Venezuela under Chavez: The Bolivarian Revolution Against Neoliberalism

Gregory Albo

Vorbemerkung der Redaktion

Die Vorgänge in Venezuela werfen einige, wenn auch hierzulande kaum diskutierte Fragen auf. Dort geht es um einen Kampf um die Staatsmacht, geführt von Chavez, einem Staatschef, der einst als Putschist gewirkt hat, sich aber inzwischen einer klaren demokratischen Legitimation erfreut. Auf den ersten Blick wirkt das eher unzeitgemäß. Selbst wenn man dem Gerede vom Ende des Nationalstaats nicht folgt, bleibt doch die Frage, ob emanzipative gesellschaftliche Veränderungen mittels des Staates überhaupt möglich sind. Dagegen sprechen nicht nur theoretische Gründe, sondern auch die Erfahrungen mit den diversen Spielarten von Staatssozialismus und Staatsreformismus. Und haben nicht auch die mexikanischen Zapatistas auf eine Eroberung der Staatsmacht programmatisch verzichtet? Mit „die Gesellschaft verändern ohne die Macht zu erobern“ (John Holloway) haben die Vorgänge in Venezuela jedenfalls nichts zu tun.

Tatsächlich sind die Verhältnisse komplizierter, weil eine Transformationen der staatlichen Herrschaftsapparatur eben nicht nur Folge, sondern auch Voraussetzung gesellschaftlicher Veränderungen ist. Zudem sind die politischen Bedingungen und sozialen Kräftekonstellationen nicht überall gleich. Albo weist darauf hin, dass die Entwicklung in Venezuela ganz wesentlich davon abhängen wird, welche Prozesse dadurch in Gang gesetzt werden, dass Chavez zur Legitimationsbeschaffung auf eine Basismobilisierung mit neuen Formen von politischer Organisation und Öffentlichkeit setzen muss. Der Ausgang dieser Unternehmung ist offen. Eine Wiederauflage des populistischen Caudillismo lateinamerikanischen Typs ist ebenso möglich wie die Festigung politisch-sozialer Selbstorganisationsansätze. Käme es dazu, würde sich in Venezuela wirklich etwas ändern. Für die politische Entwicklung des lateinamerikanischen Subkontinents, dem seit dem Militärputsch in Chile ersten und bevorzugten Experimentierfeld neoliberaler Strategen wäre das von großer Bedeutung.

Greg Albo lehrt Politikwissenschaften an der York-Universität in Toronto/Kanada. Seine Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind u.a. Internationale Politische Ökonomie, (Kanadische) Wirtschaftspolitik und Gewerkschaften. Im Mai 2004 hielt er in Berlin und Frankfurt/Main Vorträge zum Thema: The Economics of Imperialism and the Left: A view from North America. Albo war im Sommer 2004 Wahlbeobachter in Venezuela und wird in kürze das Land als Teil einer internationalen Kommission nochmals bereisen.

Wir veröffentlichen Albos Beitrag im englischen Original.

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, as the saying goes, the thing about social revolutions is 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 Rafael Chavez Frias would emerge as the key zone insisting 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.¹

Venezuelan Democracy and the Chavez Presidential Referendum

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 in a unique ‘civic-military alliance’ – the coalition of forces around his Movimiento Quinta Republica (MVR) – after the self-destruction of Venezuela’s ‘stable democracy’ through the 1990s, Chavez pushed for passage of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Constitution re-founding the Republic.² The new Constitution was a massive departure in the extent to which it deepened democratic proceduralism, indigenous and human rights, and citizen initiatives in a direction completely alien to what liberal democracy has become. The Constitution, moreover, embraced an alternate economic model in its linking of participatory democracy with cooperatives and worker self-management. As such, the Bolivarian Constitution was decidedly anti-neoliberal, going far beyond the Hayekian constitutionalism protecting liberal property rights that has become the normative referent for the ‘democratization’ advocated by the Western powers over the last two decades. In terms of the issue at hand, the new Constitution allowed, as well, for a presidential recall vote if signatures could be gathered that equaled 20 percent of the voting electorate in the previous Presidential election, an entirely unique process that could not even have been imagined in Latin America, or anywhere else, before Chavez.

Since 1998, the old conservative and social democratic parties had combined with economic elites in different Opposition configurations (these being the social actors that had shared power and split the proceeds of oil wealth between them since the Punto Fijo Pact of 1958) to attempt to defeat Chavez either through force or at the polls. The ferociousness of the Opposition’s ideological hatred (which also masks racial and class hatreds) and mobilization has kept united an otherwise organizationally splintered coalition together through innumerable, indeed almost daily, twists and turns. The strategy to unseat Chavez through a recall campaign was driven by the Opposition’s control of the mass media. Although the signature campaign was filled with irregularities, and evidence of illegal external funding to the Opposition group SUMATE from the US National Endowment for Democracy and other US government offices, the Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE) ruled that a recall referendum should go ahead. After initial hesitations (and much posturing by some elements of the hard Left, particularly certain international currents, that the recall should be rejected due to fraud), Chavez declared that the referendum should go ahead: the Opposition had decided the regime was undemocratic and unpopular and the best approach was to beat them shamelessly at their own game.

The political arithmetic in the President’s office was coolly calculated: the failed military coup of April 2002 and the subsequent disastrous disruption of the oil sector in 2002-3 by the Opposition over several months, 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. In other words, from the collapse and disarray of the old Republic in the 1990s that prepared the base for Chavez’s campaign for a constituent assembly to found the Bolivarian Constitution, through the failed coup and the oil disruption, Chavez immediately moved to seize the new political space that the Opposition opened up to advance structural institutional reform and to deepen the pro-Chavez, anti-neoliberal political bloc. The plebiscitarian character of the referendum now being advanced by the Opposition polarized the choices starkly in Chavez’s favour: are you for the advance of the reforms of the Bolivarian process or with the old and corrupt oligarchs? Nothing could be simpler to sharpen the ideological clarity of the popular base to advance the revolution. It enabled the Chavistas to focus attention on building beyond the initial Bolivarian Circles created in defence of the revolution and the Constitution into new organizational vehicles to develop new cadres and to link the government and its supporters amongst the working class and the barrios of the poor (particularly in the absence of a mass political party to do the job). This was exactly the project that the national Commando Maisanta leading the political campaign undertook through the overarching ‘Electoral Battle Units’, that then formed community-based ‘Electoral Patrols’ for political mobilization during the referendum. Such ‘Patrols’ had, as well, the potential to be converted – as they fitfully have been in some cases, albeit with no clear structures of accountability – into new ‘Social Patrols’ to advance the political and planning capacities of local communities and neighbourhoods to push the Bolivarian social agenda after the vote.

The Referendum result itself – announced in the early hours of August 16th to great celebration at the Miraflores Presidential Palace – 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 and a sweep of 23 of 24 states (including 8 controlled by the Opposition), with 4-5 million more voters than when Chavez was first elected and 71 percent of the potential electorate voting, and adding to the string of electoral victories of Chavez and his followers. So open was the process that the vote was immediately sanctioned by hundreds of international electoral observers ranging from the reticent Organization of American States and the US-based Carter Centre to dozens of NGOs and academic research tanks.³ Nonetheless, the Opposition signaled its rejection of the results, to what should have been no one’s surprise, before the CNE could even report. This act by Opposition members of the CNE before the national television audience was pure theatre. It warned 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.

Locating the Chavista Project in the Latin American Crisis

The particularities of the political-economic conjuncture in Venezuela need, therefore, to be taken stock of in locating the Chavez project. A number of points can simply be noted. First, neoliberalism has consolidated across Latin America over the last two decades, as international debt repayments and economic crisis pushed state after state to abandon postwar models of import substitution development for austerity and outward export strategies to earn foreign exchange.⁴ The results have been anything but satisfying: except in a few cases for a few periods, GDP growth across Latin America has been sluggish since the 1980s, barely exceeding 1 percent per year since 2000, with per capita output often even declining, as it has since 2000. Venezuela’s economic decline over this period has been as stark as any: from 1978 to 1990 real GDP fell almost continuously, only systematically recovering with the American boom of the 1990s, but with negative GDP growth rates again returning with the political turmoil of 2002-3 (with the oil industry back to production at historically high world prices, growth is forecast at over 10 percent for 2004).⁵ The adoption of 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. The nascent developmental – most often authoritarian – states of the past have, moreover, been gutted of bureaucratic capacities during the long reign of structural adjustment policies. In Venezuela, the structural adjustment policies came in the political u-turn of the 1989 Carlos Perez government toward neoliberalism, partly at the prompting of the IMF, and after the collapse of the banking sector in the early 1990s the agreements with the IMF in 1994 and 1996. But as the fifth largest oil producer in the world and with global oil prices piercing $50 US a barrel, Venezuela now has a conjunctural advantage that frees some of these constraints .⁶ Notably, Venezuela has been able keep its foreign debt obligations under control, while still accumulating official reserves and often running a government fiscal deficit. The political turmoil of the attempted coup and disruption of oil production, however, caused economic damage in the billions that has yet to be made up.

Second, the processes of social exclusion and polarisation that sharpened in the 1980s across Latin America have continued with faltering per capita incomes and massive informal sector growth, in the order of an astonishing 70-80 percent of new employment, to the present. With ECLA long having declared the 1990s Latin America’s second lost decade, it will soon have to do so for a third.⁷ Here Venezuela records the same numbing neoliberal patterns of reproduction of social inequality as elsewhere: some 80 percent of the population lives in poverty, while 20 percent enjoy the oligarchic wealth produced by rentier oil revenues; the worst performance in per capita GDP in Latin American recorded from the late 1970s to the present, with peak income levels cut almost in half; the collapse of rural incomes leading to massive migration into the cities, with close to 90 per cent of the population now in urban areas, particularly Caracas, one of the world’s growing catalogue of slum cities; 3/4 of new job growth estimated to be in the informal sector, where half of the working population is now siad to work; and recorded unemployment levels (which have quite unclear meaning given the extent of reserve armies of under-employed in the informal economy) hovering between 15 to 20 per cent for some time. The catalogue of social ills produced by neoliberal models of economic development makes for sober reading. These all impinge on any attempt an alternate direction for the Venezuelan state, although the booming oil sector allows for far more room for redistributional policies and potential to convert oil revenues into ‘endogenous development’ than elsewhere.

Finally, confrontation of the Chavez regime with the social forms of power operational today is another marker that need noting. The degree of class mobilization – the pervasive sense of ‘class against class’ struggle – is etched right into both 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 to be engaged.⁸

Challenges for the Bolivarian Revolution

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.⁹ 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. The strategy of exhaustion has, of course, been applied continually toward Cuba through economic embargo, diplomatic isolation and threat of military intervention; more direct military measures were taken against both the FSLN and FMLN in Nicaragua and El Salvador to exhaust these political movements. The failed military coup and the need for oil exports out of Venezuela has blocked these imperialist modalities for now. But the Opposition will, no doubt, continue to be looked on favourably from abroad to fund ‘democracy’, and it, in turn, will seek out new ways to test Chavez’s legitimacy.¹⁰ This is, however, limited by the very process of the referendum and further Opposition divisions over future strategy. With these more direct options temporarily closed off, destabilizing and militarizing the border with Columbia cannot be ruled out, with Plan Columbia and paramilitaries being the vehicles to do so. Some of the skirmishes in the Apure region of Venezuela that ended with the killing of oil workers in September 2004, and other reports of Columbian paramilitaries operating in Venezuela earlier in the year, are indications of this tack. Uncertainty and strategic exhaustion are as much the objective as fostering instability at this point, and Chavez will have to be wary of taking the bait in the traps being set.

Economic and political isolation are, therefore, a crucial question for the international balance of forces Venezuela faces. Strengthening the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and attempts at new ties with China, have been one set of international efforts. These diplomatic manoeuvres, on the one hand, strengthen the economic capacity of Venezuela and its diplomatic leverage, and, on the other hand, attempt to lessen the degree of dependence on oil exports to the US. Yet, as important as these steps are, they do nothing to create an alternate sphere of influence to the US or an anti-neoliberal agenda contesting the world market. The critical question remains, irrevocably, developments across Latin America. But apart from Cuba, other Latin American states have provided, at best, fleeting political support. Cuba has, moreover, been critical to the material and administrative capacities of the Chavez regime to improve health care (through thousands of doctors implicitly paid for by oil shipments at favourable prices) and also, to a degree, other areas of social policy. Cuba has also provided crucial diplomatic and economic advice, but it is not so clear what the latter amounts to in terms of deepening Venezuelan planning capacities given the economic straits that Cuba itself is in and its difficulty of formulating a post-Soviet development model. The stark reality is the fact that no other Latin American state – and most notably the big powers of Brazil and Argentina with Centre-Left governments – has yet attempted their own departure from neoliberalism. This has meant that external economic conditions for Venezuela apart from the oil sector remain unfavourable: for exports due to fiscal austerity and cheap currency policies across the continent, and for regional efforts to foster internal development and diversification due to neoliberal export-oriented policies insisted upon by IMF conditionalities. Chavez’s Bolivarian project of a more politically integrated Latin America has kept him attuned to continental political initiatives (which regionally still look like little more than conventional neoliberal free trade agreements),¹¹ and won him a wide audience amongst the poor and Left in Latin America as the only ‘fighter’ and ‘patriot’ in the current panoply of leaders. But the project has little in the way of concrete measures yet to speak of that would support and generalize an alternate economic model. Oil export dependence on the U.S. market thus remains the central parameter in all economic and political calculations.

With the international correlation of forces still yielding a highly restrictive set of constraints, the formation of transformative capacities at the national level necessarily remains central to advancing the Bolivarian process. The economic planning capacities of a Venezuelan Bolivarian state are, however, barely developed if not completely negligible. This is in part a longer term structural legacy of the oil ‘rentier state’. The corruption and economic direction of the ancien regime left a severely incapacitated and corrupt state bureaucracy, that seeks primarily to defend the old order rather than break from it. This bureaucracy was in no way ‘smashed’, in the sense of fundamentally re-oriented in its institutional norms, procedures and modalities. The impact of the turn to neoliberalism in the 1980s has been, moreover, to further disorganize central coordinative mechanisms while doing virtually nothing about bureaucratic cultural norms. The central bank’s independent capacity to impose monetary discipline, and the debt management policies of economic ministries, were, however, strengthened. Although not in any way marking a direct revolt on the Chavez government, these are crucial embedded institutional and policy orientations inside the Venezuelan state. They have yet to be seriously tackled.

These economic apparatuses only provide, in any case, a certain domestic stability in managing domestic capital markets and external exchanges, given the fiscal capacity provided by booming oil exports and potential for an inflationary spiral. Utilization of the economic surplus to diversify economically is another matter. The oil company PDVSA appears to have re-established most of its operational capacities under the new Chavista management, and has more than a few projects and suitors to pursue.¹² Here the critical question is still one of gaining control of oil revenues and improving national technological capacities apart from foreign capital, which involves deepening the shift from current neoliberal property rights regimes with respect to foreign capital in opposition to the pervasive direction in the world market under the WTO trading regime (and apart from Cuba, the direction of the entire rest of the hemisphere). In sectors where the means of production require enormous capital outlays (heavy industry, telecommunications, electricity, transportation, food distribution), a strategic orientation has not clearly consolidated, and enterprise governance structures and central coordination planning for investment – some of which need to be regional strategies with other Latin American countries as, for example, in steel and auto assembly – remain only loosely defined. More has been done to develop initiatives in the ‘popular economy’ through cooperatives, laws on micro-credit, new efforts to foster producer and craft associations, land reforms and small agricultural production. But these also require central administrative capacities to provide resources, infrastructure, technical support and a long period of stable financing to bear fruit. State and local capacities to convert the economic surplus into an alternate economic policy agenda remain nascent and underdeveloped. Perpetual political campaigning by the Chavez movement to thwart Opposition challenges has necessarily taken precedence over building central coordinative capacities.

The limits of economic policy capacity captures what is the paramount characteristic of the Venezuelan state and the challenge for deepening the processes of democratization: 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.¹³ While elections and political fortune have given Chavez’s movement control of the Presidency, Congress, the military and the state oil company, much of the remaining state apparatus is still not fully accountable, nor its modes of operation re-organized in support of the Bolivarian project. Part of this is due to other levels of government being controlled by the Opposition. So, for example, Caracas retains extreme divisions in urban services, education and health provision, and so forth, according to district, reproducing a deeply etched ‘economic apartheid’ across its entire urban space. Similarly, the major reforms to the economy and political system passed into legislation in November 2001, affecting a wide sweep of property and distributional relations across an array of sectors remain unevenly and poorly implemented (notably the considerable lag and difficulties in imposing a new royalty regime on the oil sector, and land redistribution in the countryside), in effect waiting for the political mobilization to force them through the bureaucracy and upon private actors. Moreover, the ‘parallelism’ of policy implementation of the Bolivarian Missions in the education and health sectors, for example, for all their accomplishments and inventiveness in improving literacy and basic health, 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. There is a struggle being waged ‘in and against’ what still remains a bourgeois state.

The ‘parallelism’ inside the state system of Venezuela under Chavez speaks, paradoxically, to both what has been achieved and its limits. The weaknesses of Chavez’s MVR and the other supporting parties has meant that Chavez has acted at the central level to speak to ‘the people’ directly, using his populist appeal to gain support for his political agenda. It also has served to empower the political base in the barrios to move ahead with building neighbourhood capacities and infrastructure as they can. To the good, this has often meant a clear orientation in local cadres against centralized control and being collapsed into overarching structures, including political parties. These community associations and cadres, with women playing a very large role especially in the health sector, enable a defense of the gains of the Bolivarian process whatever regime is in power. But the very same weak party structures and pattern of political mobilization means that the cadres necessary to develop the central coordination necessary to redistribute resources to the base and re-orient the state apparatuses is all but absent. Thus economic and political strategizing and the mobilization for the implementation of agreed upon policy within the state – as fundamental to the processes of democratization as those of empowerment at the political base – lack any clear vectors of political accountability to the wider Chavista movement and administrative mechanisms to ensure their adoption and monitor their progress. Participatory democracy at the base without the democratization of the mediation that parties can yield, and must, as the role of capitalists in determining economic allocation is lessened and central coordination and redistribution increase, can be just as illusional and formal as liberal democracy. For example, national legislation establishing Local Public Planning Councils has been passed, but have yet to be effectively implemented.¹⁴ It is hard to see how control over the state can be deepened, penetration of the 40 percent who consistently still oppose Chavez and who include significant sections of workers in the formal and informal sectors occur, and forming an independent union movement evolve, without formal organizations and mechanisms that can deepen the debate and participation over the content of the Bolivarian process. In other words, the still quite alive challenge of conquering state power – and thus economic power – will be resolved neither by Chavez’s own personal role nor by appeals to community-based power structures alone.

A Left Beyond Neoliberalism?

The social fracturing over state power has typically been the critical point in the class struggle 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 the prospects and sought out political compromise on the old terrain, or hardened itself into a permanent war setting to attain stability for the new regime at all costs. Still others have pushed ahead. In this case, the tasks of the social transition are no longer only of winning political and ideological space, 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.”¹⁵ And here the degree of freedom of transformative regimes to experiment and chart an independent democratic course has confronted consistently hostile imperial powers and the economic imperatives of the capitalist world market. This has always given special responsibility for the Left in the centres of capitalism and the international labour movement to provide solidarity and political accountability for the actions of their own governments to isolate and choke off any progressive, not even to say revolutionary, process. Such embargoes by the imperialist states have always been issued as much for their own domestic class struggles as to sanction the affront to the capitalist world market. Chavez’s 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 re-posing the question for the Left 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 the Presidential Referendum of August 2004, it needs to be said, was a vote for the Left everywhere, that can best be supported by re-imagining our own movements.

Anmerkungen

For surveys of the process see: Richard Gott, In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chavez and the Transformation of Venezuela (London: Verso, 2000); Steve Ellner and Daniel Hellinger, eds., Venezuelan Politics in the Chavez Era (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003); and in particular the writings of Jonah Gindin and Gregory Wilpert at venezuelanalysis.com. See also the Washington-based Venezuela Information Office for a variety of sources on the policies of Chavez’s government.
Richard Hillman, Democracy for the Privileged: Crisis and Transition in Venezuela (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994); Javier Corrales, Presidents Without Parties: The Politics of Economic Reform in Argentina and Venezuela in the 1990s (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Steve Ellner, „The Radical Potential of Chavismo in Venezuela”, Latin American Perspectives, 28: 5 (2001). Chavez’s failed military coup of the early 1990s had a ‘civic-military’ alliance notion behind it, and his adoption of the institutional and democratic road to power has maintained this strategy. A meritocractic officer corps and isolation from the US based military School of the Americas has allowed a different social base and orientation in the Venezuelan military to emerge, which has made Chavez far from unique in the officer corps. Unlike Chile under Allende in the 1970s, Chavez enjoys military support for his constitutional and reform efforts, and they have been central to implementing even his domestic agenda.
The final declaration of the Official International Observers was in part drafted by the noted Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano. Not surprisingly, the recall referendum prepared the basis for the sweep of Chavistas of 20 of 22 state governorships as well as the Mayor of Caracas at the end of October, 2004. In strategic and organizational disarray, and stripped of control of most centres of elected power, the Opposition could only lamely claim fraud once more that only the most willfully ignorant could pay heed to.
For the Venezuelan case of neoliberalism from its advocates see: Moses Naim, Paper Tigers and Minotaurs: The Politics of Venezuela’s Economic Reforms (Washington: The Carnegie Endowment, 1993); Michael Enright, Antonio Frances and Edith Saavedra, Venezuela: The Challenge of Competitiveness (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1996).
The data here and below draws on: Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Profile 2005: Venezuela (London: EIU, 2004); World Markets Research Centre, Country Report 2004: Venezuela (London: WMRC, 2004).
See Fernando Coronil’s remarkable book, The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and also Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
See Economic Commission for Latin American, Social Panorama, 2002-2003 (New York: United Nations 2004); Miguel Szekely and Marianne Hilgert, „The 1990s in Latin America: Another Decade of Persistent Inequality”, Inter-American Development Bank, Working Paper #410 (1999).
It is here that more than a few on the Left have already scored the outcome, after having looked for the traditional lines of revolutionary development and found them wanting. These range from Tariq Ali’s (along with James Petras’s) supportive but one-sided declaration of Chavez’s project as simply ‘social democratic’ to Mike Gonzalez’s confused and all too predictable assessment that Chavez’s project is „modernisation within a framework of ‘controlled capitalism’”. The lack of imagination here is striking: the dictates of global capital are to be heeded, and if not heeded simply snapped. All the questions of the social actors and their political capacities to undertaking the snapping are, apparanently, already resolved and the maximalist programme on the agenda. And for Michael McCaughan, following John Holloway, the mistake begins with even contesting state power. See: Tariq Ali, „Why He Crushed the Oligarchs: The Importance of Hugo Chavez,’ Counterpunch, 16 August 2004; James Petras, „Myths and Realities: President Chavez and the Referendum,” Counterpunch, 2 September 2004; Mike Gonzalez, „Venezuela: Many Steps to Come,” International Socialism, N. 104 (2004); Michael McCaughan, The Battle of Venezuela (London: Latin America Bureau, 2004).
See the insightful discussions in: Marta Harnecker, „After the Referendum: Venezuela Faces New Challenges”, Monthly Review (November 2004); Steve Ellner, „Leftist Goals and the Debate over Anti-Neoliberal Strategy in Latin America”, Science and Society, 68:1 (2004); Marta Harnecker, „On Leftist Strategy”, Science and Society, forthcoming.
For some discussion of imperialist strategies of attrition see: Sohan Sharma, Sue Tracy and Surinder Kim, „Venezuela – Ripe for US Intervention?” Race and Class, 45: 4 (2004).
1The November 2004 agreement in Rio de Janeiro of Latin America’s to create South American Community of Nations is one step in the integration process, with a draft constitution to be presented to national parliaments in six months. It follows the October 2004 trade agreement between the Mercosur and Andean Community customs unions. There is some impetus to this process given the number of centre-left regimes coming to power, with the most recent addition being Tabare Vazquez of Uruguay. But this unity is fragile, and it is not at all clear where it runs against neoliberalism as opposed to helping Latin America states to debate neoliberalism’s terms with the US, and its Free Trade Area of the Americas project. See: „S. American Nations Agree to Regional Pact”, Financial Times, 5 November 2004.
Notably, in the Orinoco oil fields, agreements are being signed with Texaco-Mobil and Exxon in the order of $5 billion (US). Other agreements on oil tar sands development are being explored with Canadian companies. It is central to any hope for endogenous development that these contracts maximize national capacity building and limit long-term lease dependencies.
A point on the bureaucratic impasse implicitly made by academic sympathizers with the Opposition: Francisco Monaldi, et al., „Political Institutions, Policymaking Processes, and Policy Outcomes in Venezuela”, Inter-American Development Bank, Draft Research Papers (2004), at http://www.iadb.org/res/.
Jonah Gindin, „Possible Faces of Venezuelan Democracy”, September 2004.
Che Guevara Reader (New York: Ocean Press, 1997), p. 160.