Unearthing the contradictions
Bolivia, Venezuela and the future of the Latin American Left
BY JEFFERY R. WEBBER
VENEZUELAN PRESIDENT HUGO Chávez and Bolivian president Evo Morales provoke intense opinions, not simply in their respective countries but across the globe. Chávez’s bold denunciation of George W. Bush as “The Devil” at the United Nations General Assembly on September 20 sharpened his usual taunting of the US president as “Mr. Danger.” This led the conservative British magazine, The Economist, to exclaim, “Mr. Chávez trumped even Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the adolescent stridency of his anti-Americanism.” In the same speech, Chávez waved Noam Chomsky’s anti-imperialist book, Hegemony or Survival, in front of television cameras, sending the title back onto bestseller lists. Chávez symbolizes, for many on the Left, a newly emboldened confrontation with the naked imperial hubris of the US under Bush.
With the astronomical flow of oil money driving Venezuela’s economy, Chávez has spread wealth domestically and internationally, including a whole host of projects benefiting poor majorities in Cuba, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia and Jamaica, while more symbolically providing help to poor communities in the US.
Chávez has been a leading opponent of free trade deals between the US and Latin America, promoting instead cooperation among Latin American countries based on principles of solidarity, and invoking the memory of independence hero Simón Bolívar and a united South America. Inspired by the Cuban revolution, Chávez has a warm friendship with Fidel Castro, even while he stresses the independence of the Venezuelan path toward a 21st century socialism, which he vaguely suggests will be less state-centred and more pluralistic. Chávez also frequently expresses the necessity of forging stronger South-South connections to counter the imperialism of the core capitalist states of the world system. Soon after the 2005 Bolivian election of Evo Morales, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia signed a Peoples’ Trade Agreement. At the same time, sharing as it does the contradictions of Third World nationalist regimes of times past, Chávez’s anti-imperialism has also led him to forge alliances with reprehensible authoritarian regimes such as those of Iran and Belarus.
At home, the official mythology of Venezuela as a “racial democracy” has been ripping apart at the seams. This is evident in the anti-chavista camp’s racist vitriol that litters its political campaigns. Heiber Barreto Sánchez writes, “ ‘Indian, monkey, and thick-lipped’ have been some of the more illustrative expressions of this racial contempt that the opposition has played when describing Chávez. What is forgotten is that the majority of us Venezuelans carry at least one of these features and by attempting to discredit them politically in this manner they are attacking the sentiments of a large part of the population.” Chávez’s proud self- identification as “Indian,” “black” or “mixed-breed” undermines such attacks, exposing them as racist. The identification of the poor, darker-skinned majority with Chávez has to do in part with the symbolic challenge he represents: he is one of us, our president. And they – the imperial giant to the North and the light- skinned elite in and around Caracas – hate him feverishly, which has to be a good thing!
A similar symbolism is at work in Bolivia with the election of the first indigenous president since the 1825 founding of the republic. Because over 62 percent of Bolivians self-identify as indigenous, Morales’ victory is akin to Nelson Mandela’s 1994 victory in South Africa, inspiring indigenous movements throughout Latin America, and to some degree in North America as well.
The Morales regime has spurred the poor indigenous majority’s expectations for fundamental change after the last six years of courageous and mass struggle by Left-indigenous movements, promising to end the colonialist relations between the white-mestizo (mixed-race) elite and the oppressed indigenous nations through a profound, democratic revolution. Morales also says that the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, or Movement Towards Socialism) government represents a fundamental challenge to the right-wing neoliberal economic model, introduced to Bolivia in 1985. Anti-imperialism, anti-neoliberalism, social justice, indigenous liberation, and a nuanced, multicultural Bolivian nationalism constitute the ideological pillars tying the Morales presidency to his mass support.
In this article, however, I move beyond the imagery and theatrics of the Bolivian and Venezuelan governments and unearth some of the contradictions beneath the surface, paying particular attention to the Venezuelan case.
VENEZUELA UNDER CHÁVEZ
Beginning with the Caracazo rebellion that was brutally repressed in 1989, followed by two failed coup attempts in 1992, the old order in Venezuela began to deteriorate, but what replaced it was unclear. Chávez was elected on an imprecise anti-neoliberal and anti-corruption platform in 1998. His first years in office did not show signs of a serious break with the old economic order, much less a move toward socialism.
However, two important processes were initiated that allowed for the eventual radicalization of the Bolivarian Revolution so that today it does seem revolutionary, even if we remain uncertain of its ultimate direction and depth. First, Chávez wrestled back control of the oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, Sociedad Anónima, which while nominally a state-owned enterprise had long functioned as an independent capitalist entity. The reassertion of state control over PDVSA, as well as Chávez’s early efforts to steer Venezuela into a leading role in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, allowed the new government to benefit from the increased price of oil on the world market. Gross Domestic Product grew by an incredible 18 percent in 2004 and by 9.9 percent in 2005. Oil revenue increased from US$226 per capita in 1998 to $728 in 2005.
A second factor in the radicalization of the Chávez regime was the right-wing opposition’s long march to self-destruction. Historian Greg Grandin sums up the situation: “Blind to Chávez’s popularity among the heretofore invisible urban poor and counselled by hard-liners in the Bush administration, the opposition launched a series of maximalist actions to drive him from power, including an April
2002 coup attempt, a two-month oil strike that cost the country $6 billion, and an August 2004 recall vote. Chávez beat back this campaign and emerged from the crisis years greatly strengthened, with . . . his adversaries in the military, police, and unions removed from office, and his bond with the poor strengthened. The corporate print and TV media, which not only sided with Chávez’s enemies but roused them to action, lost its credibility as a tribune of public trust and could credibly be dismissed by government supporters as an instrument of a self-interested and revanchist oligarchy.”
The class struggle from above against moderate reforms initiated by the Chávez regime spurred class struggle from below in workplaces and communities, pushing those once-moderate reform measures toward a more direct confrontation with the logic of capital.
ADVANCE AND CONTRADICTION IN VENEZUELA
Anti-capitalist characteristics of the revolutionary process in Venezuela are evident on several fronts. Non-private forms of ownership and control of production (cooperatives, co-management experiments, and expanded state- ownership and management) have steadily increased. Caracas-based sociologist and journalist Gregory Wilpert remarks that there were 800 cooperatives in 1998 compared to over 100,000 in 2005, involving over 1.5 million Venezuelans, or 10% of the adult population. According to Michael Lebowitz, “The new cooperatives…are destined to be small and not likely (certainly at their outset) to be major sources of accumulation and growth. Nevertheless, in their emphasis upon replacing the system of wage-labour with one based upon cooperation and collective property, they are a microcosm of an alternative to the logic of capital.”
However, he adds, “worker management in what are called ‘strategic’ state industries has moved backward, and these reversals have demoralized revolutionary workers; confining them to the adversarial role that they play in capitalism, it reinforces all the self-oriented tendencies of the old society.” Wilpert also highlights the expropriation by the state of idle factories in plants that produce paper, valves and agricultural products, and in which workers have taken control. Another 700 idle production facilities are vulnerable to such arrangements in the future.
Meanwhile, redistributive measures introduced by the state and lubricated by oil wealth have financed some rural and urban land reform, social programs such as health and education and subsidized parts of the economy targeted as nuclei of “endogenous development.”
Many Left observers rightfully praise the participatory conception of democracy outlined in the new Venezuelan constitution. They point to the important roles of participatory mechanisms in the management of social programs, especially through the various “missions” in poor neighbourhoods, as well as, writes Wilpert, “institutionalized mechanisms for civil society involvement in government (referenda, selection of high level state officials, and citizen audits of state institutions).”
Yet, as Lebowitz contends, significant obstacles to socialist democracy internal to the Bolivarian project remain: “The economic revolution, in short, has begun in Venezuela but the political revolution (which began dramatically with the new constitution but requires the transformation of the state into one in which power comes from below) and the cultural revolution (which calls for a serious assault on the continuing patterns of corruption and clientalism) lag well behind.” While the poor majority, especially women, have been the primary beneficiaries of redistributive policies, “for some Chavists who want Chávez without socialism, the process has gone far enough. To the extent, then, that there is resistance to decision-making from below (whether in workplaces or communities), the self- development of people will advance only through struggle.”
With this in mind, it’s useful to point out three areas in which struggle from below is seeking to alter the balance of forces.
First, in early 2006 Chávez enacted a “communal council law.” The new councils are structured on 200 to 400 families in urban areas and 20-50 in rural areas and coordinate the activities of local missions, urban land and cultural committees. Lebowitz suggests these councils “provide a basis not only for the transformation of people in the course of changing circumstances but also for productive activity which really is based upon communal needs and communal purposes… it creates the space for the self-development of revolutionary subjects.”
A second and fundamental development was the 2003 formation of the National Union of Venezuelan Workers (UNT) replacing the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers, long a conservative force aligned with the far Right. The UNT is a pluralistic confederation, with a sizable minority uncritically supportive of the Chávez government, and a majority who stress the importance of autonomy from the government for the workers’ movement and the need to battle from below for the deepening of the Bolivarian Revolution.
Internal battles within the UNT surfaced in the federation’s first congress, which aimed to establish concrete democratic structures to facilitate active control from below. According to a report in International Socialism, national coordinator Marcela Maspero argued against holding union elections in order to focus on the Chávez presidential election in December. “When it became clear that the majority of the delegates were strongly in favour of elections, her tendency walked out with three others, taking about a third of the 3,000 delegates.” However, the majority position, the report continues, “insisted that the campaign to get 10 million votes for Chávez was very important in isolating the pro-imperialist opposition and the big capitalist interests that back it, but that should not prevent the establishment of the UNT as an authentic, democratically controlled expression of the feelings and interests of Venezuela’s millions of private and public sector workers. After all, Venezuela remains a capitalist country, where the same capitalists who tried to overthrow Chávez continue to control major means of production, and multinationals continue to work with the state to exploit its oil and mineral reserves.”
A third development was the formation of the Party of Revolution and Socialism (PRS). During the lead up to the formation of the party in 2005, a key protagonist in the effort, Stalin Pérez Borges, told the French newspaper Rouge: “The population has acquired – this is a characteristic of the process – a certain amount of power. It is no longer possible for either leaders, ministers or bosses to impose anything on them. . . Some members of the government think that co-management [conceived as workers’ control] is a risk, because enterprises that are strategically important, for example PDVSA (the nationalized oil company), must remain under the control of the country’s leaders. In reality, they are afraid of participation by ordinary people. We are working a lot on these experiences of workers’ control. Giving power to ordinary people, that can be the leap forward that is needed for the pursuit of the revolutionary process.”
Both the UNT and the PRS will participate in the re-election of Chávez this December, Pérez Borges explained to the Spanish journal Viento Sur, but they will undertake parallel and simultaneous efforts to mobilize autonomously to deepen the revolutionary process, deepen and extend workers’ control over various enterprises and fight against conservative forces within chavismo. A more profound contradiction is forming, he suggests, as popular sectors in Venezuela renew their struggles from below and demand solutions to fundamental economic and social problems that persist, while bureaucratic sectors of government extend control of important positions within the administration. The year 2007, assuming Chávez’s re-election, will be an important measure of the advance or retreat of the Bolivarian Revolution.
RETREAT AND CONTRADICTION IN BOLIVIA
In Bolivia, between 2000 and 2005, Left-indigenous forces mounted a fierce, rural and urban attack against the neoliberal capitalist model and indigenous oppression. Levels of self-organization of the popular classes and oppressed indigenous nations were unparalleled in the Western hemisphere. The slum of El Alto, with its “relocated” indigenous miners and recent Aymara migrants from the rural Andean altiplano (high plateau), has been described as the most revolutionary slum in all of Latin America. Yet, the revolutionary wave of mobilizations was successfully demobilized and channelled into the electoral victory of MAS, led by Evo Morales, despite the fact that MAS played only a marginal, and often destructive role in the popular movements, and indeed worked in a coalition with the neoliberal government of Carlos Mesa during 2004 and parts of 2005.
Predictably, the first eight months of the MAS government saw the continuation of neoliberal economic policy in the mining sector as well as in basic macroeconomic financial policies, and extremely limited reforms in the areas of agriculture and natural gas and oil. The revolutionary Constituent Assembly demanded by social movements has turned out to closely resemble a regular parliamentary system.
Nonetheless, August and September illustrated that the far Right, located principally in the resource-rich departments of Santa Cruz and Tarija, and the Amazonian departments of Pando and Beni, are unwilling to accept even the most moderate of reforms. Fairly reliable information suggests coup plotting by the Right is well advanced, and a right-wing military overthrow of Morales may be attempted before this article goes to press.
Recently 16 or 17 miners were killed in the western community of Huanuni when cooperativistas, or petit-bourgeois independent-cooperative miners who have an interest in privatizing the entire mining industry in alliance with transnational mining corporations, attacked state-employed miners, historically the vanguard of the revolutionary Left in Bolivia. Exchanges of gunfire and dynamite left a trail of carnage, as calls from the state-employed miners and the Bolivian Workers Central for the government to send in the military to protect the miners went unanswered.
The most alarming development is to be found in a report by Heinz Dieterich, a well-known German-Mexican political analyst and advisor to the Chávez regime. Dieterich writes that a few weeks ago officials in the Bolivian police approached generals in the armed forces about the possibility of a jointly orchestrated coup d’état. (The conspiracy was apparently leaked to Morales.)
Both counter-revolutionary repression and revolutionary upsurge from below are possibilities at the moment. Ideally, the far Left and indigenous organizations would seek expanded forms of grassroots power, and prepare grounds for a general strike. Such configurations of popular power demanding arms from the MAS government to protect it from onslaught from the Right, as well as efforts to dissuade important sectors of the military and police from taking part in any such coup attempt, could circumvent counterrevolutionary advance, and, at the same time, force the Bolivian path in an increasingly revolutionary direction.
Unfortunately, such forms of popular power are not as visible as they once were, and Left currents within MAS are not explicitly organized with coherent political programs, but rather comprise loose coalitions orbiting around various individuals in the party. Nevertheless, the levels of self-organization of the exploited and oppressed has been extraordinary in recent years, and even vice-president Álvaro García Linera early this month signalled the possibility of having to call on the masses for armed defence against the Right. Even if, as some are predicting, a coup is attempted soon and organized sectors from below are not yet armed, it could still be defeated by the same means the April 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela was defeated: by spontaneous unarmed uprisings in the urban slums – in Bolivia the countryside would also be key – and the defection from the would- be coupist faction in the armed forces by factions loyal to the government (or those simply loyal to the poor indigenous majority of the population).
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Jeffery R. Webber is an editor of New Socialist and a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Toronto. He thanks Tieneke Dykstra and Sue Ferguson for their incisive comments on an earlier draft.
