12-12-05, 9:39 am
While I had not heard back at all from Venezuela until the weekend before departure, this is actually not that remarkable. By Monday the 21st, I knew I would arrive in Maracaibo the next day, and return on the 29th. That much was confirmed to me by one of my contact persons at Conatel, their state telephone regulatory agency over the weekend, but I did not know which airport I would departing from, or even what airlines I would be flying until Monday morning.
To understand the blissful attitude I had taken, one must know this. I recall one time I was staying with a family in San Paulo, where we were scheduled to take a flight to Porto Alegre. The airport was across town, and our departure time was about a half hour away when we finally wandered out to the car. We did not even travel particularly in a hurry. Yet somehow, in the twisted and bizarre time warp that is Brazil, we arrived on time for our flight anyway, and I never figured that out either. Time often has a very different meaning in Latin America.
Maracaibo is called the coldest city in Venezuela. In fact, the average year round temperature is the highest in the country, but everywhere there is air conditioning. This contrast is also found when one considers this traditionally conservative Latin American nation being at the forefront of revolution in the 21st century.
Naturally the web site at the American state department was kind enough to choose to warm me that there are military checkpoints all over the country, often manned by troops who look for bribes. Unfortunately, I failed to encounter any of these, or for that matter, any large posters of Chavez, even at the airport. I did meet with an American who traveled by bus all the way from Caracas who also failed to find any of these promised military checkpoints filled with marauding troops, as well as Italian who drove that distance.
* The People's Ministry of Economics
Venezuela is blessed with not one, but two economic ministries. There is the old ministry of economics, which deals with the traditional capitalist economy. It is worth noting that capitalism continues in Venezuela and will likely continue to do for some time. While lands are at times redistributed to landless laborers, for the most part existing industries and businesses are left alone. Instead, they have a different idea of how to transform society here, and this brings us to the second ministry.
The Ministerio Para La Economia Popular, or roughly, the People's Economic Ministry, and for simplicity, to be referred to simply as MINEP, is tasked with transforming Venezuela into a socialist society. MINEP is a quirky institution of very recent origin. Here we find all manner of bright and intelligent left thinking people, and there are from around the world working here for MINEP. The people in MINEP are from a very broad mix of socialist backgrounds, including traditional Marxists and communists, as well as those who practice other forms of socialism. Libertarian Socialists are also represented among the ranks of MINEP, though they are still considered the more radical group within it.
MINEP is in some ways like the socialist version of a Small Business Administration. However, rather than teaching people who wish to start small businesses how to put up their homes as collateral or otherwise become indentured to a capitalist owner, MINEP provides real financial resources to help those who wish to help themselves in forming a socialist economy.
The co-op training program was piloted last year, with some 3000 such worker managed co-ops formed. This year they have already formed over 45,000, and they expect to train over 700,000 Venezuelans in how to form and be part of a socialist economy by the end of the year.
Capitalism, I suspect, at best directly benefits at most maybe 100,000Venezuelans today. Many of the rest are reduced to wage slavery or otherwise indentured through it. While the exact number of those that benefit from capitalism in any given country varies, this basic principle that some few truly benefit while many do not remains a universal. In the ideal of a socialist economy, all the participants benefit.
I think there are already more people who directly benefit from the socialist economy than the capitalist one, and this will grow over time. Capitalism may not disappear entirely in Venezuela, it is certainly not being threatened or forced to change by the government, but it seems to me that it will be submerged in the rising tide of the new Socialist economy. This then is the future of the Bolivarian Revolution.
* The ministry of Intellectual Prosperity
SAPI (Independent Service ministry of Propiedad Intellectual) is the ministry that used to define Venezuela's so called 'Intellectual Property' laws. I understand SAPI also at one time concerned itself with 'Piracy'. I would have thought, however, that controlling murderous gangs of anarco-capitalist 'gentlemen of fortune' who raid ships would be the job of the navy, or perhaps the interior ministry.
The term 'intellectual property' itself is of course a new-speak propaganda word that did not even exist 20 years ago. First, the topic it covers varies from Copyright, Patents, Trade Secrets, Trademarks, to a variety of other things, all of which are in reality all very different and unrelated. Second, it is based on the premise that you can give someone something intangible to someone else and yet control it and what other people do as if it or they were your physical property, even the ideas they may have in their mind. Intellectual property amounts in part to thought control through legal fiction. Some may say it amounts to Intellectual Slavery.
The consequence of treating ideas and thoughts as if they are tangible property are the very destruction of science and education and the elimination of individual rights and freedoms. Science is in part built upon the idea that new knowledge is created by incrementally improving ideas. Education is based on the idea that one can learn from existing things and then use that knowledge to create new works. The idea behind 'Intellectual Property' interferes with both. It is barbarism, and could well lead to a new 'dark ages' , where only a privileged few are allowed to learn, under the exclusive control of greedy intellectual monopolies.
Since 'Intellectual Property' involves exclusive licensing, when public universities do this and then let others license their discoveries, the public is made to fund research that only benefits a small number of people. Even worse, those companies which receive such funding can then use this exclusive grant to sell back to society the fruits of what society already paid for. This can be thought of as paying for something twice. This could also be thought of as public welfare for private capitalism, or more simply, exploitation.
Under 'Intellectual Property', the individual is often reduced in stature lower than that of a traditional slave or serf. The slave at least was housed, fed, and hence supported by his master. Under regimes of Intellectual Property, the slave must pay for his own enslavement, and often on a continual basis. (yes, that is an allusion to something Marx once wrote about the status of workers under capitalism)
I met the current director general of SAPI, Eduardo Samán, while I was in Maracaibo. He has very different ideas. He is a well known internationalist, and had been a key person in establishing the program for promoting a developing nations agenda within WIPO. Rather than creating new intellectual restrictions, Eduardo proposes that the mission of SAPI should instead become that of promoting 'Intellectual Prosperity' by creating laws and services that promote the ability to share knowledge as the common heritage of all mankind, rather than hoard it to make a few people wealthier.
Assuming that private interests in the developed world today do succeed in the great capitalist program of owning what people are allowed to think, it is very possible that places like Venezuela will become the new leading nations in science and technology.
* PDVSA and how oil fuels to Bolivarian Revolution
Maracaibo is also the heartland of the oil industry, and the state run oil company, PDVSA. Oil companies are also traditionally conservative in nature. However, PDVSA also is a contrast, as both the primary wealth producing intuition in the country, and the strongest source of support for President Hugo Chavez's revolutionary changes.
Today, the state-run oil company is a major backer of the free software movement (software libre) in Venezuela and a major sponsor of the 3rd International Forum on Free Knowledge, which is what brought me to Maracaibo. The government of Venezuela also supports the use of free software, and the president has issued a special decry, 3.390, making this very clear. How the oil company became a revolutionary institution and a principle backer of free software started with the oil worker lockout in 2002.
Before the worker lockout, the administration of the state oil company was strongly connected to the wealthy elite of Venezuela. Many of the wealthiest people in Venezuela had been getting much richer thanks to the oil company, in part through contracts and corruption, not unlike what has been happening here in the U.S. with politically connected companies like Halliburton.
President Hugo Chavez was originally elected on a platform to use the oil wealth to help pay for the poor of the country through education and health programs, rather than to simply making the country's wealthy even wealthier. Many of Venezuela's wealthier citizens, used to having money from the state oil company, would not tolerate this, and so they decided President Hugo Chavez had to go at any cost, even if it meant sabotaging their own nation to do it.
So they tried to close the oil company in December of 2002, by locking out the workers, and hold the oil resources of the nation as a whole hostage by having the entire IT infrastructure under their control. If the data and systems present then had been destroyed, it would have been years before another drop of oil could have been produced.
Out of 4800 managers, about 200 chose to stay behind, and together, with the help of many by then retired former managers who were less corrupt than the ones who left, the workers tried to save the oil company. But the biggest challenge was the computer infrastructure.
Management of IT was at the time contracted to SAIC (Science Applications International Corp) which has well known political and business connections to Cheney's office, to the U.S. DOD, and the CIA. At first, when the Venezuelan army was called out to secure the oil facilities during the lockout, and the SAIC staff created videos of the troops securing the facilities to claim they were under attack and try and persuade the U.S. congress to give Bush war powers to seize the oil fields. When this scheme failed, the SAIC workers fled the country, but changed all the passwords and kept remote control of all the computer servers of PDVSA. They choose not to destroy the data on them because they thought they would be back in a few months when the government of President Chavez finally would capitulate.
Much of the infrastructure of PDVSA was under Microsoft Windows-based servers, and used proprietary database software such as Microsoft SQL. The IT managers did not expect a bunch of oil workers to be able to thwart their plans. Those same oil workers, working together with local computer hackers, were able to secure control of vital computer servers, and in doing so save the oil infrastructure.
The Venezuelan revolution is perhaps the first revolution in history saved by computer hackers and is one of the reasons the government is so very strong on promoting the use of free software, particularly in public administration. The Venezuelan government wishes never again to have vital infrastructure held hostage or sabotaged by agents of foreign nations. This cannot be accomplished by source secret proprietary software, such as Microsoft Windows, with it's infamous backdoor NSA key. Even proprietary software from a trustworthy source has to be suspect for possible tampering, and so must be rejected, not just by Venezuela, but by any nation that wishes to protect and maintain it's sovereignty against sabotage.
Today, PDVSA is completely committed at all levels to the basic idea of converting Venezuela's oil resources into long-term and self-sustaining wealth for the nation as a whole. This is done in part through the development of a new socialist economy, as planned for through the people's ministry of economics (Minep).
Capturing this wealth is viewed as an urgent matter because, even though Venezuela posses one of the largest known reserves of oil, they expect world oil production to begin declining and see this wealth as very temporary. PDVSA believes, and say that middle eastern oil producing nations also believe this, that nobody will 'burn' oil (as for example in automobiles) in as little as 20 years. They also believe that while oil will remain important in the many other industries it is used in, the price will settle to $5 a barrel. So they believe now is not only the best, but also the last, chance to create something useful from this wealth.
* Conatel and conclusions
I flew from Maracaibo to Caracas on Saturday. Even in Venezuela's revolutionary republic, custom officials are still custom officials, and airports are still like airports everywhere. Given the lack of revolutionary posters, pictures of Chavez, or those military checkpoints promised by the state department, what is worth noting is the rather ordinary way society and most institutions operate in Venezuela.
While there were no posters of Chavez, I understand some of the local malls did have 'talking' Chavez dolls. Alas I did not get a chance to see this for myself.
There are also many ministries and government institutions which are not connected ideologically with the revolution, yet many of the civil service in these ministries in their own way support it. Usually this is because of the kind of programs these different agencies have been able to do with funding provided by the Chavez government.
For example, the people in Conatel, the state telecom regulatory agency, run a program to deploy telecenters into communities around the country. Many of the people in Conatel, like those in other agencies, came themselves from poor families. While they live something of what we might call 'middle class' lifestyles, they are very proud of being able to bring projects like telecenters forward. They do not see it as a matter of any ideology, but simply as something that is right to do. For this reason, the civil servants as a whole, even those in very traditional government institutions, strongly support Chavez.
I actually saw their model telecenter at the Conatel building while I was in Caracas. These offer a complete free software solution, with desktop clients for users, and a server, that allows not just web based browsing, but email, the ability to make telephone calls, and to do voice and video conferencing over the Internet. These centers could one day also be used to offer distance learning and university courses to communities.
I believe telecenter-like things are or will be the public libraries of the new millennium. Unfortunately, most existing libraries, including those that have computers today, do not realize this or understand how they should be used. For example, many libraries in the U.S. have computers, but they are really only used for web browsing, come 'attached' with nutty politicians deeply concerned that library patrons might actually read about sex, and laws requiring that library content is filtered for this reason.
Venezuelan socialism is not socialism by decree, nor driven by state or single party ideology. It is rather socialism by experimentation and education. Venezuelan socialists instead are deeply tied to the basic principles of social justice, solidarity, and equality. Many actual policies are open for thought and discussion, and there is a willingness to try new and original solutions. However, rather ironically, none of this would have even been possible without the direct help of the wealthy of Venezuela.
Rather than bringing down the government of Hugo Chavez, by working together with foreign interests to directly sabotage the country's most vital industry, the wealthy elite of Venezuela instead radicalized the oil workers in a way no other action could. The workers of PDVSA are now fully committed to creating the new economy, and will remain so regardless of who is in power. When the rich of Venezuela ponder who it was that made Venezuela become a revolutionary socialist nation, they should not look at President Hugo Chavez, who may not even have been thinking of this then, and certainly had no means to accomplish it at the time if he had, but rather in the mirror.
