The third part of a seven part article by Marco Teruggi on Chavismo, the ongoing socialist revolutionary project in Venezuela.
Marco Teruggi
‘Made in socialism.’ That phrase resonated a lot in Venezuela a few years ago. It was on chocolates, yoghurts, oils, posters, embedded in a heart logo and the inevitable red five-pointed star. Every ministry claimed to be representative of people’s power, and each bakery or route was labelled as socialist. Chavez questioned this obsession on national TV: calling things ‘socialist’ does not make them socialist. If there was something he longed to build, it was a transition to 21st century socialism. Chavismo must be socialist.
It was not like that from the beginning, at least publicly, perhaps because he had not yet reached that conclusion. Or because, in the political arena, the idea was to reach that conclusion collectively: the people must be collectively willing to move in that direction; the historic subject, the epicenter of politics, people, must develop the desire for socialism. Which is why Chavez only mentioned socialism for the first time in 2005.
Until that moment, in his initial writings—for example, the Blue Book—there were strong ideas about combining and mobilising. He talked of the recovery of the betrayed independence project: Bolivarian popular nationalism. The Bolivarian movement was the assertion of a national project with a Latin American dimension: the ethical refounding of a devastated country, plundered for decades by a corrupt political / business class. The movement had as its symbols the tricolour flag, the red beret, and military discipline, and combined plebian, national and social liberation. It represented the recovery of a country in organic crisis, a recovery brought about by the people involved in a massive mass movement beginning from the Caracazo in 1989 ultimately leading to the emergence of Chavez like a thunderbolt in 1992.
Socialist Roots
The central aspect—and here we can trace the socialist roots before their public announcement—of the Bolivarian project was to implement it through centrally driven programmes like creating spaces for the exercise of participatory democracy, creating popular organisations and creating conditions for their multiplication, and launching several movements which were essentially independent of and parallel to the state, like the various missions, whose aim was to build the human being who could carry forward the Bolivarian project. All these programmes had at their centre the working people, the lower classes, and the centrepiece of the Bolivarian project was the construction of a people’s power, which took different forms over the years. The state needed to first assert its control over the economy, and then transfer this control to the organised people, who simultaneously needed to gradually learn how to exercise that power. A complex architecture, virtuous, possible, necessary. The socialist programmes thus appeared before the announcement of their socialist character.
The Bolivarian project is not about challenging neoliberalism so as to build a more stabilised and a more egalitarian capitalism, but about challenging the capitalist order itself. “This revolution has assumed the banner of socialism, and that requires and demands much more than any other revolution. We could have stayed within the frame of a national revolution, but behind those often undefined terms are hidden statements that end up being reformist, rightwing, that end up eventually toeing the line,” explained Chavez.
The official launch of the socialist project in 2005 coincides with the formation of communal councils, followed by communes. Chavez draws the communal road to socialism, which means rebuilding a new state on the basis of the political, cultural and economic power of the communes. He left it in writing: the bourgeois state had to be pulverised, and for that he outlined a plan and also the steps to be taken within that. It meant democratisation of the inherited state, building a different kind of state, on participatory and self-managed roots, a plan which has its basis in the analysis of Istvan Meszaros. A socialism from below, an endogenous socialism.
State Socialism
This socialist proposal of Chavez was in contradiction with another, which can be summarised in a few points: the centralised state should be at the centre of the whole project, it should be the protector and main player or actor; the various forms of popular organisation should be subordinated to the state and should be limited to only certain areas; the state should enter into agreements with businessmen, both old and the new emerging businessmen, and should strive to create a new national bourgeoisie. This latter project, known as state socialism, is essentially a more egalitarian capitalism, is capitalism with relatively more distributed wealth, is socialism in name but having its foundations in capitalism.
This debate can be understood through concrete policies implemented by Chavez on a national scale in Venezuela. As Meszaros says, “The measure of socialist achievements is: to what degree the measures adopted contribute actively to the constitution and consolidation of a deeply rooted and substantial democracy, of social control and general self-management.” The way to build state socialism, where the objective is more efficient management of the state, will be different from the way to build socialism as Chavez understood it, where the aim is to advance towards consolidating power in the hands of organised communities as the basic founding bloc of a new state. The aim of the revolution is not having a more progressive minister or mayor, but organising of the popular classes to collectively control power.
Chavez strived to develop social forms of ownership over the means of production in order to lay the foundations for building of communal and feminist 21st century socialism. He spent years politically and economically experimenting to build such social forms of ownership, and by the time he died, enough had been done to create the possibility for the revolution to advance further in that direction.
The advance of Chavismo in Venezuela has not been smooth, it has had its ups and downs. In particular, since 2014, the economy has been on the ropes. There have been conflicts within Chavismo about how to deal with this crisis. The revolution found itself at crossroads, with two possible paths: one, to take a conservative stance, retreat from advancing down the road of more communal power, a road whose goal appears to be historically very distant, which would also mean giving up on some of the advanves already made; and the second, to further advance down this road and deepen the changes already initiated as well as expanding the program of democratisation of people’s power into more areas. Which path should Chavismo take? Going along with the path to greater community control, or strengtheing the agreement with the business community?
It is a river that has stirred up the past in the present. The various actors wanting take Chavismo in different directions have differing desires and interests, depending upon their class interests. There are many who are tired of the deepening economic crisis. They wonder, how much more we need to endure to advance towards socialism. And so, they have come to disbelieve the historical project. There are also many others, who strongly believe that either Chavismo will be socialist, or it will cease to exist.
