Report from World Youth Festival in Venezuela

Josh Saxe

This is a report from the World Festival of Youth and Students that happened this month in Venezuela. I am a 23 year old white male substitute teacher and History graduate student from Los Angeles, I went there between August 4th-18th with a group of about 7 friends and fellow marxist activists from the U.S. I am a supporter of the socialist group Labor's Militant Voice and a member of an independent marxist youth organization in Los Angeles, Progressive Alliance.

The World Festival of Youth and Students: Background and history

These festivals started happening every 4 years in 1947 - they have traditionally been organized and controlled by the international Communist Parties and their youth organizations - this is changing as these parties weaken absolutely and relatively among the world revolutionary movement but is still basically the case. The first festival occurred in Prague '47 right after liberation and just as Eastern Europe was politically and socially joining the "socialist camp", as imperialism was taking blows from up-and-coming third world revolutionary and nationalist movements. Must have been an exciting conference - attended by something like 70,000 young people. The one this year had a modest 15,000 in attendance although at times it seemed more because of the presence of many extra Venezuelans not part of the official Venezuelan delegation.

August 4-7th, the days leading up to the conference.

I arrived at the international airport outside Caracas by myself late at night and was totally lost. There was a bloc of at least 100 Angolans dressed up in the regalia of some left party - I tried to communicate with them about where I was supposed to go but could not understand their Portuguese. Finally I found some young people from the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) who directed me to a group there for the festival and we waited around for a couple hours and then got on a bus.

At that point I met a bunch of Americans (I am just going to use the un-PC "Americans" for U.S. residents because saying U.S. residents all the time is awkward) - my impression was that the American delegation - about 700 people - was made up of three groups, here listed in order of size: independents who were loosely around the left in some fashion, often the anti-war movement, and basically held liberal political views (but may have left the festival thinking a lot about socialism!), CPUSA and YCL (the CP's YCL) members or supporters, and then associates of the SWP and some smaller U.S. left groups. The trip was very interesting just on the level of meeting a big cross section of the U.S. left from all over the country involved in a wide variety of political work - from SWP mine workers in Utah to Communists organizing in places like Alabama. The CPUSA, who I had never really gotten to know before (they are tiny in L.A.), was fascinating to me in that they seem to be really the only group on the US left that has a reflexive culture of orienting towards working class communities, and who actually still has a base amongst the American working class - the far left still has a lot to learn from them.

The conference was incredibly disorganized. For example the young Chavistas assigned to get the bus I was on to the military barracks we would be sleeping in did not really know where the place was, and we spent from 10:30PM that night until 2:45AM driving around trying to find it. Finally they put us up somewhere else for the night, a "military high school" where high school aged kids who want a military career, and where the movement around Chavez also holds a lot of gatherings, activities, trainings, etc.

It was these types (young Chavistas) who we met the next day. I had the privilege of translating for a group of about 20 Chavista youth and about 15 Americans. These kids for the most part worked in the misiones (more on these below) which are schools and health centers the Chavez government has set up in poor neighborhoods by the thousands all over the country. Talking to these kids reminded me of talking to Cubans when I went to that country a few years ago - they were zealous, emotionally swept up in the movement, and very curious about the United States. They asked us questions like: if you don't support imperialism, does your government and other Americans consider you traitors? What are you doing to stop the war in Iraq? What do you think of Fidel Castro - don't you think he's a dictator (they were testing us, they all love Fidel)? What does the media tell North Americans about Chavez and what is going on in Venezuela? Do you think the U.S. might invade Venezuela?

Everyone from our group had different answers for these questions but these young people were I think surprised at how political our group was and the way in which we shared equally harsh judgements of the role of U.S. imperialism in the world setup. They talked a lot about nationalism - the need for Venezuelans to reaffirm their own history and culture, about democracy - the need for Venezuelans to become literate in the literal sense but also literate in politics and culture to allow for free participation in the political system. Although Chavez is now talking a lot about socialism, I think the view prevails in the movement there that this is a "democratic revolution" that will bring the "excluded" (a very commonly used term) into political participation. And that certainly is where the movement is at right now - spreading literacy, health care, employment, etc, to millions, and empowering them and giving them the sense that they can participate in the political and culture life of the country for the first time.

Escape from the Stalinist Organization of the Festival

A lot of Americans got sick of the way all of our movements were controlled during the Festival - they finally put us up in these isolated military barracks on the top of a hill (eventually all 700 of us), out of contact with Venezuelan society. I'd say about 1/3rd of us just left initially and opted for cheap hostels and hotels in Caracas. I went to Caracas for the first few days before the festival actually started and had some interesting experiences. A few friends and I were dead set on going and trying to stay with the Cuban delegation for the whole festival. The festival organizers wouldn't even tell us where they were. We met some Mexican Trotskyists who were part of some split off the Spartacist League (this was a friendly group, though) who gave us insider information about where they were: "Fuerte Tiuna."

The Cuban Delegation

We sojourned to this fort one night only to find it is the biggest military base in Venezuela and is at least 10 square miles - we just wandered around until we found the Cubans. We chilled with a group of Cuban doctors who were in Venezuela for a couple years living in the "barrios" (the barrios at one point were shantytowns, but they have been built up so that they are now poor neighborhoods with jagged streets and permanent and semi-permanent dwellings). This was a fascinating group - representative of the popular base of the revolution. They were in their 30's and 40's and had been born into poor families and given the opportunity to become doctors by the revolution. I asked them if it was hard living in Venezuelan shantytowns for a couple years after having lived in a country like Cuba where poverty is experienced so differently. No they said, this was how their parents lived before the revolution and they could empathize quite easily...

There are 23,000 Cuban doctors in Venezuela (I also heard the number 20,000 quoted, so I'm not really sure) - Venezuela is a country of something like 27 million people. Considering that the doctors are amongst the poorest section of the population (lets say 15 million), 23,000 goes a long way. They are trying to set up a Cuba-like model for medical care where doctors live in a neighborhood and are assigned to a certain number of families that they check up on consistently. All the medical care is free. This is part of an oil-for-medical-services exchange with Cuba. I had to go to the doctor like 4 times while I was there and the medical service was very good and had a whole different (and vastly more warm and amiable) social vibe to it than in the U.S.

These Cubans were deeply committed socialists who had very interesting analysis of the Venezuelan situation, even if I disagree with much of what they argued. If I go into this discussion here however this email will become way too long.

A day with the Australian Democratic Socialist Perspective in the Caracas barrios

Another thing a friend and I did was meet at random the people behind the Green Left Weekly - a group of like 40 Australians from the DSP. We had long and interesting discussions with them (and arguments, we had very different appreciations of the Venezuelan situation, but also came to some agreements), and went around a knot of low-income Caracas housing buildings. These buildings were a big part of Chavez's Caracas base - during the coup in 2002 thousands of people flooded out of them to defend their president. We meet with political committees inside the apartment complex and a group of young peasant leaders who were in Caracas for the festival - they were fighting for land reform and involved in setting up cooperatives. They told us about how they had lost about 120 activists to death squads receiving support from across the Colombian border, and then took us up to the top of one of the apartment buildings for a magnificent view of the Venezuelan metropolis. Then they started chanting pro-Chavez slogans, pulled out pistols and emptied their clips into the air! We were shocked and hoped the bullets didn't land on one of the many crowds waiting for buses or at open-air markets, but were also impressed by these peasant activists, by the fact they were going up against the very real possibility of death in fighting for a different future...

Back to the Festival Housing and the Beginning of the Festival

Eventually like errant sheep most of the U.S. delegation made its way back to festival housing in the military barracks. A march of all the delegations through a kind of regal entrance to Fuerte Tiuna opened up the festival. The march was amazing but we wished we had marched through the populated centers of Caracas as an expression of solidarity with the Venezuelan population. They told us to march in formation with our delegations but the march became a free-for-all in which the formations often broke up with people going off to meet each other - my friends and I met Brasilian left Communists who had broken from Lula, Argentinian CPers, Cubans, Vietnamese, North Koreans (! the nuttiest delegation of the whole festival, these people were in their 40's and didn't want to talk to anyone), Iraqis (actually Iraqi expats from Canada, a disappointment), Venezuelan Palestinians, German union members and Communists, etc, etc. It was fascinating. Speaking Spanish and English were incredibly useful, one could communicate with almost anyone with one of these two languages.

At the end of the march there were many speakers I ignored while talking to international leftists, but then Chavez spoke which was great. I heard him speak three times during the festival, this time, at a conference about socialism, and at the end. He tends to talk about the history of struggle against imperialism around the world emphasizing the important role of Cuba in Latin America, the nationalist struggle of Venezuela against Spain in the early 19th century, the need for a "new socialism" for the 21st century (while not depreciating the role of the socialist camp as a bulwark against imperialism and possessing many positive qualities), and his economic plans to create a kind of Latin American economic-political bloc against U.S. power. In his best speech - at the socialism conference - he centered the whole talk around a quote from Rosa Luxemburg about "socialism or barbarism" being the dilemma of the modern world. He said the fate of humanity would be decided in the next couple generations on the fulcrum of this question and that it would be up to the communists in their early 20's (people like us!) to play a decisive role - a very inspiring speech. He made a decent number of references to Trotsky, Luxemburg, Alan Woods (a living British Trotskyist!), etc...

Most of the festival was boring. It was long speeches by middle-aged academic/intellectual men (almost no women!) and scripted discussions in which various CP delegations would get up and read written statements. One could intervene but get no response and get no real discussion going. The really fascinating part of the festival was getting to know the movement in Venezuela and meeting left militants from around the world.

Meeting the Invepal Workers

Invepal is a valve factory outside of Caracas where the workers have occupied their factory and are running it on their own. We made contact with these workers independently and had the great privilege of attending one of their business meetings at which they make decisions about the running of the factory. There were about 30 or 40 workers there, out of a factory of about 70. The owner of the factory was going to shut it down because he wasn't making enough profit before the workers took it up. It was a group of about 5 of us North American leftists there and 2 Argentinian Maoists plus the workers.

The workers were incredibly warm and friendly and wanted to know just as much about us as we wanted to know about them. They were socialists, as a bloc, and amongst them was a Trotskyist worker and another about to join the Trotskyist group of Alan Woods the CMR (Corriente Marxista Revolucionaria, by far the biggest Trotskyist group there, more on this later). They were also generally Chavistas and we talked a lot with them about the "Venezuelan road to socialism." There is no clear leader amongst these workers, they made decisions through fierce discussion, arguing, etc, and with tremendous pride about what they had accomplished. They sought to cultivate links with us as North American communists, and with occupied factory workers in Argentina and other parts of Venezuela. Afterwards a bunch of us went to one of the workers houses, ate delicious chicken wings, got drunk, watched a homemade video about the history of the Invepal struggle which I am highly embarrassed to say I feel asleep during as at that point I had been running off of 3-4 hours of sleep a night for a week!

A Day With the Misiones

As inspiring as they are to those of us who see the engine of the revolution as the self-activity of workers in the class struggle, the Invepal workers exist at the margins of the consciousness of the Chavista movement. They are rarely rarely mentioned. On the other hand, the "misiones" are the heart and sole of the movement around Chavez in Venezuela, they nourish, build, and sustain his popularity and power base.

There are tens of thousands of mission schools and doctors offices all over the country divided into four big categories that I learned about (there are more that are smaller I believe but which I did not visit or learn about):

Mision Barrio Adentro - this is the medical care mission under of the auspices of which 23,000 Cuban doctors reside. You will find little buildings with hand-painted letters spelling out "Barrio Adentro" all across poor Venezuelan neighborhoods. Increasingly Venezuelans are training in Cuba and coming back to serve as doctors in this program.

Mision Robinson - the first educational mission, and largest program - a typical working class district will have 10-15 schools. The goal is to eliminate illiteracy, a huge problem in Venezuela. Like all the Venezuelan misiones they use videos to teach the people and have an instructional aide in every classroom (sometimes a university student, sometimes someone older), to help those who don't understand the video.

Mision Ribas - the equivalent of elementary education, but the people at these missions (we visited maybe 6 of them) are usually between 15-60 years old, people who before Chavez could not have gone to school.

Mision Sucre - Sort of like high school. Same demographic. Once they finish this they can go to university.

Venezuelans articulate the goals of these mission not so much as upward mobility and "equal opportunity" but as a way to rebuild working class communities and give people skills and knowledge and an outlook that makes this possible. Education is politicized - these are Chavez institutions, huge bases of support for the Chavez movement.

Conclusion

The festival concluded with a huge rally of at least 20-30,000 people, maybe more, in a Caracas stadium - imagine a stadium filled to the brim with communists - Chavez spoke and asked people to raise their hands if they were communists - the whole stadium raised their hands. I have major major differences with the CP's of the world, but nonetheless for the first time I really felt part of something international, in a visceral level, the international movement for socialism - it gave me butterflies in my stomach.

This festival was a great event. Venezuela is somewhere where poor people are on the offensive. We can all be inspired by that. Chavez is a president at the head of a capitalist state, but he is also an honest mass leader figuring things out as he goes along - the Venezuelan masses and Venezuelan militants understand this and this is why he has almost total hegemony over the movement there. If there is going to be a revolutionary party in Venezuela it is going to grow as the militant wing of the Chavista popular organizations, not in opposition to them.

That said, Venezuelan militants are drawn to and need a clear class perspective and a clear sense of the road forward - arming the peasants who are already under systematic attack by rural death squads, arming the urban popular organizations, the students and teachers at the misiones, the left unions, the Frente Francisco Miranda (maybe discussed in a later email), etc, to guard against another coup attempt, and a more aggressive policy of nationalizations at least of blatantly counterrevolutionary landowners and capitalists as a preparation for a complete overturning of capitalism, a social revolution.

The only Venezuelan organization I found that advocates for these kinds of demands within the popular movement in Venezuela movement was the CMR which I mentioned above, which has grown from like 3 foreigners to 200 Venezuelan members in the past few years, with many militant workers joining. As they acquire members from symbolic and strategic centers of resistance like Invepal I hope they grow and gain influence.

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Josh Saxe can be reached at joshsaxe@yahoo.com.