full article at: http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/left_turn.htm
Hugo Chávez is not willing to accept that in a country like Venezuela, so rich in oil reserves and natural gas, a majority of the population is struggling in misery and held down by force while the wealth of a small upper class is growing; that multinational oil companies make enormous profits while the country accumulates debts; that international companies get rich off location conditions such as the water and electricity supply while for the majority of the population not even these elementary living conditions are duly available.
What he finds scandalous is the consequences of the inclusion of Venezuela as a oil supplying country into the world market in general and specifically the devastating political-economic direction at the end of the 1980s: in the 1980s most countries of Latin America, including Venezuela, fell not for the first time into a debt crisis because the revenue from their international business was less and less sufficient to finance the increasing costs of their credits. The oil dollars and other earnings from the business with natural resources and agrarian products were unproductively consumed by the private beneficiaries or were transferred to foreign countries; the foreign currency earnings mainly had to be used by the government to pay the increasing debt service, creditworthiness was perpetuated again and again through new debts and with it the growing claims of the international credit providors. That's how the capitalistic handicap that the essential revenue source of these countries is the utilization of their natural resources and agricultural goods for the capitalistic centers, i.e. for capitalistic business elsewhere, and that they never got their own industry capable of competing on the world market, asserted itself. They could never get rid of the status of a raw material exporting country lacking capital; on the contrary: for most of them it has consolidated. National efforts to induce a profitable national production in competition with foreign capital failed because of the superiority of the established world market powers and the conditions of the world market enforced by them. And because a national accumulation has not been induced, the majority of the people is of no capitalistic use and only an encumberance for a nation aiming for national enrichment, and they are left to degenerate in slums.
>From the debt crisis, the Latin American governments,
in accord with the IMF, drew the conclusion that they
should further open their countries to foreign
business interests and advocated this policy as the
best way to more national wealth. The foreign
participation in the extraction of raw materials and
the business with agricultural exports, in Venezuela
especially the partially nationalized oil industry,
was again reorganized in favor of the multinational
companies in order to fetch more foreign capital for
the development of raw material extraction in the
country, to maintain creditworthiness with the private
and official international financial institutions and,
last but not least, to secure the goodwill of the USA,
the supervising power of the world market and world
finance. Additionally, the remaining state-owned
enterprises were privatized; the water and electrical
supply, as well as telecommunications and banks were
turned into investments for North American and
European multinationals – under conditions which
guaranteed them a profitable business, guarantees for
the monetary value of their profits and free foreign
exchange operations.
Those countries indeed realized some billions of additional revenues and new credits, but they only found themselves soon again, and on a new level, in the debt trap and this sped up the conflicts within them. The privatization of the public utility companies turned into only one long list of demands on the governments: to ensure higher prices and profits, indifferent to the poverty of the masses, so that a large part of the population can no longer afford water and electricity. Mass protests were put down partly by force, partly by delaying tactics.
The arrangement of the concessions and the modalities with the tributes, also in Venezuela, led to the situation that the national revenue did not grow, although the prices for crude oil and natural gas were rising, whereas the multinationals, together with the management of the national oil industry, made huge profits and shifted the increasing dollar funds into foreign countries, to the disadvantage of the national foreign currency account.
This internationally demanded and nationally implemented “neoliberal” program of the countries of Latin America - to prosper as an investment place for foreign businesses, to make the debt service the leading priority of budgetary policy and to manage the drastic consequences for the country and people by force - Chávez finds intolerable. Impoverishment and forced oppression of growing parts of the population, on the one hand, and domestic and foreign enrichment on the other hand, proves to him that politics lacks a proper national conviction.
In the poverty of the masses he detects the subjugation of his country to foreign demands to wealth and power and sees this as a betrayal of its people. And it is also clear who is meant in particular: the USA with their multinationals companies, which claims Latin America as their economic and political backyard.
Chávez is emphatic on the point of view that the realities of the world market are not “inherent necessities” that have to be used to make the most out of them, but rather interests that harm people and nation, and which should be fought against.
The ex-military man who has close ties to the people does not want to accept that the vast majority of the population has to be kept in poverty by force because it is - according to the hitherto valid criteria - a capitalistically useless overpopulation. He wants to eliminate the capitalistically produced and governmentally supervised pauperism in his country: out of a sump of social misery and suject of state repression they should become a proper people recognized in their life needs and requirements. The masses, until now excluded from all the achievements of civilization, should be granted what they deserve, the right to a life in “dignity.”
The means for such a social development program should come from the money that the government gets from world market relations. Instead of subjecting the whole country to a terms and conditions which condemn the vast majority to being a crowd without work and income, the first man in Caracas agitates and acts for the opposite: with the money from the raw materials trade he wants to organize living conditions in which his population can reproduce itself.
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