Tackling Institutions One By One: An Interview With Gregory Wilpert

In an interview conducted in March, Venezuelanalysis.com founder Gregory Wilpert speaks of his experiences in Venezuela, activism in the US, and the processes behind the Bolivarian Revolution.

1. If I am not mistaken you are from Germany, originally. Is that correct? Can you tell us a little about the trajectory that brought you to involvement in Venezuela and helping create, I believe, Venezuela Analysis?

Yes, I grew up in Germany, but as a German-American, since my mom was from the U.S. and I was born in the U.S., but my dad was from Germany. After completing high school in Germany, I moved to the U.S. to study sociology, first at UC San Diego and then at Brandeis University, where I eventually earned a Ph.D. Throughout my time at the university I was always very interested in Latin America, partly because of the revolutionary movements there, partly to oppose U.S. foreign policy in that part of the world, and partly because I felt I had some roots there, since my mom is Mexican-American. 

A few years after completing my doctorate I met my wife in New York City, who is from Venezuela. In 2000 we decided to move to Venezuela, mainly because she had to return because she was in the U.S. on a student visa. At that time Chávez had been president for only a year-and-a-half and I was paying only marginal attention to him, thinking that he said some good things, but I was a bit skeptical about him, mainly due to his military background. I was focused on teaching at the Central University of Venezuela at that time, with the help of a Fulbright Scholar grant.

All of that changed in late 2001, when the opposition in Venezuela began organizing strikes against the 49 laws that Chávez had passed that year, among which were a fairly radical land reform, an oil industry reform, and a fishing law reform. It was then that I began to realize that Chávez meant business in confronting the country’s old elite and that this was going to be a major struggle for power within Venezuela. Sure enough, about six months later, in April 2002, the opposition launched its ill-fated coup attempt. This caused my second eye-opening, with regard to the extent to which the international media was actively trying to undermine the Chávez government, disseminating distorted and sometimes even completely false information. As you know, I saw the coup up close, being on the streets at the time, seeing where the demonstrations were taking place and witnessing some of the shooting that was going on. The evening of the first day of the coup, I saw the international media and was absolutely shocked how they merely parroted the opposition’s lies about what happened, that Chávez had resigned, that he had ordered his followers to shoot at the opposition demonstration, etc. I immediately sprang into action and tried to counter these lies by writing articles and by giving dozens of media interviews. In the two weeks that followed I had given over 40 interviews with media outlets from around the world.

In the weeks and months following the coup, I decided that rather than teaching at a university, I ought to work on trying to rectify the disinformation about Venezuela. I thus began writing for alternative media outlets and about a year later decided that rather than just spreading my writing all over the place, there ought to be a single website with information and in-depth analysis about Venezuela. As it happened, I was put in touch with Martin Sanchez, the founder of the largest Venezuelan pro-Chávez website, aporrea.org, who had been planning to do the same thing. He worked on the technical side of setting up Venezuelanalysis.com and I worked on the editorial side of things. So the site was officially launched in September 2003.

2. What do you feel have been some of the successes of Venezuela Analysis – and, also, what are some ways in which you think it could perhaps do better in the future?

I think the main success of Venezuelanalysis.com has been that it provides a left social movement perspective on the Bolivarian Revolution in the English language. It’s a fairly rare perspective, in that it is clearly pro-Bolivarian Revolution, but also critical of some aspects from a leftist perspective. However, the writers are always clear that progressives ought to be on the side of the government, even when there are clear criticisms or problems with the process. The reason for this clarity is simple: the Chávez government has done more and is in the process of doing more for ordinary Venezuelans than just about any realistic alternative to Chávez would ever do. Still, this does not mean that we shut off our capacity to think critically about things. Maintaining such a perspective in a situation that is as polarized as it is in Venezuela is not all that easy. 

In the nearly ten years since its founding, Venezuela Analysis has developed a fairly loyal following and is read (according to Google Analytics) by about 60,000 unique visitors per month. Also, it is self-sustaining via donations from readers, which is a respectable achievement for a small online publication with three part-time correspondents in Venezuela. 

However, we would love to expand our coverage, so that we could hire more writers and write more in-depth analysis articles. This goal, of course, depends on whether we can manage to raise more than $10,000 per year, which we have so far not been able to do.

Another area for improvement is to figure out how to balance journalism with solidarity work. We would love it if there were a stronger solidarity movement that we could coordinate with better. This, however, has been a big challenge for us, partly because we do not have enough time to focus on this and I guess that it’s a similar situation for the solidarity groups.

3. You also live and work in NYC. Do you have any insights you would like to share about working and being an activist in a country that is not your original one, and about international solidarity more generally?

Actually, practically all of my activism has taken place in the U.S., so I do not consider the U.S. to be “not my original country”. I was briefly involved in activism in Germany and in Venezuela, so if I compare my limited experiences in Germany and in Venezuela with my far more extensive experience in the U.S., there are some important differences. 

First, the most striking thing, I think, is how fragmented U.S. activism is. The country is so enormous and activism seems to take place in relatively small segments of the population where each movement seems to be fairly isolated from the concerns of the other movements. I don’t see that so strongly in Germany or in Venezuela. Certainly, they have their single-issue organizations and movements too, but because of the smaller size (geographically in the case of Germany, population-wise in the case of Venezuela) and because elf their better access to mass media, there seems to be more communication and cross-fertilization of concerns in these other countries. I guess also the U.S. culture of individualism probably plays a role in this fragmentation of activism.

Second, on a more positive note, I am often impressed with how well organized and strategic U.S. activist organizations can be. That hasn’t been my experience in Germany or in Venezuela, where a lot more activism seems to be ad-hoc or, when it is not, then it’s much more influenced by political parties.

4. Outsiders who actually get to Caracas and pay attention are immediately, typically, quite surprised by the extent of anti Chavez and anti Bolivarian media. How do you assess the Bolivarian approach to information exchange and media – both alternative and mainstream? What do you think has been admirable, and worth learning from for other projects elsewhere in the future? What do you think has fallen short of what it ought to be, or has even been flawed and damaging, in this area?

The Chávez government’s approach to the media is a bit complicated. On the one hand, there are some smart moves, in my opinion, such as the effort to regulate the media, especially in the effort to make them more responsible and accountable to the public. This is no doubt positive. Also, another smart move has been to dramatically increase the number of public and community media outlets. I believe that increases the space for public debate and public participation in the mass media.

However, there are two fundamental flaws in both of these originally smart approaches, plus there is also a missed opportunity. First, with regard to making the mass media accountable, the mechanism for doing this is a bit flawed. I think there is too much discretion in government hands about deciding when media outlets violate the norms. Rather, I think it would be important to have truly independent bodies making such decisions, so that the public media might also be held accountable in a way that no one would perceive that accountability as being biased in favor of the government. Also, if the opposition were ever to re-gain control over the government (something that rarely seems to occur as a possibility to Chávez supporters), they would not have a powerful tool in their hands to silence progressive voices all of a sudden. 

Second, with regard to the creation of new media outlets, I think this has been extremely positive in the case of the proliferation of community media. Here my only concern would be that perhaps the community media ought to have some sort of guaranteed funding, so that their independence is not threatened and so that they can become stronger. However, the real problem lies with the creation of the public media outlets, which are really government media outlets, in the sense that it is the government that runs them and not the public. I believe that in principle all media ought to be controlled by the public and not by private businesses nor by the government. Certainly, the government ought to have an outlet where it can present its views, but that should be just one option. The dominant option, ideally, should be for publicly controlled media outlets. Exactly how these ought to be organized I cannot go into here, but there are many suggestions out there for this.

Third, the missed opportunity, is that if, as leftists, we believe that the mass media ought to be controlled by the public, then a leftist government ought to be moving in the direction of democratizing all media outlets, including the private ones. Such a project would go far beyond regulation and would mean introducing governing boards run by the public that have an increasing control over private media outlets. None of that, however, has so far happened in Venezuela, mainly, I guess, it’s because of a lack of imagination or because the government fears the backlash this could cause internationally.

I have friends in Venezuela who believe that the most die-hard opposition media ought to be shut down because they think that these media outlets, especially Globovision, are proto-fascist news outlets and therefore have forfeited their right to exist. To the extent it is true that Globovision is openly racist, classist, or sexist, this would be grounds for shutting it down or at least heavily fining them (which has happened). However, if at all possible, I do think it is important to allow the opposition this voice, even if it is such an objectionable one, as long as it does not violate standards of anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc.

5. In the political side of life, insofar as the Bolivarian project is committed to popular participation and broad self management, what Bolivarian policies and actions have significantly furthered such results? What policies and actions, or lack thereof, have interfered with that result?

This is, of course, a topic on which I have written quite a bit, so I will keep my response perhaps a bit brief here, in order to answer other topics in greater depth. I think there are a variety of areas where the the government has advanced popular participation and self management, but the most important are the communal councils. So far, over 30,000 communal councils have been created, which are direct democratic assemblies of 150 to 400 families, who come together and get involved in a whole variety of community projects, ranging from acquiring title to their homes (urban land redistribution), to engaging with social programs, such as the community doctors, educational programs, and welfare programs, to working on community improvement projects for which they receive funds from the central government. A further form of self management that is going to be important but is still in the works, are the communes, which are agglomerations of about 10 to 20 communal councils in an urban setting, which come together to resolve issues that affect those communal councils in common. So far only a few dozen communes have been launched, but there is a plan to expand this to the entire country in the next few years. Then, also important, are the self managed enterprises. However, these are relatively few relative to the total working population. There are now probably a few dozen such workplaces, which are mostly nationalized factories that are then turned over to the workers. Finally, there is the government’s program for the creation and support of cooperatives. There are perhaps tens of thousands such cooperatives now.

6. Economically, Chavez and the Bolivarian agenda have been seeking what they call 21st Century Socialism, yet the private sector of capitalist-owned and run firms remains predominant. Why do you think that is? What, if anything, do you think might have been done differently, or might be done now, to more quickly progress toward a more equal, self managing, and solidaritous economy. 

I think that when a socialist or revolutionary movement takes over a government by force, as was the case with the Cuban or Nicaraguan revolutions, it is a bit easier for that movement to radically transform society because the overthrow generally obliterates resistance and old institutions. However, when, as in the case of the Bolivarian revolution, the transformation process is peaceful and democratic, then the process is also a lot slower. I mean, when Chávez first came into office he did not really control even many key institutions that belong to the state, such as the oil industry and the military – and this even though he had won by overwhelming margins in a series of elections between 1998 and 2000, including the passage of a new constitution. The 2002 coup attempt was an example of how the old elite tried to reverse the transformation process using the military, mayor’s and governor’s offices in opposition control, the state oil company, and the private mass media. Now, of course, Chávez and his movement control practically all levers of government and so there are many people saying, “what is holding the process up?” “Why isn’t change happening faster now?” I think that now there are at least two reasons for why more radical change has not been happening. First, the government is getting bogged-down by inefficiencies in its own administration, such as its problems in dealing with the crime problem, the lack of decent housing, inefficient social programs, and a variety of other issues. Second, there is no plan to all-out abolish the private capitalist sector of the economy. Rather, the government’s plan is to gradually displace this sector by expanding both the state-run public sector and the so-called solidarity economy, of cooperatives. According to some plans, the idea seems to be that in the medium term each one of these sectors, private, public, and solidarity, would make up about one third of the country’s GDP.

7. How do you understand the phrase, 21st Century Socialism? Do you think most folks in Venezuela, even among just those who support the revolution, understand this term similarly, or at all, beyond the most vague degree?

The term is a bit vague, but I think that its main purpose is to contrast it with 20th Century Socialism, or what used to be called, “real existing socialism” or “state socialism” or “bureaucratic socialism”, in reference to the socialism that was carried out in the former Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe (what status Cuban socialism has in this regard is deliberately left out). That is, 21st Century Socialism is supposed to be less state dependent and not repressive. It is supposed to involve a political socialism that Chávez has occasionally talked about, by which he means participatory democracy, where citizens are involved in self-governance in a much more direct form than they are in representative democracy.

I think most people largely understand this contrast between these two different types of socialism, even if the details of how the 21st Century variety is supposed to function is still somewhat vague.  

8. Many who worry about prospects in Venezuela, for many years and of course much more so at present, have feared that the great dependence on Chavez’s ingenuity and energy – and on the place he holds in the hearts of the populace – and on the stabilizing value of his ties to the military causing loyalty there – has been risky. The benefits are clear enough, they say, but the dangers are also evident. What if he changes, is one worry. More so, and now so sadly more germane, what if he can no longer contribute, is the other. Can you try to convey the feelings surging through Venezuela and the prospects for the coming period, please?

Yes, this is a great cause for concern for just about everyone who supports the Bolivarian Revolution. Some perhaps did not see this problem so clearly until now, but I think most were aware of it on one level or another. However, it seems to me that there is a growing confidence recently that the revolution will continue even without Chávez. Nicolas Maduro, the vice-president and likely successor, has pretty much the same outlook and values as Chávez and he is generally a good leader, even if he is not as charismatic nor as intellectually-oriented as Chávez (the latter being important only for a few). The recent campaign slogan, “I am Chávez,” kind of highlights this emerging confidence because it emphasizes the idea that everyone who believes in the Bolivarian Revolution is a leader and is important for this revolution. 

The greatest danger–and your question implies this–is that Chávez holds together a fractious coalition that could fall apart if he leaves the political stage. Certainly, that is a danger, one that I used to warn about a lot, but it is one that I feel isn’t as great as I originally thought it was. That is, I now believe that the governing coalition has a much better chance of holding together than the opposition. The reason is quite simple: as long as the Bolivarian coalition is in power and as long as it does a decent job of empowering people and of providing social justice, this coalition sees that it has more to gain when it sticks together than when it fragments. In other words, the pressure to stick together is probably a lot greater than the centrifugal tendencies that also exist.

9. There is a different version of this same concern, I guess, which I have to say also concerns me greatly. The Bolivarian movement has held executive power for over a decade. It has embarked on an impressive array of projects altering society and social relations on behalf of poorer and weaker constituencies in Venezuela. It has won election after election – to the point where there always seems to be an election in progress, one being won. All this, and more that one can easily list, is impressive, yet, also, if we add just one fact to the picture, at least to me, worrisome. The fact is that instead of support for the revolution steadily growing, say from 65% to 85%, and instead of popular clarity about what the end aim is, and what methods can advance the aim, growing from very general commitments to far more specific and informed ones – support has dropped and clarity has stalled, and perhaps even diminished. To me, explaining why the most ambitious and in many respects the most successful project for justice and popular involvement in the world, now, and for many decades past, hasn’t steadily gained support internally, inside Venezuela, seems a priority. Put differently, why should Chavez being unable to continue be more than a horribly sad loss? Why should there also be grave concern that the opposition may be able to win back power and curb and even reverse progress? How do you explain, in one country, the great advances, yet the continuing possibility of opposition electoral success? In short, why aren’t opposition beliefs losing 80% – 20% or more? And, if part of the reason is policies or actions that have not been pursued – shouldn’t they be pursued?

This is an excellent question and one that is easy to answer with excuses. For example, the common answer to your question is that this is a government that is constantly under siege and that this siege, whether from the mass media, internal sabotage, or external destabilization attempts, is what makes people think that the government is not as good as it could be. While there is much truth to this argument, I do think that it distracts from what I consider to be more important reasons for the loss in popularity, which have to do with the inefficiency and even mismanagement within the public administration, clientelism within the Bolivarian movement generally, and with economic contradictions. Let me briefly explain each of these.

First, with regard to the public administration, I see the main problem as being a lack of good management. All too often directors and ministers in the government place a higher premium on loyalty instead of on competency. It’s a shame that this should be a trade-off, but that’s the way it is. 14 years into the Bolivarian Revolution there still aren’t enough highly capable managers who believe in the government’s political project. I should add, though, I am not at all convinced that the opposition would do better on this count because Venezuela really wasn’t better managed when they were in office. However, people forget this over time and slowly come to think that perhaps the opposition would be better on this issue. The most glaring example of poor management has to do with the country’s judiciary and its law enforcement system. It seems to be shambles still, despite numerous reform efforts. The sad state of this system is also what explains a large part of Venezuela’s crime problem, I believe. 

I should mention that focusing on the lack of good management implies maintaining existing institutional top-down structures instead of creating more participatory ones. Indeed, in the public administration little to nothing has been done to transform these structures and these structures clash with the effort to create a participatory democracy, especially via the communal councils, which are bottom-up. This basic contradiction has not been resolved and is another key source of discontent.

This leads to my sec on point, that many people who would normally support the Bolivarian movement, because of their leftist politics, have become disappointed with the way things have been going recently. They don’t go over to the opposition, but their disappointment is reflected in lower enthusiasm and participation. The reason they feel this way, I think, has to do with the way many party officials are managing the movement in a heavy-handed manner, running roughshod over inner-party democracy. Of course, opposition critics of the government like to point to such things as examples of the supposedly dictatorial or authoritarian nature of the Chávez government, but one should be clear that political parties in Venezuela have never been particularly democratic. Actually, an argument can be made that the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV – Chávez’s party) is the most democratic party in Venezuelan history and that the real problem is that expectations for inner-party democracy are out-pacing its rather slow fulfillment.

Finally, I mentioned economic contradictions as a problem. Here the issue is a bit technical, but it has to do with the economic problems of trying to manage socialist goals within a capitalist context. More specifically, for example, the government tries to rein-in inflation via price controls, but, as pro-capitalist critics like to point out, this tends to create black markets and periodic shortages of certain goods. There is a similar situation with the exchange rate, which is currently being controlled, mainly to prevent capital flight, but this has other unintended consequences, such as providing a subsidy to people to have access to the official exchange rate, especially with regard to paying for education and travel abroad, since these are paid at the official exchange rate, which is a lot lower than the parallel rate, and the parallel rate reflects the actual value of the currency a lot better. As a result, someone who earns rather well and has access to the low official exchange rate can pay for travel and education rather cheaply.

11. Let’s agree that another major obstacle to support being much higher – say 80% – is capitalists and other elite elements blocking and sabotaging efforts at innovation and change, on the one hand, and corporate media then blaming the shortcomings and everything else they can dream up on Chavez and the revolution, on the other hand. In that case, wouldn’t a massive campaign about the acts of obstruction and sabotage and even preventing them via very severe penalties have strong benefits? And wouldn’t a massive campaign about what is freedom of speech and good media, including preventing capitalists from dominating and misusing media, again, far more forcefully than up to now, also have many benefits? If so, the question becomes, would the benefits of such campaigns be outweighed by their producing more virulent opposition from elites inside Venezuela, pretext for intervention from outside Venezuela, and also the possibility of over centralisation domestically. Or would the benefits, and the ensuing clarity of public opinion and advances of policies, and thus the growing domestic support, outweigh those costs? I wonder your thoughts on this. What do you personally think is the right mix of moving forward and, as you indicated earlier, understandably and wisely trying to avoid confrontation?

OK, here you ask what the government could do to address the problems that I did not address, because I said these problems tend to distract from the internal problems that the government could do more about. Your proposal about how the government could act in response to external threats and sabotage make sense and the government is doing an enormous amount already in this sense. That is, it has a constant campaign going on to denounce such acts and often tries to penalize sabotage, such as hoarding of foods or violations of price controls. 

On the media front, though, I think the reason this campaign does not work as well as the government hopes is that people are naturally just as suspicious of pro-government propaganda as they are of opposition propaganda in the private mass media. Actually, they are probably more suspicious of pro-government media because it is much more obvious to them that there is a link between the government and the governmental media outlets. However, in the opposition sector, even though everyone more or less knows that the private media is mostly opposition-oriented, there is more of a pretense of independence of the private media from the opposition.

Personally, as I mentioned earlier, I think the government has missed an opportunity in its approach to the mass media. Rather than fostering more and more state media outlets (TV, radio, and newspapers funded by the government have proliferated), the government should have created truly democratic and independent mass media. Such media would certainly not be anti-government or pro-opposition, but it would try to report in the interests of the country’s working class majority. Maybe one could even create a variety of media outlets that report from the perspective of a variety of social classes or groups? In any case, nothing along these lines has really been tried. The closest to this model are the community media, but they remain very small and marginal, despite their proliferation in the Chávez years. 

Just this past week, however, the new communications minister, Ernesto Villegas, who is very good, announced a new system of public media, where the community media would play a much larger role in the major media outlets. Depending on how this is implemented, this could mean a significant democratization of the state or public media. We’ll have to see.

With regard to cracking down harder on opposition sabotage and obstruction, this is certainly something that the government ought to do, but I think it does that to a large extent already. Here the real problem is that if it does it, first of all, it cannot be perceived as a one-sided opposition witch-hunt, which means, it ought to hit just as hard against corruption within its own ranks. This, however, does not seem to be happening.

12. Finally, what do you think the key lessons are of the Bolivarian experience for people in the United States or other societies? First, what does it tell us about electoral strategies?

I think there are economic lessons and there are political lessons. First, the political lessons have to do with the importance that democratization should have for any radical politics. The first thing that Chávez did when he got into office was to revamp and to democratize Venezuela’s political system. For example, he created an independent electoral council. Of course, opposition critics will scream that it is controlled by Chávez, leaving aside its political leanings, the fact is, this electoral council has dramatically increased ballot box access and voting transparency. Second, the new constitution created the possibility of referenda (which is not always a good thing, as we can see in California). Third, Chávez involved citizens in the governing of their communities, via communal councils, than has ever been the case before. This, in turn, increased the level of mobilization and participation dramatically.

The lesson I think, in short, is that progressives in the U.S. ought to give up their fruitless debate, whether to get involved in electoral politics or not. The Venezuelan example proves, I believe, that government can make a positive difference in people’s lives, but movements for change in the U.S. (just as in Venezuela) will only have an impact on the state if the state is democratized. Fighting for change within the existing state or ignoring the existing state will lead nowhere because that existing state will always present a major obstacle. Rather, the state has to be fundamentally reformed for progressive politics to be viable in the long run. This is something that earlier political movements in the U.S. knew, but which we have forgotten.

13. Second, what does it tell us about construction of alternative institutions operating in a context where other structures are from the past?

I think what it tells us is that institutions need to be tackled one by one. That is, it is too easy to believe that focusing only on individual policies (educational, social, economic, etc.) will change things, when actually it is institutions that also need to be changed. Perhaps one of the lessons that the Bolivarian movement does not seem to have learnt is that when too many old institutions are left in place, these old ones can tear down what has already been accomplished. I mean, the private media and private enterprise system remains largely untouched in Venezuela. Sure, they have to operate with some more regulations than before, but so far, structurally, they have not been touched. there have been proposals to introduce worker councils in all workplaces that would have a significant say in things, but that still has not happened.

14. Third, what does it tell us about the problems of building popular participation in winning a new society, in particular overcoming habits and beliefs of the past within our own selves and our constituencies?

I think the Venezuelan experience tells us is that one of the largest obstacles to a program of democratizing the country, whether via communal councils or self-managed workplaces, is that old habits of favoritism, clientelism, top-down management, for example, die hard. The national government plan for 2013-2019 (the current presidential term) states in several places that a new socialist ethic must be developed. The problem, though, is that the concept of how this is supposed to be done is not clear at all. This is actually an area that I want to focus on more in the future, figuring out what can be done about this (I’m in the process of writing a book on this topic). I don’t think I have all the answers, but one important element has to be the recognition that propaganda is not an effective method for changing people’s beliefs. I am sometimes reminded of how similar Venezuelan state TV is to the state TV of East Germany, where I grew up (living in West Berlin, though) and how completely ineffective state TV is as a means of convincing people that socialism is good. Rather, socialism has to deal with the consciousness problem by understanding how consciousness works, that its development is part of a complicated growth and learning process that state propaganda cannot address properly.

15. And finally, what does it tell us about overcoming opposition from sectors devoted to preserving the past, even as we try to avoid all out civil conflict?

I think one of the reasons that the Bolivarian Revolution has been able to survive as long as it has is because it has important international allies. In other words, here is an important lesson, which I guess mainly applies to countries similar to Venezuela, is that such alliances are absolutely crucial in the face of both domestic and international external opposition. Another lesson that comes to mind is that perhaps progressive governments should not be too timid once in government, that they can afford to be more radical and can overcome hard core opposition from within and from without, if they are bold and brave enough. Of course, this does not necessarily apply to all countries, since small ones (such as Haiti) are easily bulldozed by U.S. and large ones (such as the U.S. itself) have such powerful entrenched domestic interests that the state’s power might pale in comparison. In other words, the Venezuelan situation is rather advantageous for a radical experiment because it has oil, which makes it economically relatively autonomous (but which of course heightens imperial interest in the country) and because it has a relatively weak private sector (compared to the U.S., at least). Still, Venezuela has blazed a trail for many other leftist governments in the region and Venezuela’s boldness is certainly something that should be seen as a positive example beyond Latin America too.