Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution, led by President Hugo Chavez, is an ongoing process aiming at the transformation of Venezuela to overcome poverty and empower the poor majority — as well as lead a process of Latin American integration to break free of US imperialism.
However, while the process has already achieved major advances, it continues to face a series of serious challenges. Ingrained problems of corruption and bureaucracy are undermining the revolutionary process, sabotaging the implementing of pro-people policies and attempts to construct popular power.
Within the pro-Chavez camp, there are divisions between a more reformist sector, known as the "endogenous right", and a more radical left wing that is pushing for greater popular power and increasing moves towards a socialist system — democratically controlled and planned to meet people's needs not private profit.
An example of some of the problems was shown on March 14, when striking steel workers were attacked by the National Guard, who used tear gas and rubber bullets. Three workers were hospitalised and over 50 arrested.
The union blamed the state governor of Bolivar, Fransisco Rangel Gomez, who is pro-Chavez but accused of being anti-union. He initially welcomed the attack, but later denied giving the order. The Socialist Tide union current has also accused the labour minister, Jose Ramon Rivera, who has been accused by the union movement of siding with the bosses in various industrial disputes, of complicity.
It is in this context that, following Chavez's declaration that "now we build socialism" after his reelection in December 2006, Chavez called for the creation the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). The aim of the PSUV is to unite all the revolutionary forces, from the grassroots up, to lead a deepening of the process.
The founding congress of the PSUV, which began in January, finished on March 12.
Known as one of the most outspoken figures in the Bolivarian revolution, retired General Alberto Muller Rojas has been appointed by Chavez as the first vice president of the PSUV.
Muller Rojas, after retiring from the military in 1985, became politically active in La Causa R (Radical Cause). The party split over whether or not to support Chavez's presidential bid in 1998. Muller Rojas and others who backed Chavez left to form the Homeland for All Party (PPT).
Muller Rojas was assigned to heading up Chavez's successful campaign. He was later asked by Chavez to rejoin the armed forces as part of the chief of staff.
However, Muller Rojas clashed with Chavez last year, after Muller Rojas warned that Chavez was surrounded by a "nest of scorpions" who wanted to depose him. In particular he criticised positions taken by then-defence minister Raul Baduel, who only months later broke with the revolution and joined the opposition.
At the time, Chavez criticised Muller Rojas, who was serving on the national promoters commission of the PSUV. He resigned from this position and was retired from the military. Following Baduel's break, Muller Rojas received a public apology from Chavez.
Dafter his resignation from the promoters commission, Muller Rojas remained active in his local PSUV battalion (branch). He was elected as a spokesperson and then delegate to the founding congress, and was designated to the support committee for conference organising. Federico Fuentes and Kiraz Janicke, from the Green Left Weekly Caracas bureau, interviewed Muller Rojas on the significance of the PSUV to the development of the revolution.
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What is the significance of the recently concluded founding congress of the PSUV in the context of the ongoing revolutionary process?
The party was a political necessity. The process underway in Venezuela commenced in 1989 as a spontaneous movement, as a consequence of the imposition of the "Washington Consensus".
In response, a spontaneous reaction occurred, known as the Caracazo [an uprising against price rises].
A whole dynamic was unleashed. There was a fracturing of political parties, a fracturing of those forces that had dominated Venezuela for 50 years. Venezuelans lost faith in government institutions.
However, the armed forces remained untouched, to a certain extent … [it] maintained some authority.
Historically, a left movement had developed within the armed forces, a movement that continued to strengthen. The repression carried out by the military against the popular movement [during the Caracazo] — where it is calculated that there were more than 2000 victims — forced officers belonging to the left to accelerate their participation in politics.
So in 1992, a military rebellion occurred, led by Chavez.
The rebellion was defeated and its leaders jailed. In 1994 they were pardoned. In the 1998 presidential election [which Chavez won], they participated in the campaign, through which we were able to bring together all the left parties — who were practically at war with each other. We were able to unite them in what was called the Patriotic Pole.
The dominant group in that coalition was more of an electoral club than a political party — called the Movement for the Fifth Republic (MVR). It was a very heterogeneous movement — there were people from all different political backgrounds who coexisted together.
They disagreed with the existing political system and wanted change, particularly in regards to recuperating a national identity that had been lost under the impact of neoliberal policies and market globalisation.
It was a sui generis group that at no point received a political or ideological orientation. It was simply an electoral machine, with which they won general elections in 2000, and then the recall referendum [in 2004] and various other electoral contests.
However, there has never been a structured force, with clearly established political objectives, that united all the forces that had participated in the electoral triumphs, were able to reform the constitution and initiate a process of structural transformation of Venezuelan society.
The PSUV, today, is playing a determining role — not only as an instrument for electoral purposes, but as an instrument to seek the establishment of a socialist society, within a design that corresponds to our cultural values, our traditions and general socialist principles.
With the founding congress, can we say that this crucial instrument now exists?
No, you cannot construct a party in one year.
We have a multitude of 5.7 million people enrolled to be members of the party. They have organised themselves into cells of 300 or so people, called socialist battalions.
They have further organised themselves into what we call socialist "circumscriptions", which corresponds, more or less, to the idea of the commune. This represents the coming together of various associated communities who face similar problems and share a similar cultural, political and economic development. This is within the concept of "radical geography", which differentiates the state of development of different areas of the country.
As you can imagine, the culture of those 5.7 million militants varies greatly, particularly in a society where, over the last 40 years, some 40% to 50% of society were excluded from economic, political and social life. They lived in barrios [poor shantytowns] and continue to live there, because this situation has not been overcome in the last nine years.
So the issue we face is how to include that multitude into a social unit, and give a political content to that.
To construct the party as a unit of action is a task that will take several years. It is only one year and four months since this effort began. We have established the formal characteristics of a party, but to unify it ideologically will take time.
However, it has been a big surprise for me the level of knowledge and consciousness of the people that have participated in the deliberations that are occurring from below — from the assemblies of the battalions up to the founding congress, which had more than 1600 delegates elected to it.
I was a university lecturer for more than 25 years and I was pleasantly surprised by the political level of people who come from the most humble social classes in Venezuela, and how well informed they are.
In recent years in Latin America we have seen the election of several left parties into government. Perhaps in Venezuela it is possible to talk of an inverse process, where the party comes into being after the movement has become government. This has opened up an important discussion regarding the party-government relationship.
What should the relation between the PSUV and the government be?
Firstly, the structure that elected Chavez to the presidency was made up of left parties. [As well as the MVR] the Patriotic Pole was made up of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS, which later abandoned the process), the PPT and the Electoral Movement of the People (MEP).
Those parties have constituted the fundamental political support that the government has had in these first nine years.
The majority of the governmental team was drawn from the cadres of these left parties. Within the leadership of the PSUV, elected to politically direct the party for one year, the great majority were previously cadres of left parties that have existed in Venezuela — some since the 1920s.
These parties in the 1970s were part of an important movement of rebellion. What we have to remember is that these left parties in Venezuela, given that they were parties that for the majority of the time existed illegally, were not parties of the masses, they were parties made up of cadres.
In the development of the party-government relationship, some have abandoned the process, but the great majority of members of those parties have integrated themselves into the PSUV.
The relationship between the party and government is that we are the government and the government is the party. That is to say, the relationship is intimate.
We are not dealing simply with an external support for the government. Rather, we need to commit ourselves to seeking the highest efficiency possible in regards to implementing public policies, cooperating with the government in its implementation.
That is why we will have an extraordinary amount of work to do regarding the development of popular power. Especially, as opposed to other governments of the left, we are trying to minimise the role of the bureaucracy and maximise the role of the "adhocracy" — of ad hoc structures.
The members of the left parties are already involved in ad hoc structures, where they have been working with a lot of effort, supporting health programs, literacy programs, in the training and specialisation of workers. Here, the political cadres have not committed themselves to the bureaucracy but instead to an adhocracy — in order to achieve aims that allow us, in the shortest time possible, to overcome the enormous differences in our society.
There has been a lot of talk about the existence of different currents or tendencies in the PSUV. What is your opinion on this?
My personal opinion is that I see currents as very positive. I don't believe in a pensamiento unico [roughly translates to mean "single thought"], nor do I believe in dogmatic thought, nor do I think Marx thought like that.
That idea perhaps corresponds more to the Stalinist current. Nevertheless, within the movement there are people whose view of socialism comes from a Stalinist, dogmatic conception.
I think, however, that the discussion and debate that is occurring will allow us to go along adjusting our political praxis and even adjusting the content of the political thesis.
I don't think many people agree with dogmatism, except those sectors that come from the PCV. But there is a very interesting debate that is being had.
I believe that these debates enrich socialist thought and strengthen the party. That is why we do not call it the partido unico (single party) but rather the partido unido (united party), understanding that a perfect unity between human beings does not exist, because each mind is a world of its own.
So, we need to allow debate, consultation, negotiations.
I think that was one of the most important contributions made by my [previous] party, the PPT, to Venezuelan revolutionary thought. Coming out of the crisis in Czechoslovakia [in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded to put down a popular revolt], this party [La Causa R, out of which PPT later came], which originated out of the PCV, recognised Stalinism as an error, and proposed the necessity of debate.
However, this situation has not transformed itself [in the PSUV] into the existence of currents, or factions. There is a debate in which everyone participates, because the grand majority of the members of the party do not come from the old parties of the left. They are people who were previously politically apathetic, and with the hope of transforming the country have incorporated themselves into the party.
They do not have any previous political experience. This enriches the discussion a lot, because we have even had to confront people who still [express] the liberal capitalist culture.
In your opinion, what have been some of the most important decisions coming out of the debates about the program and principles of the party?
The first point is the party's definitive position against capitalism — the party presents itself as an anti-capitalist party.
Second, it has declared itself anti-imperialist and in favour of a humane societal structure based on a multi-polar world, recognising not only the differences that exist between nations, but also sub-national differences, a result of ethnic or cultural identities.
Another point is the desire to develop the productive forces, that in many cases are underutilised. I would say that more than 70% of the national territory does not contribute to the process of generating wealth, and these are areas where a significant amount of natural resources exist that could be processed and help generate work.
We have a workforce in which a great proportion, more than 40%, are unqualified, who we are trying to train. We also have capital that many times has been employed in an inefficient manner, using imported technology.
Liberating these productive forces is one of the aims of the PSUV.
There are also some considerations regarding the issues of ethics — we are guided by the ethics of life; everything that favours life is good, everything that goes against life is bad.
This includes looking after nature, looking after renewable and non-renewable natural resources and reducing the contamination of the environment, which is something that is very difficult to do because this is a petroleum-producing country. Nevertheless we are in favour of a systematic revision to protect the environment.
Here in Venezuela, where there is a proliferation of polluting traffic, particularly in the large cities, we are attempting to transform this towards the use of non-polluting public transport.
This has been very difficult given the tradition and weight of consumerism in our society, above all among the middle classes, who have been truly indoctrinated into that way of thinking. It is exactly there, in the middle class, which represents barely 12% of the population, where we find the strongest resistance to our process.
In a number of recent articles, you have warned of a series of dangers confronting the new party and the revolution. What do you view as the biggest danger today?
Like Trotsky, I think that the first danger is bureaucratism, which tends to create a new class that makes party life much more rigid. It loses its flexibility, and what happens is what we saw happen with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
It's a bigger danger than the resistance of the right and the offensive by the [US] empire against the Venezuelan state.
National identity within the popular classes is very strong — no other identity exists. They understand perfectly well that their possibilities to develop are tied to being within this group, and not outside it. Bureaucratism tends towards the breaking down of this strong sentiment, which the PSUV has incorporated within its notion of nationality — one seen from an internationalist perspective, not isolationist dogmatism.
[A longer version of this interview, with Muller Rojas taking up further questions, including on the nature and role of the Venezuelan working class, can be found at http://links.org.au>.]