IG on Venezuela:
Opportunism Makes Strange Bedfellows

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 787, 20 September 2002.

One of the positions most passionately defended by the cynical centrists of the Internationalist Group (IG) is their assertion that the CTM unions in Mexico, because they are linked to the bourgeois Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), “are not workers’ unions any more than are the company unions (sindicatos blancos) sponsored by the right-wing PAN (National Action Party); rather, they are apparatuses for bourgeois control of the workers” (Internationalist, Summer 2001). The CTM, proclaims the IG, is an agency for “police control over the workers” (El Internacionalista, March 2000). The IG has fiercely denounced us for stating that the CTM unions, despite being corporatist, i.e., unions that are organically tied to the bosses’ parties and/or their state, are also “forced to mobilize their base every once in a while” (WV No. 748, 15 December 2000).

If, as the IG insists, the corporatist CTM “represents the class enemy” (El Internacionalista/Edicion México, May 2001), what does that make the Venezuelan CTV union federation? The CTV has been tied from its inception to the bourgeois Democratic Action (AD) party, which ruled Venezuela for much of the last six decades. And as its central role in the U.S.-orchestrated coup attempt against the Chávez regime last April showed, the CTV bureaucracy has also acted as a direct agency of Yankee imperialism. But in a lengthy article on the CTV dated November 2000, the IG did not have a word about the Venezuelan unions being “corporatist straitjackets,” “police” agencies or the “class enemy.” Curious indeed. Being on the CIA’s take is apparently only a venial sin in the IG’s opportunist catechism, whereas support for the nationalist PRI is a mortal one.

The IG’s statement, posted on its Web site only in Spanish, came a month before Chávez rammed through a referendum allowing him to “renovate” the CTV leadership through government-supervised elections. Under the headline “Against Chávez, the Stock Market and the IMF—Venezuela: Mobilize Workers Power to Defeat the Anti-Union Referendum!” the IG declared: “Despite their sellout leaderships, the unions are workers organizations, and it is urgent to defend them against the capitalist state that seeks to subdue them in order to destroy any outbreak of proletarian independence.” It was indeed the duty of leftists to oppose Chávez’s reactionary referendum and defend the CTV unions against government attack and intervention—just like we, unlike the IG, defend the CTM against the Mexican state.

The IG asserted that “the government wants to punish the unions” following a victorious strike over wage demands by the powerful CTV oil workers union that October. It criticized the CTV bureaucrats for calling for “international sanctions” against the Chávez regime, counterposing typically bombastic calls to “paralyze the oilfields,” “blockade the Stock Exchange,” etc., etc. The IG painted a picture of Chávez as a stooge of the Caracas stock exchange and the imperialists, attacking the unions with a corrupt labor bureaucracy forced to oppose him. But as the range of bourgeois and imperialist opposition to the referendum demonstrated, the picture was hardly as clear cut.

An article in the New York Times (5 December 2000) after the referendum reported, “Opposition parties and local labor, business, and human rights groups sought to have the referendum declared unconstitutional.” Also opposing the referendum were the anti-Communist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the International Labor Organization—an arm of that imperialist den of thieves, the United Nations—as well as UN “human rights” commissioner Mary Robinson. Nor was that all. The director of the United States Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a government agency, warned: “When a country is out of step with internationally recognized workers’ rights, that could force us to review our investments,” amounting to a whopping $4.3 billion. Such types hadn’t talked about “workers’ rights” so much since the days when the CIA was bankrolling the counterrevolutionary, priest-infested Solidarność “union” in Poland in the 1980s!

Even the IG acknowledged, in passing, that the CTV bureaucracy had a history of “playing a central role in Yankee imperialism’s ‘dirty games’.” In fact, the CTV has long been notorious for its close ties to the AFL-CIO’s “American Institute for Free Labor Development” (AIFLD), a CIA “labor” front now called the “American Center for International Labor Solidarity.” In 1990, the CTV’s “Labor University” trained counterrevolutionary operatives as part of the AIFLD/CIA-backed mobilization that helped bring down the left-nationalist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the U.S. imperialists had it in for Chávez. Only idiots or CIA apologists could gloss over that fact. Yet the IG statement dismissed Chávez as someone who merely “irritates” Washington and intoned that “Chávez defends the capitalist system.” Of course, this bourgeois bonapartist does not oppose the capitalist system or even imperialist subjugation. But he did flaunt a level of independence—compared, e.g., to Mexico’s Vicente Fox—intolerable to the imperialists.

Over a year before the IG’s statement, Business Week (20 September 1999) reported that Chávez’s election had “brought investment—local and foreign —to a screeching halt.” In August 2000, Chávez became the first head of state to meet Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein since the 1991 Gulf War, “in defiance of criticism from the United States, a major importer of Venezuelan oil” (New York Times, 11 August 2000). That October, he signed a deal to provide Castro’s Cuba with one-third of its oil imports, on favorable terms. These facts did not even get a mention in the IG’s six-page statement, nor was there a single word about the pillaging of Venezuela’s oil by U.S. imperialism nor the slightest sense of what it means for such a country to live under the imperialist yoke. And ever since, the IG has maintained a stony silence on events in Venezuela—in the face of a number of shutdowns organized by the oil bosses in cahoots with the CTV tops and even of last April’s “Made in U.S.A.” coup attempt.

When Is a Union Not a Union?

Given its history of lining up behind “anti-imperialist” nationalists from Mexico to Puerto Rico and beyond, one could have expected the IG to cozy up to the nationalist-populist Chávez. Indeed, behind the IG’s criminal refusal to defend the Mexican CTM is its opportunist pursuit of elements around the “left” nationalist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. According to the IG, the only real unions in Mexico are the so-called “independent” unions that are politically close to the PRD. This position has no other purpose than to relieve the IG of having to defend the CTM unions from the bosses’ offensive and to prettify the pro-PRD bureaucracy.

The IG even opposed a “closed shop” provision in Mexico’s labor law, which provides the unions the right to demand that the so-called exclusion clause obligating employers to hire only union members and to discharge non-union members be included in union contracts (see “Mexico: The IG, the Unions and the State,” WV No. 775, 22 February). Nor did the IG write a single word about one of the most important union struggles in Mexico in recent years, the strike by 45,000 CTM-organized sugar workers that was declared “non-existent” (banned) by the government in December 2000. To the IG, the strike was “non-existent” because it contradicted their claim that the corporatist CTM was simply an agency of the bourgeoisie.

The IG argues that the class character of the CTM was transformed through an anti-Communist purge in 1948-49. But by then, the CTM had been part of the PRI and its predecessor, the Party of the Mexican Revolution, for a decade. By the IG’s standard, the class character of the AFL-CIO should have changed with the Cold War purges of the late 1940s. And in the case of the CTV, the bourgeois AD achieved hegemony over the Venezuelan trade-union movement by denouncing Communist-led unions to the military regime during World War II and then setting up rival unions in their place. When a military coup brought the AD to power in 1945, it set up a corporatist system in which strikes were settled through systematic government arbitration while trade-union leaders were integrated into state bodies. When the CTV was founded in 1947, every member of its Executive Committee was in AD, including one who doubled as vice president of the Constituent Assembly.

CTV bureaucrats ruled their bailiwick through blatant vote-rigging, purging of leftists and beatings of oppositionists by gangs of thugs—or by direct intervention of state security forces. By the 1990s, CTV leaders were sworn in by the head of state, top CTV officials had a direct interministerial phone in their offices, and the federation’s finances were part of the public budget and were audited by the government accounting office. The flow of oil money allowed the bourgeoisie in Venezuela to afford a few more democratic trappings than in Mexico, including the managed alternation of power between AD and its bourgeois rival, COPEI. So COPEI also got its cut of positions in the CTV bureaucracy.

This is hardly the first time that the IG has taken a very different attitude toward corporatist unions in countries other than Mexico. After mass protests erupted in Argentina, the IG began describing the Peronist unions there as bona fide workers organizations, even while acknowledging in a January 2002 article that “all the main leaders are part of the [bourgeois] ‘Justicialist’ movement founded by General Perón.” Likewise in Algeria, the IG treats the UGTA as a real trade-union federation despite its links to the military regime (see “Algeria Rocked by Mass Protests,” WV No. 761, 6 July 2001).

One could scarcely imagine a more graphic illustration of Trotsky’s observation that centrist opportunism, defined by accommodating to differing pressures on various national terrains, is inherently nationalist. According to the IG, the Mexican CTM is not a legitimate labor organization, while the Peronist unions in Argentina were corporatist but are no longer and the CTV never was. Like gods on high, the little caudillos of the IG decree which unions are real on the basis of their opportunist whims of the moment. In Mexico, the targets of their affections are elements around the PRD. In Argentina, they adapt to the mass protests against a burgeoning economic catastrophe. And one can only wonder who or what they’re chasing after in Venezuela.

While the corporatist CTM is corrupt and gangster-ridden, we Trotskyists do not recognize a class difference between the CTM-affiliated unions and other unions, whether the “independents” in Mexico or the CTV unions in Venezuela. With the PRI no longer in power, the CTM does not even have a state patron anymore. In any case, as Leon Trotsky noted in “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (1940), a common feature in the development of all modern trade-union organizations under reformist or nationalist leadership “is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power.” Marxists fight for the class independence of the proletariat in all countries. In Mexico or Venezuela, that means breaking the unions from the capitalist parties and their imperialist patrons. In the U.S., we fight to break workers from the Democratic Party and demand that the AFL-CIO cut its ties with the CIA’s “labor” fronts.

It takes some nerve for the IG to call to “defend the independence of the unions” in Venezuela. These are the words of the group that in 1996-97 dragged the municipal workers union in the Brazilian town of Volta Redonda through the bourgeois courts, in a bureaucratic struggle to hold on to the leadership of this cop-infested union, in which the IG’s supporters ran an ex-cop for union president. The IG’s Brazilian comrades turned over the union’s bank statements, account books, statutes and minutes of union meetings to the courts as “evidence” (see “IG’s Brazil Cover-Up: Dirty Hands, Cynical Lies,” WV No. 671, 11 July 1997).

Pabloites of the Second Mobilization

What is perhaps most curious about the IG’s line on Venezuela is its apparent spurning of Chávez’s greatest fan, Fidel Castro. For the IGlistas have themselves long had a soft spot for the Cuban Stalinist leader, even before Jan Norden & Co. defected from our organization to found the IG in 1996.

Norden’s Stalinoid bent toward Castro’s Cuba was expressed, perhaps most grotesquely, in his initial attempts as editor of Workers Vanguard to alibi the Stalinist show trial and execution of General Ochoa on charges of international drug dealing in 1990. Ochoa had fought with Castro against the Batista dictatorship and led the Cuban troops in Angola against the forces backed by the U.S. and South Africa. Norden was finally persuaded that the Ochoa trial was a classic Stalinist purge. But in the article “Stalinist Show Trial in Cuba—The Execution of General Ochoa” (WV No. 500, 20 April 1990), Norden insisted on “disproving” Washington’s claims that the Havana regime was involved in the drug trade by upholding Castro’s integrity: “For Castro to lie about this would be to invite an invasion.” Of course, the White House’s drug charges against Castro were part and parcel of U.S. imperialism’s relentless drive to crush the Cuban Revolution. But to assert, as Norden did, that Castro couldn’t lie about this was a statement of blind faith in the Cuban Stalinist bureaucracy. This was fought out, resulting in a clarification box in WV No. 501 (4 May 1990) that noted, “It is not that Castro cannot tell a lie, or that Stalinist regimes never run drugs.”

We have characterized the IG’s politics as “Pabloism of the second mobilization,” referring to the liquidationist current which destroyed the Fourth International in the early 1950s. Faced with the onset of the imperialist Cold War and the creation of Stalinist-ruled deformed workers states in East Europe, the Pabloites denied the need to construct Trotskyist parties and argued that the Stalinists and social democrats could be pressured to outline a “roughly” revolutionary course. The IG’s opportunism, in turn, reflects despair over the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 and imperialist gloating about the “death of communism,” leading to an increasingly desperate search for, and accommodation to, social forces other than the proletariat and vehicles other than a Leninist vanguard party to advance the cause of the struggle for human emancipation.

To see where the IG’s impressionism and opportunist appetites could lead them, recall that Michel Pablo ended up as an adviser to Ben Bella’s FLN government, which came to power following the Algerian war of independence, while Pablo’s man in Argentina, Nahuel Moreno, liquidated into the Peronist movement. On the other hand, they had something to sell out. Except for a few clots here and there, the IG’s existence is largely limited to the etherworld of cyberspace.

In our first article on the Nordenites’ split, titled “A Shamefaced Defection from Trotskyism” (WV No. 648, 5 July 1996), we observed: “As to where they are going, the possibilities are wide open so long as the minimum norm of being anti-Marxist is met.” In its political appreciation of a gang of CIA-linked labor bureaucrats in Venezuela, Norden & Co. have shown that those possibilities are very wide open indeed.