Via the BBC: Chavez ‘battalions’ hold meetings
Plans to form a single political party in Venezuela have taken a step forward with the first activists’ meetings.Six million people have signed up to become members of the President’s United Socialist Party.
Critics worry about the threat to plurality, but organisers say it will give ordinary Venezuelans more chance to shape the future of the country.
Venezuela’s parliament, the National Assembly, is made up purely of politicians who support the president.
But they come from a number of different parties.
Hugo Chavez is changing that by creating one united party, which he says will be constructed from the bottom up.
Of course, in regards to that last sentence, that’s what they all say. The Soviet government and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union both had bottom-up organizations on paper, where power was supposed to flow upwards from the people to the pinnacle of the state/party, but in reality all the lower levels did was rubber-stamp whatever the next higher level presented to them, all the way to the top of the Party–which was where the real power was.
Now, I am not asserting that Chávez is creating a Soviet-style regime, but I am saying that I don’t buy the statement that this is simply a way to govern from the “bottom up.” Like all of Chávez’s recent moves, this is about consolidating power around himself (whether it is expanding decree authority or attempts to curtail free expression).
I will say this: the first paragraph asserts that this is a move to create a single party in Venezuela, but the text makes it sound like it is an attempt to unite all the pro-Chávezistas into a single party. While the latter is still a clear power-consolidation move, it is not the exact same thing as the former, as one presumes that opposition parties, anemic as they may be, will be allowed to function. The model here is probably more the PRI in Mexico in its heyday (without, I would wager, regular executive rotation) than the CPSU.
There is also a clear whiff of authoritarianism in the air when people in power start organizing their citizen supporters using military terminology:
Six million people have volunteered to become activists.They have been formed into battalions. More than 1,000 of these have now met for the first time.
They will choose representatives who will soon take part in a national congress which will decide how the party will work.
[…]
Mr Chavez says the battalions will be centres of debate which will drive the socialist revolution.
I know that many see Chávez as some sort of hope for the poor in Venezuela, but he continues to appear to me to be self-serving and power-seeking, and history shows that those types of leaders don’t end up serving the public good in the end, even if they use public services as a means of accruing and consolidating power.
Sphere: Related Content
The opposition parties has not been prohibited, yet. Chavez moves are always very slow and you have to wait for months until you see the next mood, in that way he prevents many attacks and keep his fame as the poor savior. However, the rest of the parties that supported Chavez but had an identity and a separate history as a political party from the others are now bound to choose if they wanna keep as political organizations and Chavez supporters and then, join the PSUV (therefore, die as the party itself) or if they wanna be now against the president (and of course that will mean political death aswell.) Not because Chavez is not creating from one day to another an only party Soviet style system, doesn’t mean that his moves are not authoritarian. He’s been ruling the country non stop since 1998 and when someone rules for that long, he get used to have power and the rest to obey..
PS: I’m venezuelan and my english is very poor, so excuses about the grammar and spelling mistakes you might find on the lines above.
Comment by Julia_1984 — Sunday, July 22, 2024 @ 10:30 am
Actually, I would not use the PRI analogy, and in some respects the CPSU analogy is closer. The original organizations that Chavez created while still in the army were pretty clearly Leninist inspired.
The PRI, on the other hand, was created out of a mix of regional elites that had emerged from the revolution (and also some pre-revolutionary regional elites). It was thus much more bottom-up from the beginning, and while it grew more centralized over time, I would argue (and am doing so in the intro to the much-delayed edited volume on Mexico) that even at the height of its hegemony it remained more a “federation” of regional elites than the monolithic centralized machine it was often portrayed as being.
I think Julia is right about the dilemma faced by the various separate parties that backed Chavez. In this sense, we might even say that a closer parallel is the “salami tactics” used by the Eastern European Communists to get rid of their immediate post-war “popular front” allies.
Still, while Chavez is certainly not a Communist, I do think his tactics draw more from that playbook than from the Mexican. (So did those of his mentor, Fidel, of course, but like the PRI, Cuba’s Communist Party originated from a genuine popular revolution; there is no such parallel in Venezuela.)
Comment by MSS — Sunday, July 22, 2024 @ 1:32 pm
A very fair point, and I should clarify my position. I was speaking in terms of ideology as much as I was the mode of governance: the CPSU forbade other parties and was more important than the formal institutions of the state. The PRI, however, at least let other parties exist, even if they weren’t allowed to win anything (or, at least not much–plus it depends on which era of the PRI’s rule we are talking about).
I could see Chavez forming a main, dominant party that controlled the state, but that still allowed a few token parties to exist.
Also, I was trying to quell the knee-jerk reaction some will have that “single party” = “Communists!!”
Further, I am unconvinced (although I may be wrong here) that Chavez does not have a central ideology guiding this party, which again is more like the PRI (whose ideology was malleable over time) than the CPSU.
There is probably a better analog, however, than the PRI–I will have to give it some thought.
Maybe the early Peronists?
Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Sunday, July 22, 2024 @ 2:08 pm
Yes, I often refer to Chavismo as being this generation’s equivalent of earlier Peronism. Of course, all analogies are useful only up to a point.
As for Soviet Communism, well, it was at least as much about a strategy for holding and maintaining total state power as it was about ideology, but obviously Chavez is unlikely ever to have (or seek) the full control over the economy that Soviet and Cuban Communists attained.
Comment by MSS — Sunday, July 22, 2024 @ 2:57 pm