THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIALISM JIN THE 21ST CENTURY Some provisional lessons from Venezuela The tension at the heart of Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution, there for several years, has come to the forefront in recent months. Since Hugo Chavez' re-election as president in December 2006 his announcement of 'five motors' to drive the country's passage towards 'socialism of the 21st century', and his call for a new united socialist party to organise that transition. Here Stuart Piper discusses the tension between the revolution's anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist achievements - which are undeniable - and its socialist promise - which remains just that, a promise. depare mere pase; of the frene CRS CitRO Corneeste solong Daniel Bensale Atine I rectoria rong tighter one las structural reforms - its often noisy but nonetheless real break with the market- driven priorities of the Washington consensus - that first established the process as a beacon for the global justice movement and the international left. It was this consistent anti-neoliberal stance that lay behind the welcome given to Hugo Chavez at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in January 2005, even before the Venezuelan leader had made any commitment to the 'S word. That impact reached well beyond Latin America and the traditional solidarity circles of Europe and North America. One example comes from Egypt, where there is a tradition in the Cairo bazaar of giving the names of public figures to the dates on sale, as a measure of the quality of each batch of these dried fruit. Following last year's war in Lebanon, the poorest, bitterest varieties were called 'Bush', 'Blair' and 'Olmert'; the very finest, sweetest dates were called 'Nasrallah', after the leader of Hezbollah. But among the group of other tasty varieties, a little way behind, was one called 'Chavez'. The Venezuelan leader had of course withdrawn his ambassador from Israel in protest at the aggression. This merely illustrates the extraordinary resonance that Venezuela's bold opposition to Empire has had among tens of millions of those Fanon once called 'the damned of the earth' • a resonance that began to be felt after the defeat of the anti-Chavez coup in April 2002 and the development of the health and literacy 'Missions' from 2003, and which is unlike anything experienced for a couple of decades. But more recently, something else has emerged to give the Venezuelan process a bigger, more profound impact still. This began with Chavez' invitation in 2005 to begin discussing 'socialism of the 21st century', a discussion which continues even more intensely today after the commitment he made in December. 2006 that this is now the main challenge for the next period in Venezuela. Of course this is of critical importance for the struggle inside Venezuela. But it also transforms its international potential. 6 Socialist revolution Firstly for those of us in countries where the word 'socialism' has been erased from most people's political vocabulary for the last 17 years or more, it has suddenly become possible to talk about socialism without appearing to have just flown in from another galaxy. More than that, Venezuela is the first living laboratory - at least since Nicaragua in the 1980s - to test out what exactly socialist democracy might look like in the 21st century, and what strategies are available to get to it. Some of these strategic questions have begun to reappear in theoretical form in recent years.' Among the central questions raised: under current conditions, does a socialist revolution and the building of a new kind of state necessarily entail one crucial, explosive moment when the old state apparatus collapses, some kind of 'storming of the winter palace', the result of an insurrectionary general strike or maybe a prolonged, popular, military struggle? Or is it possible to envisage the emergence of new state structures defending a new set of class interests, alongside or even within the old state which defends the old class interests? This is probably the most decisive question now facing the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela. For at the risk of simplification. the political process in Venezuela can be described as a nationalist, anti-neoliberal. anti-imperialist revolution, within which there is a socialist revolution struggling to get out. Paradoxically, both aspects are crystallised in the personality of Chavez himself. The socialist revolution is struggling to get out because this process first developed out of a conventional (that is bourgeois representative) electoral victory in 1998, with the backing of quite a broad cross-class alliance, and which at least up until the failed coup of April 2002, did little to step beyond that institutional framework. Certainly the new Bolivarian Constitution of 2000 overhauled those institutions, and had many radical things to say about popular participatio- and the centrality of human needs anc human potential. But it did not challenge the basic premises, either of delegated, representative democracy, or of private
property relations. And to some extent : entrenched the class alliance that ha acked i Since the uprising against the coup in 2002, and especially since the struggle to resist the employers' lockout at the enc of that year, the popular mobilizations, the Missions, the urban land committees, some sporadic or partial experiences of workers' control, some of the rural and urban co-operatives, and most recently the emerging Communal Councils, have begun to move beyond the old framework and even to 'defy' it. But still the central levers of power in Venezuela - including the office of the presidency itself - remain institutionally located, even 'trapped', within the old administrative structures. The problem for the Bolivarian movement - and perhaps for this problem is connected to another: how can the movement develop a real collective leadership and free itself from the overarching dominance of one revolutionary 'caudillo', however honest and able, as Chavez himself seems to recognise it must? Three developments Two of the most recent developments in Venezuela, and one slightly older one, seem to point towards a possible solution. The latter is the experience of co-management with workers' control developed in a few workplaces since early 2005, most importantly at the ALCASA aluminium plant in Ciudad Guayana. This experiment remains very limited in its spread, patchy in its application, and there are some worrying signs that it has fallen out of favour with the central leadership. Chavez made almost no mention of it at all in his recent keynote speeches outlining the priorities of the new period of the revolution. But it remains the most ambitious and inspiring example so far of a radical alternative to the old system. The two more recent developments are the call for a new United Socialist Party, as 'the most democratic party Venezuela has ever seen', and the 'revolutionary explosion of communal power' that Chavez identified as the fifth and most important motor of Venezuela's transition to a socialism of the
Together these three seem to re-assert an old truth. The solution can only be democracy the radical extension of democracy into every area of social life - because that, in the end, is what socialism is. This is how President Chavez described the challenge of communal power on 8 January as he swore in his new government. This year with the Communal Councils we need to go beyond the local. We need to begin to create, by law in the first instance, a kind of regional, local and national confederation of Communal Councils. We have to move towards the creation of a communal state. And the old bourgeois state, which is still there, still alive and kicking, we have to begin dismantling it bit by bit, as we build up the communal state, the socialist state, the Bolivarian state - a state that is capable of carrying through a revolution. Almost all states have been born to prevent revolutions. So we have quite a task: to convert a counter-revolutionary state into a revolutionary state. This is indeed a far-reaching vision. The Venezuelan revolutionary and former minister Roland Denis - often a critic of Chavez from the left - is surely right when he says the communal councils, which are intended to bring together 200-400 families to discuss and decide on local spending and development plans, offer an historic opportunity to do away with the bourgeois state. In theory there are already 18,000 of them. This should rise to 30,000. In practice many of them have yet to get up and running. Communal Councils But there are two related problems with the Communal Councils as presently conceived. One is that they are not entirely autonomous. They were created and are regulated by law, a law drawn up and passed by the 'old state', even if an old state inhabited by chavistas. This is significantly different from the Participatory Budget (PB) of Porto Alegre and some of its other more radical manifestations elsewhere in Brazil, which to a considerable degree have inspired the Venezuelan initiative. There the PB was set up 'informally' by a convergence of the social movements in the poor neighbourhoods and the party (the Workers' Party or PT) that was in local government, taking advantage of a loophole in Brazil's post-dictatorship constitution. One of its fundamental guiding principles was that it should be autonomous and self-regulated; there was never any legislation on the PB, it drew up its own rules and could modify them at will, and neither the representatives of local government nor of the party had any direct say in the matter. Secondly, and again unlike the PB in Porto Alegre, the Communal Councils do not have sovereign decision making power over 100 percent of local budgets (another of the cardinal principles of the Port Alegre experience. although one that was only partially exercised). In fact the money that Venezuela's communal councils discuss and spend comes in lump sums allocated directly by the Presidential Commission for Communal Power - a total of about $1.6bn last year, and around twice that this year. They do not control existing public budgets and it remains unclear what relationship they will have with resources and administrative structures that currently come under the elected mayors, governors and local assemblies - whether they witl begin to absorb and supersede these or merely exist alongside them. Both of these problems are partly a result of another. In spite of the explosion of all kinds of local mobilization in recent years, Venezuela has neither a tradition of strongly organised social movements nor a mass revolutionary, or even just class-struggle, party, which can organise such initiatives. To some degree the 'Chavez phenomenon' stands in for both. United Socialist Party This is why the call to build a new United Socialist Party (PSUV) is potentially such an important step. It might just be the best way of moving beyond the reliance on one central leader. But only on the condition that it is a genuinely open and democratic party, and not some monolithic instrument for relaying decisions that have already been taken. This is a big challenge for Venezuela's several small currents and parties that already identify themselves as marxists or socialists. The most important of these from an explicitly revolutionary marxist tradition the PRS or Revolution and Socialism Party which includes the central leaders of the currently divided UNT trade union federation - has just split over the issue, with some of its best know leaders opting to join the PSUV project, while others have decided to remain outside. In our view the former group are absolutely right to argue that this opportunity must not be missed and that it is precisely because there are real dangers of the project being hijacked by some of the old bureaucratic elements that revolutionaries must fight to ensure that the PSUV is fully democratic and does not include representatives of the Venezuelan capitalist class or that new bureaucracy that has been undermining the Bolivarian revolution from within. This is very similar to the fight waged by comrades of the Brazilian section of the Fl in the 1980s to develop the new PT as a 'workers' party without bosses' and one which had the maximum internal democracy, with full rights for tendencies, the proportional representation of minorities in the leadership, a 30% quota for women, and so on - a fight that was largely successful and played a key part in making the PT such beacon for the international left for a decade or more. 8 Challenges ahead To sum up, there would seem to be three immediate and medium-term challenges facing the revolutionary process in Venezuela. 1. Can the new party become a real, mass revolutionary party - which means can it provide a thoroughly pluralist, democratic space for organising and co-ordinating the activity of all sectors and currents of the Venezuelan working class (in its broadest sense) and other oppressed sections of society? Can the exemplary experiences of workers' co-management with workers control, begun in ALCASA and elsewhere, be extended through much wider sections of the public and private sectors? And can these begin to link up with and involve the Communal Councils and other forms of popular territorial power in exerting democratic control over workplaces and the wider economy? 3. Can the new Communal Councils become real centres of popular power, taking on sovereign decision-making power over all aspects of local and regional budgets and development plans? And can these bodies link up nationally to build a new kind of state that defends popular interests? In other words, the immediate challenges are democratic. They point towards the radical extension of participatory democracy beyond the formal political sphere into every nook and cranny of the social edifice. And that of course is what socialism - before, during and after the 21st century - was always meant to look like: an unprecedented deepening of democratic rights. Looked at in this way, the question of nationalizations and the expropriation of private capital becomes a natural consequence rather than a pre- condition. For as soon as capital ceases to be controlled by capitalists, but rather is submitted to the democratic decisions of the workforce and the community, locally and nationally, then it ceases to function as private capital and begins to obey a very different logic - that of human needs and potential, and just as urgently now, that of environmental survival. And the journey between these two points is also one of the things the theory of permanent revolution set out to analyse, some one hundred years ago.
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the popular movements. Examples of the co-opting of women's struggles via the power of the Leader include the first march of women in our country for about fifty years. This march, against imperialism and war, took place on 8 March 2006, International Womens' Day, and was directed towards the US embassy. It was promoted by the president in solidarity with Cindy Sheehan' and organised by INAMUJER, the organization which carries out his policies for women. Despite being an historical achievement, bringing together so many women in one mobilization, this march paradoxically came about through a call by the President in support of an agenda which, although shared by us, was not agreed as our priority. Thus women's capacity for mobilization has sometimes been a response to other concerns not necessarily arising from our own struggles, let alone our own agendas. In addition, there is an idealisation of the leader, which was reinforced by Maria de Leon, president of the National Institute of Women, and revealed in the interview with Edith Franco in Rebelión on 3 September 2005 entitled 'The socialism of the 21st century is communism'. " In it she emphasises her appreciation that, 'Above the leadership of our president there is nothing, only God, and God is with Chávez...... Uniting women is an exclusive task of President Hugo Chávez....he is the one who leads .... and if our president decides on the union of those movements of women, they must be united, raise themselves up and converge in a single organization.' The idea that 'Only Chavez can save the women, just as only he can save caused much annoyance and uneasiness among feminists, not only those in the opposition but also those in the communist current. Not only does it sweep aside the proposals of the most libertarian socialism - which took shape in the Paris Commune, from where the phrase, 'only the people can save the people', derives - but because for the feminist struggle it is a backward step to put the leadership of our fight into the hands of a caudillo, losing our autonomy and undervaluing our own capacity and the historical achievements of women. To make a god of Father Chávez is once again to render invisible the role of women. If we, as women, do not discuss the kind of society we want, beyond what Chávez, Evo, Fidel among OTHERS, want, we will continue to run the risk that they will steal our ideas, our words and our dreams from us, and we will continue being the proletarians or the workers who belong to the dreams, realized or not, of others. Lessons of history If we delve a little into the history of that paradigmatic historical model of Socialism, the Russian Revolution of 1917, we could learn much from it, as long as we read it objectively and critically. We could then see what dangers threaten not only the revolutionary processes, but our own role and place as female citizens and as the subjects of rights, within these. In her book Bread And Roses, Andrea D'Atri describes the gains that women made at the beginning of the Russian Revolution of 1917, before it was kidnapped by the Stalinist bureaucracy after the death of Lenin. These gains included the right to vote, to divorce, to abortion, the elimination of the power of the husband, legal equality between marriage and co-habitation. Above all, beyond the new laws (and the struggles for equality) the possibility of laying the foundations for real access by women to the cultural and economic domains, including domestic tasks (the issue that usually represents the glass ceiling for any revolution that does not penetrate into the home and the so-called private realm). According to both male and female revolutionaries, domestic chores, carried out by women in an individual and isolated way in their homes, had to be replaced by a system of social services guaranteed by the socialist State: day care centres, kindergartens, laundries, collective canteens, hospitals, but also cinemas and theatres. This meant, in the words of Trotsky (1938), quoted by D'Atri, 'the complete absorption of the economic functions of the family by socialist society'? From 1926 onward, under the despotic regime of Stalin, civil marriage was again instituted as the only legal union. Later the right to abortion was abolished and homosexuality and prostitution were considered crimes. In contrast, motherhood was glorified: the title of 'Heroic mother' was given to those women who had more than ten children. There was a clear rolling back of the gains that had been achieved through the struggles of socialist women - which, by the way, did not differ much in their agendas from present-day women's struggles, more than half a century later. These conquests by women at the beginning of the Russian Revolution were later threatened by Stalinism - and not only by the bureaucracy but through the conception of the roles of women and the family as mainstays of social order and 10 control - this was one of the obstacles to the progress of communist feminists. This brief historical survey exposes the possible obstacles that we women may have to overcome regarding our participation within a future socialism, both our agenda and the contribution that we must generate. Feminist struggle and the Party Maria de Leon in her interview discusses the need to unify the women's movement, but sees it composed only of those groupings of women from the political parties. These are the Manuelita Sáenz Movement of the PPT, the Clara Zetkin Organisation of the Venezuelan Communist Party and the Bolivarian Women's Force of the MVR. 1° The overall responsibility and the task of unifying is given to the President of the Republic through the union of these parties and later of the 'women's movement' allied to the parties. This is a significant point for our debate about socialism and feminism. We need to ask: what has been the traditional participation of women in parties throughout history? Has this participation meant an advance towards the conquest of our rights? What has been the cost of this form of political exercise? Which women are able to participate in these parties and what place do they occupy? How do class and gender divisions affect this participation? What is the historical balance sheet that we make in our initial political participation in the discussion about autonomy and the delegation of power? Where does this leave our autonomy? Delegation of Power versus Female Empowerment Feminist socialism cannot become a reality without subjects who give practical shape to this historical possibility. As