by John
Wight
What is
taking place in Venezuela is an attempt at counterrevolution.
Washington wants ‘its’ country back, which is why it is providing
both overt and covert support to an opposition determined to return
the country to its previous status as a wholly owned subsidiary of
the United States.
What needs
to be emphasized in all this is that in establishing a Constituent
Assembly in Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro is acting in full
accordance with the country’s constitution. To wit:
Article
348: The initiative for calling a National Constituent Assembly may
emanate from the President of the Republic sitting with the Cabinet
of Ministers; from the National Assembly, by a two thirds vote of its
members; from the Municipal Councils in open session, by a two-thirds
vote of their members; and from 15% of the voters registered with the
Civil and Electoral Registry.
As to the
opposition’s attempts to derail the establishment of the
Constituent Assembly with street protests, rioting and a call for a
nationwide boycott of the election of delegates to the new assembly,
these have been undertaken in contravention of the Constitution, of
which Article 349 stipulates: ‘The President of the Republic
shall not have the power to object to the new Constitution. The
existing constituted authorities shall not be permitted to obstruct
the Constituent Assembly in any way (my emphasis)’.
It goes
without saying, of course, that people cannot eat a constitution.
With food shortages, a shortage of medicines, and rampant inflation
the norm, only the most foolish would attempt to suggest that Mr
Maduro and his government have no questions to answer over a crisis
that has turned Venezuelan society upside down.
But those
questions are not the same as the ones being asked amid the welter of
anti-government media coverage in the West. In what has been
tantamount to a frog’s chorus of condemnation, Maduro and his
government have been calumniated with the kind of vituperation
reserved only for those who dare embark on a program of wealth
redistribution in favor of the poor and working class. For such
people socialism is anathema, a mortal threat to their conception of
freedom as a mechanism by which, per Thucydides, ‘the strong
(rich) do what they can, and the weak (poor) suffer as they must’.
Here is
CNN’s treatment of the election, held on 30 July, to mandate the
establishment of the Constituent Assembly. ‘Critics in Venezuela
and abroad argue a Maduro mandate would erode any last signs of
democracy in the country. “It would give the government the
opportunity to turn Venezuela into a one-party state without any of
the trappings of democracy,” says Eric Farnsworth, vice president
of the Council of the Americas, a business association’.
Two things
stand out in this passage. The first is the claim that the
Constituent Assembly is undemocratic. Given the aforementioned
articles of the country’s constitution this is entirely false. The
second is Mr Farnsworth’s position as ‘vice president of the
Council of the Americas, a business association’.
The Council
of the Americas is an organization based in the United States with
offices in Washington DC, New York, and Miami. In its mission
statement it describes itself as ‘the premier international
business organization whose members share a common commitment to
economic and social development, open markets, the rule of law, and
democracy throughout the Western Hemisphere’.
Reading this
passage, you will struggle to find a more concise, if cryptic,
support for free market capitalism and the rights it confers on the
rich to exploit the poor in the name of democracy. As author George
Ciccariello-Maher points out, “the opposition’s undemocratic
aspirations come draped in the language of democracy.”
Moreover, when we learn that US Vice President, Mike Pence, has been
in direct contact with Venezuelan opposition leaders, our collective
memory should immediately transport us back in time to Iran in 1953,
Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973, and of course
Ukraine in 2014 – previous examples where the US has actively
supported coups that have unseated leaders with the temerity to
refuse to obey their imperial overlord.
It really
isn’t rocket science, especially in the case of a country where a
Washington-backed coup was previously attempted and failed in 2002.
Venezuela’s
economic problems are predominately down to the collapse in global
oil prices that has ensued in recent years. Between 2014 and 2018 the
price of crude plummetedfrom $96.29 to $40.68 a barrel, a mammoth
drop of over 40 per cent. And though the price has recovered in 2017,
at $50.31 a barrel it remains a long way off its peak 2012 price of
$108.45 a barrel.
For a
country whose economy is dependent on the price of oil, such a
seismic drop can only produce an equally seismic economic shock.
Crucially, with oil being Venezuela’s only export commodity of
note, the crisis has exposed structural weaknesses in the economy
that long predate the arrival on the scene of Hugo Chavez never mind
his successor, Nicolas Maduro.
As
mentioned, though, the Maduro government is not without blame for the
ongoing crisis. Returning to George Ciccariello-Maher, we learn that
a “failing system of currency controls governing the
distribution of oil income was never fully dismantled. The result was
a destructive feedback loop of black-market currency speculation, the
hoarding and smuggling of gasoline and food, and an explosion of
already rampant corruption at the intersection of the private and
public sectors. Confronted with street protests and food shortages,
Maduro responded erratically, supporting grassroots production by
communes while simultaneously courting private corporations in a bid
to keep food on the shelves.”
What is
crucial to understand is that events in Venezuela are not taking
place in a vacuum. This oil rich country, once a beacon of hope for
the continent’s poor, indigenous, and oppressed with the coming of
Hugo Chavez to power in 1999, is experiencing the particular
challenges involved in trying to create an island of socialism
surrounded by a sea of US-dominated capitalism.
Its
vulnerability to the volatility of oil prices merely confirms the
presence of large reserves of oil can distort rather than enhance a
nation’s economic development, particularly in the Global South
where economic diversification bumps up against the reality of the
domination of global markets by Western financial institutions and
corporations.
In the last
analysis, it is capitalism not socialism that has failed the people
of Venezuela. However socialism is being made to carry the can.
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