When most people consider opposition to the regime of Hugo Chavez, they consider that which comes from the right of the spectrum - including, but not limited to, business owners and the like. The opposition is not limited to this, however - many from the left criticise Chavez and his regime.
One form that the left and the wider working class (those without control of the means of production; i.e. those who have to work for a living) have engaged with is the strike, the withdrawal of labour by a given group of workers as a way of pressing for demands to be met. Despite Chavez's claims of socialism, the economy in Venezuela is still a fundamentally capitalist one (albeit a different type of capitalism to the USA), meaning that workers are still exploited at the point of production, and there is still class struggle going on every day between the working class and Chavez's ruling class that pretends to represent it.
Chavez has repeatedly cracked down on this opposition. In 2009, Rubén González, General Secretary of the Ferrominería miners' union was imprisoned for supporting a 16 day long miners strike near the border with Brazil. This strike was calling for the workers to be able to collectively bargain, which they barred from doing - this despite collective bargaining supposedly being a core principle of the Chavez regime's industrial policy. González was sentanced to 7 years, 6 months and 22 days in prison, simply for supporting a strike that demanded something the Government claimed to support in the first place! To make things even more unusual, González was a member of Chavez's party, the PSUV, and had even run for political office on a PSUV ticket.
Simply jailing leaders, however, has not proven to be sufficient to break left wing opposition to Chavez. Protest movements against González jailing grew to such size that the pressure on the Government became too great, and González was released from prison on March 3, 2010. The protests against his arrest continue however, as he has not yet been granted amnesty, but merely a non-custodial sentance.
A video of a protest against the jailing of González organised by union branches, rank and file union groups, human rights groups and the anarchist newspaper El Libertario can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTXoHK6gVpA
Excellent post, Ahser, though I'm not sure the idea that there is opposition to Chavez from the working class only because the economy is still "capitalist" is very well supported. You seem to be equating "capitalism" with any economic regime that (by definition) is bad for workers, and socialism with the opposite (a similar problem with the idea of equating "democracy" with good outcomes instead of specific institutions). In institutional terms, the Venezuelan economy is certainly not the same as the state-socialist economies of the former USSR and other communist countries (there is lots of private property), but it has a relatively high concentration of state-owned enterprises (typical of "historic" socialist economies). A lot of working-class opposition to Chavez happens inside state-owned enterprises, not in private companies.
ReplyDeleteHi Xavier,
ReplyDeleteI'm not at all doing what you suggest I might be - capitalism is indeed a specific economic system, not simply any economic system that is, as you put it, "bad for workers".
One of the defining characteristics of capitalism is that workers are exploited at the point of production - ie, they do not recieve the full value of the work that their labour power produces. This happens in state-owned enterprises just as much as in private companies (and in co-operatives too, including worker-owned ones, for what it's worth).
What you've labelled "state-socialist" countries such as the USSR have often been (in my view far more accurately) described as state-capitalist - ie, a form of capitalism whereby the state takes on many of the roles/functions that private enterprise occupies in a more traditional capitalist economy.
Communism (and to a lesser extent socialism) is defined in a number of different ways depending on who you listen to, but generally one consistent aspect of the definition is that the working class controls the means of production. This cannot be said to have occured in the Bolshevik dictatorship that was the USSR, and nor can it be said of Chavez's regime in Venezuela.
Don't have time right now to expand on this further, so going to just post this now, we'll have to continue this discussion next time I write a blog post ;)
Edit - Just a quick note to mention the website of El Libertario, the newspaper I mentioned in my first post, which (although problematic in several ways) is an excellent source of information on working class and left-wing opposition to Chavez's regime. Spanish speakers should visit http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/ while they also translate a limited number of articles into English at http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/english.html - their article Why is there popular protest in Venezuela? is a decent overview, and is available at http://libcom.org/news/el-libertario-why-there-popular-protest-venezuela-21032010
ReplyDeleteAlso worth reading on the same topic is the blog of an author who posts under the pseudonym Caiman Del Barrio (mostly on Venezuela but also on other Latin American countries) - http://libcom.org/blog/745