Contradictions of the Venezuelan revolution
For more than a week now, the world’s media have carried images of a Venezuela in flames. But the pictures are rarely explained or placed in any kind of context, and people are left to assume that this is one more urban riot, one more youth rebellion against the crisis, like those in Greece and Spain.
The reality is both very different and far more complex. Venezuela, after all, is a society that declared war on neoliberalism 15 years ago.
Caracas is a divided city. Its eastern part is middle class and prosperous; to the west, the population is poorer. The political divide reflects exactly the social division.
The majority of the burning barricades were built in middle class areas. And the students building them came from either the private universities or the state university which had largely excluded poorer students in recent times.
There was almost nothing happening in the poorer areas to the west. But in more recent days the class character of the demonstrations has become clearer. The government’s new bus system – offering clean and safe travel at low prices – has been attacked. The Bolivarian University, offering higher education to people excluded from the university system, was at one point besieged.
President Maduro and his cabinet have responded by denouncing the increasingly violent confrontations as organised by fascists and financed and supported by the United States. And there are certainly extreme elements involved, actively engaged in trying to destabilise the situation.
The government has called for “peace” – a slogan echoed by the huge numbers of ordinary Venezuelans who have rallied behind Maduro. Their chant “They will never come back!” is very significant. They recognise in the leaders of the current unrest the same people who implemented the devastating economic programmes of the 1990s, before Chavez.
At the same time, that “peace” has yet to be defined. Does it mean addressing the real problems that people face, and driving a wedge between an anxious lower middle class and its self-proclaimed bourgeois leaders? Or will it be achieved by consensus with other sections of that same class, who have no commitment at all to socialism, 21st century or otherwise?
Chavez’s electoral support rose consistently until his death early last year. After that, his nominated successor, Maduro, won the presidential elections in April 2013. But this time the right wing candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, came within 250,000 votes (under 1 percent) of winning.
It was a clear expression of the growing frustration and anger among Chavez supporters. In 2012 inflation rates hovered around 50 percent, and the level has risen inexorably throughout the last year. Today the basic basket of goods costs 30 percent more than the minimum wage – and that is if the goods are to be found on the increasingly empty shelves of shops and supermarkets.
The shortages are explained partly by capitalists’ speculation – just as happened in Chile in 1972 – and partly by the rising cost of imports, which make up a growing proportion of what is consumed in Venezuela.
All of this is an expression of an economic crisis vigorously denied by government but obvious to everyone else. Inflation is caused by the declining value of the bolivar, Venezuela’s currency, itself the result of economic paralysis. The truth is that production of anything other than oil has ground to a virtual halt.
How is it possible that a country with the world’s largest proven reserves of oil and possibly of gas too should now be deeply in debt to China and unable to finance the industrial development that Chavez promised in his first economic plan?
The answer is political rather than economic. The explanation is corruption on an almost unimaginable scale, combined with inefficiency and a total absence of any kind of economic strategy. In recent weeks there have been very public denunciations of speculators, hoarders and the smugglers taking oil and almost everything else across the Colombian border. But all of this has been common knowledge for years.
Chavez promised popular power and the investment of the country’s oil wealth in new social programmes. Quite rightly, his new health and education programmes were a source of great pride and a guarantee of continued support for him among the majority of Venezuelans.
Today, those funds are drying up as Venezuela’s oil income is diverted to paying for increasingly expensive imports. Instead what has emerged in Venezuela is a new bureaucratic class who are themselves the speculators and owners of this new and failing economy.
They are seen delivering fierce speeches against corruption and wearing the obligatory red shirt and cap of Chavismo. But the literally billions of dollars that have “disappeared” in recent years, and the extraordinary wealth accumulated by leading Chavistas, are the clearest signs that their interests have prevailed. At the same time, the institutions of popular power have largely withered on the vine.
The right has hoped to trade on that disillusionment. That it has not yet managed to mobilise significant numbers of working class people is testimony to their intense loyalty to the Chavista project. The solution is not in unprincipled alliances with the opponents of Chavismo, nor in inviting in multinationals like Samsung to enjoy cheap Venezuelan labour in assembling their equipment.
What can save the Bolivarian project, and the hope it inspired in so many, 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.
I leave the last word to Roland Denis, a leading grassroots activist over many years. “Either we turn this moment into a creative opportunity to reactivate our collective revolutionary will, or we can begin to say our farewells to the beautiful, traumatic history we have lived out over the last 25 years.”
[This is an edited version of an article first published at revolutionarysocialism.tumblr.com.]
