Chavista Extremism: Scarier and scarier...

Extremism is becoming the defining characteristic of the chavista movement. At no point does the ruling ideology draw the line - just the opposite: every part of the new elite seems to operate under the maxim that if a little extremism is good, a lot is better. The result is a kind of tournament within the regime, a dynamic of one-upmanship where each tries to out-extremist the other.

It's a scary thing: the phrase "that's going too far" doesn't seem to be a part of the regime's political lexicon. More and more, the regime has lost its feel for the ridiculous (el sentido del ridículo) - leaving it shorn of any way to judge how much is too much.

Examples? They're a dime a dozen. Here are a few:

• The Armed Forces' Polytechnic University awards an honorary doctorate to an aging Mikhail Kalashnikov for his lifetime contribution to the noble cause of figuring out how to kill people efficiently.
  
  
• A Cuban communist guerrillero who literally led an armed invasion against Venezuela's democratically elected government is honored in a public ceremony by regime hierarchs (handily exceeding the DDefinition of supporting terrorism") and the news is proudly splashed on pro-government websites.
  
  
• Thousands of Venezuelan kids go off to Cuba for paramilitary and ideological training, come home, and get 15,000 assault rifles bought with public money. Among their slogans - Commandante Chavez: Ordene!
  
  
• Practically alone in the world, Venezuela sets out a principled defense of North Korea's right to develop ICBMs, essentially celebrating its missile tests as an anti-imperialist move in the eve of Chavez's visit to Pyongyang.
  
  
• The National Assembly moves to further restrict the scope for NGO action, with the avowed aim of bringing them under control.
  
  
• A literally gun-toting president threatens to shut down opposition TV and radio stations, saying it is unacceptable for the media to criticize the government.
  
  
• Essentially all high-profile opposition elected officials still in office are prosecuted on trumped up charges or threatened with prosecutions if they do not behave as the regime demands.
  
  
• Even the Venezuelan Olympic Committee is taken over by a chavista aparatchik.

The point, I think, is clear: with the government firmly consolidated in power, all restraints on extremism have been lifted. The question then becomes: where does this road lead?

We need to be clear about this: Venezuela is not a totalitarian regime. But we also need to be clear about this: it is moving more and more decisively in that direction. Clearly, spaces for dissent still exist; just as clearly, the regime is working to close them down.

What's terrifying is that there is no logical limit to chavismo's power ambition. Nothing in the structure of the belief system limits its tendency to expand control into new areas of political and - more and more - social life.

There is no room in chavista thinking for the notion that some of spheres of human activity are and ought to remain outside of the political sphere. And there is certainly no space in chavista thinking for the notion that any part of the political sphere ought to remain outside the state's control. It's a way of conceiving politics that never says "enough," that has no notion of "that's not the state's business," that never sees a reason to stop expanding its reach, and that does not recognize any distinctions between the concepts of "nation", "state", "government", "party" and "Chavez." As far as the ruling ideology is concerned, to be for one of those is to be for all of them; to oppose one is to oppose them all.

What's scary is not so much where we are now, but where the internal logic of chavista thinking points us. These days people are happy buying their hummers and plasma TVs and such. But the logic of blanket politization is afoot, and with it the mechanisms first for authoritarian and later for totalitarian control.

We're definitely not there. Chavismo's myriad internal contradictions might yet cause its collapse before we get there. But it's not really possible to deny that we're heading there. Not any more.

posted by Francisco @ 7/11/2006 11:09:00 PM   

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The 2006 PSF D'Or goes to...

Envelope please...[rustle-rustle, cough]...Ladies and Gentlemen, the 2006 Pendejo sin Fronteras d'Or goes to...Chris Kraul, of the Los Angeles Times!

It's no contest, really: his piece in Sunday's LAT about the ways chavistas have been using Charlie Chaplin's 1936 classic, Modern Times, for propaganda purposes will go down as a timeless classic of slack-jawed PSFery. The story misreports, misunderstands, misconstrues and misattributes Venezuelan workers' problems with such gusto, the competition didn't have a chance.

A taste:

Since January, in a bid to expose the evils of "savage capitalism," the Labor Ministry has shown the Chaplin film to thousands of workers in places such as this rundown industrial suburb of Caracas.

Chaplin wanted his Depression-era movie to make a point, that "once inside the factory, workers had no meaningful rights," said Los Angeles-based film historian and Chaplin authority Richard Schickel. "It was very relevant in the moment it was released, a time of social unrest and the emerging U.S. labor movement."

Seventy years later, Chaplin's fable is all too relevant in Venezuela, said several factory workers who saw the film recently.

In a way, the first thing that jumps out at you is not so much Kraul's staggering ignorance as his utter lack of inquisitiveness. The piece details the way chavistas have used Modern Times to make a point about labor exploitation in Venezuela. A minimally curious writer might then ask, "hmmmm, are labor conditions in Venezuela today really comparable to labor conditions in the US during the depression? Do Venezuelan workers really have no meaningful rights? does it really make sense to describe Chaplin's film as 'all too relevant' in Venezuela?"

Well, lets see, what were workers fighting for in the 1930s in the US? First and foremost, they were worried about the right to form unions and bargain collectively...rights that have been guaranteed and widely exercised in Venezuela since 1958.

Bad start. OK, the minimum wage, then? Nope, there has been a minimum wage in Venezuela, for decades. Not only that, figured as a percentage of the average wage, Venezuela's minimum wage is the highest in the America's - fully 90% of the average, meaning that, for all intents and purposes, Venezuelan wages as a whole are decreed by the Central Government.

Not that either, then. Perhaps the eight hour work day is a good parallel? Nope, Venezuelan workers got that reivindicación decades ago. Vacation pay? Got it. Severance pay? Got it. Mandatory employer contributions to pensions? Got those too. Statutory overtime pay premiums? Check.

Hmmm...how about some more lavish perks - the kinds of things European workers protest over these days? Statutory employer-provided childcare and dining facilities, say, or an open-ended ban on layoffs, or subsidized housing, subsidized worker training, subsidized transport, or statutory profit-sharing, or paid maternity leave? Hell, these are demands that would have made US workers blush back in the 30s - but, you guessed it, Venezuelan workers have all of those as well!

In fact, Venezuela has some of the most restrictive, rigid, employment-zapping labor legislation anywhere in the world.

So restrictive is the legal framework that in the paper I wrote about yesterday, Hausmann and Rodriguez set out microeconomic evidence showing how labor market rigidities have hampered Venezuela's attempts to crack non-energy export markets, deepening our dependence on oil exports and contributing to the country's economic collapse since 1977.

In effect, with existing legislation, the legal economy can't begin to generate enough jobs for the size of the workforce we have, leaving about half of Venezuelan workers to scrape together a living somehow in the informal sector. Once there, they have no protections whatsoever. UCAB researchers have found that 90% of informal sector workers earn less than the legal minimum wage. It's hardly surprising that, for informal workers, finding a job in the "savage capitalist" economy Modern Times sends up is a universal aspiration, a wistful dream that's simply out of their reach.

Given the very high costs associated with Venezuela's hypertrophied labor legislation, it's easy to see why the informal sector has swelled. Venezuela has a plainly outsized "fiscal wedge" (cuña fiscal) - the gap between what it costs an employer to create a legal job, and the pay a worker effectively takes home. By some researchers' estimates, every Bs.100 in take-home pay for legal workers costs employers Bs.171 to generate - with the extra Bs.71 going to cover various taxes, mandatory contributions, and statutory workplace perks. These figures dwarf the notorious fiscal wedges in countries like Germany (51%), Belgium (56%) and France (47%).

For all his efforts to "even-handedly" present business viewpoints in his piece, Kraul catastrophically fails to grasp the basic ridiculousness of the way Modern Times is being used to push an extremist ideological agenda. What Kraul tragically fails to process is that Venezuela's legal labor force is a relatively privileged elite within the working class, the better-off half in a vicious insider-outsider dynamic that condemns millions of people to the atrocious poverty and total insecurity of the gray economy...and that the more legal goodies that relatively privileged elite gets, the more expensive it gets to create legal jobs, and the harder outsiders find it to crack into the legal job market.

Maybe, on his way back to the Meliá from that poultry plant, Kraul should've stopped to chat with some of the buhoneras in the Boulevard de Sabaná Grande and asked them what they think about the terrible exploitation of the quince-y-último set. The look of baffled fury he would've gotten from them perfectly mirrors my outrage at his deeply ignorant little piece.

His, dear reader, is one richly deserved PSF D'Or...

posted by Francisco @ 7/10/2006 07:09:00 AM   

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Skypecast: Francisco Rodríguez on Venezuela's Economic Collapse

As promised, today I post the first of a series of Skypecasts - interview podcasts - with academics working on the history of Venezuela's economic collapse after 1977.

The first interview features Francisco Rodríguez. Francisco is Assistant Professor of Economics and Latin American Studies at Wesleyan University, and a fast rising academic star. He's currently co-editing a book on Venezuela's economic collapse with Harvard's Ricardo Hausmann. Over the next few weeks I will be publishing Skypecasts with several of the book's contributors.

Working drafts of all the book's chapters can be downloaded here.

In this wideranging, 40-minute Skypecast, Francisco describes the overall research project, and then walks us through the draft chapter he co-authored with Ricardo Hausmann. In explaining Venezuela's economic collapse, Hausmann and Rodríguez stress the fact that Venezuela didn't have an alternative export industry to cushion the blow when oil prices fell. They go on to assess five different hypotheses to explain why, unlike Mexico, Indonesia and Malaysia, Venezuela didn't develop alternative export industries.

The Skypecast sets out their research in language that (I hope) will be understandable to non-specialists. Towards the end, Francisco explains some of the policy implications of his analysis.

Click here to listen to the interview.

posted by Francisco @ 7/09/2006 04:50:00 AM   

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Talk vCrisis here...

Personally, I've been careful not to say much about the Boyd-Livingston saga. My deep disagreements with Alek are just as public as our friendship is. However, there seems to be a limitless appetite to discuss this, so I'll open this thread for that purpose.

posted by Francisco @ 7/09/2006 01:24:00 AM   

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