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
  

High stakes for Bolivia's Mother Earth Ministry

The discovery of vast new natural gas deposits in Bolivia’s Chaco region raises the political stakes in the country just as it is about to form a Ministry of Mother Earth to give nature legal rights. Bolivia’s new law seeks to guarantee the right to life and regeneration, biodiversity, water, clean air, balance and restoration.

President Evo Morales announced yesterday that the reserves found by French energy giant Total in the Aquio field raise the country’s overall gas potential by 30% to 13 trillion cubic metres. Gas is Bolivia’s most valuable commodity and its chief export, bringing in over $1 billion over the last year.

The finding comes at a crucial time for Morales and his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party. The party, whose full name is Movement for Socialism-Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples, has been in power since 2006. Morales’ second term of office, despite a massive majority in the 2009 general election, has proved much more difficult than foreseen, as Adrian Pearce, editor of a new book about Bolivia told an audience at London University’s Senate House last night.

Latin American researchers from London and Oxford universities, joined by Dr Pilar Domingo from the Overseas Development Institute, analysed the complex tensions running through the small, poor but highly revolutionary Latin American country. James Dunkerley, author of Bolivia and the Power of History in the Present, read out choice quotes published by Wikipedia, showing US state hostility to the Morales government.

Adrian Pearce outlined the demographic factors behind the rise of MAS in what remains one of the poorest countries of Latin America. Recent years have seen population growth, increasing mobility in rural areas, improvements in education and health, and a rising tide of Mestizo (people of mixed cultural descent) and indigenous nationalism.

Morales’ popularity has rested on the relationship between MAS and the powerful social movements in Bolivia which include the peasant unions, indigenous organisations and the landless movement allied to co-operative miners and neighbourhood organisations, manufacturing workers, teachers’ and pensioners’ unions. Recent reforms have reduced the influence of these movements on the party as it has made deals with global corporations to exploit mineral and gas rights.

The MAS party’s massive electoral majority in the last elections had raised extremely high expectations which turned to shock when vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera announced an 80% increase in petrol prices last December. In the past MAS has taken advantage of the economic factors to alleviate hardship and inequality, John Crabtree of Oxford university explained that opposition from social movements was growing to the government’s wages policy at a time of rising food price inflation.

The newly discovered gas reserves heighten the significance of the Mother Earth Law now being debated in the Bolivian parliament. A new Ministry of Mother Earth is to be formed, writes Nick Buxton of Just International:

“The law would give nature legal rights, specifically the rights to life and regeneration, biodiversity, water, clean air, balance, and restoration and… mandates a fundamental ecological reorientation of Bolivia's economy and society, requiring all existing and future laws to adapt to the Mother Earth law and accept the ecological limits set by nature… rather than the current focus on producing more goods and stimulating consumption.”

But, as Buxton writes, there is also strong awareness among Bolivia’s social movements that the existence of a new law will not suffice to prompt “real change in environmental practices”.

Raul Prada, advisor to the Unity Pact which unites the country’s social movements, has said, “Our ecological and social crisis is not just a problem for Bolivia or Ecuador: it is a problem for all of us”. He is absolutely right. The success of Bolivia’s heroic struggle for an ecologically and socially sustainable future depends not only on Morales and the MAS party, nor on the masses of Bolivia, but on the ending of corporate, capitalist dominion throughout the planet.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Cancún farce puts the world at risk

Government officials meeting in Cancún, Mexico, have begun what the annual round of delay and betrayal that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) has become.

There is absolutely no sign of any compromise between delegates representing nearly 200 countries on the key issues that led to Copenhagen’s failure last December.

"We will not be able to negotiate a new treaty in Cancún, that much is clear," host nation Mexico's chief delegate Fernando Tudela admits. The best he hopes for is to “dispel mistrust”, “end the standoff”, “achieve confidence, unity and effectiveness”.

In other words – good public relations and image-building but absolutely no commitment to reductions in carbon emissions. The only area where progress may be made is in throwing money at the governments of poorer nations, supposedly to offset and mitigate the impacts of climate change. So politicians and officials will be bribed, whilst ordinary people will pay the price.

All hope of achieving an agreement on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions at these, or any other talks, has now been abandoned. This was confirmed when Japan stated its outright opposition to extending the Kyoto protocol – the binding international emissions cuts treaty signed in 1992.

Bolivia’s UN Ambassador Pablo Solon, condemned proposals known as REDD+ that would set up a market-based system to pay poorer nations to protect tropical forests. "Now they want to put a value on nature ... this is what got us here in the first place," he said adding that rich nations were claiming to take part in negotiating a successor to Kyoto without ever having even lived up to their legal commitments under the existing treaty.

At the summit in Copenhagen last year, the rich nations hi-jacked the meeting and transformed the FCCC process from planning a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, to be instead a forum for implementing a market-driven increase in global temperatures by 2ºC. Such an increase will lead to:
 complete destruction of the world’s coral reefs
 26 million people displaced by rising sea levels, hurricanes and cyclones
 300 million people at risk of hunger due to failing crops
 2.8 billion people without access to clean water.
 Spread of diseases such as malaria and Dengue Fever to new areas
 Mass extinctions in the Arctic with only 42% of the Arctic tundra stable.
 Greenland ice cap melted
 Loss of the majority of the remaining major forests of China, Europe and America.

And as meteorologists have recently explained, temperatures are rising even faster than previously predicted, and a 4ºC increase is entirely on the cards in the case of capitalism being permitted to continue business as usual. That would mean:
 Sea levels rise swamping some island nations entirely and 70% of Bangladesh, Florida, Netherlands and the south of England
 40 million people round Shanghai and 60 million around Calcutta displaced
 Melting of the Siberian permafrost, releasing millions of tons of greenhouse gases and speeding up the warming process even further.

Bolivian President Evo Morales will attend the final week of the meeting, to promote the Cochabamba Accord on Mother Earth Rights, which stated that capitalism is the structural cause of climate change, and is inherently unsustainable.

He is quite right to do so, but perhaps he’s is doing it in the wrong place. NGOs and campaigners have launched a campaign calling for “ten thousand Cancúns”. That’s the last thing we need! Instead we want 10,000 people’s assemblies, in every country, challenging the right of undemocratic governments and global corporations to continue driving the eco-system to the tipping point where life on earth becomes unsustainable.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

The strange case of the Irish mercenary in Santa Cruz

Tensions in Bolivia are reaching a high point. Unrest has shut down the city of Potosi in the south-east while president Evo Morales has used a press conference to denounce the United States for fostering tensions in the region with bases in Colombia.

At the weekend, Morales announced that the Bolivian army would offer free military training to civilians. Unfortunately for the president, his own party members are amongst the 30 hunger strikers who are supporting a general strike and road-blocking protests which have been going on for over 10 days in Potosi. Governor Felix Gonzales, who is amongst the strikers, is a member of the ruling Movement towards Socialism (MAS) party. They want Morales to travel to the city to negotiate a solution.

The Potosi Civic Committee are angry about boundary disputes with a neighbouring province. They want infrastructure projects and the preservation of the iconic Cerro Rico mountain, which is in danger of collapse. The siege has cut off rail and air links and cut the city off from the rest of the world.

It focuses attention on the difficulties facing one of Latin America’s poorest countries, which has a population of only nine million. In 2002 Bolivia ranked 104th out of a total of 174 countries in human development according a UN report. Since his re-election last December with an increased majority Morales has been treading a precarious balancing act.

His MAS party has continued to mobilise the poor indigenous people of Bolivia who form 80% of the population. The World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in the Bolivian town of Cochabamba last April encouraged a mass, democratic approach to ecological and social problems. MAS has also sought to develop a “just state” in which, as vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera put it, “indigenous communities and mestizos are included in a unified way”.

In seeking to develop Bolivia’s rich mining resources, including the world’s largest deposit of lithium under the Uyuni salt flats which are in the Potosi region, the government decreed in 2008 that the state would take full control of lithium exploitation.

Since taking office in 2006, the MAS government has nationalised the country’s power industries, including gas and electricity. Naturally this has brought Bolivia into conflict with those defending the interests of the global power corporations and those who defend the old status quo.

The strange case of an Irish mercenary, Michael O’Dwyer, reveals that there are indeed sinister machinations going on. O’Dwyer and two other men were killed last April during a shoot out with Bolivian police in Santa Cruz. Bolivian authorities claimed that O’Dwyer and two other men were involved in a plot to kill President Morales during 2009.

An investigation by journalists working for Irish television company RTE indicated that O’Dwyer was recruited by a right-wing Hungarian terrorist who wanted to overturn the Morales government. Paul Murphy and Oonagh Smyth’s report said that O’Dwyer’s paymaster was the Irish security company IRMS.

Other reports suggest that Dwyer was among seven men who had travelled from Ireland to Bolivia, supposedly for a bodyguard course. At least six and possibly all seven of these men had worked for IRMS, the company that provides security for Shell's controversial pipeline in Erris in Ireland. Up to the point of the announcement of Dwyer's death the IRMS website advertised its "special services" as including "international armed and unarmed security."

Shell to Sea, whose campaigners have been nearly killed by IRMS security thugs, is opposing oil giant Shell’s pipeline through Ireland. Fishermen and environmental campaigners say that IRMS was financed “to the tune of millions of dollars beyond the capacity of local business interests to raise alone” and traced the money back to oil and gas companies.

Opposing the interests of the power corporations is a dangerous business. But in the battle of David versus Goliath, there is no doubt where our sympathies lie.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win Secretary

Carping critics reject Bolivia's struggle

By hosting the People’s World Conference on Climate Change, the Bolivian government offered much-needed leadership in opposition to the majority of the world’s corporate-sponsored governments.

The agreement on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth which emerged from the conference is a significant step forward in thinking and planning for the future of human society and nailing the real problems we face. It states:

“The corporations and governments of the so-called ‘developed’ countries, in complicity with a segment of the scientific community, have led us to discuss climate change as a problem limited to the rise in temperature without questioning the cause, which is the capitalist system.....

“The capitalist system has imposed on us a logic of competition, progress and limitless growth. This regime of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, and life itself.”

It was only a matter of days before critics of the document emerged, complaining that it doesn’t specifically attack the oil and gas corporations and that Bolivia itself has oil and gas. Some go further to criticise the Bolivian government for BEING a government, on the basis that all government is bad!

The government of Evo Morales did not come about by accident, but through a range of powerful social movements - against water privatisation, against the ban on coca production and against the oil and gas corporations. These had to find a political expression and the form that took was Morales' MAS party.

But for the critics, this is not enough. Bolivian oil must stay in the ground, whilst Exxon and BP carry on dirty business as usual. The renationalisation of Bolivian oil and gas is not enough. Rather the Bolivian state must abolish itself and hand over power to social movements for “bottom up government”.

The introduction of a Constituent Assembly is all well and good - but it is the wrong kind of constituent assembly because it allows political parties, critics claim. A pluri-national state is not going far enough, even though this significant decentralisation has been carried through in the teeth of opposition from the right wing.

South American leaders always have in mind the 1973 bloody CIA-backed coup in Chile, which killed leftist president Salvador Allende and thousands of his supporters, driving hundreds of thousands into exile.

The harsh lesson of Chile (it was the same lesson Marx and Engels learned from the Paris Commune) is that a socialist government cannot rely on the structures of the capitalist state. It has developed with the purpose of enforcing the rights of private property and can’t be made to support an entirely different set of economic and social relations. It must be dismantled and remade.

But in so far as the Morales government is at least taking bold measures to alter the state in Bolivia, with significant decentralisation of power and an independent line in respect of the corporations, it should be supported.

A social movement is not a government – it cannot deliver rights, laws and a constitution. It certainly cannot defend Bolivia from civil war or a bloody coup that the CIA and others are no doubt discussing. People in general want to live in a law-governed society – just not one where the laws are there not to protect them but to protect private property and the corporations alone.

This is the big challenge facing all socialists and communists. How do we make the transition from capitalism to socialism, when developments and struggles take place in myriad ways and locations? How do we move from a capitalist state to a transitional, democratic state?

Of course it would be wrong to idealise the Bolivian government. But there is something truly reactionary and petty about these criticisms, coming as they do from people who have given up on the idea of revolutionary politics and submerged themselves into protest and social movements.

In practice, the only way to truly support the Movement Towards Socialism, as Morales’ party is called, is by bringing about revolutionary political change in countries like Britain and the United States. That is our responsibility and that is why A World to Win has produced a Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions, to suggest the basis of a way forward.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Mother Earth gets to have her say

Delegates from around the world are gathering in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba as the momentum builds for the start on Monday of the historic World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth called by the country’s president, Evo Morales.

An anticipated 15,000 people, including many indigenous and local groups, will be joining political leaders, scientists and academics in response to Morales’ impassioned call following the abject failure of December’s Copenhagen Summit. Outspoken Hollywood actors Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon and Robert Redford have said they will be there to join leading climate scientist James Hansen and Avatar director James Cameron.

Two climate scientists who will be travelling to the Cochabamba conference have spoken out at the increased threat posed by climate change. Veli Albert Kallio and John Nissen warned of much more rapid global warming in the polar regions than is generally understood. They were present at a meeting hosted by the Bolivian ambassador in London, Maria Beatriz Souviron-Crespo, which A World to Win also participated in.

The ambassador herself denounced a $3.5m reduction cut in US aid as “extortion” and “punishment” for Bolivia’s and other countries’ refusal to sign up to the worthless Copenhagen accord which had been secretly concocted by 28 leaders, including the US, Brazil and China, behind the backs of the majority of the delegates – African and island nations in particular.

“We think Copenhagen is a step back from the Kyoto protocol of 1992. Two degrees [of warming] is not enough to save the world. The consequences will be devastating, mainly for small island nations and the poorest countries of the world,” Souviron-Crespo warned, saying that the world was sleepwalking to disaster.

She backed Veli and Nissen’s accusations that governments were putting pressure on climate scientists to tone down their findings. Veli is a respected environmentalist and geophysical researcher, founder of an organisation to protected the frozen isthmuses in the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans. He has predicted that a massive destabilisation of the Greenland ice mass is imminent and could threaten major cities, including London.

Both scientists indicated that UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s own investigators were not facing up to the seriousness of the fact that arctic sea ice was disappearing at a much faster rate than has been previously thought. Nissen, who researches geoengineering solutions to global warming, insisted that a much more rapid emissions reduction was needed action to slow down Arctic warming. “The current Copenhagen course is suicidal,” he warned.

Also this week, dramatic evidence of global warming came in the southern hemisphere - far nearer to Cochabamba – when a chunk of a Peruvian glacier fell into an Andean lake. The piece of ice, which was the size of four football pitches, caused a tsunami.

Peru’s tropical ice fields have retreated by 22% since 1975, according to a World Bank report, and warmer temperatures are expected to erase them entirely within 20 years. The disappearance of the Andean ice sheets would threaten hydro-electric power supplies.

The Cochabamba conference is aimed at mobilising people in every country to act on climate change because the major economies have made it clear that enforceable reductions in carbon emissions are simply not up for discussion. Uniquely, the conference will also discuss the underlying causes of climate change, which centre on the capitalist system of production for profit. A World to Win has made its own contribution to this crucial discussion at what promises to be a landmark conference.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary

Morales tells it how it is

It is becoming a cliché to blame the Danish government and the way the talks have been structured for the lack of progress at the Copenhagen climate change conference. Climate Change minister Ed Miliband, for example, warned that the conference may descend into farce, adding: “People will find it extraordinary that this conference ... is at the moment being stalled on points of order."

But all this is a smokescreen. It is not points of order that are stalling the talks. The reality is that the only agreement now on the table is an empty political stitch-up that represents not a step forward from Kyoto, but a step backwards.

With all its weaknesses, the Kyoto Protocol at least provided a legally-binding framework under the auspices of the UN, and there is no way the talks can now deliver that.

In fact, there is a powerful reactionary backlash against any action on climate change, reflected in the actions of some major states over recent months. In Australia, the Liberal Party has replaced its former leader with Tony Abbott, a climate change denier whose party has blocked the minority Labour government’s plans to introduce an emissions trading scheme.

In Canada, the “filthy lucre” from extracting oil from tar sands proved irresistible to the government and this dirty business is now full steam ahead. Documents leaked by climate activists show the Canadian government will not to try to meet the already weak emissions reductions targets it set in 2008.

US officials have made absolutely clear that when President Obama arrives in Denmark he won't bring anything to the talks beyond Washington's already stated goals to commit to reducing greenhouse gases by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and to pay a "fair share" into a $10 billion fund to help developing countries deal with climate change.

China, which unbelievably continues to squat in the conference alongside the G77 group of the world’s poorest nations, has made clear that it has no plans for emissions reductions. It has invented a new weasel phrase to cover its shame – the meaningless commitment to a reduction in the “carbon intensity” of their economy.

This is the real face of capitalism in crisis – the cornered rat that will fight for survival at any cost. We also saw it in action in the beatings, tear gassing and brutal arrest of protesters who were simply trying to bring the needs of humanity as a whole from the outside to the inside of the conference.

The poor countries walked out on Monday in protest at the abandonment of Kyoto, but walked back in again after just five hours. Five hours was all they could manage in support of their own people in Africa, Bangladesh, the Small Island States and across the world, whose lives are already being destroyed by climate change. They should have walked out and stayed out!

There was just one moment of truth in the talks, when Bolivian President Evo Morales stated bluntly: "The real cause of climate change is the capitalist system. If we want to save the earth then we must end that economic model. Capitalism wants to address climate change with carbon markets. We denounce those markets and the countries which [promote them]. It's time to stop making money from the disgrace that they have perpetrated."

Morales’ demanded that targets be set to keep warming below 1 degree and his delegation are also fighting for an enforceable agreement to put the whole of nature under statutory protection.

He may not have much support inside the conference, but there is plenty of support for him outside. From the day the talks end, we must mobilise globally to put this revolutionary perspective into practice, finding ways to end, and transcend global capitalism to start to tackle global warning and conserve and restore nature.

Penny Cole
Environment editor