“Part of Chávez’s legacy was how his election contributed to sparking the first ‘pink tide’ in Latin America and sparking the discussion across the global left about socialism in the 21st century.”
By Tim Young, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign
As part of a series of events, #Chávez25, marking the 25th anniversary of Hugo Chávez’s election to the presidency of Venezuela, Labour Outlook hosted a forum with speakers to discuss different aspects of Chávez’s legacy.
You can read the report-back or watch the event in full below:
As Logan Williamsof the National Education Union and Arise Festival noted in his chair’s introduction, Chávez’s election in 1998 sparked the first ‘pink tide’ in Latin America, leading to fundamental changes in the continent and beyond, with the ideas of socialism and anti-imperialism being discussed again on a global scale.
The first speaker, Alex Main, Director of International Policy, Center for Economic & Policy Research, was a witness to the 2002 coup against Chávez. He recounted how he had been present at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas on the first day of the coup on 11 April with a huge crowd of Chávez supporters from the barrios, determined to defend the Chávista government despite being subjected to sniper fire.
The collapse of the coup, in large part to the mass mobilisation of Caracas’s barrios, illustrated a key feature of Chávez’s beliefs in action: the importance of empowering poor Venezuelans previously marginalised and excluded from meaningful political participation for decades. As his presidency continued, this was exemplified through the drive for participatory democracy, involving many forms of community-based projects and structures, such as community councils and communes, as a key ingredient of building socialism at a grass-roots level.
A second key feature was Chávez’s drive to recover Venezuela’s sovereignty through reversing the creeping tide of privatisation and regaining control of Venezuela’s natural resources, overcoming enormous resistance from local and international elites in the process. State income soared, to be invested in education, health and other social programmes, with economic growth averaging 4% annually.
The third key feature in Alex’s view was how Chávez put Bolivarian internationalism at the heart of Venezuela’s foreign policy, advancing global economic and social justice and opposing imperialism. Alongside denouncing imperialist wars and coups, he worked with others to set up progressive bodies to advance regional integration and promote redistribution.
Inevitably, these successes infuriated the United States, whose brutal sanctions programme from 2015 onwards has battered the Venezuelan economy, causing untold hardship to millions of Venezuelans, including thousands of avoidable deaths.
Alex concluded by noting the British government’s support for US sanctions, including the retention of Venezuelan gold reserves in the Bank of England, and the need for British solidarity activists to pressurise the British government to release the gold and break with the US’s foreign policy towards Venezuela.
Suzie Gilbert, co-producer of Oliver Stone’s ‘South of the Border’ and its follow-up, ‘My friend Hugo’, recounted how Chávez had encouraged the pair to visit a range of Latin American countries to gauge the support and enthusiasm for Chávista policies of reducing poverty, as a corrective to his demonisation in mainstream media.
They found deep support for what Chomsky has called ‘the second independence of Latin America’, as regional institutions such as CELAC, UNASUR and the Bank of the South were built or solidified.
She noted that Gustav Petro, now President of Colombia, had observed that until Chavez paved the way showing that a peaceful route to socialism was possible, other left movements didn’t have examples of successful left-wing electoral politics – albeit that elites would resist this success.
On Chávez’s death, she recalled that Lula’s tribute in the New York Times spoke of Chavez’s commitment to the cause of Latin American integration and his commitment to the social transformations needed to ameliorate the misery of his people, noting that his social campaigns, especially in the areas of public health, housing and education, had succeeded in improving the standard of living of tens of millions of Venezuelans.
Since then, Suzie noted, while there had been advances there had also been depressing changes – deaths, impeachments and the use of lawfare against democratically elected representatives. As Chávez had long warned, US interference is ever-present – which Oliver Stone’s documentary on Lula’s imprisonment explores.
Matt Willgress of Labour Outlook & VSC observed how part of Chávez’s legacy was how his election contributed to sparking the first ‘pink tide’ in Latin America and sparking the discussion across the global left about socialism in the 21st century.
Chávez’s aim as his presidency developed was to make Venezuela a genuinely independent nation, which meant taking control of its natural resources and ensuring that the process of change was led by the mass of people.’ Millions of people were freed from illiteracy and lifted out of poverty, with Chávez standing against the social marginalisation and exclusion and institutional repression so common before his election.
The second wave of the subsequent ‘pink tide’ has had its ebbs and flows but a key lesson emerging is that you can’t be a socialist without internationalism and anti-imperialism. This is not just a sloganising point, albeit a good one, but an essential truth because of the nature of the global economic system that we live in.
But while Chávez held to the view that you can’t have real socialism without internationalism, he also held that you can’t have real socialism without democracy, and real direct democracy at that, saying: “the way to save the world is through socialism but socialism that exists within a democracy.” That democratic element of Chávez’s politics, based on mass social movements and urban areas and oppressed sections of the people such as the Afro-Venezuelan population is what gave it such an appeal around the world, in that it could be related to in ways that other left or self-styled ‘socialist’ movements could not be.
Chávez believed that socialist change had to be profoundly democratic but also uninterrupted, saying controversially to some of his followers that Trotsky had said the revolution is permanent: “let’s go with that,” by which Chávez meant there had to be a process of renovating, renewing and democratising that change at every point.
This helps explain what others have touched on regarding the importance placed by Chávez on direct democracy through community councils and communes.
Chávez developed a theme from Che that to really break from the domination of the empire and to build a new society, you could not outsource elements of that struggle – the mass of people have to do it for themselves.
Matt concluded by noting that, 25 years on since Chávez’s election, it is absolutely key to opposing US interference in Venezuela, in revolutionary Cuba and all Latin American countries. Let us honour Chavez by building a better world today. Viva Chávez!
- Hugo Chávez, Spark for 21st Century Socialism and Latin American Liberation – was hosted by Labour Outlook on November 27th, 2023. You can watch it here or listen on the Arise Festival podcast here.
- You can follow the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign on Facebook and Twitter.
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