Edgardo Lander is an academic, professor of the Universidad Central de Venezuela (Central University of Venezuela), and an associate researcher of the Transnational Institute. He has been involved for years in social movements and the Left in his country. From this point of view, he states that the unconditional support of the international Left to Chavismo strengthened the process’s negative trends. He sustains that the Global Left has not had the “capacity to learn” that they ended up backing a “government of mafias,” as in Nicaragua, and that when the “Venezuela model collapses,” they’ll probably “look the other way.”

Three years ago, you characterized Venezuela’s situation as “the implosion of the oil rent model.” Is that diagnosis still valid?

Unfortunately, the problems related to the exhaustion of the oil rent model have accentuated. The fact that Venezuela has had 100 years of the oil industry and State-centrism that revolves around the distribution of income has created not only a state and party model but also a political culture and collective imaginary of Venezuela as a rich, abundant country and the notion that political actions consist of organizing to make demands to the state. That is the permanent logic. Despite many speeches that pretended to go in the opposite direction in the Bolivarian process, this was accentuated. From the economic perspective, this colonial form of insertion in the international organization of labor increased. The collapse of oil prices revealed something evident when you depend on a commodity with fluctuating prices.

The criticism of the situation of democracy in Venezuela has increased after Nicolás Maduro’s rise to power. Why is that so? How does it compare to the situation under Hugo Chavez?

First, one must consider what happened in the transition between Chavez and Maduro. I believe that most problems we find today were problems accumulating under Chavez. The analyses from the Venezuelan Left that hold the Chavez years as a glory time, where everything worked well, and suddenly Maduro appears as an incompetent and traitor, are too Manichean, and that doesn’t allow us to get to the bottom of the more structural logic that leads to today’s crisis. The Venezuelan process, to put it in simplified terms, was always based on two fundamental pillars: on the one hand, Chavez´s extraordinary capacity to lead and communicate, which generated a social force; and on the other, oil prices that for a few years reached over 100 dollars per barrel. Simultaneously, in 2013, both pillars collapsed: Chavez died, and the oil prices crashed. And the emperor was naked. It was clear that this had a high level of fragility by depending on things you could not depend on anymore.  Besides, there are significant differences between Chavez´s and Maduro´s leadership. Chavez was a leader who gave guidance and sense and had extraordinary leadership within the Bolivarian government. When he decided something, that was the call. That generates a lack of debate and many mistakes, and a unitary, directed action. Maduro doesn’t have that capacity, he has never had it, and now in his government, everyone pulls to their side. On the other hand, during the Maduro government, there has been an increase in militarization, maybe because Maduro doesn’t come from the military world. To guarantee the support of the Armed Forces, he has to incorporate more members and give them more privileges. Military enterprises have been created. Currently, a third of ministers and half of the governors are military officers. They are in critical positions in the public administration, where the highest levels of corruption have occurred: the assignation of foreign currency, the ports, and food distribution. The fact that these are in military hands makes it more difficult for them to be transparent operations, for society to know what is happening.

What happened to the processes of social participation that the Bolivarian government promoted?

Today in Venezuela there is a disarticulation of the social fabric. After an extraordinarily rich experience of social organization, of grassroots organization, of movements around health, telecommunications, urban land possession, literacy, that involved millions of people and generated a culture of trust, solidarity, of having the capacity to affect one´s own future, it was supposed that in moments of crisis there would be a capacity to respond, and it turns out there wasn’t. Of course I’m speaking in broad terms, there are places where there is a bigger capacity for autonomy and self-government. But in general terms you can say that the reaction lived today is one of competitive, individualist sense. Anyway, I believe there is a reserve that at some point can rise to the surface.

Why couldn’t that participation and organization current be kept?

The process was pierced from the beginning by a grave contradiction, which is understanding grassroots organizing as processes of self-government and autonomy, of the creation of social fabric from the ground up, and the fact that most of those organizations were a product of public policy, promoted from the top, from the state. And that contradiction was played differently in each experience. Where there was previous organizing experience, where there were community leaders, there was a capacity to confront the state, not to reject it, but to negotiate. Also, since 2005 there is a transition of the Bolivarian process from something very open, from a process in search of a model of society that is different from the soviet and liberal capitalism, to deciding that the model was socialist and interpreting socialism as Statism. There was a lot of political-ideological Cuban influence in that conversion. Then these organizations begin to be thought of in terms of instruments being directed from the top, and a Stalinist culture begins to consolidate in relation to the popular organization. And that obviously has brought a lot of precariousness.

How is the situation of democracy in liberal terms?

Obviously is much more serious [during Maduro’s government] because it is a government that has lost a lot of legitimacy and has increasing levels of rejection from the public. And the opposition has advanced significantly. The government had the hegemony of all public powers until they disastrously lost the (National Assembly) elections in December 2015. And from there, it started to respond in increasingly authoritarian terms. In the first place, they did not recognize the National Assembly, first, by not recognizing the results in a state that would remove the qualified majority from the opposition, for absolutely far-fetched reasons.

Subsequently, the National Assembly has been openly ignored, to the point that for the government, it doesn’t exist; it is illegitimate. And such is the case that a few months ago, it was necessary to renew the members of the Consejo Nacional Electoral (National Electoral Council, CNE). So the court ignored the National Assembly and named the members of the CNE, who, of course, are all Chavistas. Early in the year, Maduro had to present the management report from the year before, and because they don’t recognize the Assembly, he presented the report to the Supreme Court. The same thing happened with the budget. We had a recall referendum for which all steps had been fulfilled. It was supposed to happen in November last year, and the CNE decided to postpone it, which meant to kill it: simply now there is no recall referendum. The gubernatorial election was constitutionally mandatory for December last year, and they postponed it indefinitely. So we are in a situation where there is a total concentration of power in the executive, and there is no legislative power. Maduro has been ruling by decree of emergency for over a year, which has to be ratified by the Assembly. We´re very far from something that could be called democratic practice. In that context, the answers given are each time more violent, from the media and the opposition, and the government’s reaction, now incapable of anything else, is protest repression, political prisoners. All the instruments of power are used to stay in power.

What consequences does this situation bring in the long term?

I´d say that there are three things about the medium and long-term consequences that are extraordinarily worrying. In the first place, there is a destruction of society’s productive fabric, and it’s going to take a very long time to recuperate it. Recently, a presidential decree opened 112.000 square kilometers of land to big-scale transnational mining in a territory that is home to ten indigenous tribes, where the largest water reservoirs are in the Amazon jungle. In the second place, there is the issue of how the depth of the crisis is disintegrating the social fabric, and today as a society, it’s worse than it ever was before the Chavez government; this is something hard to say, but effectively it is what’s happening in the country. In the third place, how living conditions have reversed in terms of health and food supply. The government stopped publishing official statistics. We have to rely on business chambers and some universities, but these indicate a systematic weight loss of the Venezuelan population; some reports speak of 6 kilos per person. And that, of course, has consequences in child malnutrition and long-term effects. Lastly, this has extraordinary consequences concerning the possibility of any idea of change. The notion of socialism, of alternatives, is ruled out in Venezuela. The notion that public necessarily means inefficient and corrupt has settled in. It’s a failure.

How do you see the reactions of the leftist parties on a global scale, and specially in Latin America, about Venezuela?

I think that one of the problems the Left has historically dragged along is the extraordinary difficulty we´ve had to learn from experience. To learn from experience is necessary to critically reflect on what happens and why it happens. Of course, we know the whole story of the complicity of the communist parties of the world and the horrors of Stalinism. It is not that they heard about the crimes of [Iosif] Stalin later, but that there was complicity because we are anti-imperialists, and this is a fight against the empire, so let’s just play dumb about all the people who were killed; we won’t talk about it. I think that form of understanding solidarity as unconditional solidarity because there is a Left discourse or anti-imperialist stances, or because they express opposition to the ruling sector on the global system, leads to not investigating critically the processes that are happening. Thus, blind, uncritical solidarity is generated, which not only has the consequence of not criticizing the other thing but actively celebrating many of the things that end up being extraordinarily negative. Chavez’s so-called hyper-leadership was something that was there from the beginning. Or the extractivist productive model. What the Left now knows in its own culture about the consequences of that was there. Then, how not open a debate about these things to think critically and contribute alternatives?

We don’t want the European Left telling Venezuelans how they must lead the revolution, but neither do we want this uncritical celebration that justifies anything. Then, political prisoners are not political prisoners. The decay of the economy is a product of the economic war and the action of the International Right. That is true, that is there, but obviously, it is not enough to explain the depth of the crisis we’re living. The Latin American Left has a historical responsibility in relation, for example, to the current situation in Cuba, because for many years, it assumed that while the blockade on Cuba existed, they could not criticize Cuba, but not criticizing Cuba meant not having the possibility to reflect critically about what is the process the Cuban society is living through and what are the possibilities of dialogue with Cuban society in terms of an exit. For a big proportion of the Cuban population, the fact that they were in a sort of dead-end was pretty obvious at the individual level. Still, the Cuban government did not allow that to be expressed, and the Latin American Left got out of it, did not contribute anything but simple international solidarity. The most extreme case is to pretend that the government of Nicaragua is a revolutionary government and part of the allies, when it is a government of mafias, absolutely corrupt, that from the women’s rights perspective is one of the most oppressive regimes in Latin America, in a total alliance with corrupt sectors of the bourgeoisie, with the top leaders of the Catholic Church, who used to be one of the greatest enemies of the Nicaraguan revolution. What happens with that? Those negative tendencies that were made visible are reinforced. But on top of it, we don’t learn. If we understand the fight for anti-capitalist transformation not as a fight that happens over there and let´s be in solidary with what they do, but as everyone’s fight, then what you do wrong over there affects us too. So I am responsible for pointing it out and learning from that experience, not repeating it. But we have no capacity to learn because suddenly when the Venezuelan model finally collapses, we will look somewhere else. And that, as solidarity, as internationalism, as political-intellectual responsibility, is a disaster.

Why does the Left adopt those attitudes?

It has to do, in part, with not having unburdened leftist with too unidimensional conceptions of what is at stake. If what is at stake is the class content and anti-imperialism, we play one way. But if we think that today´s transformation needs that, but also a feminist critical perspective, other forms of relationship with nature, thinking that the issue of democracy is not discarding bourgeois democracy, but to deepen democracy; if we think that the transformation is multidimensional because domination is also multidimensional, why does this uncritical support to left-wing governments puts the rights of indigenous peoples, environmental devastation, the reproduction of the patriarchy as less important? It ends up judging from a very monolithic story of what the anti-capitalist transformation is supposed to be that doesn’t acknowledge the current world. And obviously, what is the point of liberating ourselves from Yankee imperialism if we establish an identical relationship with China? There is a political, theoretical, and ideological -and maybe generational- problem of people for whom this was their last bet on reaching an alternative society. They resist accepting it failed.