After 17 years of rule by Hugo Chavez’s Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), the country’s economy is unraveling. The vast majority of the Venezuelan population faces scarcities of food, medical care, consumer goods, and electricity, while poverty has doubled to 80 percent since 2013. Food riots and spontaneous protests in working class neighborhoods take place on a daily basis, and the Chavista government of President Nicholas Maduro has responded by imposing a state of emergency.
While the jostling between the PSUV and the right-wing opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) for state power has produced the possibility of a coup or martial law, these two bourgeois parties are not the only elements whose actions will determine the future of the country. The Venezuelan working class, denied the basic necessities of life, is increasingly coming into conflict with both the government and the official opposition.
But the period of PSUV rule has shown how disastrous it is for workers to forfeit their political independence to a section of the ruling class that falsely labels itself as “socialist.” What is most urgently required by the Venezuelan working class today is a political program of class struggle, independent of and in opposition to both sections of the bourgeoisie who base their support or opposition to the government on the false claim that the PSUV, Chavez, and Maduro represent socialism.
At precisely this juncture, a series of groups that have for years served as “left” props for the Chavez-Maduro administration are engaging in an operation to prevent the working class from breaking politically with Chavismo. Composed of sections of the upper-middle class which are tied materially to the PSUV bureaucracy and the purse strings of state power, the Venezuelan pseudo-left and its international allies have a material interest in defending the bourgeois government from the working class.
The web site VenezuelAnalysis, an international consortium of PSUV apologists, published a May 20 article by Jorge Martin of the International Marxist Tendency titled “Venezuela—A Last Warning.” The IMT, led by the British ex-radical Alan Woods, has long served as a “left” advisor to the PSUV and has claimed since Chavez took power in 1999 that his so-called Bolivarian revolution represented socialism.
The author begins by acknowledging that Venezuela is in the throes of “a very serious crisis.” “The reactionary opposition,” he writes, is carrying out “an attempt to capitalize on the severe economic problems the country is facing” by “trying to create a situation of chaos and violence” aimed at removing Maduro from power.
Undoubtedly the right-wing opposition, composed of CIA assets and corporate CEOs, believes it is better poised than the PSUV to impose the diktats of Wall Street and US imperialism. But what is the cause of the “severe economic problems the country is facing”?
Martin presents a list of ways in which “private capitalists” and the “private sector” have manipulated the economy through currency speculation and the black market for consumer goods. He notes that “this unsustainable economic dislocation” has been “aimed at hitting the working masses in order to undermine their support for the revolution.” He adds that “one of the main reasons for this unsustainable economic dislocation is therefore the ‘natural’ rebellion of the capitalist producers against any attempt to regulate the normal workings of the ‘free market.’”
Martin’s argument is based on a fundamental contradiction: How is Chavismo revolutionary if after nearly two decades of PSUV rule, “private capitalists” exercise such control over the Venezuelan economy that they can plunge the working class into such desperation?
