"The crossroads at which Latin America stands today is not just a matter of defending a more liberal democracy. But a state which survives within the rules of the global market cannot usher in the people's power that Morales and Chavez both promised."

Mike Gonzalez is Emeritus Professor of Latin American Studies at Glasgow University, a long standing member of the SWP, author of Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution and The Rebel's Guide to Karl Marx and co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Cultures.

Mike Gonzalez speaking at Marxism 2010

State of Nature: You say that the left governments in Latin America, such as those in Venezuela and Bolivia, have now reached a crossroads. What do you mean by this?

Mike Gonzalez: The movement for change in both countries has now been under way for more than ten years, beginning in Bolivia with the battle over water in Cochabamba in late 1999 and the election of Chavez a year earlier. In Bolivia a powerful grass roots movement challenged and brought down successive governments in a struggle over resources and the control over them. Just a couple of years earlier Jeffrey Sachs had described Bolivia as the most successful laboratory experiment in neo-liberalism, and the dramatic figures for poverty, the growing gap between rich and poor, the removal of state protections, the brutal operation of a free market, all showed what he meant by success. Yet as the 21st century began Bolivia was offering the world lessons in mass resistance, not only in terms of collective refusal to accept the priorities of the global market any longer, but also in the forms of organization through which the resistance was sustained. Often based on a combination of indigenous communal tradition and the experience of struggle over the years in the mining areas, these were new and democratic forms of collective organization. Interestingly, the existing left organizations were largely marginal to these developments – unable to cope with the new language and creative new forms the movement was taking, and divided by the brutal experience of the 1990s which had seen internal divisions, the breakdown of the traditional forms of resistance like the trade unions partly as a result of mass unemployment and the discrediting of many previously significant organizations because either they had proved unable to lead a struggle against neo-liberalism or because they had actively collaborated with it. So resistance was led from below, with clear objectives centred on control of oil and gas reserves; but its political character was shaped explicitly or not by an idea of creating alternative centres of power rather than challenging the state. When it came to elections, therefore, the movement had no political instruments of its own with which to extend the logic of the mass movement into state power. The MAS stepped into that space, recruiting Morales and Linera and adapting to the language of the movement - while at the same time leading it back in an electoral direction. Yet, even as Morales was elected, an Assembly of Mass Organization warned that they would not demobilise and would watch what Morales did before judging their relationship with his government.

In Venezuela, the process takes a new direction in 2002. When Chavez was arrested and briefly imprisoned in April a new government of the right was inaugurated - it lasted barely 48 hours. A mass mobilization to the presidential palace in Caracas and central points in other cities essentially defeated the coup. In its aftermath Chavez looked for points of reconciliation with the right; the bosses strike launched in December of that year, however, made it very clear that the right was still fighting to bring down the Chavez government and that they were prepared to destroy the economy to do it, paralysing the oil industry and other areas of production. If the attempt failed it was once again because of action from below by workers and communities.

The question was, what political expression, what form of state, best corresponded to the stage the power struggle had reached? Chavez controlled government but not the state, the economy was still overwhelmingly in private hands and there were no plans to expropriate despite pressure from groups of workers - unless and only where the enterprises were not functioning or bankrupt or being actively sabotaged, in which case the state purchased them at market prices.

The expressions of this new phase were the Misiones - essentially social programmes in health, education, housing etc. They were not revolutionary organizations - essentially they were the expressions of a radical version of the welfare state financed by the oil industry's profits. But what was important was that they represented forms of community control and organization which took the initiative away from the state in these areas. For many people, they appeared to be the embryo of a new form of state rooted in 'poder popular' - people's power.

SoN: You say that President Chavez has merely implemented anti-neoliberal policies, not anti-capitalist ones. Are the internal and external pressures on him such that he cannot go any further, or does he simply not want to go any further?

MG: Today in Venezuela, the dominant political discourse starts from the notion of people's power - the Ministries are called Peoples Power Ministries. The question is, however, whether these are genuine instruments of grass roots control over the political process. Accepting that these things are not achieved overnight, what direction are things taking and how far can we say that what has occurred since 2004 and the formation of the Missions has represented a process of devolution of power to the communities, the community councils, the mass organizations, the trade unions etc?

The announcement of the formation of the PSUV, the United Socialist Party, in December 2006 was represented as a further step in this process. Six million people joined in response to Chavez's call to make it a mass party. Yet it was clear from the outset that this was a party tightly controlled from above, its constitution and organization announced by two four man committees nominated by Chavez. Far from a mass party for control from below it rapidly became clear that the PSUV was a political apparatus of the state which incorporated the best rank and file elements into the existing state. The language of people's power has come to obscure a very different tendency - towards the concentration and centralization of power, undermining the independence of the communal organizations. While the personnel and the language of the state have changed - and the personnel change with considerable speed and very little explanation - its purposes and strategies seem to me to be devoted to the creation of a strong national economy, with a state-owned and controlled oil sector but a significant private sector which is not and will not be challenged except where it is actively engaged in sabotage.

It is true that Chavez has worked hard to create a Latin American economic bloc (ALBA) and what looks like an anti-imperialist economic alliance with China, Iran and Russia among others. Their relationships are market relations within a competitive market economy; these are not political alliances designed to build a political alternative to capitalism. Yet they are represented as such an alternative. Of course, the Bolivarian revolution has brought improved living conditions for the poor of Venezuela, created important social and educational programmes to their great benefit. But in terms of power this remains absolutely concentrated in the state - in Chavez himself and in the state bureaucracy which is seen, accurately I think, as a new ruling class with private economic interests that is growing increasingly wealthy and powerful and which is beyond any kind of control from below. They may be subject to the whim of Chavez - but they are not subject to the will of the people. It matters little whether they use the language of popular power and socialism, when their actions are those of a class defending its own interests from behind the walls of the state. The political model, enshrined in the PSUV, is a centralised command structure which channels decisions downwards but has no real mechanisms for control from below.

Chavez remains popular; he is the representation of the hopes and yearnings of Venezuela's poor and the object of venom for the bourgeoisie. But his popularity is slipping now for the first time since his election, largely because there are serious economic problems and a runaway inflation affecting the poorest most directly. Yet for all their complaints, the living standards of the middle classes remain largely unaffected and private capital still enjoys complete freedom to operate. Minor emergency measures do not affect that relationship at all.

So what is the role of the state; to build a strong national capitalism, diversifying the range of its commercial and economic partners to wrest the Venezuelan economy free from U.S. control? That is fine - but it is not the 21st century socialism that Chavez promised in 2005 in his speech at the Porto Alegre World Social Forum. The oil profits that financed the economic growth of the first ten years of Chavez are no longer a guarantee that the process he inaugurated will deepen and continue. On the contrary, comments directed at trade unionists on strike and peasants fighting powerful landlords suggest that driving forward change from below may be seen, as Chavez himself has described it, as 'counter-revolutionary'!

In Bolivia, a similar point has been reached. Oil and gas have been brought under state control but private interests still have a major stake and Garcia Linera, Morales's vice-president and ideologue, has made it clear that what is being built in Bolivia is an 'Andean capitalism'.

It is very clear that what has been gained was expressed in the election of Morales to the presidency in 2006 and in the continuity of Chavez in power in Caracas. You might say that these are the necessary but not sufficient conditions for a socialist process to continue - the enemies are out there, in Bolivia's eastern Media Luna provinces and the aggressive right of Venezuela. What they represent is a return to the worst conditions of the nineties - poverty, repression, the loss of hope. On the other hand, the issue of what is meant by socialism, by revolution, remains the central question; it was never a matter of replacing one capitalist state by another, but of shaping a new kind of society based on a profound democracy, solidarity and the equal distribution of wealth and power.

The crossroads at which Latin America stands today is not just a matter of defending a more liberal democracy. But a state which survives within the rules of the global market cannot usher in the people's power that Morales and Chavez both promised. They were carried to power by the determined resistance and struggle of the majority. But we may have reached the point where those movements must develop their capacity to drive the process beyond the state, towards the 21st century socialism which alone can end exploitation once and for all.

SoN: The US-Colombia Defense Cooperation Agreement grants the US military access to 7 military bases in Colombia. This is in addition to US military bases in Panama, the Dutch islands of Aruba and Curacao, and the aircraft carriers and warships of the reactivated Fourth Fleet in the Atlantic Coast of South America, all in close proximity to Venezuela. What does this increase in US military presence in the region signify?

MG: It is very clear that there has been a policy decision made in Washington to reassert U.S. interests in Latin America. Even before his election, Obama had expressed concern that "we might be losing Latin America". The coup in Honduras, barely six months into his administration, was a sign of things to come in a number of ways. The clear involvement of Otto Reich and John Negroponte, sinister survivors of the war on Central America in the 1980s, suggested that there would be continuity from the Bush regime. Hilary Clinton took a far higher profile in the Honduras issue than Obama, who seemed for a time to be embarrassingly out of the loop. The coup leaders were received in Washington within days by Clinton and John McCain among others; the deliberate delays in dealing with the armed overthrow of an elected government under Zelaya gave the new regime time to continue their brutal repression of the protest movement and time to become recognised as a de facto government. The intervention of Oscar Arias as a mediator had troubling echoes of his role in the region in the 1980s, when the Contadora peace process was clearly designed to wear down the Sandinistas, which it succeeded in doing. Then came the announcement of an intensified military presence in Colombia - always the bridgehead for reactionary strategies in the region. The election of a right wing president in Chile and the accommodation of Lula to the interests of international capital together represent a pro-American bloc in the region, whose purpose is of course to tighten the circle around Venezuela and Bolivia and undermine the radical project they represent. The implications for Venezuela are unclear as yet, but the U.S. presence deepens the sense of crisis and uncertainty within the country, which the right systematically exploits. And it is a kind of external support for the Venezuelan right wing which is extremely aggressive in its hostility to Chavez.