[The following is a translation of sections of "Flood of Dollars and Growing Misery," which appeared in the April-May 1974 issue of Revista de América of Argentina. (The Spanish text was printed in the July 8 Intercontinental Press.)
[The article reflects the views of the Venezuelan Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST— Socialist Workers party, Venezuelan section of the Fourth International) and the Juventud Socialista (JS- Socialist Youth), which is in political solidarity with it. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The Labor Movement
According to official statistics, there are approximately half a million industrial workers in Venezuela. The young Venezuelan proletariat began to gain strength in the early 1950s, when the process of import-substitution industrialization was initiated. This proletariat already has to its credit big struggles like the one at the Orinoco Iron and Steel Company (SIDOR) during the 1971 wildcat strike.
It was just a short time ago — the week before the new president [Carlos Andrés Pérez] took office-that the hospital workers led a strike for wage increases, which affected all the hospitals of Caracas. The teachers have postponed direct action until the new president sets a policy with regard to wages. No one can now fail to recognize the fact that the labor movement -despite its numerical and organizational weakness-is an important force with a fundamental role to play in the transformation of Venezuela.
The Venezuelan bourgeoisie itself was the first to recognize this fact. COPEI1 as well as Acción Democrática2 have sought to increase their influence in the labor movement, trying to win electoral support for their economic plans.
The Venezuelan workers' movement is grouped in four labor federations. The strongest is the Central de Trabajadores Venezolanos (CTV — Venezuelan Federation of Labor), led by a bureaucracy controlled by Acción Democrática; next is the Central Unica de Trabajadores Venezolanos (CUTV - Venezuelan United Federation of Labor), under the influence of the MEP3 and the Communist party; third is CODESA, controlled by the COPEI bureaucracy. The fourth, the CGT, is quite weak. The bourgeoisie supports these bureaucratic leaderships as a safety measure to keep the workers from fighting for their rights.
This division in the leadership of the labor movement extends also to the level of unions and factories. Where there are several unions, it creates obstacles to the development of labor struggles.
Nonetheless, one of the plans of the bourgeoisie is to unify the labor leadership in an attempt to control the workers' movement more tightly and use it in its policies of capitalist development and "confrontation" with imperialism. That is why a process of "unification" was initiated toward the end of last year.
Francisco Olivo, president of the CTV, opened the process when, in his end-of-the-year message, he announced, "In the coming year we will focus on achieving the unification of all Venezuelan union circles."
William Franco, president of CODESA, and Cruz Villegas of the CUTV made similar statements and have set the month of October as the date for the unity congress.
The bourgeoisie's interest in controlling the workers thus coincides with the interests of the union bureaucracy, which hopes to strengthen its apparatus.
This bureaucratic unity from the top, however, is also related to the workers' struggles that are making themselves felt in Venezuelan political life. The workers find themselves faced with a contradictory situation: The bureaucrats propose unity for their own reasons, but unity can be a decisive weapon in the hands of true fighters.
That is why numerous union activists and the Venezuelan PST demand the carrying through of the unification. Not by means of "congresses" of handpicked leaders but through a rank-and-file congress, with delegates elected at factory assemblies. And we also demand that this unity serve to promote a plan of struggle for (1) an immediate wage increase of 30 percent, (2) a sliding scale of wages with a minimum of 800 bolívars [about US$188), (3) annual collective bargaining-contracts are pres ently negotiated every three years, and (4) unemployment insurance to be paid from the inflated state coffers.
The uncontrollable inflation since the beginning of the year has provoked a growing unrest among the workers and the people in general. The projected 100 percent fare hike in public transportation has stimulated a reaction from all sections of labor and the students, causing the government to suspend the increase for the moment. The outlook for increased inflation and the reactions of the militant hospital workers' and teachers' unions permit us to foresee new labor confrontations this year. The wage increases announced by the new government will do no more than postpone the conflicts.
It will be in these mobilizations that the activists will have daily experience with the bureaucratic leaderships and where the revolutionary party will meet its first test in battle. The crisis of guerrillaism and of the reformism embodied in the Venezuelan Communist party will facilitate the creation of a new, class-conscious, revolutionary workers' vanguard, capable of posing itself as an alternative leadership for the workers and masses of Venezuela.
The Student Movement
A few facts will illustrate the importance that the youth in general, and the students in particular, have in Venezuela. Fifty-two percent of the population is less than 17 years old (more than 6 million people). If we add to this the number of inhabitants who have not reached 30, we find that figure reaches 80 percent (about 9.6 million persons). We do not have precise information on the number of high-school students, but it is calculated that at midyear 100,000 will enroll, which will bring the secondary school enrollment up to more than half a million. At the Central University of Venezuela there are 50,000 students.
But at the same time, the tremendous crisis of the educational system is reflected in the fact that only 2 percent of the population between 17 and 30 years old goes on to college.
The new president has stated that he plans to provide primary schooling for an additional 450,000 children. But this does not meet the real needs for access to education, nor does it provide possibilities for those completing primary school to go on to high school. And the problem does not end there, since the bourgeois educational structure is incapable of providing space in the university for highschool graduates. In the recent period 29,000 students applied for 8,000 openings, leaving 21,000 applicants waiting a year for a new chance at admission. The situation gets worse each year. There are applicants who have been waiting more than four years to get into the university.
Up until this year, there were no demonstrations to protest this situation. The explanation for this lack of activity lies in the crisis of the student movement-in the high schools as well as in the universities. The movement had become totally disorganized after the failure of guerrillaism and reformism. When student organizations like the university-based Federation of Centers and the high-school United Committee disappeared, the students found themselves with no channels for their struggles, and the authorities had a free hand to carry out their plans.
It was only this year that a mobilization of applicants began. They achieved a partial victory when the minister of education was forced to declare that all applicants would be admitted and the National Council of Universities was forced to expand the number of incoming students.
The Student Movement Begins to Recover
The first symptoms of recovery of the student movement were seen in the elections of student delegates to the university council. The leftist slate organized by the MAS4 won the elections, getting more than 8,000 votes.
At the beginning of this year, elections for the student center took place at Simón Bolivar University (the most traditional university in Caracas). Only two slates met the electoral requirements: one supported by the MAS and the other organized by the Juventud Socialista. While the former held reformist positions- for example, "Find solutions to student problems that are workable and therefore acceptable to the authorities" - the latter proposed student control of teaching, support of and links to workers' and people's struggles, and a more democratic, new form of organization- the delegate assembly.
The MAS slate got 824 votes, against 324 for the Juventud Socialista. The latter's votes came in large part from recently enrolled students at the university and their importance lies in the fact that it was the first JS campaign, while the MAS already had leadership of the center.
In the high schools, reorganization began through delegate assemblies of all students in the same class in some cases, and of student centers in others. Here too the JS played an important role, stimulating this process and extending the new organizational form to the main high schools in Caracas. The reorganization and the struggles begun in various institutions have led to the rise of an organization that projects uniting all Venezuelan high-school students. This is the High-School Committee for Federation, organized by the main centers and delegate assemblies functioning in Caracas. Independent activists and the JS are collaborating in the construction of this tool, which will be fundamental to successful student struggles. Unfortunately the rest of the left has not understood the importance of the committee and has not participated in its work.
All these symptoms foreshadow a new awakening of the student movement, capable of confronting the bourgeoisie's plans to produce technicians for its capitalist development scheme. The bourgeoisie hides its plans under the pompous title created by the new government - "democratization of teaching." Also foreshadowed is the fact that this revived movement will have to unite with the workers' and popular struggles that are beginning.
The Left
The Venezuelan Communist party has been one of the most important in Latin America. As with its counterparts elsewhere, the objective of its policy is class collaboration - the desperate search for bourgeois nationalist sectors to ally with in a popular front. Thus they abandoned guerrilla warfare and accepted legality: not in order to develop workers' and popular struggles but to ally themselves with the most "progressive" sectors.
This policy split the CP. Pompeyo Márquez, Teodoro Petkoff, and the Communist Youth abandoned the CP and formed the MAS. In a country of youth the CP was transformed into a party of old men. In the last elections the CP supported the candidate of the MEP for president and ran its own slate for parliament, obtaining 49,455 votes as opposed to the 103,591 they obtained five years before.
The electoral results deepened the crisis of the CP. Veteran leader Eduardo Machado insisted that the CP had made an error in not supporting COPEI, while the grouping headed by Jesús Faria maintained that it was correct to have supported the MEP. As a result, what remains of the powerful CP is being worn down in the dispute over which bourgeois politician to support.
Venezuelan Stalinism has not drawn any lessons from the Chilean popular front; it has lost all influence among the students and has been reduced to almost nothing in the workers' movement.
The MAS got 200,000 votes with its candidate, independent José Vicente Rangel, in the December 9 elections. MAS rejects the concept of the popular front and the "revolution" in stages. This socialist formation won the sympathy of Venezuelan youth who were acquainted with the experience of guerrillaism and reformism. However, the MAS did not propose the formation of a Leninist party and has begun to revise the basic premises of revolutionary Marxism. It began by denying the leading role of the proletariat, putting forward the notion that in Ve nezuela the numerical weakness of the working class made it no more important than other sectors, like the students and the petty bourgeoisie. MAS continues to question the Leninist concept of the need to form a party, posing itself as a movement instead. And now it is developing a new theory of the role of the bourgeois parliament, stating that MAS members of congress will force that institution to fulfill its "real function," as if its real function were not to provide a "democratic" facade for class oppression.
These positions are causing the MAS to advance along the dangerous road of writing off workers' mobilizations, and the organizations that these mobilizations create, as the fundamental places where revolutionists must work. Not seeing the function of socialists in congress as one of agitating within parliament to show the masses that they should not place any confidence in that body, that MAS is sliding down the hazardous slope of reformism.
The Perspectives
On the basis of these elements, we can return to the partial analyses of left currents that we made at the beginning of this article. It is true that President Carlos Andrés Pérez directed the repression and also that AD and COPEI have a de facto agreement to take advantage of petroleum earnings to develop the country and reduce the proportion of earnings that go to the big imperialist monopolies. We cannot discount the possibility that they may take some anti-imperialist measures, and the nationalization of petroleum firms seems to be a virtual certainty.
But just as it is erroneous to think that the government has to take an ultrareactionary direction, it is also wrong to think that petroleum income in the hands of the national bourgeoisie will change the semicolonial character of the economy, overcoming its brutal, insoluble contradictions under capitalist rule.
We are at the beginning of a contradictory period, since the big earnings will permit the bourgeoisie a certain stability. But at the same time, these earnings will encourage the workers to demand better contracts because of the prosperity.
The agreement between AD and COPEI, based on that same prosperity and on a common objective of developing the capitalist economy, will lead them to maintain parliamentary rule and a degree of freedom that can be utilized by the workers to strengthen their struggles.
The bourgeoisie, which needs the workers' movement as a base of support in its policy of blackmailing imperialism, proposes labor unity under the control of its slavish bureaucracy. However, that unity can aid the workers in their mobilizations.
The Venezuelan masses, who have had a valuable experience with the failure of guerrilla and reformist currents, are faced with a very complex situation, but one which is full of possibilities.
The legal openings can be utilized to stimulate mobilizations. The fabulous resources of the state and the bosses open up the possibility of winning wage increases, as well as access to education. Steps that may be taken against imperialism will demand a correct position - support to the measures themselves but not to the bourgeois government. Each mobilization will require the formation of a workers' united front or unity in action of all anti-imperialist forces. The nationalization of oil will place on the agenda the demand for workers' control; the same demand should be raised whenever any imperialist enterprise is nation alized.
The bourgeoisie hopes to use the big earnings from the petroleum deal for their exclusive gain and to negotiate with imperialism without breaking with it. This plan could fail thanks to the class struggle. To encourage that struggle, organize it, and lead it is the big task facing revolutionists.
For that task, however, the proletariat needs an irreplaceable weapon: the revolutionary party, formed in the very struggles of the exploited. The new rise in the class struggle reemphasizes the urgent necessity to construct such a party. The Trotskyist Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores of Venezuela has taken on this task, as it begins to pose itself as the new alternative leadership that the movements of the workers, the students, and the people require.
Notes
1. Comite de Organizacion Politica Electoral Independiente [Committee Organized for Independent Political Action]: Social Christian party founded in 1946. It held office between 1969 and 1974 (the presidency of Rafael Caldera), carrying out a policy of relative independence with respect to imperialism. COPEI amnestied the guerrillas.
2. Accion Democratica [AD — Democratic Action]: Founded in 1944. It held office between 1945 and 1948 (presidencies of Romulo Betancourt and Romulo Gallegos) and from 1959 to 1969 (presidencies of Betancourt and Raul Leoni). Intimately tied to imperialist monopoly interests, it led a harsh repression against Castroist guerrillas.
3. Movimiento Electoral del Pueblo [People's Electoral Movement]: A party organized in 1967 as the result of a disagreement in the heart of the AD. It constituted the "left" wing of that bourgeois party. In the last elections it formed part of the Nueva Fuerza [New Force], an attempt to reproduce the experience of the Chilean Popular Unity, with much less electoral success than its model.
4. Movimiento al Socialismo [MAS — Movement Toward Socialism]: In December 1970, 22 of the 51 members of the Central Committee of the Venezuelan Communist party and 74 of the 75 members of the Central Council of the Communist Youth voted to split from the Stalinist party and to form the MAS. Its main figures are Pompeyo Marquez (general secretary) and Teodoro Petkoff. MAS ran the leftist independent Jose Vicente Rangel as its presidential candidate. It came out of the elections as the third largest party, after AD and COPEI.