In May 2007, International Viewpoint published an article by Stuart Piper, The Challenge of Socialism in the 21st Century: Some Initial Lessons from Venezuela
Here we reproduce a reply to Piper by two members of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire in France, published in August.
A more recent piece by Piper on a meeting in Venezuela of the revolutionary left is online here
Does Chávez “embody the socialist revolution”? An answer to Comrade Piper
by Virginia de la Siega and Jean-Philippe Divès [1]
In the June-July 2007 issue of Inprecor (Nº528-529), there is an article on Venezuela written by Stuart Piper, the Latin American correspondent of International Viewpoint, the English speaking electronic magazine of the Fourth International. This article had already been published in the May issue of International Viewpoint under the same title “The Challenge of Socialism in the 21st Century.” The description of the revolutionary process in Venezuela, and the political conclusions that he draws are so wide of the mark that we feel obliged to answer them.
Let’s begin by what is said about Chávez’s role in the process. Even if it possible to accept the general concept that “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”, it is quite a different thing to say, as it is said in the article, that “paradoxically, both aspects are crystallised in the personality of Chavez himself”. There is nothing in the present situation in Venezuela to justify such enthusiasm.
Unless, of course, one thinks that Chávez’s attacks against Marxism on the grounds that it is a “superseded dogmatic theory which does not take into account the present reality”, and his denouncing the “thesis that the working class is the engine of socialism and the revolution” as “obsolete”[2] is a contribution to the socialist revolution. Or is Chávez’s contribution to socialism to be surmised from his attacks against the UNT and its independence from the State?[3] Comrade Piper seems to know nothing or next to nothing about the UNT (Unión Nacional de Trabajadores—National Union of Workers), which he barely mentions in relation to a completely different matter, or the CCURA, which he plainly ignores. Yet, with its million and a half workers organised on a class basis, and the CCURA as its majority, autonomous, revolutionary, unitary, class-conscious current, the UNT is the main achievement of the revolutionary process from the point of view of workers’ organization.
Socialism or Bonapartism?
At the moment, political life in Venezuela is being polarised by the ongoing debate about the project to reform the Constitution put forward by Chávez. As soon as the National Assembly has adopted it—which it will undoubtedly do—, this project will be submitted to a referendum. What can we say about the proposal to elect the president every seven years by universal suffrage and without time limit? Or about the Constitution’s protection of the private property of the means of production? Or about the communal councils becoming institutionalised and part of the State? Or about the methodology proposed to debate and adopt the reform?
But Chávez’s project has other interesting points. It proposes, for example, the reduction of the working day from 8 to 6 hours, and the 6-day week (i.e., a 36-hour week). Even though everybody knows that this type of law is often not respected by the capitalists, and sometimes not even in the public sector, this will be an enormous social achievement. Another measure allows the President of the Republic to put under his direct administration those economic areas considered of national interest. These are some of the reasons why some sectors of the bourgeoisie who will find their economic freedom restricted, oppose the reform and have already started to protest. Their reaction is understandable, but, although controversial, these measures are still a far cry from the right of workers to take control of enterprises and of the economy.
A major characteristic of the constitutional reform, which also runs through the whole of Chávez’s actions, is his extreme “bonapartism”. To the point that comrade Piper is forced to explain that, although “Chavez himself seems to recognise” that the movement must “develop a real collective leadership and free itself from the overarching dominance of one revolutionary ‘caudillo’, however honest and able,” he does not seem to know how to do it.
From the very beginning, Chávez’s project was to make Venezuela independent from American imperialism. To do that—and taking advantage of the enormous wealth generated by the country’s oil reserves—, he searched the support of the mass movement by making it concessions at the same time that he tried to control it. What is sometimes forgotten is the fact that the Venezuelan mass movement had started mobilising before Chávez came onto the stage. The revolutionary process open in Venezuela started on February 27, 1989, with the semi-spontaneous popular uprising known as Caracazo. This rebellion was brought to an end with a bloodbath (over 2000 dead) ordered by the “social democratic” government then in power. Chávez would enter the limelight three years after the Caracazo, with a failed attempt at a coup d’état.
The combination of the upsurge of the masses and the frontal opposition of practically the whole of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie forced the government to adopt some partially anti-capitalist measures. So far, these measures have been quite limited, and they have not prevented the government from taking a position in favour of the bosses and against the workers every time that it was judged necessary. Such was the case of Sanitarios Maracay, in the Aragua State, whose owner had abandoned it. With the support of the UNT-CCURA, its workers brought the factory into operation and asked for its nationalisation under workers’ control. However, in a combined manoeuvre of the authorities, the regime’s trade union bureaucracy—the FSBT (Fuerza Sindical Bolivariana de los Trabajadores-Workers’ Bolivarian Trade Union Force)—and the owner of the factory, the government ordered the restitution of the factory, and the workers have been expelled.[4]
Chávez controls the mass movement by making concessions to it, and by keeping a position of arbiter between the opposing interests of opposing social sectors. These sectors are not only the workers and the bourgeoisie, but a there is a third party, which Marea Clasista y Socialista calls: “probably the most serious threat to the Bolivarian revolution at this stage”[5]: the Bolivarian bureaucracy, whose growing social and political influence is developing at high speed within the framework and under the protection of the state structure.
A “laboratory of socialist democracy”?
“Venezuela”, comrade Piper writes, “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.”
And then, he lets his imagination wonder on the more or less 18,000 communal councils which have been recently created by law to promote “citizens participation.” To do this, he looks for the support of Roland Denis [6], who says that “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.” And considers that the objective fixed by Chávez in his speech of January 8: “We have to move towards the creation of a communal state. And the old bourgeois state,(…), 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” is “a far-reaching vision.”
We think that there is no way in which a state apparatus, whether bourgeois or democratic, can become, progressively and pacifically, “socialist” or “communal”, and much less carry out a socialist revolution (in the place of the workers). This understanding, which is part of the ABC of the revolutionary Marxist conception of the State, has always been one of the theoretical achievements of the Fourth International. Comrade Piper’s theoretical conception is not new. It was the justification used by the tendency Democracia Socialista—section of the Fourth International—in the Brazilian PT, to substitute the “extension of participative democracy” within the structures of the bourgeois State for the revolutionary strategy of breaking away from it. We now know how this experience ended. But this does not prevent comrade Piper from considering it a success… only with some reservations in relation to the Venezuelan communal councils: “unlike the PB in Porto Alegre, the Communal Councils do not have sovereign decision making power over 100% of local budgets (another of the cardinal principles of the Port Alegre experience, although one that was only partially exercised).” “Partially” is just a way of saying: it is a well-known fact that the councils in Porto Alegre had no power of decision whatsoever on their running costs or on the amount of money they received, and that they were only allowed to give advice on how to spend between 10 and 20% (maximum) of the budget.[7]
Be what it may, all this just confirms once again what we have said several times8: it is absolutely positive that the majority of the LCR and the Fourth International have rejected the political evolution of the DS in Brazil, and that they now support the PSOL, but this is not enough to solve all the problems. To do that, it will be necessary to accept that a balance-sheet on these questions is necessary.
Revolutionary Marxists and the PSUV
The reference to DS is so important for comrade Piper that he repeats it when he praises the decision made by Marea Socialista y Clasista to enter the PSUV. According to him, “This is very similar to the fight waged by comrades of the Brazilian section of the FI 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.”
The appreciation of the policy carried out by the Venezuelan comrades is comrade Piper’s very own. However, we will take up the point of this mistaken identification of the PSUV with the Brazilian PT of the eighties. Even though the leadership of the PT was controlled, from the very beginning, by a reformist bureaucratic current—Lula’s—, the PT was undoubtedly a class party, born out of the enormous democratic and working class struggles against the bourgeoisie and the military dictatorship which started at the end of the seventies. The PSUV, on the contrary, was born by the decision and under the personal impulse of the Venezuelan chief of state.
At first, the PT was really a party “without bosses,” and it was proud to be so. This is not the case of the PSUV. The members of Marea Clasista y Socialista will enter precisely to wage this battle: making the need of a party “without bosses” and—to rectify comrade Piper’s omission—“without bureaucrats and corrupt members.” Their documents show that they are absolutely conscious of the difficulties presented by this task. As they say, the perspective of a confrontation between the left and the right, between the aspirations of the rank and file and the interests of the bureaucratic sectors is imminent, even before the party has been officially founded.
The fact that a revolutionary Marxist current enters the PSUV is not a guarantee that the bureaucracy and its capitalist allies will not take it over. Nor does this mean that this current will be able to transform it into a political instrument for the socialist revolution, since this task is clearly beyond its possibilities. However, this is a battle that has to be waged. With its five and a half million members, the PSUV is a mass phenomenon of considerable importance, and it is necessary to have a policy in relation to it. It is on the basis of this organisation that it is possible to begin to convince and group people with the purpose of founding a mass revolutionary party.
The PSUV is a project launched by a leader and chief of a nationalist, anti-imperialist State who, at this stage, has not yet broken away from the bourgeoisie (nor is there yet anything to assure us that he will do so one day). His purpose is to channel the strength of a formidable mass movement in favour of his policy and his projects. The most likely thing is that the PSUV will become a class collaboration party, with a bureaucratic and/or petit bourgeois leadership, and a mass of workers, students and social activists-who represent the most combative and radicalised elements of the revolutionary process-in its rank and file.
The debate inside the PRS (Partido de la Revolución Socialista—Party for the Socialist Revolution)[9] and the CCURA to decide whether to join the PSUV or not, took place on the basis of this political reality. The minority sector, whose best-known leader is Orlando Chirino, decided to put at the forefront the fact that neither the leadership nor the political course of the PSUV can really represent the interests of the working class. The sector around Marea Socialista y Clasista made its decision to join on the basis of the mass dynamics embodied in the PSUV, at least for the moment. It is to be noted that these comrades enter without hiding their ideas, ready for the struggle, with a completely independent policy and with the strength provided by their implantation in the workers’ and trade union movement.
In these conditions, their choice is, it seems to us, the one that best answers the needs of a mass revolutionary political line which wants to avoid the traps of sectarianism and opportunism, either being variants of acting as “witnesses” as opposed to “actors” on the political scene. Such an attitude, unacceptable even in a normal period of the class struggle, becomes even more so in a revolutionary process such as the one in Venezuela.
In spite of their disagreements which, though tactical, still have practical consequences, both sectors of the PRS are doing their best to prevent public attacks and to continue working together inside the CCURA and the UNT. If this work in common continues (and it is necessary that this be so, in defence of the shared perspectives), they will become the example as to how to solve this type of disagreement among revolutionaries.
The real challenges
Comrade Piper ends his article saying that the “three immediate and medium-term challenges facing the revolutionary process in Venezuela. 1) Can the new party become a real, mass revolutionary party (…) 2) Can the exemplary experiences of workers’ co-management with workers control,(…) 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.” This leads him to conclude that “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.”
We have already discussed why the idea that the PSUV can become the party of the Venezuelan socialist revolution is completely utopian, if only because such is not the project of Chávez or of his entourage, and they will never allow it.
In relation to the extension of workers’ control, it is not a problem of good or ill will, but something that will be decided in the class struggle, in the fight of the workers against the bourgeoisie, and in the struggle against the state bureaucracy, which also opposes their demands and interests. Let us add that the idea that workers’ control could extend progressively (and pacifically?) to the whole of the economy without bringing into question, in each enterprise and branch to which it is applied, the problem of the private property of the means of production, revels a gradualist and absolutely illusory conception, which is extraneous to Trotskyism.
But even more worrying is this chimerical plan which takes up again the already tarnished principles of “Porto Alegre’s participative democracy”, through which the author imagines that the communal councils will progressively replace—within the bourgeois state and without any confrontation or breaking away—, all the other institutions until they finally constitute a workers’ state. This is a typically reformist conception which, as such, must definitely be discarded.
The real challenges to which Venezuelan revolutionary Marxists are confronted are others. To begin with, one which comrade Piper does not mention at all: the unconditioned defence of the independence of the working class and the social movement. Right now, this task goes through the defence of the UNT as an autonomous and sovereign workers’ organisation, its consolidation and its institutional recognition through the free and democratic election of its leadership.
The next fundamental task, deeply linked to the former, is winning over the best elements of the workers, students and social movements to the struggle for socialism in order to build a mass revolutionary Marxist current which fights for workers’ power. How to achieve it? By taking active part in all the mass organisations that already exist (trade unions in the UNT, PSUV battalions, communal councils, etc.) and in those that will be created in the course of the social and trade union struggles, and by defending inside them an independent revolutionary policy which, starting from the essential needs and aspirations of the masses, fights against the bureaucracy and the capitalists.
Such are the objectives of the comrades grouped around the journal Marea Socialista y Clasista, and the Fourth International should help them to carry them out.
[1] This article was first published in Avanti! (Nº44) August, 2007
[2] Chávez made these statements in his TV programme “Allo Presidente” on July 22, 2007. These quotations were taken from Stalin Pérez Borge’s public response. See here
[3] On March 24, during the first public meeting to launch the PSUV, Chávez declared, in relation to the UNT and their internal debates, that “trade unions should not be autonomous; we will have to change that”. The CCURA sent a public response about his statements. See here
[4] After this article was published, there was a new and serious police attack against the workers of PDVASA. On September 27, a thousand workers gathered in front of the company’s headquarters in Lecherías, in the State of Anzoátegui to demand the signing of the collective agreement. They were attacked by the police. As a result, three workers were wounded and 26 were sent to jail. The UNT and the CCURA have demanded the investigation of the attack and the punishment of those responsible for it.
[5] See the article by Stalin Pérez Borge, Sergio García and Vilma Vivas, « El cruce de caminos de la revolución bolivariana ».
[6] Roland Denis is an ex-under minister of Chávez, and a leader of “Proyecto Nuestra América – Movimiento 12 de abril”, a political and social current close to the autonomist movement, with links to Negri’s and Holloway’s theses. His movement, which is still relatively independent from the government, has refused to join the PSUV, not because they had political differences, but because they are against parties. Strangely enough, he accepts the need of a government and has no doubts about Chávez’s legitimacy, only that of political parties.
[7] See J-Ph. Dives « Budget participatif : réalités et théorisations d’une expérience réformiste » (Carré Rouge N° 20, January 2002, on Avanti!’s web page under « textes »).
[8] See « DS : fin de partie. Bilan et clarifications indispensables ! », Avanti ! N° 24, May 2005.
[9] The PRS was a project for the regrouping of revolutionaries which, contrary to its trade-union current, the CCURA, did not manage “to fly” and is now stagnant and paralysed.
