About the Venezuelan left opposition

An answer to Clifton Ross‘ article The leftist backlash against the Democratic Socialists’ fun trip to Venezuela

Image: Laclase.info, 2010 workers and left opposition protest in Maracay

By Venezuelan Workers Solidarity

The trip by members of the DSA International Committee (DSA-IC) to Venezuela in June stirred up important controversy. Prior to the trip itself, Venezuelan Workers Solidarity (VWS), a group of left opposition activists in the diaspora, issued an open letter warning about the implications of endorsing the Maduro regime. Our forecasts were amply confirmed. However, some sectors within DSA also echoed our positions and concerns.

The repercussions of our campaign were not limited to the left. Our position also irritated self-proclaimed liberals like Clifton Ross, who weighed in on the debate, albeit by distorting our position. In an article for Caracas Chronicles, Ross argues that the confrontation between VWS and DSA-IC is about supporting the socialist government or the people it oppresses––ultimately settling the matter in favor of DSA-IC: if both VWS and DSA are anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, the logical conclusion is that they should support Maduro.

Leaving aside Ross’s cynicism, for us, the government of the Bolibourgeoisie does not represent the interests of the Venezuelan working class. Put simply, it is not a socialist government, but a capitalist, repressive, kleptocratic one, therefore undeserving of any support from the international left. We believe that the internationalist duty of the left is to denounce the crimes of the Chavista regime and stand in solidarity with the workers, popular sectors, and the left that resist its myriad policies of exploitation and plunder. Obviously, it is also a priority for us to oppose the criminal policies of the U.S. government towards Venezuela, such as economic sanctions that do not harm the government leadership but common people, or the blatant theft of money from the Venezuelan state to spend on such miserable enterprises as the construction of a border wall with Mexico.

A sector of DSA supports Maduro. Some have fallen for neo-Stalinist and “campist” conceptions; others,due to their post-modern or reformist inclinations, believe they have found a “new type of socialism” of “communes” in Venezuela that is compatible with capitalist property. Ross not only ignores the existence of diverse tendencies within DSA, but also describes the organization as “Leninist”. To equate the Bolibourgeoisie and all of DSA, with “Leninism,” is laughable at best.

Let’s get to the heart of the matter. The aim of  Ross’s efforts  is to deny the legitimacy of the left opposition as a sector that, by its own right, occupies a space among the workers and popular struggle against the Chavista government. It has occupied it long before Ross exchanged chavismo for a more blunt pro-capitalist ideology. The left opposition organized the only regional general strikes against the Chávez government in 2007 and 2008 through the Aragua section of the National Union of Workers. For this opposition role, revolutionary workers’ leaders like Richard Gallardo, Luis Hernandez, Carlos Requena and Jerry Diaz were assassinated. The left opposition also made its way into the United Federation of Oil Workers of Venezuela, where a Trotskyist, José Bodas, is secretary general. One of the political organizations of the left opposition, the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSL), achieved in 2012 national electoral credentials, later snatched away by the government as part of its post-2015 anti-democratic reaction. The left opposition participated in the 2017 popular rebellion that was criminally repressed by Maduro’s government. There are also left leaning feminists and environmental activists confronting the government’s policies.

Though Ross may claim otherwise, the left opposition has also been consistent in solidarity with imprisoned workers––not only those with leftist ideas like Rodney Alvarez, but also those like Rubén González, whose freedom we defended when he was imprisoned as a critical Chavista and later when he was jailed as a member of a center-right party. We have also paid our share of persecutions, dismissals, and arbitrary detentions in this struggle.

The Chavista government evidently benefits from denying or disowning any leftist dissidence, while it is convenient for right-wing sectors to converge in affirming that Chavismo represents the entirety of the left and socialism in Venezuela. But opposition to the government is broad, and it includes millions of Venezuelans who do not identify with the government or with any of the traditional pro-US opposition parties. It includes leftist sectors.

Chavismo is a coalition of all types of opportunists, reformists, nationalists, and Stalinists who consider themselves to be “realists” and “pragmatic”. From their point of view, those who defend the political independence of the working class are “dreamers”, “few in number”, practitioners of “empty rhetoric”, etc. It is no coincidence that these are precisely the criticisms that Ross directs against us in his article.

Chavismo has done more than any other Venezuelan government to destroy the left. Moreover, it is not a “return to capitalism” that we face in a post-Chavista scenario. If one of the infamous slogans of the old Sandinismo was “to build socialism with the dollars of capitalism,” Chavismo has operated with the same philosophy of building “socialism” with capitalist production relations and without changing Venezuela’s role within the international division of labor. That is why Chávez handed over the oil industry to joint ventures with transnationals such as Chevron and subsidized General Motors with almost 6 billion petrodollars through Cadivi. Military men such as the Minister of Defense, trained in national security doctrines and repressive techniques in Fort Benning, discovered in the sixth year of Chávez’s government that declaring oneself a “socialist” was a requirement to become part of the Bolibourgeoisie. There is nothing revolutionary or “utopian” about that; pragmatic, for sure. Ahead of Ross’ recommendations, Maduro has imposed an “anti-blockade law” in order to privatize state assets, under the cover of secrecy and at fire-sale prices. Is this “betraying socialism”? Obviously not, since chavismo never intended to end capitalist exploitation.

This is not the place to refute in detail the theories embraced or fabricated by Ross, who believes that fascism, Marxist socialism, and anarchism are essentially the same; that a capitalist state that carries out nationalizations becomes “socialist” (an argument explicitly ridiculed by Engels); that in capitalism the role of the state in the economy is that of a neutral arbiter; or his defense of a strange version of history in which Venezuela became a rich country thanks to the US (!). The truth is that the most destructive economic policies applied by Chavismo, such as using the exchange rate policy as a looting mechanism, do not have their origin in socialist literature, but in our own national past. Cadivi is an old system like Recadi taken to the extreme: a policy neither socialist, nor Bolivarian, nor Christian, nor any of the other labels that Chávez claimed for it. The label that corresponds to it is simply Chavista.

If the Venezuelan people destroy this nefarious regime, there will be no need to ask the IMF or transnational corporations to come and save us: they will try, for their own interest, to take advantage of the comparative advantages created by Chavismo, such as a semi-slave labor force, generalized misery, and abundant natural resources surrounded by a legal framework that makes them ripe for plunder. When that moment comes, we will be where we are now: promoting the self-organization of the working class, defending its rights, and striving to develop its political independence.