Socialist Jeremy Corbyn campaigned aggressively against austerity measures before the parliamentary elections in the U.K. His surprising performance mirrored that of social democrat Bernie Sanders, who nearly won the Democratic primaries in the U.S. presidential elections despite being an independent Senator. Today, Mr. Sanders is recognised as the most popular politician in a country that has a hugely unpopular President.
Mr. Corbyn’s position in the Labour party has now strengthened. Since the elections, the Labour party has been raising issues that were long ignored in the three decades of the “neoliberal consensus” in the U.K.: wages of public sector employees and nationalisation of key under-performing sectors. This has caused much discomfiture to Britain’s right-wing cognoscenti, the Tories, and the Labour’s own Blairites who consider Mr. Corbyn and Old Labour as an anachronism.
In this milieu, Mr. Corbyn’s critics have now latched on to a new bugbear: his past support for the Bolivarian socialists in Venezuela. Labour’s anti-austerity push is being likened to the policies of the rulers of Venezuela ever since the Chavistas came to power in 1999. For years, Venezuela sought to use receipts from petroleum extraction as a means of expansive welfare without adequately reforming the oil bureaucracy. This strategy yielded tremendous support for the Bolivarians till the mid-2010s when the global fall in oil prices resulted in a crisis for the economy. President Nicolas Maduro’s handling of the decline of support for his party in the face of the lingering economic meltdown since 2012 has been catastrophic. The recent holding of Constituent Assembly elections, which were boycotted by the opposition, has had even leftist supporters of the Bolivarian project opposing such manoeuvres.
In a way, the subsiding of the “pink tide” in Latin America has coincided with Mr. Corbyn and Mr. Sanders’ rise. But can these be simply seen as cut from the same cloth? The answer is only partially “yes”. The “socialist” projects in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador were focussed on reorienting the governments’ approach towards redistribution and recognition of the rights of long marginalised groups. In Venezuela, the government was only partially successful in reversing the hold over the economy by oligarchs; it failed in diversifying the country’s economy beyond the extraction sector.
The U.S. and U.K. economies are vastly different. Mr. Corbyn and Mr. Sanders have articulated the need for social democratic policies that favour a reorientation of the state towards the benefit of many rather than a few — policies that are not radical. In fact, the economic boom post-World War II was made possible due to moderate state intervention leading to high levels of investment and employment in the developed economies. It is disingenuous to expect outcomes similar to what transpired in Venezuela to occur in Britain and the U.S. as well, if governments pursued expansive fiscal policies.
At worst, the Venezuelan crisis is indicative of the weaknesses in the project for “21st century socialism”, which did not address economic and bureaucratic issues from the past.
