By Paul Gerrard
Hugo Chávez was elected President in 1998. The nationalist and anti-imialist programme he was embarking on became known as Chávismo. Elected President on a 56.2% vote, his aim was to remove Venezuela from the tentacles of US imperialism, which had held back the country and its impoverished masses. Using the profits from the nationalised oil industry PDVSA, the government funded ambitious social programmes, known as misiones, in housing, health and education.
The whip of counter-revolution
A CIA-backed coup attempt against Chávez in 2002 failed, and a months-long lockout by employers was also defeated thanks to a surge in popular support for Chávez. The defeat of a further right-wing coup attempt in 2005 triggered a period of advance for the revolutionary process and in 2005–06 it began to look as if capitalism might be snuffed out. Some industries were nationalised, or partly nationalised. Chávez began to describe himself as a Marxist, quoted Trotsky in interviews, and coined the slogan of ‘socialism for the 21st century’.
Yet the government held back. By 2009, 70% of Venezuela’s GDP was still in the private sector. The regime failed to make further inroads into capitalism, for example by nationalising the banks, or the supermarkets which were always central to the right-wing attempts to destabilise the regime by creating shortages and panic-buying.
Industrialists who were increasingly out of sympathy with the regime abandoned their plants and fled to the US, leaving workers with unpaid wages. Often the workers would attempt to restart production under workers’ control, but then the national guard of Chávez’s own ‘socialist’ government would be sent to evict them.
Socialism – at the point of a gun?
Chávismo relied on the existing capitalist state forces – army, police, security apparatus – to carry through social change. Although army units retained their loyalty to Chávez, a socialist revolution cannot come at the point of an AK-47. It can come only through the liberated energy and determination of the working class, poor peasants and slum-dwellers themselves, implementing land redistribution and workers’ control and management on the basis of public ownership.
Rather than mobilise the workers against the right-wing opposition, the regime promoted a cult of personality around ‘El Presidente’ and clamped down on debate.
Chávez engineered the forcible amalgamation of the Socialist and Communist parties with other smaller leftist parties into the Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which restricted dissent and victimised those who criticised Chávez for not going further.
Boli-bourgeoisie
Increased state control of the economy allowed a new conservative layer of bureaucrats, contractors and political appointees to develop, especially around the nationalised oil company, which was racked by scandals and mismanagement. They became known as the ‘boli-bourgeoisie’, enjoying a very different lifestyle from the working class. At the 2010 general election Chávez’s party received less than 50% of the vote for the first time in a decade of struggle, though he retained power.
Dramatic falls in oil prices, combined with the impact of US and European sanctions, threw the country into crisis in the 2010s. The response of the government was to turn to the right, a process which accelerated under Maduro after Chávez’s death in 2013. Cuts and privatisations became the dominant policy and the left and labour movement suffered significant repression. The remnants of Chávismo, now totally divorced from any notion of revolutionary struggle, consolidated into an authoritarian capitalist administration.
In place of working-class internationalism, Chávismo pursued nationalist diplomacy, orientating to several right-wing authoritarian regimes such as Iran and deepening its alliance with Chinese imperialism in particular.
Ultimately, revolutionary movements which remain isolated, as in Cuba, or do not expropriate the ruling class, as in the case of Venezuela, will succumb to the pressure of imperialism. To win decisive and lasting change, a working-class-centred revolution must spread internationally and pose a challenge to the rule of capital inside the imperialist powers themselves.
