Noam Chomsky on Recent Developments in Venezuela

[IChing]

Could you lay out how the Venezuelan society, and the daily life of its people, has changed since Chavez’s inauguration in 1999.
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Noam Chomsky:
There have been some changes. I don’t think they’re dramatic. This is probably the first time in Venezuelan history that there’s a government that’s making more than gestures towards using its huge resources to help the poorer parts of the population. This is mostly towards health, education, cooperatives and so on. Just how great the impact is it’s pretty hard to say. But certainly we know the popular reaction to them, which is after all the most important question. What’s important is not what we think about it, but what Venezuelans think about it. And that’s pretty well known. There are pretty good polling agencies in Latin America, the main one is Latinobarometro, which is in Chile. Very respected organization. There are similar polls in the United States in less detail. They monitor attitudes throughout Latin America on all sorts of crucial issues. The most recent one in Chile, in December, found - as earlier ones have - support for democracy and support for the government have been rising very sharply in Venezuela since 1998.

Venezuela is now essentially tied with Uruguay at the top in support for the government and support for democracy. It’s well ahead of the other Latin American countries in support for the economic policies of the government and also well ahead in the belief that the policies help the poor, meaning the huge majority, instead of elites. And there are similar judgments on other issues, and as I say it has been rising rather sharply... Despite the obstacles there has been a degree of progress that has been considered by the population as very meaningful, and that’s the best measure.
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With the announcement of the creation of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV, and the acceleration in their attempted appropriation of various services and companies, can you predict the maturing of this revolution?
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Noam Chomsky:

It’s not easy to say. There are conflicting tendencies, and the question for Venezuela is which one will prevail. There are democratizing tendencies, devolution of power, popular assemblies, communities taking control of their own budgets, workplace cooperatives and so on. All of that is building towards democracy. There are also authoritarian tendencies: centralization, charismatic figure, and so on. These policies in themselves you can’t really judge in which direction they’ll go. For a country to control its own resources is certainly perfectly reasonable.

Take, say Chile, which is considered the poster-boy of democratic capitalism, the advocate of the free-market, and so on and so forth. That’s the standard party line. More or less suppressed in this story is that Chile’s major export is copper - that’s its main source of income - and the world’s largest copper producer, CODELCO, is in Chile, and it happens to be nationalized. It was nationalized by Allende, and it’s still nationalized. There are also private producers. CODELCO, the government producer, provides probably ten times as much revenue to the state as the private ones, which send the revenue abroad. And that funds what there is of Chilean social programs, and so on. And many other countries control their own resources. It’s taken for granted. So if Venezuela takes greater control of its own resources, that could be a very positive development. On the other hand, it might not be. So for example, when Saudi Arabia nationalized its oil in the 1970s, that did mean that they were controlling their own oil instead of foreign corporations - mainly ARAMCO - which is to the good. On the other hand it’s in the hands of a pretty harsh tyranny. Washington’s major and most valued ally in the region, which is a pretty brutal tyranny and the most extreme Islamist fundamentalist state in the world. So the story depends on how the resources are used.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=2039

[Buzz Clik]

1. At last. A place for American socialists to call home.

[EST]

2. This is a much better picture of what is actually happening in

Venezuela. It seems as though everyone insists on looking at the changes going on there through their own special lenses, the most paranoid being the right wing romanticists, refugees of the cold war (which was never the conflict we were told it was) or the heirs of that particular game.

Their fears and loud screams that it is "communism on our shores" are unjustified but serve to inflame the passions and mental horrors of the uninitiated and unsophisticated.

I happen to think Chavez is doing a remarkable and largely thankless job-at least at the national level-and should be judged on his own stage instead of the haunted ruins of the US right wing crazies.

[cliss]

3. Very interesting,

thank you.

There are only a few people that I trust to get the real truth out. Only Noam Chomsky and Stan Goff are the ones I have the most faith in.

It will be interesting to see how it goes in Venezuela & Chile.