3. Land Reform, Guerrilla Warfare¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: Land Reform, Guerrilla Warfare
This chapter traces the failure of armed struggle in Venezuela during the 1960s, arguing that the guerrilla movement was doomed not primarily by state repression but by its own strategic confusion, petty-bourgeois composition, and above all by the absence of a revolutionary working-class perspective. The narrative pivots on the contradiction between the radicalisation of youth inspired by the Cuban Revolution and the reformist, stagist politics of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) and the social-democratic Acción Democrática (AD) government of Rómulo Betancourt.
The chapter’s central claim is that the PCV’s reluctant turn to guerrilla warfare was never more than a tactical concession to rank-and-file pressure, subordinated to a reformist strategy of class collaboration. The PCV viewed armed actions as pin-prick operations directed from the city in support of a peaceful, parliamentary road, while the MIR envisaged a protracted rural war. This strategic incoherence was compounded by disastrous timing. Betancourt’s land reform, though corrupt and ineffective in practice—peasants received deeds but no tools, seeds, or access to land, and ninety per cent of distributed plots were later sold back to the old oligarchy—nevertheless succeeded in the short term in buying peasant loyalty. The guerrillas received a cold reception in the countryside, and their amateurish promise to prevent the December 1963 elections was humiliated by a ninety per cent voter turnout. The chapter uses this episode to illustrate the isolation of the guerrillas from both the rural and urban poor, noting that barrio women concentrated on struggles for schools and water rather than joining the armed struggle.
The chapter’s polemical target is the Stalinist theory of stages, which held that Venezuela must first pass through a bourgeois-democratic phase led by a supposedly progressive “national bourgeoisie” before socialism could be considered. This is attacked through an extended quotation from Teodoro Petkoff’s Socialism for Venezuela (1970), which denounces the PCV’s programme as “nothing but a new formulation of the policy of class collaboration.” Petkoff argues that the national bourgeoisie has no anti-imperialist capacity and that the theory of stages merely promotes bourgeois-democratic illusions. The PCV’s expulsion of Petkoff, Moscow’s denunciation of him in Pravda, and the subsequent split that formed the reformist Movement for Socialism (MAS) are presented as evidence that Stalinist parties cannot tolerate internal Marxist criticism. The MAS itself is shown to have abandoned even the label “Marxist” by 1983, winning no more than five per cent of the vote.
The chapter then shifts to the oil boom of the 1970s, arguing that the nationalisation of the oil industry under AD and COPEI governments was a hollow exercise: PDVSA retained the same management, culture, and ties to the former transnationals, while the state borrowed recklessly against future oil revenues. The crash of the 1980s and the imposition of IMF austerity by Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1989 set the stage for the social explosions that would follow, but the chapter leaves no doubt that the guerrilla left had already squandered its opportunity by failing to break with Stalinism and build a revolutionary workers’ party.