<!--venez-->
Socialism is back!
by Stuart Munckton
An October 6, 2005
Canadian Press article reported that US multinational corporation IBM had recently been fined and had its Caracas offices forcibly closed down for 48 hours by the Venezuelan government for attempting to avoid paying its taxes.
The article reported that a number of other multinationals were about to face similar treatment for tax avoidance, including Microsoft, Honda, Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens and Bosch Rexroth. This “zero tolerance” of corporate tax evasion by the government has already led to the fining and forcible closure of such powerful multinationals as the Dutch oil giant Shell and US corporate giants McDonald’s and Coca-Cola.
This crackdown led to a 50% increase in tax revenue in a year, which the government directly used to help fund an increase in the minimum wage — which has been consistently increased since Chavez came to power. The crackdown on corporate tax evasion has assisted in helping to break Venezuela’s dependency on oil revenue. State revenue for the 2006 budget is based on more than 50% from taxation, the first time in almost a century the majority of state revenue has not come from oil. The budget is 27% larger than the previous one and 41% is dedicated to social programs aimed at the poor, according to a Venezuelanalysis.com report.
Participating in the first Australia-Venezuela solidarity brigade in July 2005, I saw firsthand the changes underway in Venezuela, including a massive expansion of free education and health care to those who have never had access to them before.
However, we also saw a lot more than just a decent government willing to introduce some good policies. What we saw was that ordinary people had woken up, and were active in a huge struggle to win more and more power in order to fundamentally transform society. We saw how workers were struggling not just for better wages and conditions, but also for democratic control over their workplaces — through a process of worker-state “co-management”. This process aims not merely to make a few small changes to the status quo, but to overturn the capitalist system and create a “new socialism of the 21st century”.
Socialism — the idea that the economy should be run democratically according to human need rather than for private profit — was declared dead after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Capitalism was hailed as triumphant. And yet, just over a decade later, the socialist banner has been raised again.
The Bolivarian revolution did not start out with the aim of building socialism. It was in his speech to the World Social Forum, January 2005, that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for the first time argued for socialism. He said he didn’t mean the so-called socialism that existed in the Soviet Union, but “true socialism”, a democratic and humanist socialism. Chavez called for a debate inside Venezuela on the topic and on May Day a few months later, more than a million workers marched through the capital, Caracas, under the banner of “constructing Bolivarian socialism”.
When Chavez was elected in 1998, he admits he believed it was possible to “humanise” capitalism through a series of reforms. However, Chavez and the Venezuelan people have since discovered that the goals of the revolution — to tackle poverty, introduce participatory democracy and create a society based on social justice — are incompatible with capitalism.
The owners of industry have attempted to undermine and defeat the process of change, even though the initial reforms were moderate. It is this resistance to even mild measures aiming to improve the lot of the majority that has convinced Chavez and millions of Venezuelans that to really tackle the problems facing the country, they need to break with capitalism and begin to build a new system based on the principles of solidarity and human need.
There is still a lot of discussion and debate in Venezuela about what socialism means and how to construct it. However, Venezuela’s pro-people policies have already led to a significant reduction in poverty, with the percentage of the population living in poverty expected to drop during 2005 by 12%, or 3 million people. As Chavez explained at the May Day march, the process of change has “only just begun”. The increasing moves to put the main Venezuelan economy at the service of the poor majority at the expense of the capitalists — foreign and Venezuelan — in an increasingly planned way are part of the struggle to replace the capitalist system with a socialist one.
Based on a November 2, 2005 Green Left Weekly article.
