Doug Lorimer
In the wake of his victory in the August 15-16 presidential recall referendum in which he received the backing of 59% of voters, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called on the country's private business operators to work with his government in moving the world's fifth largest oil producing country away from capitalism.
"I call on private businessmen to work together with us to build the new economy, transforming the capitalist economic model into a social, humanist and equality economy", Chavez said during a televised speech in Caracas. "The time has come to accelerate the transformation. The revolution has just begun".
According to an August 27 report by Wall Street's Bloomberg.com wire service, Chavez said he plans to apply more rigorously the country's land law, which allows the government to confiscate unused land. "We have to eliminate large land holdings in Venezuela", Chavez said. "What we've done so far has been very, very superficial."
"Everybody expects Chavez to get tougher and deepen the revolution", Miguel Octavio, executive director of Caracas brokerage firm BBO Financial Services, told Bloomberg in a telephone interview.
As part of the referendum victory celebrations, members of the armed forces and participants in the country's new social programs called "missions" marched together through Caracas in a show of civilian-military unity on August 30.
In all, there are 12 such missions, covering the basic needs of the country's working people, including health, education, housing and employment.
As part of the revolutionary transformation of the armed forces into instruments that defend the interests of the poor (80% of Venezuela's 25 million inhabitants), Chavez, a former paratrooper, has encouraged the armed forces to play an active part in these social programs.
"The new Venezuela is born", Chavez said in his speech at the parade, referring to the participation of 3 million Venezuelans in the missions. Nieto reported that Chavez announced that the country had until December 31 to "institutionalise the missions and announced US$100 million in funding for this purpose, on top of the $500 million he announced for the housing mission, which is expected to become its own ministry in the coming months".
New funds for these programs are now coming from the increased oil revenues that the government is receiving from Venezuela's state-owned oil corporation, PDVSA, following the government's sacking of the corporation's pro-capitalist management in March, after the government organised oil workers to break a bosses' lock-out.
Oil sales account for 80% of Venezuela's exports and for about half of government income. The country's economy grew by 23% in the first half of 2004 as oil output recovered from the bosses' lock-out, which cost US$10 billion.
In a July 24 interview with Venezuelanalysis.com's Greg Wilpert, PDVSA president Ali Rodriguez explained that a majority of those who managed the operations of the corporation â "exploration, production, transport, refining, commerce, supply, finances" â had left after the defeat of the lock-out. He said the PDVSA's operations had been normalised thanks to the "massive incorporation of workers" into the management of the corporation's operations through steering committees (comites de gu¡a).
Rodriguez said that the steering committees were part of a search for a new organisations of administration within the state. "The main obstacle for advancing towards the objectives that are proposed in the Bolivarian constitution of Venezuela is the administrative structure of the state... In some areas of the country there have been some first experiences of co-management, but these are still very new experiences, embryonic. They still are not fixed into an institutional form."
Referring to PDVSA's funding of social programs, Rodriguez said: "We are investing in the most important capital of the oil industry, which is the development of knowledge of our citizens. The point of departure for this development of knowledge is that there are no illiterate persons in the country. This is why PDVSA has joined the battle against illiteracy...
"The social vision that existed in PDVSA previously was a philanthropic one. It involved occasional contributions in order to deal with an occasional problem, but did not attack structural problems, such as poverty and the phenomena that poverty generates. Our strategy is clearly defined. The principal effort of the enterprise as enterprise is the valorisation of our oil resources and all processes are being realigned so that in every phase of this process value will be added to the natural resource. This means a larger contribution to the state, which would allow it, in turn, to attend to the problems just mentioned, in addition to many others."
From Green Left Weekly, September 8, 2004.
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