Malfred Gerig is a sociologist from the Central University of Venezuela who directs the Political Economy of Venezuela research program at the Caracas-based Centre of Studies for Socialist Democracy.
Green Left’s Federico Fuentes sat down with Gerig to discuss what he calls Maduro’s “neoliberalism with patrimonialist characteristics”. This is the final in our three-part interview. Read part one here and part two here.
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What political impacts have the sanctions had on the government?
Sanctions had the political impact of changing the regime from within. The comprehensive sanctions regime [implemented since 2019] pushed Venezuela’s rentier capitalism towards a neoliberalism with patrimonialist characteristics and a sui generis Venezuelan oil-based form of crony capitalism.
We saw a gradual rise in patrimonialism, which is nothing more than the privatisation of the state by civil servants and administrative cadres. The state becomes a private preserve and the state’s assets and means of administration become a means for civil servants to generate an income.
This phenomenon already existed, but when orthodox-monetarist economic measures led to drastic cuts in public sector workers’ income, patrimonialism radically expanded as workers sought to use the tools that the system provided them with to generate an income that the system itself was taking away.
We saw that even the leitmotif of the government changed. This government no longer governs for the same people as the [Hugo] Chávez government.
You could say that the [Nicolas] Maduro government implemented bad economic policies between 2014‒16, but perhaps it did so wanting to govern for the same people that Chávez governed for.
But since 2016, and especially since 2018‒19, the government no longer governs for the people; instead, the people have been made to carry the burden of the government’s economic policies and its neoliberalism with patrimonialist characteristics.
What has prevailed, especially from 2016 onwards, is capitalist realism. The dominant idea adopted by the ruling elite back then was that there was no other option but to embrace a kind of criollo [local] capitalism that could allow them to stay in power, but now with the support of certain sectors of society that they were historically at odds with, such as local capitalists.
Today, Maduro’s government is a government that, to a large extent, has the support of local capitalists. As it lost the support of the people, the government replaced it with the support of these capitalists.
We could then say it was not so much a question of the sanctions leading to a loss of support for Maduro, as the sanctions being implemented after Maduro had already lost support....
I agree: Maduro’s loss of popularity was an incentive to implement sanctions.
It is not the same to implement sanctions against a government that has strong popular support, as it is to implement them against a government that has faced four years of the worst economic crisis, [one] that is facing a very serious food crisis where Venezuelans had nothing to eat and have to queue for everything, and so on.
The sanctions started in 2015 because that is when the catastrophic stalemate in terms of power started. That year the opposition overwhelmingly won the National Assembly elections. The lack of support for Maduro’s government was clearly exposed.
That is why the government has since applied what [US political scientist] Norbert Lechner calls “the strategy of a consistent minority” by tilting the political playing field in its favour to remain in power.
Since 2015 it has gone down an authoritarian path, which has had different facets. This path ultimately led it to the recent elections on 28 July, when the government took this authoritarianism to a new level.
Many on the left believe the sanctions were imposed on the Bolivarian Revolution as some kind of moral punishment. I do not know if that was the case, but if this was true, the best antidote Chávez had against such weapons of moral punishment was maintaining formal and real democracy.
He never gave anyone an excuse to implement sanctions or any kind of strategies of geopolitical encirclement and regime collapse.
How has the government responded to this loss of support and what you call its “crisis of legitimacy”?
I characterised this crisis of legitimacy, which above all begins in 2015, as a catastrophic stalemate. That year marks its start because the National Assembly is very important for economic governance.
But the strategy of the incoming National Assembly — in their own words — was to remove the president within six months. In response, the government sought to protect itself and govern without the National Assembly.
Since 2016, Maduro’s government has progressively adopted what Max Weber called a “politics of power for power’s sake”; that is, it abandoned its historical project and the social support base that it governed for and became a government of cliques, a government whose sole purpose was to stay in power.
However, it is important to reject any moralistic reading according to which there are good guys and bad guys in this story.
Since 2016, the formal set of rules of Venezuelan democracy have been de facto broken by both sides: the government and the opposition have consecutively attacked this set of rules, in a process by which each move by one side only ever led to a further escalation of attacks against not only the rules of representative democracy, but more importantly protagonist democracy.
The formal hollowing out of popular sovereignty that took place in the July 28 presidential election really began many years before, when both sides of the political class turned against this sovereignty and against providing solutions for the people amid the crisis.
How can we characterise the government, in political terms, after the July 28 elections?
I characterised this government as an absolutely patrimonialist government that lacks both popular and legal legitimacy, as well as any legitimacy based on legacy.
One of the worst political mistakes this government made was to destroy the political capital, or legacy, bequeathed to it by Chávez, precisely because it opted to govern for another sector of society: mainly themselves.
It is a completely authoritarian government with absolutely nothing left-wing about it.
It is a government that would love to come to an arrangement such as occurred between [former US secretary of state] Henry Kissenger and [former Egyptian military ruler] Anwar El-Sadat, for example. In fact, it has been seeking this for years, but has failed largely because it continuously places its own obstacles in this path.
There is an idea outside Venezuela that this government represents, to use an old phrase, a “fortress under siege”. That idea is used to legitimise its violation of human, social and economic rights. Such violations are seen as fine because the government remains a besieged fortress supposedly fighting imperialism, at least on the surface.
But this is ridiculous. The Venezuelan people are not an object whose raison d'être is as background actors in some fictitious anti-imperialist storyline. The Venezuelan people are a subject that must be allowed to find a way to express and defend their own interests and sovereignty.
This, in my opinion, is the position that the global left must take: above all, taking the side of Venezuela’s dispossessed classes.
We Venezuelans, especially those of us on the left, have been very disappointed with the views of a certain section of the international left.
It seems that the suffering of the Venezuelan people, of the families that have had to separate, of the political prisoners, of the people who have had to give up on their life dreams etc, matter little to them amid their completely abstract view of the situation.
To simplify the situation in such a way as to believe that there is a left-wing government fighting against imperialism is to sweep under the table all this human suffering. That does not seem ethically correct.
In summary, we have a patrimonialist government that has built a form of crony capitalism, which benefits a social minority based on the dispossession of the majority.
It is a government that implements ultra-orthodox economic policies and that is pervaded by capitalist realism, according to which there is no alternative to crony capitalism and authoritarianism.
The Bolivarian Revolution under Maduro has become a catastrophe. The Venezuelan people, in line with their republican and national-popular traditions, will no doubt be the ones who resolve this mess.
But, today, this government stands opposed to everything good about Venezuela, to our republican traditions and, above all, to our national-popular interests.