TP

Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that, in general, in Latin America today, Venezuela is used by those who claim that any alternative school of thought that doesn’t comply with neoliberal dictates and doesn’t follow the traditional recipes of the free market economic story must fail. Of course we need to be careful when making historical comparisons like this, but the situation is a bit like after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism in Europe, when there was a massive push coming from neoliberal thinkers and organizations to make a point of using the example of a failure as absolute proof that anything coming from the Left is destined to fail.

In the case of Venezuela, there is a kind of Venezuela-bashing industry. Much of this comes from people who were critics of Chavismo from the very beginning, particularly what I call the “sociological” anti-Chavistas (or traditional elite), who have opposed Chavismo by not always very lawful or democratic means. They claim that what we’re seeing today in Venezuela was written already in 1999 [at the beginning of Chávez’s government], and that’s the reason why they criticized Chavismo in the first place. This is a way of rewriting history.

On the other hand, yes of course, there are internal explanations of the current crisis. You can list them; none of them is the single, essential reason but they all play a partial role. I would say one is that, in Venezuela in particular — but this applies to most of the progressive/leftist governments that arose in Latin America during the early and mid-2000s — Chavismo found a way to mobilize the national wealth of the country, primarily derived from the oil industry, and became, among other things, a redistributive project. In that sense it had a revolutionary dimension because never before in such a massive way had any Venezuelan government decided to utilize the redistributive approach as a tool for tackling not only Venezuela’s problems such as inequality, lack of access to education and health, etc., but also as a way to boost consumption and create an internal market that resulted in dynamic economic growth.

The problem is that though these redistributive efforts had a far-reaching impact, which we can see in rapid improvements in social indicators during Chávez’s government, the Venezuelan left and the Latin American left in general never came up with an economic strategy. How do developing nations that are in what some call the “middle-income trap” address the challenge of development, of increasing the material base that enables social progress? And how do developing economies that try to organize a domestically oriented development process deal with the pressures of globalization, that is, the fact that world finance is globalized and that countries like Venezuela require access to international capital, etc.?

All those questions were not really addressed under Chávez, mainly because Venezuela’s economic situation in the early 2000s and up until recently was favorable. Most Latin American countries relied on the commodities super-cycle to sustain growth during this period and were able to access enough capital to sustain their expansive social strategies. Most of these countries, and clearly in the case of Venezuela, didn’t really need to answer those difficult questions because the favorable economic situation gave them considerable autonomy to pursue ambitious social spending programs. Once this situation changed [with the decline of global commodity prices in 2014], of course, Chavismo was not prepared to address this negative economic environment.

And of course, even if it’s sensationalized in the international press, the Venezuelan government also suffers from a lack of transparency, from corruption, and there is a general problem of mismanagement, lack of technical skills, and of qualified people in the right places. There is a belief [among Venezuelan government officials] that personal trust and political closeness are more important than technical competence. That is a common feature in many Latin American countries. Latin American states were ill-equipped to play this prominent role that the Left assigned them in the national development process.

Further, just because left-wing coalitions and leaders achieved political power through elections in the 2000s (something very new in Latin America at the time), that doesn’t mean, for instance in the case of Chavismo — despite claims to be inspired by socialist ideals and claims to have put into motion a process that would lead to a socialist society — that Venezuela today is a socialist society at all. As anybody who knows Latin America knows, these are societies where you have large economic sectors that can be characterized as precapitalist, where you have a very savage form of capitalism in which the forces of money are very strong, and the rights of the people to defend themselves against the forces of the market are weak. The development of regulated societies with strong enough institutions to enforce the rights of the people, the integrity of the civil service, etc. is far from perfect. So even if you have powerful forces at the top, and sometimes at the bottom, that doesn’t mean that day to day the society works in an ideal manner. It’s a very painful and difficult process.

Finally, it is also important to consider that even if Maduro’s government cites the economic war and the forces of the national and international bourgeoisie as the main factors causing the economic crisis in Venezuela, in my opinion that is a bit of an exaggeration, given all the factors I described before. That doesn’t mean there is no active negative influence that is being exercised by these groups. It’s true. But this is nothing new to Maduro’s government.

The national bourgeoisie has done very little historically in Venezuela to contribute to the national project. What is often described as a business community is only a private sector that, differently from the more advanced economies of the North, does not function on the risk-reward basis of risking capital and expecting a return. In the case of Venezuela these are private groups that organize themselves with allies in the state in order to capture oil rents as efficiently as possible. There are various mechanisms through which national and international bourgeoisies can preserve their interests against progressive attempts at reform, but this is a permanent feature that is not unique to the present government. Chávez had to deal with it in the past and was able to deliver successes nonetheless. So, explaining the current crisis primarily by reference to the existence of an international conspiracy is a very partial and unsatisfactory explanation.