Bob Dylan once said, “Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.” February 23rd, 2019, was the day that Juan Guaidó, the self-proclaimed President of Venezuela, had “authorised” “humanitarian aid” to enter Venezuela, an attempt to force the Maduro government, and thus the Venezuelan people, to their knees. With this began an ever-increasing escalation of violence, including several attacks on Venezuela’s electrical grid over the last few weeks, being perpetuated by those who want to destroy Venezuela. But let me be clear: the Venezuelan poor are resilient, and any change will be on their terms. Most importantly, Venezuelan politics is collective, and there is deep solidarity between communities along with an abiding interest in building a different form of politics. Without understanding this collective politics, one cannot really understand what is happening in Venezuela.
While in Venezuela doing field work in July 2018, I noted in my conversations with many Venezuelans the consistent insistence that Venezuela must be respected.
A primary feature of Venezuelan life is that politics is not only discussed but is everywhere, and as such, many Venezuelans could teach graduate courses in political science. This is well exemplified in a recent news item on the Real News Network in which a woman on the street, clutching a well-worn copy of the constitution, says to the interviewer, “If Juan Guaidó needs a constant reminder”, she “will be happy with her fellow citizens to read him the constitution every day”. An abiding factor of everyday life in Venezuela is the importance of the country’s constitution. A realisation of this helps us understand something essential: the gravity of politics for Venezuelans. This can be seen in the ease with which poor Venezuelans viscerally, expressly and collectively are directly involved with politics. It was not always thus.
Pacted Political System
Early in the twentieth century, oil was found in Venezuela. Soon Venezuela’s elites became rich beyond imagination. As economic polarisation widened, the rural and urban people began to organise, strikes and other political upheavals spread across the country. In 1958, the two dominant political parties in the country, the Democratic Action and Social Christian Party, entered into pact to alternatively share power, and thus together monopolise power. They were later supported by the Catholic Church. For the next four decades, they ran the country for the exclusive benefit of the Venezuelan oligarchy, to the exclusion of the people.
After a decade of pacted democracy, in the 1970s, the Venezuelan state—by now flush with oil money—started a few social welfare programs. While it provide relief to some sections of Venezuelans, poverty persisted. Then in the early 1980s, the State began implementing neoliberal economic policies, and as a part of that, began cutting back on the limited welfare programs, thus shutting off the small flow of oil money to the poor. Consequently, poverty in Venezuela grew to 62 per cent, and extreme poverty to 30 per cent.
In the 1989 presidential elections, the Venezuelans voted Carlos Andres Perez to power. He had come to power promising to implement a populist anti-neoliberal programme. However, just weeks after his inauguration, Venezuelans learned that Perez intended to take a loan from the IMF, integrate the state even closer with global capital, and impose yet more austerity programmes. In response, on February 27, 1989, a series of bus and food riots broke out, that lasted almost a week. This revolt throughout Venezuela by the poor against the state and society is known as the Caracazo (means the explosion of Caracas). Perez called in the military to quell the revolt. It brutally suppressed the protests, killing more than 2000 people in the process. Even though the State succeeded in suppressing the Caracazo, after that, the elites found it difficult to govern Venezuela as before.
The poor, the starving, the informal sector workers, the underemployed and the unemployed, the farmers, the indigenous people, the differently abled, LGBTQ, the students and youth, the seniors, the women – including both those who were housewives and those who were working outside their homes and simultaneously looking after the housework, the marginalised, all continued to come down from the slums to the city centres and continued their protests, which took place on an almost daily basis. Over the next decade, the number of protests grew to almost 1000 a year, from the pre-1989 average of 200 a year, signifying that there were almost three protests every day during this period. With the State intensifying its repression, in 1992, a colonel in the Venezuelan army, Hugo Chávez Frías, organised a coup to end the repression. His effort failed, following which he openly took responsibility for it.
Cementing the Revolution
Chavez came from a poor, Afro-Indigenous background. He was aware that the marginalised had to the major force in any major project geared towards their emancipation from poverty.
After serving some time in jail, Chávez ran for president in the 1998 elections. He won the elections by a landslide, winning 56% of the vote. With his win, the revolution, that had begun with the Caracazo, entered a new stage. Chavez took steps to restructure the State, and launched several social programs to support the most marginalised sections of the people. Despite enormous resistance from the Venezuelan elites, Chavez managed to advance the revolution. In this, he found great support from the people, who found in him a friend, a teacher, a comrade. After his death, the poor have continued their fight, voicing the slogan, ‘the soul of Chavez is alive in all of us’.
President Maduro is now in his second term as President. He has continued the policies of Chavez. In contrast to most countries around the world where the implementation of neoliberal policies has led to a drastic fall in living standards of the people, in Venezuela, in the 20 years since Chavez first came to power, the poor have seen great increase in access to good quality healthcare, education and housing for all, leading to enormous advances in general well-being for all Venezuelans, especially the poor. The struggle to implement these policies has led to a huge increase in the political consciousness of the people, and the people in Venezuela now are imbued with the sense that the State must provide for its citizens. The people are also aware, despite the intense misinformation campaign being waged by the Venezuelan elites backed by international capital, that the current economic and political crises in the country are not the result of Venezuelan state policies. The people are fully aware of the fact that while monetary inflation to some extent is the indirect result of state policies, the crisis is a direct result of hoarding and speculation being indulged in by the Venezuelan capitalists as well as the sanctions and blockades imposed on Venezuela by countries such as Canada and the USA.
The economic and political crises engineered by global capital has not affected the Venezuelan government’s social programs, which have continued to expand, including free or low-income housing, universal healthcare, public and universal education (including the distribution of free tablets or computers to all children), subsidised gas, and the provision of basic food stuffs to all who need it. When I was there in July 2018, because the cost to print urban public transport tickets in Caracas was more expensive than the value of the ticket, public tranport was free. It is another matter that the opposition continues to accuse Maduro of “buying votes” via these programs.
The poor have been the biggest beneficiaries of the Venezuelan government’s policies. Even though in today’s age of neoliberal austerity, the social welfare policies being implemented in Venezuela are in themselves revolutionary, what is more important and what constitutes Venezuela’s real strength is the fact of community control of this revolution, for it is the people who control the implementation of these policies. As a part of the philosophy of Chavismo, many communities have organised themselves into organisations such as community councils, missions, and various other forms of assemblies. The government of course has promoted and aided the formation of these bodies, including framing rules such as that a community council needs to be constituted of at least two hundred families (less in rural and indigenous areas), and that a certain minimum number of members, that is, the quorum, must be present for the meeting to take place, etc. It also provides funds to these community organisations, depending upon the various social services they provide, as well to help community production. While the government provides this support, these organisations are run by the communities themselves, and they have done so for the past two decades. Presently, tens of thousands of such community organisations exist throughout all of Venezuela.
There has also been an exponential growth in communes throughout Venezuela. The communes are a further development of the communal councils; in areas where several community councils have come to exist, they have taken the initiative to come together to form (constituting of thousands of members in the cities, less in the rural areas). In the cities, the communes have come to constitute of as many as 20,000 members in each. These institutional structures, and the initiative and cooperation of the people in forming them, reveal the depth of the change that has taken place in Venezuela during the last two decades.
This is the essence of Chavismo, the revolutionary practice of the masses as they build up their struggle against all forms of domination and build build alternate organisational structures to consolidate their democratic control over economy and society. The changes taking place in Venezuela are very far-reaching, such changes have rarely taken place earlier in human history. For instane, another notable feature of Chavismo is that it is consciously socialist-feminist. It seeks to restore the dignity of all the communities that had been marginalised in the past, including the women and the indigenous people, and bring about a unity of the people based on genuine egalitarianism.
Of course, Venezuela remains a capitalist, colonial, racist and male chauvinist country. It continues to be a embedded in the global capitalist–imperialist world. The Venezuelan state is a state with all its associate dangers. But at the same time, it must also be noted that the Venezuelan state is not supporting counter-revolution. Even though it is a residual capitalist state, against which the masses constantly battle for their gains, it is not a state that wages war against the masses. Although new elites have emerged, and create problems for the revolution, neither they nor the old elites have control over the state. The poor are the fulcrum in any society in which they exist; in Venezuela, they have become the fulcrum of politics too, it is their gravitonic pull that explains politics in Venezuela, where they have begun the long and slow process of ending this blot upon humanity.
Elites Try for a Comeback
Having lost their control over power in Venezuela, following Chávez’s death in 2013 and a subsequent fall of oil prices, the old elites saw an opportunity to reassert themselves. They attempted to create a storm of discontent by launching a fierce economic war against their fellow citizens. But their efforts to have miserably failed, the masses have refused to abandon Chavismo.
World leaders as “diverse” as Trudeau, Harper, Martin, and Chrétien, to Bush, Obama, and Trump, and several other leaders of the European Union and Latin America also hate the revolution in Venezuela and have sided with its elites in their efforts to sabotage and overthrow the ongoing revolution there. The imperialists desire to end the Bolivarian revolution for many reasons, including wanting to suppress the participation and control exercised by the Venezuelan people over themselves. The fact that Venezuela is rich in natural resources such as petroleum, natural gas, gold, bauxite, iron ore and diamonds and they now no longer have control over it adds to their frustration with the revolution. These “leaders” have contributed to the economic war by imposing ever increasing sanctions (especially since early 2015) and blocking imports of medicines, food and other essential goods—a war that has had quite a violent outcome against a sovereign people.
One consequence is the high inflation in Venezuela. This is entirely because of the economic war waged against the people by global capital; they are using their still considerable control over production and distribution in Venezuela and the imperialist blockades to “make the economy scream”. But the Venezuelans have come with up several creative solutions to fight the artificial shortages. One example is the growth over the last decade of urban agriculture.
The people continue to be loyal to the loyal to the revolution. This is evidenced in the outcomes of the last several elections. In both 2014 and in 2016–2017, the opposition held increasingly violent protests. It also succeeded in winning the December 2015 elections to the National Assembly (AN, total 167 seats), winning 109 seats and receiving almost 8 million votes in contrast to the Chavista parties who received almost 6 million votes and won only 55 seats.
After winning control of the National Assembly, the opposition intensified its violent protests. In response, the government called for elections to a new constituent assembly, invoking provisions of the constitution. Despite the opposition’s call for a boycott, more than 8 million people voted in the elections held on July 30 2017, clearly implying that a majority of the people did not agree with the tactics of the opposition. The new constituent assembly (National Constituent Assembly, ANC) has 545 seats, of which nearly two-thirds were elected by municipal citizens and the remaining one-third were elected by members of various social sectors such as trade unions, indigenous people, communal councils and farmers. With the overwhelming majority of the people refusing to side with the opposition, the latter was in complete disarray, and social peace returned to the country for the next two years, though the brutality of the economic war continued. It is only in 2019 that the opposition has returned to its violent ways. The persistent violence of the opposition to the revolution is clear, and the rejection of such violence by the majority of Venezuelan society is also obvious.
Since the 2017 elections of the ANC, the Chavistas have made three more electoral gains. They have won the majority of governorships (October 2017) and city councillorships (December 2018), in the process seizing control of many opposition strongholds. Maduro also won the May 2018 presidential elections with a landslide. Despite the opposition’s call for a boycott, more than six million people voted for him, which was a huge four million more than his closest rival, and indicating that a majority of the people did not agree with the opposition’s call.
New elections to the National Asssembly are scheduled for the next year. The NA is a remnant of the old state, and is a reminder of the contradictions gripping Venezuelan society. The poor are waging a war on both capitalism and the capitalist state in an attempt to replace it by a communal state, and they know that it is only through the current Maduro / Chavista government that they can achieve their victory. And so they support Maduro as President, while reserving their right to protest and demand a change in policies when they do not agree.
Clearly, ever since Chavez won his first election in 1998, the Venezuelan elites have become increasingly isolated. In 2019, they launched a fresh initiative to bring down the Maduro government and thus overthrow the Bolivarian revolution. However, their gambit of declaring a new ‘President’ in Guaido and his Trojan horse ploy of “humanitarian aid” backed by the USA and Canada has not culminated in the desired end. The opposition had been hoping that it would lead to intense violence on the streets, forcing Maduro to resign his Presidency, but nothing of the sort happened, Guaido’s coup completely failed. This failure is due to the refusal of the masses to support the opposition, and without their support, the opposition cannot hope to bring about any change in Venezuela. Tensions of course remain high, with Guaido and other opposition leaders calling upon the US and other imperialist powers to invade Venezuela and instal them in power, but this only reveals the illegitimacy of the opposition.
The government, having consistently renounced violence, has always declared its willingness to enter into direct talks with the opposition, if it too renounces violence. However, the elites are reluctant to enter into talks, for they know that without violence they are unlikely to prevail. The elites know that for the majority of Venezuelans, the opposition is worthless and the elites themselves are superfluous.
Concluding Thoughts
So, what can we Canadians do? Despite an inhumane blockade enacted over the past four years, the Venezuelan poor continue to receive greater benefits from their government than, for example, the benefits Canadians have ever received from their government. Therefore, if democracy means what exists in Venezuela, where the poor are the government, then what exists in the rest of the world is obviously not democracy. Thus, to support Venezuela is to fight for a better world, a world where the poor are the government. Let us fight against the neoliberal restructuring of Canada, let us resist the manufactured “common-sense” of austerity and all the other accompanying horrors of early twenty-first century capitalist imperialist states—that is how we can support Venezuela.
As stated at the beginning of this article, in Venezuela, it is oft repeated that “Venezuela must be respected”. This underlies the reason why Venezuelans refuse to surrender and continue to resist the aggressions by the opposition and other countries. Venezuelans have taken to heart the lessons of 1973 Chile, and both the military and the Venezuelan people will defend themselves to the last human being if attacked. To conclude, whilst it faces many challenges, Venezuela remains the place where human possibilities have been flourishing. There is much that we can learn from them. Venezuelan resistance to neoliberalism is a stellar example for us all. Their implementation of direct democracy must be protected and respected.
(Jeremiah Gaster is a Canadian political theorist and a comparativist.)
