Venezuela: Impose Workers Control
on the Road to Socialist Revolution


Mass mobilization in Venezuelan capital of Caracas to close campaign for "yes" vote for packet of
constitutional changes drew half a million participants. (Photo: Fernando Llano/AP)

 

Workers and supporters of Sanitarios Maracay marched in Caracas December 14 calling for workers control.
(Photo: Hands Off Venezuela)

On December 2, Venezuelans will go to the polls to vote on a proposal to reform 69 articles of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic, adopted in 1999. President Hugo Chávez Frías has presented this platter of amendments in order to “deepen the Bolivarian Revolution.” While taking opposite positions on the referendum, both Chávez supporters (who are voting “sí,” or yes) and rightist reactionaries (who are voting “no”) portray the measures as opening the door to socialism in Venezuela. This, however, is in no way the case.

The various changes aim at strengthening presidential power and instituting a series of social reforms characteristic of a social-democratic “welfare state” in Europe or a bourgeois populist regime in Latin America. Nothing in the 69 articles goes beyond the limits of capitalism. They do not expropriate capitalist property and in fact, for the first time they give constitutional protection to private ownership of the means of production. The fact that the right wing portrays these mild reforms as “socialist” just shows what dyed-in-the-wool counterrevolutionaries they are.

Proletarian revolutionaries who fight for a genuine socialist revolution, that is for the Venezuelan workers to take power with the support of the poor peasants and impoverished urban masses, cannot vote for these constitutional amendments. Although several of the social reforms are positive, the overall effect would be to grant unlimited powers to the president and the bourgeois state apparatus, particularly the army, which will inevitably be used against the workers. At the same time, communists must be in the front lines of those prepared to fight to the finish against the counterrevolutionaries who have coalesced around the call for a “no” vote and who are trying to provoke a crisis by causing artificial food shortages and blaming price controls.

Consequently, the League for the Fourth International urges class-conscious Venezuelan workers to cast a blank ballot (votar nulo) or abstain on the constitutional referendum, while joining in mobilizations to block any attempt by rightist reaction backed by U.S. imperialism to stage a coup d’état or seize territory during or following the voting. With the surfacing of alleged CIA documents for an “Operation Pincer” calling to do just that, documents which however dubious they may appear to be have not been disavowed by Washington, and in view of the reactionaries’ unrelenting coup attempts in the past, this possibility is not at all abstract.

The U.S. government is currently keeping a low profile, having seen its crude attempts to intervene in Venezuela blow up in its face, notably in the botched April 2002 coup. That time around Washington hailed the golpistas (coup plotters) only to see Chávez brought back to power less than two days later by key army units with mass popular support. But just because the Bush regime is keeping its spokesmen muzzled doesn’t mean it isn’t up to something. Most importantly, on Venezuela, unlike Iraq, the Republican White House has the fulsome support of the Democrats in Congress, who label Chávez a “dictator” and opponent of “democracy,” despite his electoral landslide victories while the current U.S. president took office in a judicial coup.

Speaking to the closing rally of the campaign for “yes” vote on the constitutional reforms, a huge mobilization which filled the center of Caracas with hundreds of thousands of poor and working people, Chávez warned that if Washington tries anything, oil shipments to the U.S. should be immediately cut off. Good. In fact, Chávez’ continued supply of oil to the United States, while it has brought Venezuela a windfall of billions of petrodollars as oil prices approach $100 a barrel, has also kept the Pentagon war machine going in Iraq. In the case of a new coup attempt by Washington’s men in Caracas, there should be worldwide protests against the imperialist power grab.

In Venezuela, workers committees, which exist in embryonic or developed form in many plants and workplaces, should be on the alert around the clock in the coming hours. If the constitutional amendments are approved, even with smaller margins (as several opinion surveys indicate) than Chávez’ past overwhelming victories at the polls, or if they are narrowly defeated or the outcome is in doubt, there could be a showdown in the streets with the rightist reactionaries who are armed and dangerous. While civilian militias have been formed as an auxiliary to the armed forces, the army still controls the guns. In the face of a rightist putsch, revolutionaries must demand and secure the necessary weapons for armed worker and peasant militias independent of state control, and proceed to impose workers control throughout the country.

Above all, it is necessary to forge a revolutionary workers party, a party that gives no political support to the bourgeois populist Bonaparte Chávez while militarily defending the Venezuelan regime against imperialist-sponsored counterrevolution. Against the PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), which despite its name is a bourgeois state party, what’s required is a party of intransigent opposition to all capitalist regimes, fighting for a workers and peasants government based on workers councils (soviets), and based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. It must be infused with the proletarian internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky rather than the Latin American bourgeois nationalism of Chávez, who looks back to the Liberator Simón Bolívar

The Packet of Constitutional Reforms:
Petrodollar Populism and Military “Socialism”

Posters calling for “Yes” vote on constitutional referendum in support of President Chávez scrawled
over with right-wing opposition griffiti saying “dictatorship.” (Photo: Juan Barreto/AFP)

The panoply of constitutional reforms certainly reflect a shift in the political face of the Bolivarian Revolution, which has gone through several incarnations according to the latest influences on its leader (and the current price of oil). After being associated early on with ex-Communist Party guerrilla leader Douglas Bravo, in the mid-1990s Chávez was advised by one Norberto Ceresole, an ultra-rightist Argentine nationalist and ideologue of the carapintada movement of fascistic military officers left over from the Videla dictatorship. Reacting to the hostility of U.S. imperialism, Chávez in power has moved in fits and starts to the left, but always within the capitalist framework and always leaving actual power in the hands of the army.

Today Chávez is a close ally of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, and even expresses admiration for the Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky, but his actual policies are far more timid. While talking of “21st century socialism” he has made clear his desire to work with capitalists. In fact, ex-Colonel Chávez has carried out very few nationalizations, far less than General Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico in the 1930s or General Juan Perón in Argentina in the ’50s. As Time magazine (1 May) noted of his latest move to take control of heavy oil installations:

“But the truth – one that both Chavez and his archfoe, the Bush Administration, would prefer you not know – is that when it comes to oil nationalization, Hugo is hardly the most radical of his global peers. In fact, even after today's petro-theatrics, Chavez is just catching up with the rest of the pack..”

The nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry was carried out in 1976 by Carlos Andrés Pérez of the pro-imperialist Acción Democrática (AD), a bourgeois party affiliated with the social-democratic Second International.

The packet of constitutional reforms includes a reference to the “Venezuelan Socialist State” (Article 16) and even a “Socialist Economy.” However, the latter is defined only as prohibiting “monopolies and latifundios” (large landed estates), and includes a whole range of property forms including “direct” and “indirect social property,” “communal property,” “collective property,” “mixed property” and … “private property” (Article 115). Thus capitalist ownership of the means of production now has constitutional status, including the guarantee that any expropriation will be by judicial sentence and with “timely payment of fair compensation.” Some “socialism”!

A number of the reforms which have drawn the ire of Venezuela’s rightists and their imperialist godfathers in Washington could have been implemented by any social democrat. Much has been made of the reference to a “six-hour workday,” but less of the fact that this is part of a “36-hour workweek” (Article 90), an hour more than the 35-hour workweek implemented under the popular-front French government of Socialist Lionel Jospin and maintained by subsequent conservative cabinets. Social security coverage would be extended to informal vendors, taxi drivers, housewives and others presently excluded (Article 87) – a significant reform, particularly as barely 40 percent of the population is presently covered.

Yet how much security this actually affords depends on the vagaries of the capitalist market. If the price of oil were to fall back to $9 a barrel, as it was when Chávez came to power, you can say goodbye to all this. Imperialist pundits rail against the “irresponsible” economic policies of the Venezuelan president, often accompanied by premature announcements that “That Chávez Thing Is Over” (Newsweek, 29 May 2006). Even the most rabid, such as the New York Times (29 November) Paris-based columnist Roger Cohen, are forced to admit that “Certainly, the oil money Chávez has plowed into poor neighborhoods … has reduced poverty. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America said last year that the extreme poverty rate had fallen to 9.9 percent from 15.9 percent.” But that doesn’t stop Cohen from frothing about the policies of the Venezuelan leader as “disastrous” and “grotesque.”

What really has the imperialist rulers and their kept media riled up is the constitutional amendments’ political provisos, particularly elimination of term limits on the presidency and provisions for emergency rule. Cohen sneeringly calls it a “grab for socialist-emperor status” by a “barracks-bred buffoon,” claiming it would “prod Venezuela from an oppressive rule comparable to Mexico’s under its once impregnable Institutional Revolutionary Party toward the dictatorial absolutism of Cuba.” This is pretty rich coming from a proponent of American-style bourgeois “democracy” which “elects” its presidents through a contest of who can amass more millions from capitalist donors, or can get the Supreme Court to annul the popular vote; which monitors its citizens’ phone calls without judicial warrants, arrests thousands of immigrants and holds them incommunicado for months and even years; and engages in torture on a mass scale as well as slaughtering hundreds of thousands (Iraq) or millions (Korea and Vietnam) of civilians.

Hugo Chávez at closing rally of campaign for "yes" vote, November 30. (Photo: Ricardo Mazalan/AP)

If Hugo Chávez did to even one political prisoner what the U.S. imperialist rulers routinely due to thousands, there would be a deafening hue and cry from the laptop liberal pundits. A more balanced judgment comes from a Washington economist, Mark Weisbrot, who wrote: “Perhaps it is because I am from Chicago, and had only one mayor from the time I was born until I graduated college, that I am unable to see this as the making of a dictatorship. Not to mention that if Hillary Clinton is elected next year, we will have Bushes and Clintons as heads of state for a full consecutive 24 years, and possibly 28” (New Statesman, 21 November). Brazilian president Lula, hardly a radical, asked why no one complained of Margaret Thatcher ruling Britain for so many years.

As for emergency rule, the reforms allow for the president to suspend certain constitutional guarantees in a national emergency, including the right to information and due process, but not including prohibitions on torture, holding prisoners incommunicado or forcible disappearances. Nobody in the bourgeois media has bothered to mention that the U.S. routinely violates the last three prohibitions and is presently being governed under a state of national emergency as part of the post-9/11 “war on terrorism” (not to mention such draconian laws as the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act). And while Chávez would be required to present his emergency measures to the National Assembly within eight days, George W. Bush last May signed into law a National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (NSPD-51 and HSPD-20) which supersedes the National Emergency Act by allowing the president to assume dictatorial powers over all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments, as well as private sector organizations in a national emergency without any form of Congressional approval or oversight. And no one voted on that.

In Venezuela, ex-leftist Teodoro Petkoff’s labeled the amendments a “constitutional coup,” while General Baduel declared, “I categorize it as a coup d’état.” Others have said it would make Chávez a “dictator-for-life.” Yet the fact that Baduel called on military officials to “assess carefully” the changes that the government proposed “in a hasty manner and through fraudulent procedures” amounted to a scarcely veiled call for a real coup d’état by the military.

As for term limits, this is a pseudo-democratic measure that in fact limits the right of the population to vote for whomever it wishes; the only reason it even appears democratic is the recognition that under the fake democracy of capitalism, incumbents have enormous power to get themselves re-elected. The fact that the limits are removed only for the head of state, however, points to a shift toward a presidential regime in which a strong executive with reinforced powers is increasingly independent of any parliamentary control.

The emergency measures are another matter. In conditions of imperialist aggression and counterrevolutionary attack, we defend particular repressive measures directed against bourgeois reaction, whether undertaken by Chávez’ “Bolivarian” regime against coup-plotting media, by the Nicaraguan Sandinistas against U.S.-financed contra mouthpieces or by Abraham Lincoln against pro-Confederate newspapers (see “Venezuela: Battle Over the Media,” The Internationalist No. 26, July 2007). But for a capitalist government to arm itself with  such emergency measures in advance is an invitation to use them not only against coup plotters but also against militant workers’ struggles. Communists oppose such laws giving capitalist rulers carte blanche to eliminate democratic rights, whether in imperialist or semi-colonial countries.

Some of the political reforms are positive, including outlawing discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, sex or sexual orientation, religious creed or social condition (Article 21), recognizing Afro-Venezuelans as a community along with indigenous peoples (Article 100) and lowering the voting age to 16 (Article 64). Others, such as proclaiming the right to adequate, comfortable housing with basic services (Article 82) and the right to a job and duty to work (Article 87), are pious wishes that cannot be guaranteed under capitalism, no matter what the Constitution says on paper. The provisions about revoking mandates of elected officials (Article 72), while an advance over the institutional bonapartism of U.S.-style bourgeois “representative democracy,” are far from the “participatory democracy” they claim to represent. A recall election half-way through an elected term is a minimal control, which can easily be sidestepped by a determined executive, but far less than even a parliamentary regime.

Under the rubric of “people’s power” (Article 136), the reforms refer to the constitution of “councils of working people,” but only as organs of municipal self-government along with councils of peasants, students, artisans, sports, youth, women, fishermen and others. The reforms provide for setting up a “Communal City” as part of a “new geometry of power,” but such “communes” and “communal self-government” entities would be set up and its authorities named by the “National Executive Power” (Article 16). So in the guise of “poder popular,” this actually establishes local bodies totally controlled by the presidency.

And finally, in Article 236, there is a long list of powers of the presidency, including creating or eliminating provinces, federal districts, cities, regions and districts, as well as naming or removing their authorities; naming vice presidents; declaring states of exception and suspending or restricting constitutional guarantees; issuing enabling acts and decrees; dissolving the National Assembly, and “anything else indicated by the Constitution or by law,” subject only to ratification by the vice presidents (named by the president).

This is a program for a bonapartist “strong state” regime. The inclusion of plebiscites to episodically approve the actions of the executive is a traditional mechanism of providing a veneer of popular legitimation for such dictatorial regimes going back to Louis Napoléon Second Empire and Napoléon Bonaparte’s First Empire in France. It is light years away from the workers democracy based on soviets (workers and peasants councils), in which all representatives are subject to immediate recall at any moment by the councils whose decisions they carry out.

This is what gave the Russian soviets tremendous flexibility as organs of revolutionary struggle, enabling the Bolsheviks to become the majority and oust the previous Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary leaders of the bourgeois Provisional Government. It then provided the framework for establishing a workers state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which the fiction of “representative democracy” (in which electors are herded to the polls to vote every few years in the illusion that they are picking the rulers) was replaced by working bodies directly involving the working masses.

In contrast, the amended Venezuelan Constitution sets up a top-down regime in which virtually everything is decided by an all-powerful president, ratified by his appointed underlings and periodically acclaimed by the populace. If Venezuela were a workers state, it might provide the forms for a bureaucratic regime such as Castro’s Cuba, as charged by Venezuelan right-wingers. But Venezuela remains a capitalist state in which all of this only serves as window-dressing for a state power resting on the guns of the bourgeois army. For socialists to approve such measures would be to renounce the program of proletarian revolution.

Bourgeois Bonapartism or Workers Revolution

Workers of occupied Sanitarios Maracay plant and supporters march in Caracas, 14 December 2006,
demanding nationalization under workers control. Four months later, police and National Guard
attacked workers' caravan. (Photo: Hands Off Venezuela)

Currently, the reactionaries are parading the figure of General Raúl Baduel, a “chavista of the first hour” going back to 1982, who was Venezuela’s defense minister from 2004 until retiring earlier this year and who played a key role in saving Chávez during the 2002 coup attempt. While some chavistas try to minimize this, claiming for example that Baduel and his fellow officers moved against the coup plotters only after the masses came into the streets in defense of the deposed president (not true, it was the other way around), the fact is that his defection represents a serious fracturing of the Bolivarian political establishment at the top. Other generals on active duty are rumored to be ready to break with Chávez. The “social-democratic” PODEMOS (Por la Democracia Social) party, another former pillar of support for Chávez which refused to join the PSUV, has also called for a “No” vote on the referendum.

In fact, while Chávez has broad support among poor and working people, from the beginning his political apparatus has been heavily populated with bourgeois politicians and military officers. The Movement for the Fifth Republic (MVR), his main political vehicle until the formation of the “socialist” PSUV, was shot through with corrupt careerists. Such elements were so notorious that they are popularly known as the boliburguesía, often described with adjective “hummera” to indicate their predilection of these nouveau riche chavistas for buying high-priced Hummer SUVs. Chávez has also promoted a “socialist” businessmen’s association, Empresarios por Venezuela (Empreven), who are prepared to work with the regime, for a price. Again, no surprise. Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had a similar layer of private capitalists who profited handsomely from the heavily statified capitalist economy.

We have noted in the past (see “Venezuela: Workers to Power,” The Internationalist No. 22, September-October 2005) that Chávez heads a “bourgeois nationalist government of a ‘bonapartist’ character, with its base in the armed forces, but with characteristics peculiar to semi-colonial countries.” It is not simply a military/police dictatorship such as Chile under Pinochet or Argentina under the junta (1976-83). As Trotsky noted in elaborating his perspective of permanent revolution, in countries of belated capitalist development, a weak national bourgeoisie is sometimes obliged to maneuver between imperialism and the proletariat. Writing of the Mexican government of Lázaro Cárdenas, he noted that such a regime has a “bonapartist character sui generis” (of a distinctive or unique sort).

While seeming to raise itself above classes, in reality such a regime serves the bourgeoisie by making concessions to the imperialists or to the working class (such as Cárdenas’ nationalization of the railroads and oil industry, or Chávez’ experiments in “co-management”). “Revolutionary” rhetoric does not change the class character of such governments, and in fact many “Third World” capitalist regimes describe themselves as “socialist” based on the fact that they have large state-owned sectors of the economy. Yet this is simply a means of accumulating capital which will eventually be parceled out to a nascent “national” bourgeoisie when it becomes strong enough, such as occurred in Mexico over the last couple decades.

Facile comparisons with Cuba ignore the basic fact that while Castro took power at the head of a petty-bourgeois guerrilla band, following the disintegration of the dictator Fulgencio Batista’s army, Chávez’ base is the bourgeois armed forces. These are the same repressive forces that massacred thousands of poor Caracas residents in the 1989 caracazo upheaval, and slaughtered leftist insurgents in the 1960s. There are many more Baduels ensconced at the command level of the officer corps, biding their time waiting for a propitious moment to seize power. And while Chávez may slough off pro-capitalist elements the way East European Stalinists got rid of bourgeois ministers one by one through “salami tactics” after World War II, there is no Red Army occupying Venezuela to serve as ultimate arbiter and power base for erecting a deformed workers state.

Many self-proclaimed socialists give political support to Chávez and his “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela on the basis of its extensive social programs, despite the fact that the various “missions” are basically “welfare state” (asistencialista) measures that do not put into question the capitalist economic foundations of the regime. Although the Venezuelan leader has his frictions with particular imperialists, particularly George W. Bush in the U.S. whom he has vividly compared to the devil, he has in no way broken with the imperialist system. The unprecedented high prices for Venezuela’s main export, oil, may enable Chávez to pay off rather than repudiate the foreign debt, and U.S. energy dependence on Venezuela may restrict the options of the imperialist rulers. But it will take a revolutionary working-class-led uprising to expropriate the bourgeoisie, by a workers and peasants government that then extends the revolution throughout the hemisphere and into the heart of imperialism.

Various leftists who abuse the good name and revolutionary heritage of Trotsky to cover over their opportunist maneuvers are tailing after Chávez. Among them are the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec), followers of the late Ernest Mandel, and particularly its French section, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) which says of the constitutional changes that it “can only applaud and support such a reform” (Rouge, 20 September). By far the most uncriticial of the pseudo-Trotskyist chavistas is the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) of the late Ted Grant and its current leader, Alan Woods, who fancies himself a Trotskyist guru to Chávez. The small Venezuelan group associated with the Grantite “Militant” tendency, the Corriente Marxista Revolucionaria (CMR), describes itself as “part of the Bolivarian movement and the PSUV,” and calls for a massive “yes” vote on the referendum. No surprise there, for the IMT “Marxists” are part of bourgeois parties from Mexico (the PRD) to Pakistan (Bhutto’s PPP).

Another current which sometimes pretends to follow Trotsky (but opposes his actual policies on just about everything) are the followers of the late Tony Cliff, who characterized the Stalinized Soviet Union as “state capitalist” and refused to defend the USSR against imperialism whereas Trotsky defended the Soviet Union as a bureaucratically degenerated workers state. The British mother section of the International Socialist Tendency (IST) has been critical of Chávez “bureaucratic state machine that continues to sustain capitalist social relations,” while other sections of this loose social-democratic federation enthusiastically embrace Chávez’ PSUV. The estranged American Cliffites, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) recently published an extensive front-page article on “What’s Really Happening in Venezuela” (Socialist Worker, 30 November) in which they manage to take no position on the constitutional referendum while trying to sound sympathetic to the Chávez regime.

What’s behind this confusion from a current that usually uncritically hails “Third World” nationalist caudillos is that the people they have been tailing after in Venezuela are split on what line to take on the reforms. Part of the leadership of the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT – National Workers Union) headed by Stalin Pérez is calling for a “Yes” vote, while another sector led by Orlando Chirino, until now allied with Pérez in the C-CURA (Current for Revolutionary Class Unity and Autonomy) caucus, is calling for abstention and casting a blank ballot (voto nulo). This follows an earlier dispute in C-CURA and its allied Partido Revolución y Socialismo (PRS) over whether to enter the PSUV, with Pérez opting for entry and Chirino opposed. The UNT/C-CURA/PRS managed to establish itself as the leading organized representatives of the Venezuelan workers, defeating the CTV (Confederation of Venezuelan Workers) allied with the bourgeois right-wing opposition, and outflanking the unconditional chavistas. But it has been bedeviled from the beginning by the riddle of how to oppose Chávez’ attacks on the workers while not breaking from the popularity he enjoys among Venezuela’s impoverished masses.

The answer is: it can’t be done, you have to choose. To be sure, politically opposing the leader of the Bolivarian “revolution” while defending the regime militarily against counterrevolution and imperialism is a difficult task in today’s polarized situation, where the division between chavistas and anti-chavistas is drawn in blood. Taking an independent stance would undoubtedly not be understood today by many workers mesmerized by the nationalist caudillo. But for Marxists, what’s fundamental is the class division separating all currents of the bourgeoisie, on the one hand, from the working class allied with poor peasants and other oppressed sectors on the other. Only by insisting on a class line, whatever the cost in temporary popularity, can communists prepare the working people for the revolutionary struggles ahead.

For Chávez will, without any doubt, clamp down on any act of working-class independence from his regime. He accused UNT leaders of being “poisoned” and sharply denounced any trade-union autonomy from the PSUV, even quoting Rosa Luxemburg against them! (Of course, in her 1906 work on The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, Luxemburg was responding to reformist trade-unionists who wanted to take their distance from the social-democratic workers party, whereas Chávez is opposing independence by leftist trade-unionists from the control of a bourgeois party that is the bureaucratic political apparatus of the capitalist state.) But more than that, the officials of the “socialist” regime have cracked down on leftist-led struggles by Venezuelan workers.

A case in point is the treatment dished out to the government workers union by the Labor Ministry. According to an account in the newspaper of the British Socialist Workers Party:

“The elected representatives of Fentrasep, the public employees' trade union with some 1.5 million members, went to the Ministry of Labour in mid-August to renegotiate the collective contract for their members. The minister, Ramón Rivero, is a member of the Bolivarian Trade Union Federation and an ex-Trotskyist. He refused to meet with the delegation and locked them inside a room in the ministry. No food or drink was provided; the delegates' families passed them through the windows. After six days they were driven out by hired thugs.”

–Socialist Review, October 2007

It should be noted that the leader of FENTRASEP, Ramón Arías, belongs to that wing of the UNT and C-CURA which opposed Chirino and entered the PSUV (while calling for purging corrupt bureaucrats and employers from the party). Another example is what happened to the workers at Sanitarios Maracay, manufacturers of toilets, who have occupied their plant for the last year. When the workers were traveling by bus to Caracas on April 24 to demand expropriation of the company under workers control, they were stopped on the highway by the Aragua state police and National Guard who fired on the workers with buckshot, wounding 14 and arresting 21. These workers were organized in the FRETCO (Revolutionary Front of Workers in Occupied Factories) linked to the Grant/Woods Militant tendency which has been the loudest cheerleaders for Chávez on the international left.

So here we have two cases of anti-union repression by the military-based “socialist” regime directed against supporters of the regime. One can imagine how Chávez & Co. would react to a militant struggle led by leftist workers politically opposed to their bonapartist government.

Today, the active threat in Venezuela comes from the capitalist ultra-right wing allied with U.S. imperialism, which has never let up in its drive to overthrow the nationalist government that dared to flout the diktats from Washington. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International have repeatedly called to defend Venezuela against imperialist aggression and internal counterrevolutionary forces who would drown the workers in blood. In 2002-03 bosses’ lockout we called for workers to seize the shuttered plants and impose workers control, to organize workers militias, and to form workers councils to organize supplies of necessary goods and revolutionary resistance to the pro-imperialist coup.

Outdoor market in Caracas. Capitalists are trying to create food shortages to protest price controls.
Workers should seize control of agricultural/food manufacturing and marketing system and
impose workers control. (Photo: Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press)

Today, it is urgent to put a halt to the bosses’ sabotage, in particular their attempts to create artificial food shortages, by seizing control of the entire agricultural/food manufacturing and marketing chain and imposing workers control. Such energetic action by the workers movement would certainly be opposed by sectors of the “Bolivarian bourgeoisie” in power. Hence it must be linked to a whole program of transitional measures leading to the seizure of power by the working class. This was the purpose of the 1938 Transitional Program, the founding program of the Fourth International, which Trotsky intended to “help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”

This was also the method of Lenin in his September 1917 pamphlet on The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It. Here the Bolshevik leader was responding to the disruption of production and distribution of grain as well as coal and other vital raw materials by rail stoppages and hoarding that were causing dire food shortages and a looming famine, thereby threatening the revolution. In his pamphlet, Lenin called for revolutionary action by the workers, through the soviets, rather than begging the capitalist government, which was in league with the hoarders and disrupters. His program included workers control, nationalization of the banks, and fighting for all power to the soviets. He wrote:

“In point of fact, the whole question of control boils down to who controls whom, i.e., which class is in control and which is being controlled. In our country, in Republican Russia … it is the landowners and capitalists who are still recognised to be, and still are, the controllers. The inevitable result is the capitalist robbery that arouses universal indignation among the people, and the economic chaos that is being artificially kept up by the capitalists. We must resolutely and irrevocably … pass to control over the landowners and capitalists by the workers and peasants. And this is what our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks fear worse than the plague.”

What was put forward as a program in September was then carried out in the October Revolution of 1917.

Today, while vigilantly mobilizing the workers and impoverished masses against the capitalist saboteurs, including those incrusted in the “Bolivarian” state apparatus, it is necessary above all to build an authentically Leninist-Trotskyist revolutionary workers party. It must be based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution, understanding that in the present imperialist epoch, even achieving basic democratic tasks including agrarian revolution, national liberation and democracy for the exploited and oppressed requires that the working class take power, backed by the peasantry and urban poor, to sweep away the capitalist state, establish a workers and peasants government to expropriate the bourgeoisie and spread the revolution internationally.

The choice is revolution or counterrevolution – and no amount  of constitutional fiddling will resolve it. The question is power, kto/kogo, as Lenin put it: who controls whom?  n