The way forward for Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution

There was no great surprise when Hugo Chavez was re-elected as president of Venezuela before Christmas. But only a brave man would try predicting exactly how things will go from there. Whatever else may be uncertain, it seems likely that the next few years will help us to solve the “Chavez puzzle” once and for all.

What Makes Chavismo Tick?

Figuring out the Venezuelan leader and the character of the movement he leads has been a real head-ache for the international Left. When you hear people talking about “Bonapartism”, it’s a sign of laziness, reaching for the first label that comes to hand. Whatever Chavez might be, he has next to nothing in common with any of the leaders Marxists have traditionally labelled as “Bonapartist”, from Napoleon III himself to Charles De Gaulle.

Nor does he slot into the tradition of populist military rulers. Egypt’s Nasser and Libya’s Gadaffi may have challenged western imperialism and invested heavily in social programmes, but their “revolutions” were strictly top-down affairs, and they never put themselves up for election. The same could be said for “progressive” Latin American juntas in Peru and Panama.

Perhaps the best comparison is with the Colombian politician Jorge Gaitan, who emerged from the traditional political class but terrified the country’s elite by appealing to the masses (his assassination in 1948 launched the horrific cycle of violence that has held back social movements in Colombia ever since). As the historian Gonzalo Sanchez put it, Gaitan’s moderate proposals for reform “were backed by a social mobilisation of such magnitude as to seem to transform their reformist content, leading the forces of the status quo to perceive a threat to the entire social edifice.”

This, surely, is the key point about the Chavez government. While its initial programme was far from radical, and even today many Chavista policies are not in themselves anti-capitalist, there is something inherently radical about mass mobilisation by the lower classes. When the poor are no longer willing to sit back and let other people decide their fate, everything is up for grabs. This is what the Venezuelan elite recognised from an early stage, and it helps explain their violent hostility to Chavez.

Of course, we shouldn’t take the fears of the privileged classes as definitive proof that Venezuela is experiencing a socialist revolution. Similar fears were widespread in France when the Popular Front government was elected in the 1930s, and even in the United States at the same time. Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal probably inspired more fear and hatred in elite circles than any labour or social-democratic government in Europe. Yet capitalism survived intact in both countries.

Roosevelt, however, had always been clear about his intentions – to save US capitalism from itself, by co-opting the labour movement and channelling its energy into a battle for reforms that left the social structure firmly in place. And for all their radical rhetoric, neither the Popular Front chief Leon Blum nor his Communist allies ever set out to break the power of the French capitalist class. When the electoral victory of the French Left prompted a huge strike movement, their main priority was to de-mobilise the strikers.

Chavez and his allies have not been so quick to pour water on the flames: in fact, some of their words and deeds suggest a will to attack the roots of capitalist power in Venezuela. But it remains to be seen whether the rhetoric of “Bolivarian socialism” or “21st century socialism” can become a practical reality.

Key Issues for the Revolution:

Since his re-election, Chavez has announced a major programme of nationalisation. The form which this programme assumes will tell us a lot. Despite the ferocious hostility to state ownership shared by neo-liberals all over the world, it’s important to remember that in itself, nationalisation is perfectly compatible with capitalism. The British Labour government of Clement Atlee took a big section of the economy into state ownership, but British capitalism was never threatened.

So we will have to watch closely and see whether the Chavez government intends to create a large state sector in a mainly capitalist economy, or if the nationalisation programme represents the first step towards an economy based on social ownership and democratic planning. What kind of management structures will be adopted once companies are taken out of private hands? Will the promising experiments in workers’ self-management already taking place in some firms be expanded and tested on a national scale?

It should be obvious that the answers to these questions will not depend simply on what the Chavez government decides to do. Intervention by Venezuelan workers, taking control of their own destiny, is essential. By definition, self-management is not something that can be handed down to workers by government legislation. They have to play an active role in the process.

The activists of the main union federation, the UNT, are likely to be central. It’s promising that the majority currents in the UNT have so far taken an independent line – while they support Chavez in his confrontations with capitalism and imperialism, they aren’t willing to take orders from the government. The UNT is in a position to deepen the radicalisation of the Bolivarian revolution by taking action that strikes at the position of the capitalist class.

Another initiative launched by Chavez after the election will be equally important. In his victory speech, the president announced the formation of a new “United Socialist Party of Venezuela”, which has the potential to correct a serious imbalance in the Chavista movement – but only if it takes shape in the right way.

So far, the Bolivarian revolution has been top-heavy, without any effective structures to mediate between the leadership and its grass-roots supporters. Supporters of Chavez have mobilised on a vast scale to support him in elections and referendums. Between their frequent visits to the polling stations, they have also been active in the programmes launched by his government, and it would be wrong to present the whole process as a one-man show with a passive audience simply observing his actions.

But the grass-roots supporters have no way of directly influencing the decisions made at the top level. Participation is not the same thing as control. If key decisions are made by a small group of leaders with no direct input from below, then obviously we are a long way from genuine socialist democracy.

The new party launched by Chavez could go some way towards solving this problem. In a key speech made after winning the election, the Venezuelan leader seemed to be aware of the problems that can arise without control from below. Referring to the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship, when no workers mobilised to defend the alleged “workers’ state”, Chavez argued that “this happened because it was taken over by an elite, it became a regime of the elite that could not build socialism.”

He also promised that the new United Socialist Party would be “the most democratic party in Venezuelan history … it’ll be opened up for discussion, across the board. The grass-roots members will elect genuine leaders … the party should not be born with electoral aims - even though it will be able to engage in electoral battles like those we have already fought. The party needs to go beyond the purely electoral, and that’s why this is a good time for it to be born, when we have no elections coming up in the immediate future.”

This is all well and good. But it’s significant that the initiative to launch the party came from Chavez himself, which again shows the unhealthy dependence of the whole process on one man. Activists from the social movements will have to throw themselves into the process of construction and shape the way the new movement is built – they can’t just rely on Chavez to honour the promises of grass-roots control and pluralism.

There’s no reason in principle why every left activist in Venezuela has to join the same party. An alliance of different groups might work just as well. Most importantly, the nature of the new party can’t be determined by Chavez and his allies in advance – its programme and structures should be the outcome of a real process of debate and discussion. If the “United Socialist Party” is to become an effective vehicle for carrying the revolution forward, it will have to contain room for different tendencies and currents of opinion.

And in itself, a new party won’t be enough. “21st century socialism”, in Venezuela or anywhere else, will have to go beyond the limits of parliamentary democracy as we know it - a system based on a rigid division of labour between rulers and ruled, with the latter given the opportunity to vote every four or five years, then sent back to private life while the political elite gets on with the business of “governance”. New structures of popular power, rooted in communities and work-places, are needed to give much broader opportunities for participation.

Beyond Chavez:

Judged by the standards of western capitalist democracy, the Chavez government has a healthy record. The recent decision to cancel the broadcasting licence of an opposition TV station was greeted with predictable hysteria – but if any private broadcaster in Europe or the United States had supported a failed coup against the elected government and helped to organise that coup, it would have been shut down the next day, not five years later.

In the same way, when Chavez suggested that the constitution could be changed to allow him to run for another term as president, it was considered proof by some that the former paratrooper wants to be a tyrannical president-for-life. Britain has seen two prime ministers serve three terms in office in the last thirty years, and Bertie Ahern will be seeking his third spell as Taoiseach later this year. Whatever you might say about Ahern, Maggie Thatcher or Tony Blair, none of them belongs in the same company as Kim Il Sung or General Pinochet.

It’s telling that few of the people expressing concern about the future of democracy in Venezuela were heard voicing their fears when the conservative bloc in Mexico fixed the presidential election last year to keep out a moderate left-winger. When Colombia’s president Alvaro Uribe is doing his best to legitimise the role of drug-dealing paramilitaries as a pillar of Colombian society, it’s hard not to be sickened when you hear claims that Chavez and Evo Morales are the biggest danger facing the region.

Having said all that, we shouldn’t spend too much time dwelling on the hypocrisy of right-wing commentators – that’s the sort of thinking that leads some left-wingers to make excuses for political repression in Cuba, because Castro hasn’t terrorised his people in the style of the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. Chavez may come out smelling of roses when compared to Colombia’s Uribe or Mexico’s Calderon (or Brazil’s Lula for that matter), but socialists should judge his government by higher standards.

So there’s one useful bench-mark for judging the progress of the Bolivarian revolution over the coming years – how much does the role played by Chavez himself diminish, and how rapidly? You can’t assess what’s happened in Venezuela over the last eight years realistically without recognising that Hugo Chavez has played a positive role. But an asset can become a liability, and the commanding position of Chavez could be an obstacle to the emergence of popular democracy in Venezuela. To succeed, the Bolivarian revolution will have to go beyond its dependence on Hugo Chavez.

Socialists outside Venezuela will be able to do more good and provide more useful forms of solidarity, the more they reject the one-dimensional style of thought that has often crippled the Left. We don’t have to choose between cheer-leading and condemnation – we can acknowledge the positive contribution made by Chavez without blinding ourselves to his flaws, and the flaws of his movement.