In Defence of Marxism

Here I want to give a brief and clear outline of the revolutionary process which has been taking place in Venezuela starting from the point where international powers recognised the great oil potential of the country. This occurred during the First World War. In addition I aim to show that the PSUV is a body of decisive importance in light of this revolutionary process.

During the Great War and on through the twenties Juan Vicente Gomez was president of Venezuela. He is often remembered as having been a moderniser. It was mostly due to his efforts, advocates say, that Venezuela was able to develop a modern economy and infrastructure. As with most explanations which languish in the realm of first impressions; of immediacy, this is profoundly false. Gomez did preside over the development of a more ‘advanced', more capitalistic economy but at the same time his presidency coincided with the international realisation of the great economic potential offered by the reserves of oil in Venezuela. Foreign capital flooded in and superimposed itself; it brought with it more advanced technology, it developed the materials and tools with which to better tap the oil and transport it. Workers were the ones to facilitate these changes; to build the equipment and work with it; in short to extract the oil, for capital is never a mere sum of money invested, but is instead and always the embodiment of the relation between proletariat and bourgeoisie veiled yet continually transforming and acting.

Juan Vicente Gomez for his part opened up the country to foreign investment; he made sure that the big oil companies were met with open arms and with open arms did he receive the financial rewards their ‘gratitude' delivered; he amassed a personal fortune over and above the personal fortune he had as president already amassed. He was a dictator and his relation to the imperial powers of the first world was summarised by another Venezuelan president, Romulo Betancourt, who would later say of him that he ‘was something more than a local despot, he was the instrument of foreign control of the Venezuelan economy, the ally and servant of powerful outside interests.' (Venezuela : Oil and Politics). As an afterthought Gomez did invest in public works with the colourful and lazy charity that someone swollen with money and self-importance often employs. These small benefits were not realised in and through public education. Widespread education is, apparently, rarely conducive to dictatorship.

And then a procession of dictators with the brief interruption provided by the election of Rómulo Gallegos - swiftly overthrown in a military coup led by Marcos Perez Jimenez, who took power before later being overthrown himself in 1958. This ‘caudillo' liquidated much of the opposition against him before he was eventually vanquished, but, like so many military men before him, was granted asylum by the government of the United States. He took several hundred million dollars of Venezuela's money for good measure because, as a patriot, he no doubt felt it important to retain some keep sake of the country he so very much loved. Despite the outrage and clamouring for justice on the part of the Venezuelan masses, he eventually retired to Spain where he would be met with warmth and understanding by fellow dictator Francisco Franco. It is always good to have friends.

Romulo Betancourt, who succeeded Perez Jimenez, actually won the presidency on a democratic platform. He did this partly as a result of promises made to lift the standard of living for the majority of the population. But although Betancourt did struggle to make sure the state obtained more of the wealth generated from oil sales very little of this money trickled down to the poor majority. The promises melted away in the stark light of the new relationship he forged with the United States. As well Betancourt formed an alliance with the big party of the right (Christian democrats of COPEI); an alliance known as the Punto Fijo pact. The pact ensured a common economic programme and created a situation of shared power between the two large parties - rather than struggle with one another they were content to divvy out the oil revenues between themselves. They saved their strength for the protests below which inevitably flared and which were violently suppressed. For all this Betancourt is now proudly touted as the ‘founding father' of Venezuelan democracy.

The Punto Fijo pact held for the next few decades. Whichever party was in power the same small elite comprised of politicians, oil bureaucrats and investors absorbed the riches generated from the oil. Every now and again some of that money found its way to fund social programmes for education and health but, as might be expected, this was a rare occurrence. In the 1980s this situation grew ever more desperate; the more the social divide expanded between wealth and poverty, the more frantically did the rich few grab all they could. This was the era of the yuppie and the free market; a time in which the wealthy paraded their riches with all the bravado of a drunk who knocks back more rum in order to postpone the inevitable hangover. As the 80s rolled to an end the economic headache did indeed arrive and as usual it was the people who had paid for everything else, the workers, who were expected to pay for this. 

Despite its supposedly nationalised status PDVSA (the state oil company) was a cooperation which was the continuation of a privatised method of work, its management comprised from the higher echelons of the old private companies and firmly slotted into the structures of global oil production. So it was that in the late 80s the economy felt very keenly the falling world oil prices. There was already a great deal of distrust on the part of the masses toward the IMF and the imperialist countries and, when Carlos Andres Perez was inaugurated in February 1989 much of his success was based on his overt hostility to the IMF - ‘a bomb that only kills people'- a hostility he had demonstrated throughout his campaign. Within two weeks the president had betrayed this perspective. He committed to the IMF and ratified the Washington economic proposals which saw the few state provided goods and services liberalised, and government spending restricted; measures which could yet again extract more money from an already desperately poor majority.

The Caracazo

Caracas is beautiful. In the centre stand the great sky scrapers of the business district. Streamlined and pristine some of these are the colour of marble while others are a deep, rich blue; a sapphire colour which is able to imprison the sunlight such that the surface of the building shimmers. As the view pans out you can see all around the shape and contour of great hills. The shacks and skeleton houses of the shanty towns attach themselves to these hills, and there are so very many and they are pressed so tightly together that their situation looks almost perilous. It really does seem like they are clinging on for life. And in effect that is what the poor here have always done; albeit it in a time of military dictatorship, or during the more ‘civilised' and ‘democratic' governments which still took so much and gave so very little. However all great historical events know the transition from quantity to quality and on the morning of February 27^th1989 the people from the slums and from the hills could take no more.           

The immediate consequence of Perez's deceitful concession to Washington in February was a 100% increase in the price of gasoline. On the morning of the 27^th when the population awoke to the new changes the astonishment was widespread. In Caracas where the informal workforce commuted in from the shanty towns to clean and cook in the houses and offices of the wealthy the disbelief soon converted into outrage. Many people refused to pay. Rioting and the burning of buses coincided with wider demonstrations as the whole country was engulfed in protest.  The response of the ‘democratic' government was deathly simple. They turned their guns on the population. The first reported fatalities arrived early afternoon when police opened fire on students in a park and the violence intensified after ‘democratic' president Perez appeared on national television to announce the suspension of constitutional rights and a state of siege. In the largest and poorest barrios the repression was more extreme and many of those most active in the rebellion were ‘disappeared'. It seems that no one knows just how many people were murdered in those few days - some say 1 000, others put the number closer to 10 000. We do know that those killed were predominantly poor. Following a logic of self preservation the government tried to conceal the true nature of the uprising; it insisted that no more than 257 people had lost their lives, that the Caracazo was a limited and opportunistic action on the part of a criminal element and that looting was its main expression. The wonderfully ‘free' Venezuelan press, in support of their leaders, carried the same misinformation and tried to further poison the issue with furtive references to the activities of ‘foreigners' - shady and unnameable orchestrates of chaos lurking from behind the scenes. These racist slurs were conceived of with deliberation on the part of the government and media; it was no doubt calculated that these would be the most expedient means of directing public anger away from themselves. It is worth noting that these were the same papers as those owned by billionaire media moguls such as Gustavo Cisneros; papers which today in Venezuela present themselves as the friend of the masses and the righteous guardians of truth. In the case of the Caracazo their lies were corrected in the most simple of ways by the unearthing of a mass grave one year on.                                      

The Caracazo marked the beginning of the end for the government. True, they were able to suppress the uprising and hence cling to power. For the moment. But something had changed and profoundly so. A lot of people talk about Bolivarianism and how it was cooked up in the barracks among the generals but this is not altogether accurate. The Bolivarian movement; its revolutionary core, was forged on a cold morning one February. The people who could no longer afford the price of a bus fare stood against the forces of international imperialism and the after shock tore the semblance of Venezuela asunder revealing vividly two very different entities; the poor majority, and the wealthy few who would do the unthinkable in order to sustain. The military experienced a similar polarisation; already many of the soldiers whose ranks were swelled by the poor, had refused to fire. It is against this background that a man named Hugo Chavez steps forward.                       

Chavez

Hugo Chavez was born in a mud hut in a small village. The first part of his childhood was impoverished and his parents later made the decision to send him to live with his grandmother in the near by town of Sabaneta where he would receive better opportunities. There he went through school and eventually entered the Venezuelan academy of military sciences as a Cadet. Here he was influenced by the philosophies of various left wing nationalist figures like Salvador Allende, Fidel Castro and Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. He was also affected by the ideas of Marxists such as Ernesto ‘Che' Guevara and Lenin. These threads of thought, and others, meshed to create a somewhat indistinct fabric which Chavez would christen ‘Bolivarianism', named for Simon Bolivar; the military leader who had fought successfully against Spanish imperialism 2 centuries before. It would be interesting and important to undertake a more detailed examination of the ideology of Bolivarianism; its inception and the process of development it was subject to, however this cannot be dealt with here. Suffice to say that, at this time, Bolivarianism was the fusion of revolutionary ideals with the military structure which Chavez and comrades were themselves enmeshed in. What emerged was a radicalism which could not but work from the top down. In 1992 this was expressed when Chavez headed a military rebellion against the hated government.. The organisers of the rebellion within the army had made attempts to link up with the masses. But they had no experience, no knowledge of how to do it, and in the end the civilian forces they had made contact with abandoned them. The movement became isolated though with sympathy on the part of the masses and it was defeated. So that he could call on his comrades in arms to surrender, the ruling class offered Chavez a minute of time to appear on mainstream; a minute at the end of which he qualified the defeat with a warning - ‘Por ahora' - "for now".                              

Since the Caracazo there had been an almost continual stream of protests from a population which had experienced such terrible repression and was still subject to the looming dictates of the world bank and a president who held his own people in arrogant contempt. Although the 1992 coup led by Chavez was unsuccessful he never the less entered public consciousness as a symbol of the brave and heroic struggles being fought against a ruthless and corrupted elite. Within a year Perez had been impeached. Chavez himself was released from prison and in 1998 he stood in the presidential election. His main opponent was ex beauty queen Irene Saez whose soft features, strawberry blonde hair and lack of a single coherent political idea made of her the perfect representative of an elite which devoid of credibility now sought to sink itself in the fantastical. Saez might just as well have stepped out from one of the ghastly and saccharine TV novellas which depict wealthy, western-esque Venezuelans preserved in a bubble of decadence and glamour, Venezuelans living untroubled by the presence of Venezuela. In contrast to this stood Chavez. Chavez has darker, more indigenous looks. His appearance and his street wise language mark him out as a boy from the barrio and his persona is twofold; underpinned by both the softness which comes from a genuine love of the people and the strength which arises from the desire to fight alongside them. In addition he called George Bush Jr a donkey. For all of this it is difficult not to like Hugo Chavez. In 1998 the masses of Venezuela liked him very well for they made him president in what was an overwhelming electoral victory.            

Despite their complete redundancy it seems as though the wealthy elite were still astounded by Chavez's victory. The United States government was certainly worried by the change. But though Chavez, from the very start of his presidency, initiated various reforms which would help raise the standard of life for the poor in terms of education and health care he did not challenge private property fundamentally and made it clear he wanted to work with the international investors and not against them. Nevertheless the elite, both inside and outside Venezuela, mounted a savage and relentless campaign against him. Their reaction, which seems disproportionate, cannot simply be understood by the immediate threat that Chavez did or did not pose to wealth though, in the last analysis, this was the entrenched issue. In Venezuela the wealthy; the oil and media magnates and emissaries, their affiliates in the government, and their offspring - the next generation of happy go lucky students who globetrot on the cusp of adulthood before returning home to take up the mantel; to assume a position managing their parents' business or blaze a path upwards through the higher echelons of government, overseen, of course, by the stern but benevolent gaze of ‘Pappi' - in short - the whole class itself; via its various sub stratums, had sustained, largely untroubled, rumbling on through time controlling the various sections of industry and government and reaping the vast financial rewards which arose from such a state of affairs. They felt good. The election of Chavez changed that.

This same elite has since coined a buzz word with which to label Chavez and the movement which created him; they describe it as ‘feo' which in Spanish means simply ‘ugly' yet much more is transmitted by this phrase on their lips. Before 1989 their main contact with the workers who maintained them had been through the comings and goings of domestic servants who cleaned and cooked; a mainly indigenous army whose poverty and the subsequent compulsion to stay employed rendered them almost invisible to their ‘benefactors'. Then again the ‘benefactors' never troubled themselves to look that hard. But one February the image of these people, exploding in protest, was emblazoned indelibly across their field of vision. That mainly dark skinned majority, who were ‘suited' to performing the most menial and dirty tasks discretely and from behind the scenes, were now clamouring for recognition and, to a person whose life was wealthy and free of toil, how could this appear as anything but ugly? For a revolutionary nothing is more beautiful.                                                 

In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel describes the dialectical nature of the relationship between bondsman and lord.  To immediacy it seems as though the personality of the lord, freed as it is from the burden of manual labour, has attained true nobility and independence, but the great German philosopher observes that in actual fact something else is true:

‘just where the master has effectively achieved lordship, he really finds that something has come about quite different from an independent consciousness. It is not an independent, but rather a dependent consciousness that he has achieved. He is thus not assured of self-existence as his truth; he finds that his truth is rather the unessential consciousness, and the fortuitous unessential action of that consciousness. The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the bondsman......By serving he cancels in every particular aspect his dependence on and attachment to natural existence, and by his work removes this existence away.... This activity giving shape and form, is at the same time the individual existence, the pure self-existence of that consciousness, which now in the work it does is externalized and passes into the condition of permanence'

The ruling classes despise Chavez because his figure is a visible reminder of those who work so hard and for very little; those whose labour shapes and transforms the world; thereby creating a subsistence for themselves and the vast wealth of a relative few. In the person of Chavez this minority is compelled to confront daily its own lack of substance; its wayward and unworldly nature; human beings rendered narrow and cruel by the arbitrary and parasitical role they assume in the furore of social life. This underpins the racism and venom they direct toward Chavez, and toward the vast majority of the poor in the country. The state of affairs reaches a critical point in April 2002 when seething resentment is translated into explosive action.                   

The 2002 coup

In the first part of 2002 Chavez had been struggling to reform the PDVSA in order to garner a greater deal of funding for public education and health. Since 1999 spending on these things had increased but now Chavez sought to introduce a law which would set limits on foreign investment and double the obligatory taxes to be paid by the PDVSA to the government.  The management of the PDVSA led a strike in response to these measures which was the beginning of a more aggressive campaign of mobilisations and slander on the part of the ruling class. Chavez responds by introducing the ‘Bolivarian circles' which straight away saw hundreds of thousands from the poorer elements sign up. This period saw an intensification in struggle - with both sides rattling their sabres and their supporters clashing in demonstrations up and down the country.

It is important to note the role of the mainstream media throughout as they intensified their invective directed at Chavez; they inflamed the situations as they actually occurred; the showed images of Chavez alongside angry mobs and burning buildings; they quite systematically instilled the message, directed at small businesses, professionals; the lower middle classes in general, that, under Chavez all you have would certainly go up in flames. Years later we have a clearer view of what was happening. The ruling class had decided to make its move in advance - that is to say having lost out democratically in the elections and realising that this route would be ineffective as a means to be rid of Chavez, they were now determined to remove him physically. On the 9^th of April a strike was called whereby business leaders closed down their enterprises. Two days following a large demonstration of some two hundred thousand anti Chavista protesters was launched and here things took a disturbing turn. At the same time a pro Chavista march was taking place and though both events had routes organized in advance such that they wouldn't conflict, nevertheless the two groups met and violence erupted. It is now known that the Anti-Chavista march was purposely re-routed without police consultation (a legal requirement) and this resulted in 20 deaths and over one hundred injuries. Here the media stepped in at the opportune moment - they recorded and showed images of Chavistas with guns blazing and counter posed this with images of civilians shot and running away. Later with the help of amateur footage it was demonstrated that the square below the shooters was empty and that the Chavez supporters were returning fire having been targeted by snipers positioned above. They were in no way responsible for the wounded people shown on television. But the Venezuelan media did not require the lie to sustain; it wasn't necessary that the contrived footage withstand future examination. The images were needed only in the moment; to create the spark which would ignite the explosive events that followed. While these doctored images were paraded ad infinitum by the Venezuelan media and the mainstream media around the world as ‘evidence' of Chavista brutality, Army officers came out and announced the coup. They threatened to bomb the presidential palace and had Hugo Chavez arrested. The elected government was disbanded and the president of Venezuela taken to an island military base were he was detained, charged with the violence which had occurred when the two demonstrations clashed two days before; the same violence which the opposition had so thoroughly orchestrated.  

In the hours which followed, the focus of the world was on Venezuela. The media would report that Chavez had resigned as a consequence of the popular pressure - the response to repressive action on the part of the government. They portrayed the coup de tat as a spontaneous event which was utterly unforeseen. Now it is common knowledge that the coup leaders, acting in tandem with the media, had long since prepared the action but it is illuminating to dwell on a small incident with regard to this. Pedro Carmona was the head of the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce and therefore one of the leading members of the wealthy elite who so despised Chavez. He was made president of the country following the arrest of Chavez. But what is incredible is that this individual had the traditional presidential sash he would wear at his inauguration in Miraflores on April 12^th, woven at a tailors in Madrid several months before. This astounding fact reveals the depth of contempt that Carmona and the others held for the mass of the population. Carmona and co decided to use their wealth and power furtively, from behind the scenes to remove a leader who carried with him many of the hopes and aspirations of the majority. They didn't for a moment falter or hesitate in their schemes. Carmona was so confident that the coup would succeed and that he would be made president that he was able to take care of even the smallest of details months in advance such as the ordering of an item of decorative attire. Where did such excessive confidence come from? The question isn't difficult to answer. Carmona knew the kind of solidarity he would receive from his friends in big business who closed down their enterprises creating economic chaos, he was sure of the support he would receive from his friends in the media who created the climate of lies in which the coup would flourish, and he was certain that the rich en masse would take to the streets furiously pounding the cooking pans with which the servants prepared their food. When Carmona was made president he straight away introduced a decree dissolving the National Assembly, the Supreme Court and a host of other institutions connected with the democracy. As Carmona announced the demise of each of these bodies the small circle of wealthy middle aged men gathered around, roared their triumph and slapped each other on the back. Venezuela was to be their playground once more. This had been a true demonstration of solidarity.              

But there was one type of solidarity that Carmona and friends had not counted on. While they were celebrating in the Miraflores Palace something other was happening outside. People were beginning to gather. These people were notable for their shabbier clothes and darker skins. Gradually, more and more arrived. They came from the barrios and from the hills and they came without any obvious hurry but yet they kept on coming. The anti Chavista march a few days before had gathered perhaps some 200 000 people which by anyone's estimation is quite a lot. This was different. 200 000 became 300 000, then 500 000 and then a million and still the people kept coming. From the balcony of Miraflores the coup plotters must have beheld the vast human sea. What were they thinking in those moments? Did they hold any hopes that their coup, so meticulously planned, could be sustained? Or did they feel a sinking sense of dread before the mighty power they had awoken? Whatever the case the military officers realised very quickly the perilous nature of the situation which confronted them. Simply put they understood that before the gathering storm nothing could stand. They radioed in the order to stand down and the coup collapsed with the plotters fleeing the palace. After 48 hours of imprisonment Hugo Chavez was returned to the presidential palace amid jubilant celebrations.

Now this is another of the critical moments in the history of Bolivarianism and more generally the working class struggle in Latin America as a whole. The election of Chavez, the laws he sought to implement and the investment he put into social works subsequently; these were radical occurrences for certain but it would be difficult to describe them as revolutionary. However with the defeat of the 2002 coup something took place which was profoundly revolutionary and that was the appearance of the masses on the world historic stage as protagonists. Their collective action thwarted the coup and altered the course of events decisively. For that short time, history was no longer something which unfolded gradually and enigmatically over centuries; it was no longer that which resided in a far away realm cloaked by the same sublime invisibility as heaven before earth. History became; revealing itself to be something people could lay their hands on and make their own thereby changing the world.

It is necessary to describe the dialectical nature of the relationship between Chavez and the masses. The masses emerged decisively in defence of Hugo Chavez precisely because in him they recognise someone representative of their own struggle, a figure that embodies their culture and is able to grasp organically their inner life. In turn Chavez is extremely responsive to the mass movement; each time the poor rise up in solidarity with him, his thought receives revolutionary impetus and his endeavours to create better conditions for the masses are further energised. In addition Chavez is both honourable and courageous - characteristics which are important in the arena of political struggle and vital to a political leader. But also important, from both the perspective of reality and the analysis of it, is a detailed consideration of the set of social relations which the leader here enters into. Chavez remains slotted firmly into the structures of parliamentarian. It is the paradox of the Venezuelan revolution that, in defending Chavez and returning him to power, the masses became a force which far surpassed the government they sought to restore. In returning power to Miraflores, a new type of power was itself created. The most revolutionary agency world history knows was gathered in the squares and in the streets outside the palace. For that short period there existed a situation of duel power with the unique historical quirk that rather than oppose each other, the two separate phenomena regarded one another favourably.

Nevertheless such a situation cannot be maintained indefinitely. Chavez thanked the people humbly and asked them to return to their homes. This they did. There was at this time no grass roots party which could convert their revolutionary energy into a sustaining force. There was no organisation which could help ensure that the governance of historical events by the majority might become something typical and every day. There was no group which could provide a centre around which the workers and peasants might rally; organizing on the ground to take control of societies economic organs. Might Chavez have provided the leverage by which such a situation be realised? Doubtful. Hugo Chavez contains within himself the paradox which lives at the heart of the Venezuelan revolutionary process. Chavez's great political victories have taken place via parliamentarianism whereas his political fermentation took shape in and through the activity of the masses. Chavez feels himself (and quite correctly so) to be organically affiliated to the masses but at the same time he seeks to apply this sense of things to an arena which is abstracted from the day to day activities of the majority. This fact in no way is a condemnation of Hugo Chavez. It is merely the inevitable result of the two political realms that the personality of the Venezuelan president mediates.

Some might object. What other head of state has ever called for workers in factories to take increasing control in terms of organization and in some places run the factories for themselves? This Chavez has done. However there is a great deal of complication here. Chavez had given directives for workers in a few factories to take them over and manage them for themselves. And this is good. It is often helpful to first dip your toe in the water before swimming. But this should not be heralded as the inauguration of a workers state. Even if Chavez were tomorrow to demand that not a few but all factories be put under the control of their workers this would still fall far short of proletarian revolution. And the reason for this is that such a revolution must grow organically from the economic sphere to the political, in conditions of extreme struggle. That is to say that the factory workers, confronted by severe wage repressions, strike with the hope of reversing them. The owners respond by firing those workers and replacing them. The workers seek to counteract this measure by occupying those factories. The owners again retaliate, this time employing the state in defence of private property; they endeavour to use the police or any other body to remove the workers by force, or they stay patient waiting for the workers to become hungry and demoralized.  The occupied factories in isolation cannot sustain for these reasons - and so, in great crisis, they must necessarily look forward to the only form of salvation they might hope to obtain; the solidarity which arrives from the groupings in other occupied factories. The base of proletarian revolution is categorized by precisely this; the organic connections which spring up between factories; the exchange of information and resources, the only key to their continued survival. And while this process is taking place our modern prince enters the fray decisively. The Marxist party is galvanized for the process of struggle requires a centre around which all other operations are organized and coordinated and, in this democratic capacity, the party arrives at the point of insurrection. .

If Chavez ‘hands' power to the workers in the factories the process outlined above hasn't taken place; none of the connections between factories have the chance to fuse and, therefore, there can't exist the network via which the factories can communicate their collective intentions to a central government. In other words though a few or even many factories might be occupied the big political directives would necessarily be formed in and issue forth from the concentrated power holed up in Miraflores. There could be no organic interplay between the government and the workers no matter what Chavez's best intentions might be. In connection with this Marx's statement that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves' resonates with a telling power. However, there is no doubt that if the appeal from Chávez for workers to take over factories that were being sabotaged by their owners had been taken up by the leaders of the UNT trade unions, this would have been an enormous step forward in the process of the working class becoming aware of its own power.

Chavez does not understand this. He cannot. He recognizes the power of the workers, but in an abstract and one sided way. He sees that they are the basis of his governments' power and realises very well his own moral responsibility to act in the interests of the workers and peasants as the head of the republic. In Bolivarianism as it now stands the director of the revolution is a government which acts in the best interests of the masses rather than a party which emerges organically in and through the day to day activity of the class to assume the position of vanguard; a vanguard which absorbs organically every convulsion in the working class movement such that it is able to filter and concentrate them into sustained revolutionary action.

Chavez's situation is made more precarious because of the people and mechanisms surrounding him. Without the sustained and continued stream of working class activity filtering its life blood the government can't but become isolated. The elements which join the party from the workers and other layers of society are very quickly isolated. In their day to day activities within and around the party they become exposed to a whole host of privileges; they are propelled into a new social strata and build the connections and relationships which form the basis of a new bureaucracy.

For this reason the Chavista government has an extremely contradictory character; on the one hand it is compelled to act favourably toward the workers and peasants whose votes brought it to power, while on the other the bureaucratic elements in the party resist extreme concessions to the poor precisely because such things threaten to undermine their own newly won gains. When the more radical elements of the party fought to win the referendum of December 2007 which would have granted a number of radical concessions to the working masses, they were not merely battling the relentless efforts of the ruling class to thwart the measures, they were as well fighting those within the party who had formed a dead weight, slowing and stilling the dissemination of information expressing the radical content of the reform, preventing it from effectively reaching a mass audience. If Chavez had won the reform the same elements would again have provided an anchor; as the directives from central government travelled down through the bureaucracy the new measures would have been blunted and rendered as innocuous as might be.

The defeat of Chavez in the referendum is often regarded as a result of the fact that the Venezuelan revolutionary process has not sufficiently advanced; that the masses were tired and dissatisfied with the level of actual change which Venezuelan society has experienced and yearned for more radical measures. This is undoubtedly true. Some socialists argue that the Chavista government should have acted in a more radical, more revolutionary, manner long before and thus satiated mass expectation. But one gets the impression that it hasn't been from lack of trying.  The stilted development of the Venezuelan revolution has not been due to the fact that Chavez and ministers haven't acted radically enough but moreover because the revolutionary capacity of the government is limited by its objective position. The government remains in a type of limbo; its position thus far secured by a great revolutionary movement, while at the same time operating in a realm abstracted from it. The subjective intentions of Venezuela's president cannot alter this fact.

Of course this is no reason to abandon a government which has become a beacon of hope to workers around the world. As has been pointed out Lenin wrote extensively on the question of parliamentarianism; how important it is that the working class struggle be extended to this arena in order to fight for real gains which improve the lives of people and, furthermore, give a boost in confidence to the mass movement. But what is also crucially important in Lenin's analysis is the notion that by participating actively the working class also come to realise the limitations of the ballot box. The defeat of the referendum wasn't simply an expression of the desire for a more radical action on the part of the government because the referendum which Chavez held included some of the most radical measures yet. The defeat of the referendum indicated that a large proportion of the masses have learnt in practice the very important lesson that the most revolutionary of transformations cannot take place in and through the parliament despite the best intentions of president or party. Though the loss in the referendum was a defeat for the workers and peasants of Venezuela it was also a cloud which did have a silver lining. Chavez by accepting the results graciously in defeat has refuted in practise all the absurd slurs made against him to the effect that he is a dictator waiting in the wings to seize power the moment events take a course he doesn't approve. But most importantly the referendum defeat marks a change in focus on the part of the masses. But where will they look now?

One possibility is the PSUV. Some say that The United Socialist Party of Venezuela was created by Chavez himself in order to unite the different parties and elements favourable to Bolivarianism under the single banner - and here it has to be remembered that such a project might be in danger of creating an artificial unity; one can be favourable to Bolivarianism for the reason that it is a movement which has raised the lives of the poor, or one can be favourable to it because in the current political climate of Venezuela aligning yourself with Chavismo is an effective way of getting ahead. Both tendencies have found expression in the organisation and there have already been reported clashes. Those who are more sharply critical of the PSUV suggest that the Party was created by the bureaucratic elements which surround the Venezuelan president at the highest levels of government and that this is reflected by the fact that persons like Cabello a wealthy business man, obtained prominent positions in the organising committee of the new party. In other words the character of the PSUV has not been decided yet. It is an organisation which unites a motley mix of genuine activists, bureaucrats and even some prominent capitalists.

Chavez himself has been criticised for condemning parties that don't join the body as ‘counter revolutionary' and therefore using the PSUV to further develop the concentration of power in Miraflores.  But Chavez, who mirrors many of the contradictions which exist at the heart of the Venezuelan revolutionary process, at the same time appeared before the Venezuelan masses and with characteristic flamboyance urged everybody to join the party. The masses heeded his call. As of 2007 the PSUV had 5.8 million members. And this is the important thing. Whatever its form of genesis the PSUV is now a mass organisation, perhaps the largest of its type in the world. Not only that but it brings together many of those who passed through the experiences of 2002; the coup defeat and the oil lockout; experiences which will have revolutionised the consciousness of the masses by acting as a vast mirror revealing vividly and truly the nature of their own social power. The interests of the masses now demand a new mode of expression for many people have understood in practise that the government in Miraflores is incapable of securing the required social change. This was clearly shown in the development of the founding congress of the PSUV, where rank and file revolutionary activists defeated the bureaucrats and careerists on several occasions.

And so it is that while Capitalism on a world scale moves into profound economic crisis; the convulsions of which will be felt everywhere and by everything, the PSUV emerges clearly as an arena in which a decisive battle is to be fought. The objective conditions for a victory on the part of the revolutionary proletariat are already in place. What is needed is the decisive influence and direction of a revolutionary Marxist leadership; a leadership which must therefore become a strong presence in the mass organisation. A leadership which helps develop, in the words of el presidente, ‘a revolution within a revolution.'

• Balance sheet of the PSUV congress: the Bolivarian masses are pushing for revolutionary action by Patrick Larsen (March 11, 2008)
• Venezuelan Marxists intervene in fourth assembly of the PSUV congress by José Antonio Hernández and Patrick Larsen (CMR Caracas) (February 21, 2008)
• Venezuela: The PSUV congress – what is at stake? by Patrick Larsen (February 5, 2008)