Ten years after coup, Venezuela vigilant despite gains

An abridged version of this article was published in Green Left Weekly:

Ten years after coup, Venezuela vigilant despite gains

Sunday, April 22, 2012

By Owen Richards

“April 13, the great day of victory ten years ago, opened the way to the independence and unity of our Latin America and the Caribbean … We showed that a people united will never be defeated”, said Venezuela’s socialist president Hugo Chavez from the “People’s Balcony” of Miraflores Palace, during a commemoration of the April 13 revolution that toppled a short-lived business-military coup that aimed to crush the Chavez presidency.

March commemorating April 13 revolution.

The coup attempt was in response to Chavez’ pro-poor policies. Specifically, the capitalists were desperate to stop Chavez getting hold of the state oil company – and the largest corporation in Latin America – Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), and putting its revenues at the service of the poor. They kidnapped Chavez and held him hostage. However, mass uprising of the poor and working class, along with the bulk of the military defeated the coup attempt within 48 hours and restored Chavez to the presidency.

Since 2002, the revolution has been able to advance thanks largely to the new balance of forces the revolution brought about. However, the process still faces a number of serious threats. Coming up to the presidential elections of October 7, the next few months will be especially dangerous. During Chavez’s speech, he called for the revolutionary forces to “be alert in all these days and months to come”, and announced the creation of a “special anti-coup plan” that involves the formation of a “special civic-military command” to defend against any threat.

The threat of the opposition carrying out extra-parliamentary violence, sabotage or subterfuge continues to rise as the election date approaches and polls continue to show the extreme unlikelihood of the opposition presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, defeating Chavez at the ballot box.

Carlos Sanchez of North American Opinion Research (NAOR) said “we see the victory of Hugo Chavez on October 7 as an irreversible tendency”. Sanchez was referring to the findings of recent NAOR research that found Chavez has 60% backing, while his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) has 56% support of the electorate. Meanwhile, Chavez’s opponent Capriles Radonski has a rejection level of 57%.

On the electoral front, battle lines are beginning to be drawn, with the revolution’s social missions taking center stage. An election strategy document drawn up by the opposition reveals the opposition’s bind: “What is the dilemma we confront? In accord with surveys of popular opinion, if the people think we’re going to abandon the missions, we run the risk of losing a very important number of votes, but at the same time, if we try to remedy the former problem by championing the missions without an original, critical position toward them, many people will conclude that it’s best to stick with the missions’ original father (Chavez)”.

The massive popularity of the missions owes itself to their immense achievements. To date, for example, 1,482,543 people have achieved literacy via Mission Robinson; 1,400,000 people have had vision restored through Mission Miracle; and more than 745,000,000 people have accessed public health through the Within the Barrio mission.

Capriles Radonski’s opposition has begun labeling the missions as organizations of “political blackmail”, while on the other hand proposing to introduce a law that will “give a legal status to the missions”. This contradictory position is not likely to gain much traction with Venezuelan voters, as it is common knowledge that the opposition has long attacked the missions, and vehemently opposed president Chavez’s 2007 attempt to institutionalize them - just as they are now calling for five years later.

In the heightened political atmosphere of the looming elections, the revolutionary forces have continued to mobilize. The PSUV has continued its nation-wide door knocking campaign, meeting face to face with 1,750,120 Venezuelans. President Chavez tweeted on Thursday, “Let’s go, everyone united under the direction of the Command of the National Carabobo Campaign … Everyone together! To the streets!

[Owen Richards maintains the blog Venezuela: translating the revolution.]

Socialism and voluntary labour

The following is an article from the Socialist Debate website about the role of voluntary labour in Venezuela's housing construction program, Mision Vivienda, launched in April this year to address the shortage of housing in Venezuela. It discusses the significance of voluntary labour in the transition to socialism.

Welcome socialism

By Neftali Reyes, Debate socialista 

Translated by Owen Richards 

Practice has had the last word: this process is headed for socialism. The facts have already appeared on the social horizon. Reality has outstripped the Byzantine discussions of the philosophical pretenders who deny our socialism. They have their refutation from within the bowels of life itself.

An historic event has occurred in Venezuela: the oil workers were summoned to Voluntary Collective Labour in Mision Vivienda and arrived en masse. And the number exceeded fifteen thousand.

Voluntary Labour, where the worker goes off to work motivated by altruism, and committed to the society to which they belong and in which they feel wanted, is giving labour a new meaning: it is liberating it, experimenting with it, and prefiguring free labour. It is now done without the compulsion of survival.

Voluntary Labour is the “sharp tool” that must be used to build Socialism. It radiates to all of society the new ethics of the loving relations, and through it the working class leads the revolutionary process.

The massive surge of oil workers to Voluntary Labour means that the conditions for the flourishing of socialism exist in Venezuela.  It’s indicative of the class struggle that socialism unleashes on the old world, against capitalism, a system that hangs on in a thousand ways. It unequivocally indicates that the Socialist battle takes place here in our midst, even though we sometimes misunderstand it.

Without a doubt, the Bolivarian Revolution has created conditions to build socialism as never before in our history. Socialism can arise in Venezuela because it expands and reinforces the state-administered Social Property. This form of property enables the fruits of labour to be the property of society as a whole, constituting itself thus as the basis of the Consciousness of Social Duty.

The workers become more and more aware of their power and their historical role, a role that goes beyond merely making demands; they’re committed to showing the way to the new world. This is the material basis for the advance of the process.

Furthermore, the government, political power, is in the hands of the Revolution, embodied in president Chavez. The call to socialism, to anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism that came down from the high command, unleashed the contradictions that generate movement and make the way toward socialism possible.

After years of struggle, favorable factors converge: Social Property administered by the state; a working class that is conscious of it historical role; Popular Power lead by Chavez – the most important Venezuelan revolutionary of the last hundred years in loving harmony with the masses; the Housing Mission as the auspicious setting for demonstrating the power of voluntary labour.

Centuries of hope, hope in the possibility of greatness, hope that we can defeat the deadening mediocrity, finds its concretion here. We are privileged: socialism is almost within our reach.

There’s no excuse to get lost in shortcuts or to use blunt instruments. We must have faith, break with custom, and follow the example set by the oil workers.

This is Socialism. Now we must pass beyond adversities, deepening socialism, nurturing it and extending it.

The country needed its best sons, and more than fifteen thousand patriots from within the heart of the oil industry stepped forward. The march to Socialism, which is the attempt to build a viable society, needed real action to demonstrate that humanity is able to surpass egoistic behaviour and to wholeheartedly build that other world that the Liberator dreamed of. The oil workers stepped forward and said, “present”.

Now they are the example and the promise, showing the way, they are the evidence that Socialism is more than a utopia; it’s a reality that’s taking shape before our very eyes.

They were called to Voluntary Collective Labour, invited to give of themselves to the Mision Vivienda, they gave themselves to society, to its Revolutionary Government, generously offering their most valuable possession: their labour power. And they came, without asking for explanations, and without hesitating, more than fifteen thousand good souls with a will to commit themselves to the future.

This act, which not by chance passes almost unnoticed, is one of the most important things that have taken place in the Bolivarian Revolution, placing it in a new dimension on the path.

Labour, always appropriated by the ruling classes, acquires with the gesture of these oil workers the condition of being an instrument of liberation, it’s the harbinger of a new world where exploitation - which is nothing but the appropriation of social labour on behalf of a minority - is overcome through the establishment of loving relations for the benefit of all.

What took place in Mision Vivienda with the Voluntary Collective Labour foreshadows the emancipation of labour, when labour will belong to society, to everyone.

The material and social foundations upon which to build a society where “to each according to his ability, to each according to his need” are established. In that world, exploitation, the appropriation of labour, robbery, will no longer be possible. It will no longer make sense. That is True Socialism.

Beyond the will of its protagonists, Mision Vivienda exposes the Revolution’s basic contradiction: the confrontation between capitalism and Socialism.

The capitalists, the anti-social, put a high price on their “collaboration”, they expect payment in cash, and, most harmfully, they do so with an egoistic consciousness.

Voluntary Labour is a socialist tool. It approaches the problem of housing with moral and spiritual vigour. By the end, we will have housing, but more importantly, we will have a conscious mass, a mass able to understand and confront the challenges along the road to Socialism. They will be a symbol of that which we struggle for.  And an active, conscious vanguard will have formed, that has proved its effectiveness, its loyalty to Comandante Chavez, willing to step forward when called upon.

The challenge of the oil workers is great: now they have the responsibility to show the way, to guide the rest of society in the building of Socialism.

Let the gesture that these pioneers made be known throughout the country and around the world. Let their selflessness and their understanding of the historic moment be known.

The spirit of our nation’s heroes, of the Paso de Los Andes, of Carabobo, is embodied in this gesture of the workers. They are a prelude, a good omen of the successes we will have in the coming battles.

May society reward them, returning love for the love that they gave to all of humanity.

[For more information on Mision Vivienda, see: Venezuelanalysis.com]

End capitalism and build socialism

The following is part 3 of the PSUV Red Book's 'Declaration of Principles'.

3. End capitalism and build socialism to end poverty and establish social justice

From social inclusion to the construction of Bolivarian socialism

Translated by Owen Richards

To fight and end poverty and misery in all its manifestations - abandonment, marginalisation and exclusion - is another priority inseparable from the aforementioned: without ending exploitation, the polarisation or concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and the growth of poverty beyond anything ever known before in history, war will be inevitable.

World history, and especially the Venezuelan experience, show that capitalism, in the era of imperialist crisis, in its irrational metamorphoses, in its daily growth, far from ending poverty, demonstrates to the world that to stop imperialism and build socialism - the people taking power and transforming the capitalist mode of production- is the only way out, the only rational, necessary and possible goal at this crossroads of humanity.

The socialist party should be the true guide and unifier of the class and exploited sectors in the battle to definitively liberate the Homeland from extreme poverty, backwardness, and dependence; it should be the driver of social consciousness and of the historic changes, the promoter of social, moral and economic justice.  Education in socialist ideological consciousness for all the population will enable the defeat poverty.

The party should commit itself to struggling against injustice and exclusion, to promoting new forms of organization and social policies that improve the standard of living and guarantee the greatest sum of happiness possible.  To promote a sense of belonging, respect, equality and dignity, criticism and self criticism, to combat all the threats that confront the revolution by the fourth generation war (developed by the capitalist means of communication), bearing in mind the revolutionary socialist and anti-imperialist character of the process, avoiding cultural imitation, supporting everything that unites exercising social control over governors and public functionaries, especially those who are members of the party.

Mission Robinson adult literacy program

At the moment, we can affirm that during the years of the revolutionary Bolivarian government, the priority has been given to social inclusion, which has required massive, rapid responses; resulting in the birth of the missions as a strategy to flout the bureaucratic and slothful structure of the inherited bourgeois state, using oil profits as a source of financing. we can demonstarte the advances in social inclusion, the social indicators are there in education, health, nutrition and access to fundamental human rights.  The eradication of illiteracy, generalisation of the right to education, having the highest level of growth in higher education graduates in Latin America, the increase in the percentage of the population with access to clean water, in the recycling of waste water; the growth in the percentage of the population with access to medical attention and medicine, the reduction of malnutrition and infant mortality, are some of the achievements that have allowed us to reach some of the millennium goals before the set time (2015).  Also, we have leapt above the mean level on the Human Development Index (IDH) to a high IDH, and according to a report by CEPAL [the Economic Commission For Latin America And The Caribbean], Venezuela is today the country with the least inequality in Latin America.  All this, thanks to the enormous efforts in social inclusion made by the revolutionary Bolivarian government, led by our Comandante Hugo Chavez.

Recognizing the Bolivarian revolution's advances and achievements in social inclusion, it becomes necessary to leap to a new stage of the process: to build Bolivarian socialism.  This requires deepening the structural and strategic changes.  We need to build as an alternative to the model of capital accumulation - that generator of poverty and social exclusion - a sustainable model.  Our Comandante Hugo Chavez has called it Bolivarian socialism, based on the grand outlines and principles of socialism applied to the concrete historical and cultural reality of today's Venezuela, a socialism that must, above all, be built with the participation and active leadership of the people.

The Bolivarian revolution recognizes the historic role that women have played throughout our history in general, and in particular in the revolutionary process, and for that reason promotes public policies that guarantee gender equity.  The party rejects any kind of discrimination towards women and does not permit their use as sexual objects or commodities.