Chavez (right) with fellow Latin American left wing presidents Fernando Lugo, Evo Morales, Lula da Silva and Rafael Correa
The election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 was celebrated by socialists around the world.
Military dictatorship in Venezuela ended in 1958. The country was then run by a series of neoliberal presidents who privatised key industries.
In contrast, Chavez promised human rights, social justice and an end to political corruption.
His election reflected the movements against neoliberalism, most importantly the 1989 Caracazo Uprising.
Students and workers protested for days and built barricades in the streets in opposition to state austerity measures including a rise in the price of fuel.
Chavez was a military officer who had been imprisoned for leading an unsuccessful coup attempt a few years after the Caracazo uprising.
In the years after the election Chavez radicalised and grew in popularity. In 2005, he announced to a crowd of 25,000 at the World Social Forum in Brazil that Venezuela was building “socialism in the 21st century”.
It was meant to be different to the Stalinist model developing countries had adopted in the 20th century. It would mean sovereignty over the nation’s resources and some real power for
ordinary people.
Chavez spoke about a radical alternative to neoliberalism and the imperialism of the United States. He drew on a wide range of influences, from revolutionaries Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg to 19th century independence fighter Simon Bolivar.
Socialism in the 21st century was also meant to unify states across Latin America and the Caribbean so they could share resources.
In 2005, Indigenous farmer and trade union organiser Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia. The following year, socialist Rafael Correa was elected in Ecuador. By the end of the decade, there were also progressive governments of various types in Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay and Brazil.
Chavez had built links with Fidel Castro’s Cuba. In 2004, the Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Alba) was established by Cuba and Venezuela. It also included Bolivia and Ecuador, and several Caribbean and Central American countries including Nicaragua, St Lucia and Grenada.
In 2006, Chavez established the PSUV—the United Socialist Party of Venezuela—after winning 63 percent of the vote in that year’s presidential election. Some six million people joined the party in a matter of weeks.
Chavez and the PSUV drove out US oil giants Exxon Mobil and Conoco Phillips in 2007. But US firm Chevron and several European based oil companies struck a deal with the Venezuelan leadership that allowed them to continue their operations.
The state used the proceeds of its huge oil wealth—Venezuela has the world’s largest known reserves—to fund social programmes for the poor.
For example, the Mission Barrio Adentro programme provided free healthcare to millions of people who had been denied regular access to healthcare.
These reforms turned Venezuela into the most equal country in Latin America by 2011.
By 2012 the “Pink Tide” of elected left wing governments was under extreme pressure. The global economic crisis led to a catastrophic decline in the commodity prices that states like Venezuela relied on. Over the next few years, inflation skyrocketed.
Venezuelans queued for food or turned to the black market to buy basic goods. Millions left the country. The Barrio Adentro project collapsed. The Cuban medical workers who had provided its staff returned home complaining of widespread fraud.
Proposals to diversify the economy and make it less reliant on oil, such as the Barinas sugar refinery, failed or never materialised.
Nicolas Maduro, who came to power after Chavez’s death in 2013, turned to authoritarian measures, including a crackdown on people resisting fossil fuel and mineral extraction. While ordinary people suffered, military and government employees and the wealthy with access to foreign currency were protected from the worst effects of the crisis.
The right went on the offensive, launching violent protests and attempting to overthrow the government by force.
Maduro betrayed the hopes of what Chavismo promised at its height. But the problem isn’t down to individuals—nor can it solely be blamed on falling oil prices.
Socialism in the 21st century was contradictory from the start. The Mexican-Italian Marxist Massimo Modonesi says that the Pink Tide of left wing governments was capable of bringing substantial reforms. But change was carried out by the state apparatus on behalf of the working class.
Sections of the popular movements that had risen up against neoliberalism were demobilised or co-opted into the state’s projects.
Although the state nationalised some industries and there were some experiments in workers’ control, this was very far from a full assault on capitalism.
Private firms that Chavez, and later Maduro, thought they could negotiate with remained in place.
The private sector’s share of economic activity actually increased from 65 percent to 71 percent between 1999 and 2011. Author Mike Gonzalez points out that Chavez promised that people would have control over the affairs of the state.
But in reality, the PSUV was “an instrument of control from above”, serving to funnel state-led policies towards the base of the movement.
The party was used as an instrument to maintain the power of the state. For example, it ran a food distribution system that handed out food parcels based on political allegiance.
According to Chavez’s exminister of finance, Jorge Giordani, some $500 billion of profits made during the oil boom “disappeared” or ended up in foreign bank accounts. This was corruption that began during the Chavez years.
As Gonzalez argues, Venezuela’s widespread corruption is related to the lack of grassroots democracy. The movements were not able to hold the leaders of the state to account.
Could things have been different? The widespread popular support for Chavez was demonstrated in April 2002. The president was kidnapped in a right wing coup attempt by the bosses’ organisation alongside some army generals and even a corrupt union leader.
But the attempt to overthrow him lasted less than 48 hours. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets, forcing the plotters to abandon their coup.
Working class people rioted, surrounding the presidential palace and taking over the country’s main TV station. There was a sense that ordinary people could become the subjects of their own history.
Chris Harman wrote in Socialist Worker, “The forces that had plotted to overthrow Hugo Chavez were terrified by the sight of the poor protesting on the streets. They brought Chavez back in the hope they could persuade him to bring the poor under control again.”
Chavez demobilised his supporters, calling on them to return to their homes and for the whole country to re-unite.
When organised workers take to the stage of history, they demonstrate the power they have to run society and bring their own traditions of democratic organisation. But the movement didn’t stay on the streets or develop into strikes and occupations against the bosses.
Later in 2002, the business federation and the CTV union federation called a bosses’ strike. They shut down the oil industry in an attempt to force a new presidential election.
This was even more significant than the events of April. Oil workers mobilised to take over the oil company PDVSA and defeat the shutdown. Workers also took over factories that the bosses had declared bankrupt like the Invepal paper factory, which was nationalised.
In some areas of industry, like the Alcasa aluminium enterprise, there were elements of workers’ control or “co-management” where the directors were elected by an assembly.
In 2006, Socialist Worker spoke to workers at the Alcasa plant. Santiago Martinez said that when management dream up new ways to improve productivity they are usually rejected by the workers, “We work here every day and know the process better than them.
“Since the worker-management committees have existed, let’s say about 80 percent of decisions regarding the process are effectively made by the workers.” But Osvaldo Leon, a long-standing socialist and trade unionist, described the limitations of the co-management model. “Workers’ control can’t be
implemented by decree,” he said. “It has to be built and it advances as a process.”
There were many sharp debates among workers at the time. Some argued for a deepening of the revolutionary process where the “big private means of production” are taken over by workers.
Others, such as Chavez advisor Heinz Dieterich, called for a more cautious approach based on 30 years of co-existence between state-run and private industry before society could transition to socialism.
The success of Chavismo depended on Chavez’s promise to transfer power to the people. In 2012, not long before his death, Chavez called for a transition to a “communal state”.
People would manage aspects of their lives including food production, housing, banking and justice collectively as part of communes based on geographical area.
The communes would be made up of smaller neighbourhood communal councils, which were established in 2006 and existed with the backing of billions of dollars of state funds.
The communes could have mobilised in opposition to the right. And potentially raised workers’ ambitions that they could start to run more of society themselves.
But this isn’t people deciding for themselves how they want to organise. It is a model of organisation developed by those at the top of the state and handed down to them.
Writer Andy Brown says that the communes and independent workers’ organisations offered genuine participation.
“However, these participatory bodies increasingly became integrated into the Bolivarian state machine, compromised, corrupted and shorn of any real ability to influence change,” he explains.
Venezuela’s “Bolivarian process” could have turned out differently.
But it would have meant developing workers’ control and popular organisation that could have become alternative organs of political rule in opposition to the state.
And if mass strikes and workers’ occupations had spread to the biggest economies in the region—those of Mexico, Brazil and Argentina—the fate of Venezuela could have been very different.
However, that would have required a strategy based on deepening workers’ power, an assault on the state and capitalist class and spreading revolution from below.
Today, Trump’s attack is a brazen display of imperial power that socialists should oppose unequivocally regardless of our critique of Chavismo and Maduro.
Venezuelan socialist organisation Marea Socialista says, “These external military actions, like all the US aggressions that preceded them, violate national sovereignty and endanger the Venezuelan people, regardless of whether they are directed against a highly questioned government like that of Nicolas Maduro.”
Hope in Venezuela lies with a return to popular organisation at the base—politically independent of the Bolivarian state machine. That’s where the power lies to resist US imperialism and fight for a genuine socialism from below.
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