The revolution is also thoroughly democratic. Pro-Chavez
forces have won 11 straight national elections and
introduced a new constitution guaranteeing popular
participation in government, including the right to overturn
any legislation via a national referendum. The government
has announced an extension of direct democracy, via the
promotion of grassroots communal councils, and is also
discussing workers' councils in workplaces across the
country to enable working people to exercise control over
production.
One of the most crucial lessons of the Bolivarian
revolution, learned from the experience of the class
struggle, is that you cannot build a society based
on social justice within capitalism. The capitalist
system - whereby the ownership of the means of
producing wealth are owned by a small minority who
run the economy for profit - has to be replaced with
socialism, where industry is collectively owned and
democratically run by the workers.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/699/36312
Current GLW:
21 February 2007
Issue #699
VENEZUELA
Venezuela's revolution - giving power to the poor
Stuart Munckton
16 February 2007
"We, and millions of people around the world Š
believe another world is possible, a world free
from war, poverty and hunger. Here in Venezuela
the [government of socialist President Hugo
Chavez] along with the majority of the people in
our country are fighting hard to build this new
world, despite the attempts of the old elite and
the US government to prevent us from succeeding."
This is what 25-year-old university student
Germania Fernandez told Pablo Navarrete,
according to a December 1 article on
Venezuelanalysis.com.
Fernandez was participating in a November 26
demonstration in Caracas of 2.5 million people,
in a city of only 5 million, in support of
Chavez's re-election on December 3 and his call
to deepen the pro-poor revolutionary process his
government is leading. Repeatedly slamming the
"perverse" system of capitalism, Chavez insisted
that December 3 would be a referendum on the
construction of a "new socialism of the 21st
century" - a "democratic" and "humanist"
socialism that did not repeat the errors of the
Soviet Union.
The results were spectacular. Chavez scored 7.3
million votes (63% of the total), the highest
number for a presidential candidate in Venezuelan
history and more than double his votes in the
2000 elections. Chavez has since declared: "All
that was privatised, let it be nationalised." The
nationalisation of the telecommunications firm
CANTV and Electricity of Caracas, both owned by
US interests and amounting to 50% of daily
trading on the Caracas stock exchange, has
already been carried out. Chavez has given five
oil multinationals in the Orinoco Belt until May
1 to give the state-run oil company PDVSA at
least 60% controlling interests in their
ventures, and has promised to nationalise gas.
These radical moves build on the gains already
made by the Bolivarian revolution, as the process
led by Chavez, who was first elected in 1998, is
known. Named after Simon Bolivar, who liberated
much of South America from Spanish colonialism,
the revolution has sought to challenge corporate
interests and redistribute the nation's oil
wealth to the poor majority. A November 17
Venezuelanlaysis.com article by Calvin Tucker
points out that according to opposition-aligned
polling company Datanalysis, the income of the
poorest 60% has risen by 45%. Navarrette reports
that a recent census reveals the number of
households living in poverty has dropped from 49%
in 1998 to 33.9% in early 2006.
The revolution is also thoroughly democratic.
Pro-Chavez forces have won 11 straight national
elections and introduced a new constitution
guaranteeing popular participation in government,
including the right to overturn any legislation
via a national referendum. The government has
announced an extension of direct democracy, via
the promotion of grassroots communal councils,
and is also discussing workers' councils in
workplaces across the country to enable working
people to exercise control over production.
'Death of history'?
"This is not supposed to be happening", you can
almost hear them cry out in the corporate
boardrooms. There is an air of disbelief in much
of the corporate-owned media's coverage of
Venezuela. After the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the Eastern bloc, socialism was supposed to
be dead and buried. History was supposed to have
ended, with capitalism triumphant. What kind of
weird, throwback retro act is playing in Caracas?
Yet no-one should be surprised. The "new world
order" has brought the world fresh wars for
corporate profit, worsening poverty and
environmental destruction. In the 1990s, poverty
greatly increased across Latin America at the
same time as some 4000 publicly owned companies
shifted into the hands of multinational
corporations. Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin's
comment that the world was living in an "epoch of
war and revolution" rings true today.
Venezuela stands at the head of a turbulent mass
revolt across Latin America. In recent times,
mass uprisings have deposed pro-US neoliberal
governments, and a number of new governments have
been elected pledging to take a new path.
However it is in Venezuela that this new wave of
mass struggle has gone the furthest. As the first
revolution of the 21st century, which is
struggling to construct socialism, it provides
many lessons about how to change the world.
Corporate interests can be challenged
Neoliberal economic policies were accompanied in
the 1990s by the mantra that "there is no
alternative". Corporations are too powerful to
challenge, we were told. The argument goes that
if you don't accept the demands of the
corporations, and if you place too many
restrictions on their right to make a profit,
then they will simply move to another country
with less restrictions, and this will cause an
economic crisis.
The most important lesson from Venezuela is that
another way is possible. The Chavez government
has torn up the neoliberal rule book. Halting
privatisations that were planned before Chavez
was elected, government social spending has
increased by nearly ten times since 1998. A
series of pro-worker laws have been passed. The
government has cracked down heavily on tax
evasion, closing down a number of multinational
corporations for up to 48 hours for tax
violations, including McDonald's, Coca-Cola, IBM,
Shell, Microsoft and Bechtel. As a result, in
2005 the government increased its tax revenue by
50%, and this directly funded an increase in the
minimum wage.
The neoliberal argument insists that you should
not increase the minimum wage, because this will
increase unemployment. In Venezuela, the minimum
wage has been repeatedly increased, and
unemployment is now at the lowest level since
Chavez was elected.
In an article entitled "Chavez Drives a Hard
Bargain, But Big Oil's Options are Limited", the
October 19 San Francisco Chronicle reported that
Venezuela was forcing oil multinationals to
"swallow some bitter pills". As well as a number
of tax and royalty increases, last year 26
foreign oil companies were forced to shift their
investments into joint ventures with PDVSA that
gave the latter the majority share, altogether
decreasing the holdings of the corporations by
around two thirds. Two companies refused and were
expelled.
The result is that far from being in crisis,
Venezuela's economy has grown by an average of
12% in the last three years and poverty is
decreasing. Critics of Chavez have claimed that
this is simply because oil prices are high, but
economic growth is significantly higher in
Venezuela than in other oil producing countries,
and it is only in Venezuela that there is a
serious attempt to both redistribute the oil
wealth to the poor and use it develop other areas
of the economy in order to overcome dependency on
oil revenue.
Neither are corporations fleeing the country.
Venezuela has called their bluff. The concept of
corporations as footloose and capable of going
wherever they please to get a better profit is a
myth used by pro-corporate politicians to justify
giving the ultra-rich what they want. There is
only a limited amount of resources and markets in
the world, and there is already heavy competition
among corporations for control over this finite
space. Venezuela shows that for all their huff
and puff, much of the time corporations will
accept the conditions a government imposes on
them because they would prefer to make some
profit than none at all.
Popular power can win
The US government - representing the interests of
US corporations - and the Venezuelan capitalist
class have not taken this lying down. They
launched a campaign to overthrow the government
and reverse the gains of the revolution. In April
2002, the pro-capitalist Venezuelan opposition
launched a military coup that overthrew Chavez
and installed one of Venezuela's richest men, the
head of the chamber of commerce, as president.
Chavez was kidnapped and his murder planned. The
US government, which knew of the coup plans in
advance, openly welcomed Chavez's overthrow.
However a popular uprising of the poor and loyal
soldiers overthrew the coup junta in two days and
restored Chavez's presidency.
The opposition tried again in December 2002, when
big business organised a bosses' lockout that
closed companies across Venezuela to sabotage the
economy and force Chavez to resign. The
pro-capitalist management of the nominally
state-run PDVSA shut the company gates and
sabotaged production. However, the poor mobilised
again, and blue-collar oil workers in alliance
with the armed forces (purged of the coup
plotters) restarted PDVSA and broke the lockout.
The opposition has continued trying to overthrow
Chavez and stop the revolution by any means
possible. However despite all its wealth and the
support and millions of dollars in funding it
receives from the US government, its attempts
have been defeated by the people. The
presidential election was the latest crushing
defeat suffered by the Venezuelan elite.
Socialism, not capitalism
One of the most crucial lessons of the Bolivarian
revolution, learned from the experience of the
class struggle, is that you cannot build a
society based on social justice within
capitalism. The capitalist system - whereby the
ownership of the means of producing wealth are
owned by a small minority who run the economy for
profit - has to be replaced with socialism, where
industry is collectively owned and democratically
run by the workers.
The revolutionary movement did not start out with
socialism as its goal, and many believed this was
not viable in the wake of the collapse of the
Stalinist system in the Soviet Union that claimed
to be "socialist". Chavez initially called for a
"third way" between socialism and capitalism. The
aim of the revolution was to transform Venezuela,
an underdeveloped nation, along pro-people lines.
The original economic plans to carry this out
involved a combination of the privately owned
capitalist sector, the state sector and a sector
known as the "social economy" - based on
cooperatives and small business.
It was the actions of the capitalist class that
convinced both Chavez and the majority of
Venezuelans that achieving this project required
breaking with capitalism. In the face of moderate
pro-poor reforms that affected its interests, the
capitalist class attempted to overthrow the
government. It used its position to sabotage the
economy to protect its privileges. The workers
have responded by taking over companies left idle
by their bosses and running them for the benefit
of society, while it is the cooperatives
established by the poor that have proven willing
to develop much-needed sectors of the economy
like agriculture.
The gains of the revolution have been made where
the government has been able to use industries
under its control, especially the oil industry,
in an increasingly planned way in conjunction
with the cooperatives to solve people's needs and
develop the economy.
This led Chavez in 2005 to come out in favour of
socialism. He argued that the struggle for a
"capitalism with a human face", was just trying
to "put a mask on the monster". Chavez called for
a debate across Venezuelan society on the goal of
socialism. On December 3, the Venezuelan people
gave their answer, opening the way for further
moves towards a democratically planned economy.
Power to the poor
Another key aspect of changing the world is the
need to struggle for power. Neither spontaneous
revolts, nor movements that purely pressure those
already in power for concessions, are enough to
bring about significant change.
In Venezuela, the movement Chavez led was able to
win government through elections, and then begin
to pass reforms that benefited the poor. However,
it quickly became clear that simply winning an
election is not the same thing as winning power.
Power is exercised under capitalism both through
the economic power in the hands of the
corporations, but also through the structures of
the state, including the unelected bureaucracy
that controls state administration, and
instruments of repression - such as the armed
forces, the police and the courts. It is not
enough to be able to pass laws, you need to have
the power to implement the changes, and the
institutions the Chavez government inherited have
been dominated by forces hostile to the
revolution that have sabotaged it at every turn.
In response, Chavez has turned to the people,
insisting that "to eradicate poverty, you must
give power to the poor". While the media is
obsessed with the individual personality of
Chavez, it is ordinary people across Venezuela,
led by Chavez, who are making the revolution. The
attempts of the capitalist class to overthrow the
government have not been defeated through
parliament, but through mass action on the
streets.
The defeat of the coup and bosses' lockout
through "people's power" changed the relationship
of forces in Venezuela to enable more radical
measures. After the failed coup, the government
was able to purge the military of hundreds of
right-wing officers, and increasingly use the
armed forces as a weapon to defend, rather than
repress, the people. After oil workers took over
the oil industry during the bosses' lockout, the
government was able to take full control of the
industry and use the oil income to begin
seriously redistributing wealth.
Just as important is that the institutions the
Chavez government has inherited are dominated by
a counter-revolutionary corrupt bureaucracy. To
overcome this, the government has sought to
encourage the organisation of working people into
grassroots institutions of direct democracy. The
social missions have been organised outside of
the control of the existing institutions, and
have run parallel to them under community control.
A number of experiments in creating popular power
have led to the promotion of the communal
councils as the building blocks of a "new
revolutionary state", in Chavez's words. These
are not like the sort of local councils that
exist in Australia. Based on no more than 400
families, the communal councils operate according
to direct democracy. A general assembly of the
community is the highest decision-making body and
it directly controls the funds and planning for
the social missions in that area. In this way,
the corrupt bureaucracy is bypassed. The
government is pushing for a significant expansion
in the number and the power of these councils.
This struggle is still playing out, and there is
a strong bureaucracy not just within much of the
state, but that has also infiltrated the
pro-Chavez political camp. There are many cases
where the hold of the bureaucracy means that
revolutionary measures exist only on paper, and
the degree by which changes have occurred is
often tied to the degree by which power is able
to be exercised directly by working people
themselves. Chavez has called for moves to
further strengthen the institutions of popular
power, such as the communal councils, in order to
"dismantle the bourgeois state".
For re-raising the banner of revolution in the
21st century, by showing it is possible to
struggle and to win, and by providing invaluable
lessons on how such a struggle can advance, all
those who believe in a better world owe the
Bolivarian revolution an enormous debt.
From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #699 21 February 2007.
rticles posted are as they were before
proofreading, and prior to any final changes in
the printed version.
Authorised by K. Miller, 23 Abercrombie St, Chippendale, NSW.
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