Victory in Greece

Tariq Ali on Syriza's victory in the Greek elections

A Record of Hugo Chavez - RIP

by ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN in the hindu

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frias, President of Venezuela, who died on March 5, 2013 at the age of 58, was a defining figure in Latin American politics for fifteen years, becoming almost synonymous with the popular tide that has elected and reelected left and centre-left governments across the continent in that time.

Mr. Chávez combined courage with immense conviction. Born to schoolteacher parents in Sabaneta in 1954, he qualified in military arts and sciences at the National Military Academy, became an officer in a paratrooper unit, and started his political career in the early 1980s by founding a secret organisation, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement, which took its name from the Latin American independence leader Simón Bolivar. His first big move was an attempted military coup in 1992, for which he was imprisoned for two years before being pardoned.

Yet ordinary people’s suffering under austerity measures led Mr. Chávez’s fellow officers to try again, in November 1992; they failed. Mr. Chávez, however, renamed his group the Movement of the Fifth Republic, which later merged with other groups to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and won the 1998 presidential election on a socialist manifesto, promising millions relief from a system which had put oil wealth into luxurious lives for the rich and profits for the oil corporations.

Mr. Chávez removed corrupt military officers and started a national reform programme. Venezuela, according to the United States Department of Energy and a former CIA oil expert, has the world’s largest oil reserves at 1.36 trillion barrels, and the new president promptly nationalised the main oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), putting the profits into very effective social programmes. Carles Mutaner, Joan Benach, and Maria Paez Victor note in CounterPunch that between 2000 and 2010 social spending increased by 61 per cent or $772 billion; the country has the region’s lowest level of inequality, with a reduction in its Gini coefficient of 54 per cent. Poverty is down from 71 per cent in 1996 to 21 now, and extreme poverty is down from 40 per cent to 7.3. The programmes, or Misiones, have reached 20 million people, and 2.1 million have received senior citizens’ pensions, a sevenfold increase under Mr. Chávez.

The country has also cut food imports from 90 per cent to 30 per cent of its consumption, and has reduced child malnutrition from 7.7 per cent in 1990 to 5 today; infant mortality has declined from 25/1000 to 13 in the same period, and the country now has 58 doctors per 10,000 people (as against 18 in 1996). As many as 96 per cent of the population now have access to clean water, and with school attendance at 85 per cent, one in three Venezuelans is enrolled in free education up to and including university.

Oil royalties help. A 2001 law cut foreign companies’ share of the sale price from 84 to 70 per cent, and they now pay royalties of 16.6 per cent on Orinoco basin heavy crude; they used to pay 1 per cent. Exxon and Conoco Philips rejected these terms, as Deepak Bhojwani says in the Economic and Political Weekly (December 22, 2012), and were expelled, but Chevron stayed.

Mr. Chávez of course infuriated the mainly white elites, some of whom talked of him in racist terms, as well as the United States government and press, both of which have consistently vilified him in language bordering on the delusional. The State Department greeted the 2002 coup against Mr. Chávez by expressing solidarity with the Venezuelan people and looking forward to “working with all democratic forces in Venezuela.” The statement also said Mr. Chávez had dismissed the Vice—President and Cabinet. In fact it was the coup figurehead, Pedro Carmona Estanga, who, according to the Notable Names Database NNDB, dissolved the national assembly, disbanded the supreme court, closed the attorney—general’s and comptroller’s offices, and repealed 48 redistributive laws meant to help the poor.

Yet huge public support for Mr. Chávez meant the regime collapsed within days. The President was reinstated, but the then U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice hectored him to “respect the constitution”, and Greg Palast points out in The Progressive that in 2006 the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy called him a demagogue out to undermine democracy and destabilise Venezuela.

The U.S. press dutifully played its part. In September 2012, the WorldNet columnist Drew Zahn called Mr. Chávez a “socialist dictator”, when the President was about to win a fourth successive election. All those elections were of far greater probity than the respective U.S. presidential elections of 2000 and 2004; this time Mr. Chávez won by 11 percentage points on a turnout of 80 per cent. Other U.S. media bodies have spread partial truths about the Caracas government, saying it bloats the public sector and lets the budget deficit spiral. In fact, as Mark Weisbrot notes in the Guardian, 18.4 per cent of Venezuela’s work force is in the public sector, in contrast to Norway’s 29 per cent, and its 2012 budget deficit, projected at 51.3 per cent of GDP, is lower than the European Union average of 82.5 per cent; inflation has declined too, from 27 per cent in 2010 to 19 per cent now. Weisbrot also points out that the New York Times — which welcomed the coup — has taken 14 years, longer even than other American media outfits, to publish any arguments for Mr. Chávez. Carles Mutaner and colleagues comment that U.S. analysts ask what Venezuela will do when the oil runs out, but do not ask that about other oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and Canada; neither do critics note that the country’s interest payments are only about 3 per cent of export earnings.

One of Washington’s problems is that, as Greg Palast recognises, Mr. Chávez kept oil revenues within Latin America; unlike Saudi Arabia, which buys U.S. treasury bills and other assets, Venezuela at one point withdrew $20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve, and since 2007 has aided other Latin American countries with $36 billion, most of which has been repaid back. In effect, this supplants the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and possibly also its neoliberal fellow—crusader the World Bank. Even more unpalatably for Washington, Chávismo is now a clear political programme towards a Bolivarian Revolution, which Palast calls a close replica of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, with progressive income tax, public works, social security, and cheap electricity. For Bolivarians, such things are rights; they are even reminiscent of T.H. Marshall’s view that they are integral to substantive citizenship. Worst of all for U.S. regional hegemony, Mr. Chávez himself said Venezuela is no longer an oil colony, that it has regained its oil sovereignty, and that he wanted to replace the IMF with an International Humanitarian Bank based on cooperation; Uruguay already pays for Venezuelan oil with cows. Mr. Chávez wished the IMF and the World Bank would “disappear”, and his passionate concern for Latin American countries’ sovereignty made him a decisive figure in the 2011 creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac).

Mr. Chávez could be ruthless; in 2010 a military court sentenced his former key ally Raúl Isaias Baduel to just under eight years for embezzlement after a long—delayed trial, and Baduel is now banned from future political office, almost certainly because he criticised constitutional reforms which would allow a president more than two terms. Mr. Chávez was, however, no doctrinaire leader. Although a Christian, he criticised clerical collusion with the ancien régime, and did not accept the Church’s authority in politics. He also thought seriously about political economy. Bhojwani notes that he favoured a form of 21st century socialism partly derived from the work of Heinz Dieterich Steffan. For Mr. Chávez, ethics, morality, cooperativism, and associationism make for strong public economic activity and in turn protects the equality which is essential to liberty; it even includes a respect for private property.

The Venezuelan electorate have repeatedly endorsed this; in the December 2012 gubernatorial elections — the first ones in 14 years in which Mr. Chávez himself did not campaign — Mr. Chávez allies won 20 out of 23 states. After the President’s win in October, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had sent him a message saying, “Your victory is also ours.” Billions, and not only poor people, around the world would agree: Tu victoria es también la nuestra.

Chávez's economics lesson for Europe

Hugo Chávez's rejection of the neoliberal policies dragging Europe down sets a hopeful example to Greece and beyond

• 
• • Richard Gott
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 May 2012 09.00 BST

'Hugo Chávez and his co-religionaries have called for 21st-century socialism, not a return to Soviet-style economics.' Photograph: Handout/Reuters

 

Some years ago, travelling on the presidential plane of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela with a French friend from Le Monde Diplomatique, we were asked what we thought was happening in Europe. Was there any chance of a move to the left? We replied in the depressed and pessimistic tones typical of the early years of the 21st century. Neither in Britain nor France, nor anywhere in the eurozone, did we see much chance of a political breakthrough.

Then maybe, said Chávez with a twinkle, we could come to your assistance, and he recalled the time in 1830 when revolutionary crowds in the streets of Paris had come out waving the cap of Simón Bolívar, the South American liberator from Venezuela who was to die at the end of that year. Fighting for liberty, Latin American style, was held up as the path for Europe to follow.

At the time, I was encouraged but not persuaded by Chávez's optimism. Yet now I think that he was right; it was good to be reminded that Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Greece's radical left party, Syriza, had visited Caracas in 2007 and inquired about the future possibility of receiving cheap Venezuelan oil, much as Cuba and other Caribbean and Central America countries do. There was a brief moment when Ken Livingstone and Chávez conjured up an oil deal between London and Caracas which looked promising until it was rejected by Boris Johnson.

More important than the prospect of cheap oil is the power of example. Chávez has been engaged since the turn of the century, even before, on a project that rejects the neoliberal economics that afflicts Europe and much of the western world. He has been opposed to the recipes of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and has fought hard against the policies of privatisation that harmed the social and economic fabric of Latin America and with which the European Union is now threatening to destroy the economy of Greece. Chávez has renationalised the many industries, including oil and gas, that were privatised in the 1990s.

The words and inspiration of Chávez have had an effect beyond Venezuela. They have encouraged Argentina to default on its debt; to reorganise its economy thereafter and to renationalise its oil industry. Chávez has helped Evo Morales of Bolivia to run its oil and gas industry for the benefit of the country rather than its foreign shareholders, and more recently to halt the robbery by Spain of the profits of its electricity company. Above all, he has shown the countries of Latin America that there is an alternative to the single neoliberal message that has been endlessly broadcast for decades, by governments and the media in hock to an outdated ideology.

Now is the time for that alternative message to be heard further afield, to be listened to by voters in Europe. In Latin America, governments following an alternative strategy have been re-elected time and time again, suggesting that it is effective and popular. In Europe, governments of whatever hue that follow the standard neoliberal template seem to fall at the first fence, suggesting that the will of the people is not engaged.

Chávez and his co-religionaries in the new "Bolivarian revolution" have called for "21st-century socialism", not a return to Soviet-style economics or the continuation of the mundane social democratic adaptation of capitalism, but, as the Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa has described it, the re-establishment of national planning by the state "for the development of the majority of the people". Greece has a wonderful chance to change the history of Europe and to throw their caps of Bolívar into the air, as once the Italian carbonari did in Paris all those years ago. Lord Byron, who planned to settle in Bolívar's Venezuela before sailing off to help liberate Greece, named his yacht Bolívar; he would certainly have been pleased with contemporary developments.