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Social Radicalization Deepens in
Venezuela
by Gerry Foley / June 2005 issue of Socialist Action
Since President Hugo Chavez’s victory in the August 2004 referendum
forced by the opposition in an attempt to unseat him, the third major
assault against his government in less than three years, a radicalization has
been accelerating in Venezuela.
The radicalization reached a new high point with a march of a million
people in Caracas on May Day, organized by the UNT (National Union of
Workers), a
new union confederation that arose out of a reaction by the workers
against the alliance between the old trade-union bureaucracy and the
reactionary
pro-imperialist bourgeois opposition to Chavez. Red shirts were the
uniform for the march, and the president himself appeared in one.
Before the vast crowd, Chavez declared that the goal of his government
was socialism. The website Venezuelaanalysis.com quoted the president as
saying:
“It is impossible that we will achieve our goals with capitalism,
nor is it possible to find an intermediate path. … I invite all of
Venezuela to march on the path
of socialism of the new century. We must construct a new socialism
of the 21st century.”
The report continued: “Chavez had just returned from Cuba earlier
that day, where his government and that of Cuba signed 49 cooperation
agreements. In allusion to his visit, Chavez said that the Cuban Revolution
‘vibrates to the same rhythm’ as Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution and that
the changes have just barely begun. He pointed out, though, that his government
does not intend to copy the Cuban model of socialism.”
Effective May 1, the Chavez government decreed a 26 percent increase
in the minimum wage. The president’s popularity rating has risen in
accordance with the radicalization in the country. It has already topped 70
percent. That is a dazzling contrast to the fate of Lucio Gutierrez, the
recently ousted president of
Ecuador.
Gutierrez had a similar origin to that of Chavez. He was a military
officer who went over to the side of the masses in a confrontation with a
neoliberal
regime. It was on that basis, like Chavez, that he was elected
president. But once in office, he tried to continue neoliberal policies and
subsequently his
popularity evaporated. It stood at 4 percent in the week when he
fled the country.
The predominant slogan in the UNT-organized march reportedly was “without
co-management there is no revolution, without revolution there is no
co-management!” In the conception of the radical trade union
confederation, co-management apparently means workers’ control, that is,
the right of workers’ representatives to oversee the functioning of the enterprises
in which they work. In the Russian Revolution, workers’ control was the
first stage of
the nationalization of the economy.
Bill Burgess, a member of the Vancouver and District Labor Council
delegation to the Third Global Gathering of Solidarity with the Bolivarian
Revolution, in Venezuela in mid-April, reported in a recent edition of the
Canadian webzine Socialist Voice on a three-day roundtable meeting on co-management
held in context of this assembly:
“Loud cheering was common for speakers like Angel Naves when they
sharply distinguished their ‘Bolivarian co-management’ from co-management
in
countries like Germany or Argentina. Naves argued that in the
latter, union leaders are simply co-opted into existing management
structures and methods.”
Burgess noted, moreover, that Naves saw co-management as a social
process and not just a question of company management: “Federation of
Electrical Workers' leader Angel Naves told the roundtable that enterprises
under workers’ control must serve their surrounding communities and society
at large. He argued that the union movement should reject any notions that
such enterprises belong only to the workers employed. The final resolution
approved by the roundtable characterized the co-management as ‘Bolivarian,
revolutionary, and anti-capitalist.’”
Co-management in the electrical industry developed out of the
workers’ resistance to privatization. “The Chavez government halted the
privatizations and appointed union representatives to the companies’ boards
of directors. A variety of workplace assemblies and ‘transparency’ [open
the books] policies have been instituted.”
Burgess indicated that the inspiration for the workers’ moves to take
control of their enterprises came from the resistance of the oil workers to
the attempt of the capitalists and the reactionary union bureaucracy to force
Chavez out by a campaign of lockouts and economic sabotage at the end of
2002:
“The workers were able to restore production in several key
refineries, and the bosses’ strike failed to drive the government of
President Hugo Chavez from
office. Although the oil workers did not institutionalize a direct
participation in the direction of the state-owned oil company PDVSA, some 400
striking managers were dismissed. Other speakers said the class consciousness
of all workers was raised by the example of oil and other workers who
mobilized
to keep their workplaces running during the bosses’ strike.”
So far, co-management is limited to state-owned companies, but
Burgess reported that the UNT is trying to get it extended to privately
owned companies as well. Moreover, the government maintains that it will support
workers’ takeovers of companies that are being sabotaged by their
capitalist owners.
The social radicalization in Venezuela has gone hand in hand with a
more and more outspoken defiance of U.S. imperialism by Chavez and his
government. Chavez has declared that the U.S. rulers intend to try to assassinate
him. The Christian Science Monitor reported May 20 that U.S. Undersecretary
of State Otto Reich “calls the Castro-Chavez relationship an ‘axis of
subversion.’”
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