After the death of Hugo Chavez: Which way for socialism?

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Hugo Chavez, the outspoken and charis­ matic anti-imperialist president of Venezuela for the past 14 years, passed away on March 5 after succumbing to heart failure and a two-year bout with cancer. About 2 million traveled from across Venezuela to pay their last respects, some demanding that they be armed to defend what they had gained under the Bolivarian government.

The crowds certainly included those who had mobilized more than a decade ago and brought Chavez’s regime back from the brink of defeat by the right-wing capitalist opposi­ tion and imperialism. Their struggle pushed Chavez further to the left, a turn that coin­ cided with a 660% rise in the price of oil, the bedrock of the Venezuelan economy, allow­ ing the construction of many state-run social programs. Chavez dubbed the process the “Bolivarian Revolution” and “21st century socialism.”

During Chavez’s time in office the Venezue­ lan masses gave U.S. imperialism and the na­ tive capitalists two black eyes through their mobilizations in 2002-2003.

The first blow was given in April 2002, when Chavez was saved from almost certain execution in a military coup that received the “blessing” of Washington, according to The New York Times. The Times later report­ ed that Venezuelan journalist Eva Golinger “obtained reams of documents from the National Endowment for Democracy, a non­ profit agency financed by the United States government, that show that $2.2 million was spent from 2000 to 2003 to train or finance anti-Chávez parties and organizations.” These same documents show that American officials knew of the planned coup before it was put in motion.

Later that year, in December, workers and sections of the military sympathetic to Chavez restarted and secured key industries crippled by a two-month sabo­ tage of oil production. The reactionary oil strike was actively supported by the state trade union, CTV, and organized by native rentier-type capitalists, who were subordinate to more powerful imperialist interests like ExxonMobil and France’s Total corporation, shak­ en by Chavez’s 2001 Hydrocarbons Law.

The law increased royalty rates paid by multina­ tional oil corporations to the state oil sector, PDVSA, from 16% to 30%—a rate still below those paid by oil companies in Canada, the Middle East, and Africa. However, for corporations used to the relatively taxfree oil rates during the 40 years of the neo-liberal bo­ nanza before Chavez’s presidency, this relatively small cut into their profits was intolerable. Even a few extra cents for wages, as was proposed by Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, was enough reason for U.S. imperial­ ism to spirit him away in a military coup in 2004.

During the past 65 years, at least, Venezuela’s mass­ es have used their own strength to demand land from the landlords and an end to rip-offs by imperialism. In 1958, the Venezuelan army crushed their cries for implementation of a land reform law, and in 1989 they mobilized in 21 cities, the Caracazo rebellion, to pro­ test a rise in basic fuel and bus services, the result of IMF structural adjustment measures. The Caracazo in particular had a strong impact on Chavez.

In 1992 Chavez led a small group of army troops in a coup attempt against President Andres Perez, who during the Caracazo had sided with the pillagers of Latin America and called out the military to massacre 5000. Chavez’s adventure landed him in prison. But before he was put behind bars, he appeared on nation­ al television to say that the struggle against imperial­ ism and its allies among the Venezuelan bourgeoisie was over only “por ahora” (for now).

Upon release from prison, he sought the presiden­ cy and challenged imperialism’s favored twin par­ ties of the Coordinadora Democratica (CD)—Acción Democrática and COPEI—who ruled together uninter­ ruptedly from 1958 until they were soundly defeated by Chavez in the 1998 elections. The most powerful among the global corporate elite were willing to give Chavez a chance to prove whether he would be a threat to their centuries-old extraction of trillions of dollars of wealth. Would Chavez side with Venezuela’s work­ ers, peasants, and the poor or with its capitalist class? For 14 years Chavez sided with both.

U.S. and other foreign corporations were uneasy when Chavez became the head of a capitalist state, but stock markets rose after the newly elected president reassured them that their large private stakes in Ven­ ezuelan oil, land, and finance capital would remain un­ touched. In 1999, Chavez created a new constitution whose Article 115 guarantees private-property rights.

During Chavez’s first five years in power, UN quality of life indexes slightly declined. And unemployment rose during his first three years, from 14% to 20%. It was not until after Chavez’s narrow escapes from the brink of defeat at the hands of imperialism and bour­ geois oppositionists that he accelerated reforms that made slight inroads into global and native capitalist property and profits.

The deep social polarization in Venezuela—com­ bined with mass mobilizations of workers and peas­ ants against their imperialist-aligned governments in Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia between 2001 and 2005—helped to create the conditions that pushed Chavez further to the left. His rhetoric became more radical; in 2007 he even claimed to be a Trotskyist, but so did his former labor minister, who presided over the post in 2008 when the National Guard was called out to attack workers demanding the nationalization of the SIDOR steel plant.

Billionaire benefits from “socialism”

A December 2012 article in Bloomberg News should give pause to anyone genuinely interested in dis­ cussing the strategy and tactics of fighting to create an economy and government based on the majority, workers and peasants. The writer quoted a Caracas financial-risk consultant, who sought to allay fears of giant investment banks that operate in Venezuela: “Chavez’s socialist project depends on capitalist banks. He needs institutions such as Escotet’s [a Venezuelan billionaire] to fund Venezuela’s ballooning public debt. That’s what feeds the social programs that have cut poverty and made the president popular.”

This echoes sentiments that Chavez broadcast on his television program, “Alo Presidente” (No. 151): “We need bankers that can be committed to our national project [in order to show] that we can make a revo­ lution peacefully.” Currently, 80 percent of all bank holdings are controlled by international and national finance capital (the state bank holds roughly 20 per­ cent of all deposits).

Social programs for the poor while allowing “so­ cialism” to benefit billionaires characterize Chavez’s course of balancing between the two classes, a middle of the road course not unprecedented in Latin Ameri­ Tony Savino / Socialist Action (Above) NY memorial meeting for Hugo Chavez.

can politics during the past 80 years. Chavez summa­ rized his orientation, as quoted in the on-line journal, Rebelión: “Only through a coordinated effort among the community’s actors, the State, the Government, the social actors, workers, industrialists, who at the same time are economic actors, only in a coordinated and powerful manner will we come out ahead.”

During the 1940s and ’50s in Argentina, in a similar manner to Chavez, Juan Peron carried out a populist program that combined anti-imperialist and anti-capi­ talist rhetoric, very limited industrial nationalizations, and agrarian reforms. Peron and Chavez alike devel­ oped programs that contained a hard kernel of the na­ tionalism of the oppressed, who also benefited from real material progress and social reform. Communal councils and unions Under the Bolivarian regime, participation of the workers and the oppressed in political organizing has increased through communal councils and other pop­ ular organizations. But these groups are not govern­ mental bodies and can do little more than present de­ mands or recommendations to public officials. Thus, bureaucrats in the government and the United Social­ ist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) are allowed a relatively free hand to advance their own narrow interests.

Socialism is the most democratic participation of organized workers. But if Venezuela is building “21stcentury socialism,” one important section was glar­ ingly absent among the 900 delegates that met in May 2012 at the nationalized SIDOR steel plant in Puerto Ordaz for the first national conference of the Socialist Workers Councils. Aporrea reported that no represen­ tatives from any of the national unions were present.

This may be owed to the fact that there is no strong independent trade-union movement in Venezuela to­ day, which has gone through a series of splits since the National Union of Workers (UNT) was created after the pro-government union (CTV) sided with the capi­ talists during their oil strike in 2002/2003. State re­ pression, whereby the National Guard attacked work­ ers attempting to organize workers’ control or stateworker co-management (a relationship where, by law, the state retains 51% control of the industry and the workers 49%) at SIDOR and Sanatarios Maracay, has further beleaguered the union movement.

Meanwhile, the CSBT (Central Socialista Bolivariana de los Trabajadores), is the only union recognized by the PSUV, giving the state party considerable influence in its affairs and diminishing the CSBT’s character as a (continued on page 10, in “More austerity for all”)

SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2013 3

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Tony Savino / Socialist Action any claims for reproductive justice represents one ap­ proach. The softball approach of the Democratic Par­ ty, which propagandistically defends women’s rights with token measures like the Lily Ledbetter Act or Health Reform clauses that would “allow” state funds to cover some abortions, is another.

What is certain is that there is unanimity on the need to use the “woman” card as part of the ruling parties’ efforts to make the system sufficiently profit­ able once again. And this offensive is occurring at a moment when due to unequal wages, employment discrimination, and other tools of economic marginal­ ization, adult women are about 30% more likely to be officially “poor” than adult men.

This political offensive provides the context and tools for the most reactionary cultural shifts and the revisiting of some of the oldest ideological obses­ sions associated with the oppression of women. Thus, young working women are being forced to grapple with maturation in a culture that condemns repro­ ductive choice, blames mothers for the psychologi­ cally damaged youth raised in the culture of austerity, shames the victims of rape, and simultaneously de­ mands that they look and perform like the ubiquitous corporate porn stars whose success is determined by their ability to fake sexual pleasure.

Women in the labor movement