Venezuela

Venezuela’s growing social polarisation and slide towards civil war has intensified in recent weeks, the combined result of right-wing destabilisation and the actions of the Maduro government. The current political impasse arises from the unravelling of the “Bolivarian” project of Hugo Chávez. His successor Nicolás Maduro narrowly won the presidential election in 2013, but failed to retain the regime’s popularity with the majority of Venezuelan people. Maduro’s ruling PSUV party lost the National Assembly elections to the right wing opposition in 2015. Last year, the president suspended the...

On Sunday 30 July, so-called elections took place to a so-called Constituent Assembly in Venezuela. It is important, for the future, the revolution, and democracy, not to fool ourselves about the meanings of the words being used here. For all Venezuelans, there can be no doubt: what was elected today has nothing in common with a sovereign constituent assembly. By "a sovereign constituent assembly", we mean one which exercises power. In order to submit the constitution to the whole of the people, in a sovereign manner, it is necessary that the assembly rule over any President, any internal or...

For the last seven weeks Venezuela has experienced violent opposition protests intent on toppling the elected Maduro government. Since the beginning of April, over 50 people have been killed during demonstrations orchestrated by the right-wing Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD – Democratic Unity Table). In the worst case, these events may precipitate the overthrow of the government by rightist neoliberal forces or pave the way for a military coup. Even if they fail, the events are a further stage in the demise of so-called Bolivarian 21st century “socialism” launched by Hugo Chávez and much...

The government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela is in trouble. Destabilisation after the death of Hugo Chavez has fractured the government’s political base. An economic crisis due to low oil prices, and mobilisations by the political right, have brought the government to a state of collapse. The following text is an extract from an interview with César Romero of Marea Socialista (MS), a socialist organisation, which last year left the government party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Though this group are some distance from us politically — we are more critical of the “Bolivarian...

Recent bloody demonstrations in Venezuela are part of a concerted attempt by the neoliberal right-wing section of the ruling class to destabilise and ultimately replace the chavista government of Nicolás Maduro. The Venezuelanalysis website says at least ten people were killed during the protests and the army are now on the streets. These mobilisations, it must be stressed, are led by reactionaries. In the run up to first anniversary of Chávez’s death, right-wing, free-market capitalist oppositionists have seized on popular discontent against economic shortages, inflation at 50% and crime to...

Pablo Velasco concludes his assessment of Hugo Chávez’s political legacy and the relationship of the “Bolivarian” state to Venezuela’s working class. In this article, he looks at the attitude of international Trotskyism, and particularly the “International Marxist Tendency” to Chávez. The accommodation and prostration of the apparently “Trotskyist” left to Chávez was one of the principal signifiers of a wider ideological collapse of socialism that took place in the early years of this century. Alongside support for the murderous Islamist “resistance” (instead of trade unionists and secular...

Pablo Velasco continues his assessment of the legacy of Hugo Chávez by looking at some of the aspects of his government most lauded by the left. Probably the most common argument made by pro-Chávez supporters is that the extent of welfare spending makes Chavismo a social-democratic reformist project that socialists should support, albeit critically. The Chávez government prioritised the “missions”, programmes in the areas of health (Barrio Adentro), education (Robinson, Ribas and Sucre) and food distribution (Mercal). According to official government figures poverty declined from 44% in 1998...

For Marxists, the most significant criteria for judging any regime — aside from its relation to capital and the nature of the state — is its relationship with the working class. This is so often missing from pro-Chávez apologists, who tend to treat workers as the passive recipients of Chávez’s benevolence. It is also missing from neoliberal accounts, for whom the working class is merely raw material for exploitation. The picture is somewhat complicated by the state of organised labour before Chávez. The historic official trade union movement, the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), was...

The death of Hugo Chávez earlier this year provides the opportunity for a balance sheet on his rule and what it signified for socialists. Workers’ Liberty contends that Chávez was a “Bonapartist” politician who remained to his death within the bounds of capitalism, whatever his rhetoric about socialism and “Bolivarian revolution”. Pablo Velasco contributes the first of a serious of four articles. Marxists understand capitalism as a mode of production in which capital exploits wage labour. These dominant social relations of production determine the class structure of different states across the...

The narrow victory of Nicolás Maduro in the Venezuelan presidential election on 14 April should trigger serious reflection on the left about the limits of chavismo without Chávez. Maduro won by 1.6% of the vote against right-wing neoliberal opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, with 50.7% compared to his opponent’s 49.1%. Pro-chavista apologists such as the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign were saying only days before the election that Maduro had a double digit lead over Capriles. Turnout was still high at 78%. There can be few excuses. Hugo Chávez defeated Capriles 55%-44% last October and his...