[R-G] Venezuela & Us: Reflections From the Outside Looking In

[Anthony Fenton]

Venezuela & Us: Reflections From the Outside Looking In
by Chris Spannos
	
July 04, 2007

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=13212

[This is a slightly revised version of a panel talk given at the U.S.  
Social Forum June 27- July 1, Atlanta Georgia. The panel, “Lesson  
from Venezuela for the U.S.,” was organized by Venezuelanalysis.com.  
The other panelists included Olaf Ciliberto -- student leader at the  
Central University of Venezuela, Carmen Morantes -- lawyer with the  
National Technical Office for the Regularization of Urban Land, Greg  
Wilpert -- Venezuelanalysis.com, and  Luis Diaz -- member of the  
Latin American Parliament. They spoke at various lengths and in  
detail about the changes occurring in Venezuela and surrounding region.]


As a U.S. based activist, organizer and alternative media maker, I  
want to pose three broad questions about lessons from Venezuela for  
the U.S.:

1)      How should movements in the U.S. interpret the changes  
occurring in Venezuela?

2)      How should those changes translate for our movements in the  
U.S. and the world?

3)      What is our role and what are the forces shaping how we  
defend Venezuela from within the U.S.?


Beginning with the first question of interpreting those changes,  
which will illustrate how I want to approach this topic, imagine two  
people with an illness, in advanced stages, which is life  
threatening. They are neighbors from down the block. One of them  
shows the other that they have begun seeking treatment for the  
illness and are doing better and making improvements. The other  
simply listens, and is happy about the changes, sees that they are  
compelling, and is very supportive but in no way takes in ideas about  
how they could make things better for themselves. On the one hand,  
they support the other getting treatment and making progress, but on  
the other hand they let the example of seeking positive change pass  
over or bounce off them.

Venezuela is making strides toward national and societal structural  
transformation. The U.S. Left should not only listen, support and  
defend such changes, but should also try to draw lessons for how what  
is happening there can inform our movements here.

Here in the U.S. we are doing a lot of damage control with our  
organizing. We are facing unprecedented upward redistribution of  
wealth, power and privileged. We are fighting to save social services  
that have already been cut and continue to take a beating. We are  
fighting a rollback of women’s rights, attacks on immigrants, and  
widespread systemic racism. We are trying to stop our own  
government’s current war making while knowing that plans are in the  
works for future wars. In short we are trying to change our  
government’s foreign and domestic policy on a whole range of issues.

In contrast, Venezuela is struggling to free itself from an  
international political and economic order dominated by our  
government’s strategic considerations. While domestically, they are  
undergoing mass structural transformation on a national scale.

Our struggles are in very different stages.  The contrast illustrates  
that the Venezuelan population is much further along than we are in  
its consciousness – in being aware of the structural roots of their  
nation’s historical and present condition.


Lesson #1 Our organizing and activism should seek to affect  
consciousness about the structural roots of the social and material  
crisis affecting the U.S. population as well as how U.S. global  
dominance adversely affects the well being of people in other countries.

Now it is true that the U.S. Left does do this to some extent.  
However, most of our activism and organizing fails to make the  
connection that our social and material ills – class division, racism  
and sexism, are deeply rooted in the underlying structures of  
capitalism, patriarchy, racism, etc. Where is this among our anti- 
war, anti-corporate globalization and other social movements? Is it  
prevalent in our day to day organizing, activism and events, or just  
occasionally? How often do we seek to raise our own consciousness, in  
this way, internally to our movements? How about in our outreach to  
others outside the Left? In my own experience there is usually very  
little of this done in our movement building. Beyond my own  
experience I suspect the same is true or worse. We are all at fault.

But there is more. Consequentially, the U.S. Left is unable to arouse  
desire and passion for a new world among its domestic population.  
Again, it is true that this desire for societal transformation exists  
in some sectors of the Left, among a minority, but for the most part  
it is absent. In Venezuela, passion and consciousness seemingly  
deepen and spread as empowerment and structural changes deepen and  
spread. The Venezuelans are much further along, and because of their  
consciousness, are much more deliberate about structural  
transformation -- its human aims and aspirations. This structural  
transformation is in many cases empowering Venezuelans to have more  
decision making say over the institutions and policies that affect  
their lives. We don’t know where it will lead. It could all unravel  
next month. But it is this structural transformation, empowering the  
population, which is arousing hope and desire. The Venezuelans  
believe they can win. Our own efforts should seek reforms that  
empower our movements to also have more decision making say over the  
institutions and policies affecting their lives. We need a strategy  
where we gain more and more power, eventually seeking to displace  
elite power. Similar to the process unfolding in Venezuela, these  
reforms could range from winning redistributive taxes, changes in  
workplace relations; especially in the division of labor, more  
participation in budgeting and workplace decision making, more access  
to information, and collective control over the production,  
consumption and allocation of the material means of life. Advances  
should be sought in ways that expand desires rather than delimit  
them. This would mean setting a course for winning a series of  
reforms that would eventually lead to new institutions, new  
consciousness and a new society – to victory.




Lesson #2 We need to replicate the Venezuelans in this respect by  
proposing, debating, and sharing visions of what a new society and  
world might look like, and how to get there, so we can arouse hope,  
passion and desire within our movements in the U.S. We need to  
replicate the Venezuelan attitude that we can win.

In Venezuela, this discourse is around a “21st Century Socialism”  
that is rooted in its national history through the Bolivarian  
Revolution. The struggle for a post-capitalist, anti-racist, anti- 
sexist society, in the U.S., should also be rooted in its national  
history of struggle and emancipation, drawing lessons from our own  
classical and new left movements. However, if we are going to propose  
we make history at the magnitude of centuries, through a “21st  
Century Socialism,” our vision should aspire to transcend the  
failures of last century’s centrally planned economies, with  
corporate divisions of labor and a managerial elite called the  
coordinator class.

The model I and others advocate for the U.S. is classless and self- 
managing. Through federations of worker and consumer councils,  
decentralized participatory planning, balanced job complexes in the  
work place – where all share a balanced work load comparable in  
desirability and empowerment – and where all are remunerated for  
effort and sacrifice. This model is called participatory economics  
(Albert & Hahnel), and seeks to promote solidarity, equality,  
diversity, self-management and economic efficiency.


However the modern day lesson in structural transformation and hope  
offered by Venezuela go far beyond the U.S. For social change to be  
truly successful it will have to happen internationally. Using the  
Social Forum model to illustrate this possibility, under the banner  
of “Another World is Possible!”, the 2001 World Social Forum brought  
together 20,000 participants. The 2002 WSF had 60,000 participants.  
The WSF of 2003 brought in 100,000 participants. These kinds of  
exponential leaps in numbers are what we need to eventually win. But  
in order for people to stick to the movement we need to offer them  
hope that another world really is possible. Imagine a 2010 World  
Social Forum that decided to celebrate a decade of global movement  
building with a qualitative shift in its content and character.  
Instead of talking about what is wrong with the world in the many  
thousands of workshops that have taken place since 2001, we would  
instead seek to understand how our movements are interrelated; and  
develope, debate and discuss possibilities for widely shared visions  
of what another world might actually look like, in this century;  
along with strategic ways forward. Visions for a new society could be  
offered in all realms including economics, culture, kinship,  
politics, education, science, urban planning, sports, etc. These  
social forums could be, as has already happened, replicated on  
smaller city, regional, state, or national scales, such as a future  
U.S. social forum might offer. This is just a glimpse of what is  
possible if we begin to use our imagination to envision structural  
transformation such as Venezuela is actually carrying out while  
challenging global capitalism and U.S. global domination.

Thus the importants of Venezuela, the opportunities it opens and  
inspires, should not be understated. This leads me to the last  
portion of my presentation:

What is our role and what are the forces shaping how we defend  
Venezuela from here?

A June 27 report from Reuters, carried in major mainstream media  
outlets across the U.S. says, “Insecurity, ‘malignant narcissism’ and  
the need for adulation are driving Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's  
confrontation with the United States.”

“Eventually, these personality traits are likely to compel Chavez to  
declare himself Venezuela's president for life.”

These comments come from a Dr. Jerrold Post who has just completed so  
called “psychological profile” for the U.S. Air Force. Post has a 21  
year career history at the CIA.

Post told Reuters that Chavez “has been acting increasingly messianic  
and so he is likely to either get the constitution rewritten to allow  
for additional terms or eventually declare himself president-for-life."

This extremist anti-Chavez propaganda is reminiscent of the cold war  
and offers one example of the work we need to counter in our own  
government’s misinformation and vilification of Chavez. U.S. elites  
want to instill the belief among the population that Chavez is a mad  
man, a dictator, and that he threatens free speech, human rights and  
all that is democratic. However it is not Chavez himself that bothers  
U.S. elites. From punishment of Palestinians for voting in Hamas, to  
attempts to vilify Chavez -- it is their absolute contempt and hatred  
for democratic efforts, unfolding in Venezuela today, as in other  
countries in the past, and a country’s struggle for a development  
path independent from Washington, which really causes them to froth  
rabidly at the mouth. The most recent example of course being U.S.  
elite and mainstream media response to Chavez not renewing the  
broadcast license of the opposition’s RCTV. By simply imagining an  
analogous situation in the U.S., where a media network was found  
complicit in an attempt to over throw the U.S. president (lets  
stretch the imagination by assuming he was democratically elected),  
one could quite easily see how an entire network could be shut down,  
bureaucrats in charge being jailed, facing potential prison sentences  
for life, if not handed the death sentence outright. Chavez did not  
jail nor imprison, but rather, in comparison to the U.S. hypothetical  
above, used a seemingly judicious, albeit not perfect, approach in  
dealing with the opposition media and license renewal of RCTV.

On going solidarity work, putting pressure on our mainstream media  
institutions, and making it costly for them to propagandize; applying  
the same pressures to our own Government when interfering with the  
transformation taking place in Venezuela, as in the reversed April  
2002 coup attempt, should guide our work to defend Venezuela from,  
and within, the U.S.; to ensure that Venezuela can move toward its  
vision in the 21st Century, without interference.