Analysis of developments in Venezuela and other parts of South America

It is certainly generous of the Monthly Review to make important articles such as this available for free on its website. The whole article is available on the website. Lebowitz concentrates on Venezuela but also touches on other countries in South America as well.


Venezuela:
A Good Example of the Bad Left of Latin America
by Michael A. Lebowitz


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Notes From
the Editors


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Michael A. Lebowitz is author of Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press, 2006), and The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (Monthly Review Press, forthcoming in 2008). Portions of this essay were presented as “Going Beyond Survival: Making the Social Economy a Real Alternative” at the Fourth International Meeting of the Solidarity Economy, July 21–23, 2006, at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Fair wages, a fair day’s work! Through their struggles within capitalism, it has often been possible for workers and citizens to secure themselves some share of the benefits of social labor. Capitalist globalization and the offensive of neoliberal state policies, however, have encroached upon all those gains from past struggles; and the answer to those who were surprised to find those victories ephemeral was the mantra of TINA—there is no alternative.

Yet, as the devastation of the capitalist offensive has become obvious, opposition has emerged especially in Latin America. We warned you this would happen, say the hucksters and self-promoters; instead of the good times ahead promised from the neoliberal medicine prescribed from the 1980s on, Latin America experienced (in the words of Jorge G. Castañeda) “the persistence of dismal poverty, inequality, high unemployment, a lack of competitiveness, and poor infrastructure” (“Latin America’s Left Turn,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006). The left (“rightly foretold” by the prophets) has returned.

This means that hope has returned. Working people around the world look to Latin America these days for the demonstration that there is an alternative, that a better world is possible. But, are they right to look to Latin America? Is a real alternative emerging or is it merely a negotiation of better terms in the implicit contract with capitalist globalization? Is Latin America breaking with capitalism or is it struggling for fairness?

The Good Left and the Bad Left

Of course, we know that all lefts are not the same. And, indeed, that is a constant theme among commentators of all varieties. While few would divide Latin America in accordance with dietary practices as did Alvaro Vargas Llosa (Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Evo Morales being designated as “carnivores”—Washington Post, August 6, 2006), for many there is simply the Good Left and the Bad Left. What they have in common, according to Castañeda, is that they stress “social improvements,” “egalitarian distribution of wealth,” “sovereignty,” and “democracy” (over the presumed opposite package of macroeconomic orthodoxy, wealth creation, international cooperation, and governmental effectiveness). What makes the Bad Left bad, though, is essentially described by one word—“populism.”

When they hear the term populism, Latin American intellectuals reach for their incense. Partly that is because the term conveys people, masses, the unwashed in motion. When Castañeda declares populism to be “nationalist, strident, and close-minded,” it is hard not to think of this as his description of the masses themselves. But, there is more to it (or, rather, there is another aspect of this). When he describes as among the characteristics of populists in power that they “nationalized large sectors of their countries’ economies, extending well beyond the so-called commanding heights” and captured “natural resource or monopoly rents, which allowed them to spend money on the descamisados, the ‘shirtless,’ without raising taxes on the middle class,” you know that what makes the Bad Left really bad is its attack on capital.

Small wonder, then, that the Good Left is said to include the governments of Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil (and maybe even Nestor Kirchner’s Argentina), while the Bad Left invariably revolves around Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. Given that the distance from Chávez appears to be the true measure of all things, one might conclude that Ecuador’s Rafael Correa will also fall into the category of the Bad.

Yet, here is where this classification system breaks down. How do we distinguish between an attack on capitalism as such and an attack on the current policies and practices of capitalism? Between a struggle for a new economic system, on the one hand, and a struggle for fairness on the part of international creditors, in trade relations, and in the distribution of resource rents, on the other? Distinguishing between these may be harder than it appears at first sight.

After all, even a process of despotic inroads upon capital (of a long march which wrests, “by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie,” in the words of Marx and Engels) is certain to be described as mere reformism by those for whom anything less than storming the heights immediately—nationalizing everything with workers’ control now—is simply acquiescence to international capital. Abstract idealists for whom the correlation of forces (internal and external) and the concept of process mean less than the pamphlets they have underlined always sing the same tune of betrayal (changing only the names of those who have spurned their overtures). But, it does not mean that they are wrong in particular cases.

How can we identify an attack on capitalism as such? Is an alternative to capitalism being built in the new left governments of Latin America?

Identifying an Alternative to Capitalism

What constitutes a real alternative to capitalism? I suggest that it is a society in which the explicit goal is not the growth of capital or of the material means of production but, rather, human development itself—the growth of human capacities. We can see this perspective embodied in the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela—in Article 299’s emphasis upon “ensuring overall human development,” in the declaration of Article 20 that “everyone has the right to the free development of his or her own personality,” and in the focus of Article 102 upon “developing the creative potential of every human being and the full exercise of his or her personality in a democratic society.”

In these passages (which are by no means the whole of that constitution), there is the conception of a real alternative—an economy whose logic is not the logic of capital. “The social economy,” President Hugo Chávez said in September 2003, “bases its logic on the human being, on work, that is to say, on the worker and the worker’s family, that is to say, in the human being.” That social economy, he continued, does not focus on economic gain, on exchange values; rather, “the social economy generates mainly use-value.” Its purpose is “the construction of the new man, of the new woman, of the new society.”

These are beautiful ideas and beautiful words, but they are, of course, only ideas and words. The first set comes from a constitution and the second comes from the regular national educational seminar known as Aló Presidente. How can such ideas and words be made real? Let me suggest four preconditions for the realization of this alternative to capitalism.

(1) Any discussion of structural change must begin from an understanding of the existing structure—in short, from an understanding of capitalism. We need to grasp that the logic of capital, the logic in which profit rather than satisfaction of the needs of human beings is the goal, dominates both where it fosters the comparative advantage of repression and also where it accepts an increase in slave rations.

(2) It is essential to attack the logic of capital ideologically. In the absence of the development of a mass understanding of the nature of capital—that capital is the result of the social labor of the collective worker—the need to survive the ravages of neoliberal and repressive policies produces only the desire for a fairer society, the search for a better share for the exploited and excluded: in short, barbarism with a human face.

(3) A critical aspect in the battle to go beyond capitalism is the recognition that human capacity develops only through human activity, only through what Marx understood as “revolutionary practice,” the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change. Real human development does not drop from the sky in the form of money to support survival or the expenditures of popular governments upon education and health. In contrast to populism, which produces people who look to the state for all answers and to leaders who promise everything, the conception which truly challenges the logic of capital in the battle of ideas is one which explicitly recognizes the centrality of self-management in the workplace and self-government in the community as the means of unleashing human potential—i.e., the idea of socialism for the twenty-first century.

(4) But, the idea of this socialism cannot displace real capitalism. Nor can dwarfish islands of cooperation change the world by competing successfully against capitalist corporations. You need the power to foster the new productive relations while truncating the reproduction of capitalist productive relations. You need to take the power of the state away from capital, and you need to use that power when capital responds to encroachments—when capital goes on strike, you must be prepared to move in rather than give in. Winning the “battle of democracy” and using “political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie” remains as critical now as when Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto.

Consider these preconditions. Are they being met by the new Latin American governments on the left? On the contrary, for the most part, we can see the familiar characteristics of social democracy—which does not understand the nature of capital, does not attack the logic of capital ideologically, does not believe that there is a real alternative to capitalism, and, not surprisingly, gives in when capital threatens to go on strike.

“We can’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs,” announced the social democratic premier of British Columbia in Canada (in the 1970s when I was party policy chairman). Here, crystallized, is the ultimate wisdom of social democracy—the manner in which social democracy enforces the logic of capital and ideologically disarms and demobilizes people.

Venezuela, however, is going in a different direction at this point. While the Bolivarian Revolution did not start out to build a socialist alternative (and its continuation along this path is contested every step of the way), it is both actively rejecting the logic of capital and also ideologically arming and mobilizing people to build that alternative.

The Initial Venezuelan Path

Although the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999 focused upon the development of human capacity, it also retained the support for capitalism of earlier constitutions. That constitution guarantees the right of property (Article 115), identifies a role for private initiative in generating growth and employment (Article 299), and calls upon the state to promote private initiative (Article 112). And, support for continued capitalist development was precisely the direction of the initial plan developed for 2001–07. While rejecting neoliberalism and stressing the importance of the state presence in strategic industries, the focus of that plan was to encourage investment by private capital—both domestic and foreign—by creating an “atmosphere of trust.”

To this was to be added the development of a “social economy”—conceived as an “alternative and complementary road” to the private sector and the public sector. But, it is significant how little a role was conceived for self-managing and cooperative activities. Essentially, this was a program to incorporate the informal sector into the social economy; it is necessary, the plan argued, “to transform the informal workers into small managers.” Accordingly, family, cooperative, and self-managed micro-enterprises were to be encouraged through training and micro-financing (from institutions such as the Women’s Development Bank) and by reducing regulations and tax burdens. The goal of the state was explicitly described as one of “creating an emergent managerial class.”

The social economy, thus, was to play the role it plays in Brazil and elsewhere—islands of cooperation nurtured by states, NGOs, Grameen-type banks, and church charities and serving as positive shock absorbers for the economic and political effects of capitalist globalization. Of course, if seriously pursued, this could make things easier for the unemployed and excluded, the half of the Venezuelan working class in the informal sector, by providing them with a better opportunity for survival. But, the social economy was not envisioned in the 2001–07 plan as an alternative to capitalism (except insofar as survival within the nooks and crannies of global capitalism constitutes an alternative).

A Third Way for Venezuela: it would turn its back on neoliberalism, would change the distribution of oil rents by acting against the state within the state that was the national oil company (PDVSA), and would move via an active state in the direction of the “endogenous development” supported by structuralist economists. The goal, in short, was a different capitalism. The Bolivarian Revolution at its outset clearly belonged in the Good Left.

But, it also contained a potential subversive element—its theme of human development. The Bolivarian Constitution is unequivocal in indicating that human beings develop their capacity only through their own activity. Not only does Article 62 declare that participation by people is “the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective,” but that constitution specifically focuses upon democratic planning and participatory budgeting at all levels of society and (as in Article 70) upon “self-management, co-management, cooperatives in all forms” as examples of “forms of association guided by the values of mutual cooperation and solidarity.” With its emphasis upon a “democratic, participatory and protagonistic” society, the Bolivarian Constitution definitely contains the seeds of the social economy, the seeds of socialism for the twenty-first century.

And, those seeds didn’t drop from the sky. They came from the social movements that were allied with Hugo Chávez’s struggle to throw out the Fourth Republic (and that, through membership in the new Constituent Assembly, introduced those seeds directly into the constitution); and, they came from the self-described “subversive in Miraflores” himself—Chávez, the prisoner who wrote in 1993, “the sovereign people must transform itself into the object and the subject of power. This option is not negotiable for revolutionaries.”

Of course, contradictory elements such as those found in the Bolivarian Constitution are not unique, and potentially subversive seeds often produce nothing. We are all familiar with governments elected as agencies of working people which, once elected, send the people home to rest for the next election. Further, there is much sad experience with the manner in which those social movements then proceed to self-police themselves—with the result that the seeds wither. In Venezuela, however, class struggle nurtured the seeds of that social economy so that it increasingly was seen as the alternative to capitalist development.