Venezuela, honesty and the left
Once again we borrow an excellent piece from Comrade Coatesy’s blog:
Time for the Left to Defend Human Rights in Venezuela.
Many people will have watched yesterday’s report on Venezuela on the BBC Newsnight.
It was deeply disturbing.
“In Venezuela, activists say the government is using torture and imprisonment without trial against those who oppose it – a claim the government denies. So who are the people hoping to overthrow President Maduro? Vladimir Hernandez reports.”
The programme showed evidence of repression that would shock all supporters of human rights.
I am not in a mood to listen to those who will try to cast doubt on the BBC report.
There are plenty of other reliable sources of information which confirm their facts begining with, La represión de Maduro se salda con al menos 36 muertos en un mes. El País (May 5)
The Guardian reports today, “It takes a lot of courage’: Venezuelan protesters tell of rising police violence.As general strike begins, more than 100 have died and hundreds more arrested in anti-government protests since April. Spanish language media takes the same angle, Una huelga general endurece el pulso contra la Constituyente de Maduro. Tres muertos, 367 detenidos, calles desiertas y barricadas en el paro organizado por la oposición a una semana para la Asamblea Nacional Constituyente. El País (Today). The mass emigration of the population is also startling, Les Vénézuéliens s’exilent en masse vers la Colombie. (le Monde)
The splits inside the Chavista side (signaled in the Newsnight film) are well known: La procureure générale du Venezuela critique la répression de l’opposition.
Here is some more of the BBC coverage:
- Venezuela crisis: When a simple cut can mean death
- Airline stops flights to Venezuela
- What is behind the crisis in Venezuela?
- Crisis-hit Venezuelans leave for Brazil
How is the left reacting?
First of all we have the Morning Star’s ‘reports’ which say nothing of state repression.
VENEZUELA’S right-wing opposition launched a 48-hour “civic strike” yesterday, calling on workers to stay at home in its latest campaign to derail plans to convene a new constituent assembly.
President Nicolas Maduro has confirmed that Sunday’s elections will go ahead to choose the members of the assembly, despite the Democratic Unity Roundtable (Mud) coalition’s three-month campaign of rioting which has led to hundreds of deaths.
The CTV union federation, which supported the 2002 coup against late president Hugo Chavez, said its 333,000 members would join the strike.
On Tuesday, Mr Maduro said Venezuela would “choose between peace and war, between the future or the past and between independence or colonialism.” He has said that the new constituent assembly will promote peace and reconciliation.
Foreign Minister Samuel Moncada has demanded answers from the US over “systematic” efforts to overthrow its elected government. He said there was a “campaign of intelligence operations at the highest level to overthrow the constitutional government of President Nicolas Maduro.”
The Foreign Ministry accused Washington of providing “finance and logistical support to the Venezuelan opposition as an integral part of its destabilising efforts against democracy.”
It also condemned former president Barack Obama for extending his 2015 decree designating Venezuela an “extraordinary threat to US national security” before leaving office in January.
It also attacked Mr Obama’s successor Donald Trump for additional sanctions imposed since he took office.
This is what Cuba said….
Cuban Communist Party second secretary Jose Ramon Machado denied claims Havana would mediate between the government and opposition.
He said it was up to the Venezuelan people and government to overcome their challenges “without foreign meddling in their internal affairs.
“Those who from the outside try to give lessons on democracy and human rights while encouraging coup-mongering violence and terrorism should take their hands off that nation.”
Counterpunch,
Time for the “International Left” to Take a Stand on Venezuela July the 17th
Venezuela is heading towards an increasingly dangerous situation, in which open civil war could become a real possibility. So far over 100 people have been killed as a result of street protests, most of these deaths are the fault of the protesters themselves (to the extent that we know the cause). The possibility of civil war becomes more likely as long the international media obscure who is responsible for the violence and as long as the international left remains on the sidelines in this conflict and fails to show solidarity with the Bolivarian socialist movement in Venezuela.
…
So, instead of silence, neutrality, or indecision from the international left in the current conflict in Venezuela, what is needed is active solidarity with the Bolivarian socialist movement. Such solidarity means vehemently opposing all efforts to overthrow the government of President Maduro during his current presidential term in office. Aside from the patent illegality that the Maduro government’s overthrow would represent, it would also be a literally deadly blow to Venezuela’s socialist movement and to the legacy of President Chávez. The international left does not even need to take a position on whether the proposed constitutional assembly or negotiations with the opposition is the best way to resolve the current crisis. That is really up to Venezuelans to decide. Opposing intervention and disseminating information on what is actually happening in Venezuela, though, are the two things where non-Venezuelans can play a constructive role.
Socialist Appeal (17th of July) continues in this vein,
Defeat reaction with revolution
The reactionary opposition represents the interests of the oligarchy (bankers, capitalists and landowners) and imperialism which stands behind them. If they were to take power they would launch a massive austerity package on the Venezuelan workers and the poor, with brutal cuts in public spending, the abolition of the Bolivarian social programs, the privatisation of social housing, the privatisation of expropriated companies, the privatisation of re-nationalised utilities, the abolition of the main rights and protections in the Labour Law, etc. At the same time, they would launch a political purge of all state institutions, ministries and state-owned companies and an all out assault on democratic rights, unleashing a lynch mob against chavistas and their organisations.
For this reason we must oppose their reactionary campaign and stand in solidarity with the Venezuelan working people.
But,
As we have explained elsewhere, this does not mean giving support to the present policies of the Maduro government, which are ineffective in combatting reaction and by making constant concessions to the capitalist class undermine the social base of support of the Bolivarian movement. Even now, during the campaign for the Constituent Assembly elections, the so-called “patriotic businessmen” are advocating the privatisation of expropriated companies as well as the use of the Assembly to “strengthen private property rights”. This is the main plank of the campaign of Oscar Schemel, for instance, with the full backing of businessman and minister Perez Abad, which has been given ample time in all the state media. That road leads directly to disaster.
The only way to defend the conquests of the revolution is by unleashing the revolutionary self-activity and organisation of the masses of workers, peasants and the poor. An example of what is possible can be seen in the campaigns organised by groups like the Bolivar Zamora Revolutionary Current (which has organised Popular Defence Brigades) or the Alexis Vive Patriotic Force (which is calling for a new revolutionary leadership).
The offensive of the oligarchy must be defeated, but it can only be defeated by revolutionary means.
The duty of revolutionaries and consistent democrats internationally is to oppose the insurrectionary attempts of the reactionary opposition and defend the gains of the Bolivarian revolution. Taking a “neutral” position puts you objectively on the side of counter-revolution. We must wage a relentless campaign against the lies of the international media, to denounce our own imperialist governments which support reaction in Venezuela in the name of “democracy” and “human rights”. At the same time we must support and encourage those in Venezuela who are beginning to draw the correct revolutionary conclusions from this crisis: we cannot make half a revolution.
These might be fringe leftist groups but more seriously El Pais has accused Podemos of complicity with Maduro: Cómplices de Maduro (28th of July). That is, “guardan silencio, cuando no justifican a Maduro y acusan a la oposición de antidemocrática..” (ie: Podemos leaders have kept silent, when they are not justifying Maduro and accusing the opposition of being antidemocratic).
Others are beginning to ask broader questions.
Being honest about Venezuela. Socialist Worker (USA, no relation these days to SW UK).
The world’s media, overwhelmingly hostile to the Bolivarian process, sneer at President Nicolás Maduro’s rhetoric while presenting the right-wing parties, which certainly launched this wave of violence, as defenders of democracy. This definition of democracy apparently allows whole populations to fall into poverty and illness, with nearly 100 people left to die in the streets.
Meanwhile, the international left has accepted the explanations government spokespersons offer, still believing that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Thus, when a helicopter attacked government buildings on June 28, some observers simply added the event to the catalog of right-wing violence.
It is, unsurprisingly, far more complicated than that.
Oscar Pérez, a retired officer of the state security services, piloted the helicopter. Pérez has close ties to ex-Interior Minister Miguel Rodríguez Torres, whom Maduro dismissed in 2014. Torres, like the majority of the current cabinet and around half of Venezuela’s state governors, belongs to the military. He also leads one of a number of Chavista factions angling for power.
Behind a façade of governmental unity, another struggle is developing, but none of the groups are fighting to continue the revolutionary project or to reconstruct the mass movement that saved it after the attempted coup and the bosses’ strikes of 2002-3.
The opposition is also split into rival factions. Some advocate dialogue with the president, while others, especially the group that Leopoldo Lopez and his partner Liliana Tintori lead, almost certainly support the most violent street fighters. They aim not only to get rid of Maduro but also to destroy Chavismo itself.
Most Venezuelans know the major players on the right: they belong to the wealthiest and most powerful families, who controlled the economy until Chávez arrived. Since the first street barricades went up, Maduro has tried to work with representatives of these right-wing sectors. In 2014, for example, he called in Lorenzo Mendoza, head of the Polar multinational and one of the richest Venezuelans.
Gustavo Cisneros, another member of that exclusive clan, has remained untouched in the nearly 20 years of Chavismo. He recently claimed that Venezuela needs a Macri, referring to the militantly neoliberal Argentine president, who is currently working to dismantle that country’s public sector. Cisneros likely speaks from knowledge of the right’s strategic thinking.
As the economic and political crisis deepens, it’s become obvious that neither the government nor the opposition will offer any real solutions. While Maduro betrays the revolution by courting the bourgeoisie and sliding backwards into neoliberalism, right-wing forces have brought in violent mercenaries to try and disrupt the country even further. As these two groups struggle for power, ordinary Venezuelans are watching the gains of Chavismo slip away.
It must have been hard for the comrades of the ISO to say the above, but it needed to be said.
Nobody can accept the state version of what is happening in Venezuela, or its claim to ‘defend’ anything resembling socialism.
We have to defend human rights.
It is time for those in this country who are close to these issues to speak out.
Fidel Castro’s legacy: Cuba as a class society
Castro leads his victorious troops (photo: History Archive/Rex/Shutterstock)
Pablo Velasco and Sacha Ismail examine Castro’s legacy in an article written in early 2012, largely informed by Cuba Since The revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment, by Sam Farber.
The 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro and his 26 July Movement to power was a bourgeois revolution which smashed Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, but replaced it with their own Bonapartist regime.
Half driven by US hostility and half by choice, this government opted to become a Stalinist state in 1961, adopting the model of the USSR and similar states.
Farber calls this a “bureaucratic system of state collectivism”, in which society’s economic surplus “is not extracted in the form of profits from individual enterprise, nor is it realised through the market. Instead, it is obtained as a surplus product of the nation as a whole. The surplus is appropriated directly, through the state’s control of the economy”. Cuban workers and peasants received their means of subsistence in the form of largely non-monetary rations — low cost or free food, housing, education, health and other welfare facilities. However the surplus product pumped out of the direct producers is controlled and allocated by the ruling bureaucracy — “without any institutional constraints by unions or any other independent popular organisations”.
Cuba’s achievements and failures “resemble those of the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam before these countries took the capitalist road”. Part of this was Cuba’s receipt of “massive Soviet aid from the early sixties to the end of the eighties… even the most conservative estimates would place it well above Cuba’s calculated losses from US economic aggression during that period”. Between 1960 and 1990, Cuba received about 65 billion dollars of Soviet aid on very favourable terms.
The “systematic repressive nature of the Soviet-type regimes made it politically difficult to build enduring oppositions within those societies”. In Cuba there was “certainly no lack of physical brutality… particularly during the first twenty years of their rule. There were thousands of executions, and there was large-scale imprisonment, throughout the revolutionary period, of tens of thousands of people under typically very poor living conditions and physical mistreatment.”
Who rules Cuba?
The state bureaucracy that developed out of the revolution is still in power.
The state owns the means of production and the bureaucracy “owns” and controls the state. The “one-party state” is in fact a no-party state, since the bureaucracy rules directly through the myriad of state and state-sponsored “mass” organisations.
The bureaucracy has privileged access to consumer goods through special stores, separate hospitals, recreational villas, and trips abroad. The armed forces and security services have their own medical facilities. Since the two-tier economy of hard currency and pesos was legally established in 1993, more conventional inequality has been unleashed.
The political ideal of the Cuban elite has been summed up by current head of state Raúl Castro as “monolithic unity” (2009). Although there is enforced mass participation in Cuba’s polity, there is a complete absence of democratic control. Cuba has had a variety of ruling institutions, but none function democratically. The Communist Party was formed in 1965 and has only had six congresses in over 50 years. The Popular Power assemblies were not established until 1976 and allow only vetted candidates to stand on their biography, with those “elected” able only to rubber stamp decisions taken elsewhere by the bureaucrats.
Cuba does not have the kind of impersonal rule of law and citizens’ rights against the arbitrariness and capriciousness of the state which exist in some bourgeois societies. This is evident in the crimes of “social dangerousness”, and “antisocial behaviour”, and the use of imprisonment, electric shock treatment and psychiatric institutions for opponents. Fidel Castro has admitted that there have been 15-20,000 political prisoners in Cuba and Cuba currently has 531 prisoners per 100,000 people, the fifth highest rate worldwide.
What about the workers?
The idea that Cuba is ruled by its workers is laughable. In 1959, the Cuban working class “was not socialist in any meaningful sense of the term, nor did it lend its own distinctive character to the Cuban revolution”. Fidel Castro himself has admitted as much on numerous occasions.
The working class was certainly not passive during Batista’s dictatorship. Despite the shackles of the state and business-gangster trade unionism, sugar workers, rail workers and bank workers fought militant reformist struggles around pay and conditions. The 26 July Movement had its own trade unionists who did organise successful strikes on a number of occasions after the rebel leadership landed in Cuba in 1956. But the general strike they called in April 1958 was a failure and workers’ action only an adjunct to the main, guerrilla warfare strategy for taking power. Read the rest of this entry »
The US makes peace with Cuba
A great day for the long-suffering people of Cuba and a move that may eventually bring about some degree of democracy in the anti-working class Stalinist dictatorship of that benighted island. Obama has shown some real leadership:
Snowden’s flight undermines his cause
Snowden: no Daniel Ellsberg
Opinion differs, even on the left (and I use the term in its broadest sense), as to the significance of Edward Snowden’s revelations. Francis Sedgemore reckons it’s a pretty big deal whereas Workers Liberty seems somewhat more sanguine.
But what most of us could agree on, at least until now, was that Snowden seemed to be a well-intentioned and quite brave individual, entirely worthy of our support.
But his decision to flee rather than face the consequences of his actions, has inevitably diminished his credibility. And worse, his apparent willingness to seek refuge in some of the most repressive states in the world, can only make things worse. The hand of the tyrant-lover and arch-hypocrite Assange is obviously behind this, manipulating a second vulnerable, idealistic young man (poor Bradley Manning being the first).
Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon papers, has been unstinting in his support for Snowden, but the truth is that there’s a fundamental difference between the two: Ellsberg faced up to the consequences of his actions and stood before his accusers. Come to that, so has Bradley Manning. Snowden has slunk away (and yes, I know it’s easy for me to sound off from the safety of my comfy little home, but the point stands nonetheless).
James Bloodworth at Left Foot Forward and Tim Stanley at the Telegraph both make much the same point, Stanley concluding:
“It’s a tragedy that Snowden’s made this mistake because what he had to reveal about the US security state was very troubling. But while the message remains important, the messenger has been exposed as unworthy of it. Snowden’s totalitarian tour is an embarrassment to his cause.”
Cubana bop
I attended the AWL’s Ideas for Freedom event in London last weekend. It was, as usual, very enjoyable and educative. Particularly heartening was the number of new, young comrades present. I attended a very civilised, good humoured debate between AWL-founder Sean Matgamna and former leadership member of IS, John Palmer, on the IS’s position on British troops in Ireland in 1969. While these two old adversaries were mulling over old times and old differences, shouting, heckling, cheering and booing could be heard eminating from a nearby room. It turned out that this was a super-heated deabate on Cuba, between the AWL’s Paul Hampton and the RCG’s Helen Yaffe (accompanied by quite a few vociforous Cuba Solidarity Campaign supporters, so she wasn’t outnumbered). I gather both speakers gave as good as they got and it all nearly spiralled out of control, but stopped short (just) of blows.
Paul Hampton says:
I hope comrades enjoyed my debate with the RCG on Saturday (I did!)
My review of Helen Yaffe’s book is at
Paul
‘Lefties’ vote for 42 days
So, Gordon Brown and the New Labour machine have managed to win the vote on detention without charge for 42 days, by just 315 votes to 306. In effect, that means that this fundamental attack on habeas corpus went through on the back of the nine Democratic Unionist votes, following an alleged £200 million sweetener for Stormont, to offset the effects of water charges in Northern Ireland.
The support of the DUP (plus Anne Widdecombe and some UKIP nonentity) is not that surprising, though even New Labour might be expected to feel just a little embarrassed about relying on their support. But what about the capitulation of those heroic tribunes of the ‘left’, the Jons Cruddas and Trickett – and what will their Compass fan club have to say about it?
Even more extraordinary (if true) are the rumours that at least a few Cuba-supporting Labout MP’s were bought off with promises that Brown will push for a relaxation of the EU’s trade restrictions on Cuba. Talk about “for export-only” leftism! I know that the Cuba Solidarity Campaign is a single-issue movement and I have no reason to believe that it in any way approved of what these (so far unnamed) MPs are alleged to have done: but even so, if the rumours prove to be true, Cuba Solidarity really ought to make it clear that it didn’t ask for and doesn’t want that sort of support.
N.B: Here are all the Labour rebels.
Socialism in One Man: Fidel Steps Down
As someone who cut their political milk teeth defending the Cuban Revolution in “the belly of the beast” as Jose Marti so aptly described the United States, I have maintained something of a soft spot for this tiny island which showed so much defiance in the face of the colossus to the north. For activists in the US, Castro’s Cuba was our North of Ireland. It was in your backyard, it was unavoidable and your opinion towards it said a lot about where you were politically.
I had the great fortune to travel to Cuba in 1995 twice and to spend my 18th birthday there, despite facing arrest and/or imprisonment by the US government upon my return for doing so. I say great fortune because I was touched by the spirit of the Cuban people, their generosity, their love of all night parties and the elderly people’s love of the revolution. I stayed with Cuban families; one in Havana whose brother was killed in the Bay of Pigs (Playa Giron) and photograph was lovingly framed in their tiny hallway. Maria swelled with pride as she told me of the bravery of her brother and I had to agree that he died in the most heroic of circumstances – defending Cuba from US invasion.
I had gone as a part of a work brigade and then a youth conference. During the first visit I saw rural Cuba. We drove for hours on a bus before reaching Ciego de Avila where we worked cutting dead leaves off of banana trees. I was amazed at the speed with which the Cuban workers went through the various rows whilst the Yanks lagged far behind. They had teased us in the morning about our “pretty clothes” – which were the work clothes most of us had brought, theirs being torn and stained with the sappy juice of day after day in the field. I immensely enjoyed watching an impromptu baseball game being played with such joy and passion without any proper equipment and the game coming into its own in a random patch of land in the Cuban countryside.
In Havana I visited a sugar cane factory and drank fresh “guarapa” from reused plastic cups, visited a hospital which had a metal shop inside to make new spare parts, and sat at meetings of local women’s councils. For the youth conference (a precursor to the world social forums) we heard a number of government officials talk about the revolution and the “special period” (it was long enough after the collapse of the Soviet Union to start to feel the bite of the loss of trade) and I heard Fidel himself, twice. Never before or since have I heard such a charismatic speaker, and whatever one thinks of him or his government, it was immediately clear to me why this man had been in power for so many years and why he was much loved by broad sections of the Cuban people, and so loathed by others. I was so wrapped up in his speech that I thought only an hour had passed when in fact he had been speaking for three hours – such was the eloquence of his oratory.
Needless to say all of this was incredibly inspiring. But having come from an organisation which maintained a very uncritical stance towards the Cuban government, it was difficult to comprehend the realities on the streets which showed a more complex side of Cuba.
In the countryside two men spoke in hushed tones as one passed another a pamphlet – with Jesus on the cover. Men would often whistle and cat call to women on the streets which was shrugged off by the women as “Machismo” (ie that was just the way Latin men were) or an outright denial by the women’s council leaders that there was any problem with women’s equality in Cuba at all, despite admittedly great strides having been made. Evidence of the black market was everywhere and while the pride and love of the revolution (which is akin to a respect of the NHS in this country) kept some in the older generation from buying goods on the black market, many in the younger generation didn’t have a problem with this, and I didn’t blame them.
In addition, young people everywhere were questioning the revolution – something I considered to be a healthy activity, but something for those who lived through Batista (the dictator before Fidel) found threatening. The paternal overtones of “Fidel the father” were evident everywhere, but particularly in the question of press access. The organisation I was with claimed it would be impossible for Cuba to have a free press because this would inevitably be used to undermine “the revolution”. I was always uncomfortable with this argument because while I saw its logic on one level, I didn’t understand why information, even false information, should be withheld. Surely the Cuban people, who had made “the revolution” in the first place, were more than capable of making up their own minds whether or not what they read was true.
This I believe was the fundamental problem; the idea that “the revolution” trumps everything else, including a free press, democracy, the right to protest and the right to dissent. Over the years “the revolution” and “Fidel” grew to become synonymous to the point where you had, in effect, socialism in one man; where the man represented “the revolution”. The Cuban people threw off the chains of Batista precisely because they wanted freedom from tyranny, the right to live in peace and the ability to not be controlled by others and I believe this did sincerely include Fidel, Che, Camillo and the other leaders of the July 26th movement.
However in Fidel and the development of Cuba, you see the destructive influence of Stalinism in its full glory, and this for me is where Trotsky comes in. It was clear from Trotsky’s views that “socialism in one country” could not exist. The only way for a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat to survive in anything akin to its revolutionary form was for the extension of the revolution to other countries. Now some try and claim that this was Che’s aim and I suppose in a round about way it was. However, the way the Cuban revolution came about was more a particular circumstance than the rule – and the attempt to apply the Cuban model of “revolution from below” to other Latin American countries from the outside, and with very little organic support internally, was as doomed to failure as the attempts by the Soviet Union to invade and forcibly change property relations from above. Cuba thus not only developed an internally bureaucratic structure within its government (at the peak of which repression of dissent and jailing of LGBT activists was at an all time high), but also a heavy reliance on the Soviet Union complete with its bureaucratic structures and dominance in certain international spheres of power.
The fact remains that Cuba and Fidel’s reign specifically, whether we fully appreciate it or not, is a reflection of the left internationally, where we’re at and how we’ve failed. The weakness of the left is reflected in the arguments which we will now see posited by both sides – Fidel the great leader and Fidel the tyrant. The reality is that the theory of revolution is not fully developed at this point. We still fail to understand what the best way is for a social revolution to come about to maintain the aspirations of the people in the long term. We still fail to have an adequate understanding of the effect of the collapse of the Soviet Union and having tried the methods of a revolutionary vanguard party, guerilla warfare, and military coups as means for securing the power of the oppressed, we still haven’t cracked it.
The Cuban people didn’t, Fidel didn’t, but they certainly had the courage to give it a go and for this and the lessons they taught us, we should at the very least be appreciative. But the question remains as to how we best go about creating enduring social change and ridding the planet of destructive capitalism and neo-liberalism while maintaining local democracy, freedom and workers control within a society. Perhaps greater men and women than the Cubans would’ve solved this problem by now, but given their bravery since the revolution in 1959 if we searched the world over, I doubt we could find them.