7. The Bosses Lock-out, PDVSA and Worker’s Control in Action¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter analyses the December 2002–January 2003 bosses’ lock-out in Venezuela, arguing that what the oligarchy and its media allies presented as a general strike was in fact a counter-revolutionary offensive by Fedecámaras and the CTV leadership aimed at toppling the Chávez government through economic strangulation, centred on halting oil production in PDVSA. The chapter’s core narrative thrust is that this attempt was defeated not by the state or the president’s legalism, but by a revolutionary alliance of oil workers and poor communities who took direct control of production, thereby saving the government and demonstrating the working class’s capacity to organise industry without its managerial elite.
Key claims are supported by detailed evidence. Outside PDVSA, the strike failed to gain traction: workers in Carabobo’s major factories (Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Pirelli, Good Year, Firestone) opposed it; state-owned basic industries (iron, steel, aluminium) continued at full capacity; airports, public transport, shops and restaurants functioned normally. The chapter insists this was a bosses’ lock-out, not a strike, as workers reported for duty but were barred from entering. In PDVSA, an alliance of directors, managers and senior technicians sabotaged production by withdrawing computer passwords and codes while fixing their own salaries, but oil workers progressively took control of refineries and oil fields, reviving output to fifty per cent capacity by 10 January and seventy per cent soon after. The chapter contrasts the media’s inflated figures for opposition demonstrations with the two-million-strong Chavista mobilisations on 7 December and 23 January, which went virtually unreported in the capitalist press.
The historical and theoretical context draws on the failed April 2002 military coup as a precedent, showing the opposition’s shift to economic sabotage. The chapter situates the lock-out within a broader class struggle, noting that the working class participated in the revolutionary process as a class for the first time. It draws on the experience of SIDOR workers requisitioning buses to break police lines and restore gas supplies, and on the communities surrounding oil installations massing in support.
The polemic is directed at several targets. Chávez himself is criticised for his “extremely legalistic” position, remaining within bourgeois legality and refusing to support workers’ control of PDVSA beyond an emergency measure. The state bureaucracy, inherited from the Fourth Republic, is condemned for believing the masses could never run industry and for sabotaging progress toward workers’ control. The new technocratic bureaucracy that reasserted control after production resumed is attacked for reinstating the old management structure, promoting workers into unaccountable managerial positions, and even rehiring middle-managers who had supported the lock-out. Rafael Ramírez, Minister of Energy and PDVSA president, is singled out for intervening in union elections and labelling activists as ‘Adecos’, including Gregorio Rodríguez, who had been decorated for defending the oil industry during the lock-out. The chapter concludes that the failure to maintain workers’ control over an enterprise generating nearly eighty per cent of Venezuela’s wealth fatally undermined the broader campaign for workers’ control, leaving the economic base—banks, food distribution, mass media—in private hands as “high-powered weapons” for an enemy that had already shown its willingness to use them.