A Marxism-Leninism Today exclusive interview with Carlos Ojeda Falcón, ideological secretary of the Central Committee of the PCV (Communist Party of Venezuela)

 

MLT: What is the situation of the controversial elections of July 28, in the opinion of the PCV?

COF: The PCV has denounced the growing governmental authoritarianism expressed in the recurrent and systematic violation of rights and constitutional and legal guarantees. Such violations of rights  created in recent years a dangerous scenario that compromises, day after day, the very existence of the state of law and justice established in the 1999 Constitution, whose legitimacy comes from the full exercise of popular sovereignty, through voting.

In this context, the recent election of July 28, and in particular the way in which the protocols and normative processes surrounding its results have been carried out, constitute in themselves a qualitative leap backward.  It will further deepen the crisis of political legitimacy with negative effects on the credibility and a greater deepening of the authoritarian drift of the anti-democratic and anti-communist government of Nicolás Maduro.  It begins in the early hours of July 29, after the challenged  announcement by the authorities of the National Electoral Council. Now there are  more than 2,000 prisoners, the announcement of the construction and use of two maximum security prisons, new laws for greater social control and political persecution, as well as the improvement of repressive and judicial methods and practices against anyone considered hostile to the interest of the government, who will be declared ‘fascists’ and ‘terrorists’ with the application of sentences of up to 30 years in prison. In this sense, July 28 can be seen as a milestone that will express the negation of everything that was affirmed and finally reflected in the 1999 Constitution.

Venezuela has had to maneuver in hostile circumstances that include US economic sanctions, numerous attempts at violent destabilization, invasion, and even a failed coup d’état.

The PCV has been persistent in denouncing the cynical conduct of the reformist and anti-communist government of Nicolás Maduro and his helpers, who have had pragmatism and political opportunism as the ideological source that conceals the reactionary essence of their government.  Their economic policy is completely subservient to the interests of large imperialist transnational capital, and whose development has been moving in recent years towards greater proximity and strengthening of ties with important lobbies of the US establishment, especially within the Democratic Party of the current government of Joe Biden.

The government of Nicolás Maduro has developed an effective policy of “double-sided” mass communication manipulation. On the one hand, the government plays the victim and on the other, it carries out juicy financial and commercial triangulation deals, based on the justification centered on the blockade and economic sanctions. Thus  the economic and political elite acts with total discretion, lack of control and impunity supported by laws, public policies and the actions of high public officials favorable to practices of illicit enrichment and obscene corruption, such as the famous cases of Saab and El Aissami, examples that we mention as public evidence of what we claim. In Venezuela there are “imperialist” sanctions to keep the working people under conditions of political subordination through dependence on the massive allocation of a food-containing bag (CLAP), while the political and economic elites travel in luxury vehicles imported directly from the United States and whose value is around 100,000 US dollars.

 In the US, many solidarity activists continue to assume that since the US has been working to overthrow the Maduro government, it is their responsibility to defend it. They argue that whatever Maduro’s flaws, he is better than a right-wing government. Please comment.

Over the past 10 years,three major political currents have emerged in Venezuela: conservative and reactionary, and orthodox and liberal, in economic terms. All are expressions of unprincipled political conduct, in which a combination of “ends justify the means” political pragmatism and opportunism of any kind prevails, in order to cover up their shameful political conduct before the whole of society.

At present, what is called “the Right,” in Venezuela is configured as follows:

The “Right” that maintains political control of the public powers of the Venezuelan State led by President Nicolás Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV),

On the other hand, the fractions or breakaways of political parties coming from the traditional or historical Venezuelan “Right”, whose performance serves the interests of the government of Nicolás Maduro and whose practice is evident in the obedient subordination they show in the National Assembly. There they faithfully accompany the leaders of the PSUV in the national parliament, and serve as instruments to the advantageous electoral policy designed by the PSUV to favor the candidacy of Nicolas Maduro, or presenting itself as a nationalist opposition.

And finally, the political parties grouped around the Platform of Democratic Unity (PUD), where almost all organizations converge ideologically as “Right” today under the Yankee-loving leadership of María Corina Machado.

In short, anyone who supports or backs any of these political options is supporting the Right, since the anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-popular conversion of Nicolás Maduro’s government is such in its essence that it cannot be ideologically characterized in any other way than that of the “Right.”

Many American solidarity activists still think that the Venezuelan government is building socialism, or at least that it is “oriented toward socialism.”

This is completely false. In Venezuela, no socialism is being built, nor is there any “orientation” toward that goal. We communists know that socialism cannot be built without a profound and radical transformation of the economic base and its political relations under the leadership of the working class as its organized vanguard.

In Venezuela there was a government led by then President Hugo Chavez, with a progressive and democratic orientation, which based on the 1999 Constitution, guided a significant set of social changes supported by a new redistribution of national income from oil activity. It allowed progress in a process of reformist changes, whose rise towards the structural transformation of the mode of production was never raised because of the ideological limitations of the political leadership of the process and the government, as well as by the manifest inability to advance in a truly revolutionary line capable of overcoming the narrow limits of social reformism.

Today, this social and political process of a progressive nature is in accelerated reversal and complete dismantling, hence, we witness the consolidation of its authoritarian political form with fascist-type practices against everything that is considered hostile to government interests.

Please describe the rightward movements in economic policy by the PSUV and Maduro (including violations of union rights, disregard for the Organic Law of Labor, privatization of companies that had been nationalized under Chavez, and the sale of Venezuelan oil to the American corporation Chevron).

During these years, 7 million citizens left the country seeking to escape economic hardship. There are many and varied aspects that we can mention  regarding the progressive dismantling of rights and guarantees that have served as the basis for public policies oriented to the interest of the people, workers in the city and the countryside, as well as outstanding programs to care for the most needy in matters of education, health, nutrition, among many rights historically violated  by governments and dictatorships subservient to imperialism and its local agents during the twentieth century.

In order to narrow down the answer to this question, we are going to present them based on the  analysis of the national reality contained in the political line approved at our XVI Congress (November 2022).

Firstly, the liberal and neoliberal turn to the right that has occurred based on a new economic policy of an orthodox, liberal and monetarist nature, is aimed at favoring the interests of capital accumulation of the importing and commercial bourgeoisie, as well as the financial and private banking sectors. The elite that maintains political control of the public powers of the Venezuelan State has established important links and alliances with economic sectors of national life that accumulate and serve large transnational imperialist capital. They have been creating spaces of mutual recognition and trust around the interests that determine their relations.

Secondly, euphemistically framed as the need to attract “investments”, the government has carried out the most brutal “adjustments” that the Venezuelan people have known in the last 100 years, which has completely destroyed workers’ wages through the perverse manipulation of the exchange rate regime, inflation, price liberalization, elimination of subsidies, de facto dollarization of the economy, covert privatization of public and essential services in health, education, among others, making labor relations “flexible” and precarious , elimination of the collective bargaining regime, destruction of social benefits and workers’ savings and pension funds, dismantling of the performance-based benefits regime, positions and seniority of public sector workers, among other measures that have destroyed the already weak national labor force and created a massive migratory movement unprecedented in the history of the country, dismembering entire families and society itself in general.

That is to say, the weight of the crisis falls on the shoulders of the working people, hence the PCV works for the broadest unity of action of the workers in their just struggles and demands for the vindication of the rights that have been taken away from them in the interest of creating viability for an inhuman economic policy completely at the service of the accumulation of capital and foreign interests.

Lastly, the dismantling of political rights through the court interference in political organizations, as is today the case of the Communist Party of Venezuela, among others; its legal status was handed over to an infamous group of PSUV mercenaries by decision of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme  Court (TSJ) in its ruling 1,160 of August 10, 2023.

Describe the repressive drift of the Maduro government’s policy, including its attacks on the PCV, the persecution of high-ranking PCV leaders, the attacks on left-wing trade unionists, the withdrawal of their electoral accreditation, the seizure of the PCV party symbol, etc.

We can say that in the heroic history of the PCV’s struggle, we have never faced such infamous and shameful conduct as that exercised by the government of Nicolás Maduro and the institutions at its service.

The PCV has firmly and determinedly faced powerful enemies who did not hesitate to resort to illegalization, persecution, exile, prison, confinement in concentration camps, confinement, torture, disappearance and extermination for political reasons. In this struggle we earned the recognition and respect, even from our most bitter political enemies and adversaries.

We are facing a political adversary who cynically conceals his anti-communist conduct by calling himself an ally of the communists, declaring himself anti-imperialist and preaching a false socialism. This is an adversary who neither believes in nor practices democracy or dialogue, does not accept criticism and questioning. He persecutes, prosecutes and criminalizes workers who demand rights; he questions any dissent or difference and calls anyone who questions him a terrorist and fascist.  But even more, he orders the usurpation and kidnapping of a modest political organization like the PCV, to hand it over by court order to a group of political criminals in order to subjugate its membership, symbols and electoral ballot status and place it in support of the presidential candidacy of Nicolás Maduro, ignoring legitimate communist activism. The PCV had never dealt with such baseness and indignity.

What is the new Popular Democratic Front that the PCV is working to build?

Venezuela has historically been a society with a democratic, pluralist and egalitarian calling.  That is why it has managed to create within itself the forces capable of carrying out struggles such as those waged for its own independence, which achieved victory even beyond its own borders. The popular movement faced the challenge against a grotesque oligarchy that for years subdued the unrepentant rebellion of the people who  found in federalism the banners for the struggle for more egalitarian conditions in the face of the Creole oligarchy, the caudillismo and the montoneras at the service of that oligarchy, which predominated in our early republic.

During the 20th century, the greatest challenge was always determined by democratic rights and the desire for a life in better material conditions, goals always denied by the servile surrender of dictatorships and governments subservient to imperialism. The Popular Democratic Front (FDP) is a socio-political space under construction, a project that must be shaped, in the opinion of the PCV, into a powerful instrument to guide the struggles of the Venezuelan people at this stage for the rescue of the rule of the Constitution and the laws, the full right to exercise the guarantees and rights that have been taken away from the people, especially the workers, democracy, pluralism and the broadest unity in ideological and political diversity, to confront authoritarianism, surrender, abuse, opportunism, manipulation and the despotic use of public powers.

 

-Carlos Ojeda Falcón is a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela, re-elected at the XVI National Congress in November 2022. He is also the National Secretary of Ideology of the Central Committee and current Director General of the Bolivar-Marx Institute of Higher Studies (IAEBM).