"Revolution by stages" in Venezuela?

Submitted by martin on 4 February, 2007 - 12:38

Jim McIlroy and Coral Wynter, two very well-respected and experienced socialists from Brisbane, members of the DSP, have just returned home after spending a year in Venezuela.

On Saturday 3 February they reported back at a public meeting in Brisbane, with a slide show of over 100 photos accompanied by their comments.

Three of us attended from Workers' Liberty, with a leaflet advocating a more critical attitude to Venezuela's president Chavez.

What struck me most was the huge gap between the general claims that Jim and Coral made for Chavez, and the specifics they reported.

In general, their enthusiasm was without limit. "We are Chavistas, Coral and I", declared Jim. This is "socialism in the 21st century".

Listen carefully, and Jim was not quite claiming that Venezuela is already socialist. But he certainly was claiming that Venezuela is well set on a broad and straight high road to socialism, and "they won't turn back".

Moreover, this socialism is the best ever. It is a "socialism which has learned the lessons from the 20th century". This socialism is democratic. Jim and Coral had great hopes for the new "communal councils" being launched by Chavez.

When I asked Jim about parties to the left of Chavez, like the PRS, he replied that he "wasn't sure what 'to the left of Chavez' would be".

At one meeting, Chavez had given Coral a kiss on the cheek. Jim commented, jokingly but evidently with a serious thought in mind, that "she hasn't washed her face since then".

Then to specifics. The 100 photos contained nothing, absolutely nothing, showing working-class self-organisation, other than two photos from the congress of the UNT trade-union federation.

Jim skipped past those photos quickly: "On the downside, there was a lot of factionalism". (Actually the congress ended with a split between those more and less critical of Chavez). Jim hoped that "they" would find some way to overcome the factionalism. That's all.

There were some photos of demonstrations by homeless people and by women, but probably fewer than there were of military displays by the Venezuelan army.

The main pictures of activity by ordinary working people were of election rallies and marches to support Chavez.

Jim and Coral had lots of interesting pictures of everyday life in Caracas, and of various social programmes of the Chavez government: clinics, job schemes, vaccination programmes, care for disabled children, posters from literacy programmes.

It is certainly good that the Chavez government is using Venezuela's oil revenues, boosted by the recent high oil prices, for such social programmes rather than just to line the pockets of the oligarchy. But isn't socialism something more than such reforms?

In the question session, Jim and Coral conceded that:
* the Venezuela economy is still capitalist;
* that trade unions are very weak, and working conditions for most workers are appalling by the standards of a capitalist country with even halfway-established reformist unions;
* that the state apparatus has not been revolutionised;
* that the police, in particular, are notoriously corrupt;
* that nothing much has been done yet for land reform, or for the dramatic housing problems in Caracas.

Only, they insisted that the Venezuelan officer corps is a progressive force, that there is a vast mass movement behind it, and that the mass movement will move on to deal with all those issues.

The trouble with this is that not just Marxist theory, but also repeated historical experience, suggests that a bourgeois officer corps can indeed come into conflict with an old oligarchic elite, and carry out nationalist-populist reforms against that elite - but in doing so it does not cease to be a bourgeois officer corps.

"The major social base of Chavez", said Jim, is not the working class, since even in the big cities those with a regular waged job are a minority. The major social base is the stallholders - the vast numbers of people who live from selling small items on street stalls.

What about the working class? Jim's reply was:

"The role of the working class is crucial; but the present stage of the Venezuelan revolution is not yet socialist.

"It is still in the national-democratic stage. National-democratic tasks have to be carried through.

"Venezuela is still under the thumb of the USA. It's breaking away from the USA and establishing a national-democratic revolution. Then, as Lenin said, there is no Chinese wall between the national-democratic revolution and socialism".

For Australia, I guess, Jim would still uphold all the basic ideas of Marxist politics: that the working class can be emancipated only by its own action; that socialist victory requires a relatively sudden explosion of mass action from below, not just a gradual process (eight years already, in Venezuela) in which a government, from above though with mass support, bit-by-bit turns capitalism into socialism.

Yet the formulas "revolution by stages", "national-democratic revolution", serve to insulate Venezuela from all those general truths, although Venezuela is surely more industrialised and urbanised than most European countries were in 1917.

How long before the "socialism bit-by-bit, from above" scenario comes to overwhelm the "socialism by revolution, from below" still upheld for other countries?

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