A Response: Why Venezuela Isn't Iran

The folks at The Flying Carpet Institute respond to Josh Shahryar's article, "Venezuela: Twitter Revolution’s Next Stop?":

Some pundits have recently tried to compare the recent upper middle-class mobilizations against the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to the ones occurring in Iran since last summer’s Presidential election. As proof of the similarities, the author notes the technological aspects of the mobilization, such as activity on Twitter. He furthermore notes that Venezuela is "a population subjugated to ill-planned economics, a strongman unwilling to leave power, and a government ever more keen to restrict its citizens' rights to freedom of speech".

Venezuela: Twitter Revolution’s Next Stop?

This is a very superficial analysis of events that can be overturned with a range of empirical evidence. However, I will confine myself to some obvious facts. For instance, the Chavez Government hasn’t resorted to executions of opposition members like the Islamic Republican regime in Iran. The "curbed free press" of Venezuela isn’t actually that curbed. In no other country in the recent years has the ruling class shown its teeth so openly against a popular reformist government, through "Chilean" methods like assassinations, employer lock-outs, and pot-beating upper middle-class housewives. What Western media reports also fail to show are the (even if somewhat modest) attempts of the Chavez Government to support the growth of communal radio programmes that are intended to challenge the corporate media monopoly.

Let us now turn our heads to Iran. Here, the neoconservative Ahmadinejad regime, elected by the narrow confines of the system of Velayaat-i-faqih (ultimate clerical authority), has followed a policy not unlike the one followed by neoliberal governments throughout the rest of the world: it has privatized enterprises and tried to crush unionized labour by introducing contract labour. At the same time it has tried to cushion the results of its policies with populist measures. In Iran, those populist measures are called "free potatoes", in the US and elsewhere they are called "No more taxes!" or "charity".  Chavez was instrumental in forming the UNT trade union federation, the backbone of the Left in the Chavista movement. Ahmadinejad on the other hand, was responsible for the severe crackdown on organizations like the Tehran Bus Drivers´ Union.

So what does bring Venezuela and Iran together? One can and should criticise Chavez´s praises of Ahmadinejad. They have no relation to reality and are based on a completely absurd understanding of the situation. Ironically, they resemble the West’s depiction of Ahmadinejad as an uncompromising "radical", something that is far from the truth.  Islamic Iran has shown that it is able and willing to cooperate with the US and Israel on a number of issues when this suits its interest (Iran-Iraq War, Afghanistan, Iraq).

But it’s not the similarities of the systems that brought the two countries together. It’s the fact that they are both faced by an American onslaught. The Obama administration has shown its real colours by silently embracing the Honduran coup against Manuel Zelaya, making obvious that it is prepared to follow the same ends in Latin America as the previous Bush administration but with different means. Meanwhile, not a week goes by that doesn’t see verbal threats of sanctions (the US) or the possibility of an upcoming war in Lebanon (Israel) to finish off the Iranian challenge.

One should not forget that the US --- or anybody else in the West --- isn’t diametrically opposed to the concept of political Islam. Instead, what any imperial hegemon fears most is the concept of resistance, irrespective of its colours. To equate Venezuela with Iran is false. It implies that the Islamic regime is a consistent anti-hegemonic regime that empowers organized labour and supports forms of democratic self-organization, while enjoying genuine popular support among the mass of people.

Comments

[Old Outsider]

Ah, well, OK.
You know, I like joking, but I rarely do about people dying.
And Iranians and Uyghur are not worlds apart. The calls of "Down with China" had at least partly something to do with the incidents in July, so I was told - by Iranian Azeris.

[Catherine]

I totally agree with you on the parallels between the Iranian opposition and the Uyghurs, actually. I followed the whole thing closely last summer thanks to Aljazeera English and the first thing that popped into my mind was that the Iranian authorities were "pulling a China" and the Chinese authorities were "pulling an Iran".

[pessimist]

old outsider

No, I limit my 'similarites' to my limited knowledge. As for the differences, I know there are many.

This thread has taught me quite alot from all the comments and I've been surfing today on Catherine's links to Indians (thanks), and funny but we had a long documentary on our TV, (Arte, friday 5th) about precisely this subject - Latin American countries and their politics, histories, relations... very interesting, even if it was pretty biased and done in 2008.

I see that your perspective is from a personal experience, which country have you had that bad time ?

Flying Carpet's perspective is Marxist leninist, just as Revolutionary Road an amazing blog that I watched from the beginning of the protests in June. When I realized what they really were, I was very surprised.

I've tried to think about this and I think that it's understandable that countries that have huge problems in gaps between rich and poor, justice etc.. will attract and lean towards these old idealogies as they don't see any other ways to get out of their situation.

But the solution is not total anti-capitalist, it's just not practical in our global world. This is where those popular leaders are going to fail. If they don't use their power to create real democracies and prepare their parties to continue after them, cos 8 years is a maximum.. there will be automatically a fierce resistance that will cause maybe the opposite to occur, as in Chile.

I'm no specialist but in my life I've seen all these things and it follows the same patterns.

When you consider that in Europe there are no longer any communist parties to speak of, when they were quite powerful before.

It's ironic today that the 'labour' gvt in Britain is more liberal than the conservative gvt in France. We have more social insurances, more political choice and various workers unions etc than in Britain. Our Communist party no longer supports anti-capitalism. Well, that's simply because there are no causes to be fought for, all is achieved.

The major socialist opposition simply can't find any 'causes' to base their future election campaign. That's saying quite alot. Maybe this is simply the future of Iran, of Latin America, whatever their present leaders today. They should take a better look at history.