Читать книгу Building the Commune - George Ciccariello-Maher - Страница 7

Nothing says “enough” like a bus on fire. On February 27, 1989, Venezuelans woke up to an economic reform package that saw gas prices double overnight, and with them bus fares. Workers and students on their Monday morning commute into the capital, Caracas, decided they had had enough. Instead of simply paying the new fare, they began to burn buses, occupy bus terminals, and block streets. While their anger was initially focused on the bus drivers, it wasn’t long before they set their sights on the government. Burning buses soon gave way to marches and protests, broken glass, looted stores, and nearly a week of rioting across the entire country.

Grainy news footage from the rebellion shows the population looting unashamedly, some covering their faces but most not even bothering. After all, they were taking back things they deserved, but of which they had been deprived. Basic goods that had become too expensive or hard to find were soon discovered hoarded in warehouses and storerooms. These were now redistributed directly by the people themselves, who carried everything from imported whiskey to entire sides of beef on their shoulders up into the barrios (shantytowns) surrounding the city. In some instances, local police—who knew full well they couldn’t stop the looting if they tried—even helped to make the process more orderly.

This was the Caracazo—the “explosion in Caracas,” although the rebellion quickly went national, lasting almost a full week in some places. The Caracazo marked the first of a series of Latin American rebellions against the spread of neoliberal economic reforms that would see presidents deposed and political parties collapse across the continent. In theory, neoliberalism claims to minimize the role of the state in favor of the free market, but in practice the state has played a major role in enforcing neoliberal reform at gunpoint, in Latin America and elsewhere. When Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende, the elected socialist president of Chile, in a 1973 coup backed by the CIA, he made the country a testing ground for radical experiments in market-based economics. And in the 1980s, a US interest-rate increase set off a debt crisis across Latin America as a whole that provided a pretext for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to step in and impose neoliberal reforms more broadly.¹

Poor countries saddled with massive debts had no choice but to beg the IMF and World Bank for bailouts. The strings attached to these loans took the form of what has been called “structural adjustment,” but this polite term conceals a brutal reality. In practice, neoliberal reforms meant cutting wages, laying off teachers and other public-sector workers, cutting social-welfare spending, and privatizing public goods by selling off natural resources and services like water and gas—not to the highest bidder, but often to the highest briber. Under duress from international lenders, governments handed over their sovereignty by restructuring entire economies according to the dictates of the global market, giving foreign corporations free rein while they paid almost no taxes, and eliminating any and all price controls put in place to protect the poorest Latin Americans.

In Venezuela, gas prices and bus fares were simply the last straw. Following a decade of oil-fueled growth, the Venezuelan economy had been in crisis since at least 1983, when the price of oil tanked and the currency devalued sharply, instantly making people’s wages and the money in their pockets worth much less. One newspaper greeted the decision, whose date is still known as Black Friday, with a headline announcing: “The Party Is Over.”² A series of neoliberal reform packages followed, with a single common denominator: eliminating all safeguards that existed to protect the Venezuelan population from the ravages of the global economy. This meant lifting price controls on the basic goods the population needed, freeing interest rates, reducing all sorts of subsidies—gas prices included—and increasing the cost of public utilities.

The result in Venezuela and elsewhere was not the growth that neoliberal economists and ideologues had promised, but instead the exact opposite: what is referred to in Latin America as the “lost decade,” in which the only things that really grew were unemployment and poverty. By the end of the 1980s, nearly half of all Latin Americans were living in poverty, with nearly 70 million falling into poverty in that decade alone. By 1989, the Venezuelan economy was shrinking, inflation was running at 85 percent, and the poor were bearing the brunt: more than 44 percent of families were living in poverty, and almost half of those in extreme poverty.

Against this backdrop, presidential candidate Carlos Andrés Pérez played the role of charismatic savior. Having presided over an oil boom during his first term as president in the early 1970s, Pérez was a reminder of the good old days, and he made big promises to match. His 1988 electoral campaign echoed popular frustrations with the emerging international financial system that was saddling poor countries with debts they couldn’t pay. Pérez denounced the IMF as a “bomb that only kills people,” accused the World Bank of “genocide,” and encouraged collective resistance among indebted nations worldwide. Once elected, however, Pérez did a sharp about-face: in exchange for billions of dollars in IMF loans, he signed on to a structural adjustment plan even more radical than those of his predecessors.

When rebellion is in the air, however, broken promises can be fatal, and the widespread perception that Pérez had betrayed his own campaign promises, in what many characterized as a “bait and switch,” had everything to do with the fury Venezuelans would unleash in the streets during the Caracazo. Pérez repaid that fury in kind. Unable to quell the rioting by other means, he declared a state of emergency and sent the army and police into the barrios surrounding the capital to subdue the rebellious poor. Young army recruits sprayed entire apartment blocks with automatic gunfire, killing many who lived and looked just like themselves, leaving bullet holes that are still visible today. In a single incident, the army opened fire on a crowd gathered on the Mesuca stairway in the poor slum of Petare in eastern Caracas, killing more than twenty. When all was said and done, hundreds if not thousands had been slaughtered—the numbers have never been agreed upon because bodies were simply dumped into the mass graves that are still being unearthed today.

Given the brutal failure of neoliberal reforms across the region as a whole, the Caracazo would soon be followed by a string of rebellions elsewhere on the continent and beyond. Only a year after the Caracazo, indigenous movements in Ecuador responded to neoliberal reform with the Inti Raymi uprising (1990), unleashing a chain reaction that would eventually see three sitting presidents unseated from power by street mobilizations. The Zapatista rebellion in southern Mexico (1994) exploded into history on the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, provoked by the Mexican government’s abolition of communal land rights to please the United States, and has since helped to inspire struggles worldwide while undermining the legitimacy of a corrupt political system. Struggles in Bolivia against attempts to privatize first water (2000), and then gas (2003), led to the removal of two presidents.

These grassroots rebellions did more than simply destroy, however. Through resistance to neoliberalism, new movements emerged, new alternatives were forged, and new leaders were thrown into power: Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador all contributed to the broader leftward swing in the region, later dubbed the “Pink Tide.” Even more importantly, new forms of democracy also emerged that were local, participatory, direct, and communal—in short, unrecognizable from the perspective of the old, corrupt form of democracy in crisis throughout the region.

For example, when the state failed to provide drinking water to communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia, residents did not look for solutions through elections but took matters into their own hands. They came together to dig wells and manage the water supply themselves in a participatory and democratic way that built on both indigenous and leftist traditions. When water rights were later sold off to the transnational corporation Bechtel, these same neighborhood organizations barricaded the entire city to collectively resist the move, sparking a chain of events that has transformed the country as a whole.

These new experiments in democracy have since gone global, with the Spanish indignados, Tahrir Square protesters, and Occupy Wall Street all fighting against neoliberalism through practices of direct discussion, debate, and management of our own lives. Some would call this new form of self-government “direct democracy” or “radical democracy”; others might insist that it is the only democracy truly worthy of the name. What this developing form of self-government could look like is not yet clear, in part because it seeks to respond to an unavoidable challenge: how to harness the spontaneous energy of rebellion into new forms of political organizing, and how to ensure that these forms don’t betray their rebellious origins.

In Venezuela, the rejection of neoliberalism in the streets during the Caracazo led not only to Chávez’s election, but also to a long and continuing experiment in radical democracy that continues to this day in new institutions of local self-government, known as communes. At the time of the Caracazo, Chávez and others had been conspiring both within the army and alongside clandestine revolutionary groups, but the spontaneous rebellion by the people in the streets caught them off guard and forced them into action. On February 4, 1992, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement attempted to depose Pérez in a coup d’état that failed to seize power but made Chávez a national hero overnight.

It was only through the combined impact of the Caracazo and the failed coup that Chávez would later be elected president in December 1998, amid the collapse of the corrupt two-party system. The first task of his new government was to fulfill the most important promise of the electoral campaign: rewriting the Venezuelan Constitution. Within six months of Chávez’s inauguration in early 1999, a constituent assembly was elected, and before the year was out the Bolivarian Constitution had been approved in a national referendum. The new Constitution, written with the participation of social movements and grassroots Bolivarian Circles, promised to expand both social welfare and participatory democracy.

Social welfare came first, with the Bolivarian government attempting to tackle the poverty and social exclusion left by more than a decade of neoliberal reform. But even after being elected, the Chávez government lacked control over the purse strings of the national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). As a result, the revolution would not truly get under way until the combative whirlwind that began with the brief coup against Chávez in April 2002. US-backed and -funded opposition forces briefly kidnapped the president and abolished the new Constitution before being forced out of power by mass mobilizations in the streets and the barracks alike. Defeated politically but not economically, opposition forces then shut down the entire Venezuelan oil industry in late 2002. They were again defeated, this time by oil workers who seized the installations after more than two catastrophic months.

With oil production now firmly in the hands of the state, the Bolivarian government sought to make good on its promises of social welfare, in particular through the establishment of a series of Bolivarian missions. Misión Barrio Adentro, for example, provided free health care in the poorest neighborhoods through Cuban-staffed medical clinics; a series of missions provided free education, from basic literacy training up to the university level; Misión Mercal provided subsidized food; Misión Vuelvan Caras (About-Face) sought to eradicate poverty by integrating the poorest of the poor—and these were followed by dozens more.

The effects of these policies on reversing the ravages of the neoliberal era have been undeniable: household poverty has been cut in half and extreme poverty cut by 63 percent. This doesn’t even account for the impact—more difficult to measure—of expanded access to subsidized food and free health care and education. Venezuela went from being one of Latin America’s most unequal countries to one of the most equal.³ As the Bolivarian process radicalized, however, it began to move beyond social welfare and toward making good on the Constitution’s promise of a more direct and participatory democracy. But the foundations of this radical democracy had been laid long before Chávez, by the residents of Venezuela’s barrios themselves.

Today, well over 90 percent of Venezuelans live in the cities. If “perversion” literally means “turning away,” the Venezuelan economy has been perverted since oil was discovered in the early twentieth century. Since then, the entire country has been reshaped, with political life turning away from the needs of society to face the global market, creating a vast geographic distortion in the process. Peasants abandoned an otherwise lush countryside for the cities, the majority coming to inhabit the swelling barrios ringing urban areas. As Venezuelans rushed to the cities, agricultural production—indeed, all domestic production—plummeted. The contours of this perversion have everything to do with understanding the importance of the communes of today, as well as the challenges they face.

In Caracas, this process of urbanization was magnified by the oil economy: as the transit point for all wealth extracted from the subsoil, the capital city lured millions from the countryside with the symbolic glimmer of often-false promises of access to their share of the oil wealth. It was these new barrio residents—those who built informal housing in the hills while eking out a living through informal labor on the valley floor—who spearheaded the Caracazo rebellion of 1989. The collective identity and struggles emerging from the chaotic terrain of the barrios would lay the foundation for the new experiments in direct democracy.

For the most part, these were not factory workers squaring off against a boss in the workplace, but informal workers performing services or circulating the imported goods that flooded this oil economy. They confronted not a physical boss but the market itself, and their political demands centered not so much on where they worked but where they lived. As a result, in the words of Dario Azzellini, many “Venezuelans identify much more strongly with their community than with their workplace.”⁴ These are still very much workers in the broadest sense of the word, however, and in fact some of Venezuela’s poorest, working without a contract and benefits, or hustling for a living in the unforgiving city.

Over time, their demands for running water, education, health care, stable streets and safe housing on unstable terrain, and cultural and sporting activities for youth all translated into new instruments of community control. And since Venezuelans were struggling against a corrupt, two-party system that was democratic only in name, it was natural that they would seek out more radically democratic ways to organize themselves. Neighbors formed associations and then spontaneous assemblies and popular self-defense militias in the 1980s and 1990s, especially after the Caracazo. They began to govern and defend their own communities—their own territories—by themselves.

It was these participatory, grassroots assemblies that served as the prototypes for what would come to be known as communal councils—officially recognized institutions for directly democratic self-government on the local level. And it was these councils—with the grassroots energy and territorial identity they embodied—that would later come together under the aegis of the broader units known as the communes.

In the chapters that follow, I track the emergence of the Venezuelan communes not only from above but from below. Just as Chávez the individual did not create the Bolivarian Revolution—it was instead the long revolutionary process that “created Chávez”—so too with the communes.⁵ Before the Venezuelan state took on the task of building the communes from above, revolutionaries were building them from below. As a result, the relationship between the communes—the seeds of a future nonstate—and the existing state has been far from smooth.

I then turn to the ongoing struggle for urban space, to show how the urban movements that have always been the political spearhead of Chavismo are today fighting for a right to the city, storming earthly heavens by tearing down the walls separating the rich from the poor. If revolutionary Chavismo emerges from the space of the barrios, those who oppose it hail from the increasingly fortified zones housing the wealthy. In the third chapter, I analyze the opposition street protests of 2014, documenting the emergence of new right-wing movements that have skillfully appropriated tactics often associated with the left.

Next, I explain the dangerous clashes emerging within Chavismo today—offering no easy answers, simply an insistence on the creative powers of the revolutionary grassroots—before turning directly to the network of communes currently spreading across the Venezuelan political landscape. I do so with uncertainty but also with faith, both of which are essential for grasping a process that is still very much in process. The challenges confronting the communes are many, not least of which are the deepening economic crisis and the political gains made by the opposition. But as a project for seizing and governing space to produce, the communes might just provide the best escape from the crisis. Marx once described the commune as the “form at last discovered” for the emancipation of workers, and that form is today being filled with the content of hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries who are making it their own in the construction of Venezuela’s distinctively territorialized socialism.⁶