The Venezuelan working class under Maduro (2013-24): Part 1 — Introduction

[Editor’s note: Below is part one of an extensive essay written by Venezuelan Marxist Luis Bonilla-Molina, originally published on his blog as “ La situación de la clase trabajadora en Venezuela (2013-2024)”. Due to its length, LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal is publishing our translation in fourth parts: Introduction (below); The first Maduro government (2013-18); The second Maduro government (2018-24); and the July 28 presidential elections.]

To understand the situation of the Venezuelan working class, it is important to analyse the Maduro government — and Madurismo — in three phases. While complementing each other and together expressing a strategic continuity, each phase has its own emphases. In the first period (2013-18), Maduro concentrated on consolidating the political project of the new bourgeoisie and crushing the political representatives of the old bourgeoisie. In the second period (2018-24), Madurismo assumed a Bonapartist character as it sought to: a) become the key factor in solving Venezuela’s crisis of capitalist accumulation (from 1983 onwards), b) forge an agreement between these two sectors of the bourgeoisie, c) implement an anti-worker package, d) and take initiatives to re-establish relations with the United States as a stable oil supplier (as occurred after the start of the war in Ukraine). The third period, which began after the July 28 presidential elections, has involved Madurismo becoming increasingly authoritarian, as it seeks to demonstrate its complete domination and capacity to lead Venezuela out of its long crisis, even at the cost of the loss of legitimacy derived from the electoral situation.

Maduro assumed power as the successor to [former president Hugo] Chávez amid an extremely complex situation. To deal with the tasks arising from this new situation, Maduro broke with the original Bolivarian project (Chavismo) to build his own project (Madurismo). This rupture was evident in the speech he gave to the National Assembly when he first took office as President of the Republic. Maduro assumed office amid a context of demands and contradictions that had developed into struggles for power:

• With the departure of Chávez (who had administered the contradictions generated by the birth of a new rich elite), the new bourgeoisie that emerged between 2002-13 started demanding that Maduro take control of the political situation. This required a 180-degree turn from the multi-class program that Chávez had implemented, and which contained within it two parallel projects: creating a new bourgeoisie and promoting forms of popular power. This meant that numerous state policies to promote popular power (expropriation of land and its redistribution to peasants, capitalist companies being reactivated under worker’s control, a percentage of the state budget being assigned to social programs, greater state control over oil income) clashed with the accumulation pretensions of the new bourgeoisie, which sought to consolidate itself as the new ruling class. Forced into the position of having to succeed someone who exerted as strong a leadership as Chávez, Maduro did not have the personality and ability to forge relationships and balances of forces that could help him deal with the pressures coming from the new bourgeoisie (and, perhaps, he did not want to given his own ties with them);

• This meant having to unify and consolidate Madurismo as the political representative of the new bourgeoisie. Under Chávez, various second-tier leaders had emerged who were capable of challenging Maduro for hegemony in terms of political control. In this context, the demands of the new bourgeoisie served as an opportunity for Maduro to consolidate his initially weak leadership. Simultaneously, it was necessary to reduce the power of other political factions within the PSUV [Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, United Socialist Party of Venezuela] and government. This reorganisation implied sidelining — and, where necessary, persecuting — former comrades fulfilling roles as party or state officials, either because they continued to defend Chavismo’s multi-class program or because they openly favoured becoming representatives of the new bourgeoisie but wanted to weaken Maduro’s power in order to replace him before the 2018 presidential elections. Maintaining the discourse of Chavismo was useful in terms of the masses, but when it came to dealing with power struggles, it was necessary to forge Madurismo as the de facto expression of the new leadership demanded by the new bourgeoisie;

• The situation was complicated because it required isolating and sidelining high and middle-ranking party and government leaders who wanted to keep promoting the kind of initiatives that Chávez envisioned within the 21st century socialism that he first announced in December 2004 and January 2005. Continuing the rhetoric of 21st century socialism was useful for keeping the social base united as new ideas, such as fomenting entrepreneurs and business opportunities, were promoted as part of constructing a new hegemonic discourse. But this rhetoric was dangerous for the strategic interests of this new fraction of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, amid growing international conflicts, Madurismo’s hollowed out socialist discourse allowed it to maintain its international alliances and the support of the campist left, as it improved its relationship with the US;

• One complication that arose was the relative autonomy expressed by the political leaderships of allied parties in the Gran Polo Patriótico (GPP, Great Patriotic Pole), who in many cases did not agree with the new political program promoted by the new bourgeoisie. A strategy was therefore required to reign in potential dissidents. What began as a trial run with the legal interventions carried out against Bandera Roja (BR, Red Flag), from the right-wing opposition, and the Movimiento Electoral del Pueblo (MEP, People’s Electoral Movement), which was part of the GPP, became the means for dealing with any splits or dissidents. In the end, every single left-wing party in the GPP faced legal interventions and were stripped of their electoral registration;

• Since it was impossible to erase with the stroke of the pen the advances made in building popular power, participatory and protagonistic democracy, and community control, along with the radicalism generated as a result of the prevailing culture of people’s self-organisation, it was necessary to further co-opt and control from above organs of popular power, compared with what had occurred between 2003-2013. The strategy adopted was to convert them into administrators of community investment projects while suppressing any initiative towards genuine territorial, political and democratic control. While some popular power initiatives that resisted this logic survive at a local level, little by little these organs have been taken over from above;

• Adding to the complexity of the situation was the fact that oil prices began to fall to the point of basically hovering around the cost of production and export. This led to an abrupt collapse in a key sector of capitalist accumulation and the social income redistribution model inherited from the Chávez period;

• The US and powerful European nations assessed that Maduro’s leadership was extremely weak and began to intensify their interventionist policies;

• The old bourgeoisie and their right-wing political representatives also viewed Maduro as standing on shaky foundations and able to be removed from power. That is why they initiated several destabilisation and insurrectional attempts between 2014-17;

• Maduro’s narrow electoral victory [in 2013] enabled the political right to create a strategy for the 2015 parliamentary elections to win a majority in the National Assembly. But far from promoting an inter-bourgeois agreement, their focus was on removing Madurismo from power and crushing the new bourgeoisie. Madurismo responded by forming a parallel parliament — in the form of a “Constituent Assembly” — that reduced the impact of the opposition’s control of parliament;

• When Maduro took power, progressive forces internationally were starting to show signs of exhaustion and needing political and leadership renewal. The deepening authoritarian turn in Nicaragua [under President Daniel Ortega] complicated the alliances that had been built. The following years saw mobilisations and the removal of progressive forces from power in Brazil and Bolivia, and the accelerated deterioration of popular support for similar forces in other countries. The inability of progressive forces to go beyond a capitalist program with a social agenda and pursue an anti-capitalist path undermined its image and eroded its social base;

• As this was occurring, the extreme right and neo-fascists were gaining strength internationally. This generated a new polarisation between conservatives and progressives, to Maduro’s benefit. While strategically reorienting the Bolivarian project towards something closer to neoliberalism, Maduro was able to frame this shift as part of the fight against fascism.

In contrast to Chavismo, which was the social extension of Chávez's leadership and ideas, and was based on an alliance between the party and the state/military, Madurismo began constructing a collective civic-military-police leadership. In order to become hegemonic and long-lasting, it sought to establish itself as the political representative of the new bourgeoisie. During its first phase (2013-18), its aim was to crush the old bourgeoisie and its political representatives. In its second phase (2018-24), Madurismo sought to play the role of an arbiter able to unify the two competing bourgeois sectors through its sui generis Bonapartist policies.

The political right — and much of the left — have underestimated Maduro and Madurismo. Although Maduro is no intellectual, he is a master pragmatist and knows how to use economic power to build alliances. He knows his limits and has worked to develop shared leadership by unifying interests. In underestimating Madurismo, its adversaries have played into his hands. With each battle, Maduro has further consolidated his power and weakened his opponents. This was particularly the case between 2013-24, when he managed to weaken and politically control the right, while intervening into and taking over left-wing parties. Maduro also crushed the right’s insurrectional attempts through the use of police-military force on the streets.

However, Maduro has also increasingly underestimated the level of people’s discontent with deteriorating material living conditions. This meant Maduro did not fully appreciate the possibility that María Corina Machado (MCM) — herself having suffered multiple defeats at the hands of her opponents within the right — and then her preferred presidential candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia (EGU), could see such exponential grow in their support.

An important part of the intelligentsia (of all ideological persuasions), who should have been able to help build popular alternatives to Madurismo, instead succumbed to emotions derived from the impossibility of establishing a broad intellectual dialogue with those in power. This only contributed to the successes of Madurismo’s persistent and consistent pragmatism. Their contempt for Maduro’s lacklustre performance meant many of these intellectuals were incapable of recognising Madurismo’s bourgeois class character.

The flip side of this is that many international intellectuals seeking to analyse the situation in Venezuela have struggled to comprehend the relations of oppression that the new bourgeoisie has established over the working class, beyond any errors or actions imposed by circumstances. For the bourgeoisie, as a social class in Venezuela, the issue of worker-employer relations is substantive (in particular the mechanisms for regulating the right of workers to strike and for controlling wage increases when considering inflation and purchasing power). Several indicators demonstrate how the concerns and proposals of the bourgeoisie — the old bourgeoisie of the Fourth Republic (1958-1998) and the new bourgeoisie of the Fifth Republic (1999-) — have been accommodated through state policies. These include: the trajectory of the minimum wage and inflation over time; converting salary payment into bonuses as a means to undermine labour achievements such as Christmas (or additional months) and vacation pay and other social benefits; legislating to regulate substantive rights with regard to the freedom of association and right to strike; and the manner in which the state “administers” these rights. This must be combined with understanding the historic and current mechanisms that the bourgeoisie used to expropriate oil rent and its impacts on the material living conditions and democratic freedoms of the working class. These critical issues are ignored by this international intellectual class, which has failed to comprehend the shift that Madurismo represents within the Bolivarian project: while maintaining an increasingly tenuous continuity with Chavismo, Madurismo is a pro-bourgeois break with it that seeks to impose its own identity.

This probably has to do with the challenges in identifying the origins and structural causes of the crisis Venezuela is living through. The crisis of capitalist accumulation and political model of representation that erupted in 1983 — from which Venezuela has still not escaped — emerged within the framework of the start of neoliberal globalisation, the internationalisation of capital and the financialisation of the world economy. Since then, various political projects have tried to resolve this crisis.

The first project (1983-92) was tried by the existing social democratic and Christian democratic political forces [that had alternated in power during the Fourth Republic]. A second project (1993-98) emerged as a result of the dissolution of the Punto Fijo Pact [signed between the parties of the Fourth Republic] and the emergence of a new alliance based on a former historic leader of Christian democracy (Rafael Caldera) with sections of the left — parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, including the Partido Communista de Venezuela (Communist Party of Venezuela, PCV) — that had been excluded from the pact. This attempted multi-class alliance behind a neoliberal program became known as Agenda Venezuela. A third project (1988-94) involved the formation of a workers’ front led by Causa R (Radical Cause) and [trade union leader] Andrés Velásquez, which shifted from the left to the political centre. Finally, the fourth project, Chavismo, was a multi-class civic-military project (which included the PCV, that broke early with the Caldera government). It defended a Third Way based on a humane capitalism in which the traditional bourgeoisie was to be replaced by a new nationalist bourgeoisie.

An important section of the left that accompanied Chávez’s project did so — or least justified its support as such — on the premise that the crisis generated by this attack on the old bourgeoisie could generate a revolutionary situation and open a path to socialism. This section of the left became filled with unbridled joy when Chávez announced his intentions to build 21st century socialism, in many cases losing the capacity to structurally analyse the Bolivarian process's direction. The international left — an incestuous lover of geopolitics as a discourse of power — went into ecstasy with Chavismo’s call for a 21st century socialism, an emotional state from which it has not yet escaped. But 21st century socialism did not break with Chavismo’s multi-class project; rather it deepened its two constitutive lines: the promotion of forms of popular power and direct democracy within the popular movement; and supporting and funding the creation of a new bourgeoisie aligned with the Bolivarian political project.

Since emerging as a political expression, Madurismo has led to a sustained period of precarious material living conditions for the working class and a deterioration of political freedoms. Some of these are the results of structural factors inherited by Maduro (such as the crisis that began in 1983 and Chavismo’s errors) while others are of his own making.

Author’s note: I am grateful for the critical reading of the draft, as well as the comments and observations (partial or extensive) of Adelmo Becerra, Antonio Cunha Neto, Rose Mary Hernandez, Luz Palomino, Raul Gil, Oswaldo Coggiola, Pedro Fuentes, Ana Cristina Carvalho, as well as the contributions of Pedro Eusse, Manuel Sutherland, Victor Alvarez, Roberto Lopez, Tony Navas, Maria Alejandra Diaz.

Luis Bonilla is a university professor and researcher in pedagogy and social sciences. Member of the CLACSO Steering Committee and of the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education. Research director of Other Voices in Education. Militant of the Fourth International.