‘President Chavez has said…that capitalism is slavery and that the Bolivarian Revolution must go towards socialism. This conclusion is not by chance. It is the product of many discussions, many experiences and an in-depth analysis of the situation. The President used to consider the option of the so-called “Third Way” – a way between capitalism and socialism. We examined that and, as the President said, we have realised that for the Bolivarian revolution there is no third way possible, we must choose the way of socialism. This does not mean we are going to import other models from outside. Socialism is a system in which man is above capital. That is clear. But we must adapt the ideas of socialism to the concrete conditions.’
Adan Chavez, Venezuelan Ambassador to Cuba, April 2005.
Venezuela is a society with sharp social contradictions, where corruption and clientalism, succoured by imperialism, have been endemic for generations. There are a relatively small number of organised workers. Some of these are militant and class conscious workers who led the opposition against the attempted privatisation of the oil industry from December 2002 to February 2003. Efforts to construct militant trade unions in the past were suffocated in the vice of corrupted leaderships and employer intimidation. Today a new National Union of Workers (UNT) is striving to create and implement a revolutionary programme of economic management, based on workers self-management.
A key challenge is to prevent the development of an aristocracy of labour, the better paid, skilled and more securely employed sections of workers, creating a militant economism which displaces a conscious attitude of solidarity among all workers. Thus the education system will now emphasise ‘coexisting, knowing and doing’. This in turn needs a determined anti-imperialist campaign to break the promotion of anti-socialist self-interest amongst the privileged employees of large international corporations, for instance in oil, food, motor manufacturing. However since over half of the Venezuelan working class scrape a living through self-employment, or ‘informal’ occupation, solidarity can only fully be achieved in the day-to-day political campaigns to meet the pressing needs of the masses.
In this, education is vital. Presently 26 Bolivarian high schools exist in Venezuela. By September there will be 307, and by 2007 all high schools will be Bolivarian, ie community schools, whose purpose is to transform young people from individualistic, competitive consumers into socially aware, co-operative, and creative humans…the exact opposite of Tony Blair’s new City Academies! In Venezuela the entire educational system is being transformed, from pre-school up to university level.
Chavez has recently called upon Venezuelan youth to reject ‘imperialistic anti-values’. Given the very strong hold that Catholicism has on the poor in Venezuela, strengthened by years of economic despair and misery, Chavez has called for the rescue of ‘authentic Christian values, lost by the capitalist model’. The workers have to defeat traditional clientalism and corruption among those drawn to government by ensuring that they themselves run matters honestly, democratically and transparently.
Exposing abuses
In May, to demonstrate the central threat to Venezuela, the Minister of Energy and Mines, Rafael Ramirrez presented a clear account to Congress of the abuses committed by transnational corporations in the country’s oil sector – ‘a true assault was carried out against Venezuelan petroleum’. He showed that 90% of transnationals had cheated the country, avoiding $3bn taxes and $1bn royalties, in a strategy that started immediately after the nationalisation of oil in 1976. ExxonMobil still refuses to accept the October 2004 contracts which set up joint ventures and set royalty payments at normal international levels. Sincor – the joint venture with France’s Total – constantly violates its contract by exploiting oil beyond its allocated blocks. Meanwhile Citgo Corp, a Venezuelan State Oil (PDVSA) subsidiary with 14,000 petrol stations and five refineries in the US, has overpaid taxes to Washington! The previous privateering PDVSA management bought the refineries so that 48% of assets lay outside of Venezuela’s jurisdiction, removing their control and profits from government.
Leadership
Key to the development of a revolutionary national consciousness is the leadership based around Chavez, who are struggling against the old society, the old state, the old order. The leadership is organised through the governing Movement for the Fifth Republic. Yet still the political parties themselves either will not, or have not yet learned to work consistently and closely with the masses, so that Chavez constantly appeals directly to them, for example in the successful referendum campaign in 2004. When it was clear that the opposition had the requisite number of signatures to trigger the referendum, the instinctive reaction of many pro-Chavez party members was to abandon the Constitution and reject the referendum. Chavez himself turned to the people and called upon them to organise in small groups to defeat the opposition in the referendum. The initiative didn’t come from the parties. The response was a resounding victory, and the emergence of new local leaders, many of them women. The process has moved on from just opposition to neo-liberalism (suggesting that an imperialist policy, not imperialism itself was the problem), to opposition to capitalism (the destructive nature of capital itself) and now to an alternative Bolivarian socialism developed by the masses and their leaders.
Naturally, in this process there are daily disputes within the Chavist camp, the parties, the unions, the social movements. On the fringes, there are the abstract, immediate demands for the nationalisation of all industry and banks with workers control, the slogan of some Trotskyists in Venezuela, the demands for ‘communism now’, and from the odd eccentric, for the ‘abolition of the state’. These are symptoms of a complete separation from the actual revolutionary struggle for national independence in the epoch of imperialism. None of these particular demands come out of a concrete understanding of the historic task required of Chavez by the Venezuelan masses. Of course there can be no alternative to completely transforming the state structures, which were designed to perpetuate Venezuelan subordination to imperialism, into a ‘self-government of the producers’ and to driving forward the development of a new state form – the question is how to ensure that this really succeeds, and as quickly as possible.
Alvaro Michaels
FRFI 186 August / September 2005
