[Marxism] Tomorrow Venezuela goes to the polls once again

[Joaquin Bustelo]

This is really somewhat abstract, because I'm not intimate with the
Venezuelan process enough to be able to illustrate it in great detail, and
therefore this is also just an *impression* from afar, but it is far from
clear to me that the constitutional referendum tomorrow is the sort of
turning point that Phil seems to suggest in the message Walter forwarded
from Cuba News: 

"The reforms taken as a whole, if adopted, will accelerate the pace and
increase the force of the Bolivarian revolution which is transcending its
anti-imperialist and nationalist phase and cresting towards a socialist
revolution." 

No paper provision can do something like that: it depends MOSTLY on the
degree of mobilization, organization, cohesion and consciousness of the
working people. Also, I'm not sure the way Phil describes a coming new phase
of qualitative change is the best way to understand it. 

The main enemy is not the Venezuelan capitalist class. Insofar as there are
some very large capitalists, for example the Cisneros group, they have long
since stopped being Venezuelan in most senses, in that they've become part
of imperialist capital, as symbolized and demonstrated by the transfer of
their corporate headquarters to Miami. (The Cuban Bacardi family was an
early example of this phenomenon; Mexico's Carlos Slim, the world's richest
man, by at least some accountings, perhaps its most finished expression).
Many other capitalists who have not been able to ascend to such heights and
ARE much more Venezuelan (i.e., whose capital is tied up within Venezuela
and whose fate as capitalists depends on, among other things, whether
capitalists have a future there) in reality remain under the thumb of
imperialist capital, tied to it by a thousand strings. The feebleness of the
Venezuelan capitalists as a "ruling class" has been shown precisely by the
development of this process and their inability to mount a really coherent
response.

So the essential core and thrust of the revolution is against imperialism,
which is capitalism in our epoch, which means that talking about "The
powerful national capitalist class ... backed to the hilt by Washington and
various European powers" puts things somewhat upside down about the essence
of the overall war. At some specific point the local rich may be the central
target for a time, but as a skirmish or battle in a much broader campaign or
war.

The other side of this is that to the degree individual and family-scale
production remain pervasive if not dominant, the issue isn't taking over
production and distribution but creating social production and distribution.
That is the work of many years and also a social and cultural revolutionary
transformation which becomes a ticklish problem when those individual/family
producers and merchants are a big part of your social base. It was an
underlying central problem in Nicaragua in the Sandinista Revolution, and
the Sandinista agrarian reform's emphasis on privileging land distribution
to cooperatives and state farms was an important factor in the contra being
able to develop a social base along the agricultural frontier, transforming
the mercenary imperialist war into a civil war that bled the revolution to
death.

The idea that nationalization of the major means of production is the very
core, bedrock, distilled essence of going beyond capitalism is a very
incomplete one. As we saw in the USSR and are seeing in China, even when
those property forms are the issue of a powerful revolution, they can become
empty forms that can easily be reversed.

I think the most advanced thinking on this has been done by the Cubans,
about the importance and centrality of the "subjective" factor in socialist
revolution, and how this subjective factor needs to be transformed into a
material force through organization and mobilization. And I also believe
that the resulting transformation of social relations, in the workplace and
society as a whole, the would be the end result of fully socializing the
means of production in the fullest sense of the word is very far from Cuban
reality today, and it could hardly be otherwise given the level of
development of the productive forces, the domination of the world by
imperialism, and Cuba's insertion into the world imperialist market. 

It's not clear to me how much the organization of working and oppressed
people in Venezuela so that they can become the protagonists on a new state
power has yet advanced. There are all sorts of signs that at this level,
things remain rather inchoate and contradictory. We can talk abstractly
about "the dictatorship of the proletariat" or of the "workers and peasants"
or of the "popular masses," but whatever you choose, such a type of regime
definitively requires a cohered subject, a protagonist. And here I see
multiple indications that this is a very unfinished process in Venezuela.

For example, who are the members of a stable layer of central leaders of the
process as a whole around Chavez? I don't know. For a while three or four
years ago I would have said, well there's Rangel and I'm sure two, three or
four others who I just don't happen to know. But Rangel is much older than
Chavez and appears to have retired, and again, maybe I just don't know them,
but there don't appear to be such figures.

That is tied in with something else, which is the lack of a more-or-less
consolidated and cohered, organized, central political expression of the
revolutionary movement. In Cuba this all seemed to come together around
Fidel quite organically and naturally. The PSUV doesn't yet seem to have
come together anywhere near to the degree that the political movement did in
Cuba (July 26 Movement, ORI, PURS, and finally the Communist Party). 

And I believe this, then, is reflected in a lack of clarity and coherence in
the development of mass organizations. 

I forget who is it that said that every revolution, if it is a real
revolution, is a first edition, and this is above all true of the Bolivarian
Revolution. It has arisen under a very distinct series of circumstances,
after the collapse of the socialist camp, with no real model to follow or
serve as a positive reference, only models to avoid or that are simply
inaccessible (Cuba in particular cannot be such a positive reference point
in most senses, because the world conditions that made possible the WAY the
Cuban Revolution was made have disappeared). 

Chávez has been very open about this, about the need to create a socialism
for the 21st Century, but the Venezuelan revolution itself has been able to
establish itself and survive and make some progress thanks to an extreme
combination of circumstances, including the very evident failure of
neoliberalism, Venezuela's oil resources, and Cuba's human resources, the
latter having been key to allowing the revolution to deliver extremely
important social advances to millions of the poorest Venezuelans with health
care especially, over and above an improvement in living standards thanks to
a redistribution of the oil wealth.

Chavez's STRATEGIC perspective of a growing and increasingly integrated
Bolivarian federation of Latin American republics makes total sense. But
that road opening up does not depend on Venezuela ALONE, or on the insight,
leadership qualities, hard work and everything else Venezuelans can bring to
their revolutions. It depends most immediately right now on Bolivia and
Ecuador, where things are even more ambiguous and I daresay will prove even
more difficult than in Venezuela (Bolivia is already showing this; Ecuador
will soon, though I would be happy to be surprised by the latter). And in
the longer run, either Mexico or Brazil is an absolute necessity to the
effort achieving at least some relative stability, with Brazil being
decisive, but Mexico is also strong and large and developed enough to help
hold the fort for quite a while, even though for a many reasons all of which
are called the United States a revolution in Mexico is extremely
problematic. 

At any rate, tomorrow is one more battle --an important battle to be sure--
but whether it can become THE decisive, or A decisive battle, that's not
clear to me from here. And probably there is more at stake on the downside
than the upside, i.e., a defeat might be more of a setback than a victory
would be an advance. Because those constitutional articles that point in the
direction of further "socialist" measures will be meaningful only to the
degree that the organization and combativity of the Venezuelan working
people make it possible to take advantage of them.

And even things like giving the president greater power over the central
bank depend on developing a really consolidated revolutionary cadre cohered
around the project of building a socialism for the 21st Century. Chavez
cannot literally run the central bank himself, he needs reliable
revolutionaries who know what they are doing in that field to do it. Being
able to name them is extremely important, but he needs to have the people.
The defection of the former defense minister to the opposition camp in this
referendum once again shows at this level the revolution hasn't been as
consolidated as one would hope.

I think the main challenges in Venezuela --AGAIN, these are just IMPRESSIONS
form afar, made on the basis of general considerations and at best
fragmentary information, but this seems to be an opportune moment to raise
them, and in the context of this list, not broader fora-- are not in the
sphere of the organization of the state, but in the sphere of the
organization of the people and the revolutionary movement.

Joaquín