13. Nationalisation of Steel (SIDOR) and Workers’ Control¶
Core Argument¶
The nationalisation of SIDOR, Venezuela’s giant steel producer, provides the focal point for an examination of the contradictory dynamics within the Bolivarian Revolution. Originally state-owned from the 1950s, SIDOR was privatised and sold to the Argentinian multinational Techint in 1997, a period workers describe as a ‘living nightmare’. When Chávez called for re-nationalisation in January 2007, the plant erupted in jubilation, with walkouts and the raising of the Venezuelan flag. The chapter argues that this victory was won despite ferocious opposition from within the government itself, not merely from capital. The Minister of Labour, Jose Ramón Rivero, slandered striking workers, falsely claiming they had supported the 2002-2003 bosses’ lock-out, when in fact their actions had kept the plant open. In March 2008, the National Guard, allegedly under orders from the governor of Bolivar state, attacked union members with tear gas and rubber bullets, arresting fifty and hospitalising three. Chávez was forced to sack Rivero, but the episode exposed a fundamental contradiction: the government paid US$1.9 billion to re-nationalise SIDOR, a generous price for an asset the state had originally given away cheaply under neoliberalism.
The chapter situates SIDOR within a broader wave of nationalisations, including the compulsory purchase of sixty per cent of three major cement producers—Mexican Cemex, French Lafarge, and Swiss Holcim—which controlled over three-quarters of the industry and sold at export prices domestically, causing severe shortages. Yet management of these companies was assigned to ex-military officers who opposed cogestión (co-management), leading to catastrophic output falls due to mismanagement, corruption, and theft. The core polemic is directed against the bureaucratic and corrupt layers within the state, the PSUV, and the trade union federation FSBT, who actively sabotaged workers’ control. The chapter details how, immediately after re-nationalisation, workers suspected sabotage when the Automatic Production System failed, and later uncovered a plot involving a fake TV crew apparently hired to film staged destruction to blame workers for hooliganism. Workers spontaneously formed a basic militia to defend the plant.
The argument draws heavily on the concrete case of Luís Velasquez, SIDOR’s Commercial Director, a ‘Bolivarian top’ and former PSUV finance director, who was arrested in 2011 for heading a ‘cabilla mafia’ that stole steel reinforcing bars for sale on the black market at three or four times the official price, with some diverted to Colombia and Brazil. The chapter notes that Velasquez was a personal friend of Governor Rangel, and that workers who provided evidence were threatened with dismissal. He was released from prison in 2013, demonstrating the power of his connections. The chapter uses this to argue that a mixed economy, especially one where capitalists are put in charge of nationalised industries, inevitably generates wholesale corruption. It draws a historical parallel with the New Democracy period in China, where capitalists produced only a tiny fraction of GDP but had a corrosive effect on the Communist Party out of all proportion to their economic weight.
The chapter concludes with the removal of Carlos d’Oliveira, the elected worker-president of SIDOR and a leading member of the Revolutionary Front of Steelworkers (FRTS), in August 2012. The FSBT organised a conflict over outsourcing that caused an estimated US$431 million in damage, and Chávez declared it a ‘management error’, replacing d’Oliveira with a member of the FSBT and ally of Governor Rangel. The chapter’s polemical thrust is clear: the workers’ control movement threatened not only the US-backed opposition and transnational capital, but also those who supported the revolution for personal gain, because democratic control of finances would end the schemes for filching state monies. The SIDOR workers, who had shown their mettle during the 2002-2003 lock-out by keeping the Anaco gas plant open, organised the first National Meeting for Workers’ Control in May 2011, passing a manifesto entitled ‘Neither capitalists nor bureaucrats – all power to the workers’. Yet the chapter ends on a note of warning: the conjuncture of forces, while still favourable, was threatened by de-politicisation and apathy among