Continuing my “it’s nice to be nice” strand here’s an account of last week’s London meeting of Hands Off Venezuela.

Meetings of Hands Off Venezuela are among the most consistently pleasant ones that I go to. Last week Alan Woods introduced a discussion on Chavez and permanent revolution. I’ll concede that it’s a moot point whether or not a solidarity organisation should be talking about the finer points of Marxist theory but it was Chavez who started it. Anyway it’s rare that there’s an opportunity to have openly and comradely discussions about ideas. So that made it worthwhile.

Readers hoping for a closely written summary of what he said will be disappointed. The sort of people who take lots of notes at events like this often worry me. Either they are giving a report to a group of people as peculiar as they are or they are planning to write a 3000 word denunciation. I’ll do neither and just pick out a few points I judged noteworthy that I can still remember. Anyway why don’t they video the meetings like I do?

Supportive political criticism has gone out of fashion in recent years. But, as Alan pointed out, it’s only a false friend who tells you that you are right all the time. There is no conflict at all between enthusiastically building support for the Bolivarian revolution and commenting on some of the potential dangers that exist for it. I’m always encouraged by a speaker with a low threshold for sycophancy. They are becoming a rare breed on the British left.

Alan assumed little prior knowledge. He described what a bourgeois revolution is, reminding the audience that the American revolutionaries had not only confiscated land from British landholders after their revolution, they had also taken the land from Americans who had supported the British. He recommended something similar happening in Venezuela. His account of the failure of the bourgeoisies in the former colonial countries to fulfil their tasks was wide ranging, scathing and easy to understand. In Argentina, producer of the world’s best beef, children were suffering from malnutrition. The Pakistani ruling class rules a country that is more subordinate and backward than it was sixty years ago. The principal danger to the revolution at the moment is coming from what Alan referred to as “the fifth column” inside it. As if to demonstrate the point the day before the workers of Sanitarios Maracay, who have been demanding that their company be nationalised under workers’ control, were stopped by the Police of the Aragua State, following orders of the regional governor, Didalco Bolivar. After being prevented from continuing their journey to Caracas, the workers started a protest which was brutally repressed by the Aragua Police and members of the National Guard. The old state apparatus has pretty obviously not been destroyed and the governor was showing which side he was on. Alan’s assessment is that the majority of the army and some lower ranking police officers are in favour of the revolution but that a big clearout is needed. He extended this to talk about pseudo revolutionary bureacrats inside the regime.

Chavez seems to be reading a lot of Trotsky at the minute. Here’s a lengthy quote from one of his speeches “”Trotsky points out something which is extremely important, and he says that [the conditions for proletarian revolution] are starting to rot, not because of the workers, but because of the leadership which did not see, which did not know, which was cowardly, which subordinated itself to the mandates of capitalism, of the great bourgeois democracies, the trade unions. Well, they became adapted to the system, the big Communist parties, the Communist International became adapted to the system, and then no one was able to take advantage, because of the lack of a leadership, of an intelligent, audacious and timely leadership to orient the popular offensive in those conditions.” It’s indisputable that the comrades of the International Marxist Tendency are having a big impact on Chavez’s thinking and it’s entirely positive. It’s they who have established a dialogue with him and they who are providing him with Trotsky’s writings. The staggering thing is that he is reading them and applying the lessons to Venezueala today. That’s a first.

One essential thing that HOV gets right is its willingness to encourage political discussion. Ideas are discussed frankly but without rancour or caricature. Dissent and disagreement are welcome and everything is transparently democratic. In many respects it’s a model campaign.