In recent weeks, Bolivian social movements have blockaded highways and streets, besieging the capital to protest President Rodrigo Paz’s economic and social policies.
Right now, social and indigenous groups in Ecuador are preparing for a national strike on June 24–26, having initiated a recall process against President Daniel Noboa. They want an end to extractivist policies, and reject the government’s public service price hikes and failure to comply with previous agreements.
The ‘stabilisation phase’
While social movements in the rest of the region are pushing back against anti-popular economic policies, in Venezuela, the process of state restructuring has accelerated since the January 3 United States bombing.
It began with the hydrocarbon law reform, then the mining law reform. Now, the announced electricity law reform paves the way for privatisation and price hikes to make the sector more profitable for private companies.
According to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the US government, Venezuela is currently in a “stabilisation” phase. This stabilisation plan, announced by Rubio and agreed to by the Delcy Rodríguez government, is about more than just control and management of the economy.
It involves a structural transformation of Venezuela’s social state and rule of law, dismantling whatever social policies remain. The US government insists that, by the end of the stabilisation phase, there should be a complete transformation of Venezuela’s social institutions and legal framework.
This radical reform is to be carried out by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and its allies — that is, by Chavismo.
A kamikaze government
Why has the US government kept the upper echelons of Chavismo in power? Is it simply because they can guarantee political stability and territorial control through their hold over the repressive apparatus?
Or, additionally, because forcing Chavismo to eliminate social policies — not just those it introduced, but even institutions that predated Chavez’s election in 1998 — would represent its final and definitive defeat.
By delegating the dismantling of Venezuela’s social state to Chavismo, the US guarantees the next government will not bear the political cost of implementing such reforms. It also avoids having Chavismo in opposition, which could mobilise society against these reforms.
Since about 2017, there has been a debate in academic and political opinion circles over what the first post-Chavista government might look like. Analysts and investigators noted that any new government would have to carry out a “political self-immolation” or become a kind of “kamikaze government” to enable such a transition.
The first post-Chavista government would have to implement unpopular and brutal austerity measures, such as “adjusting” public service and petrol prices, restructuring debt and the state, and turning to the International Monetary Fund to secure capital injections.
Discussions in these circles centred on the “day after” syndrome: the magical expectation of recovery following the change in government clashing with the harsh reality of this structural adjustment. Any post-Chavista government would have to bear this high political and social cost. One variable excluded in these analyses was the possibility that a Chavista government could implement these policies.
The Nicolás Maduro government began to do this with many of its measures, but his government never dismantled the legal system and apparatus that formally constitutes Venezuela’s social state.
Instead, policies were implemented via de facto measures, national emergency decrees or states of emergency due to economic crisis, and measures such as the anti-blockade law. Rodríguez’s government represents a certain continuity and radicalisation of that process.
Yet, at the same time, it also represents the first post-Chavista government. It is dismantling the state and its legal apparatus because the US overlord believes that Chavismo must bear the social cost of austerity, while using its repressive apparatus and carrying out an ideological juggling act to contain its social base, which in theory should be the first to react in opposition.
Annilating popular resistance
But does Chavismo have the capacity to mobilise against these policies?
Venezuela’s grassroots, at times organised around the most advanced Chavista sectors, did mobilise against austerity policies in 2018–19.
In subsequent years, the campesino movement mobilised and suffered first-hand measures aimed at destroying the movement, from assassinations to cooption and division.
The same occurred with the trade union movement, with dozens of its leaders arrested and jailed, including some well-known Chavista militants.
Left sectors that broke with the government, or that never supported it, were intervened into and stripped of their electoral registration. Criticism was relentlessly criminalised.
Ultimately, large sections of Caracas’ poor neighbourhoods, which had been key to mobilising support for Chavismo, also took to the streets in the wake of the July 28 elections [when the Maduro government claimed victory while refusing to publish results] only to be violently repressed. The most macabre social terror was unleashed to prevent further protests.
All this dealt a sustained blow to the capacity of social sectors to respond to the state’s dismantling.
I mentioned the capacity for resistance of social movements in countries where progressive governments were replaced at the ballot box by right-wing governments precisely due to this contrast.
The Chavista government never devised a strategy for relinquishing power and becoming an opposition with agency. On the contrary, they squandered mobilising capacity, social support and the power of resistance, preferring to cling to power through fear and terror.
Stage set for transition
Rubio’s stabilisation plan involves the ruling echelons of Chavismo completing the dismantling of the social state, bearing the political cost of austerity, and overseeing the transition as the first post-Chavista government.
As such, the next government will have the dirty work done for them. If nothing is done, they will face a completely demoralised, fragmented and impotent opposition.
The greatest victory that the current stabilisation plan could achieve is convincing society that demobilisation is irreversible. Avoiding this trap requires overcoming the grief for what has been lost and grasping the new contradictions that will inevitably generate fresh antagonisms.
Rebuilding mobilisation requires grassroots work and identifying new arenas for struggle. Venezuelan society faces an uphill battle, but one that is indispensable for building a new hegemony from below.
[Manuel Azuaje Reverón is a Corriente Comune member. Abridged from links.org.au.]