AUTHOR: Redaspie DATE: Friday, June 09, 2006 ----- BODY:

I went to a very interesting meeting hosted by the SWP on the situation in Venezuela last Saturday, the discussion at which led me to develop some thoughts on my own on the possible prospects for the current revolutionary government in Venuezuela of Hugo Chavez. (For anyone unacquainted with Chavez here is the Wikipedia article on him.) These thoughts are in part influenced by my current reading material, Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution.

The first thing to be clear about is who Chavez is, and most importantly who he is not. And the answer to the last is that he is not a genuine revolutionary socialist, nor is he anti-capitalist except to the extent that he wishes the capitalist system in Venezuela, and the businesses elites both at home and internationally, to facilitate the development of basic public services such as school education, health care and other similar welfare programmes. His programme, ultimately, is a social democratic one, and involves implementing a set of basic and quite limited reforms in the context of a state totally dominated by a deeply corrupt ruling elite and with absolutely no help for the poor at all who were forced into living a hand to mouth existence in shanty-towns. One of the SWP members at the discussion correctly pointed out that Chavez is not doing anything more radical than the British Labour governments of Attlee and Harold Wilson (and indeed one could add that his politics are no more further left than Franklin Roosevelt's). The difference is that, of course, that back then there was a great deal of political leverage for such reforms due to the crisis in which capitalism was embroiled, while now the neo-liberal agenda is dominant across the world.

Another important point, and one made at the meeting, is that Chavez is only able to successfully enact his policies because of the oil reserves that Venezuela holds, and the fact that the oil price is particularly high right now. If and when the oil price starts to fall, then things may very well change (I'll ignore at this stage the controversies surrounding 'peak oil'). In such an eventuality, the reforms of Chavez may have to be curtailed. It is possible that Chavez may also decide to curtail them for other political or ideological reasons - pressure from the capitalist class both home and abroad, who may come at some stage to the conclusion that he has gone too far, could persuade him to change direction. We know that he is not hostile to capitalism per se, despite his socialist rhetoric. It is telling that, during his recent visit to London, that having wowed an audience of leftists in his speech in Camden, he later had meetings with British business leaders to discuss the possibility of investing in Venezuela. One oil industrialist, I am led to believe, has stated that he has no problem with Chavez at all. So such a situation is entirely plausible. In that situation, what will the Venezualan workers do? There is some indication that some of them are mobilising, in communities and in workplaces, and indeed some factories that were due to be closed down by the owners have since been taken over by the workers. As Chris Harman's article in Socialist Review earlier this year makes clear, however, many of them still place their confidence entirely in Chavez.

This can be contrasted with the situation in Bolivia, where a similar radical, Evo Morales, is now in power. Like Chavez he is also charting a radical course, but like Chavez he is by no means a revolutionary. Indeed his recent nationalisation of the gas industry in Bolivia was carried out as a result of pressure from the masses to turn left. Like Chavez, Morales is surely vulnerable to be co-opted by the business classes in Bolivia and through them the international capitalist class. However, the masses in Bolivia appear much less inclined to give Morales blanket support, which is why Morales is now being forced to be more radical than he initially wished to be. The question must be asked - why is this? The clear answer appears to be that Morales' coming to power was preceded by several years of open revolt against moves by successive governments to privatise the nation's resources, including most significantly the revolt centred in the Cochabamba region in 2001 against water privatisation. These revolts succeeded in wrecking the privatisation plans and even toppled the governments trying to push them through. They have also thrown up several leaders, including Felipe Quispe, and trade unionist Jaime Solares, who espouse revolutionary politics and are very much an independent force to Morales.

As a result of this, the masses in Bolivia are much more inclined to take independent action than their brothers and sisters in Venezuala, where the same recent history of revolt has not occurred. The 1989 revolt in the capital Caracas by the poor of the city was brutally crushed by the authorities, a serious defeat which in itself set back the development of a movement. It can be argued that Chavez's subsequent attempted coup in 1992 then pre-empted and therefore prevented the growth of an independent working class movement. Chavez's coup failed, and he voluntarily surrendered and then asked, and was granted, the opportunity to speak on television in order to prevent further bloodshed. In his speech, he began by stating that the aims of his movement had failed 'for the moment' and this phrase caught the imagination of the watching millions, who immediately interpreted it as a sign that Chavez was going to return at some stage and try again to take power on behalf of the ordinary people. As Richard Gott's excellent book Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution makes clear, this phrase ('per ahora' in the native language) became Chavez's catchphrase amongst Venezuela's poor, who invested their hopes in Chavez's return. I would argue this was a major factor in preventing the development of an independent movement in Venezuela analogous to the one in Bolivia.

This has huge potential for future developments if Chavez and Morales do abandon their original constituencies. One of the most important lessons of the February revolution in Russia, as described by Trotsky, which toppled the Czar and brought a coalition of bourgeois and moderate socialist politicians to power as a Provisional Government, is that the people, if dissapointed by the actions of erstwhile revolutionary leaders who promise a new beginning, is that they can turn on the new order and go beyond the revolution's original limitations. The failure of the Provisional Government in Russia in 1917 to end Russia's involvement in the First World War and solve the huge social inequities that wracked the masses of people, led to public support swinging behind the Bolsheviks, and the October 1917 revolution that brought Lenin to power. As in Bolivia, there was a recent history of successful revolt - both the 1905 revolt which forced concessions from the Czar, and the February revolt which was a grassroots revolt, as opposed to the voting in of a new leader via a popular election as in the case of both Chavez and Bolivia. Therefore, I would argue that it is Bolivia, and not Venezuela, that holds the key to possible future developments. If Bolivia revolts against Morales the result will likely be a genuine workers' revolution and regime, and this will undoubtedly change the situation in Venezuela and across Latin America. Venezuela, meanwhile, is more likely (although by no means guaranteed) to be acquiescant to any move by Chavez away from reform due to the lack of a real grassroots independent mobilisation and the trust placed in Chavez. So Bolivia, and not Venezuela, is where we should really be watching.

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