If we are to follow the recent opening toward socialism created in the United States by the Bernie Sanders campaign, if we are to avoid the Nationalism which was defeated by the deeply democratic tolerance on display this weekend in reaction to the hate, if we are to avoid the pitfalls of Nationalism only to end up in a watered-down “identity” politics of upward mobility into the neoliberal ruling class…
On August 11, in the wake of a threat to nuke North Korea, the acting United States President has threatened to militarily invade Venezuela. As the fourth largest oil producing country in the world and the United States major oil supplier, and as the architect of several regional trading agreements which have stood in the way of the neoliberal agenda to regain hegemony over Latin America and the Caribbean, it is more than one of the President’s distractions. Despite repeated and deeply destructive counterinsurgency attacks engineered by the United States. Although the United states has brought Venezuela to its knees, it has not be able to completely destabilize the Bolivarian revolution to regain the neoliberal hegemony it seeks without direct military intervention.
According to James Petras, one of the major progressive analysts on Latin America over several decades, US policy toward Venezuela is a microcosm of its larger strategy toward Latin America. The intent is to reverse the region’s independent foreign policy and to restore US dominance; to curtail the diversification of trading and investment partners and re-center economic relations to the US; to replace regional integration pacts with US centered economic integration schemes; and to privatize firms partly or wholly nationalized.
Meanwhile, back in the United States there is increasing concern in mainstream media over Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis under the alleged dictatorship of Maduro and his failed socialist project. The only solution to this crisis — they say — is for Nicolás Maduro’s government to step down and leave room for the opposition’s coalition party (the Roundtable of Democratic Unity) to take power and stabilize the country.
In late June, the New York Times put out an article saying:
Venezuela’s economic crisis — triggered by a drop in oil prices after a decade of excessive government spending, borrowing, and corruption — has led to a shortage of medicine, food, and other goods. Meanwhile, President Nicolás Maduro, who has militarized cities in response to the crisis, is fighting a push for a recall referendum.( Implying, while other news outlets from the US Media outright state, with some hysteria, that Maduro is, like his predecessor, a dictator repressing a real democracy.)
The article comes after several headlines showcasing the Venezuelan middle- and lower-classes’ desperation as they wait in long lines to get into supermarkets with empty shelves and pharmacies that have no medicine.
Forbes magazine, too, suddenly has a deep concern for the Venezuelan people. Over the past few weeks, they published a series of articles with the titles: “Congratulations to Bolivarian Socialism — Venezuela Has Food Riots Now,” “Congratulations to Bolivarian Socialism — Venezuela Now Faces Imminent Famine,” and most recently, “Congratulations to Bolivarian Socialism — 35,000 Venezuelans Leave the Country to Feed Themselves.
While this biased representation can be expected from the Capitalist class and even its supposedly more liberal New York Times acting as the loyal opposition party, the death knoll on the Bolivarian Revolution has already been sounded by some of the communist left commentators such as NACLA, the ISO and Jacobin, proclaiming the end of the Bolivarian Revolution and the failure of twenty-first century socialism, and suggesting a takedown of the alternative Latin American media outlet TeleSUR as propaganda.
One wonders if the elements of the left are premature in writing off the Bolivarian revolution. Could it be that they feel such a “populist” attempt at social change, without the vanguard Marxist analysis, be better off with no revolution than attempting to prop up an imperfect attempt at social progress? The concept of a smug, “I told you so” comes to mind. Interestingly, after the Cuban revolution in 1959, some of the older Marxists who had for years promoted a communist revolution in Cuba critiqued Castro for not following the Marxist line. After about a year, Castro re-formed his central committee excluding many of those Marxists. There is a big difference between theorizing about a socialist revolution (which is important) and being in the midst of making one a real one.
The diatribe by Mike Gonzalas in Jacobin Magazine against Maduro as a bourgeois betrayer of the revolution who, through his personal incompetence and authoritarian tendencies, is responsible for bringing down the revolution, is an example. While blind support of a revolution is not useful, neither is what Lenin calls an “uncritical criticism” that refuses to go to the heart of things and grasp revolutionary change as a dynamic process. According to another Jacobin contributor, nothing is harder than making a revolution and little is easier than prematurely forecasting failure. Gonzalez’s goal is to reveal Maduro’s betrayal of the revolution, but this is a catch 22: the government is ineffective, but if it attempts to act, it is authoritarian; when it defends itself in a far less heavy-handed fashion than most governments would, it is repressive; it is fiscally irresponsible, but criticized for turning out of desperation to extractive projects like the Arco Minero; if it fails to fill the shelves, it is useless, but collaborating with private companies to do so is high treason; and when an admittedly problematic socialist party (the PSUV) acts in a partisan way – which is what revolutionary parties are meant to do –it becomes an instrument of political repression. “
For Gonzales, the Chavista elites and the bourgeois who they “collude” with are equally responsible for the corruption and loss of millions in oil revenues. But this leaves us with the same question—if they are one in the same, why are they fighting a bloody, deadly battle in the streets? The answer is that, however imperfectly, the Maduro government and the Bolivarian Revolution still stand for the possibility of something radically different. Perhaps the worst part of this analysis is that it leaves out the most important voice in this struggle – the voices of the majority of the Venezuelan people and the grassroots organizations who still support the revolutions goals and continue to fight for them –not because they don’t have criticisms, but because the alternative is an actual repressive rightwing neoliberal imperialist regime.”
Frankly Gomez’s article seems to have become infected with the United States propaganda campaign of American Exceptionalism by which the United States is “bringing democracy to the world” while forgetting the 100 years of United States imperialism added to recent neoliberal efforts to bring Latin America back under its imperialist global hegemony.
This tendency, especially in America, to equate democracy with American values expressed in the American Constitution and the importance we place on the “Rule of Law” has led many of us to a confusion of what democracy really is. Many of the social democratic or democratic socialists groups who hyphenate seem to see socialism as necessary to economic equality but often perceive it as dictatorial and authoritarian due to their perceptions of planned societies such as the Soviet Union or China. By combining it rather mechanically with the concept of democracy, they feel they can have the best of both worlds –material equality combined with democracy (I have been guilty of this myself).
Democracy, often viewed as providing certain social liberties and rights in the political realm, is ensured through “rule of law.” But the rule of law cannot be an empty formal procedural process but always reflects the type of economy which it represents. The model of the American Constitution, the most common example, ensures the right to individual liberties, the right to own individual property, freedom of speech, the right to assembly, as well as the right to participate in the formation of government policies at all levels through the process of voting in a representative democracy. Under capitalism, however, although they provide equal opportunity to try to be as rich or poor as one wants, citizens cannot, guarantee material equality since the very concept of capitalism is based on competition for profit maximization in the market place, with “winners and losers” as one recently famous huckster would say. The idea of mixing together two separate concepts of socioeconomic relationships from two different socioeconomic systems developing at different historical times is like mixing apples and oranges.
Another problem with American rule of law is that it only applies to US citizens in the nation state and even then it is sometimes questionable as to whether it applies to conquered communities within the United States such as First people, refugees from other countries or people brought to these shores as slaves. Outside of the bubble of main stream Western media and American Exceptionalism, democracy appears quite different to those who have felt America’s foot print not as democracy but imperialist hegemony. In the face of the United States’ cries to oust the dictatorial socialist regime of Venezuela, the Organization of American States, an organization of 33 Latin and Caribbean countries formed under the influence of the United States, has consistently refused to sanction Venezuela in spite of Obama’s and now Trump’s, urgent pressure. And this February, the UN unanimously appointed a Venezuelan to head the committee of the Subjugation of Peoples, despite pressure from the United States against this appointment. This silence should tell us something if we’re listening.
Analysts Steve Ellner and Gabriel Hetland offer a more nuanced exchange about the complexity of challenges faced by the Maduro government, and they are clear about the need to oppose imperialist intervention. But beyond the intellectual evaluations of the Maduro government, we need to go deeper to understand the political struggles of social movements on the ground in Venezuela, and to offer solidarity to the many urban and rural organizations to the left of the Maduro government who continue to critically support it, and who constitute a vital part of the ongoing revolution as well as the nature of the Venezuelan government itself.
Chavez, by asserting Venezuela’s goal as 21srt century socialism is asserting the building of socialism from the ground up, by supporting grassroots social movements (i.e. the city communal councils, the cooperatives, etc.) Unlike many of our leftist in the United States, however, Chavez was acutely aware that the Bolivarian Revolution was not in control of the government but in a relationship with both other political parties and private businesses. In an effort to provide some space to develop both necessary people’s organizations on the ground and make necessary changes to the oil dependent economy Chavez inherited, he chose to make what some leftists consider a bargain with the devil. Chavez, by making an alliance in the oligarchy and using the massive wealth regenerated by boom in oil revenues in the early 2000s (which provides 90% of the capital of Venezuela, used its position as the majority party in the government to take oil revenues) to both develop a socialist safety net for the 80% of the working poor and to develop, as best it could economic alternatives for the 50% of workers in the informal economy.
Although the traditional oil rentier capitalist class retained hegemony, the high prices of oil the 2000s allowed a rise in capital accumulation for a sector of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie at the same time the social spending increased. In fact, Chavez’s attempt to bring the bourgeois into the Bolivarian economy left the private sector practically intact. Under the Bolivarian project, the capitalist class was assigned to the “nationalist and productive” entrepreneurship which played an important role in the changes brought by the Bolivarian regime. Meanwhile, the Bolivarian government used this space to develop agricultural and productive coops and later, communal council structures which gave the poor a chance to develop an alternative economy and democratic process in the informal sector. At the time that Chávez gave his speech to the ministry of the new revolutionary cycle in October 2012, there were almost no registered communes—although many were in formation (some of which had begun to emerge at the grassroots level as early as 2010). By September 2013 there were more than 40,000 registered communal councils (some going back to 2006), while the number of registered communes had topped a thousand, with substantial political power devolving to the emerging communal state.35 Despite cutbacks in government spending (starting with his own salary), Maduro increased the 2015 budget for the communes by 62 percent. He has called the communes “the maximum expression of democracy” and “pure socialism.” The goal, he declared at the National Communal Economy Conference in February 2014, was not just creating the communal state but the communal economy as well: “democratizing property, generating new forms of social property such as communal ones, is necessary for strengthening participative and protagonistic democracy.”36
Although the communes are at the heart of the Bolivarian Revolution, they do not stand alone. Venezuela has moved forward in promoting the elementary triangle of socialism. The Bolivarian Revolution has thus progressed on multiple fronts. Already by 2011, 3.6 million acres of land had been expropriated for distribution. By 2012, over 90,000 cooperatives had been formed with some 2 plus million members. At the same time 26,000 agricultural units had been developed in the cities and suburbs aimed at food security and food sovereignty. Socialist workers councils have proliferated. “The most successful attempt at a democratization of ownership and administration of the means of production,” Azzellini states, “is the model of Enterprises of Communal Social Property (ESPQ), promoted to create local production units and community service enterprises.” These enterprises “are collective property of the communities, which decide on the organizational structure of enterprises, the workers incorporated and the eventual use of profits.” The Bolivarian state has promoted these collective enterprises since 2009, and by 2013 there were several thousand.
Although the sector has continued to grow and while the developments are quite impressive, they have yet to grow to a scale that could challenge the dominant economy financially and have been severely hurt by the increasingly violent disruptions of the opposition. Equally importantly is the deterioration of the money economy due to the drop in oil prices, causing growing inflation and lack of foodstuffs. Their relative self-sufficiency and relative independence from the money economy of the communes has balanced this somewhat but only in limited areas as yet.
The Bolivarian revolution also used their oil wealth to develop political and economic relationships with other countries in the Southern Cone through the development of regional organizations such as Unasur (a regional trade organization meant to replace Mercosur, the trade organization dominated by the neoliberal agenda of the imperialist American agenda).
This income distribution for not only the working class, but also the bourgeois – what had been called distributive balance between classes by Uruguayan economist Rodrigo Alonso – became unsustainable from 2012 on. This led to increasing inflation, which led to a vicious cycle where the bourgeois who still controlled the private economy of manufacturing and the importation of necessary food stuffs and who the working class had to rely on for the continuation of food imports highlighted the major complaint of leftist who felt this failure to develop more food self sufficiency and less reliance on the oil economy, more than anything else, undermined the Bolivarian revolution and showed their complicity with the ruling class.
In fact, historically, the policy for the forty years prior to the Chavez regime, under the general oversight of the United States, the development of Venezuelan oil reserves for profit by foreign countries, had made real diversification almost impossible. Much of the arable land had already been appropriated for the development of new oil projects and agriculture had been reduced to only 3%of the economy.
There was a period during that time when the Venezuelan government did pursue a nationalist import substitution program which attempt to develop other metal resources and manufacturing and weaned their dependence on oil to a lower percentage (in the 60% range); however the international drop in oil prices in the 80s, causing a severe depression, and the economy had not had time to recoup their profit through their new industries, but also had not maintained their oil industries and the economy collapsed. Also troublesome even though the GDP was still strong, the economy under Venezuela’s “golden age of [capitalist]democracy” had not shared this wealth with the poor which still numbere3 over 50% of the population with inadequate food supplies. This resulted in the infamous Carazco uprising of 1989 and led to the beginning of the Bolivarian movement.
Thus Venezuela was and is still dependent on food imports which required money in dollars to make such purchases. The critics are partially right- not only by their failure to dismantle the oil rentier economy but by maintaining their co-relationship with the business classes who were only won over in part, is proving their undoing . Many of the bourgeoisie who seemed to go along with the Bolivarian project, in fact were right wing compradors who both due to their political inclinations to undermine the socialist project and their natural inclination to make a profit, utilized their position as importers of goods in the economy to speculate and hoard goods, and resale them on the black market or over the border in Colombia, greatly increasing their profit, greatly decreasing access of the majority of people to basic goods, and greatly increasing inflation.
Much like Cuba and earlier, Nicaragua, Chavez set up a dual currency where the local currency was much lower in value. This allowed the Government to provide commodities to poorer people at relatively lower rates. The government also established government run stores where good could be bought at a 30% discount. Instead, a system designed to provide minimal food security to all segments of the population, resulted in diverting basic goods in huge amounts to the black market by the wholesalers. That this was a political strategy of the rightwing, not just for profit but intended to undermine the economy, was the intentional hoarding of basic goods such as cooking oil, flour and milk right before elections. MADURO’S attempts to control this theft of state goods enforcing anti-hoarding and smuggling laws, sometimes resulted in legal expropriation of the business, often results in accusations of dictatorial control magnified by the US backed and rightwing media.
The increased regulations on currency to try and control the inflation, led to increased speculation and profits on the black market leading to spiraling inflation. If they government instituted a single dollar currency, the average worker would not be able to survive. Even when the this policy led to empty shelves in the government stores and prices people could not afford on the black market, the removal of the dual currency would have caused great problems providing basic subsistence supports. The theft and smuggling of goods from government coffers to the black market also effected other products such as auto parts, bringing to a halt the efforts to produce other manufacturing products in an effort to reduce dependency on oil. These problems are not new to Venezuela but are part of the daily negotiations in many Latin American societies dependent on the imperialist North.
I have witnessed these difficulties in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba, and. although the pressures vary a little each country, I have seen how these seeming small internal corruptions have deeply crippled and limited the paths for each project. After the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, Fidel Castro who had been a big supporter of the Sandinista project, told a crowd of Nicaraguan revolutionaries in Managua that the changing fortunes of the Soviet Union would limit the amount that they could support Cuba and this, in turn, would limit the amount that Cuba could help Nicaragua.
Unfortunately when you are fighting a revolution against the financial elite of the world, it takes money. In earlier years, prior to the global economic collapse of 1972, most revolutionary groups had relied on economic support from money of the major revolutionary states (Russia, China, Cuba). The lack of those supports forced newer revolutionary movements to take different tacks. Nicaragua chose, much like Chavez did after his failed efforts to bring down the Venezuelan government by a coup, to establish a mixed economy with “patriotic” capitalists. After they took over the Somoza government, the Sandinistas planned to lower the massive malnutrition (47%)by setting up an agricultural land reform program and distributing the Estates of the Somoza family to landless peasants. If fact, Somoza’s land only constituted 20% of the land held by the oligarchy which limited the success of the land reform. The Sandinistas also subsidized coop development in an effort to minimally socialize the means omedif production in the small to medium business sector. Many middle class families who ran their businesses as individual private enterprises, would file as coops in order to get tax breaks and subsidies though upon visiting them, it was their employees were clearly not an integral part of the coop. However, the same “coop “on paper only also complained that the local official’s, Sandinista or not, would demand a substantial bribe to get the license, a practice left over from the tributary culture of oligarchies from Spain.
In Venezuela, dependency on oil, also made it difficult to develop agriculture as there was little land or incentive. Venezuela, like Nicaragua, subsidized coop development through financing, coop education, tax breaks, etc. to employ people in the informal sector in production coops and in agriculture where land was available. This was also a natural choice since the Catholic Church had already established a cooperative movement through the liberation theology movement. The corruption in the cooperative sector was so widespread, however, that Chavez, in the mid-2000s, changed the government’s priorities to the development of communal councils. When the Bolivarian proposed that 5% of the public land be set aside for communal lands in a 2008 referendum, it was voted down. After two more years of public education on the issues the referendum was resubmitted to the people and passed. I was impressed with Chavez’s patience and democratic approach.
In Cuba the problem has been and still is the economic boycott imposed by the United States for the last 50 years which, coupled with the loss of help from the Soviet Union after it dissolved in the early 1990s has had a dramatic effect on the economy and goals of Cuba. While they continue to provide as much social services to other countries as they can, especially through their medical program, and 70% of their economy is still planned and owned by the state, they have established a small private sector which is now promoting a small coop sector to promote production of goods and agriculture for social needs, not for profit. They have also established a dual currency. Some of the same problems of cooptation by the more wealthy sectors of Cuba, like skirting coop rules and using remittances from their wealthy relatives in Miami require vigilance through government regulation to prevent increasing levels of inequality among the population.
The Deep State
The counterinsurgency plan of the United States has, since the inception of the Bolivarian Revolution been implemented through electoral, cultural and military means. The recent increase in the street violence only highlights the belief that full military action may be necessary to unlodge the Bolivarian Revolution. The reason the Bolivarian Revolution, in spite of all of the flaws, has been so resilient to the United States counter-insurgency, are worth noting:
The resort to military coups in Venezuela is a strategy designed to impose a client regime. This is a replay of US strategy during the 1964-1983 period. Major upheavals in the world economy including the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1972 which led to a worldwide economic collapse, made it an ideal and also necessary time for the United States and its newly developing neoliberal agenda to recoup and reaffirm its control over Latin America in a time where progressive governments had challenged its hegemony.
This included, most specifically, the violent overthrow of the elected Allende government of Chile by the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet. The counterinsurgency plan of the United States has, since the inception of the Bolivarian Revolution been implemented through electoral, cultural and military means. The recent increase in the street violence only highlights the belief that full military action may be necessary to unlodge the Bolivarian Revolution. The reason it has been so resistant, inspite of all its flaws are worth noting:
Over 60-80 thousand suspected leftist sympathizers were killed and 400,000 imprisoned including leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, students, teachers, etc.
During these two decades US strategists successfully collaborated with business-military elites to overthrow nationalist and socialist governments, privatize public enterprises and reverse, social, labor and welfare policies. The client regimes implemented neo-liberal policies and supported US centered integration. The entire spectrum of representative institutions, political parties, trade unions and civil society organizations were banned and replaced by imperial funded NGOs, state controlled parties and trade unions. With this perspective in mind (and well-remembered by the people of those regions) the US has returned to all out regime change in Venezuela as the first step to a continent-wide transformation to reassert political, economic and social dominance.
Washington’s resort to political violence, all out media warfare, economic sabotage and military coups in Venezuela is an attempt to discover the effectiveness of these tactics under favorable conditions, including a deepening economic recession, double digit inflation, declining living standards and weakening political support, as a dress rehearsal for other countries in the region. Washington’s earlier resort to a regime change strategy in Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina and Ecuador failed because objective circumstances were unfavorable. Between 2003 to 2012 the national-populist or center-left regimes were increasing political support, their economies were growing, incomes and consumption were improving and pro-US regimes and clients had earlier collapsed under the weight of a systemic crises. Moreover, the negative consequences of military coups were fresh in people’s minds.
Recently the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay have all moved to the right, compliments of the recent economic upheavals aided by United States counterinsurgency tactics. However, Moreno’s recent win in Ecaudor has boosted the flagging spirits of the Left in South America, in-spite of the flagging economies. (Maduro-Venezuela and Morales-Bolivia congratulated Morano profusely on Twitter).
Today Washington’s strategists believe that Venezuela is the easiest and most important target because of its structural vulnerabilities and because Caracas is the linchpin to Latin American integration and welfare populism. According to Washington’s domino theory, Cuba will be more susceptible to pressure if it is cut-off from Venezuela’s subsidized oil-for-medical services agreement. Regional integration will be diluted or replaced by directed trade agreements. The US military presence will be enlarged beyond Colombia, Peru, Paraguay and Honduras. Radical anti-imperialist ideology will be replaced by a revised form of “pan-Americanism”, a euphemism for imperial primacy.
What is to Be Done?
Forward revolution: One view, promoted by James Petras, is that Venezuela cannot continue to play soft-ball with the United States with Venezuela’s seriously debilitated government and economy. The United States is closing in for the kill and the Maduro government must respond in kind if it is to survive. Following a page in Obama’s play book, it must use all available legal methods under the constitution to try and imprison those who break the law, whether in the street or through business fraud, even though this will be touted as undemocratic by the United States media. The Venezuelan government has continued to win many battles against a very powerful enemy and can still live to fight again but only if Maduro can activate the base – the popular organizations, the communes, the grassroots to prepare for an all out national resistance to stop the violence of the counterinsurgency. That it still has the majority of Venezuela’s support, in spite of brutal counter insurgency tactics suggests that the Bolivarian revolution still has some cards to play. The continued cooperation with the business elites of the rightwing, however, will only lead to further undermining social programs demoralization and will not solve the problem of redirecting the oil revenues. The result will be rightwing control, a massive dismantling of the social programs and the alternate economic model of cooperation and years of repression and misery.
Toward a Negotiated Piece: Another view espoused in the Nation is that the extreme objective conditions do not warrant such an extremist position and that a negotiated peace including those more middle class sectors who are currently supporting the rightwing regime but willing to negotiate with Madro’s socialist regime will be more productive in the near future. Instead of polarizing people into an all out civil war which they cannot win, they should continue to move forward slowly, both developing an alternative economy from below and trying to work with the middle class moderates to form a unity government.
The role of American democratic socialists or socialists who want a mass democratic party: Whichever solution the Bolivarian pursue, it is not for us to decide as it is their revolution. However, there is a role for democratic socialists in the United States. If we are to follow the recent opening toward socialism that has been created in the United States by the Bernie Sanders campaign, but to avoid the Nationalist perspective which stops our natural social democratic tendencies at our borders, and also avoiding the pitfalls of exchanging an international socialism for a watered-down “identity” politics of upward mobility into the neoliberal ruling class, we have to begin at home.
The actual tolerance of the “other” that is a result of our somewhat skewed democratic American project has come to the fore in response to the American racist, sexist and xenophobic agenda that is inherent in the capitalist project. From immigrant rights, to Muslim rights, to the struggle in Charlottesville, we have seen the best of America respond to the hate. Unfortunately, this movement has been diverted to using our truly noble instincts toward tolerance to the democratic party’s neoliberal agenda. In order to fix this, we have to promote an anti-imperialist agenda which educates and includes active anti-war and immigration struggles of those that we have victimized both beyond our borders and continue to victimize within our borders as “the other”. This will also include some rethinking by the white male Bernie Sanders movement as well. There is a reason that the settlements in the West Bank in Gaza were sending pizzas to the Black Lives Matter in Ferguson Missouri. Peace and unity in struggle. J