US Stake in Venezuela Reserves Sparks Outcry

The workers who pump crude from beneath Lake Maracaibo, who maintain the refineries at Amuay and Cardón, who have watched their wages collapse alongside their currency for a decade, have one plain interest: that the oil beneath their feet be used to feed their children and rebuild their country, not divided as spoils between whichever power wins the current struggle for control of it. The decision being made this week - a decision about who holds a stake in Venezuela’s energy reserves - does not include their voice. It should. It never has.

I want to be careful here, because there is a trap being set, and it is a trap I have seen before in every strike where the bosses offered the workers a choice between two masters and called it liberation. The Venezuelan opposition cries out that Washington’s claimed stake in the reserves is predatory and unconstitutional, and they are not wrong. But listen to what is not being asked in that outcry: not one word about the oil workers themselves, not one word about whether the people who extract the wealth will have any greater voice in its disposition than they had under Maduro. The opposition’s objection is a objection between elites over which elite gets the revenue. It is not a demand for the sovereignty of the working people of Venezuela. Those are different things, and the difference is the whole of the matter.

Now consider the other report, the one buried under the outrage over stakes and shares: that the Trump administration is reported to have abducted Nicolás Maduro. I do not mourn Maduro. A man who starved his own people while claiming to speak for them earns no tears from me. But ask the mechanical question, the organizer’s question: what does the removal of the negotiating counterparty accomplish for the party doing the removing? It clears the table. It means there is no government left standing that can bargain, however corruptly, over the terms of extraction - there is only a vacuum, and vacuums are filled by whoever arrived with the paperwork already drawn up. This is not liberation. This is a foreclosure sale conducted at gunpoint, and the tenants have not been consulted about the eviction.

A nation’s oil can belong on paper to its government and still not belong to its people - Maduro proved that for years, running the state oil company as a patronage machine while the workers who kept the pumps running took their wages in a currency that lost value between the morning shift and the evening one. But the answer to a government that steals from its own workers is not a foreign government that steals more efficiently, with cleaner accounting and a signed agreement. The answer is that the workers who do the labor get a say in what happens to what they produce. That has never yet been tried in Venezuela, under Chavez, under Maduro, or under whatever arrangement Washington drafts this week.

I think of the pipe fitter at Amuay, standing his shift while men in two capitals argue over what belongs to him and to his neighbors, and neither one has asked him. That image is the whole of the situation, more honest than any communique from Caracas or Washington. The opposition wants him to cheer American capital as rescue. The remnants of Maduro’s apparatus want him to see American capital as the only enemy. Both of them are lying to him in the exact places where the truth would cost them something.

The solidarity that matters here is not solidarity with a government, any government. It is solidarity among the people whose labor is being fought over as though they were the ground itself and not the men and women standing on it. Until the oil workers of Venezuela can bargain collectively over the wealth they raise from the earth - not through Maduro’s patronage, not through Washington’s stake - the fight over who “owns” the reserves is a fight between landlords over a tenant neither of them has bothered to name.