14.03.2013

Chávez obituary: Man, myth and legacy

Nick Rogers looks at the Bolivarian revolution of Hugo Chávez

On Tuesday March 5 at the age of 58 and after struggling with cancer for almost two years, Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, died. In the days that followed, hundreds of thousands of his compatriots - most wearing brilliant red - thronged the streets of Caracas and other towns and cities to pay their respects and express their support for the self-styled ‘Bolivarian revolution’.

Friday’s funeral brought together heads of state and government from the Latin American and global ‘anti-imperialist’ alliance that Chávez sought to construct. As I write, long queues of Venezuelans continue to file past his body, which, dressed in military uniform and a red beret, aptly encapsulates the combination of military and revolutionary politics that Chávez represented.

The tradition of assessing the impact of someone’s life immediately after their death may make some kind sense when their most active years were some time ago. When that person dies at the height of their political career, having been re-elected president for the fourth time by a margin of 10% or so back in October, it perhaps seems premature to reach definitive conclusions about their legacy. If genuine revolutionary leadership - whether of an individual or a collective - is about empowering the mass of people or a specific class to act on their own behalf, the true test of that leadership comes when the mantle passes from the original leaders.

Nevertheless, it is possible to make a start in weighing Chávez’s role in history and the prospects for the political process he initiated.

Hugo Chávez certainly exhibited a boldness of personality in seizing opportunities to make a difference. The son of two school teachers from Barinas in the dusty provincial plains of western Venezuela, he joined the army as a teenager in the 1970s, led an abortive junior officers’ coup in 1992, and was elected president for the first time in 1998 - in the process contributing to the disintegration of the two parties which had alternated in national government for four decades and explicitly shared the spoils of office (jobs, resources, etc) between themselves.

He embraced Venezuela’s national hero, Simón Bolívar - who was also the leading figure in the liberation of South America from Spanish colonial rule - as the standard-bearer for the national revolution Chávez crafted and South American unity that defined his ideology.

In the course of the next 14 years Chávez rewrote the Venezuelan constitution (renaming the republic as ‘Bolivarian’) and survived in rapid succession a rightwing coup attempt that was supported by United States president Bush, an oil industry strike and a recall referendum. Levels of public spending dramatically increased to the benefit of Venezuela’s poorest citizens. Declaring for ‘socialism of the 21st century’ in 2005, Chávez’s government nationalised several hundred companies and engaged in widespread land redistribution.

In Latin America he challenged the hegemony of the US. Opposing a US-sponsored free-trade pact, he launched an alternative Bolivarian alliance - Alba - that brought together countries including Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Argentina that were resisting US demands.

Chávez’s was clearly a government that turned the tide on neoliberalism. A strategy of both US imperialism and the local capitalist class that had been applied in Venezuela - as across Latin America - particularly harshly from the 1980s onwards. A semi-uprising by the poor in Caracas had taken place in February 1989 and been ruthlessly suppressed by the military (and provided part of the justification for Chávez’s 1992 coup attempt). Living standards - particularly for the poorest - collapsed during the 1990s.

Two factors explain the success of the sharp turn of direction executed by Chávez’s government. The one most remarked upon in the obituary columns is oil. Venezuela’s reserves are massive. Indeed, after a redefinition of its tar sands as ‘heavy oil’, its reserves are now officially the largest in the world, exceeding those even of Saudi Arabia.

Many have commented on Chávez’s luck in being elected just before a boom in oil prices: $10 a barrel at the start of 1999 and then rising to, and for much of the subsequent period remaining at, $100 a barrel or more. The commodities’ boom that has survived even five years of a global economic downturn certainly played a role. But Chávez also helped to make his own luck. Previous Venezuelan governments had undermined Opec agreements at the behest of the US. Chávez reinvigorated Venezuela’s membership of the oil cartel, making common cause with other Opec hawks. At the same time, he reasserted government control of the semi-autonomous state oil company, PDVSA, and increased royalties (on both the PDVSA and foreign oil companies), assuring a steady flow of income to the government.

Oil resources allowed spending on the social needs of the poorest Venezuelans to be increased, including on the social ‘missions’ that were launched in regular succession. Oil lubricated relationships within Alba. Cuban doctors sent in return for cheap oil formed the backbone of the health mission in the shanty-towns of Venezuela. And oil also facilitated increased purchases of military equipment from Russia and elsewhere.

The second factor that underpinned Chávez’s reversal of neoliberalism was popular mobilisation. This was initially almost entirely spontaneous. In his first year or two in office he was a much more cautious figure than the tub-thumping rhetorician who declared that the pedestal from which he was addressing the United Nations general assembly still smelt of the sulphur lingering after president Bush spoke the previous day. This early Chávez spoke approvingly of the ‘third way’ of Tony Blair.

Moderation was more difficult to sustain in the face of the upsurge of middle class and bourgeois opposition that responded with large demonstrations to Chavez’s first moves over land reform and the oil industry. These culminated in the 2002 coup that successfully removed Chávez from office. It was only the counter-demonstrations of the poor majority, who in Caracas poured down from the shanty towns that coat the hills surrounding the capital, that swung the balance of power within the military and forced the restoration of Chávez.

Popular support and organisation proved equally crucial when the opposition shut down the oil industry for several months over 2002-03, cutting off 80% of exports and much of government income.

Class power

The key question for socialists and communists in drawing up a balance sheet of Chávez’s legacy is not actually the degree of state ownership or control of the economy - there being nothing intrinsically socialist about state ownership. Nor even levels of social and welfare spending. What is key is the relationship between Chávez and the popular movement that sustained him, ie the balance of class power.

On this score grassroots structures have emerged: communal councils that are supposed to allow neighbourhoods to participate in budgeting and planning the resources relevant to them. Workers have engaged in fierce industrial struggles and some nationalisations have been in response to these. In workplaces production self-management councils are supposed to encourage moves to workers’ control.

A new party was formed after the 2006 presidential election, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) that at its launch attracted a huge membership.

However, each positive development has been either undermined or severely curtailed by the extreme presidentialism of Chávez’s approach to government. The new constitution of 1999 guaranteed many rights, including those of popular participation in social and political affairs. But it also strengthened the powers of the presidency. In fact the presidential term was increased to six years and the restriction on any one individual serving more than one consecutive term was removed. Chávez later had to fight two referendums before he successfully removed the new restriction on more than two consecutive terms that would have blocked him from standing in 2012.

Even with the extra powers concentrated in the person of the president and never with less than a majority of supporters in the national assembly, Chávez four times demanded and was given the right to rule for a year by decree - thus bypassing the very constitutional arrangements that were supposed to define the new Bolivarian republic. If popular participation does not extend to the national assembly, what chance is there for ordinary Venezuelans in communal councils, production self-management councils or even the PSUV?

The weekly Aló presidente TV programme in which Chávez journeyed around Venezuela speaking in front of cameras to a local audience for up to seven or eight hours and making apparently off-the-cuff announcements of government policy was typical of his style. Very personable, very much at ease with ordinary Venezuelans - but the antithesis of a collective or participatory approach to leadership and government.

The limited space for autonomous action is reflected in the struggles within the trade union movement. The historic trade union confederation, the CTV, was closely linked to Democratic Action - one of the traditional parties of government and a member of the Socialist International. In the 1990s, leftwingers had sought to break the stranglehold of the bureaucracy within the CTV, but were defeated by undemocratic and fraudulent means. The CTV worked closely with the opposition to Chávez and actively supported the 2002 coup and the oil industry strike (perhaps more accurately described as a bosses’ lock-out).

The workers who effectively broke the strike and kept Chávez in power then sought to set up a new independent trade union centre, the UNT. This quickly recruited a large membership but repeated attempts to elect a leadership were blocked by the Chávista minority organised in the Bolivarian Socialist Workers Force (FSBT). The FSBT has now split from the UNT and is effectively the only trade union organisation recognised by the government for the purposes of industrial negotiations.

Chávez has openly spoken of his hostility to the concept of the working class organising autonomously from the ‘revolutionary’ party - perhaps an inheritance of his military formation or a lesson learnt from the Cubans.

Similarly, the prominent Trotskyist, Stalin Pérez Borges, who entered the PSUV and formed the Socialist Tide tendency, has reported on the lack of space to organise at the grassroots of a party that is very hierarchical. Recent nominations of candidates for governorships and mayoralties have been handed down by fiat by the PSUV leadership.

The problem is that a ‘revolutionary’ project that does not empower the working class will end up returning power to the only other class that can rule in modern society - the capitalist class. A logic obscured by the furious opposition of that class to Chávez and his policies - Chávez’s mixed, black African and native American racial origins, which he shared with the majority of Venezuelans, contributed to the loathing of the more prosperous sections of Venezuelan society, which are predominantly white European in origin.

But, for all his talk of ‘21st century socialism’, Chávez did not envisage expropriating the bourgeoisie as a class. His political coalition includes political barons who had formed close - and profitable - links with businessmen who have prospered in the new dispensation and earned the sobriquet ‘boli-bourgeoisie’.

The warmth and political support that Chávez extended to anti-working class regimes such as those of Ahmadinejad, Putin, Lukashenko (the strongman of Belarus), and the state capitalists of China spoke not only of the necessity of making deals with others prepared to stand up to US dominance, but an understanding of anti-imperialism and international solidarity that was not rooted in the politics of our class.

Chávez turned politics in Venezuela upside down - and to some extent across Latin America also. The pieces he upturned are yet to resettle in a fixed configuration. The forces of the working class still have everything to play for. Yet, in plotting a way forward, surely we have learnt that our movement can have no truck with personality cults, secular canonisation or embalmed relics.