The elections held on July 28 in Venezuela confirmed Nicolas Maduro as
president of the country with 51.95% of the votes, against the
opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia who obtained 43.18%. ---- The
United States, openly aligned with Urrutia, immediately refused to
recognize the elected president, as did four other Latin American
countries such as Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay and Costa Rica. ----
Maduro is therefore preparing to govern for the third term, when the
interference of US imperialism in what he considers "his own backyards"
is now a fixed rule.
The street riots, fueled by the formally defeated opposition that is
crying out about electoral fraud, riots from which the US certainly
cannot claim to be extraneous, have been and are harshly repressed by
Maduro. This has allowed Luis Almagro, secretary general of the OAS -
Organization of American States based in Washington, which includes 36
independent states of the Americas, to repeat the charade by asking the
International Criminal Court to indict the newly elected president and
issue an arrest warrant against him for the repression of the protests.
The European Union has also not hesitated to disavow the validity of the
elections in Venezuela, demonstrating an alignment with US policies that
results, once again, in total subordination.
The analysis of the Venezuelan situation, which is constantly evolving,
is not the aim of this contribution, which is instead aimed at
considering the ongoing debate on Venezuela, a debate in which
unilateral interventions that substitute partisan reports for the
analysis of the facts are poorly avoided, loudly demanding the adoption
of clear positions, for or against Maduro, so to speak.
Even the term "21st century socialism", which had a large following in
the previous regime of Hugo Chavez of which Maduro is the political
heir, is a term that has fallen into disuse and does not contribute to
clarity, since it is variously declined based on the intentions of those
who share it and act as its spokesperson in some way or of those who,
instead,
against discrediting him.
Now we are not going to say-
to demonstrate in a professorial way how and when the political and
social transition underway in Venezuela "moves away from the
revolutionary path", consequently handing out sentences and acquittals,
perhaps in the stale perspective of the conflict between
authoritarianism actually pursued and freedom abstractly expressed.
Instead, we will try to highlight how the political and social
transitions that actively involve the proletariat in its slow process of
emancipation are unpredictable, full of contradictions, pitfalls and
how, in any case, they must be analyzed in their historical implications
and in their concrete social essence starting, precisely with regard to
Venezuela, from the awareness that "the criticism of Maduro" is in any
case the criticism of a process underway in the "backyard" of North
American imperialism, and those who directly experience this transition
are inevitably subject to conditioning that somewhat complicate the
formulation of objective and complete analyses.
To these comrades goes our unfalse respect, and all our solidarity, the
solidarity we owe to those who live the real processes and suffer the
inevitable consequences: but who is outside of similar contexts, and
intends to
However, to analyze them, it has the obligation to formulate analyses
that do not end up in the mere chronicle of the conquests or the
excesses of "Bolivarian Socialism" (from now on, for brevity SB ).
The following notes therefore constitute only an approach to the
phenomenon, to point out how the arguments of its supporters do not
proceed in an authentically socialist and libertarian direction as is
sometimes expressed with irritating ease, but fall back into the
worn-out furrow of "socialism in a single nation" and continue to
irresponsibly wave "the scarecrow of the external enemy to hide the
internal one", as dictated by an ancient Bolshevik tradition of social
democratic inspiration, evidently still well rooted in the Italian left
and beyond.
We will therefore continue with a brief examination of the SB , with the
aim of highlighting its interclass and national characteristics which
have been defined within the historical anti-imperialist tradition still
very much alive in Latin America, a tradition which however does not
constitute any socialist value.
Many of the contributions that have followed one another regarding the
SB launch explicit accusations of "fascism" towards this experience;
others instead defend it uncritically and with authentic ideological fury.
The discussion also includes intermediate positions of critical support,
which indulge in polemics with the intent of countering a certain
left-wing government, centrist by necessity and vocation, satiated and
presumptuous, which, in the end, recovering stale democratic categories
from the employers' press, always and in any case resolves itself
against Maduro.
In any case, the arguments of the supporters of the SB allow us to
detect the progressive affirmation of a certain damaged way of
conceiving socialism and its enemies, typical of the historical left of
the 20th century and its national and patriotic drifts.
In fact, if we read or reread the pronouncements of the main leaders of
the Italian Communist Party (PCI) following the Hungarian revolt of
November 1956, we note that today, at least in Italy, a similar climate
is maturing with respect to the experiences of the SB, which adheres to
the same contents formulated at the time by the various Togliattis,
Ingraos and Paiettas who sided, albeit with different motivations,
perspectives and hardships, with the USSR because, according to them,
with the armed repression of the revolt socialism was defended from
Western imperialist aggression.(1) .
The limit of this unilateral im-
historical station that was already the PCI's and that we define as
"terminal" , in the sense that it dated back to the Bolshevik (and
subsequently Stalinist) tradition, of criminalization of political and
class opposition against which one proceeded by unleashing repression
and firing squads, consisted precisely in considering the global
imperialist dimension as a clash between models that in 1956 were still
claimed to be opposed: the Western capitalist model to be condemned and
the socialist model of the USSR which, rightly, represented "the
socialism of the twentieth century ", to be defended with intransigence.
Consequently: by discrediting the really existing socialism one ended
up, "objectively" by playing the game of "Western imperialism"
considered to be the only existing imperialism, in a certain harmony
with what is today uttered by the uncritical supporters of the SB.
At the time of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 the issue took on greater
importance considering that these pronouncements reflected the official
position of the PCI on the Hungarian question, a position which was
evidently dictated by Moscow in defence of its significant power interests.
In this regard our comrades of the
Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action (GAAP) already in 1950 drew up a
clear assessment of the drift of Soviet socialism: "... in the history
of the Communist International... the organisation is engaged in an
increasingly demanding manner on the level of the foreign policy of the
USSR: a foreign policy which translates the process of capitalist
restoration underway within the Soviet state into an external
imperialist push..."(2).
Times have evidently changed, but the ideological opposition
"socialism/imperialism" , which during the 20th century defended the
interests of Soviet state capitalism and the imperialist policy of the
USSR, evidently continues to exist and, regardless of the damage,
provoked, constitutes an alarming regression that it is appropriate to
analyze in order to prevent its repetition because, today as yesterday,
the evident aggressiveness of the external enemy cannot hide the dangers
that are also hidden within a specific historical process that is
sometimes defended with naivety and approximation and, sometimes, with
arrogance.
The change in property relations (from private to state) does not imply
a qualitative and stable reversal of production relations. In other
words: the nationalizations, however profound, of the means and systems
of production of goods and services do not constitute, as such, any
socialist construction.
These should not be underestimated, but they do not constitute a
reversal of property relations since the transfer of the means of
production from private individuals to the state leaves capitalist
social relations unchanged.
Even today, as in 1956, there are no external imperialist subjects to
fight and internal socialist subjects relegated to single states to
facilitate and defend. Instead, today as yesterday, there is a single
contest between imperialist powers fighting for the domination of world
markets.
There has never been "capitalism in one country only," because
capitalism is by its nature a phenomenon that tends toward universalization.
So there has never been another
complete economic and social system opposed to capitalism in its
imperialist configuration, as this began to manifest itself at the end
of the 19th century by building its respective economic and social
structures, its political and institutional superstructures, its
ideologies and its models:
- the privatized capitalist model that has historically characterized
the main Western bourgeois democratic powers;
- state capitalism in its various historical articulations, even if
antagonistic to each other (fascism; Stalinism), which correspond to the
need to place the state as the driving force of capitalist development.
But if we look closely, economic and social phenomena intersect as they
do in real processes: the New Deal of the democrat FD Roosevelt was not
looked down upon by early National Socialism and W. Churchill showed an
undoubted and not only initial interest in Italian fascism.
Moreover, JM Keynes identified the role of the state as the main
anti-crisis engine (public investments) like the fascist regimes in
Italy and Germany. With this, we cannot affirm that bourgeois democracy,
Stalinism and fascism are equivalent phenomena because we would repeat a
serious error typical of historical extremism and it would not be
possible to understand the evolution of the imperialist phenomenon and
its adaptation to different historical contexts.
Bourgeois democracy, fascism and nationalism in its countless variants,
Stalinism, which had already begun to manifest itself in various forms
in Europe, the Americas and Asia towards the end of the 1920s (the
establishment of communist parties of Soviet observance, the
establishment and role of the Third Communist International), are the
product of different phases of capitalist development, where the
bourgeoisies of the respective countries at different levels of
development used, in order to assert themselves and prosper, the
theoretical, political, organizational and institutional tools that they
had concretely available and that they had managed to build in relation
to the historical contexts in which they operated.
It is this peculiarity that explains the blue eagle of the New Deal in
the USA, the fasces in Italy, the swastika in Germany and the hammer and
sickle in the USSR.
But not everything is so simple because, as we have said, the phenomena
intersect and then we must resort to a further reference to understand
the origin and the affirmation of "socialism in a single nation" and its
further and diversified developments that lead us to the lights and
shadows of the SB: this reference is "Bonapartism".
A concept coined by Marx and Engels around 1869 (see "The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" ). Later, in 1884, Engels provides us with
a clear formulation of the phenomenon:
" there are periods in which the contending classes have almost equal
strength, so that the state power, in its apparent capacity as mediator,
momentarily acquires a certain autonomy in relation to both... such as
the Bonapartism of the first and especially of the second French empire,
which made use of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and of the
bourgeoisie against the proletariat..."(3).
Although proto-fascism tended to shift the class conflict into a
conflict between poor nations and rich nations ( "Western democratic
plutocracies") , assuming " socialist" contents , Bonapartist regimes
that cloak themselves in anti-imperialism cannot be hastily defined as
"fascist" , because fascism has precise characteristics and, in its
affirmation, manifests an aggressive foreign policy, chains and
oppresses the proletarian class, relegating it to rigid spheres through
the totalitarian state that abolishes and persecutes any kind of
opposition and dissent. The same social policies intended, in general,
for the subaltern classes with the evident aim of gaining their loyalty
therefore coexist with the bloody repression of any form of political
and social opposition.
This, objectively, has not yet happened in Venezuela with the si -
systematicity and efficiency typical of fascist and national-fascist
regimes. Therefore, any comparison that intends to equate Chavez and
Maduro with Mussolini (but also with Videla and Pinochet) is devoid of
any historical foundation.
In the USSR, the process that led to privileging the national interests
of the nascent "socialist state" over those of the Russian and world
proletariat did not begin with the death of Lenin (1924) and the
subsequent affirmation of Stalinism, but with the Treaty of Brest
Litovsk (1918); it continued with Soviet foreign policy towards the
Turkish revolution (1920) and was then further strengthened with the
bloody repression of the revolt of sailors, soldiers and the proletariat
of Kronstadt in 1921 and of the Makhnovist opposition in Ukraine, within
the framework of the violent repression of all internal and external
opposition to the party to arrive at the institution of the NEP (1921)
and the Treaty of Rapallo (agreement between the USSR and Germany) of 1922.
It must be said that if all these choices were understandable in light
of the real imperialist aggression and the civil war (1918 - 1921),
together with the catastrophic economic and social conditions of
post-revolutionary Russia, they objectively contradicted the process of
triggering the world revolution and with it the very internationalist
proclamations of the Communist International (III In
International 1919-1943), which will in fact be progressively abandoned.
If in Italy and Germany the bourgeoisie, in order to survive, abolishes
bourgeois democracy and plays the card of fascist dictatorship, in
Russia capitalism, in order to develop, will have no choice but to
choose the Bolshevik perspective, now in its revolutionary drift,
because that was available and nothing else.
But in Stalinism, then, are there elements of fascism, the same ones
that we find in those regimes that, as in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba,
have assumed forms that are said to be fully socialist, even if national?
The question is badly posed because if there are formal analogies
between the institutional systems that develop in the capitalist
production system, they must be contextualized and not compared in the
abstract according to a widespread tendency having anti-communist and
reactionary aims.
In the New Deal USA, the bourgeoisie is strong enough to be able to
defend its interests by mediating them through bourgeois democracy,
which in fact persists with all its economic, political and social
institutions.
In Italy and Germany, however, the bourgeoisie is weak and delegates the
management of the state to the fascist parties.
The fascists assume power constitutionally; they establish a
dictatorship that erases the democratic form that was now an obstacle to
the interests
bourgeois and financial capital which still manages to limit the role of
the state in the economy.
In the USSR the bourgeoisie is very weak: an armed revolution has wiped
out the old Czarist regime, "bulwark of reaction in Europe", and its
historical infrastructures; the post-revolutionary economic situation is
very serious; a civil war fueled by the main imperialist powers is
looming. The role of the state in the economy and in social life will
therefore be increased, unilateral, direct and widespread, controlled as
it is by the sole Communist Party in power, which in the nascent Soviet
state will begin to pursue that "capitalist restoration" that will find
full implementation with Stalinism, as the epilogue of the defeated
revolution.
But if bourgeois democracy, fascism and Bolshevism in its Stalinist
drift constitute configurations of capitalist exploitation , they
produce very diversified political and institutional forms also in terms
of social organisation and freedom, precisely because their history is
different and their aims are different.(4)
Coming to the present day, imperialism is a phenomenon that by investing
capital upsets the economic and social structures of the areas where it
asserts itself, creating new class structures between the bourgeoisies
and the indigenous proletarian classes, qualifying itself (also) as a
stimulus and driving force of a new model of development, albeit unequal.
In Latin America, Asia and Africa, in order to fully assert themselves,
the national bourgeoisies began to play an anti-imperialist role,
precisely through bourgeois nationalism.
In those countries, where there were no solid bourgeois democratic
traditions to refer to, the weak native bourgeoisies turned to
socialism, often imported from the West and adapted to national
realities: but what asserted itself was not socialism, but rather
Bonapartist regimes aimed at achieving "national unity" with an
anti-imperialist function, with inevitable more or less significant
concessions to the subaltern classes to free them from underdevelopment
which, let us remember, constitutes a brake on the development of
capitalism itself.
We could then define Maduro as the continuator of a Bonapartist
experience that, begun with Chavez, has indisputably acquired
credibility thanks to the social reforms that he followed up, to raise
the material conditions of the subaltern classes in order to achieve
"the unity of the homeland against imperialism", that is, the true
essence of the SB.
Moreover, even the most recent history of Latin America expresses other
precedents of this type (the Cuban revolution, the first phase of
Peronism in Argentina; the experience of the Allende government in
Chile, for example) and an immense literature on the subject.
Chavez was the political leader of a Bonapartist front; the product of a
social polarization that saw relevant components of the Venezuelan
bourgeoisie demand emancipation from North American imperialism to
contain and personally manage the penetration of foreign capital
together with the relevant natural resources deriving from oil and raw
materials, against those internal reactionary bourgeois components that
have historically benefited from imperialism and that today, in order to
survive, feed the political, parliamentary and social opposition of the
extreme right of which Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia is the most recent and
significant product.
This opposition continues with all its convulsions and the manifest and
ineffective coup attempts plotted by the USA have the possibility of
repeating themselves precisely because, in Venezuela, Chavez reached
power with democratic elections which imply the permanence of the
opposition while in Cuba Castro assumed power with an armed revolution
which swept away the old Cuban ruling groups linked to US imperialism.
Thus the Venezuelan Bonapartist regime represents an unstable balance
between opposing social forces in a reality in which foreign capital has
a decisive role, and the government is struggling between the interests
of the national bourgeoisie that demands an autonomous role from
imperialism and those of the bourgeois components that instead benefit
from this capital.
Despite the fact that the SB is losing consensus even with entire
sectors of the subaltern classes who are giving in to the appeals and
above all to the maneuvers of the pro-imperialist right (replicating a
direction already effectively tested in Salvador Allende's Chile), it
has not suppressed bourgeois democratic freedoms, it has not chained the
proletariat and the political and social opposition with a police
dictatorship as has happened in the past in numerous Latin American
countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay), but has tried to create
an inter-class front between the proletariat and that Venezuelan
national bourgeoisie determined to stem the penetration of foreign
capital to its exclusive advantage.
The economic and social measures implemented by the Venezuelan leaders
must therefore not be underestimated by revolutionary critics, as well
as the militias defending the revolution and the various popular control
committees spread across the territory of that country.
All these achievements were, together, a necessity to strengthen the SB
in its interclass essence and a concession to the inevitable material
needs of the subaltern classes and their claim for an active role in the
national revolutionary process and an inevitable necessity to
strengthen the SB in its interclass essence.
The SB and, in general, any form of socialism that tends to assert
itself in a single nation, must not be demonized nor, even less, passed
off as something that cannot be
and that is socialism. The revolution
Cuban has achieved important social progress such as that achieved by
Chavez in Venezuela: but the engine of these achievements has not been
the proletariat, nor its liberation their ultimate goal. And if the
proletariat has been involved, more by Chavez than by Castro, it is the
nascent national bourgeoisie that, in its contradictory affirmation, has
held and holds the helm to manage its class hegemony, in Cuba as in
Venezuela. But the balances of the world imperialist contest overwhelm
the plans of the weak Venezuelan national bourgeoisie and the very
construction of the SB, with disastrous consequences on the Venezuelan
and continental social structures as happened, for example, with the
defeat of Allende in Chile in 1973.
But once again imperialist aggression - "the external enemy" - cannot be
used to hide the internal enemy.
In Venezuela there is no system to defend because it is socialist, and
we cannot even continue to believe that revolutionary intransigence,
even if only stated, preserves us from imperialist aggression and
internal political and social derailments.
In a backward context like Venezuela we cannot but support those
processes that have objectively raised the material conditions of a
people simply because they were carried forward by the national
bourgeois components that achieved the classic objectives of the
continental bourgeois revolutions, redistributing in a more equitable
way the social wealth produced and accumulated to overcome, at least in
part, backwardness as a brake on capitalist development, while
maintaining unchanged the property and power relations still held by the
Venezuelan anti-imperialist bourgeoisie.
But the bourgeoisie is not a universal class and to defend its hegemony
and its interests it can easily replace instrumental progressivism with
forms of domination that can materialize in the authoritarian drifts of
an inspired experience.
to national socialism, according to the
unavoidable historical genesis of Bonapartism, which is what happens in
Venezuela.
But, by avoiding posing the question of freedom in the abstract, it is
also necessary to avoid falling into the trap of the " external enemy ",
which resolves itself in "the unity of the homeland for the defense of
socialism from imperialist aggression", to the full advantage of those
components of the national bourgeoisie who hold power in Venezuela.
Once again, the exceptions of history surprise unprepared
revolutionaries, with a social rootedness and an organizational presence
not up to the needs, which does not allow them to effectively influence
the balance of power between the classes to condition them in the sense
of defending the interests of the subaltern classes, both against
external and internal adversaries because, if the enemy is objectively
represented by imperialism, its allies and its misdeeds, it is very true
what the German internationalists affirmed on the threshold of the first
imperialist world war "... the main enemy
It is made up of the bourgeoisie that each person has in their own country."
From this point of view, Nestor Makhno's experience in Ukraine, which
took place between 1918 and 1921, can be considered a reference which,
even if less complete than others (the Paris Commune; Spain 1936/3, the
Hungarian uprising of 1956, to name but a few), represented a model of
management of economic and social life which could be generalised,
albeit with the inevitable limitations, in the post-revolutionary
Russian experience.
The Bolsheviks, in keeping with their social democratic traditions of
the Second Socialist International and their teacher Karl Kautsky, who
was only formally but never substantially "renegade", instead took the
path of creating a "socialist state" for the construction of state
capitalism, progressively liquidating all political and social opposition.
In any case, Makhno attempted to position himself in relation to
Bolshevism by recognising the concrete balance of power and by taking
into account the existing reality in which he was forced to operate,
thus avoiding opposing it only because Bolshevism did not represent his
own anarchist communist horizon.
He did so generously by choosing, in the heat of the revolution and
civil war, the difficult alliance with the Bolsheviks to fight the White
counter-revolution armed by the Western and Eastern imperialist powers
as the main enemy in that precise historical moment, trying, at the same
time, to indicate a political, social and organizational path
alternative to Bolshevism: a path that he did not have the strength to
sustain, both because of the adverse circumstances in which this
experience developed, and because the Russian and international
anarchist movement, together with the opposition communist and socialist
movement, were going the other way anyway, as were the social democrats
(Bolsheviks).
From this point of view, the comparison with Maduro's Venezuela could
even take on some validity because there are numerous similarities
between the Bolshevik drift and "Bolivarian socialism" .
Notes:
1) Pietro Ingrao, «On one side of the barricade in defense of socialism»
- «l'Unità» 25 October 1956;
Giancarlo Pajetta, «The tragedy of Hungary - «l'Unità» of 28 October 1956;
Palmiro Togliatti, «On the events in Hungary», «l'Unità», 30 October 1956
2) Taken from: "Half a century of struggle of the world working class
(1900 - 1950)." - In "Piccola Enciclopedia Anarchica" edited by the
Initiative Group "for an oriented and federated Movement" - Rome 1950;
3) F. Engels "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State -
Editori Riuniti, 2005
4) To better understand the role of Bolshevism and its historical
incomparability with fascism, it is sufficient to consider the debate
that took place in Russia on workers' control and the trade union
question from 1917 to 1921 (10th Congress of the Bolshevik Communist
Party). In fact, the transition that in Italy and Germany will lead to
state trade unionism will be far simpler and shorter than the one
achieved in Russia.
The following bibliographical note does not dwell on the particularities
of the Venezuelan situation but on the theoretical contents of the SB in
the context of the Latin American continent, of the current imperialist
phase and of the historical references and anarchist communism contained
in the text.
Karl Marx: "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" - Editori
Riuniti, 1977.
Ida Met: "The Kronstadt Revolt"- Partizan Editions, 1970.
Pyotr Andreevich Arshinov: "The Anarchist Revolution in Ukraine " -
Pgreco editions, 2014.
Juri Colombo (edited by) "Nestor Makhno- The Revolution in Ukraine -
Memoirs". Castelvecchi, 2023
Maurice Brinton: "The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control". Jaca Book, 1976.
Daniel Guerin: "Neither god nor master". Jaca Book, 1977. (from page 425
to page 410)
" Half a century of struggle of the world working class (1900 - 1950)."
- In "Piccola Enciclopedia Anarchica" edited by the Initiative Group
"for an oriented and federated Movement" - Rome 1950.
" Hungary 1956 - the need for a budget". LOTTA COMUNISTA Editions, 1986.
Juan Josè Sebreli: "Third World Bourgeois Myth". Vallecchi, 1977.
D. Bo: "Marxism and Populism in Latin America". Ottaviano Editions, 1976.
Andre Gunder Frank: Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America.
Einaudi, Turin, 1969
Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution.
Einaudi, 1974.
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president of the country with 51.95% of the votes, against the
opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia who obtained 43.18%. ---- The
United States, openly aligned with Urrutia, immediately refused to
recognize the elected president, as did four other Latin American
countries such as Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay and Costa Rica. ----
Maduro is therefore preparing to govern for the third term, when the
interference of US imperialism in what he considers "his own backyards"
is now a fixed rule.
The street riots, fueled by the formally defeated opposition that is
crying out about electoral fraud, riots from which the US certainly
cannot claim to be extraneous, have been and are harshly repressed by
Maduro. This has allowed Luis Almagro, secretary general of the OAS -
Organization of American States based in Washington, which includes 36
independent states of the Americas, to repeat the charade by asking the
International Criminal Court to indict the newly elected president and
issue an arrest warrant against him for the repression of the protests.
The European Union has also not hesitated to disavow the validity of the
elections in Venezuela, demonstrating an alignment with US policies that
results, once again, in total subordination.
The analysis of the Venezuelan situation, which is constantly evolving,
is not the aim of this contribution, which is instead aimed at
considering the ongoing debate on Venezuela, a debate in which
unilateral interventions that substitute partisan reports for the
analysis of the facts are poorly avoided, loudly demanding the adoption
of clear positions, for or against Maduro, so to speak.
Even the term "21st century socialism", which had a large following in
the previous regime of Hugo Chavez of which Maduro is the political
heir, is a term that has fallen into disuse and does not contribute to
clarity, since it is variously declined based on the intentions of those
who share it and act as its spokesperson in some way or of those who,
instead,
against discrediting him.
Now we are not going to say-
to demonstrate in a professorial way how and when the political and
social transition underway in Venezuela "moves away from the
revolutionary path", consequently handing out sentences and acquittals,
perhaps in the stale perspective of the conflict between
authoritarianism actually pursued and freedom abstractly expressed.
Instead, we will try to highlight how the political and social
transitions that actively involve the proletariat in its slow process of
emancipation are unpredictable, full of contradictions, pitfalls and
how, in any case, they must be analyzed in their historical implications
and in their concrete social essence starting, precisely with regard to
Venezuela, from the awareness that "the criticism of Maduro" is in any
case the criticism of a process underway in the "backyard" of North
American imperialism, and those who directly experience this transition
are inevitably subject to conditioning that somewhat complicate the
formulation of objective and complete analyses.
To these comrades goes our unfalse respect, and all our solidarity, the
solidarity we owe to those who live the real processes and suffer the
inevitable consequences: but who is outside of similar contexts, and
intends to
However, to analyze them, it has the obligation to formulate analyses
that do not end up in the mere chronicle of the conquests or the
excesses of "Bolivarian Socialism" (from now on, for brevity SB ).
The following notes therefore constitute only an approach to the
phenomenon, to point out how the arguments of its supporters do not
proceed in an authentically socialist and libertarian direction as is
sometimes expressed with irritating ease, but fall back into the
worn-out furrow of "socialism in a single nation" and continue to
irresponsibly wave "the scarecrow of the external enemy to hide the
internal one", as dictated by an ancient Bolshevik tradition of social
democratic inspiration, evidently still well rooted in the Italian left
and beyond.
We will therefore continue with a brief examination of the SB , with the
aim of highlighting its interclass and national characteristics which
have been defined within the historical anti-imperialist tradition still
very much alive in Latin America, a tradition which however does not
constitute any socialist value.
Many of the contributions that have followed one another regarding the
SB launch explicit accusations of "fascism" towards this experience;
others instead defend it uncritically and with authentic ideological fury.
The discussion also includes intermediate positions of critical support,
which indulge in polemics with the intent of countering a certain
left-wing government, centrist by necessity and vocation, satiated and
presumptuous, which, in the end, recovering stale democratic categories
from the employers' press, always and in any case resolves itself
against Maduro.
In any case, the arguments of the supporters of the SB allow us to
detect the progressive affirmation of a certain damaged way of
conceiving socialism and its enemies, typical of the historical left of
the 20th century and its national and patriotic drifts.
In fact, if we read or reread the pronouncements of the main leaders of
the Italian Communist Party (PCI) following the Hungarian revolt of
November 1956, we note that today, at least in Italy, a similar climate
is maturing with respect to the experiences of the SB, which adheres to
the same contents formulated at the time by the various Togliattis,
Ingraos and Paiettas who sided, albeit with different motivations,
perspectives and hardships, with the USSR because, according to them,
with the armed repression of the revolt socialism was defended from
Western imperialist aggression.(1) .
The limit of this unilateral im-
historical station that was already the PCI's and that we define as
"terminal" , in the sense that it dated back to the Bolshevik (and
subsequently Stalinist) tradition, of criminalization of political and
class opposition against which one proceeded by unleashing repression
and firing squads, consisted precisely in considering the global
imperialist dimension as a clash between models that in 1956 were still
claimed to be opposed: the Western capitalist model to be condemned and
the socialist model of the USSR which, rightly, represented "the
socialism of the twentieth century ", to be defended with intransigence.
Consequently: by discrediting the really existing socialism one ended
up, "objectively" by playing the game of "Western imperialism"
considered to be the only existing imperialism, in a certain harmony
with what is today uttered by the uncritical supporters of the SB.
At the time of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 the issue took on greater
importance considering that these pronouncements reflected the official
position of the PCI on the Hungarian question, a position which was
evidently dictated by Moscow in defence of its significant power interests.
In this regard our comrades of the
Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action (GAAP) already in 1950 drew up a
clear assessment of the drift of Soviet socialism: "... in the history
of the Communist International... the organisation is engaged in an
increasingly demanding manner on the level of the foreign policy of the
USSR: a foreign policy which translates the process of capitalist
restoration underway within the Soviet state into an external
imperialist push..."(2).
Times have evidently changed, but the ideological opposition
"socialism/imperialism" , which during the 20th century defended the
interests of Soviet state capitalism and the imperialist policy of the
USSR, evidently continues to exist and, regardless of the damage,
provoked, constitutes an alarming regression that it is appropriate to
analyze in order to prevent its repetition because, today as yesterday,
the evident aggressiveness of the external enemy cannot hide the dangers
that are also hidden within a specific historical process that is
sometimes defended with naivety and approximation and, sometimes, with
arrogance.
The change in property relations (from private to state) does not imply
a qualitative and stable reversal of production relations. In other
words: the nationalizations, however profound, of the means and systems
of production of goods and services do not constitute, as such, any
socialist construction.
These should not be underestimated, but they do not constitute a
reversal of property relations since the transfer of the means of
production from private individuals to the state leaves capitalist
social relations unchanged.
Even today, as in 1956, there are no external imperialist subjects to
fight and internal socialist subjects relegated to single states to
facilitate and defend. Instead, today as yesterday, there is a single
contest between imperialist powers fighting for the domination of world
markets.
There has never been "capitalism in one country only," because
capitalism is by its nature a phenomenon that tends toward universalization.
So there has never been another
complete economic and social system opposed to capitalism in its
imperialist configuration, as this began to manifest itself at the end
of the 19th century by building its respective economic and social
structures, its political and institutional superstructures, its
ideologies and its models:
- the privatized capitalist model that has historically characterized
the main Western bourgeois democratic powers;
- state capitalism in its various historical articulations, even if
antagonistic to each other (fascism; Stalinism), which correspond to the
need to place the state as the driving force of capitalist development.
But if we look closely, economic and social phenomena intersect as they
do in real processes: the New Deal of the democrat FD Roosevelt was not
looked down upon by early National Socialism and W. Churchill showed an
undoubted and not only initial interest in Italian fascism.
Moreover, JM Keynes identified the role of the state as the main
anti-crisis engine (public investments) like the fascist regimes in
Italy and Germany. With this, we cannot affirm that bourgeois democracy,
Stalinism and fascism are equivalent phenomena because we would repeat a
serious error typical of historical extremism and it would not be
possible to understand the evolution of the imperialist phenomenon and
its adaptation to different historical contexts.
Bourgeois democracy, fascism and nationalism in its countless variants,
Stalinism, which had already begun to manifest itself in various forms
in Europe, the Americas and Asia towards the end of the 1920s (the
establishment of communist parties of Soviet observance, the
establishment and role of the Third Communist International), are the
product of different phases of capitalist development, where the
bourgeoisies of the respective countries at different levels of
development used, in order to assert themselves and prosper, the
theoretical, political, organizational and institutional tools that they
had concretely available and that they had managed to build in relation
to the historical contexts in which they operated.
It is this peculiarity that explains the blue eagle of the New Deal in
the USA, the fasces in Italy, the swastika in Germany and the hammer and
sickle in the USSR.
But not everything is so simple because, as we have said, the phenomena
intersect and then we must resort to a further reference to understand
the origin and the affirmation of "socialism in a single nation" and its
further and diversified developments that lead us to the lights and
shadows of the SB: this reference is "Bonapartism".
A concept coined by Marx and Engels around 1869 (see "The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" ). Later, in 1884, Engels provides us with
a clear formulation of the phenomenon:
" there are periods in which the contending classes have almost equal
strength, so that the state power, in its apparent capacity as mediator,
momentarily acquires a certain autonomy in relation to both... such as
the Bonapartism of the first and especially of the second French empire,
which made use of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and of the
bourgeoisie against the proletariat..."(3).
Although proto-fascism tended to shift the class conflict into a
conflict between poor nations and rich nations ( "Western democratic
plutocracies") , assuming " socialist" contents , Bonapartist regimes
that cloak themselves in anti-imperialism cannot be hastily defined as
"fascist" , because fascism has precise characteristics and, in its
affirmation, manifests an aggressive foreign policy, chains and
oppresses the proletarian class, relegating it to rigid spheres through
the totalitarian state that abolishes and persecutes any kind of
opposition and dissent. The same social policies intended, in general,
for the subaltern classes with the evident aim of gaining their loyalty
therefore coexist with the bloody repression of any form of political
and social opposition.
This, objectively, has not yet happened in Venezuela with the si -
systematicity and efficiency typical of fascist and national-fascist
regimes. Therefore, any comparison that intends to equate Chavez and
Maduro with Mussolini (but also with Videla and Pinochet) is devoid of
any historical foundation.
In the USSR, the process that led to privileging the national interests
of the nascent "socialist state" over those of the Russian and world
proletariat did not begin with the death of Lenin (1924) and the
subsequent affirmation of Stalinism, but with the Treaty of Brest
Litovsk (1918); it continued with Soviet foreign policy towards the
Turkish revolution (1920) and was then further strengthened with the
bloody repression of the revolt of sailors, soldiers and the proletariat
of Kronstadt in 1921 and of the Makhnovist opposition in Ukraine, within
the framework of the violent repression of all internal and external
opposition to the party to arrive at the institution of the NEP (1921)
and the Treaty of Rapallo (agreement between the USSR and Germany) of 1922.
It must be said that if all these choices were understandable in light
of the real imperialist aggression and the civil war (1918 - 1921),
together with the catastrophic economic and social conditions of
post-revolutionary Russia, they objectively contradicted the process of
triggering the world revolution and with it the very internationalist
proclamations of the Communist International (III In
International 1919-1943), which will in fact be progressively abandoned.
If in Italy and Germany the bourgeoisie, in order to survive, abolishes
bourgeois democracy and plays the card of fascist dictatorship, in
Russia capitalism, in order to develop, will have no choice but to
choose the Bolshevik perspective, now in its revolutionary drift,
because that was available and nothing else.
But in Stalinism, then, are there elements of fascism, the same ones
that we find in those regimes that, as in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba,
have assumed forms that are said to be fully socialist, even if national?
The question is badly posed because if there are formal analogies
between the institutional systems that develop in the capitalist
production system, they must be contextualized and not compared in the
abstract according to a widespread tendency having anti-communist and
reactionary aims.
In the New Deal USA, the bourgeoisie is strong enough to be able to
defend its interests by mediating them through bourgeois democracy,
which in fact persists with all its economic, political and social
institutions.
In Italy and Germany, however, the bourgeoisie is weak and delegates the
management of the state to the fascist parties.
The fascists assume power constitutionally; they establish a
dictatorship that erases the democratic form that was now an obstacle to
the interests
bourgeois and financial capital which still manages to limit the role of
the state in the economy.
In the USSR the bourgeoisie is very weak: an armed revolution has wiped
out the old Czarist regime, "bulwark of reaction in Europe", and its
historical infrastructures; the post-revolutionary economic situation is
very serious; a civil war fueled by the main imperialist powers is
looming. The role of the state in the economy and in social life will
therefore be increased, unilateral, direct and widespread, controlled as
it is by the sole Communist Party in power, which in the nascent Soviet
state will begin to pursue that "capitalist restoration" that will find
full implementation with Stalinism, as the epilogue of the defeated
revolution.
But if bourgeois democracy, fascism and Bolshevism in its Stalinist
drift constitute configurations of capitalist exploitation , they
produce very diversified political and institutional forms also in terms
of social organisation and freedom, precisely because their history is
different and their aims are different.(4)
Coming to the present day, imperialism is a phenomenon that by investing
capital upsets the economic and social structures of the areas where it
asserts itself, creating new class structures between the bourgeoisies
and the indigenous proletarian classes, qualifying itself (also) as a
stimulus and driving force of a new model of development, albeit unequal.
In Latin America, Asia and Africa, in order to fully assert themselves,
the national bourgeoisies began to play an anti-imperialist role,
precisely through bourgeois nationalism.
In those countries, where there were no solid bourgeois democratic
traditions to refer to, the weak native bourgeoisies turned to
socialism, often imported from the West and adapted to national
realities: but what asserted itself was not socialism, but rather
Bonapartist regimes aimed at achieving "national unity" with an
anti-imperialist function, with inevitable more or less significant
concessions to the subaltern classes to free them from underdevelopment
which, let us remember, constitutes a brake on the development of
capitalism itself.
We could then define Maduro as the continuator of a Bonapartist
experience that, begun with Chavez, has indisputably acquired
credibility thanks to the social reforms that he followed up, to raise
the material conditions of the subaltern classes in order to achieve
"the unity of the homeland against imperialism", that is, the true
essence of the SB.
Moreover, even the most recent history of Latin America expresses other
precedents of this type (the Cuban revolution, the first phase of
Peronism in Argentina; the experience of the Allende government in
Chile, for example) and an immense literature on the subject.
Chavez was the political leader of a Bonapartist front; the product of a
social polarization that saw relevant components of the Venezuelan
bourgeoisie demand emancipation from North American imperialism to
contain and personally manage the penetration of foreign capital
together with the relevant natural resources deriving from oil and raw
materials, against those internal reactionary bourgeois components that
have historically benefited from imperialism and that today, in order to
survive, feed the political, parliamentary and social opposition of the
extreme right of which Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia is the most recent and
significant product.
This opposition continues with all its convulsions and the manifest and
ineffective coup attempts plotted by the USA have the possibility of
repeating themselves precisely because, in Venezuela, Chavez reached
power with democratic elections which imply the permanence of the
opposition while in Cuba Castro assumed power with an armed revolution
which swept away the old Cuban ruling groups linked to US imperialism.
Thus the Venezuelan Bonapartist regime represents an unstable balance
between opposing social forces in a reality in which foreign capital has
a decisive role, and the government is struggling between the interests
of the national bourgeoisie that demands an autonomous role from
imperialism and those of the bourgeois components that instead benefit
from this capital.
Despite the fact that the SB is losing consensus even with entire
sectors of the subaltern classes who are giving in to the appeals and
above all to the maneuvers of the pro-imperialist right (replicating a
direction already effectively tested in Salvador Allende's Chile), it
has not suppressed bourgeois democratic freedoms, it has not chained the
proletariat and the political and social opposition with a police
dictatorship as has happened in the past in numerous Latin American
countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay), but has tried to create
an inter-class front between the proletariat and that Venezuelan
national bourgeoisie determined to stem the penetration of foreign
capital to its exclusive advantage.
The economic and social measures implemented by the Venezuelan leaders
must therefore not be underestimated by revolutionary critics, as well
as the militias defending the revolution and the various popular control
committees spread across the territory of that country.
All these achievements were, together, a necessity to strengthen the SB
in its interclass essence and a concession to the inevitable material
needs of the subaltern classes and their claim for an active role in the
national revolutionary process and an inevitable necessity to
strengthen the SB in its interclass essence.
The SB and, in general, any form of socialism that tends to assert
itself in a single nation, must not be demonized nor, even less, passed
off as something that cannot be
and that is socialism. The revolution
Cuban has achieved important social progress such as that achieved by
Chavez in Venezuela: but the engine of these achievements has not been
the proletariat, nor its liberation their ultimate goal. And if the
proletariat has been involved, more by Chavez than by Castro, it is the
nascent national bourgeoisie that, in its contradictory affirmation, has
held and holds the helm to manage its class hegemony, in Cuba as in
Venezuela. But the balances of the world imperialist contest overwhelm
the plans of the weak Venezuelan national bourgeoisie and the very
construction of the SB, with disastrous consequences on the Venezuelan
and continental social structures as happened, for example, with the
defeat of Allende in Chile in 1973.
But once again imperialist aggression - "the external enemy" - cannot be
used to hide the internal enemy.
In Venezuela there is no system to defend because it is socialist, and
we cannot even continue to believe that revolutionary intransigence,
even if only stated, preserves us from imperialist aggression and
internal political and social derailments.
In a backward context like Venezuela we cannot but support those
processes that have objectively raised the material conditions of a
people simply because they were carried forward by the national
bourgeois components that achieved the classic objectives of the
continental bourgeois revolutions, redistributing in a more equitable
way the social wealth produced and accumulated to overcome, at least in
part, backwardness as a brake on capitalist development, while
maintaining unchanged the property and power relations still held by the
Venezuelan anti-imperialist bourgeoisie.
But the bourgeoisie is not a universal class and to defend its hegemony
and its interests it can easily replace instrumental progressivism with
forms of domination that can materialize in the authoritarian drifts of
an inspired experience.
to national socialism, according to the
unavoidable historical genesis of Bonapartism, which is what happens in
Venezuela.
But, by avoiding posing the question of freedom in the abstract, it is
also necessary to avoid falling into the trap of the " external enemy ",
which resolves itself in "the unity of the homeland for the defense of
socialism from imperialist aggression", to the full advantage of those
components of the national bourgeoisie who hold power in Venezuela.
Once again, the exceptions of history surprise unprepared
revolutionaries, with a social rootedness and an organizational presence
not up to the needs, which does not allow them to effectively influence
the balance of power between the classes to condition them in the sense
of defending the interests of the subaltern classes, both against
external and internal adversaries because, if the enemy is objectively
represented by imperialism, its allies and its misdeeds, it is very true
what the German internationalists affirmed on the threshold of the first
imperialist world war "... the main enemy
It is made up of the bourgeoisie that each person has in their own country."
From this point of view, Nestor Makhno's experience in Ukraine, which
took place between 1918 and 1921, can be considered a reference which,
even if less complete than others (the Paris Commune; Spain 1936/3, the
Hungarian uprising of 1956, to name but a few), represented a model of
management of economic and social life which could be generalised,
albeit with the inevitable limitations, in the post-revolutionary
Russian experience.
The Bolsheviks, in keeping with their social democratic traditions of
the Second Socialist International and their teacher Karl Kautsky, who
was only formally but never substantially "renegade", instead took the
path of creating a "socialist state" for the construction of state
capitalism, progressively liquidating all political and social opposition.
In any case, Makhno attempted to position himself in relation to
Bolshevism by recognising the concrete balance of power and by taking
into account the existing reality in which he was forced to operate,
thus avoiding opposing it only because Bolshevism did not represent his
own anarchist communist horizon.
He did so generously by choosing, in the heat of the revolution and
civil war, the difficult alliance with the Bolsheviks to fight the White
counter-revolution armed by the Western and Eastern imperialist powers
as the main enemy in that precise historical moment, trying, at the same
time, to indicate a political, social and organizational path
alternative to Bolshevism: a path that he did not have the strength to
sustain, both because of the adverse circumstances in which this
experience developed, and because the Russian and international
anarchist movement, together with the opposition communist and socialist
movement, were going the other way anyway, as were the social democrats
(Bolsheviks).
From this point of view, the comparison with Maduro's Venezuela could
even take on some validity because there are numerous similarities
between the Bolshevik drift and "Bolivarian socialism" .
Notes:
1) Pietro Ingrao, «On one side of the barricade in defense of socialism»
- «l'Unità» 25 October 1956;
Giancarlo Pajetta, «The tragedy of Hungary - «l'Unità» of 28 October 1956;
Palmiro Togliatti, «On the events in Hungary», «l'Unità», 30 October 1956
2) Taken from: "Half a century of struggle of the world working class
(1900 - 1950)." - In "Piccola Enciclopedia Anarchica" edited by the
Initiative Group "for an oriented and federated Movement" - Rome 1950;
3) F. Engels "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State -
Editori Riuniti, 2005
4) To better understand the role of Bolshevism and its historical
incomparability with fascism, it is sufficient to consider the debate
that took place in Russia on workers' control and the trade union
question from 1917 to 1921 (10th Congress of the Bolshevik Communist
Party). In fact, the transition that in Italy and Germany will lead to
state trade unionism will be far simpler and shorter than the one
achieved in Russia.
The following bibliographical note does not dwell on the particularities
of the Venezuelan situation but on the theoretical contents of the SB in
the context of the Latin American continent, of the current imperialist
phase and of the historical references and anarchist communism contained
in the text.
Karl Marx: "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" - Editori
Riuniti, 1977.
Ida Met: "The Kronstadt Revolt"- Partizan Editions, 1970.
Pyotr Andreevich Arshinov: "The Anarchist Revolution in Ukraine " -
Pgreco editions, 2014.
Juri Colombo (edited by) "Nestor Makhno- The Revolution in Ukraine -
Memoirs". Castelvecchi, 2023
Maurice Brinton: "The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control". Jaca Book, 1976.
Daniel Guerin: "Neither god nor master". Jaca Book, 1977. (from page 425
to page 410)
" Half a century of struggle of the world working class (1900 - 1950)."
- In "Piccola Enciclopedia Anarchica" edited by the Initiative Group
"for an oriented and federated Movement" - Rome 1950.
" Hungary 1956 - the need for a budget". LOTTA COMUNISTA Editions, 1986.
Juan Josè Sebreli: "Third World Bourgeois Myth". Vallecchi, 1977.
D. Bo: "Marxism and Populism in Latin America". Ottaviano Editions, 1976.
Andre Gunder Frank: Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America.
Einaudi, Turin, 1969
Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution.
Einaudi, 1974.
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