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On 21 June, on his regular Aló Presidente TV show, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez indicated where he stood on the struggle unfolding in Iran: with the forces murdering and repressing the students and workers, with the clerical dictatorship that stifles and oppresses women and national minorities.
He stated:
„We send a greeting to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s great president, to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and to the Iranian people. We ask the world to respect Iran because they (sic) are trying to undermine the Iranian revolution’s strength.“
He continued:
„Ahmadinejad’s triumph is a victory in full order. They’re trying to stain Ahmadinejad’s victory, and by doing so they aim to weaken the government and the Islamic revolution. I know they won’t be able to do it.“
He also reports that he personally phoned Ahmadinejad to congratulate him as soon as he received the news of his “victory” .
The Foreign ministry of the Venezuelan government also made its views clear.
„In the name of the people,“ it hailed the „extraordinary democratic development“ that resulted in Ahmadinejad’s victory.” Extraordinary indeed! Of the same order, no doubt, as the “divine miracle” that the Supreme Leader ascribed as its cause.
The Foreign Ministry went on, „The Bolivarian government of Venezuela expresses its firm rejection of the ferocious and unfounded campaign to discredit, from abroad, that has been unleashed against Iran, with the objective of muddying the political climate of this brother country.“ It added, „We demand the immediate end to manoeuvres to intimidate and destabilise the Islamic Revolution.“
Of course, Chávez and the Venezuelan government are not alone in rushing to support the Iranian clerical regime. The Palestinian Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah have also declared their support for Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. But they at least have some sort of pretext, both are political Islamists and both are dependent on Iran for military-logistical support in their resistance to Israel. This, of course, is no justification for their support for the repression but it is at least an explanation. Chávez has neither justification nor explanation.
It is true that over the past three years Venezuela has done million dollar deals with Iran’s government but it is not in any sense dependent on them for its economic survival. At the same time, Chávez claims to be the leader and ideologist of what he calls “the socialism of the twenty first century.” Many people around the world, encouraged by Venezuela’s combination of significant socials reforms and defiance of the USA, take all this as good coin. But if Chávez were really a “democrat,” a “socialist” and a champion of the working class, he ought to solidarise with young people, workers and socialists fighting in Iran for freedom against the theocratic dictatorship.
His statements show that, in reality, he does not take international working class solidarity as his starting point but rather an alliance between capitalist states that find themselves obliged to resist the exploitation and bullying of US (and European) imperialism.
Revolutionary socialists should certainly support Iran (and Venezuela) unconditionally against economic blockades, threats and any military attacks coming from the United Sates and its Zionist puppet. But this does not in any way oblige us to support a dictatorship against its own working class. The “Iranian Revolution” that Chávez refers to was strangled between 1979-82 by the very people who now rule Iran.
The “antimperialism” of the Supreme Leader and his President is not revolutionary but counterrevolutionary. The living Iranian revolution is on the streets, in the universities and in the factories. It is represented by the bus workers whose leaders were flogged for going on strike and whose May Day Demonstration this year was brutally repressed.
Hugo Chávez has put himself on the opposite side of the barricades to all these freedom fighters and thus to the Iranian revolution. In doing so he has enormously weakened the Venezuelan revolution itself, since part of its strength is the international solidarity of the world’s workers and youth. Though practitioners of the “anti-imperialism of fools”, like James Petras, are heaping slanders on the Iranian demonstrators, genuinely revolutionary forces worldwide will recoil in disgust from such statements.
Of course, no one denies either regime the right to conduct trade with one another or to combine forces to resist any pressure or attacks from US imperialism. But to the extent that Chávez pretends to be not simply a typical “Third World” dictator in conflict with imperialism (a Saddam Hussein, a Gaddafy, or a Robert Mugabe) but a representative of 21 Century Socialism – he should ask himself why trade unionists and women’s liberationists in Iran are flogged and tortured, why socialists of all varieties are banned and repressed.
Clearly, the “socialism” of Hugo Chávez stops at the borders of Venezuela or, maybe, on the shores of Latin America. But a socialism that stops at national for continental frontiers is no socialism at all.
His statement must be a major embarrassment to those “Trotskyists” who have painted a rosy picture of Hugo Chávez’s socialism. Most obviously this causes problems for the International Marxist Tendency of Alan Woods. Woods has been fawning on the Bolivian president for years, citing his praise for books like Reason in Revolt. But now Woods says that,
“Some on the left are questioning whether the movement in Iran is a progressive one. They have been taken in by propaganda that states that the movement is all an ‘imperialist plot’ to overthrow the Islamic regime. This ignores the very essence of what is happening in Iran, which is the beginning of a revolution.”
Amongst these people “on the left”, indeed very prominent amongst them, are Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales.
Now Woods is obliged to admit that Chávez’s support for Ahmadinejad has “seriously damaged the image of the Bolivarian Republic in the eyes of the people of Iran. But his explanation, that the two Latin American presidents have confused the reactionary movements that they face at home with the progressive movement in Iran, does not go to the root of why Morales and Chávez take the positions they do. True, the situations of the revolution in Latin America and Iran are radically different. The differences are between a workers’ revolution blocked by a popular front, a left bonapartist regime and a revolution beginning against a 30-year old senile, clerical bonapartist dictatorship.
What unites them is a semi-colonial capitalist bonapartism which has nothing whatsoever in common with socialism or the power of the working class. It is shameful that “Trotskyists” act as attorneys for any sort of non-working class regime and it is to be hoped that members of the IMT will now ask themselves and their leaders in the light of Chávez’ position, why their tendency acted for so long as advocates of Chavismo- with only the mildest criticism. Ahmadinejad’s hands are now stained with blood and Chávez has just publicly and warmly shaken them. Anyone who shakes hands with Hugo Chávez in future will carry similar marks of shame.