[News] Authoritarianism in Venezuela?
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Mon May 22 12:35:56 EDT 2017
https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13136
Authoritarianism in Venezuela? A Reply to Gabriel Hetland
By Lucas Koerner – May 19th 2017
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Venezuela is once again dominating international headlines as violent
opposition protests bent on toppling the elected Maduro government enter
their seventh week. The demonstrations have claimed to date at least 54
lives <https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13081> since April 4,
surpassing the previous wave of violent anti-government protests in
2014, known as “the Exit”. However, this time around, the unrest
coincides with a severe economic downturn and a transformed geopolitical
landscape defined by the return of the right in Brazil and Argentina as
well as an even more bellicose regime in Washington.
Meanwhile, the international outcry at this latest violent effort to
oust the Chavista government has been far more muffled than the last time.
With the notable exception of an open letter
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13121> by LASA members, a
UNAC/BAP joint statement <https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13127>,
and other smaller protest actions, the US left has been largely
passive vis-a-vis both the Trump administration’s escalating
intervention against Venezuela as well as the systematic media blackout
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13070>, preferring silence to
active solidarity with Chavismo.
In this environment, some leftist academics have publicly broken with
the Maduro administration over its response to the country’s current
political and economic crisis.
In a recent piece
<https://nacla.org/news/2017/05/03/why-venezuela-spiraling-out-control> for
NACLA*, University of Albany Assistant Professor Gabriel Hetland parts
ways with the Bolivarian government, citing concerns over Maduro’s
“authoritarian” slide.
“Yet, while previous claims of Venezuela’s authoritarianism have had
little merit, this is no longer the case,” he writes.
While we deeply respect Professor Hetland’s critical contributions to
the debate on Venezuela, we at Venezuelanalysis
<http://venezuelanalysis.com/>** – a collective of journalists and
activists who at one point or another have lived, studied, and/or worked
in Venezuela – firmly reject this charge of authoritarianism on both
analytical and political grounds.
*Setting the record straight*
Hetland cites a number of recent actions of the Venezuelan government to
bolster his claim, including the Venezuelan Supreme Court’s (TSJ)
alleged “dissolving” of the opposition-held National Assembly (AN), the
“cancel[ation]” of the recall referendum, the postponing of “municipal
and regional elections that should have occurred in 2016”, and the TSJ’s
blocking of the AN’s legislative activity in 2016.
There are of course a number of serious problems with this account.
To begin, several elements of this narrative are misleadingly presented,
if not all-together factually inaccurate.
First of all, as Venezuelanalysis reported
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13018> at the time, the TSJ’s
March 29 decisions did not “dissolve” the Venezuelan National Assembly
as was almost uniformly reported in the mainstream press. Rather, the
rulings sought to temporarily authorize
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13013> the judiciary to take on
pertinent legislative functions, which in this particular case meant
approving a pressing joint venture agreement between Venezuelan state
oil company PDVSA and its Russian counterpart, Rosneft, which was
critical for the former’s solvency. The ruling – which was based on
article 336.7 of the Venezuelan constitution – provoked a rift
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13014> within Chavismo, with the
current and former attorney generals lining up on opposite sides of the
constitutional divide. One can certainly criticize the since-reversed
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13019> decision on constitutional and
political grounds, but to present it as a “dissolution” of the
parliament is just disingenuous.
This brings us to the question of the Supreme Court’s blocking of the
opposition-majority legislature in 2016. It is undeniable that the TSJ
did in fact strike down three of the four laws the AN managed to approve
last year. However, it takes two to tango and Hetland severely
understates the opposition’s own role in this protracted institutional
standoff. It’s important to note that the AN did not “act beyond its
authority” only “in some cases”, as Hetland describes.
From quite literally the moment that the new AN was sworn-in in January
2016, the body explicitly declared war on the Bolivarian institutional
order crafted by Chavismo, with AN head Henry Ramos Allup promising to
oust Maduro “within six months
<http://www.telesurtv.net/news/Ramos-Allup-asegura-que-sacara-a-Maduro-en-seis-meses-20160105-0039.html>”
– a blatantly unconstitutional threat against a sitting president. A
sampling of the legislation pursued by the National Assembly in 2016
includes a law to privatize Venezuela’s public housing program
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11965>, a law to return expropriated
lands and enterprises to their former owners
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11870>, a law forcing the executive
to accept humanitarian aid
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12038> into the country, the infamous
Amnesty Law <https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11887>, as well as a
constitutional amendment
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11948> retroactively shortening the
presidential term by two years. We can add to this list the opposition’s
attempted parliamentary coup <https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12737>,
in which it declared that Maduro had “abandoned his post” first in
October <https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/12744> and again this
past January <https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12912> – which Hetland
likewise neglects to acknowledge. Nor does he mention the reason for the
legislature’s current “null” status, namely the opposition’s refusal to
unseat three of its lawmakers from Amazonas state currently under
investigation for alleged vote-buying in flagrant violation of the high
court. Again, one may still criticize the TSJ’s blockage of the AN, but
to understate the parliament’s systematic efforts to overthrow the
Bolivarian government by any means necessary is quite misleading.
Hetland similarly omits the opposition’s own role
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/12875> in the suspension of the
recall referendum (RR) process. As we noted, the opposition-held
parliament came into office with the objective of overthrowing Maduro
“within six months” – a goal evidently incompatible with the RR, which
takes a minimum of eight months. Indeed, the RR was just one of the
strategies in the opposition’s four-pronged plan
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11880> to oust Maduro unveiled in
March 2016, which also included the aforementioned constitutional
amendment, a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution (which the
opposition now opposes <https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13111>), and
heating up the streets to force Maduro’s resignation. As a result of the
opposition’s own internecine divisions, it delayed
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11999> in beginning the RR and
made serious procedural errors, such as collecting 53,658 fraudulent
signatures, which gave the government a pretext to indefinitely stall
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12736> the process in the courts.
There is no doubt that the Maduro administration dragged its feet on the
RR process knowing full well it would likely lose, but this was hardly
the one-sided drama presented by Hetland.
Lastly, the National Electoral Council (CNE) did in fact postpone
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12727> the regional elections
scheduled for last year, citing logistical conflicts with the RR
process, a move which is indefensible on constitutional and political
grounds. However, it’s worth noting that there is a precedent for such a
delay: the local elections
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/1278> slated for December 2004 were
similarly postponed until August 2005 on account of the recall
referendum against then President Chávez the year before. Hetland passes
over this important detail in his rush to indict Venezuela’s democratic
credentials.
Moreover, while it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize the Bolivarian
government for delaying the governors’ races, municipal elections are a
different story. Local elections are scheduled for 2017, meaning that
they can be held any time before the close of the year. In suggesting
that the government has postponed local elections, Hetland commits yet
another factual error that serves to inflate his largely ideological
case for the Maduro administration’s “creeping authoritarianism”, as we
shall see below.
*Fetishizing liberal democracy*
Beyond these factual errors and misrepresentations, the main problem
with Hetland’s piece is his implicit notion of “authoritarianism”, which
he at no point takes the time to actually define.
Without going extensively into the genealogy of this term, it’s key to
remember that authoritarianism is hardly a politically neutral concept.
As Hetland correctly observes, the charge of authoritarianism was
dubiously leveled against the Chávez administration and other “pink
tide” governments who were excoriated by Western commentators and
political scientists for daring to challenge the hegemony of
(neo)liberal capitalist representative democracy.
Indeed throughout the last decade, political scientists led by former
Mexican foreign minister Jorge Casteñeda
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6361?page=2&favtitle=The%2520Rightward%2520Drift%2520of%2520a%2520Latin%2520American%2520Social%2520Democrat> have
distinguished between a “good” reformist, liberal left epitomized by
Brazil’s Lula Da Silva that is willing to play ball with the Washington
and transnational capital and a “bad” radical, populist left embodied by
Hugo Chávez, which has opened up the liberal representative floodgates
to direct mass participation in democratic governance.
As Sara Motta underlines
<https://www.academia.edu/31559252/Latin_America_as_political_sciences_other>,
this binary is deeply colonial in nature: the “mature” and Westernized
“good-left” has learned from the alleged failures of revolutionary
Marxism and embraced incremental reform, while the “bad-left” remains
mired in the clientelism and tribal authoritarianism of the “pre-modern”
past, rendering it hostile to liberal democracy.
This “good-left”/“bad-left” dichotomy is of course nothing new,
amounting to a minor aesthetic rehashing of the
“revolutionary”/“democratic” distinction applied to the Latin American
left in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, which in turn is founded on
the classic “civilization” versus “barbarism” divide.
Hetland, in lieu of questioning the liberal ideological criterion behind
this colonial binary, preserves the distinction, announcing that the
Maduro government has passed over into the dark realm of authoritarianism:
By cancelling the recall referendum, suspending elections, and
inhibiting opposition politicians from standing for office, the
Venezuelan government is systematically blocking the ability of the
Venezuelan people to express themselves through electoral means. It is
hard to see what to call this other than creeping authoritarianism.
In other words, “authoritarianism” for Hetland seems to amount to the
quashing of proceduralist liberal democratic norms, including most
notably separation of powers, threatening the political rights of the
country’s right-wing opposition.
What we get from this formalist approach is a sort of Freedom
House-style checklist <https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/12924> in
which the pluses and minuses of global South regimes (freedom of speech,
press, etc.) are statically weighed and definitive moral judgement
concerning “democratic quality” are handed down. Venezuela is still not
yet a “full-scale authoritarian regime,” Hetland tells us, “given the
opposition’s significant access to traditional and social media and
substantial ability to engage in anti-government protest.” In this
point, Hetland’s conclusion is virtually indistinguishable from that of
mainstream Latin American studies, which has long invented convoluted
monikers such as “participatory competitive authoritarianism
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23326927.pdf>” to characterize the
Bolivarian government.
The trouble with this perspective is that it ends up reifying these
so-called authoritarian practices, casting them as the cause – together
with the opposition’s regime change efforts – of Venezuela’s current
crisis rather than a symptom of the underlying correlation of forces.
The Maduro administration’s alleged steamrolling of certain liberal
democratic norms – particularly the postponement of regional elections –
is undoubtedly quite concerning, precisely because it evidences the
catastrophic impasse in the Bolivarian revolutionary process.
We at Venezuelanalysis have long been critical of the Bolivarian
government’s top-down institutional power plays to contain the
opposition’s efforts to oust Maduro, which we view as a conservative
attempt to maintain the status quo in lieu of actually mobilizing the
masses of people from below to break the current deadlock and resolve
the crisis on revolutionary terms.
In this vein, we have critiqued those tendencies within the Venezuelan
state which we see as consolidating the power of corrupt reformist
“Boli-bourgeois” class fractions in the bureaucracy
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/12861> and armed forces,
including direct military control
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12080> over imports, the de-facto
liberalization of prices, reduced social spending coupled with draconian
debt servicing <https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/12120>, the
Orinoco Mining Arc <https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12122>, a dubious
but since-modified <https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13086> party
registration process <https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12929>, and a
conservative turn <https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11489> in
anti-crime policy.
Yet Hetland is strangely silent regarding these reformist retreats and
regressions over the past four years, which for all intents and purposes
are far more serious than many of the above “authoritarian” abuses he
describes.
It is precisely here that the charge of “authoritarianism” betrays its
liberal ideological bias: by prioritizing the procedural violations
affecting the bourgeois right-wing opposition, Hetland renders invisible
the underlying dynamics of class warfare brutally impacting the popular
classes.
Therefore, contra Hetland, the problem is not that liberal democratic
norms have been undercut per se, but rather that the revolutionary
construction of alternative institutions of radical grassroots democracy
– the “communal state” in Chávez’s terms – has come up against decisive
structural roadblocks <http://www.alainet.org/es/articulo/184922>.
Here we must be unequivocal: liberal democracy is not absolute nor
universal, and its relation to revolutionary processes is always
mediated by context. To impose these norms on the Cuban Revolution, for
instance, in its context of genocidal imperial siege is the height of
absurdity and political irresponsibility. Given these circumstances,
Cuba’s model of revolutionary democracy – despite all its faults and
limitations – is no less legitimate than other democratic socialist
projects that have made strategic use of elements of liberal democracy,
such as Chile and Nicaragua in the 70s and 80s or Venezuela and Bolivia
today.
The Bolivarian process is, however, fundamentally different, as it is
premised on an electoral road to socialism in which the existing
bourgeois democratic order is approached as a strategic space of
counter-hegemonic struggle. In this context, the suspension of certain
liberal rights such as elections or specific opposition freedoms would
only be acceptable under exceptional circumstances in which the
Bolivarian government were actually taking revolutionary measures to
resolve the current crisis and commanded unquestioned legitimacy among
its social bases.
Despite the undeniable spiral of political and economic violence driven
by the opposition, Venezuela is unfortunately not going through an
equivalent of a “special period” insofar as the leadership of the party
and state has thus far failed to go on the offensive against endemic
corruption and take the fight to the local and transnational capitalist
enemy as was the case during crucial revolutionary turning points in
Russia, China, and Cuba.
Given this reality, the message coming from some sectors of Chavismo
that there can be no elections under conditions of warfare –
a legitimate argument in other contexts including Nazi-besieged Britain
– is questionable at best. Nonetheless, this counterfactual is useful
insofar as it demonstrates that liberal democracy is a wholly inadequate
yardstick for evaluating revolutionary processes, confounding far more
than it clarifies, as in the case of Hetland’s critique of
“authoritarianism” in Venezuela.
*Throw them all out?*
In this diagnosis of causes of the current crisis, our position
coincides with that of the vast majority of Venezuelan left-wing
movements whose chief grievance is hardly the litany of “authoritarian”
practices against the right-wing opposition enumerated by Hetland, but,
on the contrary, the reformist and at times outright
counter-revolutionary policies being pursued by the Maduro government.
The same is true for Venezuela’s popular classes – the social base of
Chavismo – who don’t particularly care that the Supreme Court has
blocked the National Assembly and the president has been ruling by
emergency economic decree since February 2016. According to independent
pollster Hinterlaces, around 70 percent
<http://www.eluniversal.com/noticias/politica/hinterlaces-poblacion-evalua-negativamente-gestion_646518> of
Venezuelans negatively evaluate the opposition-controlled parliament,
while 61 percent
<http://hinterlaces.com/61-no-confia-en-que-la-oposicion-resolveria-actuales-problemas-economicos/> have
little faith that a future opposition government will address the
country’s deep economic problems. Rather, the majority of Venezuelans
want the Maduro administration to remain in power and resolve the
current economic crisis
<http://hinterlaces.com/61-no-confia-en-que-la-oposicion-resolveria-actuales-problemas-economicos/>.
Their discontent flows not from Maduro’s use of emergency powers
– contrary to the international media narrative – but rather from his
failure to use them to take decisive actions to deepen the revolution in
lieu of granting further concessions to capital.
Despite the setbacks, retreats, and betrayals that have characterized
the past four years since the death of Chávez, the mood among the
Venezuelan masses is not a uniform rejection of Venezuela’s entire
political establishment as Hetland suggests in a sweeping generalization:
If any slogan captures the current mood
<http://venezuelablog.tumblr.com/post/160047747376/protests-and-lootings-in-venezuelas-popular> of
the popular classes living in Venezuela’s barrios and villages it is
likely this: Que se vayan todos. Throw them all out.
While Chavismo has undoubtedly bled significant support over the past
five years and the ranks of independents, or ni-nis, has swollen to over
40 percent of the population
<http://hinterlaces.com/monitor-pais-44-no-simpatiza-con-ningun-partido-politico/>,
the PSUV remarkably remains the country’s most popular party, actually
increasing <https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12866> its support from 27
to 35 percent since January. Similarly, Maduro still has the approval of
approximately 24 percent <https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13053> of
Venezuelans, making him more popular than the presidents of Brazil,
Mexico, and Chile – a fact consistently suppressed by international
corporate media. These poll numbers are nothing short of incredible in
view of the severity of the current economic crisis ravaging the
country, speaking to the partial efficacy of some of the government’s
measures such as the CLAPs
<http://hinterlaces.com/53-se-ha-beneficiado-con-los-clap-en-2017/> as
well as the opposition’s utter failure to present any alternative program.
Likewise, despite growing disillusionment with the government and hints
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13033> at a possible rupture, the
fact is that the overwhelming majority of Venezuela’s social movements
and left-wing political parties continue to back Maduro.
What’s more is that this left unity in support of the Bolivarian
government has only hardened in the face of the ongoing opposition
onslaught and in anticipation of the National Constituent Assembly to be
held in the coming months.
However baffling on the surface, this staunch defense of the Maduro
administration actually makes perfect sense for at least two reasons.
First, as any Chavista who has lived through the last six weeks of
right-wing terror can attest to, the choice between the continuity of
Chavismo in power and an opposition regime is not a matter of mere
ideological preference – it’s a question of survival, as there is no
predicting the extent of the political and structural violence the
opposition would unleash if they manage to take Miraflores. This is in
no way to deny or downplay the fallout of the current economic crisis,
for which the government bears a great deal of responsibility, but there
is no doubt that an opposition government would take this economic war
on the poor to new levels of neoliberal savagery.
Second, the existence of the Bolivarian government embodies the
lingering possibility of transforming the inherited bourgeois
petro-state as part of the transition to 21st Century socialism. While
there is cause for skepticism about the real possibilities of pushing
forward the democratization and decolonization of the Venezuelan state
in this conjuncture, there has been an outpouring
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13123> of grassroots support for the
National Constituent Assembly which could serve as a vehicle to retake
the revolutionary offensive and institutionalize radical demands from
below <https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13125>.
This broad-based consensus of critical support for the government on the
part of Venezuela’s left stands sharply at odds with Hetland’s “plague
on both your houses approach”, which, in Steve Ellner’s terms
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13126>, ends up “placing
opposition and Chavista leaders in the same sack” as equally undesirable
alternatives.
While there is indeed tremendous anger and frustration with the
government – which may in fact translate to a crushing electoral defeat
for Chavismo in the next elections – the prevailing sentiment among much
of Venezuela’s popular classes in the face of the opposition’s present
reign of terror remains “no volverán” (they shall not return).
*The role of solidarity*
All of this brings us to the position of international solidarity
activists with respect to Venezuela.
We wholeheartedly agree with Hetland that it is the duty of each and
every self-respecting leftist and progressive to “reject any and all
calls for imperialist interventions aimed at ‘saving’ Venezuela”.
Nevertheless, while anti-interventionism is urgently necessary, this
begs the question, with whom are we supposed to be in solidarity?
Hetland calls on us to stand with “the majority of Venezuelans who are
suffering at the hands of a vengeful, reckless opposition, and an
incompetent, unaccountable government.”
The end result of such a “plague on both your houses” approach is a
refusal to take a side in this struggle – in a word, neutrality. This
posture flows naturally from Hetland’s liberal framework of
authoritarianism, which necessarily posits the Western intellectual as a
disembodied arbiter – occupying the Cartesian standpoint of the “eye of
God” in Enrique Dussel’s terms – uniquely capable of objectively
weighing the democratic virtues and deficits of Third World regimes.
In contrast, we at Venezuelanalysis stand unconditionally with
Venezuela’s Bolivarian-socialist movement, which at this conjuncture
continues to critically support the Maduro administration.
We take this stance not out of a willful blindness to the Bolivarian
government’s many faults and betrayals, but because we (and particularly
our writers on the ground) know that for a great many Chavistas the
choice between radicalizing the revolution and right-wing restoration
is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
* /A version of this article was submitted to NACLA, but no initial
response was received. The editor elected to go ahead and publish at
venezuelanalysis.com
<https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/venezuelanalysis.com> in the
interest of a timely response. UPDATE: NACLA did ultimately respond to
our submission on the afternoon of May 19, but by that time, the article
was already published. /
/** Written by Lucas Koerner on behalf of Venezuelanalysis’ writing and
multimedia staff as well as VA founder Greg Wilpert./
--
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