 Hello, and welcome to this, the second episode of IMTV, International Marxist Television. I'm Josh Holroyd, I'm a writer at Socialist.net, Socialist Appeal. And today, joined with me in our secret revolutionary bunker, is Jorge Martín of the International Marxist Tendency, a regular writer at the website www.Marxist.com and the international secretary of the Hands Off Venezuela campaign. And this week we're going to be discussing Venezuela, where at the weekend there will be elections on the 20th of May. Now, last year you may remember all over the world there were many images of serious economic problems, demonstrations, rioting, and a huge amount of coverage, especially in the media over here in Britain. But Jorge, you have really been following the Bolivarian Revolution, the process in Venezuela, too much since the beginning of the revolution with the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998. So I think the first question that I would like to ask, and I imagine our viewers slash listeners would like to know about, is what is the Bolivarian Revolution and what has it achieved? Yes, the Bolivarian Revolution, as you said, started more or less about 20 years ago in 98 when Chávez was elected for the first time as president. And it is a revolution. That means that it is the direct entry of the masses onto the scene of history. There has been massive upheaval, a very high degree of political participation on the part of working people, the poor, the peasants who never participated before. And they basically taken the future into their own hands. That's what the revolution is. And as for what it has achieved, I will say that there are many gains of the revolution over these 20 years, too many to detail, but if there are maybe three that could be highlighted, I will say, which are also very relevant for us here in Britain, one is in the field of education where the revolution has massively expanded education free of charge at all levels from primary, secondary and higher education. The number of students enrolled in university has gone up from 800,000 in 98 to about 2.5 million now. And this is free of charge when over here we are paying ever increasing tuition fees. The massive expansion of healthcare with the creation of diagnostic centres and health clinics in the poor neighbourhoods in Caracas in other cities. And maybe third, an attempt to solve the problem of housing whereby the revolution in the last five or six years has built and delivered now three million new homes free of charge, fully equipped for people who were excluded from the housing market before. And I think that these are very important achievements that demonstrate that it's possible to do things in a different way when your priorities are not the profit-making motive of the few rich, but the general interests of the people, the poor, the workers, the peasants and so on. So I would say the revolution has achieved a lot. It's in a very difficult situation now, but there are many very important gains and also many important experiences of the people participating directly in politics, workers' control in many state-owned companies, factory occupations, land occupations by different groups of peasants, the people organising themselves in the neighbourhoods in the main cities. And as you mentioned earlier, it sounds from some of what you were saying, that there has been a retreat, if you like, in some of these gains. You mentioned that workers' control has dwindled to an extent. And of course many people would always be aware of some of the economic difficulties. And where do you think that fits in with the story of the revolution? Yeah, there's two things. Always there was for the last 20 years of the Bolivarian Revolution there has always been a conflict, a tension between the revolutionary initiative from below and the state apparatus that was trying to block that. And in most cases Chaveth played the role of pushing the movement forward and then being pushed by the movement himself. But there was always, and Chaveth recognised that, a layer of bureaucracy that would sabotage and try to prevent the revolutionary initiative of the masses from being put into place. And this has been there always. But it has had a bigger impact as the revolution has gone on because people become demoralised or become sceptical if they see that what they want to fight for is being blocked by bureaucrats who call themselves socialists or Bolivarian who dress in a red shirt. But at the end of the day they are implementing bureaucratic measures to prevent the workers from taking control. As for the economic crisis, we must say clearly that the situation in Venezuela right now is bad. It's very bad. There's been a very serious economic recession for the last four years or perhaps five years, massive contraction of the economy. And this has created many serious problems for the living conditions of working people that has been accompanied by scarcity of basic food products, medicine, hyperinflation which has now reached levels of hyperinflation. What kind of levels are we talking about? I mean, we're talking, for instance, the other day I was talking to some Venezuelan comrades we were trying to work out the increase in the price of chicken. In one year from May last year to May this year, a kilo of chicken has gone from 4,500 bolivars a kilo to 900,000 or a million which is an inflation of 20,000% in one year. Of course, wages have also gone up but nowhere near the same levels. I mean wages have gone up maybe by 1,600%. So that means that the purchasing power of wages in one year has lost about 90% of the purchasing power. But what's important to see is that the bourgeois media over here will say, oh, that's because of socialism. Socialism has failed in Venezuela. The implementation of socialist policies have led to this economic disaster. Well, in fact, I would say it's precisely the opposite. What Chavez did and then Maduro continued was an attempt in reality if you boil down the policies to the core was an attempt to regulate the capitalist economy which is something you cannot do. They, for instance, introduced price controls in order to prevent inflation. They introduced foreign exchange controls in order to prevent the flight of capital. And this never worked. The capitalist, as long as they own the means of production, the banks, the land and so on, they always find a way to go around any regulations that you want to introduce. So in reality what has not worked in Venezuela is not socialism, the state monopoly of the economy and the democratic management of the economy and the benefit of the majority, but rather the fact that too much of the economy was still left in private hands and the oligarchy, the capitalist, the bankers, the landowners used the ownership of the means of production, land and capital, to sabotage the revolution because they fundamentally opposed to this revolution. So there's an element of deliberate conscious sabotage going on. Maduro himself, for some time now, has been talking about an economic war and how much of a role do you think that plays? Is this purely propaganda by Maduro? Is it a real thing? And to what extent is it driving the crisis? There's clearly an economic war over many years. There have been, for instance, instances in which the police have entered or the National Guard have entered into warehouses belonging to private capitalists where food items that were not available in the market were stored in massive amounts. But I will say that this is part, you can call it an economic war, it is deliberate sabotage, but at the same time, if you are a capitalist, from a purely capitalist point of view, if the government tells you you have to sell mace, flour or rice at this particular price and you don't think you're making enough profit, then you simply won't sell it, whether you'll sell it in a black market or you'll sell it abroad in Colombia where you can make a higher rate of profit. So in reality it is an economic war, but at the same time it is the consequence of trying to regulate capitalism, which is something you cannot do. Capitalism is based on the freedom of the capitalist to invest or not according to the profit that they can make out of that. Capitalism is not based on the interest of the general public of the majority of the population. So that's another factor. And a third factor, I will say, is the fact that Venezuela has been hit very hard by the economic crisis of capitalism worldwide and the slowdown of the Chinese economy. So while before oil prices were very high for Venezuela and oil over $100 a battle, which they were around 2012, 2013, and then they massively collapsed after 2014, bringing a low level of $27 a battle. They have now recovered slightly, but still they are much lower at the peak. And obviously a country like Venezuela, which gets most of its hard currency from the export of oil, then has been massively hit. The ability of the government to introduce, to sell subsidized food products or to carry on with the social programs has been massively depleted. Foreign reserves have gone down and so this is really the course of the crisis in Venezuela. The crisis is aggravated by a number of other factors, but at the bottom of the crisis is the crisis of world capitalism and its effects in a country that produces one single product for export. Talk about the opposition a bit actually. The way that they're presented, so speaking from Britain, the way that they're often presented on the BBC is as democratic fighters who are facing up to a corrupt, authoritarian regime, destroying the country's economy and what they want is fair elections so that they can solve the problems in Venezuelan society. Some of what you've told me suggests that that's perhaps an element of spin in that. What else do you think is relevant to the opposition here? I would say it's almost the opposite. In fact, the main section of Venezuelan opposition, a boycotting the presidential elections that are coming up this weekend, after spending one year demanding that these elections take place, the elections were not supposed to take place this early, they were supposed to take place later on because the term of office of Maduro hasn't finished, but the opposition demanded the elections, early elections, elections for everything and this and that. Now that the elections are taking place, they're refusing to participate and what that suggests to me is that they know they're going to lose these elections, like they've lost most of the elections over the last 20 years with two exceptions. The second thing is that if you look at the behaviour of the opposition one year ago, if you look at the track record, is the track record of undemocratic coup plotting, oligarchic, US imperialism linked opposition, but if you look at the track record one year ago when there were big protests, the track record is extremely undemocratic. I mean, they used terrorist violence in these opposition demonstrations, they tried to overrun military base in the centre of Caracas, they used homemade rocket launchers and also they had a very strong content of class hatred. Most of the demonstrators, the protesters and the opposition supporters come from the upper class and middle class areas in the east of Caracas and that's where the demonstrations were taking place. And for instance there were two or three incidents in which people who looked like Chavista supporters, maybe because they looked poor or dark skin and they were set upon by the opposition protesters. In one case, one person was set on fire and he could have died from his injuries just because he didn't look the right shade of skin colour or because he was coming from a poor neighbourhood. So this is the real content of the Venezuelan opposition. They said they thought it was a thief. Yeah. Because obviously anyone who is from a poor neighbourhood must be a thief or anyone who supports the Chavista revolution must be a thief. That's the way they think and they never reconcile themselves with the fact that they've lost all these elections, all these years. They now control the national assembly but if you look at the track record of the opposition dominated national assembly, the legislation they attempted to bring forward was very undemocratic. For instance they wanted to privatise the housing schemes that the government had created saying that people had the right to private ownership of their home but in reality what this means, we know this in this country, will have been the privatisation of public housing stock and massive increase in prices and the exclusion of people from the housing market again. So this is the real character of the opposition. An opposition that does not hesitate in demanding foreign military intervention. You see a week ago Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States, made a big speech at the Organization of American States and he was basically threatening with intervention. He used all the key coded words when as well as a failed state in its humanitarian intervention, it's a tyranny, it's a regime and all those things and then he said and there are a number of very courageous leaders of the opposition here and they are also in favour of these measures and they have openly called for military intervention. We know that military intervention by the United States in any country of the world only creates destruction, chaos and suffering for the population of that country. I'm still yet to see any US intervention that brings democracy anywhere in the world. These people, they don't hesitate in calling the United States to come and invade their own country with all the associated costs that that will have because they don't really care about the country, its people or anything. The only thing they care is about their ownership of the natural resources and the wealth of this country. This is the real character of the opposition in Venezuela. We should probably explain the situation currently in the political situation in Venezuela because we have a national assembly like a parliament which from the end of 2015 is now majority opposition. That's one of the very few elections that they actually recognise. The president is Nicolas Maduro, the successor to Hugo Chavez of the PSUV, the Socialist Party of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and then you also have, and this might confuse people, you also have a constituent assembly last year. So what role has the constituent assembly played in this? Yes, the idea. About one year ago in May last year, President Maduro decided to call to propose the convening of such a constituent assembly. There has been another constituent assembly in Venezuela in 1999 which was at the time when they rewarded the constitution. So Maduro said, look, there is a deadlock between the different powers. Let's have a constituent assembly to rework the whole system, the ground rules for the Venezuelan political system. And then the thing is that the opposition decided to boycott this election. At that time they were in this attempt to organise an insurrection they just described and they thought they could remove the government by un-democratic means, by provoking a coup, by calling on military officers to carry out the coup and so on. So they weren't interested in any democratic election. Even though the demand was allegedly that there should be elections, so they could have participated in the constituent assembly but they chose not to. The constituent assembly had a massive turnout. People turned out to vote in order to deliver a blow against this un-democratic opposition to say, look, we are also Venezuelans, we are the majority and we want a democratic election. So the idea was to have a constituent assembly that will, one, represent people directly, that people could elect representatives from the neighbourhoods, from the peasant communities and so on, from the different workplaces. And second, the idea was that such an assembly will then have powers to deal with the economic situation. But I have to say that, in my opinion, the constituent assembly hasn't fulfilled its role. First of all, the bureaucracy has taken control over it, so there's no real initiatives coming from below. When you say the bureaucracy, is this the PSUV bureaucracy? Yes, the bureaucracy at the top of the PSUV, the Socialist United Party and the state bureaucracy that basically have asphyxiated the revolutionary initiative from below. On many different levels. And secondly, the constituent assembly has been unable or unwilling to take any serious measures to deal with the economic situation. In fact, the economic situation has deteriorated sharply since one year ago and since the election to the constituent assembly on July the 30th last year. And so people are very disappointed. So now when Maduro comes in this election for the elections on Sunday and he says, give me 10 million votes and I will fight against the economic maffias that are creating this economic crisis. Many people are skeptical. They say this might be the language used by a candidate to the presidency. But you are already the president. If you know how to deal with the economic maffias, why don't you do it now? Why don't you do it for the last one year or two years or three years? And this is very dangerous because the bureaucracy, the lack of the inability to deal with the economic crisis means that amongst the working class people, amongst the poor who are the basis of support for the Bolivian Revolution, skepticism grows, demoralisation grows. So there might be a higher degree of abstention, for instance, in these elections. And this basically prepares the ground for the return of the oligarchy to power. In my opinion, it has to be said. If these policies, the policies of the current government, the government of Maduro continue, its inability to deal with the economic problems of the country continues, then the right wing will come to power and that will be a real disaster. I suppose that follows on to what I was going to ask next. It sounds like the current situation in Venezuela, the situation that has existed for the last couple of years or so, is one that can't continue the way it's currently doing. You can't have levels of hyperinflation of that nature. I remember learning at school about Weimar Germany and eventually, one way or another, that situation had to be resolved, so to speak. And so you've already started answering what I was going to ask about, well, what exactly is going to happen. But kind of apart from that or alongside that, what do you think the tasks for socialists in Venezuela, first of all, are right now and in the short to medium term? Well, I think first of all we need to ask ourselves that is a serious, very serious economic crisis in Venezuela. No one is able to deny that. So what will be a programme that will allow the government to deal with this economic crisis? In my opinion, there are only two ways out of this economic crisis. One is the way that the ruling class, the oligarchy, wants and they will implement if they come to power, whether they come to power through foreign intervention, military coup, an insurrection or whatever, or they come to power by democratic means, by winning another election, they will implement the following programme. There is now in Venezuela a massive fiscal deficit, i.e. the government is spending more than what is taking in in revenue, tax revenue, oil revenue and so on. And the government is basically printing money in order to bridge that. That's a very important contributing factor to hyperinflation. But there's only two ways of solving this. The ruling class wants to close that gap, the fiscal gap, by cutting expenditure. So they will basically destroy all the social programmes, destroy the healthcare programme, destroy the university education, privatise all the state-owned companies, open up inverted commerce, pay the visa to foreign investment. They will carry out a massive austerity package in order to make the workers and the poor pay for the full price of the crisis. That's one way of solving the economic crisis, one way in which the workers will pay. The other way to solve the economic crisis is basically to nationalise, to expropriate the capitalist class. The capitalist class is sabotaging the economy. That's funding and creating these undemocratic coup plots and attempting to bring down the government by undemocratic means. They expropriate them, expropriate the properties, the factories, the food processing places, the land and so on. And use these means of production to democratically plan the economy according to the needs of the majority. This is the other way to solve the crisis. Now the government currently is not following one or the other. It's just following a middle-of-the-road solution which doesn't solve anything, which only makes the economic situation worse and prepares the way for the right wing to come to power. So I would say the first thing that socialists need to clarify in Venezuela is which programme is needed for the revolution to continue and to be completed, because this is the problem. The revolution was never completed. That will be the first task. The second task is to discuss who's going to carry this programme out. And in my opinion, the government of Maduro, which has been in power now for four years or more, has proven completely unable to carry out these tasks. It has had many opportunities and every single juncture continues pursuing the same policies and making appeals to the capitalist class to invest in the economy, which they're not doing. And not only appeals, empty appeals, but also giving them concessions, lifting the price controls, giving them cheap loans, creating special economic zones, opening up vast parts of the country for mineral exploitation and so on. And this is very dangerous because this not only does not solve the economic situation, it aggravates it. Even the idea that the government, for instance, introduces these wage bonuses to top up wages, because obviously wages are now worth much less than they were, say, a year ago. But this is not a solution in itself because the minute the government announces an economic bonus, the prices are already going up and eating away that concession. Maduro actually did that, didn't he? He announced a 95% wage increase in advance of the elections. On May Day, and that didn't last at all. I mean, the prices in just one or two weeks went up by 100%. So that didn't solve the situation because you cannot just print money, more money to give to workers when there is no production of goods that only adds to hyperinflation. So the second question that we need to ask ourselves is who's going to carry out this program. There are many forces in Venezuela within the Bolivarian Revolution that are still attached to the legacy of Hugo Chávez. And Chávez, before he died, he made a couple of very important speeches. One was Golpe de Timón, turned the Rada, and he basically said, the problem here is that we still have a capitalist economy. All things socialist, socialist university or socialist housing project, whatever, but they're not socialist. They exist in a capitalist economy. So the first thing that needs to be sorted out is the question that we need to move towards a socialist economy, he said. And the second is that we need to destroy, pulverise things, the word he used, the bourgeois state, which is still blocking the revolutionary initiative of the people, to create a communal state, a state based on the communes, a workers and peasants state. And he was talking about the bureaucracy, he was taking aim at the bureaucracy with that, wasn't he? Yeah, I mean, he was actually, in this turn, the Rada speech, he was actually telling off his own ministers for not having carried out what they should have. And so what I'm trying to say is that there are still many forces in Venezuela who are loyal to the idea of the Bolivarian Revolution, to the ideals, which is also the democratic participation of people in production, workers' control, peasant communes, but they're isolated, they are scattered, they're not politically organised at the national level, and I think that there is a need for a revolutionary alternative to come from within the Bolivarian movement, which carries out a socialist programme that can deal with the danger of the right-wing and imperialism, and can also clear from within the ranks of the Bolivarian Revolution the bureaucracy, the reformists, which are carrying out policies that prepare a disaster for the Bolivarian Revolution. So I suppose part of your message for this election is that socialists in Venezuela are going to have to look beyond it effectively to start rebuilding really the... Many people in Venezuela will in these elections vote for Maduro, not so much because they are convinced that his policies are correct. They can see that the situation is not improving, but they will vote as a way of blocking the right-wing and imperialism. The imperialism meddling in Venezuela is very important, there are sanctions being implemented that prevent Venezuela from trading with other countries, that prevent companies from sending money to Venezuelan state-owned companies. It's very disruptive. That's presumably making the economic crisis much worse for Neri Venezuelans. That's the idea. The idea is to create such an economic chaos that then people will say, we want to get rid of this government. So imperialist aggression is very real. It's not government propaganda, some may tell you. It's very real and very effective. And it's growing. Now they're even talking about an oil blockade which will really destroy the economy. So many people will vote for Maduro, not so much because they are convinced of his programme or his ability to solve the situation, but rather as a way of blocking the right-wing. Now we, in my opinion, I sympathise with their motives. It's a class instinct. They don't want the right-wing to come back to power. But at the same time, I will say, I will warn that re-electing Maduro will not solve the situation. The elections of the Constitution Assembly didn't solve the problem. The regional elections in October didn't solve the problem. Maduro has had powers enough to deal with the situation if he had a plan for over four or five years. So the discussion should concentrate not only on what are we going to do on Sunday in the elections, who are we going to vote for or not. But above all, on what programme is required for completing the revolution and getting out of this economic crisis. And secondly, how to build a revolutionary alternative based on the workers, based on the peasants, in the communes, in the factories and so on that can carry out that programme to completion. A follow-up question from that is we've talked about the leadership of these movements. We've talked about Corbyn and the Labour Party specifically. But what should socialists in Britain and elsewhere outside of Venezuela be doing about what's going on in Venezuela? What can we do, basically? Well, I say our main and first task is to fight against imperialism, imperialist aggression in Venezuela, imperialist meddling in Venezuela. This is the main aim of the Hands of Venezuela campaign. The future of Venezuela should be decided by the people of Venezuela without any foreign interference. We're not just talking about the US. I mean, it is also the European Union has implemented sanctions against Venezuela. The British government has received the Venezuelan opposition leaders, the undemocratic Venezuel opposition leaders. We're plotting a coup. And even in 2002, when Tony Blair was in power, they gave tacit support to the coup in Venezuela. So we must fight against imperialist aggression in Venezuela. This is our first duty as socialists in an imperialist country. And at the same time, try to cut through the fog of lies and half-truths and misinformation that you see in the British media about Venezuela. This is the best contribution that we can make to help the Venezuelan revolution, as well as preparing revolution in our own country. OK, thanks, Jorge. And thank you everyone for watching or listening. I hope you've enjoyed the episode. Do tune in next time when we're going to be discussing lessons for the student movement. In the meantime, if you'd like to check out more articles, videos and other multimedia, then please go on to marxist.com or socialist.net where you can find all sorts of material there. Thank you.