Greg Wilpert, Changing Venezuela By Taking Power: The Policies of the Chávez Presidency 1999-2006, Verso 2007
Greg Wilpert is responsible for some of the most useful English-language journalism on Venezuela over the past five years. The Venezuelanalysis website he edits continues to be a valuable daily source of accurate information on the current situation. Wilpert has for example comprehensively exposed the right wing reactionary opposition ot Chávez by the old elites, which had included sections of the old CTV union federation.
This book is a clearly written factual account of Chávez’s policies, more comprehensive and certainly more objective than other largely uncritical accounts by Gott, Woods and Harnecker. But it also as flawed as other left books on Venezuela, because the author believes the rhetoric that Chávez really is creating some kind of 21st century socialism.
On the positive side, Wilpert confirms what AWL comrades have argued for many years - namely the centrality of the military to Chávez’s project. He argues that Chávez’s talk of “civilian-military unity” is not just for show. Of the 61 ministers in Chávez’s governments between 1999 and 2004, 16 of them (26%) were military officers. After the 2004 elections, of the 24 regional state governors, 22 were Chavistas and 9 of them (41%) were military people (p.49).
Although Wilpert believes that the military has become more “civilianised” under Chávez, he also points to other facets of Chávez’s rule such as “constitutional presidentialism”, patronage and the lack of democracy in the ruling MVR party which point towards our conception that Chávez is a Bonapartist figure, which workers should be wary of. Although Wilpert denies there is “outright authoritarianism or caudillismo” in Venezuela, many of the facts he cites point in that direction.
For example he highlights proposals to extend the presidential term from six to seven years and to allow Chávez to be re-elected an indefinite number of times. Other proposals include the expansion of the president's powers, to allow him to dissolve the National Assembly, appoint ministers and maintain control over the armed forces. Chávez’s comments on being “with me or against” and his warning earlier this year that unions could not be autonomous should sober up some socialist observers.
Although Wilpert does not discuss the state of the unions very much beyond stating that the UNT is “weak” (p.187), which is a real hiatus in the book, he does indicate the limits of other measures towards workers control and nationalisation, including the so-called “workers’ councils”. He argues that the co-management schemes in a small number of firms has not gone very far, and that in the case of the much-trumpeted Invepal paper manufacturer, “the state ends up with a majority vote on the governing board” and “as a result workers end up being marginalised” (p.79).
Similarly, he points out that the nationalisation of some firms, including telecom and oil this year have not resulted in any kind of workers’ control. Key sectors of industry are still run in typical capitalist top-down fashion (p.232). Wilpert seems to hope that the large number of cooperatives might help transform the capitalist market dynamic (p.101) – but Venezuela shows now sign of stepping outside a state capitalist form of development, whatever the rhetoric about socialism.
The weakest element of the book is Wilpert’s analysis of socialism and his belief that Chávez really is laying the groundwork for 21st century socialism. Whilst he rejects both social democratic and state-socialist variants, Wilpert puts Chavismo in the category of libertarian socialism, by which he means the early Russian revolution and Spain in the late 1930s (p.249).
The basic mistake is his analysis of capitalism, which he defines as private ownership of the means of production, a competitive market and a state that adjudicates for private property. This is a long way from the Marxist understanding of capitalism in terms of the exploitation of wage labour by capital, which is fluid enough to account of widespread nationalisation and regulation, while understanding that capitalism remains fundamentally oppressive. The fact is that Venezuelan workers are still exploited as wage labourers, something which Chávez has no intention of changing.
The absence of focus on the wage labour – capital nexus is what leads Wilpert to neglect the position of the Venezuelan workers. He discusses a range of utopian participatory democratic ideas that might develop in Venezuela and against which he assesses Chávez’s new round of reforms. But he avoids the more concrete criteria – namely the position of workers. This is not about welfare, i.e. judging Chávez by how much money has reached the poor. Rather it is about the relative political and economic strength of the working class, its own organisations, caucuses and parties – in other words the measures of independent working class power that are for Marxists the essential and unavoidable necessities for the introduction of socialism. For us, either socialism will be made by the workers, or there will be no socialism.
Wilpert says that the Bolivarian socialist project “remains one of the best beacons of hope for a newly invigorated left in Latin America”. (p.235) My view is that “Bolivarian socialism” is a snare for Venezuelan and other Latin American workers, like Peronism and Cardenismo in earlier periods. What separates us is both different conceptions of capitalism and flowing from that, different visions of socialism and the social agents that can make it.
