14. The Financial Crash of 2008¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 14: The Financial Crash of 2008¶
The global financial crash of 2008 exposed the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, as the banking system teetered on the brink of collapse and governments across the world forced ordinary citizens to bail out the very institutions responsible for the crisis. In Venezuela, President Chávez responded by nationalising Banco de Venezuela from the Spanish banking giant Santander, which had refused a state purchase offer and instead preferred bankruptcy. The bank had been privatised in 1996 for a mere US$300 million, yet generated US$325.3 million in profit during 2007 alone. Chávez paid US$1 billion for the institution, declaring that its future profits would fund socialist development. While Marxists welcomed the nationalisation, they argued that such ad-hoc, partial measures would prove insufficient to resolve Venezuela's deeper economic problems. What was required, they insisted, was the full nationalisation of banking and finance as part of a planned economy, with the working class holding state power and running production for popular benefit. Previous experiments with state ownership under capitalism had merely generated a corrupt bureaucratic layer while over a third of the population remained in poverty.
The struggle over workers' control reached a flashpoint in October 2011 during trade union elections at the SIDOR steel plant. The Revolutionary Marxist Current accused prominent figures including Juan Carlos Monedero, Pablo Iglesias, and Vice-President Elías Jaua of attempting to install a candidate less committed to workers' control. The state sector had become dominated by bureaucracy and corruption, with workers' control being systematically strangled. At the CVG industries, intense political conflict erupted over the revolution's future, revealing a sharp contradiction between the bureaucracy and its reactionary allies on one side, and forces committed to radical transformation on the other. The reactionaries were unconcerned with efficiency; after the dismissal of a key workers' control advocate at Alcasa, production fell to a quarter of its previous level. The bureaucracy blunted workers' control through economic sabotage and physical attacks on leaders. In 2009, a politically-motivated lock-out at Mitsubishi ended with police killing two workers, and the plant eventually closed after 150 workers, including eleven union leaders, were fired. A Toyota union leader was shot dead, and General Motors closed for three months. At the November 2009 PSUV Congress, Chávez called for a Fifth International and workers' militias, but the bureaucracy and Stalinists blocked these initiatives. The PSUV primaries in May 2010 were rigged by the party apparatus to crush the left. The state machine sabotaged progressive legislation and nationalisation under workers' control, exemplified by the PDVAL scandal where managers hoarded food until it rotted and sold it on the black market. Minister Eduardo Samán was removed after capitalists demanded his head in exchange for not generating food scarcity in the election year. The economy remained fundamentally capitalist; private manufacturing still provided three out of every four jobs, and the revolution's transformative potential was being systematically undermined by the very state apparatus that claimed to serve it.