[Marxism] The central battle in Venezuela now is in and for the countryside

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Green Left list has had an extensive discussion of the character of
the Venezuelan government and economy, and the direction of the
revolution.  This is an edited version of a contribution I made at the
tail end of that discussion, which was led politically by Stuart
Munckton.
Fred Feldman


Probably the best option to characterize the current government would be
the one developed by  the  Communist International under Lenin  and
later revived by the Socialist Workers Party US, where the main figure
developing it was Joseph Hansen.  Relevant materials can be found in
three Socialist Workers Party education for Socialists booklets on this
subject, which are available from Pathfiinder Press in the United
States.  In applying this concept to transitional periods in Cuba,
Algeria, the southern half of Vietnam, Grenada, and Nicaragua, the SWP
came to define the workers and farmers' government as a government
brought to power by a popular upsurge of the workers and peasants, which
has broken with the bourgeoisie and is on an anticapitalist course that
has the potential to lead to a socialist transformation.

That doesn't seem like an obviously wrong definition of where Venezuela
is at today, but  I AM AGAINST USING IT. And not primarily because of
problems of "technical" assessment -- such as whether the government
completely broken with the bourgeoisie and how is that determined, what
is the real state of the army politically and to what extent are the
people armed, what are they saying or doing about nationalizing
industry.

I think hard-and-fast characterizations, which inevitably center on the
question of working-class power and socialism, are a mistake today
because it focuses our attention too much on the transition to
socialism. Things may develop thus if many things break right. But I
notice that the debate over the class character tends to turn our eyes a
bit toward questions of nationalization of industry, planned economy,
and socialism, and turns our eyes a little bit away from the real
conflicts and decisive battles that are taking place today. These
battles which will vastly affect the power and capacity of the exploited
and ruling classes and which ARE NOT SOCIALIST OR EVEN EXCLUSIVELY OR
PRIMARILY PROLETARIAN, but battles in which the working class must rally
to the support of another class: the peasantry and rural poor.

In order to keep our attention where it belongs -- on the here and now
-- I prefer to play the character of the government and its eventual
destination primarily by ear.

The greatest coming battles in Venezuela will be taking place in the
countryside.  Unless that battle is won by the peasants and rural poor
with massively mobilized support from the urban workers, the transition
to socialism is a pure and simple pipe dream, for the masses and for the
working-class vanguard.  The countryside remains where the old alliance
of ruling classes has its bastion, its greatest holdings of property,
its greatest traditions of mastery and subordination, its most
entrenched class dictatorship, armaments and armed men access to many
more more armaments and armed men-- including across the border in
Columbia.  I believe the US is doubling its troops in Colombia to
strengthen its hands for this battle.

In many ways, imperialist political power and control of Venezuela is
based even more firmly in the countryside than in the cities, and this
was true in Cuba, too (and, I suspect, in Bolivia and a number of other
Latin American countries.

I think there will be a much more savage conflict in the countryside
than is taking place over the land reforms in the city, where the
bourgeoisie has been clearly weakened politically and where the army has
probably gone through themost transformation.  If Chavez and the
peasant-worker vanguard are serious about breaking the power of the land
barons over the rural people-- and the indications are that they are
serious --the bitter battle that is comng that may well dwarf those that
have happened so far.  And that battle will decide a great deal about
the power, depth, capacities, and future of the Venezuelan revolution.

So let us go through that next step with the Venezuelan fighters, and
see where we stand after that.
Fred Feldman





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