9. ‘Recovered’ Companies ( Empresas Recuperadas )¶
Core Argument¶
From late 2005, the Venezuelan government’s Fábrica adentro programme offered subsidies and cheap loans to smaller firms facing lay-offs, conditional on co-management, profit-sharing, a 10 per cent levy for industrial transformation, and a ban on sackings. The government aimed to create 100,000 jobs; around 1,500 small firms joined in the first year. Civil servants and many private enterprises saw co-management as a means to draw workers into boosting productivity and avoiding conflict, while militant workers viewed it as a step towards workers’ control. In practice, some co-management schemes gave workers shares or 25 per cent ownership without real decision-making power, and the state bureaucracy suppressed genuine democratisation.
Against opposition from his own party and the bureaucracy, Chávez launched Empresas Recuperadas — companies recovered from private owners and run under co-management by workers, the state, and local communities. This included re-nationalising firms privatised under neoliberalism, such as the electricity sector, CANTV in February 2007, and SIDOR in April 2008. However, government authorities were half-hearted: they refused to nationalise as workers demanded, despite expropriation being legal since 2000 under Articles 115 and 117 of the Constitution. Bureaucrats preferred employers’ economic stranglehold to workers’ struggle, fearing it might deepen the revolution. A law preventing arbitrary redundancies was passed only as a lesser evil. Managers in state-owned enterprises, such as the electricity company Cadafe, resisted workers’ participation, and by 2005 had smothered meaningful involvement, subverting the president’s declared policy.
The case of Alcasa, the state aluminium company, exemplifies these contradictions. In February 2012, Vice-President Elias Jaua announced President Chávez’ order replacing Alcasa president Elio Sayago with Ángel Marcano, a government deputy and FSBT member. Sayago’s dismissal was justified by trade union conflicts he had allegedly caused, though these conflicts had been instigated by those sacking him. Marcano had led the previous year’s thirty-four-day lock-out, making the appointment a “contradiction in terms”. Workers reported Marcano was undermining workers’ control by refusing factory meetings and appointing vice-presidents arbitrarily. The PCV’s Tribuna Popular criticised the “internal right-wing” in Bolivar state, warning bureaucratic actions were “grinding down the revolutionary process” and aiding transnational corporations. Under Marcano, production fell, unions fractured, and the main extrusion plant remained idle. The chapter argues that workers’ control at Alcasa threatened profitable arrangements between international and local interests, and that Bolivarian bureaucrats’ and union leaders’ interests ultimately coincided with oligarchs and multinationals. Alcasa demonstrated how workers’ control in a bourgeois state is transitional: it either leads to overthrowing capitalism or is itself overthrown.