Voices from Venezuela — Behind the Bolivarian revolution
By Coral Wynter & Jim McIlroy
Resistance Books, 2008
316pages, $25
Available from Resistance Books
Why should Australian working people take any notice of far-off, Spanish-speaking, oil-exporting, baseball-playing Venezuela?
Coral Wynter and Jim McIlroy's book Voices from Venezuela tells us why, and does it in the best possible way — by handing a microphone to a wide range of Venezuelans, participants in the excitement, stress and strain of the "Bolivarian revolution" that began in 1998 with the election as president of former paratrooper Hugo Chavez Frias.
The enormous value of the book is that it provides an English-speaking readership with the lived experience of Venezuela's roller coaster of a revolution in the straightforward words of those who are making it.
The reader will learn many things, but probably the first lesson that strikes home is that the Bolivarian revolution is very much the product of Venezuela's peculiar history.
For example, the revolution didn't develop its strength as a movement against dictatorship (as in Cuba). The Venezuelan people threw out their last dictatorship back in 1958, when torturer Marcos Perez Jimenez fell after a month of protests ending in a general strike.
Bolivarian revolution
The Bolivarian revolution emerged as a protest movement against the corrupt two-party oligarchy that was set up, with US blessing, to replace Perez Jimenez.
Over 40 years, Christian Democrat and Social Democrat administrations alternated, often posing as friends of revolution in other Latin American countries, but letting the obscenely wealthy Venezuelan elite send at least $100 billion abroad while millions of their compatriots starved, died of preventable diseases and remained mired in illiteracy and ignorance.
The beginning of the end of this "Fourth Republic" was the 1989 uprising of the people of Caracas against IMF-imposed price increases on basic necessities. This led to a failed 1992 coup by Chavez, and to the last-ditch "progressive" presidency of one-time Christian Democrat president Rafael Caldera, who created a new political movement allied with the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS).
Mass disappointment with Caldera's 1994-1998 rule prepared the ground for the emergence of Chavez's successful Movement for the Fifth Republic and the adoption in 1999 of the new, radically progressive, constitution of the "Fifth Republic".
The reader of Voices from Venezuela will learn what this constitution means for the Venezuelan masses. In the words of Dr Marcelo Alfonso, director of the Institute of Experimental Medicine at the Central University of Venezuela: "Yesterday, someone asked me, 'What is the best move that Chavez ever made?'. I said the new constitution of 1999, because in order to make a new society, you need a new political instrument and a new ideology. The constitution is a new base: everything that has changed has come via that constitution."
Which leads straight to the second lesson that the reader will draw from reading Voices from Venezuela. The Bolivarian revolution has developed in a strictly constitutional way, acquiring and reinforcing its legitimacy — and delegitimising its enemies — through winning majorities at fair elections and referenda.
In the one case where a Chavez proposal has failed to win support — the December 2007 referendum on amendments that would have changed the constitution into a socialist magna carta — Chavez accepted the decision, drawing the lesson that a lot remained to be done to win people to the revolution's now openly socialist objective.
Voices from Venezuela devotes a specific section to this aspect, but it also permeates the comments of many of the book's interviewees, reflecting the underlying reality that the Bolivarian revolution is a permanent struggle for hearts and minds in a country where the economic power of the capitalist class has yet to be broken.
The third strength of Voices from Venezuela is that it imparts the deeply human content of the revolution. No one who finishes the book will be in any doubt as to why it enjoys and builds on mass popular support.
Missions
In one sense its motor force is simple — since 1998 the country's oil wealth has increasingly been directed to improving the lives of the mass of the people, beginning with the poorest, the most marginalised and most remote. This has been achieved by creating a network of "missions" parallel to and in action against the bloated, corrupt, lazy and incompetent state apparatus inherited from the Fourth Republic.
The missions, staffed by the revolution's most enthusiastic supporters and, in the case of health, by Cuban volunteer doctors and nurses, have succeeded in eliminating illiteracy, installed new health care centres in thousands of townships and villages, equipping hundreds and thousands of people with useful skills and education, providing food and other essentials at big discounts to the poorest, and created the first ever services to the homeless, drug addicts and the mentally ill.
How this immense job was done comes through in a moving interview with the son of Dr Gilberto Rodrigues Ochoa, the first health minister of the Chavez government. According to Andres Eloy Rodrigues Ochoa: "At the start [my father] had to confront the disaster that was the health ministry and the disaster that was the health system.
"Barrio Adentro ['Into the Neighbourhood', the basic public health mission] was born from an idea of my father's. He called it 'integral medicine', but it was part of the plan to decentralise and remove the overcrowding from hospitals. This was the only way you could properly use the hospitals' resources … The majority of patients could be treated in community consulting rooms.
"With the overcrowding of the hospitals there are now centres of integrated diagnosis, where all treatment is free and of the highest quality. This is all part of the public health system, so people don't have to pay for something my father considered a fundamental right for everyone and a responsibility of the state. This right is now recognised in the Bolivarian constitution."
But redistribution of oil income from the wealthy to social need is not socialism. However, the steps the Bolivarian revolution has already taken in increasing social justice for the Venezuelan people has set up a permanent conflict with the capitalist class. Up until now this has been softened by the high price of oil and the booming economy, which has enabled the rich to stay rich even as the Venezuelan state has increasingly been removed from their control.
But a showdown will come sooner or later, not only because socialism is the avowed goal of the revolution, but also because the social spending and other development plans of the Chavez government will at a certain point require increasing control of the "commanding heights" of the economy, in particular the finance sector. (A straw in the wind is the recent nationalisation of the Bank of Venezuela, local affiliate of the Spanish Santander banking group.)
This need to "make despotic inroads into the rights of property", as the Communist Manifesto puts it, demands that the self-organisation of the working people and poor that Voices from Venezuela details so well must reach new heights. After all, these "despotic inroads" can only be the work of the mass of the working class, peasantry and urban poor, becoming conscious from their own lives of their vocation for socialism.
Nationalisation
The fourth strength of Voices from Venezuela is that it vividly charts the strengths and weaknesses of these forces for socialist transformation of Venezuela.
The reader will learn of the still difficult situation of organised labour, which has shed the old bureaucratic straitjacket of the Confederation of Workers of Venezuela without yet managing to build a strong and unified replacement intent on helping the workers organise to advance the revolution.
The book also tells of the creativity and determination that sections of the working class, shown in the creation of co-operatives and in forcing the recent nationalisation of the country's biggest steel plant, Sidor. The generalisation of that creativity will be critical to the revolution's advance.
Other chapters deal with the struggles and gains of women, students and the country's indigenous peoples — the other forces most committed to socialist transformation.
Today, two years after Jim McIlroy and Coral Wynter returned to Australia, the Venezuelan revolution continues to advance in its inimitable and nerve-wracking zig-zag way. As Chavez himself has often said, the Bolivarian revolution has made its biggest advances by having to mobilise to defeat the counter-revolution — against a coup in 2002, a lock-out by the state oil company bosses in 2002-03 and a recall referendum against Chavez in 2004.
Readers of Voices from Venezuela will grasp this dynamic and come away inspired with the importance of the Bolivarian revolution as a uniquely Venezuelan expression of a global need — to throw off the shackles of an obsolete capitalism and begin the building of a human-centred, just and sustainable society.
As such, it will also help readers strengthen their commitment to the struggle for socialism in our very different, but not so different, Australia.