’re
discussing the possibility of a socialist future as well. Chávez’s
Venezuela challenges Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum,
adopted by neoliberal policymakers everywhere: “There
is no alternative”—TINA. Venezuela is increasingly
seen as proof that TINA, if not dead, is certainly suffering
from a crisis of legitimacy. Not only has Venezuela begun to
reverse decades of what is known in Latin America as “social
exclusion,” but the oil boom has facilitated regional
economic integration and anti-U.S. diplomatic initiatives that
are giving shape to Chávez’s aim of achieving
pan-Latin American, anti-neoliberal unity.5 Latin America has
seen other populist leaders with a base among the working class
and the poor, but rarely with such an immediate international
impact.
These changes
powered Chávez’s reelection in
December 2006 over conservative Manuel Rosales, a state governor
notorious for having signed the coup decree of April 2002.6 The opposition’s lackluster campaign ensured that Chávez’s
victory would be the biggest yet, with 60 percent of the vote.
Afterward, Chávez declared a new phase in what Venezuelans
call the “revolutionary process”—the nationalization
of sectors of the oil industry that were still in the hands
of foreign investors. This move followed the re-nationalization
of the telephone company, CANTV, and other companies. Parallel
to these nationalizations—carried out by presidential
decree following authorization by the National Assembly—are
far-reaching efforts to create new political structures, including
communal councils and workers’ councils that are presented
as cornerstones of the “protagonist” democracy
that Chávez has long championed. Earlier, Chávez
had marked his reelection with a call to create a United Socialist
Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and later denounced parties previously
part of his electoral and government coalition for refusing
or hesitating to dissolve within it.7
With this
turn, certain contradictions in the revolutionary process
have surfaced. Are the proposed workers’ councils
a step towards workers’ control, or are they an effort
to extend state control over organized labor, as some critics
in the left wing of the pro-Chávez National Union of
Workers (UNT) have argued? Is the PSUV a means to bind Chávez
more directly to the mass of workers and the poor, and bypass
unresponsive and/or corrupt bureaucrats, as its promoters claim,
or is it a move to co-opt and bureaucratize the social movements
themselves, as some leading movement activists have argued?
Will the companies that have been nationalized—through
compensation to capital worth billions of dollars—be
democratically run by workers or by the same managers? Is a
government that has paid off $3.3 billion in loans to the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank—the odious debt of
previous, corrupt regimes—prepared to carry out a consistent
opposition to imperialism in all its forms? What will be the
response of Chávez to attempts by unions and social
movement activists to advance the “revolution within
the revolution,” as the Venezuelan Left has long advocated?
Or the response to strikes in state-owned companies? Class
polarization is leading to sharper class conflict and political
crises, for example, over inflation and the hoarding of staple
foods. Will the government attempt to mediate such conflict
or support workers and the poor against employers and speculators?
Are Chávez’s exhortations to study revolutionary
leaders of the past—most recently, Leon Trotsky—the
harbinger of more radical policies? Can a government elected
within the framework of a capitalist, bourgeois democratic
state initiate a socialist transformation of society? Can the
prestige of Chávez among workers and the poor in Latin
America and beyond contribute to the revival of radical and
socialist politics?
These
questions are not entirely new. But until recently, the broad
Chávista camp was bound together by pressure
from the Venezuela Right and imperialism. Tensions, for example,
had bubbled up among government supporters over the highhanded
way government officials ran Chávez’s campaign
in the recall election of 2004.8 But positions didn’t
crystallize, given the perceived threat of an electoral victory
by the Right or another coup. Moreover, rapid economic growth—more
than 10 percent annually since 2003, has nearly cut in half
what had been a 20 percent unemployment rate, ameliorating
conditions for workers but simultaneously aggravating class
polarization. Consequently, sharp political debates in Venezuela
are emerging within the Left itself in response to Chávez’s
new initiatives. The Right remains a threat, however, as evidenced
by the violent protests (which are ongoing as the ISR goes
to press) after the government failed to renew the broadcast
license of an opposition television station that had allowed
active military generals to broadcast calls for the government
to be overthrown during the coup attempt.
Where is
Venezuela going? This article seeks to provide a framework
for answering that question. It will (1) analyze
the rise of Chávez within the context of Venezuelan
history and politics; (2) examine the government’s economic,
social, and political policies; (3) evaluate the Venezuelan
revolutionary process from the standpoint of classical Marxist
theory; and (4) outline a strategic approach towards the Chávez
phenomenon for those committed to anti-imperialist and revolutionary
socialist politics.
From the “Venezuelan dream” to
economic catastrophe
Venezuela
was long considered perhaps the least likely country in Latin
America to become an international reference point
for revolutionary and socialist politics. The fall of the military
dictatorship of General Pérez Jiménez in 1958
was followed by a political power-sharing deal between the
nominally center-left Democratic Action party (AD) and the
conservative Christian Democratic party (COPEI). Known as the “Punto
Fijo” system, named after the house of then-presidential
candidate Rafael Caldera where the pact was brokered, the agreement
created a duopoly that excluded the Communist Party (PCV),
then dominant in organized labor.9 The communists were also
expelled from the Confederation of Venezuelan Labor (CTV),
which was soon dominated by the AD and became a vehicle for
U.S. imperialism to subvert organized labor across Latin America.10
For decades,
the CTV and the puntofijismo political duopoly seemed impervious
to challenge from the Left. Since voting
for the National Assembly was done by party slate rather than
individual candidates, and state governors were appointed,
it was almost impossible for individuals or parties outside
AD and COPEI to win elections. When threats did emerge, outright
fraud ensured that the two parties would retain their grip
on power.11 “Acta mata voto”—the tally sheet
kills the vote—became the duopoly’s unofficial
slogan.
Locked
out of elected office and influence in the unions, the Left
struggled to make an impact. Unions tied to the PCV
formed a separate labor federation that remained small and
had only limited influence. A generation of young militants
influenced by the Cuban Revolution—mostly young, middle-class
radicals—broke away from the PCV and took up armed struggle
in the 1960s, but made little headway. The guerrilla actions
were used as a pretext for state repression against student
radicals and labor militants.12 By the 1970s, however, the
Left had partially recovered. A breakaway from the PCV, the
Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) reoriented from guerrilla struggle
to an electoral strategy.13 In the center of heavy industry
in the Bolívar state, a radical union movement led by
ex-communists gave rise to the Radical Cause party (La Causa
Radical).14 Elements of both would later break away to join
Chávez’s electoral coalition.
The 1976
nationalization of the oil industry by the AD government
of President Carlos Andrés Pérez was the high
watermark of puntofijismo and nationalist economic development,
as the U.S. defeat in Vietnam forced Washington to give Caracas
a longer leash.15 Venezuela seemed poised to reach a qualitatively
higher stage of development than its neighbors.
The Latin
American debt crisis of 1982–83 and a dramatic
fall in world oil prices shattered the Venezuelan dream. The
debt used to finance Pérez’s nationalist development
plans couldn’t be repaid. In 1970, Venezuela’s
long-term debt had been only 8.7 percent of GDP. By 1985, it
was 46.1 percent.16 Subsequent governments turned to the IMF
for emergency loans, contingent, as usual, on “structural
adjustment” and austerity. The heady days of high growth
and expansive plans for economic development suddenly gave
way to endless crisis. Debt—and the succeeding IMF loans—strangled
many Latin American economies during what became known as the “lost
decade” of the 1980s. The income share of the poorest
40 percent of the population dropped from 19.1 percent in 1981
to 14.7 percent in 1997, while the wealthiest 10 percent increased
their share of the national income from 21.8 to 32.8 percent.17 “During
the 1980s and 1990s, no South American country deteriorated
more than Venezuela; its GDP fell some 40 percent.”18
The
social explosion, known as the Caracazo, finally came on
February
27, 1989, when riots erupted in Caracas against
a dramatic increase in bus fares, driven by fuel costs, and
by the massive hoarding by supermarkets in anticipation that
the government would authorize price increases in regulated
food items. The AD government of Carlos Andrés Pérez—who
had been returned to office on a populist platform, only to
embrace new IMF “adjustments”—ordered the
military to clear the streets. Thousands were killed by the
repression.19 A state that had been held up as the model for
Latin American democracy turned out to be as vicious as any.
Neoliberal policies, combined with low oil prices, took a
terrible toll on the Venezuelan working class. Real wages dropped
23 percent during the 1990s, and 60 percent of the population
was forced to turn to the informal sector of the economy to
survive.20 Poverty rates skyrocketed, reaching, according to
one estimate, 66.5 percent in 1989.21
The duopoly responded to rising social polarization by trying
to let off steam in the political arena. A series of reforms
under an AD government allowed a vote for individuals to the
National Assembly and in 1989, the first direct elections for
governor in Venezuelan history.22
The Left,
it seemed, finally had an opening to consolidate its influence.
Thus in 1989, when the first-ever direct elections
for governor were held, Causa Radical won the post in the industrial
state of Guyana, and MAS made gains in the National Assembly.23 Yet opportunity coincided with crisis: 1989 was the year not
only of the Caracazo and electoral reform, but also the year
the Berlin Wall was torn down. The collapse of Stalinism in
Eastern Europe and in Russia disoriented not only pro-USSR
parties like the PCV but also Maoist and Trotskyist groups.
Thus the Left, seemingly poised to exploit political reforms
and intervene in social struggles in the aftermath of the Caracazo,
fragmented instead. Indeed, the rise of Chávez must
be seen in part as a consequence of the weakness of the Venezuelan
Left.
Enter Chávez
Lieutenant
Colonel Hugo Chávez burst onto the scene
on February 4, 1992, in a failed coup against Pérez.
His plan called for seizing key government and military installations
and radio transmitters, through which his group would call
for a national uprising. The plan echoed the 1945 coup and
AD-military junta that overthrew the military dictatorship
of Isaías Medina Angarita. But unlike the AD party of
that time, Chávez’s conspirators had almost no
contact with social movements, organized labor, or the Left.24 The apparent hope was a repeat of the Caracazo uprising, this
time with the military on the side of the people.
Betrayed
by spies, the coup failed. Chávez went on
television to urge his forces to surrender—“for
now”—and was sent to a military prison. Large numbers
of Venezuelans saw Chávez not as a would-be dictator
but as a hero—a point made by former president Rafael
Caldera on the floor of the Senate. Caldera adapted to the
Chávez phenomenon by breaking from his COPEI party to
win reelection as an independent on a populist platform in
1993. Once in office, he pardoned Chávez, reprising
a move he made in his first term in 1969 when he pardoned former
guerrilla fighters. But like Carlos Andrés Pérez,
Caldera soon abandoned his populist rhetoric and implemented
IMF-approved economic policies. It was in this context that
Chávez turned towards the electoral road to power. AD
and COPEI were discredited as corrupt accomplices of the IMF,
while political reform had made the strategy of seeking office
viable.
Chávez’s only organization had been his once-secret
circle of military conspirators, the Revolutionary Bolivarian
Movement-200 (MBR-200, the number signifying the bicentenary
of Simón Bolivar’s birth), founded in 1983. The
MBR-200 took root among a generation of officers who had no
experience of counterinsurgency measures against the left-wing
guerrillas of the 1960s. Rather, they were the beneficiaries
of a new, university-level training system created at the height
of the 1970s oil boom and salaries that were the highest for
officers in the Western Hemisphere, after the U.S. and Canada.
The training “reinforced nationalist patriotic sentiments
among officer cadets after 1974,” writes one researcher. “Some
developed an almost mystical attachment to the teachings of
Simón Bolivar, and many shared a populist, egalitarian
and ultimately utilitarian attitude toward democracy.”25
These young
officers considered themselves superior to the less educated
high-ranking officers, who were enmeshed in AD-COPEI
corruption. The economic shocks of the 1980s, however, shattered
the Venezuelan military officers’ world, cutting their
living standard from that of the upper middle class to the
working class. Many looked askance at Pérez, whose “sale
of state industries and the national telecommunications company
to foreign investors, were viewed as damaging to national sovereignty
by many officers still influenced by a belief system that equated
security with state control of ‘strategic industrial
sectors.’” On top of all this was revulsion at
the military’s role in shooting down poor rioters in
the Caracazo.26
Less discussed
is the extent to which Chávez’s
politics draw upon nationalist traditions within the Venezuelan
military itself. As in many Latin American countries in the
nineteenth century, Venezuela was divided by civil wars between
urban bourgeois liberals and rural conservative landowners.
In Venezuela, the conflicts escalated to the point where there
was barely a functional central state. Chávez is sometimes
compared to the populist figures from this era, such as Ezequiel
Zamora, the liberal caudillo “horror of the oligarchy” assassinated
in 1860.
Chávez’s politics, in fact, echo broader nationalist—and
not particularly left-wing—traditions of the Venezuelan
military, for example, that of General Cipriano Castro, an
admirer of Bolívar, who seized power in 1899 and formed
an assertively nationalist government. U.S. President Theodore
Roosevelt called the dark-skinned Castro “an unspeakably
villainous little monkey” and plotted a possible invasion.
An intervention did take place, but privately: the U.S. asphalt
trust financed an invasion by a rival general. Castro prevailed,
and survived gunboat diplomacy when Italy, Britain, and Germany
sent naval ships to the Venezuelan coast in 1902, with Germans
opening fire. Ultimately Castro accepted the U.S. as a broker
for the repayment of the debt.27
The subsequent
dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez—who
ousted Castro—paid off the debt by 1930 and collaborated
with U.S. oil companies to boost Venezuelan oil production,
mainly as a counterweight to Mexican President Lázaro
Cardenas’s nationalization of his country’s oil
industry.28 But in a development that presaged Chávez’s
MBR-200 military conspiracy, a section of more nationalist-minded
junior officers led by Major Marcos Pérez Jiménez
allied with the AD party in a populist junta that ousted General
Isaías Medina Anagrita to initiate the democratic trienno
of 1945–48. Anticipating the MBR-200, Pérez Jiménez’s
circle considered itself “a movement of political and
military renovation” that sought not military rule but
to serve “as a mere instrument to bring into being a
new government comprised of patriotic, able, and honest men
who were backed by popular opinion.”29 Pérez Jiménez
turned on his civilian allies three years later and installed
himself as dictator-president for a decade. Yet while a reliable
guarantor of U.S. oil interests, Pérez Jiménez
carried out a planned, nationalist economic development program—laying
the basis for state-owned steel and aluminum industries, for
example—a program Chávez would later seek to revive
and democratize.30
There is
another strong military influence on Chávez
as well: the populist government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado
in Peru, who took power in a military coup in 1968 and held
the post of president until 1975. In a process described by
one author as “revolution by decree,” Velasco took
advantage of a commodities boom to nationalize key Peruvian
industries, including mining, transportation, communications,
electrical power, and more. An aggressive land reform policy
handed out small parcels to poor peasants, breaking up the
great latifundia landholdings with minimal compensation to
the owners. Velasco’s quasi-governmental National System
for Social Mobilization and state-initiated organizations of
workers and peasants prefigured Venezuela’s social missions
of today. This attempt at revolution from above—including “social
property” and “workers’ self-management,” unraveled
amid the 1974–75 world recession. The prices of Peruvian
exports plunged, leading to social discontent, a revolt by
police, and splits in the junta, which forced Velasco from
power.31
Yet to
the young Hugo Chávez, sent to Peru as part
of a military-diplomatic mission, the Velasco experience showed
the potential for a military alliance with “the people,” in
contrast to the right-wing dictatorships in Chile, Argentina,
and Brazil that slaughtered leftists and union militants. Chávez
was able to meet Velasco, who gave the young Venezuelan officer
a copy of his small book on his “Peruvian revolution.” Chávez
would carry the book in his shoulder bag until the day of his
1992 coup attempt.32
Chávez continues to sound the theme of a revolutionary
civic-military partnership. In a June 2 address to half a million
at a mass rally against the violence from the Right, Chávez
devoted a large part of his speech to commemorating the anniversary
of one of two failed 1962 military revolts led by officers
with leftist sympathies. In a speech otherwise full of references
to building socialism, Chávez hailed the “civic,
military, patriotic, and revolutionary” uprising against
the “treason” of the Punto Fijo pact, adding, “By
that road we came, and by that road we arrived at February
4”—that is, the 1992 coup.33 One need not doubt
the sincerity of Chávez’s commitment to communal
councils and “protagonist” democracy to conclude
that the Venezuelan leader accords a leading, if not decisive,
role in political change to patriotic and nationalist elements
in the armed forces.
The 1992
coup’s failure, however, compelled Chávez
to forge political relationships with civilians. While imprisoned,
his contacts with the Venezuelan Left broadened, and included
former guerrilla fighters, trade unionists, and politicians
to the left of the AD. After his pardon by Caldera, he traveled
to Havana to speak and meet with Fidel Castro and the Cuban
leadership.34 By 1998 he was a credible presidential candidate,
as the AD-COPEI duopoly had reached its terminal crisis. Caldera
had won presidential elections in 1993 on a populist basis,
breaking from his own COPEI party, and pardoned Chávez
as a symbol of reconciliation with those who suffered in the
economic decline. In short order, though, he embraced a new
IMF austerity package.35 It is difficult to overstate the resulting
crisis of legitimacy of the Venezuelan political system.
Chávez won election with 56.2 percent of the vote in
December 1998, the highest percentage of a presidential winner
in decades. While he sounded themes of social justice and nationalism,
his central platform was a call for political reform through
a constituent assembly to write a new constitution to replace
that of the so-called fourth republic of the Punto Fijo accord.
Chávez’s electoral vehicle, the Fifth Republic
Movement (MVR) was small and lacked roots; it relied on a coalition
initially drawn from a split from Causa Radical called Patria
Para Todos and MAS (which would later split itself).36 This
lack of a political party of working class and the poor that
Chávez aspired to represent has been a persistent problem
for his political project—and as we shall see on the
debate over Chávez’s proposed unified socialist
party, the problem persists nearly a decade later.
Once in
office in 1999, Chávez was besieged with the
effects of the economic crisis—the economy contracted
by 7.2 percent, and unemployment jumped from 11.4 percent to
15.4 percent. Compounding the misery, a catastrophic mudslide
killed thousands. He retained Rafael Caldera’s budget-cutting
finance minister in that post. Chávez’s main focus
was the constituent assembly that was charged with creating
a constitution that would implement political reform “while
emphasizing the importance of the free market and recognizing
private property.”37 With the new constitution in place,
Chávez ran for president again in 2000 and increased
his vote while still keeping within the framework of third
way economic policy. In November 2001, Chávez proposed
new legislation to implement land reform, strengthen state
control over the oil industry, and increase spending on social
security.38 Many government economic measures, though, had
the character of pragmatic, improvised interventions, such
as the creation of military-civilian projects to boost economic
development in poor and rural areas to supplement an increase
in social spending.39 While Chávez did assert the importance
of the state in economic management, particularly in regard
to PDVSA, he hardly positioned himself as an anti-neoliberal
rebel. Shortly after taking office in 1999, the Venezuelan
president traveled to Wall Street to “assure the moneymen
of the ‘credibility’ of his government and its
aims of a ‘diversified’ and ‘self-sufficient’ economy,” as
well as throwing the first pitch at a New York Yankees baseball
game and ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.40
The empire strikes back
Nevertheless,
Chávez’s economic policy did antagonize
Venezuelan capital—and more important, the U.S.—in
one respect. Chávez moved to restore government control
over the state oil company, PDVSA, and reversed Venezuela’s
longstanding policy of undercutting OPEC quotas. Chávez’s
moves were credited with helping to reverse the trend towards
low oil prices and restore pricing clout to oil producing nations.
The incoming
Bush administration soon assumed a hostile stance towards
Chávez. Since the 1920s the U.S. had relied
on Venezuela’s oil and had insisted on compliant governments
ever since, be they military or civilian. It was only in the
post–Vietnam shock of U.S. imperialism that the Venezuelan
bourgeoisie felt confident enough to follow the example of
nationalist governments in the Middle East and nationalize
its oil industry. But this nationalist phase didn’t survive
the economic shock therapy that the U.S. imposed on Venezuela
via the IMF.41
Chávez’s resurgent nationalism, however, represented
an obstacle to George W. Bush’s plans for a more aggressive
U.S. imperial control of oil resources. A weak economy left
Chávez vulnerable to pressure from Washington and the
domestic Right. Sections of the middle class that had voted
for him turned against the government, seeing no immediate
benefit for themselves in the government’s fledgling
anti-poverty programs. Meanwhile, Chávez’s coalition
was fraying. Already in the 2000 election he faced a fairly
strong electoral challenge from Francisco Arias Cárdenas,
his former military co-conspirator in the 1992 coup attempt,
and in the months before the coup Chávez couldn’t
be assured of a majority in the national legislature.42
The middle-class opposition and conservative military officers
were egged on by an utterly hostile corporate media that raised
the specter of a Castroite communist dictatorship in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan oligarchy, led by billionaire media magnates
like Gustavo Cisneros, called the shots. But the oligarchy
astutely relied on a handful of prominent ex-leftists and the
leadership of the CTV union federation to provide a supposed
progressive political cover. The CTV called the general strike
and mass march that served as the launching pad for the April
11, 2002, coup attempt, which began as unknown snipers opened
fire on the defenders of the Miraflores presidential palace.
United
States government foreknowledge and support of the coup has
been thoroughly documented. Venezuelan-American attorney
Eva Golinger has used the Freedom of Information Act to publish
documents that show how the government-chartered National Endowment
for Democracy (NED) funneled $2 million to the Venezuelan opposition
in the six months prior to the 2002 coup, and that the NED
had given the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy arm more than
$750,000 to support the CTV, a key opposition group.43 The
CIA knew of the coup beforehand, and the U.S. immediately endorsed
the would-be dictator Pedro Carmona, head of the FEDECAMARAS
chamber of commerce who decreed the abolition of the National
Assembly and declared martial law.44
The coup collapsed because of pressure from below. Journalist
Michael McCaughan describes the scene:
In the
absence of any communication from the missing president “Radio
Bemba,” the word-of-mouth network that carries rumor,
gossip, innuendo, and hard news like a powerful breeze through
Latin America’s popular barrios, suddenly sprang into
action. The message carried on the wind was that Chávez
had never resigned, and that the dead and injured outside Miraflores
were mostly Chávez supporters. The next day, Chavistas
gathered in small groups and descended from the hillsides to
besiege the presidential palace demanding their leaders’ safe
return…
The growing
clamor of the angry crowds unnerved the “transition
government,” sending generals, bishops, and business
people scuttling to their cars to beat a path to the safety
of their homes.45
Meanwhile,
Carmona’s power grab, the “coup within
a coup,” alienated the CTV leaders who had backed it
and isolated within the military key sections of which rallied
to Chávez and returned him to Miraflores under pressure
from officers and soldiers loyal to the president.
The slums
that rallied to Chávez are the same ones
that had revolted against IMF austerity in 1989; Chávez
had sought to call them into the streets against the old order
in his attempted coup three years later. On April 11–13,
2002, the two elements fused together. The Bolivarian Revolution,
however ill-defined, had shown it had won the active support
of the impoverished and oppressed in a struggle against counterrevolution.
The search for revolutionary agency
The uprising
against the coup seemed to vindicate the notion of a “revolutionary process” in Venezuela. But
there was still relatively little organized connection between
Chávez and the masses.46 Various attempts had been made
since 1999 to solve this problem: the constituent assembly
process aimed at creating genuine “protagonist” democracy;
the civic-military projects of 1999–2001; an attempt
to legislate the CTV out of existence and create a new labor
federation, later withdrawn; the effort to create grassroots
Bolivarian Circles to form a popular counterweight to the Right.
The coup
attempt posed the question of lack of political organization
still more acutely—as did the lockout by top management
at the PDVSA state oil company in late 2002. Supported by technicians
and a section of workers tied to the CTV, the shutdown sent
the Venezuelan economy into free fall. Other private employers
supported the lockout as well, as shortages of gasoline and
fuel oil led to widespread factory shutdowns. It was only the
determined efforts of pro-Chávez oil workers who restarted
production under their own control, assisted by a scattering
of technical personnel rushed in from abroad and soldiers who
transported gasoline. In other sectors of industry, workers
kept production going in spite of management sabotage.47
While the
episode was “ephemeral,” it was successful,
wrote oil workers’ union leader José Bodas and
two other labor militants, Richard Gallardo and José Joaquín
Barreto:
The dream
of workers’ control of production became flesh
in Venezuela and made an indelible mark in workers’ consciousness,
and managed to convince them in a matter of hours that it was
not a revolutionary socialist utopian idea to expropriate to
the capitalists, to control production, to plan the economy
and to put the goods produced at the service of the majority….
The workers democratically chose their authorities, managers,
shift leaders; distributed the working hours and began to plan
the rhythms and quantities of production.48
The working
class, faced with an unavoidable choice of whether to support
Chávez or the CTV alliance with the oligarchy,
opted for Chávez. The result was the formation in 2002
of a new labor federation, the UNT, a formation committed to
the revolutionary process and led by a coalition of social
Christians who split from the CTV, veteran socialist labor
organizers, and Chavistas of the Bolivarian Workers Front (FBT).49
The wave
of oil revenue in 2004 gave Chávez new leverage
in his efforts to consolidate a mass base, providing funding
for the social programs known as “missions.” Funded
by huge revenues from oil exports, the missions are controlled
directly by the central government in a kind of NGO-ized twist
on traditional clientelism of Latin American populist governments
of the past (Cárdenas in 1930s Mexico, Juan Perón
in Argentina in the 1940s and 1950s). The missions enabled
Chávez to bypass the state bureaucracy, still largely
staffed by the opposition, and provided him with a recruiting
base for cadre as a substitute for a grassroots political party
organization. In this way, Chávez could begin to have
a more organized relationship with the barrios that mobilized
to defeat the coup at a time when his electoral operation was
embattled.
“[A]ctive participation and mobilization are key components
of the process,” Venezuelan labor expert Steve Ellner
wrote in 2005.
Chávez has relied on more than just electoral or passive
support. He has followed a strategy of ongoing popular mobilization
to face his insurgent adversaries, actions that have proven
essential for his political survival including his comeback
after the April 2002 coup. The massive street actions in favor
of the Chavista process have been made possible by the conviction
among rank-and-file Chavistas that Chávez’s rhetoric
is based on substance and commitment to thorough change, not
manipulation.50
More recently,
the Venezuelan government has provided seed money for cooperatives—worker-owned and run businesses
aimed at providing stable employment for those who labor in
the informal sector, which still includes nearly half the working
class. The intention is to supplement the oil revenue-funded
social reforms with lasting economic change and what Chávez’s
economic policymakers call “endogenous economic development”—self-sustaining
economic activity that can create jobs and growth without overdependence
on oil revenues. The political byproduct of this effort would
be the consolidation and extension of Chávez’s
political base among the poor.
The analog
to the cooperative initiative is the creation of communal
councils, locally organized bodies that are established
in parallel to existing municipal structures, and which are
given grants by the state for local projects. Created under
the Chávista constitution established in 2000, the councils
received new emphasis following Chávez’s re-election
in 2006. The ultimate aim, according to Chávez, is the
replacement of existing municipal and state structures.51 Just
how this will work isn’t clear. “The current law
presents weaknesses,” writes left-wing sociologist Margarita
López Maya. “The councils are mini-governments
with many tasks. Questions arise, such as, will people act
through pure solidarity? Will they have enough time and desire
to do so? Many people who work arrive home tired, and women
in particular have a double workday. How is that to be resolved?”52
Politically—and most controversially—Chávez
aims to consolidate mass participation in his project through
the PSUV, which will be discussed in detail below.
Toward socialism?
In January
2005, Chávez declared himself for a “socialism
of the twenty-first century” in a speech at the World
Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Sidelined on a trip to
the forum two years earlier—he was forced to speak at
City Hall rather than at the event itself—Chávez
now emerged as the most radical voice among the Left and center-left
forces that had, or would soon, take office in Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
But what
kind of socialism? Chávez distinguished his
vision from European social democracy and the “state
socialism”—really Stalinist state capitalism—of
the old USSR and its Eastern European bloc. He even made a
point of distinguishing his vision for Venezuela from the Cuban
experience, despite his close alliance with Castro. Leaving
aside for now the nature of socialism for the twenty-first
century, it’s clear enough that Chávez is seeking
a model of nationalist economic development directly counter
to the trends of the previous three decades, when the turn
toward corporate globalization, or neoliberalism, had begun.
The question
is whether Chávez’s Venezuela would
evolve differently from previous attempts at economic nationalism
in the Third World, which also presented themselves as variants
of socialism—African socialism, Arab socialism, and so
on. In his recent wide-ranging history of the Third World,
Vijay Prashad sums up the dilemma that faced postcolonial governments
that tried to initiate socialism from above through radical
reforms:
As output
increased, regardless of the means to do so, the state would
have a larger aggregate pool of capital and resources
to distribute to the population. Market socialism or the mixed
economy was a socialism of consumption not production. In the
attempt to industrialize and create agricultural change, there
was only a muted effort to change the relations and methods
of production. The process of industrial as well as agricultural
production remained similar to that found in any advanced capitalist
country: workers had no say in the process of production, which
was run by a detached management class. Deliberation was kept
to a minimum. Socialism made its appearance in the marketplace
and on the threshing floor—to more equitably divide the
spoils rather than to more equitably produce them in the fist
place.53
The Venezuelan
government aims to avoid such an outcome by promoting what
Chávez calls the “five motors toward
socialism.” The first “motor” is the enabling
law, called by Chávez the “mother law” of
the transition to socialism.54 The law, passed by the National
Assembly in the weeks after Chávez’s inauguration,
gave him the authority to govern by decree in specific areas.
It was the enabling law that allowed Chávez to order
the re-nationalization of the CANTV telecommunications company
and to nationalize sectors of the oil industry still under
direct foreign control.
Conservative
critics, especially in the U.S., point to the decrees as
evidence of dictatorship. In fact, the decrees are
considerably easier to alter than George W. Bush’s unconstitutional “signing
statements” appended to legislation stating which parts
of laws the president will enforce. In Venezuela, the National
Assembly has the opportunity to revise Chávez’s
decrees, and they are subject to review by the Supreme Court.
Defenders
of the measure point out that previous Venezuelan presidents
have used enabling laws—including Carlos Andrés
Pérez during his first presidency in the 1970s—and
cite the need for rapid change. Neither argument is convincing.
The nationalizations come eight years after Chávez took
office, which makes the urgency claim dubious. Moreover, Chávez’s
supporters have overwhelming control of the National Assembly
in a government based on a constitution that many of them helped
to draft. Surely the goal of participatory democracy would
be furthered by a public legislative debate over such crucial
issues.
A more
reasonable explanation is that Chávez presents
the enabling law as “the direct way to socialism” because
it allows him personally to take the initiative and control
the pace of political change. This is not a concession to the
Chávez-as-dictator complaints of the opposition. Rather,
it recognizes the contradiction of the attempt to initiate
a socialist transformation from above by circumventing the
layers of state bureaucracy and elected officials tied to the
status quo. While the left wing of organized labor and the
social movements have called for nationalization and greater
transformation, Chávez’s decrees are essentially
attempts to substitute for the class struggle to achieve those
demands. The decrees of an individual, however, no matter how
revolutionary or enlightened, can’t substitute for the
self-organization of the working class, still less the workers’ democratic
control that is the essence of genuine socialism.
Chávez does aim to raise political consciousness and
stimulate organization. The remaining four motors to socialism
are apparently intended to fuse Chávez’s leadership
to a more politically educated and active population through
greater participatory democracy. Thus the second motor is constitutional
reform that is to involve invoking “constituent power.” The
third motor is education with socialist values: “A fighter,
a revolutionary, has to study every day of his life, every
night of his life, has to study theory and practice to navigate
in the waters of the dialectic,” Chávez declared.
The fourth motor is a “new geometry of power”—essentially
the redrawing of Venezuela’s internal political boundaries
to overcome imbalances of population density, wealth, and political
clout. “If we don’t have the capacity to demolish
the old customs, the odious differences of class, the obscene
privileges, and generate a new culture of equality, of solidarity,
of brotherhood, we’ll lose the moment,” Chávez
said following his reelection. “But we’re not going
to lose the moment. We’re going to achieve this!”
The fifth
motor of the revolution is an “explosion of
communal power: Protagonist, revolutionary, and socialist democracy.” The
aim is to create self-organized communal councils that will
develop to replace existing municipalities, and eventually, “at
the national level, a confederation of communal councils,” Chávez
said. It is necessary, he declared, to “dismantle the
bourgeois state” because all states “were born
to prevent revolutions.” The Venezuelan state, he said,
must cease to be a “counterrevolutionary state” and
become a “revolutionary state.”55
Yet no
revolutionary state that attempts to build socialism can
coexist with capitalism indefinitely, particularly in smaller
countries historically dominated by imperialism. Chávez
seeks to expropriate the bourgeoisie politically by excluding
it from state power and its dominance in the media (for example,
through the government’s refusal to renew the broadcast
license of the RCTV channel because of its aggressive support
for the opposition). Yet such a change will ultimately be superficial
unless the class relations that gave rise to that state are
also overturned. Nationalizing industries isn’t equivalent
to socialism—a point Karl Marx and Frederick Engels always
insisted upon. After the conservative German leader Otto von
Bismarck “went in for state ownership of industrial establishments,
a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen,” Engels complains, “degenerating,
now and again, into something of flunkyism, that without more
ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort,
to be socialistic.”56
Nor does
nationalization necessarily even mean the democratization
of management. While workers at Venezuela’s state-owned
Alcasa aluminum plants were able to elect their own bosses
as part of an experiment in “co-management,” militant
trade unionists at the PDVSA oil company complain that many
of the old managers from the lockout are still on the job.57 As a major player on the world market, PDVSA faces pressure
to mirror the practices of its competitors—including
maximizing profits. Nor would foreign multinationals with Venezuelan
operations—like Ford or Chrysler—simply stand pat
if workers’ control were legislated into being.
Reforms
have been possible due to increases in oil revenue—but
will this add up to revolution? The question remains as to
whether, and how, this “socialism in distribution,” as
Prashad put it, can be transformed into the direct rule of
the working class. To assess this possibility, it’s necessary
to review Venezuela’s economic policy.
“Bolivarian” internationalism
Chávez’s Venezuela is often compared to Castro’s
Cuba by supporters and enemies of both. The two countries have,
of course, forged a close alliance via the oil-for-doctors
arrangement and by jointly forging opposition to U.S. imperial
aims in Latin America. Castro’s association with the
Venezuelan “revolutionary process” has rehabilitated
Cuba’s revolutionary credentials more than fifteen years
after the collapse of the USSR forced the country into prolonged
economic crisis and political isolation. In the last years,
Castro has reemerged as the grand old man of the Latin American
Left, an adviser to Chávez, Evo Morales in Bolívia,
and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. Chávez’s attempts
to form Bolivarian Circles (which never took off) recalls Cuba’s
Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, and Chavez’s
PSUV initiative invites comparisons to the merger of Castro’s
July 26th Movement and other socialist organizations to eventually
form the Cuban Communist Party.58
Making
an alliance with Cuba, however, has not led Chávez
to copy Castro’s bureaucratic state-capitalist economic
model that was derived from Stalinism in the Soviet Union.
That system could work as long as the Cuban economy was functioning
as part of a large political and economic bloc dominated by
Moscow; without that alliance, the country has been forced
to reintroduce the market and private investment, deepening
the inequalities that had already emerged under the “socialist” economy.59
While there are Castroist elements around Chávez who
favor a hard turn toward state capitalism, Venezuela is hardly
likely, or willing, to move in this direction, writes Latin
America analyst Hampden Macbeth:
Despite
appearances to the contrary, Chávez and Castro
differ on several critical ideological issues. Castro believes
in traditional “real socialism,” in which the economy
is controlled by the state and it exerts a strong influence
over the economic affairs of its citizens and foreign trade.
However, Chávez thinks “real socialism’s” time
has passed, saying: “[w]e have to re-invent socialism.
It can be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union,
but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built
on cooperation, not competition,” with this being seen
as “new socialism.” One manner in which “new
socialists” differentiate themselves from “real
socialists” is that they are significantly more tolerant
of private economic enterprise and considerably more experimental
in the approaches they are willing to take to achieve their
socialist goals. Evidence suggests that Latin America might
be returning to its traditional “mixed economy” where
an important role is assigned both to the public and private
sectors.60
The Cuban-Venezuelan
economic relationship is significant. Venezuela supplies
Cuba with upwards of 90,000 barrels of oil
per day at subsidized prices in return for the services of
20,000 doctors and other medical personnel. “The increase
in daily oil imports allowed Castro in May of 2005 to double
the minimum wage for 1.6 million workers, raise pensions for
the elderly and deliver cooking appliances to poor Cubans.”61
Rather
than mimic Cuba, the international focus of Chávez’s
economic policy has been to (1) promote economic regionalism
and greater integration of Latin American countries through
trade internally and with non-U.S. partners; (2) organize alliances
of hydrocarbon-producing countries, boosting OPEC and advocating
the creation of a similar cartel for natural gas producers;
and (3) wean Latin American countries away from the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank and U.S.-European finance through
the creation of the Bank of the South. Chávez’s
course reflects not a turn to economic autarky, or self-sufficiency
seen in Third World nationalist governments of the past, but
a pan-Latin American attempt at “sovereign insertion” into
the world economy, to borrow the phrase of Brazil’s President
Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva. In fact, a
flurry of Brazil-Venezuelan business deals ranging from oil
and gas to infrastructure—Brazilian exports to Venezuela
increased 60 percent in 2006—are at the heart of this
change.62 Lula’s friendly relations with George W. Bush
and the U.S. are very different from Chávez’s
anti-imperialist stance, but the aspirations of Brazilian capitalism
coincide with those of Chávez insofar as regional integration
creates more space for what is the world’s ninth-largest
economy. The same point can be made about Argentina, which
rode a commodities export boom out of the economic collapse
of 2001. Today, Argentine President Néstor Kirchner,
certainly no radical, finds it convenient to ally with Chávez
to develop export markets and obtain cheap energy. By spring
2007, Venezuela had purchased $3 billion in Argentine government
bonds, and the two governments jointly issued additional bonds
worth $1.5 billion.63
Chávez’s international economic initiatives have
had some important successes. With the U.S.-proposed Free Trade
Area of the Americas (FTAA) dead in the water, Chávez
has been able to flesh out his proposed Bolivarian Alternative
for Latin America (ALBA), which to date groups Venezuela, Cuba,
Bolivia, Nicaragua, Haiti, and, as an observer, Ecuador. Among
the more important initiatives under the ALBA umbrella is the
creation of PetroCaribe, in which PDVSA will offer oil at preferential
prices to fourteen Caribbean nations, finance up to 40 percent
of the purchases, allow twenty-five years for repayment, and
bar U.S. oil companies from purchasing or distributing the
oil.64
At the
same time, however, Venezuela joined Mercosur, the South
American trade bloc dominated by Brazil and Argentina. “Although
Mercosur has recently taken on a more social focus with the
addition of Venezuela, the recent economic accords signed with
Cuba, and Castro’s offer to share the Cuban social and
educational experiences with the rest of the countries, the
trading bloc is still essentially economic and built on the
neo-liberal tendencies on which is was founded,” writes
journalist Michael Fox. “Nor does Venezuela’s entry
in to the 15-year-old bloc appear to be based on the ALBA tenets
of cooperation and solidarity, but rather the complete elimination
of tariffs on all imported and exported goods, including ‘sensitive
products’ by 2014.”65 In other words, Chávez
is attempting to derail the FTAA by collaborating in a free-trade
area for South America independently of the United States.
(The U.S., meanwhile, has had to lower its expectations and
seek individual free-trade deals with Colombia, Peru, and Panama).66
Oil diplomacy
has opened doors for Venezuela even where the U.S. has far
greater influence—for example, in Chile
under moderate socialist Michelle Bachelet, whose government
has continued neoliberal policies and lined up behind Washington.
Shortly after Venezuela nationalized the foreign oil company
holdings in the Orinoco region, the government signed a deal
with Chile’s state oil company to allow it a stake in
operations there.67
Seeking
alternatives to trade with the U.S.—to which
Venezuela exports 60 percent of its oil—is another key
element of Chávez’s policy. A $335 million gas
pipeline will link Colombia’s natural gas fields to Venezuela’s
refineries, to the consternation of Washington. Beyond Latin
America, Venezuela in 2006 exported 150,000 barrels of oil
per day to China, a tenfold increase since 2004, and China
has a $2 billion investment in oilfield development and another
$9 billion in infrastructure. Iran and Venezuela are developing
oil refineries in Indonesia, Syria, and Venezuela. India plans
to purchase two million barrels per month from Venezuela.68 This integration among Latin American economies and “South-South” economic
agreements is a departure for the region.
Chávez’s
economic initiatives with potentially the greatest impact
are efforts to influence hydrocarbon politics
in Bolivia and Ecuador, where left-wing parties won office
after years of popular mobilizations against a succession of
neoliberal governments. The objective is an alliance of South
American energy producers that could offer discounts and barter
deals to its neighbors while maximizing revenues from exports
to the U.S. and Europe.69
To finance
this integration and new economic development, Venezuela
is working with Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador,
and Paraguay to launch the Bank of the South. Already, Chávez
is “squeezing the International Monetary Fund out of
Latin America, the region that once accounted for most of its
business,” Bloomberg reported. IMF lending in the region
has fallen to 1 percent of its portfolio, compared to 80 percent
in 2005, while Venezuela had, by March 2007, loaned or offered
$4.5 billion to Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador, and had $34
billion in reserves.70
Chávez has also called for debt forgiveness by the
IMF to reduce pressure on Third World countries. In fact, Venezuela
had already tapped oil revenue to pay off its own debt of $3.3
billion to the IMF and the World Bank five years early on loans
taken by previous corrupt governments.71 The payout to the
IMF has been criticized by the Venezuelan Left, and is a sign
that Chávez’s policies are often far more moderate
than his revolutionary rhetoric would suggest. What’s
more, the Venezuela-Argentina joint proposal for the Bank of
the South is “shocking” and “completely compatible
with the neoliberal vision, the vision of the World Bank, the
vision of the dominant economic thinking [and] the vision of
the capitalist class regarding the reasons behind Latin America’s
limitations,” argues Eric Toussaint, an anti-debt campaigner
and author who served as a consultant to Ecuador’s government
during negotiations to create the bank. “The general
prescriptions specify the need to promote the formation of
multinational corporations with regional capital, without specifying
that they must be public.”72
Taken together,
Venezuela’s international economic policy
and its focus on Latin American integration point not toward
international socialism, but the goal of the New International
Economic Order proposed by the Argentine economist Raúl
Prebisch in the early 1970s.73 Among the key elements of this “developmentalist” economics
was the creation of cartels of basic commodity producers to
avoid the wild price swings that played out in boom-slump patterns
in the developing world. It’s precisely this that Chávez
has in mind in shoring up OPEC, creating a gas producers’ cartel,
nationalizing key industries, creating a regional economic
bloc, and expanding trade among countries of the Third World.
The difference is that today’s attempts to alter the
terms of world trade and finance take place after nearly thirty
years of neoliberalism. While large sections of Latin American
capital have suffered under the pressures of an opening to
the world market and the loan sharks of the IMF and Western
banks, their horizons are limited to trying to make neoliberalism
work for them, rather than disproportionately suffer its consequences.
The Argentine Marxist economist Claudio Katz calls this trend “neo-developmentalism.” “The
turn is ‘neo’ and not fully developmentalist because
it preserves restrictive monetary policy, fiscal adjustments,
a priority on exports and the concentration of income,” he
writes. “It seeks only to increase state subsidies to
industry in order to reverse the consequences of extreme free
trade.”74
It is on
this point that Venezuela (as well as Bolivia and Ecuador)
aspire to be different—to go beyond neo-developmentalism
toward genuine social transformation by spreading the benefits
of economic growth to the mass of the population. At issue
is whether this will be successful, and whether it can build
socialism of the twenty-first century.
Confronting capital?
It is oil,
of course, that gives a country of just under twenty-seven
million people an outsized importance in the world economy,
especially to the United States. Venezuela is the fifth-largest
oil exporter in the world, and ranks in the top ten in reserves.
Oil accounts for 80 percent of revenue from exports and around
one-third of GDP.75 The oil boom boosted GDP from $117.1 billion
in 2000 to $140.2 billion in 2005.76 This oil wealth made it
imperative for U.S. imperialism to use Venezuela as a counterweight
to assertive nationalist governments in Mexico in the 1930s
and Cuba in the 1960s. Little wonder that Nelson Rockefeller
of Standard Oil formally ran U.S. policy in Venezuela during
the Second World War and made Venezuela his second home.77 Any leader pressing for significant progressive change in Venezuela
is therefore bound to step on Uncle Sam’s toes, and Chávez
has done so repeatedly. But the heavy-handed U.S. response
to Chávez has imparted an image of radicalism to his
government that isn’t always warranted.
For example,
Venezuela’s high-profile nationalizations
of the telecommunications company and foreign oil holdings
seem to echo the classic Third World development strategy of
import-substitution industrialization—promoting state-owned
companies and high trade barriers to stimulate domestic production.
In fact, Chávez hasn’t pursued nationalization
in nearly so radical manner, or on as wide a scale, as anti-imperialist
governments in the developing world had pursued in the mid-twentieth
century—for example, Egypt under Nasser.78 Compensation
paid for nationalized companies has been at more or less market
rates, totaling $1.6 billion for Verizon’s share of CANTV.79
In fact,
the private sector in Venezuela has benefited handsomely
from the country’s oil-driven boom. “GDP growth
of 17 percent in 2004, 11 percent in 2005 and 10 percent in
2006 speaks for itself,” observes one financial journalist.
Away from
Chávez, his mouth and his oil, the Caracas
financial community has been making serious money.… Venezuelan
banks’ results that are the envy of the banking world,
with returns on equity (RoE) of 33 percent the norm and 40
percent-plus RoE posted by pack leaders. International concerns
are welcome to the party, too: Spain’s Banco Santander,
which enjoys 15 percent of total market share, is a shining
example.80
Business,
aside from hydrocarbons and mining, isn’t
particularly squeezed by high taxes. The highest corporate
taxes are 34 percent, a typical figure internationally, except
for income from petroleum-related companies, which pay 50 percent,
and royalties for mining at 60 percent. The top income tax
rate is 34 percent, about the same as the U.S. but without
the additional charges the wealthy pay in the States.81 Thus
for all the talk of building socialism, the enormous wealth
of Venezuela’s oligarchy remains essentially untouched. “Currently,
the richest 20 percent of Venezuelans receives 53 percent of
all income, while the poorest 20 percent accounts for only
a 3 percent share of the country’s total income,” the
World Bank reports.82 At the top of the heap is media mogul
Gustavo Cisneros, worth an estimated $4 billion.83
In June,
Chávez made it clear that the Bolivarian Revolution
could exist with Venezuela’s elites. At a rally of hundreds
of thousands in defense of his decision not to renew RCTV’s
license, Chávez proclaimed, “We have no plan to
eliminate the oligarchy, Venezuela’s bourgeoisie. We
have demonstrated this sufficiently in our eight years.”84
Any serious
attempt to make Venezuelan society more egalitarian—let
alone socialist—would begin with a radically progressive
tax system aimed at redistributing wealth. Yet after eight
years in office, Chávez has only made his first moves
in that direction, cutting the regressive value-added tax from
14 to 11 percent in March.85 Following reelection, Chávez
also spoke of a luxury tax on second homes, expensive cars,
and art collections that would fund communal councils, but
as of mid–2007 the plan had not been formalized.86
What’s more, the Venezuelan government has been unable
to stop capital flight by the wealthy. According to one estimate,
$66 billion was transferred out of the country between 1999
and 2005, compared to an inflation-adjusted $112 billion between
1950 and 1999.87 Some of this takes place through legal loopholes;
some is a tax dodge. One of the benefits of the CANTV nationalization
is that it prevents Venezuelans from buying up shares of the
company in the local currency, the bolívar, and selling
them for dollars on Wall Street. However, currency traders
continue to dump the bolívar in the markets, despite
Venezuela’s rapid growth and large dollar reserves. This
is a reflection of both the inflationary dynamic of the oil
boom and capitalists’ fear of being expropriated.
There are
grounds for such fears. Venezuela’s land reform
program aims to draw urban slum dwellers into the countryside
to till what is potentially some of the world’s most
productive land. To achieve this the government is handing
over state-owned holdings but also compelling absentee landlords
and cattle farmers to sell for what they say are below-market
prices. The result has been some of Venezuela’s sharpest
class conflicts, with settlers and squatters meeting repression
from landowners and their hired thugs and assassins.88 The
leading radical farmers’ group estimates that fifty Chavista
activists in the land reform struggle were assassinated in
the 2002–03 period.89
As
intense as the struggle on the land has become, the Venezuelan
government
has shied away from a direct confrontation with
big capital and the foreign multinationals. This has constrained
the government’s ability to boost living standards of
workers and the poor. The constant injection of oil revenue
into the economy has fueled inflation to 20 percent officially,
often higher in reality. This has encouraged speculators to
hoard staple food items like sugar and chicken in anticipation
of inevitable price increases. Since the government’s
Mercal subsidized markets rely on private suppliers who sell
at fixed low prices to distributors, they are themselves faced
with shortages. They are often forced to buy items from street
vendors that should be on the Mercal shelves, but at much higher
prices. 90
Added to
this economic pressure on workers and the poor is an epidemic
of murders and violent crime. Venezuela’s
murder rate is five times that of the U.S., and is the third
highest in Latin America after El Salvador and Colombia, two
countries that have seen prolonged civil wars and institutionalized
political violence. There were 9,402 homicides reported in
2005; in April of the following year a high profile kidnapping
and murder of three boys and their driver in Caracas made the
issue into a political debate. The Right seized upon the killings
as an example of Chávez’s failure to guarantee
law and order, and the opposition took to the streets in protests.
Several police were implicated in the murders “confirming
public distrust of police forces widely seen as corrupt, ineffective,
and at times complicit in crime.”91 To be sure, much
of this crime is rooted in Venezuela’s rapid and prolonged
economic decline in the 1980s and 1990s. But it also underscores
the fact that even a red-hot economy and wide-ranging social
reforms cannot substitute for the self-organization and shifts
in consciousness that have curbed or reduced crime during revolutionary
movements of the past.
The revolutionary
process is inhibited by the state bureaucracy itself, as
Chávez himself often says. Leftist militants
speak of a “Bolivarian bourgeoisie” clustered around
PDVSA, the heads of government ministries, state governors,
mayors, and “pro-revolutionary” business types.
The recent sale of PDVSA bonds gives some idea of how this
stratum consolidates itself in class terms. An anti-Chávez
business analyst claims that a recent $7.5 billion PDVSA bond
issue attracted bids worth $15 billion. This, he claimed, allowed
a relatively small number of people close to the government
to purchase the bonds at list price through a limited number
of institutions, and then quickly resell the bonds for a much
higher price, netting $780 million, a figure that is 20 percent
higher than Venezuela’s total financial profits for the
2004–06 period.92 Even if these estimates are inflated
by opposition figures, there’s no doubt that the enormous
amounts of money flowing in and out of PDVSA inevitably binds
company management and sections of the government closely to
capital, however hostile individual capitalists may be to the
Bolivarian project.
Even Hugo
Chávez speaks of the dangers of bureaucracy
and calls for “deepening the revolutionary process” towards
socialism. What is not clear, however, is what role the Venezuelan
working class will have in the “Bolivarian revolutionary
process.”
State and revolution in Venezuela
The classical
revolutionary Marxist approach to state and revolution is
based on a theoretical analysis of the capitalist
state and historical experience of workers’ power in
successive epochs. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
stated that “the executive of the modern state is but
a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,”93 that is, the final arbiter of differences within the ruling
class and a collective defender of the interests of capital,
through what Lenin called “special bodies of armed men” who
stand above society as a whole.94 The brief seizure of power
by workers in the Paris Commune of 1871 prompted Marx and Engels
to clarify their views on the state and social revolution: “One
thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ‘the
working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery,
and wield it for its own purposes.’”95
In the
Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin generalized Marx’s
theory. Lenin’s book State and Revolution pointed out
that workers’ self-organization in the form of councils,
or soviets, constituted an embryonic workers’ state.
In order to reorganize society on a socialist basis, however,
workers must smash the old state machine and, by wielding power
directly, abolish the old state as a separate apparatus that
guarantees the rule of a minority of exploiters. Writes Lenin: “It
is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the
suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of
the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple
and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than
the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-laborers,
and it will cost mankind far less.”96
How does
this theoretical and practical framework apply in Chávez’s
Venezuela, which seeks to create a revolutionary state?
The Chavista
case can be summarized as follows: Chávez’s
success in wresting control of PDVSA and nationalizing key
companies has deprived the old state machine of its economic
lifeblood. At the same time, the “explosion of popular
power” in communal councils will dismantle the state
bit by bit from below. Coops, land reforms, and co-management
in workers’ councils are democratizing the economy. Thus
the transition to socialism has begun via a prolonged revolutionary
process. The phrase “revolutionary process” is
borrowed from Castro’s Cuba, where, it is claimed, a
revolutionary process is still underway half a century after
the old regime was overthrown.
When used
in this way, the term “revolutionary process” reflects
a misunderstanding both in the nature of the capitalist state
and the politics of social classes. The Russian revolutionary
leader Leon Trotsky, whom Chávez has become fond of
citing, pointed out that even the hostility of the bourgeoisie
toward the reformist Popular Front government of Spain during
the Civil War of 1930s didn’t change the class nature
of the state; further, he argued that the struggle against
the fascist army of General Francisco Franco had to be combined
with the struggle against bourgeois rule itself:
It is necessary
to think out the problem of the revolution to the end, to
its ultimate concrete conclusions. It is necessary
to adjust policy to the basic laws of the revolution, i.e.,
to the movement of the embattled classes and not the prejudices
or fears of the superficial petty-bourgeois groups who call
themselves “Popular” Fronts and every other kind
of front. During revolution the line of least resistance is
the line of greatest disaster.97
What is
more, the question of revolutionary insurrection can’t
simply be subsumed into a never-ending revolutionary process.
While it is certainly true that working-class revolutions are
the culmination of a long process of struggle and building
organization, there must also be a decisive change in state
power and class relations if the term “revolution” is
to have any meaning.
The question
of state power remains before the Venezuelan working class.
The core of the capitalist state is the “separate
body of armed men” that Marx described. The military
is the most rigid and hierarchical of all capitalist institutions,
reflecting the class divisions in their most concentrated form.
However estranged the bourgeoisie may be from Chávez’s
government, the top military brass remains socially intertwined
with the oligarchy and shares its class interests. Reshuffling
top officers, as Chávez did after the failed 2002 coup,
can’t erase the class divisions in the military. Civilian
reformers may be parachuted into key ministerial posts to carry
out progressive government policies, but the military is by
its nature relatively impermeable, with top officers climbing
the ranks only after years of service.
The 2002
coup showed that Chávez’s own career
in the armed forces and the presence of other former military
figures in government was insufficient to prevent a coup. This
isn’t a prediction of a new military coup. Rather, it
is to point out that the core of the capitalist state remains
entrenched despite the revolutionary process and therefore
will ultimately, and necessarily, reflect the interests of
capital. The armed forces will not simply convert themselves
into democratic workers’ militias. It is telling that
the so-called revolutionary state of Chávez’s
Venezuela has not proposed soldiers’ councils—a
key development in the Russian Revolution of 1917—still
less the election of officers or co-management between the
general staff and new recruits. The “federation of communal
councils” that Chávez envisions will coexist with
the military, in which the rank and file must unquestioningly
follow officers’ orders or face severe consequences.
Changing the official greeting in the military to “socialism,
fatherland or death”—a variation on Castro’s
slogan—doesn’t alte
