Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  And these laws themselves, Margarita reminded me, were passed by decree of Chávez, with no consultation of the people, despite the fact that the Bolivarian Constitution requires that “all laws be passed in consultation with the people.” She said that the crisis arising over the elections had its roots in this authoritarian style of governing. But she felt we had to back up and look at the nature of the Venezuelan economy to understand its politics.

  Venezuela, for the past century, has been a petro-state, which is a state sui generis. A petro-state doesn’t live from taxing the people but, as Margarita said, “from the revenues it captures from the international world according to the price of the barrel of oil.” The petro-state manages a huge amount of money when oil prices are high, but that can collapse in an instant when prices drop, making the petro-states very “volatile.”

  By contrast with normal states where government is expected to serve the needs of, and is accountable to, the taxpayers who pay to maintain it, in Venezuela and other ­petro-states the people expect to be paid, and be “maintained.” This reminded me of what two Venezuelan journalists wrote, that many Venezuelans live under the illusion their country is “a utopia in which the state is the providential benefactor, all structure and rules are dispensable, effort is a distraction, and destiny is not a future to build, but a heaven that already exists, a treasure already won that needs only to be meted out properly.”1 Pondering this, I could almost see the little squares on the napkin that my poet friend Jose Gregorio drew for me to explain how land reform worked in Venezuela.

  Fernando Coronil had described how, under previous governments, “the circulation of torrents of oil money not only undermined productive activity and stimulated the spread of financial speculation and corruption, but also facilitated the concentration of power at the highest levels of government,”2 such as in a president ruling by the power of decree, granted him by the National Assembly under his command.

  Margarita went on to say, “under the government of President Chávez we became even more dependent on the oil. Before we used to have industries, and we had more agriculture. But because the price of oil has been so high for so many years the country has quit producing.” Despite massive investment in the countryside, nothing was being produced, and even coffee, rice, and white corn, all of which was once grown in Venezuela, was now being imported, and the list of imports was growing.

  “The elites arrive to power when there are oil booms and they become intoxicated with the money and begin to have great fantasies, more delirious than you can imagine,” Margarita said, and she added that she thought the “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century” was Chávez’s delirious fantasy. “The elites arrive and see all this money that came out of nothing, not produced by any work, and society can’t control them because they don’t need their taxes to sustain them in public expenditures. So [the political elites] develop a sort of autonomy from society and they end up attempting to impose their dreams of grandeur on society.”

  Margarita compared Venezuela and Chávez to “Libya with Gaddafi, also a petro-state, also with a charismatic leader, who decided that Libya was going to have a unique, green Muslim socialism… and, well, these things can be done when you have all the money in the world.”

  The oil money funded military dictatorships that ruled, with the exception of the Trienio Adeco, all the way up to 1958.3 The last dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, began a modernizing project that continued under the early democratic governments. With good educational and development programs came good jobs, and this allowed for the growth of the upper, middle, and working classes. But then the price of oil dropped in the late seventies and the eighties and Margarita said “the elites didn’t know what to do. They couldn’t develop an alternative model and so they adopted the formulas of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and moved toward neoliberalism.” The poor suffered terribly under the new regime and “the breach between the rich and the poor delegitimized the political elite but it also delegitimized representative demo­cracy. And into this breach came a caudillo.”

  With President Chávez, the military returned to power and Chávez expressed the polarization between the poor and the working, middle and upper classes, Margarita said, “with a very strong, and very aggressive, populist discourse: ‘We are the good, they are the evil; we are the people, they are the oligarchy; they are the powerful, they’re guilty for everything, we are the innocent, the good, those who never had power. And this discourse paid great political dividends for Chávez: he won the elections of 1998 and then seventeen of eighteen more elections thereafter.”

  Inflated by his great popularity, which coincided not incidentally with the beginnings of an unprecedented oil boom, Chávez decided to undertake the construction of a socialist project for Venezuela. After his election with 63% majority in 2006—an election that also had the lowest voter turnout from the Democratic Revolution in 1958 to the present—Chávez announced his new project of Twenty-First Century Socialism.4 In order to begin, he had to modify the Bolivarian Constitution, which wasn’t socialist. His referendum to do this failed in late 2007, the only election he ever lost, so he decided to impose the reforms by decreeing new laws and with “rules and other legal and administrative resources.”

  Margarita pointed out that “Chávez was able to do this because by that time he had managed to subordinate all public powers to his rule.” He had packed the Supreme Court (Tribunal Supremo de Justicia, TSJ) and, indeed, the entire judiciary with his own people, 80% of whom, by 2013, were contracted or provisional judges.5 He had increased the number of branches from three to five and had packed them all with loyal supporters so it wasn’t likely that anyone would be able or willing to challenge what was an unconstitutional move. As Margarita pointed out, the Bolivarian Constitutional Article 345 was “very restrictive and explicit in saying that a Constitutional reform could not be resubmitted.”

  I asked Margarita if she’d ever believed in the project of Chávez. She said she had indeed supported the first government (1999–2005), especially as he “promised to channel the discontentment of Venezuelans toward what were the old political elites and to push forward changes to the constitution.” She explained that the reforms creating a decentralized state had been under discussion since the 1980s and had even led to street protests. In those days, like most petro-states, power in Venezuela was very centralized. Local and city governments wanted more power as well as “mayors elected by universal, direct, and secret suffrage” and Margarita said there was also “a demand for more direct citizen participation that would go around the political parties and avoid the discredited political leadership.”

  Chávez promised to carry forth the reforms demanded by the people themselves and he thus received the backing of a broad cross-section of the population, which led to his election in 1998. He promptly took steps that led to the new Constitution that included decentralization and greater participation, which he called “participatory and protagonistic” by which he meant “the participation and the protagonism of the people was going to be the most important feature, and that this would begin to weaken and lower the tone of the political parties.” Margarita emphasized, “many of us supported this, not because it was a proposal of Chávez, but rather because it was a proposal of the Venezuelans.”

  It took many years for the opposition to accept the new Constitution and, in fact, they opposed it because it ended state subsidies to the church and other privileges of the old elite. One element of this opposition elite was the management of PDVSA, the state oil company, which had grown autonomous over the years since it had been nationalized on January 1, 1976. Much of the crisis leading up to the election of Chávez had been caused by the fact that PDVSA “no longer responded to the State, no longer paid dividends to the state” and “this had been a real factor in the impoverishment of the people in the eighties and nineties.”

  Then PDVSA management confronted the government with a “nearly deadly” oil strike
or lockout in late 2002, after the earlier coup of April 11th the same year, but Chávez won both times.

  The next year the opposition attempted to remove Chávez through a referendum process. But once again, good luck was on the president’s side. The oil boom took off alongside the Referendum and with oil money filling the coffers of PDVSA, which he now controlled, he was advised by Fidel Castro to undertake the Missions so as to win the elections. So, in true populist fashion, Chávez began funding the Missions and distributing oil money as patronage down to his constituency.6 As a result he won the referendum and the opposition was essentially demoralized and disarticulated as a result. That was about the time that I first arrived in Venezuela, in December 2004.

  With all the money pouring in and under his control Chávez began to dream of building his “petro-socialism,” beginning with reforms to the Constitution. “He tried to sell the idea to the people as if it were an extension of the Constitution of ’99,” Margarita said, “but in fact it was a very different project.” It was significantly different in that it was a “recentralization of the State” because “the Communal State would essentially bring the governorships and mayoralties and elected officials to an end and create a structure of authorities that would depend on, and be chosen by, the president.”

  Of course Chavistas I knew believed that this “Communal State” would be a way of ending centralism, by bringing an end to representative democracy and implementing a more direct democracy through the communal councils. Margarita agreed that that was the message Chávez put out, but the projects of anti-liberal states, as she put it, have inevitably “ended in totalitarian or authoritarian projects. That’s been true as much on the right with the cases of Italian or Spanish fascism and German National Socialism, as on the left as in the case of the Soviet Union, with Stalinism, and the Central European countries.”

  What was so interesting about the Constitution of 1999 for Margarita was “its proposal to maintain the liberal institutions but to put them into tension with direct democracy so the two would control each other. Because the tendency of Liberal representative democracy is toward elitism, toward what we could call ‘privatization’ through the political parties of the interests of the state. But the perverse tendencies of direct democracy are toward totalitarianism. Direct democracy of assemblies, and councils, up to now have ended in very authoritarian regimes that attempt to transform humanity... into the ‘new man’ and end up becoming totalitarian.” The Constitution of 1999 was an attempt to “draw forth the virtues” and to complement each form of democracy since direct democracy allows the poor and marginalized majority a place to speak and be heard while the framework of liberal representative democracy would provide a set of institutional guarantees.

  This was, for me, a turning point in the interview. I was recording Margarita and my attention up to the moment was on the sound levels, the poor lighting, which concerned me, keeping the subject properly framed, and all the other technical details of an interview when one person is the writer, camera operator, grip, director, interviewer, and errand boy. But now, suddenly, it occurred to me that I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by “liberal.” Perhaps it was late and I was tired from traveling all over the country in very trying circumstances; perhaps also, I had my own idea of “liberal,” defined by Phil Ochs, my Marxist friends, and my Berkeley culture, as a conformist wedded to the system, unwilling or afraid to take the necessary steps to “make the revolution,” a reformist… In other words, a species that had presumably died out of the US political system, to the delight of conservatives and the revolutionary left alike. I’d done my part to disparage them.7 But a tradition of its own? I asked her to explain to “North Americans” who “don’t understand very well the liberal tradition.” She was happy to oblige me.

  “The Liberal tradition of the Western democracies held certain ideas that today are considered the great achievements of humanity,” she said. “One idea would be the independence and autonomy of branches of government which make possible the counterweight between the different powers so they control each other and there would be no abuse of power.” Chávez, as she’d mentioned earlier, had largely destroyed this autonomy. Then there was the liberal idea of political pluralism, severely damaged in Venezuela by the political polarization Chávez imposed to such a degree that now only Bolivarian views were heard on public media. If you disagree with the government, said Margarita, they bring “judicial proceedings against you, imprison you or persecute you; they criminalize you and stigmatize you in the public media. You aren’t invited to the programs of public media in Venezuela because the public media has been confiscated by the PSUV and the President.”

  The limits on a diversity of viewpoints extends to collective political recognition as the “Communal Laws say that if you want to organize a Community Council in your neighborhood and be recognized by the State to be given resources to resolve community problems, one of the requirements of the Community Council is that it must build the Socialism of the Twenty-First Century. So if you decide in your assembly, that you don’t agree with the ‘Socialism of the Twenty-First Century,’ well, then your Community Council won’t be recognized by the State.” Obviously, some vestige of pluralism still exists since the Opposition can still campaign and have a voice in private media, but that’s dwarfed by the communicational hegemony of the petro-state with its vast pool of resources. She compared Venezuela under the PSUV to Mexico during the seventy years under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

  The secret ballot in the right to vote is often viewed as a crucial element in “free” elections: few voters feel “free” when the state camera is watching their ballot to see who they tick off. While secret ballot is guaranteed in Venezuela, in the community councils it is not so. There’s no voting: everything is decided in assembly and as you know, assemblies can be interesting and important for some things, but also they have their defects. They’re easily manipulated. All that’s required are two or three leaders within an assembly to manipulate an assembly for or against a proposal.” The direct democracy of the communal state is therefore extremely vulnerable to the “tyranny of the majority” where minorities can be deprived of their rights since there’s no liberal framework to guarantee the rights of everyone.

  I recalled that IWW convention in San Francisco when the proposal was on the floor to fund Darryl Cherney and Judi Bari, and how only Dave Karoly had the courage, knowledge, and independence of action to vote against it. It might have been quite different if there had been contrary opinions not only allowed, but encouraged; if Darryl and Judi had not been present for the vote; if the vote had been secret. But based on that, and the few community councils I’d attended, I knew what Margarita meant. That was, perhaps, a case of the worst of both forms of democracy: the convention inappropriately assumed the role of representative body on an issue that had needed to be voted on by the entire union, and had passed an initiative by means of the worst sort of “direct democracy.”

  It was getting late, and Margarita clearly wanted to end the interview, but I was curious about an interview with her I’d read in which she talked about the messianism of the Bolivarian movement. I asked her if she could talk a little bit about it, especially now that Chávez was gone.

  Margarita said she’d been reading about the French Revolution and how the conception of popular sovereignty was rooted in the medieval world with the “Right of Kings” to govern, a right believed to be granted by God. “It’s difficult to get rid of a king and try to legitimate a government that doesn’t have that Divine Right, so there’s a part of democratic theory that passes the Divine Right to Popular Sovereignty with the idea that, ‘well, popular sovereignty is sort of divine. It can’t be wrong, and what it decides is as if God were speaking. This idea that the People are wise and don’t ever make mistakes is a religious idea, an idea of faith,” and clearly as problematic as the right of Kings because people make mistakes, even as majorities. This “religious
” conception of popular sovereignty is further complicated in a context such as Latin America, and Venezuela in particular, with the rule of populist caudillos who are believed to be leaders who “represent the popular sovereign, leaders that incarnate it and have, practically speaking, the ‘divine right’ to govern.”

  This, Margarita believed, was Chávez’s view, that since “he was governing there was no need of unions to defend the interests of the workers” because he was the workers. Nor was there need for popular organizations, much less autonomous social movements because he was the State and the people. In other words, said Margarita, Chávez “had an image of himself that was quasi-religious.”

  When Chávez died, the government went into crisis. Clearly this divine right simply “couldn’t be transferred to a mortal.” The Bolivarian nomenklatura thus began to develop a “sort of civil religion in which Chávez delegated to his successors his ‘Divine Right’ to govern, in a manner of speaking.” Thus Maduro, a follower of Sai Baba8 who called himself the “Son of Chávez,” said that Chávez had appeared to him as a little bird, like the Holy Spirit, to confer his blessing upon him.9 This, Margarita argued, was invented to indicate that the “quasi-divine legitimacy has somehow been transferred to Maduro to govern.”