As many of you are aware, there is a debate taking place in the
International Socialist Tendency (IST), the state capitalist formation
led by the Socialist Workers Party in Great Britain. The New Zealand
Socialist Workers Party, an affiliate, has begun to push for a much more
positive attitude toward Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution:
"Socialists worldwide should be enthusiastic about the Bolivarian
Revolution. Socialists worldwide need to engage with the revolution’s
leaders, who will be in the PSUV, so there can be a reciprocity of ideas
that promotes the global struggle for grassroots self-emancipation. Thus
Socialist Worker-New Zealand is looking to forge practical links with
our PSUV comrades in a land where socialism is well on the way to
becoming a determining force."
In his response to the New Zealanders, Alex Callinicos of the British
SWP tries to stake out a position somewhere in-between the New
Zealander’s enthusiasm and the kind of hostility expressed in a Chris
Harman article from 5 years ago:
"Chavez has described the attempts of the upper classes to get rid of
him as a 'class struggle'. But his response to these attempts has only
partially relied on the backing of the country’s poor.
"After the attempted coup in April he repeatedly called for “national
conciliation” between the rich and the poor. Although the US had given
some backing to the coup, he declared he was prepared to work to ensure
the US government got its oil supplies.
"And while Chavez denounced neo-liberalism in words, his government’s
budget accepted the neo-liberal principle of cuts in government
services. The result is that the poor have continued to get poorer.
Meanwhile, public sector workers have been faced with job cuts and
cancellation of bonuses to which they are entitled."
Although Callinicos et al do not use the term “Bonapartist” to describe
Chavez, it is not too difficult to glean this from his response to the
New Zealanders:
"But exciting though such remarks [a reference to Chavez’s salute to
some of Trotsky’s writings] may be for Trotskyists confined to the
political margins for two generations, it doesn’t alter the fact that he
presides over a bureaucratic state machine that continues to sustain
capitalist social relations against the mass movements on which any real
revolutionary breakthrough depends. Hence the constant balancing act
[ie, Bonapartist] between the state and the mass movements that he is
constantly forced into."
Clearly, what’s at work here is the “socialism from below” mindset that
I do not find very useful, particularly in Venezuela. While Chavez
superficially might be regarded as “from above” because of his military
background, there is clear evidence of his close bonds to revolutionary
organizations operating at the grass roots level. If I were the IST, I’d
pay a little less attention to orthodox Trotskyist figures like the
oddly named Stalin Perez and more to the men and women who were members
of Causa R and now form the backbone of the Bolivarist movement. They
were the first to understand the importance of Chavez’s initiatives and
have helped keep the revolution on track, even if they haven’t gotten
the kind of attention they deserve.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/alex-callinicos-debates-new-zealand-swp-over-venezuela/
