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Chavez’s election victory — a fresh wind or a dead end?
by Gerry Foley
As had to be expected, the pro-imperialist opposition
to Hugo Chavez’s government in Venezuela did not
accept the populist president’s victory in the Aug. 15
referendum that it had sponsored in an attempt to
remove him. It proclaimed to an incredulous world that
Chavez had triumphed by means of a “massive fraud.”
It would have to have been “massive.” The official
figures put the “no vote” at almost 60 percent. Even
the truculent magazine of the British business class,
The Economist, a consistent and dedicated denigrator
of Chavez, had to say that fraud on that scale was
“unlikely.”
International observers, such as former U.S. President
Jimmy Carter and Organization of American States
Secretary General Cesar Gaviria, confirmed the results
declared by Venezuela’s National Electoral Commission
(CNE). On Sept. 2, The Economist’s web site offered an
article by an election observer giving a detailed
confirmation of the results.
In the aftermath of the election, the central body of
the opposition, the Democratic Coordinating Committee
(CD), called a “cacerolozo,” a march with pot banging,
in Caracas to protest the CNE’s report. Noisy marches
of this sort became famous in the right-wing campaign
against Salvador Allende in Chile in the early 1970s.
They culminated in the bloody military coup that
overthrew him in September 1973.
The CD component parties also made disgruntled noises
to the effect that they might boycott the upcoming
regional elections, although these threats for the
moment seem to be fading.
The opposition, of course, was furious at Carter and
Gaviria for endorsing the official results of the
vote. Moreover, it began arguing that Chavez was
actually supported by some imperialist companies.
Thus, an Aug. 23 Reuters dispatch quoted an opposition
statement as saying that the populist leader was
relying on “the support he receives from international
factors of power like Wall Street and [U.S. oil
company] Chevron-Texaco. These are curious allies for
someone who declares himself ‘anti-imperialist.’”
The Reuters dispatch commented: “While they wince at
his anti-capitalist rhetoric, financial analysts and
oil investors view Chavez’s referendum win as the
least disruptive short-term scenario for Venezuela.”
In the wake of the referendum, there was an obvious
relaxation in the oil market and a certain drop in oil
prices. However, that does not at all mean that the
imperialist interests intend to tolerate a regime like
Chavez’s in a durable way. They did not accept such
reformist regimes even in the most prosperous years of
the international capitalist economy, when they
brought down Vargas in Brazil, Arbenz in Guatemala,
and Peron in Argentina in the 1950s.
They are even less likely to do it today when the
imperialist economy is stumbling and they are putting
on the squeeze everywhere to maximize their
exploitation of countries like Venezuela.
Chavez tried to quiet the howls of the right-wing
opposition by promising the rich that he would not
attack their wealth and property. But such assurances
could be expected to have only a limited effect, given
the nature of capitalism. Central to the system are
competition and raising the profit rate. Under these
pressures, capitalists are loath to accept any
limitations on their power, even if they could just
sit back on their yachts and sip martinis.
One of the leading organs of imperialist capital, the
British Financial Times, compared Chavez to Peron in
an article carried on The New York Times website Aug.
31: “Mr. Chavez’s victory—ratified by international
observers as clean—is important and may well have an
impact in Latin America, but not because Mr. Chavez is
now about to export revolution as Cuba did during the
1960s or in the way that Simon Bolivar, Mr. Chavez’s
swashbuckling hero, did at the beginning of the 19th
century.
“Instead, with his vote-winning social welfare
policies paid for from an oil price windfall, Mr.
Chavez may have signaled the revival of a Latin
American populist tradition, perhaps best exemplified
by General Juan Peron and Eva, his charismatic wife,
in the Argentina of the late 1940s.”
There is a basic similarity between the Chavez and
Peron regimes. Peron was able to offer concessions to
Argentine workers without challenging capitalism as
such because of the accumulated demand for the
country’s agricultural produce resulting from wartime
food shortages. Chavez has the advantage of high oil
prices, which will probably be more enduring than the
high grain prices were after World War II, since oil
drives the engines of capitalism, while grain only
feeds the people.
But in the capitalist world economy the price of
anything is likely to be unstable. And The Financial
Times argued that oil prices also would eventually
fall, cutting the ground out from under Chavez’s
populist experiment, just as the declining grain
market undid Peron.
The Economist, along with other capitalist journals,
has played up the economic difficulties that Venezuela
has experienced over the last four years. Of course,
it never compares them with similar problems in other
Latin American countries, such as Argentina where a
ruthless free-market president, Carlos Menem, presided
over the ruin of the national economy.
But there is a basis for the British journal’s
expectation that Venezuelan workers will eventually
become demoralized if unemployment remains high and
growing and real incomes continue to be eaten away by
double-digit inflation.
Chavez has won mass support by using the oil manna to
finance social programs that offer some hope to the
poor. But the problems of poverty and inequality are
an integral part of capitalism, and insoluble as long
as the capitalist world market dominates the
Venezuelan economy. A solution is only possible if
Venezuela builds an economy based on social ownership
and control. Chavez has shown no interest in that.
In fact, it would require a deep going mobilization of
working people in Venezuela under revolutionary
leadership to wrest control of the economy from the
capitalists and redirect it to meeting human needs.
Moreover, a revolution in Venezuela could only survive
as the vanguard of a wider revolutionary movement—that
is, by “exporting revolution,” to use The Financial
Times’s phrase.
The Financial Times did note that Chavez’s victory
will be an encouragement to “new populism” in Latin
America. That is clear. It is why the new populist
regimes—in particular, the Lula government in Brazil,
and the Kirchner government in Argentina—have seen
their fate linked to Chavez’s.
But all of these regimes are the beneficiaries of a
rising rebellion against the world capitalist
offensive that has plunged Latin America and other
Third World countries into even deeper misery. They
face not only the backlash of the capitalists and the
imperialists but the unfulfilled aspirations of their
own peoples.
The failure of the populist regimes in the period of
mass upsurge and instability running from the 1930s to
the fall of Peron is a historic milestone. They led to
defeat the masses who had supported them. The lessons
of this are inscribed in the Second Declaration of
Havana, the manifesto of the triumphant Cuban
socialist revolution.
However, these populist regimes did raise the
expectations of the masses and mobilize them to some
extent. It was not inevitable that this dynamic would
be stopped halfway.
Chavez has certainly had to impel a considerable
mobilization of the masses in order to win his
electoral victory against the machinery and media of
the bourgeoisie. A network of popular organizations
has developed in poor and working-class neighborhoods.
The opposition’s use of the corrupt trade-union
confederation in its attempt to overthrow Chavez led
to a split in the labor movement, and the emergence of
a more radicalized union movement, the UNT, in which
revolutionary socialists appear to have a certain
influence.
Obviously the Venezuelan president is the hero of
working people in his country and throughout Latin
America for his social programs and above all his
defiance of U.S. imperialism and its local agents.
However, the central weaknesses of anti-imperialist
movements in the past in Latin America is that they
have remained focused around idealized leaders who
tried to balance between the masses and the
bourgeoisie and the imperialists.
The prospects of the mass movement in Venezuela for
decisively defeating its imperialist and capitalist
enemies depends on the emergence of a leadership that
is loyal to the movement and its aspirations. The
movement that has formed behind Chavez can only win if
it goes beyond him, if a new revolutionary leadership
emerges.
The confrontation that came to a head in the
referendum movement is continuing. Within a relatively
short period of time, it will probably be decided if a
leadership independent of Chavez can emerge that can
lead the movement to victory. If it does, it will
transform our era. If it does not, the prospect is
another disastrous defeat of the many that have ended
populist experiments in Latin America in the past.
The article above first appeared in the September 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
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