Chavez's visit to London in mid-May gave an opportunity to deepen understanding
of many details of the Venezuelan revolution. Particularly instructive
were emphases in Chavez's speech to the solidarity rally in Camden Town
Hall on 14 May.
First let us return to fundamentals. What is taking place in Venezuela
is the first self-defined and conscious attempt to create a socialist
society since the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. It is therefore
also the first offensive struggle at a state level for over 25 years.
That is already momentous. After a quarter of a century the working class
is waging a direct struggle for state power. Furthermore the Venezuelan
revolution has the specific form of being the first successful taking
of state power essentially through urban insurrection since the Russian
Revolution of 1917 and its immediate aftermath.
Naturally the decisive moment of urban insurrection in Venezuela started
in defensive form, in the defeat of the coup of April 2002, but form
is not decisive. The essence of the issue is that over one million people
descended into the streets, a number armed, against the attempted military
coup d’etat. Through this insurrection the top echelons of the
army that supported the coup were decisively isolated and crushed and
the rank and file soldiers went over to the side of the insurrection.
This created both the unique opportunity of the Venezuelan revolution,
that the core of the capitalist state power, the military reaction was
defeated and many of the difficulties - elements of state power
outside the army and the direct slums and working class areas remained
organised, and even controlled, by forces totally hostile to the revolution.
This applies even to large parts of the civil service, the police, the
media, companies etc. The process since the insurrection of April 2002
therefore includes the spreading of revolutionary power into wider and
wider layers of society – most notably into the oil sector.
That the core of the Venezuelan revolution was an urban insurrection differentiates it from the revolutions after 1917 that overthrew capitalism.
The Chinese revolution, the Vietnamese revolution, the Yugoslav, and
the Cuban revolutions were all based on rural guerrilla warfare – often
of a prolonged type. These combined the tasks of the bourgeois democratic
and socialist revolutions in the specific form that the peasants carried
out a bourgeois democratic revolution in the countryside, which smashed
the bourgeois state apparatus and allowed a working class power to
be constructed to destroy capitalism in the urban centres. These revolutions
delivered huge objective gains compared to what had proceeded them – the
expulsion of imperialism from China, the unification of that country,
the freeing of Vietnam from French and US imperialism, the defeat of
fascism in Yugoslavia, the establishment of universal literacy, the
creation of health and other welfare services, huge steps forward in
the position of women.
Nevertheless the extremely economically underdeveloped character of
China and Vietnam, in particular, at the time of the revolution, the
essentially bureaucratised military character of the organisations that
led these struggles etc meant that these huge gains were nevertheless
partial and these parties did not function as fully developed universal
vehicles of human liberation – narrow national prejudices were
maintained, the position of women, while greatly improved, was far from
adequate, reactionary positions were adopted on issues such as gay rights,
etc. These were both wrong in themselves and limited the attractiveness
of these revolutions in other countries.
The urban character of the Venezuelan revolution, which is in turn linked
to the fact that it is a society at a much more economically advanced
state of development than China or Vietnam at the time of their revolutions,
means that right from the beginning it not only serves the basic economic
and social needs of the Venezuelan people but is a far more advanced
agency of universal human liberation. Chavez at this speech in London
devoted large sections of his speech to the position of women and to
the fight against racism while also raising issues such as disability
rights. The Mayor of Caracas has erected a flag declaring the city a ‘homophobia
free zone’.
It is also evident that the struggle in Venezuela is intrinsically, and
consciously, linked to the international struggles taking place around
it.
So far also the social transformation of Venezuela has been able to
proceed while maintaining democratic rights – indeed the main threat
to the latter comes from external military intervention, civil war etc.
A process is therefore unfolding which combines social progress and democracy – a
deeply attractive model in all countries.
These features allow clear identification of the character of the forces
leading the social transformation, the revolution, in Venezuela. This
is not a process where one fights on the same side as other forces against
imperialism or a worse enemy despite fundamental disagreement and contradictions
with them – as was the case for example with the unequivocal necessity
to fight on the same side as Stalin against the Nazi invasion of the
Soviet Union, or Khomeni against the Shah of Iran. The current leading
the Venezuelan process is a political current that one is part of, that
one identifies with.
Does this mean that victory is certain, or that such a current may not
change its character in the case of such defeats? Not remotely. Victory
is never certain, and defeat is always possible. It means however that
on the face of the planet there are now two places, and one political
current, that one is part of and identified with – in Cuba and
Venezuela. The urban insurrectional core of the Venezuelan revolutionary
current creates a dynamic which makes it the force with the greatest
potential to appeal to the population of economically advanced countries
to emerge for a prolonged period.
All the political conclusions flow from that.