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From International Socialism 2 : 109, Winter 2006.
Copyright © International Socialism.
Copied with thanks from the International Socialism Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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Miguel Angel Hernandez and Emilio Bastidas presented their views at a seminar in Rio de Janeiro last summer. They are activists in Venezuela’s Party of Revolution and Socialism (PRS). It was launched last July with, they say, ‘a significant representation of the country’s working class vanguard’ from the UNT union federation and was ‘co-directed’ by two of its best known leaders, Orlando Chirino and Stalin Peréz Borges. ‘There was also an important participation of leaders of the popular movements and students, including dissident sections of the official Chavista parties.’ This article first appeared in Spanish on the website publication Rebelión, and has been translated and edited by Chris Harman. |
Venezuela brings out important aspects of the political debate taking place in the left in Latin America and internationally. Like the rest of Latin America it has been the setting for the neo-liberal policies of privatisation and IMF-monetarist prescriptions, for the crises and fall of governments which have implemented them, for the implosion of the structures of the bourgeois democratic regimes relied on by imperialism and the bourgeoisie, for confrontation with US imperialism, for the development of powerful mobilisations and revolutionary triumphs, and also, very fundamentally, for the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
Without doubt, the most outstanding events have been the conclusive defeat suffered by US imperialism with the overturning of the Venezuelan coup of April 2002, the defeat of the bosses’ lockout and the counter-revolutionary sabotage of the oil industry from December 2002 to February 2003, and the defeat for Bush and the bourgeois opposition in the referendum attempt to remove Chavez in August 2004.
What was decisive in Venezuela was the movement of the oil workers in retaking control of the PVDSA during the bosses’ sabotage at the end of 2002. The triumph of the working class against the 63-day lockout was the real basis of everything happening in Venezuela today, even more than the defeat of the coup of 11 April 2002. But the workers’ struggle did not stop after the defeat of that lockout. It continued through 2003 with the beginning of taking over factories that the pro-coup bosses declared bankrupt, claiming they had lost money as a result of the stoppage they themselves had organised. As a result of the mobilisation and perseverance of the workers, some have now been taken over by the government, as is the case with Invepal (a paper factory) and Inveval (maker of valves for the oil industry).
A veritable revolution is taking place within the workers’ movement – what we call an ‘anti-bureaucratic political revolution’. The old bureaucracy of the CTV collapsed, and every day there are referendums in which new leaders defeat bureaucrats who have controlled the unions for 20 or 30 years.
And the process does not stop there. Often the new leaders do not measure up to the task and are replaced by still newer leaders emerging from the heat of the struggle. This revolutionary deepening has given rise to the new union federation, UNT, without doubt the biggest mass organisation in the country. What is more, within it the revolutionary classist and democratic current is consolidating itself, with comrades Orlando Chirino and Stalin Perez Borges at its head.
The pendulum of working class struggle is swinging from light industry located in the centre of the country to its heavy battalions, especially its electrical sector and the basic industries (aluminium, iron and steel). They are beginning to undergo the experience of co-management – which in some cases, especially the Alacase aluminium enterprise, is taking on connotations of workers’ control (the election of directors by an assembly, the opening of the company books, the participation of workers in the organisation of production), presaging its spread to other sectors. The working class calls this ‘revolutionary co-management’ to distinguish it from the European example. Meanwhile in the electrical industry the workers are fighting and resisting their own government officials, including the minister, who are rejecting co-management.
All this has opened up discussion on the way forward to fundamental solutions for our people.
We say in the political declaration of the PRS:
We are conscious of the advances made and positions conquered in the last six years of the revolutionary process. We are conscious of the significance of the misiones [1], of the widening of democratic freedom, as with the inclusion of socio-economic questions in the Leyes Habilitantes. [2] However, we are also clear that much is still lacking when it comes to providing a structural response to the deep problems that exist among the poorest sections of our country. It is necessary to move forward to the expropriation of the big enterprises that are in the hands of the bourgeoisie and imperialism.
There can be no socialism without expropriation of the big private means of production. None of the parties holding ministries or parliamentary seats are ready to carry the struggle against imperialism through to its ultimate consequences. Their practice amounts to introducing timid reforms to capitalism or taking ad hoc measures that do not resolve and cannot resolve the problem of exploitation and oppression. Every day it becomes clearer that under these parties the revolution will become blocked and we will not advance to socialism ... This means we have urgently to put an unambiguous socialist project for a workers’ government before the masses.
By contrast, Heinz Dieterich, a German-Mexican sociologist, who is an adviser to both Chavez and Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, defines clearly what ‘socialism for the 21st century’ means for him:
There will be a long phase of coexistence between big and small enterprises. It requires a minimum of 30 years, in which all forms of property are necessary, for neither the state nor the enterprises alone can resolve the problems ... This first phase has nothing to do with socialism ... Proposals, like those from sections of the traditional left who continue thinking of a government of workers and peasants as if we were in the 1960s, are stupid. (El Nacional, 27 July 2005)
So the debate over the perspectives for revolution, over socialism and its objectives, is a red hot issue, not only in Venezuela but also for Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina – for any country where the revolutionary process has overthrown governments and put the political regime into question. There have even been schemes like those of Heinz Dieterich or Martha Harnecker (sent by Fidel to advise Chavez) in Brazil and Uruguay where there has been the electoral triumph of the centre-left. The forgotten debate of the 1970s, lived out in all its intensity with the experiences of Chile and Nicaragua, is coming to the fore again.
Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ had a very short life. Chavez raised ‘socialism for the 21st century’ as an alternative to capitalism for the first time at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre (in Brazil) because of his need to respond to the left sectors and the radicalised masses of Venezuela. Now he is popularising it internationally. In doing so he has brought the old debate back into vogue.
Venezuela has been converted into the new Mecca of the worldwide left, given the crisis of Stalinism, and that Cuba and Castroism do not enthuse people as they used to. And the prestigious voice of Chavez projects a politics of ‘socialism in the 21st century’. What is involved is not only a push to the left, to the side of revolution, with an apparently radical discourse, but also a designation of the content and characteristics of the socialism appropriate for the present century. But this designation has nothing to do with the scientific socialism elaborated by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, and even less with what is required by the masses on a world scale.
The socialism of President Chavez is a ‘socialism’ with something missing. It would be a species of capitalism in which the collaboration of classes would prevail. It would aim for the impossible, for a supposed social function for capital alongside a hypothetical more democratic distribution of wealth. This proposal is a chimera that has never materialised in any part of the world. Capital exists to reproduce itself without limits. It does not have any heart or any fatherland. It does not seek to satisfy need, but to guarantee an increasing rate of profit.
There has been developing for some time in Venezuela an ever-greater understanding between government and important sections of business and the multinationals. It takes concrete form in particular agreements favoured by the oil bonanza and has led Vice-President Rangel to affirm that ‘now the government can count on sections of business that it could not before.’
There are flagrant contradictions and limitations to the Chavez project. The great challenge in front of us is how to clarify this for the masses. There are politically organised sections who believe that Chavez is heading towards socialism but that those immediately below him are opposed to this. They do not understand that there is a tight nexus between what the president ‘says’ and what his ministers ‘do’, as together they produce a politics that disorients and confuses, preventing the revolutionary sectors occupying space politically. Important groupings with a significant presence among the popular sectors and the youth are prisoners of this confusion and, without meaning to do so, have converted themselves into the best proponents of this government policy. They are creating expectations among the population that this government is ‘ours’, that it is of the workers and the people, that there exists a ‘popular power’ whose base it is only necessary to strengthen, that we are advancing to socialism and that it is only a question of getting rid of a number of government bureaucrats and remnants of the old political order who have disguised themselves as ‘Bolivarians’.
This is a complex matter, but we are intensely optimistic, given the dynamic and depth of the Venezuelan revolutionary process.
The mass of the workers and the people have taken up Chavez’s proclaimed ‘socialism for the 21st century’, interpreting the notion in the heat of the revolutionary process, and amplifying it so as to provide an answer to their immediate needs.
People are beginning to move forward from what is said to what is done: from words to street mobilisations; from verbal criticism to direct demands on officials and the president himself – demands to make the agrarian reform concrete; in defence of workers’ co-management; against police abuse. We are assisting in practice in this new phase of the revolutionary process, as well as participating in the debate over socialism as a formula for overcoming capitalism.
For the PRS, deepening of the revolutionary process means, among other things, encouraging workers’ and popular mobilisations while confronting the ‘socialism’ of Chavez with the demand for an emergency economic plan which takes advantage of the bonanza in the price of oil. We call: for a national plan of infrastructure and housing constructions so as to create employment for millions of people; for granting the same big wage increase to workers in public and private enterprise as the 60 percent that has gone to the armed forces; for no payment on the external debt, with a national referendum so that the people can pronounce on this; for an oil constituent process that permits discussion over hydrocarbon policy, the business portfolios of the PDVSA state oil company and the annulling of concessions to the multinationals.
Our proposal to build a revolutionary organisation has caused reactions from other political sectors in Venezuela, especially from some functionaries of the Chavez government. They insist that our proposal is ‘inopportune’ and that we should wait at least until the end of 2006. We have also faced objections from people who once worked to build a revolutionary organisation and then abandoned that so as to be part of ‘broad’ organisations. They argue that the Leninist conception with which we want to build the PRS is ‘self-proclaimed’ and closes us off from new sectors which could be interested in the process of building a new organisation.
But we have been drawing in leaders of the workers’ movement and genuine leaders of the popular and student movements, finding with great surprise that they do not object to the building of a revolutionary party or demand that we hold back from democratic centralism. There are trade union, popular and peasant sectors which have been undergoing the experience of everyday struggle and are just breaking with the bureaucratic methods of the government parties or from being volunteers in the misiones. They find it easy to understand the need for the method of democratic centralism so as to win victories. These experiences are very significant for us, taking into account the immense influence that Chavez has over the popular sectors and the workers. Many activists from different regions and sectors have welcomed the construction of an organisation that struggles for socialism without bosses or bureaucrats, and a workers’ government.
1. Health and education services for the working class and the poor, provided by the government and financed out of oil revenues but without going through the old state bureaucracy.
2. The laws passed in 1999–2000 which granted certain reforms and caused the bourgeoisie to turn against Chavez.
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