Shadowing Practice: Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution - Learn English Speaking with Video
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No I have no doubt.
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It is necessary, we say, and many intellectuals of the world say, to transcend the capitalism.
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But I agree with you,
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the capitalism will not be going to transcend within the same capitalism.
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No. The capitalism has to transcend the socialism,
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that is why we have to transcend the capitalist, the real socialism, the equality, the justice.
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The revolution socialista.
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No se trata de capitalismo de Estado.
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Y ustedes tienen un papel vital que jugar ahí en el tema del control obrero,
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la autogestión obrera, la cogestión obrera socialista.
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En las empresas que no deben ser del Estado, sino de empresas del pueblo the people, managed by the people workers.
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I was reading this morning, I didn't bring it to you, that little book, but very good, of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, The State and the Revolution,
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the question of the State.
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We have to discuss that, the State and the Revolution.
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Here Lenin comes to the passage some interpretations about the State issue.
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For example, here's a subtitle that says, The destruction of the Parasite State.
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That's true, that we have to end it as soon as possible.
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The Parasite State, the Burgundy State,
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the Capitalist State, and create a new state, a revolutionary, socialist state.
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Okay, so since this talk is called Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, and I realized when I started preparing for this,
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uh, Lidoff, I realized that these events that we're going to discuss took place, uh, at the very least 20 years ago.
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Uh, Chavez was, was giving this first speech about socialism in 2005.
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And I realized that it's now 25, so it's 20 years later.
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So anyone in this room who's under the age of, let's say, 40, didn't live through these events.
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So the overwhelming majority of people in this room, the overwhelming majority of members of the RCI in the whole world,
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were not around at the time when these things were happening.
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And it is very difficult,
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I would say, to understand the Bolivarian Revolution and Hugo Chavez if you have not lived through some of these things, right?
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So I wanted to give you a two-minute sample of how Hugo Chavez was was like.
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And we are Marxists and we think that the driving force of history is the class struggle.
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But the class struggle is made by men and women.
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And men and women, particularly people in leadership positions like Hugo Chavez, put their own stamp on events.
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We do not, as Marxists, we do not deny the role of the individual in history.
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And the role of Hugo Chavez,
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Hugo Chavez was a very peculiar character and he certainly put his stamp on events.
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Now, Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998 as the president of Venezuela.
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But you could say, any time we discussed this, or we used to discuss this question.
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We could say that the Bolivarian Revolution really traces its roots back to 18.. sorry, 1989.
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1989 saw the election in Venezuela of the government of Carlos Andres Perez.
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Venezuela is an oil-rich country and this is one of its main characteristics but also a curse for Venezuela.
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and in 1989, Venezuela was hit by a big crisis.
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At that time, there was a Latin American white foreign debt crisis which also hit Venezuela.
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Carlos Andres Pérez was elected.
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He was sworn in in January 1989 and by the beginning of February 1989,
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he implemented, many people voted for Carlos Andrés Pérez, was at the head of a social democratic party called Acción Democrática.
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Many people voted for him because in his previous time in office in 1976, he benefited from very high oil prices after 1973.
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And many people remember that time as a time of prosperity
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and Venezuelan middle class people used to go to Miami for their weekly shopping and stuff like that.
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The currency was very strong.
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Anyway, so many people voted for Carlos Andres Pera, thinking they were going to get social democratic policies.
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But at the beginning of February 1989, he introduced a massive package of austerity measures imposed by the IMF.
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and one of the measures was the lifting of subsidies on fuel in an oil rich country
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which immediately led to a traveling
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or times four increase in the prices of public transportation so
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when people got to the buses to go to work in
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the morning of the 27th of February 89 the prices had gone up four times People refused to board the buses,
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then they set the buses on fire and this was the beginning of what was known as the Caracazo
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an uprising which was misnamed because it wasn't just an uprising in the capital Caracas
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but it was an uprising throughout the country which lasted for two or three weeks there was looting,
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there was clashes with the police the state had lost control
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of the situation they used the army against the unarmed population and hundreds, possibly thousands of people were killed.
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To this day, the full figure is not known.
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This event, the Caracazo, completely destroyed an agreement that was called a political system that had existed in Venezuela since the 1950s,
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which was called the Punto Fijo Agreement, an agreement between the two main parties, Acción Democrática, Social Democratic, and COPEI,
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Social Christian, Christian Democratic Party
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They basically alternated in power between the two of them Nothing
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changed They distributed the positions of power in the state In the oil company
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and so on And this was the end of that From that point on, people didn't trust any of the political institutions As I said,
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the army was used against the unarmed population in that uprising And this provoked a massive rift within the armed forces.
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There was a whole layer of young military officers, amongst them one Hugo Chavez, who was a military officer at that time,
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who thought, being trained, the official ideology of the army in Venezuela was Bolivarian.
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Bolivar had been the liberator, fought for independence from the Spanish Empire.
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and nowhere in Bolivar's official ideology was that the army should be used to attack the unarmed civilian population.
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The army was supposed to defend the country and so on.
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There was a political movement started amongst these young military officers called the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement,
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an underground organization.
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and in 1992 on the 4th of February they attempted a civilian military uprising against the government
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that had ordered its troops against civilians.
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And this movement was led by Chavez.
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For reasons that are not relevant today this movement failed
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and Chavez was given an opportunity to come on national TV to tell his followers in the army to lay down arms.
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And he, in a very striking manner, he was on a national live TV broadcast,
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and he said, the aims of our movement have not been achieved, but he added, for now.
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And this was broadcasted live.
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So people, yeah, they lay down arms, but they remember that this is not the end of the story, right?
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We've been defeated, but we will come back.
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After a few years, he was released.
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He was put in jail.
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He was tried, put in jail for military uprising, obviously.
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And a few years later, he was released from jail under pressure from the population.
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There was another unpopular government carrying out privatizations and so on.
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And he decided that the insurrectionary way, having failed, he will stand in the election in 1998.
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And as this election was developing, the ruling class, the oligarchy in Venezuela, was becoming more and more worried.
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This guy was now becoming very popular.
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And so different establishment politicians started to drop out from the elections just to concentrate in one candidate.
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By the end of the campaign, there were two candidates, Chavez and the candidate of the oligarchy.
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and he was seen, he traveled around the country, he spoke in small villages, in working class communities, in the poor neighborhoods that surround the capital Caracas,
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the barrios, and he did a campaign talking to people, and basically what he managed to do was to bring into
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the election process the large numbers of people who've never participated in politics before, people who abstained and so on,
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and he won that election against the whole might of the oligarchy, the mass media and so on.
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At the beginning, the ruling class thought, okay, well, this is a guy who knows nothing about politics.
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We can, he's defeated us, but we can work with him.
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We can steer him along safe channels.
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And there were some capitalist enterprises that financed the Chavez campaign in the hope of having some impact.
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But what was Chavez's program at that time?
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During his election campaign, Chavez came to Britain, and he spoke, I think he spoke at Oxford Union,
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and he met with one Tony Blair.
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And Tony Blair obviously was talking about the third way.
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And Chavez, you can see him in videos explaining the reasons, He said, the third way, that sounds okay.
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I mean, it's not communism and it's not capitalism.
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It's something for the people, isn't it?
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So he said, well, my ideology is the third way.
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We need clean politics in Venezuela.
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We need to do away with corruption.
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And we need to use the oil resources of the country for the benefit of the majority, not the small minority.
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We need to improve the conditions of people in general.
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a very moderate program, if you may.
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He was certainly not talking about socialism.
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He not read state and revolution or anything like this.
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And he came to power with this limited program.
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And he started doing things.
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First thing he did was to call a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution.
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Now, you might think, well, this is just a political gimmick, isn't it?
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It doesn't change anything.
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No, it didn't change anything fundamental.
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However, the process through which this new constitution was discussed involved everyone.
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People were discussing about this constitution.
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They wanted to put this thing in, that thing in.
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And for 10 years after, people in Venezuela, working class people, were carrying a copy of the constitution this size,
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there was a little edition of it, in their pocket.
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And every time they suffered an abuse from someone in a position of power, they would get the Constitution out and said, the people have the right to do this.
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It became a political tool for the people.
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The people felt that they had drafted that constitution.
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It was their constitution against the powerful.
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It was quite significant from the point of view of the consciousness.
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But also, as soon as he was elected, they started organizing, right?
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They organized the Bolivarian circles.
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They organized the urban land committees.
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All sorts in order to directly deal with the immediate problems.
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Problems of lack of access to housing, lack of access to clean water, lack of transportation in the working class neighborhoods and everything.
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Now in 2001, Chavez drafted and passed 21 enabling laws.
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The main one of these laws was the law of agrarian reform, the expropriation of land to give to the peasants.
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And there was also another law.
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They attempted to get control of the oil company.
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Some people say Chavez expropriated the oil in Venezuela.
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This is not true.
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The oil was nationalized under Carlos Andres Perez in 1976.
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The oil company, PDVSA, the most important company in the country, was already in the state's hands,
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but it was run by a bureaucracy which was in cahoots with the private sector and the multinationals.
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They wanted progressive privatization.
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There's many examples of this I don't have time to go into.
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Anyway, he tried to get control of the oil company.
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Now, this was a red rack to a bull for the oligarchy.
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The oligarchy said, okay, this guy, we can't work with him we need to remove him from power.
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From the enabling laws in December 2001, they started preparing a military coup to remove him from power.
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There were provocations, there were more provocations, the high-ranking managers in PDVSA,
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the executive directors, they refused to leave their positions, even though this is a state-owned company, the president has the right to remove them and so on.
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And there was a movement, this was class struggle, right?
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The opposition was drafted mainly from the middle upper class areas in the east of Caracas.
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The Bolivarian supporters, supporters of Bolivarian revolution, supporters of Chavez were coming mainly from the working class areas in the barrios,
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in the west, and in the far east of, and in the working class areas generally in the country, amongst the poor masses in the cities.
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And this culminated in the April 11, 2002, coup against Chavez.
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It is a very good film.
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There was an Irish documentary theme that was in Venezuela at the time.
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And they were fortunate enough to film everything that was happening from the inside.
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The film is called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
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It's available online.
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I recommend it, comrades.
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Watch it.
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And it was cool.
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Now, so far, nothing new.
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How many times we've had progressive governments come to power in Latin America, clash with the oligarchy, and then the oligarchy,
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when I say the oligarchy, this is, I mean, comrades say, or workers, there's workers, there's peasants, and there's capitalists, what is this oligarchy?
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The oligarchy basically is the conglomerate of the owners of capital, the owners of the land,
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the old established families that have ruled the country, they're known in Venezuela as the owners of the valley,
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Los Amos del Valle, from a novel.
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And these people have ruled the country for 200 years.
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They think they have the God-given right to rule the country, and none of these people, including Chávez, have any right to office.
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They are ignorant and so on.
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Incidentally, this is one of the things that the oligarchy hated about Chávez.
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Chávez spoke the same language, same common language as ordinary working class people.
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He broke protocol.
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He was wearing tracksuits in official meetings.
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And this, why did they hate that so much?
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They hated that because usually in normal bourgeois democracy, politics is the preserve of the people who know.
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People who've gone to university, have degrees, They have letters in front of the names.
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And they're professional politicians or experts and think tanks and journalists.
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Not, and they are different from working class people who know nothing.
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The only contribution they can make to democracy is vote once every four years, once every five years.
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That's it.
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That's why they hated Chavez, because Chavez spoke in the language of the people, attempted to involve the people in the running of their own affairs.
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They broke with this idea that only the few selected people can participate in politics.
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Now, as I said, there was a coup.
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The Spanish imperialism and US imperialism participated in the coup.
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The day after, the editorials of El País in Spain, the New York Times, they said democracy restored.
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The Chávez, the autocrat, has now been stopped.
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And this was a coup, right?
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The president, democratically later president, was arrested, taken into a penal prison in an island of La Horquilla,
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La Horquilla, and then a new government was sworn in a room like this in the presidential palace.
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Similar number of people in this room, they were all cheering for this guy, Pedro Carmona, who was president of the Business Federation,
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was now the new president that was going to restore democracy.
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And they were so confident that they had won.
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They all signed the attendance list.
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And you can see it.
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It's in that film.
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They were all cheating.
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And then this guy, Pedro Carmona, says, and now we're going to remove the attorney general.
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And everyone's cheating.
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And now we're going to remove the constitutional...
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Yeah!
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So confident they signed the attendance list.
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No. If you look at that attendance list, it was the who's who of the Venezuelan oligarchy.
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The Bishop of Caracas, the owners of the main TV stations and newspapers, the owners of the land,
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the owners of the industries, everyone was there, you know.
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The leaders of the bureaucratic trade unions, the CTV, they all signed on to this and the military officers were behind that.
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Anyway, what is different in Venezuela is that in a space of 48 hours, the masses came out on the streets and defeated the coup.
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There was masses of people coming down from the barrios onto the presidential palace and they were saying,
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no ha renunciado, lo tienen secuestrado.
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He's not resigned, they have kidnapped him.
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Because the story that was going on, they were showing cartoons on TV, they were keeping people in the dark,
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and they were saying Chávez has resigned because he has ordered the army to fire on the unarmed opposition demonstrations, people being killed, and he's resigned.
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And people say, no, no, he's not resigned.
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We want to see, we want to see, where is he?
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He should tell us that he's resigned if he's resigned.
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And this is the president that we have put on.
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This is our president.
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We want him back, right?
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People gathered outside the 42nd Parachute Division in Maracay.
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And you have this situation.
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Masses of people outside the military barracks.
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Finally, the army broke.
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And a whole section of the army went over to the people.
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This was made easier by the fact that Chávez was a military officer.
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So we had close contacts in the army high command, and some people were vacillating, some people were under pressure of the masses.
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Anyway, it was the masses that brought the president back.
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And you can see it in this film.
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It's very funny because these people, these bourgeois, are all in the presidential palace.
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And then after a while, they can see something's wrong, something's wrong, the presidential guards coming back, and then they're all running.
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They're running like rats.
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They're scurrying away, and the people won a victory on the 13th of April.
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Actually, I have the T-shirt.
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This T-shirt says, Every 11 has its 13th.
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This is the slogan of the people in Venezuela for many years after that.
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They said, look, we defeated this coup.
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And the coup they had defeated.
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And what did Chavez do after this defeat of the coup?
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He came out and said he was shocked.
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He never expected a coup.
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He knew things were being planned and so on.
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But he was, above all, he was against any bloodshed, any revenge or anything like this.
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And he said, let's have a negotiating table with the opposition.
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Let's sort all these things out in a peaceful manner.
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He conciliated.
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He negotiated.
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Now, I was in Venezuela one time.
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And I stayed, I went and visited this comrade's house.
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And his mom was from Colombia.
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She lived in Venezuela for a long time.
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And she was a very religious woman.
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She had a crucifix in her fridge door.
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And she was a pious woman.
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And we were talking about, what do you think about the Bolivarian robots?
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She said, listen, since this started, I am now Venezuelan.
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I'm no longer Colombian.
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with apologies to Nico, I'm no longer Colombian.
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I feel I'm Venezuelan.
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I am part of this revolution.
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He says, but I'll tell you one thing.
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This is a person with no political education, no political involvement, no political experience.
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He said, when I saw the president come out on the people's balcony, as it was known since that point,
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on the 13th when he was returned, when I saw the president come out on the people's balcony, And on one hand, he had the Constitution,
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and on the other hand, he had a cross.
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I said, that's bad news.
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He should have come out with the sword of Bolivar and start chopping the heads of all these traitors.
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OK, so Chavez has been accused of many things.
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He's an authoritarian figure, an autocrat, and trampled over democratic rights.
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All lies, all a pack of lies.
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And he actually made a mistake.
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He said, oh, let's compromise.
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Let's negotiate with the opposition.
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The whole number of negotiating tables were open for months on end.
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They were talking.
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In the meantime, the opposition was preparing another coup. Of course.
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They had not been satisfied with one.
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They wanted a successful one.
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So in December 2002, the same year, December 2002, they organized another attempt.
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This attempt consisted in a whole number of military officers.
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They claimed themselves in rebellion.
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They went into the Altamira Square in the east of Caracas.
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And then most importantly, the high command,
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the executive directors of PDVSA and all the high ranking technicians, engineers and so on, they declared themselves on strike.
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This was, let's be clear, a boss's strike, a lockout, a reactionary lockout against the economy.
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And the idea was we want to bring PDVSA, the oil company, to a standstill And this will wreck the government.
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This will break the back of the government.
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The economy cannot work without the oil industry.
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And what happened?
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This lockout went on for about two months, nearly three months.
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It started on the 4th of December, 2002, and then lasted until February, 2003.
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And what happened in the meantime was the following.
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The masses came out on the streets again through self-organization.
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they surrounded the oil installations, the filling stations, the oil refineries, the oil wells, everything.
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And with the collaboration of some loyal workers from the industry, and some workers who had been sacked from the industry for political reasons,
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they came back, the workers, and the workers control, the workers of PDVSA, reestablished production in the oil industry.
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We are not talking about a small textile factory in Argentina or something like this, and the works of 200 workers.
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No, we're talking about an industry that at that time employed about 20,000 people.
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It's a very advanced, technologically advanced satellite systems, computerized system.
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The workers were running this mammoth of a company for two months under workers' control.
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There was a point, and there's so many anecdotes that illustrate this.
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I don't have the time to give them all,
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but there was one point at which the minister of oil called the workers in this installation the cryogenic plant at Jose.
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This is the place where they take gas and they pressurize it and they put it on oil tankers, LNG.
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The oil minister called these workers that were running this installation and they said,
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what do you need?
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Right?
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You've done a very good job.
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How can we help you?
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And these oil workers said, well, I mean, we're running this.
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There's not much we can need.
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Can you send us some managers?
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This is the only thing that we don't have.
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The workers were running this and the workers, they were not fully conscious of what they had done.
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managers, that was the whole point.
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They were running it under workers control.
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The managers were completely redundant.
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OK, so that was the second massive defeat for the opposition.
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Now, at this point, Chabot was no mood to compromise anymore.
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At this point, I think it was in April 2003, he declared the anti-imperialist character of the revolution.
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He said, this revolution is now anti-imperialist.
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The United States had participated in this two courts quite clearly.
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Now, some people at that time, some people I know personally, were very afraid.
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They said, okay, this is it now.
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Now this is going to go down the same way as Allende in Chile.
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And there's going to be a coup.
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And I was thinking, there has already been two coups.
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What are you talking about?
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It's not Chavez that's provoking imperialism.
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This has already happened.
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There's already been two coups.
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Anyway, so Chavez decided to go forward at that time.
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There was something else that happened because the bosses had gone on a lockout.
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They locked the workers out of the factories, right?
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In some places that I know, in the Nissan factory in Carabobo, the workers went in and they said, Unless you allow us back into this factory to produce,
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we're going to jump the fence and start producing under workers' control.
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The bosses opened the gates.
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But in some other places, the workers have been locked out for two months.
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And then when the lockout was defeated, the bosses then said, well, we're not going to pay you the wages for that.
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And the workers said, what?
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We never voted to go on.
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This is your stuff.
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You need to pay us.
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And then as a result of this, a wave of factory occupations started throughout the country.
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It was the whip of the counter-revolution that was pushing the workers forward.
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And then, this is a funny story, Chávez went to a meeting that had been organized by a tendency within the workers movement
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that was calling itself the class struggle tendency.
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It was a meeting about occupied factories.
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And there was a big banner that said, uh, say, Fabrica Cerrada, Fabrica Ocupada.
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Fabrica, factory that is shut down should be occupied by the workers, right?
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Something like this.
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And, uh, Xavitz went there.
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He had been invited to the, to the closing session of this meeting.
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And he looked at that, uh, banner and said, that's a very good idea.
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That's a very good idea.
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Now we got, this is what we should do.
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If the bosses shut down the factories, the workers should occupy them and the government will legalize it.
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Now, this is a bit unusual, right?
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This guy is a military officer with no previous history of left-wing politics or socialists,
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but in this case, the fact that he was a military officer and not a politically trained person was an advantage, right?
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He'd not been trained for 30 years in reformism.
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This is things you can do.
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This is things you cannot do.
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No, no, no, no, no. He was a practical man.
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And he said, OK, this sounds like a good idea.
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After all, look, I mean, these guys shut down the factory.
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They don't want to run the factories.
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Well, let the workers run the factories, and we'll legalize it.
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And then he instructed his minister of labor, Maria Cristina Iglesias, to draft a list of all the factories in the country
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that had been idle or semi-abandoned or facing problems for the workers to occupy them.
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And one day, Maria Cristina Iglesias, the minister of labor, came on the television and said, this is the list.
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1,200 factories, semi-paralyzed, idle.
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The workers should occupy them.
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Now, when have you seen a government like this?
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What I'm trying to say is this is not just someone who came to power and introduced some progressive measures, of which there were many.
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This is a revolution.
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This is a government and a movement
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that was moving in the direction of breaking with capitalism
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and breaking with a capitalist state and breaking with protocol and bourgeois democracy, direct action by the workers themselves.
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In January 2005, Chavez nationalized two factories,
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Venepal, the paper mill in Aragua,
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and CNV, a valve-making private company that was working for PDVSA in Los Teques Miranda,
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near the capital.
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And he did say something similar to what he said there.
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He said, we're nationalizing this factory, But this is not state capitalism.
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The workers must run these factories.
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This is nationalization under workers control.
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And so the workers did elect a president from amongst their own ranks.
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In Vival, which is how the factory, the Vival factory was then.
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Some comrades here have been in this factory.
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It was run by a member of this international who had been elected the president of this factory by the workers.
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And they had all sorts of things.
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They had rotation of positions.
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They had weekly mass meetings for accounting.
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The leadership was elected by the workers.
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And there's a factory under workers control, which was owned by the state.
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And then there was a big movement of factory occupations and workers control.
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Now, in December 2005, this thing was going ahead.
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There's a dialectical interrelationship between Chavez and the masses.
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The more Chavez moves forward, pushed by the opposition and by the movement of the mass, the more he speaks in a more radical way, the more the masses become more radicalized.
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Chavez had a weekly TV program, which was called Allo Presidente, High President.
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And he will speak for hours, four hours, five hours.
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And he will speak about all sorts of things.
411
He will go to different parts of the country, talk to people in a meeting like this.
412
And he will say, so what is your problem?
413
Do you have land here?
414
And he will try to talk to people and then work out ideas, how to solve the problems.
415
And he became extremely popular.
416
He bypassed the official channels of the bourgeois media.
417
He was talking directly to the masses.
418
People made fun of this program, but it was a mass exercise in political education.
419
I remember, he will have a map of Venezuela.
420
And he said, Venezuela is not a poor country.
421
Here we have oil.
422
And then we have fertile land over there.
423
There's some mines, gold mines in the south, and then there's basic industries in Bolivar.
424
And there's no reason why people should be poor in a rich country.
425
We must use this wealth for the benefit of the majority.
426
This is political education, because this is an idea
427
that breaks with the whole of the capitalist system as it's been run in Venezuela for 200 years.
428
Now, as I said, in December 2005, he went to the World Social Forum.
429
It's in the first video there.
430
He went to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in Brazil, and he said this.
431
He said, I've been thinking for a long time.
432
I've been reading, and I've been talking to intellectuals, and I've reached the conclusion that what we want to achieve in Venezuela cannot be done within capitalism.
433
We must transcend capitalism, and we must go to socialism.
434
Now, this is 2005, right?
435
at the back end of the collapse of Stalinism, where no one in Europe was talking about socialism.
436
Forget about it.
437
No trade union, labor movement, left leaders were talking about socialism.
438
They all talked about, I don't know, you don't remember, but there was a thing at that time called TINA.
439
There is no alternative.
440
There's only neoliberal capitalism or nothing else.
441
And then there's this guy who is a military officer is the president, a democratically elected president of the country, and he starts saying that we need to go to socialism.
442
This was an earthquake in Venezuela.
443
Everyone was talking about socialism everywhere.
444
I remember very well, I was in...
445
I was in Venezuela just before this speech,
446
and I was talking to some guy, David Velasquez, who was the leader of the communist youth.
447
And I said, we were intervening in Venezuela at this time.
448
We were saying, yeah, Bolivarian revolution, very good.
449
But we need to go towards socialism.
450
This cannot be done within capitalism.
451
We were the first ones to say this.
452
But obviously our voice is not the same as the voice of the president.
453
But anyway, so I was talking to this guy, David Belakia, and he said, no, no, no, no, the character of the Venezuelan revolution, this is the general secretary of the communist youth,
454
the character of the Venezuelan revolution is a Bolivarian revolution.
455
It's a national, democratic, anti-imperialist revolution and socialism is not on the agenda.
456
We shouldn't even raise it.
457
And I said, OK.
458
Then, no, I didn't say OK.
459
I said, OK, I take note.
460
This is your position.
461
We continue to argue for socialism.
462
And many people were telling us, no, no, this is a Bolivarian revolution.
463
It's different.
464
This is not the, this was in the 20th century.
465
This is something new.
466
Anyway, and then the minute Chavez talks about socialism, the communist youth is now, yes, yes, we You must go to socialism.
467
Anyway, everyone.
468
There was even at one point an organization that was set up was called Businessmen for Socialism.
469
Socialism was so popular.
470
You can't imagine it.
471
Then, Chavez went to another election.
472
There's been so many elections.
473
I can see Julian Chavez laughing about this.
474
But I think there were 14 different elections,
475
regional elections, national elections, constituent assembly elections, constitutional referendum elections.
476
I don't know there were so many elections.
477
You can't have a more democratic revolution.
478
Anyway, so he went to another election in December, no in August 2000, no this,
479
wait, in 2006, never mind the month.
480
He went to another election and he said, Chavez said, this is not about Chavez.
481
This election is about socialism.
482
If you are in favor of socialism, vote for me.
483
If you are against socialism, don't vote for me.
484
The clearest impossible to be clearer.
485
And what was the result of that election?
486
Well, first of all, there was a turnout of 78%.
487
78%.
488
The highest turnout ever in any election in Venezuela and many other countries.
489
And socialism won by over 62%.
490
This was the highest point of Chavez's popular support.
491
And so he then said, from now on we're going to build socialism.
492
But obviously Chavez didn't have a very clear idea what socialism was or how it looked like, or how to get there.
493
One day he was saying to the workers, take over the factories.
494
The next day he was meeting a businessman and said, well you should invest in Venezuela.
495
The difference is that the businessman knew better than that than that, right?
496
Whatever the president said, they knew that the workers were taking over factories and that the president was legalizing that, so they were not going to invest, right?
497
But he had many confusions, but they started implementing, just very quickly, there were some material gains of the revolution,
498
but remember this, in 2002, when the masses defeated the coup, there had been no material gains for the revolution, right?
499
This was a purely a movement on the basis of the consciousness of the masses had been raised in the self-organization.
500
But by 2006, 2007, they implemented what they called the missiones, the social programs.
501
And there was one called Mission Barrio Adentro where they brought
502
primary healthcare to the working class neighborhoods where Venezuelan doctors didn't even want to go.
503
And they had to bring Cuban doctors,
504
but they set up primary healthcare centers in the poorest areas up in the hills around Caracas.
505
They had the Mission Robinson, which abolished illiteracy.
506
They had, there was an old woman, there was an old woman of 90 who was interviewed on the telly.
507
She just learned how to read and write for the first time in her life.
508
And asked him what do you want to do next?
509
He said well I want to go to university.
510
This is it.
511
This is how the people's expectations were lifted by this revolution.
512
They had another one called Mission Milagro,
513
Miracle Mission, where hundreds of thousands of people were operated of cataracts so they could now see and previously they couldn't see.
514
These are the material gains of the revolution were massive.
515
There was a massive program of agrarian reform, factory occupations and so on.
516
However, there was a Mission Vivienda.
517
I think it's 3 million housing units have been built and given for free to working class families in Venezuela,
518
which at that time was a country of 30 million people.
519
And this was possible on the basis of what?
520
Okay, because this is an interesting question.
521
Venezuela remained all the way until Chavez's death and today a capitalist country.
522
So how is this possible?
523
Basically, they used the oil money, and oil went up very much at that, the oil prices went up very much at that time.
524
There was a boom in oil prices.
525
They used that in order to pay for all these social services, right?
526
Without abolishing capitalism.
527
Not only this, there was something, this is the limitations of the Bolivarian Revolution and Chavez himself.
528
For instance, they, in the field of the economy,
529
what they did in order to fight the sabotage of the ruling class was to introduce controls, right?
530
State controls over the economy.
531
So they introduced price controls.
532
When the private sector was hoarding and speculating and black marketeering over basic food products, they introduced price controls.
533
Instead of expropriating the owners of these distribution chains, Mr. Mendoza, who owned Grupo Polar,
534
which controls the main distribution of food in Venezuela, And then there was a flight of capital,
535
so they introduced currency change controls.
536
And so they introduced more and more controls.
537
The problem with this, Alan explained it very well many times in Venezuela itself,
538
is the problem is that you have not abolished capitalism and created a planned economy,
539
which can run the economy, but you have made impossible the functioning of the free market capitalism.
540
Therefore you have the worst of both worlds.
541
You don't have a planned economy, but you don't have a capitalist economy either.
542
This is the main reason, I will say, one of the main reasons for economic problems in Venezuela, which existed already under Chávez.
543
And then the other thing is that in relation to the state, Chávez said this thing many times he said he said we
544
must we must pull very far what's it we must smash
545
to smithereens the capitalist state the bourgeois state this is a president saying
546
that on television this is quite powerful but but did he do
547
that no he said we must replace the capitalist state with a communal state
548
and people started organizing themselves in communes in the working-class areas in the in the neighborhoods, but these communes didn't really have power and the state still existed.
549
There was a parallel, I don't know, dual power situation under the same head.
550
I don't know, very difficult thing to understand.
551
And what happened was that the old state apparatus still existed in reality.
552
And in fact, it was sabotaging even some direct instructions from Chavez.
553
I'll just give you one example.
554
I feel I'm running out of time, but maybe I'll take five minutes extra.
555
I'll just give you one anecdote.
556
This is Comrade I mentioned before, Jorge Paredes, he was the workers elected president of Inverval, a factory that was now nationalized,
557
made valves for the oil industry.
558
So he had the right to attend a meeting of all
559
the directors of all the companies related to the oil industry with the president.
560
So Chavez was in this meeting, I don't know, 100 people there.
561
And then Chavez said, turn to this guy.
562
Chavez was like this, you know, he will turn on a minister on live television and demand answers.
563
And the minister didn't have the answers.
564
Anyway, so he turned to Jorge Baredes and said, Jorge, I have heard that the CNV,
565
Inverval, your factory, is not delivering the valves that PDVSA is ordering.
566
Obviously there was an interest in the bureaucrats at the head of PDVSA to rubbish workers control.
567
Workers control doesn't work.
568
Look, I mean, they can't even deliver the valves that we order.
569
And then Jorge said, no, President, that's not true.
570
That's not true.
571
In fact, what is happening is that the bureaucracy at PDVSA, and he pointed at the guy who was the president of PDVSA,
572
Rafael Ramirez, who is now in exile and was involved in some corruption scandal.
573
He pointed to Rafael Ramírez, he says, they are ordering the valves that they know we cannot produce.
574
So us two set us to fail.
575
And then say we can't do it.
576
He says, however, Mr. President, if you nationalize this other valve foundry, which is nearby, we will be able to make these other valves.
577
And then the president said, okay, well, nacionalize, expropiese.
578
Let's expropiate that as well.
579
But the president turned to Rafael Ramírez and said, is this true?
580
And Rafael Ramírez couldn't say otherwise.
581
He just fumbled and mumbled.
582
Anyway, this is an example of how the bureaucracy of the state was sabotaging even the president's direct orders.
583
He said, at one point he said, I feel like I'm in a nest of alacranias.
584
How do you say that?
585
A nest of scorpions.
586
I'm in a nest of scorpions.
587
The people who surrounded them, they were just out to get him to sabotage his direct instructions.
588
So basically, it's a clear demonstration that you cannot, what did Marx say?
589
You cannot take the instruments of the bourgeois state and use them for the benefit of the working class.
590
You need to destroy that state and create a worker's state, right?
591
A state based on the committees, direct election, accountability, and so on.
592
Anyway, so these were the main contradictions.
593
And in his last months, Chávez died in 2013. Had cancer, he died.
594
But as he knew he was dying, he made one last speech.
595
And his last speech was called Change the Radar.
596
Change course, basically.
597
Golpe de Timon.
598
And he said, in this speech he said, we talk a lot about socialism.
599
We have a roundabout, we inaugurate a roundabout, we call it a socialist roundabout, or we inaugurate a factory, this is a socialist school or a socialist factory.
600
But in reality we don't have socialism, we still have a capitalist economy.
601
And until and unless we destroy this capitalist economy, replace it by a socialist economy, we will not go forward.
602
And then he said, and the capitalist state also must be abolished and destroyed.
603
We need a communal state, that's how we call it, based on the communes.
604
But he was aware of this.
605
But one, he didn't really know how to advance.
606
And two, he didn't have a party.
607
One man cannot carry out a socialist revolution.
608
And the people he had around him were not particularly the best elements.
609
Some of them were giving bad advice some of them were deliberately including one Nicolas Maduro Nicolas Maduro,
610
even when Chavez was ill he went to Cuba for treatment and as he was away from the country Nicolas Maduro, who was a minister of something,
611
I can't remember he set out to destroy workers' control so there was all these big factories in Bolivar State in Sidor,
612
Alcasa Ferro Minera, a whole number of big factories.
613
This is steel mills, aluminum smelters and stuff like that.
614
And they were all run by workers.
615
Chavit had said this must be run by workers.
616
This should be a workers' assembly to elect the leadership.
617
And we must have a socialist plan of production here.
618
And Maduro went there and destroyed workers controlling every single one of those factories using all sorts of dirty methods,
619
sacking people, undermining people, removing them from...
620
This was still when Tavid was alive. So that's the...
621
I would say that's the main...
622
The Venezuelan revolution has many lessons.
623
One is about the strength and the power of the masses when they set themselves to do something, particularly in relation to workers' control.
624
This was phenomenal.
625
And also, but also, is the question of the leadership.
626
The question of the leadership.
627
There wasn't a leadership that was putting all these things together and moving forward in a clear way.
628
And a leadership cannot be improvised in the course of a revolution.
629
It's too late.
630
Even if you have someone as extraordinary as Chavez was, it was a man who was very open to discussing ideas, open to...
631
He was reading a lot.
632
Someone said this morning, Malcolm X in jail was reading 15 hours.
633
I don't know how many hours Chavez was reading, but he once said to Alan, I think he said, yeah, he spent until 2 or 3 in the morning reading.
634
And then he woke up at 6 in the morning to start running the country.
635
But he read lots of stuff.
636
He read Reason in Revolt.
637
He read Bolshevism.
638
And he recommended both books on a national TV broadcast.
639
And he learns things from the ..
640
He not just said, I read these books.
641
He said, in the Reason in Revolt book, I found something very profound, very profound idea.
642
He says, when there is a chemical reaction, there is something called the Biggs energy.
643
And the Biggs energy is what makes this, catalyzes this chemical reaction and makes it happen.
644
And this is what we need here.
645
We need the Biggs energy so that this revolution becomes a revolution that cannot be reversed or rolled back.
646
So he was aware that there was something still missing.
647
Anyway, he was a very peculiar character.
648
He was a brilliant man
649
and he was very in tune with the pressure from the masses
650
and he derived his energy from them and then he gave it back to the masses.
651
But, as I said, the two main lessons of the Bolivarian Revolution, apart from the strength of the masses, is that the question of the economy,
652
the question of the state are crucial.
653
and now just to I mean just to say in two minutes look,
654
then Chavez died in 2013 and then after Chavez died around 2014 15 there was the collapse in oil prices the
655
Chinese economy was slowing down, there was no, anyway for whatever reason the price of oil went from 100
656
dollars a barrel to $27 a barrel in the space of one year.
657
And this destroyed any possibility of oil socialism, of using the oil resources for social programs without touching capitalism.
658
And this is the main reason for the economic crisis in Venezuela, which started more or less around that time.
659
The government followed a crazy policy of monetary expansion, which led to a massive devaluation of the...
660
A massive devaluation.
661
This is the worst episode of hyperinflation at any time in the history of the world.
662
You might have heard about the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic.
663
This is worse, right?
664
Much worse.
665
And then on top of this, obviously there was the sanctions from the United States, the sabotage of the ruling class.
666
Maduro decided that the only way forward was to implement a package of monetarist adjustment.
667
And so particularly after 2018, I can go into the details,
668
but after 2018 everything that the Bolivarian Revolution had done, Maduro reversed.
669
Chavez expropriated factories, nationalized factories, Maduro privatized them them.
670
Chavez introduced workers control, encouraged workers control.
671
Maduro destroyed workers control.
672
Chavez expropriated the land and gave it to the peasants.
673
Maduro took the land away from the peasants, gave it to the land owners.
674
Chavez encouraged the organization of the workers,
675
and in 2018 Maduro destroyed collective bargaining by decree and destroyed the workers conditions,
676
and then progressively proceeded to eliminate all possibility of a left-wing opposition.
677
The Patria para Todos party, the Communist party, the Tupamaros, the Lina Ron party, a whole number of left parties that were small or big,
678
they all had the electoral registration taken away, and workers who tried to resist this and organize,
679
they were put in jail with no due process and so on.
680
So from a revolution, you ended up with a counter-revolution.
681
But worse than that, because this counter-revolution had a line of continuation from Chavez, right?
682
Maduro had been put in power by Chavez himself.
683
Maduro swore loyalty to Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution and socialism.
684
So you have a situation now where you have a complete counter-revolution, but people are completely against this government but they think,
685
many of them think, that this government is a socialist government, that this government is a Bolivarian government, that this government is somehow linked to Chavez.
686
So the situation is quite bleak in Venezuela.
687
Having said that, we obviously still have the same position.
688
The United States, Trump has no right to remove or not the government in Venezuela.
689
Our position continues to be hands of Venezuela.
690
This is irrespective, regardless of the political regime that there is in Venezuela.
691
This is a question, a basic question of imperialism against an oppressed nation.
692
And we are on the side of the oppressed nation despite the fact that we are opponents, adversaries of the Nicolas Maduro government.
693
Thank you very much for a fantastic introduction to the discussion.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: workers, Chavez, revolution, Venezuela. This video has 692 sentences and 8124 words to shadow. The speech runs for 55:14. The speaker talks at a steady 147 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| socialism noun | /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/ | Any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution… |
| capitalism noun | /ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/ | A socio-economic system based on private ownership of resources, and capital and their exploitation for profit. |
| coup noun | /ku/ | A quick, brilliant, and highly successful act. |
| oligarchy noun | /ˈɑlɪˌɡɑɹki/ | A government run by and for only a few, often the aristocracy, the wealthy, or their friends and associates. |
| capitalist noun | /ˈkæp.ɪ.tə.lɪst/ | The owner of a considerable amount of capital; a wealthy person. |
| uprising noun | /ˈʌpˌɹaɪzɪŋ/ | A popular revolt that attempts to overthrow a government or its policies; an insurgency or insurrection. |
| resign verb | /ɹɪˈzaɪn/ | To give up; to relinquish ownership of. |
| lockout noun | The opposite of a strike; a labor disruption where management refuses to allow workers into a plant to work even if they are willing. | |
| transcend verb | /tɹæn(t)ˈsɛnd/ | To pass beyond the limits of something. |
| sabotage noun | /ˈsæb.əˌtɑʒ/ | A deliberate action aimed at weakening someone (or something, a nation, etc) or preventing them from being successful, through subversion, obstruction… |
| occupy verb | /ˈɑkjəpaɪ/ | To fill. |
| nationalize verb | /ˈnæʃənəlaɪz/ | To bring a private company, or an industry comprising such companies, under the control of a specific government. |
| unarmed adjective | /ˌʌnˈɑɹmd/ | Defenceless and lacking weapons. |
| abolish verb | /əˈbɑl.ɪʃ/ | To end a law, system, institution, custom or practice. |
| barrio noun | A municipality or subdivision of a municipality in Spanish America, and in Spain itself. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| go up verb | To move upwards. | |
| shut down verb | To close, terminate, or end; to stop operating, either permanently or temporarily. | |
| carry out verb | /ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/ | To hold while moving it out. |
| lie down verb | To assume a horizontal position. | |
| live through verb | To survive a difficult period or event | |
| set up verb | /ˌsɛt ˈʌp/ | To make ready for use. |
| take over verb | To assume control of something, such as a business or enterprise, and sometimes by force. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- How can we help you?
- Can you send us some managers?
- What are you talking about?
- Do you have land here?
- How do you say that?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been thinking · I've been reading |
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to discuss · used to go |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have not lived · have not been achieved · We've been defeated |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is called · is made · was elected |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 77 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, didn't, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: socialism /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/, sabotage /ˈsæb.əˌtɑʒ/, nationalize /ˈnæʃənəlaɪz/, abolish /əˈbɑl.ɪʃ/, hyperinflation /ˌhaɪpəɹɪnˈfleɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: socialism /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/, capitalism /ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/, oligarchy /ˈɑlɪˌɡɑɹki/, capitalist /ˈkæp.ɪ.tə.lɪst/, nationalize /ˈnæʃənəlaɪz/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like socialism, capitalism, coup.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.