Venezuela's Revolution in the Revolution The political struggle unfolding in Venezuela has become the most important reference point in today's world for both the left and the global justice movement. Here Stuart Piper explores some of the contradictions facing Chavez. 26 • he reception given to Hugo Chavez on the last day of the 5th World Social rorum in Porto Alegre in January - in marked contrast t that given to Brazil's Lula on the first day - was a clear sign of this. At a time when the immense movement against war in Iraq has had difficulty translating into political gains, when the experience of other left gov- ernments in Latin America has been one of disappointment or outright betrayal, Venezuela's 'Bolivarian Revolution' seems to show that there really IS an alternative. Most of us on the left have been slow to recognise what is going on. It is therefore doubly important now to begin studying and discussing the process in Venezuela. Firstly to put us in a better position to con- tribute to the international solidarity movement that the Venezuelan people so badly need and deserve. Secondly, so that we can begin to understand and learn from what is a complex and highly original political process. A New Phase The moment is a good one. The decisive victories at the polls last year have opened up a new phase. The 60 per cent majority in favour of Hugo Chavez in the August 15 recall referendum turned the tables on those seeking to bring him down. Following dramatic defeats in the coup at- tempt of April 2002 and the oil industry shutdown of 2002/2003 - both the result of spectacular mobilisations by the mass of the Venezuelan people - the domestic opposition now saw its last, constitutional card blow up in its face. The political opposition has since been in a state of total disarray. Sections of the Venezuelan business class have been left scurrying about trying to patch up arrangements with parts of the gov- ernmental machinery that will allow them to continue making money. The ultimate architects in Washington were left with egg on their face, unsure what their next move should be. The rout was consolidated when Chavez supporters won control of the immense majority of state and municipal governments in October's regional elections. Of course the threats, domestic and international, did not go away. But their temporary retreat opened up a space. Chavez and his closest sup- porters began speaking about 'a new phase', a 'leap forward', the 'revo- lution in the revolution'. In November they met with all the new mayors and governors to begin to flesh out a 'new strategic map'. Chavez himself began to speak increasingly against not just 'neo-liberalism', but against capitalism. Early this year he began to talk about the need to reinvent socialist solutions for the 21st century. In April, he finally spelt it out ex- plicitly. 'I'm a socialist.' "Socialism. That's where we're heading?' In parallel, sympathy for the Bolivarian Revolution abroad gathered momentum rapidly, especially in Latin America. More and more of us watching from the outside began to realise that something was happen- ing here that needed to be taken very seriously indeed. Obviously we need to take time to follow and study what is happening. We should avoid jumping too quickly to conclusions. But we can try to begin iden- tifying some of the main features. Strengths and Weaknesses At risk of simplifying, we can say that the process in Venezuela has two great strengths, and two great weaknesses. Mobilisation The first strength is the enormous capacity of the Venezuelan people to mobilise and respond to the challenges facing them. This capacity has taken many forms over the years, going back to the Caracazo in 1989, when tens of thousands of people from the slums or 'ranchos' of Caracas took to the street in a spontaneous uprising against a pack- age of IMF adjustment policies. An uncertain number, probably several thousand, were killed in the ensuing repression. Many chavistas, and Hugo Chavez himself, like to identify the Caracazo as the start of their revolution. The connection may be more symbolic than real, but the events of February 1989 did show the willingness of the Venezuela's mainly urban poor to act on their own account, against formidable odds, and without any clear organisational structures or leaders.
That willingness has been shown several times again during the last six years bf the Bolivarian Revolution proper, but now clearly in defence of their one undisputed leader, Hugo Chavez. The most spectacular and important of these was of course the uprising on 11-13 April 2002, which stopped the Washington-backed coup in its tracks and returned Chavez in triumph to the Miraflores presidential palace, just forty-eight hours after he'd been forced to leave it. The capacity for mobilisation has also been expressed at the ballot box - eight or nine times in fact, in these last six and a half years. Meaning that, without any convincing evidence of fraud at all, Chavez, habitual- ly tagged in the international media as an 'authoritarian', "leftist', "fire- brand', "former paratrooper' and 'coup-plotter', has achieved a record of electoral victories unmatched by any other bourgeois democrat on the planet. The most intense expression of this kind of mobilisation came with last year's Recall Referendum. Tens of thousands of peo- ple took part in the Electoral Battle Units (UBEs) and Patrols, which played such a central part in producing this decisive re-legitimization of the revolutionary process. In the process they utterly supplanted the lacklustre and fractional campaign initiated by the pro-Chavez political parties grouped in the Ayacucho Command. Both these kinds of mobilisation, however, have been largely defensive - demonstrations that a majority of the Venezuelan people are prepared to fight, in the streets if need be, to defend what they see as their govern- ment, their leader, their revolution. Less obvious and more limited in scale, but perhaps more important in the long run, have been the more offensive forms of mobilisation - sections of the population taking action not just to defend what they have, but to create what they want. These are of several kinds: the launching of land committees, health committees and water boards by urban shanty-town communities to support and even 'manage' some of the government's social programmes (or 'missions' as many of them are called); the attempts (often frustrated by pro-Chavez local government officials) to set up Local or Communal Planning Councils to draw up and implement local government budgets and investment plans; the creation of more than 40,000 co-operatives, urban and rural, of the most varied kind (and most of them still proposals rather than realities), in response to the government's call to promote 'endog- enous' (that is integrated, self-sufficient) development; the still fragile and incipient attempts in a few factories and workplaces to implement forms of workers' control. The most ambitious of these latter were the efforts during the oil indus- try lockout of 2002/2003 by some workers at the state oil company PD- VSA, for example at the refinery in Puerto de la Cruz., to turn defence of the country's key economic resource into popular control over it. These efforts did not survive the end of the immediate crisis, and there may be a legitimate debate to be had about the precise timing and tactics of such measures in what is effectively Venezuela's, and the Bolivarian Revolu- tion's, single, economic lifeline. But symbolically important examples have followed in less sensitive sectors, like the bankrupt paper factory Venepal which was expropriated by the government earlier this year and re-launched as Invepal under workers' control, or the smaller Na- tional Valve Company, where workers have successfully campaigned for similar action. And there are the beginnings - still unclear in their exact character and scope - of workers' control or co-management in much bigger industries, like the state aluminium company, Alcasa. Evolution of Chavez The second great strength of the political process in Venezuela is the evolving capacity for leadership demonstrated by Hugo Chavez and his team of closest collaborators. Much has already been written on this. Much more remains to be written. Here we need only say that both ideologically and in practice, Hugo Chavez has been seriously un- derestimated - both by his Venezuelan and imperialist opponents, and by many of us on the left. Up to a point, we can say that the Chavez government in Venezuela has done what Lula's PT administration had neither the courage nor the conviction to do in Brazil - that is, confront imperialism and begin a clear break with its neo-liberal priorities. Yes, there ARE aspects of left-leaning populism, military nationalism and pure pragmatism - making it up on the hoof - alongside a good deal of flamboyant rhetoric. But none of this captures the astute tactical sense, the huge pedagogical skill, or the deep, radical conviction that characterize, ever more clearly, the Chavez leadership. This conviction can be summarised in four basic principles: Sovereignty - Venezuela, and Latin America, must recover complete control over its resources, territory and decision-making processes; Participatory democracy - the only way of eradicating poverty is to give power to the poor; A new economy - the new economic model needed cannot be achieved within capitalism; Internationalism - there are no purely national solutions. During the last few months of the 'new phase' of the Bolivarian Revo- lution, this combination has been expressed by Chavez in terms of an ever more explicit, personal commitment to socialism. This is certainly gratifying to many of us. It is difficult to remember when we last heard a head of state tell a large international gathering that we should learn the lessons of the debate between Stalin and Trotsky, and that as far as he is concerned, Trotsky was right. Of course we should not get carried away. Later in the same speech Hugo Chavez is likely to be singing the praises of Putin, Chirac, Ghadd- afi or Ayatollah Khamenei, or coming to the rescue of Lula, as he did when the Brazilian government was noisily assailed by half the hall at the end of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. In this there may be a degree of diplomatic licence. But it also appears to reflect a new kind of 'campism', one that divides the world into those who are for, and those who are supposedly 'against' (in some sense or other), the White House. There are also frequent contradictions between these radical principles and the realities on the ground, as we shall see further. But the fact remains that not since the Cuban revolution or before, have we seen the leaders of a revolutionary process so explicitly expressing socialist convictions, and showing serious signs of wanting to put them into practice. Oil There is of course one other major factor in favour of the Venezuelan process, one that has little to do with the political creativity of Chavez or the Venezuelan people. Oil. Venezuela is not only the world's fifth 27
ages producer. and the main supplier of all the petrol consumed on •: Ear: Coast of the United States. It also calculates it has the largest reserves in the world, if you include the super heavy crude of the -roco Belt. In the past, oil companies did not classify this as oil at all, ca: as bitumen - which counted as a form of coal - thus reducing their ax liabilities. Modern refining technology, however, makes it relatively simple to turn this super heavy crude into high grade fuel. Venezuela's oil wealth has left a legacy of profound economic and social distortions. But, combined with the high world prices, it means that this is a revolutionary process with an unprecedented amount of economic muscle behind it. However none of this makes sense unless we try to understand how these strengths of the Venezuelan experience combine with its evident weaknesses - or perhaps we should say with the evident challenges it has yet to overcome. Dearth of organistion Possibly the most serious of these is the extreme weakness of Venezuela's social movements and left political parties. The lack of social movements may seem paradoxical, in a process so marked by mass moblizations. But there is nothing in Venezuela that remotely compares with the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, the indigenous movements in Ecuador or Bolivia, the piqueteros in Argentina - whatever crises of organisation or perspective many of these may be facing. The reasons for this are complex. One element of an explanation may have to do with the fact that what trade union or social movements did exist in Venezuela were largely tied to Accion Democratica (AD). This was the highly corrupt, would-be 'social democratic' party, which was at the forefront of implementing neo-liberal policies in Venezuela in the 1980s and 90s, and which has since been at the centre of ruling class But whatever the causes, the absence of strong, independent, social movements has at least three, overlapping, negative consequences. Firstly it means that the forms of organisation thrown up around suc- cessive phases of mobilisation tend to be ephemeral. Bolivarian Circles have largely disappeared. Their energies were redirected partly into the Missions and the Health, Land and Water Committees that went along with them. Politically they gave way to the UBEs and patrullas of last year's referendum campaign. These in turn have now been encouraged to transform themselves into Endogenous Battle Units, to support the development of integrated, co-operative development projects. And as relations with the US become increasingly tense, there are the begin- nings of moves to encourage local communities and workplaces to put some of their energies into creating local people's militias too. These various objectives may be entirely legitimate. But the instability in the forms of organisation makes it very difficult to develop coherent perspectives or unified platforms of demands in different sectors. Secondly, this in turn raises a serious question mark about the autonomy of such mass organisation. The absence of strong, national movements with their own specific demands tends to lead to an acute dependence on initiatives coming from the centre, from parts of the state apparatus, or as often as not from Chavez himself. And it is this direct and abso- lutely central relationship between the leader and the masses that gives the appearance, and partly the reality, of populism, at least in form, though not in content. The only real exception to this phenomenon - and it remains at a very preliminary stage - is the new trade union confederation, the UNT (Union Nacional de los Trabajadores), which in the last two years has gone some way to filling the space left by the collapse of the old 'adeco' bureaucracy of the CTV (Venezuelan Workers Cen- tral), following the latter's ignominious role in the failed coup and oil lockout of 2002. 28 Thirdly the one key reason why the UNT is an exception, is that it is the only social movement with a significant current of autonomously organised revolutionaries within its ranks and its leadership - namely those of the OIR. This is a regroupment of revolutionary Marxists, still in the process of formation, many but not all of whose members come from the Moreno tradition of Trotskyism. For the main political parties that support the Bolivarian Revolution, are surely its weakest link. The smaller ones, the PPT, Podemos, the Communist Party, the UPV, may provide some important cadres, but as political parties, as the collective organisers of political action and political ideas, they are completely in- effective. The biggest party of the Chavistas, the MVR (Fifth Republic Movement), is not really a party at all. It has never had a congress, it has no internal life to speak of, and no real ideological or programmatic pro- file. It is more an amalgam of groups, clans and interests, many of them genuine, but a good number of them purely electoral or opportunist. Chavez and his team are certainly aware of these limitations. But it is far from clear how they can rebuild a real, militant party out of the very limited materials at their disposal. And if they do, it will be of decisive importance how far they are able to incorporate 'constuctively critical' voices like those of the OIR. The state All of these difficulties interact with, and are partly reflections of, the other great problem, or challenge, facing the Bolivarian Revolution - its rela- tion with the state. Because what we are seeing in Venezuela is the acute paradox of a revolution, or rather a revolutionary process, which has not yet been able to make a decisive break with the bourgeois state apparatus. There have been partial ruptures and rearrangements. The very election of Chavez back in 1998 saw Venezuela's traditional elite lose most of the political command posts from which it had for so long run the state as its private fiefdom. In 2000 the drawing up of a new Constitution by a Constituent Assembly went some considerable way towards rewriting the rules of the game. The popular uprising that defeated the April 2002 coup, accompanied by a revolt of junior officers and soldiers, broke the back of visible resistance within the state apparatus, most obviously in the upper levels of the armed forces. No doubt there remains subterranean opposition within parts of the armed forces, the police and the judiciary. Recent incidents like the assassination of public prosecutor Danilo Anderson or the kidnapping of Colombian guerrilla leader Rodrigo Granda by Venezuelan military working for the Colombians, and the seeming paralysis of attempts to bring anyone to justice, indicate that things are not running as smoothly here as the government would like. But the real problem is more fundamental. It is that the Bolivarian Rev- olution is trying to carry out its programme of radical transformation with the entire administrative, legislative and judicial machinery of the old bourgeois state apparatus still in place, along with most of its per- sonnel too. Strictly speaking, there has been no revolution at all - just a revolutionary process, still trapped in the bourgeois state. It is a political problem that Chavez and his team are acutely aware of. The overriding preoccupation of their 'new strategic map' is to de- velop ways of building a new economy and a new state, partly going through and partly going around, the existing institutions. At least some of Chavez' team are also well aware, as revolutionary Marxists have long argued, that confrontation with the old state apparatus is inevita- ble, and that preparing the masses politically and organisationally for this is therefore paramount. For the time being, the prevailing view is that with the existing bal- ance of forces internationally and in the region, it would be suicidal to make an explicit break with the current framework, just as it would be to launch a frontal assault on private property. How far and how fast to push the process forward; how to find the mechanisms of mass organi- sation and popular participation that are capable of giving legitimacy to new institutions, are dilemmas felt far beyond Venezuela.