The 28 July presidential election in Venezuela provided US imperialism with a renewed opportunity to ratchet up its war against the Bolivarian Revolution. In the run-up to the poll it offered unstinting support to the far-right opposition led by Maria Corina Machado. While the vote was won by the leader of the United Socialist Party (PSUV), President Nicolas Maduro, a massive cyberattack took out the electric grid, disabling the electoral commission’s operations. The imperialist-backed opposition used the opportunity to declare a ‘landslide’ victory for Machado’s proxy candidate, Eduardo Gonzalez. In support of its spurious claim, the far-right instigated violent protests on the streets, which the bourgeois press were quick to depict as ‘popular’ mobilisations against Maduro. In the end these petered out, and Gonzalez fled to Spain.
In August FRFI spoke to Hernan Vargas, former vice-minister for economics in the Venezuelan Ministry of Communes, member of the political coordination of ALBA Moviementos, the continental platform of social movements, and long-time militant of the urban Pobladores movement. With the working class of Venezuela having once again mobilised in defence of the Boliviaran Revolution, Hernan Vargas discusses the class struggle in Venezuela and the central role of the communal movement.
FRFI: How is the communal movement contributing to defeating the coup plot and destabilisation following the election?
1Hernan Vargas: Following the election, Gonzalez publicly called on his followers not to recognise the electoral results, to call fraud and to be on the streets. Armed far right followers have persecuted Chavista1 militants. Communal leaders across the country have received threats. 25 people have been murdered, including two women community leaders. So the communes and grassroots have organised together to defend our own militants and protect our communities.
The international disinformation media has made the mobilisation of Chavista forces invisible. Instead, they promote the idea that we have a lot of protests from the far right, from those who voted for Gonzalez. In reality we’ve seen only two or three opposition mobilisations.
Meanwhile, almost every day Chavistas have been mobilised in all the main cities and towns of our country. This is part of the Bolivarian Revolution’s tradition; if we want to maintain peace, we need to mobilise to defend it. If they call for violence, we take to the streets, with peace, in our masses, to show we are a reality they can’t deny. Yet the media has people in Britain and other countries absolutely convinced that there is nobody supporting Chavismo. Happily, our future is not decided by public opinion manufactured by Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg.
In August there was a national consultation for communal projects. Can you say more about it?
The 1999 Bolivarian Constitution established our model of democracy as participative and protagonistic; each constitutional right is accompanied by popular organisation. For example, the constitution upholds the right to housing and land. In 2004 an act was passed to regularise urban land in popular sectors, necessitating the organisation of an Urban Land Committee to establish the history and chain of property of the land, to regulate each family’s tenancy through communal oversight. Similarly, the constitutional right of access to water was supported by technical water community committees developing projects to ensure access to water and so on. In 2006, President Chavez proposed joining these different committees into the communal council, a building block for the establishment of a different system. At the next level, communal councils come together and form a popular commune, to establish and manage community projects. We have 440,000 communal councils in Venezuela, and around 70% of these have combined, resulting in 4,100 popular communes across the country. They can then access part of the national budget for projects executed by people’s power. This is a communal way towards building a new socialist system. This process has been interrupted by the blockade, which has diminished our national budget, starving communities of resources. But at the same time, this popular power has allowed us to protect ourselves from the worst of the sanctions. Earlier this year, President Nicolas Maduro announced a stabilisation in the economy; now he is prioritising the distribution of this income to the communes.
This new communal consultation process is developing the mechanism where we can use the national budget to make resources available for the communes’ priorities. For example, a commune made up of ten communal councils holds an assembly proposing seven projects, like fixing the road, or the school. On the day of the consultation, everyone aged over 15 gets to vote for the project they think the most important. The first consultation was on 21 April, and the second on 25 August. Many of the projects chosen in April have already been executed. Maduro states this new mechanism is part of building a system of popular government, with communes at the centre, and is the antidote to both corruption and bureaucracy, because the communes manage the resources directly and have to render account, not only to the state, but to the people. They have to account to the community for how the funds were spent. In this way the commune is a system of self-governance and part of building socialism, driven by the community.
In 2012, the peak of economic growth, we had no sanctions, a good national income, political stability. Now, 12 years later, we have gone through a really difficult economic situation.22 We can’t go back to the stability of 2012, no, we need to build socialism as an answer to the crisis. This is not just a national crisis in Venezuela, it is a capitalist crisis, with each day more war. The genocide in Gaza is part of this system, the capitalists live from war, they live from making the weapons used in those wars. The main manufacturers in the global north live from war, from dispossession, from inequality, from racism, from forced migration. Capitalism is a system centred in death, against life. We have a world that is in crisis, where the United States’ most important goal is to preserve its control over the whole globe. And that means war against everyone who puts that hegemony at risk.
And that’s why they target Venezuela. It’s not about democracy or human rights. These are just scripts for Hollywood movies. The reality is they need our oil, they need Venezuela to stop promoting integration in the continent, they need to defeat the Bolivarian Revolution, they don’t want people talking about socialism as an alternative. The commune gives us the possibility of facing this imperialist crisis of hegemony. It gives us the possibility of building a new model not dependent on oil income, the possibility of developing new productive relations, as well as defending our sovereignty. In the next decades we will have even more crises – natural crisis, a racist crisis, a crisis of war and violence. And we need to build an alternative: the future of humanity depends on it.
Within the Bolivarian revolution there are political positions expressing different class interests. For example Wilmar Castro Soteldo, when Minister for Agriculture, advocated for the ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’ at the same time as rural communes and campesino collectives were facing conflicts with landowners and agribusiness. Meanwhile, Angel Prado, a long-standing organiser from the ‘El Maizal’ rural commune was recently appointed Minister of Communes. How can we understand the class struggle within the revolutionary movement?
We didn’t say in the Constitution in 1999 we would abolish latifundia [large landowners] or that overnight we could abolish class struggle. No, we have had the class struggle during the last 25 years. It’s a struggle for land, against racism, against patriarchy. It’s important to draw comparisons with different historical moments. I find the situation facing the Republic of China in the first half of the 20th century has many parallels. China was facing invasion from Japan, with the complicity of the imperialist powers. But at the same time, there was the national war, against the Kuomintang nationalists. In analysing the class struggle, Chairman Mao said that on the one hand you have the foreign imperialists and the Chinese comprador bourgeoisie, absolutely aligned with imperialist interests. But you also have a national bourgeoisie whose interests and development are actually held back by the actions of the imperialists. This opposition to the imperialists is what they have in common with the revolution. Yet, this national bourgeoisie will at some point act against the interests of the people. The national bourgeois and the working class and poor can act together against imperialism, but their interests are counterposed.
During recent years in Venezuela, we have needed some level of national unity. Maduro posed five issues where it is possible to find a consensus even with centre-right political parties and the private sector. All want to end the blockade, all need national economic recuperation, an improved social situation, to defend our sovereignty in the dispute with Guyana, and we all need peace, not guarimbas [street violence]. This consensus recognises that Machado is of the extreme pro-imperialist right. She’s dangerous, violent, she wants the blockade tightened. This consensus recognises the need to block her plans. But if we consider the economic model we want to build, whether it should be based on social property or private property, we will clearly have differences.
Venezuela has an oil rentier capitalism. We have never experienced a situation where we don’t have capitalism, where we don’t have colonialism, where we are not attacked by imperialism. In the different left sectors there is this idea that revolution is about the disappearance of contradictions, actually it’s the opposite. The revolution is the possibility of contradictions. We have this confrontation between those who think that by constructing a new national model that is not dependent on oil, we will create a productive capitalism in Venezuela. And on the other hand, those who propose the communes as a way of constructing different relations of production in order to build a socialist system. We are facing international aggression and at the same time going through a class struggle that will determine which system we will build. Hugo Chavez always talked about stages. We have had different stages in the Bolivarian Revolution, from the struggle against neoliberalism, to the development of the new constitution in 1999, then the era of constructing the first communal councils and communes beginning in 2006, then later the blockade from 2015, and now we are starting a new era. We are still under blockade, but we are stabilising and facing a new era where the international context is of different confrontations, where we need a clear strategy of national unity, and unity with common interests in the global south, but also a way of dealing with our inner contradictions.
So Castro Soteldo has recently been removed from government. He was necessary in a different period but not in this new era. The contradiction doesn’t disappear when you change one minister for another. However it indicates the direction we are fighting towards. Angel Prado is a local communal leader who some years ago was proposed to stand as mayor in grassroots primary elections within the PSUV in his local area. There was a disagreement within the PSUV, and despite winning the internal elections he was blocked. But four years later, the same PSUV told him to stand again, and he made it. Prado is a grassroots leader who has battled through the inner contradictions of the PSUV yet remained within the Bolivarian Revolution. He worked out a way to face the inner contradictions in favour of building socialism. As we try to build a new alternative from our inner contradictions, we remember the words of Chavez: ‘the commune – or nothing; independence – or nothing’. There is no alternative.
This is an abridged version of the interview with Herman Vargas. A full version will be available on frfi.org.uk
- Chavista and Chavismo relate to supporters of the revolutionary ideas of the late president, Hugo Chavez ↩︎
- See ‘Venezuela: resurgent economy defies imperialist sanctions’, FRFI 290, October/November 2022 ↩︎
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 302 October/November 2024
