"How to do the revolution better": a critique of the British SWP on Venezuela

(We reprint the article below by Phil Cournoyer as a very interesting contribution to the ongoing debate about the way forward for the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, and how revolutionaries should behave towards broad radical parties and movements. Socialist Worker - New Zealand feels that this article hits the nail on the head by tying the two themes together, though we do not necessarily endorse all its statements and political formulations.)

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Posing straw questions usually leads nowhere

The article { Lessons from Venezuela's referendum } appearing in the current edition of International Socialism Issue: 117 is not signed and hence appears to have the status of an editorial from the leadership of the British Socialist Workers Party, the axial hub of the International Socialists current.

I read it hoping to learn something about Venezuela that is not common knowledge among activists in the international solidarity movement with the Bolivarian revolution and the anti-imperialist alliance whose flagships are ALBA and PetroCaribe.

Unfortunately, that did not happen.

On other questions, such as the imperialist offensive against the Muslim world, I have found the publication to be very acute and in some ways an indispensable source of analysis on the Eastern Mediterranean and Iraq-Iran-Palestine struggle. Likewise, it is difficult to appreciate and understand the evolution and current stage of the international antiwar movement without following the information and analysis provided by the SWP UK.

When it comes to Latin America, it seems that the comrades need to send a delegation to a few of the countries they write about and do some on the ground interviews with key activists.

The editorial article makes some good overall points; a similar description of some physical process or phenomenon would have to be described as very course-grained. That’s how satellite shots taken from very distant orbits appear on a cloudless day – vital detail is lost in the coarse-graining involved, but it could be captured from a lower altitude. The level of fine or course graining needed, of course, depends on the purpose of the exercise. The authors of the SW editorial have no influence in Venezuela or for that matter in most of Latin America, but they do influence significance forces in the British left. The article is written for them for reasons I will suggest below.

What strikes me most is its wooden tone and spirit. It does not appear to be written by someone with a passionate identification with Venezuela in its showdown with the empire and its allies and agents within the Venezuelan political and economic system.

We are led through a series of admonishments about how to do the revolution better, and then into author’s main concern, it seems – to convince readers that the new United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) is an obstacle to the advance of the mass movement in Venezuela. The author affirms that

“The [referendum] defeat was the outcome of relying on a top down approach which introduced some reforms but left intact the capitalist economy and the main parts of the machinery of the state. More defeats will follow unless the movement from below develops structures of its own capable of acting independently of the presidential palace.

“We have insisted before [ see http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=368 ] that the PSUV is not such a structure. Established by presidential edict from the top down, it includes, alongside hundreds of thousands of dedicated activists, a good number of corrupt bureaucrats, refugees from the pre-Chavista parties who still exist at every level of the state apparatus, people who dream of an authoritarian Cuban model, and even some capitalists who profit from their Chavista connections. If it failed to motivate nearly a fifth of its members to vote in the referendum, it is certainly not a tool for carrying through a real revolution or even combating counter-revolution…”

“At best,” we are told, the PSUV “can provide a debating forum out of which can emerge a real revolutionary current—and then only if the leadership allows freer debate than hitherto.”

This editorial is clearly not aimed at the broad solidarity movement. Many solidarity activists have travelled to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and many more follow the events there closely via many good websites. Most such activists would easily see through the shallow line being set forth. It seems, rather, to be written as part of an effort to shore up support for, or indifference to, a sectarian and ultra left line on Venezuela being promoted by the central leadership of the British SWP. The general British political culture of insularism and indifference to Latin American affairs that affects broad sectors of the British left, with some commendable exceptions, is a likely source of the erroneous approach taken by the author or authors. Dismissal of the leadership of the Cuban revolution is another source because that is a symptom of an essentially Eurocentric judgmental stance of analyzing struggles from a distance of oceans and continents, and delivery tactical advice carrying with it a high risk of error or irrelevance. That attitude is reinforced and sustained, IMHO, by the jaded atmosphere of the British and Scottish campus where many of the Marxist academics responsible for growing “analyses” spend their lives.

Hence, the editorial article offers another serving of yesterday’s supper – the false counterpoising of “leading from above” against “leading from below.” This error is old hat for the Marxist movement, a position that Lenin, among others politicized against.

Saddled with that hat, we are walked through an argument that not only writes off the mass party of the revolution, the PSUV, but also the Venezuelan army.

"One of the most dangerous myths surrounding Venezuela is the one spread in books and articles by Marta Harnecker, Diane Raby and others that its military officers are different to those elsewhere in Latin America. It is even claimed that it was the army, not the mass movement, that saved Chavez in 2002. That myth received a serious blow weeks before the referendum when the officer who had been portrayed by official Chavismo as the “hero” of 2002 , Raúl Baduel, turned against Chavez only weeks after resigning as minister of defence. There will be many others still on active service who share the upper middle class’s hatred of Chavez. No doubt the Venezuelan rich and their allies in the CIA will seize any opportunity to begin organising them."

This single paragraph is replete with errors, both through false insinuation about the views of Marta Harnecker and Diane Raby about the character of the Venezuelan army high command, and through dismissal of well known historical and current facts.

The fact is that the April 2002 coup provoked a split in the army officer corp. Neither Harnecker nor Raby argue that the army alone, and not the mass movement, saved Chávez. Clearly the key was the mass uprising, but without the split that occurred in the army that movement could and likely would have been drowned in blood, and the authors of the massacre applauded as heroes by Washington, as was Pinochet in his time. Hence, the coup was defeated by a combined effort of mass mobilization and action of Bolivarian leaders in the army. That history evidenced the positive achievement of years of clandestine political work in the armed forces by Hugo Chávez and his movement. Further evidence of that is the fact that Baduel’s appeal to the army to oust Chávez during the last stages of the referendum debate went unheeded.

The Venezuelan military high command is not monolithic. But it is not the same kettle of fish as the army in Brazil or Colombia – to mention only two neighboring countries. The Colombian army is steeled in a permanent war against the revolutionary left, the campesinos, and the urban labor movement. It is organically tied, at the level of the officer corps, with the drug lords and trafficking.

Can we attribute to the Venezuelan army even a drop of that reactionary mix? It seems that some do in Britain.

Harnecker and Raby, were they at all interested in replying to the International Socialism article, would have a field day replete with a picnic. They would be in their full right to turn the question back. Do the editors of International Socialism (UK) say that the two country’s armies are but peas in a pod, serving the same bourgeois interests, but of different nationality? Do the editors of the London publication really believe that it was only the mass movement, and not also a decisive component of the army high command, that saved Chávez?

Someone with an intimate knowledge of how Chávez’s life was saved and how he regained the Presidency – Fidel Castro – has written conclusively on this issue; and he comes down on the side of Harnecker and Raby, and many others on that issue. Castro’s testimony is especially relevant because he and other leaders of the Cuban Communist Party played an important role in enabling the forces opposed to the coup to communicate with one another, and to recognize a favorable relationship of forces for them in their resolve to smash the coup.

The editorial’s argument hinges on posing of straw questions and argument from abstractions; and it falsely counterpoises rigid either-or propositions such as the pitting a from below strategy against an only from above strategy – allegedly held and pursued by Hugo Chávez and his closest allies in the leadership. This formalism blinds the editorialist from seeing the complex reality of the PSUV. Hugo Chávez launched this party to mobilize the ranks against the state bureaucracy and the careerists who have surrounded him from the beginning of the Bolivarian government in 1998. This he states openly in a myriad of ways. Broad layers of the grassroots of the party also see that as one of its principal goals – to isolate the parasitic elements and melt them down under the heat of a mass movement. But Chávez and thousands of the best Bolivarian militants in the PSUV see the party also as a crucible for forging revolutionary unity, for drawing together the best of the broad vanguard in the country around a clear, anti-imperialist and anti-imperialist program.

It is true that much remains to be done to achieve that goal, but abandoning the PSUV “to draw together the many, many activists who are beginning to see that the reformist road of socialism from above is not a viable option” is a recipe for ultra left abstention from the real arena of struggle, and pure unadulterated Viagra for hand-on political self-gratification.

This editorial may convince the already convinced in the SWP ranks to maintain their distance from the Bolivarian revolution, and to stand aside from efforts in Britain to build ongoing solidarity with Venezuela, with the ALBA, and with revolutionary Cuba. However, it is unlikely to convince anyone else.

From the point of view of the British ultra left alphabet soup, the editorial adds to their arsenal of arguments for maintaining hostility to Bolivarianism and to the Cuban communist leadership. Although they despise the UK SWP for all the wrong reasons – because it does not advance ultra left policies for British politics, for building the antiwar movement, or for defending immigrants of Islamic faith from ruling class campaigns to stir up Islamophobic campaigns. But the SW editorial on the Venezuelan Referendum is or to their mill because its approach and methodology, if applied to struggle elsewhere in the world, including Britain, would tilt the organization radically and set in down an ultra left, sectarian path not much different from the course of anti-Chavistas in the Venezuelan far left who are implementing it. And the editorial will be a boost to the sectarian left, helping them to make sure none of their folks are taken in by “people who dream of an authoritarian Cuban model” for Venezuela.

Despite many differences on the fine points, they march to a common drummer who keeps them in step in pursuit of the fetish of the WORD – sure in the conviction that without THE WORD (theirs, of course) nothing can be achieved down there on the southern shores of the Pirate’s Sea.

I don’t think the British SWP leadership really want to go down that road, but there’s time and room enough to pull back and about face, and throw its energies into the Bolivarian process in Indo-Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean.

Phil Stuart Cournoyer

Managua

Venezuela's referendum

Lessons from Venezuela's referendum

International Socialism

Issue: 117

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=394&issue=117

Posted: 18 December 07

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