Concrete analysis needed on Venezuela
Mike Gonzalez (Red Flag March 3) tells us, “What can save the Bolivarian project ... is for the speculators and bureaucrats to be removed, and for popular power to be built, from the ground up, on the basis of a genuine socialism”.
However, the Venezuelan revolution is isolated. The only friendly socialist state is the small, poor island of Cuba (itself suffering US economic blockade for 50 years). Venezuela inherited an undeveloped capitalist economy. What could possibly be the meaning of Gonzalez’s “genuine socialism”?
It is, in essence, yet another call by foreign leftist for Venezuela to ‘go forward and create socialism now’, ‘hurry and expropriate all capitalists...’ etc. This has been stock-in-trade for small Trotskyist groups since the Venezuelan revolution began with the defeat of the counter-revolutionary coup (2002) and bosses lockout of the oil industry (2002-2003).
However, Gonzalez’s call is for “socialism” in one country, or more accurately, in two backward countries. While Stalin advanced the policy of “Socialism in One Country” to force-march Soviet development from the late 1920s he was only able to “achieve” it at terrible cost to workers and peasants who were forced to compensate for Russia’s backwardness.
Notably, the Cuban Communist Party does not agree with Gonzalez’s view either. Witness Cuba’s forced retreat from a fully socialised economy since 1991 when the island lost 80 percent of all foreign trade owing to the Soviet collapse that year. So, for what Gonzalez’s Venezuela might look like we would have to cast our eyes to North Korea!
Gonzalez’s starting point is in principal opposition to any collaboration with capital – an ultra-left position, rather like a unionist advocating in principle opposition to signing any contract with the bosses. Back in 2007 Gonzalez criticised Chávez for pursuing a “policy of mixed enterprises in the development of the oil industry”. But Gonzalez’s criticism assumes there is another option. While Venezuelan oil has been fully nationalised, it exists in the form of a thick tar that is buried deep underneath Lake Maracaibo. How does Gonzalez propose this be extracted at competitive cost without contracting the advanced technology which is monopolised by the principal multinational oil corporations?
Gonzalez believes his “genuine socialism” would be possible if “speculators and bureaucrats [were] removed” and “popular power ... built, from the ground up”. The speculators are the capitalist class, so that is just another call for “forward march!” Then we are told the “bureaucrats” (an extremely imprecise term in the circumstances) should be removed. But Venezuela has an undeveloped economy, I.e. one where material shortage is not resolvable given the existing level of development of productive capacity; were the cultural level of the population is also undeveloped, even compared with that of working people in “advanced” capitalist societies, like that which Gonzalez is from, the UK.
It is possible to remove individual bureaucrats who are found to be corrupt, inept, politically counter-revolutionary etc. But Gonzalez believes through this process it would be possible, in an isolated backward country to resolve problems of bureaucratism, corruption etc. This is despite the fact that in Gonzalez’s own (unsubstantiated) view “the institutions of popular power have largely withered on the vine”. The short answer to this perspective is not “North Korea” but “Stalin”. Or perhaps Gonzalez thinks Stalinism in the USSR was not a function of under-development isolation, but just the Bolshevik leadership’s inability to adopt “genuine socialism”.
The contradictions arising from Gonzalez’s refusal to make a concrete assessment can be seen from his awkward understanding of popular power. For Gonzalez, “The promises of community control, of control from below... have proved to be hollow.” So “control from below” is determined by “promises” from the government i.e. from above. This formulation wasn’t a one off; it proceeds from Gonzalez’s outlook. He repeats the same view at London Marxism 2013, concluding his speech calling for “conscious reorganisation of those elements of popular power that were promised and really never delivered”. “Popular power” can be “promised” but can never be “delivered”. It must be organised popularly.
We all hope the Venezuelan working class are ready and organised to expropriate the remainder of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie (principally the food and beverages company Polar, who employs 90,000 people). But Gonzalez has not attempt to show this is the case through any concrete assessment of the real situation. He ignores the frequent a repeated attempts to stimulate the development of popular power made by the Chavez leadership for more than a decade. The Bolivarian Circles, myriad social missions, housing committees, communal councils, workers councils, United Socialist Party of Venezuela, worker control of basic industry and many other initiatives were all more-or-less successful, more-or-less wise attempts to not to “deliver” workers power but to stimulate its organisation in a semi-proletarian country.
It is only through a serious and concrete analysis of these and initiatives – i.e. by assessing the interaction between the leadership and the mass – that it’s possible to draw political conclusions about the character of the Bolivarian leadership or of the political situation in Venezuela in general. By ignoring all the concrete forms of the development of the revolutionary process in order to paint the leadership as fakers and sell-outs, Gonzalez reduces the Venezuelan class struggle to government policy in the abstract.
Against Gonzalez we can glimpse another method. In “The Revolution Will Not Be Decreed: An interview with Gonzalo Gómez” (venezuelanalysis.com) we find that Gonzalo Gomez, a revolutionary leader inside Venezuela would, similar to the international left critics, like to see “an acceleration, a democratic radicalisation, of the revolutionary process, with more audacious and radical measures that rupture with the existing capitalist system.” However, unlike Gonzalez, he sees that “these measures will have to recognise the reigning balance of forces, obviously.”
Thus for Gomez, “workers’ control will never come from the government merely giving a directive for workers’ to assume that role. The working-class needs to achieve a certain level of organisation and consciousness, it has to have its own leaders, and it has to be carried out in a dynamic of struggle. If there is no dynamic of struggle, the attitude of the people is to wait for the government.
“If there is no dynamic of struggle and mobilisation within the workers themselves that make this a possibility in reality you are not going to see actual workers’ control installed. The enterprises will instead be managed by the government. And with the structure of the state that currently exists, given the fact that we have not superseded capitalism, with all of these processes of bureaucratisation inside of the state ... the slogan of workers’ control will be distorted.
“The government is a close interlocutor of ours, sensitive to our demands, and it pushes various actions forwards and provides an orientation; but at the same time, the bureaucratic apparatus of the state often acts as a break on all advances. The bureaucracy appropriates the discourse of the revolution, but in reality rather than living for the revolution, they live from the revolution. They accumulate capital, negotiate with the bourgeoisie, and reject real changes.”
Gonzalez’s view that it might be possible to defeat this bureaucracy through simple purge and government directed organisation of workers is not just in opposition to Gomez it is contradiction to Gonzalez’s own tradition, the International Socialist Tendency’s support for “revolution from below”. It is also against Lenin’s general orientation, who in April 1918 wrote, “Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by “determination” alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about without this ability.
To ignore Lenin’s distinction, and march headlong into more expropriations (and there have been over 1000 nationalisations already) may mean simply handing more property to “the bureaucratic apparatus of the state” which appropriates the discourse of the revolution, but in reality rather than living for the revolution, they live from the revolution. Short of a consolidated workers power to replace this apparatus, it cannot, in the real world, be swept away by government decree – that is the lesson of the whole terrible history of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
