In spite of so many determined efforts of the past to impose a uniform architecture, there is no blueprint for making a revolution against capitalism. And there is just as clearly no single design for the Left today to break out of the straitjacket of neoliberalism, and re-open possibilities for more democratic and egalitarian social orders. Indeed, the thing about social revolutions is, as the saying goes, that they keep coming around in unexpected ways and in unexpected places. Who would have dared predict the eruption that was Seattle in November 1999, when the powers behind neoliberal globalization seemed completely incontestable? And who would have then predicted – certainly none of the sages of the global social justice movement who quite consciously moved to the margins the issue of winning state power as another failed blueprint – that Venezuela under Hugo Chavez would emerge as the key zone asserting that alternatives to neoliberalism must not only be asserted but tried? But this is exactly the importance of Chavez and the Bolivarian revolutionary process, as the Chavistas refer to their struggle, for the Left at this juncture.
The politically-charged context that has become Venezuela revealed all this and more during the August 15th Presidential Referendum on President Chavez’s tenure in office. Coming to power in 1998 after the self-destruction of Venezuela’s ‘stable democracy’ through the1990s, Chavez pushed for passage of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Constitution refounding the Republic. The new Constitution was a massive departure in the extent to which it deepened democratic proceduralism, rights and citizen initiatives in a direction completely alien to what liberal democracy has become. Indeed, the new Constitution allowed for a presidential recall vote if enough signatures could be gathered, an entirely unique process that could not even have been imagined in Latin America before Chavez. Although the signature campaign was filled with irregularities, and mounting evidence of external funding from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy and other offices, Chavez declared that the Referendum should go ahead. The political arithmetic in the President’s office was cooly calculated: the failed military coup of April 2002 and the disastrous disruption of the oil sector later that year by the Opposition, allowed the Chavez government to consolidate in turn control over the military and the state oil company PDVSA; a failure to defeat Chavez in a Referendum would leave the Opposition in further political disarray and advance the social base for the Chavista reform agenda.
The Referendum result itself was electrifying and anti-climatic at one and the same time. The Chavez ‘No’ against removal of the President was resounding at almost 60 percent of the vote, with 4-5 million more voters than when Chavez was first elected, and adding to the string of electoral victories of Chavez and his followers. But the Opposition signalled its rejection of the results, to what should have been no one’s surprise, before the Venezuelan Electoral Commission could even report. This act was pure theatre and it signalled that the play was far from over and that the ruling classes still in place would use their economic and social power to disrupt, discredit and wear down the government as best as they could. This, too, the Referendum results recorded: the insistence of the poor and the Chavista cadres to get on with the job of constructing a ‘Bolivarian’ Venezuela, and the declaration of the Opposition that much of the ground for construction had yet to be broken.
The particularities of the political-economic conjuncture in Venezuela need, therefore, to be taken stock of in locating the Chavez project. Here we can simply note that neoliberalism has consolidated across Latin America; that the processes of social exclusion and polarisation that began in the 1980s have continued with faltering per capita incomes and massive informal sector growth deeply entrenched; that the moves to export-oriented economic strategies and liberalised capital movements across Latin America make moves toward more ‘inward’ strategies to meet basic needs singular and fraught with obstacles; and that the nascent developmental – most often authoritarian – states of the past have been gutted of bureaucratic capacities over the long reign of structural adjustment policies. These all impinge on Chavez and the coalition of forces around his Movimiento Quinta Republica, but the booming oil sector allows for far more room for redistributional policies and potential to convert oil revenues into alternate uses than elsewhere.
The features of the Chavez regime and its encounter with the social forms of power operational today are other markers that need noting. The degree of class mobilization – the pervasive sense of ‘class against class’ struggle – is etched right into the urban landscape of Caracas and the countryside, of regimented order and chaos, of private luxury and slum, of neighbourhoods against and for Chavez, of huge estates and squatters’ shacks. It was clear to all sides in the Referendum that what was at stake was not merely a change between this or that government or this or that leader preaching better times one day and austerity the next – the standard fare of bourgeois democracy today – but a real struggle over social and state power. In the immediate sense, this could be seen as a test as to whether the Chavez reform and redistributional programme would simply continue in the face of neoliberal orthodoxy. But in a deeper pre-figurative sense, the mobilization of the poor and raising their expectations during the Referendum places on the agenda the entire character of Chavez’s ‘participatory and protaganist democracy’ project, and a terrain of struggle over social power that remains yet to be confronted.
The challenges that now face Chavez and his Bolivarian revolution are, therefore, many, and quite possibly far more intractable and complex than the political terrain that has so far been the predominant battlefield. Perpetual political campaigning and relative economic and political isolation have more than once exhausted a revolutionary process, and the many forms that this destabilization can take remains a bedrock of American imperialist policy. Apart from Cuba, support from other Latin American states has been, at best, fleeting, but most importantly none has yet attempted their own departures from neoliberalism. State economic planning capacities are barely developed if not completely negligible. Indeed, the state apparatuses remain only partly under Chavista control in that the existing bureaucracy is poorly integrated with the central government, and often forms a ‘passive’ opposition to the Chavista reforms. The ‘parallelism’ of policy implementation of the Bolivarian Missions in the education and health sectors, for example, for all their accomplishments and inventiveness, are indicative as much of the deep transformations that remain to be accomplished. The ‘dual power’ between the still-existing economic and social elites comprising the ruling class Opposition and the government’s control over key institutions and the oil sector are crystallized in the divisions within the Venezuelan state itself.
This has been the point of ‘political rupture’ where the old ways of doing things are no longer sustainable if the new ways are to be given life and allowed to develop their independent course. More than one process of social transformation has turned back at this point, or hardened itself into a permanent war setting to attain stability for the new regime at all costs. But others have pushed ahead. The tasks of the social transition are no longer only of winning the political terrain, but foremost of fostering the democratic and organizational capacities of ‘the people’ to deepen and forward the revolution. This is precisely what Che meant when he complained, well into the Cuban revolution, of the lack of control over the bureaucracy and that “we can consider the need for organization to be our central problem.” Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution is, in its own specific way, at this juncture in the struggle against, and effort to move beyond, neoliberalism in Venezuela. The importance of Chavez to those outside Venezuela is that the Bolivarian movement is again posing the question of ‘what we want to become’ and not just of ‘what we no longer want to be’ after all the destructiveness of the last decades. And that is why the vote for Chavez in August, it needs to be said, was a vote for the Left everywhere, that can only be paid back by re-imagining our own movements.•
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