Reports from Venezuela
by
The Bolivarian revolution in
The biggest setback during the past
year of course was the defeat of the constitutional referendum in December
2007. Beginning in 1997, the movement headed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez enjoyed an unbroken string of electoral victories.
December 1997 was this movement’s first electoral defeat in ten years. Some of
the reasons for this defeat are examined in the first report below, by Fernando
Esteban, a member of the Fourth International working in
Esteban also looks at the difficulties and complications for revolutionary socialists who are trying to work within the reformist-dominated and bureaucratically run new party established by Chávez, the PSUV (Partido socialista unida de Venezuela—United Socialist Party of Venezuela).
On the other hand, some significant gains in a socialist direction have been made. After a hard-fought strike lasting over three months, workers at the giant iron-and-steel plant SIDOR saw a major breakthrough. The Chávez leadership intervened on the workers’ side and nationalized SIDOR. One of this summer’s reports, below, indicate that workers who had been contracted-out by the SIDOR management have now been reinstated as part of the regular work force.
The victory at SIDOR was
accompanied by Chávez’s ouster of the pseudo-Trotskyist Jose Ramon Romero as
Earlier, Chávez had nationalized the cement industry, and the most recent report below describes Chávez’s nationalization of a major private bank, the multinational Banco de Venezuela, at the end of July. (See the article below by Alan Woods.)
The June 2008 interview with a Trotskyist union leader, Stalin Pérez Borges, shows that in June Chávez was playing up to the capitalists and seeking to collaborate with them, moving away from a socialist direction. Now, at the end of July, he is nationalizing one of the banks whose owners he was trying to ally with in June. The worldwide financial crisis, and intensifying food shortages, may have played a role in this apparent about-face. Perhaps Chávez felt forced to nationalize the bank to prevent worse economic turmoil from hitting home.
The existence of a strong current of militancy among Venezuelan workers, expressed also in the fact that several revolutionary socialist groups are among the top union leaders in that country, is also a constant pressure on Chávez, challenging him to act in accordance with the socialist ideas that he proclaims.
A report from
The first two reports below are from International Viewpoint, the online publication of the Fourth International. All the reports have been edited for style purposes by Labor Standard.
The Bolivarian Revolution at
the Crossroads
by
Fernando Esteban
[The author is a member of the
Fourth International working in
The defeat of President Hugo Chávez in the referendum last December marks an important
turning point in the Bolivarian process, which began more than ten years ago.
Following this defeat a crucial choice arises: to accelerate the process toward
a socialist society or on the contrary to prefer the status quo by centering
the revolution solely around the image of the
president.
After thirteen electoral
victories in a row, the defeat in December was a body blow for the whole of the
Bolivarian Left. For the first time in ten years, the Venezuelan people [that
is, a substantial section of the masses who had previously voted for Chávez] expressed its disapproval, in spite of the widely
recognized gains of the revolution.
Gains
of the Revolution
In a country which is the
fourth largest world exporter of oil and which has the greatest oil reserves in
the world, oil is a very powerful financial weapon.
The profits generated by PDVSA (the state oil company) make it possible to
finance the “missions” of the revolution. Among the most important are those
concerning education:
·
The Robinson mission aims at
teaching illiterates how to read and write.
·
The Ribas
mission trains graduates.
·
The
These educational missions are
extremely successful. The students, of all ages, are very numerous, so much so
that the centers where they operate are being multiplied. This enthusiasm can
be explained partly by the methods of teaching that are used. The courses are
given on videocassette, and a teacher is there to help the group, which is
always quite small. There is no place here for the system of evaluation and
sanction.
Everything is done to encourage
the students’ progress. And the results speak for themselves: in October 2005,
UNESCO officially proclaimed
Another of the best-known
missions is “Barrio adentro,” which is a medical
mission. In the framework of an agreement with
Access to health care has thus
become completely free. Installed in [clinics that are] all built on the same
model, these doctors treat the population, but at the same time they inform and
make people aware of the rules of hygiene and contraception. They also keep
many statistics up to date, in order to observe the evolution of the medical
situation of the population. It is clear that progress is being made, and the
whole of the population, in particular in the barrios, has seen its living
conditions improving, largely thanks to these doctors.
We could also speak about the Mercal mission, which markets food products at low prices.
Created for all Venezuelans, it addresses itself more specifically to the
poorest sectors of the population.
We could furthermore
mention the Piar mission, which aims at improving the
living conditions of children; the “Vuelvan Caras” mission, whose purpose is to develop co-operatives
of production; and Guaicai, which works to restore
the rights of the indigenous peoples and communities of the country. Chávez often repeats that “to fight against poverty, it is
necessary to give power to the poor.” The missions are there for that, to help
the needy populations of the barrios, those who took to the streets at the time
of the 2002 coup and put Chávez back in power.
Lastly, how can we speak about
the gains of the Bolivarian revolution without evoking one of the essential
reforms of the process: the law on land and fishing.
Just eight families in the country own between them more than 150,000 hectares
of land. That represents roughly the equivalent of eighteen times the surface
of the capital of
This law has encouraged the
construction of rural population centers equipped with basic services, giving
their inhabitants access to health and education, in order for them to have a
better and more dignified life. The law protects the poor peasants and
encourages the formation of cooperatives and other associative forms of
production, by supporting them financially and technically and by creating at
the same time the conditions of their economic viability, through establishing
the necessary means of transport and marketing of their produce.
Again
on the Lost Referendum
So we might be astonished that
in spite of these well-known gains, Hugo Chávez lost
the referendum last December. All the more so in that in the president’s
proposals we could find in particular:
·
recognition of popular
participation through the Councils of Popular Power (such as, for example,
Student Councils, Peasant Councils, etc.), and through workers’ associations,
cooperatives, and community enterprises;
·
strengthening of the right to a
job, including the creation of a fund of social stability for workers, allowing
them, with the help of the state, to take advantage of wide-ranging rights
concerning retirement, pensions, and paid holidays;
·
the reduction of the working
day from 8 to 6 hours, and from 40 to 36 hours a week;
·
recognition of the
specificities of the indigenous groups and the groups descended from forced
African immigration, guaranteeing the exercise of their rights and special
attention from the law;
·
the
creation of a state productive economic model, based on the values of humanism,
cooperation, and the preponderance of social interests over private interests.
The state promotes and develops specific forms of companies and economic units
based on social, communal or state property, social production and
distribution, mixed enterprises between the state and the private sector,
creating the best conditions for the realization of the socialist economy.
All these social gains would
make you think that the popular classes would mobilize to once again vote
massively in favor of the proposals of Chávez. However,
that was not what happened, quite the contrary. The referendum was more a
defeat of the Venezuelan president than a victory for the capitalist
opposition. If we compare the results with those of the last presidential
election, won by Chávez with 61.35% of the votes, the
opposition stagnated, with 4 million votes, whereas Chávez
lost 3 million votes. The abstention was 45 per cent. In the final
analysis, it was by only 200,000 votes that the constitutional proposal was
rejected.
Most of the Western [big business]
media were quick to salute the wisdom of the Venezuelan people. For them, the
explanation of this failure was simple and linear. It came down to two points:
the rejection of a “Cuban-style” socialist model and the refusal to allow Chávez the right to stand for the presidency indefinitely.
Admittedly, article 230 of the new Constitution proposed a lengthening of the
presidential term to 7 years, with the possibility of standing again
immediately and indefinitely.
Such a proposal is obviously
not satisfactory. But to conclude from it that Chávez
wants to make
The reasons for the defeat are
undoubtedly to be looked for elsewhere.
Reasons
for the Defeat
First of all, by aiming to
broadly satisfy the population, the proposal did not in the end satisfy anyone.
The renewal of the presidential mandate was clearly there to satisfy the
moderate wing of the Bolivarian process, the wing that wants a Chavism without socialism. It could not, however, satisfy
the most radical wing of the process. So we saw personalities like Orlando Chirino, a member of the leadership of the country’s main
trade-union confederation, the UNT, officially come out against the proposal.
On the other hand, the entire social aspect of the reform, which we outlined
above, was unacceptable to a new Bolivarian bourgeoisie which does not want
socialism. From this point of view, it was highly symbolic that General Baduel, an old associate of Chávez,
came out strongly against the reform.
Furthermore, there was very
clearly a problem with the method chosen by Chávez.
The Venezuelan president worked out his constitutional reform proposals,
consulting only a group of friends selected by him and gathered around his own
person. Over and above the reform proposals, Chávez
thus made disappear by decree the original formula of this revolution: that of
a popular, revolutionary, democratic process of a constituent nature. The
maximum that was obtained was the kind of open discussion that there was around
the constituent assembly of 1999. At a moment when the context made it possible
to go much further, to undertake a reform by establishing spaces of dialogue
and power all over the country, Chávez threw down a
challenge to the entire Bolivarian and revolutionary movement, forcing it to be
with him or against him.
There was a possible way out of
this, making the model of reform proposed by Chávez a
working draft for a great many constituent spaces organized all over the
country, seeking perhaps their approval but gaining a model of legitimacy and a
concretization of constituent and revolutionary democracy. In fact, the reform
almost faded into the background because in the campaign Chávez
personified the referendum to the point of transforming it into a plebiscite.
The line was: “To vote No is to vote for Bush, to vote Yes
is to vote for Chávez.”
In the face of that the
opposition developed a highly effective campaign. Through advertising spots on
television, but also by going into the popular quarters, it ceaselessly argued
that with the reform and “the arrival of socialism,” the state would be the
owner of all private goods and could seize in an absolutely legal way anyone’s
house or car. Exploiting people’s fears by claiming that socialism would take
from those who had little or nothing, this line of argument turned out to be
extremely successful .
Lastly, the primary reason for
this failure was undoubtedly the rise of [internal conflict] within the
Bolivarian camp. The desire to identify the Bolivarian revolution with the sole
figure of Chávez, the way in which the United
Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) is being constituted, without much
consultation, and then the way in which they tried to impose the reform,
explain this disaffection. Abstention was high because the proposal of Chávez, both in its form as and in its essential contents,
did not offer practical democratic and counter-hegemonic perspectives. As Sebastien Ville and Francois Sabado
wrote in [the newspaper of the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire] Rouge
no. 2230, “this defeat is a response to the degradation of the relations
between the government and the most combative sectors of the Bolivarian
revolution.”
It is utopian to think that in
the
The
Nationalization of SIDOR
First of all, there is of
course the nationalization of SIDOR [in April 2008]. After three months of a
determined strike and of struggle, on Wednesday April 8, Hugo Chávez finally intervened and agreed to renationalize the
most important iron and steel plant in the country, which had been privatized
in 1997 by President Caldera.
At the heart of the debate was
the denunciation by the workers and the UNT trade union of the violation by
SIDOR of Venezuelan labor legislation. Completely ignoring the collective
bargaining agreement, the management of Ternium-SIDOR,
a company owned 20 per cent by the state, 20 per cent by the workers, and 60
per cent by the Italo-Argentinian consortium Techint, had maintained for 15 months a situation of
absolute wage insecurity for the 15,000 workers, including 9,000 who had no
contracts. Not only did the management refuse to implement the wage increases
voted legally in a general assembly by the workers, but on the contrary it
sought to impose a reduction of the workforce, wage cuts, modifications of work
contracts in the direction of greater insecurity, as well as a downward
revision of the pensions paid to former employees.
Worse still, whereas the fact
of having 20 per cent of the capital enabled the workers to appoint one of the
co-presidents, the management categorically refused to recognize the validity
of this vote. Hitherto protected by Jose Ramon Rivero,
the minister of labor [appointed by Chávez at the
time of Chávez’s reelection in 2006], the management
of the firm thought it could count on the fact that it benefited from foreign
capital to continue flouting Venezuelan law. Whereas Rivero
never sought to negotiate and on the contrary preferred to impose a trial of
strength on the workers, as he had previously done last August with the
comrades of the UNT in the public sector, he has since been repudiated in a
scathing fashion by Chávez.
On April 4, the UNT trade union
organized a referendum where two questions were put to the workers of the
factory: first of all, did they or did they not agree with the proposal that
the employers had made at the negotiating table; then, whether they wished to
continue the strike and the negotiations. In spite of three months of struggle,
the workers answered No to the first question by 3,338 votes to 65, and Yes to the second by 3,195 to 97. On Monday April 7, weary
of the workers’ resistance, the government decided, in the person of
Vice-president Ramon Carrizales, to convene new
negotiations. Negotiations to which Labor Minister Jose Ramon Rivero was this time not invited. Under the constant pressure
of 600 workers guarding the factory permanently, it took less than 48 hours to
resolve the crisis.
The
Fall of Rivero
This struggle also led to the
fall of José Ramón Rivero. It was not the first time
that the comrades of the UNT had clashed with him. On August 15 last year, the
trade-union representatives of the UNT, workers in the Venezuelan Ministry of
Labor, had an appointment with the director of his cabinet, Lennina
Galindo, in order to present their draft of a national collective agreement for
all workers in the public sector. On their arrival, they were told that she was
in a meeting with the minister, José Ramón Rivero. So
the trade-union representatives decided to wait. At the end of the day, someone
came back to see them to tell them that by order of the minister, Lennina Galindo was not authorized to receive them.
The trade unionists, furious,
then decided to occupy the Ministry until they were received. Forty-five
people, men and women, thus continued to wait. Initially, the director of his
cabinet and the vice-minister were sent to convince the recalcitrant workers to
leave the Ministry. Then, understanding that he could not avoid a
confrontation, the minister ordered the doors to be closed, but also for water
and electricity to be cut off. Six days passed thus, without any change in the
situation. Fire fighters were prevented from entering,
all contact was prohibited with the employees of the ministry who, out of
solidarity, vainly tried to get food to them.
Deprived of water, food, and medicine,
faced with this serious lack of respect for the elementary rights of the human
person, the courageous trade unionists nevertheless remained in place. The
minister then called on the army to evacuate them. Soldiers came to the scene,
noted the occupation, but decided not to intervene. Furious,
the minister then decided to use purely and simply gangster methods, by calling
in roughnecks from the neighborhood. Promising each of them 50,000
bolivars (approximately 15 euros), he asked them to forcibly make these trade
unionists leave, presenting them as anti-Chavist
oppositionists. A violent evacuation of the ministry ensued, with the trade
unionists being driven out by thugs armed with revolvers.
But the strangest part of the
story was not the evacuation itself.
In fact, these trade-union
comrades were all members of the C-CURA and Marea Socialista currents of the UNT, and many of them were Trotskyists.
At the very time when the
evacuation was taking place, this same minister was making an inaugural speech
on the occasion of the first official homage paid by the
Finally, at the time when he
was ousted, Rivero was trying to set up a new
trade-union confederation, which would have been directly in competition with
the UNT, and would have followed his orders. Although this project seems to
have been frozen with the departure of Rivero,
nothing indicates that it will not be taken out of the closet one day by the
right wing of Chavism.
Internal
Maneuvers in the PSUV
The right wing seems for the
moment more preoccupied by the PSUV, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela,
the new party bringing together the old MVR (Movement for
The first stage consisted of
designating the members who had the right to vote. Out of 5 million members,
only 80.000 could vote, without anyone knowing on what criteria this choice was
based. In a second stage, Chávez announced on live
television a list of 70 names from which it was necessary to choose the 35
people who were going to make up the national leadership. Lastly, in the third
stage, once the 35 members of the national leadership had been elected, Chávez designated on live TV the members of the political
bureau. There you can only find members of the government, and there are no
representatives of the social or trade-union movement. The vote of the
delegates in each battalion (base organization) proceeded without there being
any control of the results.
In spite of the way the
bureaucracy arranged this election, there remain political spaces within the
PSUV. Thus for example, when there was the election of the 35 people who were
to make up the national leadership, a list drawn up by the government was
circulated, indicating the names for which it was necessary to vote.
Unfortunately for those thus designated, the 80,000 grand electors did not
follow instructions and voted freely. Which undoubtedly
partly explains Chávez taking matters in hand
directly by nominating the political bureau. In the same way, comrade
Gonzalo Gomez, a member of Marea Socialista,
succeeded in being elected a delegate, in spite of the opposition of the
bureaucracy.
Admittedly, learning how to
work within the big machine that is the PSUV will be extremely complicated.
Nevertheless the assiduity and the sharpness in the political struggle that the
comrades of Marea Socialista,
above all Stalin Pérez, have shown, is making it
possible for them to win a hearing. These small day-to-day political victories
validate a posteriori the choice of going into the PSUV and calling for a Yes
vote at the time of the last referendum. Conversely, the positions of the
comrades of C-CURA and Orlando Chirino on these two
principal points tend to put them off the political field.
The
Next Electoral Deadlines
In this context, it looks as
though the municipal elections in November could be very complicated. There is
a strong chance that the Chavist camp will lose quite
a few towns and cities, which would further weaken the Bolivarian revolutionary
process. At a time when the revolution seems to be looking for its second wind,
the problems of daily existence are coming to the fore again. Galloping
inflation (20 per cent per annum), insecurity, the problem of refuse disposal,
unemployment, corruption are elements which contribute to weighing on the
process and which will play a preponderant role at the moment of putting a
voting paper in the ballot box.
Admittedly, these problems did
not start with the Bolivarian revolution and are inherited from the former
republic. However, the Chavists must be able to
respond to questions relating to living conditions at the same time as
proposing a project for another society.
For ten years, the revolution
has continued to be unceasingly attacked by the capitalist bureaucracy, which
forces it to solve the strategic problems of industrialization and
nationalization, of the development of agro-industry in the countryside, and
especially of private banking, which still controls public finances and the
rates of interest and borrowing (which is about 32 per cent). If the Bolivarian
camp does not grapple with these problems, the towns of Ciudad
So it is more than ever
important to defend the Bolivarian process. Of course it makes mistakes, even
takes condemnable decisions such as those that we have described above, and we
will not cease to condemn them.
Nevertheless, it is worth
repeating with force that the Bolivarian revolution remains by far, and in
spite of its errors, the most interesting phenomenon existing on the planet
today. On it depends the equilibrium of the entire
Andean and
That is why it is important to
follow and support the Venezuelan social movement. Admittedly, it remains
weakened and divided. But it is its capacity to unite which will make it
possible to give a second wind to the revolution and will radicalize a process
which is still and always too dependent on the sole figure of Hugo Chávez.
Interview
with Venezuelan Socialist Union Leader:
“
[The following is an interview
with Stalin Péres Borges, one of the national coordinators of the UNT,
[The interview was conducted by
the staff of Marea
Socialista
[It was also published on the
site <www.aporrea.org>
on June 30, 2008.]
On June 11, President Chávez, accompanied by several of his principal ministers,
met in the hotel ALBA in
Question: How
do you evaluate the meeting of President Chávez with
the employers?
Answer:
Scarcely a few months ago, the president reaffirmed that his government was a
“workers’” government. He also nationalized the iron and steel company SIDOR
[in April 2008; see the article above, by Fernando Esteban], although he did it
by repurchasing it, whereas, in our opinion, it is this multinational which
should have paid the Venezuelan state for not respecting its laws and for
punishable acts against the country. Despite everything, we cannot deny that it
was a very progressive measure, asked for, demanded, and won by the struggle of
the workers. This reaffirmation of the concept of a “workers’ government,” as
well as the dismissal of one of the most anti-working class Ministers of Labor
that you can imagine, were steps in the right direction: in the direction of
measures that we have been demanding since December 2 (the date of the defeat
of the referendum on the constitutional reform).
How do you evaluate the meeting of President Chávez with the employers?
At the time, we affirmed that
the revision, the rectification, and the relaunching
of the revolutionary process should be centered on the resolution of the
problems of the popular sectors. But this June 11, this meeting with the
employers, the economic measures announced, and especially the political
proposal that President Chávez made to them,
represent a step backwards in relation to the orientation conquered by the
workers of SIDOR and by the people for the Bolivarian Revolution.
The proposal of the president,
his call for an “alliance” with employers described by him as “national,” with
the “national” bourgeoisie, all that is taking place at the same time as the
putting forward of an alliance with the workers and the people. On the very eve
of his meeting with the employers, Chávez had signed
[an authorization for] the reincorporation of the first 900 contracted-out
workers into the official work force of SIDOR. So these actions by Chávez are contradictory; they are by no means complementary:
one excludes the other.
All the historical experiences
of alliances with the aforementioned “national” bourgeoisie show that this road
has led to the failure of the popular processes, of processes of national
independence, of socialist processes. They lead only to the strengthening of
the bourgeoisie and of imperialism and to the victory of the
counter-revolutionary sectors. At the moment when we are commemorating the
centenary of the birth of Salvador Allende, it would
be good to remember why the Chilean road to socialism was broken. In our
opinion, it was because they did not want to confront in a consistent way the
Chilean bourgeoisie, allied to the Yankees, and that this bourgeoisie was able
to organize the destabilization, the economic boycott, and the weakening of [Allende’s] government of Popular Unity, which opened the
way to and facilitated the coup d’etat (of September
11, 1973). We have already experienced such a situation here, but thanks to the
revolutionary action of the masses, the coup was defeated on April 13 (2002).
Q.: Many comrades think that
what is involved is a tactic of the president with a view to the next elections
(regional and local elections in November), in order precisely to avoid
economic destabilization and to slow down inflation.
A.: I want
first of all and above all to insist on the political, strategic problems of
the Bolivarian Revolution. It is on this level that we can explain why the
measures that were announced will not obtain the results that are claimed to be
sought. The measures necessary to obtain these results are of quite a different
order. They must really express the idea of a “workers’ government,” as the Chávez government defines itself.
The political problem is the
most important one because the president is talking to the wrong people if he
wants to stop inflation and relaunch production. It
is not these employers, it is not, in general, the big bosses, the Mendozas, who want to or who can stop inflation. Those who
were present at this meeting work closely with the multinationals, and their
companies are sometimes themselves multinationals. The case of the private
banks is illuminating; all of those banks in
It is a mistake to think,
precisely at the moment when the banking system in the United States and
internationally is collapsing, when big banks are collapsing, and when
neo-liberal governments have to rush to the aid of the banks with the people’s
tax money, that these bosses of finance will act in a different way in
Venezuela. They do nothing but obey the orders of the financial institutions
that control them. They are in no way interested in an “alliance” with the Chávez government, unless such an alliance makes it
possible for their enterprises to make bigger profits, which will in any event
be dispatched out of the country.
That is the reality. You cannot
speak to these employers from the heart, with a project of national
independence, even less with a socialist project, because their very existence
depends on the maintenance of a system of neo-colonial relations with
imperialism. These people would have acted at the time in the same way as the
oligarchy behaved with Bolivar. You cannot make these bankers and the big
economic groups recognize the need for national unity. On the contrary, they
represent a real threat to the revolution.
The president also invited the
employers of the building industry to collaborate with the Brazilian and Argentinian multinationals. He invited the importers,
producers, and processors of food to collaborate with the Brazilian and Argentinian multinationals. He opened a fund of a billion
dollars, to be shared between the local employers and the multinationals. But
when we speak about Brazilian and Argentinian
multinationals, it would be more exact to speak about North American, European,
and Asian multinationals, because the majority of their financial capital comes
from companies and banks in those regions. Like the Ternium
enterprise (which controlled 60 per cent of the SIDOR iron and steel plant that
was nationalized). This is allegedly an Argentinian
multinational, but its capital is Brazilian, Mexican, Italian, and North
American (U.S.).
To appeal to such firms in the
name of national unity while following the path of Bolivarian socialism reveals
great confusion on the part of the president. None of the 500 owners present at
the meeting will answer this appeal. They want to hear only one thing: the
appeal of profit at any price. It is they who create precarious employment, who
subcontract jobs, who lay off workers, who harass the trade-union organizations
when they cannot buy off or corrupt their leaders.
But let us return to the
political problem. Mendoza and its group of companies are among those
principally responsible for the food shortage and the speculation on food. Why
would it change its attitude today? The president is bathing in illusions if he
thinks that by granting the privileges claimed by the employers, they will no
longer constitute a factor of destabilization. The electoral agenda matters
little to the employers. Their only agenda is profit and for that they will use
the electoral conjuncture if necessary. Either the president is mistaken, or he
knows what he is doing and in that case he is promoting a capitalist model,
which will never win independence because these economic groups have no sense
of the fatherland or of independence. They are only junior partners of
imperialism and they only aspire to remain that.
To ask them to repatriate the
billion dollars that they have hidden abroad constitutes another demonstration
of naivety. They could indeed do it, but only with the guarantee that they will
make even more money than they currently make and with the assurance that they
will never be expropriated. And the only thing that can give them such
confidence is that the (presidential)
So the problem with which we
are confronted is political. It is a question of choosing between two models.
It is necessary to choose between the model suggested by the president on June
11 with the employers and that of the workers of SIDOR, of a consistent fight
against the multinationals.
Q.: Some people claim that
“alliance with the employers” would be a kind of New Economic Policey (NEP), the economic policy followed by Lenin after
the Russian civil war. In order to solve the problems of supply and the
productive crisis, he loosened controls on the market and gave certain
advantages to the small capitalists. What do you think about that?
A.: The
Leninist NEP was a policy intended to solve the brutal crisis in which
Moreover, the launching of the
NEP in
Q.: What measure do you propose
to achieve the goals defined by the president?
A.: In the
first place, there is a political objective. We reject this “alliance of
national unity” because it is counterproductive if we really want to advance
toward socialism. It will even be reactionary if it is carried out, because it
will weaken the revolutionary process. We propose on the contrary an alliance
of popular power, of the workers and the exploited and oppressed sectors of
society, in order to resolve the question of state power. In the second place,
we need measures of economic policy that are consistent with the discourse on
the building of socialism and the working-class nature of the government,
measures which must respond to the real problems and needs of working people.
Let us take the example of
foreign trade. If there is an area in which the state must have a monopoly of
purchases and imports, it is certainly that of food. The nationalization of
foreign trade and particularly of the food sector is a fundamental tool for
controlling inflation.
Next, there is the question of
wages. You cannot on the one hand spend millions of dollars on incentives and
subsidies to the employers, without any control by the workers, while on the
other hand workers are affected every day by price increases. We must install a
periodic, monthly or quarterly indexation of wages to keep pace with inflation.
Collective bargaining
agreements concluded every two years cannot respond to the situation.
One of the main issues whose
gravity should be understood is that of the control of finances, the banks and
credit. The crisis of the international economy will continue to deepen, just
like the crisis of the banking sector. In this context, it is not acceptable
that there does not exist any control on deposits in
our country. We think that the system of credit is a strategic sector just like
basic industries, oil, food, communications, etc. This sector cannot remain in
the hands of the private sector and even less of the multinationals. At the
very least, deposits would have to be nationalized. Or else, the central bank
should control and manage all the money in the banking system. It would also be
necessary to directly abolish the value-added tax (VAT) and to progressively
increase taxes on company profits. That means, concretely: those who earn more
pay more.
Those are some of the ideas and
proposals which we want to put up for discussion among workers. But what
remains fundamental is the question of knowing whether we are working with the
perspective of an alliance with the supposedly national bourgeoisie, which
would represent a retreat on the road to socialism. The president must know
that each of the possible choices excludes the other: either you are with the
workers and the people or you are with the big economic groups and the multinationals.
A genuine workers’ government cannot choose an alliance with the bourgeoisie
because that would mean the retreat of the revolution, and in saying that we
are not falling into any kind of “ultraleftism.”
by Alan
Woods
In a television program
broadcast to the whole of the country on July 31, President Chávez
announced the nationalization of Banco de Venezuela,
the Venezuelan bank owned by the Spanish banking multinational Grupo Santander. “We are going to nationalize Banco de Venezuela. I make an appeal to Grupo
Santander to come here so that we can start to negotiate”.
He added: “Months ago I
received the information through intelligence sources that Banco
de Venezuela, which had been privatized for years, was being sold by its
Spanish owners; that an agreement had been signed between Grupo
Santander and a Venezuelan private banker, then the Venezuelan banker needed
the permission of the government to buy a bank, this is not a small operation (…)
and then I sent a message to the Spanish and the Venezuelan banker, to tell
them that the government wanted to buy the bank; we want to recover it. Then
the owners said, ‘No, we don’t want to sell it.’ So now I say, ‘No, I will buy
it, how much is it? We are going to pay for it, and we are going to nationalize
Banco de Venezuela.’”
President Chávez
continued: “From this moment the media campaign on the part of the Spanish and
international media is going to start. They are going to say that Chávez is an autocrat, that Chávez
is a tyrant. I don’t care. We are going to nationalize the bank regardless.”
“Ladran,
luego cabalgamos” (The dogs
bark. That means the caravan is
moving), he said, quoting from Don Quixote.
“There is something obscure
here because its owners first were desperate to sell, and now they are saying
they do not want to sell it to the Venezuelan state. We are going to
nationalize it so that it is put at the service of the Venezuelan people.” He
added that the bank controls millions of Bolivars, which belong to “the
Venezuelan people and also the Venezuelan government.”
“We need a bank of that size.
Because this is the Banco de Venezuela [formerly a
government bank]…[T]his bank generates massive
profits, but these profits are going abroad.”
Chávez also
assured his listeners that the savings of account holders were going to be
guaranteed as well as the jobs of the workers, whose conditions would improve,
“as has happened with the nationalization of SIDOR.”
Chávez
thanked the private managers of the bank for having turned it into a very
efficient institution, but added that the bank would cease to be a capitalist
bank and would turn into a socialist one: “Profits will not go to one private
group. They will be invested in socialist social development. Socialism is
stronger every day that passes!”
Super
Profits
Banco de
Venezuela is one of the most important banks in
Banco de
Venezuela was nationalized in 1994 after a massive banking crisis, which
bankrupted 60 percent of the banking sector, only to be privatized in 1996 and
bought by Grupo Santander, a Spanish multinational
banking group, for only US$300 million. In only nine months Grupo
Santander recovered its original investment. The bank’s assets are now
estimated at $891 million. In 2007 alone it made $325.3 million in profits,
which is more than what Grupo Santander paid for the
bank in the first place.
This is not the only example of
scandalous profiteering by Spanish bankers in
Venezuelan banks, Mercantil and Banesco. The
Spanish Grupo
The attempt of the Venezuelan
government to regain control over the resources of the country is entirely
justified. Yet it has been met by howls of protests from the multinationals.
“It’s looking like a negative development. I don’t see why the banking sector
needs to be under the purview of the public sector,” said Alberto Ramos, a
senior economist with Goldman Sachs. “The private sector does a much more
efficient job of running that type of business.”
Lying
Hypocrisy
This is an excellent example of
the lying hypocrisy of the defenders of big business. How can these gentlemen
speak of the so-called efficiency of the private bankers when everybody knows
that the big banks in the USA and other countries have been engaged in massive
and criminal speculation for decades, which has led to the collapse of one big
bank after another in the last 12 months, threatening the entire world
financial system with collapse?
Not long ago, the Federal
Reserve Bank of
When President Chávez announces the nationalization of a bank, he is
accused of committing a crime against private property. But bourgeois
governments in the
What does this case tell us
about the “efficient job” done by the private bankers of the
We saw exactly the same thing last
year in
Appetite
Comes with Eating
The workers of
For Marxists, the question of
compensation in itself is not a question of principle. Long ago, Marx advocated
paying compensation to the British capitalists as a means of minimizing their
resistance to nationalization and Trotsky raised a similar possibility in
relation to the
However, the real issue here is
not the amount of compensation. It is the fact that a big bank is being taken
out of private hands. What the capitalists and imperialists really fear is that
the tendency of the Venezuelan revolution to make inroads into private property
will become irresistible. The [current worldwide financial] crisis of
capitalism means that an increasing number of banks and other private enterprises
will enter into crisis and close in the next months, causing a sharp rise in
unemployment. Already, private investment in
The argument of the reformists
and Stalinists that the revolution must form a “strategic alliance with the
national bourgeoisie” is dangerous stupidity. Everybody knows that the
bourgeoisie is the enemy of the revolution and socialism. It is not possible to
form a “strategic alliance” with a “progressive national bourgeoisie,” which
does not exist. The reformists and Stalinists would like to create a national
bourgeoisie with state money. What logic is there in this absurd proposal,
which they put forward as so-called realism? Instead of throwing money at
private capitalists who will immediately send it out of the country to bank
accounts in Miami [or Switzerland], the state should take the productive forces
into its hands and use its resources to create a genuine socialist planned
economy. The prior condition for this is that the productive forces should be
in the hands of the state, and the state should be in the hands of the working
people.
Despite all the exhortations,
the private capitalists will not invest in
In the television program in
which President Chávez announced the nationalization
of the Banco de Venezuela he mentioned Marx and Lenin
and referred to the importance of reducing the working week, as well as
analyzing the world crisis of capitalism. He said that only with socialism can
societies achieve their emancipation. That is absolutely true. But socialism is
only possible when the working class takes power into its hands, expropriates
the bankers, landlords, and capitalists and begins to run society on socialist
lines.
The Venezuelan revolution has
begun to take measures against private property. Marxists welcome every step in
the direction of nationalization. At the same time, we point out that partial
nationalizations are not sufficient to solve the fundamental problems of the
Venezuelan economy. The nationalization of the entire banking and financial
sector is a necessary condition for establishing a socialist planned economy,
along with the nationalization of the land and all big private firms, under
workers’ control and management. This would enable us to mobilize the entire
productive resources of
We therefore welcome the
nationalization of the Banco de Venezuela as a step
forward. But the main objective has not been yet attained: the elimination of
the economic power of the oligarchy and the establishment of a real socialist
workers’ state. The battle continues.