Los Angeles Teachers Union Votes to Support Effort to Block U.S. Military Aid


The Los Angeles teachers union voted to support a congressional effort to block $20 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel, providing an important example for the labor movement.


Emma Lee 

November 4, 2024

LEFT VOICE USA

United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and Service Workers International Union (SEIU) Local 99 held a joint rally outside Los Angeles City Hall, Los Angeles, Calif., on Wednesday, March 15, 2023. Photo by Caylo Seals, The Corsair.

In late October, the LA teachers union voted to support a congressional effort to block $20 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel. The genocide in Gaza, carried out by Israel and bankrolled by the United States and other imperialist powers, has lasted over a year and has expanded into Lebanon last month. The United States has provided more than 70 percent of the funding for Israel’s military operations since last October. Meanwhile, according to multiple polls, a majority in the U.S. believe that the U.S. should stop sending weapons to Israel.

“The arms named have been used in violations of U.S. and international law, indiscriminately killing large numbers of civilians, many of them children,” stated union materials prepared for a board of directors meeting, according to The LA Times. The motion for the resolution states: “It is our duty as educators to speak up for the protection of education and all young people and their families, especially when it is our tax dollars fueling this destruction and our government providing the arms. Furthermore, this directly affects our members; many UTLA rank and file have loved ones who have lost their lives or livelihoods due to this conflict.”

The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) called for California Senators Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler to pledge their support for a joint resolution which would stop specific arms sales to Israel. The “Joint Resolutions of Disapproval” is expected to be taken up when the Senate reconvenes in November. The joint resolution is sponsored by Senators Bernie Sanders, Peter Welch, Jeff Merkley, and Brian Schatz. The UTLA did not release the vote tally, but it passed easily among those members of the union’s House of Representatives who attended the virtual meeting, according to sources of the LA Times.

A sector of LA teachers have been organizing for Palestine for years. In 2021, during the Israeli onslaught of Sheikh Jarrah, the UTLA chapter chairs passed a resolution calling for an end of U.S. aid to Israel, though the resolution was not passed along to the UTLA leadership or voted on by the rest of the membership. In March of this year, the UTLA joined the hundreds of unions in the U.S., including seven major unions such as the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Auto Workers (UAW) and United Electrical Workers (UE), in calling for a ceasefire.
Zionist Opposition

Unsurprisingly, the resolution was immediately met with Zionist opposition. The Los Angeles Jewish Antisemitism Roundtable, which is a coalition of a number of Zionist groups, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), issued a public letter in opposition to the teachers union. In the letter, the group expressed their “profound concern regarding ULTA’s recent decision to adopt a resolution taking a one-sided position on the Israel-Hamas conflict.” The letter went on to claim that blocking military aid, “dismisses the complexity of this geopolitical crisis, ignoring Hamas’s well-documented and globally condemned attacks on innocent civilians.”

The group went on to not only dismiss the role of labor in taking a stand against the genocide, but also continue the tired tactic of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism: “Passing this resolution has no impact on the situation in the Middle East but serves to foster an environment of exclusion within LAUSD, further alienating Jewish students, teachers, and allies who feel increasingly unsafe.”

This conflation is taken straight from the playbook of the McCarthyist congressional hearings of higher education officials, and continues the pattern of heightened repression against the pro-Palestine movement by the state since the genocide began last October.

Zionist groups have organized petitions against the teachers union, saying that “UTLA needs to focus on local issues that directly impact our educational system.” The implication here is that the genocide does not directly impact education in the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As rank-and-file UTLA members wrote in their letter in response to the Antisemitism Roundtable, “As educators in a nation where the military funding is ten times that of federal education spending, we are directly impacted by the scarcity resulting from American involvement in foreign wars.” Rather than funding crucial public services like education and healthcare for children in the U.S., enormous sums of money directed toward slaughtering Palestinian civilians, including tens of thousands of children. Those who remain have lost one or both parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, teachers, and friends, and bear indescribable psychological trauma. Educators are not only nearsightedly concerned with the physically and mental wellbeing of the specific students sitting in our classrooms; we are deeply aware that the wellbeing of all children of the world is intertwined.

Moreover, by conflating justified outrage over a genocide with discrimination against Jewish community members, the Antisemitism Roundtable is not only suppressing freedom of speech, it is also casting the Jewish community as a monolith and ignoring the diversity of opinion that exists among Jewish people. As the rank-and-file response states, “The resolution in question was authored by a coalition of UTLA members, including Jewish and Middle Eastern educators.” Though the state of Israel uses Jewish identity as a cover for its genocidal, settler-colonial project, Zionism, based on displacement, apartheid, and occupation, does not represent the Jewish people, neither in the U.S. nor the world at large.
The Labor Movement Needs to Go Further

The pro-Palestine movement has energized rank-and-file workers to challenge the Zionist common sense of our union leaderships and demand an end to our unions’ complicity in the genocide. Yet the brutal events of the past year have proved to us that ceasefire resolutions are far from sufficient — and that rank-and-file workers are willing to fight for more.

The action by LA teachers is significant in that it not only calls for a ceasefire, a demand which has met its limits, but goes further by challenging U.S. military funding, reflecting the movement’s extended demands beyond a ceasefire and towards an arms embargo. But why should we limit ourselves to essential but limited measures like this Sanders-sponsored effort that blocks only “certain defense articles and services,” as the resolution states?

Members of UTLA should organize resolutions that go even further — to demand that their unions divest from Israeli companies and to end all U.S. aid to Israel. The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), for example, recently passed a resolution in support of a ceasefire and arms embargo, divestment of pensions from Israel, protection of workers engaging in political speech, and endorsement of only candidates who adhere to their principles. Organizing local chapters can serve to deepen the conversation about how to organize against U.S. imperialism within our unions and the wider labor movement.

There is nothing more urgent as workers in the United States than the task of organizing ourselves independently from the capitalist parties that support this genocide. Our union leaderships spend enormous resources organizing to campaign for Democrats — who continue to fund Israel’s military, as well as the police that crush our protests. The UTLA, for example, endorsed the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ticket for president, along with other Democrats at all levels. The Chicago Teachers Union, which called for a ceasefire in January, uncritically supports Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who comes from their own ranks but now serves as Chicago’s top cop. Ahead of the DNC, Johnson organized a “labor truce,” in which union leaderships agreed to not strike during the DNC, crushing in advance the potential of what could have been a powerful show of solidarity among the working class for Palestine, and against the Democratic Party’s support for genocide.

When union bureaucracies undemocratically endorse capitalist politicians and organize dues-funded top-down election campaigns, they actively ignore the massive potential in their memberships for campaigns that resist the anti-worker, anti-immigrant, imperialist policies of both capitalist parties. Moreover, they undermine workers’ rights to democratically discuss and decide our unions’ priorities, orientations, and actions. With the upcoming presidential election results, we have to organize now to resist the continued U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians, which will be supported by whichever capitalist presidential nominee who enters the White House in January.

Our Democrat-allied union and social movement bureaucracies go to great lengths to defend “lesser-evil” politics by decrying the impending “fascism” that will sweep the U.S. if Trump takes office. Of course, workers and oppressed groups every have right to despise the repulsive agendas of the Right. Yet these selective campaigns serve to distract workers from the attacks of the Democratic Party, which have occurred during the length of the Biden term, and will surely continue if not deepen under an apparently even more right-wing Harris presidency.

As rank-and-file workers, organizing independently means we have to fight for greater democracy within our unions. Fighting against capitalist exploitation — whether for bread-and-butter issues or against oppression — is inherently political, and therefore our unions are and should be political spaces. But our union leaderships are linked to both parties of capitalism — historically concentrated among the Democrats, but in the case of the Teamsters and other unions, have been turning toward the Republicans in a wave of “dealignment”.

Los Angeles, among other California cities, have provided a powerful example of labor action from just this year. Back in April during the wave of Gaza solidarity student encampments that swept the country, a Zionist mob physically attacked the UCLA encampment with fireworks, pepper spray, bats, and knives while the police stood by. In response, over 1,000 people mobilized at UCLA to defend the encampment and defend students against the Zionist attacks. Members of the labor movement in particular showed up and called for solidarity. How did workers respond? UAW 4811 — representing the UCLA graduate workers — released a statement calling for a strike authorization vote of the local to defend the encampment. Hundreds stayed and forced both the Zionists and the LAPD to retreat from the encampment, and the University of California workers eventually went on strike to defend their students. University of California workers have demonstrated how the labor movement can respond to attacks upon our democratic rights to speech and protest. We should take inspiration from this example in the struggles to come.

Why is the working class so strategically important in this question? Educators in the United States, you might say, have little direct impact on arms sales to Israel. Of course, not every worker is as directly tied to the production and distribution of arms as dockworkers, for example. But we know that our labor — as teachers, healthcare workers, logistics workers, and beyond — makes the world go around. We have the power to demand an end to military support for Israel, withholding our labor until our demands are met. That is why it is so crucial to strive for greater union democracy and fight back against every anti-worker law that tries to defang the labor movement, such as the Taylor Law here in NeYork that makes public sector strikes illegal. The example of the dockworkers in Greece who blocked ammunition to Israel, teachers in Los Angeles, NYSNA healthcare workers, and all those who are fighting in their unions and universities to oppose the U.S.-backed genocide, should serve as an inspiration. Alone, they may appear small, but together provide invaluable examples to workers around the world. Our class has the power to stop the genocide — and we need to do everything in our power to use it.




Emma Lee
Emma is a special education teacher in New York City.

 

Anarchism and the Labor Struggle Today

Nov

03

2024

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From Organise! Magazine UK by Elisha Moon Williams

When I first started my journey as an anarchist, I was incredibly privileged in both my environment and upbringing. I had grown up in a very upper-middle class suburb, neither knowing economic struggle nor of want when it came to my basic needs. I was, at that point in my life, a young 20 year old ‘man’ living with their parents as I started my doomed college career. That was when I got into the package industry.

Being a warehouse worker within the package industry was the most radicalizing job you could have given me. The sheer amount of naked disregard for safety and the well-being of myself and my co-workers only confirmed the anarchist inclinations that were forming from seeing police brutality against the George Floyd Uprisings. That Uprising was the first time that I, a white person living in the comfort of the suburbs, saw what the police really did to folks that didn’t look like me. However, it was on the warehouse floor that I truly understood what anarchists were talking about when it came to class struggle, white supremacy, and how the latter is used to suppress the former.

It was at that job that I read the anarchist books and zines that would become the cornerstone to how I saw the world and acted within it. It was at that job that I slowly realized my queer identity and adopted the name Elisha Moon Williams. It was at that job that I wrote down the rough outline that would become my first Anarchist Essay, Queers with Guns, in the small notebooks I carried around. Through this lens, I ended up attempting my first round of organization as an anarchist: collective labor struggle. Although I was unsuccessful in my attempt, it was an incredibly important part of my life. Without interacting with such a clear case of class struggle, I may not be the woman I am today.

This story demonstrates not only how important my involvement with class struggle was in my emergence as a queer anarchist, but also how impactful it was in gaining the skills necessary to organize projects later in life. For me, becoming an anarchist was not abstract and intellectual but instead related directly to the world around me and my actions within it. If more anarchists were active within the workplace, more people could have the same experience that I had when I was younger.

There has been an overall lack of focus within the broader anarchist community today on involvement in the labor struggle. There is often talk in online spaces of ‘joining a union,’ but very little in regards to actually organizing within your own workplace. Often times, this makes sense. Workplace organizing and collective worker action are both incredibly risky and not guaranteed to succeed. Not to mention this sort of organizing being directly connected to one’s livelihoods, and that even a successful campaign could contain the risk of organizing workers being illegally fired or reprimanded. In such an atomized and hyper-individualist society, it is more difficult to connect with your co-workers than ever before. These difficulties are real, and are not to be dismissed out of hand.

However, many of the more popular actions focused on by the current Anarchist movement are just as risky to one’s personal livelihoods, if not more so. The protesters’ peaceful actions to sabotage and prevent the building of ‘Cop City’ has given many of its participants RICO charges, including those that simply raised legal funds for their defense in court. Although some of the more extreme charges have been dropped at time of writing, the fundamental charges remain the same for many within that group. These charges give jail times that are comparable or even exceed that of murderers and sex criminals, permanently marking their records as felons if the charges stick. The police have often arrested and charged leaders of protests (both peaceful and not-so-peaceful) in order to break protests that ‘break curfew’ or even because they can.

Another objection that may be made is that organizing your workplace is too difficult these days. Some may argue that the workplace has changed more drastically than the old syndicalists of America and Europe could have ever dreamed of. It is true that the workplace and what a job even means has fundamentally shifted as the nature of the market itself has grown and shifted over the years. There’s an entire gig economy like Uber and Instacart where workers within the same company brand have no idea who their co-workers are, if the term ‘co-worker’ even applies at all. Many of the common workplaces that have remained have also been engineered by the bosses to reduce or eliminate workplace camaraderie which could get in the way of their bottom line by daring to exercise their fundamental labor rights, let alone the right to collective bargaining.

The package industry, An example within my experience, is designed to have many of its entry-level workers that do most of the heavy-lifting (literally) burned out and encouraged to either work up the ladder of management or quit. Most of the workers choose to quit, leaving the warehouse a constantly changing meat-grinder of manual laborers, disproportionately people of color, to do the dirty work without ever having to risk them advocating for themselves. Even if giving workers basic amenities that help them stay in the industry long enough to become competent at the job would give them better long-term profits, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the short-term value that they are able to avoid losing by treating their workers as disposable machines. Many of the people that stay are those that move higher up the company ladder, separating them from the newer workers and lessening their chance at coming together in solidarity.

These difficulties put in place by the owning class are things that we as anarchists must overcome if we wish to ever grow beyond a small niche of idle intellectuals within the United States and Europe. There is a great opportunity being missed by the Anarchist movement from putting labor struggles on the back-burner. Although many workplaces have changed quite significantly since the hey-day of the labor anarchists, many of the same fundamental truths remain the same:

We have no control over when, where, or how we work. We are only employed for the profit of those that own for a living and often at our own expense. We work under threat of starvation and homelessness. We live under a dictatorship of the owning class every single day, and the workplace is an overt representation of that. It is up to us to agitate for both autonomy and dignity in the one life we know we have.

If there was much more emphasis on organizing our workplaces, many within the Anarchist movement would be able to learn the valuable skills that are needed for us to organize other aspects of our lives. The skill of effectively talking to people outside of our own experience is crucial, something that labor organizing forces you to learn incredibly quickly. Meeting people where they are at is one of the key things that

We cannot let top-down, reformist organizations be the only active forces agitating workplace organizing in the United States. In my own home city of Saint Louis, the most active labor movement is the growing amount of unionized Starbucks stores. The biggest group of people involved in its animation weren’t anarchists, but instead the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The main thing such organizations do is take the radical and active rank-and-file workers that agitate for change and better working conditions and place their aggression, ingenuity and energy into forming the exact same kinds of unions that are responsible for their own decline within American society. Unions that are intensely hierarchical, while being used as pressure-valves for the workers’ frustration and anguish without ever challenging the fundamental relationship between worker and owner. Unfortunately, Starbucks Workers’ United seems to have become that exact sort of union. Within my own experience, its upper management only approved performative one-day ‘Unfair Labor Practice Strikes,’ that ultimately never truly threatened the company of Starbucks’ profits. The union itself and how strike funds are doled out are purely run by the national organization and decided by its Board of Directors at the end of the day. Although the national union finally has the Starbucks Corporation at the bargaining table, such a goal could have easily been reached sooner if more firm economic pressure was placed upon the coffee giant. We need to be fighting for something greater than that, as anarchists. We need to advocate for the workers to represent themselves in organizations made by and for themselves and their own interests.

If we truly wish to connect with other working class folks, then we must be actively involved in agitating against some of the most authoritarian systems in their daily lives. Otherwise, they will remain trapped in the merry-go-round of trying to reform a society fundamentally based on violence and domination. The systems that dominate all of us will only continue to perpetuate themselves. We as anarchists must make the active decision to focus on labor struggles in our own neighborhoods. The future of our communities depend on it.

Elisha Moon Williams

Elisha (She/Her) is a Queer Especifist Anarchist living in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. More of her work can be found at medium.com/@elisha1542 or on the Anarchist Library.

Whoever Wins, the Labor Movement Must Break Free From the Two Capitalist Parties


No matter who wins the elections this year, the labor movement needs to break free from both capitalist parties and prepare to fight attacks from the far right and both parties by using our strategic positions as workers.


Olivia Wood 

November 4, 2024

LEFT  VOICE USA

Jason Bergman/SipaUSA/AP

On the first night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC), the party’s attempts to appeal to organized labor were on full display. The presidents of AFSCME, SEIU, LiUNA, IBEW, CWA, and the AFL-CIO all spoke briefly in support of Kamala Harris’s presidential bid during a joint speaking slot, and UAW president Shawn Fain gave extended remarks later in the program.

Fain gained national fame during the joint “stand up” strikes against Ford, GM, and Stellantis in 2023, and he represents a more progressive and class struggle-oriented sector within UAW. During his speech, he decried the “billionaire class” and its attempts to divide and conquer the working class by blaming economic problems on people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants. As an example of ruling-class greed, he called out Cornell University (whose service staff, organized with the UAW, had begun a strike earlier that day), and drew raucous applause when he took off his jacket to reveal a “Donald Trump is a scab” T-shirt. But all these correct critiques of bourgeois tactics and Republican rhetoric were used not to build or wield working-class power, but instead to express organized labor’s support for a Kamala Harris presidency and encourage UAW members to stay in the fold of the Democratic Party.

Fain claimed that Harris is “one of us” and a “fighter for the working class,” that she will “stand with the working class in our fight for justice.” But this is plainly untrue; while the Democrats’ program for workers has important differences from the Republicans’, they are still ultimately a bourgeois party, one that takes a different approach from that of the Republicans to manage class antagonisms in order to contain class struggle in favor of the bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile, the sector of the new Far Right that Trump and J. D. Vance represent has gained in strength in recent years. The former president has a slight edge in the polls, and Republicans are poised to take over the Senate and possibly keep the House of Representatives. Their program includes serious attacks against immigrants, workers, women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and climate change initiatives.

No matter who wins the elections this year, the labor movement needs to break free from both capitalist parties and prepare to fight attacks from both parties of capital using our strategic positions as workers.
Harris, Walz, and the Working Class

To see the futility of organized labor’s alliance with the Democratic Party, we need only look at who else is taking the stage at the DNC: Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, and several Democratic governors, all of whom are the ultimate bosses of public sector workers in their cities and states. J. B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, even bragged about his own status as an “actual billionaire” during his convention speech on Tuesday. These are the mayors and governors (including Tim Walz) who set the police and National Guard against protesters, who oversee the destruction of the tents and belongings of people living on the street, and who approve the austerity budgets that defund public services and force public sector workers into ever-more difficult working conditions.

Biden came to power with big promises to the working class, promising to be the most pro-labor president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). While Biden’s NLRB appointees have issued more progressive rulings than previous administrations, the Biden administration nonetheless broke the 2022 rail workers’ strike and intervened in the 2024 East Coast longshoremen’s strike to prevent disruptions to the economy. While some have praised the administration for refusing to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to suspend the strike and for urging companies to offer their workers more, the real value of stopping the strike as quickly as possible is to protect the flow of capital and prevent the working class from seeing the extent of our power.

As the political situation stands now, the Harris/Walz campaign has created a Democratic Party with a “tent” big enough to include both labor movement superstar Shawn Fain and the much-loathed former Republican vice president Dick Cheney, who is famous for supporting war, torture, strengthened executive powers, and government surveillance. The Democratic Party, on many key issues such as immigration, is moving further to the right.

Just in the realm of education, the 2024 platform removed language present in the 2020 platform about providing LGBTQ-inclusive sex education; while the 2024 platform does discuss the problem of student debt, it doesn’t promise any further relief beyond what the Biden administration has already announced, which falls far short of the promises in the 2020 platform. The 2020 platform supports providing universal pre-K for three- and four-year-olds, while the 2024 platform only discusses four-year-olds. The 2020 platform calls for free tuition at all public colleges and universities for children of families making under $125,000 per year; the 2024 platform discusses free tuition only for community colleges and trade schools.

In a thread posted to the website commonly known as Twitter in August, the UAW praised Tim Walz, claiming that he “has always put the working class first.” But that’s untrue — in May 2023, Governor Walz sided with the Mayo Clinic over the Minnesota Nurses Association, agreeing to a carve-out that would exempt Mayo Clinic patients and nurses from a new safe staffing law.

Mary C. Turner, president of the Minnesota Nurses Association at the time, had this to say:


Nurses denounce Governor Tim Walz for his abdication of good government and acquiescence to anti-democratic and anti-labor corporate bullies. … By siding with the profits and power of corporate executives over the rights and needs of patients and workers, Governor Walz has made clear he will only side with labor when corporate interests concede.

As an individual and former teacher, Walz probably does understand and empathize with many workers’ issues. But as a Democratic politician, his personal goodwill is constrained by political expediency, because the Democratic Party is not a working-class party. It competes with the Republicans for working-class votes, but it is ultimately beholden to the bourgeoisie.

The Democratic Party is not moving to the left, as many people hoped it would given the popularity of Bernie Sanders and the Squad, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Uncommitted Campaign. It is retreating on several of its own policy commitments — not only failing to achieve them during the Biden administration, but abandoning them as even stated goals. This is not a party that represents the interests of the working class and the oppressed, even though it continues to court these voters.
Election 2024 and the Fight for the Working Class

Amid the new trends toward greater militancy and new organizing in the US labor movement, such as how the pandemic and the 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement have inspired new organizing, especially among young people, the 2024 campaign season has included significant attempts to appeal to the working class and organized labor in particular. Both in this year’s polls and in the past two presidential elections, Trump has gained ground among sectors of the working class (defined by pollsters in various ways).

This phenomenon is in part because the US working class is going through a process of political realignment. Jacobin’s summary of several studies on the phenomenon finds that the Democratic Party has “lost somewhere between 20 and 40 points of working-class support to Republicans or to abstention over the course of the past half-century,” and a debate about this “dealignment” in New Left Review notes that different segments of the working class are shifting in different directions (for instance, workers with higher levels of education and higher incomes are gradually becoming more Democratic, while workers with less education and lower incomes are gradually becoming more Republican). The Republican National Convention last month demonstrated the Republicans’ new overtures to workers, such as through appeals to economic populism, references to both “union and non-union workers,” and inviting Teamsters president Sean O’Brien to speak. The choice of J. D. Vance — known for his memoir Hillbilly Elegy — as the Republican pick for vice president also indicates the party’s attempt to appeal to the working class. While Project 2025 includes all kinds of anti-worker proposals, the policy handbook itself frames these proposals (including reducing overtime protections and strengthening independent contractor status) as pro-worker and pro-family, even though in reality they would make life significantly worse for workers and their families.

In short, Democrats and Republicans are fighting over working-class votes. Each party is attempting to present itself as having the solution to high inflation and the high cost of living, issues that most voters from both parties were “very concerned” about, according to a January Pew Research Center report. Because organized labor has historically aligned itself with the Democratic Party, Harris quickly locked down endorsements from many of the major national unions. At the DNC, the stage featured some of the union presidents in rapid succession, showing off their long-standing relationship with the Dems (and pointing out the Republicans’ relative lack of union support). This makes the argument that workers — and unionized workers in particular — should vote Democrat because the Democrats are their “allies.”

These appeals are especially important now in the context of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and anger from sectors of the labor movement over the United States’ funding and support for Israel. The UAW in particular has expressed support for its members taking part in divestment actions at college campuses, although the extent of that support has varied by location and has serious limitations, falling short of support for strike actions that exceed current labor law. But in the states where UAW members have been especially active in organizing for Palestine, most prominently in California (UAW 4811) and New York (especially graduate student unions at Columbia, New York University, and the New School), it’s Democratic politicians sending the police to arrest students, workers, and allies. In this context, the Democratic Party is also incentivized to strengthen its relationships with labor in order to temper labor’s organizing against the Democratic Party. By pulling segments of organized labor closer, the Democrats can strengthen their chances of winning elections in November while also smoothing over tensions and criticisms.

As one example, Fain’s T-shirt doesn’t just say “Trump is a scab” — it also says “Vote Harris.” Instead of directly fighting for the interests of their members and the working class as a whole, Fain and the other union presidents who spoke at the DNC are subordinating these interests to the interests of the Democratic Party.

On July 22, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) became the first international union to endorse Harris for president. Biden’s withdrawal from the race happened to coincide with the AFT’s biennial convention, at which the union had already planned to vote on a presidential endorsement, and the planned resolution was amended for the new presumptive nominee. In her address to the AFT convention on July 25, Harris thanked AFT president Randi Weingarten for her “long-standing friendship” and for “serving as an adviser to the president and me.” Weingarten spoke on the final night of the DNC, on the same stage as some of the Democratic mayors, governors, and legislators who control funding for the schools that AFT members work in. Where I live, in New York, Democrats control the governorship and both houses of the legislature, but our universities — staffed by AFT members — are continually underfunded. Our buildings are perpetually falling apart, and most workers make less than a living wage.

Trading political support for Democratic officials in exchange for (possible) favorable treatment is a common strategy within the labor movement, dating back, as Mike Davis describes in Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class, to the days of FDR and the New Deal coalition. In my own union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY), which is affiliated with the AFT, several people strongly argued in discussions around whom to endorse in the 2021 Democratic primary for the mayor of New York City that we should endorse based on who we thought was most likely to win rather than whose mayoral platform we supported the most or who would be most likely to give more funding to the City University of New York. In internal political discussions — especially about Palestine, but about other political issues as well — we are frequently told that it would be politically disadvantageous for us to come out in support of Palestinians or in opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza because we would risk alienating our legislative “allies” in city council and the state legislature, and thereby risk getting less funding for the university than we might otherwise have won.

The result of this strategy is that labor is compelled to constrain itself according to its so-called allies’ political wishes, in exchange for merely hoping for something in return. In this devil’s bargain, unions limit their own political activity, the possibilities that members might organize for, and the tactics they might use.

Of the unions whose presidents spoke at the Democratic National Convention, two of them (SEIU and UAW) also signed onto a July 23 letter demanding that the Biden administration halt all military aid to Israel. Given that Harris supports continuing weapons shipments to Israel and ensuring that the US military is the “most lethal fighting force in the world” if she is elected president, there is a clear contradiction between the unions’ political demands and their support of Harris’s candidacy.

PSC-CUNY has endorsed a presidential candidate only twice this century, endorsing John Kerry in 2004 and Bernie Sanders in 2020, with a clause in the latter resolution specifying that the union would support whoever won the Democratic nomination in the general election. The Kerry endorsement resolution specifies that the PSC was offering only critical support to Kerry, in contrast with the AFT’s uncritical endorsement passed at the convention, noting that “John Kerry’s presidential election campaign has taken positions at odds with the stated positions of the PSC on such issues as Iraq, labor policy, NAFTA, and educational policy.”

Much of the rest of the 2004 resolution’s text is dedicated to anti-war policy, including reaffirming the PSC’s “commitment to building labor participation in an independent anti-war movement and to maintain pressure on any presidential candidate or president to shift his position on this and other key issues.” In that clause from 2004, we at least see lip service to political independence, and labor participation in the anti-war movement, in contrast with the PSC leadership’s strong opposition to organizing in the movement against the genocide in Gaza. Neither the PSC as an institution nor its leaders has offered any qualifying statement about the AFT’s Harris endorsement, and the union’s social media accounts are instead celebrating the Harris campaign, even though Harris also holds several policy positions at odds with the official political positions of the PSC. For instance, she opposes Medicare for All, defunding the police, and certain provisions of the Green New Deal, all of which the PSC officially supports. Is that the program of a “champion for the working class?” No.

In contrast with this total lack of criticism from the AFT and many (but not all) of its locals, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) General Executive Board issued a statement on September 13 that offers political support for Harris while acknowledging that “a true political alternative, a labor party that can unite and speak for the working class,” would be better and that “in the long run, merely voting for the lesser of two evils is incapable of producing any kind of positive good for working people.” Even though the UE’s statement does not resolve the contradiction between the logic of lesser evilism while recommending a lesser evil vote, this example highlights just how deep in the Democrats’ pocket unions like the AFT are, in their refusal to make even minor criticisms of the Harris/Walz campaign. It also reveals the horizon that the US labor movement, including more progressive unions like UE, is currently unwilling to approach: actually organizing independently of the Democrats.

But instead of cutting ties and building a party that will actually represent our interests, the leaderships of the US labor movement continues to follow in the Democratic Party’s footsteps, with little in return. Instead of spending time and money organizing for Harris, the labor movement could dedicate itself to building its forces for fighting on behalf of workers and oppressed people regardless of who wins. The International Longshoremen’s Association won annual raises of over 10 percent for six years by shutting down East Coast ports for only three days — a strong sign of their power. If Trump wins — and especially if Republicans take control of Congress — there will undoubtedly be new attacks on our rights and new austerity measures imposed from the federal level. If Harris wins, there may still be new attacks and new austerity measures, but there will certainly be all of the same problems we have now under Biden: our government is funding a genocide; the federal minimum wage remains at $7.25 an hour while people struggle to make ends meet even in places with higher minimums; trans rights are highly restricted in more than half the country; many states have imposed abortion bans; police departments across the United States continue to brutalize people and are building new “Cop Cities” — and these are only some of the many serious problems facing everyday people.

Our work is cut out for us — and we need to spend our time preparing for what is to come rather than funneling our time, money, and energy into a political party that does not represent our interests.




Olivia Wood
Olivia is a writer and editor at Left Voice and lecturer in English at the City University of New York (CUNY).

 

Imperialist sanctions, crony capitalism and Venezuela’s Long Depression: An interview with Malfred Gerig

By Malfred Gerig & Federico Fuentes

Published 2 November, 2024

Malfred Gerig is a sociologist from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (Central University of Venezuela) who directs the Political Economy of Venezuela research program at the Caracas-based Centro de Estudios para la Democracia Socialista (Centre of Studies for Socialist Democracy). He is the author of La Larga Depresión venezolana: Economía política del auge y caída del siglo petrolero (Venezuela’s Long Depression: Political economy of the rise and fall of the oil century) In this extensive interview with Federico Fuentes for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Gerig situates the impact of United States’ sanctions on Venezuela and the rise of Venezuela’s crony capitalism within the context of the nation’s “Long Depression”.

Some blame sanctions for the economic crisis in Venezuela. Others point to economic mismanagement by the government of President Nicolás Maduro. But you pinpoint 2013 as the start of what you term a “Long Depression”, which precedes the sanctions and any shift in government policies. Why?

The first thing to understand about Venezuela’s economy is that this crisis is the result of how capital accumulation occurs in Venezuela, along with the way it was inserted into the world capitalist economy during Venezuela’s “ oil century” and [what Italian economist Giovanni Arrighi terms] the US’ systemic cycle of accumulation.

Venezuela was inserted into the world economy as an oil supplier. As a result, it became a rentier country, because its state claims sovereignty over this natural resource and collects an international rent or payment for use of its property. This generates a pattern of national capital accumulation known as rentier capitalism, which is a sui generis national capitalist economy as its metabolisation of capital is dependent on the surplus that the state captures from the world capitalist economy.

I have divided this period of [Venezuela’s oil century] into two main stages. The first was the boom stage, which ran from the start of this insertion in 1914-17 until the 1970s. For most of this period, Venezuela was the world’s leading oil exporter. Its economy expanded at an accelerated rate, taking it from the most backward economy in South America to first in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita.

Venezuela: GDP per capita (1890-2020)

But the 1970s marked the start of a crisis period that emerged out of abundance. The crises of rentier capitalism perfectly fit within French physician and economist Clément Juglar maxim: “The only cause of depression is prosperity.” This prosperity came as a result of the 1973 oil crisis and concurrent rise in oil prices, along with the first Carlos Andrés Pérez government’s oil nationalisation and “Big Push” project for rapid industrialisation.

After a crisis at the end of the 1970s, the 1980s began with another crisis. This one has a specific date — February 18, 1983, known as “Black Friday” — when for the first time since the 1930s, a substantial devaluation of the local currency occurred. That date marked a point of rupture and the start of an economic crisis that is yet to end.

The ’80s and ’90s were a period of deep crisis and social marginalisation. By the turn of the century, the social conditions most Venezuelans found themselves in were alarming.

These are the social conditions out of which the pro-poor Bolivarian Revolution lead by former president Hugo Chávez emerged in the late ’90s...

Yes, the Bolivarian Revolution emerged above all with a proposal to invest Venezuela’s oil income in alleviating people’s needs and then transform Venezuela’s economy and its role within world capitalism.

It is worth noting that every Venezuelan government since the 1930s has had its own project for “Sowing Oil”. That is, using the external income generated from oil for national development. Some believed the best way to do this was by satisfying human needs, others thought it required a process of forced industrialisation; but all, more or less, had the same idea. The Bolivarian Revolution was no exception.

It also has to be said that the Bolivarian Revolution benefited from a period I call the “golden age”, which occurred from 2003-04 to 2012. During these years, two major systemic events occurred, which pushed up oil prices: the War on Terror and the US’ crusade to reshape geopolitics in the Middle East; and the rise of East Asia, in particular the boom in oil demand generated by China’s growth. These two phenomena combined to push oil prices up and briefly paper over the crisis.

But with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, problems began to emerge in the Bolivarian Revolution’s macroeconomic model. This was followed by another major event that splits this story in two: the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013. His death generated a forced leadership change in the Bolivarian Revolution, amid a rapidly escalating economic crisis specialists knew would require drastic corrections.

Before we start talking about the Maduro government, I would like your opinions on whether economic policy mistakes were made during the Chávez government.

I would say three things about the Chávez government’s economic policy. The first is that its economic policy did not place enough special emphasis on the negative sides of oil. As oil prices began to rise, Chávez was obsessed with the belief that there was nothing pernicious about the country reproducing itself based on international rent. This was the same mistake that other governments made, such as the Andrés Pérez government in the 1970s. Oil is like that: when it is not there, you only see the bad side of it; but when oil prices are high and you can pay for everything or solve everything on the cheap, it becomes more difficult to see the problems.

I would also add two things that were a bad idea to maintain over time: the fixed exchange rate system and the external debt model. From 2002-03, the government adopted a fixed exchange rate system, or administration of foreign exchange, that in real terms was much less malleable than even the dollarisation of the economy. This generated a process of exchange rate overvaluation in which Venezuela had year-on-year inflation rates of about 30%, while the exchange rate remained pegged at a parity of $4.30. This generated a drive towards imports, and a greater demand for international rent to pay for those imports. All this put pressure on productive and industrial sectors to import instead of diversifying their exports.

Of course, there were benefits to the fixed exchange rate system: cheap imports, higher consumption levels, controlled inflation. But the fixed exchange rate system led to a path of dependence that generated economic interests among sectors of the government and business elites, particularly those capitalists involved with imports who ended up benefiting from this system, even though in theory they were the main enemy of Chávez’s project. The result was that Venezuela became even more dependent on oil exports.

Tied to the fixed exchange rate issue was the issue of external debt. Venezuela had enough inflowing foreign currency that it did not need to raise its external debt. But the government carried out a large-scale and poorly-executed program of external indebtedness, which ended up exploding after Chávez’s death.

This is related to the fixed exchange rate system because this made private foreign debt cheaper. As a result, a whole network of zombie [shell] companies were set up, which borrowed externally and paid that debt with cheap dollars obtained from the fixed exchange rate system. This had drastic repercussions on the national economy.

Venezuela: Total external debt and central government external debt (1996-2019)

That said, Chávez’s economic policy may have had its problems, but it led to GDP growth between 2004-08, when there was a two-year recession, before again seeing GDP growth until 2013. The 2008 crisis was not easy to solve, but it was solved. There were problems and difficulties; the issue of electricity generation, for example, was a major one. But it was an economic policy that never led to a mega-depression. It was a coherent policy that never excused itself in any way and always provided answers to technical questions. It was a policy where you knew what the figures were and where there was no lack of transparency.

So, when Maduro takes office in 2013, not only had the golden era that paper over the economic crisis ended, but this was now intertwined with a political crisis generated by a leadership change in the Bolivarian Revolution...

As I said, this model was already, as we say in colloquial terms, pasando aceite [dripping oil] since 2010-11. While the Venezuelan economy grew in 2013, investments suffered a shock. This is a key indicator of recession. Then in 2014, the Venezuelan economy went into a recession that ended up transforming into the worst depression ever seen in a Western country that was not at war. The Venezuelan economy shrank by about 80% of GDP. The result of this in social terms is the mass migration we have seen of Venezuelans who have had to leave the country and the levels of subhuman consumption, malnutrition, lost days of schooling and a host of other issues that the vast majority of the population finds itself in.

Venezuela: Total annual GDP at constant price in dollars (1990-2020)

Then the crisis clearly started before the sanctions imposed by the US?

We have to say two things. First, that this was not a question of bad economic policy, but profoundly serious structural contradictions in the economy. This was not about a bad government coming to power, but a bad government coming to power and having to deal with a very serious and long standing structural crisis.

Second, that the sanctions came on top of both these things — a very bad economic policy and a very serious crisis — and created a perfect storm. Amid this perfect storm, each factor fed off each other, culminating in a nuclear bomb of dispossession, social marginalisation, deteriorating conditions for production, and so on.

The reality is that many things, both political and economic, occurred before the sanctions were imposed. This idea that it was all the fault of the sanctions — which the government has tried to push, above all outside the country because domestically people know it is mainly Maduro government propaganda and blame passing — has gained international traction because it is mixed in with the question of US imperialism.

This is not the same as saying the sanctions are a trivial matter; they are absolutely serious. But when they are used as a weapon by the government to exonerate itself from responsibility for its economic policy and its handling of the crisis — which is largely to blame for this social, economic and political catastrophe — it does a disservice to truth and reality. It is one thing to take the sanctions and the grave social damage they have caused seriously; it is quite another thing to do what the government has done, which is to trivialise the sanctions and use them as an excuse, while in practice doing little about the social impact these sanctions have on suffering humans.

In your opinion, what has the US government sought with its sanctions?

It is worth recalling that the first sanctions started in 2015, but that these sanctions were not remotely comparable to the sanctions implemented in 2019. We have to distinguish between two different sanctions regimes: on the one hand, the comprehensive sanctions regime that starts in 2019; and on the other, the sanctions that came before that as part of a targeted sanctions regime. The targeted sanctions regime pursued a strategy of attrition, while the comprehensive sanctions regime sought a collapse of the Maduro government.

There were a lot of sanctions prior to 2019 targeting top-level government officials over allegations of corruption, economic wrongdoing, and so on. The strategy here was not really about determining whether these public figures were involved in any crime, but to fragment the ruling elite. The US thought: “Here we have economic interests of actors who have investments in the US, who have deep connections to the international monetary system, who need to make transactions, and so on. When we sanction them, this will lead to the government fragmenting.” What happened was absolutely the reverse.

Prior to 2019, the Venezuelan government was also prevented from obtaining fresh currency through loans via sanctions imposed in 2017. However, by then — and contrary to the government’s belief — the problem facing the Venezuelan economy was not one of liquidity but of fundamentals. Any new debt was only ever going to be paid for by consumers and taxpayers, which is what ended up happening.

From 2019 onwards, a comprehensive sanctions regime was imposed, above all through sanctions on [the state oil company] PDVSA and the Central Bank [of Venezuela, BCV]. I have described these sanctions as a “weapon of financial destruction”. This sanctions regime was based on: disconnecting Venezuela from the international banking and SWIFT systems; disconnecting the BCV, and therefore Venezuela’s private banking system, from the international monetary system; and halting trade in strategic goods to limit the inflow of foreign currency. It represented a de facto severing of the country’s ties to the global economy.

It is worth asking why the sanctions implemented in 2019 did not end up causing more damage. The answer is because the Venezuelan economy was already destroyed. Venezuela was already six years into its Long Depression before the comprehensive sanctions regime came in. The comprehensive sanctions regime only came into effect in what I termed the “disaster stage” of the Long Depression, which was its third stage.

Venezuela: Annual percentage variation in GDP (1961-2020)

I want to return to this question of the different stages of the Long Depression, but before then I want to finish with the issue of the sanctions. What impact did the sanctions have in political terms if they failed to fracture the government or bring it down?

Sanctions had the political impact of changing the regime from within. The comprehensive sanctions regime pushed Venezuela’s rentier capitalism towards a neoliberalism with patrimonialist characteristics and a sui generis Venezuelan oil-based form of crony capitalism. The combination of an economic policy based on orthodox-monetarist measures and a neoliberal spirit — the two things are not the same — led to a regime change from within.

We saw a gradual rise in patrimonialism, which is nothing more than the privatisation of the state by civil servants and administrative cadres. The state becomes a private preserve and the state’s assets and means of administration become a means for civil servants to generate an income. This phenomenon already existed, but when orthodox-monetarist economic measures led to drastic cuts in public sector workers’ income, patrimonialism radically expanded as workers sought to use the tools that the system provided them with to generate an income that the system itself was taking away.

We saw that even the leitmotif of the government changed. This government no longer governs for the same people as the Chávez government. You could say that the Maduro government implemented bad economic policies between 2014-16, but perhaps it did so wanting to govern for the same people that Chávez governed for. But since 2016, and especially since 2018-19, the government no longer governs for the people; instead, the people have been made to carry the burden of the government’s economic policies and its neoliberalism with patrimonialist characteristics.

What has prevailed, especially from 2016 onwards, is capitalist realism. The dominant idea adopted by the ruling elite back then was that there was no other option but to embrace a kind of criollo [local] capitalism that could allow them to stay in power, but now with the support of certain sectors of society that they were historically at odds with, such as local capitalists. Today, Maduro’s government is a government that, to a large extent, has the support of local capitalists. As it lost the support of the people, the government replaced it with the support of these capitalists.

We could therefore say it was not so much a question of the sanctions leading to a loss of support for Maduro, as the sanctions being implemented because Maduro was already losing support....

I agree: Maduro’s loss of popularity was an incentive to implement sanctions. It is not the same to implement sanctions against a government that has strong popular support, as it is to implement them against a government that has faced four years of the worst economic crisis, that is facing a very serious food crisis where Venezuelans had nothing to eat and have to queue for everything, and so on.

The sanctions started in 2015 because that is when the catastrophic stalemate in terms of power started. That year the opposition overwhelmingly won the National Assembly elections. The lack of support for Maduro’s government was clearly exposed.

That is why the government has since applied what [US political scientist] Norbert Lechner calls “the strategy of a consistent minority” by tilting the political playing field in its favour to remain in power. Since 2015 it has gone down an authoritarian path, which has had different facets. This path ultimately led it to the recent elections on 28 July, when the government took this authoritarianism to a new level.

Many on the left believe the sanctions were imposed on the Bolivarian Revolution as some kind of moral punishment. I do not know if that was the case, but if this was true, the best antidote Chávez had against such weapons of moral punishment was maintaining formal and real democracy. He never gave anyone an excuse to implement sanctions or any kind of strategies of geopolitical encirclement and regime collapse.

Why then do you think the US has started to ease sanctions if the government has become even more authoritarian and has even less support?

The answer has to do with the geopolitical effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine [which has pushed up oil prices]. And that the US government is reaping the rewards of these sanctions by having set up an oil exchange program — because the US is not paying for Venezuela’s oil. Under this program, the OFAC [Office of Foreign Assets Control] basically has sovereignty over Venezuela’s oil via remote control.

That is why the US government grants a licence to Chevron, which pays PDVSA with debt forgiveness. In theory, PDVSA receives no fresh currency; what it receives in exchange is a discount on the debt it owes Chevron. There may also be some other benefits for Venezuela; for example, the exchange rate system may benefit from Chevron selling foreign currency in the exchange market as part of its operations in the country.

But in practice, the Venezuelan state’s sovereignty over its oil has been completely suspended. In the past 100 years, the US has never had as much control over Venezuela’s oil as it does right now.

Returning to the Maduro government’s economic policy. You said that by 2018-19, the Maduro government was already clearly a government that no longer governed for the people and referred to three periods within the Long Depression. Could you elaborate on this?

The Long Depression that started in 2013 has three major periods. The first, between 2013-15, is what I call the “period of crisis”. In this period, government economic policy was characterised by inaction: the dominant idea within the government was that there was no crisis and that it could carry on doing the same thing and obtaining the same results.

Initially it even denied there was a crisis, to the point that to talk about questions of technical economic issues, macroeconomics, investment, consumption, etc at the time meant you were a “neoliberal”. Instead, everything was a result of the “economic war” — a conspiracy theory involving everyone from imperialism to the local corner shop owner. There was a complete disregard for questions of basic economics.

This period saw the collapse of the currency exchange market, which generated a very important supply shock to the Venezuelan economy, given its deep dependence on imports. Most of the industrial sectors still active at the time were very dependent on imports. As a result, these sectors contracted.

So, the main characteristics of this period of crisis were a supply shock, the collapse of the exchange rate, and what I call, borrowing from Marx, the impossibility of reconverting money into capital. This was because production was unable to continue at the same scale due to these shocks to the currency market and imports.

Venezuela: Imports per inhabitant at constant price in dollars (1990-2020)

Then we had the oil price shock in 2015. The government once again concocted a conspiracy theory that this was all part of imperialism’s strategy. In reality, it was our partners — OPEC and Saudi Arabia — who sought to keep oil competitive with shale gas. This oil price shock generated what everybody was already expecting: a very serious debt and fiscal crisis in Venezuela.

That is when the first major disastrous economic policy decision was taken: to continue the strategy of paying foreign debt. The government decided to halt imports in order to pay the foreign debt, using the argument that imports meant giving dollars to capitalists to enrich themselves. Sure, to a large extent that was true; but giving dollars to capitalists also means importing food, industrial inputs, etcetera.

As part of this strategy, the government paid US$100 billion in foreign debt. To put that figure in context, at one point Venezuela’s economy was $40 billion; that is, the government paid off an amount of foreign debt twice the size of Venezuela’s economy. The shock that this generated on imports led to a second major supply shock, taking the country’s economic depression to a new level.

This policy also generated another deep shock to production, which pushed Venezuela into a profound humanitarian and food crisis between 2016-17 as agro-industrial and food import sectors totally collapsed. This was the second phase of the Long Depression: the “period of collapse” between 2016-18.

In this phase, the government tried to apply its first chaotic macroeconomic stabilisation program, based on paying foreign debt and cutting imports in order to improve conditions. It was completely naive on the part of the government to think that dressing up to impress international finance would lead to an influx of fresh currency and thus solve the serious structural problems afflicting the Venezuelan economy. Particularly, as I insist, when the problem facing the Venezuelan economy was not one of liquidity but of fundamentals.

The main consequence of this program of being a “good payer” of foreign debt and import cuts was that it became intertwined with a deficit management strategy to facilitate paying foreign debt through the sale of PDVSA debt bonds via the Central Bank. This represented a form of Quantitative Easing (QE) on steroids amid a collapsing economy. It led to one of the worst periods of hyperinflation in Latin America’s history.

This triggered a new phase in the crisis, as GDP began falling by double digits. As with similar experiences in history, this hyperinflation was caused by the debt crisis and political-institutional collapse. With the government still pursuing a strategy of cutting imports to pay debt, Venezuelan households were burdened with the debt payments and their wealth collapsed due to hyperinflation.

This is the third phase, the “period of hyperinflation”, where hyperinflation became a social phenomenon of such harrowing dimensions that people basically forgot all the other economic problems. Hyperinflation absolutely changed society. This is also the period in which the government began, in mid-2018, to implement the orthodox-monetarist program it still maintains.

We cannot even really call it an adjustment program; it is a stabilisation program designed to reduce inflation without taking into account the serious impacts the program would have on economic activity and society.

The program’s main pillar was a draconian cut to public spending, which in 2018 was about 48.4% of GDP, while revenue amounted to 17.4% of GDP, leading to a fiscal deficit of 31%. Under this new program, spending was first reduced by 27 percentage points in 2019, then reduced again to about 10% of GDP in 2020.

Venezuela: Budget income, expenditure and total balance according to IMF (1990-2021)

This orthodox-monetarist policy also included other pillars, in particular a financial squeeze that sent Venezuelan society back to the financial stone age by implementing a legal reserve requirement on banks that at one point reached 93% of reserves. The aim was to cut off secondary sources of money creation. This meant that the level of household credit in 2019 was only 2.2% of GDP. Amid hyperinflation, households could not even use credit cards to take advantage of negative real interest rates to buy the goods they needed. Companies that wanted to invest or continue producing had to use their own capital as they could not get bank loans.

There was also a very serious wage squeeze, as adjustment programs of this nature require a shock on consumption and demand. This was largely achieved through a wage squeeze, especially in the public sector, which covers administrative staff and civil servants but also pensioners as Venezuela has a public pension system. Pensioners today receive the legal minimum wage, which has hit rock bottom: about $2.30 a month. Destroying wages was a means for solving the government’s fiscal problems on the expenditure side rather than the income side, while also destroying demand amid collapsing supply.

Changes were also implemented to the currency exchange market, leading to a unification of exchange rates. The Maduro government had continued with differential exchange rates for about six years. This meant that if you converted the minimum wage at the official exchange rate, it was equivalent to about $11,000 a month — a complete fantasy. No one knows if people were buying dollars at the official rate, but if they were — which is almost certainly the case — it is not hard to see how this created extravagant conditions for mass looting.

From 2018 onwards, the currency exchange market was liberalised. A regime of inter-bank trading desks and successive micro-devaluations were implemented, leading to a gradual dollarisation of society. As dollarisation rose, society had a currency it could now use as a means for exchange, for storing value and as an accounting unit. The bolivar today only functions as a means of exchange, it no longer serves the other two functions that all other currencies have. Prices are marked in dollars because that is the currency that functions as the unit for accounting for all economic activities: for the family when calculating its weekly or monthly expenses; for a large company, etc.

Aspects of this program provided some economic breathing space, but only because the economy had shrunk to such a small scale. By the time this macroeconomic stabilisation program was applied, the economy was much easier to manage. The government could stabilise without any large external financing program, precisely because the economy was so extremely small.

Were there alternative policies that could have been implemented?

There are always alternatives, especially to such a catastrophic policy in terms of impacts on production and society. The government’s policy was basically to activate what Karl Polanyi called “the Satanic Mill” and seek economic stabilisation through social destruction.

In fact, when we seek comparisons to Maduro’s macroeconomic stabilisation program, we see that it most closely resembles the first stabilisation programs implemented in Latin America — in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina — rather than the less orthodox programs implemented in Bolivia or Brazil’s Plan Real. In other words, Maduro’s program is not only more orthodox than the orthodoxy of today but even that of the ’90s.

So, indeed, other things could have been done. The most important of these was understanding that the level of destruction wrecked on the Venezuelan economy had reached such a level that solutions required supply-side economic policies; that is, economic policies that drastically increased investment, generated employment, raised wages, etc.

There were also many alternatives in terms of protecting society from what the government was seeking to do. Instead, society was left to fend for itself because, by that time, all the social assistance programs implemented during the Chávez period and the first years of the Maduro government had been totally dismantled. When the avalanche of social dislocation began, society had nothing with which to protect itself. This is important to stress.

In your book, you argue that this Long Depression has been accompanied by a crisis of government legitimacy. How has the government responded to this crisis?

I characterised this crisis of legitimacy, which above all begins in 2016, as a catastrophic stalemate. That year marks its start because the National Assembly is very important for economic governance. But the strategy of the incoming National Assembly — in their own words — was to remove the president within six months. In response, the government sought to protect itself and govern without the National Assembly.

This led the government down an authoritarian path with different phases, up until the July 28 presidential elections when it took it to another level. Since 2016, Maduro’s government has progressively adopted what Max Weber called a “politics of power for power’s sake”; that is, it abandoned its historical project and the social support base that it governed for and became a government of cliques, a government whose sole purpose was to stay in power.

However, it is important to reject any moralistic reading according to which there are good guys and bad guys in this story. Since 2016, the formal set of rules of Venezuelan democracy have been de facto broken by both sides: the government and the opposition have consecutively attacked this set of rules, in a process by which each move by one side only ever led to a further escalation of attacks against not only the rules of representative democracy, but more importantly protagonist democracy.

The formal hollowing out of popular sovereignty that took place in the July 28 presidential election really began many years before, when both sides of the political class turned against this sovereignty and against providing solutions for the people amid the crisis.

How then can we characterise the government, in political terms, after the 28 July elections?

I characterised this government as an absolutely patrimonialist government that lacks both popular and legal legitimacy, as well as any legitimacy based on legacy. One of the worst political mistakes this government made was to destroy the political capital, or legacy, bequeathed to it by Chávez, precisely because it opted to govern for another sector of society: mainly themselves.

It is a completely authoritarian government with absolutely nothing left-wing about it. It is a government that would love to come to an arrangement such as occurred between [former US secretary of state] Henry Kissenger and [former Egyptian military ruler] Anwar El-Sadat, for example. In fact, it has been seeking this for years, but has failed largely because it continuously places its own obstacles in this path.

There is an idea outside Venezuela that this government represents, to use an old phrase, a “fortress under siege”. That idea is used to legitimise its violation of human, social and economic rights. Such violations are seen as fine because the government remains a besieged fortress supposedly fighting imperialism, at least on the surface.

But this is ridiculous. The Venezuelan people are not an object whose raison d'être is as background actors in some fictitious anti-imperialist storyline. The Venezuelan people are a subject that must be allowed to find a way to express and defend their own interests and sovereignty. This, in my opinion, is the position that the global left must take: above all, taking the side of Venezuela’s dispossessed classes.

We Venezuelans, especially those of us on the left, have been very disappointed with the views of a certain section of the international left. It seems that the suffering of the Venezuelan people, of the families that have had to separate, of the political prisoners, of the people who have had to give up on their life dreams etc, matter little to them amid their completely abstract view of the situation. To simplify the situation in such a way as to believe that there is a left-wing government fighting against imperialism is to sweep under the table all this human suffering. That does not seem ethically correct.

In summary, we have a patrimonialist government that has built a form of crony capitalism, which benefits a social minority based on the dispossession of the majority. It is a government that implements ultra-orthodox economic policies. It is a government pervaded by capitalist realism, according to which there is no alternative to crony capitalism and authoritarianism.

The Bolivarian Revolution under Maduro has become a catastrophe. The Venezuelan people, in line with their republican and national-popular traditions, will no doubt be the ones who resolve this mess. But, today, this government stands opposed to everything good about Venezuela, to our republican traditions and, above all, to our national-popular interests.