Translated by Alex Stoan
Translator’s Introduction
Kléber Ramírez Rojas (1937 - 1998) was a Venezuelan revolutionary who had a profound impact on Hugo Chávez and the development of a left nationalist politics in Venezuela. He is the key theorist behind the MBR-200 and the 4 February (4F) 1992 left-wing coup attempt. The following translation is based on a chapter of his Documentary History of the 4th of February. The larger body of text is masterful in developing Bolivarianism through a socialist and popular perspective. The translation concerns the founding document of a tendency Ramírez attempted to build after he broke with the military layer surrounding him in MBR-200. It is a document drafted in the twilight of a rapidly decaying two-party system during the apex of the barrio assembly movements[1].
Ramírez’s political life began in the Communist Youth where he participated in the 1956 strike against the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship. As a civil engineering student, he was elected President of the Central Civil Engineering Student Union[2]. There, he worked to advance the guerilla struggle of the FALN. Eventually, Ramírez became a professor at the Universidad de Los Andes – a post that positioned him close to several guerilla fronts in the Venezuelan Andes. When the FALN split on the question of continuing the armed struggle in 1966, Kléber Ramírez chose to continue. He joined Douglas Bravo, Alí Rodríguez Araque, and Fabricio Ojeda in forming the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution (PRV). During the 1980s, Ramírez used his university position to organize PRV activities among the military. Out of this organizing the MBR-200 crystalized and was catalyzed by the events of the Caracazo. Where the government of Carlos Andreas Perez, whom Ramírez refers to as populist and messianic, chose to massacre his own people rather than rebuff the IMF[3].
The 4F coup attempt was a direct result of the massacre. It was aimed to abolish two facets of the modern Venezuelan polity and replace them with a commoner state. First, it aimed to destroy the remnants of the pact of Punto Fijo. This was the electoral accord struck in the 1958 democratic revolution between the Christian Democrats (Copei) and Democratic Action parties to alternate power. For Ramírez, this pact allowed for the transfer of capital from the nation to the state and then to the political and capitalist elite[4]. Second, and more fundamentally, 4F aimed to destroy the gomecista state – the foundations of the modern Venezuelan rentier state that has remained intact since its establishment by the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. Briefly, this refers to the extreme concentration of power in the office of the present, the deep links between public revenue and the oil sector, and subservience to the United States[5]. Writing in the program devised for 4F, Ramírez explains that “Venezuela needs to break out of, to explode the straitjacket that the Gomecista state represents, creating a new state, a commoner state”[6].
In contemporary memorializations of 4F, Chávez frequently becomes the central figure. With hindsight we see the coup attempt backwards through Chávez’s progressive rule and then the deep degeneration of the movement he led by his successors. However, within MBR-200 Kléber Ramírez played a role as a seasoned insurgent and key theoretical leader. He drafted most of the materials relating to the coup should it have taken power. These documents include the Constitutive Act of the Government of National Emergency, the Emergency Programme, and several revolutionary decrees.
Chávez’s popular style of politics, his unwavering faith in both the barracks and the street, and his leaning into a state based on the commons, draws inspiration from Kléber Ramírez’s political thinking. Edgar Perez, a community organizer and participant of 4F explains that “Kleber, in fact, was the founder of the Bolivarian movement that would eventually be led by Chavez”[7].
Kléber Ramírez had a long political trajectory. He began as a communist youth fighting dictatorship then a hollow two-party democracy through armed struggle. Then moved to socialist politics working through military institutions while rooted in local popular communities. The translated work below, written for the ongoing wave of working-class community-based protests, offers the Anglophone reader the opportunity to grapple with the seeds of a commons theory[8] of state-making that influenced the boldest attempt at socialist creation in the western hemisphere thus far in the 21st century.
Popular Bolivarian Insurgency
By Kleber Ramirez (1992)
The global or general frame of the crisis of the Venezuelan nation, known and felt in depth by the entire population of our country, has matured to such a point that everything indicates that we are entering a period of struggles for radical or revolutionary transformations of the Venezuelan society.
The present Venezuelan State, with a development that dates back eighty years, has experienced a crisis and will maintain its power in a situation of unstable equilibrium until it faces, in a decisive manner, its own profound and total transformation. As a solution to this situation, two options will be presented: one from the right, as has been the Chilean case on our continent and for which the bourgeoisie and all reactionary elements try to unify efforts to imprint upon it their own content; the other would be a revolutionary solution [exit, way out] that would give rise to a new State, where democracy is expanded and deepened so that the political, social and economic solutions of urgent attention, tend to principally favour the vast majority of the national conglomerate.
The political and social struggle for these transformations, in the immediate future, historically originates with the overthrow of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship. It has managed to accumulate a period of maturation of 34 years, during which there successively produced the armed struggle of the sixties; the revolution and the wave of contention of the seventies; the multitude of local insurrections for diverse political, economic and social demands, of which we can remember the Río Caribe insurrection for the right to water; the Barquisimeto insurrection against the increase in electricity service rates; the Mérida insurrection for the right to life; the Puerto Cabello insurrection against pollution (the toxic waste); the insurrection of La Victoria and Belén against repression and for life, etc. These actions begin to shake the national consciousness little by little and the population is increasingly separating itself from the party structures, given the irrational repressive attitude of the governing coalitions and the guilty indifference with which the opposition assumed these popular demonstrations that accumulated, ever more, a greater frustration with respect to traditional political struggles, leading them later, at the end of the seventies, to express themselves with a significant electoral abstention.
In the popular sphere, the struggle rose considerably to produce that social commotion that signified the outbreak of 27F [the Caracazo], the uncontainable violence that lasted for two days, like a hurricane of fire, hit the conformist and complicit consciousness of this oil society, accustomed to prosper in the shadow of the protective and corrupt State. But it was also the way, very dramatic for everyone else, with which the masses departed from the formality of "representative discussion", to assert directly, without intermediaries, their most pressing rights, which the hoarders of the oil rents had persistently denied during these 34 years. Likewise, this insurrection was the political response of the masses against CAP's economic package and a moral sanction against it, because the policy that he was beginning to put into practice had nothing to do with his electoral promise.
This popular insurgency of 27F would be defeated politically and socially crushed with blood and fire, displaying a brutal repression by the regime that was being inaugurated and that we still suffer, in which the hegemonic role, delegated by President Pérez, was assumed by his Minister of Defense, Italo del Valle Alliegro.
The main reasons for the defeat of this formidable movement were due to the dominant spontaneity of the action, the lack of a leadership nucleus that would tactically and strategically lead it towards concrete political objectives, the lack of a specific minimum program that would serve as a north [star] to the action undertaken and the need, unsatisfied, to have broken the localism of the operational theatre, since it was not reflected or strongly extended to the rest of the national geography.
The popular movement began to recover from this defeat towards the end of 1991 with the combative anti-government presence of the students in the streets.
Finally, the 4F revealed to the country the total exhaustion of the system, whose ruling State appears to dissolve in its own reigning circumstances, when the last bastion of support that outlined an apparent unity, such as the Armed Forces enters into crisis and nine army battalions nationwide produce the failed coup d'état, which, however, shocked national and continental political consciousness.
From this moment on, Venezuela truly is another. It enters a pre-revolutionary period and the public powers that make up the essence of the State itself remain in the management of society in such a way that we could, graphically, classify it as a situation whose power maintains an unstable equilibrium; national political consciousness has grown; the loss of prestige of the public powers and its entourage, parties and unions in general, has increased enormously; the nation demands new powers outside the context that has served it as a framework in these 34 years, both the quartermasters of the government and the opposition and the most advanced levels of Venezuelan society are preparing to face new forms of struggle and assume the vanguard in the leadership of the revolutionary process in this stage of political-social clarification.
There are tendencies that are possibly moving towards (re)groupings and they sprout outlines of programs opposed to official policies of political-economic dependency and also different from the proposals of the parties of status, both those that support the Government and those that exercise the opposition.
However, we still suffer from flaws that can become strategic dangers to ensure that the definitive way out is framed politically, socially and economically for the real benefit of the great majorities. Among these flaws, we can observe the following:
Lack of independence of the popular masses to produce their mobilization in a constant and sustained manner, which may be able to drive national sentiment toward the desire for a way out that is popular and radical.
Still is a victim of the ancestral messianic hope that someone comes to solve their problems.
The various sectors and factors of struggle remain dispersed without reaching a unity of purpose, a joint decision to maintain and develop continuous action that expresses their insurmountable will to achieve a new political and social system for the country.
All of the above results in the yet persistent absence of a single center of management that could be able to approximate the resolution of the battles by bearing towards the fundamental objective and of its greatest interest: to overthrow the public powers to begin to create new ones.
Faced with the political weakness described, other dangers become[9] palpable that could distort the political feelings of the Venezuelan nation, seeking immediate results like those offered by Dr. Caldera and the reformist bloc, who having played a relevant role in a specific moment of the outbreak and development of the current crisis, were viewed positively because they corresponded, at that time, with the advanced positions within the political struggles of the national conglomerate. Six months after those extraordinary events occurred, the preaching of Dr. Caldera and other national political spokespeople became a siren’s song, diverting the possibilities of a revolutionary way out. The same would happen with the call for a constituent assembly, if that call comes from the same political sectors guilty of the situation that we suffer.
They could also transform important dangers to achieve the purposes demanded by the Venezuelan nation, the general isolation or partial syndicalism of some sectors among workers. The scattering of the efforts of the popular neighbourhoods that, due to their just political aspirations to take a leading role for these changes, exaggerate an organizational horizontality in moments of revolutionary boom that prevents them from orienting and coordinating their immense efforts in the daily struggles for their political, economic, and social demands, towards the fundamental objective of the entire Venezuelan nation: the creation of a new State. With this behavior, the leaders of the neighborhoods confuse the strategic development of this new State, which we could call commoner, because its fate will depend on the prosperity of the communities and for which this horizontality will be essential in the full and daily exercise of sovereignty. But at the moment of the peak of the revolutionary struggle, the tactical need arises to create an authority to give unique management to the process, that is to say, in the period of generalized struggle for profound changes, the appearance of a central leadership will be vital in order to be able to lead it to the expected conclusion and not dilute it as the shock of [the Caracazo] did.
Another danger would be to wait for pure military action and then come out in support of it, because if there is no awareness of the process and the fundamental objectives, the final outcome will hardly give rise to a revolutionary and popular exit to the crisis, especially if it sneaks in, in the midst of the political crisis, the classic putschist pronouncement of the traditional sectors of the right. The achievement of this commoner State will be the political basis for overcoming the current crisis, from the national, patriotic and Bolivarian points of view, and will serve as a proposition for continental integration, to rescue and strengthen our identity. Similarly, it will also be a formidable retaining wall to the neocolonial pretensions and advances of North American imperialism. This danger will be averted when we are clear about the fundamental guidelines of the new State, the particular elements of a minimal and radical program that points towards the previous objective to generate the profound changes that Venezuelan society craves at all levels and that has emerged from the heat of social struggles, a team of men, capable of putting them into practice, tactically directing the entire society or the fundamental part of it, in this period of generalized struggle for revolutionary changes. In this sense, the birth of the Venezuelan Popular Insurgency presents itself as a new political factor in these ideological and practical struggles, [thus] contributing in this way with the political orientation for the achievement of the proposed task and opting for its participation in the management of the current national process of revolutionary changes.
Not understanding the previous anxieties would deepen the social breakup in such a way that the enemy would make its way through said breakup to reach the electoral process in which they would invest all the coercive resources of the system, preparing an appropriate solution to the crisis suitable to the interests of the dominant classes internally and of total surrender to the voracity of transnational capital. Meanwhile, through the winning candidate, they would make some concessions to gain time that allows them to consolidate national and foreign monopolistic factors of production.
A final danger could be characterized as the expression of sectarian, hegemonic, and isolationist attitudes of any sector interested in these changes, to ignore the importance that all other concerned sectors play in the Development of the various activities within the revolutionary process, to all other sectors equally committed and also interested in this fight, such as: manual and intellectual workers, employed or not, students, peasant farmers, indigenous people, unions; professional unions, small and medium-sized agricultural and industrial producer unions; industrial sectors with patriotic and progressive consciousness, progressive religious sectors; patriotic soldiers and organized communities in both cities and towns. This unhealthy sectarianism could have its maximum expression in vanguardist actions that would further isolate the possibilities of incorporating the suffering majorities of the country into the transformative struggles of our society.
It is necessary, therefore, to join forces to strengthen the insurgent struggle of Venezuelan society, which leads to the overthrow of the current State, which gives way to the Development of a minimum program of patriotic content, of an anti-imperialist character and a reaffirmation of our people, with a continentalist vocation and which is dedicated to orienting immediate solutions to the most serious political, social and economic problems currently suffered by the Venezuelan majority, integrating all the components of our nation, so that they participate directly in the solution of its own problems, sowing the minimum collective essential for the creation of the new State, facilitating Venezuela's definitive march along paths of progress and material and spiritual well-being [bienestar].
These purposes contributed to the formation of a political tendency clearly differentiated from the reactionary, reformist, populist, immediatist, messianic, and opportunist tendencies that have done so much damage to the struggles of our people, whose objective is to contribute with its presence in national life to deepen further the political and social conquests of the Venezuelan people. Thus, we will try to give our contribution to the revolutionary leadership of the political process that our country is experiencing and, consequently, we will launch ourselves to the conquest of a prominent position in the concrete and real leadership of said process. As was noted above, this tendency adopts the name of Bolivarian Popular Insurgency. Every civil, military and religious patriot can participate in it, who takes as their aim (without being exclusive) the programmatic guidelines expressed below, who is not guilty of crimes against sovereignty, against society, against human rights, against the environment, of corruption or of drug trafficking.
This tendency is not a political party, nor a front, nor an opportunist movement. It is a conscious alliance among social and popular sectors, advanced political factors and patriotic individuals, with the sole purpose of overthrowing the current political system, creating a new State, much more democratic, with an iron yet broad will to persevere in the fight and be the driving force of the fundamental social unity that guarantees success and with a firm decision not to change course until seeing a satisfactory solution to the current crisis, with the direct participation of the entire nation. Starting from the overthrow of the current public powers, a government of popular insurgency will direct the process until the creation of the new commoner State is achieved, developing the expansion of democracy to make way for the creation of the IV Insurgent and Bolivarian Republic.
The basic guidelines of this program of dignity, honesty, and reconstruction can be summarized as follows:
In the political sphere, we agree on a convergence of civil, religious, and military sectors, which shall sow the seeds to fight for a new institutionality whose guiding principle will be the expansion of democracy, whereby the communities assume State powers, which will administratively entail the global transformation of the Venezuelan State and socially the real exercise of sovereignty on the part of society through communal powers.
In the social sphere, it will confront the main problem of security, whose first instances will be rooted in the community itself when assuming sovereign functions at its respective level. It will liquidate administrative corruption and proceed with the extradition, imprisonment, and expropriation of the assets of the corrupt. For justice, it will apply a social criterion, consistent with the strengthening of the new State and not elitist as the aberrant action of the current courts has been conceptually and practically. It will immediately apply itself to facing educational, health, and environmental problems.
In the economic sphere, it will orient the national economy not on the State paternalism that must be definitively eradicated. General social well-being will be the referent for growth and development and not the “economic indices” in which IMF policy casts performance. Urgent and concrete measures will be taken to resolve the problem of the fiscal deficit: a wealth-producing program, viable for the participation of large social contingents with some important plans, both public and private, which, supported by cooperative and self-managed modalities, would substantially reduce state bureaucracy; luxury purchases will be restricted. The discussion about the restructuring of the external debt will be reconsidered, which is in the soul of all current political classes and begins to be an anxiety of international economic and political factors. There will be a relentless war against speculators, exemplary punishment for the corrupt, and guaranteeing stable prices for essential products. Financially, measures will be taken to democratize the use of commodity-money based on small and medium-sized industry and on agro-industrial projects. Provisionally, strict exchange control will be established and nationals who have withdrawn their capital in foreign currencies will be ordered to repatriate those financial resources, increasing investment in the strategic direction of producing food, science, and dignity. Fundamentally, we will develop these plans relying on our own resources.
In the international sphere, its orientation will be cooperation, mutual respect, non-interventionist, for the self-determination of peoples and solidarity with the liberation struggle of nationalities subjected to interests foreign to their authentic needs. The deepening of Latin American integration with our complementary economies, the expansion of our knowledge, continentally speaking, and the understanding of our ethnic and cultural particularities through the diffusion of folkloric, artistic, and educational expressions will be a priority. Our diplomacy will be as open as possible. The commitments and agreements, legally contracted, that does not diminish the development of our plans will be ratified; the others will be reviewed.
These criteria and this program rethink the discussion of the forms of struggle, since the system, apart from mocking national sentiment by not fulfilling any formulated promises, denies the free expression of thought, denies the democratic game of popular mobilizations to assemble freely; it denies the expression and exercise of popular sovereignty by preventing the nation from speaking out on the present public powers, restricting in such a way its right to daily struggle that forces, in tactical considerations, to contemplate the possibility of preparing and opportunely calling a general strike to rescue the rights that have been persistently violated.
It must be taken into account that this is an attempt at a provisional government for which general lines are drawn, in such a way that with the country's own participation the new forms of government, State and political-social action of Venezuelan society will be clearly outlined so that they serve then, and only then, as a frame of reference on which the future constituent assembly, validating the new way of being and doing the nation, shapes the new Constitution in which the philosophical principles will be specified, political and ethical principles of a broader democracy that will give theoretical basis and real content to the IV Insurgent Republic.
The way out of the crisis is the people in power!
For a government of popular insurgency!
Let's conquer sovereignty and national dignity!
Let's face repression with mobilization and new ways of fighting!
Let's prepare for the general strike!
Kléber Ramírez Rojas
Caracas, 30 August 1992
Notes
[1] Antillano, Andrés. “La lucha por el reconocimiento y la inclusión en los barrios populares: la experiencia de los Comités de Tierras Urbanas.” Revista Venezolana de Economía y Ciencias Sociales 11, no. 3 (September 2005): 207; Maya, Margarita López. “Participación y poder popular en Venezuela: antes y ahora.” Revista Historia 3, no. 3 (2014): 65.
[2] Coordinadora Simón Bolívar. “Kleber Ramírez Rojas: A 22 años de tu Siembra, los camaradas de la CSB te decimos Presente.” Aporrea, November 10, 2020. https://www.aporrea.org/cultura/a297129.html.
[3] Maher, Geo. “Building the Commune: Insurgent Government, Communal State.” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 4 (October 1, 2014): 791–806. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2803657.
[4] Ramírez Rojas, Kléber. Historia documental del 4 de Febrero. February and April Collection. Caracas, Venezuela: El perro y la rana, 2022, 25.
[5] See Ramírez Rojas, 2022; Maher, 2014, 804.
[6] See Maher, 2014, p.799-800; Ramírez Rojas, 2022, 67.
[7] Pascual Marquina, Cira. “Chavez, a Mirror of the People: A Conversation with Edgar Perez | MR Online.” MRonline, June 18, 2019. https://mronline.org/2019/06/18/chavez-a-mirror-of-the-people-a-conversation-with-edgar-perez/.
[8] See De Angelis, Massimo. Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. London, England: Zed Books, 2017; Broumas, Antonios. “Commons’ Movements and ‘Progressive’ Governments as Dual Power: The Potential for Social Transformation in Europe.” Capital & Class 42, no. 2 (June 2018): 229–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816817692124; Federici, Silvia, and George Caffentzis. “Commons against and beyond Capitalism.” In Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, by Silvia Federici. Oakland: PM Press, 2018; Foster, John Bellamy. “Monthly Review | Chávez and the Communal State.” Monthly Review (blog), April 1, 2015. https://monthlyreview.org/2015/04/01/chavez-and-the-communal-state/; Gilbert, Chris. “Monthly Review | Mészáros and Chávez: The Philosopher and the Llanero.” Monthly Review (blog), June 1, 2022. https://monthlyreview.org/2022/06/01/meszaros-and-chavez-the-philosopher-and-the-llanero/; Gilbert, Chris. Commune or Nothing!: Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project. Monthly Review Press, 2023.
[9] Here Ramírez Rojas is referring to definite ideological and external changes.
