Venezuela: Into the Revolution

The flights are booked. Brilliant! In three weeks I’ll be flying off to Venezuela for a three month stay involving intensive Spanish classes, volunteering, and a trip around the country with a group of Australian solidarity activists. I’ll be blogging my thoughts, observations and activities on my trip while I’m there, both on this site, my blog, and a travel blog at Travel Pod. On my blog, I’m creating a “Venezuela Trip 2011” category, where you can follow all of my reports on my travels. 

But why Venezuela? Over the past decade and more Venezuela has witnessed an intense struggle to build a societal alternative to the “Washington Consensus” – a liberal-plural political system combined with free-market capitalism – demonstrating to the rest of us that another world is possible, that there are alternatives to the barbarity of global capital.  As such, the changes taking place in Venezuela have become an inspiration for many, as well as a source of intense and polarised debate both inside and outside of the country.

A wide range of left opinion has celebrated the changes in Venezuela, centred on the record of the Chávez-led government since its election in 1998: opposing U.S. imperialism through rejecting free-trade agreements and setting up the progressive, hemispheric alternative ALBA; supporting Latin American integration; fully nationalising the country’s petroleum industry (and using oil wealth to benefit the country’s poor);  nationalising sectors of the telecommunications, electricity and banking industries; massively increasing social spending and reducing poverty and unemployment;  and providing numerous avenues for popular empowerment through the creation and promotion of communal councils and community media to name but a few.

What has drawn even more attention to Venezuela is that since December 2005, when Chávez announced that the goal in Venezuela was to replace capitalism with “socialism of the 21^st century”, is the question of whether we are witnessing the first genuine attempt to replace capitalism with socialism in recent history. With nationalisations, the widening guarantee of social rights, rhetoric and action supporting popular power in community councils and ‘communes’, a growing movement for worker control and ‘co-management’ in industry, and a developing community media movement, Venezuela seems to be a hive of creative revolutionary ferment and activity. In important respects, capitalism is being challenged and spaces for constructing an alternative have opened. Whether el proceso is destined to create a socialist society, or indeed how far it is possible to have a transition to socialism in one country, is an open question. Certainly however, gains have been made and there are important and exciting lessons we can learn from the Venezuelan experience.

Of course, the process of change underway in Venezuela has met with stiff opposition, both from the U.S. state and from the Venezuelan right. The oligarchy who previously ran the country under the pseudo-democracy provided by the Punto-Fijo pact  have been ejected from the levers of political power. Venezuela has now become a threat, not just for what it has already achieved, but for what it represents: the threat of a good example; an alternative model of development to U.S.-dominated free-market capitalism; a source of inspiration, ideas, and a call to action. Numerous attempts to overthrow, destabilise and de-legitimise Venezuela’s political process and its president, Hugo Chávez, have occurred. These include the short-lived 2002 coup led by the Venezuelan business community, U.S. funding of anti-Chávez groups via the ‘National Endowment for Democracy’, and a campaign by the international media to demonise Venezuela (the UK Guardian’s Rory Carroll is a case in point). Against this campaign of the right-wing, the gains of Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” should be emphasised and defended.

Image: UNETE’s National March in Caracas Brought Thousands of People to the Streets, Including these Young People with Banners that Read, “Neither Bureaucracy nor Capitalism, Worker Control” and “Socialism is Won Fighting.” (Source: VA.com)

What these questions point to is that the process of change underway in Venezuela isn’t as straightforward as may first appear, as simply a story of pro-Chávez and PSUV forces vs. right-wing opposition and pro-U.S. forces. In order to learn the positive lessons that Venezuela provides, and to know where and to whom we should lend our support, a nuanced and critically-supportive understanding is necessary: uncritical and facile support of Venezuela’s political and social transformation will do all genuinely revolutionary forces a disservice. Thus, what makes Venezuela at once exciting and frustrating to study is its complexity, and the sheer multitude of ideas, movements, and activities that are driving forward the process of building a better society, ultimately one which transcends capitalism and can emancipate all people to live their lives as fully as possible.

At the root of Venezuela’s transformation however, one thing has become clear. The upsurge in activity in Venezuela is connected to a widespread popular-democratic consciousness with revolutionary implications: a mass of people in Venezuela are awakened to the need to change society, and collectively are confident in their capacity to do so.  This mass democratic empowerment, a political agency and capacity to collectively fight for a better future, is the backbone of revolutionary changes taking place in Venezuela, and the greatest threat to all those who support the established order of things. This sentiment is echoed in the words and actions of activists like Valentina Blanco, who describes her experience of getting involved with a new community radio station, Radio Libertad:[i]

“A community radio is like having access to a window that shows you how the world is – a world that we want and which we are constructing, the world we all dream of in the depths of our hearts, as inhabitants of this planet. Because we have love for our planet; for our fellow mankind; for all the men, women, girls, boys, adolescents who are part of this population. The world is united as one, regardless of music and language barriers. There are so many things to broadcast on the radio that allow you to dream, that caress the senses and lift the most diverse feelings in you – like anger, fury at the injustices – and wake up the need to change within you; to change things; to transform them. And it also awakens the need within you to change yourself, because while you are changing and overcoming these fears, you are transforming your reality, and transforming the reality around you, and this is like a spark, which burns and grows, and it is very beautiful to share with everyone. What else can I say?” 

While that sentiment remains widespread, no form of hierarchy, exploitation, or oppression can continue unchallenged in Venezuela, and the future of “the process” remains full of possibilities. 

The other thing has become clear to me from studying Venezuela is this: if I really want to get a grip on what is happening in that country, I need to get myself over there. I can’t wait!

[i] Martinez, Fox & Farrell (eds.) 2010. Venezuela Speaks! Voices From the Grassroots. PM Press: Oakland, CA, pp188-189