Though Cowards Flinch

A few days ago, at an extraordinary conference of the PSUV in Venezuela, Chavez announced his intention to form a “Fifth International” built around Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, while not resurrecting ‘old structures’ and ideas that have become useless. Like real socialism perhaps. In earlier remarks, Chavez defended Carlos ‘the Jackal’ as a revolutionary, along with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Elements conveniently absent from the reports by Chavez’ cheerleaders amongst the British Left.

A fine account of the deficiencies of Chavez’ regime can be found here, including details of his sending two hundred PSUV members to China to be trained by the ‘revolutionary’ regime of Hu Jintao. Chavez’ claim that the new international should provide a school for cadres to study ideology, it hardly bodes well that he considers the Chinese model of education to be a good one. Meanwhile the Mision Robinson, the programme undertaking the abolition of illiteracy in Venezuela, is stalling – along with many other programmes of reform.

Is the call to a Fifth International liable to gain any traction? A certain section of trades unionists certainly like to parade alongside the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, and will be touring the UK with members of the trades union leadership from Venezuela in the next few weeks. Attending the conference of the PSUV were members of the Labour Party ‘Friends of Venezuela’ campaign (of which the founding secretary and treasurer were Jon Trickett and Jon Cruddas). But in terms of wider working class sentiment in support of Chavismo, not much can really be said.

People don’t want another war, so they’ll come along to Hands Off the People of Iran (HOPI) or Hands Off Venezuela (HOV) marches and demonstrations – but there are frequent reports of the Venezuelan state using repressive measures against Venezuelan workers – and our own workers are not soft enough in the head to believe that the dictators Chavez praises, like Colonel Gadaffi of Libya, really are ’socialists’, with the interests of workers at their heart. There’s a good chapter in Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed which explains the type of echo Chavez might get.

At present the chief contribution to the treasury of thought is declared to be the Webbs’ book, Soviet Communism. Instead of relating what has been achieved and in what direction the achieved is developing, the authors expound for twelve hundred pages what is contemplated, indicated in the bureaus, or expounded in the laws. Their conclusion is: When the projects, plans and laws are carried out, then communism will be realized in the Soviet Union. Such is the content of this depressing book, which rehashes the reports of Moscow bureaus and the anniversary articles of the Moscow press.

Friendship for the Soviet bureaucracy is not friendship for the proletarian revolution, but, on the contrary, insurance against it. The Webbs are, to be sure, ready to acknowledge that the communist system will sometime or other spread to to the rest of the world.

“But how, when, where, with what modifications, and whether through violent revolution, or by peaceful penetration, or even by conscious imitation, are questions we cannot answer.”

This diplomatic refusal to answer – or, in reality, this unequivocal answer – is in the highest degree characteristic of the “friends”, and tells the actual price of their friendship. If everybody had thus answered the question of revolution before 1917, when it was infinitely harder to answer, there would have been no Soviet state in the world, and the British “friends” would have had to expand their fund of friendly emotion upon other objects.

These were the same Webbs who opposed the General Strike in the UK, for example. The sort of middling people who enjoy popular enthusiasm for almost anything, from a comfortable distance, whilst lacking the principles which would hold their own feet to the fire and provoke them into real action to achieve anything on behalf of the ideals they espouse. Not that I’m necessarily characterising Cruddas or Trickett in this way. I’m simply saying that, as during the Russian Revolution, it’s easy to support anything when you don’t have to act yourself.

Bottom line: I don’t see that Chavez’ call for a fifth international will get much more than tepid hangers-on here in the UK. In Latin America, however, the story might be different – and this is perhaps why socialists elsewhere need to take cognisance. A top down approach to organising a Latin American socialist congress might divert the needed pressures away from the governments of participating countries, governments which while they are left wing do not unambiguously represent workers. This is what the Comintern did for Stalin and it was disastrous.

A grandiose plan to rally the world’s socialists (such as are acceptable, no doubt, to Chavez himself) to his banner may be an internationalist gesture – an attempt to reach agreements that will allow expansion of social democratic tendencies on the part of leaders. Left-mayoralties, governorships and presidencies of the world, unite! It may even pull together sections of the working class in areas where the Bolivarian Revolution has great prestige. But coupled to Chavez’ antipathy to the US and friendship towards dictators, it could be another Comintern.

Speaking of his antipathy towards the US, Chavez’ militarism, particularly the spending of money on Russian and Chinese military hardware, even while infrastructure reforms are hardly begun, is disturbing. Fronting off between Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia is not encouraging either. Yet the sort of quasi-nationalist rhetoric that emerges from Chavez, as well as his moves to squash any socialist activism independent of the PSUV, coupled to his reconciliation with sections of the capitalist class, potentially make war more likely, with Chavez as a new Bonaparte.

The last thing the world’s socialist movement needs right now is a self-proclaimed socialist hero, newly garlanded by a gathering of international socialists, to suddenly encourage or begin a war that will do little but butcher peasants or invite the wrath of US imperialism upon more jungle villages. For all these reasons, we need to be very cautious in our approach to this Fifth International. Patient work by socialists of and amongst the working class will produce socialist cadres; they will not be commanded into existence by even the most gifted of Generals.