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Revolution #94, July 1, 2007

New Series on Venezuela

Hugo Chavez Has an Oil Strategy...But Can This Lead to Liberation?

by Raymond Lotta

During his electoral campaign for president in 1998, Hugo Chavez took on the old elite this way:

“Oil is a geopolitical weapon, and these imbeciles who govern us don’t realize the power of an oil-producing country.”¹

He expressed his strategic thinking about oil in a 2006 interview:

“We are today implementing a strategic program called the Oil Sowing Plan: using oil wealth so Venezuela can become an agricultural country, a tourist destination, an industrialized country with a diversified economy. We are investing billions of dollars in the infrastructure: power generators using thermal energy, a large railway, roads, highways, new towns, new universities, new schools, recuperating land, building tractors, and giving loans to farmers. One day we won’t have any more oil, but that will be in the twenty-second century. Venezuela has oil for another 200 years.”²

Chavez has spoken often about weaning Venezuela away from excessive dependence on the oil sector. But as the above statements and concrete policy underscore, oil will continue for some time, certainly for the medium term, to be the backbone of the economy and the keystone of Venezuela’s foreign policy.

What Kind of Resource?

There is no question that Venezuela is rich in oil. Venezuela possesses the largest conventional oil reserves in the Western hemisphere (more than three times the proven reserves in the U.S.); has trillions of cubic feet of natural gas; and has, by some estimates, untapped reserves in the Orinoco belt of the country that may exceed those of Saudi Arabia. Nor is there any question that oil revenues can grow astronomically: the price of oil is approaching near-historic highs, in the range of $65 per barrel.

But why is oil as a sphere of investment and as a “petrodollar” financial instrument “black gold”? Oil has become a source of productive and monetary wealth within a certain set of social-production relations. The growth and contemporary expansion of world capitalism has produced a profit-based agro-industrial structure that relies heavily and disproportionately on a non-renewable resource, oil, as an essential economic input whose world price has impacted production costs, profits, and competitive advantage. In the post-World War 2 period, new oil-based and oil-related industries like auto, petrochemicals, and plastics, arose. Moreover, the exploration, extraction, refining, and marketing of oil form a highly profitable sector of the world economy.³

An historical trajectory of oil-fueled development under world capitalism has been ruinous of human lives and planetary ecology. The production and consumption patterns of the advanced capitalist countries—where 25 percent of the world’s population lives but which consume 75 percent of the world’s resources—are now culminating in a global climate crisis. A just and rational world economy would neither be organized around a social structure of exploitation and inequality nor be based on this kind of non-sustainable technical-resource foundation.

Oil has also become a weapon in world politics. This too is a function of imperialism. Power relations are integral to imperialism. Control over resources yields geo-economic advantage and geo-political domination—in which some powers gain privileged and monopolistic access to resources and the ability to control other economies and states. Oil has been an object of imperialist rivalry, collusion, and conquest, including through local proxy wars. Oil has been a means of propping up and controlling neocolonial regimes awash in oil revenues and corruption, like Nigeria. The modern, imperialist global military machine runs on oil.

Oil and Venezuela

Over the last half century, oil income has both lubricated a certain kind of growth and development in Venezuela and locked Venezuela into an international oil economy dominated by Western imperialism.

Venezuela has played a certain historical role in the imperialist international division of labor: as a strategic exporter of oil. And the economic pillar of the modern Venezuelan state system has been the extraction of rents from oil companies, the charge for allowing them to pump oil out of the ground. Over the last half century, oil income has both lubricated a certain kind of growth and development in Venezuela and locked Venezuela in to an international oil economy dominated by Western imperialism.

Oil, with its booms and busts, reshaped the economic geography of the country. Caracas, the capital city of Venezuela, more than doubled in size between 1920 and 1936, and doubled again between 1936 and 1950. Then it tripled between 1950 and 1971. The oil economy gave rise to a new middle class dependent on the state and disbursement of oil revenues, while shantytowns of the rural poor spread through and literally seeped into the muddy slopes of western Caracas. Today, almost 90 percent of Venezuela’s population lives in the cities and half of the population of Caracas lives in poverty. One measure of oil’s distorting effects on the economic and social structure of Venezuela has been the vast growth of the “informal economy” in the cities: the urban self-employed (like peddlers and street merchants) and workers who perform unregistered or “off-the-books” labor and services.⁴

Oil has produced and perpetuated a developmental trajectory marked by great economic and social gaps: between the productivity of the petroleum sector and the productivity of the non-petroleum sectors; between the development of the rural and urban areas; and between rich and poor, in the cities and in the countryside.

Let’s step back. From 1958 to 1998, Venezuela earned some $300 billion in oil revenues. What has this meant for the masses of people in Venezuela, and what kind of development has resulted from subordination to the dynamics of the world imperialist economy and the world oil industry within that?

The production of oil has actually stifled any significant industrial diversification. Much of the new infrastructure built between the 1960s and 1980s is decaying for lack of maintenance. Floods and mudslides, aggravated by uncontrolled urbanization, have washed away towns. Health hazards stalk the shantytowns in which 60 percent of Venezuela’s urban population lives. The number of people living in official poverty nearly doubled between 1984 and 1995; and, today, more than half of Venezuela’s working population works in the precarious informal economy.⁵

Hugo Chavez has decried the oligarchic oil economy with its corruption, patronage, and extremes of glittering wealth and grinding poverty. He has spoken of the need to revive the peasant economy. But can a different form of oil economy produce a just and viable alternative to the neo-liberal economic model and lead to socialism? And just how different will such an economy be if it requires the massive infusion of foreign investment capital and a gamble in a game of oil markets?

A Program That Cannot Break Out of the Status Quo; A Program Wracked with Contradictions

Chavez has pinned the success of his program of social equity and diversification of the economy on oil revenues. His main economic order of business, as he repeatedly states, is “sowing the petroleum.” This is a phrase and program that has been part of Venezuela’s populist-nationalist politics and discourse since the mid-1930s: the government is to assert greater control over oil revenues, use oil wealth to promote development, and allow more people to share in the oil bounty. Chavez is counting on high and rising oil prices to undergird vast increases in government spending, a growing state presence in the economy, and subsidized prices for certain domestic products (mainly gasoline but also imported consumer goods, including food). In 2004, $1.7 billion of the state oil company’s $15 billion budget was allocated to fund social programs; soon thereafter it went to $4 billion a year.⁶

Chavez, after having restructured the management of the state oil company, is moving along three tracks to maximize oil revenues to make good on his program. He is seeking to expand oil production. He is seeking to increase state ownership and the government’s share of earnings, royalties, and taxes deriving from foreign-based activity in the hydrocarbon sector (oil, natural gas, and coal). And he is seeking out new markets for oil, both to absorb expanded output and as a cushion against possible U.S. pressure and retaliation. These are not simply technical tools of economic management; they are bound up with a capitalist logic, and are fraught with the contradictions of dependent, imperialist-led development.

On the first track, the strategic twenty-five year Plan Siembra Petrolera (Oil Sowing Plan), in its first phase for 2005-2012, calls for an increase in production from current levels (2006 estimates range from 2.8-3.3 million barrels a day) to 5.8 million barrels of oil per day in 2012. In the gas industry, similar large-scale development is also planned.

The Venezuelan state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) estimated in 2006 that this phase of the expansion plan requires some $75 billion to finance new investment. Where is this money coming from? Most will come from the state oil company. Some 25 to 30 percent is expected from external, private sources: borrowings from banks, offset by anticipated oil earnings, and investments by the foreign oil companies operating in Venezuela.⁷

Chavez is counting on increased output from the so-called Orinoco Petroleum Belt, a region in the center of the country that has been the site of major investments by the state oil company and foreign operators, like Exxon-Mobil, ConocoPhillips, and France’s Total SA. Since the 1990s these imperialist transnationals have invested more than $17 billion, which may have grown in value to $30 billion. The extraction and processing of this extra-heavy crude oil requires expensive investment in heavy machinery, treatment, and storage complexes. Partial processing of this oil on the spot, to make it liquid enough to flow in pipes, produces enormous amounts of waste material.

There is a sharp contradiction. On the one hand, the state must extract financial resources from the oil industry to underwrite its development and social spending plans (and, increasingly, to meet rising popular expectations and shore up the political base of the Chavez regime). On the other hand, the state must invest to maintain the competitiveness of the oil industry as a capitalist enterprise in the international capitalist market.⁸

Again, there is great tension here. In the last two years, social programs have absorbed a larger share of the state oil company’s budget than has spending on maintenance and new oil capacity. This social spending by the government puts strains on needed investments in the oil sector. To say investments are “needed” is not to make some pure technical statement; rather, investments are “needed” from the standpoint of an oil-exporting economy and the dictates of the world market—improving efficiency and compensating for possible price declines with expanded output. Because Venezuela’s wells are so old, output declines 23 percent a year—and so it is necessary to drill new wells just to maintain capacity.⁹ There is a pull exerted by competition on the world market, intensified by low levels of investment in Venezuela’s oil sector relative to other oil-producing countries, to upgrade and expand the industry, and maintain profitability.

If foreign investment comes forth to finance a major share of Plan Siembra, this investment carries with it real control and puts real leverage in the hands of those foreign investors. This is important to bear in mind. Venezuela is not unusual in having formal sovereignty over its oil. Some three-quarters of the world’s oil and gas reserves and half of global output are controlled by national state oil companies like Saudi Aramco, Kuwait Petroleum, and the Algerian state company. But the national-state oil companies rely on international finance, work through international trade and marketing channels, and collaborate with the large, Western-based transnational oil companies, like Exxon-Mobil. These transnational corporations and their service company networks have strong competitive advantage: in scale, reach, and core managerial and technological competences, financial capabilities, support by the Western imperialist governments, and the ability to pull up stakes in a country like Venezuela.

In terms of the second track: higher tax and royalty payments. In April 2006, Chavez announced his intention to increase PDVSA’s share in major projects to 60 percent from 40 percent. The Chavez government is creating new forms of joint ventures (what are now called “mixed companies”) with Shell, Chevron, British Petroleum, and others. Oil resources and oil profits are jointly owned in the form of single new enterprises—only now, the Venezuelan government obtains a higher proportion of profits than it had previously, while the foreign oil companies, with heavy investments, benefit from current high oil prices and prospect of profitable new oil fields. At the same time, the government has negotiated with the 22 foreign companies operating in Venezuela to agree to a new tax law that is being enforced retroactively.

On May 1, 2007, Chavez made good on his ultimatum to the foreign companies that they accept a larger share of ownership by the Venezuelan government or cease operations. Chavez may be a tough negotiator (and did succeed in getting a larger slice of rising oil revenues from companies who want to stay put in order to recoup the value of their investments and make huge profits). At the same time, to keep these projects alive, to go forward with expansion plans, Chavez must reach some kind of understanding with foreign capital, as these firms are providing essential finance and technology. So the threat of takeover was sweetened with a commitment to compensate the firms.¹⁰

The third track of the oil program is to restructure Venezuela’s external trade relations away from dependence on the U.S. as a market and source of investment capital and technical expertise. Venezuela accounts for some 12 percent of the U.S.’s daily oil imports, and plays a certain strategic role in the U.S. ability to project power in the world. But the other side of the equation is more telling, illustrating an aspect of Venezuela’s structural dependency : that 12 percent share of U.S. oil imports accounted for by Venezuela represents 60 percent of Venezuela’s total production!¹¹

In seeking to diversify markets, Chavez has opened negotiations with China and has plans to sell Venezuelan oil to China, the world’s second-largest energy consumer, and to India as well. But there are high costs of servicing these markets. Venezuela does not have a Pacific port, and large tankers cannot make it through the Panama Canal. So Venezuela would need to construct pipeline through Colombia in order to ship the oil. But shipment to Asia is costly, owing to the long distances involved. Further, China does not have adequate capacity to refine Venezuela’s sulfur-rich crude. China is investing substantial sums to increase that capacity, but China is also exploring for oil and gas closer to its shores in the South China Sea and angling as well for deals in the Caspian Sea region.

The U.S. connection is a difficult knot for Chavez to cut, especially if oil is to be the centerpiece of development. There is the close proximity of the U.S. market and low transportation costs. There are the refineries in the U.S. adapted to processing Venezuela’s oil. And the U.S. continues to be Venezuela’s most important trading partner (U.S.-Venezuela trade actually rose 36 percent in 2006). These are among the pressures operating on Chavez to maintain stable economic relations with the U.S.,¹² even if the U.S. has other plans.

Part of Chavez’s strategy for diversification involves inviting foreign companies from outside the traditional circle of the big Western oil majors to invest in Venezuela’s petroleum industry and to participate in his plan for a continental gas pipeline project stretching from Venezuela down to Argentina. These form part of Chavez’s efforts to create more multilateral investment and trade links. Chavez is courting companies from India, China, Russia, and elsewhere. Chavez hails investment plans in Latin America as anti-U.S. regional integration.

But whether in Venezuela or elsewhere in Latin America, the essence of these projects is: investment by capitalist firms...according to capitalist methods of exploitation...to be measured by capitalist criteria of profitability. These projects have enormous social consequences for local populations, including dislocation of indigenous peoples. And they have enormous environmental consequences.¹³

Chavez must assure long-standing Western and new investors of a relatively stable business-receptive environment. It is revealing that the Chavez regime has designated the oil sector a “strategic industry.” The state-appointed management tightly controls this sector (and the oil industry is one where worker co-participation, the limits and real nature of which will be discussed in a subsequent installment of this series, is forbidden).

One critical-minded supporter of Chavez has observed, “the joint ventures provide a reality check to those used to only a diet of Chavez speeches...[B]ut in the current circumstances, paradoxically, a Faustian pact with foreign capital may be necessary to keep the forces of imperialism [U.S. pressure and intervention] off Venezuela’s back.”¹⁴

This captures much of the “best-case” thinking about Chavez’s oil-based strategy of development. But this “best-case” thinking rests on a misunderstanding of imperialism. As desirous of genuine social change as many Chavez supporters are, that cold-water splash of “reality check” is worth pursuing further.

Modern-Day Enclave Development

Imperialism manifests itself not simply through economic bullying or military threat and intervention—and U.S. military action against Venezuela is by no means “off the table.” It is also expressed through the structure and functioning of the world economy and the existing economic and social structure of Venezuela, which reflects and reinforces dependency on oil and subordination to the world market.

Chavez is perpetuating a form of export-led growth centered on the oil industry. The irrationality of an economy so geared to oil is expressed in the fact that only 20 percent of Venezuela’s total oil production enters into the domestic economy.¹⁵ It is expressed in the fact that while Venezuela’s state oil company (PDVSA) is the country’s single largest employer, with about 45,000 on its payroll, employment in the oil sector accounts for less than 1 percent of Venezuela’s total work force.¹⁶ It is expressed in the fact that, despite high oil prices and earnings, official unemployment in Venezuela has ranged from 8 to 15 percent in the Chavez years, with the poverty rate at 30 percent at the start of 2007.¹⁷

This is a profoundly distorted economy: today, the oil sector accounts, and this has been a long-standing pattern, for about one-third of Venezuela’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 50 percent of the government’s revenue, and 80 percent of Venezuela’s export earnings. As one of the world’s top oil producers, Venezuela is a top emitter of CO2 emissions in Latin America and has the region’s highest per capita rate of carbon emissions.¹⁸

The oil-export economy induces a form of “enclave” development. Such development responds to external sources of economic dynamism: the world oil market, conditions of demand in the major imperialist and regional economies, the rhythm and direction of world capital flows, etc. And such capital-intensive mono-export development is a barrier to integrated, all-around agricultural and industrial development in the exporting country.

Here it is necessary to elaborate on two related aspects of dependent development: lopsidedness and heightened exposure and vulnerability to the world market.

In the oppressed nations, the oil sector requires massive investment in advanced equipment and technology. These technology demands are met disproportionately from outside the economy—much of the advanced technology required by the oil sector is either imported, requiring that foreign exchange be generated to pay for imported capital goods, or obtained through the joint ventures (the foreign oil and oil-service companies involved, like Halliburton, provide the technology in-house or purchase it on the world market).

Moreover, much of this technology cannot be widely diffused and adopted throughout the economy to revolutionize social production. This is so for two reasons. First, much of the specialized oil-drilling and oil-engineering technology is not appropriate to overall conditions of social-economic development. Second, even where some of this technology could have useful direct and indirect spin-off applications, there does not exist a broad-based industrial structure to which the benefits could accrue—exactly because the oil focus has constrained broader development.

The oil sector is not significantly stimulating new demand for locally produced industrial products, nor is it resulting in a rising socially useful skills level of the overall work force. You do not have a process of agricultural and industrial development unfolding that strengthens local capacity to innovate and adapt technology. These are consequences of enclave-like, oil-based development.¹⁹

Under Chavez, PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, has been seeking agreements with foreign oil companies requiring as a condition of entry that they source (obtain) more oil-service supplies locally. But as oil resources are depleted, and as the extraction and processing of Venezuela’s heavy crude and sulfur-rich oil grows more challenging, new technology requirements appear. And as these requirements are met with even more specialized and sophisticated technology, the technology gaps between the oil sector and the rest of the economy are reproduced on a new level.²⁰

Meanwhile, the huge port, pipeline facilities, and other infrastructure investments to facilitate the exploration, extraction, and shipment of oil and coal are often out of scale to the needs of the overall economy—again, since they serve these more self-contained, outward-oriented investment projects, like the Orinoco Petroleum Belt plans.

As mentioned earlier, the oil sector overall accounts for a very small fraction of total employment. Chevron’s huge $3.8 billion investment in the Orinoco Petroleum Belt initially will have created 6,000 jobs—upon completion, the project will only need 700 permanent employees.

These are phenomena of the enclave-like character of oil-based development. But here is the rub: the overall agro-industrial structure is profoundly influenced and skewed by the oil sector. There is heightened unevenness as between the productivity and wage levels and technological dynamism of a modern oil sector and other segments of the economy; and, as will be discussed shortly, the oil industry has negative feedback effects on domestic agriculture and food production. At the same time, the build-up of the state-capitalist oil sector strengthens class interests and class forces that have a strong stake in maintaining the dominant macro-economic structure.

To develop an agricultural base that could meet the food needs of society, provide rural employment, and develop through mutually reinforcing links with an integrated and balanced industrial structure would require a) a very different allocation and prioritization of resources serving the needs of the now exploited and oppressed, and b) a break with the economic logic, structure of options, and pressures of the local and world capitalist market system (what Marxists call the law of value).

Pressures and Constraints of the World Economy

Export-oriented oil production is a relation to the world imperialist economy, a rope of control and dependence, a rope tightly constricting the creative capacities of the masses of people. And that rope must be cut through revolution...

This brings us to the second aspect of oil-dependent development. The oil sector is a principal contact point with the world economy. It transmits world prices and aligns currency rates. It imposes competitive world efficiencies on the Venezuelan economy: the oil sector must operate at certain levels of productivity, which dictates investments and regimes of efficient exploitation of workers. And fluctuations in the international oil market are transmitted to the Venezuelan economy.

What are some of the implications and effects of this?

Oil exports have generated a high exchange rate that makes local products, agrarian or industrial, uncompetitive on international and domestic markets. Windfall oil export prices weaken the incentives to develop peasant-based agriculture. A strong currency, with strong purchasing power, makes it “cost-efficient” to import goods, like food, that can be more cheaply produced overseas than domestically. This has contributed to a shift of labor out of agricultural production and local manufacturing into service and commercial sectors and, most especially, into the “informal economy” (of street merchants and irregularly employed workers with few social protections).

Agriculture’s share of Venezuela’s GDP declined from 50 percent in 1960 to about 6 percent when Chavez took office in 1998. Venezuela has traditionally imported about 75 to 80 percent of its food from abroad, despite its rich soil and water sources.²¹

This is the logic of world capitalism, and it continues to impede sustainable agricultural development and food security in Venezuela. These are the workings of market forces, acting through the medium of an internationally traded and strategic commodity, oil, and its effect on exchange rates.

The Chavez administration has benefited from a five-fold increase of oil prices in the years since he came to power. These prices have held fast for some time and have enabled the regime to expand and underwrite social programs. There is no question that these programs have brought certain benefits to the poor: some improvements, though limited, in health care, access to food, some public works, expanded social security, and cheaper electricity, etc. And the Venezuelan economy, stimulated by oil demand, has enjoyed very high rates of growth over the last three years.

But two things must be emphasized.

First, Chavez is gambling on continued high oil prices and demand. Oil has to sell above $30 a barrel to make the expanded investments in the extra-heavy oil that Chavez has embarked upon profitable. A plunge in oil’s price would have devastating consequences for foreign investors, PDVSA, and the state treasury. Chavez is trying to stabilize production and prices at profitable levels.

Despite the surging oil revenues, the government has had to borrow heavily from Venezuelan banks to cover a large and growing deficit (the government deficit is expected to reach 5 percent of gross domestic product in 2007).²² Some of this government borrowing is driven by the decision to compensate foreign oil companies for a larger government share of their operations. (Chavez is not expropriating the oil companies but rather working out deals with them in order to ride the oil markets.) Middle-class and luxury consumption patterns have gone along with an imperialist-dependent oil economy; consumer spending is skyrocketing and consumer debt growing as oil revenues have grown. In the “oil windfall” atmosphere, domestic and foreign banks have enjoyed an incredible earnings boom, a rate of return of 33 percent in 2006 that was described by an international banking journal as “the envy of the banking world.”²³

Much is made of Chavez’s attempt to solidify a stronger price front in OPEC. But the oil market is subject to all kinds of economic uncertainties and geopolitical developments. Importantly, OPEC is not a unitary, self-determining price setter.²⁴ “Spot” markets and the speculative “futures” markets based in New York, London, and Singapore now play a key role in determining oil prices. There are oil-producing countries outside of OPEC, like Russia, whose oil production and marketing influence world prices. There is global competition among the existing oil regions of the world. Oil is a cyclical industry subject to world economic conditions. Just nine years ago, Venezuelan oil was selling for about $10 to $12 a barrel (compared to today's price of $60 plus).

In terms of geopolitics, the U.S. would not welcome any shift in OPEC power away from Saudi Arabia to Venezuela. (The imperial bargain with the Saudi princes and Gulf sheikdoms: they ensure a stable oil supply, and the U.S. provides the “neighborhood” with military protection.) Further, through “regime change” and closer working relations with producers in the Caspian Basin and in Africa, the U.S. and Great Britain have been seeking greater control over supply conditions.

Second, the Chavez regime has done little to lessen the economy’s dependence on oil, to diversify Venezuela’s industrial base, or to significantly expand agricultural production. “Sowing the petroleum” has mainly involved the financing and expansion of the social programs.

Indeed, if we take something like food, the constraints and contradictions become more apparent. One of the most celebrated of Chavez’s “missions” (the social campaigns and funding that address health, education, housing, food, etc.) is Mission Mercal. Its stated strategic objective is national food security. This program is providing low-cost food to sections of the poor (and to broader urban strata) through a network of markets, supply depots, and distribution-nutrition centers. This would be an important emergency and back-up measure in a genuine revolutionary society.

But this is not a real food security program; rather it is redistributive, a form of rationing and price subsidy. It is not part of a larger project to radically reorient the economy away from external dependence: on oil and food imports. It is not part of a socialist project to forge a whole new structural foundation of balanced and integrated agricultural-industrial development that can provide for the livelihood and food needs of society. In fact, Mission Mercal relies on imports and purchases from the same transnational firms that have traditionally dominated Venezuela’s food sector.²⁵ This is a continuing expression of Venezuela’s lack of internal economic integration.

Here, as with other initiatives, a major downturn or collapse in world oil prices would ramify widely and destructively through the economy¼and seriously endanger this kind of social program. From the perspective of making a genuine socialist revolution in an oppressed nation, there is a pressing task to move quickly and decisively to free society from food dependency and the colossal distortion by imperialism of agricultural and food systems. The imperialists will attack, they will boycott, and they will try, literally…to starve you.

A sympathetic treatment of the “Bolivarian revolution” summarized that “international oil markets continue to be the single most influential factor in determining the prospects for Venezuela’s political economy.”²⁶ Chavez may rail against the IMF, but how does this represent an alternative to neoliberalism, which prescribes in part that a country specialize in its “comparative advantage” in the international division of labor, maximize export earnings, import cheap food, and harness revenues for development?

Conclusion: Oil’s Social Price Under Imperialism; Another Way Is Possible

Even if this program provides some short-term improvement in the conditions of the masses, it cannot be sustained and cannot lead to a world beyond imperialism.

Oil is not a “treasure” to grab hold of. Oil-rich countries, from Venezuela to Iran to Algeria to Indonesia, have seen export booms produce inequality and social misery. Government budgets bulging with petrodollars have come crashing down (as Venezuela’s did in the late 1980s and early 1990s). In Nigeria, there is the “technological achievement” of foreign capital building an infrastructure that can extract oil from a waterlogged equatorial forest—while adjoining villages are without power or clean water. When more nationalist regimes have replaced old elites that functioned as local client-watchdogs for imperialism, as happened in Iran in the 1950s, the U.S. has not hesitated to move against them. The flow of “black gold” must not be disrupted for long.

The extraction of oil and more oil, based on exploitation of labor power and the realization of value through the international circuits of capital, historically enmeshed and continues to enmesh the population of Venezuela in a global network of commodity relations in which social and human development hangs in the balance of an unequal structure of world production and trade…and the movement of prices on the world market.

A genuine socialist revolution is not about striving for a more equitable distribution of oil revenues, or trying to strengthen regional trade and oil blocs that only further exploitation of people and despoliation of nature, or demanding that the major oil companies “recognize their ethical and social responsibilities” (yes, you can go to ChevronTexaco’s website and learn about the educational and health programs they are setting up in Venezuela).

The point is this: the modern oil economy is not a neutral set of production and technical coefficients. Export-oriented oil production is a relation to the world imperialist economy, a rope of control and dependence, a rope tightly constricting the creative capacities of the masses of people. And that rope must be cut through a revolution that overthrows the old order and state power.

When the proletariat and the masses of people seize power in the oppressed societies, the goal cannot be to take over and reprogram a lopsided oil-based economy that warps development and that subjects society and economy to the destructive imperatives of the world system. Rather, a revolution must do away with the very foundations of such an economy in order to break the grip of imperialist control and to overcome the distortions of imperialist-led development.

In place of the old economy, a liberating new one must be built: an economy whose foundation must be agriculture, an economy with a diversified and decentralized industry serving agriculture and broad developmental needs. Only by constructing this kind of economy can basic social needs be met and relative self-sufficiency achieved in a world dominated by imperialism.

What would be the role of oil in a country like Venezuela, with extensive petroleum reserves, if a genuine socialist revolution took place? There would need to be a radical reorientation away from oil’s historically dominant position in the structure and functioning of the economy. This calls for a decisive break with export-oriented, oil-based development. Oil would still play some role in the economy, but this would be quantitatively and qualitatively different. Concerted and coordinated society-wide efforts would be made to greatly reduce dependency on oil as an energy source. Society would move towards more ecologically sound alternatives, especially as oil is currently extracted, refined, transported, etc., but fundamentally in developing a renewable energy foundation of growth. The social-economic calculus would no longer be one of maximizing production or maximizing returns but rather developing a just, rational, and ecologically sustainable economy based on the conscious activism of the masses and serving the liberation of society and humanity as a whole.

Socialist economic development must serve the goal of overcoming the great differences between town and country, between agriculture and industry, and between mental and manual labor. Socialist economic development must enable a revolutionary society to stand up to imperialism and aid the advance of revolution elsewhere in the world. None of this is possible without a new revolutionary state power that can lead this process forward and mobilize the masses to remake all of society.²⁷

Developing this kind of economy is a complicated task, and the elimination of huge inflows of petroleum income, along with the economic, political, and military pressures of imperialism, will further complicate this task. But the elimination of petro-dependency and the petro-state, and the adoption of other revolutionary economic and social measures, will open whole new possibilities for creating a truly liberating economy.

In addition, socialist state power above all is state power exercised by a class—the proletariat—that aims to eliminate all classes, all exploitative systems of production, all oppressive social relations and institutions; and all the ideas and values that reflect and reinforce the division of society into classes. The socialist state’s program at any given time must embody the communist project of moving humanity, through ever-more conscious struggle and transformation, in this direction.²⁸

Under Hugo Chavez, Venezuela remains locked tightly into the global economy, and Chavez’s program turns on the market value of the oil resource. Even if this program provides some short-term improvement in the conditions of the masses, it cannot be sustained and cannot lead to a world beyond imperialism. And rather than represent the proletariat, Hugo Chavez personifies a section of the Venezuelan capitalist class and radicalized petty-bourgeoisie that bridles at the inequities caused by foreign domination but that cannot conceive of rupturing out of the imperialist-conditioned dominance of oil in the motion and development of the Venezuelan economy.

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Footnotes

1. Cited in Nicholas Kozloff, Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the U.S. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 7. No original Spanish-language source available. [back]

2. Greg Palast, “Hugo Chavez,” Interview in Z, July 2006. www.zmag.org. [back]

3. See Larry Everest, Oil, Empire, and Power: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 2004). [back]

4. On the growth of Caracas, see Allen Gilbert, The Latin American City (London: Latin America Bureau, 1998), pp. 7-11. [back]

5. See J.P. Leary, “Untying the Knot of Venezuela’s Informal Economy,” naclanews, December 6, 2006. http://news.nacla.org. [back]

6. U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Country Analysis Briefs, Venezuela, June 2004. www.eia.doe.gov. [back]

7. On the 2006-2012 expansion plan and its costs and financing, see the statements and interviews by PDVSA officials at www.pdvsa.com. [back]

8. These kinds of contradictions are pointed to in Fernando Coronil, “Magical Illusions or Revolutionary Magic? Chavez in Historical Context,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. XXXIII, No 6, 2000. See this article and also the highly important analysis of the historical development of the rentier oil economy and modern Venezuelan state and various incarnations of plans to “sow the petroleum” in Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). [back]

9. See David Luhnow and Peter Millard, “As Global Demand Tightens, Oil Producer Has Agenda,” The Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2006. [back]

10. See Simon Romero and Clifford Krauss, “Deadline Nears in Chavez Fight Against Big Oil,” The New York Times, April 10, 2007; Simon Romero, “Chavez Takes Over Foreign Controlled Oil Projects in Venezuela,” The New York Times, May 2, 2007. In his July 2006 interview with Greg Palast (see zmag.org), Chavez says about the foreign oil companies, “[W]e don’t want them to go, and I don’t think they want to leave the country, either. We need each other.”  [back]

11. Claude Larsimont, “Hugo Chavez, the Bolivarian Use of Petrodollars and the Oil Market,” ESISC Background Analysis 10/05/2006. [back]

12. See James Surowiecki, “The Financial Page: Synergy With The Devil,” The New Yorker, January 8, 2007, p. 26. [back]

13. On the environmental and human rights issues posed by Chavez’s petroleum and natural gas regional initiatives, see David Hallowes and Victor Munnik Poisoned Spaces: Manufacturing Wealth, Producing Poverty, www.groundwork.org.za, October 2006; “Open Letter to President Hugo Chavez,” Sociedad Homo et Natura, posted at www.nadir.org in April 2006. [back]

14. Steven Mather, “Joint Ventures: Venezuela’s Faustian Pact with Foreign Capital,” Venezuelanalysis.com, September 30, 2006, www.venezuelanalysis.com. [back]

15. Year-end data for 2006 from U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration. [back]

16. “Venezuela: Minerals,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online, www.britannica.com. [back]

17. Bernardo Alvarez, “Venezuela’s Global Agenda: Six More Years,” April 5, 2007, Venezuelanalysis.com, www.venezuelanalysis.com. [back]

18. Data from U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Country Analysis Briefs, Venezuela, September 2006, www.eia.doe.gov.  [back]

19. The question of appropriate technology and whether raw materials investments spur linkages to other parts of the economy has been a long-standing topic of research and analysis on the part of radical, dependency, and Marxist theorists. The 2003 report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Foreign Investment in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2003 examines patterns of foreign investment in Latin America and questions supposed benefits and spillover effects resulting from natural resources investments. [back]

20. On new oil seismic technology and highly sophisticated secondary and tertiary recovery methods, some of which are now being used in Venezuela, see Jad Mouawad, “Oil Innovations Pump New Life into Old Wells, The New York Times, March 5, 2007.  [back]

21. Food and Agricultural Organization, United Nations, “Feature: FAO in Venezuela,” 2002, www.fao.org/english/newsroom/news/2002/9788-en.html. [back]

22. Simon Romero, “Chavez Rattles Takeover Saber at Steel Company and Banks,” The New York Times, May 7, 2007. [back]

23. Jans Erik Gould, “Boom Times for Banks in Venezuela,” The New York Times, June 15, 2007; Mark Turner, “Banks Thriving Despite Chavez Bravado,” The Banker, March 5, 2007. www.thebanker.com. [back]

24. On OPEC, see Cyrus Bina, “Limits of OPEC Pricing: OPEC Profits and the Nature of Global Oil Accumulation,” OPEC Review, Vol. 14 (1), Spring 1990. [back]

25. Sarah Wagner, “Mercal: Reducing Poverty and Creating National Food Sovereignty in Venezuela,” Venezuelanalysis.com, June 24, 2005, www.venezuelanalysis.com. [back]

26. Chesa Boudin, Gabriel Gonzalez, Wilmer Rumbos, The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions—100 Answers (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), p. 141. [back]

27. For Mao’s approach to self-reliant socialist development and the agriculture-industry relationship, see Raymond Lotta, ed., Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism (New York: Banner Press, 1994), especially chapter 7. [back]

28. See Bob Avakian, Views on Socialism and Communism: A Radically New Kind of State, A Radically Different and Far Greater Vision of Freedom, revcom.us. [back]

Send us your comments.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/avakian/anotherway/anotherway11-en.html

Revolution #94, July 1, 2007

Part 11

The Necessity That Is Being Confronted

Now, having spoken to some questions of basic analysis and of outlook and methodology, and with that as a foundation, I want to return again to the situation, to the necessity, that has to be confronted now. From what has been discussed so far, it is possible to see that the necessity facing the U.S. imperialists and in particular the core at the center of power now in the U.S.—and what they have done and are doing in the world in responding to that necessity, as well as how they are moving in relation to the freedom they have perceived that they have in the current situation, particularly since the "end of the Cold War" and the demise of the Soviet Union and its bloc—all this is in turn imposing necessity on all different strata and groups throughout the world, including within the U.S. itself.

Again, to just touch on these points quickly—but as bases and focuses for further reflection and wrangling—for the class of U.S. imperialists themselves, this situation is now impinging on them, and this necessity is making itself felt, in increasingly acute ways. They can't roll back the clock and go back to the situation before they invaded Iraq this time (in 2003) and ousted Saddam Hussein. Some of them might actually wish now that they could do that—but they can't. Some of these right-wing commentators were, for awhile, making joking remarks like: "Here's what we should do. We should get Saddam Hussein out of jail, apologize to him, put him back in power, tell him to whip this shit in shape while we ignore what he has to do to get this done." Now, clearly they can't do that. But these jokes themselves are a reflection of "the fine mess they have gotten themselves into," and the fact that, as a result, the necessity that is confronting them is greatly heightened.

And one of the ways this finds expression—and in fact this is another manifestation of, or dimension to, the point about "the pyramid of power"¹ in the U.S. now—is this: Especially in these acute circumstances, as well as in an all-around and basic sense, to really take on and answer the right-wing section of the ruling class and its program and where it is driving things, it would be necessary to get down to, and to hit strongly at, the underlying assumptions and foundations upon which this rests. And that the other representatives of the ruling class—including as this is embodied in the Democratic Party leadership—can never do—and do not want to do.

If, for example, you are going to really challenge the thrust of the Iraq War, and the "let's go after Iran" logic, and so on, you have to call into question the whole assumptions of the "war on terror" and you have to bring forth what all that is really all about and is based on. Or, if you are going to take on something like the attacks on affirmative action, you have to talk about the actual history of this country—and all the atrocities, including genocide, slavery, and other horrendous forms of oppression, down to today—that this has involved. And that you cannot do from a ruling class perspective. Or to defend the right to abortion in a truly powerful way, which can answer the many-sided attacks on this—practical, political, and ideological—you have to get into the role of women in this society and the whole historical oppression of women—how that is bound up with other fundamental social and class relations. That, again, is something you cannot do while remaining within the dominant and "acceptable" framework of bourgeois politics and ideology.

This is especially acutely posed in today's circumstances. Bourgeois politicians can't even do what the Church Senate Committee (named after Senator Frank Church) did back 30 years ago. Then, as a result of a whole mass upheaval and growing mass consciousness about the real nature of what the U.S. does around the world, this Senate Committee came out and exposed some of the things the U.S. had done, like in Chile and other countries where the U.S. pulled off coups and committed other crimes. Today, if you want to represent the ruling class, you cannot do even what the Church Committee did. It's nowhere on the agenda to talk about that stuff. The current situation—and not just the freedom but the necessity of the ruling class—doesn't allow for that kind of discourse, even in watered-down terms.

I was watching this guy Jeff Cohen on Amy Goodman. He was the founder of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting). He's got this book out: Adventures in Cable News Media.² It's an interesting book. It provides exposure of how the mainstream media operate. This is coming from a certain standpoint, different from our own, but it's not without its insights.

Cohen makes an observation that objectively has to do with the "pyramid point." He recalled how, during a break when he was on one of these CNN Crossfire shows, he turned to the right-winger, Robert Novak, and said, "Do you really think Pat Buchanan is a liberal?" And, Cohen recounts, Novak went into a whole tirade about how Buchanan is an economic "New Dealer" and a populist and all that. And then Novak said: I was an Eisenhower Republican in the '50s, and everyday since then I've gone further to the right. In commenting on this, Cohen makes the very true and very telling point that you could not get somebody on TV, as a regular and mainstream commentator, who said: "I was a Kennedy Democrat in the '60s, and every day since then I've gone further to the left." No way such a person could ever have any place in the mainstream media—except as some sort of object of ridicule. I mean, Noam Chomsky has been declared to be "from the planet Saturn"—he's way beyond the pale of respectable and acceptable discourse in the mainstream media.

Cohen, who was a producer for the Phil Donahue show before it got kicked off of MSNBC, talks about how, if they wanted to have even a relatively mild left-winger on that show, they were told they had to have at least two or three right-wingers to "balance" that left-winger. And the Donahue show was supposed to be the liberal answer to the right-wing talk shows. But when it got to the question of someone like Chomsky, the "joke"—or, really, more-than-half-serious point—was that if they were going to have Chomsky on, they'd have to have 38 right-wingers for "balance." [laughs]

Again, this is not just owing to the organized strength of right-wingers, nor is it merely a matter of corporate dominance in the mainstream media. More essentially, it is a reflection of the necessity that the U.S. ruling class faces–-not just the freedom they are seeking to seize on, but also the necessity and the way in which how they have responded to that necessity has created further necessity impinging, yes, even on them.

But this is also impinging on and confronting all different strata throughout the world—other imperialists in other countries, other ruling classes, for example, like in China and India, or Pakistan. Remember, there was that whole thing about Richard Armitage, the friend of Colin Powell and assistant secretary of state in the first Bush administration—how, right after September 11th, Armitage went to the head of state of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, and basically gave him the "offer he couldn't refuse" routine—insisting that he allow Pakistan to be used as a base for the attack on Afghanistan, and for the "war on terror" more generally. Recently, when Armitage was asked about this, he said—continuing the Godfather routine, or at least his role as the henchman of the big Don—"I never make a threat I'm not in a position to carry out, and I couldn't personally carry that out." Well, that was never the point. [laughs] The threat was coming from U.S. imperialism—you were just the one delivering the threat.

But, beyond the particularities (and peculiarities) of that, in one way or another what the U.S. is doing impinges on all kinds of ruling elites, and other forces—and not just through direct Mafia-type threats. Every ruling class--in India, China, Russia, France, Germany, and so on—and even lesser ruling classes in various parts of the world, which are fundamentally dependent on and beholden to imperialism—all of them are forced to respond to this. They are all being confronted with this necessity.

And so are all the "popular strata" throughout the world. All the non-ruling class strata, all the different groupings among the people in the U.S. and in countries all over the world, are being confronted with necessity which is stemming mainly at this point from what the U.S. ruling class, and its core at the center of power now, is doing. On a deeper, more fundamental level, all this is stemming from the underlying dynamics of the imperialist system, but in more immediate and proximate terms—in terms of what's directly affecting people right now—it is proceeding to a significant degree out of how the core at the center of power of U.S. imperialism now is perceiving things, including its necessity as well as its freedom, and how it is acting in relation to that. But, again, it is very important to stress that this is not a matter of "all freedom" for them—as powerful as they are, it is far from the case that they can just "do whatever they want." And what they are doing not only involves necessity as well as freedom for them ; it presents necessity but also—at least potential—freedom for those forces, of various kinds, who are opposed to them. Here, once again, I am using "freedom" not in a more "conventional" sense, but in the sense of confronting and transforming necessity—material reality—in ways that are favorable, are in line with one's objectives.

So there is not a single group in society—and, for that matter, ultimately not a single individual, but in any case not a single stratum or group in society anywhere in the world, from ruling classes down to the most basic masses—which is not being impinged upon and being confronted by these dynamics. Of course, most people are unaware of this, or only vaguely conscious of it—or, even if aware of it in varying degrees, they do not yet have a scientific understanding of it and therefore are not able yet to consciously act to change all this in their own interests, and most fundamentally in the interests of humanity. So the challenge this poses for us, as communists—as those who have the responsibility of acting as the vanguard of the proletarian revolution and moving humanity to a whole new stage and a whole new world—this challenge once again revolves around Mao's "amendment" to Engels: that freedom does not lie just in the recognition of necessity, but in the transformation of necessity, through struggle. And, especially in these acute circumstances, the orientation, the perspective, and the approach has to be one of wrenching freedom out of all this.

This is being more and more acutely posed. It is true, as I pointed out not long ago: If there are a few more major changes in the world—particularly in this dynamic where Jihad and McWorld/McCrusade mutually reinforce each other while opposing each other—it is going to be qualitatively harder to break out of this dynamic. And this is one of the things we have to join more fully, and struggle over more deeply, with people. You know, sitting on top of a rumbling volcano might somehow seem more comfortable than trying to move, but it's actually not a very good position to be in. [laughs] This is what we have to get people to understand.

---

Footnotes

1 In a number of talks and writings, Bob Avakian analyzes the relations at the top of U.S. society—as well as the relations between various contending forces "at the top" and social bases at various levels of society—in terms of a "pyramid." This analysis can be found, for example, in the DVD of the talk Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About (Three Q Productions, available at threeqvideo.com). See also the articles "The Pyramid of Power and the Struggle to Turn This Whole Thing Upside Down" and "The Center—Can It Hold? The Pyramid as Two Ladders," available online at revcom.us. [back]

2 Jeff Cohen, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media (Sausalito, CA: PoliPoint Press, 2006) [back]

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/094/three-worlds-en.html

Revolution #94, July 1, 2007

Three Alternative Worlds

by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

This essay is taken from the book Bob Avakian: Observations on Art and Culture, Science and Philosophy (Insight Press, Chicago, 2005).

As the world exists today and as people seek to change it, and particularly in terms of the socialist transformation of society, as I see it there are basically three alternatives that are possible. One is the world as it is. Enough said about that. [laughter]

The second one is in a certain sense, almost literally and mechanically, turning the world upside down. In other words, people who are now exploited will no longer be exploited in the same way, people who now rule this society will be prevented from ruling or influencing society in a significant way. The basic economic structure of society will change, some of the social relations will change, and some of the forms of political rule will change, and some of the forms of culture and ideology will change, but fundamentally the masses of people will not be increasingly and in one leap after another drawn into the process of really transforming society. This is really a vision of a revisionist society. If you think back to the days of the Soviet Union, when it had become a revisionist society, capitalist and imperialist in essence, but still socialist in name, when they would be chided for their alleged or real violations of people’s rights, they would often answer “Who are you in the West to be talking about the violation of human rights—look at all the people in your society who are unemployed, what more basic human right is there than to have a job?”

Well, did they have a point? Yes, up to a point. But fundamentally what they were putting forward, the vision of society that they were projecting, was a social welfare kind of society in which fundamentally the role of the masses of people is no different than it is under the classical form of capitalism. The answer about the rights of the people cannot be reduced to the right to have a job and earn an income, as basic as that is. There is the question of are we really going to transform society so that in every respect, not only economically but socially, politically, ideologically, and culturally, it really is superior to capitalist society. A society that not only meets the needs of the masses of people, but really is characterized increasingly by the conscious expression and initiative of the masses of people.

This is a more fundamental transformation than simply a kind of social welfare, socialist in name but really capitalist in essence society, where the role of the masses of people is still largely reduced to being producers of wealth, but not people who thrash out all the larger questions of affairs of state, the direction of society, culture, philosophy, science, the arts, and so on. The revisionist model is a narrow, economist view of socialism. It reduces the people, in their activity, to simply the economic sphere of society, and in a limited way at that—simply their social welfare with regard to the economy. It doesn’t even think about transforming the world outlook of the people as they in turn change the world around them.

And you cannot have a new society and a new world with the same outlook that people are indoctrinated and inculcated with in this society. You cannot have a real revolutionary transformation of society and abolition of unequal social as well as economic relations and political relations if people still approach the world in the way in which they’re conditioned and limited and constrained to approach it now. How can the masses of people really take up the task of consciously changing the world if their outlook and their approach to the world remains what it is under this system? It’s impossible, and this situation will simply reproduce the great inequalities in every sphere of society that I’ve been talking about.

The third alternative is a real radical rupture. Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto that the communist revolution represents a radical rupture with traditional property relations and with traditional ideas. And the one is not possible without the other. They are mutually reinforcing, one way or the other.

If you have a society in which the fundamental role of women is to be breeders of children, how can you have a society in which there is equality between men and women? You cannot. And if you don’t attack and uproot the traditions, the morals, and so on, that reinforce that role, how can you transform the relations between men and women and abolish the deep-seated inequalities that are bound up with the whole division of society into oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited? You cannot.

So the third alternative is a real radical rupture in every sphere, a radically different synthesis, to put it that way. Or to put it another way, it’s a society and a world that the great majority of people would actually want to live in. One in which not only do they not have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, or if they get sick whether they’re going to be told that they can’t have health care because they can’t pay for it, as important as that is; but one in which they are actually taking up, wrangling with, and increasingly making their own province all the different spheres of society.

Achieving that kind of a society, and that kind of a world, is a very profound challenge. It’s much more profound than simply changing a few forms of ownership of the economy and making sure that, on that basis, people’s social welfare is taken care of, but you still have people who are taking care of that for the masses of people; and all the spheres of science, the arts, philosophy, and all the rest are basically the province of a few. And the political decision-making process remains the province of a few.

To really leap beyond that is a tremendous and world-historic struggle that we’ve been embarked on since the Russian revolution (not counting the very short-lived and limited experience of the Paris Commune)—and in which we reached the high point with the Chinese revolution and in particular the Cultural Revolution—but from which we’ve been thrown back temporarily.

So we need to make a further leap on the basis of summing up very deeply all that experience. There are some very real and vexing problems that we have to confront and advance through in order to draw from the best of the past, but go further and do even better in the future.

Now I want to say a few things in this context about totalitarianism. Just as an aside here, I find it very interesting that you can read innumerable books delving deeply into the psyche of Stalin or Lenin or Mao—“What went on in the deranged minds of these people [laughter] that led them to think they could remake the world in their maddened image [laughter] and led them, in the name of some greater moral good, to bring great catastrophe on the humanity that they were affecting?” I don’t know how many books I’ve seen like that. I have never yet seen—maybe there are some, but I have never seen—a study of the deranged psyche of Thomas Jefferson [laughter] or George Washington: “How is it that a person could come to believe in their own mind [laughter] that they were benefiting not only humanity in general, but other human beings whom they owned? [laughter] What depth of psychological derangement must be involved in that? [laughter] What is more totalitarian than actually owning other human beings?”

Or what about the study of the depths of the depraved minds of Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan [laughter], who murdered millions of people, including vast numbers of children? “What must have gone wrong, somewhere in their childhood or somewhere else in their lives? [laughter] What demented ideas must they somehow have internalized that led them to believe that in the name of the shining city on the hill, or whatever [laughter], they had the right and the obligation to slaughter thousands and millions of innocent people?”

I have never seen those studies. Certainly I haven’t read about them in the New York Times Book Review section. [laughter]

Still, there are some real questions that are raised about totalitarianism by the ideologues and the “intellectual camp followers” of the imperialists that do need to be taken on. In particular, they make the charge that in a society which they call totalitarian, but which is in reality the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is first of all an official ideology that everyone has to profess belief in, in order to get along in that society. And there is an official politics that everyone has to be involved in, in order to get along in that society and not get in trouble. Well, what about this?

Fundamentally, this is a distortion of what has gone on in socialist societies: why these revolutions were necessary in the first place and what they were seeking to accomplish and to overcome, and how they were going about doing that. The reality is that, for the great masses of people in capitalist (and certainly in feudal) society, they are barred from really being involved in any significant way in official politics and the politics that actually affect the affairs of state and the direction of society. And they are indoctrinated with an outlook and methodology and ideology that prevents them—discourages them and actively obstructs them—from really understanding the world as it is and changing it consciously. And that is what socialist revolutions seek to change, as well as bringing about fundamental changes in the economy and the social relations.

But what about this question of official ideology that everyone has to profess? Well, I think we have more to sum up about that from the history of socialist society and the dictatorship of the proletariat so far.

With regard to the question of the party, I think two things are definitely true. One, you need a vanguard party to lead this revolution and to lead the new state. Two, that party has to have an ideology that unifies it, an ideology that correctly reflects and enables people to consciously change reality, which is communist ideology.

But, more broadly, should everyone in society have to profess this ideology in order to get along? No. Those who are won over to this ideology should proclaim it and struggle for it. Those who are not convinced of it should say so. Those who disagree with it should say that. And there should be struggle. Something has to lead—the correct ideology that really enables people to get at the truth, and to do something with it in their interests, has to lead; but that doesn’t mean everyone should have to profess it, in my opinion. And this is just my opinion. But it’s worth digging into this a bit, it’s worth exploring and wrangling with the question.

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/094/iran-us-threats-en.html

Revolution #94, July 1, 2007

The Danger of a U.S. Attack on Iran...And the Need to Resist

There is a growing danger of a U.S. war on Iran. This is true in spite of, and in many ways because of, the quagmire in Iraq, the growing strength of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a whole range of destabilizing outbreaks in the region, including the routing of Fatah troops by Hamas in Gaza, and the fighting between Islamic forces and the Lebanese government.

In this context, powerful figures in the U.S. government are arguing that the only way to prevent further threats to U.S. interests, and to push forward on the Bush agenda of radically transforming the Middle East, is to knock down their most powerful adversary in the region.

In mid-May, Vice President Dick Cheney stood in the hangar bay of the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis, 150 miles off the Iranian coast, and declared he wanted to “send a clear message to our friends and adversaries alike” that the U.S. would “prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.”

On CBS News Face the Nation, June 10, Senator Joseph Lieberman said, “ I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq. And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran…”

Norman Podhoretz, a leading neo-conservative propagandist, wrote in a major article in the June issue of Commentary magazine titled “The Case for Bombing Iran”: “I hope and pray that President Bush will do it.” At the Republican Party debates, presidential candidates have competed over who is the most war-like towards Iran, and tactical nuclear strikes have been explicitly not ruled off the table.

And the Democrats? All the leading Democratic presidential candidates—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards—have joined in the confront-Iran chorus, declaring that all options should remain on the table. Former Senator Mike Gravel pointed out at the Democratic candidates' April 26 debate, “that’s code for using nukes…”

U.S. Aggression Is… Aggression—And Must Be Opposed

Much of the tension between the U.S. and Iran has been over Iran's nuclear program. The atmosphere is so heated that United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei told the BBC that in the current tense climate, “I wake every morning and see 100 Iraqis, innocent civilians, are dying,” and that, “You do not want to give additional argument to new crazies who say ‘let’s go and bomb Iran.’”

Meanwhile, the Bush regime and the mainstream media have run nonstop “briefings” by the U.S. military claiming that Iran is arming and training anti-U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is directly responsible for killing U.S. soldiers. Philip Giraldi, a former officer of the CIA, wrote, “One thing that all the stories about Iranian involvement have in common is their lack of substantiating detail. There are no names, dates, places, or corroborating information, and most rely on anonymous government sources or bald assertions that are presented as fact. Photos of alleged captured ordnance have been unconvincing. Further, the presence of the weapons, even if true, cannot be traced back to any official Iranian government body or policy through documentary or other evidence.” (http://antiwar.com/orig/giraldi.php)

All of the charges by the U.S. are potential pretexts to justify attacking Iran, and the United States and its allies in the region are also involved in all kinds of potentially provocative actions, which could serve as a tripwire for an attack.

On the other side of the equation, Iran’s theocrats have worked to preserve their hold on power in Iran and to extend their influence in the region. And it is entirely possible that Iran is taking steps—including developing ties with a variety of anti-U.S. forces in the region—to be able to respond to any U.S. attack. But again, the same people who lied about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq are lying now about why they have Iran in their crosshairs. Even if some of what the U.S. is saying about Iran is true, this would still IN NO WAY justify any kind of aggressive action by the U.S. against Iran, especially a military nuclear strike which the U.S. has NOT ruled out as an option on the table.

Dangerous Scenarios

Powerful neocon strategists who are calling the shots on Bush's foreign policy had made an assessment that the Middle East was a breeding ground for anti-U.S. terrorists that had to be dried up. And that strengthening U.S. domination in the region was critical to their global agenda. But in invading Afghanistan and then Iraq, the U.S. created even more problems for themselves.

There has been much speculation that Bush officials grouped around Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice favor stepping up diplomatic, economic, political, and military pressure against Iran in concert with other world powers, while holding back from a military assault, at least for the time being. If that's true, it may reflect concerns that an attack on Iran might backfire and create an even worse situation for the United States. At the same time, those grouped around Vice President Cheney reportedly argue that negotiations with Iran’s leadership are bound to fail and that the U.S. will ultimately have to use military force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and more fundamentally to crush the Islamic Republic’s influence and ambitions in the region and protect U.S. hegemony.

These reported differences in the ruling class should not be cause for passivity on the part of those opposed to a war against Iran. Just the opposite. Both sides in this debate in the ruling class are starting from U.S. imperialist interests in the region, and agree that U.S. domination of the region is not “optional.” And none of them are starting from what is in the interests of the people—in the Middle East or in the U.S.

This is why none of the top Democrats—whose party also represents imperialist interests—has publicly opposed war with Iran, and why language forbidding such a war without congressional consent was removed from the recent war appropriations bill.

And sanctions and diplomacy are hardly incompatible with preparation for war. The buildup to the invasion of Iraq was preceded by sanctions and intense diplomatic activity.

Playing the Israel Card

There is a possibility that the U.S. would use its Israeli enforcer in the region to attack Iran. Israel’s Channel 2 News reported that Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s former defense minister, told Rice “that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities by year’s end if diplomacy and sanctions fail to persuade Tehran to suspend its enrichment activities.” ( New York Times, 6/16)

Steve Clemmons' internet blog ("The Washington Note") of May 24 warned that Cheney’s office may be planning an end-run around opponents of military actions against Iran in the Bush administration by utilizing Israel: “The thinking on Cheney's team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz [a major Iranian nuclear facility] using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

“This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against U.S. forces in the Gulf—which just became significantly larger—as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war.” (http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/002145.php)

Such an attack by Israel would be an expression of U.S. imperialist interests and aggression.

The People Must Prevent Another U.S. War

We in the U.S.—the country that has launched an unbounded war of conquest in the Middle East—have a special responsibility to act with boldness and determination to prevent a war on Iran. It is urgent that disaffection, loss of allegiance, and anger be translated into action and resistance—not passivity and despair. This will take tenacious struggle—including among the people themselves—but such action could spread and greatly impact the rulers' freedom to carry out their savage and reactionary plans.

As Revolution pointed out in its editorial in issue 92: “The people can not impact the direction of things within the political confines and terms set by the imperialist ruling class; that is one lesson of the May 25 vote [by Congress to fund the Iraq war]. But this does NOT mean that the people can not have a profound impact on politics. In fact, it is only by acting outside those terms that real change can come about. Mass disaffection transformed into mass political action from below can become contagious. It would be criminal, at a time when the carnage continues and the plans for worse—including attacks on Iran—are in the works, to give up now. And it would be foolish as well, at a time when the rulers have no answer to the anger and disillusion of millions, to fail to seize what could be a moment, an opening, that—in a very real and positive way—could change everything.”

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/094/iran-pt4-en.html

Revolution #94, July 1, 2007

Background to Confrontation:

The U.S. & Iran: A History of Imperialist Domination, Intrigue and Intervention

Part 4: Iran in the 1970s: Oil Boom, Breakneck Development, Seething Discontent

by Larry Everest

During the 1970s, the agrarian reforms of the White Revolution (see part 3), skyrocketing oil revenues, and Iran’s new role as the U.S.’s Persian Gulf gendarme combined to bring rapid—and destabilizing—social, political, and economic change. Oil income shot up from $22.5 million in 1954 to over $19 billion in 1975-76. By mid-decade, nearly half of Iran’s people lived in urban areas (up from 30 percent a decade earlier). Tehran’s population soared by 2.5 million people between 1961 and 1978. Industry and manufacturing tripled in size compared to the 1950s, and Iran’s middle class was growing quickly.¹

The Shah bragged that Iran would soon have one of the world’s five biggest economies. The U.S. imperialists saw Iran as a model of development, an island of stability, and a crucial Middle East outpost.

Yet billions in oil revenues didn’t lead to balanced, self-reliant economic growth or a better life for most Iranians. Oil revenues propped up the Shah’s repressive tyranny. Iran’s oil sector and a few other more technologically developed industries remained islands linked to foreign capital, technology, and markets, but disconnected from most of the rest of Iran’s economy.

Iran’s oil industry was very capital intensive (machine and technology heavy), employing only 42,000 Iranians out of a 1972 labor force of nearly 10 million.² Oil technology and equipment were imported, so its development didn’t lead to either technological development of the economy as a whole or less dependence on selling oil. Instead, by 1977, over three-quarters of Iran’s government revenues came from petroleum.³

Most manufacturing was still done in very small, labor intensive workshops. Traditional goods—like carpets, handicrafts and agricultural goods—continued to make up more than 80 percent of Iran’s non-oil exports. Fewer worked in rural areas and on the land, but feudal and semi-feudal relations remained widespread and per capita agricultural output stagnated. Newer urban industries were often concentrated in “import substitution” manufacturing. There, high-end consumer goods—like cars—were assembled using imported parts and technology.⁴

This kind of imperialist-driven economic growth made Iran even more addicted to imports of technology, up-scale consumer goods, military hardware, and food. Iran’s imports jumped from $400 million in 1958-59 to a staggering $18.45 billion in 1975-76, including some $2.6 billion in food. This giant tab sucked up most of Iran’s oil income, wiped out many small Iranian businesses, and reinforced foreign capital’s overall stranglehold.⁵

These changes also sharpened social divisions. Foreign companies made huge profits in Iran, ranging from 30% to 200% rate of return on investments, while the Shah and capitalists and landowners closest to his regime made immense fortunes. Iran’s small upper strata and growing professional and technical middle class enjoyed rising incomes, some becoming quite wealthy.

At the same time, millions were being driven off the land and pulled into sprawling urban shantytowns without water, sewage, or electricity. Sixty percent of Iranians remained illiterate, life expectancy was 50 years, and 139 of every 1,000 children died in their first year.⁶ When I visited Iran in 1979, a construction worker told me about working on a new palace for the Shah’s mother. He made $3 a day, barely enough to pay cab fare to and from work, and buy a lunch of bread and cheese. He couldn’t afford Tehran’s skyrocketing rents, and had to live with his brother’s family to survive.⁷ Uprooted from the countryside and set adrift in the cities, many shanty dwellers became a key base of support for Ayatollah Khomeini and Islamic fundamentalism. Khomeini, a reactionary theocrat, would emerge as the leader of Iran’s 1979 revolution.

A British magazine captured Iran’s crazy-quilt, lopsided growth: “Iran is being Westernized in all the wrong places. Modern bottling plants for Pepsi, Coke, and Canada Dry have sprung up all over the place, while in the filthy poor quarters of the cities people still drink from the jubes—open water courses that run down the sides of the streets, collecting all manner of rubbish. Teheran airport is one of the finest in the Middle East, yet there is still no adequate road and rail system. A tall Hilton hotel is being built, while hundreds of people sleep in the streets.”⁸

Iran: America's Persian Gulf Gendarme

The Shah’s role heading up a U.S. military outpost in the Persian Gulf and on the Soviet Union’s southern border also skewed Iran’s economy and society, and amplified other problems.

U.S. military advisors had been operating in Iran since the early 1940s. But U.S. direct involvement in Iran's military greatly increased after the 1953 coup. By 1954, three different U.S. military groups were operating in Iran, directing the expansion of Iran’s Shah’s army, forming a modern air force and navy, training Iranian officers, and overseeing weapons purchases.⁹ Iran was a key member of a sequence of U.S. regional military alliances.

In the early 1970s, Iran’s importance as a U.S. military ally took a leap. U.S. President Nixon, then in the throes of the Vietnam War, announced the U.S. was going to rely more heavily on allies and clients to police key regions. Iran, along with Saudi Arabia and Israel, would be one of U.S. imperialism’s “pillars” in the Middle East.

To fulfill this role, Iran embarked on a massive military buildup and spending spree. Huge bases were built in the north to monitor the Soviets and along the southern coast to police the Persian Gulf. Between 1972 and 1975 alone, Iran spent $35 billion of its $62 billion in oil revenues on the military—mainly on purchases from the U.S. and other Western powers. By the late 1970s, nearly 8,000 U.S. military advisers and technicians were stationed in Iran.

In the wake of Israel’s 1967 and 1973 wars seizing Palestinian and Arab lands, anger and resistance rose across the region. The Shah stepped in and supplied Israel with 90 percent of its oil. The Iranian military helped crush an anti-imperialist guerrilla movement in the Dhofar province of Oman. The Shah conspired with the Nixon administration to manipulate and then betray Iraq’s Kurds in order to weaken the Saddam Hussein regime. (In 1975 the unsuspecting Kurds were decimated by Iraqi forces, with thousands killed and some 200,000 driven into Iran.)

SAVAK: U.S.-Trained Torturers

A decade of breakneck development, fueled by imperialism and oil revenues, effected rapid economic, political, social, and cultural changes—in a highly unstable way. The U.S. and the Shah built up elements of a modern economy and infrastructure, but in a narrow, lopsided manner. Feudal relations weren’t fully uprooted, and in many ways were reinforced and incorporated into these imperialist-driven transformations. Millions of rural labors and peasants were still locked in poverty, and those driven into the cities remained largely left out of the more modern segments of society. These changes also alienated powerful segments of society whose authority was rooted in regressive, feudal relations and ideas. These included some merchants and landlords, as well as significant segments of the Islamic clergy.

The newer middle and upper classes did grow and prosper, but were denied a political voice. Tens of thousands of students went abroad as part of the Shah’s modernization. They were radicalized by both the situation in Iran and the anti-imperialist and revolutionary movements sweeping the world. They, in turn, brought an open, seething hatred of the Shah’s regime to countries where they studied, and often militant anti-imperialism and internationalism.

The Iranian students had a powerful impact on the countries where they studied. This included the United States, where they made millions aware of the role the U.S. government played in propping up the Shah’s tyranny--and what this meant for the Iranian people. And their revolutionary sentiments and solidarity with people struggling inside the U.S. brought an internationalist consciousness against a common enemy. Few who encountered anti-Shah students will ever forget their marches of unabashed defiance and seemingly boundless energy, going for miles. Or their booming chants: "The Shah Is a Fascist Butcher, Down with the Shah!" "The Shah Is a U.S. Puppet, Down with the Shah!" The Shah dispatched his secret police abroad. But their efforts to intimidate and suppress the students failed. All this reverberated profoundly back in Iran, where such open contempt and opposition was suppressed. And these students would play a crucial role in the downfall of the Shah in 1979.

Both the more traditionally-minded as well as the newer, more secular classes were humiliated and outraged by the Shah’s subservience to the U.S. In the face of widespread deprivation, he insisted on pursuing America’s imperial objectives, ostentatious consumption, and grandiose royal displays.

So the Shah’s U.S.-driven politics and economics ended up turning both traditional and new segments of society against his rule.

To keep the lid on, the Shah increasingly turned to his dreaded secret police—SAVAK. Founded in 1957 under the CIA’s direction (and later with assistance from Israel’s intelligence police, Mossad), SAVAK’s mission was finding and stamping out any and all opposition. It had the authority to arrest and detain suspects indefinitely and ran its own prisons. Torture was routine: “electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails.”¹⁰ In 1975, the London Times reported that prisoners were forced to watch their children “savagely mistreated.” One man reported, “I found it so unbearable, that that I wished I had a knife so that I could kill my son myself, rather than see him suffer like that.”

SAVAK dispatched its agents all over the world to monitor and punish dissidents, anti-Shah students in particular. Communist, radical, and secular forces were SAVAK’s main targets. Some clerics were also jailed, exiled, or suppressed, even as the Shah continued to reinforce Islam and the clergy. In 1976, Amnesty International reported that Iran had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.”¹¹

The U.S. was directly and deeply involved in SAVAK’s operations. By the 1970s, an average of 400 SAVAK agents were trained in the U.S. every year. A former CIA analyst on Iran admitted the agency instructed SAVAK in torture techniques. “We’re keeping the Shah in power through our agents,” one intelligence officer stated, “who are training their agents in Iran.”¹²

But this too would soon backfire. Underneath a facade of stability, Iran was heading toward a revolutionary eruption, and the founding of a reactionary Islamic theocracy.

Next: The 1979 revolution and the Islamic Republic.

---

Footnotes

1. Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, pp. 10, 15, 138-9; S.D., “Iran: The Forging of a Weak Link,” A World To Win (AWTW), 1985/2, p. 38 [back]

2. Halliday, pp. 176, 179 [back]

3. Halliday, pp. 138-39; Nikkie R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution, p. 162 [back]

4. Halliday, pp. 176, 10, 182; Ali Reza Nobari, Iran Erupts, p. 32; Keddie, p. 160-161 [back]

5. Per capita agricultural output was the same in 1973 as in 1961. Halliday, pp. 160, 126-128 [back]

6. Halliday, p. 13 [back]

7. Rents in Tehran had risen 15 times over between 1960 and 1975 (and another 100 percent the next year), Halliday, p. 190 [back]

8. Ali M. Ansari, Confronting Iran, p. 45 [back]

9. Amin Saikal, The Rise and Fall of the Shah, p. 54 [back]

10. Federation of American Scientists, www.fas.org/irp/world/iran/savak [back]

11. William Blum, Killing Hope, excerpt at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Iran_KH.html [back]

12. Nobari, p. 144 [back]

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/094/prisoner-letter-en.html

Revolution #94, July 1, 2007

Prisoner Corresponds on
“The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism, Knowing What's Real and Why It Matters”

Since its publication last fall, The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing What’s Real and Why It Matters by Ardea Skybreak has received increasing recognition from renowned scientists and educators… as well as from many people who are ordinarily denied access to science. Word of the book is spreading, particularly through numerous reviews on the Internet. It has received especially warm welcome on a number of science blogs and web sites, and from among prisoners. The book has gotten exposure at conferences, at Darwin Day celebrations, and book fairs. It is available in many bookstores and in some museum stores. (And it should be in many more.) This book is truly unique in the way it popularizes the science of evolution and the scientific method. It combines uncompromising scientific rigor with an accessible style which gives it the ability to connect with a broad and diverse audience. And it’s already begun to show the potential to reach into every corner of society—from college professors and librarians to prisoners and residents of housing projects—and profoundly influence the way that people see the world and how they think. Recently, the book was named as one of three finalists for the 2007 Benjamin Franklin award in the category of Science/Environment. Sponsored by the independent publishers association PMA (Publishers Marketing Association), this award recognizes excellence in independent publishing. On June 5, 2007, the book was named "Book of the Week" at the "agnosticism and atheism" section of the popular web site about.com. Over the past several months, in addition to praise from renowned scientists Richard Leakey, Kevin Padian, and David Seaborg that is included in the book itself, The Science of Evolution… has been welcomed and promoted especially on a number of science blogs and web sites that are engaged in defense of evolution, and of science itself, in face of attempts to bring religion, often in the form of “intelligent design creationism,” into science education the public schools. Many people who are ordinarily “locked out” of getting into scientific ideas have also taken up this book—including more than a few prisoners. Those promoting the book at the recent publishing conference, Book Expo America, report that the unusual mix of people who have been reading and talking about The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing What’s Real and Why It Matters is exciting and heartening, and has, itself, piqued further interest among a number of academics, scientists, and others in the book world. The following letter was provided to Revolution newspaper by Insight Press, the publisher of The Science of Evolution. The book's publisher, Insight Press, encourages people to order the limited-edition hardcover edition of the book directly from the publisher, at insight-press.com. Proceeds from the sale of the hardcover edition help make it possible to fulfill requests for the book from prisoners.

I bought this book because I’d had the great fortune of reading it in the RW [the newspaper currently known as Revolution] as a series a few years ago. I was absolutely fascinated by Ardea Skybreak’s presentation of evolution scientifically and exposé of the myth of creationism. It was and is very beautiful and enlightening.

What I enjoyed most about the series and now the book is that it has caused me to think and look at life and the world differently, scientifically! And not in a way that causes me to feel that I’ve lost the sense of purpose and destiny and amazement religion is supposed to provide. Rather, with new found purpose! Let me quote from one of my favorite parts of the book: Since there’s really no particular special purpose to our existence… “Does that mean we don’t matter? Does it mean that we might as well kill each other off because there’s no god out there to care what we do one way or the other? Does it mean that are lives have absolutely no purpose? Of course not! Our lives are precious and we do matter a great deal…to each other!

“We should decide to ‘do the right thing’—and act with each other with some integrity and in ways that are ‘moral and ethical’—not because we’re afraid we’ll get written up by some warden-like god if we don’t, but because what we do directly affects the quality of human life. And, of course, our lives can and do have purpose (though different people will define that in different ways in accordance with their world outlooks), because we humans can choose to imbue