Excerpted from EWAN ROBERTSON:
“the experience of worker control in the Grafitos factory is one of a number of worker control experiments across Venezuela. This article investigates the development of this movement in recent years, in particular through the Plan Socialist Guayana, and what Venezuela’s experience of worker control means for the Bolivarian revolution and radical social change more generally.
The worker control movement forms one of the most radical social movements in the Venezuela, pushing for a transformation of the existing mode of production and class relations, the division and hierarchy of labour, and decision-making within the economy. Interestingly, the movement has emerged as a political force later on during Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, the process of social, political and economic change led by President Hugo Chavez since his election in December 1998. The contemporary worker control movement has its beginnings in the oil lockout December 2002 – January 2003, when bosses tried to shut down the country’s oil industry and economy in order to oust Chavez from power, after a failed coup d’état in April 2002. This attempt at economic sabotage, while causing huge damage to the economy, failed when workers in various industries, including oil, temporarily took over the running of factories in a bid to keep the economy moving and maintain Chavez in power.
In 2005 the first worker controlled factories came into being when the Chavez government expropriated paper factory Invepal and valve factory Inveval in January and April of that year respectively, after workers launched occupations against the former owners. The factories were established in “co-management” with the state, whereby workers owned 49% and the state 51% of the factory and administration was shared between the two. Of the two factories, Inveval developed the deepest worker participation, with decisions made in weekly worker assemblies and a factory council formed in January 2007.
Key to this process was the relationship between the government and workers struggling for worker control. In 2005 President Hugo Chavez began to promote the idea of worker control as a means of recovering and putting into productivity factories closed by recalcitrant members of the business class, launching his call “company closed: company occupied”. Meanwhile the government’s labour ministry supported the organisation that year of the first “Latin American Meeting of Recovered Companies”.
This was part of a left-turn by the Bolivarian movement after successfully defeating numerous destabilisation attempts by the country’s right-wing opposition, with Chavez announcing in 2005 that the goal of the Bolivarian revolution was the construction of socialism. His government then set about nationalising strategic sectors of the economy such as telecommunications, energy, and food supply chains, and promoting grassroots organisation through communal councils among other mechanisms of participation.
From 2005 a range of factories have been occupied and put beneath various forms of worker control in Venezuela, including state-owned Aluminium factory Alcasa from 2005, Invetex, Central Pío Tamayo, Sideroca, Tomatera, Caisa, Central Cumanacoa (2005/6), Sanitarios de Maracay (2007), Grafitos del Orinoco (2009/10), food chain Friosa (2010), coffee producer Fama de Amerca (2010), and many more. Not every model established since 2005 has remain intact and the process has been fluid and at times uneven, yet the general trend has been a growing number of concrete examples and the popularity of the idea of worker control among Venezuela’s working class. Thus, despite the number of factories under worker control representing only a small part of Venezuela’s economy, by mid-2011 the Bicentenary Front of Companies Under Worker Control (FRETCO) was able to declare: “Currently, the Bolivarian revolution has entered a critical point in which the bourgeoisie has lost control over the exploited. The workers have been acquiring an ever greater level of political consciousness and are organising themselves to respond to the capitalists’ attacks”.
In their analysis, the FRETCO tie the growth of the worker control movement to the overall fate of the Bolivarian process, arguing:
“We are living in times never before seen in our history. There are factories that have been in the hands of their workers for five years, occupied and operated by them. There aren’t any historical references [in Venezuela] in which this situation has been able to sustain itself for so long without one of its parts being defeated. In other times the bourgeoisie would have used all the power of the state to suppress the worker and grassroots movement”.”
After discussing a conflict related to the Plan Socialist Guayana, a takeover of strategic industries in the region Guyana, the author then concludes:
The course of the struggle for worker control in Venezuela has highlighted important characteristics of the Bolivarian revolution, as well as containing important lessons for movements for radical social change globally.
One of these characteristics is the on-going, and perhaps growing, internal contradiction in the Bolivarian revolution between the bureaucracy and politically reformist elements which, both consciously and unconsciously, act to slow continued social, economic and political transformation, and a more radical wing committed to a deeper process of revolutionary change.
On a positive note, the coming together of the Patriotic Committees in Guayana demonstrated the extent to which grassroots organisations in the region are working together and are able to unite to resist attempts to undermine the Plan Socialist Guayana. That said, these groups were unable to prevent the dismissal of Elio Sayago from Alcasa, showing that the bureaucracy have the power to put the PGS in real danger from being realised.
It is important to point out that the worker control movement is one part of a varied and exciting process underway in Venezuela, encompassing community councils, communes, community media, women’s, LGBT, afro-descendent and indigenous groups, and radical government policies domestically and internationally, from social programs to solidarity-based international alliances such as the ALBA (Alliance for the Bolivarian Peoples of our America). The political spaces available to push the worker control movement forward will be partly determined, not only by workers’ ability to organise and struggle, but also by the general direction the revolution takes in the coming months and years.
Author Steve Ellner has observed how the Bolivarian revolution can be characterised by cycles of radicalisation, often driven in response to successfully fighting off attacks from the opposition.[lxiii] Will a strong election victory for Chavez in October mark a move against internal barriers to further radical transformation in Venezuela? In the election campaign on 26 July, Chavez highlighted his awareness of the problems of bureaucracy in state institutions, when he spoke of the importance of self-criticism and the need to correct existing errors in the revolutionary process.
He personally addressed the bureaucracy, saying that “the office, the meetings, the analysis, the air conditioning, the chauffeur and the good salary; that’s not worth anything, what matters is the commitment with the people, that’s why we’re here”.
Finally, by what has been achieved so far, Venezuela’s worker control movement demonstrates to the world that workers can indeed collectively self-manage their factories and workplaces, and that capitalist hierarchies and divisions of labour are not the only, nor best, way of organising economic life. By running production in a collectively democratic manner, workers’ alienation from their labour and the unfair distribution of produced resources can be overcome, while leading to the greater education and consciousness of workers. Such a model can also benefit society as a whole, as production is geared toward the needs of society and not profit for capitalists, and lays the basis for deeper economic and social transformation. In the context of austerity being imposed by an elite upon peoples across Europe and North America as a result of the latest crisis of capitalism, worker control in Venezuela is another example of not only how another, better, world is possible, but also what that world could look like.”