Hugo Chávez changed the way socialists viewed elections around the world. The left had long been skeptical about them. The main arguments were that elections are not a terrain on which the socialist left can compete or make bids for power, both because of the grip of capitalist ideology over the masses, and because of the bourgeois establishment’s control of real power before, during, and after the elections take place.
These arguments are solid ones, and they seemed to be confirmed by history. In our continent, socialist governments did not come to power via suffrage until Salvador Allende was elected in Chile in 1970, only to be brought down by a bloody U.S.-sponsored coup d’etat three years later. In the next decade, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua won an initial election after taking power, but in the face of the U.S.-backed Contra War, the desperate masses finally opted for a candidate that was amenable to imperialism in 1990.
Then Hugo Chávez came on the scene and proved that elections could be a tool for taking and maintaining socialist power. He called elections “battles” and rallied the broad masses with powerful and programmatic discourses. While effective in communication, Chávez also mobilized people massively on the street level. At the same time, he worked the angle of real power, winning most of the military over to his side as a way to guarantee that the people’s democratic decisions would be respected.
This novel formula worked wonders. It seemed to open a new terrain with unprecedented possibilities for socialist construction. A champion of the ballot box, Chávez won 13 out of 14 of the electoral contests that he entered (only losing in a badly conceived attempt to reform the constitution in 2007). He and the Venezuelan people made history by advancing socialist measures under the protection of elections. The model was also contagious, establishing a revolutionary playbook that, though its immediate sphere of influence was the countries of the Pink Tide, also went way beyond that.
However, like any model, the one established by Chávez also had its limits. Those limits began to be felt even during his lifetime. On the one hand, the formula yielded diminished results when adopted by other countries of the region. They were not as radical and advanced less. On the other hand, even in Venezuela, after the global Great Recession of 2008, Chávez’s electoral programs became notably toned down, focusing less explicitly on socialism and more on subaltern patriotism.
In parallel, the social focus of Chávez’s campaigns shifted, in part because of the very success of the revolution, but mostly because appealing to the middle class represented a path of least resistance. Chávez still pursued the radical program of building socialism through communes, but it was carefully back-burnered in the lead-up to elections, where ideas such as “Venezuela Potencia” had more play.
After Chávez died and Nicolás Maduro came into power, narrowly winning an election in April of 2013, the model was put under new pressures. Imperialist aggression intensified, with economic war and cruel sanctions that left the country and the masses reeling. President Maduro still carried the flame of Bolivarian socialism forward, but in the face of the sanctions, he implemented extreme measures such as liberalizing the economy and cutting social programs.
By the middle of the last decade, the model of electorally-ratified socialism that Chávez had built was clearly taking on water, both because the material returns were smaller for the masses and because of the unwillingness of U.S. imperialism to permit elections to take place in a situation of tranquility and fairness. Most recently, the U.S. has done everything possible to undermine a presidential election in Venezuela, first throwing its weight behind a fascist candidate with its money, media, and the threat of more sanctions, and then calling into question Maduro’s July 28 victory afterwards.
In the face of this difficult panorama, which is now more than a decade old, it is worth returning to the left’s historical claims about the limits of elections as a tool in the movement toward socialism. In fact, the bases of the original skepticism are still in place. On the one hand, the sway of capitalist ideology has not abated but rather intensified, with the partial supplanting of mass media by social networks. On the other hand, the brute power of imperialist interference continues to operate worldwide, as is clear in the lethal sanctions on Venezuela and the genocidal final solution that U.S. imperialism and Israel is applying to the heroic people of Palestine.
It is easy to see, with some historical perspective, that the epoch that Chávez lived through was an exceptional one marked by a geopolitical climate of imperialist overreach and readjustment, and also the extraordinary oil bonanza that boosted the country’s economy internally. The idea of advancing toward socialism on the primrose electoral path was not a pipe dream, but it was a plant that grew on very special soil. Now that that soil has been in great measure washed away and we are back to old times, it is a good moment for the left to remember a few basic truths:
- Democracy is not the only value of the socialist left; so are solidarity, equality, and science.
- The kind of democracy we defend is best understood as people power or popular power, and elections might or might not be useful for advancing it. People power must include the right to food, housing, health, education, and in general becoming “richer” multidimensional individuals and communities.
- Democracy (as people power) has a temporal dimension to it, since the material factors mentioned above must be built over time. The way that this ongoing construction should be conjugated with processes of consultation, participation, and election is not written beforehand.
This last issue, the issue of time, is one that is a source of much confusion. As the electoral spirit descends on a country, people both inside and outside imagine a process that steps outside of the tempests of the present and takes place in conditions of crystalline perfection.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The blasts from a rising storm are blowing stronger than ever in Venezuela and abroad. The fascists and imperialists know this and act decisively in their exterminist offensives. We cannot survive unless we act with equal decisiveness in the defense of our peoples and our projects of emancipation.