Susan Spronk and Jeffrey R. Webber spoke to Andrés Antillano a militant within the Movimiento de Pobladores (Poor People's Movement, MP) - an umbrella organisation of urban movements that has worked for education, solidarity and equality in Venezuela since 2005 - about the political backdrop to elections in October. This is an edited version of that interview. Can you explain the significance of the Polo Patriotico, and the role of the Poor Peoples' Movement (MP) within this wider grouping? • One of the unresolved tasks of the revolution has been the formation of a collective leadership capable of expressing the totality (conjunto) of forces that constitute the revolutionary camp. In Venezuela it was a situation in which all of the traditional left parties were in decline because of the profound ideological and political crisis suffered during the 1980s. And in its place, the organized popular movement was incapable of leading the intense cycle of social struggle that exploded between 1989 and the moment when Chávez came to power in 1999. If the popular movement played an important part in this cycle of struggle, it's evident that it was lacking the capability to lead. It was a cycle of struggle that was not entirely spontaneous, but neither was the popular movement capable of providing leadership. This has resulted in the fact that the revolutionary process in Venezuela has as a clear visible expression, its incarnation in an individual figure, rather than an organic collective leadership. This has to do precisely with the absence of a solid organic point of reference or leadership of a collective kind. Therefore the figure of Chávez is to a certain degree a solitary figure, some kind of paradoxical, egalitarian caudillo (big man leader). Chávez has been the boss, without being the boss, caudillo without being caudillo - the kind of figure that has been a part of Venezuelan peasant struggles stretching back historically, the clearest example being Simón Bolivar. The idea of the egalitarian caudillo was the negation of the delegation of political power. This phenomenon has made it difficult to build a collective political reference point with the capacity to bring together all of the various popular social forces. We also need to add another element, which is the perverse role that the state plays in this dynamic, particularly the role of oil rent in the administration of politics and economics in this country. Today, as in the period of oligarchic hegemony, the objective of social organizations has been to access parts of the state in order to control a portion of the oil rent rather than to organize the autonomous struggles of the people. These factors together have meant that it has been difficult to build an organizational structure capable of bringing together all of the popular social forces that constitute Nonetheless, there have been various attempts to do just this. Chávez himself came to power through the unity of political parties of the left called Polo Patriótico in the electoral campaign of 1998, a unity that was maintained until 2001, when some parties abandoned the coalition and joined the right-wing opposition. So there have been various attempts to build a united, organic political space. The latest attempt was the creation of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV) announced in December 2006 and created The construction of the party came shortly after the declaration in 2005 that the revolutionary process would be socialist in orientation. This is an important element in understanding the decision to form this party. It signified a shift away from managing politics in a more or less conventional manner towards a nationalpopular orientation, of national liberation, in the classical terms of the socialist tradition. The new orientation was a shift away from the idea that the revolution was fundamentally Bolivarian and nationalist, toward the idea that the revolution would be socialist. The idea was that this socialist project required new levels of organization, and that this would be realized through the founding a new socialist party. However, in spite of calling itself a socialist party, there were serious contradictions in the multi-class character of the party's platform, embracing everyone from business people to sectors The party was initially able to register millions of members, to express the key nodal points of the organizations of the masses, at an objective high point in mass struggle, and to win people to the idea that the party was going to be a strategic instrument through which to respond to the demands that they had raised through their local struggles. However, the way in which the party was formed, and the intervention in the party of sectors closely linked to the state bureaucracy meant that the party quickly bureaucratized and became an appendage of the state. The parliamentary elections of 2009 represented a significant reversal in the number of votes won by Chavismo. In the wake of this defeat, the President and the process went through a serious period of self-criticism, out of which, interestingly, the President advanced a series of political theses that signified the radicalization rather than the tactical retreat of the process - calling for an intensification of the class struggle, the intensification of social polarization, the accentuation of the mobilization of the people, and a revision of the way the government had been governing. The idea was to work on further developing the PSUV as a party which would bring under its umbrella those sectors that had not yet felt comfortable inside of it, particularly parties and social movements that were close allies of the PSUV - to create a more significant popular unity out of this process of self-criticism. An idea, first expressed in institutional form in the 1998 elections, was taken up again - the Polo Patriótico, which was now meant to be a political space in which not only all the political parties in favour of the process would find a home, but also all those social sectors on side with the process of Chavismo. However, in spite of the fact that the President called for this
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OnSETO cuna DE Andrés Antillano initiative, the initiative did not make I believe that there was an effort on the part of the bureaucratic layers of the revolution to strangle this initiative, or to mediate it, and control it. And I am not speaking only of the bureaucratic sectors of the party and in the state. There is also a bureaucratic layer within the popular movement itself. Its capacity to mobilize has been hampered by the clientelistic behaviour of its internal bureaucratic In 2011, a number of popular organizations saw what was happening inside of the Polo Patriotico and decided to enter it and to attempt to transform it into an instrument of the popular movement. The social organizations involved were very important ones, like the Frente Campesino (Peasant Front), the Movimiento de Pobladores (MP), communitarian media groups, and radical unions, amongst others, and they agreed to attempt to open up the debate publicly around the character of the Polo Patriótico. We conducted a series of mobilizations with the effort of transforming the Polo Patriótico into an instrument that would be authentically of and for the people. COMU LIBERTADOrE From your perspective, what are the most important popular organizations in the current conjuncture? • My perception is that the popular movement and popular organizations are presently experiencing an ebb in their capacities. There has been a retreat in the level of popular organization and popular mobilization that is quite significant. The revolutionary process since 1998 until 2004, and again in 2007, was a period of high levels of popular organization and struggle, a continual series of high points in struggle, a period of incredible dynamism. My sense is that there is now an attempt developing of a thermidorian reaction, to channel, to capture, administer these popular forces, and to distinguish their capacities to act in a critical way. This is a product of the overarching mentality of the bureaucracy. We've seen this developing in the last few years At the same time, this is not to say, that there are not contradictory forces at play going the other way. It is not to say that the thermidorian attempt has been entirely successful in imposing itself. There's still an important social force that points in the other direction, that continues to work toward building the capacities of the
23 * International popular movement, and to call into question the bureaucratization of the state, of the institutions, of their functionaries. This social force remains the principal source of challenges to the status quo. One example is the communal councils, which were important expressions of the organization and power of the grassroots, and there are still many that remain so. But in many other cases, the communal councils were rapidly transformed into mere administrators of resources, or areas of intermediation between a series of different state institutions. Many communal councils have, through this process, become bureaucratized and pacified, and separated from their popular bases This complexity characterizes the current political moment. We can simplify slightly and say that there are two forces that are disputing for hegemony in the popular camp - a thermidorian attempt at bureaucratic control over, and cooptation of popular organizations, and the debilitation of certain popular organizations that no longer have the capacity to mobilize and organize; and others that continue to defend a logic of autonomy, and belligerence, in other words continue to be the
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Toward urban revolution and organic collective leadership in Venezuela 24 motor of this revolution. In the latter of these you find various struggles that are quite localized, including certain communal councils, land committees, and so on, and others that have a larger national base, such as the Peasant Front, union organizations, the MP, the alternative media The groups that help constitute this second force came together formally in May 2012 to form an umbrella group called the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Popular Alliance, APR). Against this backdrop, what is the importance of the forthcoming elections, on October 7, 2012? We have always insisted that within bourgeois democracy elections have tended toward demobilization and depoliticization. Revolutionary democracy, on the other hand, signifies the ongoing politicization of the people, the deepening of their political organization. As I suggested, there are two forces disputing for hegemony in the popular camp, and this dispute finds its natural expression inside of the electoral process as well. These can either be elections absent of meaning, depoliticized, with banners and little else, or these can be elections that take up again the more authentic character of this revolutionary process, the radicalization, politicization, and the construction of socialism and popular power. These are the tensions that exist in the present moment. Beginning from this thesis, the elections need to be used as a platform for strengthening the political capacities of the people, and heightening the consciousness of the people. We can see this for example in discussions around the electoral platform of Chávez, and how to relate the many immediate demands emerging from local struggles to an overarching programme, in the choreography of the electoral struggle, in the mobilization of the people in the present moment, and placing at the centre of everything the central historic demands that have emerged from the people. From our perspective, this is what has to be kept foremost in mind. Without doubt, as in every election in Venezuela, the elections will also be a battle between the domestic reactionary forces and imperialism, on the one hand, and the revolutionary forces on the other. If the campaign is depoliticized, this will favour the forces of reaction, and if the elections are politicized and employed as a way of deepening the political organization of the people, this will favour the revolutionary forces. Since 2005, Chávez has been employing the rhetoric of socialism for the twentyfirst century. What does socialism mean for the people organized from below? • I think the biggest challenge facing Venezuela today is how to conceptualize socialism after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Without doubt, a good part of the revolutionary forces have assumed a distance from what was called "really existing socialism" in the twentieth century. Evidently, the crisis that the Soviet bloc entered into, and the explosion of liberal rhetoric around the "end of history" and so on, have had an ideological impact on even being able to think about socialism. And the problem isn't only ideological; it also has to do with the new transformations of capitalism itself. Capitalism has changed in its nature, its forms of coordination, of exploitation - for example the domination of capital doesn't have as its principal form the factory any longer, that form that used to condense the labour-capital contradiction. The themes of housing, territorial dispossession, the struggle for natural resources, cultural struggles, are expressions of new fields of the capitallabour contradiction which were not foreseen in the classical socialist programmes of the revolutionary left formulated at the close of the nineteenth century. So there is an ideological crisis, but there also is a reconfiguration of capital that has, in turn, meant a reconfiguration of struggles against capital and the programs of resistance against capital. Returning to an earlier question, in the case of Venezuela, we can note that the period between 1998 and the revocation referendum of 2004 was the high point of popular mobilization and struggle. This was a moment that broke neoliberalism, and neoliberalism was replaced with a strengthening of the state. Even the right-wing candidates cannot talk in neoliberal terms, but rather need to campaign with social democratic platforms. Neoliberalism is obviously their real program, but it is totally impossible, it would be totally unacceptable, for them to speak plainly about advancing that kind of program today in Venezuela, to talk openly about privatization and the extension of the market. This kind of neoliberalism has been ideologically and politically defeated. And this is not a small thing to have achieved in this era of globalization and the Washington Consensus, which had been accepted not only by the right but by the majority of the reformist left as well. This means that the contradictions facing Venezuela today are of another type. The contradiction today isn't how to struggle against neoliberalism but how to confront the strengthening of state capitalism, in which the rebuilding the capacity of the state, rather than guaranteeing the democratization of the means of production in the hands of the people, has meant merely the transfer of oil rent, and the formation of a new layer of privileged elite This is a grave danger facing this revolution, that there will not be a historic transformation, but rather a transfer of power from one elite to another. The strengthening of the state, the increase in social investment on the part of the state, the increase in the economic and political capacities of the state - if all of this was tactically beneficial for the defeat of neoliberalism, it certainly does not guarantee a transition toward a new
I Susan Spronk teaches international development at the University of Ottawa and is a research associate with the Municipal Services Project (http://www. municipalservicesproject.org/). • Jeffery R. Webber teaches politics and international relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Red October: Left Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (Haymarket, 2012).