Taking on the Jeep part 3: On measures of Equality and 'Venezuela' as an argument

This criticism, like the rest of this series, is based off of Jordan B. Peterson’s 2016 lecture The Equality Authoritarians Must Be STOPPED NOW!- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7HPbjsYYGg- it is blog 3/4 and probably the most controversial.

I just ask that you make it to the end before you decide that I am an a tankie (an authoritarian leftist, Stalin-sympathiser). I promise I am not, but I am going to say the unthinkable- that pointing to Venezuela in itself, is not to Leftist arguments what water is on the Wicked Witch of the West, it will not cause me to melt.

I have tried to be balanced here but find the way that the Jeep uses Venezuela in this way, as a coded burn against all attempts at creating a more equal society ad doomed to failure and maybe even evil.

Now, this is another area where I take massive issue with the Jeep. It seems disingenuous and anti-intellectual to have such a brief section on Venezuela within this talk but to say that ‘policies predicated on equality of outcome are dangerous and genocidal at worst’. Within Jordan B Peterson’s lecture, he claims that approaches to social policy based on equality of opportunity & equality of outcome are both dangerous and the situation in Venezuela is set up like a ready made exhibition on human misery and forced equality that there is no need to curate at all .

Here Peterson is playing on his audience’s knowledge of the current economic crisis in Venezuela and the videos of supermarket shelves without food. So far, so standard right wing fare, but this it is a terrible situation. Though Peterson is notably not really asking any critical questions about what is happening in Venezuela or furthering his audiences’ understanding of the crisis beyond what they could have learned from a tabloid headline.

It is true that Venezuela has a left-wing government, but that doesn’t mean that the nation is defined by 'central planning’. Part of the Bolivarian ethos of the Cháves government was a new approach to social policy. This approach was profoundly anti-neoliberal, pro-cooperative organisation, which may explain the hostility to which it has been treated and how their is a rush to blame the current problems of Venezuela on 'the dangers of socialism’. Hugo Cháves was not a dictator in a straightforward sense, having won numerous elections as the leader of the MVR Party. However concerns about judicial freedom, press freedom were very much real under his reign ( according to reports from both Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International).

Fear and Quality of Life Indicators in Venezuela

The Cháves government and Venezuela in general, however were not always by-words for corruption and poverty. Part of the hope that the government represented came in their ‘Bolivarian policies’, which expanded vital services and democratic deception making across the country. In order to improve the lives of working class and rural Venezuelans, Cháves also began to divert the revenues from Venezuela’s state oil company (Venezuela is a major oil producing nation) into a new set of social missions aimed at improving healthcare, education, literacy, housing and access to food across the country. This created a new social wealth in the nation, however, one which was dangerously linked to the profitability of the oil industry.

Cháves also reversed neoliberal reforms which had privatised parts of the health care system. These programs were radical not only in increasing spending on social programs and redistribution of wealth, but also of power, as decisions were taken at the community level. With the social mission for healthcare, barrio adentro, this involved setting up committees with community members, social workers and physicians deciding priorities, including over the allocation of resources (Hasstrad, Amen and St Clair, 2014).

The philosophy behind these missions was about strengthening the social safety net through the empowerment of individuals and communities and is not a top-down state approach and is enshrined in changes made by Bolivarians to constitution of the republic;

'Article 62: All citizens* have the right to participate freely in public affairs, either directly or through their elected* representatives.

The participation of the people in forming, carrying out and controlling the management of public affairs is the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective. It is the obligation of the State and the duty of society to facilitate the generation of optimum conditions for putting this into practice.'

The Issue with Oil Revenues for the Social Safety Net

During the years of the oil boom- particularly the years leading up to 2008, the Venezuelan economy was booming and rapidly redistributing much of the wealth to the people. The Bolivarian approach of Chávez enjoyed popular support in Venezuela and seen extreme poverty in the nation drop from 2001, where the rate was about 25% to 8.7% in 2009 according to Unicef. Rates of poverty dropped from 48% in 2002 to 28% in 2008. During this period, enrolment in schools, disaster and trauma relief and the registration of births were other notable successes. Market commodities that are essential to life, such as food, also became highly subsidised, having the effect of broadening access to nutritious food across the nation. Importantly though, this food was mostly imported, purchased and subsidised through the earnings Venezeula was making on historically high commodity prices (MacDonald and Ruckert, 2009). Unlike other oil-producing nations that have attempted to use the revenues for some for of 'social good', the Venezuelan social safety net was very much built on this liquid foundation.

For the Jeep to erase from history this decade of progress of living standards, entirely due to the current situation is just simplistic and reductive in the extreme. For Venezuela to be the go to cautionary tale of equality conveniently conceals the fact that from the most recent data, Venezeula’s Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality within a society) even with the Bolivarian policies is higher than the UK, Canada and the US. Under Cháves, Venezuela’s economy still had a far lower percentage of spending coming from government programmes than countries like France.

Summary

I don’t deny that what is happening in Venezuela right now under Maduro’s premiership is horrendous. The government seems to be complicit in brutality towards protestors and rounding up of political activists. There has also been concerns raised at the UN and Amnesty international about torture within prisons and by military officials- this is barbaric and an area where we could really do with more scrutiny of the government of Venezuela.

However, the current context of these protests and violent crackdowns is the economic crisis, despite which, the government is only as unpopular as the hated main opposition of elites and US-backed neoliberal groups. The economic situation, where GDP growth is in the -10s, has a lot to do with sanctions, corruption and the ‘natural resource curse’- the fact that Venezuela is especially vulnerable to shocks to the oil price and based so much of its economy and social services on this bonanza.

It is hard to hear this from someone who is a public intellectual. To sloganeer about Venezeula, to make it into a modern day myth about the dangers of equality with no context or narrative at all -this sounds like propaganda to me, and its not what we would expect from the Jeep or anyone who works in education. I am not a ‘tankie’ or someone who celebrates either Chávez or Maduro, but it is a little dishonest to claim we can’t have redistribution of wealth and a high standard in public services without the police rounding up the opposition and food shortages.

Sources (please note the diversity in perspectives here, I am really not a cheerleader for Venezuela, just totally not down with the Jeep analysis, which seemed simplistic to me)

Amnesty International information about Human Rights situation in Venezeula - https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/americas/venezuela/report-venezuela/

Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Bolivarian_Republic_of_Venezuela/Title_3

Gabriel Hetland from The Nation Magazine on local and grassroots democracy in Venezuela- https://gabrielhetland.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/hetland-grassroots-democracy-in-venezuela-the-nation-1-30-12.pdf

Harvard Hasstrad, Mark Amen and Ascuncion Lera St Clair (2004), Social Movements, the Poor and the New Politics of the Americas- has a very good section on Venezuela starting on page 75.

Human Rights Watch on situation in Venezuela and the abuse of dissidents- https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/03/05/venezuela-chavezs-authoritarian-legacy

Laura Macdonald and Arne Ruckert, (2009), Post-Neoliberalism in the Americas- section 2 on Latin America starts out with a great discussion on Venezuela and the implications of Venezuelans Bolivarianism for the region

Noam Chomsky on the failure of sustainable economic alternatives to neoliberalism in Latin America- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maHgtLp21Iw

UN Development Programme Reporting results- http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/income-gini-coefficient

UNIFEC page on Venezuelan health and protections of the child- https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/venezuela_27098.html

Venezuela Solidarity Campaign on the issue of the extreme right-wing main opposition in Venezuela- http://www.venezuelasolidarity.co.uk/venezuela-exposing-extreme-right-wing-violence-in-2017/