Venezuela: U.S. Imperialism’s Referendum Ploy Fails

Populist Capitalist Ruler Chávez Prevails

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 831, 3 September 2004.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez scored a 58 to 42 percent victory over his opponents in the August 15 recall referendum. The recall referendum was the third attempt by the CIA and Venezuela’s right-wing bourgeois parties to oust Chávez. In April 2002, they briefly succeeded with a military coup and demonstrated their commitment to “democracy” by dissolving the legislature. This was followed in the winter of 2002-2003 by lockouts and strikes organized by the bosses aimed at crippling the economy. The National Endowment for Democracy, a money-laundering conduit for the CIA, funneled millions of dollars to fund anti-Chávez marches, sabotage land reform projects, disrupt services, and line the pockets of the military officers, police and politicians the CIA favors over the populist Chávez.

Despite the red-scare tactics of the kooks and neocons in the Bush administration, more rational spokesmen for imperialism’s interests washed their hands of the three-time losers in Venezuela’s opposition and accepted Chávez as a man who could be trusted to protect their investments. Chávez has been able to beat back repeated efforts by the Bush administration and its local agents to topple him by maintaining a strong base of support among the Venezuelan population and sections of the armed forces. As opposed to the Venezuelan ruling class, which is overwhelmingly white, racist and hostile to the poor non-white population, Chávez proudly promotes his indigenous and African ancestry. And given the long history of U.S. imperialist incursions into Latin America, propping up murderous right-wing regimes, typically military juntas, Chávez’s anti-imperialist posture resonates with much of the population.

Moreover, to a certain degree Chávez has translated his nationalist-populist rhetoric into actual reforms beneficial to the poor in a country where some 80 percent of the population lives in abject poverty. This ability, however, is largely dependent on the fact that the Venezuelan economy has enjoyed historically high oil prices in the world market over the past couple of years. The oil revenue windfall has allowed the government, for example, to triple the budget for education (according to official figures), increasing school attendance by 25 percent by 2002. Free medical clinics have been established, staffed by more than 17,000 Cuban doctors and dentists, in exchange for cheap Venezuelan oil exported to Cuba. Faced with the latest effort to oust him via the referendum, Chávez introduced further social reforms, such as free food distribution to the poor as well as nationalizing and distributing unused agricultural land. He also commendably naturalized some 1.2 million desperately poor immigrants, many of them refugees from Colombia, which deepened his political base in the run-up to the referendum.

However, these programs, in themselves quite progressive, are not based on any kind of social revolution or even basic structural reforms. They are entirely dependent on the vicissitudes of the world market prices for oil. As the research department of the Wall Street investment bank of J.P. Morgan commented, “The strength of oil prices is allowing the [Chávez] government to maintain an expansionary fiscal policy that would be unsustainable otherwise” (London Financial Times, 13 August).

At the same time, the Chávez regime has perpetuated the reactionary influence of the Catholic church on social questions like gay rights and abortion. When Chávez’s 1999 Constitution was initially proposed, it originally contained language against discrimination of homosexuals. But under pressure from the church, such language was removed. Meanwhile, abortion remains illegal in Venezuela.

Chávez’s defeat of the recall referendum was welcomed as a guarantor of “stability” by such mouthpieces of imperialism as the London Financial Times and the New York Times. In the lead-up to the referendum, oil giants ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco signed agreements to invest billions in Venezuela. In turn, Chávez’s victory was enthusiastically cheered by a broad spectrum of ostensible socialists around the world. What accounts for this seemingly contradictory base of support? Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many leftists have imbibed the “death of communism” ideology, concluding that the only hope is to fight for reforms and thus prettify forces that are only seeking to rescue capitalist rule and enhance the exploitation of the working people. In Venezuela, these leftists help mask Chávez’s leadership of the capitalist state as a “revolution” by the working people and poor.

Workers World Party organized pro-Chávez protests outside Venezuelan consulates in the U.S. where Venezuelans cast absentee ballots in the referendum. The front page of Workers World (August 19) screamed, “Venezuelans Mobilize to Defend Revolution.” But Hugo Chávez and his “Bolivarian revolution” (named for nineteenth-century bourgeois nationalist Simón Bolívar) rule Venezuela on behalf of local capitalism and foreign imperialist investors. As such, Hugo Chávez is a class enemy of the workers and the oppressed.

Although the International Communist League does not have a section in Venezuela at this time, our aim is to stake out a position to clear the theoretical obstacles in the path of present and future struggles. We state that the working class had no way to express its own interests in the Venezuelan recall election: a “yes” vote would be a de facto bloc with the CIA and its local lieutenants; a “no” vote would amount to political support to the capitalist Chávez regime. As there was no means to express the crucial need for the political independence of the working class from the bourgeois state in this referendum, abstention was the only choice for revolutionaries.

Had there been a rightist military coup against the Chávez regime, as there was in 2002, we would have sought to mobilize the working class in military defense of Chávez while politically opposing his regime. The classic historical precedent for Marxists is Spain 1936 when a right-wing military coup, led by General Francisco Franco, attempted to overthrow the Popular Front government, a coalition of the Socialist and Communist parties with a handful of bourgeois liberals. The heroic and spontaneous mobilization of the Spanish working class beat back the coup attempt, leading to a prolonged civil war. As Trotsky declared at the time, to be victorious the workers had to break with the Popular Front government, a form of bourgeois rule: “It is only necessary to seriously and courageously advance the program of the socialist revolution” (“The Lesson of Spain” [July 1936]). While the Chávez regime in Venezuela is a bourgeois-populist, not a popular-front, government, a U.S.-backed military coup aimed at toppling it would necessarily pose the defense of the organizations of the working class and plebeian masses.

The immediate perspective that is urgently posed is not only to oppose U.S. imperialist incursions into Venezuela and elsewhere, but to fight to shatter the support of the workers movement to either Chávez or the opposition, and to forge a revolutionary internationalist workers party to lead the working class to power. This requires an intransigent fight against nationalism in Venezuela, which obscures class divisions in the country. Only the victorious struggle for working-class rule, i.e., socialist revolution throughout the Americas, will ensure land to the landless and enable the oil workers and other proletarians to enjoy the wealth created by their labor.

Chávez: A Bonapartist Strongman

Chávez and U.S. imperialism have a symbiotic relationship. Venezuela supplies 14 percent of U.S. oil imports and is the principal source of oil for refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Chávez has kept the oil pumps flowing to the U.S. throughout the Iraq war (despite his verbal opposition to the U.S. war) and pays the foreign debt to the imperialist bankers. Venezuela depends on the U.S. market for two-thirds of its oil exports which generate 75 percent of the country’s export earnings and half the government’s revenues. In turn, bogged down with an Iraq occupation going badly, certain circles among America’s imperialist rulers see a stable source of oil from Venezuela as more important than removing Chávez.

With hunger riots in Argentina still fresh in mind and a deep economic crisis throughout Latin America, Venezuela’s oil windfall and the entanglement of U.S. imperialism in Iraq allow Chávez to posture as an “anti-imperialist” strongman in America’s backyard. Along with recent popular upheavals in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, Chávez’s defeat of the recall referendum is another indication of a political-ideological shift in the climate away from “neoliberalism” to nationalist populism in the region. As we wrote at the time of the Argentine economic crisis which ignited mass protests and strikes in “Behind the Global Capitalist Recession” (Part Two, WV No. 768, 9 November 2001):

“However, such a shift in the political climate and balance of forces is not in itself anti-capitalist. In a sense, it would strengthen the forces of capitalism in Latin America by recementing the ties of the working class to its own national bourgeoisie, which is well practiced in demagogic denunciations of Wall Street and Washington.”

Nationalist populism and economic neoliberalism are merely alternative policies of the same capitalist rule, often pursued by one and the same individual, as dictated by the exigencies of the moment. Thus former workers’ leader Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva of Brazil abruptly dropped his populist rhetoric to embrace a $30 billion IMF bailout package and has enforced austerity on the masses as part of the deal, while sending Brazilian troops to police devastated Haiti. Leftists who yesterday were gaga for “Lula” now drop his coattails to climb on the Chávez bandwagon. In so doing, they help prepare future defeats for the workers and peasants of Venezuela.

Like Peronism in Argentina or the rule and institutions established by Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico in the 1930s, Chávez, a former colonel who led a failed military coup in 1992, is what Marxists call a bonapartist ruler. The term refers to a regime usually headed by a strongman, typically a (former) military leader (like the original Napoleon Bonaparte), which in a period of crisis or stalemate between the irreconcilably opposing class forces of labor and capital elevates itself to a position of “leader of the nation,” seemingly above competing class interests. In Argentina and Mexico, such bonapartist rule was combined with corporatism, whereby political, social and even trade-union organizations are directly tied to the state.

In fact, the current bourgeois opposition in Venezuela includes Democratic Action (AD), which began as a bourgeois-populist party and dominated Venezuelan bourgeois politics for decades. Moving to stave off labor unrest, the AD government in 1945-46 was able to extract substantial concessions from the oil companies to the benefit of oil workers. This resulted not only in the creation of a labor aristocracy among the oil proletariat, but also gave AD control of the vast majority of oil unions in the country.

Revolutionary Marxist leader Leon Trotsky analyzed why bonapartist rule frequently occurs in countries that have “skipped stages,” i.e., where there was no bourgeois revolution and socio-economic modernization before the rise of imperialism as a stage of capitalist development. Although these societies, like any other capitalist society, are divided into three classes—the bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the vacillating petty bourgeoisie— the national bourgeoisie is weak and, in fear of the proletariat, serves as dependent agents for foreign imperialism. In a transcript of a 1938 discussion with Trotsky, then in exile in Mexico, titled “Latin American Problems: A Transcript,” Trotsky said:

“We see in Mexico and the other Latin American countries that they skipped over most stages of the development. It began in Mexico directly by incorporating the trade unions in the state. In Mexico we have a double domination. That is, foreign capital and the national bourgeoisie, or, as Diego Rivera formulated it, a ‘sub-bourgeoisie’—a stratum which is controlled by foreign capital and at the same time opposed to the workers; in Mexico a semi-Bonapartist regime between foreign capital and national capital, foreign capital and the workers.

“Every government can create in a case like this a position of oscillation, of inclination [tilting or leaning] one time to the national bourgeoisie or workers and another time to foreign capital. In order to have the workers in their hands, they incorporated the trade unions in the state.”

In Venezuela, the Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV—Venezuelan Workers Confederation) is subordinated to the bourgeoisie’s Fedecámaras (Chamber of Commerce) through the political domination of AD over the CTV. Following a three-day strike in 2000 by oil workers affiliated to the CTV, Chávez introduced a union-busting national referendum on whether existing unions should undergo a “re-legitimation” process. The CTV called for a boycott and only about 25 percent of the country’s electorate participated. A necessary step in the evolution of any bourgeois populist regime must be to attempt to bring the unions to heel. Chávez has sought to do this by either co-opting workers organizations or crushing them through repression, or some combination of the two. When a majority of CTV candidates won in the “re-legitimation” elections, Chávez then threw his support to a new, rival union federation, the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT—National Workers Union). Many union leaders within the UNT see defense of the Chávez government as the central axis of their formation. The future of the UNT will be no different than the CTV so long as the UNT remains subordinated to the bourgeoisie through its alliance with Chávez.

To advance the struggles of the workers in Venezuela and for the labor movement to champion the rights of all the oppressed, the rural toilers, the unemployed, women and the youth, it is essential to fight for the complete and unconditional independence of all the trade unions from the capitalist state and bourgeois parties. This means a fight to turn the trade unions into organs of class struggle and not machines in the service of bourgeois-nationalist rulers and imperialism’s satraps.

“Death of Communism” Leftists Tail Chávez

Close ties between Castro’s Cuba and Venezuela are a thorn in the side of America’s rulers. But both Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez are opposed to the fight for social revolution in Venezuela or elsewhere. In the late 1970s-early 1980s, when a civil war raged in El Salvador and the left-wing Sandinistas toppled the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, Castro advised against following the “Cuban road”—i.e., he advised against the expropriation of the capitalist class and the overthrow of capitalist rule. Castro thus contributed to the subsequent defeat of the Salvadoran insurgency by the U.S.-backed military regime and the eventual toppling of the Sandinistas as a result of U.S. economic warfare and support to the contra terrorists.

This has only emboldened the American imperialists to tighten the noose around Cuba with the imperialist blockade. We Trotskyists fight for unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. Our perspective is to forge a Trotskyist party to lead a political revolution against Stalinist misrule in Cuba and to implant the revolutionary internationalist perspective of Bolshevism and the fight for revolution throughout the Americas.

It must be precisely because Chávez has no intention of carrying out a social revolution that the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) called for “unconditional military defense of the Chávez regime” (“U.S. Hands Off Venezuela!” Proletarian Revolution, Spring 2004). Vehemently opposed to the Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense to any and every workers state, where capitalist rule was overthrown, the LRP invokes the slogan...to defend the capitalist Chávez regime without condition—i.e., giving Chávez a blank check.

The LRP has historically refused to defend the workers states on the false premise that they are “state capitalist.” Well, Trotsky wrote that bonapartist regimes like Cárdenas’ in Mexico “create a state capitalism which has nothing to do with socialism. It is the purest form of state capitalism” (“Latin American Problems: A Transcript”). Now, irony of ironies, the LRP reserves the call of “unconditional military defense” for the “Cárdenas-lite” bonapartist regime of Chávez!

A more credible argument is presented by the Mexican Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS—Workers League for Socialism), which originated from the tendency of the late Nahuel Moreno, an Argentine pseudo-Trotskyist who was an ardent supporter of bourgeois-populist general Juan Perón, who ruled Argentina in the 1940s and ’50s. In an article on the recall referendum (13 August), the LTS states: “The Chávez leadership can only bring defeat and frustration to the Venezuelan masses. Unfortunately, most of the left capitulates to him, bestowing political support more or less shamefacedly, which only serves to impede the proletarian vanguard from regrouping around independent working-class politics.” These fine words serve to camouflage the operational conclusion drawn by the LTS: “Vote NO critically, a NO to the opposition and to imperialism, which in no way means a ‘YES’ to Chávez.” Thus when the ballots were counted, all the LTS rhetoric notwithstanding, their position and their vote were to maintain Chávez in office, helping to recement the ties between Venezuela’s working people and the Chávez regime. The LTS is a very good example of centrism: revolutionary in words, opportunist in deeds.

Hugo Chávez does not even pretend to be a Marxist. That ruse is for the ostensible socialists who support him. None are more fawning than the International Marxist Tendency (IMT). British IMT leader Alan Woods has been wined and dined by Chávez. Chávez quotes from Woods’ book, Reason in Revolt, on his weekly television broadcast, Aló Presidente. IMT members in Venezuela threw themselves into promoting Chávez, guided by Woods’ oddly messianic adulation of the strongman: “He alone has dared to confront the power of the oligarchy and defy the might of American imperialism.” This is reminiscent of what pseudo-Trotskyist groups in Argentina have argued, that it was correct to have supported Perón, otherwise you would be supporting “the oligarchy.”

The IMT is taken to task for “over egging the pudding” in their adulation of Chávez by the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI). A lengthy CWI polemic, “Revolutionary socialists and the Venezuelan revolution,” (21 June) waxes orthodox against the IMT’s capitulation to bourgeois-nationalist forces. Nonetheless, the CWI then goes on to advise Chávez on how he should have responded to the referendum, to the point of criticizing Chávez for not organizing workers militias and committees rather than agree to the referendum. The CWI writes:

“Chávez agreed to proceed with the referendum arguing that he will win it and it will strengthen the legitimacy of his regime. This was an incorrect policy in our opinion.... Rather than accept this result it would have been far better to strengthen the community organisations and build workers’ elected councils, to link these up locally, on a citywide basis, regionally and nationally and go onto the offensive. Together with rank and file committees of the soldiers these bodies should establish an armed workers’ militia and take the necessary step to take the revolution forward and overthrow capitalism.”

In the same article cited above, the CWI writes, “It remains to be seen if Chávez actually proceeds to undertake the arming of the working class and the general population,” thus pushing the deadly illusion that Chávez and the capitalist state would ever arm the working class. Such deadly illusions have been pushed in the past by leftists with disastrous results, for example, in Chile in 1970, when the Socialist leader Salvador Allende was elected president as head of a Popular Front coalition. As a condition for taking office, Allende pledged to the Chilean bourgeoisie and its American imperialist protectors that he would appoint no military or police officers who had not been trained in the established academies and, moreover, would prohibit the formation of workers or other popular militias. We warned at the time: “Any ‘critical support’ to the Allende coalition is class treason, paving the way for a bloody defeat for the Chilean working people when domestic reaction, abetted by international imperialism, is ready” (“Chilean Popular Front,” Spartacist No. 19, November-December 1970). And three years later that is exactly what happened.

Notwithstanding the CWI’s criticisms of the IMT, the premise of the CWI is not that Chávez is a bourgeois politician and therefore the class enemy of the working class and oppressed, but that he has simply not gone far enough in his “revolution.” Rejecting the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party, both the CWI and IMT (which until 1991 were one organization) are characterized by liquidation into and promotion of social-democratic and bourgeois-nationalist forces.

Hugo Chávez is a lot more frank about his aims than the craven leftists who capitulate to him. In an interview with Tariq Ali (CounterPunch, 16 August) Chávez explained:

“I don’t believe in the dogmatic postulates of Marxist revolution. I don’t accept that we are living in a period of proletarian revolutions. All that must be revised. Reality is telling us that every day. Are we aiming in Venezuela today for the abolition of private property or a classless society? I don’t think so.... Try and make your revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it’s only a millimetre, in the right direction, instead of dreaming about utopias.”

The basic premise of all the left groups —from Workers World Party to the IMT and CWI—that to one degree or another support the Chávez regime or prettify it is that the anti-imperialist rhetoric and reforms are a step toward socialism, a sort of modern variant of the Menshevik/ Stalinist schema of “two-stage revolution” (the first stage being a bourgeois-democratic revolution and the second stage, in the never-to-be future, being a socialist revolution). But both Marxist principle and all historical evidence have demonstrated that the tying of the working class and its organizations to any bourgeois ruler only serves to impede independent working-class struggle, and sets up the proletariat and its allies for slaughter by the bourgeoisie. In the case of Venezuela and Chávez, this would be posed when either Chávez turns on the workers and poor (for example, if oil revenues substantially drop) or when the Chávez regime is overthrown by more rightist forces. In opposition to such left groups, Marxists seek to prepare the Venezuelan working class to effectively combat the murderous forces of bourgeois reaction, whether carried out by Chávez or his bourgeois opponents.

By historical standards, Hugo Chávez is not a particularly radical left bourgeois nationalist either in terms of his ideological posture or actual reforms. During the Cold War era, many left bourgeois nationalists, like Egypt’s Nasser or Algeria’s FLN, claimed to be carrying out some kind of “socialist” program or transformation. Even Mexico’s Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the oil industry and made significant land distributions to the peasantry in the 1930s. The subordination of the working class to Cárdenas resulted in more than 60 years of corporatism and the shackling of the proletariat to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the bourgeois ruling party until 2000. And if one looks at the living conditions of working people and the oppressed in countries like Mexico today, you can plainly see the limitations of even the most radical bourgeois nationalists. In the wake of the destruction of the Soviet Union, ostensibly Marxist organizations that have always tailed left bourgeois nationalists are today reduced to promoting nationalist politicians who openly repudiate any socialist pretensions.

Authentic communists struggle to forge Leninist-Trotskyist parties throughout Latin America, and this means a determined struggle against bourgeois nationalism which serves as the “glue” binding workers to their “own” rulers. Chávez’s “Bolivarian revolution” is an appeal to anti-U.S. Latin American nationalism. But as one of the founding documents of Trotsky’s Fourth International, “Thesis on the World Role of American Imperialism” (1938) underlined: “Only a union of the Latin American peoples striving towards the goal of a United Socialist America and allied in struggle with the revolutionary proletariat of the United States would represent a force strong enough to contend successfully with North American imperialism.”

It is only the working class that has the social power to end the rule of the foreign imperialists and their local lackeys. Key to the survival of a workers revolution in Venezuela is its international extension to the rest of Latin America, particularly into Mexico and Brazil, and into the imperialist United States itself. This is the perspective of permanent revolution for which we of the Spartacist League/U.S. and our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, sections of the International Communist League, fight.