When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, some political analysts affirmed that the socialism as an economic-political governance model no longer would be an option. Some would say that the dyad left-right was something from the past since one only existed because of the other and that socialism had come to an end. When Norberto Bobbio published “Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction” in 1996 he stated that the debate between these two political fields was not done, on the contrary, it was a current one as much as the ideological polarization right-left. The implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union, hence the so-called “real socialism”, for the ideological field wiped out the label socialist in the majority left-wing parties in the West. In Latin America, it was not different. Some of the left-wing parties migrated to the social democratic political-label. However, it is worthy to mention, the Latin-American social democracy ended up absorbing much of the neoliberal program designed by right-wings in the late 80s and 90s, which moved it away from the left.
By the end of the 90s, the political wheel started to turn to the left in Latin America. When Hugo Chávez rose to power in 1998 his project to Venezuela was not as substantial as it became after he was briefly removed from power through a coup in 2002. After his re-election in 2004, a reformist agenda started to emerge from his government. It crystalized in 2005 at the World Social Forum, a turning point for the subcontinent when Hugo Chávez announced his government was pursuing to develop a socialism adapted for the present century, the Twenty-first-century Socialism. The term, however, was created in the late 90s by the German sociologist Heinz Dieterich Steffan, who proposed a new model of socialism, which valued subjects such as real participative democracy, poverty and hunger reduction, gender equality, abolition of racism, economic exploitation and oppression, and environmental issues. These aspects of this new type of socialism had absorbed from European social democracy agenda, specially the German Social Democratic Party of Germany, had been between the 70s and 90s. Nevertheless, the most abrupt distinction, was the economic exploitation and oppression subject, which encompassed more than the establishment of a welfare state, but advocated for a greater role of the State in the economy as a powerful producer and supplier. This paper, hence, aims to analyze the status quo of the so called twenty-first-century socialism after Hugo Chávez death in 2013 and the oil drop prices after 2014. For this research primary sources such as speeches and government official documents will be used along with secondary sources such as specialized literature.
Chávez adapted Dieterich concepts and developed his own idea of socialism when in 2007 he published an action plan for Venezuela titled “ Líneas Generales del Plan de Desarrollo Económico y social de la Nación 2007-2013”. Chávez proposed seven topics to be implemented through what he called the Bolivarian Revolution: a new socialist ethics, supreme social happiness, revolutionary and protagonist democracy, socialist model of production, new national geopolitics, Venezuela: an energetic superpower, and a new international geopolitics. These seven points structured a social-economic reality based on the broadening of popular participation in politics, a larger State which higher social expending and, therefore, reducing the income concentration and increasing the government’s voter base among the mass.
The socialism invented by Chávez has some problems. Some critics from the far-left see the Bolivarian Revolution as a demagogic movement, which did not turn into a revolution, as stated by the Marxist author Rosa Luxemburg, but implemented some non-structural reforms. Therefore, it has not achieved the real socialism, but a welfare state with a large productive state-enterprise in the energetic field (oil mainly), which revenues would be converted into social expending in the aiming to build a more egalitarian society. Yet, it became a capitalism organized by the state with state and private capital moving the economy but also with some alternative production models based on collectivism and communitarism. It became a rentier economic model based on the oil revenues similar to a previous one back in the 70s. The almost full dependency on the oil industry turned this socialism dependent on the international market. When the prices dropped from more than 60% in 2014, the national economy plummeted. With much less money to redistribute through social programs the chavist-socialism started to loss its high popular support. For the first time since the beginning of this century, the Socialist Party lost the majority of the seats in the legislative house.
Without a big leap towards real socialism and popular participation in politics, with decision-making power, the real democracy plan was jeopardized. New bureaucratic elite arose: the high-levels public employees. The years of 2015 to 2017 have been of great social upheavals with many deaths among the Chávez supporters and the opposition. The political polarization has frozen any dialog among government and opposition and Venezuela, which has been enhanced by a severe economic crisis and basic goods shortages. The twenty-first-century socialism is now in a critical moment mainly due to its incapacity of providing basic needs to huge mass of unemployed and poor families.