[News] Which Way Out of the Venezuelan Crisis?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13271


  Which Way Out of the Venezuelan Crisis?

By George Ciccariello-Maher – Jacobin, July 30th 2017
------------------------------------------------------------------------

When revolutions stagnate, confusion reigns, and both are palpably true 
of Venezuela today. Amid a deep economic, political, and now 
institutional crisis, many on the ground in Venezuela and even more 
observing from abroad don’t know what to think or to do. But rather than 
abandon the Bolivarian Process by echoing mainstream denunciations of 
the government of Nicolás Maduro 
<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nicolas-Maduro> as undemocratic, 
repressive, and even authoritarian, it is precisely in this most 
difficult of moments that revolutionaries must think clearly and carry 
the fight forward.

The causes of the crisis are many and their explanations well-worn. The 
2013 death of Hugo Chávez 
<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hugo-Chavez> left a symbolic 
crater at the heart of the Bolivarian Revolution, and coincided with a 
collapse in global oil prices that severely limited the maneuvering 
space of a Maduro government already faltering out of the gate. Seizing 
upon this weakness, conservative elites at the head of the US-backed 
opposition went on the offensive in the streets in April 2013 protests 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/16/protests-venezuela-capriles-nicolas-maduro> that 
left eleven dead and set into motion a strategy of tension that 
continues four years later.

Rather than acting decisively from the outset, the beleaguered Maduro 
government opted for a pragmatic approach. A failing system of currency 
controls governing the distribution of oil income was never fully 
dismantled. The result was a destructive feedback loop of black-market 
currency speculation, the hoarding and smuggling of gasoline and food, 
and an explosion of already rampant corruption at the intersection of 
the private and public sectors. Confronted with street protests and food 
shortages, Maduro responded erratically, supporting grassroots 
production by communes while simultaneously courting private 
corporations in a bid to keep food on the shelves.

The whirlwind that has ensued is not the one we had hoped for. As is 
often the case, the pragmatic path promised to be safest when it was in 
fact the most treacherous, and Maduro’s hesitance backfired 
spectacularly when the opposition won a decisive victory in the December 
2015 National Assembly elections 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/world/americas/venezuela-elections.html?_r=0>. 
What has followed is a full-blown institutional crisis in which the 
opposition has sought to stoke crisis 
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/venezuela-crisis-maduro-opposition-violence-elections-economy>, 
destabilize the government, and to make the country ungovernable.

Having seized one branch of government, opposition forces immediately 
demanded all three, constantly violating Supreme Court rulings and 
brazenly attempting to topple the executive. They continue to encourage 
violent protests in the streets that have left more than one hundred 
dead — where the cause is known, most have been killed directly or 
indirectly by the protestors themselves. This is not the picture of 
government repression painted by the international media, and in a 
country where 55 percent of Venezuelans continue to approve of Chávez 
and nearly half are opposed to the opposition’s violent tactics, those 
seeking to overthrow Maduro do not enjoy any great popular legitimacy.

The international media has played its role, framing the question as 
simply a matter of time: when will the democratically elected and 
legitimate president step down? Never mind that, even amid the crisis, 
Maduro is still more popular than Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto, 
Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos, and the unelected and illegitimate 
Brazilian coup-president Michel Temer. These important details disappear 
in the fog of a relentless media onslaught, backed by both the CIA and 
the Trump administration.

It’s difficult to find a path forward. There is talk of dialogue — the 
liberal panacea of panaceas — but it remains unclear with whom the 
dialogue should take place, or what kind of solutions it might bring. 
While arguably necessary to stop the violence, absent concrete solutions 
to the underlying contradictions of the petro-state, such dialogue would 
merely ease the political crisis at the expense of resolving the 
economic crisis. The situation that prevails is not the result of too 
much socialism, but too little 
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/unfinished-business>, and any path 
that attempts to split the difference between socialism and capitalism 
will endure the worst of both worlds.

In the context of this acute institutional crisis, Venezuelans go to the 
polls this Sunday to elect a Constituent Assembly empowered to revise 
the nation’s Constitution for the second time since the emergence of 
Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. In the elections, Venezuelans 
will elect not only 364 regional representatives, but also 8 indigenous 
representatives and 173 additional sectoral representatives, including 
workers, farmers, disabled people, students, retirees, and 
representatives of businesses, communes, and communal councils.

This process is far from perfect and faces many obstacles, including an 
unresolved legal debate fostered by an apparent contradiction over who 
can convene a constituent assembly: is it “the people” (Article 347) or 
the president among others (Article 348)? Claiming that Maduro has 
violated the former but refusing to cite the latter, the opposition is 
threatening to boycott Sunday’s election and even physically obstruct 
polling places. After previously courting the idea of calling a 
constituent assembly to undermine Chavismo, opposition leaders now 
recoil at the idea of an assembly that might deepen the Bolivarian 
process rather than rolling it back.

The opposition has suffered the disastrous consequences of electoral 
abstention in the past: after boycotting the 2005 Assembly elections, 
they were left without a voice in the legislature. But 2017 is not 2005, 
and the ebullience of early Chavismo has given way to a deep and 
sustained crisis that has its opponents looking for an endgame to bury 
its gains once and for all. Months of street blockades and looting have 
developed into bombings and infrastructural attacks on public transport, 
hospitals, state television and, recently, state milk production 
facilities. The opposition has threatened to name a new 
government-in-resistance, and promises heightened clashes this weekend, 
including a possible march on the presidential palace much like the one 
that provoked the 2002 coup against Chávez.

In such difficult circumstances, what is a revolutionary to do? The 
Constituent Assembly is not perfect, but we are not in the terrain of 
perfect solutions. Blind support is not useful, but nor is the opposite 
path, what we might call — borrowing a phrase from Lenin — an 
“uncritical criticism” that refuses to get to the heart of things and 
grasp revolutionary change as a dynamic process. Nothing is harder than 
making a revolution, and little is easier than prematurely forecasting 
failure.

In a recent article, Mike Gonzalez pronounced the Bolivarian Revolution 
dead 
<https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/venezuela-maduro-helicopter-attack-psuv-extractivism-oil>: 
“This project has failed.” Needless to say, this cavalier suggestion 
would come as a surprise to those on the ground still fighting for 
revolutionary change, precisely because they have no other option. For 
an article entitled “Being Honest About Venezuela,” Gonzalez begins with 
a strange conspiracy theory: that a helicopter attack against government 
targets was really a false flag operation carried out by the government 
itself. Unfortunately for him, this unsubstantiated innuendo — which 
echoed right-wing talking points — didn’t age well: less than a week 
later, Oscar Pérez 
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-40429867>made an appearance 
at an opposition rally.

Gonzalez’s goal is to reveal Maduro’s “betrayal” of the Revolution, but 
this betrayal takes the form of a catch-22: the government is 
ineffective, but if it attempts to act, it is authoritarian; when it 
defends itself in a far less heavy-handed fashion than most governments 
would, it is repressive; it is fiscally irresponsible, but criticized 
for turning out of desperation to extractive projects like the Arco 
Minero; if it fails to fill the shelves, it is useless, but 
collaborating with private companies to do so is high treason; and when 
an admittedly problematic socialist party (the PSUV 
<https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-Socialist-Party-of-Venezuela>) 
acts in a partisan way — this being, after all, what revolutionary 
parties are meant to do — it becomes an “instrument of political 
repression.”

Amid hyperbolic denunciations of the “systematic undermining of 
democracy, the demonization of dissent,” Gonzalez dismisses the 
Constituent Assembly in a paranoid fashion: “There will be no debate, no 
transparency,” he tells us, with no need to explain. And for a 
revolutionary socialist, the author seems to hold liberal democracy in 
high esteem, misleadingly decrying Chavismo’s “packed institutions” and 
deeming the government “increasingly antidemocratic” without specifying 
by what measure. Gonzalez claims that the government is “prevent[ing] 
the constitutionally protected right to protest” — this would come as a 
surprise to those whose neighborhoods have seen nothing but protest for 
months on end.

With little more than a nod to imperialism, global capital, or the 
brutality of the Venezuelan opposition, Gonzalez heaps blame on Maduro’s 
shoulders. Corruption thus appears as state policy with no mention of 
the private “briefcase companies” that simply took billions in 
government funds before disappearing into thin air. Empty shelves are 
left to speak the truth of a failed political project, with no mention 
of capitalist sabotage of production. And Gonzalez points cryptically to 
the murder of indigenous cacique Sabino Romero, while failing to mention 
that he was killed by wealthy landowners. The “gains of Chavismo” are 
indeed slipping away, but this does not absolve us from the task of 
explaining why.

Ultimately, for Gonzalez, Chavista elites and the bourgeoisie who have 
“happily colluded” with them are one and the same. But this leaves him 
unable to answer the most basic question of all: if they are the same, 
then why are they fighting a bloody battle in the streets? The answer is 
that, however imperfectly, the Maduro government still stands for the 
possibility of something radically different, as the many grassroots 
revolutionaries that continue to support the process can attest.

By portraying a chaotic constellation of facts without explaining their 
causes, by heaping blame onto the government while letting the 
opposition and imperialism off the hook, Gonzalez’s account shares much 
with its professed adversaries. Like the mainstream media, he doesn’t 
tell us who is responsible for the deaths in the streets, and like the 
mainstream media, he offers decontextualized tragedies as proof of the 
government’s failure. But most of all, like the mainstream media, he 
erases the very same revolutionaries that he claims to speak for: left 
almost entirely out of this picture are the hundreds of thousands 
struggling for socialism on the grassroots level 
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/venezuelan-jacobins> and having to 
make difficult decisions — with real consequences — amid the crisis of 
the present.

“We should support those in struggle in rebuilding the basis for a 
genuinely democratic society,” Gonzalez writes. In order to do that, he 
might heed José Miguel Gómez, a revolutionary organizer from the Pío 
Tamayo Commune in Barquisimeto who has long been struggling for communal 
power:

    The government is not the Bolivarian project, which goes far beyond
    the presidency — this is why they haven’t been able to defeat it and
    why it is still in the streets today. We need to continue to resist
    and to build a truly revolutionary option that can transform the
    very structure of the state. The Constituent Assembly is a step
    toward this, but we also need to cleanse the government and the
    institutions, where there is too much corruption and bureaucracy. We
    have to wrest power away from the military. There are too many
    financial mafias — we need to eliminate the currency controls and
    nationalize banking and foreign exchange. The Right will never be an
    option. We must be critical toward the government and build a true
    alternative capable of governing.

Here, Gómez expresses many of the same critiques voiced by Chavismo’s 
critics, but he tethers them to a revolutionary vision of social change 
and an understanding of what would happen if the opposition were to 
seize power.

We should be clear about the stakes of the coming weeks and months: 
victory for the Right means austerity at best, and civil war at worst. 
We know this because we know exactly who they are: the opposition 
leadership is drawn from the most reactionary sectors of the old elites, 
and the masked youth in the streets — as I show in /Building the 
Commune/ — are the fruit of a dangerous alliance with the forces of 
Latin American fascism under the leadership of Colombian death squad 
guru Álvaro Uribe 
<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alvaro-Uribe-Velez>. Their return, 
which promises to reestablish the smooth functioning of capitalism, 
would only do so — as Marx insists that it always has — through the most 
brutally repressive means.

Of course, the opposition’s undemocratic aspirations come draped in the 
language of democracy. A recent opposition “consultation,” carried out 
entirely informally and without official support from the electoral 
council, spoke of defending the 1999 Constitution. Meanwhile, it tacitly 
asked the Armed Forces to take a side in the conflict by “supporting the 
decisions of the National Assembly” (one branch of government), and 
called for “the establishment of a government of national unity” through 
early elections — in clear violation of constitutional norms.

Despite opposition claims about government repression, few can forget 
the bloody retribution exacted by the opposition during the brief 2002 
coup, in which Chavista leaders were hunted and beaten, and sixty were 
killed in less than two days. The fact that several people have been 
lynched, burned to death, and even killed with homemade mortars in 
recent months for looking too much like Chavistas (i.e., too 
dark-skinned and poor) is only a taste of what is to come if the 
opposition destabilization campaign succeeds.

There is no coherent understanding of revolution that doesn’t involve 
defeating our enemies as we build the new society. Corruption, 
bureaucracy, and the complacency of new elites are all plagues to be 
fought and defeated — but merely criticizing these does not make a 
revolution. We cannot defeat such dangers without weapons, the most 
important of which are the weight of the masses in the streets 
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/04/chavez-maduro-venezuela-mud-psuv/>, 
popular grassroots struggles for self-determination, and control of 
territory and production. While the Bolivarian government — from Chávez 
to Maduro — has helped to sharpen those weapons, it has also relied on 
them for its own survival.

Revolutions are made by the masses in motion, gripped by revolutionary 
ideas. No single individual was more effective at helping to set the 
Venezuelan masses into motion than Hugo Chávez. And yet that motion 
collides inevitably with obstacles in its path to be struggled with and 
overcome, from economic realities to the ferocious enemies of change. In 
that process, and even without it, a certain slow exhaustion is 
inevitable. This goes by the name /desgaste/ in Venezuela today — a 
wearing-down of revolutionary fervor, especially when times are tough.

For the Trinidadian revolutionary C.L.R. James 
<https://www.britannica.com/biography/C-L-R-James>, there existed an 
undeniable gap between the Jacobin leadership of the French Revolution 
and the grassroots fury of the sansculottes. The former, like 
Robespierre, were authoritarians; the latter, radical democrats. But 
they coincided momentarily and strategically toward the goal of 
defeating a brutal enemy on the field of battle: “Never until 1917 were 
masses ever to have such powerful influence — for it was no more than 
influence — upon any government.”

No one would claim that the Venezuelan masses are in power today, but 
the past twenty years have seen them come closer than ever before. Their 
enemies and ours are in the streets, burning and looting in the name of 
their own class superiority, and we know exactly what they will do if 
they are successful. The only path forward is to deepen and radicalize 
the Bolivarian process through the expansion of the radically democratic 
socialism embodied in Venezuela’s grassroots communes, which help to 
overcome the economic contradictions of the petro-state while expanding 
participatory political consciousness.

The only way out of the Venezuelan crisis today lies decisively to the 
Left: not in the neither-nor of “que se vayan todos” (“out with them 
all”), but in the construction of a real socialist alternative that will 
emerge alongside the Maduro government if possible, but without it if 
necessary.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20170731/5a28eda9/attachment.htm>