Chapter 3

Venezuela: The Almost Revolution

1. Introduction

Venezuela has been on the front line of the struggle against capitalism for two decades; every step forward by the masses has met ferocious opposition from the Venezuelan bourgeoisie backed by US imperialism. The Bolivarian Revolution – in the name of ‘Socialism for the Twenty-First Century’ – has restricted itself to the demands of the bourgeois-democratic revolution: national independence, land reform, a more equal distribution of wealth, and a democratic state. But in the twenty-first century, even these limited demands cannot be achieved without ending the looting of Venezuela by the imperialists and their allies. In this sense the Bolivarian Revolution is an integral part of the world crisis of capitalism, and a link in the world socialist revolution.

This chapter traces the history of the Bolivarian Revolution made in the interests of the poor and the oppressed, but where the gains are being taken back by the Venezuelan oligarchs, a tight-knit coalition of land-owners, bankers, capitalists, and the tops of the state bureaucracy.

The Venezuelan Revolution, from the time of the attempted coup in April 2002 to overthrow President Chávez by military and anti-democratic means, is unique in several important ways, not least that it was effected in full view of TV cameras. The bourgeois mass media was actively involved in plotting the coup, it deliberately misrepresented events in order to justify the actions of the military, it deliberately misreported the actions of Chávez, it gave widespread publicity to the plotters and amplified their limited successes, it silenced the voices of those opposed to the coup and, when the coup had failed, rather than report the success of the masses, it closed itself down for a day. Events in Venezuela in 2002, and later, have proved beyond any doubt that ‘freedom of the press’ under private ownership is freedom for the bourgeoisie to feed lies to the people.

But the most important factor by far, is that a spontaneous uprising of the popular masses defeated the coup. This was the first time in history such an event had occurred and undeniable proof of the extent and depth of the popular support for the Chávez government. However, the emphasis placed on Chávez by the mass media, and even academics, has tended to divert attention away from the actual process of the Revolution and the gains of the poor and dispossessed, the great majority of the Venezuelan people.

At its height, the Bolivarian Revolution had: largely abolished illiteracy; increased the proportion of children enrolling at secondary schools from just under half to three-quarters of the school age population; provided free university education, and increased student numbers from 800,000 to 2.6 million; had built over two million furnished new homes; provided access to free healthcare in community centres for most of the population; increased the number of persons receiving a pension from 380,000 to over 2 million, and increased the level of the pension; reduced the proportion of Venezuelans living in poverty from forty-eight per cent to twenty-seven per cent of the population; reduced malnourishment from twenty-one per cent to five per cent, introduced low-cost, state-run food stores, and increased the calorie intake of poor Venezuelans by fifty per cent.1 These facts have been consistently downplayed and even ignored by the popular media in the West and it is these gains that gave Chávez his mass base, and the reason why Nicolás Maduro can still win elections.

Chávez gave the popular masses of Venezuela a sense of their own worth and in doing so made a bitter enemy of US imperialism. The gains made by Venezuela’s masses pose a serious threat to imperialism, not only to its interests in Venezuela, but across Latin America.

2. Some History

Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a federal republic located on the northern coast of South America. It is bordered by Colombia on the west, Brazil on the south, Guyana on the east, and the islands of Trinidad and Tobago to the north-east. Venezuela covers 916,400 km2 (353,800 sq miles), one-and-a-half times the area of France but with only about 32 million people. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil, freshwater and gold, and the world’s second largest gas reserves. The abundance of oil has shaped practically every aspect of the country’s history, economy, politics, and culture.

The European bourgeoisie had built a world economic system, and the self-confidence it felt enabled it to make temporary and partial concessions to absorb upsurges in workers’ militancy. However, the Venezuelan oligarchy, about 100 families with grand sounding surnames – are a product of colonialism and imperialism, and are particularly parasitical in nature. They enriched themselves by filching from state revenues, the mechanisms for which resulted in an all-pervasive culture of corruption. This gang of robbers and cut-throats has always been especially reactionary and obtuse, never willing to make any compromise that meant surrendering even the smallest part of their power or privileges.

Given Venezuela’s vast areas of arable land, benign climate and relatively small population, it was astounding that it imported about two-thirds of the foodstuffs it consumed, the cause of the co-called ‘food crisis’. Venezuelan agriculture was (and is) one of the most extreme expressions of the backwardness and parasitical character of the Venezuelan oligarchy. Tied to the big land-owners by a thousand links and wholly dependent on the imperialists, the national bourgeoisie never had any interest in leading a bourgeois democratic revolution, supporting the peasants’ seizure of the latifundia, and breaking the control of the caudillos. For the oligarchy, it is preferable, i.e., more profitable, to invest their money abroad, milk the state’s oil revenues, and produce beef for the international market, than it is to develop food production to feed Venezuelans. Without land reform there will be no farmers producing food to feed Venezuela’s own population. But, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, seizing the latifundia means challenging imperialist domination root and branch, and this the national bourgeoisie will not do.

In 1908, General Juan Vicente Gómez, a military strongman, seized control of Venezuela and launched a dictatorial regime. Under his rule the first Venezuelan commercial oilfield was discovered in the Lake Maracaibo Basin (in Zulia state in western Venezuela), and, by the end of 1917, oil was a significant proportion of exports. Gómez granted concessions at bargain basement rates to foreign oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell to exploit the oil. By 1928, Venezuela was the world’s leading oil exporter with US companies the major players in the Venezuelan oil industry.

By 1935, oil dominated all aspects of the economy, and accounted for over ninety per cent of exports, with large numbers of Venezuelans employed in the oil fields. However, the profitability of this sector of the economy, in accord with the laws of a capitalist economy, sucked in the investment that could have been used to create other industries, and actually robbed Venezuela of its ability to generate new industries or to modernise existing ones. In 1920, the agricultural sector dominated the country; by 1941, the economy was totally dominated by the extraction of raw materials. Agriculture declined dramatically causing a significant fall in the living standards of the already poverty stricken campesinos.

Venezuelan democracy was a racket to further enrich the fabulously wealthy. The state bureaucracy, already corrupt, now had as its main purpose, the funnelling of state oil revenues into private pockets while avoiding any public backlash. Oil money was used to bribe the middle classes through the growth of a state bureaucracy until it employed nearly half the working population.2 By 1998, Venezuela would rank as one of the ten most corrupt countries in the world with an interlocking system of graft and privileges feeding off the oil industry at the expense of the people. Of course, a small part of the oil revenues was spent on providing some social housing and the most basic of education, but these rose and fell with the price of oil on the world market.

By the start of World War II there were, in the cities and oil fields, large numbers of professional managers, technicians and literate wage-earners who wanted an end to the ultra-conservative rule of the caudillos. The World War ‘for democracy’ accelerated social and economic development, and different political parties were permitted, which allowed Rómulo Betancourt a well-known activist and, at that time, communist sympathiser, to tap into the widespread dissent and rapidly create what was, in effect, a mass party of the pardo, the non-white, impoverished overwhelming majority of the population, Acción Democrática (AD).3 AD was a reformist party: it called for universal suffrage, an end to political rule by the military, genuine representative government, industrialisation of the country not just the oil industry, agrarian reform, more public health facilities and better educational provision.

The Allies’ need for a secure source of oil, allowed the Venezuelan National Congress to pass the Hydrocarbons Law of 1943, imposing taxes and royalties amounting to about forty-three per cent of oil profits, and limiting concessions to a maximum of forty years. This law remained basically unchanged until 1976, the year of nationalisation. The Hydrocarbons Law brought in extra income but tied it to taxes on oil sales. Increasing oil production increased income, but meant an ever-greater reliance by the state on this one source of revenue.

General Isaías Medina Angarita, military dictator from 1941, in a bid to strengthen his regime, called elections at the end of 1945 but his manoeuvring angered Betancourt to such an extent that Betancourt pledged the support of the strongest political party in Venezuela to a group of military conspirators, creating the conditions for the 18 October, 1945 coup d’etat. Medina was quickly overthrown by a combination of a military rebellion and a popular movement led by AD. Betancourt, now the most popular politician in the country was called to chair the junta of government.

The three-year period from 1945 to 1948 saw the first free democratic elections in Venezuelan history, which AD won by a landslide on a radical programme of universal suffrage and an increase in tax on oil revenues from forty-three per cent to fifty per cent. The USA offered no serious opposition to the hike in oil taxes in return for a secure and plentiful supply close to home. However, AD also promised land reform. The landed oligarchy comprised less than two per cent of the population, but owned seventy-five per cent of the country’s arable land. So powerful was this group that no government in Venezuela’s history had succeeded in imposing any kind of land tax. The AD government proposed that idle and under-utilised land should be compulsorily purchased and distributed to landless peasants. The land-owners fought tooth and nail, and on 24 November, 1948, between the bill being passed and its implementation, Colonel Marcos Pérez Jiménez and Minister of Defence, Lt. Colonel Carlos Delgado Chalbaud (both coup organisers in 1945) staged another coup. In all class societies there have been strong links between the armed forces and the landed gentry, Venezuela was no exception.

Political parties were suppressed and all prominent members of AD and the Communist Party (PCV) were exiled or jailed. Then the Junta decided to legitimise its position by holding an election for president. The 30 November, 1952 election was a notorious travesty, which demonstrated just how much hostility there was towards the military. However, ignoring the popular vote, Pérez assumed the presidency on 19 April, 1953, and enacted a new constitution allowing him to rule openly as a military dictator. The limited reforms introduced by AD were reversed, but a temporary rise in the price of oil meant Pérez was able to buy a degree of support by launching a number of public works programmes such as social housing and building the Central University of Venezuela. His main expenditure, however, was modernising the military and expanding the secret police (National Security, Seguridad Nacional), which ruthlessly hunted down, imprisoned, tortured and killed those who voiced opposition to his rule.

From the mid-1950s, Middle Eastern countries contributed significant amounts of oil to the world petroleum market and the over-supply meant Venezuela experienced a sharp drop in state income. This resulted in government spending on education, health and public housing being slashed, while the spending on lavish, costly and unnecessary construction projects such as the world’s most expensive officers’ club overlooking Caracas was maintained.

A referendum, on 15 December, 1957, to extend Pérez’ mandate had exactly the opposite effect. Officially, eighty-seven per cent of voters favoured he stay in office for another five years, but so unanimous had been the opposition that the regime began to fragment immediately. On 1 January, 1958, a failed coup by air force officers provoked a popular rebellion. Street demonstrations mobilised by students, opposition political parties and some business leaders, culminated in a general strike on 21 January, with overwhelming mass support. A navy revolt led by Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal followed, and in the early hours of 23 January, Pérez fled to the Dominican Republic.

At news of the overthrow, the people took to the streets, destroying the headquarters of the government newspaper, El Heraldo, attacking the headquarters of the security forces and dispensing quick justice to those they caught. A Provisional Government led by Larrazábal called elections, and released political prisoners.4 Betancourt won the 7 December, 1958 presidential election handsomely; AD holding seventy-three of 133 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and thirty-two of fifty-one seats in the Senate.

Prior to the elections, AD, with the other two main political parties – COPEI (Comité Popular Electoral Independiente5) and URD (Unión Republicana Democrática6), signed the Punto Fijo Pact. This was a formal arrangement between the three main parties, under the pretext of protecting democracy, to share power whatever the election results. The Pact guaranteed the three parties access to power in proportion to the votes cast. In other words, whichever party won the presidential and legislative elections, it would be obliged to share the spoils of Venezuela’s oil economy with the other two parties. This way, each of the main parties was guaranteed access to jobs, contracts, ministerial posts, etc. In accordance with the Pact, Betancourt invited members of COPEI and URD to join his cabinet. Radical socialist parties and the PCV were, naturally, excluded.

The agreement grew into an ongoing arrangement between AD and COPEI to share power and its accompanying perks, to the exclusion of all others, made all the more easy because there were no substantial ideological differences between them.7 For the next thirty-five years AD and COPEI would play ping-pong with the presidency and government. The Punto Fijo pact began falling apart with the decline in oil rents in the mid 1980’s. Its days were over when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998.

The main trade union federation, the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela, CTV), was similarly divided, although AD, as its founder, always retained final control. The overthrow of Pérez had raised expectations but Betancourt’s response was soon seen as a betrayal. Elected on a left-wing programme and personal image, he rapidly reconciled himself with the interests of the dominant classes, convinced that no leftist government could face down US imperialism.8 With the perspective of the US as invincible, Betancourt was little more than a pawn of the oil companies and the military who allowed him considerable leeway conditional upon their share of the oil monies remaining stable and their continued existence as virtually autonomous institutions. The Cuban revolution of January 1959 was a stinging refutation of his analysis.

3. Land Reform, Guerrilla Warfare

The uprising and street fighting against the Pérez dictatorship had been led by students and the members of the youth movements of both AD and COPEI and there was considerable impatience with the mismatch between Betancourt’s pre-election promises and his actual programme. Dissent against the regime grew rapidly and, increasingly, protesting students, peasants and workers were assaulted, tortured and killed by the secret police.

Under the influence of the Cuban Revolution and the world-wide upsurge it inspired, the AD youth, in particular, moved rapidly leftwards, increasingly in opposition to Betancourt’s leadership. Its youth movement split from the AD in April 1960 to form its own party, Leftist Democratic Action, but this name was soon changed to Movement of the Revolutionary Left (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, MIR). The MIR rapidly concluded that the oppression was so intense that meaningful change within the system was impossible and in 1962 turned to guerrilla actions. Simultaneously, large numbers of young activists entered the PCV buoyed up by Castro’s victory in Cuba, and pressed the Stalinist leadership to commence guerrilla warfare.

In response, Betancourt closed the premises of the MIR and PCV, closed opposition newspapers, suspended constitutional rights and civil liberties and arrested the MIR and PCV members of Congress. Against the background of the Cuban Revolution, this drive against leftists and the closure of democratic means of protests was interpreted by the PCV as obliging it to turn to armed struggle, and its Third Congress (1962) reluctantly approved the road of guerrilla warfare. A sector of the PCV under the leadership of Comandante Douglas Bravo was given responsibility for military work.9

The PCV and the MIR guerrillas were co-ordinated through the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, Armed Forces of National Liberation) launched on 20 February, 1963. However, the MIR and PCV differed over strategy: the MIR saw a long war stretching over many years while the PCV view of guerrilla warfare was one in which the CP tops in the city ordered attacks on such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time, in support of a reformist perspective,10 a strategy doomed to failure.

The launch of the peasant guerrilla war could hardly have been less well-timed. Betancourt was proclaiming widely and loudly that there would be a thorough-going agrarian reform. Land reform bills were passed: unused, underused, and the least productive land was to be taken for the landless, though the compensation paid was higher than the best land would have fetched on the open market.11 The US, fearful that the Cuban revolution might spread, endorsed these modest measures. Betancourt made a great show of visiting the countryside every week to hand over to poor peasants and rural labourers the deeds to their own land. The distribution of these small pieces of land succeeded, for the moment, in maintaining campesino support for the AD. Without the sincere support of a significant proportion of the campesinos it is impossible to think of successful guerrilla activity, but the guerrilla bands were getting a cold, even hostile, reception.12

In all, more than 90,000, almost a quarter of all, campesino families were given deeds. However, the corruption and disorganisation was such that peasants could be allocated land but not told where it was; certainly no equipment was supplied to the peasants to bring the land to a state where it could be farmed, no access to fertilisers, no loans to buy seed, and in many cases no access to the land itself. Land reform was being implemented but nothing was being achieved. A 1998 census revealed that ninety per cent of farmland given to the poor under the 1960 agrarian reform programme had since been sold back to the caudillos at ten per cent of the price they had been paid.

For the guerrillas, matters came to a head very rapidly when the FALN denounced the December 1963 elections and showed its amateurism, inexperience, and overwhelmingly petty-bourgeois nature by unequivocally promising they would not take place. Over ninety per cent of eligible voters cast their votes, the FALN failed to rally even the students, let alone the rural or urban poor. The result was a serious split within the PCV guerrilla cadres: Bravo now advocated a protracted guerrilla war, while Teodoro Petkoff accepted the peaceful road and went on to play a key role in founding and leading the Movement for Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS).

Indicative of the attitudes of the urban poor to the guerrillas were the responses of barrio women who, generally steered clear of the guerrillas and concentrated their struggles on the provision of, for example, improved facilities for local schools, drinkable water, and so on. Not that these struggles were peaceful, all too often they incurred beatings from police clubs and imprisonment.13 The reality was that the guerrilla struggles were isolated; they increased the political domination of the AD and COPEI, who used the guerrillas to defame the political left generally.

At the January 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, the long-simmering differences between the Cubans and those adopting a class-collaborationist policy towards, particularly, the Betancourt and Leoni regimes in Venezuela (Raúl Leoni Otero succeeded as AD President on 13 March, 1964) burst into the open. The Cubans launched a broadside against those who opposed armed struggle as the necessary road to power in Latin America but were caught on the back foot when, to their surprise, the leadership of the PCV broke publicly with the FALN, declaring the tactic of guerrilla warfare “erroneous and harmful”.

The Political Committee of the PCV furiously denounced Castro. The Eighth Plenum of the PCV, held in early April, 1967, formally agreed to end guerrilla activities and Bravo was expelled. The PCV then agreed to participate in the upcoming 1968 elections under the slogan ‘democratic peace’ behind a candidate of ‘national unification’. Teodoro Petkoff accepted the new line and remained on the Central Committee of the PCV, but his experiences had led him to a more independent and critical position regarding the history of the PCV and the Soviet Union.14

President Caldera (1969-74) won the 1968 election for COPEI, finalised a ceasefire with the FALN, legalised the PCV, and reformed the 1961 Constitution to allow ex-guerrillas to be elected to public office. In autumn 1969, Petkoff published Czechoslovakia – Socialism as a Problem, which opened the door to a re-evaluation of Stalinism by defending Dubcek’s liberalising measures against the slander that they were leading back to capitalism. It also, in the teeth of PCV criticisms, defended the Cuban Revolution. This book won him solid support amongst Young Communists, sufficient to retain his position on the Central Committee.

Petkoff now openly questioned whether the Venezuelan bourgeoisie could be progressive, since it relied for its existence on the USA and, in June 1970, he published Socialism for Venezuela, a book that challenged the core of the PCV programme, the theory of stages:15

One of the sacred myths of Stalinism was the existence of a ‘national bourgeoisie’… a section of the national bourgeoisie had developed with so little connection with imperialism that, under the colossal pressure of competition from imported goods and faced with the combined power of the imperialist economies and the local big bourgeoisie, it possessed an anti-imperialist capacity that meant it could collaborate in a meaningful way in a grand, multi-class front for national liberation…

To this end, the party programmes made important concessions, including the fundamental one of limiting the objectives of the revolutionary transformation of the country to a bourgeois-democratic phase, offering the perspective of the expansion of national capitalisms once imperialist domination was broken and the internal market enlarged by agrarian reform…

Conflicts between this social layer and imperialism do exist, and revolutionaries should intervene to foment and support them. But the Communist Parties in their attempts to win over or neutralize this sector inserted into their general political line concessions that lessened the revolutionary content of their own programmes, promoted bourgeois-democratic illusions, and created a general debilitating belief in the possibility of the independent development of Latin America by a capitalist road.

The examples of the bourgeois democratic revolutions in Mexico nearly two hundred years ago, and in Bolivia and Cuba after World War II, should have demonstrated in practice the inability of the national bourgeoisie to lead the democratic revolution. But there are none so blind as those that won’t see… Up to now ‘operation national bourgeoisie’ has not enabled us to win either this bourgeoisie… or the working class… What does this conception of ‘national unity’, of which the leadership of our party was the most outspoken champion… have to do with Marxism? …it is nothing but a new formulation of the policy of class collaboration.

When Petkoff condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and reliance on the national bourgeoisie, the PCV – as a Stalinist party – disavowed both his argument and his right to organise support within the party. At the same time, the PCV, in line with its theory of stages, endorsed the presidential candidacy of an AD dissident, Luís Beltrán Prieto Figueroa.

Moscow intervened to close down discussion by vigorously denouncing Petkoff in the pages of Pravda as an anti-Leninist and anti-socialist. So crass were these manoeuvres that a combination of the youth section, a tendency around Pompeyo Márquez that had been calling for greater internal party democracy, and trade union leaders who opposed the setting up of rival unions to those of the AD, quit the party to found the MAS.16

The MAS held its first congress in January, 1971, and adopted a reformist perspective – democratic liberties would gradually expand until society achieved socialism. At its first major public rally (15 February, 1971) the MAS openly stated that it was seeking an accord with those bourgeois parties excluded from the AD/COPEI accord.

The overthrow of the Popular Unity government in Chile and the killing of Salvador Allende in September 1973 had a traumatic effect on all the left parties in Latin America. The leadership of the MAS moved decisively away from its socialist roots, dropping the labels ‘Communist’ and ‘Leninist’.17 The MIR and MAS were on the same trajectory, and in 1982 they began a process of alliance and merger which ended with the MIR disbanding, and most of its members joining the MAS. In the run-up to the 1983 election the MAS stopped calling itself ‘Marxist’, and symbolically refused to include a ‘Woman’s Right to Choose’ in its election programme.18 It would, however, never win more than about five per cent of votes.

Actually, the PCV fractured into three, a small group of militants rejected the rightward evolution of both the MAS and the PCV and launched Radical Cause (La Causa Radical, LCR) under the leadership of Alfredo Maneiro, an intellectual and one-time PCV guerrilla fighter. This was by far the smallest of the three groups, but had the largest proportion of workers in its ranks. Claiming to be Marxist, the LCR maintained a small but important base in the trade unions, primarily amongst the steel workers in the Guayana Region, winning leadership positions in the steel workers’ union (SUTISS) against the opposition of the AD.19

The Second World War had created a conjuncture of specific conditions: the entire capitalist world was in a state of unparalleled debility and disarray, of which the rise of the Chinese workers’ state was the most extreme manifestation. The emergence of a rising nationalism and an end of formal colonial domination meant the ‘Third World’, especially the oil-exporters, saw an opportunity to flex their muscles and demand a greater share of oil revenues. The formation of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) – now a price-fixing cartel – represented an attempt by semi-colonial and colonial countries to gain national sovereignty over natural resources. Venezuela created the Venezuelan Oil Corporation, which would form the basis for the nationalisation of its oil industry. Then, in August 1971, President Caldera nationalised the country’s natural gas industry and stipulated that all exploration, production, refining, and sales programmes of the oil companies required prior Ministerial approval.20

In 1973, the oil producers of the Persian Gulf countries decided to boycott those nations which had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War against Egypt. Within a year, the price of oil had quadrupled. Venezuela experienced a flood of oil monies, and the newly-elected President Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodríguez (1974-79), a self-professed social-democrat, announced an ambitious economic plan, ‘La Gran Venezuela’, which called for the nationalisation of the oil industry and for the revenues gained to fund Venezuela’s transformation into a developed country within a few years, fighting poverty by increasing incomes and diversifying the country’s economy by import substitution.

On 1 January, 1976, the country officially nationalised its oil industry (paying the foreign companies US$1 billion), and created Venezuelan Oil (Petróleos de Venezuela SA, PDVSA). The fourteen transnational corporations became the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company, but continued to operate as fourteen distinct and separate Venezuelan companies in competition with each other. Since all managers were Venezuelan, there was no change in management personnel, practices or culture on nationalisation. For example, Shell Venezuela became Maraven, the name changed but the president, management and ethos remained the same. At the top, Venezuela’s oil industry maintained an anti-statist culture, placing its own interests and those of the international oil industry above those of the Venezuelan government. The ties to the former owners were maintained through commercial deals, which seriously discounted the price of oil, and contracts to pay over-the-top fees for technical advice and assistance.21

The bourgeois politicians of the AD and COPEI were convinced that Venezuela’s soaring oil revenues could be used to industrialise the country via huge infrastructure and public projects, spending on which was vastly in excess of the additional oil income, with the shortfall funded by external debt. The government’s expectation was that high oil revenues were here to stay. These grand schemes caused the cost of living to rise significantly, leaving millions of Venezuelans even more mired in poverty.

For the next ten years, both COPEI and AD presidents used monies borrowed at high interest rates to generously fund selected agricultural and industrial projects. In 1980, as oil prices peaked, it was decided that PDVSA would aggressively expand, and it bought refineries in USA and Europe, and the American gas station network Citgo. In doing so, it catapulted itself into the third-largest oil company worldwide. However, oil prices began to fall, gradually at first and then more steeply, and with falling revenues, poverty increased. OPEC members, under pressure from the US, were violating production quotas, and oil prices fell drastically. Oil income was declining, but reducing government spending was not as easy as it had been to increase it. The result was a government getting deeper and deeper into debt, crippling the Venezuelan economy. Only through AD control of the major trade union federation, the CTV, did the regime manage to keep a lid on worker protests.

The crisis broke in January 1989 just as Carlos Andrés Pérez was taking office as president for a second time. He had run a populist election campaign, but on taking office he announced a policy which had the full backing of the International Monetary Fund: to minimise state intervention in the economy, to no longer seek to generate employment or engage in e.g., housing projects. Instead, there would be privatisation of state-owned enterprises and an accelerated expansion of the private sector. To attract foreign investment financial rules would be relaxed, and existing price controls were removed beginning with an immediate 100 per cent increase in the cost of petrol.22

4. The Caracazo, Chávez and the 1998 Presidential Election

On the morning of Monday 27 February, 1989, those travelling to work by bus found fares had doubled. Students who simultaneously lost their half-price concessions found their fares had quadrupled. Popular demonstrations began in Guarenas, near the capital and then spread nationally. This was a spontaneous rising of the masses. The fare rises ignited the bonfire of injustices accumulated over years. This expression of the rage felt by the poor and downtrodden became known as the Caracazo, a misnomer, since the uprising was not confined to Caracas but was nationwide. Protests escalated: first the burning of buses, and then widespread rioting and looting. The government and its intelligence agencies were taken by surprise, but so too were all the political parties, including the PCV, MAS and LCR. With no leadership and no clear aims, the Caracazo dissipated in anarchy and chaos.

However, the Caracazo taught the popular masses of Venezuela a severe lesson in the realities of bourgeois democracy. On 28 February, Pérez declared a state of emergency, but both the police and the National Guard baulked at the mass shooting of civilian protesters. The army was called in. The killings went on for a fortnight in a calculated warning to the barrios of what they could expect in any further attempt at rebellion. Even though the army had carried out its murderous orders, a group of politically motivated officers (co-ordinated through the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement – 200 [Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario – 200, MBR-200]), one of whose leaders was Major Hugo Chávez, became convinced of the need to overthrow the regime.23

These young officers did not keep their secret very well and, in December, Chávez and several others were arrested, charged with plotting against the government and planning to assassinate the president. Nothing was proved, the accused were allowed to take leave of absence, after which they were again appointed to responsible posts – Chávez, for example, now a lieutenant-colonel, was given command of a paratrooper battalion.

Chávez and his associates continued with their plans and launched their ‘military-civilian’ uprising on 4 February, 1992. However, Pérez managed to rally the rest of the military against the plotters. Chávez and a small group of rebels were soon isolated in the Military Museum in Caracas, without any means of contacting their collaborators. Chávez gave himself up to the government and was allowed to appear on national television – for seventy-two seconds – to call for all remaining rebel detachments in Venezuela to cease hostilities. When he did so, Chávez famously quipped that he had only failed “por ahora” (“for now”). This was taken by many that Chávez’ project to overthrow the government was only suspended, and he would return. Chávez was catapulted into the national spotlight as a man of action, with many poor Venezuelans seeing him as an admirable figure who had stood up against government corruption, and a hope for the future.24

Together with his fellow officers, Chávez was tried under military regulations, and imprisoned at the San Carlos military stockade, but pro-Chávez demonstrations outside led to his transfer to the more secure Yare Prison. Conditions in Venezuelan prisons were appalling, inmates were left to their own devices and it was only by the rebels keeping together as a group that they were able to survive. On the other hand, Chávez was able to give radio interviews, to receive visitors – including representatives of MAS and LCR – and to write his manifesto: How to escape the labyrinth (Cómo salir del laberinto).25

While Chávez was being held in prison, on 27 November, 1992, a second short-lived attempt to overthrow the government was launched by a group of young officers loyal to MBR-200. By mid-day it was over, with the leading conspirators having fled. Unlike in February, government agents now took advantage of the situation to kill surrendered rebels and oppositionists, arbitrarily arresting and assaulting hundreds, including entirely innocent student leaders. Pérez was now seen as a threat to the regime by the old guard of AD and the opposition in Congress, who ganged up to impeach him, placed him under house arrest, and removed him from office.

Caldera, now eighty-six years old, was unacceptable to COPEI as its presidential candidate, and he was forced to found a brand-new political movement, Convergencia, which contained seventeen smaller political parties including the PCV, MAS and URD. Caldera ran a campaign that had two clear planks: to stand up to the IMF, and to release Hugo Chávez. When the returns were in, Caldera had won by a slim margin but with abstentions at a record forty per cent.

Caldera’s presidency began with popular decisions. Chávez and others were pardoned, and their political rights reinstated. Founding members of the MAS: Petkoff and Márquez were appointed as Ministers of Planning, and Frontiers, respectively. But the honeymoon was short-lived. Financial deregulation allowed banks to aggressively compete for deposits, with many banks paying higher interest rates than they could afford. With little banking supervision the market was full of speculative bubbles. It only needed a weakening of the oil price to trigger a banking crisis.

Between January 1994 and August 1995, seventeen of the country’s forty-nine commercial banks, representing just over half of the system’s assets, failed. Caldera guaranteed the safety of deposits at a total cost of US$12 billion.26 The falling oil price simultaneously led to a collapse in government revenues, so Caldera attempted to raise the moneys required using neo-liberal methods, including (in 1997), selling a majority share in the giant state-owned steel corporation SIDOR to private investors. It was workers who shouldered the cost of saving the banks, SIDOR cut its workforce by a third (18,000 to 12,000), and then replaced half the remaining permanent employees with non-union labour hired via sub-contractors and often paid below the official minimum wage.27

Caldera pursued a policy known as Apertura – opening the state sector to privatisation. The steel industry was the most extreme example, but the state oil companies investment plan expected one third of new investment to be from such companies as Shell or BP. Between 1994 and 1998 the world price of oil fell from about US$26 to under US$18 a barrel, and combined with neo-liberal economic policies, this meant that, in Venezuela, real wages fell, on average, by a quarter, with additional cuts in healthcare (thirty-seven per cent), in education (forty per cent) and in housing (seventy per cent). By 1998, one third of Venezuelans lived in extreme poverty and another third lived in poverty. Yet, over the same period the share of the national income pocketed by the top ten per cent rose from 21.8 per cent to 32.8 per cent.28

Caldera and the traditional parties, offering no real solution to the crisis, became increasingly unpopular, with the masses looking for alternative ways out of their poverty. The MAS lost credibility when Petkoff actively supported even the most conservative and reactionary of Caldera’s policies, ignoring the rank and file opposition within MAS.

After his release from prison in March 1994, Chávez travelled around Venezuela, reaching out to the politically-excluded, establishing links with the existing informal networks, primarily those campaigning for clean water, drainage, sewage disposal, electricity, education, and health provision. These were, in their great majority, women. In Venezuela, as in so many other under-developed countries, poverty had been feminised and, in reaching out to the poor, Chávez was reaching out to women. The majority of his support from then until his death was the women of the barrios29 In discussion with MAS and LCR leaders, he concluded he should stand for president in the 1998 elections. In January 1997 the MBR-200 held its first congress, and agreed it should field candidates in the elections for president, congress, senate, state governors, and local mayors to be held on 6 December, 1998.

Chávez’ decision to run for election caused the LCR to split in February 1997, with the majority of the rank and file forming Homeland for Everyone (Patria Para Todos, PPT) to support Chávez in his bid for the presidency, a small rump containing most of the leaders continuing as La Causa Radical. Chávez launched the Movement for a Fifth Republic (Movimiento Quinta Republica, MVR), in July 1997, to act as his political party and organise his electoral campaign. The MVR itself was very small, and would gain the great majority of its members from mergers with other parties. In parallel, and largely independently, groups of barrio activists mobilised in his support.30

Almost in its entirety, the MAS chose to align itself with Chávez, though some big names such as Petkoff remained with Caldera. Noting which way the wind was blowing – Chávez had by far the highest rating of any of the candidates – the PCV and a host of tiny groups declared for Chávez who won handsomely with just over fifty-six per cent of the vote. His nearest rival, formally representing Project Venezuela, but with the whole of the establishment lined up behind him, got forty per cent.

This was the first time for a generation that an election had delivered a candidate with genuine majority support, and it gave Chávez unprecedented authority as president. However, in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, AD and COPEI had the majority of seats. Chávez had become president without any real party apparatus behind him; this gave the MAS and PPT a head start in, for example, drafting a new Bolivarian Constitution, but it also meant that Chávez relied very heavily on bourgeois figures such as the businessman and industrialist Luís Miquilena who had joined him in founding the MVR and would be appointed Minister of the Interior and Justice. It would later become clear that many such people had joined Chávez in the hope of re-legitimising bourgeois democracy in Venezuela while limiting any changes introduced.

The politics of the MVR in 1998 were radical, but neither socialist nor revolutionary. Its programme, the so-called ‘Plan Bolívar 2000’, was essentially limited to: (i) changing the name, Republic of Venezuela to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (República Bolivariana de Venezuela), (ii) a new Bolivarian Constitution, which would require a national referendum to endorse the creation of a National Constituent Assembly (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente, ANC) to draft it, and (iii) the goal of integrating the armed forces into the economic and social life of the country. The groups supporting Chávez projected the constitutional reform under the slogan, ‘All power to the people’. This may have been more an expression of their own hopes than reality, but it sparked an explosion of self-activity by the masses, including many who had taken to the streets during the Caracazo.

Even a section of the Venezuelan ruling class backed Chávez’ campaign, hoping to use him as a pressure washer to clean the façade of Venezuelan politics and give bourgeois democracy a new lease of life. However, his campaign reached out to the people who had risen up in February 1989, those in fundamental conflict with the interests of the landlords, capitalists, bankers, media owners and wealthy parasites who formed the Venezuelan oligarchy. Speaking the colloquial language of the people, Hugo Chávez travelled the length and breadth of the country engaging in a dialogue with the poorest and most oppressed. His message was simple, clear and appealing: against the old order. For the first time in decades the masses were drawn into political activity, as they saw a candidate with whom they could identify, and who reflected their interests and aspirations. Spontaneous, and with no central plan, the upsurge was chaotic, but it demonstrated how eager the Venezuelan masses were to have some control over their own lives and this, of course, terrified the oligarchy.

The referendum to approve a Constituent Assembly took place on 19 April, 1999, voters being asked two questions: (i) should the ANC be convened? (ii) do you agree with the President’s suggestion of how the ANC should be elected? Both measures were overwhelmingly approved. Two months later (25 July), the elections for the ANC took place and 125 seats out of a total of 131 were Chávez supporters. On 3 August, the ANC met to begin drafting the new constitution.

President Chávez then undertook a series of presidential visits to Japan, China, Malaysia, Spain and France, intended to boost trade. While he was away, the MAS, PPT and others on the left had a field day drawing up the most democratic and libertarian of bourgeois constitutions; it still guaranteed the right for individuals to own the means of production (Article 115 of the Constitution). The rights of the Venezuelan people now included the right to healthcare and the right to employment providing an adequate salary. The indigenous population (twenty-six ethnic groups comprising less than 1.5 per cent of the total) were given specific rights, including education in their own languages, their own territories, and a guaranteed three seats in the National Assembly. The ANC gave the people the right of recall over their representatives. It also ended state funding of political parties, a means by which the party tops in AD and COPEI had been assured luxurious lifestyles. The legislature changed from a bicameral system, similar to the US, to a unicameral one where a National Assembly would be the only legislative body.

With the masses, these measures were hugely popular even if many were only statements of intent. But the constitution was also popular because the left groups and ANC members took the discussion on the constitution into the localities, calling public meetings at which the population could have its say. In the Bolivarian Circles (Círculos Bolivarianos) of the barrios it was a subject of much discussion and debate, one result being that the country’s poor in particular supported the new constitution with genuine intensity. The constitution was, and is, widely available as a little blue book that was enthusiastically waved at demonstrations and rallies by pro-government supporters. It pulled together the heterogeneous, dispersed and fragmented support of Chávez by reflecting the democratic goals of the masses. The fear amongst the oligarchs was that the masses would strive to make it a reality. The task for revolutionaries was to make this Bolivarian Constitution a call for mass action, the logic of which would lead the popular masses to overthrow the oligarchy.

The ANC gave itself seniority over all the existing state institutions, a move vigorously opposed by the existing lower and higher chambers of Congress. The matter was both important and urgent because the ANC had determined to investigate the judiciary – it being universally acknowledged except by those who benefited that the court system in Venezuela was totally corrupt. A nine-member commission was appointed by the president with powers to dismiss even the Supreme Court (Tribunal Supremo de Justicia, TSJ). Congress, itself deeply mired in the corruption, attempted to engineer a confrontation with the ANC, and decided to review the resignation of the president of the TSJ who had quit in protest at the investigation. Across the country there were demonstrations for and against the ANC’s actions, and the first street battles of the Chávez presidency took place. Faced with inciting events that could only make things worse for themselves, the opposition backed down.

When Chávez arrived home, he found his pet project to rename the country as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela had been dropped because the Assembly considered it too costly to change all the government’s letterheads, official seals, etc. Chávez had it re-instated. The Assembly had also decided that Venezuela’s citizens not only had the right to information, but information that was “timely, true, and impartial”. The opposition read this as the state having the right to censor newspapers and TV stations for providing information it did not consider “true.” The final version declared that information was to be provided “without censorship, in accordance with the principles of this constitution”.31 This unbecoming compromise freed the media to launch a virtual war, based on lies, slander and provocations against all the progressive content of government policies.

In Grenada, the short-lived Workers’ and Peasants’ Government (1979-83) had faced similar hostility and misreporting in the bourgeois press. The action taken there was to ‘democratise’ the newspapers by passing a law restricting ownership to citizens of Grenada and limiting any one person to no more than four per cent of the shares.

In early 1999, the US ambassador, John Maisto, appreciating the radical nature of the upcoming ANC, hurried the government to sign the treaty the US administration had forced on all other Latin American countries (save Cuba), guaranteeing protection of foreign investments. Chávez made no objection and the treaty was duly signed in the October. At much the same time, the ANC was inserting into the new constitution a clause forbidding the presence of foreign troops on Venezuelan soil which, given the history of Latin America, was clearly aimed at the US. Maisto, an astute man, appraised the situation with his comment: “Watch what Chávez does, don’t listen to what he says”.32

Probably the most indicative issue that had been a litmus test for the regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua, was a woman’s right to choose. The ANC was on the verge of having the draft constitution approving the right to abortion, but, as Gott explains, this was unacceptable to Chávez so while many progressive principles were included in the constitution with respect to women’s rights, “motherhood” was to be protected from the point of conception. This was a political statement that put the Venezuelan state alongside the Catholic Church hierarchy against a woman’s right to choose.33 This is not to say the new constitution did not represent a big step forward for women’s rights. Article 21 stated: “No discrimination based on race, sex, creed or social standing shall be permitted, nor… any discrimination… nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on equal terms, of the rights and liberties of every individual”. This denial of abortion rights was a bad omen for the future.

The ANC’s commission on judicial restructuring threatened the privileges enjoyed by corrupt bankers and politicians. It was judges who ensured charges were dropped on the flimsiest grounds, guaranteed errors in court procedures as would lead to acquittals, or simply postponed proceedings sine die. On the other hand, over half of Venezuela’s prison population, many incarcerated for years in dreadful conditions, had never been brought to trial.

The commission’s report claimed most of the country’s judges were so corrupt and/or incompetent that they should be summarily dismissed, and by 2000, over three-quarters had been removed, a process of repair and rectification of a bourgeois system. To keep the courts operating, the commission quickly appointed a large number of new judges. There were no people’s courts, no involvement of the masses, no election of judges, and no revolutionary code for the courts. Instead, a raft of provisional judges were put in place, most of whom were lawyers, products of the same corrupt system that was meant to be eliminated. Many were openly hostile to the cleansing process.

On taking office, Chávez had been faced with the lowest oil prices (in real terms) since before WWII and an industry that, left to its own devices, put its own interests and the needs of the USA first, even if that meant the impoverishment of millions of Venezuelans. The Chávez government took immediate action under the guidance of Ali Rodríguez Araque, an ex-guerrilla fighter and member of the PPT. Araque transformed Venezuela from quota avoider into OPEC’s most enthusiastic quota-enforcer. A major success of Chávez’ government in its first year was that oil prices rallied, and by the year 2000 would have doubled. This inevitably brought Venezuela into conflict with the big oil companies and US imperialism.

Chávez had no defined economic policy. In his first speech as president (2 February, 1999) he defined his perspective: “as much state as necessary, and as much market as possible”.34 However, just by attempting to impose a rational system (even in bourgeois) terms on the PDVSA inspired hatred of the new government. Yes, Venezuela did have huge oil revenues, but the entire system had grown and developed so that the richest ten per cent acquired over half the national income. There had been some face-saving social expenditure, but any suggestion that the system would be re-organised and open to inspection threatened to rob the oligarchs of their plunder.

At the same time, Chávez attempted to affect one of his pre-election promises and put 70,000 of Venezuela’s 120,000 soldiers to useful social work. Military personnel (about 200 active duty officers) appeared in responsible posts in important ministries. But this was not a smooth process; too many of these officers were university graduates with working-class backgrounds who thought ‘Plan Bolivar 2000’ was a good idea, and were looking for ways to implement it. Voices began to be raised in the bourgeois media asking whether Chávez was the right man to revitalise Venezuela.

The PDVSA had been formally nationalised in 1976 but was run almost independently of the government, for the benefit of the top executives who not only pocketed exorbitant salaries but had in place all kinds of schemes for transferring company monies into the pockets of themselves, and their families and friends. For example: PDVSA oil was carried in a fleet of oil tankers owned by the company president; the computer services used by the PDVSA were supplied by a company owned by a member of the board of directors; the company employed two to three times the number of administrators and managers as its rivals but far fewer employees in total, meaning a substantial amount of field work was outsourced to private companies, many of which were owned by friends and family, or gave large kickbacks for their contracts.

Naturally, the PDVSA tops were bitterly opposed to paying increased royalties to the Venezuelan state. They had in place a highly developed strategy for keeping profits out of the hands of government. Refineries had been purchased in the US and Europe and then, using an in-house mechanism not open to government scrutiny, oil was sold substantially below the market price to its own subsidiaries who kept their huge profits in overseas trusts. This scheme for siphoning off national resources was wildly successful. Between 1981 and 2000, the royalties paid to the state fell from seventy-one cents per $1 of gross earnings to thirty-one cents.35 Araque was determined to end these practices; the PDVSA managers were equally determined that he would not.

5. The ‘Mega-Election’ of 30 July, 2000, and the Forty-Nine Enabling Laws

The changes in the constitution meant every holder of an elected office, from president to local council had to stand for re-election. In the ‘mega-election’ of 30 July, 2000, 33,000 candidates stood for over 6,000 posts. In the presidential race Chávez obtained 59.8 per cent of the votes cast, Francisco Arias Cárdenas (officially representing the rump of Radical Cause, but with the backing of AD and COPEI) obtained 37.5 per cent. In the elections for the National Assembly the Chavistas won 104 out of 165 seats, marking a transformation of political power. Chávez and his supporters held the presidency and, effectively, a two-thirds majority in the Assembly. The election results made Chávez even less acceptable to the oligarchs.

Chávez’ political platform now included: a fight against corruption, a fairer distribution of incomes, greater support by the state for local self-help initiatives, greater accountability of the lower levels of government and greater grassroots participation in community improvement. The programme caught the imagination of those at the bottom of Venezuelan society struggling to make ends meet. This activation of the masses was not welcomed by the oligarchs who had previously kept political power firmly in their hands and excluded the popular masses from effective participation.

For those who had siphoned state revenues into their pockets, the Chávez government was a nightmare and a disaster rolled into one. This ultra-conservative layer had, in the space of months, been faced with the loss of their political hegemony with the defeat of AD and COPEI; the courts which had protected them from prosecution for their corrupt practices were to be made responsible to a democratically-elected government; anti-discriminatory legislation had given those they despised and feared (women, the people of the barrios and the indigenous peoples) protection from their discriminatory practices; and – worst of all – the government was now threatening to re-organise the PDVSA to remove from them a major source of income. They determined to use their hold over the mass media to block any further moves.

In October 2000, Chávez announced the appointment of General Guaicaipuro Lameda, Head of the Central Planning Bureau of the Venezuelan army, as President of PDVSA. In February 2001, a series of public announcements by dissident officers in the armed forces were choreographed by the media to give the impression that opposition was gathering momentum and that Chávez could no longer rely on the backing of the military. The so-called Democratic Co-ordination, which included most anti-Communist elements in Venezuela, attacked government polices as ‘Castro-Communism’ while actively sabotaging the economy (some US$50 billion of Venezuelan capital had been sent abroad by the summer of 2002).

Under a new bilateral agreement, Venezuela supplied Cuba with up to 53,000 barrels of oil a day in exchange for Cuban teachers, doctors, and nurses serving in Venezuela and assisting in a range of social projects. The Cuban teachers were a special target of the Democratic Co-ordination, as government “endorsement of Cuba’s education system and policies”. By the summer of 2001, with extensive media support, ‘concerned mothers’ had organised a movement against the ‘revolutionary propaganda’ being imported into Venezuelan schools. Many, perhaps most, of the leaders of this campaign were from the wealthy middle classes, whose children had never met a Cuban exchange teacher. The result was a stand-off; the government would provide free education for the masses, and guarantee no interference in the private education of the better off.

One aim was to change the traditional pattern of healthcare in Venezuela to be more like the Cuban model of community and family care based on preventative medicine. As in Nicaragua, this sparked strike action led by the Medical Federation, demanding an end to the hiring of Cuban doctors. In the face of this opposition, the government again sought a compromise. It would not interfere with private practices, but would provide a parallel system of free healthcare for the poorest in society.

Before Chávez came to office, Venezuela’s hospital and medical system was a shambles. Insufficient hospital beds and provisions meant that patients had to bribe doctors and bring their own medical supplies if they wanted treatment. Barrio Adentro I (Into the Neighbourhood I) was a programme of healthcare based on the construction of over 3,000, two-storey medical centres (consultorios) in the barrios delivering universal healthcare, from cradle-to-grave, free at the point of delivery. This project would grow until, at its height, over 31,000 Cuban healthcare workers were serving in Venezuela.36 This scheme would be followed by Barrio Adentro II and III, to overhaul the hospital system and open military hospitals to the public so that all hospital care is free.37

Oppositionists, who had previously ignored the healthcare of the poor, now voiced a range of criticisms: Cuban doctors lack proper training; the Ministry of Health should be training and recruiting Venezuelan doctors; the deal was an intolerable way of supporting the communist regime in Cuba, and so on. One reason for the attack on the consultorios was that they were (and are) a major reason why the barrios support the Bolivarian Revolution so strongly. The opposition, on the other hand, promised (and promises) that if it ever takes power the Cuban doctors will be forced to leave.38 But the consultorios again revealed a systemic weakness: instead of purging from the state machine those functionaries who actively opposed the new health system, Chávez compromised and created a parallel system to accommodate them. Protests notwithstanding, Chávez’ government would progressively strengthen diplomatic and economic ties with Cuba, leading to Venezuela becoming Cuba’s biggest trading partner.

The employers’ anti-Chávez campaign was openly racist, describing Chávez supporters as lumpen or negros or pata en el suelo (barefoot). Chávez himself was zambo – a mix of both Amerindian and Black African – which the barrios love, and the white, wealthy middle-class suburbs hate. TV news reports show pro-Chávez demonstrations in Venezuela as mostly pardos or black people, the opposition mostly whites. The ongoing virulent racist campaign in the press, TV and radio, was intended to, and succeeded in, polarising Venezuelan society by whipping up every prejudice of the middle classes.39

Officially, as part of Plan Bolívar 2000, but also to structure his base in society, Chávez campaigned for the Bolivarian Circles to organise grassroots movements around local priorities in shanty towns, neighbourhoods and villages across Venezuela. For example, in Barrio La Palomera, community leaders, mostly women, organised a badly-needed medical supply dispensary. The initiative gave rise to more than 5,000 Health Committees (Comités de Salud) staffed almost entirely by women and these became the support organisations on which the health service relied. Bolivarian Circles, supported by hundreds of ad-hoc groups organised on the basis of a single issue, began extensive social and political activities across Venezuela to, for example, provide school after-care for poor children, etc.

In a move that very much caught the mood of the times, a Women’s Development Bank was set up with Professor Nora Castañeda, an economist and university professor, a woman of African and Indigenous descent and the daughter of a low-income single mother, as Head. Since the bank’s formation, thousands of women have been able to start their own businesses thanks to low or no interest loans and advice and assistance.40 Women activists entered the public arena as leaders who were largely responsible for the distribution of the funds and resources provided by the government to the localities. The collectivisation of private tasks, food kitchens, food banks and child care gave many women the opportunity to transform their lives. This new layer of community activists, while not linked organisationally to the MVR, were invariably dedicated Chavistas.41

Seeing the poor self-organise sent a shiver of fear through the middle and upper classes and, immediately, stories appeared in the media presenting the circles as armed bands funded by the government out to terrorise society. To make things worse, the serving officers in the ministries were taking Plan Bolívar 2000 seriously, and co-operating with the Bolivarian Circles to, for example, provide construction equipment to help build the consultorios and schools where they were most needed, in barrios throughout Venezuela.

Chávez’ social programme was tremendously progressive, and it was the duty of all revolutionaries and democrats to defend it. Chávez was an honest and able man, who genuinely wanted to act in the interests of his country, and the poor and dispossessed who make up the vast majority of its people. But he was no Marxist, had no perspective of establishing a workers’ state, which, in the era of imperialism, was the only means of attaining his declared goals. Instead, Chávez called for an increase in the number of Bolivarian Circles believing that a loose network of socially-heterogeneous groups was sufficient for the tasks he had in mind. Not so. What was necessary was to establish a co-ordinated network of action committees in every barrio, army barracks, oil refinery, factory and landed estate, with a clear and common political perspective. This was the only way to defend the new constitution and to deter a counter-revolution.

Matters came to a head when, in November 2001, the Assembly passed an enabling law empowering Chávez to unilaterally enact forty-nine decrees. These did not go beyond the democratic tasks of the Venezuelan revolution but two, the ‘Organic Law of Hydrocarbons’ and land reform touched the opposition where it hurt – in their pockets and their inalienable right to their properties. The Venezuelan oligarchy raised a massive outcry in a clear demonstration of their particularly parasitical and reactionary character.

The first sign of the coming crisis between the PDVSA and the government occurred during the temporary fall in oil prices in 2001. The government refused to cut back its spending on public housing and healthcare and passed a new law in November 2001 doubling the fixed royalties that had to be paid, and limiting foreign companies to a maximum of fifty per cent share of new ventures. Worse, in the small print was the requirement that the murky finances of the PDVSA be opened up, restructured and rationalised to allow effective government inspection and a greater degree of government control. The executives and managers of PDSVA, in the words of Wilpert, “went ballistic”.

Also, in November 2001, the first ever direct elections within the official union were held. The new government had held a national referendum on the need for democratic elections in the CTV and as a result, had passed a law requiring the CTV to hold elections. This was the direct intervention of a bourgeois state in trade union affairs implemented under the slogan of democratising the union movement. It earned the Chavistas the undying hatred of the CTV bureaucrats. The elections were marked by widespread and blatant fraud in which tens of thousands of votes (the records for 9,000 polling stations) went ‘missing’. The results were announced when fewer than half the votes had arrived to be counted, and the old trade union bureaucrats declared themselves the winners.

Under pressure from PDVSA managers, Fedecámaras, the largest and most effective of the employers’ organisations, decided to test the mettle of the government and, after discussions with the CTV, a joint call for a one-day general strike on 10 December, 2001 was issued. The privately-owned media hailed the “success” of the “strike” when, in fact, it was a lock-out that achieved little. In many working-class neighbourhoods, street demonstrations by government supporters took place on the day of the stoppage, including one march to the headquarters of Fedecámaras to protest the lock-out. In a show of defiance, on the day of the ‘strike’, Chávez told a crowd of 7,000 in central Caracas that he would speedily implement the forty-nine decrees.42

Chávez’ economic and social programmes were certainly not meant to challenge the capitalist nature of Venezuela, but he was doing something the US Administration saw as very dangerous and a serious threat to the interests of US imperialism. He was raising the expectations of the Venezuelan popular masses, and the US had learned its lesson in Cuba: such expectations were a danger to capitalism. The bourgeois press in the USA was increasingly hostile. On 7 December, 2001, Mary O’Grady, editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Americas section supported the ‘strike’ and voiced her own fears in an article entitled, ‘Opposition builds to Castroite tactics of Hugo Chávez’. Behind the scenes, the US actively encouraged the employers’ lock-out.

By the end of 2001, the US Congress was intervening directly in Venezuelan politics through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which provided as much as US$3 million to opposition parties that supported the coming April coup. All available records show that the NED provided not a cent to any party of the left, nor for women’s groups, nor for any of the multitude of groups and organisations attempting to involve the masses in politics. NED exclusively promoted those political organisations which endorsed the violent overthrow of Chávez and opposed mass participation in politics.43

An independent audit of the PDVSA in January 2002, found that under Lameda, Chávez’ appointee to the presidency, numerous dubious contracts had been entered into which appeared to personally benefit managers at the expense of serious losses for the company. Chávez fired Lameda.44

The style of Chávez, while popular in the barrios, was shocking for the middle and upper classes. He fired five (of the seven) directors of the PDVSA board live on his 7 April TV talk show Aló Presidente, broadcast weekly on Sundays, reading out their names, showing a red card with ‘You’re out’ as though they were being sent off in a baseball match.45 In the same programme, Chávez announced that the national minimum wage would be increased by twenty per cent from 1 May. He then appointed five new PDVSA board members from outside, breaking with the tradition of jobs for the boys. This struck a serious blow at management perks, underhand payments and corrupt practices. Lameda, and the PDVSA’s top managers, charged Chávez with politicising the PDVSA on the grounds that the new appointments were for political loyalty rather than merit. Unarticulated, but overshadowing these events, was the fear that these appointees would enforce the new oil law, which meant that monies previously diverted into the pockets of friends and families would now be paid to the government.

Top management pondered, discussed with Fedecámaras and the CTV, and issued an ultimatum to Chávez to dismiss the newly-appointed directors, otherwise managers throughout PDVSA would strike indefinitely. On 4 April, all administrative offices, several petrol distribution centres and the El Palito refinery were shut down. Two days into the shut-down, the CTV leader Carlos Ortega called his members to join the strike for twenty-four hours from 9 April, and told them to be prepared for indefinite action. His call was welcomed by Pedro Carmona, head of Fedecámaras.

The ongoing and vitriolic media campaign against Chávez was all-encompassing. Polls conducted on behalf of the capitalist media showed Chávez’ popularity fell from sixty-five per cent in June 2001 to less than forty per cent in January 2002. The opposition became convinced it could oust Chávez from the Presidency in the short term and not have to wait until the next elections. Their next action, with the support of CTV officials, was to hold a demonstration of some 70,000 people in Caracas on 23 January, 2002, the anniversary of Pérez’ overthrow by a combination of military actions and mass demonstrations. This, undoubtedly, was the model the opposition wished to emulate. The relatively low turnout at the pro-government rally on the same day confirmed in their eyes the declining support for the Chávez government and boosted their self-confidence.46

The PDVSA managers were defending the indefensible: their right to rob the government through corrupt practices. The Land Law, however, could be presented as stealing the land that families had owned for generations. This allowed those opposing the law to claim right was on their side, which every commercial newspaper, magazine and TV station did on an hourly basis, with commercial breaks trumpeting the latifundistas’ case. The Land Law and the promised agrarian reform was the most emotive issue in the new legislation, because it could be presented as attacking the principle of private ownership of property. The background was much the same as had existed some forty years before, when Betancourt made similar proposals: one per cent of farms incorporated over half the arable land while seventy-five per cent of proprietors owned a mere six per cent of the land, and of these, about two-thirds farmed with no title to the land they worked. The land reform law called for a government review of the holdings of wealthy land-owners and the expropriation of unproductive or unused land, with compensation paid at market value. The big difference, however, from the situation in the 1960s was that the US administration now opposed the proposals, fearing them as a potential step towards a revolution, and threw its support behind the anti-Chavistas.

Less than one tenth of Venezuelans lived in the countryside, so the importance of these proposals lay in their symbolic value – that it was possible for the Bolivarian Revolution to break the power of the oligarchy. In terms of the numbers affected, land reform in the cities was much more significant. Over half of Venezuelans lived in the slums that are the barrios – squatter encampments of tin and breezeblock huts perched on the sides of the hills surrounding Caracas, in perpetual danger of being washed away in heavy rain. Of course, few, if any, of the barrios dwellers had title to land. During the 1998 election, voices in the barrios had called for the new government to legitimise their home ownership. Chávez now adopted this call as his own, and on 4 February, 2002, he dramatically announced the Decree on Regularisation of Urban Land: the government would give the people of the barrios the legal ownership of the land on which their houses stood.47 By March 2005, over 4,000 Urban Land Committees (Comités de Tierras Urbanas, CTUs) had distributed more than 170,000 property titles.

6. The Attempted Coup of April 2002

Carlos Ortega, the head of the pro-capitalist CTV, announced plans to hold a nationwide work stoppage as part of the efforts to weaken and destabilise the government. Fedecámaras encouraged employers to give workers paid time off to join anti-government protests and simultaneously raised the demand for a re-call referendum on Chávez’ presidency, as provided in the new constitution.

A planned coup was being put into operation, but Chávez was due to attend a meeting in Costa Rica when it was scheduled to occur and the plotters needed him to be in the country so he could be arrested and forced to resign, giving a form of legitimacy to their plan. Napoleón Bravo, host of Venevisión’s 24 Horas, broadcast on Wednesday 10 April, a message by Brigadier General Néstor González (then under investigation for corruption) announcing he no longer recognised President Chávez as his Commander in Chief, demanding Chávez resign, and declaring there was significant opposition within the military to Chávez continuing in office.48 Chávez duly cancelled his visit. This was the first of a series of incidents, each giving the lie to all those who claimed the attempted coup was a spontaneous reaction to what happened on the streets of Caracas.

On Thursday 11 April, an opposition demonstration in Caracas, was re-routed by the organisers in order to clash with a much smaller pro-government rally being held in front of the presidential palace. Depending on one’s source of information this, demonstration numbered one million (opposition newspapers and TV stations), 150,000 (BBC News) or 50,000 (Press Agency and government sources). Gunshots were fired, people were killed and wounded. It was immediately claimed that armed thugs from the Bolivarian Circles had mowed down defenceless defenders of democracy. Footage of Chávez supporters firing in self-defence at snipers was manipulated to look like Chávez supporters firing indiscriminately on the opposition demonstration. In fact, seven Chávez supporters, seven oppositionists and five by-standers were shot dead.49

To justify the coup that allegedly resulted from these events, but which, in reality, had been long-planned and was now underway, the privately-owned media declared that law and order had broken down. All the private TV stations broadcast scenes from the streets, commentators continually repeating, that Chavistas were shooting at unarmed opposition demonstrators. This lie would be the key element in justifying the coup.

Shortly after the first demonstrators were killed, at 3:45 pm, Chávez took over the airwaves in a national broadcast (a cadena in which the government broadcast simultaneously on all TV stations), asking people to remain calm, and severely criticising the opposition. A few minutes into the broadcast, however, the TV stations, in a co-ordinated action, split their screens and showed Chávez on one half, and biased footage of the street shootings on the other. Chávez responded by issuing an order, to take all private TV stations off the air. This was a well-planned coup d’etat, and Chávez’ move had been anticipated. The TV stations immediately switched to cable and satellite.

At 7 pm, Vice-Admiral Hector Ramírez called on ‘the people’ to no longer recognise the authority of President Chávez or the government. The deaths and woundings in the city centre, Ramirez claimed, obligated ‘us’ to stop further bloodshed and justified forcing the departure of the president, and his substitution by the High Command.

The four major television channels (all private, still broadcasting via cable and satellite), constantly repeated the images of Chavistas shooting at off-screen targets, and commentators claiming that they were firing at unarmed opposition demonstrators. This footage was now intermingled with the pronouncements of a parade of politicians and military officers declaring their opposition to Chávez and demanding a return to the ‘status quo’: Inspector General of the National Guard, Carlos Alfonso Martinez, backed by a group of high-ranking officers, condemned the Bolivarian Circles for firing on civilians; Vice-Minister for State Security, General Luis Alberto Camacho Kairuz called for Chávez’ resignation, announced the defection of various regiments throughout the country, and suggested a provisional junta be installed to govern the country.

At 8 pm, the head of the army, General Efraín Vásquez Velasco and General Manuel Rosendo, head of the military high command, declared for the coup. The mayor of Greater Caracas Alfredo Pena, accused government snipers of firing on the opposition demonstration, claiming: “Chávez has shown his true face”. Luís Miquilena, Minister of the Interior until earlier in the year, denounced the “repression”.50

Meanwhile, the state television channel (VTV), broadcasting live from the Miraflores Palace, where ministers and pro-Chávez National Assembly deputies were assembled, flatly contradicted the private TV stations’ claims that only opposition demonstrators had been shot. VTV announced that Chávez was meeting with both his ministers and the military high command, to decide how to deal with the crisis. Then, suddenly, at 9.30 pm, VTV went off the air, by 10 pm cell phones were no longer effective, isolating the occupants of the palace. Simultaneously, the private TV channels came back on air over the regular airwaves spreading the rumour that Chávez had resigned and had asked to be taken to Cuba.

The private media refused to give air time to pro-government officials and, when protests broke out following news of Chávez’ detention, declined to give any coverage to them. Attempts to disclose that Chávez had not resigned, and was being held prisoner, were cut off. Attempts by military units to publicise their rejection of the coup were ignored.

By 9 pm, members of the military High Command had arrived at the palace to meet with Chávez and demand his resignation. Chávez, shocked by the desertion of so many top military officers, concluded that he and his cabinet could not get out of the palace alive, and surrendered.

At 3:30 am, General Lucas Rincón Romero took to the airwaves to announce in a brief statement that the “President of the Republic was asked to resign, which he accepted”. This was a lie. Chávez had not agreed to resign. Rincón added that the military high command would be at the service of the “new authorities”. About half an hour later, Chávez, was escorted to the military base on the island of La Orchila, via Fort Tiuna (Fuerte Tiuna). The officer in command of Fort Tiuna, General García Carneiro, was sympathetic to Chávez and informed the international media that Chávez had not resigned but had been arrested, and notified them of his location.

At 4:50 am, wealthy businessman Pedro Carmona, head of Fedecámaras appeared on television, as interim president, to announce, the transitional cabinet, and to dissolve the constitution and National Assembly in one fell swoop. He ably demonstrated that the corrupt and rotten Venezuelan bourgeoisie was (and remains) incapable of playing a progressive role.

BBC News, Saturday 13 April, described how Mr Chávez (note ‘Mr’, not ‘President’, a simple demonstration of where the BBC’s loyalties lay) was being held at the Fuerte Tiuna military base in the capital, Caracas. It reported that Mr Carmona had:

• Declared himself President of the Republic of Venezuela.
• Dissolved the National Assembly, promising elections by December.
• Annulled the Land Law.
• Pledged presidential elections – in which he would not stand – within one year.
• Declared the 1999 constitution introduced under ‘Mr’ Chávez void.
• Promised a return to the pre-1999 bicameral parliamentary system.
• Repealed the decrees that gave the government greater control of the economy.51

The announcements were made to applause and cheering from the 300 or so present – the heart of the Venezuelan oligarchy, the coup organisers and participants; bank owners, army officers, media moguls and churchmen. So arrogant were they, so sure of success that they flaunted themselves before the TV cameras and signed an attendance list (available in Los Documentos del Golpe, 2009, Fundacion Editorial El Perro y la rana). The Bolivarian Revolution would have been completely justified in arresting every one of them, expropriating their property and, in so doing, would have broken the back of capitalism in Venezuela.

Nothing revealed the class interests behind the coup so clearly as the plans to put the country and its oil wealth firmly in the grasp of US imperialism: the PDVSA would suspend oil exports to Cuba immediately, and expand production by more than 300,000 barrels per day above its OPEC quota to bring down world oil prices.

During 11 and 12 April, the police were attempting to physically crush any public displays of support for Chávez. The “return to democracy” in Venezuela was marked by an aggressive “disarmament plan”. With the excuse of searching for illegal weapons, oppositionists went on a rampage, raiding the homes and work places of known Chavistas. Chávez’ supporters were hunted down and arrested wholesale, taken to police stations and National Guard barracks where many were severely beaten. Police and National Guards used shotguns, rubber bullets, tear gas and clubs with abandon. Agency reports claimed that at least sixty people were killed and hundreds wounded by police gunfire.52

However, by the night of 12 April, the international media carried reports that Chávez had not resigned and signs of opposition to the coup were beginning to appear. By the Saturday morning, the people of the barrios were beginning to congregate across Caracas in huge crowds of such numbers that the police were simply pushed aside (though not before using water cannon and firing on the people). In the front ranks were Chávez’ most loyal supporters: the women of the barrios. Elizabeth, an activist who had campaigned for water and health provision, explained:

We marched to Miraflores and refused to leave until they returned Chávez to us. We elected him, and we would not let them take our elected president away from us. It was like what they always did to us, denying us our rights… Well this time we weren’t going to let that happen.53

By 1 pm on 13 April, Miraflores was besieged by a crowd of many tens of thousands of Chávez supporters, and hundreds of thousands of people occupied roads and squares throughout the country. The overwhelming majority was from the barrios and a large number of them were waving the blue book containing the constitution. This mass outpouring strengthened the resolve of pro-Chávez units in the military. In 2002, the army was no longer monolithic, it had been ‘infected’: many young officers had genuinely bought into the Plan Bolívar 2000, they had gone into communities and built bridges, roads and medical centres. They had been welcomed and feted by the local people, and liked it. Demonstrators fraternised with rank and file soldiers, many of whom remembered Chávez as a leader and heroic figure.

The Forty-Two Parachute Regiment in Maracay, besieged by tens of thousands protesting the coup, declared for Chávez. Without these mass actions, these military units would have been isolated and not felt able to come out in opposition to the generals. For the plotters, reports were arriving from around the country that important army units were preparing to resist the coup. The high command was divided and paralysed; it feared an uncontrollable response from the people and clashes between military units. It had lost its grip. In Miraflores, the conspirators, after furtively peeping through the curtains and weighing up the situation, and with TV crews recording their actions, ran for it. When faced with a serious challenge, the quality of leadership is a key element, and the counter-revolution collapsed.

Bizarrely, none of this was reported on Venezuelan TV or in the Venezuelan press. On 12 April, all private TV channels broadcast interviews with exulting opposition leaders. On 13 April, an almost complete news blackout was in place. Venezuelan television media failed to broadcast news of Chávez supporters retaking Miraflores Palace; the four major television networks stopped providing news reports altogether.54 The largest television station RCTV (Radio Caracas Television) showed Walt Disney cartoons. Venevisión ran Hollywood movies, Televen treated its viewers to baseball and soap operas. Globovisión, supposedly the top twenty-four-hour news station, re-broadcast old footage of Chávez’ removal. Two of the three major newspapers, El Universal and El Nacional, cancelled their Sunday editions rather than report Chávez’ return. The third major newspaper, Últimas Noticias, printed a limited Sunday edition accurately reflecting events; some regional television stations began to cover the events that were taking place. Channel 8, the state television channel remained off the air all day on 12 April and for most of the day on 13 April.

It was as though nothing newsworthy was happening. But anyone who received cable television, or who was in some way connected to the network of Chávez supporters, or had sight of a barrio, knew that something big was indeed happening. The masses of Venezuela were on the move. Such a thing had never crossed the minds of the conspirators.

The events of the coup were recorded by an Irish camera crew as a documentary and can be seen on YouTube under the title Hugo Chávez – The Revolution will not be Televised. Chávez and his cabinet were meeting, the High Command arrive to deliver an ultimatum: “surrender or we bomb the palace”. Chávez surrenders five minutes before the ultimatum ran out, is led away, but refuses to resign. The cabinet, now without Chávez, was paralysed. There was no attempt to rally support or to organise against the coup. Instead, they said things like “the game is up”, “they were too strong for us”; the best that was recorded was “the people are with the president they’ll defend him – you’ll see”. There was no concept that they, themselves, should lead a fight back against the coup, the words ‘headless’ and ‘chicken’ spring to mind. But this lack of leadership was no accident; these ministers had governed under the illusion that they controlled the bourgeois state. The Bolivarian government failed to recognise the class nature of the state, even after three years in power. There was no party organisation, no team of leaders educated and trained to think and act for themselves, no network of cadres to give the mass upsurge an organised character and direction.

By the afternoon of 13 April, crowds had gathered not only in front of Miraflores, but also RCTV and Venevisión, Globovisión and Televen and the offices of El Universal and El Nacional, throwing stones and compelling reporters to broadcast a message reporting Chávez had been restored. This was later presented as an intolerable attack on press freedom.55

The popular movement played a profoundly revolutionary role on 12 and 13 April, 2002, the masses mobilised and defeated the coup. This included the working class, but it did not play an independent role with its own working-class methods and objectives, it intervened as part of the spontaneous and disorganised movement of the masses comprised in their majority of the unemployed and the self-employed (e.g. street vendors). These sectors have an immense capacity for struggle and their participation was decisive. But, because of their class nature, a movement based in these sectors always tends to be explosive and disorganised. Such a movement finds it difficult to form stable organisational structures that can develop a worked-out programme, provide the movement with a clear leadership and generate organs of dual power to serve as an embryo of a new revolutionary state capable of replacing the old bourgeois one.

In the months and years after the coup, it became fashionable to argue that its defeat was down to the coup plotters’ internal wrangling. Not so. It was the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the masses that caused hesitation and divisions amongst the coup plotters. Let nobody be fooled by this historical revisionism: the coup was well prepared, carefully orchestrated and all the actors played their given roles. This was not the first oligarchic imperialist coup in Latin America and in fact, the script closely followed that of the coup against Allende in Chile in 1973, but with a very different result.

In My Life, Fidel Castro revealed that his advice to Chávez, during the coup was “trying to meet with the people in order to trigger national resistance… had virtually no possibility of success”! This blind spot to the power of mass action flowed from his view of the masses as an auxiliary to guerrilla action, rather than the dynamo of the revolution.

6.1 US Involvement in the Coup Attempt

Diligent reporters using the Freedom of Information Act obtained CIA documents showing that weeks prior to the coup the CIA had detailed plans in their possession of the events about to occur. A 6 April, 2002 intelligence briefing headlined ‘Venezuela: Conditions Ripening for Coup Attempt’, stated:

Dissident military factions… are stepping up efforts to organise a coup against President Chávez, possibly as early as this month… To provoke military action the plotters may try to exploit unrest stemming from opposition demonstrations slated for later this month…56

A vast amount of evidence has surfaced showing the coup attempt was pre-planned in conjunction with the US administration. The earliest, and one of the most revealing, was a news programme on Saturday morning, 12 April, when Napoleon Bravo interviewed Vice-Admiral Carlos Molina Tamayo, a self-professed coup leader who gave a detailed account of the events leading up to the coup, claiming it had been in preparation for over a year, naming key individuals, and praising the private television stations for their complicity and assistance. The interview provided positive proof that the overthrow of Chávez was a premeditated event. This was later confirmed by The New York Times:

[D]iscontented military officers had been meeting among themselves and with business leaders for almost a year to discuss ways to oust Mr. Chávez.57

The Observer newspaper on Sunday, 21 April, reported that visits to the White House by Venezuelans plotting the coup, including Carmona himself, began several months prior, and continued until just weeks before the coup attempt. The visitors were received at the White House by President George Bush‘s key policy-maker for Latin America, Otto Reich, previously heavily involved in destabilising the Nicaraguan government. The CIA knew that a coup attempt was being planned for the near future, that the plan was to exploit violence in an opposition march, and to use that as the excuse for deposing Chávez. This begs the question: how could the plotters have been sure sufficient violence would erupt to justify a coup? The answer is only too obvious, they would ensure it happened: on 3 April, 2009, Ivan Simonovis, former Security Secretary of the Metropolitan Mayor of Caracas with former Police Commissioners Henry Vivas and Lázaro Forero were sentenced to thirty years in prison after being found guilty of playing leading roles in the massacre. The violence of 11 April was organised and orchestrated by opposition leaders using Metropolitan Police personnel.58

Not having foreseen the mass actions that overturned the coup was not just a failure in intelligence gathering and analysis. The mass upsurge was outside the comprehension of the CIA analysts and their political masters: indeed, it was exactly what they feared, the aspirations of the masses expressed in action. Just as Trotsky had organised the October 1917 Russian Revolution as defence of the Soviets against reaction, so the barrios had shown their preparedness to act to defend what they believed to be ‘their’ government. And let us confirm the truly remarkable character of that intervention, it was unprecedented – for the first time in the history of Latin America, mass action had defeated a military coup. The question was: how would Chávez, the undoubted leader, react.

Venezuela was an example of the economic and social disaster that capitalism offers the workers and peasants of semi-colonial nations. Despite the country’s vast oil wealth, two-thirds of the population lived below the official poverty line, while imperialist investors and domestic capitalists raked in massive profits. The prospect of losing control of ‘their’ state to the popular masses, had inflamed the oligarchs more than the reforms actually proposed. The coup attempt showed just how much the oligarchs valued democracy and how far they were willing to go to get rid of the country’s democratically-elected president and its democratically-elected National Assembly. The self-mobilisations of the popular masses against the coup simultaneously showed the effectiveness of workers and campesinos when defending their class interests, and their potential to make a revolution that would take power out of the hands of the capitalist minority.

The counter-revolution was defeated by a spontaneous uprising of the masses; with no party, no leadership, no programme and no clear idea of where they were going, women and men, largely from the barrios, rose up and attempted to take their destinies into their own hands. The collapse of the coup created extraordinarily favourable conditions for going onto the offensive and dealing a decisive blow against the counter-revolution. There should have been a determined effort to smash the resistance of the bosses and their cronies under a call to protect the government – the crowds that had besieged the private TV and radio stations should have been called on to go one step further and take over those stations, placing them under workers’ control. There can be absolutely no doubt that if Chávez had given the lead, capitalism in Venezuela could have been overthrown that April, and it could have been achieved relatively painlessly. Unfortunately, Chávez had no such perspective. Instead of calling on the masses to take decisive action, he temporised and attempted to appease the counter-revolutionaries.

A key factor was missing, the lack of understanding of the class nature of the divisions in Venezuelan society. This was epitomised by the actions of Chávez, a deeply-religious man, immediately following the coup. Chávez appeared on the balcony of the Miraflores Palace, in one hand he held the small blue book containing the constitution and in the other a crucifix.59 A middle-aged woman, a practising Catholic, who had been in the crowd told one of the authors (JM) that her heart sank when she saw the crucifix, “I knew that meant bad news, he should have held the sword of Bolivar”. Chávez explained that he was “in shock”, he was still assimilating events, but had “no thirst for revenge”, that he was willing to listen to the grievances of the opposition. He invited the plotters to join him in a round-table discussion, and to show good faith he had those plotters arrested, including Carmona, released from custody. The masses gathered in front of the Miraflores Palace were thanked for their support and told to go home quietly! This was a serious mistake; it allowed the plotters to think they could have another bite of the cherry and emboldened them to believe that they could do so with impunity. Instead of arresting those who had fired on the masses during the coup attempt, the regime hesitated and backed off, limiting itself to transferring responsibility for the police organisation for central Caracas (Distrito Metropolitano) from the local mayor to the Commission for Citizen Security (Comisión de Seguridad Ciudadana).

The forces of reaction, under the tutelage of the USA, immediately prepared a new challenge to the regime in the form of defence of the democratic rights of the plotters. Military action on the streets is not the only way to defeat the masses. With the opposition’s real face revealed, rank and file Chavistas understood – probably better than Chávez himself – they were facing greater threats than they had previously imagined.

Chávez used every occasion possible to insist that anyone wishing to support the Bolivarian process should not remain on the side-lines. The Bolivarian Circles expanded rapidly and by the end of 2003 the government would claim as many as 2 million Venezuelans were members of about 200,000 circles. This was an extensive grassroots organisation. Bolivarian women, youth and workers organised food distribution, medical centres, and education provision. The great majority of these activities, while enacting government policies, were separate from the MVR, and did not consider themselves party organs.60 Chávez saw these grassroots organisations as a counterweight to the oligarchy and key to deepening social reforms. The weakness was that, dispersed, and without a political understanding of the class nature of the state, these organisations posed no existential threat to the oligarchy.

The mass mobilisation and class action against the coup had shown that the overthrow of the old ruling class was possible, but had failed because the necessary political understanding and organisation were lacking. There was no party to develop the necessary revolutionary class consciousness and guide the strategy during the revolutionary upsurge. Such a political organisation can grow very rapidly during a revolutionary upsurge, but it cannot arise spontaneously. Rather, it must be continuously, consistently and consciously built. The experience of the coup incontestably demonstrated that a nonchalant or lackadaisical attitude in this vital area would mean disorientation and defeat of the Bolivarian Revolution, whether from another coup or degeneration at the top.

The failed coup also showed the weakness of the Venezuelan capitalists. The opposition had lacked a decisive leader but nothing was settled. The same opposing class forces remained in sharp conflict, Washington had not surrendered its goal of overthrowing the Chávez government. The coup had been defeated in time for many in Venezuela to celebrate the 19 April anniversary of Cuba’s crushing victory over a US-organised mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs – a victory that underlined how, by taking power and ending capitalist rule, Cuban workers and farmers were able to defeat imperialist assaults and defend their sovereignty and social gains. Yet, economically, technologically, in terms of infrastructure and urbanisation, Venezuela was far more developed than Cuba had been in 1959.

A number of generals closely associated with the coup were removed from their posts, sufficient for the opposition (including the US) to give up, temporarily, hope of a military coup. Charges were brought against only the most senior officers who participated in the coup and remained in Venezuela. But on three occasions between the end of July and 14 August, Venezuela’s full TSJ by eleven votes to eight dismissed the charges against them, claiming that what had occurred was not a military coup, but a ‘power vacuum’. The TSJ decisions revealed the cost of not eradicating the corruption of the old regime. By voting to acquit, the TSJ cast doubt on the legitimacy of the government. The legal establishment, reflecting its social origins, its interests and the pressure of the bourgeoisie and imperialism, took the side of the golpistas against the democratically-elected government.61 To assure itself of the continuing support of the armed forces, the regime should have launched rank and file committees in the military of Bolivarians, revolutionaries, and patriots and so isolated the reactionaries.

The TSJ did not stop there. In November 2002, it rescinded Article Eighty-Nine of the constitution, the legal basis on which peasants could begin to cultivate idle land before they acquired formal title to it. Without Article Eighty-Nine, land-owners could successfully challenge land redistribution. Article Ninety was also rescinded. This stated that, if lands had been occupied illegally, then the government did not have to recompense the occupier for investments in infrastructure, such as buildings or watering systems. Rescinding these two Articles meant, in effect, the end of government seizures of private land.

7. The Bosses Lock-out, PDVSA and Worker’s Control in Action

The oligarchy still believed it had the whip hand in the all-important oil industry, and, through that, control of the economy. Fedecámaras and the leadership of the CTV, jointly called an “indefinite general strike” to start on 2 December, 2002, with the goal of toppling the government by stopping oil production. This was a coup attempt by non-military means. As in the April coup, the privately-owned media launched a campaign of disinformation in support of the strike, TV stations went so far as to suspend normal programmes to broadcast reports of the ‘successes’ of the strike, reports which were repeated in the bourgeois media all round the world. However, to any experienced observer it was clear almost from the start that the strike, outside of the PDVSA, never really got off the ground but, nevertheless, because of its dominance in the economy, shutting down the PDVSA would give the counter-revolution victory.

In the state of Carabobo, a key manufacturing centre, workers in the most important factories (including Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Pirelli, Good Year and Firestone) declared their opposition to the strike. In some factories the bosses locked out their workers, in others the workers threatened to occupy if the factories were closed and they remained open. The workers of closed factories demanded to be paid their wages since they had gone to work, and in most cases, they were. The same was true in some sections of the food and beverages industry, controlled almost in its entirety by Grupo Polar, owned by the opposition leader, Lorenzo Mendoza.

On 11 December, eye-witnesses reported the airport to be working normally, as was public transport (buses, coaches and the Caracas Metro), and most shops, restaurants and bars. The state-owned basic industries (iron, steel, and aluminium), continued working at 100 per cent capacity because the workers and their local unions opposed the strike. It was soon clear that, apart from the oil industry, in those enterprises that were closed the workers were not on strike but were locked out. This was not a strike at all, but a bosses’ lock-out with the active support of the executive of the CTV.

In the PDVSA, an alliance of directors, managers, supervisors and senior technicians sabotaged production and almost brought the industry to a halt. Having fixed the computerised systems to continue delivering their salaries, they withdrew key passwords and codes in an attempt to halt production. Slowly, sometimes having to battle through police lines, but progressively, the oil workers took control of the refineries and oil fields and started to revive production. By 10 January, PDVSA was working at fifty per cent capacity.62

In refineries like Puerto la Cruz and El Palito, and the Yagua distribution centre, most workers turned up for work and in an organised way re-established normal functioning under their direct control. The lock-out was defeated by a revolutionary alliance of oil workers and people from the poor communities. It was a measure of the enhanced class-consciousness of the popular masses at this time that the communities surrounding the oil installations came out onto the streets in mass demonstrations, supporting and encouraging the workers. It can be said without fear of exaggeration that it was the oil workers supported by the poor, who saved the Chávez government in a marvellous example of the capacity of the working class to organise production.

The picture was repeated in the massive iron and steel industry, SIDOR. At a time when SIDOR’s management was supporting the conspiracy to overthrow Chávez, thousands of SIDOR workers requisitioned company buses and travelled to the Anaco PDVSA gas plant, breaking through police lines on the way, to re-establish gas supplies to keep SIDOR and other Guayanan companies producing.

The media, both nationally and internationally, reported opposition demonstrations demanding the resignation of the government, claiming that these mobilisations of mainly the rich and middle classes brought 100,000, 200,000 or even 300,000 people onto the streets. The media carrying the reports were owned by the same people organising the demonstrations and, given the quality of their reporting of the April coup, we can be confident that these figures were generous estimates. On 7 December, a Bolivarian demonstration of more than 2 million people took to the streets of Caracas against the ‘strike’ and to defend the democratically-elected government. Strange to say, there was virtually no reporting of this demonstration in the capitalist press in Venezuela or worldwide.

Facing the failure of their ‘strike’, the opposition upped the stakes and announced the closure of banks, and that schools and universities would not re-open after the Christmas holiday. Some banks did close, but only for forty-eight hours. All over the country, communities ensured that the schools did open. In the universities, a strong movement by the students demanded resumption of lectures, which forced the opening of most universities, strengthening the influence of the left-wing students and increasing their base in the universities and colleges. It was in this framework that the giant Chavista mobilisation of 23 January took place. Again, about 2 million people took part in an impressive show of strength against the ‘strike’, and in defence of the government. That demonstration was the last nail in the coffin: the opposition had no other option but to admit defeat, announce its ‘easing of the strike’, and then call it off altogether.

From the beginning of the lock-out on 2 December, every action of the counter-revolutionary forces had the effect of increasing revolutionary support for the Bolivarian process and raising the level of consciousness and organisation of the people generally, and the workers in particular. Low paid workers did what had previously been thought impossible, they took the place of the well-heeled elite and production had reached seventy per cent capacity.63 There was a discussion in parliament of introducing a new law of social responsibility of the media which had played a crucial role in organising both coup conspiracies and had lied outrageously when doing so. Alas, nothing came of that. Chávez’ position was extremely legalistic, faithfully remaining within the constraints of bourgeois legality.

The fightback of the workers and the people, while marvellous, was much less effective than it should have been. There were tens of thousands of rank and file organisations all over the country, but there was no nation-wide coordinating body, no national leadership to organise their efforts and realise the revolutionary potential of the struggle to overthrow capitalism. A major factor in this was Chávez’ lack of understanding of the fundamental antagonism between the class forces at work, and his refusal to support workers’ control of PDVSA other than as an emergency measure. During the lock-out, if the state-owned industries had led the way for the social transformation of society through implementation of workers’ control, it would have been only a short time before the sabotage of the economy by the mass media, the banks and the private companies was halted.

The attempted coup of April 2002 and the lock-out of 2002/2003 meant a sharp contraction in production. The ‘strike’ caused losses to the national economy of more than US$7 billion with GDP falling by twenty-seven per cent in the first quarter of 2003. The proportion of people in formal employment fell sharply. When Chávez was first elected, the unemployment rate was about fourteen per cent. As a result of the lock-out, unemployment reached 20.7 per cent. Naturally, the opposition blamed government policy. The government attempted to borrow its way out of the problem in the expectation of future oil revenues, ignoring the abject failure of this policy under previous governments when the cure had proved worse than the disease.

The defeat of the lock-out, following the failure of the April coup had plunged the reactionary forces into a state of deep demoralisation, and it would take some time for them to recover their ability to mobilise. The opposition’s hope of dealing a serious blow to the revolutionary process was now aided by the new constitution. Having bitterly opposed it, they now determined it would be an integral part of their war against the Chávez regime through the recall referendum.

The Chavista victory march to celebrate the defeat of the lock-out was on 13 April, timed also to celebrate the popular uprising that defeated the attempted military coup. In a mood of jubilation and celebration, the revolutionary masses were perfectly aware of the significance of having defeated reaction twice. This was summed up in the marchers’ victory chant “every 11th has its 13th”.

Given the extent and depth of their defeats, the oligarchy and imperialism hunkered down and adopted the policy that had been so successful in Nicaragua, a war of attrition and economic sabotage; making the lives of Venezuelans progressively less bearable economically and socially until, using the provisions of the constitution, they could remove Chávez legally. Integral to this strategy of disruption were unwarranted price increases, artificial shortages of food and other necessities, inflation accompanied by refusal to pay wage increases, forced unpaid holidays and unpaid wages, and more and more bankruptcies of small enterprises. In a whole series of factories across the country, the workers took the initiative and fought back. They organised democratic unions to replace the hated CTV, and occupied factories to force bosses to resume production and pay unpaid wages. These were important precedents and government support through, for example, freezing of rents to the levels before the bosses’ lock-out were very welcome, but without a plan for the economy as a whole, these individual measures would, sooner or later, fail.

The advances of the revolutionary process had been concentrated in the extension of formal democracy, but had left the economic base of the country largely untouched. Still at the disposal of the Venezuelan ruling class were the economic levers necessary to sabotage and destroy the revolutionary process. To have left the banks, the means of production, processing and distribution of food, and the mass media, in private hands meant leaving high-powered weapons in the hands of an enemy that had already shown its willingness to use them against the revolution.

Indicative of the bourgeois thinking that remained rampant in the legal system was the suspension, by the Attorney General in 2003, of the Law on ‘Violence Against Women and the Family’, removing protection for abused women and children. This ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court. It was not until 25 November, 2006, that the Organic Law on the ‘Right for Women to a Life Free From Violence’ was passed.64

7.1 PDVSA and Workers’ Control in Action

During the lock-out, the oil workers destroyed the myth that the managerial layers of the PDVSA were the only ones who could organise production. In doing this, they saved the Chavista government. Ordinary oil workers, supported by local communities, and some who had been kicked out of the industry because of their political and trade union activities, responded by taking over the industry, overcoming sabotage and keeping it running. This was a clear demonstration that workers’ control was an effective way to defeat reaction and its corruption and cronyism.

The bureaucratic leadership of the official, oil workers’ union supported the CTV. Their total alienation from the workers became obvious when they told the rank and file not to collect their wages during the shut-down, losing the official leaders and CTV any remaining credibility amongst rank and file workers, and clearing the way for militant action. The state bureaucracy, the civil servants in the various ministries, were largely inherited from the Fourth Republic and, in their majority, especially at the tops, were ideologically committed to a particularly reactionary and backward form of capitalism. These people were not on the side of the Chavista government during the lock-out and became increasingly hostile as it took actions in the interests of the poor. As a body, the state bureaucracy firmly believed that the popular masses could never run a factory, an industry or the state, and acted to undermine and sabotage all and any progress towards workers’ control.

This experience of workers’ control occurred not in a small bankrupt company, but in the main industry in the country, and one of the fifty largest companies in the world. The lock-out meant that the working class, for the first time, participated in the revolutionary process as a class. However, this immense collective effort, during which the workers elected those to carry out the most responsible tasks, was maintained only during the lock-out.

On 12 December, the government fired the four PDVSA executives leading the strike, and sacked a further 300 in early January. Eventually, nearly 12,000 from the upper echelons of the company were sacked. The PDVSA could have been the launch pad for workers’ control in all state-owned companies – the directors of many of which had declared themselves to be ‘in rebellion’ and with the opposition. That was the only way to guarantee that ‘PDVSA belongs to the people’ and that state-owned industries were run for the benefit of all. But there was no organisation with an understanding of the class forces at work, capable of generalising the experiences of the workers and giving voice to their demands.

Rejecting the wishes of a large swathe of oil workers for democratic management, the state bureaucracy and conservative elements within the government re-instated the old management structure of the PDVSA, the very system which had given rise to the conflict. To absorb the pressure for workers’ control, a substantial number of workers were promoted to replace sacked managers. This gave the appearance of democratising PDVSA, but this new layer of managers was neither answerable to the workers, nor subject to their recall. Instead, honest workers were absorbed into a capitalist business, which was structured to prevent democratic control. An indication of the attitude of the new senior managers (appointed by the ministry) was their hiring of many middle-managers who had been sacked for actively supporting the lock-out. Of course, some high-profile changes were made: i.e., many of the operations and services, which had been previously outsourced, were brought in-house, giving an additional 20,000 workers the same working conditions and benefits as PDVSA workers.

Once normal production was resumed, the oil workers’ participation in the control and running of their industry rapidly declined. A new technocratic bureaucracy, supported from the very pinnacles of government, soon asserted control on the grounds that the company was strategically important to the economy, an argument that flew in the face of the history of the lock-out. With oil prices high and rising, the PDVSA was soon generating enough income to allow public spending to expand and the tops of the MVR were euphoric.

The events at the PDVSA were a focus of discussion amongst trade union activists. Although it was not clear at the time, the failure to maintain control by the workers over an enterprise that generated nearly eighty per cent of the wealth of the country would fatally undermine the campaign for workers’ control that would soon erupt across Venezuela. An example of the attitude of top Bolivarians to oil workers took place in July 2009. Rafael Ramírez, Minister of Energy and, simultaneously, PDVSA president (a post he held to 2014) intervened in the elections for the national leadership of the United Federation of Venezuelan Oil Workers (FUTPV) which represented more than half the workers in the company. This union had been formed in 2007 under government pressure, when Jose Ramón Rivero, Minister of Labour, had appointed a provisional, and malleable, national leadership committee but the promised democratic elections had never taken place. Given the example of leadership elections, even in the CTV, a number of activists demanded democratic elections in the FUTPV. In an attempt to retain control, Ramírez categorised the activists as ‘Adecos’ – supporters of the counter-revolutionary AD Party. Ironically, one of those accused, Gregorio Rodríguez, had been decorated with the ‘Order of the Liberator’ for defending the oil industry during the lock-out. Ramírez, the longest serving cabinet minister under President Chávez would, in early 2018, be subject to an international arrest warrant on grounds of embezzlement and money laundering while at the top of the PDVSA.

8. The Founding of the National Workers’ Union, Co-operatives and the Recall Referendum

The recklessness of the bosses’ actions meant many smaller factories faced two months loss of income and were genuinely bankrupted. The great majority of private companies attempted to make workers pay the cost to the bosses of their own lock-out: many workers were not paid for the time they were locked out, some companies declared the lock-out an unpaid holiday, others told their workers they would have to wait weeks or months for their pay, and so on. In other cases, ‘bankruptcy’ was a tool of economic sabotage, so that assets could be sold off and the capital realised was transferred out of the country. Where they could, the employers organised the closure so that the workers were left unpaid.

The CTV, had openly sided with the oligarchs against the government in both the coup and the lock-out and, as expected, it made no attempt to support the workers in their fight backs. In many factories, workers attempted to organise democratic unions and fought for recognition. The bosses replied by making union organisers redundant, which led to strike action and factory occupations. In several cases, the bosses, faced with a militant workforce, declared bankruptcy and abandoned the premises; to get wages due and to defend their jobs, the workers often occupied the enterprise, seizing stock and machines. For example, the workers at the Convencaucho rubber works in Barquisimeto had to simultaneously occupy the factory, change their union and defend themselves from attacks from thugs, before the employer agreed to pay the wages owed and keep the factory open.65

The Chavista government moved to replace the CTV with a friendly trade union confederation. The proposal originated from established trade union leaders close to the government, but who appeared to believe that the best way to launch a new national union was from above without any real involvement of, or even consultation with, the rank and file; that it was sufficient to set a date for the founding conference and have leadership and programme settled by horse-trading behind the scenes. These were bureaucratic and arbitrary methods. A real re-founding of the trade union movement would have meant a serious campaign of explanation, discussion and struggle to win the rank and file in the existing unions, and to bring the unorganised into union membership. Such a campaign based on the principles of democratic and militant trade unionism would have given the class struggle a massive push forward.

The process by which the National Workers’ Union (UNT), a trade union umbrella organisation, was founded received strong criticism from rank and file activists as undemocratic; the pro-tem leadership had been self-selected with support of government functionaries, too many had been closely associated with the CTV and were more concerned with their own interests than those of the workers they were supposed to serve.

A proclamation at the Caracas National Theatre on 5 April, 2003 launched the UNT, and the founding congress took place in Caracas on 1 and 2 August, 2003. More than 1,500 delegates from all over the country, representing over 120 local unions participated. The Congress passed a radical programme calling for: a thirty-six-hour working week; closed factories to be occupied and placed under workers’ control; nationalisation of the banks, and abrogation of the foreign debt. In its statement of principles, the UNT declared itself an internationalist, class-struggle movement based on the equality of men and women and for emancipation from class exploitation, oppression, discrimination and exclusion.

The CTV was rapidly shown to be a hollow shell supported more by employers than by workers. On May Day 2004, the UNT demonstration had tens of thousands of workers, but there was hardly a sign of the CTV. In Carabobo, a state which concentrates a large proportion of the country’s private industry, dozens of factories were soon organised in UNT-affiliated unions. An important example was at the Daimler-Chrysler assembly plant where, after twenty-five years of CTV mafia-type trade unionism, 400 workers set up an independent class-struggle union affiliated to the UNT.

The leadership of the UNT had been agreed with government bureaucrats without reference to the rank and file. Consequently, in its first two years it ignored the policies of class struggle agreed at the founding congress, and stayed well away from any issue that might be opposed by Ministers or their civil servants, such as factory occupations and workers’ control. Of course, some leaders were more militant than others and made serious attempts to build the UNT, but even these did not prove capable of leading and organising on the central issues of the day: factory expropriations, and workers’ control in the nationalised industries. The lack of either a united or a class-struggle leadership in the UNT meant the workers’ battles actually taking place at a time of heightened class struggle were uncoordinated, often isolated, and rarely supported.

From July 2005, the government gave special attention to closed businesses, because the closures resulting from the lock-out had poured many thousands of redundant and angry workers onto the streets. There followed a succession of expropriations, usually of factories that had been deliberately run down and, subsequently, occupied by protesting workers: Industrial de Perfumes, a perfume-making company in Caracas; Sanitarios Maracay, a factory for sanitary facilities in Maracay; Sidororca, a pipe manufacturer for the oil industry; Fribasa an industrial slaughterhouse; a tomato-processing plant of the U.S. multinational Heinz; the cornflour processing plant Promabasa; and several other plants occupied or previously occupied by employees. The owners received compensation equivalent to the market value. This was often generous for the larger companies, but many smaller companies left dilapidated buildings, out-of-date machinery that had been run into the ground, and huge debts (workers’ back pay, gas, electricity and phone bills, unpaid taxes, etc.): these owners received little, if any, payment.

At the other end of the scale, according to a parliamentary commission of inquiry, was Polar, which had bought Promabasa years before, in order to eliminate competition and achieve a monopoly position. Polar closed down production at the site and relocated a number of machines to Colombia, re-exporting the processed corn products to Venezuela to be sold through Polar’s distribution network. In September 2005, the governor of Barinas state in Venezuela (Chávez’ father), signed a decree stating that the abandoned Promabasa corn processing plant was of public interest, and it was expropriated and handed over to the co-operative, Maiceros de la Revolución, created by former workers in the context of cogestión.

Cogestión (a form of co-management), was to be a feature of the government’s industrial strategy, but was understood differently by the groups affected. As expressed by the Ministry of Light Industry and Commerce, and Ministry for the Popular Economy, cogestión was worker participation, possibly even on the board of directors, owning shares in the company through a co-operative. Workers on the other hand had a somewhat different view. Joaquín Osorio, a leader of the electrical workers’ union, declared cogestión should have nothing to do with workers owning shares, as this would transform workers into owner-bosses and reproduce capitalist antagonisms. Freteco (Frente Revolucionario de Trabajadores de Empresas Cogestiónadas y Ocupadas) saw cogestión as a form of workers’ control, and argued for the creation of workers councils along the lines of those that existed in revolutionary Russia.66

It was right and proper for revolutionaries to take a leading role in these occupations to both deepen and extend them. In this Freteco was giving effect to Trotsky’s analysis:

The various capitalist enterprises, national and foreign, will inevitably enter into a conspiracy with the state institutions to put obstacles in the way of the workers’ management of nationalised industry. On the other hand, the workers’ organisations that are in the management of the various branches of nationalised industry must join together to exchange their experiences, must give each other economic support, must act with their joint forces on the government on the conditions of credit, etc. Of course such a central bureau of the workers’ management of nationalised branches of industry must be in closest contact with the trade unions.67

Workers’ control could have been a big step forward, and was strongly encouraged by the revolutionary left. It challenges the ‘sacred right’ of the capitalists to own, and the bureaucrats to manage industry, it gives the workers priceless experience in administration and control that could be put to good use in a socialist planned economy, and it gives direct contact on a common platform to the most politically-advanced workers and Marxists.

Attempts to introduce cogestión into enterprises invariably brought the workers into confrontation with an amalgam of: those whose who had been robbing the state for years and whose activities would be brought to light; managers, who were used to running a company and saw their authority being challenged; those who believed the popular masses were quite incapable of running their own lives let alone a factory; and all those who were fed crumbs from the oligarch’s table, particularly trade union bureaucrats.

8.1 2004: Co-operatives, the Recall Referendum and Regional Elections

After the lock-out, there was a desperate need to create jobs. From about 2004 to 2006/7, the government promoted co-operatives. In the expectation they would create hundreds of thousands of jobs, the movement received massive injections of state credit.68 At the turn of the century, fewer than 800 co-operatives were officially registered, mostly due to the initiatives of young Catholic activists. Legal hurdles to their creation were removed and a series of incentives were offered, including: approved co-operatives exempt from income tax, and small co-operatives getting interest-free loans.

Such favourable conditions meant a boom in co-operatives. At the end of 2008 according to the national co-operative supervisory institute, Sunacoop, there were over a quarter of a million officially registered.69 Subsequent evaluation showed that only about a third were viable and operating as intended, with the majority of these being family businesses from the most marginal sectors of society. The process was greatly hindered by the private financial institutions administering it, which demonstrated an alarming lack of commitment, taking many months to deliver promised funds. Where the co-operatives were peasants this meant the loss of a year, or borrowing at commercial rates. Government departments were no better, taking months to deliver technical equipment and/or assistance.70

All too often, the co-operatives were created as capitalist enterprises, with members pushed into reproducing the same exploitative working conditions as in traditional capital-labour relations, resulting in workers concentrating on maximising their own earnings. This was particularly true in co-operatives where the state was a co-owner; government bureaucrats pressured the co-operative to become a small capitalist enterprise, competing for business.71 Nevertheless, there was job creation and, generally, greater job security, better working conditions and an improvement in the quality of life of the employees, despite the co-operatives being encouraged to compete one with another for the work outsourced by larger companies. The government rated the experience with co-operatives as a worthwhile investment, successfully increasing national production and import substitution.

The opposition now adopted a course of action intended to rally its base and sow confusion in the Chavista ranks. The constitution contained a recall clause, symbolising the commitment to making public officials accountable. Any elected official, whether President or local councillor, could be subject to a recall referendum once that person had completed half their term in office, and a petition containing the signatures of at least twenty per cent of the registered electors submitted to the National Electoral Commission (CNE). The CNE checked the legitimacy of the signatures and, if verified, organised the referendum.

In August, the opposition presented their petition calling for a presidential recall referendum, but the CNE annulled many signatures as fraudulent, the most common ground being that the signee was dead. The number of legitimate signatures fell to below the number required, and the opposition had to restart the recall process.

The opposition collected a second set of signatures and submitted them on Friday, 28 November. Nearly half of these were rejected by the CNE, but an appeal to the TSJ reinstated sufficient to take the number of legitimate signatures above the 2.4 million required. Rank and file Chavistas responded by collecting signatures to recall dozens of opposition members of parliament, many of whom had been elected on a Chavista ticket, but later joined the opposition without relinquishing their seats. Surprisingly, this initiative was not welcomed, and soon died a death, an early indication that many party and government tops felt more comfortable with oppositionists than rank and file Chavistas.

Only the most short-sighted of the oppositionists could have believed the recall referendum would unseat Chávez. No restrictions were placed on freedom of speech during the recall referendum and known coup-plotters appeared on television to talk, more or less openly, of how best to overthrow the democratically-elected head of state. In this respect, the cynicism of the Bush administration in the US was shameless: it claimed the Venezuelan government was anti-democratic because it was closing down the private TV channel Globovisión. This was completely untrue. The only media outlet closed down was a community-based TV station called Catia TV and this was done by opposition leader, Alfredo Peña, because it was openly in favour of the revolutionary process. Catia TV had been founded largely due to the efforts of Bianca Eekhout, and was a focal point for breaking down gender barriers in TV reporting.72 The barrage of lies had one main objective: to create a massive web of confusion so that the workers of the world were unable to follow what was really going on in Venezuela.

During the campaign, to support their allegations that Chávez was ruining the country, the oppositionists stepped up their economic sabotage: closing factories, firing workers, creating shortages of goods, and so on. It was the government’s economic response that was, and remains, its weakest point. In the fields of health, housing and education the government had achieved great things, but the fate of a revolution ultimately depends on its ability to raise the living standards of its supporters – and key factors in that are quality of life, food, and employment.

By 2004, the regime had established over 4,000 food banks and/or soup kitchens across the country at which children and needy mothers could get one square meal a day. These were often sited in the houses of Chavistas, and almost entirely staffed by women. In the recall referendum, barrio women played a major role in motivating people to register and getting the votes out, activities that were key to Chávez’ victory.73

Chávez had also launched a number of educational initiatives specifically aimed at women in the barrios: from basic literacy programmes to Misión Ribas, a college level work-study programme leading to university courses. These were advertised, for example, on billboards and were unlike anything previously seen in Venezuela. First, there was the presence of black and mestiza women – in contrast to the pictures of young, fair-skinned, blonde-haired, bikini-clad women with European features that dominated advertising in Venezuela, and distorted and belittled the expectations and self-esteem of young women. Second, the campaign showed black and indigenous women taking control of their lives, achieving their aspirations, moving from domestic worker to business administrator, social worker or doctor, challenging the racism and prejudice so prevalent amongst the oligarchs.

On the morning of 16 August, 2004, the CNE announced the result of the recall referendum: on an electoral turnout of over ninety per cent, the opposition obtained 40.74 per cent of the votes cast while Chávez obtained 59.25 per cent. Before the official announcement was made, there was a separate announcement by CNE board members Sobella Mejias and Ezequiel Zamora, questioning the result. It was an open secret that both were aligned with the opposition. By such tricks the opposition sought to discredit the referendum and, as expected, the opposition immediately and ‘categorically’ refused to recognise their defeat, claiming it was based on electoral fraud. The internal and external enemies of the Bolivarian Revolution will never be bound by elections, referendums or negotiations. They will be satisfied only when the revolution is defeated. Not to recognise that was, and is, irresponsible wishful thinking, but the Bolivarian leaders saw themselves as liberalising social democrats, not revolutionary socialists, and argued for ‘moderation’. The inevitable result would be a new offensive of the counter-revolution.

The recall referendum was the eighth victory in a row for the Bolivarians. Jimmy Carter, ex-president of the USA, had acted as observer and declared the presidential referendum results fair and transparent. Later, at a very swanky restaurant in Caracas, he was booed and spat on by upper-class opposition supporters, demonstrating their democratic credentials.

It was at this time that Trotskyist groups, while supporting Chávez in the face of US imperialism, and praising his progressive measures, began publicly, to draw attention to the bureaucratic behaviour of his government; that those who called for unity, even with known coup-plotters, were the same people who attempted to block every progressive measure. These compromisers had a solid base of support in the civil servants and top state officials inherited from the Fourth Republic, and eventually joined with them to accumulate and consolidate substantial wealth.

Warning that a revolution that stopped half way would be defeated (i.e., Chile and Nicaragua), the Trotskyists proposed a series of transitional demands to weld together the popular masses by offering solutions to their immediate problems, giving them confidence in their own strength and ability to carry the revolution through to completion. At that time, the core economic demands were: nationalisation under workers’ control of the big food and transport companies and the mass media; non-payment of the foreign debt; workers’ control and management of the PDVSA and basic industries; nationalisation of the banking system; and state control over foreign trade. Other important demands were: setting up self-defence brigades; a workers’ and people’s militia in every neighbourhood, workplace, town and village, to protect the people, to maintain order, and to defend the revolution from any internal or external aggression.

Chávez’ social policies were radical and aroused colossal enthusiasm. There was no mistaking the intense loyalty and extraordinary devotion felt for him by the masses. It was Chávez who, for the first time in modern history, gave the great majority of Venezuelans hope for a better future. For the popular masses, Chávez and the Revolution were one and the same thing. But it was not until after the failed coup of April 2002, after the bosses’ lock-out of December 2002-January 2003, and after his victory in the recall referendum of 2004, that Chávez’ economic policies were radicalised with the call to re-nationalise those enterprises privatised under the neo-liberal policies of previous governments. The call was soon extended to include companies of ‘strategic importance’ or those occupied by their workers as part of an industrial dispute. These measures were meant to transform the social basis of production from production for profit to production for need, with the added goal of overcoming the social divisions within the enterprise. The economic balance of many small companies and co-operatives was transformed, but state subsidies using monies obtained from the PDVSA became essential to keep them operating.

Regional elections throughout Venezuela had been postponed to 31 October, 2004, due to the recall referendum. Oppositionists won only two of the twenty-two governorships and lost the post of metropolitan mayor in both Caracas and the capital district. Former opposition strongholds were won by Bolivarian candidates, confirming the support for Chávez shown in the recall referendum. This was the ninth consecutive election victory for the Bolivarian movement.

During the election campaign, Chávez raised the need to proceed with the land reform against the latifundia. He very publicly directed a number of candidates for state governor to tackle this issue immediately after being elected. First, they were to attempt to persuade caudillos to give up land they did not really need. Only if that failed was the expropriations law to be used to purchase and distribute the land. Later, at a rally on 10 January, 2005, Chávez announced a new decree aimed at accelerating land reform. The December 2001 Land Act, had been half-hearted and largely thwarted by the TSJ decision of August 2002. True, since the Land Act, the National Land Institute (Instituto Nacional de Tierras, INTI) had distributed 2.2 million hectares of land to peasant co-operatives, but this had been state-owned. There were few, if any, expropriations, though there had been spontaneous peasant occupations. Generally, the latifundia had been left well alone.

The proposed new decree, Decreto Zamorano was cautious and offered no existential threat to the caudillos. A special land commission investigated whether the latifundia had proper land titles. In Venezuela, over the years, it was common practice for caudillos to occupy land that belonged to the state, de facto appropriating it. A second issue was whether the land was sufficiently productive as only underused land could be expropriated (with compensation at market rates) and distributed to, for example, peasant co-operatives. The corollary was that the peasants received the least productive land to farm.

While insisting that he preferred reaching agreement with the land owners, Chávez claimed that he would go as far as using the army to enforce expropriation of the land if needed. This, of course, was no more than Betancourt had done, only with much more militant language. The hopes of thousands of peasant communities were again lifted. Vice-President Jose Vicente Rangel, rushed to reassure the opposition that the measures did not threaten private property; those with their titles in order and their lands productive had “nothing to fear”. Such assurances did little to calm the fears of the numerous caudillos who had stolen state land.

On 5 and 6 February, 2005, the ‘Peasant Conference in Defence of National Sovereignty and for the Agrarian Revolution’ sponsored by the Frente Nacional Campesino Ezequiel Zamora (FNCEZ) severely criticised the realities of the Agrarian Reform Law. Land needed to be uncultivated not just underutilised to be expropriated. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the land could be stripped of entire forests while a decision was being made. The peasants expressed “universal support for President Hugo Chávez”, and welcomed the Decreto Zamorano, but simultaneously observed that it did not go far enough: far too little land would be taken and re-distributed. It was also pointed out that over 100 peasant leaders and activists had been killed in disputes over land in the previous four years but little or nothing had been done to bring the culprits to justice. The Conference agreed that the best way to help the government’s land programme was to step up actions from below and it wanted the means to do this – armed peasant militias, noting that despite Chávez’ many calls, very little had been done to establish them. This should surprise few people; a bourgeois state bureaucracy can never be an instrument for revolutionary change, in particular the arming of the masses.

In April 2005, the new Land Law was passed, reversing the 2002 TSJ decision and introducing ‘agrarian letters’ (cartas agrarias), which provided farmers with government permission to develop land even if ownership had not been resolved by the courts. Chávez stressed that Decreto Zamorano would mean more redistribution of privately-held land. Six months into this plan, the INTI had identified some 5.2 million hectares for redistribution. Six years later, at the end of 2011, only half had been ‘rescued’ and turned over to landless peasants. A more important part of the land reform programme was the ‘regularisation’ of land tenancies, meaning the verification of existing land-ownership claims. Between 2003 and 2011 the government would regularise 5.9 million hectares. These changes were more substantial than the change of land-ownership implied, the previous agrarian economy had been built on cattle, coffee and cacao but never foodstuffs. Now the aim was for Venezuela to feed itself.

Every genuine revolutionary and democrat is duty-bound to support the agrarian revolution. But whatever laws were passed, the land-owners would not give up their power, land and privileges without a fight. In order to succeed against the oligarchs, the most energetic and revolutionary measures were necessary. The mobilisation of the peasants was the only guarantee that the agrarian reform of the Bolivarian Revolution would be carried through, and not remain a dead letter, a scrap of paper in the drawer of some bureaucrat.

The optimal way to effect a peaceful and orderly transfer of land to the campesinos was, as the FNCEZ had demanded, for the campesinos to be armed, able to defend themselves against the counter-revolution, and to establish a network of peasant defence committees linking with workers in the urban centres. But land reform could only succeed if the campesinos received cheap credit, cheap fertilisers, tractors and combine harvesters, lorries for transportation, and guaranteed markets for their products. That could only be achieved if they were integrated in a national plan of food production.

9. ‘Recovered’ Companies (Empresas Recuperadas)

The government’s policies had, from the end of 2005, permitted smaller firms faced with laying off workers, to access government subsidies and cheap loans through the programme Fábrica adentro. To obtain these funds, owners had to agree to (i) some form of co-management, (ii) a share of the profits to go to the workers, (iii) at least ten per cent of any gains made to be donated to a fund for industrial transformation, and (iv) the creation of new jobs, and no person could be sacked. The government hoped to generate 100,000 jobs this way. Small firms, about 1,500 in the first year flocked to join. With this venture, it was clear that civil servants, and many private enterprises, were seeing co-management and social partnership as drawing workers into taking partial responsibility for increasing production and profitability, and as a means to avoid industrial conflicts. Many of the more militant workers, conversely, saw co-management as a possible step towards workers’ control and a socialist society.

The quality and type of co-management in different factories reflected these differences. In some companies, co-management gave the employees shares in the company, or transferred twenty-five per cent of the ownership to a co-operative of employees. This enmeshed the workers into the drive for profitability, but without giving them any real say in decision-making. The state bureaucracy was, of course, always on the look-out for any progress towards real democratisation and, as soon as it was discerned, the relevant Ministry moved in to behead it, usually by replacing the leaders with persons more complaint, even outright reactionary.

However, against the wishes of many of his own party tops, and in the face of the opposition of the state bureaucracy Chávez unexpectedly launched a number of initiatives. The first was Empresas Recuperadas, companies ‘recovered’ from their private capitalist owners and operated under some form of co-management by employees, the state and local community. In particular, factories shut down by bankrupt owners could be subject to a state take-over in the national interest. Included was the re-nationalisation of companies privatised under the neo-liberal policies of previous governments, which included the electricity sector and the national telephone company, CA Nacional Telefonos de Venezuela (CANTV), both in February 2007, and SIDOR, in April 2008.

The response of the authorities was less then half-hearted. There were a few interventions to stop workers being forcibly ejected by employers’ goons, but government bureaucrats refused to nationalise companies as the workers demanded, on the grounds that no law had been enacted. In fact, it had been legal to expropriate since 2000, under Articles 115 and 117 of the Constitution, and in 2001 a closed sugar processing plant, Pío Tamayo Sugar Mill, had been re-opened as a co-governed enterprise, though it soon lapsed into 100 per cent government ownership. The bureaucrats preferred the economic stranglehold of the employers to a workers’ fight back, especially if it risked deepening the Bolivarian Revolution by placing factories under workers’ control. To take some heat out of the struggle, a law preventing arbitrary redundancies was passed, but only as a lesser evil.

However, there was opposition to workers’ control by many managers in state-owned enterprises, who held to the old ways, even with revolutionary changes happening around them. In the state-owned electricity company (Cadafe), the workers demanded participation in the decision-making processes and were met with determined resistance from the management. The trade union Fetraelec (Federation of the Electric Industry of Venezuela) had long campaigned for worker participation and in 2001 signed a collective contract with Cadafe which included the right of workers to participate in managing the industry. After the defeat of the bosses’ lock-out at the end of 2002, workers began to organise committees across the industry to implement the agreement. They encountered fierce resistance from company managers, who succeeded, by 2005, in smothering any meaningful workers’ participation.74 It was highly significant that the managers and bureaucrats were able to successfully subvert the president’s declared policy.

Because of the opposition to workers’ control within the government itself, the civil service and the state governors, there was no clear or systematic policy either for nationalisation of companies or the introduction of cogestión. The most publicised cases of successfully-completed expropriations were the paper factory Venepal (later Invepal) in January 2005 and, at the end of April 2005, Constructora Nacional de Válvulas (CNV, now Inveval), a factory producing industrial valves.

Workers’ control at Invepal was effected by a militant occupation, but the experiment was short-lived due to a destructive dispute between full-time and temporary workers. This gave the state bureaucracy the excuse to intervene and end workers’ control. In April 2006, a board of directors was appointed with Minister María Cristina Iglesias the president of the factory.

9.1 Inveval – 28 April, 2005

Constructora Nacional de Valvulas (CNV) in Los Teques, near Caracas, had been producing high-pressure valves for PDVSA for more than thirty years. Andrés Sosa Pietri, owner of CNV, a member of one of the traditional families of the Venezuelan oligarchy, and director of the PDVSA in the 1990s, had wholeheartedly supported the failed coup in 2002, and on 9 December, 2002, as part of the lock-out, he closed CNV, after which he refused to pay wages to the workers for time lost.

After months of negotiations, in May 2003 a group of workers placed a picket line across the entrance to the factory to prevent finished products or machinery leaving the premises. The owner replied by closing the factory. Inspired by the nationalisation of Venepal, a group of sixty-three CNV workers decided to take over their factory and, on 17 February, 2005, occupied the premises and campaigned for CNV to be nationalised, pointing to its strategic importance to the PDVSA. On 28 April, 2005, Chávez announced the expropriation of CNV, saying it would be run under a system of worker-state co-management with fifty-one per cent state and forty-nine per cent employee ownership in a joint co-operative.75 Unfortunately, the expropriation did not include Pietri’s foundry at nearby Acerven, which produced the outer casings of the valves, and, without which, production soon came to a halt.

Initially, the Ministry of Popular Economy proposed co-management with all five directors named by the Minister, which reneged on Chávez’ promise that the majority of directors would be elected by and from the workers. The proposal was rejected, the workers demanded the Ministry honour Chávez’ promise.

On 4 August, 2005, a deal was signed in which the factory became a co-managed co-operative with day-to-day management in the hands of the workers’ assembly. The legal administration was a five-member executive board, including the factory president. Two members of the boards were elected directly by the workers, and two members represented the Ministry. The fifth member, the president, was appointed by the state, but at Chávez’ insistence, this person was a worker at the factory, chosen by the workers. All the important decisions affecting the factory were to be ratified by the weekly factory assembly. One of the first actions of the workers’ assembly was a wage increase and a seven-hour working day. Such measures would become common practice at the first meetings of workers’ assemblies. The two board members chosen by the Ministry showed their appreciation of the importance of this initiative by never turning up for any meetings.

Inveval restarted partially in mid-2006, but was largely limited to carrying out maintenance and repairs. Without the Acerven foundry, essential valve components were made at another, private, foundry, which placed all kinds of obstacles in the way of the Inveval workers, sometimes refusing orders, sometimes imposing unscheduled delays, but most often delivering sub-standard or deficient parts. Inveval workers continued to press the government to either buy or expropriate the Acerven foundry, but their efforts were in vain.76 Meanwhile, PDVSA was importing valves, an arrangement that simultaneously satisfied the prejudices of state functionaries while generously lining the pockets the private sector.

The workers of Inveval, supported by Freteco, took up a proposal by Chávez made in January 2007, to deepen the revolution through the formation of workers’ councils, and decided with immediate effect to elect a factory council with thirty-two members. The workers themselves, from their own experiences, had concluded that co-operative-state joint ownership with co-management in a mixed economy was not suited to building socialism. “What a co-operative does is to feed capitalism because it is created as part of the capitalist system and that’s what we don’t want here. We didn’t kick out one capitalist to have the sixty capitalist instead,” explained one Inveval worker.77 In only a short time, by mid-2008, the Inveval workers had dissolved the co-operative arrangement so they were no longer owners of the means of production, turning the factory into state property.

The workers had found that Inveval, rather than moving towards socialism, was moving in the reverse direction, with the workers’ co-operative being forced to adopt a capitalist-commercial logic; that co-management as it had been applied was at best a moderate reform of capitalism. The workers remained keen to have workers’ control and pushed strongly for its adoption, but in a form that gave them real authority.

For years, the Inveval workers had to struggle against the top managers of the PDVSA to make the state-owned oil company honour existing contracts, let alone sign new ones This was sabotage by state and PDVSA bureaucrats, who waged a consistent campaign of slanders and lies against workers’ control in general and Inveval in particular. At a meeting at which Jorge Paredes, president of the democratically-elected workers’ council at Inveval, was present, President Chávez asked why Inveval was no longer producing valves. Paredes replied that, despite production difficulties, they were ready to supply the PDVSA. This exchange resulted in an agreement for Inveval to supply valves, but then the PDVSA bureaucrats demanded a new style of valve, which they knew would incur development costs for Inveval and production delays. The workers responded with a determined campaign to acquire their own foundry. Chávez was persuaded to order the expropriation of Acerven which would allow Inveval to manufacture the new valves in-house. But it took until 2010 before the National Assembly declared the Acerven foundry to be of public interest, and February 2011 before it was nationalised.78

Ministry bureaucrats, certain Ministers and some PDVSA tops had, as part of their campaign against workers’ control, actively sabotaged the process. Sabotage would begin by the Ministry demanding the workers accept a form of management structure, in the full knowledge it would be unacceptable. The to-and-fro arguments were stretched as long as possible to dampen the workers’ enthusiasm. Start-up funds were mysteriously delayed, for months, possibly years. Payments for work done and subsidies failed to arrive. Requests for technical support were mislaid, and then the necessary staff occupied elsewhere. At the local level the opposition could be open and blatant. A regional governor, Didalco Bolivar, a member of Podemos, a party in the government coalition, met one peaceful delegation of workers from Sanitarios Maracay with National Guard units firing tear gas and bullets.79

By 2009, a thirty-two-strong council, answerable to regular mass meetings, was the supreme authority within the company. Jobs inside the factory were rotated in an attempt to overcome the social divisions of labour (e.g., intellectual and manual), and all positions were recallable by the workers’ assembly. In addition, salaries were the same for everybody, truck drivers, line workers, or the company president.

Inveval maintained a significant degree of workers’ control (despite the sabotage of the bureaucracy) until early 2015 when Jorge Paredes was removed as president, and a military officer, Vice-admiral Alcibiades Paz, appointed in his place. This changed the character of the administration. As the state bureaucracy regained full control, the PDVSA ordered valves again, payments were made on time, government funds arrived and bureaucratic sabotage largely ceased.

However, Paredes was a thorn in the side of the new administration. He knew too much about the company, its dealings with suppliers, with other companies, etc., and remained a focus for the forces opposing the change in character of the factory. He was arrested in 2016, accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife from whom he had been separated for four years. He was jailed immediately and held there. His trial has been postponed numerous times with different excuses, and militants in the factory believe the case was fabricated with the aim of removing Paredes permanently from the company. Since then the factory council has been disbanded, and workers’ control smothered by the state bureaucracy.

9.2 The Struggle at Alcasa Aluminium for Workers’ Control

Strictly, Alcasa, as a nationalised company, was not ‘recovered’, but the introduction of co-management occurred at the same time as at Invepal and Inveval. In 2005, Alcasa in Ciudad, Guayana, in the state of Bolívar, was the second largest aluminium smelter in Venezuela, employing around 3,000 workers. It is part of the state-owned industrial conglomerate Corporacion Venezolana de Guayana (CVG). The Minister responsible in 2005 was Víctor Álvarez, who was strongly in favour of co-management80 and Álvarez wanted a form of production that integrated an enterprise with its local communities. Cogestión at Alcasa was expected to have a model character and, indeed, its achievements appear to have been amongst the most advanced.

In the previous seventeen years, largely due to an inefficient and corrupt system, Alcasa had acquired huge debts. Attempts to privatise the company had sunk in a swamp of corruption and embezzlement. At the beginning of 2005, on Álvarez’ recommendation, Chávez appointed Carlos Lanz as President of Alcasa. Lanz was tasked by Álvarez to introduce a cogestión scheme whose end goal would be workers’ control of the company; giving the workers complete authority over distribution, production and product development. The aim was to help meet the need for cheap, good quality housing. The company soon became a political symbol of workers holding real power.81

The immediate goals were: democratisation of the plant, making it productive and profitable, and reducing corruption. Some fifteen days after Lanz arrived, all heads of department were replaced and new ones elected by a workers’ assembly with the new heads receiving the same wages as the workers. All posts could be revoked by the workers’ assembly. Department meetings were established and representatives elected. To help win the support of the workers, an initial decision of the workers’ assembly was to increase wages by fifteen per cent.

In November 2005, a new five-member executive board was selected: of these, three, including Lanz, were employees of Alcasa. In July 2006, Lanz stood for election as president of the factory and obtained 1,800 votes from the 1,920 employees who voted. His plan for co-management began with restructuring the board, adding two workers from Alcasa. Production levels rose by eleven per cent.82 At the end of 2006, Alcasa had paid all salaries and pensions owed to workers and former employees, and signed a new collective agreement with the union, Sintralcasa, confirming that a workers’ council would select the management model to be adopted for Alcasa.83

However, within Alcasa powerful forces were pushing hard to get rid of Lanz. The previous managers, in alliance with the leaders of the FSBT union (Fuerza Socialista Bolivariana de Trabajadores or Bolivarian Socialist Workers’ Front), were undermining the departmental meetings, ensuring they met less frequently and, in some departments, managed to stop the meetings completely. The multinationals hit by new arrangements responded with a barrage of adverse publicity. Ministry officials, who opposed co-management, erected bureaucratic barriers and made public statements detrimental to Lanz. In the January 2006 union elections, those opposing cogestión ran a campaign demanding a big increase in wages, Lanz’ supporters, who campaigned almost exclusively on the issue of cogestión, got less than ten per cent of the vote. Then in June 2006, the workers voted to restructure the management system, and elected many of the same managers whom they had removed in the previous elections.

In May 2007, Lanz left Alcasa for health reasons. The state bureaucracy, holding fifty-one per cent of Alcasa stock, appointed a new president with little interest in co-management, and active engagement by the workers fell rapidly. A hangover from Lanz was that employees of co-operatives associated with Alcasa were scheduled to join the fixed payroll. There were about sixty such people, but 600 new workers were taken on, most of the excess were friends and families of management.84 Production and productivity suffered immediately, and by the end of 2007 Alcasa was again reporting enormous losses. So catastrophic was the decline that, in April 2008, a replacement president, Carlos Aguilar, was installed. Aguilar was even more undemocratic than his predecessor. The new president started selling the company’s huge aluminium stocks at below market prices in exchange for cash payments; he went further and tried to pull Alcasa out of the social projects which it had agreed to support. The number of workers who favoured cogestión expanded rapidly under Aguilar’s presidency.

In February 2009, Sintralcasa organised a referendum in the factory for a vote of no confidence in Aguilar. Given the public fiction that the company was co-managed, it would have been difficult for the state-appointed directors to ignore a clear workers’ vote. In May 2009, Chávez met some of these workers and agreed with their call for the election of managers from below. The workers seized on this speech and, basing themselves on it, made a series of demands, one being the democratic election of the company president. The Ministry bureaucrats had little choice but to give in, though with considerable ill-will, and active opposition from Jose Khan, the minister directly involved, Cristina Iglesias, Minister of Labour, Nicolas Maduro, Foreign Minister, and Jorge Giordani, Minister of Planning and Finance. Elio Sayago, long time trade union activist and well know leftist was elected president with an overwhelming majority, and personally approved by Chávez on 15 May, 2010.85

Merely by showing it was possible to challenge the forces of reaction, and setting an example for workers in other industries (particularly the workers in SIDOR), the Alcasa workers made important enemies. The supposedly pro-Chávez, but reactionary, Governor of the Bolívar state, General Francisco Rangel Gómez, bitterly opposed the links formed with workers from other factories, teachers’ unions, communal councils, students’ organisations and co-operatives. Behind the scenes, Rangel threw his weight against the Alcasa workers. The state bureaucracy, the right-wing within government and the FSBT tops joined forces to launch a sustained and aggressive campaign against co-management in general, and Sayago in particular.

Over his period as president, Aguilar, had signed deals with international companies that were seriously disadvantageous to Alcasa, but very profitable for others. The workers’ assembly decided to abrogate them and to concentrate instead on supplying domestic customers as required by Alcasa’s designation as a Social Production Enterprise. These moves were opposed by the FSBT union, which was closely allied with Aguilar. Early on the morning of 9 November, 2010, about twenty FSBT members entered the factory before the first shift, chained the gates shut, as though executing a coup d’etat. Sayago swiftly organised the mass of workers and an estimated six hundred from the first shift accompanied him into the factory to make it perfectly evident who had their support.86

The FSBT now raised questions of back-pay dating from when Aguilar was president, which had not been raised at the time but now were posed as most urgent. The FSBT leader in Alcasa was José Gil who was determined to see workers’ control fail in Alcasa and, in January-February, 2011, led a group of armed supporters of the FSBT to blockade the gates. The action stopped workers entering the factory for over a month. When Sayago, backed by workers who supported workers’ control, attempted to access the installation, he was brutally beaten up. The day after, two women members of the FSBT accused Sayago of assaulting them, videos of the attack, however, clearly showed Sayago as the victim. Here, the FSBT was acting as a front for an unholy amalgam of corrupt politicians, company managers and multinational interests. It is widely believed that the same ministers who opposed Sayago’s election – Khan, Iglesias, Maduro and Jaua – did more than a little to assist this adventure. The lock-out did enormous financial damage, deliberately exacerbated by the state machine, which punished the workers by holding back funds promised for modernising plant and equipment.

Allegedly taking advantage of Chávez’ ill-health and weakened condition, governor Rangel is supposed to have pressurised him into signing an order to remove Sayago as president. On 25 February, Vice-President Elias Jaua formally announced that, by order of President Chávez, Elio Sayago was to be replaced by one of Rangel’s cronies, Ángel Marcano (a government deputy in the National Assembly for 2005-2010, and member of the FSBT), as president of Alcasa. Jaua himself had drafted the order and the major reason given for Sayago’s dismissal was that he had been responsible for trade union conflicts in the company – the very conflicts which those sacking him had instigated! Sayago later pointed out that, given Marcano had been one of the leaders of the thirty-four-day lock-out the previous year, his appointment was a “contradiction in terms”.87

In a packed press conference on 29 February, 2012, Yasmín Chaurán, a CVG worker herself, reported that Ángel Marcano had already begun undermining the structures of workers’ control in the factory, by refusing to attend factory working group meetings and setting up a ‘parallel apparatus’ of six vice-presidents who were making appointments ‘a dedo’ (arbitrarily). She argued that the ‘sin’ that cost Sayago his post was the ending of corrupt practices that had put a lot of money into private pockets. The press conference was followed by a centre-spread in Tribuna Popular, the PCV’s paper, publicly criticising the “internal right-wing” within the revolution in Bolivar state. It warned that “harmful bureaucratic actions” emanating from the Bolivar state governance were “grinding down the revolutionary process” and working with transnational corporations to regain control of state industries in the region.

The matter was sufficiently serious for Chávez, despite being in Cuba for medical attention, to respond on 2 March: “I carried out changes there (Alcasa) in the directors’ board, and I ask for support, unity and patriotic consciousness of the whole of the working class in the factories in Guayana”. Chávez gave no reason for removing Sayago, but simply used his personal authority to get the workers to accept the decision. On 8 March, a spokesperson for the political team governing Bolivar state made great play of Chávez’ endorsement of the decision to replace Sayago with Marcano. The spokesperson was José Ramón Rivero. No attempt was made to defend the indefensible, instead Rivero used the age-old trick of diverting attention by attacking the ‘unacceptable behaviour’ of those National Assembly members who had dared to criticise governor Rangel.

Workers’ control at Alcasa was threatening long-standing and very profitable arrangements between international and local interests. To make matters worse, Alcasa was entering talks with other companies to persuade them do the same. What was clear was that the interests of the ‘Bolivarian’ bureaucrats at different levels of the state and national apparatus and the trade union movement coincided, in the last instance, with the interests of the oligarchs and multinational companies, and any form of workers’ control threatened those interests.88 Under Marcano, production at Alcasa steadily decreased, the unions within the plant were soon at each other’s throats with no common policy and, despite five attempts to restart it, the main extrusion plant still lies idle. Alcasa was a prime example of how workers’ control in a bourgeois state is a transitional phenomenon, it either leads on to the overthrow of capitalism or it will, itself, be overthrown.

10. Socialism for the Twenty-First Century (February 2005)

Worker activists and socialists were beginning to see flaws in the revolutionary process. The state bureaucracy contained layers of people, especially at the top, who, although publicly endorsing Chávez’ actions, privately did not believe in the revolutionary capacity of the masses; self-activity by the workers was perceived as something dangerous, a threat to privileges and perks. This pressure from below, combined with the intransigent opposition to even the meekest of reforms, had pushed Chávez to become more radical in his calls for workers to occupy factories, to make “the revolution within the revolution” by struggling against bureaucracy and, for the first time, to speak openly about socialism.

The language of Chávez both reflected and stimulated the growing consciousness of the masses. Attempts by the masses to take the revolution forward, to enact Chávez’ calls and proposals, clashed with the reality that there were no channels by which these actions could be organised. Despite popular involvement in Bolivarian Circles, community projects, health centres, education, housing, etc. there were still no organisational structures in which the masses could discuss and organise how to overcome the resistance of governmental and regional bureaucracies, or to hold their leaders to account. This contradiction was because the capitalist mode of production and bourgeois state had both been left intact.

On the sixteenth anniversary of the Caracazo, in his Aló Presidente programme, Chávez made an appeal for the opening of a discussion on socialism within the MVR and the Bolivarian movement: “I am convinced… that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism, the path is socialism”. However, Chávez was not ready to define his concept of socialism: “…we will have to invent it, this is why this debate is so important, we must invent twenty-first century socialism”. That Chávez deliberately differentiated his proposal from previous socialisms was significant.

It is true that every revolution has its own character, personality and historical antecedents and it is essential to recognise national specificity. But if Socialism for the Twenty-First Century was to be the Venezuelan road to socialism it had to, of necessity, include the lessons of the past. In particular, the need for a participatory democracy in which decisions made are binding on the leaders. Certainly, the Venezuelan masses, in common with previous revolutions, had demonstrated a colossal capacity for creativity and inventiveness, but that had highlighted the main weakness of the Bolivarian movement. There was no national structure that enabled the movement to generalise its experiences, to decide policy, to elect the leadership that would co-ordinate the revolutionary upsurge. Instead, the heterogeneous and largely arbitrary nature of the leadership meant there was ongoing confusion and conflict regarding both the aims and the means of the Bolivarian Revolution.

It was three years since the attempted coup and President Chávez, for all his radical social programme and fighting courage, his challenges to the power and privileges of the ruling class, and his resistance to the pressure of the imperialists, had never previously posed the question of socialism. To solve the structural problems of Venezuelan society and to protect the gains made, it was necessary for the government to introduce economic planning – to draw up a national plan based on the needs of the majority, not the profits of the minority. But the government could not plan what it did not control: key economic levers such as the banks remained in the hands of the rich and the state machine remained structured to serve the oligarchy, with many of the tops in the nationalised industries part of the problem, not the solution.

When he came to power in 1998, Chávez believed he could solve the problems of inequality, poverty, and misery within the limits of capitalism. His government went out of its way not to violate the private property rights of big land-owners, bankers and businessmen, but any attempt to seriously address the problems faced by the masses clashed head-on with an ultra-reactionary oligarchy which, en bloc, was quite prepared to overthrow a democratically-elected government by an armed insurrection. Chávez and many in the Bolivarian movement had been pushed into the conclusion: “Within the framework of capitalism it is impossible to solve the challenges of fighting against poverty, misery, exploitation, inequality”. The revolutionary appeals of Chávez did not fall on deaf ears. They were eagerly listened to by millions of dispossessed workers and peasants in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and Brazil. But would Chávez carry that analysis forward into action?

The hope and expectation on the political left was that the dynamic of the Bolivarian Revolution would now parallel the first years of the Cuban Revolution; and opening a debate about socialism was seen as representing an important point in the Venezuelan revolution with worldwide implications. For the first time in many years, the leader of a mass revolutionary movement had drawn the conclusion from his own experience that capitalism cannot solve the problems of the masses and that socialism is the only way forward. Now Chávez had to convert his words into deeds!

On 17 July, 2005 President Chávez, during his weekly television programme Aló Presidente, announced that nationalised companies would become Social Production Enterprises (Empresas de Producción Social, EPS); in all of which, solidarity, co-operation, complementarity, and equity would be more important than producing a profit, and which would help bring about Socialism of the Twenty-First Century. The President urged all co-operatives to become one of three types of EPS: communal production, communal distribution or communal services. Jointly, these would form the Communal Economic System (Sistema Económico Comunal, CES).

A major part of his speech was that if a factory was closed down by the employers “(it) will probably have to be expropriated… the workers should occupy, try to start production, and discuss the legal aspects later”.89 Workers in Venezuela were being encouraged to take the initiative and not wait for the government to give them the green light. Labour Minister, María Cristina Iglesias, urged unions, workers, and former employees to ‘recover’ their companies, arguing that such moves could help overcome Venezuela’s dependence on imports. The UNT declared its support, and announced in mid-September, it would call on its members to occupy over 800 closed-down businesses.

In fact, only about forty of the 800 enterprises were occupied and even fewer were expropriated. It was immediately obvious that there was no government policy of any kind for expropriation. Occupying workers calling for expropriation were hindered by government bureaucrats and actively opposed by local authorities who, on many occasions, sent in the police and National Guard to eject them. A major factor was the failure of the UNT to deliver on its own statement. It can rightly be said that inactivity, and in some cases even hostility, to factory occupations was the mark of the UNT over this period. Chávez’ call for action was effectively smothered by the bureaucratic apparatus, which justified its lack of promotion of, or support for, occupations on the grounds that it could respond only to processes self-initiated by the rank and file.

The oligarchs, ever sensitive to any threat to their authority or property were up in arms. An intense media campaign claimed the expropriations were illegal, arbitrary and confrontational. Fedecámaras demanded “an immediate end to arbitrary and illegal actions against private property… (and)… respect of the right to work for workers and employees of the companies affected”. The petty bourgeoisie were whipped up by being told their homes could be taken from them. In upper-middle-class neighbourhoods in the main cities (Caracas, Valencia, etc.), rallies were called against expropriations, but the live coverage of these events revealed a poor attendance.

The media campaign of the oligarchy was to protect their sacred right to retain property filched from the state, pretending to defend the national interest while exporting their money and investing it abroad, defending their right to keep factories and land idle in order to undermine the government. These would be enduring themes in the private media and would rise to a crescendo every time the government took a significant step forward in the interests of the peasants and workers.

Venezuela could not advance towards social equality while the latifundia, factories and banks remained in the hands of the oligarchs. Chávez’ call, while enormously positive and raising the question of who held the power, was still constrained within a capitalist framework and, as such, was doomed to fail. Solving the problems of the Venezuelan people was only possible on the basis of common ownership of the means of production and the democratic planning of the economy. That was the only way of overcoming economic sabotage and achieving real economic development. It was also the only way to build any kind of effective Socialism for the Twenty-First Century. But it was at just this point that the Bolivarian Revolution drew back.

The EPSs were soon central to the government’s strategy for stimulating internal production and exchange through the investment of oil money in previously neglected sectors of society; for Venezuela to stop importing what could be produced nationally.90 In theory, EPSs were to be a central element of the “economic turnaround in the direction of Socialism for the Twenty-First Century”. However, Yaffe has accurately described this initiative as the Bolivarian government attempting to avoid a head-on confrontation with the oligarchs:

Instead of dismantling the old apparatus and infrastructure of capitalism, it has attempted to build a parallel apparatus to create an alternative system of social relations, production, distribution and political power.91

In April 2006 the government passed the Communal Council Law for the creation of communal councils throughout Venezuela, formalising the shift in emphasis from co-operatives to communal activities. A state-owned company had to become an EPS, and any goods or services it needed had to be acquired from an EPS. The EPSs were expected to spread like a red tide across Venezuela, gradually engulfing all economic enterprises until the country woke up one morning as socialist. This was a re-presentation of the failed ideas of the utopian socialists of the nineteenth century, now to be funded by oil revenues.

By early 2007, many hundreds of communal ventures had been opened. These EPSs were to be based on equality, fairness and social needs; work responsibilities would be decided democratically, no employee’s position was meant to give him or her any privilege. EPSs were expected to invest at least ten per cent of any surplus in local social projects and infrastructure, integrating themselves into the local communities. The priority for an EPS was social benefit (termed ‘social profit’) and production had to be directed toward fulfilling Venezuela’s social needs rather than monetary profitability and capital accumulation. In line with this communalistic approach, in October 2005, the president signed a decree by which all EPSs were required to undertake work in the communities where they were located, such as maintenance of schools and, for this reason, representatives of the local community had a right to be present at EPS management meetings.

Yaffe has described the heroic efforts, hard work, ingenuity and innovation of the workers in their attempts to get the EPSs running efficiently and profitably. She also describes the numerous challenges and obstacles they face: no mechanism for the rational allocation of resources, no mechanism for the sharing of information, not even a central inventory of machines and equipment. Because the EPSs are invariably small, lacking experience and separate, the very same problems have to be solved again and again, wasting time and resources. A major government initiative was the building of millions of new homes. Because the state does not own the full chain of production, the door is opened for the private sector to make huge profits by, for example, transporting materials at exorbitant prices from one EPS to another. Estimates suggest that the final cost to the state is approximately three times the production cost. But this lack of coherence also allows private sector sabotage. For example, delivering necessary nails a week late costs the private supplier little or nothing, but it can paralyse an entire housing project. Yaffe reports that the private sector disrupts production on a grand scale, with the clear political objective of sabotaging the Bolivarian Revolution.

Social ownership came in two quite different types. The ‘indirect’, enterprises managed by the state (e.g. PDVSA) which, despite all the hype, are left largely alone. Chávez, shortly before his death, declared that PDVSA was abjectly failing in its progress towards an EPS, but took no action, Rafael Ramírez remained head of the PDVSA, no call was directed to the workers of the PDVSA to take control of the company; with a metaphorical shrug of his shoulders Chávez classified the problem as “cultural” and moved on.92 The ‘direct’ type, the more than 200 ‘socialist factories’ funded by the state would, it was said, strengthen Venezuelan independence and sovereignty, by establishing a national production network to reduce imports and foreign dependence. These direct EPSs, were the supposed embryos of the new socialist economy, but most were too small to compete even with private companies in Venezuela, let alone internationally. Only about ten per cent of ESPs make a surplus, the remainder fail to fill their production targets most often because of over-charging by private sub-contractors and obstruction of production by bourgeois elements, usually in the state machine.93

Nevertheless, co-operatives and communal activities remain a major factor in the lives of poor Venezuelans, because the government has periodically extended their powers by, for example, providing them with the materials and means for house construction, and giving them responsibility for delivering the state-sponsored, house-to-house food distribution.94

10.1 Latifundia and Parliamentary Elections

On Wednesday, 21 September, 2005, during a ceremony for aerospace technicians, Chávez stated: “The latifundio is one of the most powerful obstacles for the development of the country and as long as it exists, it is impossible to begin the foundations of progress”.95 This is, of course, the classic argument of the bourgeois revolution but in the era of imperialism, in semi-colonial countries, it threatened the entire rotten system.

Four days later Chávez renewed the offensive in his television programme, Aló Presidente, from La Marqueseña, a large landed estate of about 8,500 hectares (21,000 acres) which the INTI had recently declared to be state property. According to the President, the Azpurua family had held the land illegally for decades and now had to return it to the state, to use for the government’s land reform programme. The land seized was eventually given to eighty peasant families and the sixty workers at the ranch. Many land-owners had been found to have no property titles, or deeds, for the land they occupied; they had simply extended the boundaries of their estates arbitrarily, illegally appropriating land that belonged to the state or to poor peasants. The INTI had plans to assess land titles in 317 latifundia up and down the country. Genaro Mendez, president of Fedenaga, the association of cattle ranchers and latifundia owners responded, “the land that is threatened is the whole of Venezuela…”

Chávez replied in a speech on 16 October:

The capitalist economic system is a system of domination imposed on our people so that a wealthy minority dominates an impoverished majority. This is economic tyranny. And this economic tyranny is still intact. We are going to break it up once and for all through a revolutionary process of economic and social liberation.

He again demanded: “wherever there is a factory that is closed it must be handed over to the workers, wherever there is a plot of land that is idle it must be given to the peasants… we must break with the capitalist model”. The masses of workers and peasants at the heart of the Bolivarian movement whole-heartedly supported these appeals, but also wanted organised action. Certainly, the conditions were favourable, the Bolivarian Revolution had brought the masses to their feet but the lack of political understanding, the absence of a party with such a perspective meant the strength of the movement was nowhere fully utilised. Venezuelan Marxists strove to make the masses conscious of the real meaning of their actions, to understand the objective necessity of a break with capitalism, but were unable to make good the main weakness of the Bolivarian movement, which was (and is) its lack of a revolutionary party.

In 2008, the government launched a Food Sovereignty initiative to radically transform agriculture. The new effort was to be a means to solve the problem of rural poverty and energise food production. Any head of household or young person could apply to become a leader of a co-operative, regardless of whether s/he had any experience of working the land. By the end of 2008, the INTI claimed to have redistributed more than 4.38 million hectares of ‘recovered’ land to over one hundred thousand families and co-operative-owned farms.

The bureaucracy and complexity of state aid meant that many of these initiatives received investment and advice too little and too late. For example, credit was provided by the Agricultural Bank of Venezuela; infrastructure – provision of water and rural roads – was provided by the National Institute of Rural Development; technical assistance and training was provided by the Foundation for Capacity Building and Innovation to Support the Agrarian Revolution; assistance in bringing products to the market was provided by the Venezuelan Food Corporation; advice on how to develop as an agro-ecological enterprise was given by the National Institute of Agricultural Investigation; and finally the provision of the land itself, of deeds etc., was the responsibility of the INTI. This vast array of institutions was (and is), of course, grossly inefficient, confusing and offered golden opportunities for corrupt practices. Wilpert reports that the INTI had retained in its files about 30,000 cartas agrarias. No-one could say why, but in July 2016, a director at the INTI was arrested for demanding millions of Bolívars in bribes to finalise the transfer of land deeds. It was no wonder that many co-operatives were soon struggling, failing to achieve necessary levels of production, to gain access to internal markets, and to repay loans. The most harmful pressure on the peasants was the inefficiency and corruption of the state institutions.96

The peasants were, in their majority, expected to participate in co-operatives which were attached to, or were themselves EPSs intended to transform the agricultural sector from a capitalist to a socialist model of production with the constraint that all food-production had to supply domestic demand first. However, these were operating within a capitalist system which functions according to its own laws, so that, even with the government attempting to empower small agrarian producers, the reality meant that, in the end, the peasants faced the same inequalities as the campesinos always had.

Pre-election polls for the 4 December, 2005, parliamentary election for the National Assembly showed the opposition would struggle to gain even a third of the votes cast and would lose over fifty of the seventy-six seats they held. Rather than face such public humiliation, the opposition decided to hide their weakness by boycotting the election. The Chavistas gained 116 of the deputies and their allies, the PCV, Podemos and PPT another thirty-five. The Bolivarian Revolution had total control of the National Assembly, enough to legally abolish capitalism if it so decided.

However, the Bolivarian leaders had no perspective of ending capitalism in Venezuela; they had set themselves the task of managing a ‘mixed economy’. Not prepared to take decisive action against the oligarchs, they prevaricated, retreated and then attempted a compromise, which naturally exposed them to pressure, bullying and blackmail by the oligarchy and imperialism. For too many of these Bolivarians, ‘defence of democracy’ meant freedom for private ownership, with revolutionaries constrained to act within the existing bourgeois law. One of the arguments heard was classical social democratic: “The economy is in a mess, we have to fix the problems before we can introduce socialism”. This was, of course, the cart before the horse, the economic problems could be solved only by introducing socialist measures.

Marxists have long argued that it is impossible for the working class to carry out the socialist transformation of society using the existing bourgeois state, because the bourgeois state was created by capitalists to serve their needs. Attempts by the masses to advance ‘towards socialism’ within the existing Venezuelan state inevitably lead to clashes with a bureaucracy that serves the state, does not believe in socialism, or in the ability of the masses to consciously participate in the leadership of the country. How could state functionaries, bureaucrats and others left over from the old, discredited Fourth Republic be relied upon to progress the interests of the masses? Such a question answers itself. The corollary is also true, how could the Bolivarian Revolution progress towards socialism if it did not recognise the class nature of the state?

The vast majority of Venezuelans sided firmly with Chávez and wanted to push the revolution forward. The main and immediate task of Marxists was to organise the advanced layer and educate them as cadres with a correct programme and method, so that they could provide an alternative leadership to the reformists in the Bolivarian movement and win the Bolivarian masses to the ideas of Marxism. This would have to be done as part of the Bolivarian movement because there was no other possibility of melding with the revolutionary mass movement. Any attempt to do otherwise would have separated the revolutionary layer from the popular masses.

11. Launch of PSUV and the Constitutional Referendum

During 2006 the oligarchy significantly advanced its strategy of economic sabotage, particularly in the food sector where wholesale distribution was largely in the lorries of Grupo Polar. The model had been successfully tested in Chile and again in Nicaragua, and was now the agreed strategy in Venezuela. The measures would be stepped up before every election and/or referendum.

This was the context in which the UNT held its Second Congress. However, the UNT leadership was more intent on jockeying for positions than solving the problems of the workers. The Congress was scheduled to begin on Thursday, 25 May, 2006, but the 2,000+ delegates had to wait until the following day due to arguments over delegate accreditation, always a sign of hard-fought battles on the floor of the Congress. This Congress was all the more relevant because, on 3 December, there would be a presidential election. Any rational observer would have expected the union to agree to take a leading role in the election campaign and used it to publicise its solutions to the grave problems from which the workers (and the vast majority of the population) continued to suffer. Far from it, the entire congress centred on the issue of the leadership elections. Instead of addressing economic and political questions the elections emphasised personalities, with the inevitable mud-slinging that served only to smother discussions on policy and programme. The congress ended in chaos, fist fights, walkouts and the splintering of the UNT, marking its end as a united force for some years.

The FSBT had only about one third the Congress delegates, but was the current within the UNT that was closest to the MVR tops. In January 2007, Chávez appointed Jose Ramón Rivero, a leader of the FSBT faction, as Labour Minister. He then used his position to intervene in industrial disputes to advance the FSBT at the expense of other currents within the UNT, even to the extent of siding with the bosses in specific disputes. The FSBT allied itself increasingly closer with the government and, in April 2008, it was Labour Minister Rivero who announced the formation of a new national union federation and called on unions to disaffiliate from the UNT. The FSBT then cuddled up with the more reactionary elements within the government, increasingly acting as a brake on the Bolivarian Revolution.

It was obvious that, in the run-up to the December 2006 Presidential election, many people were noticing a heightened scarcity of basic foodstuffs. Supermarkets and markets, both in the private sector and the public distribution network, were short of milk powder, chicken, cooking oil, cheese, sardines, refined sugar, and black beans – a staple in Venezuela. The bourgeois media carried hysterical campaigns aimed at inducing panic buying in order to exacerbate the shortages and, more importantly, to create dissatisfaction amongst the social base of the revolution. The oligarchs were attempting to grab the revolution by its throat. Now the private media did something it had never done before: it championed the health of the poor, of children, and the elderly.

The government attempted price controls, but food producers avoided these by selling their products on the black market, selling to foreign companies and re-importing, or by diverting production to products that were not regulated. For example, milk was regulated but cheese was not, plain rice was regulated but flavoured rice was not (with Polar foods, for example, ninety per cent of rice produced was flavoured). The bosses blamed the government for causing the food shortages, saying price controls meant it was no longer profitable to produce items such as milk, so the population would have to go without.

The bosses’ organisations demanded the government remove all controls saying they would then respond by producing more goods. In fact, the situation pleaded for the opposite course – nationalisation of food production and distribution under the democratic control of workers, peasants, and communal councils. FNCEZ, the peasant organisation, was right when it responded to the refusal of processing plants to buy their crops, especially sugar cane, by saying to the bosses: “If you refuse to feed us we will take over your factories”. This should have been the practice nationwide.

One factor not mentioned in the bourgeois media was that some shortages were due to the improved diet and nutrition of the most downtrodden layers of the population. The actions of the Chavista government had given them increased purchasing power, and, as revealed by the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, between 2004 and 2006, the poorest sections of the population had their real incomes doubled. By organising artificial scarcity, the opposition was ensuring the creation of a parallel black market with high-priced goods, which it hoped would neutralise the effect of increased purchasing power and controlled prices. It aimed to demoralise those layers of the population who were hardest hit and who constituted the social base of the revolution. ‘What is the point of a revolution if you cannot buy milk anymore?’ was the feeling the counter-revolution wanted to induce among the poorest sections of the population.

The reaction of the government was a combination of appeals to business to increase production, massive imports of goods and their distribution through the state-run company, Mercal (Mercados de Alimentos, C.A.), to provide subsidised food and basic goods through a nationwide chain of stores. Despite the enormous barrage of propaganda to the contrary, there were few expropriations of abandoned companies in the food production chain and only mild measures against the most blatant examples of hoarding, corruption and speculation.

However, because Mercal was not under democratic workers’ control, it was riddled with corruption. Large amounts of produce were leaking onto the black market, not through petty pilfering, though there was plenty of that, but because of crooked bureaucrats diverting whole containers of food. The economy was, and remains, the Achilles heel of the revolution, half-hearted measures weakly applied have failed to end the reality of economic sabotage. The reformists in the government shrug their shoulders and call for more public money, borrowed against future oil revenues, to spend on imports and so avoid confrontation with the oligarchy and its agents.

Chávez declared the existence of a social (but not socialist) state and called on the masses to struggle for socialism while accepting that Venezuela would have a ‘mixed economy’. He carried out expropriations, but continued to support MPs, governors and mayors discredited for their anti-worker practices. Such contradictions reflected the different class pressures that bore down on him. His programme of democratic and national reforms inevitably came into conflict with a parasitic capitalist system and this pushed him to the left time and time again. Chávez increasingly used language that was critical of capitalism but, while a revolutionary leader, he was not a Marxist intervening in events with a clear, revolutionary programme.

The prevailing mood among the masses continued to be one of waiting for the proposals of President Chávez to be implemented, but with a growing sense of unease. Class contradictions were growing and intensifying within the Bolivarian movement, different tendencies were beginning to crystallise, revealing that not everyone was fighting for the same aims and ideas.

The presidential elections held on 3 December, 2006, were won by Chávez with the widest margin in the history of Venezuela: 62.8 per cent of votes cast to his opponent’s 36.9 per cent. Chávez won in all twenty-four states, but the MVR was not a democratic party and its leaders had exercised a tight grip over the election campaign. The major slogan was: ‘10 million votes!’, with ‘por amor’ (for love) and ‘Chávez, victoria de Venezuela’ (Chávez, Venezuela’s victory) the slogans preferred by the party bureaucrats. Standing in contradiction was Chávez’ own pledge to “nationalise everything that was privatised” by previous administrations, focusing on the “strategic industries” of oil, cement, steel and telecommunications.

This was the first election campaign after Chávez declared socialism as the aim of the revolution. As the campaign progressed, he spoke at mass rallies in increasingly radical language, receiving an enthusiastic reception. Simultaneously, the opposition campaign and the bourgeois media chose to run a campaign based on Chávez’ ‘communism’: they will take away your house, your children, etc., and managed to get as many as 300,000 at their main rallies. This was a factor in radicalising both the masses and Chávez himself. He increasingly posed the choice between the Bolivarian Revolution and imperialism in terms of: if you vote for me, you vote for socialism. In his victory speech on election night Chávez said “Long live the socialist revolution”. And added:

I said that 3 December was not a point of arrival, but a point of departure… Today, a new epoch begins, that we can sum up in four points. The central idea is the deepening, widening and extending of the socialist revolution. More than sixty per cent of the people has not voted for Chávez but for a project that has a name: Venezuelan Socialism.97

On 15 December, 2006, almost two weeks after his massive electoral victory, Chávez made a speech, broadcast on national TV, in which he made clear his belief that a new stage had opened up for the Bolivarian Revolution: “we are going towards socialism”, though “I haven’t got a blueprint, we must build it from below, from within, our own socialist model”. Of course, the reformists and moderates within the Bolivarian movement also talked about socialism, but only to ensure it was a watered-down socialism with no anti-capitalist content. Importantly, Chávez’ speech contained the call to form a new party: The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, PSUV).

This speech was a conscious attempt to give the Bolivarian movement an organised democratic structure, built from the bottom up. If successful, this would have remedied the key weaknesses of the revolutionary movement in Venezuela: the lack of a mass revolutionary organisation to give the Bolivarian movement an organised expression. However, this was quite a different method of party building from Lenin’s, with consequences that would be apparent all too soon. The Chavistas had absolute control of parliament and the presidential vote showed Chávez retained massive support among the population. It appeared that the balance of forces remained ripe for snuffing capitalism out in Venezuela once and for all, and quite easily. Would the new PSUV be the means of doing that?

At the swearing in of his new government, Hugo Chávez gave a fiery speech in which he proposed a series of radical changes to the constitution, declaring it was necessary to “dismantle the bourgeois state”. In that he was absolutely right. Not only was the Venezuelan state riddled with active supporters of the old regime, but its very structure was inimical to socialism. The proposed changes to the constitution would be subject to a referendum on 2 December, 2007.

11.1 The Constitutional Referendum Defeat

The recent nationalisations of CANTV and EDC (with compensation), the promise to re-nationalise steel maker SIDOR, and the call to set up the PSUV were, for the oligarchy, clear signs that Chávez was moving in a dangerously leftward direction. The oligarchs were, as ever, anxious to present a scenario to the world in which Chávez would be seen as a ‘dictator’. The private cable TV station RCTV was due to have its licence renewed at the end of May 2007, but the government awarded the licence to Venezuela Social Television instead. The counter-revolution prepared to test its strength on the streets using ‘free speech’ as a mobilising issue. The irony was that the group of which RCTV was the hub, was an empire that controlled sixty-six per cent of transmitting capacity and eighty per cent of the production of all media content in the country: ‘defence of free speech’ was the slogan of precisely those who proposed to monopolise it.98

The oligarchs were reluctant to attempt mass demonstrations; instead, gangs of thugs erected burning barricades during the night and terrorised neighbourhoods. During the day there were ‘peaceful demonstrations’, mainly of students from private, and some elite state universities. Active in these demonstrations was the organised counter-revolution (the CIA and its paid agents) throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails.

These noisy adventures could not hide the fact that the balance of forces remained extremely favourable to the revolution, as confirmed by the more than 5 million that registered to join the PSUV, enough to brush aside the counter-revolutionary gangs occupying the streets in the East of Caracas. However, it is not enough for a revolutionary movement to have the support of the majority of the population; the initiative cannot be in the hands of the counter-revolution.

In November 2007, Chávez made a personal appeal for workers in every workplace to set up Socialist Workers’ Councils (SWCs). Workers responded enthusiastically. Thousands of existing workers’ councils adopted the new designation and, throughout the country, many new councils were launched, usually on the initiative of a new generation of young workers, who had only recently woken to political activity, and who threw themselves into the struggle to establish SWCs.

The SWCs were launched with no legal provisions or regulations covering their activities or responsibilities, so workers improvised. The majority of these councils took on the improvement of workers’ rights and conditions, but they also assumed responsibility for implementing some sort of cogestión. As part of the latter, the more militant demanded access to the financial dealings of the company and a say in all the main decisions. Though they were attempting to implement an appeal by the President himself, the workers faced hostility and harassment at all levels. Often the SWCs were ignored, but sometimes workers were accused of counter-revolutionary activities and sacked for attempting to set up SWCs. This occurred in both the private and public sectors.99

Fourth Republic bureaucrats allied themselves with new ‘Bolivarian’ bureaucrats in their common fear of workers. One scandalous case was the harassment of the promoters of the SWCs at Fundacomunal, an institution whose purpose was creating communal councils such as Misión Madres del Barrio (a social programme for mothers in poor neighbourhoods). That an institution, whose purpose is to help establish organisations through which communities can run their own affairs democratically, used repression against its own staff for wanting to have a democratic say in the running of their own institution is Kafkaesque. A more recent example of such repression was in 2016 when Tromerca, the state-run tram system in Mérida State, fired workers quite illegally for attempting to organise a SWC.100

The FSBT came out in opposition to SWCs, particularly in the basic industries in the Guayana region. Here there were (and are) particularly close links between the local FSBT tops, the local PSUV leadership including the state governor, and top managers in the CVG. Azzellini suggests this is a hang-over from the days of the Fourth Republic, when the AD and COPEI ran the unions with “a corporate structure for private appropriation of public goods and funds… creating a culture of theft that in many places has remained in effect”.101 As cogestión became more of a threat to the activities of these crooks, so the resistance and active opposition of the PSUV tops and the state machine increased. Cogestión was an immediate threat to the material benefits of state, party and company bureaucrats, and so came under direct and continuous attack until, during Chávez’ terminal illness, a coup would be carried out to remove the most radical worker-presidents.

The PCV sponsored a ‘Special Law on Workers’ Councils’ empowering and giving legal protection to the SWCs. This was put before the National Assembly in 2007, but no decision was reached. This happened on several subsequent occasions, indicating the political strength of the interests opposing this move. The question is: why didn’t Chávez support the PCV proposal? A law on SWCs is still promised, at some unspecified time in the future.

Chávez’ proposed amendments to the constitution were formally announced in July; sixty-nine articles of the Venezuelan constitution were to be amended for the country to begin the transition to ‘Socialism for the Twenty-First Century’. The Episcopal Conference of Catholic bishops declared the proposed reforms “morally unacceptable” and paid for a two-page advertisement in Ultimas Noticias, claiming that the State would take people’s children away from them and that freedom of religion would be abolished. Every Sunday, the Church preached from its pulpits against Chávez and ‘godless communism’ and was supported in its crusade by the privately-owned newspapers, TV and radio stations. These latter were able to carry this hysterical campaign of lies and slander against Chávez, the Revolution and socialism only because the Revolution had been far too generous, far too tolerant, far too patient, and far too soft. Despite the media’s open collaboration in the coup attempt, the Revolution had made no attempts to limit ‘press freedom’, it left this weapon in the hands of the oligarchs with which to sabotage the Revolution, with the goal of ultimately destroying it.

Opposition students played a crucial role. They had received vast amounts of publicity when challenging the non-renewal of the RCTV broadcast license, gaining support within the student body by claiming they were ‘standing up for free speech’ and denying affiliation to any political party. Their largest demonstration numbered 50,000 and attracted much publicity, but more for the accompanying violence than the number of demonstrators. After the referendum, the Cato Institute, located in Washington, DC, reported it had awarded the Venezuelan student movement $500,000 for acting as the storm troops of the opposition during the referendum. But the Chavista students had over 200,000 on their rallies. In the ideological struggle for the youth, the Revolution attracted far greater numbers than the counter-revolution. But to take the movement forward there needed to be a programme of action that would enable the students to unite in common cause with the workers. Some students did this by support work around the factory occupations, but what the campaign made clear was the need for a youth organisation of the PSUV.

Regarding the referendum itself, the bureaucrats within the government and the Bolivarian movement again showed their complete inability to organise a serious mass campaign. How could they, when they themselves were opposed to the proposed changes? Many ‘Chavista’ governors and mayors actively sabotaged the ‘Yes’ campaign because they correctly saw that democratisation of the state would mean the end of their perks. It was both significant and disappointing that while there was a clause stipulating non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation there was no parallel proposal to decriminalise abortion, access to which was, and remains, severely restricted. These false ‘Chavistas’ failed to answer the lies of the opposition. They failed to publicise the many points in the reformed constitution that would have benefited the working class, such as the thirty-six-hour week.

For all the talk about Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, the oligarchy was still firmly entrenched and using its wealth and power to sabotage, undermine and roll-back the gains of the Revolution. The right-wing media was free to spew out lies and slanders, peasant activists were murdered and nothing was done about it. Despite the reforms of the government, which undoubtedly had greatly helped the poor and disadvantaged, the majority still lived in poverty. The caudillos and capitalists got away with open economic sabotage, substantially worsening the living conditions of the popular masses. All this had a cumulative effect.

The masses wanted decisive action against landlords and capitalists, action against corrupt governors and officials. There was a growing weariness of going to the polls every year being promised changes, followed by a lack of concrete action. Furthermore, the referendum was not an election in which to clearly vote for Chávez or an opposition candidate. The referendum took place on 2 December, 2007, and gave Chávez the first election defeat of his nine-year presidency (50.65 per cent to 49.35 per cent). The result, as expected, was greeted with jubilation by the opposition. For the first time in a decade they had secured a victory. Chávez went on television accepting the results, saying that he would continue to struggle to build socialism. However, the joy of the reactionaries was exaggerated. They had won only because a large number of Chavistas had not voted.

Despite the referendum result, the real balance of class forces was shown by the rallies at the end of the campaign. The opposition moved heaven and earth to mobilise its mass base and succeeded in assembling a large crowd. However, the next day the streets of central Caracas were flooded by a sea of red shirts and banners. The two rallies revealed that the active base of the Chavistas was five to eight times bigger than that of the opposition. The decisive force, the working class, in its overwhelming majority, was on the side of the Revolution.

The Bolivarian Revolution was still holding its ground and, in certain areas, making progress, but in a piecemeal, ad-hoc manner that reflected the lack of any commonly agreed idea on just where the Revolution was going. Its great weakness remained the lack of a subjective factor in the sense of a revolutionary party. But it was the very dynamism of the Revolution that made it so hard for the development of a Marxist party, in particular the role played by Chávez, who made one radical announcement after another in support of the struggles of the workers and peasants but, no matter how militant they sounded, they always remained within the bounds of the bourgeois state. The majority of Bolivarians who voiced criticisms still believed that building a revolutionary tendency, with a clear strategy of how the working class could take power, was secondary to the practical work of building Socialism for the Twenty-First Century. Activism substituted for analysis.

A key element in the workers’ movement had been the factory occupations, nationalisations under cogestión. In Inveval a small group of Marxists was leading the struggle for workers’ control and having to fight battles they could never have foreseen: for new sources of parts and materials, against sabotage by the state bureaucracy, and against the tops of the state oil company the PDVSA. Though successfully recruiting workers to their organisation, they had the central problem that an isolated Inveval could not survive amid a capitalist economy. Efforts were made to link up with other occupied factories and factories threatened with closure by establishing Freteco to co-ordinate common struggles across the country. Such co-ordination was anathema for the bureaucracy, which had put considerable effort into isolating the different factories, asphyxiating the movement, starting with the more advanced forms of workers’ control. First, they starved them of cash and resources, and then, when the workers were worn down, they replaced the elected leader with their own appointee.

Ultimately, the economic question is decisive. As Trotsky had said, the masses can sacrifice their today for their tomorrow only up to a certain point. For the masses, the question of socialism and revolution are not abstract questions, but very concrete ones. They had shown a high degree of revolutionary maturity and willingness to fight. But the oligarchs and their CIA analysts had rolled with the punches and countered by planning to have the situation drag on until the masses tired. They planned to generate a mood of apathy and scepticism in the most backward layers, leaving the most advanced elements isolated. When that moment arrived, the counter-revolution would strike. Those who argued that the Revolution had gone too far too fast, that it was necessary to reach a compromise to save the Revolution, were playing into the hands of the oligarchs.

Food shortages throughout 2007 and 2008 were part of everyday life for millions of Venezuelans and reached major proportions during the run-up to the constitutional reform referendum. It was certainly a factor in the collapse in Bolivarian votes in working-class areas. It was not the food scarcity itself that was the reason why 3 million abstained in the referendum. Most of them knew from their own experience that food scarcity was created by a deliberate campaign of sabotage by the oligarchy. The crucial factor was that the government was seen not to be doing anything about it.

For example, in March 2007 the government had passed the ‘Law against Sabotage, Hoarding and Speculation’, which allowed for the seizure of food stocks and the expropriation of those involved. However, as with so many things that adversely affected the oligarchs, this law had not been implemented in any serious way. Chávez himself became frustrated by the lack of action and tasked the Minister of Agriculture, Elias Jaua, to produce a list of those companies involved in sabotaging food distribution and production in order to expropriate them. Do something or resign, was Chávez’ demand, but still no serious action was taken. However, the defeat of the constitutional reforms made it impossible to continue with merely face-saving measures. In Aló Presidente on 22 January, 2008, Chávez announced his personal intervention against “the monopolies and rackets”. In two weeks more than 13,000 tons of food was seized. This figure gives an indication of the scale of the sabotage, but it was only the tip of an iceberg. Elias Jaua was promoted to be both Minister of Agriculture and Vice-President in January 2010.

The National Guard targeted Polar group’s food distribution chain and confirmed that food scarcity was largely a deliberate campaign organised by the oligarchy against the Bolivarian Revolution. The biggest seizures were in the regions bordering Colombia, where convoys of trucks were smuggling produce to Colombia. On 24 January, twenty-seven lorries belonging to Alimentos Polar were seized, containing 165 tonnes of maize flour and 350 tonnes of basic foodstuffs including many which had been scarce in Venezuelan shops for many months (i.e., sugar, rice, pasta and milk). The goods seized by the National Guard were then sold at regulated prices.

Food was not the most valuable commodity smuggled across the border into Colombia. State-subsidised gasoline was sold in Venezuela at about one tenth a Bolivar per litre, whilst in neighbouring Colombia and Brazil the price was over 200 Bolívars per litre. This created a massive black market in Venezuelan gasoline. It was more profitable than smuggling narcotics and was a major business for the bourgeois and paramilitaries. Fuel subsidies amounted to nearly one quarter of government expenditure in 2015, and estimates showed that smuggling using heavy freight vehicles accounted for an annual loss of over US$5 billion to Venezuela. Food smuggling gave a much lower profit and was undertaken for political, not financial, reasons. In 2016, the price of petrol would be increased to one Bolivar per litre.

In January 2008, as part of the Food Sovereignty Plan, the PDVAL – a subsidiary of the PDVSA – was launched. It was expected to expand rapidly to purchase food on the international market and distribute it throughout Venezuela, with the aim of ensuring basic foodstuffs for all Venezuelans.102 In the same month, while inaugurating the first Socialist Dairy Plant in Machiques, Zulia, Chávez declared that companies that sold their milk directly to foreign multinationals above the regulated price would be expropriated, along with the dairy plants involved. He repeated the same message when he announced the nationalisation of the Lacteos Los Andes milk processing plant and a chain of slaughterhouses, which gave the state control over forty per cent of milk processing and seventy per cent of the meat processing sectors.

But food production remained within a mixed economy and was controlled by bureaucrats whose loyalty lay with the capitalists. The only guarantee of food sovereignty was to nationalise the whole of the food and agricultural industry and run it under democratic workers’ control. This would include not only processing plants and distribution, but also the latifundia. The workers, the real producers, needed to be brought together as employees of a national food producing company, publicly owned and managed by themselves. This would have allowed the planning, co-ordination and control of everything related to food, from production of the raw materials to the processing and distribution of the final products.

Instead, in late summer of 2008, the government again offered the hand of compromise to the oligarchs. Prices of around 400 products were raised, with the price of milk increased by a third. The ranchers saw this as weakness on the government’s part, claiming it was too little, too late, and demanded a 100 per cent increase. No amount of concessions would satisfy the oligarchy, short of ending the revolution. Economic sabotage was intensified, hoarding of basic foodstuffs increased, as was making small changes to production lines so that the end product was not on the regulated list. The end result was even greater scarcity on the supermarket shelves.

On 28 February, 2009, Chávez decreed state intervention in Polar’s rice processing plant in Guárico. The workers at the plant supported this measure and turned production to wholly unmodified rice with enthusiasm. Outraged at Polar’s tricks to avoid price control, Chávez on Aló Presidente, on 1 March threatened: “we will expropriate all of their plants, and convert them from private property into social property”. The government then decreed compulsory production quotas from 3 March, for all companies producing white rice, sugar, flour, cooking oil and foodstuffs, to ensure companies produced these items at the controlled price rather than divert production to non-regulated products.

Then, on Wednesday, 4 March, 2009, Chávez announced the expropriation of the rice plants owned by Cargill, a US-owned multinational food company. This rice-processing plant in Portuguesa was refusing to produce rice at the regulated market price, using the dodge of adding artificial flavouring; 2,400 tons of this presentation rice was found. Documentation recovered at the plant showed that massive quantities of rice had been smuggled to Colombia to be sold at unregulated prices.

Two days later Chávez signed an official decree expropriating the Polar rice plants, warning: “my hand will not shake when it comes to expropriating the whole of the Polar group if they are found to be breaking the law”. In what was a very radical speech, President Chávez dismissed the need to conciliate with the ruling class: “There cannot be any agreement with the oligarchy or agreements at the top with anybody; I will make sure that we put our foot down on the accelerator of the Revolution”. He went further stating it was time to “dismantle the old bourgeois state, before it dismantles us”. A striking feature of the actions against Polar was the response of workers. Once the ice was broken with the state intervention, workers from the food industry all over Venezuela began to call for action against the sabotage by ‘their’ capitalists. Wherever officials of the INDEPABIS (National Institute in Defence of People’s Access to Goods and Services) went, they were welcomed by the workers. Juan Crespo, the national leader of Fetraharina (Trade-union federation of flour workers, which organises more than 25,000 workers nationally) explained; “It is the workers who are going to open up the companies and say, here there is speculation, here there is hoarding…”

On 7 March, the Minister of Agriculture and Land, Elías Jaua called on the “people to come out and occupy the means of production”, explaining that this was “a fight between the people and the oligarchy which creates hunger, exploits the people, and hoards produce”. Calls from ‘on high’ from Jaua or even Chávez, for radical action were welcome, but the Bolivarian movement contained no structure or mechanism for transforming those calls into action. In a few small factories that were closing down, workers did occupy, but these were the rare exception, not the rule. The UNT gave little or no support, while the FSBT opposed such actions.

Shortages were accompanied by soaring inflation. Soon, the prices of many vegetables were higher than in most European countries (where wages were much higher than in Venezuela). The combination of food shortages and inflation created a very dangerous situation from the viewpoint of the Revolution because, as intended, it hit the poorest layers of society hardest and undermined support for the government. The land reforms of the government, intended to increase home production in order to be less dependent on imports, did help slightly, but the measures taken fell well short of what was required to fulfil the most elementary needs of the national democratic revolution: at the end of 2008, some eighty per cent of farmland was still controlled by fewer than five per cent of land-owners.

Government attempts to create alternative supermarket chains, such as Mercal and the PDVAL, providing cheap food products, had proved inadequate. There were relatively few of these stores, often many basic food products were missing and even if they had the required goods, customers had to queue for hours. Corruption by bureaucrats was widespread, underlining how the bourgeois character of the Venezuelan state meant it could not be used as an instrument to carry out even social-democratic measures, let alone a revolution. As long as the old state inherited from the Fourth Republic remained in place, the cancer of corruption and bureaucratism would continue to undermine the progressive reforms that Chávez proposed.

Neither price regulation nor partial nationalisations were solving the food crisis. Capitalists produce with the aim of making profits. If they consider that regulated prices do not allow them a sufficient rate of profit, they stop producing, even breaking the law if necessary. The obvious and correct conclusion was that there is a fundamental contradiction between the needs and interests of the majority of the population and the private ownership of the means of production. But the government would not countenance the nationalisation of the food monopolies under workers and community control. The shortage of food and lack of leadership were two sides of the same coin and the defeat in the reform referendum had been a warning.

The food crisis in Venezuela contained very important lessons. The continued existence of private ownership of the means of production, processing, distribution and sale of food was in direct contradiction with the needs of the population and provided the basis for the effective undermining of all government measures.

Concessions were the natural response of the state apparatus, confirming that it could not be relied upon to carry out revolutionary policies in favour of the masses. Concessions to the capitalists only made the crisis worse. They strengthened the hand of the oligarchy because they could present them as the government recognising it had been wrong and the capitalists right, it led to an increase in confidence amongst the oligarchs and greater determination on their part to intensify their offensive against the revolution. Worse, they introduced demoralisation and apathy amongst the ranks of the revolutionary masses.

12. The PSUV Founding Congress (January 2008)

The declaration of the decision to launch a mass socialist party threw the parties of the left into confusion and even crises. The PCV suffered an important split when half of its central committee left to join the PSUV. The PPT and Podemos opposed joining the PSUV, but a large proportion of their leading militants defected to the PSUV.

The expectation was that the PSUV would be the arena in which the struggle between the revolutionary and reformist tendencies in the Bolivarian movement would unfold. This was expected to begin immediately with the selection of candidates for the coming regional elections for governors, scheduled for November, 2008. Chávez’ call to form the PSUV was in the wake of his overwhelming victory in the presidential elections but when, on Saturday, 12 January, 2008, the new socialist party opened its First (two-month long) Congress it was after a referendum defeat that reflected a tiredness amongst layers of the masses due to lack of effective action by the government.

Chávez had proposed the PSUV as “the most democratic party in the history of Venezuela… genuine leaders will rise from the rank and file… enough of appointments from above”. That the PSUV would hold both government and state to account, that it would be a tool to eliminate bureaucracy and complete the revolution, gripped the minds of the masses – and in just two months, April-May, 5.6 million registered for membership. Present at the Congress were almost 1,700 delegates from all over the country. A vocero (spokesperson) had been elected from each of the over 20,000 Socialist Battalions, the base units of the PSUV. Groups of ten voceros met to elect one delegate. At battalion level, 1.4 million people showed up for the elections.

This party was supposed to represent the next step forward for popular participatory democracy. By 12 January, the congress had two plenary sessions. Between these, the delegates returned to their home regions and met and discussed with the rank and file, reporting on the Congress and its debates. The draft of the ‘Declaration of Principles’ and Party Programme had been circulated for discussion by a committee, led by former Vice-President Jorge Rodríguez. Both texts reflected the contradictions seen in the speeches of Chávez and the policies of the Venezuelan government.103

The draft programme was long on what should be done: Section 4, on the ‘Planned Economy and Communal State’, stated that the PSUV wanted a “democratically planned and controlled economy… capable of ending alienated labour and satisfying all the necessities of the masses”. To accomplish this, two measures were proposed: the end of monopolies and the latifundios. These were measures that Marxists would whole-heartedly support, and would have supported even more keenly had the programme included any concrete steps for their implementation. Instead, the programme contained formulations that were ambiguous, but open to interpretation, and party tops and Ministry bureaucrats did the interpreting.

Delegates from Caracas proposed that ‘anti-capitalism’ be included in the Declaration of Principles. Party tops, supported by the PCV, argued against, but during the final session, the rank and file heckled the platform until the issue was brought before Congress, approved, and included in the text.

Most members had joined the PSUV to end economic sabotage (particularly of basic food products), abolish unemployment, poverty and homelessness, and end corruption in the state apparatus. But to do so effectively, meant the overthrow of capitalism, just what the party tops and state bureaucracy were committed not to do. Regarding the forthcoming regional elections, Chávez in, Aló Presidente, on 20 January, called on PSUV members to de-select those Bolivarian governors who swore loyalty to the revolution and socialism, but carried out pro-capitalist policies in practice, working with the opposition and opposing all initiatives by workers, peasants and youth to change society. A glaring example was Podemos member, Didalco Bolívar, Governor of Aragua State, who was elected as a supporter of the revolution, but advocated a ‘No’ in the referendum and who had sent in the police against the occupying workers of Sanitarios Maracay.

In a dynamic situation where the masses were becoming involved in ‘party politics’ for the first time, and were joining the PSUV en masse, with the expectation of creating a genuine revolutionary party with a real anti-bureaucratic, socialist programme, it would have been criminal for Marxists to have allowed the reformists and bureaucrats a clear path to take over the PSUV. The expectation was they could join forces with the tens of thousands of revolutionary workers, youth, poor peasants and small shopkeepers and help lead a definitive struggle against the oligarchs, and bureaucrats, and for socialism.

However, the right wing inside the Bolivarian movement (all who wished to reach a compromise with the oligarchs and imperialism) managed to put their stamp on the congress. These people were (and remain) installed in key positions within the PSUV, state apparatus and nationalised industries, and from these positions they effectively control the party from above. Their major ideological thrust at this congress was to promote a reformist concept of socialism that allowed different forms of property. Behind this concept they would oppose nationalisations and defend private ownership of the means of production.

The major clash between the left and the right occurred on the decisive issue of how the national leadership would be chosen. The demand was that the party be controlled democratically by the rank and file in line with Chávez’ repeated statements, and that meant, amongst other things, that the leaders should be elected and subject to recall. The right fought back; this was a key question for them because it threatened their whole way of operating. The congress could not reach agreement on the method of electing the leadership. In the end, Jorge Rodríguez took everyone by surprise by suddenly declaring that each delegate should write three names on a sheet of paper and then all the ballots would be taken to Miraflores Palace where Chávez, taking the wishes of the delegates into account, would name sixty-nine candidates who would stand for election – fifteen full members and fifteen alternate members to be the national leadership. Then Rodríguez dropped the bombshell, the three names could only be ‘recognised leaders’.

On the last weekend in February, Chávez had been elected President of the party; now he used his enormous personal authority to impose the proposed election method. The role of Chávez in these manoeuvres was, at best, ambiguous and contradictory. He attacked the “splitting elements” and called for “unity and discipline”, using his authority to get the Congress to accept a fundamentally flawed leadership election procedure, objectively, supporting the bureaucracy. These actions reflected the limits on his perspective of how to advance the revolution. Chávez’ military background helped explain his emphasis on party unity and discipline but, of course, during a revolutionary period it is quite impossible have unity between reformism and revolution. By not defending democracy, by remaining tied to individuals who were clearly integral to the party bureaucracy, he was undermining the very revolution that he had done so much to initiate and progress. No matter how honest a man Chávez was, his balancing between the forces of reformism and the revolution was acting as a brake on the revolution.

Taking the ballots to Miraflores prevented the delegates from knowing either who the candidates were, or how many nominations each candidate had received. Forcing the delegates to name three candidates there and then prevented consultation with the rank and file and also stopped prospective candidates from presenting themselves and their ideas to the delegates. Limiting the proposals to ‘recognised leaders’ biased the election in favour of established leaders who were, in their majority, reformists.

The right wing got away with imposing an election process that was rigged in their favour from start to finish. In the final list of the sixty-nine candidates, which Chávez presented for election, there were a large number of people who were seen by the masses as useless and discredited bureaucrats. The vote took place on 9 March and, as would be expected, the resulting PSUV leadership came predominantly from the right wing of the party. Prominent right wingers, who failed to make the ‘first fifteen’ were either elected as alternates or found jobs elsewhere. Significantly, there was only one trade unionist on the list and he topped the poll.

The left had put its mark on the congress, most notably on the Declaration of Principles, but the national leadership which would enact the Declaration was firmly under bureaucratic control. This set the scene for an ongoing fight between the rank and file members of the PSUV and the bureaucrats, but without a party structure that was democratic, the likely outcome of that struggle was obvious.

13. Nationalisation of Steel (SIDOR) and Workers’ Control

The giant steel producer, SIDOR, was founded as a state-owned company during the 1950s and then privatised and sold to the Argentinian company Techint in 1997. From 1997 to 2008, when SIDOR was re-nationalised, the workers went through what they describe as a ‘living nightmare’. Thus, when Chávez made his call in January 2007 to “nationalise all that was privatised”, SIDOR erupted in jubilant celebrations with spontaneous walk-outs and the Venezuelan flag was raised over the installations.

After oil, the SIDOR steel mills are the most important industries in the country, with the largest concentration of industrial proletariat. Prior to re-nationalisation, the negotiation of a new collective contract had escalated into strike action. SIDOR’s management were supported by the Minister of Labour, Jose Ramón Rivero, and the governor of Bolivar state, retired General Francisco Rangel Gómez. Rivero slandered the workers, falsely claiming they had supported the boss’s lock-out in 2002-2003, when in fact, it was their actions which had kept the plant open. Next, Rivero threatened the workers: if they continued their action the government would consider forcing them back to work. He then accused members of the union negotiating committee of being agents of the oligarchy, intent only on disruption.104

The situation intensified in 2008, when Rivero tried to bypass the elected union leaders and impose a referendum on the company’s pay offer. On 14 March, 2008, the local National Guard, allegedly acting under the orders of the governor, attacked SUTISS (the steel workers’ union) members using tear gas and rubber bullets, arresting about fifty and hospitalising three. They then began a hunt to arrest the leaders of SUTISS. The workers in the region responded with a clear class instinct, organising solidarity meetings and pickets, and threatening strikes in other plants.105

This was an intolerable situation and Chávez had no alternative but to sack Rivero as Minister when he announced that SIDOR would soon be re-nationalised. A compromise between the Argentinian owners and the Venezuelan government meant the company was not ‘re-nationalised’, but instead sold its shares at preferential prices on the open market, with the only buyer prepared to pay the enhanced price of US$1.9 billion being the Bolivarian government. This was doubly generous given how cheaply Techint had bought the plant. It was also a contradiction: one of the reasons Chávez gave for re-nationalising companies privatised under the neo-liberal policies of previous governments was that they were practically given away, now his government paid over full market price when re-nationalising.

The question raised on the shop floor was, would a re-nationalised SIDOR be run to suit the oligarchs, to suit the bureaucrats, or would it be run in the interests of the Venezuelan masses? Although Chávez had sacked Rivero and nationalised SIDOR, the whole episode showed the government’s contradictory approach. Chávez was supporting the workers but the PSUV right wing was hand-in-glove with the oligarchs. Rivero was gone, but Gómez and the bureaucracies remained.

The nationalisation of the steel industry followed on the heels of important nationalisations in another sector of the economy. On 3 April, Chávez announced the compulsory purchase sixty per cent of each of the three major cement producers in Venezuela. These three overseas-owned companies (Mexican Cemex, French Lafargue, and Swiss Holcim) controlled over three-quarters of the industry. Producing primarily for the international market, these companies sold their products in Venezuela at the same price as their exports, the result being that Venezuela suffered both high prices and severe shortages. Chávez assured these foreign companies that they would be fairly compensated, but Venezuela was determined to solve its housing shortage – then standing at about 2.7 million dwellings.106

These particular nationalisations followed that of a much smaller enterprise, Cementos Andinos, the previous year, when all 4,600 workers were put on full-time contracts, ending the casualisation of labour. How such nationalisations were viewed by the workers was articulated by Alexander Santos, a leading member of the union at Cementos Andinos and spokesperson of its newly-formed Socialist Factory Council: “This measure will put the industry at the service of the people, to develop a state policy of house building without allowing a multinational to put its own interest above the interests of the people”. However, management of these companies was assigned to ex-military officers who completely opposed cogestión in any form. Soon they were mired in mismanagement, corruption and theft with the result that output fell catastrophically.

The re-nationalisation of SIDOR, was largely due to the heroic determination of the SIDOR workers, despite the ferocious opposition of Rivero, despite sabotage by many bureaucrats in both the state apparatus and SIDOR, and despite opposition within SUTISS. It was thanks to the determination of the workers in action not words, that the strategic goal of re-nationalising SIDOR was achieved. With a clear revolutionary and class instinct, the workers immediately acted to protect the plants to defend the equipment, materials and technical and administrative information necessary for normal working.

The day after the announcement, the Automatic Production System (the control centre for all aspects of production) ceased to function. A group of workers, suspecting sabotage, confronted the managers. After a heated exchange, normal operations were resumed. In another incident workers discovered a TV crew pretending to be a team from the state-owned TV station VTV. The workers confronted them and seized the tapes: it appeared that a group of hired thugs was to destroy company property, that this would be recorded and broadcast in order to accuse the workers of hooliganism. It was the workers, not the managers, who spontaneously defended the plant, implementing a basic form of workers’ militia to protect plant and equipment from wilful destruction and prevent the theft of equipment, instruments and computer systems, not only for their resale value but in order to sabotage the nationalisation.

SIDOR was formally re-nationalised on 30 April, 2008, accompanied by wide-spread discussion on the future of state industries, with the idea of putting all Guayanan heavy industries under workers’ control rapidly gaining momentum. Re-nationalisation was a giant step forward but carried out reluctantly by bureaucrats from several Ministries. With extensive mismanagement and corruption at the top, many acute problems remained unsolved and the re-nationalised SIDOR experienced a veritable battle between workers, who wanted to implement an effective system of workers’ control, and those elements in management, the trade union and state bureaucracies, who were doing all they could to make the attempts to build a ‘socialist enterprise’ fail. Having control of the local union in any company gives the bureaucrats power, access to key information about contracts, suppliers, etc., and with these comes the possibility to steal and demand bribes. It was widely believed this was the reason behind the concerted campaign organised by the FSBT, that used mafia type methods, in the various companies of the Guayanan heavy industry complex against worker-directors and workers’ control.

The question of the election of supervisory staff arose very concretely due to the experience of workers in the Maintenance Department who demanded their manager, an individual closely linked to the Argentinean multinational and in a position to cause serious damage, be replaced by a safe pair of hands elected from the shop floor. Faced with a campaign by the workers, the company permitted an election for the post, which a well-known Socialist and member of the Revolutionary Front of Steelworkers (FRTS), won easily. Workers in other departments now demanded the right to elect managers. As in the case of PDVSA at the time of the lock-out in 2002, all conditions were present in SIDOR for the rapid and full implementation of workers’ control. This did not happen because of the combined resistance of managers, government bureaucrats, corrupt trade union officials and local PSUV tops.

SIDOR generated massive resources but had inherited from the totally corrupt neo-liberal practices of previous regimes, widespread mafioso networks; e.g., repairs and maintenance awarded to friends and family, or for kick-backs. After the leftist, Carlos d’Oliveira, had been sworn in as president it was discovered that top managers were involved with the theft of materials for sale on the black market.107 A huge scandal erupted on 9 June, 2011, with the arrest of Luís Velasquez, SIDOR’s Commercial Director. Velasquez, it emerged, was head of a so-called ‘cabilla mafia’, guilty of the wholesale theft of cabillas, the steel bars used in construction. In November 2010 alone, twelve lorries loaded with 336 tonnes of cabillas, worth US$373,000 went missing. Velasquez was a Bolivarian top. He was the former finance director of the PSUV and a member of the management boards of the recently-nationalised Cemex and Lafargue. Apparently, Velasquez was, amongst other things, diverting cabillas to private companies with which he was involved. These would then sell the cabillas on the black market at three or four times the official price. Other materials were diverted to Colombia and Brazil where there are no regulated prices and where Velasquez also had business interests.

Jesús Pino, a leading member of the FRTS at SIDOR insisted these crimes were revealed only because the worker-directors of SIDOR noticed irregularities in the financial records that had previously been ‘overlooked’, found proof of misdeeds and alerted the authorities. Velasquez was the tip of an iceberg of a large-scale operation. The FRTS pointed out publicly and loudly that he was a personal friend of ‘Bolivarian’ Governor Rangel and that top people in the region and the national government were exerting strong political pressure to prevent the investigation of the thefts from going any further, i.e., workers who provided evidence against Velasquez were threatened with dismissal.108

With Velasquez holding such powerful positions and having such influential connections, the only effective way to combat the corruption was through the democratic participation of the workers at all levels of management in the companies. After robbing hundreds of poor families of a decent home, and the state of millions of dollars, Velasquez was released from prison in 2013, the short length of his internment a further demonstration that he still had powerful friends in high places in a corrupt system.

The Velasquez episode again confirmed that with a mixed economy, especially one in which capitalists are put in charge of the nationalised industries, wholesale corruption is only to be expected with the nationalised industries being blamed as inherently inefficient. Either the means of production are taken over and integrated into a democratic plan of production, or the anarchy of the profit motive will sabotage any attempts at regulation. The New Democracy in China was a period of mixed economy. For historic reasons the capitalists produced only a minute proportion of the GDP but their corrosive effect, particularly the corruption of the Chinese Communist Party, was out of all proportion to either their numbers or their economic strength.109 In Venezuela the mixed economy was dominated by the capitalists, so it was only to be expected that there would be powerful interests within the Bolivarian movement opposing workers’ control because it threatened their corrupt practices.

Behind Velasquez were those who had opposed the introduction of workers’ control: the state bureaucracy, top managers at SIDOR, the ‘Chavista’ trade union leaders of the FSBT, the governor of Bolivar state and the former Minister of Labour, Rivero, who had progressed to be an alternate member of the National Assembly, a Member of the Bolivar state Bureau of the PSUV, and aide to Governor Rangel.110 This powerful alignment of reactionary forces was one more manifestation of the impossibility of running Venezuela in the interests of the popular masses without expropriating the means of production and putting them under workers’ control, as part of a democratic plan for the economy.

In early 2011, Chávez was openly favouring Nicolás Maduro as his successor. This worried many trade union activists as Maduro had been a leading member of the FSBT, had actively opposed workers’ control, possibly even supporting the strong-arm tactics at Alcasa, and was feared to have kept his links with former colleagues. All this boded ill for workers, certainly in the nationalised industries.

The workers faced powerful enemies, but the SIDOR workers had shown their mettle during the bosses’ lock-out in 2002-2003, when their actions in keeping the Anaco gas plant open had ensured continued production in all Guayana. Following the assault on Sayago at Alcasa, workers across the region responded by organising the first National Meeting for Workers’ Control in May 2011 on the SIDOR site. More than 900 representatives of workers’ councils, occupied factories, trade unions and revolutionary workers’ organisations met for two days to discuss the challenges facing workers’ control and to develop a plan of action. The meeting passed a very sharp and clear manifesto entitled ‘Neither capitalists nor bureaucrats – all power to the workers’.

While the Meeting was largely upbeat and projected that the “conjuncture of forces is still favourable to the workers” the delegates expressed concern with the de-politicisation, apathy and scepticism of many workers, which had been seen in the September 2010 National Assembly elections, where the PSUV gained the majority of seats, but with only a slim majority of votes over the joint opposition coalition (MUD) – 5,451,422 votes against 5,334,309. The leftist PTT, which refused to join the Chavista alliance garnered 354,677.

In 2012, the workers’ control movement in Venezuela, and in Bolivar state in particular, was at a crossroads. The many achievements of the workers in forcing nationalisations, of driving toward workers’ control of the state-owned heavy industries, threatened the interests, not only of the US-backed political opposition, transnational companies and private bosses, but also of those who supported the Bolivarian Revolution only for personal gain. After all, there is little need for state managers if workers eliminate management hierarchies and operate factories themselves in a participatory democratic manner, and open democratic control of finances brings to a sudden halt the schemes for filching monies from the state.

Workers’ control also gave the lie to those who argued that workers are ‘not ready’ to operate factories themselves and showed that it was active sabotage by the reactionary forces that was undermining the Bolivarian Revolution. This had been particularly evident in Alcasa, which had been considered by many as the most advanced of the Guayanan factories in implementing workers’ control. In August 2012, some six months after successfully removing Sayago, the Ministry dismissed the elected worker president of SIDOR, Carlos d’Oliveira, a leading member of the Revolutionary Front of Steelworkers.

The process by which d’Oliveira was removed was very similar to that of Sayago. The FSBT trade union (under the name ‘Union Alliance’) organised a conflict, this time regarding the outsourcing of work. This was done in order to disrupt production, and caused damage to plant and equipment estimated at US$431 million. President Chávez explained that the events and protests were “a management error” by Oliveira and he had to go. Rafael Gil Barrios, a member of the FSBT, president of the CVG, and an ally of Governor Rangel was named as d’Oliveira’s successor by the government. To stop any fight-back in SIDOR, a story was put about that d’Oliveira had been arrested for embezzlement.

14. The Financial Crash of 2008

2008 was the year of the financial crash. Starting in March, the world’s banking system tottered on the brink of collapse. Around the world dozens of banks were saved only because their governments stepped in and forced their citizens to foot the bill for the greed of the bankers. Santander sought a local bank to take Banco de Venezuela (BdV) off its hands. Chávez offered to have the government buy the bank. To his amazement, Santander refused. It appeared to prefer BdV going bust than being state-owned.

Chávez often said that the nationalised industries had almost been given away and that the Banco de Venezuela was one such. BdV had been nationalised in 1994 after the massive banking crisis, only to be privatised in 1996 and bought by the Spanish multinational banking group Grupo Santander for US$300 million. It made US$325.3 million profit in 2007 alone and in the first half of 2008 a further US$170 million. This is just one example of how big foreign multinationals plunder the resources of Latin America.111

In his TV programme on 31 July, 2008, Chávez announced the government was going ahead with the nationalisation of BdV; assuring both employees and account holders their jobs and savings would be protected. He added that the bank’s profits “will not go to one private group, they will be invested in socialist social development”. Reuters later reported112 that Chávez paid $1 billion for BdV. Marxists, certainly, welcomed every forward step in nationalisation in Venezuela while pointing out that nationalising in an ad-hoc, partial manner would not solve the fundamental problems of the Venezuelan economy. The Bolivarian Revolution still did not understand that nationalisation of the entire banking and financial sector was necessary to establish a planned economy. Socialism is only possible when the working class holds state power, takes the productive forces into its hands and runs society for the benefit of the popular masses. There had been extensive state ownership in Venezuela before Chávez but, as part of a capitalist rentier state, this had generated a thick layer of bloated bureaucrats interested only in their own inflated salaries, while over a third of the population went hungry, living in shacks without running water.

At every decisive juncture, young people had energetically mobilised demonstrations of hundreds of thousands in support of the Revolution. The need for a Bolivarian youth organisation was obvious, and the PSUV called the four-day founding congress of the J-PSUV (PSUV Youth) to begin 11 September, 2008. The process of electing delegates was the same as for the PSUV, and around 1,300 young people from all over Venezuela arrived at Puerto Ordáz in the eastern state of Bolívar. The Congress revealed a well-organised bureaucracy around Héctor Rodríguez, Minister of the Office of the Presidency, intent on stifling genuine debate, but it also showed the revolutionary qualities of the youth, who managed to block all attempts to impose undemocratic statutes on the organisation.

Distribution of the statutes and accompanying documents was deliberately delayed until the Congress, so delegates would have no chance to collaborate to submit amendments or make alternative proposals. The cause was the grossly undemocratic structure proposed: the national leadership of the J-PSUV was to be fifteen members directly elected by the rank and file and ten appointed by the PSUV national leadership. This was flatly rejected by the delegates. During the morning of 12 September, there was so much dissent that the plenary session to discuss the proposed statutes was cancelled. Instead, Rodríguez gave a very short speech in which he stated that: “ninety per cent of the proposals received would be incorporated into new statutes”.

The J-PSUV Congress served to bring many genuine young revolutionaries together to discuss how to defeat the bureaucracy. It successfully opposed attempts to turn it into a bureaucratic apparatus, fought for internal democracy, and forced the leaders to change the statutes from top to bottom. There were no appointments to the J-PSUV National leadership, all positions being filled by national elections. A paragraph was also introduced stressing that the leaders were open to recall. The paragraphs directed at curtailing internal oppositions were deleted. But it was a pyrrhic victory. The leadership of the PSUV saw the first J-PSUV congress as a warning, and successfully resisted having a second until 2014. The Second Congress was tightly controlled by the party bureaucracy and the new leaders of the J-PSUV were appointed. Today the J-PSUV is, largely, an empty shell, an electoral machine for bringing out the youth vote.

In the November 2008 regional elections for local councils and state governors, the PSUV won about 5.8 million votes and the opposition about 4.6 million. Compared to the referendum defeat, the Chavistas had recouped about 1 million votes while the opposition had lost nearly half a million. But compared to the 2004 regional elections, the PSUV lost Miranda, Carabobo and the Metropolitan District of Caracas, all of them extremely important from the point of view of politics, industry, and population. However, the important losses of Carabobo and Miranda were explained as due to special circumstances.

In industrial Carabobo the sitting ‘Bolivarian’ governor, Luis Acosta Carlez, was typical of the corrupt breed of politicians occupying many of the top positions of the Chavista movement. He was deselected and expelled from the PSUV because of corruption and financial irregularities. In revenge, he stood as an independent and took enough votes to prevent the election of PSUV candidate, Mario Silva from the left-wing of the party.

In Miranda state (surrounding and including parts of the capital city), Diosdado Cabello the sitting Bolivarian governor, and the most outspoken representative of the right wing of the Bolivarian movement, lost his seat to Capriles Radonski. Having also lost his position as a full member of the national committee his influence appeared to be waning, but Chávez stepped in to rescue him. He was appointed Minister of Public Works and Housing, then in 2009 as Head of the National Commission of Telecom. On 11 December, 2011, Cabello was installed as Vice-President of the PSUV, becoming the second most powerful figure in the party after Chávez. In 2012, he was sworn in as President of the National Assembly.113

There may have been specific reasons for the loss of Miranda and Carabobo, but generally the level of abstentions was a warning to be added to the defeat of the constitutional referendum. The popular masses were learning that when they attempted direct action, the first opposition they faced was from a corrupt PSUV bureaucracy. No wonder that the abstention rate in the traditional Chavista areas was typically over forty per cent, whereas in opposition areas it was much lower, between twenty and thirty per cent.

Within a couple of weeks of the elections, oppositionists launched a series of assaults against the grassroots of the revolutionary movement. In Carabobo, Miranda, and the Caracas Metropolitan area, groups of reactionary thugs with police protection, attacked and closed down Radio Voz de Guaicaipuro, a revolutionary radio station in Los Teques, and Avila TV, run by young revolutionary activists. The western media was silent concerning these attacks on free speech. Next, the thugs targeted social programmes involving Cubans; forcibly closing down educational programmes and consultorios, shouting: “Now we rule Miranda”. However, local people soon rallied and attempts to evict the misiones from their buildings were defeated. These actions were a real eye-opener for many young Venezuelans who had little previous memory of the rule of the oligarchs.

On the morning of Thursday 27, three UNT activists Richard Gallardo, Luis Hernandez, and Carlos Requena arrived at the Alpina processing plant in Aragua, to give support to the 400 workers occupying the plant against closure. Police arrived, entered the premises and brutally kicked out the workers. The three trade unionists immediately rallied support from UNT branches in the area and soon the processing plant was surrounded. The police, outnumbered, allowed the workers to re-occupy the building. That evening, the three trade union leaders were assassinated on their way home.

On learning of the killings, the Aragua UNT immediately called for a day of protest action with mass meetings in all the factories and workplaces. Thousands of workers downed tools and came out on the streets the following afternoon. Thousands attended the funeral, and the Aragua UNT in an emergency meeting agreed a plan of action, holding mass meetings in all the region’s workplaces, a regional strike on Tuesday 2 December, and a national day of action the following day. The leader of the left within the UNT, Orlando Chirino, called on workers to respond to any threats by the bosses by “occupying the factories and demanding expropriation by the government”. The Aragua UNT now raised the need for workers’ defence.

The killings and wave of provocations on the part of reactionary gangs in the states and local municipalities where the opposition had won seats, was an indication of what would happen on a national scale if these counter-revolutionaries ever took power again. In an angry speech on Sunday 30, Chávez gave numerous well-documented examples of such attacks. The international media, in a concerted effort, despite all the evidence to the contrary, chose to dismiss these reports. The mass demonstrations by workers, students, and poor people who marched in defence of the misiones and against the counter-revolutionary attacks were never mentioned. The role of the ‘liberal’ press, in particular, was especially vile, accepting the smokescreen of lies erected by the opposition as good coin.

14.1 The February 2009 Referendum and Plan Socialist Guayana

On Thursday, 12 February, 1 million people marched in favour of a ‘Yes’ vote in the constitutional amendment to abolish the limit on the number of times the President, state governors, mayors and National Assembly deputies could stand for office. The amendment was passed with 54.4 per cent in favour and 45.6 per cent against, a clear victory for the Bolivarian Revolution. The masses saw a ‘Yes’ vote as defence of the gains of the revolution against the attacks by the semi-fascists on health and educational centres.

The bureaucrats, however, perceived it as approval of their policy of compromise and moderation. But the international crisis of capitalism during 2008 and subsequently, caused a collapse in the price of oil, with the PDVSA announcing a forty per cent cut-back in the year’s budget which seriously undercut the country’s economy. Prices of other raw materials, such as aluminium, cement and steel, which Venezuela exports, also dropped dramatically. The Venezuelan economy was capitalist, and therefore obeyed the basic laws of the market, meaning the gains of the revolution were seriously threatened. Inflation soared, and food prices in Caracas rose by fifty per cent in a single year. To escape the oscillations in oil prices it was necessary to break the power of the oligarchy and activate the country’s productive capacity, particularly in food. But in revolutionary struggles, what is needed to win over hesitating elements is decisive action. The slower the pace of the revolution, the more difficult it is to convince doubters that socialism will be the final victor.

After the nationalisation of SIDOR it was natural for the leading militants from across the CVG factories to discuss common problems and try to hammer out a common approach and policy on the future development of state industries. Chávez gave form to this by establishing the Guayana Presidential Commission with representatives from the PSUV National Executive Committee and some 400 workers from across CVG factories. On 21 May, 2009, all 400 workers, met with Chávez at a ‘Workshop of Socialist Transformation’ to loudly demand Guayana’s basic industries be placed under workers’ control. The President responded with his now famous cry “I unconditionally support the workers!” and announced the launch of Plan Socialist Guayana (PGS).

Chávez began his report to the Workshop by announcing that the state would retake control of a gas bottling plant in the eastern state of Monagas, and five steel and iron briquette companies that had been sold off to foreign multinationals under Caldera. These were to be integrated into the planned Iron-Steel and Aluminium Socialist Corporations as a sign of the government’s commitment to the PGS. Chávez declared: “these companies must be under workers’ control. That’s how it must be”. He continued, “What is happening here today is very important, since it is an example of the consciousness of the need for unity through debate”, the problem was that the Bolivarian Revolution was suffering from too much ‘debate’ and too little action. To the cheers of the workers Chávez announced ratification of a hard-fought collective bargaining agreement at Ferromineran (CVG), with, and here the applause rose to a crescendo, a ten to twenty per cent reduction in the salaries of the company managers.

The major outcome of the Workshop was the launch of the PGS with Labour Minister Maria Cristina Iglesia, and Planning and Development Minister Jorge Giordani appointed to lead working parties to flesh out the plan into a final form and provide a scheme for assimilating the country’s heavy industry into the government’s strategic development plan. The president emphasised the need for this new industrial complex to break with the old structures, he appealed for a “struggle against the mafias, corruption, bad management, against the deviations and vices of the Fourth Republic” as these were a “threat to the socialist revolution”.

Chávez went further and declared to the enthusiasm of the workers, the need for cogestión in the industrial sector in general: “The plan is an integrated plan. And we want you to carry it out, of course! We must raise all of these companies’ productivity, efficiency, and transparency… The entire productive process… needs to be under workers’ control”. How many times previously had the president outlined similar plans and given direct orders to his ministers, only to have them ignored and buried. To go from words to deeds is, in the first place, the responsibility of the revolutionary leaders, to project a course of action that would motivate the industrial proletariat of Guayana, particularly the iron and steel workers.

For all the hype, concretely, the proposals outlined by Chávez amounted to little more than the participation of the workers in the election of the management in a company that operated within a capitalist economy. It was true that many managers holding senior positions in re-nationalised companies were counter-revolutionaries and often worked hard to ensure the failure of those companies, as was the case with Inveval and Alcasa. However, even if all reactionary managers were replaced with revolutionaries, the bourgeois character of the system would remain unchanged.

Guayana covers nearly half of Venezuela’s land area, it comprises the three eastern states: Bolivar – population 1.4 million, Amazonas – 140,000, and Delta Amacuro – 170,000. This region is home to extraction and manufacturing industries: iron, steel, aluminium, gold and more. The CVG is a state-holding company comprising seventeen basic industries, directly employing over 30,000 workers. Azzellini describes the situation in Guayana as an open conspiracy by which an association of imperialist interests, the oligarchy, the state governors, bureaucrats left over from the Fourth Republic and still holding top jobs in the various Ministries, local entrepreneurs, the managers of the CVG industries, and an elite of privileged workers and trade union bureaucrats “operating something like a paradise of ‘free theft’”, filching billions of dollars a year from the state.114 After 1998, the Chavista government showed little interest in intervening, not least because the elected governor of Bolivar, the dominant state, in 2004, 2008 and 2012, was retired General Francisco Rangel Gómez, a high-ranking member of the ruling Chavista party and fellow graduate of Chávez from the Venezuelan Military Academy.

The report from Iglesia and Giordani was presented to Chávez on 9 June, 2009, as Plan Socialist Guayana 2009-2019, the blueprint for the future development of state-owned industries in Guayana. The PGS had serious implications for power relations in the Guayana industries, even if in a limited form of co-management. Robertson describes how these basic industries would become the key battleground between those wishing to advance workers’ control and vested interests within the Bolivarian movement, who would fight bitterly to oppose it.115

The introduction of Plan Socialist Guayana 2009-2019 states “the aluminium, iron and steel workers of Guayana, alongside the Bolivarian government, have decided to take a step forward in the construction of socialism, by assuming direct control of the production of the region’s heavy industries”. To this end, the PGS presented nine goals, with detailed plans for their achievement. Seven were unobjectionable and ranged from integration of all CVG industries into two mega companies, one iron and steel production, the other aluminium processing, democratisation of management, promotion of health and safety in the work environment, to the provision of educational opportunities for workers.

However, two of the goals were for every worker to participate in formulating projects for implementation, which had to be costed by the work force as a collective, and to establish codes for public accountability of the management of the CVG factories. These sent shivers down the spines of those who had made rich livings for many years by robbing the state in one form or another.

The PGS recognised that the Venezuelan economy was still overwhelmingly based on bourgeois social relations. These took the form of private ownership of production, but included state ownership even when fulfilling a social need such as housing, because state ownership in itself did not necessarily challenge either hierarchical capitalist power relations or the bourgeois nature of the state.

The general argument behind the PGS was that participatory decision-making in both public and economic life was emancipatory, and therefore a step towards socialism. The call was for active participation of the popular masses in all areas of public and economic life as an important mechanism to stop the formation of elite groups which could lead to the bureaucratisation of the revolutionary processes. Marxists pointed out the impossibility of attaining equality in decision-making in societies where large-scale private ownership of, for example, newspapers and television exists. To realise meaningful democracy, the mass media must be under democratic control through, for example, workers’ control and soviets.

The PGS proposed a ‘worker council’ model for running the factories, with each work section electing one or more representatives to a General Management Council (with any sub-committees deemed necessary) responsible for the day-to-day running of the enterprise. Proposals of a substantive nature had to be approved by an assembly of all the workers. Representatives of the local community or co-operatives with which the company was linked could be seated on the Council or invited to attend as and when required. In a typical nationalised company or joint enterprise where the state held a fifty-one per cent share, the executive committee or board of directors would have equal numbers of workers and state representatives, but the president, would be determined by the state. This gave ultimate control to the Minister and the PSUV bureaucracy.

Class-conscious workers made every effort to advance the workers’ council as a step towards workers’ control, hoping to lay the basis for radical social transformation by introducing mechanisms of democratic decision-making ‘from below’. Revolutionaries naturally supported these efforts and pushed for the most democratic and complete form of workers’ control in all enterprises. However, they simultaneously explained that without a social transformation of society the gains being made would, sooner or later, be in danger of being lost to the counter-revolution.

The PGS moved into a new phase on 15 May, 2010, when, after pressure from the rank and file, worker-presidents were sworn-in at each of the CVG companies. These included Elio Sayago in Alcasa, and Carlos d’Oliveira in SIDOR. Chávez warned against reluctance on the part of managers and administrators to accept these appointments, declaring that “it’s necessary to defeat such resistance to change”. and that some management positions were occupied by “enemies of the revolutionary process”. The question was, where would the PSUV tops and Chávez, stand in such disputes?

On 6 October, Elio Sayago found himself barred from entering a PGS Sub-Committee meeting attended by government ministers Khan, Iglesias, Maduro, and Giordani who had opposed his appointment as worker president. Jose Khan, had been appointed Minister at the Ministry of Basic Industries and Mines (MIBAM) in April, 2010. By December, he had stopped meeting with PGS working groups, side-lining them. The US$403 million approved for Alcasa by President Chávez earlier in 2010 failed to materialise, frozen between the bureaucracies of the CVG and MIBAM. Very powerful people were actively sabotaging workers’ control in CVG companies. Pro-PGS activists claimed this informal alliance included PSUV Governor Rangel (himself a former CVG president) and the FSBT.

In October 2011, trade union elections were scheduled in the SIDOR steel plant. The Revolutionary Marxist Current, a group within the PSUV, accused Khan, Iglesias and Vice-President Elias Jaua, of attempting to influence the vote to get a candidate less committed to the PGS elected. After a period in which the workers’ control movement had made many advances, often due to the direct intervention of President Chávez, Freteco warned that counter-revolutionaries were organising to intervene, using the disruption of production that they themselves were causing, to ‘prove’ workers’ inability to administer companies. A similar warning was expressed by the Alcasa Socialist Workers Front in January 2012: that the “internal right-wing” faction around Rangel and the FSBT union was engaged in a campaign to gain control of the CVG companies. According to the statement, the aims of this faction were to make the PGS “unworkable”, in order to achieve “the elimination of workers’ control (and) the removal of Sayago”. In the view of the Alcasa union, if the Rangel faction were to achieve these goals “all the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution in the basic industries would be brought down”.116

An orchestrated crusade against co-management and workers’ control in Venezuela, and the PGS in particular, was being voiced by conservatives of all stripes, from the tops of the state bureaucracy to the most backward layers of workers. The CVG industries had become the site of an intense political conflict over the future of the Bolivarian Revolution. This conflict over cogestión between different groups, each identifying itself as Bolivarian, revealed one of the sharpest contradictions in the revolution. The struggle within the PGS intensified in 2012, reflecting the intensification of the fight within the Bolivarian Revolution between the bureaucracy and reactionary political sectors, and those forces genuinely committed to further radical transformation.

The course of the struggle for workers’ control highlighted important characteristics of the Bolivarian Revolution. In particular, the on-going, and growing, internal contradiction between the bureaucracy and their reformist and reactionary allies and the more radical Chavistas committed to a deeper process of revolutionary change. The reactionary elements had one major advantage: they were not concerned with the efficiency with which the nationalised companies operated; their concern was to protect their personal interests. For example, after the dismissal of Sayago, production at Alcasa steadily declined and the latest figures (2015) show a production level of one-quarter that achieved under Sayago’s leadership.

The bureaucracy appears to have successfully blunted the struggle for workers’ control which, in many ways, was the spearhead of the Bolivarian Revolution. Not only by economic sabotage but going so far as to organise physical attacks on workers leaders who threatened their under-the-counter deals with the oligarchs.

14.2 First Extraordinary Congress of the PSUV

The year 2009 began with a politically-motivated and illegal lock-out at the Mitsubishi plant, intended to crush the trade union. An initial occupation by the workers was ended on 29 January, when police broke into the plant, shooting and killing two workers, but the workers stood firm and their militant action won a temporary victory on what, initially, appeared to be generous terms but which contained the condition that production was raised to a new high. This target proved impossible to achieve and, in August, Mitsubishi closed the plant ‘indefinitely’. The Ministry of Labour intervened and the plant re-opened when Minister, Maria Cristina Iglesias, agreed to 150 workers, including eleven union leaders, being fired.117

In early May, Argenis Vasquez, general secretary of the workers’ union at the Toyota assembly plant in Cumana, who had led a four-week strike in March was shot dead, triggering an occupation of the factory. In June, General Motors, which supplies Venezuela with forty per cent of all its vehicles, closed its production plants for three months, alleging a lack of dollars with which to buy parts, and thousands of workers were laid off. At the end of August, the government agreed to provide additional support despite a fall of almost half in oil revenues that year, and production re-started.118

The First Extraordinary PSUV Congress (also referred to as the PSUV Second Congress), commenced on Saturday 21 November, 2009, with a five-hour speech by Chávez that contained the now legendary call for a ‘Fifth International’. Holding aloft a copy of Lenin’s State and Revolution, he stressed the necessity of destroying the bourgeois state and replacing it with a revolutionary one. The speech reflected the enormous pressure of the masses who were demanding real progress towards genuine change. The PSUV bureaucracy, supported by the Stalinists, argued that this was an uncalled-for provocation, the regime should not adopt an openly anti-capitalist stance. The call for the Fifth International faded away.

Chávez admitted that Venezuela remained a capitalist state and this was the central problem of the revolution. He, once again, repeated his call for the establishment of a people’s militia, that every worker, peasant, student, man and woman, should receive military training, and that this must not remain on paper but be put into practice. Chávez had called several times for the formation of workers’ militias but almost nothing had been done. The previous May, he had said: “in every factory there must be a workers’ battalion… with the weapons kept there”. Not surprisingly, no-one in the leadership of the PSUV nor the UNT and certainly not the FSBT, took the call into the factories or the barrios.

Chávez used his speech and the Congress to attempt to breathe new life into the revolution, to overcome the general feeling that the leadership of the PSUV was out of touch, not listening to the masses and not concerned with their problems. For example, he announced that seven medium-sized banks were to be taken over. His speech was enthusiastically received by the 772 red-shirted delegates, but seven years after defeating the attempted coup there were clear signs that the masses were frustrated with the slow pace of the revolution. The state sector was dominated by bureaucracy and corruption, and workers’ control, which had shown so much promise, was being strangled. The communal forms of property did not represent more than ten per cent of GDP, the latifundia remained relatively untouched, and Socialism of the Twenty-First Century had sunk in a swamp of endless debates.

The banks referred to were merged into a new state sector bank, Banco Bicentenario, holding about one-third of all personal deposits. These nationalisations were a government bail-out to protect the banks concerned from insolvency. In June 2010, the government would take control of Banco Federal (which held less than three per cent of total deposits in the banking system), for failing to maintain minimum reserve levels. However, Venezuela’s financial sector remained largely free to suck enormous wealth out of the country. An article in the bourgeois financial journal Reporte Diario de la Economía from 5 February, 2010 revealed that the banks had made US$2.6 billion in profits in 2009, of which eighty-three per cent came from fees charged. This was a grotesque figure when it is remembered that millions of Venezuelans lived in shanty towns and survived on US$5-10 a day. The amazing thing here is that much of the profit came from the state. Even today, oil money passes not through the nationalised banks but bourgeois financial institutions. Using Banco Bicentenario for these transactions would not only save the state huge sums of money but would be a body blow against the oligarchy.

The PSUV primaries for selecting candidates for the Assembly elections were held on 2 May with 3,527 registered candidates in eighty-seven constituencies. During the Congress Chávez had warned party officials, especially those who served in powerful government posts such as Ministers and state governors, to refrain from campaigning for or against candidates at the local level: “The party base should be the ones who decide”. National Executive member Freddy Bernal came forward to argue that the election of candidates should be open to the entire membership, rather than just the 2.5 million active members registered in ‘patrols’. He suggested that this would counter the influence of governors and mayors. Those with experience of elections within a mass political party know full-well that moves to get the ‘entire membership’ (i.e. the non-active members) voting is invariably a manoeuvre to retain the status quo.

The party apparatus (‘la maquinaria’) did everything possible to ensure its candidates would be selected in the primaries, and no left-wing candidate would win. In this they were aided by the officials of the CNE. Favoured candidates were assisted in the production and distribution of posters and leaflets. Full-page adverts in newspapers, spot adverts on sports programmes, promotional openings of misións, trucks and cars used to bring supporters to voting booths, the picture was everywhere the same – the apparatus used every possible trick to crush the left.

The result was an outright victory for the apparatus. True, the masses did get some ‘popular’ figures onto the final list, such as Andreina Tarazón of the M-28 student movement and the J-PSUV. But nationally, the picture was bleak. The rank and file protested the rigging manoeuvres of the bureaucracy, and the dissent was of sufficient weight that, on Thursday, 7 May, PSUV Vice-President Cilia Flores, announced that the national leadership was “investigating the claims of inequality in the campaigns”. As though nothing untoward had occurred, President Chávez gave a very radical speech to the 110 winners of the primaries: “You must put yourself at the service of the people, not of yourselves, nor of a governor or a mayor, but of the people who are still suffering”. His audience were those who had just rigged the primaries so that no such things would happen!

The state machine and most governmental ministers were intent on paralysing any advance of the Revolution; sabotaging progressive legislation, cancelling out the initiatives of the president and stubbornly opposing nationalisation under workers’ control. Nowhere was this clearer than in the food sector, as demonstrated by the scandal in PDVAL, the state-owned food company, which delivered more than 1,000 tons of food on a daily basis. The Venezuelan intelligence service found that twelve top managers had organised a network which systematically hoarded containers and hid them until the contents were beyond their sell-by dates, classified as inedible, and then sold on the black market. Anyone who dared oppose them was immediately dismissed and silenced by death threats. A hoard of 2,334 containers of food goods was found. This case shows how impossible it is to build a new, socialist society for the Twenty-First Century, or any other century, with the old bourgeois state still in place. Without the democratic control of the working class, it is impossible to root out corruption and bureaucracy. Últimas Noticias, 9 June, 2010, reported it was the workers of PDVAL who blew the whistle on how the organised crime syndicate operated within the company.

As time went on the actions of the bureaucracy against the left wing became ever bolder, even ministers were sidelined or removed. The most scandalous case was the sudden removal on 10 February, of Professor Eduardo Samán, Minister of Trade, the most popular minister in the government. According to Samán it was Chávez’ decision: “the capitalists in the food sector… asked for my head as a guarantee and then in turn they promised not to generate food scarcity in this year of elections. …I was the obstacle that they wanted to remove”.119 The man who replaced Samán, Richard Canán, immediately increased the price of a whole series of basic food products, and lifted the price controls on basic products which Samán had kept in place. For whose benefit did he do this? The question was particularly relevant in an election year.

It was noticeable that trends seen in Nicaragua were making an appearance – companies subsidised by the government were making fortunes by currency speculation, while producing practically nothing. In the decade up to 2012 the state had ploughed US$317 billion into subsidising the private sector instead of investing in productive machinery.120 Much of this became capital exported to American banks. Increasingly, the nationalisations that took place were dubious; the bureaucracy was learning its lessons, and now nationalisation was used not to support but to smother the struggle for workers’ control in a factory; in other cases, the old owners continued to run the companies but with government subsidies so that all that changed were the labels on the tins. What these obvious social injustices reflected was that, nearly a decade after the start of the Bolivarian Revolution, the Venezuelan economy was clearly still a market economy in which private manufacturing provided three out of every four jobs. The capitalist element clearly dominated the mixed economy.

Nicaragua had demonstrated that, within a market economy, there is no way of solving the most pressing problems of the masses. In Venezuela, partial nationalisation as a launch pad for socialism was daily being shown not to work. The failure of the President to put his words into practice was allowing demagogic calls from the opposition to penetrate layers of the urban poor who were desperate to reverse the now continuous decline in their living standards. Demonstrations, even mass demonstrations, were now being seen by many militants as drawing attention away from the problems that really concerned ordinary people. One Chavista activist commented bitterly: “In the past, people used to fight to get on the buses to go to our rallies. Now nobody wants to go. Some even say: ‘I will go if you pay me.’ They say: ‘there is plenty of money in this country – for some!’”

The opposition had learned its lesson from its abstention in the 2005 Assembly elections, now they were clearly mobilising for the National Assembly elections that coming September, convinced their economic sabotage was undermining the revolutionary morale of the masses. Its goal was to win a sufficient number of Assembly members to be able to wage an effective propaganda campaign of pointing the finger of blame at the government, in particular for the food shortages. After ten years of unfulfilled revolution, the economic situation was worsening not improving. Within the Chavista camp, those who would abstain were growing in number, but simultaneously, more radical elements, especially within the J-PSUV, were openly calling for destroying the source of the oligarchy’s power, i.e., private ownership of the means of production.

The opposition was ready to complement its ongoing economic sabotage by street actions whenever it could present the unrest as justified. In January, middle-class students demonstrated violently against the alleged closure of RCTV and in defence of ‘press freedom’. RCTV’s broadcasting licence had not been renewed in 2007, and it was now a cable TV channel. It was closed by its private license owners temporarily, in protest at being judged as subject to the national rules on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television. These protests left one Chavista student dead and several injured.

The opposition was convinced that its well-organised campaign to produce food shortages had helped score a victory in the constitutional referendum. Similar plans were now laid for the coming 26 September, 2010, National Assembly elections. The government tried but failed to make good the food shortages. The problem was four-fold: the majority of the food production and distribution sector remained in private hands; the network of government stores was limited and corrupt; there was no monopoly on foreign trade to control the flow of food out of the country; national food production remained low level because many of the peasants granted land never received the cheap credits and technical assistance they had been promised, and had been forced into subsistence farming.

In the months preceding the National Assembly elections, the counter-revolution was yet again on the offensive, using its control over the media to maximise the effects of the food shortages. An extensive investigation by Professor Pasqualina Curcio of the Universidad Simón Bolívar reported in her book subtitled Economic Warfare in Venezuela, a clear and significant correlation between intensity of food shortages and politically important moments, such as the lead-up to elections. She also found that, despite Venezuela being largely self-sufficient in root crops, fruit and vegetables, there were shortages because the food supply chains were largely controlled by a single, private, corporation.

The opposition again opened a campaign of disinformation and destabilisation; doctored opinion polls made it appear as though the PSUV was losing ground and the opposition Coalition for Democratic Unity (MUD) would win the election. El Universal published polls showing the MUD miraculously increasing its share of the vote until on the eve of the election it reached fifty-seven per cent. This prepared the ground for undermining the integrity of the elections, calling them rigged, and providing justification for the proto-fascists to take to the streets.

The right wing claimed victory before the votes were counted, the international media reported that Chávez had lost before the election results were announced: “Venezuela has said no to Cuban-style communism”. The actual results showed the PSUV with a majority, but no longer a two-thirds majority, dropping from 118 to ninety-six seats, while the MUD went from eighteen to sixty-four seats. Officially, the PSUV won the majority of the seats in sixteen of Venezuela’s twenty-three states, but in terms of votes cast in the industrial states, the PSUV won by a whisker in Bolivar, but lost decisively in Carabobo, Miranda, and Zulia.

The role of the reformists at the top of the PSUV was particularly pernicious. In an entirely parliamentary interpretation they tried to present the election victory as a step forward, an endorsement of their class-collaborationist policy. As for the drop in votes they drew all the wrong conclusions: we are too confrontational and that cost us the support of the people, we must draw back and govern on behalf of all the people.

But, for every step back, the MUD would demand ten more, and for every step back the enthusiasm of the masses for the PSUV would fall even further. It was class conciliation that was undermining the Revolution and alienating its base. This was demonstrated by the result in Anzoátegui, where the MUD gained a big victory, reflecting discontent with the scandalous behaviour of the governor, Tarek William Saab and the right-wing Chavista bureaucracy who backed the bosses against the factory occupations in Mitsubishi, Vivex and Macusa, alienating many Chavista voters. The counter-revolutionaries were encouraged and emboldened to go onto the offensive.

The PSUV retained a majority in the National Assembly and was able to control the passage of laws and most other functions of the legislative body. However, the opposition, even though a minority, would now be able to intervene in the parliamentary processes and obstruct the actions of the government, and would be able to use its position in the Assembly to mobilise the masses of enraged petty-bourgeois on the streets to create an atmosphere of chaos and disorder.

In a press conference on Monday night, 27 September, Chávez, putting on a brave front, said the next phase would be to “accelerate the programmes of the new historical, political, social, and technological project”. The president concluded: “We must continue strengthening the revolution!” But who would translate these words into action? The emphasis on bourgeois legality and parliamentary politics had divided, weakened and put a block on the Bolivarian Revolution. No matter how many idealistic revolutionaries are employed by the bourgeois state on valuable and worthwhile social projects, the socialist revolution can only be achieved by the destruction of that state.

15. Offensive Against Landlords and Speculators

Due to the 2008 crash, for the eighteen months prior to the 2010 election Venezuela had been in recession and, for the workers and poor, the situation was very bleak indeed. The Bolívar was devalued in January 2009 and food prices rose by thirty per cent in a year. Cheap credit to private companies contributed to increasing inflation, but that did not stop business executives from demanding ever more dollars from the government. Carlos Larrazábal, president of Conindustria (the industrial employers’ federation) demanded that the government “invest in private initiative”, conveniently ignoring that Venezuelan capitalists were not investing in their own businesses. They were continuing their strike of capital, amplifying the effects of the crisis. The government was nationalising firms that were at a standstill, putting compensation payments into the pockets of those causing the problems.

After the September election, workers and campesinos demanded that the government use the last three months of the old parliament (where it still had the required two-thirds majority) to enact the organic laws it had promised, in particular: legitimisation of workers’ and factory councils, and Agrarian Reform to destroy the rule of the caudillos. Pressure was also coming from the rank and file of the PSUV, reflecting the widespread anger provoked by the undemocratic nature of the primaries. Activists linked the fall in the overall vote to the lack of decisive measures to advance the revolution. There was a sense of outrage amongst the grassroots that the revolution was now in serious danger of being thrown back.

It was in this context, that Eduardo Samán opened a debate within the PSUV on the balance sheet and the lessons to be drawn from the election results. He stressed the need for profound change within the PSUV and the need to create a Radical Tendency to achieve this. Samán toured the country publicising his proposal. Many PSUV rank and file were attracted by Samán’s clear statements on the need to accelerate action against the capitalists and push for what he called ‘Socialist definitions’. However, the Tendency faded away after Samán was appointed President of Indepabis at the end of May 2013, a position in which he vigorously fought for a tough new approach against price speculators. Chávez accepted that the Radical Tendency had a place within the PSUV, but only on the condition it was not ‘divisive’. Interestingly, no sooner had Radical Tendency appeared than a disciplinary tribunal was established within the PSUV under the control of Ramón Rodríguez, former Minister of Interior.121

Chávez repeated his calls for the radicalisation of the revolution, and rejected any possibility of a pact with the bourgeoisie. Amongst others he nationalised Agroisleña, owned by the multinational Vestey group, an agricultural supplies company that served seventy per cent of Venezuela’s producers, and US-based glassmaker Owens-Illinois, placing sixty per cent of Venezuela’s glass bottle industry under government ownership. Many of the firms taken over were badly run, unprofitable or occupied by workers in dispute with the owner. Usually, to make them viable, they required government investment over and above the compensation paid. It was becoming a case of nationalising the losses and privatising the profits. These actions combined the worst evils of capitalist anarchy (falling investment, flight of capital, factory closures, inflation and unemployment) with all the most negative features of bureaucracy (waste, mismanagement, inefficiency and corruption). This was a viable scenario only while the oil money continued to flow.

At the end of November, Venezuela was hit by torrential rain causing widespread flooding and mudslides, killing at least twenty-five people and leaving 130,000 homeless. The barrios were particularly hard hit. On Friday 17 December, 2010, the Venezuelan parliament passed an Enabling Law giving Chávez the power to legislate by decree for the next eighteen months in matters concerning human needs generated by the rainstorms, including infrastructure, transport and public services, housing, the use of urban and rural lands, international co-operation and socio-economic systems. The President explained that he would use the Enabling Law not only to tackle the negative consequences of the prolonged period of rainfall, but also some of the structural problems of capitalism which had worsened the crisis. The reaction of the Venezuelan oligarchy was furious. Articles in El Universal compared Chávez to Hitler. Clearly, the bourgeoisie was worried that some of its more scandalous behaviour would be unearthed. Their concerns were well-founded. Chávez would soon act against speculators in the housing sector, nationalising construction firms that were cheating people with empty promises of future homes, and companies which left houses half completed and moved on as soon as payment was received.

Peasant organisations, like the FNCEZ, had been calling for years for an acceleration of the struggle against latifundia, both to alleviate Venezuela’s dependence on imported foodstuffs and to satisfy the campesinos’ demand for land. Land reform was enormously popular with Chavistas, its effect on the economy was largely beneficial, and it directed the attention of the masses onto the most parasitic elements of the oligarchy. Chávez now directed that action be taken against forty-seven caudillos, who owned huge territories south of Lake Maracaibo in South-western Venezuela.

The new expropriations met with a ferocious media barrage on behalf of the land-owners. Opposition MPs demonstrated the kind of role they expected to play in the new National Assembly. Hermann Escarrá urged people to take to the streets to “show civil and military resistance”. Miguel Ángel Rodríguez appealed for “a civilian uprising”. Abelardo Díaz urged protesters to block the Pan-American highway, in order to “send a message to the president”. There were only a few minor clashes between landowners and the National Guard and soldiers sent by Chávez to protect the newly expropriated land.

By 2011, rural land reform has been in effect for nearly a decade and despite the caudillos retaining most of their lands, rural poverty had diminished significantly. The government had ‘rescued’ 5.8 million hectares of land, regularised 5.9 million hectares, and distributed nearly 180,000 titles or agrarian letters. About half of Venezuela’s, rural population had directly benefited from the reform which explained the solid support for the PSUV in rural areas. By giving peasants the means with which to challenge the latifundios and to engage in land reform ‘from below’, the 2005 Land Law had meant, at least for the time being, greater empowerment of poor farmers vis-à-vis the caudillos.

Government statistics showed that overall food production had increased by twenty-two per cent in the decade ending in 2009. This increase, welcome though it was, fell far behind the increase in demand. By 2011, Venezuelans were much better fed, with a per capital increase in daily calories consumed of about a third. Over the same time period there had been a population increase of twenty-five per cent, which explains why food imports doubled. These figures do not record the food produced for home consumption by the recipients of land reform.

In the spring of 2011 a serious political scandal erupted. Colombian political refugee Joaquín Pérez Becerra, a naturalised Swedish national, was arrested on 23 April by Venezuelan security as he arrived at Maiquetía airport. After being held incommunicado for nearly forty-eight hours, Becerra was handed over to the Colombian authorities and taken across the border. This raised deep questions about the direction of the Bolivarian Revolution, especially as Chávez himself assumed full responsibility.

The effect of handing over Becerra was to drive a wedge between Chávez and revolutionary activists, the very backbone of the Bolivarian movement. As demonstrators massed outside the Caracas headquarters of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN), to protest Becerra’s illegal detention, the Venezuelan government was deporting Becerra to Colombia without granting him access to legal counsel or representatives of the Swedish embassy.122 Chávez had respected bourgeois legality when it came to actions concerning the oligarchy but now approved the handing over of a revolutionary activist to the reactionary Colombian regime in flagrant disregard of the rights of the accused. This was a serious mistake which did not serve to defend the Venezuelan revolution, quite the contrary.

Becerra was found guilty on terrorist charges by the Columbian Supreme Court on 12 September, 2012, and sentenced to eight years imprisonment. However, on appeal in 2014, the evidence submitted by the prosecution collapsed and Becerra was released.

16. Chávez’ Death, and the Election of Maduro

On 30 June, 2011, Chávez revealed in a televised address from Havana, Cuba, that he was recovering from an operation to remove an abscessed tumour with cancerous cells. On 17 July, he returned to Cuba for further cancer treatment. On 28 July, his fifty-seventh birthday, Chávez made a public appearance and gave a short speech in which he stated that his health troubles had led him to radically reorient his life. He went on to call on the middle classes and the private sector to get more involved in the Bolivarian Revolution, something he saw as “vital” to its success. Symbolically, he wore a yellow, rather than his customary red shirt.

Initially, the opposition tried to take advantage of Chávez’ stay in Cuba by cynically arguing that there was a ‘power vacuum’ and that this had to be filled. This backfired badly as it reminded everyone of April 2002 when the oligarchy attempted to justify the coup against Chávez by falsely arguing there had been a ‘power vacuum’ which they had proceeded to fill.

The implications of Chávez’ announcements were discussed everywhere. In particular whether he would be able to stand in the 7 October, 2012 presidential elections. For the masses, Chávez personified the revolution, they saw him as quite separate from the inept, corrupt and incompetent layer of managers, directors, regional governors, local mayors, ministers, state apparatchiks, etc., who were regarded as interested only in their personal advancement, and were openly counter-revolutionary. In the eyes of the masses, only Chávez remained as a genuine and honest revolutionary leader.

Despite all the hopes raised by the formation of the PSUV, the organisation’s structures were increasingly being emptied of any real democratic content. At the end of 2011, Chávez appointed Diasdado Cabello as First Vice-President and five other vice-presidents: Elias Jaua, Nicolás Maduro, Tarek El Aissami, Adan Chávez (Hugo’s elder brother), and Ramón Rodríguez. This was a pretty unsavoury bunch. Jaua, Maduro, and El Aissami had openly and actively opposed workers’ control and sabotaged Plan Socialist Guayana. Cabello was a capitalist who had a track record of undermining internal party democracy. El Aissami had also been heavily involved in the arrest and expulsion of Becerra. Ramón Rodríguez was head of the PSUV’s disciplinary tribunal.

With Chávez ill, the PSUV tops moved quickly to increase their control over the party, ruling that local leadership structures of the party at parish and municipal level would be appointed rather than elected. This was a giant step in top-down control of the party. ‘Cadres’ could now be parachuted in to take control of any dissident local organisation.123

The campaign by the opposition for the 2012 presidential elections was more of the same: to focus on immediate issues while using economic sabotage to make living conditions as unbearable as possible for the poorest, all the time blaming the government for every problem of daily life; even the recent heavy rain storms. This time, the opposition made crime a critical issue, bombarding the people with alarming figures for homicides, robberies and kidnappings. The government consistently failed to produce an effective response, and for that reason the bourgeoisie made crime their battle cry. The least the government needed to do was accept the level of crime with a ‘Yes, it’s true’ and not equivocate. This would have removed the criticism that the government denied the level of crime to be an issue.

The high level of crime was an evil inherited from the Fourth Republic and greatly exacerbated by the particular contradictions of the Venezuelan capitalist system. The problem was that Socialism for the Twenty-First Century offered no solutions. The functioning of a corrupt state apparatus, particularly in the food chain, the wholesale theft that went on in state enterprises, fed both petty and organised crime. But Venezuela did not need more police, more jails, more judges and more attorneys; it needed effective workers’ control and peoples’ militias united with communal councils and the popular masses to excise the cancer at the heart of the system.

In the last weeks of the campaign the opposition’s economic policy was leaked: a classic austerity package, proposing cuts in pensions, social spending and the ‘opening up’ of the PDVSA and other state-owned companies to private investment. The plan was so scandalous that four smaller parties in the MUD withdrew their support for Capriles and a whole host of opposition figures distanced themselves from him. In response, the opposition attempted to shift the emphasis to Chávez’ illness: stressing Chávez’ “frailty”, in contrast to the good health and energy of his opponent. They highlighted that the Chavistas did not have anyone who could take his place. On this they had a point; it was an undoubted weakness of the Bolivarian Movement that it depended so much on one man.

The bourgeoisie, having spread lies and more lies for twelve years, acted no differently in the 2012 election campaign: the oligarchy’s media told of a sure victory for their candidate, of his enormous support among the popular masses and declining popular support for the president. Shamelessly, the polling firm Consultores had Capriles pulling ahead in September with a two per cent lead. Again, these polls were not meant to reflect reality, they were preparation for making trouble when the results were announced.

The election gave Chávez 55.1 per cent of the vote and Capriles 44.3 per cent. The turn-out was a record eighty-one per cent. The opposition had worked hard on its campaign of dirty tricks; from early in the day rumours were spread about so-called ‘exit polls’ which gave Capriles an advantage over Chávez by as much as ten percentage points. These were intended to create the impression that any official results showing a Chávez victory were dubious. However, the defeat was so definite that the opposition had no choice but to recognise they had been beaten.

In his election victory speech from the ‘People’s Balcony’ of Miraflores Palace, Chávez announced that the march toward democratic Socialism for the Twenty-First Century would continue. It was seven years since he had first declared that the Venezuelan economy and state apparatus was capitalist and dominated by an oligarchy, inextricably linked to foreign imperialism. This speech contained no definite measures on how to bring their rule to an end.

The more intelligent sections of the ruling class understood that they would not win this election. They wanted to capitalise on the 6 million votes they received (their highest result ever) and play the long game of economic sabotage, while hoping that Chávez’ illness would prevent him from completing his term of office. They knew there was no-one else in the Bolivarian leadership who commanded the same level of support and authority amongst the masses so they expected to make big gains in any election held after his death.

Immediately after the presidential election, Vice-President of the PSUV, Diosdado Cabello, announced the party’s list of candidates for governors in the forthcoming elections on 16 December. This was a substantial increase in the powers of the party tops over the appointment of local PSUV leaders. The response from the grassroots of the party was fast in coming and was essentially the same everywhere: What had happened to party democracy? Where are the militants who enjoy the support of the local PSUV branches and would take the Revolution forward?

The PSUV was no longer for revolutionary change; it had discarded the objectives on which it had been founded and had become an election machine. The lack of democracy in what was supposed to be “the most democratic party in the history of Venezuela” was due, of course, to the intensity of the struggle between the party machine and the masses. The candidates, in their great majority, fitted in with the leadership, and avoided any action that would embarrass the party tops in Caracas. As they were chosen centrally, they were not responsible to the local PSUV and could be expected to carry out policies quite the opposite of what the local rank and file wanted. These were not the kind of people who would support Socialism for the Twenty-First Century or any other century.

To everyone’s surprise, the PSUV candidates for governors won twenty out of the country’s twenty-three states, including five which had been run by the opposition. The opposition’s only consolation was that their defeated presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, retained the important Miranda state, beating former Vice-President Elias Jaua. The official PSUV candidates won 56.2 per cent of the votes, the opposition received 43.8 per cent. The reason for these candidates doing so well was rather obvious. Despite assurances to the contrary, as soon as the opposition had won governorships in the 2008 election it had immediately launched a campaign to reverse the gains made under Chávez; it unleashed its supporters against the healthcare and education programmes, attempting to close them down by expelling them from the premises they occupied. Now the MUD was calling the Housing Mission “a fraud and a failure”. Clearly, if the MUD had won then not only would health and education suffer but hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans could be transferred from social housing to the private market.

16.1 Death of Chávez and Election of President Maduro

The 23 January remains a national day celebrating the struggle for democracy in Venezuela. The opposition attempted to take advantage of Chávez’ illness by calling a demonstration to protest against “the unconstitutional situation”, i.e., the postponement of the swearing-in of Chávez due to his illness (he would never be sworn in). The PSUV leaders responded by calling on the masses to take the streets on the same day. Faced with the prospect of being completely surpassed in numbers, the opposition leaders replaced their march with a rally in Parque Miranda, an upper-class area of Caracas. Fewer than 6,000 attended.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Chavistas marched, with a big contingent from the unions, both the UNT and the CBST (the Bolivarian Socialist Union of Workers, the new name of the FSBT). It was reported that “thousands of militia men and women in green uniforms” also marched. These were not the people’s or workers’ militia that Chávez had called for numerous times, these were army reservists who had been renamed the Bolivarian National Militia, as opposed to the popular militia of his original proposals. Rank and file Chavistas carrying banners and chanting slogans against any pacts or deals with the right-wing cheered at the news that the government’s campaign against hoarding of basic food products had seized thousands of tons of food hidden in secret depots.

On Friday, 8 February, 2013, the President of the Venezuelan Central Bank, Nelson Merentes, announced the devaluation of the Bolivar from 4.3 to the US dollar to 6.3. At the end of the day, devaluation inevitably leads to higher prices for the final consumers – that is, higher prices for working class families. Currency exchange controls had been introduced in 2003 in an attempt to curb the massive flight of capital, the bourgeoisie had responded with a black market with its own dollar exchange rate. Just as had happened in Nicaragua, the state currency administration division gave dollars to capitalist enterprises at the official exchange rate so they could import materials for production or goods for re-sale. The capitalists then sold the dollars on the black market, making profits of over 1,000 per cent without having to produce anything. The trade was so profitable that even though dozens of businessmen and capitalists were arrested the process flourished. No complete figures have been produced, but at one point the government revealed that around US$20 billion of the subsidies given to the private sector in 2013 had been illegally used for speculation against the Bolivar. However, to this day, tens of billions of dollars are still being handed over to capitalists every year from the state coffers.

This was (and remains) a ludicrous situation, the state is pouring money into the pockets of those who are most actively sabotaging the country’s economy. The black market in dollar exchange is ever more under the control of a few politically minded individuals who use it to increase the inflation rate. Government tops sit tight and take no action. The obvious solution is the centralisation of foreign trade, the creation of a single State Importation Centre that would co-ordinate all the country’s imports that depend on the dollars supplied by the state. This would be a major brake on inflation and stop the draining away of foreign exchange. It would also be an important step forward in combating corruption, particularly in the state institutions; which may be the reason nothing has been done.

The shortage of medicines is a case in point. Between 2004 and 2014, the scarcity of pharmaceutical products increased dramatically, and headlines screamed of extreme shortages due to the cut-back in government dollars given to the pharmaceutical importers. But analysis by Pasqualina Curio has shown that between 2004 and 2014 there had been cuts in neither the monies allocated, nor the amount of pharmaceutical goods imported. Curia concluded that the shortages were due to hoarding and provides additional evidence by demonstrating that despite the claimed lack of medicines, none of the top ten pharmaceutical importers reported any drop in sales or profits.

Hugo Chávez died on 5 March, 2013, before he could be sworn in as president for the fourth time, and before coming anywhere near to completing a socialist revolution in Venezuela. Important reforms had been carried out that had greatly improved the conditions of the poor and given them hope for the future, but Venezuela had remained a mixed economy and no definite measures had been taken to change that. The bourgeoisie hoped that without Chávez in the presidency, a rapid transition back to ‘normality’ could occur: undoing the gains of the revolution, the social missions, the nationalisations, the remaining elements of workers’ control, agrarian reforms, and so on. The goal, of course, would be to return the ‘honey pot’ that was the PDVSA to the oligarchy through full or partial privatisation.

Revolutions are made by the masses in motion, gripped by revolutionary ideas. No single individual was more effective in setting the Venezuelan masses into motion than Hugo Chávez. As many as 2 million people took part in the procession accompanying the coffin, as it was transported from the Military Hospital to the Próceres where it was to be displayed. For the previous fourteen years, the overwhelming majority of the population, workers, the poor, peasants, and many who would describe themselves as middle class, had gained a deep feeling of pride and dignity from participating directly in activities which changed their lives, learning to read and write, building medical centres and schools, taking ownership of a new house, and defending those gains against the repeated assaults of the oligarchy and imperialism.

But because Chávez was the undisputed leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, of the Venezuelan state and PSUV, it is all the more important to examine his most important mistakes. The absence of a party to focus activity, democratically deciding policies, democratically electing its leaders and able to hold them to account, was a serious impediment to the revolutionary process. Chávez repeatedly made radical proposals, but no mechanisms existed for advancing them. They were not party policy, the PSUV tops simply ignored or sabotaged them, safe in the knowledge there was no structure to hold them to account. With no elected collective leadership, Chávez was constrained by the right-wing tops in the PSUV, who were able to curb his more left-wing tendencies. Without Chávez, this central weakness of the Bolivarian movement would be writ large.

The bourgeois media and US imperialism immediately insisted that “the Constitution must be respected”. The opposition went further and alleged that a “coup” had taken place, when Vice-President Nicolás Maduro was sworn as President-in-charge by the National Assembly, and boycotted the ceremony. The constitution clearly stated that in the case of “permanent absence” of the president, the vice-president would take over and new elections would be called within thirty days. The Venezuelan ruling class did not really care who took over until the presidential elections on 14 April. What they wanted was a climate of uncertainty, and to tarnish the institution of the presidency with suspicions of illegitimacy.

On Friday 8 March, 2013, the main opposition leader, Capriles, went on the offensive saying that the decision for Maduro to become President-in-charge was a “constitutional fraud”. In an arrogant and condescending tone, he opened a campaign attacking Nicolás Maduro for having been a “simple bus driver” and therefore, unsuitable to be a president. Maduro replied to these insults by driving a bus to register as a presidential candidate. In public Capriles described Maduro as “Satan”, “bird brain”, “great fool”, and “liar”. These insults exposed the depth of class hatred which inspired the oligarchs, the bankers, caudillos and capitalists, but it was also a quite deliberate attempt to lower the tone of the campaign into the gutter, to undermine the authority of the election and the democratic process. Capriles then refused to sign the standard CNE document committing him to recognising the result, saying instead that he would “respect the popular will”, preparing the ground for not acknowledging the election outcome.

The election was held on 14 April, 2013. The result was sufficiently close (7.6 million votes [50.6 per cent] against 7.4 million [49.1 per cent]), for Capriles to call his supporters onto the streets banging pots and pans to demand the CNE not proclaim Maduro the winner. Right-wing students hurling chunks of concrete took over squares in Caracas, burning several clinics and attempting to block the main roads. Seven deaths were reported. National Guards were called to disperse the demonstrators.

Capriles refused to concede defeat and raised accusations of fraud, demanding an audit of all votes cast, with detailed examination of voters’ signatures and fingerprint records to see if dead people, or foreigners, or duplicates had voted.124 The CNE rejected this as “impossible” since the process would take up to five years to complete. Capriles responded that, without this audit, the result was “a joke”. As late as 30 April, the opposition was still refusing to recognise Maduro as the elected president. On that day opposition legislators prepared to disrupt National Assembly proceedings, arriving with a large “Golpe al Parlamento” (Coup in Parliament) banner and interrupting the session with whistles and air horns.

After his narrow victory, Maduro appealed to businessmen to stay away from politics and concentrate on production. He offered the creation of Special Economic Zones modelled on those in China, and to ease foreign exchange controls. There was even talk of reforming some of the articles of the Labour Law. Several prominent radical Bolivarian talk show hosts and presenters were removed from state TV and radio stations. None of that pacified the opposition, of course, but it indicated that Maduro was not intending to move in a socialist or even radical direction. Quite the reverse, it looked as though he was attempting to strike a deal with the MUD at the expense of a deepening crisis for the poorest.

Over the summer and into the autumn, the oligarchy, buoyed up by the election results, escalated its economic sabotage. Inflation soared, reaching fifty-four per cent between January and October, with a record level of shortages. The opposition believed that, having caused so much economic distress for so long, the government would fare badly in the 8 December, municipal elections.

In September, four months before the election, the government was against the ropes, with its level of support falling sharply. Then, in late October and early November, the government launched a massive campaign against the hoarding of goods. Led by Eduardo Samán, the campaign started with Daka, a white goods and electronics chain, warehouses full of goods were seized and the business forced to sell them at ‘fair prices’. The government measures had a two-fold impact. On the one hand, they made products available which were previously scarce or too expensive, and on the other, they rekindled the revolutionary expectations of the rank and file. Here was a government clearly identifying the enemy and taking harsh measures against them. This is what the popular masses wanted to see. This offensive enabled the Bolivarian movement not only to win the municipal elections but to increase its lead over the opposition.

The opposition presented these municipal elections as a plebiscite on Maduro’s presidency. In the event, the PSUV and its allies in the Great Patriotic Pole received 5.2 million votes with 4.4 million going to the opposition. Celebrating the election results, President Maduro pledged to intensify the offensive against the economic war, the campaign of hoarding, speculation, sabotage and corruption launched by the “parasitic bourgeoisie”. Concrete measures were absent.

17. The Opposition Offensive and Electoral Gains

After the elections, President Maduro met with representatives of the national bourgeoisie. Adopting a conciliatory tone, he offered concessions, such as increasing state credit in the form of US dollars. Thanking the president for his generosity, the opposition left the meeting and immediately ramped up the economic war. The bourgeoisie showed a complete lack of interest in working with the government, intending to continue their campaign of economic sabotage, and with the main means of production in their hands, they had the power to do it.

The conciliatory attitude of the PSUV leaders was taken as weakness and convinced the most extreme of the opposition leaders that they should take their fight onto the streets. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado (an opposition MP) were convinced that action on the streets would bring the government down. This campaign was launched on 23 January, 2014, under the banner of La Salida (the way out) with the stated aim of forcing the removal of democratically-elected President Maduro.

A guarimba (creation of public disorder and unrest) was launched. In some cases, it could count on the passive support of opposition mayors and regional governors who would do nothing to stop them or to clear the streets of roadblocks. Destruction of buses, fire bomb attacks against public institutions, notably the VTV state TV station in Los Ruices which was besieged for seven nights, followed. Actions took place in different towns, such as Mérida and San Cristobal. In Caracas, the guarimba was concentrated in the rich areas of the East. This was akin to rioting in London taking place in Hampstead, Kensington and Chelsea, with the centre of protests in Belgravia. It is also interesting to note that there was no looting, as opposed to what usually happens when people are moved by hunger.

Capriles Radonski, and the main body of the opposition opposed this campaign of street violence because it was obvious that the interests of the ruling class were best served by consolidating their positions in regional governments and municipalities and waiting for a more propitious time when they would win an election and assume power more gently. It is not that they were opposed to the violent overthrow of the government, they simply did not think that the conditions were right and hoped to do it peacefully. The bourgeois press referred to “a brainless mob which wants to destroy everything in its wake”, complaining that such actions strengthened the Chavistas and could incite the masses to action.

On 18 February, the opposition called a march which was widely reported in the world’s press, and which, according to Associated Press, had 5,000 participants. On the same day, the workers at the PDVSA had their own counter-demonstration in defence of the revolution, with tens of thousands participating. The latter was barely mentioned by the world’s media. The oil workers’ demonstration marked the beginning of a Bolivarian counter-offensive against the small groups of opposition rioters. On 19 February, a large demonstration of pro-revolution workers from the basic industries in Puerto Ordaz, Bolivar took place. The workers, who had suffered road blockades by a small number of opposition thugs, quickly cleared their barricades. They were then shot at by fascist elements from one of the neighbouring buildings, resulting in nine workers being wounded. In other parts of the country there were mobilisations in defence of the revolution, in many instances with workers playing a leading role. In a televised speech on the night of 19 February, President Maduro appealed to the working class to be united and mobilised and “to strengthen the workers’ militias”.

President Maduro had talked of workers’ militias before, and this was clearly a time to put words into actions. But talk is one thing, action is another. The government action was not to arm its citizens but to appeal to the ruling class and offer even greater access to foreign exchange. Samán, one of the main driving forces behind the campaign against the economic sabotage, was removed from his position without explanation. This constant oscillation between strong words and conciliatory actions was deepening the disillusion, scepticism and cynicism of the Bolivarian masses and encouraging the oppositionists to believe their methods were working.

The bureaucracy simultaneously acted as a brake on workers’ struggles. To give just one example: the workers at ABC Formas y Sistemas, faced with an illegal lock-out by their bosses, had been occupying their factory for over a year. They had tried all the existing legal avenues for the expropriation of the factories but had come to a dead end, with the Ministry of Labour taking no action (not refusing to act, just taking no notice, leaving the workers in limbo). There were dozens of examples like that throughout the country. The state bureaucracy and the reformist elements within the PSUV and government acted as saboteurs, blocking the initiatives of the masses and giving support to the counter-revolution.

There was increasing and widespread discontent amongst the Bolivarian ranks at the open control of the movement at all levels by the bureaucrats at the top. President Maduro made calls for unity and discipline, but the forthcoming congress of the PSUV, scheduled for the end of July was already getting off to a bad start, it had been announced that the 900 delegates would include the PSUV’s national leadership, ninety-six parliamentary deputies, twenty state governors and 242 mayors, some forty per cent of the total.

There were also widespread protests within the PSUV over the number of prominent radical or left-wing Bolivarian journalists who, since the presidential election, had been removed from state TV and radio channels without explanation. Whatever the reason might have been, the result was clear: critical left-wing voices were being silenced or denied access to larger audiences. Whether or not these sackings were part of a backroom deal with the opposition, or just a gesture of good will to them, they did not moderate the opposition, but rather helped demoralise the revolutionary movement.

On the evening of 10 April, 2014, the main political representatives of the Venezuelan opposition met with the government at Miraflores Palace in a ‘Dialogue for Peace’. Present at the meeting were international observers from UNASUR (Union of South American Nations, an inter-governmental body). A famous quote from Bolivar seems applicable here:

Every conspiracy was followed by forgiveness, and every forgiveness was followed by another conspiracy which was in turn forgiven again… Criminal clemency, more than anything else, contributed to the destruction of the structure which we had not yet entirely completed!125

Much the same sentiments were expressed by French revolutionary Hébert, if in a sharper manner:

The moderates have buried more victims than those that fell before the steel of our enemies. Nothing is more harmful in a revolution than half measures.

The national and international media painted a picture of the government of Venezuela as dictatorial, attacking the human rights of unarmed, peaceful and defenceless people. In reality, if the Bolivarian Revolution can be accused of anything, it is of being too soft on its opponents. This was graphically seen at the ‘Dialogue for Peace’: nearly all the opposition representatives had participated to some degree in the 11 April, 2002, coup. None of them had faced trial. On the contrary, they had been allowed to go free. President Chávez, magnanimously, perhaps naively, called for dialogue and forgiveness. The capitalist class responded by organising a lock-out to bring the government to its knees, followed by an ongoing media war and continuing economic sabotage and the guarimbas. Why would it be different now?

The representatives of the bourgeoisie brought to the ‘Dialogue for Peace’ proposals which included: fiscal discipline (i.e., cuts in social spending); national production with a free market (i.e., lifting price controls); encouraging productivity through the ‘flexibilisation’ of labour (i.e., abolishing job security and destroying the labour rights contained in the Organic Labour Act); and liberalisation of foreign exchange controls (i.e., free access to oil revenue dollars). These measures, taken together, would have meant a brutal shift in the balance of power in favour of the oligarchy and allowed exploitation of the labour force with little hindrance. The popular masses would face savage cuts, an end to the measures which the revolution had implemented to better their lives.

The opposition also demanded: all talk of socialism and revolution to be stopped (“it’s not in the Constitution”), the release of ‘political prisoners’ (i.e., immunity for those involved in the terrorist guarimbas), fairness in public institutions (i.e., the capitalists to regain direct control over the most important levers of the state apparatus), and disarm the colectivos (i.e., criminalisation and destruction of the rank and file organisations of the Bolivarian Revolution).

For fifteen years the Bolivarian Revolution had restricted itself to bourgeois legality, while the oligarchy resorted, time and again, to any means at their disposal to try to overthrow it. The bourgeoisie had spared no effort, legal or illegal, to crush the revolution. They had consistently defended their class interests. To each and all of these the Bolivarian tops extended the hand of forgiveness and friendship. Now they were doing the same again. Emboldened by the discussions, caudillos were increasingly challenging land occupations, claiming that the INTI had committed legal errors or not properly compensated them for the lands expropriated. The murdering of campesino leaders to prevent land occupations went largely unpunished because of the land-owners’ control over the local judiciary. At the same time, the MUD campaigned against expropriating unproductive land, despite agricultural production, largely by co-operatives, having increased to a level where it supplied 100 per cent of the demand for basic root vegetables.

On 2 May, 2014, the TSJ ordered the INTI to dispossess a twelve-year-old co-operative known as Brisas de Masparro and return the 3,600 hectares of land to Rogelio Peña Aly, an ex-mayor of the region who, according to the peasants, had acquired the land through corruption and intimidation. The ruling was symbolic as Hugo Chávez had personally introduced the Land Law into Barinas state. The ruling was a double strike because the co-operative was producing 30,000 litres a day of much needed milk, had over 25,000 livestock, had built over 230 km of agricultural roadways and fourteen schools. To put the cap on it, Ruben Dario Mendoza, representative of the cattle and agribusiness federation claimed that, on the basis of the decision, ten other plots of land could now be taken back.126

On 9 December, 2014, the TSJ made a second important decision when it revoked the property title of the El Maizal commune with about 7,500 members. At a time of food shortages this was known as the most productive commune in the nation, with crops of corn, legumes, and vegetables. Chávez had twice broadcast his weekly show Aló Presidente from the commune, and commended its progress. El Maizal was in the process of building a cornflour factory, to combat the monopoly of the Mendoza family, who had long used the distribution of this staple as a political tool against the government. It may not have been entirely coincidental that the person taking the court action was an associate of Polar. One thing was clear the caudillos and forces within the state were again criminalising the struggles of the campesinos, the bourgeoisie were feeling strong enough to openly use the judicial power against the popular masses.

Ángel Prado, a spokesperson for El Maizal argued that local Chavista leaders and the PSUV were their main enemies, actively attempting to “extinguish the commune… the grassroots sectors that withstood the guarimba protests, that withstood the coup d’etat and oil strike, that resisted all of these and neutralised the right wing”.127 In public, Maduro declared the TSJ decision “counter-revolutionary”, but there was no suggestion of taking active measures in support of the commune. On the strength of Maduro’s response, the opposition prepared the ground for a determined assault on co-operatives, and the state chosen to spearhead that was Barinas, where Chávez’ brother Adan was governor.

On 17 June, 2014, President Maduro announced the removal of Minister of Finance and Planning Jorge Giordani, a key architect of the government’s economic policy since 1999. This move towards ‘normality’ was commended by the US Bank of America in glowing terms:

[A] strong sign of the waning influence of the radical Marxist wing on economic policy issues… there is evidence of greater willingness by officials to engage the private sector and investors than there was in the past.

Giordani, now publicly describing government policies as inefficient and opening the door to corruption, challenged the very basis on which the government had convened the so-called ‘Economic Peace Roundtable’, disputing the idea that there could be a modus vivendi between the Bolivarian Revolution and big businesses. In response, the Minister of Oil and Vice Minister for the Economy, Rafael Ramirez, embarked on a series of meetings and press conferences with the aim of “re-establishing relations with the financial markets” (while declaring “socialism would be maintained”). The bankers, of course, had no intention of investing in Venezuela unless the demands made at the roundtable were agreed.

Some six weeks later, on 28 July, 2014, the PSUV’s Third National Congress began with Vice-President Diosdado Cabello announcing Nicolás Maduro as PSUV candidate for the presidency, to the “acclamation” of the 985 delegates. Maduro’s acceptance speech declared that the government’s “foremost task in the coming period (was) the advancement and transition towards a socialist economy”. When details emerged, they showed the advance would, in practice, be the continuation of the government’s perverse and ineffective policy of class conciliation. Maduro sat down with Lorenzo Mendoza and Henrique Capriles, providing them with a political platform and economic concessions, but failing to reduce the economic sabotage.

On 12 February, 2015, a coup attempt was foiled with the arrest of seven Air Force officers. Many in the Bolivarian movement had been convinced that the armed forces were “as red as red can be” and there was no threat from that quarter. But, within the confines of the bourgeois state, military men, as they rise up the ranks and receive higher salaries, perks and privileges, tend to identify more with the bourgeoisie than the dispossessed masses. As long as the military apparatus remained based on a bourgeois state and organised according to the social relations that dominate in a bourgeois society, there will always be pressures pushing the top military officers towards the interests of the ruling class.

For revolutionaries this confirmed the need to consolidate militias in every neighbourhood, workplace, union, school, and university, as an independent armed force and not under the tutelage of the army. It also confirmed the need for rank and file committees within the armed forces, and for political commissars linked to the Bolivarian masses. Without such measures the events of 12 February will surely be repeated. Just as US Imperialism finances sectors of the opposition, so US agents will be working to convince army officers to effect a coup if the bourgeoisie can engineer an appropriate scenario. In this the PSUV tops and state bureaucrats, with their policies of sabotaging workers’ initiatives, aid the destabilisation of the country.

In early August 2015, there was a sudden upsurge in attacks on communes. The two main targets were the comuneros in El Maizal who were still holding out, and a large commune in Barinas state. According to reports, the attack on El Maizal was by local National Guard units which had previously been known to act on the orders of big landowners allegedly implementing TSJ rulings.

An attack on the communities of Orticero, Las Mercedes, and Jovito in Barinas state commune was an even murkier incident. The land had been occupied since 2011 with permission from the INTI. This should have meant that, under the law, the comuneros were protected from eviction. In April of 2017, a new co-ordinator for the Barinas INTI took office, Ingrid Gil Guzmán. Under her orders National Guard units removed more than 860 people from their homes in an early morning raid. “When they arrived to evict us, they drove the tractors over to destroy our crops, they poured gasoline on the plantains and poisoned the wells that the campesinos had made for human and animal consumption” testified María Alejandra Tovar from Las Mercedes. “They took our animals, burnt our homes, our harvests, they destroyed everything in their path”.128 Communities Minister, Elias Jaua, remained silent.

For more than six months, the campesinos in Barinas had been demanding the removal of Guzmán, even to the extent of occupying the local INTI offices on the grounds that she had been ‘doing business’ with local landowners. An investigation into alleged involvement in illegal expulsions and corruption in the INTI regional authority, arranged a few days after the events, was rapidly discontinued. During the short-lived search, files and documents were found in which INTI officials had allocated themselves land. It was also found that land titles issued by the central authority in Caracas were not delivered, so that the campesinos lived and worked without formal legal authority, which meant they could be subject to arbitrary eviction or made to pay a bribe.129

17.1 Counter-Revolution Wins 2015, National Assembly Election

To help set the tone for the National Assembly elections, to be held on 9 March, 2015, US President Obama issued an Executive Order declaring a “national emergency” affirming that “the situation in Venezuela” posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”. This was US imperialism unjustifiably meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. The threat which Venezuela presented to US imperialism was the threat of inspiring progressive and democratic change in Latin America and beyond. The democratic credentials of the Bolivarian Revolution cannot be questioned by anyone.

The collapse of oil prices, exacerbated by US sanctions, meant the previous three years had seen a sharp deterioration of the economic situation in Venezuela. Oil hovered around $100 a barrel in 2013, but in 2016 it reached its lowest level for over ten years – $24 a barrel. The government decided to prioritise the payment of foreign debt, thereby severely constraining its ability to invest money in social programmes, to import food and other products. To continue paying for the social programmes to which it was committed, the state started to print massive amounts of money, resulting in galloping inflation, which hit working people especially hard. In a year, the price of many basic products rose by over 100 per cent. In real terms state subsidies on most products, including food, fell substantially.

Eggs, one of the main protein sources in the Venezuelan diet, were sold at around 100 Bolívars per carton of thirty eggs at the beginning of 2014. As prices rose, the government stepped in to regulate the price at 420 Bolívars. The result was the immediate and complete disappearance of eggs from the shops, as producers and shopkeepers refused to sell at the official price. By the end of October 2015, the street price was 1,000 Bolívars. Similar examples can be given for every basic product.

The dislocation of normal economic activity led to the collapse of the little private investment that was still taking place. The capitalists made more money exploiting the exchange rate differential than investing in production. Without nationalisation of the banking system, the exchange rate controls, instead of protecting the government’s reserves, were becoming a means by which the country’s oil revenue was being returned to the pockets of the oligarchy. The country’s hard currency reserves dropped from around US$30 billion in 2012, to less than US$15 billion at the end of 2014.

On 6 December, 2015, the result of the parliamentary election was a decisive victory for the counter-revolutionary opposition, the MUD, which gained 7.7 million votes and 112 seats, to the PSUV’s 5.6 million and fifty-five seats. The PSUV tops had believed the path of compromise to be safest, when it was, in fact, the most treacherous. Maduro’s policy had backfired spectacularly. The opposition made inroads into what had previously been revolutionary strongholds, even managing to win in the 23 de Enero parish in Caracas. If this pattern were to be repeated in the presidential elections, the oligarchy would be returned to power.

The never-ending stresses and strains of ordinary life were becoming steadily worse, not better. The realisation that many Bolivarian tops were benefiting massively from the endemic corruption, the weariness brought on by having to battle continuously against layers of corrosive bureaucracy, all of this had an impact on the consciousness of layers of the masses who previously supported the revolution. These were the key reasons for the defeat in the National Assembly elections.

The government’s attempts to compromise with the opposition meant there had been no large-scale seizures and distribution of hoarded goods, a situation perceived by the masses as a serious failure of leadership. The public wanted action. Denouncing and threatening to nationalise Grupo Polar was seen as weakness when nothing resulted. Nor had the PSUV election campaign projected any sense it would solve these problems. Maduro accepted the election results with the words “it could be said that the economic war has won”, but it was his inaction that had handed victory to the oligarchs. With the victory of the right wing, the cries of ‘fraud’ which had dogged the very same electoral process for seventeen years were noticeable by their absence.

The state and party bureaucracies had refused to support workers in action and deliberately stifled workers’ democracy. Their corruption and mismanagement of nationalised factories and enterprises caused even militant workers to doubt whether state control and planning was the way forward. On many fronts the bureaucracy had acted as the vanguard of the capitalists: every time a group of workers moved forward, by setting up a workers’ council, by occupying a factory and running it themselves, by taking over idle land, by setting up communes, they were blocked and pushed back by the bureaucracy, often using the police and National Guard.

One example: Industrias Diana is a food plant processing oil and margarine, which was expropriated in 2008 and was then run very successfully under workers’ self-management. A major success was that eighty per cent of the output was going to Mercal, much of the remainder went to community collectives and only a small proportion to the open market. In July 2013, Minister of Food, Félix Osorio, decided to impose a new manager without consulting the workers. The workers resisted and argued that they had a say in the matter. Osorio was determined to have his way, and the measures he took included subjecting leading members of the union to detention and interrogation by the National Intelligence Service. Finally, after months of struggle, the workers won, the new manager was removed and a former military officer who vowed to continue to the existing self-management was accepted by both sides and appointed.130

This example could be replicated many times across the country at all levels, but in most cases the workers did not emerge victorious, and in this context, talk of ‘revolution’ and ‘socialism’ became empty rhetoric. The opposition won the election not because of any failure by the Bolivarian masses, but because their reformist leaders had consistently avoided the path of expropriating the capitalist class, and chose instead to appeal to the goodwill of private capitalists.

With 112 seats in the National Assembly the opposition appeared to have a two thirds majority and the wide-ranging powers that went with it. Drunk with victory and seething with revenge, on the night of the election the representatives of the opposition announced the measures they would implement: nothing less than rescinding every progressive law passed by the Bolivarian government. The Law on Fair Prices, the Labour Law and the Health and Safety at Work Act would be made more ‘business friendly’. The Land Law would be repealed and all expropriated latifundia returned. A law for Activation and Strengthening of National Production was promised for privatisation of all state-owned land. All state-owned enterprises (i.e. PDVSA) and expropriated factories (i.e. SIDOR) would be privatised with their new owners being exempt from all taxes for four years. The opposition also announced its intention to purge all state institutions, including the CNE and the TSJ.

Venezuela now faced the unique situation where the National Assembly was in the hands of the MUD, and the President and Executive in the hands of the PSUV. The MUD needed a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly to change the organic laws and overrule the President, but during the election campaign some of its hotter heads had played fast and loose with the electoral rules. At the end of December 2015, the TSJ ruled that there had been irregularities in the election of deputies in the Amazonas state on the grounds that the MUD had been involved in vote buying. The election in that state was declared invalid and ordered to be re-run. This affected four deputies, two from the MUD, one from the PSUV and another one elected in the indigenous list (also a MUD supporter). However, the three deputies were essential to give the MUD its two thirds majority.

At first, the National Assembly refused to accept the TSJ ruling and swore in the three MUD deputies for Amazonas on Wednesday 6 January. The TSJ declared that this act threatened to make the entire swearing-in process null and void. The National Assembly temporarily retreated and a week later suspended the members for Amazonas. However, just to show its resolve, on the same day it introduced a bill to privatise state housing but this, and other reactionary measures, were blocked either by the President or the TSJ. In parallel, measures taken by the President were ruled out of order by the Assembly. Government was paralysed.

Throughout January 2016, President Maduro was in a running fight with the National Assembly. He claimed the economic situation amounted to a State of Emergency and introduced special powers for sixty days under an ‘Economic Emergency Decree’. These included sweeping powers to deal with, amongst other things, problems of food production and distribution. However, the National Assembly refused to accept the decision and responded by announcing that it would instead concentrate its efforts on removing Maduro as President. The new President of the National Assembly, Henry Ramos Allup (from AD with a long history of actively promoting neo-liberal policies) promised on taking office “to get rid of the Maduro government within six months”. The first of the anti-Maduro street demonstrations was scheduled for Saturday 12 March, 2016, in Caracas. In the event, some ten thousand attended, but a rival PSUV march was much larger, with tens of thousands supporting Maduro. It was becoming clear that a layer of people who had voted for the opposition from desperation, and wanting to end the economic impasse were having second thoughts on seeing what the rule of the right wing really entailed.

Maduro now embarked on a two-pronged approach to resolve the problem. In an attempt to assuage the capitalists, he established the National Council for a Productive Economy, a diverse body composed of ministers, private business leaders, governors, mayors, and others, tasked with finding solutions to the country’s deepening economic crisis. This was an ideological throwback to the time when Chávez still believed in the third way of Tony Blair. Simultaneously, he announced economic measures to show he was willing to compromise: capitalists would receive even more preferential dollars, soft loans, the passage of imports and exports would be smoothed, prices of goods and services could be increased, there would be devaluation and increased gasoline prices. For the financiers he promised to continue prioritising the payment of foreign debt.

To defuse any backlash from the masses, he announced some face-saving and limited social programmes, a small wage increase and food stamps. At the same time the PSUV bureaucracy called mass demonstrations in support of Maduro which, given the shock of the electoral defeat, were well attended. In a fanfare of publicity, the government also launched the Congress of the Fatherland, with 100 elected delegates with responsibility for drawing up a strategic plan “for the strengthening of the socialist project in Venezuela”. Initially well-received, it soon became clear that it would have no effect on government policy. This manoeuvre was totally inadequate to block the counter-revolution and take back political power. It soon faded away. Both the Congress and the demonstrations were intended to act only as safety valves for dissent; instead they increased the cynicism, scepticism, and apathy of the masses. 

On 28 March, the TSJ ruled that the National Assembly remained in contempt of court. Seeing his opportunity, Maduro sent a memo to the TSJ asking whether his presidential decisions still needed ratification by the National Assembly. The TSJ replied with its now-famous ruling of 29 March, that since the National Assembly was in contempt of court, the government did not have to send its decisions to it for ratification, that the TSJ was taking over the National Assembly’s legislative powers to exercise as it saw fit.

The National Assembly could have easily regained its powers if the MUD had agreed to re-elections in Amazonas. Its refusal to take the obvious and peaceful path to government says much about the character and intentions of the oligarchy. The opposition was not really interested in parliamentary procedures, it was determined to remove Maduro from office as soon as it could. This was not a question of who was right and who was wrong from a legal or procedural viewpoint, but of who held real power, in terms of mass mobilisations and the loyalty of the army.

Following this announcement by the TSJ, the MUD launched a campaign of almost continuous violent street protests with the aim of overthrowing the president. A spokesperson for the most radical wing of the opposition, María Corina Machado, in an opinion article in the Ecuadorean paper El Comercio, made clear: “The aim is not to hold elections… The aim is to depose the regime”. These protests were extremely violent, leading to over thirty people, mostly Chavistas, being killed. There were violent clashes with small groups of young MUD supporters who used firearms, home-made explosives and rocket launchers against the police, but also against educational institutions, state buildings, housing projects, hospitals and public transport.

On 8 April, MUD supporters ransacked and attempted to set fire to the TSJ building, they then set out to march to the buildings of the CNE. The government called out the National Guard to prevent them reaching their destination. However, these protests were not occurring throughout Venezuela, not even the whole of Caracas. They were concentrated in municipalities ruled by opposition mayors, particularly in Carabobo, Lara, Mérida, Táchira, and eastern Caracas.

To make matters worse, Venezuela was suffering a severe drought bringing problems in energy generation at, for example, the El Guiri hydroelectric dam. This led to regular power outages and, in April, the government decreed a two-day working week in public institutions to reduce electricity consumption. Of course, MUD supporters took advantage of this with bomb attacks against power generating plants, power stations and substations in different parts of the country with the aim of creating additional power outages to spread feelings of chaos and instability.

Despite the popularity of the PSUV being at a low ebb, there was still a hardcore of working class and poor people who came out on May Day. Hundreds of thousands of people marched against MUD’s attempts to overthrow the government. The world’s media, which had been paying much attention to Venezuela and had correspondents in Caracas at the time, was unanimous in its silence on this demonstration; instead, they painted a picture of an authoritarian regime with no support holding power only by its repression of peaceful protesters.

In May, the TSJ blocked a law for the privatisation of 1.2 million homes built as social housing for families on low incomes. The law as it stood gave ‘Deeds of Use’, which granted the right to the home, to the family as a whole and the property could not be sold on the open market. Change of residence would be a swap with a family in a suitable home. The new law would give ownership to the (usually male) head of the family who would then have the legal right to sell the property privately.

In July, the MUD decided to ignore the TSJ and again swore in the three Amazonas deputies. This was followed in August by the TSJ declaring that the National Assembly Presiding Council and the MUD deputies were all in contempt of court. In a further escalation of the institutional conflict, in October, the National Assembly voted to initiate proceedings to declare that Maduro had “abandoned his office” based on claims which included Maduro not being a Venezuelan citizen and therefore, unable to be president.

But if Maduro’s government regained power, what would it do with it? Since the exit of Giordani from the government in July 2014, there was increasing recognition of the failure of the previous model of using oil revenues to attempt to regulate capitalism and fund social programmes. But the changes proposed were not a move leftwards. Ignoring the lessons of history, the new policy was to make even more concessions to the capitalists, national and international, in the forlorn hope they would collaborate with the government and help to turn the economic situation around. This was expressed in a whole series of measures such as further liberalising of foreign exchange and the establishment of Special Economic Zones, where companies did not have to abide by labour laws or pay any taxes. The majority of those who now continued to support Maduro did so because the alternative, a MUD government, would have made their lives even worse.

These measures were very unpopular amongst the ranks of the Bolivarian movement as representing a betrayal of the legacy of Chávez. But really, they were no more than a continuation and a deepening of the policy which the Maduro government had inherited: making ever more concessions to the capitalists in the economic field while defending itself against the MUD’s attacks in the political and institutional arenas. The oligarchy had maintained its economic sabotage and there were now widespread media reports of food scarcity, hunger and looting across Venezuela.

The MUD was attempting to create a situation of such chaos and violence as would justify a coup or foreign intervention to remove President Maduro. Inevitably, the massive expansion of the money supply had caused hyperinflation, a rapid depletion of foreign reserves and a further decrease in government imports of food and other basic products. More people had to buy a greater proportion of their food on the black market, with prices between twenty and seventy times the official price. The government decreed increases in the minimum wage, but nowhere near enough to feed a family.

Scarcity led to massive corruption at all levels; from criminals who hired people to queue for hours to buy whatever subsidised products were available to re-sell on the black market, to the nationwide director of the Bicentenario state supermarket chain who diverted entire ship-loads of products. To some extent, the majority of Venezuelans were aware of the despicable role played by private companies, like Grupo Polar, in hoarding, racketeering, speculation, etc., and of the government’s failure to take the necessary measures to solve the problems.

In the summer of 2016, the government began formally promoting mixed public-private investment in the mining of diamonds, copper, silver and gold. Maduro invited multinational corporations to bid for concessions; an initiative which authorised open pit mining in 112,000 square kilometres of the mineral-rich south-eastern Amazonian state of Bolivar. These will be environmentally destructive projects; all mining and oil extraction projects are, and there is no exception to this anywhere in the world.

An integral part of this venture is the military. Previously, President Maduro had approved a Socialist Military Economic Zone, allowing initiatives in different economic sectors, from transport, agriculture and communications to construction, finance and hospitality. Now, CAMIMPEG (Military Company for the Oil, Mining, and Gas Industries) was launched to provide a wide range of industrial services as an integral part of a US$580 million deal in mining and gas production in the Orinoco Mining Arc backed by Chinese investment. The Maduro Administration has placed the Arco region under military control, suspended constitutional rights and already begun to expel the residents. CAMIMPEG will administer the resource extraction as an autonomous enterprise and not be subject to public accountability. These ventures are widely seen as attempts by Maduro to tie the military to his regime. The Orinoco Mining Arc project, taking into account only the gold reserves of the area, is estimated to be worth more than US$200 billion.131

In a separate multi-million dollar deal, the Venezuelan government will work with Yuankuang and other Chinese companies to jumpstart nickel mining in the central states of Aragua and Miranda.132

On Monday, 16 May, Minister of Economic Development, Pérez Abad, in the face of rumours to the contrary, stressed Venezuela’s intention to continue to pay its foreign debt obligations in full and on time. He added that this would mean a further reduction in food imports in 2016 and, behind the scenes, sold US$2.8 billion of PDVSA bonds maturing in 2020 to Goldman Sachs for only US$865 million, a give-away price that has been termed absurd.

The government’s concessions were accompanied from time to time with threats of expropriation, which were given headlines by the bourgeois press world-wide. In Venezuela the threats were never followed up; the reality was quite the opposite. Workers, who took over factories where production had been suspended by the bosses, were met with either an endless string of bureaucratic obstacles or direct repression by police or National Guards. Even though laws were formally on the side of the workers and did allow for expropriations, the majority of labour inspectors were in the pockets of the bosses. Instead of expediting expropriation, the owners were given extension after extension in which to restart production, until the workers were so demoralised they gave up their fight.

The bourgeoisie, however, feared rekindling the revolutionary fervour of the masses; they remembered the extraordinary vitality and strength of the revolutionary mobilisation of the popular masses in 2002 and 2003. The government and PSUV tops also feared the masses, which accounts for the calls to form popular and workers’ militias never being carried through. The bureaucracy was organically incapable of activating the revolutionary mobilisation of the masses because they knew they had more to lose from a socialist revolution than from the bourgeoisie.

18. The Recall Referendum and the Constituent Assembly

The MUD was collecting signatures for a recall referendum, but evidence presented to the courts of widespread irregularities meant the process was suspended, effectively ruling out any possibility of a presidential recall referendum being held in 2016. In response, the MUD called the decision “a coup carried out by the government of President Maduro against the Constitution”. On Sunday, 23 October, an extraordinary session of the National Assembly, which was still in contempt, adopted a resolution declaring that the government had committed a “breach of the constitutional order”, and symbolically appointed new members to the CNE and the TSJ.

The sharpening of the economic war and rampant inflation had meant the impoverishment of vast sectors of the popular masses. One survey by Venebarómetro carried out between February and December 2016 described how, over that time, the percentage of Venezuelans who ate three times per day dropped from 69.5 per cent to 34.3 per cent; and those who ate just once a day rose from 4.8 per cent to 19.8 per cent. There was a parallel resurgence in the number of Venezuelans, predominantly children and young men, who rummaged through garbage in search of food or some other product for use or resale. In these circumstances the opposition was able to mobilise large numbers, but still largely limited to its traditional areas of support. It had failed to break into the army, despite repeated attempts to do so, with public calls for a military coup. The situation appeared to be one of a stalemate.

On May Day 2017, hundreds of thousands of supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution marched from three different gathering points to Bolivar Avenue in Caracas. The whole route was teeming with people from early in the morning. Chavismo still had a core of support, which could be mobilised when faced with the whip of counter-revolution. However, it was noticeable that, for the first time for over a decade, a Bolivarian president did not mention socialism on May Day. During his speech, Maduro, announced the convening of a National Constituent Assembly (ANC), which he described as a workers’ and communal assembly. The same process was used by Chávez over a decade previously. The MUD and its international supporters responded with a frenzied campaign: “There’s been a coup in Venezuela! Maduro has carried out a power-grab!”

The ANC was to be all-powerful, meaning that once it finished its work, the authority of every elected body would be superseded and required renewal, as in the ‘mega-election’ of 2000. The MUD denounced the move and immediately called for an escalation of protests: for supporters to march to the TSJ with a second march to the CNE. Given the level of violence unleashed on previous opposition marches to these destinations, it was obvious that the government would deploy police to protect them. The opposition strategy was a provocation aimed at creating a scenario of violence, which would be portrayed in the world’s media as police repression, to put the government under more pressure at home and internationally. As expected, opposition protesters clashed violently with the police and National Guard, providing an abundance of images for the bourgeois media.

The MUD’s economic programme was released to the press: to privatise state-owned companies, to reduce the fiscal deficit by implementing massive cuts in social spending (particularly on education and health), privatisation of social housing, to sack hundreds of thousands of public sector workers, to liberalise prices, greater access to dollars from oil revenue, and the abolition of labour and trade union rights.

Simultaneously, the MUD rank and file were becoming tired, having been demonstrating for sixty days with no obvious results. In certain parts of the country (San Antonio de los Altos in Miranda, and Socopó in Barinas amongst others) there had been well organised, violent riots, in connivance with the local police. In right-wing municipalities, with MUD mayors, the rioters had taken control of urban centres, sometimes for days, where they destroyed public buildings, imposed a shut-down of commercial establishments and replaced the authority of the state. But increasingly, the guarimbas were degenerating into gang warfare, taken over by hooligan and criminal elements: those suspected of being Chavista were set upon, stabbed or shot, and even set alight but, in reality, many victims were attacked simply for being pardo. By the end of June, the right-wing offensive had left eighty-five people dead but had failed to achieve any of its aims. Importantly, it had not provoked any public fissures within the Armed Forces.

While bitterly opposed to the MUD, many Chavistas were deeply sceptical of the proposed ANC and believed rank and file participation would be more form than substance. The experience of the Congress of the Fatherland was an all-too-recent memory. The issues for discussion by the ANC were certainly not radical, but more of the same. Venezuela was to build a ‘post-oil’ economy that worked for all, and with all the different property forms that existed, implying the maintenance of a capitalist economy. Nevertheless, the call for the ANC woke sections of the Chavista vanguard, who wanted to elect deputies to the ANC to represent the rank and file and who would propose a programme of revolutionary demands. The government called the ANC elections for 30 July, in what marked a major test of its popular support.

The practice of the PSUV bureaucracy of appointing candidates, at all levels, without reference to the rank and file members was universally detested. So, the announcement that the ANC elections would not take place on the basis of lists prepared by the party machine was welcomed. In a short space of time a number of Chavista left lists were being circulated. The programmes proposed by these different groupings all reflected a deep-seated hatred of the bureaucracy and reformism, and a desire to move forward, to take power. But there was little co-ordination between them. In addition, their demands shared a common weakness – although containing anti-capitalist and anti-bureaucratic language, there was little clear understanding of the need to expropriate the means of production under democratic workers’ control, almost certainly because of the way in which workers’ control had been subverted by the PSUV.

At the beginning of the campaign these initiatives were accompanied by large meetings in neighbourhoods and workplaces. But slowly and surely, the bureaucratic machinery of the PSUV imposed itself. The practicalities of the process, such as there being only a very short time to get organised and collect supporting signatures, made it very difficult for anyone outside the apparatus to actually become a candidate.

18.1 Opposition and the ‘Sovereign Consultation’

In late June, the MUD’s more violent activities appeared to have regained some momentum. Their road blocks were proving more effective. There had been severe rioting in Maracay and Aragua, with over sixty shops looted, a number of official buildings, including the PSUV offices, ransacked and one member of the National Guard shot dead. These were not peaceful pro-democracy protests, but terrorist attacks combined with appeals to the army to effect a coup.

On 28 June, opposition politicians, in a ‘state of disobedience’ called on their supporters to extend the road blocks. What other country in the world would allow protesters to set up and maintain road blocks across its motorways? How would London, Madrid or Washington react to a para-military assault on government buildings? What would be the response of Berlin or Paris if gangs descended on urban areas and stabbed, shot and set light to people?

On Sunday 16 July, 2017, the opposition held a ‘sovereign consultation’. Voting booths were placed all over the country so that people could give their opinions on three issues: 1. Was Maduro’s call for a National Constituent Assembly legitimate? 2. Should the MUD reject and not recognise the ANC? and 3. Should the armed forces mutiny, remove the government and form a ‘government of national unity’? To complement the consultation, the opposition announced that 16 July was “zero hour” after which their supporters would be “stepping up the pressure” and using “even harsher actions”, including setting up permanent road blocks until the “fall of the dictatorship”.

The parallel with the attempted coup of April 2002 was obvious: especially the suggestion that the armed forces remove the president and establish a ‘government of national unity’. This time, however, the opposition was attempting to give its moves a sense of legitimacy. On the day, the MUD was able to mobilise large numbers of people, and there were queues at many of their polling stations. However, the figures issued were questionable. In Catia for instance (Parroquia Sucre of Libertador council), the electoral register contained over 290,000 names, of which thirty-nine per cent (91,000) had previously voted for the MUD. This area had only one polling station. Even if the opposition had only their own supporters voting that would be less than half a second per person per vote! In that half a second every voter had to have their details checked against the electoral register, receive a ballot paper, fill it in and put it in the ballot box. Nor was there any restriction on how many times an individual could vote. Chavistas, on the look-out for multiple voting, were able to produce video evidence of multiple voting in, at least, the right-wing stronghold of Chacao. The ballots and registers were burned after the count to ensure that whatever result was announced it could not be checked.

The New York Times of 16 July reported that:

More than 98% of voters sided with the MUD in answering three yes-or-no questions drafted with the aim of weakening Mr. Maduro’s legitimacy days before his constituent assembly is expected to convene.

To their shame, across the political spectrum, the western media almost entirely agreed on the same narrative. So poor was their checking of the facts, that the main photo used to show crowds queuing to vote was, in fact, a photo of Chavistas queuing to vote in support of Maduro’s call for the ANC. The declared result of the opposition consultation was that 7,186,170 people had participated, a figure which, even if true, was less than their own candidate had received in the presidential election and fell well short of the 7,587,579 votes for Maduro.

The government decided to have a dry run on that very same Sunday to show Chavista support for the ANC. The two sets of voting were in parallel though, of course, it was possible to vote in both. Almost entirely ignored in the western press, was the massive turn out in support of Maduro. The queues outside the official CNE polling stations were massive throughout the country, even in cities such as Barquisimeto, Valencia, and Mérida where the opposition was very strong, and its thugs had been terrorising the streets for over three months.

The opposition did not expect this and they were unsettled. The consultation had backfired and threw the opposition leaders into a state of indecision on how to proceed. Their rhetoric before 16 July had been fiery, they had planned for a result so positive that the government would not last until the 30 July ANC elections. As the campaign for the ANC elections progressed, PSUV Minister, Pérez Abad, backed by so-called ‘patriotic businessmen’ such as Oscar Schemel (candidate for the business section of the ANC), appealed to the MUD for peace and dialogue, and advocated the ANC should “strengthen private property rights” by the privatisation of expropriated companies.

On 30 July, the vote for the ANC was held. The opposition abstained. However, the government was worried about the outcome, as all polls were predicting a turnout so low the vote would be a farce. It called on all its employees to make a point of voting and to encourage all their friends, neighbours and colleagues to vote. There may be some truth in claims that workers’ jobs would be under threat if they did not vote. The PSUV party machine also applied a great deal of pressure on its Chavista base in order to mobilise it into the voting booths. Party cadres used social benefits such as the CLAP (government provided food parcels), special pensions such as ‘mothers of the barrio’ and the ‘chamba juvenil’ plan, to pressurise recipients to go out and vote. The attitude of the party tops was very reminiscent of the old ‘Adeco’ style of doing politics, in that the working masses and poor were bought with a mix of food bags and social benefits along with threats of the suspension of those benefits. On the day, the Chavista vote rallied and 8,089,230 voted – not too different from the turnout for the dry run on 16 July. All 545 seats went to the PSUV and its supporters.

The other side of the coin was the deadly violence of opposition supporters aimed at preventing the election. The Public Prosecutor listed ten deaths of Chavistas and National Guard officers, assassinated on the eve of the election or on Election Day. Over the course of the day, 200 voting stations across the country were attacked by opposition militants and “large-scale explosive devices” were exploded near other polling stations.133

19. The ‘Advance’ of the Counter-Revolution

On Tuesday 8 August, 2017, Donald Trump warned: “We have many options for Venezuela. And by the way, I am not going to rule out a military option”. Trump cares not a jot about “lives being lost” in Venezuela, a situation he could stop tomorrow by ending US support for the opposition and removing trade sanctions. What he is really concerned about is that, for nearly two decades, Venezuela has been an example of how the revolutionary masses could seize their destinies into their own hands; defy imperialism, the oligarchy, and fight to reorganise society along more democratic and participatory lines. In Venezuela, oil revenues have been used to eliminate illiteracy and provide healthcare for all; how different to the USA.

In Venezuela, the response of the ultra-right to the ANC elections was, throughout August, to launch hit-and-run attacks on working-class neighbourhoods killing several people. But the political landscape of the country had changed; the great majority of the opposition had gone home. From the PSUV point of view, things looked good for the regional elections and the government brought them forward to October, in order to take advantage of the temporary demoralisation of the opposition and the mobilisation achieved on 30 July. However, Maduro’s government, while attempting to cuddle up to the capitalists, was economically paralysed. Its belief in the possibility of a deal with the opposition had no foundation in reality, but prevented it from tackling economic sabotage, the lack of food, medicine, etc. Continuing this pro-capitalist policy could only estrange important sectors of the proletarian masses, meaning it placed increasing restrictions on internal party democracy, further transforming the PSUV into an instrument of political control.

It was at this time that the Marxists openly classified Maduro and his supporters at the top of the PSUV and government as “the Mensheviks of our time” whose goal was a popular front with the bourgeoisie. The parallel was drawn between Lenin and Trotsky’s call for the Bolsheviks to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Kerensky against the open counter-revolution in the form of General Kornilov, and the need to defend the PSUV government, by describing the MUD as the modern Kornilov at the gates of Caracas. Lenin and Trotsky understood that the masses, no matter how long it took, had to learn from their experiences before progressing to ‘All power to the Soviets’. The Bolsheviks, of course, carried on their own propaganda campaigns for ‘Bread, Peace and Land’ and ‘All power to the Soviets!’ against Kerensky even while defending his government.

The overwhelming vote on 30 July, was the result of the millions of workers who knew the MUD would worsen their conditions, and hoped that the PSUV would, finally, tackle galloping inflation and chronic shortage of basic necessities. The result had demoralised and demobilised the opposition rank and file, even the most violent groups. Simultaneously, the PSUV leadership took the victory in the ANC election as an endorsement of its policies, with the result that the campaign for the 2017 regional elections lacked any spark of originality, and was devoid of any measures that were capable of solving the pressing problems of the masses. The campaign was social-democratic and demagogic, full of promises that were forgotten once the candidates were elected.

Most of the candidates were either already establishment figures up for re-election or those parachuted in by the PSUV bureaucracy. In the first category were candidates such as Arias Cárdenas [Zulia state] or Vielma Mora [Tachira] who, in their previous terms of office had clearly governed to enrich the local party bureaucracies and benefit their respective bourgeoisie. In the second case, the party ‘changed the face’ of the local administration by inserting candidates such as Justo Noguera in Bolívar, and Margaud Godoy in Cojedes. These may have been new candidates, but they were establishment figures.

Once again, on time and in tune, the mass media began to issue opinion polls that showed a secure MUD victory. In October, in the run-up to the election, the average poll rating for MUD was fifty-seven per cent and for the government thirty per cent. On the Election Day, Sunday 15 October, 2017, the PSUV achieved a substantial victory with 5.8 million votes against 5 million for the MUD, whose candidates were elected governors in only five states: Anzoátegui, Nueva Esparta and three border states, Zulia, Táchira and Mérida. Following the expected and customary pattern, as soon as the final count was announced, the MUD declared that it did not recognise the results, but this time, two of its leading contenders Carlos Ocariz and Henry Falcón, refused to go along with the charade and publicly acknowledged the results in their respective states; the matrix of ‘fraud’ collapsed.

Despite the brutal deterioration in their living conditions, the working masses had rallied to the PSUV. But the ANC failed to take any decisive action, and the economic crisis worsened with each passing week. The major achievement of the ANC was not any concrete measure it took. It was, as expected, a talking shop, but it served to legitimise Maduro’s government and allowed him to bypass the National Assembly. Gradually, the ANC came to dominate the parliamentary processes, accruing for itself powers that were not initially specified.

The regional election victory was a defeat for the forces of counter-revolution but, by itself, did not change the prospect of economic desolation facing the working masses. The atmosphere of triumphalism amongst the Bolivarian leaders did not suggest much likelihood of significant changes in government economic policies over the coming months. Quite the opposite, the bureaucrats again saw the election victory as endorsement of the government’s reformist, social-democratic policy of class conciliation.

With the results of the elections announced, President Maduro boasted that Chavismo had “obliterated” the opposition, and loudly declared he would not accept guarimba rioters and coup plotters as governors. In the next breath he declared that he was prepared to sign a “dialogue agreement”. It turned out that representatives of the government and the MUD had already met in the Dominican Republic for round-table discussions on Venezuela’s economic and political problems. Subterfuges of this kind showed that the government was quite incapable of implementing even the most basic measures associated with the bourgeois-democratic revolution: agrarian reform, social justice, and national independence.

The opposition, after much internal discussion, decided to boycott the municipal elections of 10 December, 2017. The official reason given was that elected mayors would have to be sworn in before the ANC, which the MUD considered illegitimate. A much more likely reason was the opposition’s deep demoralisation and fear of a landslide defeat, further legitimising the government.

The Bolivarian movement had closed ranks for the regional elections, but the withdrawal of the main opposition parties from the municipal elections opened the door for candidates representing the revolutionary wing of the Bolivarian movement to stand against the official, hand-picked candidates. The tension between the rank and file, revolutionary left of Chavismo and the bureaucrats and reformists who dominated the PSUV party machine and state apparatus burst into the open. The bureaucracy and the state responded by using all sorts of tricks to prevent the local PSUV from endorsing leftists, and to stop candidates from socialist groups and/or parties from standing.

In a number of municipalities, mainly rural, alternative Bolivarian candidates did stand against the PSUV, some standing under the banner of the PCV, or the PPT or the Tupamaros, but all having in common the fact that they represented areas where the communal movement had taken real roots and developed. These were areas where the struggle against the reactionary offensive earlier in the year had a more militant character, with the organisation of self-defence committees and occupation of land belonging to caudillos. Some of these areas included occupied factories linked to agricultural production and communes with a history of fighting against the capitalists and landowners, and also against sabotage by local bureaucrats, regional governors as well as government institutions.

The bureaucracy was furious. The CNE was used, quite improperly, to ‘weed out’ left candidates who might have been successful. In the Simon Planas council in Lara, Ángel Prado, a member of the ANC was told by the CNE that he needed permission to stand. Other high-profile members of the ANC, chosen by the PSUV leadership, were standing as candidates and no obstacles had been put in their way. On 28 November, in an outrageous decision, the ANC denied him permission, the real reason being that, if he had been allowed to stand, he would certainly have won the election. The bureaucracy was mortally afraid of the challenge posed by a candidate who genuinely represented the rank and file of the movement and who stood for revolutionary democracy and no compromise with the capitalist class. Basing himself on the support of the local campesinos, Prado insisted he would stand on the PPT ticket. The CNE printed ballot papers in which the PPT was presented as supporting the official PSUV candidate. Despite these manipulations, fifty-seven per cent of the vote went to Prado and only thirty-four per cent for the PSUV. Since Prado’s name was not on the ballot paper, the CNE insisted that the winner was the PSUV candidate, Jean Ortiz.

The highest profile case was that of Eduardo Samán, both because of his history and the office for which he was standing – the mayor of Libertador Council, which covers most of the centre of Caracas, and the western working-class and poor districts. Samán was standing against the official PSUV candidate, Erika Farias, who had initially been elected to the PSUV leadership as a left candidate, but was now Chief of Staff for President Maduro. Initially, Samán, known for his fierce opposition to the capitalists, his struggle against racketeering and his defence of workers’ control, won the support of the Communist Party, the PPT and the MEP. Under pressure, the MEP later withdrew its support but the PCV and PPT stood firm. The CNE attempted to block Samán’s registration, but public pressure finally got his candidature allowed. The CNE then resorted to another trick. As both the PPT and the PCV had already pre-emptively registered their candidates, the CNE argued that the names on the ballot box next to those party logos could not be changed. Therefore, Samán’s name would not appear on the ballot paper. This was a complete scandal because there was no real reason why his name could not appear next to the PCV and PPT logos; it was a stratagem to create confusion. 

From the bureaucratic perspective, there was more danger in Samán winning than the MUD, because he would be in a position to promote an alternative, socialist policy for government. Samán represented the struggle against the black market, the speculators, the capitalists and multinational companies, the struggle for accountability within the movement, for revolutionary democracy and workers’ control. It was right and proper under the specific circumstances of there being no opposition candidate, for Marxists and revolutionaries to support his candidature. With voters having to write in his name, Samán received 6.6 per cent of the vote against sixty-six per cent for the official Chavista candidate. Nevertheless, his campaign managed to pull together into a joint effort, most of the revolutionary left of Chavismo in Caracas.

Samán later denounced a boycott of his candidature in the state media during the election campaign. On 30 November, he was invited to a TV interview in the state-owned ViveTV and interviewed for half an hour in a morning talk show. The channel’s director, press officer and co-ordinator were fired as a direct result of this interview.

The PSUV won 308 out of 335 local councils and twenty-three out twenty-five state capitals. The opposition largely boycotted the election, but did stand for, and win, two significant local councils – San Cristobal, the capital of Táchira, and Libertador, the capital of Mérida. After the defeat of their violent attempt to overthrow the government in the first half of the year, their strategic defeat with the ANC, and their electoral defeats at the end of the year, the opposition ended 2017 fractured, with their ranks demoralised and without a clear strategy.

Open conflicts and tensions within Chavismo, though limited to a minority of municipalities, revealed the lengths to which the PSUV and state bureaucracy would go to squash potential challengers from the left of the movement. The methods used against these candidates were very similar to those used during the Fourth Republic: bureaucratic manoeuvres, political patronage, intimidation and threats, media blackout, the use of state resources to cajole people to vote for the ‘right’ candidate, and so on.

It also showed a widespread mood of discontent amongst the Bolivarian rank and file against the reformists leading the party and the state bureaucracies. This was compounded by the severe economic crisis and the sight of the government making all sorts of concessions to the capitalists. The leftist movement was embryonic, disorganised and scattered, but the campaign for leftist candidates in the municipal elections and then the struggle to defend their victories provided a focal point around which the left Chavismo could organise.

20. Presidential Elections and Economic Crises

At the end of 2017, the severe economic crisis forced the government to renegotiate its foreign debt to avoid default. Maduro still appeared to believe that his policies were capable of controlling and containing the opposition. But he also needed to be seen to respond, in some ways, to the criticisms raised by his own rank and file. An offensive against corruption in the PDVSA saw dozens of high-ranking officials arrested and charged including Rafael Ramirez, oil minister from 2002 to 2014, head of the PDVSA between 2004 and 2014. The public prosecutor talked of US$4.8 billion lost from the public purse.

The Central Bank had been printing money so that the government could pay staff Christmas bonuses ahead of the 10 December municipal elections. This added substantially to a doubling of the money supply in the two months starting with October. Such irresponsible moves made to retain power, undermined the remaining gains of the revolution. The policies of the Maduro government continued to do little other than prepare the way for the return of the oligarchy.

Events in 2017 showed that, despite everything the masses had endured, there remained a healthy class instinct of rejecting the right-wing opposition’s attempts to overthrow the government. This instinct is cynically used by the bureaucracy to keep itself in power.

In such a situation, any challenge from the left must take place within the framework of the Bolivarian Revolution. Anything else would be a sectarian mistake that would allow the bureaucracy to depict the leftists as part of the opposition, discrediting them in the eyes of the masses. A revolutionary opposition coming from within the rank and file could have as its central theme reclaiming the revolutionary content of Chavismo by putting meat on the bones of Chávez’ calls to action: for rank and file democratic participation, accountability of the leadership, radical land reform and against capitalism.

Since Maduro came to office, three themes can be discerned in the government’s apparently haphazard and chaotic actions: the transformation of the PSUV into an instrument of political control, attempts to revive foreign investment in extractive industries, and increased use of authoritarian measures.

When Chávez announced the PSUV, the party was supposed to represent a substantial step towards popular participatory democracy as enshrined in the 2003 constitution. Chávez intended the PSUV to be an open, democratic party that would hold both government and state accountable. What emerged, however, was the very opposite: a top-down, authoritarian structure that rigidly controlled dissent and debate. The degree of control exerted over the barrios and other poor communities increased as the economic sabotage of the oligarchs bit deeper. For example, the government developed a programme to bring food parcels to poor homes at guaranteed official prices, but the PSUV took over the distribution and used the programme to ensure political loyalty at election times. The system, despite good intentions, was under the control of the party machine and riddled with corruption. Since then, a so-called Fatherland Card (carnet de la patria) has been introduced. This is state-issued and gives access to pensions, disability benefits, etc., and its use has been similarly exploited.

Maduro’s solution to the massive hole in the state budget is opening up to foreign investment of the Arco Minero, Venezuela’s Amazon region, which holds a cornucopia of minerals, oil, and gas and, incidentally, is also the country’s principal source of freshwater. This is a development rejected by Chávez due to environmental concerns, and in recognition of indigenous communities’ human and territorial rights.

The Venezuelan Presidential elections on 20 May 2018 were yet one more episode in a long saga of imperialist aggression, economic crisis and the deterioration of living conditions for the working class and poor. Re-elected, Maduro continued his policy of making concessions and appeals to the capitalists. The mood of the Chavista rank and file is increasingly angry and critical of the PSUV leadership. Without the subsidised food parcels, and migration to surrounding countries, the situation would have already generated to a social explosion.

Washington and Brussels have been joined by the Organisation of American States, in declaring that the elections were not ‘legitimate’. Maduro was re-elected with 6,248,864 votes on a 46.07 per cent turnout. His nearest rival, opposition candidate Henri Falcón, received 1,927,958 votes. The MUD, in its majority, called for abstention and so, in opposition strongholds, Falcón received far fewer votes than he expected. The working class and campesinos voted overwhelmingly for Maduro, but the votes cast show that a section of those who traditionally voted for Chávez and supported Maduro in 2013, stayed home because of the perception that the government is unable or unwilling to take the necessary measures to deal with the economic crisis.

The imperialists, under the fig-leaf of ‘concern for democracy’ and the ‘humanitarian crisis’ increased their diplomatic pressure, added more sanctions and called for a coup. The Trump administration was quick to tighten the sanctions against Venezuela, even before the final results of the election had been announced. Existing sanctions, decreed by Trump in August 2017 on the basis of an Obama-signed Executive Order, as well as targeting high-ranking officials in the Venezuelan state, make it illegal to renegotiate Venezuelan-issued debt. The new sanctions, announced on 21 May, will bar US companies or citizens “from buying debt or accounts receivable” from the Venezuelan government, including the PDVSA. These sanctions are intended to make it increasingly difficult for Venezuela to access the world’s financial system. The hope is that tightening the economic screws will lead to a section of the army deciding it should remove the Maduro government.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis in Venezuela continues its course, aggravated by a serious deterioration of all infrastructure as a result of years of bureaucratic mismanagement and corruption, the lack of funds for investment, maintenance and repairs, and now the exodus of workers migrating to other countries, fleeing the collapse in the purchasing power of wages, and the regular electricity outages and water cut-offs, which now affect millions of people on a regular basis. As a result, areas of the capital go without water for days or weeks. People have to resort to all sorts of tricks to wash themselves and their clothes and to get water for drinking and cooking.

Inflation, for which there are no official figures, has become hyperinflation, pulverising the purchasing power of wages. In the first four months of 2018 the price of chicken increased by over 500 per cent, and by mid-summer the increase was 1,500 per cent. Meanwhile, the integral wage (minimum wage plus food tickets) increased by just 220 per cent in the same period. At the beginning of the year the minimum wage would buy 4.4 kg of chicken, by mid-summer it bought just over half a kilo.

The only reason the economic crisis has not precipitated a social explosion is its alleviation by factors such as the system of subsidised food parcels provided by the government’s Local Provision and Production Committees (CLAPs), which, at least in the capital region, reach a large proportion of the population; and regular bonuses granted by the government to different groups of the population (workers in general, families, mothers, the youth). There have been eleven such bonuses between January and July in 2018.

Neither CLAPs nor bonuses are a real solution, but they provide a welcome relief from the brutal impact of the crisis. The problem is that what these measures amount to is the government printing money in order to provide subsidies. This only adds to the massive fiscal deficit, which amounts to between fifteen and twenty per cent of GDP (again, no official figures are available). There is no way this can continue in the long term, because many of the products making up the CLAP parcels are imported, and thus are vulnerable to sanctions. But the importance of these parcels and bonuses should not be underrated, it is these which secure the turn out for the PSUV because the MUD is pledged to end them.

Another escape valve is migration. This is a hotly-contested issue and it is clear that hundreds-of-thousands of Venezuelans, mainly youth, have left the country in search of jobs abroad, and are maintaining their families through remittances. A few years ago, this was a phenomenon affecting mainly middle-and-upper-class families, and the destination was Europe and the USA. Now there are growing numbers of youth from working-class families who leave for Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, where they are brutally exploited. Considering the minimum wage in Venezuela is the equivalent (on the black market) to US$1.25, the money these migrants send back enables their families to survive.

This is not to say that everyone in Venezuela is suffering from the impact of the economic crisis, some are actually benefiting. There are those who receive hard currency to pay for imports. They and the government officials in charge of the system, have made massive fortunes via the black market. Despite government attempts, the dollar black market continues to exist and is run by a small number of increasingly wealthy people.

The government’s response to the growing crisis has been to resume its policy of concessions and appeals to both the opposition and the capitalists. Soon after the presidential election, Maduro held a high-profile meeting with bankers at which he agreed, amongst other things, to delay the introduction of a new currency, which gave black marketeers and speculators time to launder their ill-gotten gains. This meeting enraged the Chavista rank and file. It was not only the fact that, once again, the government was prepared to do deals with those it accuses of being responsible for the economic war, but also the arrogant way in which the president of the Banking Association demanded concessions from Maduro, on live TV, and the way Maduro acquiesced.

To add insult to injury, the TSJ decided to release a number of those jailed for their involvement in the opposition’s violent offensives of 2014 and 2017. These unrepentant thugs were responsible for the deaths of many loyal Chavistas. A number of directors of Venezuela’s leading private bank, Banesco, were released separately. They had been arrested just prior to the elections, accused of being part of the economic war against the Venezuelan economy. The question asked was: were they arrested and jailed as a stunt to give the appearance that the government was being tough on capitalists?

Meanwhile, the conflict in the countryside continues between comuneros fighting the latifundia and a coalition of state officials, local judges, and police officials who have launched a broad offensive to reverse the gains of agrarian reform. Increasingly, peasant communes were expelled from land they were occupying legally, and at least two leading campesinos were executed on orders from landowners. A few days after the election, the spokesperson of the El Maizal commune, Angel Prado, and two other comunero leaders were illegally detained by police officers, accused of purchasing products they need for sowing from illegal sources on the black market. They replied that the official state-owned company, Agropatria, was refusing to sell the products to them legally and that, in fact, it was the managers at this company (expropriated under Chávez) who were the black market! The peasant leaders were eventually released, but the countryside is quickly becoming a battlefield between revolution and counter-revolution, and in most cases the state apparatus is, either by action or omission, on the side of counter-revolution.

The re-election of Maduro on 20 May, has not solved anything; it may have postponed the oligarchy’s return to power, but the government’s policies prepare the conditions for defeat. However, events in 2017/18 showed that, despite everything they had endured, there remains a healthy class instinct of rejecting the opposition’s attempts to overthrow the PSUV government and the remaining gains of the Revolution.

A small but significant indication of a growing mood amongst Chavista activists, a video containing extracts from a speech by Chávez during his first swearing-in, in February 1999, has gone viral. In a hard-hitting statement, which fits the situation today like a glove, he says: “to look for consensus with those who oppose the changes that are necessary is betrayal”. He could be responding to Maduro’s public statements made after 20 May. At the beginning of August, there was a terrorist attempt on Maduro’s life while he was presiding at a military parade in the centre of Caracas. This confirmed that, within the military, oligarchy and state apparatus there still exists a current that is prepared to overthrow the elected government through a coup.

On 17 August, 2018, Maduro announced an economic plan to deal with the economic crisis, including launching a new currency,134 recognising the fact that some government policies have played a role in exacerbating hyperinflation.

The government de facto adopted the black-market exchange rate for the dollar (6 million Bolívar Fuerte) as the basis for the new currency, Bolívar Soberano (BsS), which will eliminate five zeros from prices. Turkey did much the same thing in 2005, when it reduced the value of the lira by a factor of one million. For Venezuelans, this has meant a devaluation of 95.85 per cent from the previous official exchange rate. Maduro said the BsS would be anchored to the Petro, the Venezuelan state-backed crypto-currency. In turn, the price of the Petro is linked to the price of a barrel of oil, which stands at US$60. Maduro also recognised that inorganic money had been issued by the government in order to pay for the budget deficit and that this would have to end. He announced that, from now on, there would be zero fiscal deficit. Value Added Tax would increase from twelve per cent to sixteen per cent. Subsidies on fuel phased out over time.

In essence, these measures amount to an adjustment programme aimed at recovering confidence in the currency and stopping its precipitous devaluation. However, these measures are accompanied by others aimed at easing the pain they will inflict on working people and the poor. The minimum wage, which was around US$1 at black market exchange rates, will be increased to 1,800 BsS, the equivalent to US$30 in the new exchange rate. However, while wages are to be paid in BsS, the minimum wage will be set at half a Petro (US$30). The idea is that, even if the BsS devalues, the wages will keep their purchasing power. Increasing the minimum wage from US$1 to US$30 appears a massive enhancement, but does little to recover the purchasing power of wages if we remember that, on Maduro’s election in 2013, the minimum wage was US$325 at the official exchange rate (US$100 at the black-market rate).

Maduro also announced that the state will cover the differential in wages with the new rate for all private sector small- and medium-size companies for ninety days; and pay around 10 million people a bonus of 600 BsS. The state is promising to pay for all this, and, at the same time, to balance its books by increasing taxes on the wealthy and introducing a new system for paying income tax on a weekly basis as opposed to fortnightly. The proposed lifting of subsidies on fuel is aimed at decreasing government expenditure and saving the huge amounts of money lost through the smuggling of heavily-subsidised Venezuelan fuel into Colombia, where it is sold at market price. The universal fuel subsidy is to be replaced by targeted subsidies to prevent contraband. In addition, regulated prices have been introduced for twenty-five basic food products, as agreed with the main private sector suppliers. The increased cost of public transport already represents a substantial increase in the cost of living: in the case of the Caracas Metro, the new fare will be 0.5 BsS (it had been free for over a year), while bus fares will go up tenfold from 0.1 BsS to one BsS.

The programme seems to be modelled on the 1994 Plan Real applied in Brazil to stabilise the economy. However, in Brazil the plan ‘worked’ (from the point of view of the ruling class) because of increasing fiscal revenues obtained by the wholesale privatisation of public assets plus a steep hike in interest rates to attract foreign investment. Neither of these measures has been proposed in Venezuela. It is thus difficult to see how the Venezuelan state can achieve both its aims simultaneously: ‘fiscal discipline’ and higher real wages, particularly when oil production was only 1.28 million barrels per day in July (down from a peak of 3 million).

The plan cannot solve any of the basic and acute problems facing the Venezuelan economy – a crisis with only two possible outcomes. One is the implementation of a capitalist, monetarist adjustment programme, lifting all controls and restrictions on the normal functioning of the ‘free market’, and ending any regulation of the prices of basic products and foreign exchange controls. That would be accompanied by a brutal programme of cuts in public spending (including an end to all subsidies and social programmes), privatisation of state assets and severe economic contraction. In order to create a ‘business-friendly’ environment, trade union and labour protection laws would be scrapped. On such a basis there could be a certain stabilisation of the economy with the workers and poor made to pay the price of the crisis.

In the current political climate in Venezuela, the implementation of these measures would meet fierce resistance by sections of the workers, peasants and poor, and so it would require restricting democratic rights and the repression of social movements and their organisations. If the government attempted to fully implement such a programme, the Bolivarian movement would split down the middle, with a clear break between its openly capitalist wing, and all those defending, to one degree or another, the revolutionary legacy of Chavismo.

The other solution to the crisis is a revolutionary one: taking over the means of production under democratic workers’ control to resolve the crisis in the interests of working people. From the standpoint of the workers and the poor, the enactment of a genuine revolutionary programme is the only acceptable solution. Such a programme must be compiled by those on the spot, but would likely include:

• State monopoly on foreign trade, so that no more dollars are handed over to the bourgeoisie.
• A worker’s audit of preferential dollar allocations over the last fifteen years. Confiscation of properties and jail for all those involved in theft and mismanagement (capitalists and bureaucrats).
• Nationalisation and centralisation of banking and finance companies so that all their resources are put to the service of a rational plan of production, under democratic workers’ control.
• The creation of socialist workers’ councils in every factory and workplace, expropriation of large industries, under workers’ control.
• Nationalisation under workers’ control of all companies involved in hoarding, speculation and the black market.
• Expropriation of the latifundios under campesino control organised in communes. Peasant communes to be given credit for the purchase of seeds, fertilisers, machinery and so forth.
• Nationalisation of all food production, processing and distribution under the democratic control of peasant communes, workers, and consumers.
• Revolutionary provisioning committees in every neighbourhood with powers to control and organise the distribution of food.
• Suspension of all payments of the foreign debt. Imports of basic food and medicines to be prioritised.
• Internationalist appeal to the workers and peasants of Latin America and the world to come to the aid and defence of the Venezuelan revolution against imperialist intervention.

A revolutionary solution to the crisis is also one which recognises the basic fact that capitalism cannot be persuaded to act ‘patriotically’ or for the ‘general good’. The Venezuelan national bourgeoisie have no interest in advancing those national democratic tasks still outstanding; rather, they remain tied to US imperialism and demand the reversal of the remaining gains of the Bolivarian Revolution. In this, they confirm a basic premise of the theory of permanent revolution.

The reformists and bureaucrats will argue that such a programme is utopian and cannot be implemented. They will say that the Venezuelan working class is not strong enough or has too low a level of consciousness. The truth is that the programme of the reformists in the leadership of the Bolivarian movement is the one which has proven to be completely utopian. Venezuela has seen huge amounts of money spent on social programs, and there have been countless attempts to regulate a capitalist ‘mixed economy’ in order to protect the interests of working people. They have led directly to the present economic collapse (a fall in GDP of nearly fifty per cent since 2013). As for the consciousness and strength of the working class, this could not have been higher. At all decisive junctures the working class and the poor have responded, showing a fine class instinct and a consciousness much higher than that of any of the bureaucrats which dominate the ministries and the leading echelons of the Bolivarian movement.

In April 2002 it was the poorest of the poor who came down from the barrios and defeated the US-backed military coup. From December 2002-January 2003 it was the workers, particularly those in the oil industry, who defeated the bosses lock-out by implementing workers’ control. Later they developed the workers’ control movement, taking over abandoned factories and running state-owned enterprises under one form or another of workers’ management. When Chávez made a call to struggle for socialism they responded in their millions by joining the PSUV. Whenever there has been a threat by imperialism and reaction, the workers and the poor have come out in their hundreds of thousands, in the streets and on the barricades. The Venezuelan working class cannot be faulted if the revolution has ended in a cul-de-sac.

What has been missing is a clear revolutionary leadership, which could have led to victory by expropriating the oligarchy and smashing the capitalist state. Unfortunately, the self-styled Trotskyists in leadership positions in the UNT have wasted opportunity after opportunity for the last twenty years. Their political position has been simultaneously opportunist and sectarian: opportunist in the support they gave some employers against striking workers, and sectarian in holding back UNT support for the wave of factory occupations that took place in response to the calls from Chávez.

President Chávez himself started from a position where he honestly wanted to cleanse Venezuelan politics and use the oil revenue for the benefit of the majority. He gradually came to understand that this could only be done through the struggle for socialism. However, he was not a Marxist and had no clear idea of how to implement this. Many times, he talked about socialism, but his speeches were mostly left at the level of words. He consistently failed to take action against those reformists and bureaucrats in the PSUV, the state machine or the nationalised industries who openly sabotaged his proposals. By his end he was painfully aware of this, and in his last speeches he stressed the idea, in a confused way, that the revolution had to move towards a socialist economy and the smashing of the bourgeois state.

The key task for revolutionaries in Venezuela today is precisely the preparation of that one factor, which was missing all of these years: a revolutionary leadership with a clear socialist programme. Amongst the revolutionary elements of Chavismo there is a growing critical mood and realisation that the obstacles to be overcome are not only the oligarchy and imperialism but also the reformists and bureaucrats who have led the movement to a disastrous dead end. It is from these forces and through a process of political clarification, that a new and necessary leadership can emerge.

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[2] Ellner, S., Rethinking Venezuelan Politics, 2008, Lynne Reiner.

[3] Ellner, S., Factionalism… 1937-1948, Science and Society 1981, 45(1)52-70.

[4] YouTube FALN Venezuela, 1965.

[5] A Christian Democratic Party founded in early 1946, by Rafael Caldera and other prominent Catholic laypersons

[6] A centre-left liberal party

[7] Derham, M., Undemocratic Democracy, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2002, 21(2)270-289.

[8] Diago, E., Venezuela: when two worlds collide, Int. Viewpoint V353, Sept. 2003.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Castro, F., Those who are not revolutionary fighters… Granma, 19 March, 1967.

[11] YouTube FALN Venezuela, 1965.

[12] Martz, op cit.

[13] Fernandes, S., Barrio Women and Popular Politics, Latin American Politics and Society, 2007, 49(3)97-127.

[14] Ewell, J., The History of the MAS, Latin American Perspectives, 1991, 18(4)113-117.

[15] In Lowy, M., Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present, Humanity Books, 1992.

[16] Ellner, S., The MAS Party… Latin American Perspectives, 1986, 13(2)81-107.

[17] Vallejo, A., What Kind of Revolution for Venezuela? IP Dec. 17, 1973.

[18] Ellner, S., Venezuela’s MAS: From Guerrilla Defeat to Innovative Politics, 1988, Duke UP.

[19] Ewell, J., The History of the MAS, Latin American Perspectives, 1991, 18(4)113-117.

[20] Kobrin, S., Diffusion as an Explanation of Oil Nationalization, Journal of Conflict Resolution. 1985, 29(3) 3–32.

[21] Wilpert, G., The Economics, Culture, and Politics of Oil in Venezuela, 30 August, 2003, VA.com.

[22] Gott, R., Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution, Verso, London, 2005.

[23] Martin, J., ‘Chávez and his government’s policies’, 2004, www.marxist.com

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[25] Marcano, C., and Tyszka, A., Hugo Chávez, Random House, 2007.

[26] De Krivoy, R, The Venezuelan Banking Crisis of ‘94, Group of Thirty, 2000.

[27] Cornejo, C., and Koppel, M., Steelworkers end strike in Venezuela, Militant, 31 May, 2004.

[28] Wilpert, G., Collision in Venezuela, New Left Review, 2003, May-June pp 101-116.

[29] Motta, S., The Feminization of Resistance in Venezuela, Latin American Perspectives, 2013, 40(4)35-54.

[30] Roberts, K., Populism, Political Conflict and Grass-roots Organization in Latin America, Comparative Politics, 2006, 38(2)127-148.

[31] Wilpert, G., Constitutional Reform, 2003, VA.com.

[32] Jones, B., Hugo, Bodley Head, 2008.

[33] Gott, op cit.

[34] Quoted in Gott, op cit.

[35] Wilpert, op cit, Aug. 30, 2003.

[36] Arsenault, C., Cuban doctors prescribe hope in Venezuela, Al Jazeera, 31 December, 2012.

[37] Wilpert G., Venezuela to Completely Overhaul Its Healthcare System, VA.com, Aug. 29, 2005.

[38] Rodríguez, A., Cuban doctors in eye of… Associated Press 16 April, 2014.

[39] Cannon, B., Class/Race in Venezuela, Third World Quarterly, 2008, 29(4)731-748.

[40] Sanchez, Bolivarian Circles: A Grassroots Movement, VA.com, 30 September, 2003.

[41] Fernandes, op cit., 2007.

[42] Wiley, J., Venezuelan bosses strike against Chávez government, Militant, 24 December, 2001 Vol.65/No.49.

[43] Golinger, E., The CIA Was Involved In the Coup Against Venezuela’s Chávez, 22 November, 2004 VenezuelaFOIA.info.

[44] Wilpert, op cit., 30 August, 2003.

[45] Wilpert, G., The 47-Hour Coup That Changed Everything, VA.com, 14 April, 2012.

[46] Calero, R., Bosses seek to topple Chávez government, Militant, 11 February, 2002, Vol.66/No.6.

[47] Wilpert, op cit., May-June 2003.

[48] Wilpert, op cit., 14 April, 2012.

[49] Fischer-Hoffman, C., Victims of 2002 Venezuelan Coup Denounce Double Standards, VA.com, 22 September, 2014.

[50] Wilpert, op cit., 14 April, 2012.

[51] The full list of announcements can be seen on: https://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n155077.html

[52] Bellow, A., ‘Chávez rises from very peculiar coup’, The Guardian, 15 April, 2002.

[53] Motta, op cit.

[54] Dinges, J., Soul Search, Columbia Journalism Review, 2005, 44(2) pp 52-8.

[55] Lemoine, M., Venezuela’s Press Power, Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2002.

[56] In Golinger, E., The CIA Was Involved In the Coup Against Venezuela’s Chávez, 22, 2004 VenezuelaFOIA.info.

[57] Rohter, L., Venezuela’s 2 Fateful Days, The New York Times, 20 April, 2002.

[58] Wilpert, G., Two More Arrests and one More Death in the Case of Venezuelan Prosecutor’s Assassination, VA.com, 28 November, 2004.

[59] Bellos, A., ‘Chávez rises from very peculiar coup’, The Guardian, 15 April, 2002.

[60] Roberts, Op cit. 2006.

[61] Wilpert, G., Constitutional Reform, VA.com, 2003.

[62] Smith, M., Venezuela, Oil and Chávez, CNBC, 11 January, 2013.

[63] Jones, op cit.

[64] Espina, G., Beyond polarization: organised Venezuelan women promote their ‘minimum agenda’, NACLA Report on the Americas, 2007, 40(2)20-24.

[65] Venezuelan Trade Unionists Shot At, www.marxist.com, 29 January, 2003.

[66] El Freteco y la Empresa Socialista. Fundación Federico Engels de Venezuela, Los Teques 2007.

[67] Trotsky, L., Nationalised Industry and Workers’ Management, www.marxists.org.

[68] Wilpert, G., Co-operatives are the businesses of the future, VA.com, 17 September, 2003.

[69] Management Achievements, Sunacoop 2008.

[70] Piñeiro, C., Main Challenges for Co-operatives in Venezuela, Critical Sociology, 2009, 35(6):841-862.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Schiller, N., Gender, Power and Community Television, 2008, Taylor & Francis.

[73] Fernandes, op cit., 2007.

[74] Cerceau, G., Experiencia de Cogestión en CADAFE, 2007, ILDIS, Caracas.

[75] Gindin, J., Venezuela Expropriates… Valve Factory, 28 April, 2005, VA.com.

[76] Kiraz Janicke, K., Venezuela’s Co-Managed Inveval, 27 July. 2007, VA.com.

[77] Ness, I., and Azzellini, D., Ours to master and to own, Haymarket Books, 2011.

[78] Ness, and Azzellini, op cit.

[79] Hise, M., Workers Control… under Attack, VA.com, 18 August, 2007.

[80] Álvarez, V.¿Hacia donde va el modelo productivo? 2009, CIM, Caracas.

[81] Thomas, F., “Co-management” in Venezuela’s Alcasa, VA.com, 25 October, 2005.

[82] news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/latin_america, 19 August, 2005.

[83] Azzellini, D., and O. Ressler, 2006, 5-Factories: Workers control in Venezuela, Film, trailer on YouTube.

[84] Azzellini, D., Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela, Haymarket, 2018.

[85] Interview with Elio Sayago, Lucha de Clases, 25 October, 2011.

[86] Ness, and Azzellini, op cit.

[87] Robertson, E., Revolutionary Democracy in the Economy? VA.com, 3 August, 2012.

[88] Martín. J., ‘Workers’ Control vs Bureaucrats, Mafia and Multinationals in Bolivar’, VA.com, 10 July, 2011.

[89] www.rebelion.org., 22 July, 2005.

[90] Purcell, T., The Political Economy of Social Production Companies in Venezuela, Latin American Perspectives, 2013, 40(3)146-168.

[91] Yaffe, H., Venezuela: Building a Socialist Communal Economy?, International Critical Thought, 2015, 5(1) 23–41.

[92] Chávez, H., Strike at the Helm, 20 October, 2012, Monthly Review.

[93] Yaffe, op cit.

[94] Ellner, S., Social Programs in Venezuela… VA.com, 7 November, 2017.

[95] Wilpert, G., Chávez Highlights Venezuela’s Land Reform, 26 September, 2005, VA.com

[96] Wilpert, G., Chávez’ Legacy of Land Reform, Review of Agrarian Studies, 3(2).

[97] Fox, M., Chávez Inaugurates Blitzkrieg of Projects VA.com, 29 November, 2006.

[98] Ciccariello-Maher, G., Zero Hour for Venezuela’s RCTV, VA.com, 29 May, 2007.

[99] Pearson, T., First National Meeting of SWCs, VA.com, 24 May, 2011.

[100] Dobson, P., Venezuelan Constituent Assembly Approves Workers’ Councils Law, VA.com, 3 February, 2018.

[101] Azzellini, D., Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela, Haymarket, 2018.

[102] PDVSA, Venezuelan Government Launches New State Food Company, VA.com, 22 January, 2008.

[103] Draft Program and Principles of the PSUV, January 2008, www.handsoffvenezuela.org.

[104] Kiraz J., SIDOR workers reject arbitration, VA.com, 27 February, 2008.

[105] Fuentes, F., Venezuela: Class Struggle Heats Up, 26 July, 2009, Green Left Weekly.

[106] Sugget, J., Venezuela To Nationalize Cement Industry, VA.com, 5 April, 2008.

[107] Larsen, P., Chávez Appoints Workers to Lead Factories… VA.com, 2 June, 2010.

[108] Martín, op cit., 10 July, 2011.

[109] Roberts, J., China: From Permanent Revolution to Counter-Revolution, Wellred Books, 2016.

[110] Martín, J., op cit., 10 July, 2011.

[111] Woods, A., Nationalisation of the Banco de Venezuela, VA.com, 18 August, 2008.

[112] 8 October, 2012

[113] Venezuela National Assembly chief: Diosdado Cabello, BBC News, 5 January, 2012.

[114] Azzellini, D., Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela, Haymarket, 2018.

[115] Robertson, op cit.

[116] Ibid.

[117] Suggett, J., Venezuelan Auto Workers Decry Possible Firings of Union Leaders as Mitsubishi Plant Reopens, VA.com, 24 September, 2009.

[118] Suggett, J., Venezuela Invests Surplus Oil Dollars in Education, Housing, and Industry, VA.com, 3 September, 2009.

[119] Lucha de Clases, Venezuela: Interview with… Eduardo Samán, VA.com, 15 October, 2010.

[120] Yaffe, op cit.

[121] Pearson, T., United Socialist Party of Venezuela Defines New Strategies for 2011-2012, VA.com, 24 January, 2011.

[122] Rosales, F., Deportation of Alternative Journalist Becerra… VA.com, 29 April, 2011.

[123] Martin, J., ‘Venezuela: Revolutionary Vignettes’, VA.com, 25 September, 2011.

[124] Carlson, C., VA.com, 25 April, 2013.

[125] Simon Bolivar, Cartagena Manifesto, 1812.

[126] Dutka, Z., Venezuelan Peasants Protest Supreme Court, VA.com, 29 May, 2014.

[127] Ciccariello-Maher, G., Venezuela: ¡Comuna o Nada!, VA.com, 22 March, 2016.

[128] Boothroyd Rojas, R., Investigation Launched into Violent Eviction of Rural Families in Venezuela, VA.com, 14 March, 2017.

[129] Haule, E., Forcible Transfer of Farmers in Venezuela, Corruption in Land Authority, Amerika 21, 18 March, 2017.

[130] Robertson, W., Venezuela’s Diana Industries Workers Claim Victory in Struggle vs. Managerial “Imposition”, VA.com, 16 August, 2013.

[131] Egaña-Prodavinci, C., Venezuela’s Orinoco Mining Belt, VA.com, 8 September, 2016.

[132] Koerner, L., Venezuela Signs Controversial $1.16 bn Mining Deal, VA.com, 24 July, 2017.

[133] Koerner, L., Venezuela: 10 Dead, 200 Voting Centers Attacked, VA.com, 1 August, 2017.

[134] Dobson, P., Venezuela Rolls out New Currency amid General Economic Overhaul, VA.com 20 August, 2018.