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University de Los Andes (ULA) lecturer Jutta Schmitt writes:  The Bolivarian Revolution here in Venezuela is, according to our analysis … and placed in the context of even, uneven and combined development … the effort to accomplish the pending historical tasks of the French revolution (such as agrarian reform introduced by the Chavez' government), the push for industrialization beyond the oil/extractive industry sector, and the building of a national bourgeoisie, which has been a continuous effort of this government since 1999.

Simultaneously and facing today's globalized reality, the Chavez government has been strongly pushing towards Latin American integration, in order to effectively counter the USA's Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which originally was going to take effect in 2005 …a plan aborted for now.

Latin American Integration, however, presupposes the existence of respective national bourgeoisies in all of the hemisphere's countries, yet we know, that historically and as a result of the establishment of the world market, national, productive bourgeoisies — as we have known them in Europe for instance — never came to be a reality in the “Third World” countries, where the economic structures and the capital accumulation models were, from the very beginning, unilaterally oriented towards the extractive industries and/or agri-monocultural production, mainly for exportation.

Pretending to catch up with the historical tasks of national capital accumulation, industrialization and the formation of a national bourgeoisie in the midst of the de facto existing, globalized corporate world, under the economic and financial dictate of the few giga-corporations that dominate the world market, is comparable to “fighting the hen with the egg.”

Finally and given Venezuela's specific situation, where we have seen kind of a “rentist state model of capital accumulation” operating through the 20th century, based on the State's income from the oil extractive industry, the behavior of the economy always strongly has depended on oil prices.

Depending on these, we have seen efforts in the past of a redistribution of national wealth, favoring the lower classes of Venezuelan society, and this is what we see again today, under Chávez´ government, which, in addition, has tried to politically empower the lower classes to a certain extent, which may be considered the epicenter of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Given all these factors, can we really speak of a “revolution” here?

Certainly not in terms of a socialist revolution, in terms of socializing the means and gains of production.

Even if the new Constitution (1999) is a comparatively progressive and innovative one, the right to private property keeps being enshrined in it and thus does not affect the continuity of capitalist production.

However, and given the concentration and monopolization of capital on a global scale, the fascist face of which we have been seeing ever since the “New American Century” has (unofficially) been proclaimed with its merciless drive to preventively stop and crush all remaining competitors for energy and markets on a worldwide scale, we have to support each and every effort, however obsolete in time and limited in space, to counter the existing global barbarism … and this is why we are supporting the “Bolivarian Revolution” … especially the radical tendencies that do exist within it, and that tend to transcend it towards overcoming the capitalist mode of production as such.

Jutta Schmitt
mailto:jutta@aktionspotenzial.de

www.geocities.com/juschmi/index.html JUTTA SCHMITT, M.A., Political Science, Philosophy & Sociology is an Assistant Lecturer (ad honorem) in Political Science at the University de Los Andes (ULA) in Merida. 
You may email Jutta Schmitt at mailto:jutta@aktionspotenzial.de

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