Rev Left Radio - Venezuela in Crisis: Defending the Bolivarian Revolution

Episode Date: July 31, 2017

Dr. George Ciccariello-Maher is an American political theorist, commentator, and activist. He is an Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia and Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is the author of three books: We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution, Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, Decolonizing Dialectics. Brett interviews Dr. Ciccariello-Maher on the history of, and the current situation in, Venezuela.  Topics Include: Hugo Chavez, the Constituent Assembly, the opposition, the Venezuelan Communes, the concept of dual power, Jacobin Magazine, the Bolivarian Revolution, and much more. ----- Follow George on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ciccmaher?lang=en Visit his website: https://georgeciccariello.com His latest article on Venezuela: https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/venezuela-elections-chavez-maduro-bolivarianism --- Please donate to our Patreon:  http://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter: @RevLeftRadio Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/revleftradio Don't forget to rate/review us on iTunes to help our overall reach! This Podcast is Officially Affiliated with the Omaha GDC and The Nebraska Left Coalition Random Song From Our Friends: The Fireman and the Bumblebee by Particlehead https://soundcloud.com/dirklind   We cannot thank you enough for all of your support and feedback!

Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach. Workers of the world, unite! We're educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that, because more and more of us are waking the fuck up. So we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn.

We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. People want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. Like, this is not my fault. And I think that's part of the distancing from, like, people who don't want to admit that there's privilege. When the main function of a protect and serve, supposedly group is actually revenue generation. They don't protect and serve.

It's simply illogical to say that the things that affect all of us that can result in us losing our house, that can result in us not having clean drinking water, why should those be in anybody else's hands? They should be in the people's hands who are affected by those institutions. People are engaged in to overcome oppression, to fight back, and to identify those systems and structures that are oppressing them. Pressing them. God, those communists are amazing.

Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and comrade, Brett O'Shea, and we have a very special guest with us today. I'm extremely excited about this interview. So as not to butcher the name, I'm going to let our guest introduce himself and say a little bit about his background in academia and in revolutionary activism.

My name is George Ticcarella Marr. I'm a professor of politics and global studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and I'm the author of We Created Chavez, which is a people's history of revolutionary movements in Venezuela, as well as more recently building the commune, which discusses the development and emergence of radical democratic communes in Venezuela over the last few years. All right. And this is a very timely episode. A lot is going on in Venezuela right now. The constituent assembly process is occurring today. But before we dive into what's been going on lately in Venezuela, I'd really like to cover kind of a little lead-up of what's happened in the past.

few decades to lead up to this situation by informing the audience as to what the Bolivarian revolution is, what role Hugo Chavez played in it, and what its achievements have been since its inception? Sure. So, I mean, Venezuela, to situate it on a kind of world historical level, you could think about Venezuela as the beginning of the global pushback against neoliberalism. Even prior to our own experience of neoliberalism in the global core in Europe. in Europe and in the United States, neoliberalism is being pressed and imposed onto Latin

Americans, you know, by gunpoint, starting in particular with the Chilean coup in 1973, but then spreading across the continent. The 80s and 90s really see the imposition of neoliberal austerity and structural adjustment on and across Latin America as a kind of laboratory for what would later become global transformations. And I think the real sort of shot across the bow of this neoliberal offensive comes precisely in Venezuela in 1989 in this mass rebellion against neoliberal structural adjustment known as the Caracas.

And that's the beginning of what's happening in Venezuela today. It was before Chavez was publicly known. It was a mass riot and rebellion in the streets by the poorest of the poor that really set into motion everything that has come since and really provoked a chain reaction that included then three years later, Chavez attempting a coup to overthrow the two-party elite government that existed in Venezuela. And then later his election in 1998. So this is a process that involved Chavez very heavily as a focal point for revolutionary sentiments, but also involved mass rebellion on the grassroots level. And this has really never stopped. You know, the development and the

deepening of this radical grassroots, you know, pressure and momentum and energy has been essential to the radicalization of the Bolivarian process ever since. In the context of what they called the pink tide. Could you give a little geographical context of what was happening in other Latin American countries during and since the Bolivarian revolution? Sure. You know, as I said, Venezuela was really kind of the spearhead of a lot of this. Chavez came to power in an election in 1998. It came into power in 1999. We're talking about the transformation of the Constitution and the radicalization of society as a whole. But then you also saw, of course, the emergence of what you could see is the more leftist variance of this being tied in Bolivia, in Ecuador.

And what's interesting is that all these really came on the heels of popular rebellions. And so I actually think it's pretty clear that where you had mass popular rebellions in the streets that were ousting governments and that were taking down institutions, you also had the emergence of more radical, more left-wing governments that then, of course, were joined by more moderate governments in Chile and Brazil in Argentina. Yeah. And this led to this period of time in which the left managed to develop, you know, a certain degree of power in Latin America, gain some autonomy in the region as a whole was able to act more independently, independently of the World Bank, the IMF and foreign, you know, in foreign powers. What have some of the achievements been since Hugo Chavez took power? What have been some of the achievements made for poor and working people in Venezuela? I mean, you're talking about, of course, first and foremost, the dramatic reduction in poverty. the emergence of what we're called, you know, the sort of educational missions, social missions, which provided a social welfare, you know, structure in Venezuela for the poorest of the poor,

not only in terms of goods, you know, first of all, income, but also food and other items, but also education. You got an illiteracy program that basically eliminated illiteracy, and that program was then extended upward to the university level, so people like university level, education, subsidized food products, access to these kind of things, and access to a whole range of other social welfare products that basically at that time eliminated homelessness, eliminated a whole range of difficulties that existed in Venezuela's society, and brought Venezuela from being one of the most unequal Latin American societies to being one of the most equal over the period of a short

number of years. What was the coup in 2002? Who was behind it, and how did that play out? The 2002 coup was the product of, what's interesting about it is that it comes really before Chavezmo really, really radicalizes. And there's this phrase that has been used for saying it's a counter-revolution without a revolution. In other words, before Chavez was a socialist, before any of these really radical social programs were instituted, there was this clash and this heightening tension that led to a coup by a right-wing that was really unwilling to give up any kind of power in society. They saw Chavez as fundamentally illegitimate, partly because he spoke for the poor, partly because he gave the platform to the poor, but also partly because he was also just like an Afro and indigenous Venezuelan person who didn't fit the bill of what they thought a political leader should look like. And so, you know, this is the kind of situation that provokes this coup.

A very moderate process of social welfare reform and land reform provokes a right-wing reaction that then, to use the phrase often attributed to it. to Marx, the whip of the counter-revolution sparks the revolution and sets it into motion. Because it's also at that moment that Chavez, but also the movements that he's connected to, the most military movements, realize that there's no compromising with his right-wing, with capital, and realize that rather than being a kind of social democratic movement, this had to be a socialist movement, a much more radically combative movement that sought to restructure Venezuela society to move beyond welfare reform, for example, to move beyond social welfare and the social safety net and to restructure the state and the entirety of the

Venezuelan economy. Yeah, I actually think there's an interesting parallel there between this sort of delayed radicalization that happened in Venezuela and what happened in Cuba. At the very beginning of the Cuban Revolution, it really wasn't a hardcore ideological Marxist-Leninist revolution at the beginning. But as Castro took over and began to deal with, you know, U.S. imperialism and the bourgeois interventionism within its own society, that sort of sparked the revolution to go in that direction to seek help from the USSR at the time.

So what parallels do you think exist between Cuba and Venezuela in that sense? I mean, I think, first of all, I would say that the parallels with Cuba are overstated, but that's only because the Venezuelan opposition constantly talks about Castro communism being a threat that they confront and they face. But the reality is that any revolutionary process needs to deal with this question of transition and understand what it means. I think there's this tendency to think that making a revolution is easy

when, in fact, it's incredibly difficult. And the first thing that happens is that you have to fight enemies. You need to defeat these enemies, and these enemies will fight ferociously for the privileges that they maintain. And that has implications for how a revolution plays out. So, of course, in Cuba,

you had a process, a revolutionary process that did not describe itself as communist or even socialist, that leaned in certain strategic ways on sort of U.S. liberalism to explain itself, to justify itself. But then when confronted with the reality of what it meant to exist, not only in a revolutionary process by itself, but also in a global arena, realized that certain changes had to be made and realized that, for example, the United States was not going to be a supporter of this process, but was going to be an antagonist. And something similar, I think, happened in Venezuela. And this is the kind of thing that leads to these processes radicalizing.

And ideally, what you get is situation in which the relationship between grassroots movements and mobilizations and organizers on the grassroots level and those leaders in the state apparatus exist in some kind of synchrony. And that did happen, and that was the case for many years in Venezuela, in part because Chavez certainly knew that he relied on and required the support of these grassroots. And here's one of the ironies of the coup in 2002. For those they don't know, was a brief coup that was really in an unprecedented way reversed after 47 hours by mass resistance in the streets.

And what's kind of ironic to think about is the fact that this coup in which the boulevard process was very nearly lost, very nearly defeated, was actually in some ways very good in terms of making it clear to the government that they required the support of these grassroots movements and armed grassroots movements, guerrilla elements. that were active in, in the Bolivari movement, because they simply wouldn't be able to exist or stay in power without that. And so there's this phrase that CLR James,

the Great Trinodadian Revolution, are used to describe both the French Revolution and the simultaneous Haitian Revolution. And he speaks of the way in which when leaders attack their own left wing, they kind of forget what, you know, they forget that this is their support base and they seal their own doom.

And this is the lesson, I think, that the 2002 coup pointed out, namely the fact that without the support of these revolutionary movements, Chavez would not have been able to confront all of the enemies that he confronted and the movement confronted. He required instead the support of those movements, and that created a very positive and productive dynamic that radicalized the process as a whole.

Yeah, one thing I really like about your writings on this subject is that you consistently point out that, you know, there is no ego Chavez without the people that backed them up. And in the 2002 coup, it was the people, as you said, who really rose to the challenge and beat back that attempted coup. But what role did U.S. intervention play in the 2002 coup? Was it explicit? Was it more subtle?

Was it really there at all? How would you describe that? No, the U.S. support, this was under Bush. Recall, the U.S. support for the coup was pretty explicit. It wasn't called by the U.S. The U.S. didn't say have a coup right now, but it was clear where their loyalties lay. And to be perfectly clear, the loyalties of the Obama government,

the Obama administration, particularly when Hillary Clinton was at the State Department, the loyalties of the Trump administration, these are nearly identical. It's just really a question of the tactics that they're trying to use to overthrow this government because they all wanted to get rid of, you know, to get rid of Chalizmo because it was a thorn in the side of the United States. And so the U.S. supported the coup in 2002, attempted to justify and legitimize it and then continued to and continues today to fund, to explicitly fund those opposition leaders who participated in that coup. is even against U.S. policy and U.S. law to continue to fund undemocratic, anti-democratic coup leading elements of the Venezuelan opposition, yet they do it openly, brazenly, because there's really no respect for Venezuelan democracy and sovereignty when it comes to the U.S. government.

Yeah, and I think it's really telling how the U.S. media had covered it in the Bush years and how they continue to cover it. I mean, just yesterday, I was listening to NPR, and they were framing the constituent assembly that's occurring currently as an attempt by Maduro to implement his dictatorship. And so this is even the most, you know, liberal, you know, shining example of the media, and they are still fully in the tank for U.S. imperialism

and playing into that narrative 100%. What role does the U.S. media play in this sort of thing? No, I mean, one of the editors at the New York Times praised the coup in 2002 as a victory for democracy when it happened. And so this tells you just how much the media is really, you know, is really against this bolivarian process. 100% in the United States. And this should be no surprise, in part because of the, you know, the fact that, of course, this is a, you know, this is a revolutionary process that doesn't

fit within the framework that, you know, that U.S. liberals expect. It's too combative. It's too, you know, antagonistic, you know, and they found, they took, you know, infinite pleasure in mocking Chavez as being a kind of dumb, brown hick. When in reality, he was someone that really understood politics and was actually a genius when it came to understanding what it would take to mobilize Venezuelans, you know, under the conception of the people and struggle as a people against not only imperialism, but against capitalism as a whole and set all of society into motion. And so the role of the media was essential. And the role of the Venezuelan media during that coup was, you know, has been often commented. There's a great film that it was filmed

during the coup called The Revolution Were Not Be Televised that documents in detail the ways in which the opposition-run media in Venezuela essentially blacked out the coup. You know, they talked about the coup, and then they blacked out all kind of resistance to it. They were showing soap operas and reruns of television shows when people were in the streets resisting the coup. They, you know, shut down, the coup leaders shut down the state television station, and that had to be regained by force in order to transmit out the fact that a coup was actually happening. And so the weapon of the media has really been essential from day one in Venezuela, and it's one that continues today.

And unfortunately, what we're seeing in the international media and even in leftist outlets is, you know, is a misunderstanding of what's going on on the ground that draws upon these false media narratives that talks about authoritarianism, talks about dictatorship. Well, it's a strange dictatorship that loses elections to the National Assembly. It's a strange dictatorship that calls for votes and then only to have the opposition refuse to participate. And it's a strange dictatorship that will be rewriting or amending the Venezuelan Constitution only to put that to a population. the referendum to be approved. I mean, this is a place that's had more elections over the last 20 years than anywhere else on earth. Yeah, absolutely. Before we get into what's going on currently, I had this question slated to ask you later, but I think it's actually important to understand the history that has led up to this. And in your book, Building the Commune, you analyze the

communes in Venezuela. And I don't think a lot of leftists understand exactly what those communes are and what role they play. So can you please explain to us what those communes are and the relationship between those communes and Ego Chavez and then the relationship between those communes and the current Venezuelan government today? Sure. So in the shift that I alluded to earlier from an early Chavismo that was more focused on social welfare on improving the lot of the poor

and on making up for what is referred to as the historical debt to the poor, those who have been really starving under the old neoliberal regime, there's a shift from that to a more radical conception of transforming the Venezuelan state. This is even prior to, but also around the same time, that Chavez starts to speak more about socialism. But it wasn't just a socialism that's sort of imported from the Soviet or other experiences. It was really a kind of radically democratic understanding of decentralizing power as a way of really transforming production and democracy in Venezuela. So it began with the establishment of what we'll call communal councils where people on the local grassroots level could get together with their neighbors and in a directly democratic way make really crucial decisions about how their lives will be run.

managed on the local level. And more recently, around 2009 and 2010, these councils began to sort of merge into these broader units called communes that also, you know, involved and included productive units, you know, communal businesses, communal factories that then would produce, and they would literally produce based on the decisions made in this directly Democratic Assembly. So the people would get together in this communal parliament, it was called, and decide what to produce, how much to pay the workers, how long they would work, how to distribute the goods and what to do with the surplus, and that surplus will be reinvested into the local community through the commune. In other words, it was a directly democratic management

of production on the local level. And this is a really revolutionary phenomenon. It's not the entirety, of course, of Venezuelan society. It's actually a very small fragment of it, but it points toward a very different way to manage a society in general. And in particular, a society that because of oil dependency does not produce the things that the country needs. And so this turn toward local and democratic production in a socialist way is really essential to understanding the potential for getting out of this economic crisis, for example, that exists today in Venezuela. And this is a sort of shiny example of what a new kind of socialism could look like.

Now, Maduro has supported these communes, and that needs to be understood. At the same time, partly because of the very difficult situation, he was thrown in. to in the kind of really, I mean, the really shitty hand that he was dealt, beginning with his election in 2013, he's been very erratic. You know, there was a sort of half-hearted attempt to transform a really bad currency control system. There's been a tendency to, and this is not entirely Maduro's fault, right? You've got shortages of certain goods.

You can radically turn toward grassroots production, which, of course, is ideal, but also out of desperation to get food on the shelves, you can turn toward private producers and private importers, which the government also did. Now, while some sort of decry this as a betrayal, it's also just a very, you know, concrete and strategic attempt to feed Venezuelans in the process of transition. So Maduro has been an ally of the communes and of the revolutionary movements at the same time that the situation has become very, very difficult. And certain sectors, certain private sectors and private companies as well as certain military

sectors have gained a great deal of influence and corruption has become a very acute problem. Not that it was never there before it was, but it's become very, very sharp because of the economic crisis. And so the situation is very, very tense and very complicated. Yeah, when you talk to the communes, it kind of speaks to me as a parallel somewhat to what happened in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, this attempt by people to take control of their own lives. And it's almost anarchistic in that sense. Do you think it's a fallacy to frame the communes as a sort of anarchistic movement? Is that too simplified? I mean, what would you say to that? I mean, it's a difficult question. I think it's not a total, it's not totally false to put it that way, because

what the commune stand for ultimately is an anti-state force. Now, of course, this is the same anti-state force that Marx understood the Paris commune to be, when he called it a revolution against the state itself. And we talked about the replacement of the traditional state with something radically different. So insofar as it's, you know, as it's anti-state, it's also Marxist. It's also all of these things. And it points toward a deep tension, the fact that the Venezuelan state of, you know, even more than many states by the centralism and the oil, you know, the oil dependency is a huge, bloated bureaucratic state that needs to be decentralized and needs to be replaced by these kind of grassroots movements.

And this explains the fact that, for example, if you ask comuneros, in other words, commune activists organizing to develop and deepen this communal power, they say often that they're big, and I talk about this in the book, that their biggest enemies are often Chavistas, they're often local bureaucrats or party leaders or others who don't understand, on the one hand, the importance of communal power, or simply see it to be a threat to their own power, authority, wealth. And, you know, and this clash is direct. And so on the one hand, but this simply gets to the necessary tension that we need to understand. This is what many on the left miss is that, you know, simply supporting the process of revolution under someone like Maduro and the way

that it's played out in a tense and complicated way, it's too simple to say, oh, we're against this government all of a sudden when the movements need to develop and press forward and do so in a very specific context in which they're not going to abandon the government for the right. They're not going to let the right wing come to power. They're going to push forward and press the government and attempt to radically transform and put pressure on that government without abandoning it, without acting as though they can simply, you know, sort of clean their hands a bold situation and act as though political power doesn't matter. And this is where the question of anarchism, I think, comes in, whereas I think there's a, you know, there are, you know, very good

and nuanced approaches to anarchism that understand the revolution is a complicated mass process that requires the majority of people to be involved in, you know, in thinking through and pressing forward a radical anti-state platform. But much of what goes by the name of anarchism, unfortunately, simply refuses to think about power and think about the state. And I think that's a fundamental error in Venezuela, but also, you know, elsewhere. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, let's go ahead and dive right into what's going on now. So after Hugo Chavez's death in 2013, Nicholas Maduro was elected as president,

and things seem to have gotten very difficult since then. The first protests really broke out in 2014 and have continually escalated to the point where we currently are. Can you please explain what happened in those last few years and what's going on now? Sure, beginning around 2012, 2013, you had the emergence of an economic contradiction with regard to the exchange rate system. I don't want to go into too much detail, but essentially it means that there's a sort of high black market rate for the U.S. dollar, which leads to a variety of phenomena that include black market trading of currency, huge amounts of corruption, because oil money comes

in in dollars, and then is given to private corporations to import goods in dollars. And if there's a high black market rate for that currency, that encourages people to speculate on the currency, to sell it on the black market. And also, when you have price controls, for example, of oil and of food, there's a huge incentive to smuggle those goods to sell them across the border in Colombia. And this led to really an explosion of economic contradictions within the government that led to some of these early shortages that people may have heard about a few years ago. But these were just shortages of certain sectors. People probably heard about toilet paper and other things that emerged from this tense contradiction that was emerging around the import sector and the contradictions in that sector. That was years ago, though, and this is really snowballed into a much bigger and much more serious economic crisis as well as a political crisis. And it becomes a political crisis precisely because the opposition from the day that Maduro was elected unleashed people.

into the streets in bloody protests that killed dozens of people and has really never let up and kept the pressure on, kept attempting to delegitimize the Maduro government, sabotage the stability of the Venezuelan economy, leading right up to the opposition winning the National Assembly in 2015 in December. And this is where you get what is really an institutional crisis. You get crisis within the state apparatus itself because the opposition controls the legislature, The Chavistas control, the Supreme Court, in other words, the judiciary and the executive. And there's a total standoff between these, in particular because the Venezuelan opposition doesn't simply want to pass policy to improve the economic situation, but actually wants to overthrow the government.

And this is what it sets itself to do. So what you hear is a one-sided story in the U.S. press, for example, about the Supreme Court annulling the existence of the National Assembly. Well, what you actually had in reality was a National Assembly that refused to recognize. Supreme Court decisions, constraining its power, constraining the kind of, you know, policies that it could engage in. And you have this real clash that deepens. And you see then in recent months the emergence of more violent street protests in which many people are killed, now more than 100. Many, I would say many by the government and by police and National Guard, many by the protesters. And it's really, you know, deaths across the board through a variety

of different means as a result of these protests and blockades. And this is the crisis, and this is the moment in which the National, sorry, the Constituent Assembly emerges as a possibility and as a possible exit from the crisis, not, as I put it in this recent article in Jacobin that was published yesterday, not a perfect solution, certainly, but we're not on the terrain of perfect solutions. Yeah, and I always think it's very interesting how, you know, the opposition is portrayed as the Democratic force seeking democracy when in reality every move that they've made has been in an attempt to deconstruct democracy or undermine it, and it's actually democracy that

put Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Madura into power in the first place. So I think it's really important that we kind of hyper-focus in on who the opposition is, because in the Western media, it's portrayed, as I said, as this democratic force, as just people rising up trying to take back control from, you know, an authoritarian dictatorship. But when you really dig into it, you see that there are fascist elements, there are oligarchical elements from the old bourgeoisie. inside Venezuela. And there are, to be honest, some CIA and U.S. government imperial money flowing into the country supporting the coup. So can you go ahead and kind of flesh out what the opposition consists of and what sort of factions exist within it?

Sure. I mean, the Venezuelan opposition has never been particularly democratic. You know, and this goes back again to the Caracasso rebellion, this mass rebellion, which left somewhere between 303,000 people dead. In other words, this is a radically anti-democratic attempt to impose austerity on the poorest of Venezuelans. And as a result, Chavez emerged in a radically democratic way, you know, as a, you know, popular candidate that the people really wanted because they wanted change and they wanted these things, you know, to be transformed. They helped to write on a grassroots democratic level, a new constitution that the opposition

fought tooth and nail, the same constitution that it claims to be using today as a shield, it did not want these opposition leaders. And these leaders come from the same elite. political families, the same white and rich families that have been ruling Venezuela forever. And so there's no, there's no really confusing the matter. These are people that come from movements that openly support Pinochet, that support any attempt to, you know, maintain a sort of radical capitalist neoliberalism at the expense of the poor is because they don't think that the poor should have anything to do with politics to begin with. And as I mentioned before,

this is the same opposition, of course, that overthrew the democratically elected and legitimate political order and dissolve the Constitution and dissolve all, you know, all branches of government during the 2002 coup. These are people that have no democratic credentials and that we know just on a political level will impose neoliberal austerity if they come back to power. Yeah, and there's, for people in the U.S., it kind of is weird to think of racial hierarchies existing in some Latin American countries, but certainly race plays a huge role. There was a black man who was recently beaten and burned alive in public by the opposition. And they pointed out his black skin as an indicator that, you know, that he was sympathetic to Chavez and the Chivismo government.

And what role does race play in Venezuela? And how does that hierarchy, you know, parallel itself with class hierarchies? I mean, they overlap dramatically. You know, the poorest of Venezuelans are, you know, are the darker skinned. And elites have always been symbolically white. And those who appear in the media and the political leaders are almost always, not completely, but almost always the whitest. And that has crucial implications, especially today. As you mentioned, those being attacked and beaten and lynched in the streets for looking to Chavista, you know, it could be a red shirt, but often it's, you know, the fact that

they look very clearly poor and dark-skinned, unlike many of the protesters who maintain a really unmitigated feeling and sentiment of class and racial superiority. And this is part of why they're in the streets, because they want power of. back. They're angry and still furious that they were displaced from the political apparatus. Some are feeling the pinch of losing some of those unearned privileges. And this is really at the heart of what goes on in Venezuela today. And it's at the heart of why the Venezuelan opposition can't win the majority or has had a hard time, I should say, until now, winning the support of the majority of Venezuelans because they are very clearly representatives of

the most elite white sectors. was able to break that down and communicate with and present himself as what he was, in other words, someone who came from poverty, who came from the countryside, and who was one of them. And the Venezuelan opposition has never been able to do that. Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about food shortages in the country. And then with that talk comes talk of, you know, sabotage of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, you know, purposefully shutting down supply lines or burning food. Is that true? How much of that is true? And what role is the sort of the bourgeoisie class in Venezuela playing in sort of trying to intensify

the situation and accelerate it through sabotage? Certainly. I mean, to be perfectly clear, you know, and I think it was probably clear from what I said before, a huge part of these shortages in the economic crisis has to do with not only a drop of oil, of oil prices, but also government in action when it came to dealing with this exchange rate system. I mean, that was a problem that should have been dealt with. I understand why it wasn't dealt with immediately.

but, you know, it's led to a real spiraling of complications and difficulties. But at the same time, there's also active sabotage. At the same time, these protests that were seen today are also, you know, one of them attacked a state-run milk producer just a few days ago. And so we're talking about acts of sabotage that really undercut the very, you know, the ability of the government to do precisely what the protesters are demanding. In other words, to put food on the shelves to figure out a way to get beyond dependency on oil and to figure out how to produce what's actually necessary.

But the opposition has no strategy for doing this and no policy proposals. What it will do is to subject Venezuela more directly to the whims of the global market by removing price controls, privatizing oil and believing based on this sort of fallacious faith that is constantly had in the free market that the free market will provide.

When we know this crisis that's happening with the oil prices happened to, you know, the corrupt two-party democracy in the 1980s as well. And that's why they turned to neoliberalism. That's why we saw the mass rebellion that Brent brought about Chavismo. Hypothetically, let's say the opposition totally has a landslide victory in the next few months and just totally takes back over the entire government. What sort of, I know you've hinted at this many times in this conversation thus for it, but if you could flesh it out a little bit more, what sort of society would the opposition bring if it had full, you know, unimpeded power to bring about its own vision?

I mean, I think what's going on is the opposition has not been honest about its ambitions or about its proposals. And this is strategic. Venezuela has become a Chavista country. In other words, it's a place that Chavez transformed the very basic elements of political life so that if you walk into Venezuela and propose neoliberal austerity, of course, no one wants it. Or, you know, you simply can't get away with these things. And so the opposition can't be honest about what it would do. And yet we have these hints and we have these leaked policy documents that would emerge over the years suggesting what we know based on who they are, namely the fact that they will, you know, support a totally untrampled neoliberal capitalism based on a narrative, on the one hand, a cynical narrative that this will help stabilize the economy. But the reality that this will help them and this will help private corporations and this will help a certain sector of society to profit off the best majority.

And that's the kind of society that you definitely see. won't, for example, say that they're going to eliminate social welfare programs that, you know, Chavismo will help to create, but of course they will. That will be one of the most immediate effects of any austerity program as we're seeing in Brazil, as we're seeing in Argentina when the right takes power. Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's important to kind of flesh out what the constituent assembly that's occurring right now. Can you go ahead and tell the listeners what that is and what its implications are? Sure. So today, Venezuela, I mean, until a couple of hours ago, I actually Venezuelans were electing a constituent assembly that would be empowered to, I mean, technically

to rewrite the constitution, but the realities it won't be a rewriting. It's, you know, the 1999 constitution that was written under Chavismo is a good constitution, is a really relatively radical or at the very least progressive constitution that doesn't need much rewriting, but could use some kind of adjustments to move forward. And again, this is a political attempt to break out of this situation of deadlock. And so it depends on everything. It depends on whether the opposition participates today, which apparently they are unwilling to. It depends on whether or not people believe this constituent assembly can provide a path forward.

But the goal is to put together a bunch of representatives of municipalities, but also crucially of social movements in different sectors of society, who can work on that document, put it forward. And again, put it forward for popular approval. This has to be approved by the majority of Venezuelans, this new constitution, or this revised constitution. And so there's nothing undemocratic about it, despite all the sort of hysterical media narrative. Yeah, I'm going to pivot now, but before I do, I'm going to ask some other questions that are still related, but kind of off the topic of exactly what's happening right now. But before I do, there's just this big debate that goes on, especially here in the United States, about the cause of the problems going on in Venezuela right now. and the very simplistic narratives breaks it down to this sort of black and white

capitalism versus socialism dichotomy. And a lot of people on the rights just hold up the Venezuelan chaos as an example of socialism and that socialism always fails. So can you go ahead and answer the question of whether or not the Venezuelan economy is socialist and whether or not

that socialist ideas are the reason that this is happening? No, of course not. I mean, in the sense, socialist ideas have a lot to do with this, but what you have in Venezuela is not a socialist society. you have a deep and protracted clash between capitalism, global capitalism, and an attempt to build something different, you know, an attempt to build socialism that nevertheless is very limited, if you think about it, some nationalization, price controls, an attempt to ensure that people can actually afford to eat and survive and live and have access to the things that people should have access to. And yet what we see, and we see this repeatedly, is that any attempt to deviate from the norms of global capital,

capitalism is punished and punished severely. And that's the kind of punishment you're seeing today. And that's why when I sort of write in my article in Jacobin that what's going on today is not a problem of too much socialism, but too little. It's because when you're between two different ways of organizing an economy, you get the worst of both worlds. In other words, the private sector is still very much in control. You're still very much at the whim of global oil prices, for example, because you haven't developed and deep into socialist production apparatus. in Venezuela, and yet you're trying to do something different and being punished for it at every step.

For example, when you set price controls and you say that people should be able to afford chicken, and you say the price for chicken should be this, and yet the private sector are the ones producing most of the chicken at least, then they'll either refuse to produce it or they will smuggle that chicken out of the country and sell it across the border for twice as much

or three times as much. And this is the kind of constant undermining of any kind of alternative that happens within these sort of transitional states. And what we as revolutionaries need to understand is that this is inevitable, this is difficult, this is what it takes, and we need to have some kind of faith on the one hand in the process as a process, as a temporary and contradictory process. But we also need to know that the solution lay to the left.

Yeah, and that's one of the things that I really liked about that article is that you made that very clear. And we'll link to that article in the episode summary so that people can go check that out because, you know, Jacobin has been hit or miss lately. And it's published some really sort of, you know, liberal kind of third-way, quote-unquote, pieces on the subject, and that kind of leads into my next question. In an article, you wrote in 2014, you did criticize critiques of Venezuela coming from certain, quote-unquote, anarchists. In the article, you explained that they're actually, you know, middle-class liberals. But, and more recently, the Democratic Socialist outlet, Jackman Magazine, has been under fire from the left and

TELUSR specifically for their critiques of the Venezuelan government. Why are the Why are these critiques from some anarchist and democratic socialist poorly founded, and how should the global left critically engage with the Venezuelan state, its policies, its errors, in a way that supports the Venezuelan people and the Venezuelan left? I think it's complicated because it really gets to the heart of how we understand revolution as a process. You know, the first thing, of course, in today is that a revolution is far from clean and perfect and pure.

it's a battle to the death against really brutal enemies. And Venezuela is a great place to see this totally borne out and verified in practice. In other words, you begin to try to change something and the brutality with which your enemies attack you forces you back and forces you to change your tactics and your strategy and forces you to start to fight back, right, and to really think in a real way. And so after living in Venezuela and seeing the ways in which people make concrete decisions

based on being there, based on the actual concrete consequences that those decisions will have, to then be in the U.S. left and to see the ways in which people just throw critiques out there, often to make themselves feel better or to sort of confirm their own sense of superiority without thinking about what it would take to really make a revolution. And this is not simply anarchism or the democratic socialist sectors, because it's also kind of some Marxist-Leninist sectors

to say, well, they didn't seize the means of production yet. And you said, well, okay, well, where concretely and at what point and with what constituency, would you have done that? And what does it look like to seize the means of production? Like just really, like, give answers and give strategies. And that's what it would take to really be a good critic, right? To look at concrete contexts, to understand what the consequences are of making certain decisions and policy proposals, and then to move forward on that basis.

And it's not that there aren't different perspectives on the, these things. And it's not that the government of Venezuela has not made huge errors or, you know, or has, you know, very questionable loyalties on occasion. I think that's all true. But there are plenty of people, hundreds of thousands of people on the ground pushing, fighting for this process to radicalize it, to transform it because it really is the path forward. Yeah. Would you say that speaks to a sort of more materialist analysis of the situation as opposed to what is commonly call it an idealist analysis of the situation? Yes, I mean, certainly, like, there's a certain kind of idealism that says that there are no,

that we can sort of wish into being the reality that we want, that misunderstands the materiality, I think, of the decisions that we make in the context in which those are made. And, you know, this idealism manifests as what we see a lot of today, the sort of neither nor or the, you know, the outwithing them all kind of narrative that says, you know, neither the government nor the opposition, which of course is in many ways reflective of what people feel, but also a cop-out, right? Because you're actually making a clear decision if you're saying no to the government and if you're saying no to Chavismo, for example.

And that's why most people on the ground in Venezuela are still chavistas and are still pushing and attempting to radicalize this process and push it in the right direction and push it away from the kind of negative tendencies that have developed as a result of this process. Yeah, I'm sure you don't have the numbers in front of you, but if you could just kind of take a stab at, like what percentage of the Venezuelan population is the opposition made up of and what percentage, you know, more or less,

although they have their critiques, supports the current, you know, Chavez and Maduro government? It's complicated because it depends on what you're asking. If you look at polls, what you see is that most Venezuelans are sympathetic to Chavismo still, but that is not the same as being sympathetic or approving of the Maduro government right now. you know, approval for the government is very low in the 20s, in the 20% range, 25% range.

But it's worth of bearing mind that's actually higher than, for example, the president of Mexico, Colombia, Brazil. But it is very low for Chavismo. But what you also see is that the opposition has a popularity that's really only a little higher than that. And there's a huge sector that is in between what are called the Ninnis, the neither norse, that don't necessarily identify strongly with either power. And some of those are sort of liberals or some of those are in between. or some of those are just poor people that feel abandoned by the process in this situation of economic need that has actually seen people struggling over food and struggling over supplies.

So that's the kind of difficulty of the situation in the present is that Chavismo is not the sort of overwhelmingly powerful force that it was at one point. Yeah, what is like, what do you think the perspective of the opposition is from like, you know, the broader population maybe of the people in between the neither nor is as you put it what is their perception of the opposition i mean the opposition is extremely violent it shuts down traffic it kills people in the streets so i mean you don't have to agree with the government but is there sort of a repulsion at the opposition there is and it comes in different ways i'd say on the one hand there's a clear uh you know there are opposition supporting poll there are

polls that come from opposition sympathizers that show that almost half of the country is opposed to these kind of violent blockades of streets that the opposition engages in. And it's often been clear, even on an anecdotal level, that people that live in these neighborhoods, which are wealthier opposition neighborhoods, that they don't want their neighborhoods shut down every day for months on end. And part because if you go to cross some of these barricades, that people will threaten you or sometimes demand payment to cross them, this is not fun for anyone. involved. And so it's really only those hardcore opposition supporters, I think, that are most sympathetic with this form of protest. And then there's another aspect, which is people, in particular poor people who, even if they're not sympathetic with the Maduro government, are not sympathetic

either with the idea of overthrowing the democratically elected government. I think that's borne out pretty clearly as well in a lot of the surveys, where people who are not chavistas or once for chavistas and no longer are do not support the opposition as a politically insurrectionary force. And it seems like the opposition just won't have the democratic base of support that it would need to really take over power. And do you think that maybe contributes to why they are so unwilling to participate in this constituent assembly or to pursue democratic mechanisms to get into power? Because a part of them knows that the vast majority of Venezuelans aren't really going to be sympathetic to them and their rule either?

It's tough because I think the opposition could win an election now. I mean, I don't think it would be very hard for them to win an election now. I think they would be winning that as they won the National Assembly on the basis of economic dissatisfaction by many in the population. And I think many of those people who got in opposition government would then experience some form of, you know, of buyer's remorse when they realized that this was a government that was really going to undermine their quality of life in the long run. And so that's the tension, I think, that exists. But the opposition really could win elections. And that's in some ways what it's angling for, but it plays this constant game of being in the streets, de-legitimizing the institutions, then attempting to use those institutions to win. And for a long time, that was not working for the opposition.

It was a contradiction that undermined their ability to mobilize their own voters to vote. And yet now, in this context of deepening crisis, the real risk is that they could win an election. And there are elections, you know, despite all this nonsensical talk about dictatorship, there are presidential election schedule for next year. And if Chavismo does not manage to sort of write the economic ship, then there's a very real risk that a well-positioned opposition candidate could win. I know this is a counterfactual, and there's always problems with that. But hypothetically speaking, you know, if Hugo Chavez was still alive and maybe lived, you know, 20 years past the point where he actually did, you know, maybe, or just alive right now, let's just keep the hypothetical limited. What would be the differences? Do you think it would have been better?

Do you think that Maduro specifically is to blame for some of the problems that Chavez, if he was still alive, could have handled better? What's your take on that? I mean, I think it's impossible to say because Chavez's death coincided with all of these other elements unraveling. And so, as I said, Maduro was really dealt a shitty hand. Maybe he could have dealt with it better, but it's really impossible to say because he's had to try to stabilize Chavismo from within to maintain the support of very different sectors, the far left, the sort of more conservative chavistas. At the same time, the people are kind of jockeying for power, and there are other contenders who want to be the leader of this movement. At the same time that foreign capital and foreign governments and the opposition are all kind of intriguing against the continuity of this process.

So it's really been incredibly difficult in all in the context of an economic crisis and collapsing oil prices. So it's hard to blame Maduro, despite the fact that he's been maybe less charismatic and less energetic and less capable as a political leader than Chavez was. But that's also trying to compare someone to a really exceptional, you know, an unparalleled political figure who was with Will Chavez. Definitely, definitely. Very fair. All right. We're coming up. We're about 10 minutes short of an hour. I still have a few more questions. I'm going to pivot a little bit into more theoretical realms. In a lot of your writings, you talk about dual power. of touches on the commune and the government. But what role has dual power played in Venezuela?

And what do you think the strengths of dual power are, both theoretically and in practice? So, you know, I borrow, of course, the idea of dual power from Lenin when he's talking about this period in which the Soviets are emerging is this alternative power. And it's prior to the overthrow of, you know, of the old regime or between the two revolutions, of course, you know, I should say in 1917. So it's about this development of an alternative power. And for Lenin, this is very much about developing the basis to then seize power. Although Lenin sees the seizure is a very decisive and momentary thing, when in Venezuela what you've seen is this much more protracted situation of dual power, meaning the development of alternative, revolutionary grassroots movements and organizations

as a reservoir and an alternative of a different way to think about in govern society that develops and that provides a kind of leverage and a sort of fulcrum for pushing against transforming and ideally dismantling the state entirely making it into something very different in the communal councils, in the communes, in these alternatives, these radically democratic alternatives that represent an alternative to the existing state apparatus. And so that's where the conception of dual power, I think, is important. It's about thinking about the fact that we're not simply trying to take over the existing state, but also to transform it, to replace it, and to do so on the basis of this alternative conception of power. and these alternative movements. Now, when I wrote about dual power, I was also writing when things were going much better,

when you were looking at the potential and really seeing, I think, in practice, the strength of those movements and their ability, which is just a concrete, conjunctual ability to pressure the state and transform it. And today, of course, the situation is much worse, but the lesson, really, I think, is very much the same, namely the fact that as one commonerro,

you know, commune organizer in Lada State, put it to me, said the only people who can save this revolution are the same ones who have saved it every other time. In other words, these grassroots revolutionary movements. Okay. In previous interview, you said a line that I thought was very interesting. You said there's no contradiction between populist mechanisms and revolutionary politics. Can you please elaborate on what you would mean by that and how that might apply to the left in the U.S. moving forward? I think populism is a really, you know, it's on the far left in particular. It's a category that is misunderstood, misrepresented. It's seen as a selling out of the purity of radical

leftism. When in reality, that's a misunderstanding, but it's also a sort of exaggeration of what the left itself is capable of doing or has shown itself capable of practice. Because what happens when things really are set into motion is that huge numbers of people come together, together around certain kinds of, you know, focal points and set, you know, and set society into motion. And they don't do it on the basis of a perfect revolutionary program. I often do it on the basis of very flexible and often sometimes seemingly empty ideas about popular power and control and self, you know, government. And this is what happens with radical populism. And the fact that There is bad populism that exists, and Trump, of course, as a right-wing populist.

That does undermine the fact that what we need to do originally as a task is to understand how it is that we can divide society and bring people to the left toward a radical understanding of populism. And in many senses, the importance of it is borne out by someone like Trump because the question is really one of understanding, you know, the left that refuses to understand why Trump was able to win or why he's able to garner certain kinds of support. And why it is that we need a kind of radical populist alternative that can pull people who don't identify as communists or socialists or anarchists to the left in an effective way that will be able to transform, you know, the world. All right. And final question. This kind of sums up the whole conversation. Are you optimistic about the future of Venezuela? Where do you see it going from here? I'm optimistic. You know, the Venezuelan Poira-Rakir-Nas-Sas-A-Swa-Cities is I'm optimistic. And I believe. even the creative powers of the people. And that's really, I think, the only basis for optimism we have. Our optimism can't be rooted in the fact or in the idea that we know that we will win

or that we're confident of that fact or that even the odds are in our favor because they never are. I think our optimism has to be grounded in, you know, in understanding that we have a certain kind of power that cannot be replicated or really totally destroyed by those who stand against us. And that's the kind of power that needs to be set into motion. So even if this boulevard process as a governing movement is overthrown tomorrow or loses the next elections, the people in Venezuela have grown have developed, and that's something that's not going to go away. The level of consciousness that has been developed in Venezuela, elsewhere in land America, is not going to go away. And we live in a moment in which all of these, you know, optimisms and, you know, all of this sort of collective consciousness raising is a part of

our everyday life from occupied to the Arab Spring to the global revolt that we've all lived through just now things are in motion and we're capable of pressing that forward and that's the only basis for optimism I think that there is awesome well thank you so much for coming on the show comrade I really appreciate this I'm really excited to let my listeners hear this but before we go can you please point listeners in the direction where they can find your books and your writings

sure so my first book was called Weir-Chavez and it's a history, as I said, of revolutionary movements. It was published in 2013 by Duke University Press. But more recently, you can see a book published by Verso, part of the Jacobin series, called Building the Commune. It's a very short book. It's a good introduction and overview to what's been going on today and these tensions and contradictions that I think we are seeing playing out.

And you can follow me as well on Twitter at C-I-C-C-M-H-E-R-Chic-M-R on Twitter. All right. Well, thank you very much for coming on. I really appreciate the conversation. It's been an honor to speak to you. Thank you so much for having. When the fireman he said, this is all that we have. I'm sick and tired of playing games without a gun. So I'm leaving, not for you, not for anyone.

I will pick up my arms in this darkest hour. and cure this wanting mind because it's all my fault and it's hard to make someone believe and all we are is there written on her sleeve and leaves me there a broken incomplete man to everyone I am fine, I am fine, I am so damn fine

And I will say I'm okay Until the day I die And I don't know how to fight But I do know how to hide So leave me to myself I am helpless I did it Bumblebee retort.

You are so very long. It ain't perfect, but it sure is hard to find. A better way to spin the rest of our lives. So don't remove from yourself. from yourself this blessed love and come back holding strong because it's not your fault and it's hard to admit to anyone

and all the wars you know you could have won they'll leave you there a broken complete mental mind. I am fine, I am fine, I am so down fine, and I will say I'm okay until the day I die. I don't know how to fight, but I do know how to hide. So I leave you to yourself. to death

da-da-da-da.