Chavez Calls for ‘Permanent Revolution’ in Venezuela

by Gerry Foley / January 2007 issue of Socialist Action Newspaper

http://www.socialistaction.org/foley68.htm

In swearing in his new cabinet on Jan. 8, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez proclaimed the goal of carrying through a socialist revolution. A Jan. 9 AP dispatch quoted him as saying: "We're heading toward socialism, and nothing and no one can prevent it.”

In his inauguration address Jan. 10, he took an even stronger line. The Jan. 11 British Guardian reported: “The past eight years of his rule, which started with Blairite rhetoric about a third way, laid the groundwork for what will henceforth be accelerating radicalisation on the principles of Trotsky's permanent revolution, said Mr Chavez. ‘We have hardly begun. It will be permanent.’”

The Venezuelan president followed up his proclamation of the goal of socialism by announcing that he would nationalize the energy and telecommunications trusts, as well as four oil projects on the Orinoco River owned by big imperialist companies.

Chavez certainly issued a ringing challenge. “Socialism or death,” he declared. Those, in fact, might now be the alternatives. The theory of “permanent revolution” indicates that in a country dominated by imperialism any reform measures that stop short of a complete socialist revolution are likely to be abortive and eventually suicidal; without fundamental economic change, the working people will eventually sink into passivity, and then the imperialists and local capitalists will strike back.

Chavez’s statements did rattle the local stock market and Wall Street. But in general, it seems that the capitalists are waiting to see how far economic changes will actually go.

The Washington Post reported Jan. 11: “Investors are still unclear about what his nationalization plan entails. But Ricardo Sanguino, head of the finance commission in the National Assembly, told reporters Wednesday that the government would negotiate settlements with companies it plans to nationalize. ‘We're not going to do anything illegal,’ he said. ‘There will always be compensation.’”

The article continued: “Shares of the CANTV telephone company, which is expected to be nationalized, rebounded after Sanguino's assurances to investors.”

Meanwhile, the oil markets and energy companies took a wait-and-see attitude, noted David Mares, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, who has studied the Venezuelan oil industry.

“He's announcing that he's going to do what the markets already expected him to do—take more control of the profits of the Venezuelan production," Mares told the Washington Post. "He has not said that nationalization in the Orinoco means 100 percent Venezuelan ownership.” So far, Chavez’s nationalizations have involved the state taking a 51 percent of the stock and leaving the actual management in the hands of the capitalists.

Decisive for actually carrying out a socialist revolution in Venezuela will be the creation of a leadership that can effectively mobilize the masses. Even the Cuban socialist revolution, which was carried through from the top, was based on the holding of power by the Rebel Army.

Chavez is talking about a process of expanding community councils. But organs of direct democracy without a revolutionary leadership have been a recipe for still-born reformism, as in Germany and Austria after 1918.

Chavez’s party, the Movement for the Fifth Republic is a multi-class populist organization that is notoriously distrusted by the masses. He has now followed up his proclamation of revolutionary goals by proclaiming the formation of a revolutionary party, a united socialist party. The process of the formation of the new party is likely to prove decisive for the process of radicalization in Venezuela. But many questions remain about this project.

About two weeks after his election victory, in a Dec. 15 speech, Chavez announced the formation of the Venezuelan United Socialist Party (PSUV). He said it would include all of the parties that support him and be the government party.

Parties were free either to join the PSUV or to continue their independent existence, but in the latter case they would not be included in the government.

The function of the party, Chavez said, would be to provide a means to overcome bureaucratic obstacles to the representation of the masses and to the transformation of the country.

The announcement of this project has been followed by a long series of statements and discussion articles posted on Aporrea (www.aporrea.org), a website dedicated to the defense of the Chavez regime and sponsored by groups with Trotskyist origins, the Venezuelan Partido de la Revolución Socialista (PRS) and the Argentine Movimiento Socialista de Los Trabajadores.

The Fifth Republic Movement immediately announced that it was dissolving into the new party, transferring all its assets to it, and that “everyone” was welcome to join it. That statement alone raises the question of what the class character of the new party will be.

A Dec. 25 article by Humberto Marquez on the Aporrea site noted: “During the election campaign … Chavez had warned that after his victory he would give impetus to a ‘single party of the revolution,’ as he calls the process that he is leading and which is now ‘entering a new phase of building Twenty-First Century Socialism,’ the vague concept that he evokes in his speeches.

“Besides, he [Chavez] will promote a reform of the Constitution, which he himself pushed in 1999 to adjust it to the concepts that he is using—for example, to define the Venezuelan economy as a mixed system of private, state, and social property and permit his reelection for an indefinite number of terms.

“The Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), created by Chavez in 1997 to run into the 1998 election, which he won, has ‘disappeared and gone into history, and will give way for the United Socialist Party,’ a statement of his followers declared last weekend. On Dec. 18, the leaders of the MVR began the process for its legal dissolution, in order to transfer its moveable and immoveable assets to the new PSUV, when it is formed.”

Another article, by Sergio Sanchez and Carlos Mogollon, pointed out: “The [right-wing] opposition has understood that it needs to win over popular sectors that are now supporting President Chavez but are discontented because of the quantity of defects in a lot of the functionaries and parties of the Bolivarian government.

“The bureaucracy present in all the institutions of the state, corruption on the part of many of those who call themselves comrades, despotism of some who talk about socialism that at the same time mistreat, humiliate, and forget the people, and opportunism have been features of the good part of the Chavista ruling class, which has undermined the confidence of the people and even its hope.

“A section of the opposition has understood that if it builds up its forces … it could in a short time win certain territorial bases, such as governorships and mayoralties, since a recent poll shows that only 35 percent of the population supports the mayors and governors that support the revolution.”

The discredit of the Fifth Republic Movement in the eyes of the masses has been notorious. But the question is if the entire old party joins the new party, how is the latter going to be different?

Of course, Chavez may think that he can control the new party more directly if the ranks elect leaders in accordance with his indications. He has said that he expects that they will follow his suggestions. Moreover, the new party is not being formed on the basis of a program but rather a directive from Chavez. The basic common thread of all the statements of groups joining the new party is their acceptance of Chavez’s leadership.

The historic model for a revolutionary socialist party, the Russian Bolshevik Party, was a party seeking to organize and lead social struggles, including a mass struggle for working-class power.

The Bolsheviks were a vanguard formation of disciplined cadre organized on the basis of a revolutionary or anti-capitalist program. The Bolsheviks never viewed their party as becoming a "state party" or the future apparatus of the new government they sought to bring into being.

Instead, they viewed the socialist government of the workers' state they envisioned as consisting of the direct rule of the working class and their allies among the revolutionary peasantry through the form of soviets (“soviets” being the Russian word for "councils") representing the vast majority of the entire oppressed classes.

In short, the Bolsheviks set out to establish soviet rule, as opposed to the rule of a vanguard party. The socialism they fought for was to be a new society where, for the first time in human history, the vast majority ruled in their own name, through their own institutions (soviets), and in the context of the abolition of private property for profit—that is, a collectively owned and managed society.

So far, this is by no means the conception of socialism or of the revolutionary socialist party projected by Chavez. The latter institution appears to be a party based on governmental power; such a party tends strongly to become a magnet for opportunists of all sorts. Neither its socialist program nor its class character have been defined.

Chavez’s decision to call the new party socialist and to devote it in principle to socialist revolution is certainly a step forward. But it is still quite uncertain what this will lead to. Even his definitions of socialism and socialist revolution remain vague.

In the Aporrea discussion articles, both the terms “único” and “unitario” are used for the new party, with some contributors objecting to the first. “Unico” or “single” does suggest a state party. There is a long history of state parties that call themselves socialist in Third World countries that have been anything but democratic and still less revolutionary.

Chavez’s project has launched considerable political discussion that can advance the mass radicalization in Venezuela. But it needs to begin to be focused more on program than it has been so far. Arguing about organizational questions is pointless until the question of the program and class character of the new party is settled.

Human Needs, Not Profits!