Chavez leaves an unfinished revolution

The death of Hugo Chavez at the age of only 58 has robbed Venezuelans of a president who was the first political leader in the country’s history to use oil revenues to fund social programmes.

His fourth election victory in a row last autumn was achieved on a turnout of 81% of the 19 million Venezuelans registered to vote, which is in stark contrast to falling turnouts in Britain. Chavez was a real hate figure not only for the right everywhere, but also for the liberal press in Britain.  

The Independent claimed that Chavez bribed people to vote for him by “spending heavily on public housing and bankrolling expanded social programmes”. Apparently, during the first quarter of 2012, the construction sector expanded by nearly 30% compared with the same three months of 2011.

Sitting here in the UK where Osborne is about to announce another package of deep spending cuts, you have to say: “Why can’t we have such bribes – we have oil and gas reserves too.”

Venezuela has the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, and the corporations have been greedily eyeing this prize for years and hate Chavez for keeping it from them. Because of limited access to expertise, it has proved hard for the Venezuelan state oil corporation to improve oil facilities and infrastructure. The explosion at the Amuay refinery last August in which 42 people were killed underlined this.

It has not even begun exploiting its gas reserves, and with refining capacity limited, this energy-rich country struggles to ensure power supplies and affordable energy. Petrol prices are extremely low but only because of a state subsidy.

To afford extensive social programmes and universal health and welfare benefits, the MVR government pushed to all sorts of fixes and deals. It has had $42bn in loans from China over the last five years. Of the 640,000 barrels of oil a day that Venezuela exports to China, 200,000 of them service this debt.  

Chavez’s manoeuvring, however, made him an apologist for reactionaries like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Vladimir Putin of Russia, party because those countries will make oil deals with Venezuela without demanding entry into the unregulated global market.

Venezuela is not immune to the problems of bureaucracy that afflict all attempts to build socialism centred not on popular ownership but on state control. Inflation is high and rising, and many state-owned industries are inefficient and corrupt.

But Venezuela is not some Stalinist state whatever liberal critics claim. The constitution has been reformed and there are popular committees with a real say. A recent poll showed that half the population of Venezuela agrees with the idea of building a socialist country, against 29% who opposed it.

Since Chavez became president in 1999, income inequality in Venezuela has been declining, and it has the fairest income distribution in Latin America. Government expenditure has risen 30% in real terms in the last year, whilst GDP increased by 5.4%.

Chavez has tried to follow a path that avoids putting the global corporations in control of his country’s assets, and to use them, however imperfectly, to improve life for the people.

That made him a thorn in the side not only of the right, but of so-called liberal media who hate trade unions, mock socialism, despise universal benefits and continually tell us such things are hopelessly out of date and unattainable.

Chavez formed an alliance with leaders of other supporters of his Bolivarian Revolution project, notably Evo Morales of Bolivia and the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa. His anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal stance won him respect from people throughout the region.

As academic and author Oscar Guardiola-Rivera wrote today: “Like Bolívar, Chavez swore to break the chains binding Latin Americans to the will of the mighty. Within his lifetime, the ties of dependency and indirect empire have loosened. From the river Plate to the mouths of the Orinoco river, Latin America is no longer somebody else's backyard. That project of liberation has involved thousands of men and women pitched into one dramatic battle after another, like the coup d'état in 2002 or the confrontation with the US-proposed Free Trade Zone of the Americas. These were won, others were lost.”

With the death of Chavez, who was once a tank commander who tried to seize power in a coup, the Venezuela’s immediate future is full of dangers and pitfalls. Washington will pitch in resources – mostly covertly – to support the right-wing candidate in the forthcoming presidential election. The White House’s hatred for Chavez stretched to the point where president Obama’s statement did not even offer formal condolences to the dead leader’s family. Even William Hague, the British foreign secretary, managed that minimum of decent behaviour.

For all the dramatic changes in Venezuela under Chavez, the state remains capitalist and the army a powerful force. Big business is waiting for an opportunity to seize the revenues that have been redirected to the people in the form of social programmes. Chavez’s legacy is that he launched a revolutionary process with all its flaws and contradictions, one that on his death remains incomplete.

A World to Win editors

See also:

State and revolution in Venezuela  

Chavez and the struggle for power in Venezuela  

Revolutionary Doctors
  

Venezuelans choose Chavez over the corporations

Hugo Chavez’s fourth election victory in a row was achieved on a turnout of 81% of the 19 million Venezuelans registered to vote, which is in stark contrast to falling turnouts in Britain and the upcoming US presidential election in which 50% may stay at home.

Chavez is a real hate figure not only for the right everywhere, but also for the liberal press in Britain. The Guardian has been predicting his imminent demise at every election since the first and published dire predictions of violence if there was a close result – all proved 100% wrong!

The Independent reports claims that Chavez bribed people to vote for him by “spending heavily on public housing and bankrolling expanded social programmes”. Apparently, during the first quarter of 2012, the construction sector expanded by nearly 30% compared with the same three months of 2011.

Sitting here in the UK where Osborne is about to announce another £12bn of cuts, you have to say: “Why can’t we have such bribes – we have oil and gas reserves too.”

Well, now I’ll do a bit of Independent/Guardian style speculative reporting. Whilst Henrique Capriles, a right-wing businessman, presented himself as left of centre and insisted he would not privatise oil and halt the social programmes, I say he would have!

He would have stopped the oil-for-loans programmes, abandoned existing contracts and brought in the big corporations like BP and Shell. He would have turned the 100,000 state oil corporation workforce over to them to deal with as they saw fit. He would have given them access to unlimited profits, in return for small percentage payments to his government and big bribes to his friends. Just as well he didn’t win and have the chance to prove me right.

Venezuela has the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, and the corporations have been greedily eyeing this prize for years and hate Chavez for keeping it from them. Because of limited access to expertise, it has proved hard for the Venezuelan state oil corporation to improve oil facilities and infrastructure. The explosion at the Amuay refinery in August in which 42 people were killed underlined this.

It has not even begun exploiting its gas reserves, and with refining capacity limited, this energy-rich country struggles to ensure power supplies and affordable energy. Petrol prices are extremely low but only because of a state subsidy.

To afford extensive social programmes and universal health and welfare benefits, the MVR government has been pushed to all sorts of fixes and deals. It has had $42bn in loans from China over the last five years. Of the 640,000 barrels of oil a day that Venezuela exports to China, 200,000 of them service this debt.  

Chavez’s manoeuvring has, however, made him an apologist for reactionaries like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Vladimir Putin of Russia, party because those countries will make oil deals with Venezuela without demanding entry into the unregulated global market.

Venezuela is not immune to the problems of bureaucracy that afflict all attempts to build socialism centred not on popular ownership but on state control. Inflation is high and rising, and many state-owned industries are inefficient and corrupt.

But Venezuela is not some Stalinist state whatever liberal critics claim. The constitution has been reformed and there are popular committees with a real say. A recent poll showed that half the population of Venezuela agrees with the idea of building a socialist country, against 29% who opposed it.

Since Chavez became president in 1999, income inequality in Venezuela has been declining, and it has the fairest income distribution in Latin America. Government expenditure has risen 30% in real terms in the last year, whilst GDP increased by 5.4%.

Chavez has tried to follow a path that avoids putting the global corporations in control of his country’s assets, and to use them, however imperfectly, to improve life for the people.

That makes him a thorn in the side not only of the right, but of so-called liberal media who hate trade unions, mock socialism, despise universal benefits and continually tell us such things are hopelessly out of date and unattainable.

Penny Cole

One solution - one secular state

Outrage and shock is growing around the world as the Israeli war on Gaza takes its toll on a defenceless civilian population. The slaughter of women and children at a United Nations school compound yesterday prompted Venezuela to expel diplomatic staff from the country and angry demonstrations are taking place in many countries against the US-backed attacks.

The atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli military are war crimes on a large scale. Of that there is no doubt. John Ging, head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) in Gaza says bluntly that Palestinians are being terrorised, adding: “There is no place safe in Gaza for ordinary people. One million are without electricity, 750,000 have no water, hospitals are overwhelmed, with heroic staff working around the clock.”

He confirmed that UNWRA had provided the Israeli military with the exact GPS co-ordinates of all UN facilities, which are clearly marked with UN flags, brightly lit at night. In fact the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) spokesman did not deny knowing it was a UN facility, simply claiming that Hamas was using the building to launch rockets. Yet another lie to justify the latest atrocity.

As politicians and diplomats at the UN try to patch together a ceasefire/truce, we might ask: what does Israel actually seek to achieve with this ferocious assault on people, most of whom are defenceless civilians? The IDF claims that it plans to root out Hamas fighters who are launching puny rockets at southern Israel. But despite its vastly superior firepower – and the powerful backing of the US - it can never achieve a lasting victory, as some military experts are already noting.

More and more observers are increasingly seeing the Gaza offensive as “tragic and self-defeating”. Michael Clarke of the Royal United Services Institute, questions whether the Israeli defence chiefs are pursuing the correct overall strategy. "In terms of day-to-day tactics they [Israeli defence chiefs] know what they are doing, but it's not clear they know what the strategic goal of this operation really is," he says. "You can't go into a territory like this and eradicate Hamas in any meaningful sense.”

Veteran observers like Robert Fisk are noting what should be crystal clear to all but the most blinkered. The latest bloodbath perpetrated by Israeli forces is stoking up more hatred against what is seen as “The West” around the Arab and Muslim world. The question is: does the United States and the rest really give a damn? After all, they need some reason to carry on with their “war on terror”.

In fact, the rise of Hamas, much like the Taleban, is a case of the big-power sorcerers’ apprentice. As Stephen Zunes has pointed out,“if it were not for misguided Israeli and American policies, Hamas would not be in control of the territory in the first place”. He explains how Israel initially encouraged the rise of the Palestinian Islamist movement as a counter to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the secular coalition composed of Fatah and various leftist and nationalist movements.

After Israel cut off negotiations with the Palestinians in 2001 and carried out a devastating military offensive as well as undermining the Palestinian economy, support for Hamas grew from 15 percent in 1993 to 44% of the vote in the January 2006 elections. Hamas was seen as the only force opposing Israeli occupation.

No wonder that the Middle East peace process is getting nowhere. It is not intended to. The present crisis makes the campaign for a unified secular state that guarantees rights and freedoms to Palestinians and Jews alike the only viable long-term solution. So Hugo Chavez’s call to the people of Israel to deal with their leaders, who launched the offensive in no small part to get themselves re-elected, is not a pipe-dream but a realistic proposal.

Corinna Lotz

AWTW secretary