This is a piece for next month’s Socialist Resistance. I’ll try and render some of the Marxist jargon into normal English later. Say what you like about Chavez but he’s better than Bush and Blair.

Chavez the Trotskyist ?

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has done something no other head of state has ever done. Describing George Bush as “more dangerous than a monkey with a razor blade” is pretty imaginative. He also declared himself to be a Trotskyist. Newly appointed Minister of Labour José Ramón Rivero felt it necessary to warn Chavez that he is a Trotskyist. The president’s reply, which has never been denied was “what is the problem? I am also a Trotskyist! I follow Trotsky’s line, that of permanent revolution.”

From the mid 1920s until after the fall of the Berlin Wall “Trotskyist” was always intended as an insult in the Communist Parties. In organisations like the British Labour Party it usually connoted sinister intentions. It’s reported that when the editor of the Morning Star was told of Chavez’s announcement his response consisted of four letters. Chavez himself would be aware of the impact of a statement like this. It represents him putting a huge distance between himself and the anti-democratic, bureaucratic and often murderous legacy of the “Marxism” of Stalin, Mao and Enver Hoxha. Chavez has reportedly read many of Trotsky’s works. He will have seen that consistent revolutionary Marxism, which is what Trotskyism is, represents something very different from what Stalinism was when it held power.

In the first instance it demands an ever present awareness of how a revolution can be undone by the bureaucracy that the revolution creates. The only certain remedy for this is to maintain high levels of participation in the revolutionary process by youth, workers and the poor in the cities and in the countryside. It also requires that the state is transformed using both the revolutionary legal system and, more importantly, the pressure of the masses to replace the old army, police and civil service with bodies that are accountable to the revolution’s supporters. In Venezuela it requires that the vast amount of land that is owned by tiny numbers of people is taken over by the rural poor and the revolutionary state. Finally it means that control of major means of production and distribution are put under workers’ control.

On the basis of these measures Chavez is not a Trotskyist. Yet the statement signifies more than rhetorical bravado. It shows that he has absorbed some of the bloody lessons that the twentieth century taught revolutionaries. In 1998 Chavez was strongly influenced by Blair’s long forgotten “third way”. He now constantly changes the personnel in his cabinet as they fail to change from the corrupt old ways of working of Venezuelan political parties. Parliament has passed an enabling which allows Chavez for the next year to pass laws on specified issues as decrees. Speaking just after the law was passed the second Vice-President of the national assembly, Roberto Hernandez, said, “We are living in a revolutionary time and a revolution is characterized by having as its fundamental objective social justice and social justice, for revolutionaries, cannot wait… We are promising justice for today and not for the future.” One could add that revolutions do not take place within the legal framework established by a capitalist parliament and that Chavez’s electoral mandate was justification for the use of such extraordinary powers.

Part of this enabling law will be the nationalization of key industries that had been privatized under previous governments, such as the telecommunications company CANTV and the electricity companies. “All of that which was privatized, let it be nationalized,” said Chavez. The government also plans to convert the minority stake the state oil company has in four Orinoco Oil Belt projects into a majority stake. The four Orinoco joint ventures are with the U.S. companiesExxonMobil, Conoco, and Chevron, France’s Total, Britain’s BP, and Norway’s Statoil. Together these produce 600,000 barrels of oil per day, about 18% of Venezuela’s total production. During the swearing-in ceremony of his new cabinet Chavez said he will abolish the independence of the Central Bank, saying that such independence is a tool of neo-liberalism.

Chavez has started talking about the nature of the state. In his speech January 9th he said:

“This year with the Communal Councils we need to go beyond the local. We need to begin to create, by law in the first instance, a kind of regional, local and national confederation of Communal Councils. We have to move towards the creation of a communal state. And the old bourgeois state, which is still there, still alive and kicking, we have to begin dismantling it bit by bit, as we build up the communal state, the socialist state, the Bolivarian state – a state that is capable of carrying through a revolution. Almost all states have been born to prevent revolutions. So we have quite a task: to convert a counter-revolutionary state into a revolutionary state.”

None of these things amount to the establishment of what revolutionary Marxists understand to be be necessary for creating a workers’ state. The absence of the deep rooted revolutionary party (see Stuart Piper’s piece in last months Socialist Resistance http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article412 is worrying. The experience of the mass movements in Latin America, and one thinks of Argentina in 2001, shows that they are capable of mobilising millions of people and posing the question of which class holds power. But movements do not take power. That requires parties which have as their conscious aim the replacement of one form of class rule by another. Chavez is consistently and continuously taking initiatives that move the revolutionary process forward. That is very unusual at this stage in most revolutionary processes. After eight or nine years stagnation and bureaucracy tend to emerge like weeds. The element in this revolutionary process that needs to be strengthened still further is the active, conscious participation of the workers, youth and power as they take control of society into their own hands.