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Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Socialist Worker via Venezuelanalysis - Nov 29, 2007
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2925
[VENEZUELANS WILL vote December 2 on constitutional reforms proposed by
President Hugo Ch!vez and his sup****ters, capping weeks of
sometimes-violent protests by right-wing opposition forces, a defection
by a top Ch!vez political ally, and mass mobilizations by Ch!vez
sup****ters.
LEE SUSTAR, recently returned from Venezuela, looks at the aims of
Ch!vezs proposals, the response of the opposition and the shape of
Venezuelan politics today.]
Whats Really Happening in Venezuela?
by Lee Sustar
FOR THE U.S. mainstream media, Venezuelas vote on constitutional
reforms December 2 is simply the latest power grab in authoritarian
President Hugo Ch!vezs bid to crush dissent, make himself president
for life and impose a state-controlled economy.
The view from the streets of the Caracas barrio of 23 de Enero,
however, is very different.
A densely populated, impoverished neighborhood seldom visited by U.S.
re****ters, it is famous for its role in mobilizing in January 1958 to
overthrow a Venezuelan military dictator on the date that gave the
barrio its name.
These days, it is home to an active local branch, or battalion, of the
United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV, according to its Spanish
initials). On a rainy mid-November evening, activists gathered to
distribute copies of the proposed reform by going door to door.
Of the 30 or so people who turned out--all but four of them women--just
two had prior political experience in Ch!vezs original political
party, the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR). Only one--Rosaida
Hern!ndez--is an experienced politico, having served as a functionary
of the Fifth Republic Movement and won election to Caracas municipal
council.
More typical was Iraima Daz, a neighborhood resident in her 30s who
had long sup****ted Ch!vez and benefited from his governments social
programs, but hadnt been politically active. I got involved to solve
the problems of my community, she said.
Another activist, Lz Estella, a social worker whose father lives in
the area, also became active recently, fed up with the opposition media
and wanting to get involved.
Now Daz and Estella find themselves members of Ch!vezs own PSUV
battalion--the president often turns up at the weekly Saturday meetings
held at the military museum in the neighborhood.
The facility also serves as a place for enrollment in government
missions--national social welfare programs initiated by Ch!vez in
2003, which evolved from offering free medical care to literacy and
education programs, subsidized grocery stores and a great deal more,
thanks to revenues from oil ex****ts and some of the fastest economic
growth rates in the world.
Despite its well-known member and proximity to local missions, the 23
de Enero PSUV battalion faces a challenges common to its counterparts
across the country--how to mobilize the 5.7 million people who have
registered for the party since it was formed earlier this year through
a merger of parties of Ch!vezs governing coalition.
Nevertheless, as the group, singing campaign songs, made its way
through the narrow streets on steep hillsides of the barrio, people
came to their windows to take copies of the reform and discuss it
briefly--an elderly man alone in his small apartment; a young woman of
African descent breastfeeding an infant; the proprietor of a tiny store
situated in what was once a living room, with a window facing the
street; a group of young men in their 20s gathered outside a small
restaurant.
THE IMPACT of Ch!vezs reforms is visible on the streets of 23 de Enero
and other barrios--people are better fed and better dressed.
As is often the case in Venezuela, the political direction in the
barrios is the opposite Caracas well-off neighborhoods and the
suburbs, where the upper middle class and the wealthy live in luxurious
gated communities and drive Hummers and Land Rovers.
As opposition to Ch!vezs reforms sharpened--first with protests by
largely middle-class college students; then the defection of a longtime
Ch!vez ally, former army chief of staff and defense minister Ral
Baduel--the mass of Ch!vez sup****ters began to mobilize.
Nevertheless, the opposition, tainted by the coup of 2002 and the
subsequent lockout of oil workers by industry bosses, has been able to
refresh its image.
Key to this was the student mobilization last summer over the
governments refusal to renew the broadcast license of the privately
owned, opposition-controlled RCTV channel.
Wrongly ****trayed in the Western media as a closure of a media
outlet, the decision was made as the result of RCTVs active role in
sup****ting the coup. Nevertheless, the governments refusal to renew
the channels broadcast license gave Venezuelas right the op****tunity
to claim the mantle of democracy, a theme it has continued in
protests aimed at forcing a delay in the vote for constitutional reform.
Significantly, the student protests took shape as a national social
movement, led mainly by middle class and wealthy students who
predominate at Venezuelas elite universities, such as the UCV in
Caracas.
While ****traying themselves as nonviolent in the face of allegedly
armed Chavista students--two students were wounded on the UCV campus
November 7--the opposition student protests have often turned violent.
The U.S. media focused on the supposed gunplay of Chavista students,
but it was the right-wing protesters who besieged pro-Ch!vez students
in UCVs law and social work schools, physically destroying both.
Still, the student protesters have carried the day politically on
campus, with the opposition winning a re****ted 91 percent of votes in
student government elections soon afterward.
The opposition got another boost when it was joined by Baduel, the
former general and defense minister.
A key figure in preventing the 2002 military attempt to oust Ch!vez,
Baduel has used the word coup to describe the impact of Ch!vezs
proposed constitutional changes.
While Baduels impact on the reform vote is probably limited, his turn
may point to something more serious--concern among senior military
brass over a constitutional reform that would reorganize and centralize
the armed forces and give the president authority to promote all
officers, not just top generals.
Already, Ch!vez has dropped a call to convert the reserves into
Bolivarian Popular Militias to sup****t the regular armed forces,
presenting it in the constitutional reforms instead as a National
Bolivarian Militia.
IN ANY case, the retooled opposition presents a new challenge for
activists of the Bolivarian revolution--named for the 19th century
anti-colonial leader.
In the past, Ch!vez could mobilize his base among the poor on clear-cut
issues--protesting the right-wing coup attempt of April 2002, voting to
keep him in office in the recall election of 2004, re-electing him as
president a year ago.
The constitutional reforms, however, are more complicated and
controversial within the Ch!vez camp itself.
At issue is the balance between the creation of communal councils to
enhance what Ch!vez calls popular power, and measures that would
strengthen the powers of the presidency and the central state in
several respects.
These include the removal of presidential term limits and lengthening
the term from six to seven years; the ability to appoint an
unrestricted number of secondary vice presidents; the authority to
determine boundaries of proposed communal cities of municipalities
and states; and control over the use of foreign currency reserves with
no constitutional limits.
The right to recall the president still exists, but the number of
signatures required to trigger a vote would increase from 20 percent to
30 percent of eligible voters.
Other constitutional measures debated on the left would give the
president and National Assembly the ability to impose states of
emergency in which the right to information is waived--probably a
response to the private medias complicity in the 2002 coup. The
National Assembly would also gain the right to remove Supreme Court
judges and election officials through a simple majority vote.
These changes hardly amount to the Ch!vez dictator****p conjured up in
the mainstream media, and the Venezuelan constitution would remain more
democratic in many respects than the U.S. Constitution, a relic of the
18th century.
The question, however, is whether the constitution promotes a
transition to popular power and socialism, as Ch!vez would have it.
Essentially, the reforms reflect the contradiction at the heart of
Ch!vezs project--an effort to initiate revolutionary change from above.
The expansion of communal councils and creation of workers councils are
seen by grassroots Chavista activists as a legitimate effort to anchor
the revolutionary process at the grassroots.
However, the additional powers for the presidency and the
reorganization of the armed forces highlight the fact that Ch!vez
apparently sees the presidency--and the centralized state--as the
guardian of the revolution.
Tellingly, it is the military, the most rigidly hierarchical
institution in society, which is to protect the newly decentralized
democracy, while remaining aloof from such changes internally.
Ch!vezs effort to combine what he calls an explosion of popular
power with greater centralism may reflect his military past. But if
the government is able to ****tray itself as creating motors of
revolutionary change, its because grassroots organizations, social
movements and organized labor have so far failed to create sizeable
organizations of their own.
While there is no doubt of Ch!vezs popularity, particularly among the
poor, their role thus far has been to defend Ch!vez from the right
during the coup and lockout, and turning out for elections. The
constitutional reforms, along with the creation of the PSUV at Ch!vezs
initiative, are intended to close the gap between these periodic mass
mobilizations and the lack of day-to-day organization.
To consolidate this base, the proposed constitutional reforms offer
further social gains. For example, virtually unmentioned in U.S. media
accounts is the fact that the reforms would provide, for the first
time, social security benefits to the 50 percent of Venezuelan workers
who toil in the informal sector as street vendors, taxi drivers and the
like. The workweek would be limited to 36 hours.
There are other advances as well, including the consolidation of land
reform, outlawing discrimination based on gender and ***ual
orientation, lowering the voting age from 18 to 16, guaranteed free
university education, gender parity in politics and political parties,
public financing of political campaigns, recognition of Venezuelans of
African descent, and more.
Critics on the right claim these measures constitute a bribe to the
mass of Venezuelans--handouts in exchange for political sup****t, a
version of the traditional clientleism used Latin American populists
such as Argentinas Juan Pern.
In fact, Pern and other 20th century populists went far beyond Ch!vez
in terms of nationalizing industries--Venezuelas oil company, PDVSA,
has been government owned since the 1970s, and the recent state
takeover of the telecommunications and electrical power companies are
renationalizations.
But the Ch!vez project aims at a more thoroughgoing social
transformation than populists of the past. The aim is to build what
Ch!vez calls socialism of the 21st century by trying to bypass the
capitalist state with new structures and enshrining new forms of
social, public and mixed property to promote endogenous
economic development--that is, growth not dependent on the oil economy.
These efforts are, in turn, supposed to mesh with communes created by
communal councils--which, under the proposed constitutional changes,
will receive at least 5 percent of the national budget to manage local
affairs. The text of the reform proposal explains: The state will
foment and develop different forms of production and economic units of
social property, from direct or communal-controlled, to indirect or
state-controlled, as well as productive economic units for social
production and/or distribution.
Moreover, the proposed reform on popular power also calls for the
creation of councils for workers, students, farmers, craftspeople,
fishermen and -women, s****ts participants, youth, the elderly, women,
disabled people and others.
This new geometry of power, as Ch!vez calls it, is apparently
designed to engineer social change while avoiding direct confrontation
with big business, whose property rights are in fact safeguarded in the
constitutional reforms. As Ch!vez himself said last summer, We have no
plan to eliminate the oligarchy, Venezuelas bourgeoisie.
Funds for social reforms have so far come from state oil revenues,
rather than any transfer of wealth through higher taxes, and the
nationalization of companies has been achieved by paying market price
for stock market shares.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE QUESTION on the Venezuelan left is whether all this amounts to a
transition to socialism, as Ch!vez and his sup****ters would have it.
For Orlando Chirino, a national coordinator of the National Union of
Workers (UNT) labor federation, Ch!vezs reforms herald the
Stalinization of the state and state control of the labor movement
along the lines of the Cuban CTC labor federation, he said in an
interview.
Chirino, a key leader of the C-CURA class-struggle current of the
factionalized UNT, is among the most prominent figures on the left to
oppose the reforms. He made waves on the left when he granted an
interview with a leading opposition newspaper and appeared on the
platform with leaders of the CTV, the corrupt old trade union
federation implicated in the 2002 coup.
Today Chirino, along with an oil workers union official, Jos(c) Bodas, is
a founder of a new group calling for an independent workers party.
Chirinos and Bodas opposition to the reforms put them at odds with
the majority of UNT national coordinators and organizers in C-CURA,
such as Ramn Arias, general secretary of the public sector workers
union federation, FENTRASEP. Arias is a sup****ter of the Marea
class-struggle current of trade unionists in the PSUV, which calls for
purging of employers, bureaucrats and corrupt elements in the new party.
Despite some criticisms of the centralizing aspects of the
constitutional reform, including the new provisions for states of
emergency, the Marea current has joined the majority of the Venezuelan
left in calling for a yes vote to achieve social gains and defeat the
opposition.
Arias and his C-CURA allies are already at loggerheads with prominent
members of the PSUV, including Oswaldo Vera, a member of the National
Assembly and leader of the Bolivarian Socialist Labor Front (FSBT), a
faction of the UNT that also controls the ministry of labor.
The labor ministry refuses to negotiate a contract with
FENTRASEP--which covers 1 million workers--because, it says, there is a
dispute over union elections. As a result, many public sector employees
are among the 73 percent of Venezuelan workers who earn the minimum
wage--which, although the highest in Latin America, is still low in
relation to the soaring prices caused by Venezuelas rapid economic
growth, to say nothing of enduring economic inequality.
Arias and other FENTRASEP leaders say that public sector workers are
casualties of a larger factional struggle between the FSBT and C-CURA.
This in turn is part of an internecine conflict that has prevented the
wider UNT labor federation from holding a proper congress since it
adopted a provisional structure at its founding event in 2003.
Now, C-CURA, the largest grouping in the UNT, is itself split over the
PSUV and constitutional reform, which means organized labors voice is
barely heard in the political debates of the day.
This sets the stage for a battle over the workers councils to be
formed in the future, in which both factions of C-CURA expect to
contend with an effort by the FSBT to exert control over the labor
movement.
On the political terrain, the C-CURA activists of the Marea current
inside the PSUV aim to make alliances with others on the left who have
succeeded in being elected as spokespeople and delegates to the
founding conference.
With the PSUV founding conference still in the future--it has been
postponed repeatedly--it isnt clear if, or how, such groupings will
exist within the party, which already has a provisional disciplinary
committee that re****tedly expelled a prominent Chavista (the
commissioners subsequently denied that this was the case).
Certainly the PSUV is a highly contradictory formation, and includes
key members of the government apparatus and local elected officials who
are unpopular among grassroots Chavistas. Mareas slogan calls for a
PSUV without bosses, bureaucrats and corrupt elements.
Whether the far left will be able to operate openly, be expelled or
decide to leave to organize openly are open questions.
In any case, stormy weather is ahead, said Stalin P(c)rez Borges, a UNT
national coordinator and sup****ter of the Marea current. Political
polarization and class conflict, ameliorated in recent years by rapid
economic growth, are unavoidable, he said.
The constitutional reform marks Ch!vezs consolidation of power, so
the oligarchy cant just wait for him to go, he said. Ch!vez wants to
discipline and control the bourgeoisie. But they want to be in control
themselves.
*
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