Following the referendum victory that abolished term limits for elected officials, the class struggle in Venezuela has continued to deepen. Nationalizations, expropriations, occupations and continued growth of communal councils all signify the growing socialist revolution. The brutal reaction of the capitalist class in defense of their wealth underscores this trend.
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Land seizures have taken place in two ways: by the hands of the government and by the hands of the campesinos themselves. Rich landowners have responded by launching vicious attacks on campesino leaders. Since the passage of the 2001 land reform law, at least 200 campesino activists have been killed. Many right-wing government officials have employed police to evict campesinos from redistributed land. On April 26, for instance, more than 60 campesinos were evicted in the state of Portuguesa. Roughly 1,500 have been arrested.
However, violence and arrests have not stopped poor farmers or the government from making access to food a top priority. Massive tracts of arable land in Venezuela either go uncultivated or produce only cash crops, but 90 percent of the expropriated land is now producing meats, grains, fruits, and vegetables. Land is either redistributed into state farms owned by the government or to cooperatives run by the campesino organization Ezequiel Zamora National Farmers Front.
Speaking of the ongoing land reform, National Land Institute President Juan Carlos Loyo stated, “These measures are based on the need to change the agrarian structure of our country from the private property of a few people to social property, that is, property of all Venezuelans, socialist property.”
Communal councils put workers in charge
The Bolivarian government has also encouraged and set up what it calls “socialist factories.” Production, serving primarily the national market, will eventually encompass goods in strategic sectors such as foods, chemicals, machinery, plastics and more. The government has provided credit for the creation of some of these enterprises and is initially running them, but the plan is to meld them with the communal councils.
This was the case with a new aluminum company announced by Chávez, which will make products for the automobile, communications, agriculture, electronics, and military industries.
President Chávez has called for the creation of a “socialist distribution network” to distribute these goods to the people, and has encouraged the communal councils to take on more governmental responsibility and manage community development projects. In the Torres municipality, the communal councils are now in control of both the budget and local development projects.
An integral part of the “Socialist Caracas” plan is the Nucleus of Endogenous Development Fabricio Ojeda. NUDEFO is an area of worker-run collectives, subsidized grocery stores and pharmacies, sports facilities, and cultural workshops. The mayor of Caracas hopes that projects like these will be an “example of the new socialist communities and the establishment of communes.”
Though the transformations now unfolding in Venezuela are uneven, these developments are significant. The Chávez government has created a number of social missions focused on health care, education and nutrition, including Misión Mercal, which distributes subsidized food from expropriated land. Additionally, thousands of communal councils have sprung up over the past decade creating the nucleus for Popular Power.
Socialism is a system where the working people have control over the resources of society, and use it to meet the needs of the masses of people. In its current stage, the Bolivarian revolution is attempting to create an incipient socialist sector with the various missions, development projects and communal councils as its foundation.
These institutions oriented toward the needs of the working class coexist with the capitalist economy geared toward the interests of the rich. For all its advances, the Bolivarian revolution must contend with the continued existence of a domestic capitalist class bent on overturning the progress toward socialism with Washington’s full support.
As the class struggle deepens, the line between pro-capitalist and pro-socialist elements will sharpen. Those divisions will become more pronounced, even within the forces presently in the Chávez camp. Sabotage and outright counter-revolutionary activity are real obstacles to the progress of new measures and the revolution itself. While Venezuela’s working class fights on the domestic front, progressives and revolutionaries in the United States must continue to defend the achievements of the Bolivarian revolution against the encroachments of foreign capital.
