Luis Bilbao: Venezuela and `the rebirth of the idea of revolution'

Interview with Luis Bilbao, conducted by Agustina Desalvo for the Argentinian journal Razón y Revolución, issue #18 (second semester 2008). Translated by Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal/Green Left Weekly’s Federico Fuentes and published with the permission of Bilbao.

Luis Bilbao is a central participant in the construction of the mass United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and in the formation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR); founding editor of the Latin America-wide monthly magazine América XXI. Luis Bilbao will be a featured guest at the World at a Crossroads conference, to be held in Sydney, Australia, on April 10-12, 2009, organised by the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Green Left Weekly. Visit http://www.worldATACrossroads.org for full agenda and to book your tickets.

* * *

What is imperialism’s strategy for Latin America? Who are those who are fighting against it and how are they doing so?

For more than 200 years, the US strategy for Latin America has been domination. There are a number of official documents dating as far back as 1820 that belonged to members of the government, of Congress, that put forward the proposition of seizing control of the region for themselves.

The Free Trade of Americas Agreement (FTAA) was nothing more than an attempt to formalise the assimilation of the entire continent within a single market, a single currency, a single army and a single government. That is, in the more general sense, the strategy of the US.

However, during the last few years a particular phenomenon has occurred, a phenomenon provoked by the very deep and structural crisis facing the world capitalist system, that has not only led imperialism to further pillage the workers and peasants of all our countries, but has also put the local bourgeoisies up against the wall, suctioning an elevated portion of the surplus value that they extract from workers, and which has provoked a very particular opposition, of course within the boundaries in which the bourgeoisie can oppose imperialism, but a clear attempt of strategic resistance.

If we look at what occurred in August 2000, an extraordinary event in world, and specifically continental, geopolitics occurred: the emergence of the geopolitical notion of South American presidents. A new instance of international organisation emerged that, curiously, rests on two governments, two countries: Brazil and Venezuela.

But at that time, Brazil was headed by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, so there was no revolutionary intention behind the move, no socialist intention, no anti-imperialist intention, from the point of view of the necessities of the masses, in the origins of this movement. Instead what existed was the necessity of resisting the indiscriminate, uncontrolled looting by the United States of the economies of our countries.

This movement started along an axis with two very different points of leverage, which after eight years has resulted in the creation of UNASUR (Union of South American Nations). A movement of South American convergence has come into being and dragged governments from a wide political spectrum behind a common position, which is the necessity of putting a brake on the brutal plundering of the United States.

But I want to insist: a brutal plundering no longer just of the workers and peasants, but also the bourgeoisies themselves. The steamrolling entrance of international finance capital into all the areas of the economy of each our countries has sucked out of them the possibility of generating local wealth, of the illegitimate ripping-off of wealth which the local bourgeoisies carry out.

In this way, US strategy now clashes not only with its traditional enemies. It does not clash only with the resistance of workers, students, peasants, but now also clashes with the South American bourgeoisies.

We also have to point out that the bourgeoisies have a completely limited room for resistance, and moreover are divided in every country, which explains why some do opt to – understanding that it is still profitable for them – to place themselves in line with the needs and will of international financial capital and the United States.

This has, without a doubt, created complicated situations in each country. But the result of this very complex set of factors has been seen in the creation of UNASUR.

UNASUR is a heterogenous grouping within which exist the most diverse set of forces, where no one is missing, not even the president of Colombia, a direct representative of the will of the United States in South America. And he does not remain outside because, I insist, there are also needs of the local bourgeoisie to resist what is nothing more than a brutal expression, in the sphere of economic looting, of the structural crisis of the capitalist system

Now, this situation produces itself in an unequal manner because the resistance does not only bring together all the bourgeoisies. Within this grouping has appeared a force which does not represent the bourgeoisies, but instead represents, in general, the people in the very ambiguous sense of the word, as the word itself presupposes, and with a perspective of confrontation with imperialism, from an anti-capitalist position that is vague, at times diverse, and in many senses contradictory, but anti-capitalist nevertheless.

A bloc within UNASUR, within the Latin American situation, has been created. It is called ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas). ALBA is made up of Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, to which we have to add some Caribbean countries that, for different reasons, cannot fully integrate themselves but want to do so and have the disposition and will to do so, plus Ecuador, which, for very particular reasons – and conjunctural in my opinion – has not become a member yet.

Therefore, within UNASUR there is a bloc called ALBA, that even goes beyond the boundaries of UNASUR because ALBA is not only South American: it includes Cuba and Nicaragua.

Within this bloc, the determining factor is the will to resist imperialism from a non-capitalist, and in some cases explicitly socialist, perspective. On this point, the US has a conflict of a different nature, because it is confronting an organised, extended, structured resistance of all the south of the hemisphere against its policies, as well as from within this bloc that resists, that impedes it from carrying out its aims as occurred very clearly in the FTAA meeting.

As a side point, President George W. Bush suffered a crushing defeat at the meeting of the FTAA in Mar de Plata, but this defeat was not suffered at the hands of the revolutionary forces, or at the hands of the representatives of the fighting, organised, class-conscious working class. No, the two protagonists of this extraordinary event that resulted in a disaster for the head of the empire, were none other than Argentina’s President Néstor Kirchner and Uruguay’s PresidentTabaré Vasquez.

Néstor Kirchner is far from being a representative of the revolutionary proletariat and, although from a totally different view, the same can be said for Tabaré Vasquez.

Why did this occur? Well, precisely because of the level of contradiction that the world capitalist crisis has generated between the bourgeoisies that sustain these governments and imperialism. This has been translated into a belligerence that has reached a point where these bourgeoisies said, “We are going to negotiate everything you want, but we will not allow FTAA to go ahead.”

So, there is a very large sphere, in many ways very diverse, in regards to the overall, general opposition of the continent to imperialism.

And the US therefore has a double problem: it has to confront those who advance with an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist perspective, who have the capacity to infecting the others and lead to a situation of revolutionary transformation of all Latin America, and it has to confront, of course on a different level, UNASUR, the whole of the region resisting US policy.

Things have reached such a point that it is an imperative for the stability of regional capitalism and, much more, for US control of the region, to halt, impede the continuity of these experiences that are seeking to move beyond capitalism. Above all else in two countries – Venezuela and Bolivia – and at a different level, Ecuador.

The US is confronting this situation through the use of arms. It has tried all possible routes; it has tried everything and failed. It cannot regain the space lost in Venezuela, in Bolivia and in Ecuador by another means that is not with arms.

That is why, to finalise my response to your question, the US is carrying out its general strategy, today, in this historic conjuncture, through a strategy of war. The US has declared war on us. And this war against all of Latin America has specific points of leverage in Venezuela and Bolivia.

If they can, they will not carry out the war in a direct manner. They are trying to do this via third parties. They are trying to force secession in Bolivia, planned, structured and led by the US. If they succeed in splitting off some departments [provinces], it is highly probable that this would lead to a civil war and abort – or at least make extremely difficult – the process underway in Bolivia, either due to the effect of the civil war itself, or because faced with such a situation, the US would have the perfect excuse to send troops and install them there under the guise of bringing “peace” to Bolivia.

The US is trying the same thing in Venezuela, although with particular characteristics. They are promoting a secessionist policy starting in Zulia province, a petroleum state that borders Colombia and is led by the opposition to the government of the Bolivarian Revolution, which has already clearly expressed itself in favour of a policy of dividing the country.

Of course, this cannot be carried out with the force of Zulia alone; rather it needs the force of the US, backed moreover by the government of Colombia, through paramilitaries who have infiltrated Venezuela.

Through different forms but with the unequivocal aim of halting these revolutionary processes in Latin America, the US is right now trying to impose its general strategy through a line of military action.

Four years after the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) assumed power  Bolivia, what balance do you make of the Evo Morales government?

Before drawing up a balance sheet of any of the revolutionary processes underway in Latin America we have to analyse and take as our starting point the reality of the world situation. A reality that has existed for a long time before, but particularly since, 1999 when the Soviet Union collapsed and a regression occurred in the overall political situation, particularly in the area of ideas and organisations that gave the proletariat and peasantry of the world even a minimum of organicism and some banners – stained, deformed, disfigured – but that provided the possibility of uniting others: the red flag, the perspective of socialism.

They were points of unity that the exploited and the oppressed of the world could have had in their hands until a reactionary wave of enormous power was unleashed in 1991. One which is deeply rooted in history and, in the last instance, comes from the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the middle of the 1920s. 

This defeat expanded over the whole continent and placed the exploited masses of the world in a very weak situation. It was not just a military battle that was lost, not just a political battle lost, not just an organisational battle lost. We lost an ideological battle, because in 1990-91, we did not just witness the collapse of the reformist and Stalinist forces that, in the last instance, survived off the Soviet Union; we also saw the collapse of what was supposed to be the counterforce to this degeneration in ideology, that is, those who had resisted the Stalinist degeneration in the 1920s, forming the Left Opposition and which was later labelled, by its enemies, Trotskyism.

Well, these forces also failed and, in my opinion, failed in a manner much more forceful than anyone expected, when it tried to explain what had occurred. At the same time that this appalling defeat was occurring, the majority of the forces who could be defined as – if we can define phenomena by its subjectivity – a revolutionary Marxist left, interpreted what had happened as a powerful leap forward by the proletariat, with the workers of the Soviet Union fighting for socialism.

They did not understand the reactionary impact of these events that would cause massive destruction, as a result of this totally contradictory movement. It is true that the collapse of the Soviet bureaucracy signified a step forward in many ways and in historic terms, but there would have to be a very prolonged stage of defeat. And this was not understood, such that the world political map was restructured from a starting point of submission, desertion, confusion and delirium.

Those who did not hand themselves over to the enemy, passing over completely to the other side of the class line, abandoned the label communist, relegated the condition of socialist, hid or buried the red flag, and threw out the idea of revolution. And let’s not even speak about parties, much less Leninism.

They either did this or got so confused that their own ranks became disorientated (that is the cause of such dispersion, splits, this generalised crisis of revolutionary organisations across the world).

And the others simply held onto the discourse, that I do not want to classify in psychological terms, a discourse completely removed from the reality around them. There are always exceptions, of course. But the only one of any weight, with international visibility, was the Cuban Revolution.

Within this international context we are seeing a rebirth of revolution and a rebirth of the struggle for socialism.

If one tries to draw up a balance sheet of what is occurring in Bolivia without this historic backdrop, without this international context, without this cataclysm of revolutionary organisations, well, they could draw up a correct literary balance sheet, but one which would be politically speaking very incorrect, because all the enormous deficiencies that we can point to over these years of government in Bolivia, in reality, are something completely different when one takes as their starting point the reality, mixed up, combined and worn out by a number of forces, out of which this transformation, this political transformation and the revolutionary government emerged from.

Placed in this context, I believe that the Evo Morales government has dealt very well with essential issues. We have to begin from this context; we cannot carry out an abstract evaluation of what has occurred.

 What have they achieved? First, advances in organisation and raising consciousness, in the general and political education of the masses. Very important steps forwards have been taken towards regaining  of the natural wealth of the country. Bolivia has aligned itself with the South American revolutionary project and has projected a line of march that systematically advances against the oligarchy, against imperialism and against the bourgeoisies not only of Bolivia but regionally (although, of course, the political leadership in Bolivia does this with a lot of care precisely because the correlations of forces within which they are working are extremely difficult).

So, that is the real measure of the situation, all of which does not presume that the possibility of risks have been closed off for the Latin American revolution in general, and in Bolivia particularly. 

There is no solution to the enormous difficulty that the masses of have in front of them in Latin America, in the world, there is no solution in Bolivia, no solution in Venezuela, nor in Ecuador or any country on their own. Or the solution exists at the Latin American scale or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t then, put simply, this revolutionary tide that Latin America is living through, this wave, this rebellion of the exploited and oppressed masses of the region will suffer a defeat.

A very terrible defeat because it will be a military defeat, because the level reached, in general, of voluntary, organised mass action of the proletariat, of the peasantry, of the popular masses in some countries, particularly Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, cannot be wound back simply through an election.

One cannot go back from here simply by losing an election. To go back to the past requires losing a war; to advance requires a victorious war. So, the responsibility that each person has, not those that act – of course those of us that are active have an enormous responsibility – but those who speak or write about this burning issues, is enormous, because what is at stake is not just any battle, it is a certain war that we have in front off us in this continent, a class war.

I am speaking in military terms, not metaphoric ones.

A war that can only be won if we have a policy that can unite millions and millions of people; not one to unite [just] socialists, to unite Marxists. The unity of Marxists will have to be the result of the unity of the masses and not the inverse. Our great task is the unity of these masses that exist as they do, that are the result of this tremendous defeat that I spoke of before.

That is why my balance sheet of the struggle in Bolivia is very positive. I believe that it has contributed in a lot of ways to this grand task of forming a mass revolutionary, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist Latin American international. They are on that path; they are heading in that direction.

That is what ALBA is, and I can give you an example that I don’t think has been highlighted much, and that has a transcendental importance. I’m referring to what occurred on May 2, 2008.

On May 4, the Santa Cruz referendum was going to be held. On May 2, at midday, President Hugo Chavez convened an ALBA summit meeting, that is, a meeting of the presidents of ALBA. At midnight and throughout the whole night of May 2, the meeting of presidents took place; the only one who was not present was the president of Cuba, for totally understandable reasons, but he sent his vice-president, Carlos Lage.

What was discussed there? Well, it was not reported in the newspapers and I believe that it did not even pop into the minds of the ranks: they discussed war, they discussed the war that was to begin in Bolivia the following Monday, parting from the programmed secessionist victory by imperialism. Not as result of winning the election but rather because it was part of an international plan where the dissemination of these counterrevolutionary ideas and of the falsified results was going to blown up all over the world press and, in the heat of the moment, a belligerence would have been unleashed in Bolivia.

That is what was discussed in Miraflores Palace [Venezuela’s presidential palace] that morning. And they resolved that it would not be Bolivia plunged into war, but rather ALBA would take up Bolivia’s war as its own, and military forces would be sent from the countries that make up ALBA, to fight in Bolivia.

That single decision postponed the war in Bolivia; that is, it gave more space, more time, to better organise, to win more people, to take space away from and weaken the enemy.

What I am trying to say is that, concretely, at this moment, right now in Latin America, a revolutionary leadership, made up of people who do not refer to themselves as Marxists, although some do; which does not have a revolutionary Marxist tradition, much less a Leninist one, with the exception of the Cuban leadership; nevertheless, is precisely exercising the revolutionary leadership of a battle against the US and against its local associates, that is, against the local bourgeoisies and oligarchies.

That fact is of enormous importance because what has emerged is something that we lacked and as a result suffered from in the 1990s, which is an International, a working International.

There is no problem with talking when there is nothing else to do. I have been a talker for many years, because I did not have the possibility to act. But now, the possibility to create a working International has opened up.

And Bolivia has contributed enormously to that, in such a way that, in the balance sheet that I draw up of Bolivia, of the Bolivian government, I view this as a very important point.

What is your balance sheet of the insurrections of 2000 and 2003? What is left of that process and what relationship does it have to the MAS government?

Well, the insurrections of 2000 and afterwards, the partial insurrections, practically constant throughout all this period, are precisely the substrate and foundation of this government; this government is an expression of those events, a legitimate expression.

What do the confrontations between the government and the denominated “half moon” (Tarija, Pando, Santa Cruz and Beni provinces) express? What is the solution to this conflict?

As I said, the hand of imperialism is behind this, promoting, organising these fractures. But, of course, imperialism does not act upon abstract considerations.

There is a structure, a historic failure one could say (failure in the geological sense) in this country. There is an objective division between the provinces or the departments that want to separate and the centre of the country.

Naturally, that has an economic structure, has historic roots and an ethnic reality. It is a material base upon which the US can act to carry out war. That is the reality.

The solution is socialist revolution, there is no intermediary solution. And the socialist revolution cannot be carried out just in Bolivia. We could take a huge step forward in that direction when we are able to propose that objective on a South American scale as a minimum, and more so on the Latin American level. But this dynamic will not be able to resolve itself if it is not placed on the international scale, the world scale.

What is situation of the working class and its organisation and where are they heading (in Bolivia and Venezuela)?

As I said before, the working class finds itself in a state like never before in its history. The working class has never experienced the degree of disorganisation, disideologisation, as it has in the last years. I’m talking about the global working class.

In opposition to what many academics or pseudo-academics of capital have said, as well as many on the left, the working class has numerically increased at an extraordinary rate in the last decades. Simply put, what capital did in progressing, in carrying out its technological revolution, was to proletarianise sectors that weren’t proletarian before and today are.

Here it is very important to talk about Karl Marx, who differentiated conceptually the working class in itself and the working class for itself. The working class in itself is made up of all those who sell their capacity to work, their labour force. The working class for itself is one that is conscious of its existence as an exploited class.

According to this classic Marxist definition, the working class in itself grew spectacularly and the working class for itself disappeared. It’s not that it was reduced: it disappeared; we cannot find conscious proletariats in the national sphere in any country of the world, with a real representation (and every time that I allude to this and other such issues, we have to make the exception of Cuba, although naturally no country can escape the influence of the world historic moment).

Clearly there are class-conscious proletarians, there are class-conscious unions, and there are parties with a real weight that have a class consciousness. But proletariats as a whole, with class consciousness, that does not exist… today, practically all doctors are proletarians, but there does not exist one that is capable of saying, “yes, I am a proletarian”.

Architects, lawyers, all have become proletarianised, not to mention the metalworkers who are also not conscious of what they are, who think they are middle class. In Argentina, a well-paid worker, given she/he has a house, lives relatively well and has a car, says she/he is middle class.

When I was talking to you about an ideological defeat, this is what I was talking about. This is the state of the working class and, of course, this conditions everything, unless we think that revolutions can be made without the working class.

Any revolutionary movement will reflect and translate this reality, because this is the reality of the working class. How will it translate? Well, through confusion, vacillation, errors, deviations, that will produce tensions between the revolutionary will of a leadership that succeeds in winning hegemony within the movement and the reality of the mass movements.

This is the state of the working class and this is true for all the countries in the world, particularly for all those in Latin America, but it is also valid, with the exception of Cuba, for the ALBA countries, and particularly valid for Venezuela.

We have just seen a simply extraordinary example of this, one that ratifies something that we have defended on our own for a long time now.

Our opinion is that the Venezuelan proletariat has been a fundamental rearguard force; when the enemy has attacked, the proletariat has come out as an impregnable bastion in defence of the revolution. But it isn’t the vanguard of the revolution, not even close, and it does not have organisation.

Consciousness has advance a lot in the last nine years but it is far from the level of consciousness say, of the proletarians that made up an English trade union in 1850.

The example that I was talking about is what just occurred in SIDOR steelworks: fifteen months of struggle by the workers of SIDOR, for wage increases and better work conditions, and no real force of the movement in SIDOR, of the workers’ movement, raised the issue of nationalisation, none.

Of course there were activists, small groups that did so. But not the workers as a whole. And not even a significant fraction.

It is false to say that it was pressure from the workers that forced Chavez to nationalise SIDOR. It was the reverse. I was a witness to this reality.

For years Chavez has been trying to raise consciousness, advance in raising the consciousness of the workers who, because they are a labour aristocracy within Venezuela (just like petroleum workers), do not consciously struggle against the system and in an organised manner.

Plus, because the revolution has resolved a number of their problems, they are comfortable with how things are. They support this revolution, they will not hand it over to anyone. But they are not the vanguard, and do not understand well why it was necessary to nationalise or recuperate SIDOR... It had to be the government that raised the slogan after 15 months of union struggle.

I believe that this paints an accurate picture of the situation of the working class in the most advanced place of the South American revolution, without even beginning to mention what is happening in the most backward place, which could well be Argentina.

And let’s not even talk about what has happened with the most important proletariat of the region, Brazil’s, that since the great struggle that it waged in 1995, where it was defeated, in the framework of the generalised fall of the world proletariat. It simply disappeared from the political scene, putting in government the Workers’ Party (PT).

An incongruence that one can pin of the bad will of Lula and his leadership team. But it would be a poor excuse for a Marxist interpretation of reality, with very little to do with a materialist outlook. In reality, what came out of the debacle of the leadership of the PT was the debacle of the Brazilian working class. That is the state of things as I see it.

Of course we are advancing; we are advancing in Venezuela, in Bolivia. The weight of the industrial proletariat in Bolivia has decreased a lot, but there are many non-industrial or non-traditional industry proletarians that in Bolivia now understand that they are proletarians, therefore there they are advancing a lot.

And I hope that we, the Argentine revolutionaries, can comprehend this situation and be able to intervene in a very critical conjuncture … in order to contribute in a positive manner towards a great leap forward in the consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, because in Argentina there is no proletariat for itself. And the organisation that existed has been handed over to an apparatus in the hands of an enemy of the working class. 

What is your general balance sheet of the Chavista process and where it is going?

The general balance sheet is even more positive than what I outlined about Bolivia, because in Venezuela the revolutionary process began with a constitutional reform and two years later became more accentuated, beginning to take very deep, social measures.

This led to a coup, and this coup, one year later, was responded to with a clear definition, now formally, for a revolution that until then was referred to as the “Bolivarian Revolution” and ideologically defined itself in line with “the tree of the three roots” (the three roots were Simon Bolivar, Simon Rodriguez and Ezequiel Zamora), but did not go beyond this ideological definition..

In 2003, in a celebration of the first anniversary of the victory against the coup at a rally of more than 1 million people in Caracas, President Chavez formally adopted the anti-imperialist character of the Bolivarian Revolution.

And one year later he took the next step and proclaimed the revolution to be socialist.

Following this, he asked the masses to vote on whether they wanted to go toward socialism or not, and stood for re-election in December 2006 with a campaign focussed on “vote for me if you want to go towards socialism, if you don’t want to go towards socialism, don’t vote for me”. This was the focus of the campaign; this was the content of Hugo Chavez’s campaign in 2006.

And he won with 63% of the vote. Afterwards a few stumbles occurred due to errors by the revolution or the concrete relationship of forces that do not escape the general framework that I outlined above.

So as part of drawing up a balance sheet we have to see that over the course of eight years, the Venezuelan revolution passed over from beginning as a general revolution, based on the ideas of liberators of the 19th century, to a formal concrete identification with socialist revolution.

But it did not stay there, because immediately after the re-election of Chavez as president with this campaign in defence of socialism, he called for the construction of a mass socialist party.

From that time until now, a mass socialist party (the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV) began to be constructed, starting with the signing up of aspiring members that resulted in the registration of 5,800,000 people. Making a rough calculation, we can say that half of those signed up due to confusion or for opportunist reasons. What are we left with then: a little more than what those who consider themselves to be revolutionary parties have in the rest of the world.

And of those 5,800,000 people, some 1,500,000 meet regularly and form an active part of the party that every Saturday meet across the country….

There are more than 1,200,000 people in the military reserves, what we would call in classical terms popular and workers’ militias, to militarily defend the Bolivarian Revolution.

This is my balance sheet: it is the biggest leap forward that has been taken in a very long time. But it is much more than a grandiose leap forward in Venezuela: it is the rebirth of the idea of revolution; revolution is no longer just a word in the mouth of some revolutionary.

Now, revolution is something that is becoming real in millions of people, in millions of minds, in millions of hands, and it is the revindication, the rebirth not only of the concept of revolution but of something that had disappeared from world politics: the revindication of socialism.

Who was revindicating socialism 10 years ago? Sure there were many of us, but we were people, isolated individuals, small parties, who no one listened to: something was missing.

Socialism is revindicated, but now not only for Venezuela, not only for Latin America, but for the world.

I have had the opportunity of accompanying President Chavez on his international tours and I have seen workers, people, youth, from completely different countries, African, Asian or European countries, revindicating the figure of Chavez. Not because of the personal characteristics of Chavez but because he is the bearer of the “Good News”, as religious people would call it.

The good news is that the possibility of fighting for socialism has been reborn.

And if that was not enough, as well as the idea of revolution, as well as the idea of socialism, in Venezuela the idea of a party has been revindicated and reborn, a notion that had also been wiped out of political theory.

How many opportunists have come to explain that we don’t have to construct more parties, and that we don’t even have to take power? Well, all that has gone to the “dustbin of history”, as Trotsky would say.

But that had a pivot upon which to generate itself and that was the Venezuelan revolution.

What is the position of Chavez regarding international political alignments? What interests does he defend and how?

Chavez defends the interests of the revolution, of the anti-imperialist revolution and the socialist revolution. How does it defend it? First, raising the consciousness of the masses: his Hello, President program is a cadre school held every Sunday, over the past nine years. And the results are easy to see because 63% of an electoral register of 15 million voters voted for socialism, for socialist revolution, not for the socialism that one can vote for in Spain, no: for socialist revolution, for a hard, firm, intransigent confrontation with imperialism. Sixty three per cent voted for this policy.

Why? Because educative work was carried out, the task of explaining what is capitalism; first, what is imperialism, and afterwards what is capitalism and why we have to get rid off it. And the people understood it, something that is not occurring in any other country in the world.

This occurred because of Chavez. I refer you to the work of Georgi Plekhanov on the role of the individual in history. There is no way that an individual can change the course of events in historic terms: but there are particular moments in historic development where the individual plays an extraordinary role, as occurred with Lenin between 1915 to 1924, as occurred with Fidel Castro in Cuba. Well, now it is occurring with Chavez.

That is the role that he is playing, of the true banner raiser of the idea of revolution for Venezuela, of socialist revolution for Venezuela, and of socialist revolution for Latin America and the world.

Chavez has the same discourse everywhere he goes, and he has a very particular characteristic, because, I would say, he does not have the straitjacket (which in many cases is very positive and in many cases is very negative) who begins to form around a person that has an ideological formation, who belongs to a party.

He has a different origin and development in regards to consciousness than that of a traditional revolutionary. To give one example, like me: there are things that I would not do because my own mental and cultural formation does not allow me to.

Well, Chavez does not have those barriers and that has been very postive... Of course this has negative features, but the result of this has precisely been that he has been able to take the message of revolution and socialism beyond his country.

And he does so, first, through his method of teaching; second, by transforming words into action.

There is a very particular phenomenon that is occurring in Venezuela, which is the transference of power. The transference of power to organs of the masses: it is not the mass organisations that are struggling for power and obtaining it, it is a revolution that from the power of the state begins to carry out a plan of organising the masses and a plan of passing over the concrete exercise of power to these organised masses, what have been called communal councils.

Well, that is how they are doing it, and I believe that the role it is playing is the most important that exists today in the idea of the revolution at the world level.

Of course, when I say this I say it in the function of what the masses see, anyone could say to me, and not without reason, that the most important role today in the world for the revolution is being played by a person that we don’t know, whose name we don’t know because he is writing, he is thinking, he is elaborating and nourishing the revolutionary ranks of the world with correct ideas.

This is right, but from the point of view of world politics, the political role that Chavez plays cannot be played by a revolutionary thinker, a revolutionary that belongs to a small party, it is Chavez that is playing that role.

What are the concrete tasks for the socialist revolution in Venezuela?

The concrete tasks of the socialist revolution are not in Venezuela, that are, in the first place, in Latin America. The enormous leap that the Venezuelan revolutionaries have made, at least some Venezuelan revolutionaries, first President Chavez, is to understand that we cannot think in terms of nations as we did until now.

On one hand we have an international policy and on the other a national policy. Chavez articulates his national policy as a function of an international policy. That is the first issue that has to be clarified: the tasks of the socialist revolution in Venezuela are unfolding in the world, and particularly in Latin America, and take concrete form in Venezuela, there are very concrete things.

In first place, to advance much more rapidly in this process – which has already advanced, but still has to improve a lot – of assuming political power by mass organisations in each sphere, of power in all senses of the word, by the workers in their factories.

I would say that today there exists a particular conjuncture where it is vital to carry out some key expropriations, not only of SIDOR which has already been done.

I believe that it is necessary to expropriate some import and distribution companies, particularly the company Polar, and some banks associated with the process of import and distribution. Because it is a point upon which a minority sector of the bourgeoisie that can exercise pressure upon the revolution still has power: we have to take that away from them, these are concrete tasks.

But I would not have said the same thing two or three years ago, it is not an axiom: we have to expropriate everything. What has to be done is expropriate everything within a strategic plan, whose objective is the Latin American revolution, not the Venezuelan revolution.

They have to be carried out in line with a process within which we have to even out a very deep inequality; we have to move towards levelling out an enormous inequality between the political processes of our countries.

We have to remember that if we look at all of Latin America, the three most important countries, in terms of population, industrial development, of real power, are Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. None of the three are in revolutionary processes.

So, the countries that want to advance towards the real perspective of socialist revolution have to make the maximum effort to level out these inequalities. Measures that could weaken the revolution, even when the idea is to strengthen them, should be avoided.

We have to be very careful because this is always concrete: one cannot say a prior that such and such measure will debilitate; such and such measure will strengthen. This has to be concretely analysed within the concrete situation. This requires a revolutionary leadership and that is where the great weakness exists, not of Venezuela but of all Latin America and, of course, the world.

We have not yet seen a recomposition of the actions and thoughts of revolutionaries, and the revolutionaries that do act lack the strategic and general backing that is the international existence of thought and action articulated in the function of socialist revolution.

A great task that the revolution in Venezuela is accomplishing is promoting the effective articulation of revolutionary internationalism: the development and articulation of revolutionary thought and of revolutionary action and organisation.

[Luis Bilbao is a central participant in the construction of the mass United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and in the formation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR); founding editor of the Latin America-wide monthly magazine América XXI; previously editor of Le Monde Diplomatique Southern Cone edition; author of 16 books, most recently Venezuela in Revolution: the Rebirth of Socialism; Marxist professor of political economy and international politics at TEA, School of Journalism, Argentina; and member of Union of Militants for Socialism, Argentina.]