Early April 2002: Hugo Chavez returns to power after a coup attempt, the suspension of all constitutional rights and the installation of a new government recognized by the US. At the time, I had some awareness of Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, primarily through his October 2001 condemnation of the US attack upon Afghanistan as an instance of fighting terror with terror, replete with photographs of dead Afghans. It was one of those profound moments, a truly brave statement of resistance at a time when the political leadership of the rest of the world was cowed into silence in the face of US intentions to militarily expand its influence in response to 9/11.

Upon hearing about the coup on April 9th, I realized that Chavez was a seminal figure of the age, someone around whom opposition to the purported war on terror and US inspired neoliberal policy had coalesced. The popular uprising that restored Chavez to power within days after the coup, and his victory in a national referendum on the question of his removal from office a couple of years later, after an attempt by workers and managers in the state turn oil company, PDVSA, to bring the economy to a halt by shutting down the production, literally changed the course of history.

Along with the enduring ability of the Iraqi insurgency to inflict grievous losses upon the US, losses in both blood and money that have impaired the offensive capabilities of the US military, the survival of Chavez has prevented the US from recreating the global economy in its own imperialistic image. Even more important, his survival has served as an inspiration for social movements around the world dedicated to the goals of fulfilling the needs of impoverished people and empowering them.

Consistent with this, we tend to disregard the extent to which Chavez is admired because, as a dark skinned ruler, with indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan roots, he presents a marked contrast to the Eurocentric figures that have dominated not just South America, but many other parts of the world as well. The Irish documentary about the failed coup, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, provides some excellent insight into these themes.

Here is Part 1 of that documentary:

The remaining segments are readily available on YouTube.

Of course, Chavez is not without flaws. He vacillates between policies of economic centralization and decentralization; he has not put sufficient land in the hands of campesinos so as to reduce Venezuela's dependency upon other countries for much of its food supply; he has failed to reduce the country's notorious incidence of violent crime, and, he tends to reflexively embrace other anti-American leaders around the world indiscriminately.

But these failings do not outweigh his strengths. Since the end of the late 2002, early 2003 PDVSA sabotage, he has presided over an impressive period of economic growth, as indicated here and here, one that has disproportionately benefitted the poorest of Venezuelans. Unemployment has dropped from 16.6% when he was elected to 7.6% in February 2008, after being just over 10% in January 2008 and December 2007. Such a record stands in marked contrast to the domestic record of the Bush presidency.

Chavez has created a culture of democratic participation at all levels of society to replace the duopoly, governance by elites that relied upon the practice of alternation, the rotating substitution of rule by one party by the other, to implement neoliberal policies. If anything, as noted by Lula and others, he has subjected Venezuela to an excess of democracy through electoral and referenda campaigns that have seemingly followed one after another.

Accordingly, Chavez remains a strong anti-imperialist with an impressive record of economic accomplishment. Predictably, despite the referendum defeat last year, he remains popular with the Venezuelan public. The preservation of his legacy depends upon confronting new economic challenges emerging over the course of this period of growth, the emergence of a new generation of leaders within Venezuela capable of carrying forward the Bolivarian Revolution, the continued vitality of leftist movements throughout the continent and, just possibly, the continued success of Iraqi insurgency.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez, Neoliberalism, Occupation of Iraq, YouTube

Subsequent social movements in South America abandoned his foco based approach to igniting revolutions throughout the region, as well as the Soviet inspired centralized state socialism adopted by Cuba, but they revere him as someone who kept alive the hope, no matter how dark the horizon, that American imposed neoliberal policies could be successfully resisted.

Back in his day, of course, he described it as straightforward imperialism, but no matter, the subsequent substitution of the symptom, neoliberalism, for the disease, imperialism, has merely sharpened the understanding of the nature of the conflict. Hence, in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Brazil, in Argentina, indeed, throughout the continent, he retains his mythic stature, even after the leftists inspired by him put down their arms, and embarked upon a generational effort to build a social alternative from the ground up, an effort that required the most intense faith to be sustained, because, after all, how could they be sure that decades of activism, of relatively non-violent confrontation with the state, its affiliated labor unions and paramilitaries, would come to fruition?

But it did. As with any transformation, the results are uneven, with success in Venezuela, enthusiasm in Bolivia, increasing cynicism in Brazil, and an anti-capitalist, non-hierarchical social movement struggling to survive in Argentina. Thus, the incongruity of Chavez and Morales, two men who achieved power non-violently through democratic means because of the failure of structural adjustment policies, sharing murals with Che, the man who walked out of the party bureaucracy and into the jungle to arm the peasants for the coming revolution.

Che failed, but it was a failure that educated others about what was necessary to ultimately prevail. He was consistently and unabashedly with the victims of US imperialism, even though his methods of armed resistance and bureaucratic socialism were repudiated. Chavez, Morales and millions of others understandably identify with Che for this reason, as they are likewise irrevocably aligned with the impoverished and exploited of their countries, recognizing the great debt they owe him for educating them about the difficulties of confronting global capitalism.

Labels: Activism, Bolivarian Revolution, Bolivia, Political Violence

A informative post by Louis Proyect on the subject of The Nation, Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's US Embassy funded visit to Caracas to learn about the Bolivarian Revolution from the children of the oligarchy: When poor Black people in Little Rock or Caracas decide to stand up for their rights, white, middle-class philosophers and psychiatrists get terribly upset. (Hat tip to plato's cave for drawing my attention to it)

Labels: American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Neoliberalism, The Nation

Travel to Venezuela to speak to an organization that receives funding to pay for your appearance through the US Embassy, fraternize with upper income students who loathe Chavez, write an article about your experiences and get published in The Nation. After all, didn't you know that, if you are unaware of Hannah Arendt, you have no business trying to make the revolution? Apparently, nothing is more frightening to the leftist academic vanguardists associated with The Nation than the possibility that people will politically act on their own in the absence of their insight.

Labels: "Why I Don't . .", American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Neoliberalism, The Nation

Like water on rock, the Iraqi resistance is slowly wearing down the forces of the occupation:

Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up.

When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by.

The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad - hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq.

Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.

The Iraqis, of course, endure far worse, fighting a technologically superior force that does not hesitate to use its weapons indiscriminately. They live in conditions of poverty, without reliable water, power and food. And, yet, they are on the verge of defeating what is commonly described as the world's only remaining superpower, despite the lack of open foreign assistance. Unlike the Vietnamese, the last people to inflict a humiliating defeat upon the US, there are no countries with the economic and military resources of countries like China and Russia to assist them.

The Iraqis are very clear about why they are fighting, they are doing so to expel the Americans. Conversely, US troops aren't so sure. They provide many reasons to gloss over the fact that they have volunteered to kill Iraqis and subjugate them in their own land. Some believe that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs, others that Saddam and al-Qaeda were jointly responsible for 9/11, others that the war is part of a global religious conflict between Christianity and Islam. Cindy Sheehan probably described the most compelling reason, the need for soldiers to stand together, to fight for one another, until the war is over.

None of them are sufficient to overcome the intensity by which Iraqis are fighting to liberate themselves from occupation. While US troops express weariness and demoralization, the resistance exudes assurance. It draws support from across the whole of Iraqi society, with the exception of the Kurds. Tariq Aziz's famous remark, Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles, ceased to be implausible bravado years ago.

Nor do any of them justify what US and British troops have done to the people of Iraq. Whether this year, next year or sometime thereafter, the US, like the British, will depart. Many around the world will celebrate their victory, in the expectation that it announces a new era, one in which they too will be able to successfully challenge US hegemony. The Venezuelans will do so quite boisterously, in recognition of the debt that they know that they owe the Iraqi resistance for making it impossible for the US to violently intervene in their country. Because, while they may not know it, participants in the Iraqi resistance have been fighting not only to liberate Iraq, but to defend the Bolivarian Revolution as well.

Labels: American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Iraqi Resistance, Occupation of Iraq, US Military

John Bellamy Foster, in a Monthly Review article recalls a groundbreaking work of Paul Baran, his 1957 book, Political Economy of Growth:

. . . Baran acknowledged the great variance in conditions in the underdeveloped world. But he argued that there were common conditions that justified viewing these countries together at a high level of abstraction. The characteristics they shared were: (1) a history of imperialist penetration, (2) low per capita incomes and low levels of economic development, and (3) similar internal and external obstacles to development resulting from the history of colonialism/imperialism. Since all of these countries were far behind the advanced capitalist states, the goal of rapidly catching up required not simply an industrial take-off but economic growth rates of 8–10 percent per annum for extended periods, as opposed to the historical average of around 3 percent. Such growth rates had occurred before, with the United States reaching an 8.6 percent rate of growth in the second half of the 1880s, Russia 8 percent in the 1890s, Japan 8.6 between 1907 and 1913, and the Soviet Union credited with double digit rates of expansion in 1928–40. The principal question was therefore how to mobilize and rationally utilize surplus to achieve the goal of catching up with the advanced capitalist countries, as opposed to falling further behind as at present.

This framework led Baran to a consideration of the class and imperial environment of underdeveloped countries governing the use and misuse of society’s potential surplus: what he called “the morphology of backwardness.” Here he concentrated on how his four major leakages to potential surplus were related to the dominant class (and intra-class) structure of underdeveloped societies, focusing on the role of (1) a semi-feudal landlord class, (2) the proliferation of mercantile interests and money lenders of all kinds, (3) the small, monopolistic industrial bourgeoisie that tended to be heavily dependent on foreign enterprise, (4) foreign capital, and the (5) state. The entire distorted class structure that emerged was prone to waste: luxury consumption by the wealthy coupled with loss of output and misallocation of surplus due to the irrational and wasteful organization of production and chronic unemployment/underemployment. The state apparatus was often distorted by these developments reflecting the parasitical class relations. “What results,” he stated, “is a political and social coalition of wealthy compradors, powerful monopolists and large landowners dedicated to the defense of the existing feudal-mercantile order.” The ruling elements in the underdeveloped countries tended to invest large parts of the surplus at their disposal abroad “as hedges against the depreciation of the domestic currency or as nest eggs assuring their owners of suitable retreats in the case of social and political upheavals at home.” The mobilization of the surplus for new investment was thus typically blocked at every turn, leading to dismal economic performance and the expansion of poverty in a vicious circle. “Just as investment,” Baran wrote, “tends to become self-propelling, so lack of investment tends to become self perpetuating.”

A crucial element was the disarticulated, outward orientation of the peripheral capitalist economies, which were geared to the requirements of foreign capital and the markets of the advanced capitalist countries more than to their own internal needs. This dependence took various forms, including: remittance of surplus abroad to foreign investors and reinvestment of some of the surplus by multinational corporations: “While there have been vast differences among underdeveloped countries,” Baran wrote, with regard to the amounts of profits plowed back in their economies or withdrawn by foreign investors, the underdeveloped world as a whole has continually shipped a large part of its economic surplus to more advanced countries on account of interest and dividends. The worst of it is, however, that it is very hard to say what has been the greater evil as far as the economic development of underdeveloped countries is concerned: the removal of their economic surplus by foreign capital or its reinvestment by foreign enterprise.

Such reinvestment was normally directed at the export economy, organized around the export of raw or semi-processed agricultural products, minerals, and other primary commodities—and tended to weaken rather than strengthen the internal development linkages of the underdeveloped country thus impeding any possible “investment snowball effect.”

Although the rate of exploitation in certain sectors of third world economies was very high, this was predicated on low wages and very high unemployment and underemployment, which meant that the internal market within the economy was virtually non-existent. The typical underdeveloped country was constituted as “an appendage of the ‘internal market’ of Western capitalism,” blocking the rational allocation or even retention of the economic surplus produced. Rapacious imperialism, moreover, robbed the land of the conditions of its reproduction on a scale exceeding the ecological destruction wrought by the advanced capitalist nations on their own environments—disregarding nature’s “lasting assets” in the pursuit of mere accumulation of capital.

The dialectic of imperialism and underdevelopment was most obvious in the case of major third world resource-exporting countries. Baran closely analyzed the case of VENEZUELA, including the U.S.-supported coup in 1948 after a decade in which the surplus produced from oil revenues had been diverted increasingly to economic and social development. “Under the reign of the present companies-supported dictatorship,” he wrote, “what is spent on economic development is considerably less than what is at its disposal, and the purposes of such spending are determined not by the best interests of the Venezuelan people but by the requirements of foreign capital.”

Those third world countries that sought to break out of this trap through the growth of an oppositional state apparatus aimed at mobilizing the potential surplus for development either on democratic or authoritarian lines were faced with direct or indirect intervention by the United States and other center capitalist states. Thus the United States, acting in the interests of the imperialist bloc frequently intervened militarily (by overt or covert means) to stop development. Moreover, it did so, Baran pointed out, whether the challenges came from democratic movements/states (such as Venezuela, Guatemala, and British Guiana), indigenous popular struggles (such as Kenya, the Philippines, and Indochina), or nationalist-authoritarian governments (such as Iran, Egypt, and Argentina). “Operation Killer” thus reinforced “Operation Strangle” in keeping the underdeveloped countries in their place. The huge waste on military expenditures in underdeveloped countries was part of the imperialist control system, aimed at facilitating comprador regimes and targeting internal populations rather than external dangers.

“The tragedy of the situation,” Baran wrote, has the dimensions of a Greek drama. In Hitler’s extermination camps the victims were forced to dig their own graves before being massacred by their Nazi torturers. In the underdeveloped countries of the ‘free world,’ peoples are forced to use a large share of what would enable them to emerge from the present state of squalor and disease to maintain mercenaries whose function it is to provide cannon fodder for their imperialist overlords and to support regimes perpetuating this very state of squalor and disease.

One can only imagine what Baran would write if he were alive today. A key concept here, a concept that can be easily overlooked, is Baran's contention that the US, along with its other G-8 allies, intervenes covertly and, if necessary, militarily, to stop development within what we now call the Global South. Recall Alexander Cockburn's remark that a journalist friend told him that the need to invade Iraq in 2003 acquired greater and greater urgency precisely because the sanctions were no longer effective in hobbling the Iraqi economy. It sounded rather odd at the time, but, given the consequences of the war and occupation, it no longer does.

Or, consider Iran. With oil selling above $60 a barrel, and the prospect of nuclear power, replete with the capacity to enrich its own fuel domestically, thus releasing more of what remains of its reserves for the international market . . . well, something must be done, and, predictably, the bipartisan American political elite is insistent about the importance of stopping the Iranian nuclear program, even though Iran is a long time signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that, to date, there is no evidence that it has violated its treaty obligations.

Or, let us look to the north, to the Russian Republic. Upon the breakup of the Soviet Union, the US, by persuading to the Russians to adopt the remorseless economic policy known as shock therapy, turned back the clock, transforming Russia into a state with the social conditions associated with the Global South, with the ultimate goal being the transfer of control of Russia's state controlled resources, especially oil and natural gas, to global transnationals through the intermediary of the oligarchs, who purchased them at fire sale prices when they were privatized. Yeltsin, the man who oversaw this corrupt process, along with the implementation of the increasingly autocratic practices required to pursue it, was, upon his recent death, hailed as a democratic reformer, while his successor, Putin, is perpetually maligned in the US as an incipient authoritarian, even though he never launched a military attack upon his own Parliament, as Yeltsin did, precisely because he has undertaken actions to reestablish Russian sovereignty and economic independence.

And, finally, there is, of course, Venezuela, which I helpfully capitalized in the quote from Bellamy's article. As it became increasingly evident that Chavez was about to assert control over the country's primary resource, oil, and use the proceeds for economic development, the Bush administration did nothing to dissuade coup plotters from going forward, and immediately recognized them as the new government in April 2002 after Chavez had been arrested, as did their friends like the editorial writers at the New York Times. The democratically elected Chavez, it was said, had "brought it on himself", an explanation aphoristically echoed throughout the opinion elite within the US media, but the explanations as to how he had done so rang hollow. By contrast, US intolerance for an alternative development approach in South America, one independent of the neoliberal constraints of US controlled global financial institutions, like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, was a much more persuasive one, and, predictably, either ignored or deliberately concealed.

As always, we must be careful to avoid the mechanical application of reductionist doctrines to explain the patterns and practices of US imperialism, but Baran's explanation of the reasons for underdevelopment in the Global South forces us to address it in new ways, supplementing the contemporary theorization of cultural, social and economic motivations for it, as subsumed within the concept of military neoliberalism.

Labels: American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, eliberalism, Iraq War, Neoliberalism, War with Iran

An excerpt from an article by Gregory Wilpert at venezuelanalysis.com:

The April 2002 coup attempt against President Chavez represented the perhaps most important turning point of the Chavez Presidency. First, it showed just how far the opposition was willing to go to get rid of the country’s democratically elected president. Up until that point the opposition could claim that it was merely fighting Chavez with the political tools provided by liberal democracy. Afterwards, the mask was gone and Chavez and his supporters felt that their revolution was facing greater threats than they had previously imagined. A corollary of this first consequence was thus that the coup woke up Chavez’s supporters to the need to actively defend their government.

Second, the coup showed just popular Chavez really was and how determined his supporters were to prevent his overthrow. They went onto the streets, at great personal risk (over 60 people were killed and hundreds were wounded by the police in the demonstrations that inspired the military to bring Chavez back to power), to demand their president’s return to office.

Third, the coup woke up progressives around the world to what was happening in Venezuela. It forced them to examine why a supposedly unpopular and authoritarian government would be brought back to power with the support of the county’s poor. As such, the coup shone a spotlight on what was happening in Venezuela and eventually rallied progressives around the world to support the Bolivarian (and now socialist) project.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly for the future evolution of the Venezuelan conflict, the coup was the third nail in the political coffin of the country’s old elite. The first such nail was Chavez’s election in 1998, which brought an explicitly anti-establishment figure into Venezuela’s presidency for the first time in forty years. The second nail was the passage of the 1999 constitution and Chavez’s confirmation as President, in 2000, which democratically swept the country’s old elite almost completely out of political power, such as the governorships, the Supreme Court, and the National Assembly. With the third nail, the failure of the 2002 coup, the opposition lost a base of power in the military and a significant amount of good will in the international community. The next three nails, the failed 2002-2003 oil industry shutdown, the August 2004 recall referendum, and the December 2006 presidential election, only further solidified the old elite’s demise as a political force in Venezuela.

Wilpert omits another important aspect of the failed coup: it rendered the movement in South America away from the US and towards regional economic integration irreversible. The mass movement that returned Chavez to power showed the rest of the continent that it was possible to chart a left, integrationist course without the approval of the US. It repudiated the clash of fundamentalisms upon which the Bush Doctrine is based, and demonstrated that another way is possible, neither capitalist nor religious fundamentalist extremism, but inclusive, communitarian and humanistic. Accordingly, the failed coup may ultimately be considered more historically significant than the violent pyrotechnics of 9/11.

Finally, Wilpert's forensic work is exceptional in regard to providing a detailed social chronology of the events surrounding the coup and the successful resistance to it. At such moments, history truly does hang in the balance, determined by the courageous, spontaneous actions of individuals in the face of great adversity. Decades from now, we may recall, the collapse of the American Empire improbably commenced on the streets of Caracas on April 11 through April 13, 2002.

Labels: American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez, Neoliberalism

According to the Los Angeles Times:

"If you truly want social justice in the world, order the immediate withdrawal of the troops from Iraq," Chavez scolded Bush, scoffing at the president's recently declared commitment to reverse inequality in Latin America. "Use that gigantic [military] budget for investments in food and health."

The charismatic, media-savvy Chavez seized upon the presence of Bush, who is widely unpopular in South America, as an opportunity not to be missed. Chavez's self-proclaimed status as a target of "the empire" has won him many admirers in the resurgent left, and Bush's "anti-Chavez" tour, as some here have called it, provided fresh rhetorical ammunition.

In Brazil, a country not recently known for heavily attended public protests, there was outrage over the Bush visit:

Some arrived clutching banners telling "Mr Butcher" to go home. Others brought effigies of "The Warlord" dangling miserably from a hangman's noose. A handful dressed up as the grim reaper, while some women paraded through the streets with stickers of George Bush and Adolf Hitler placed tastefully over their nipples.

Fabio Silva had other ideas. He stuffed a sock into his mouth and left it there for three hours. "It means that the Brazilian authorities have tried to censor us - to pretend to Bushy that we don't exist," said the 21-year-old student, using the president's nickname in these parts after briefly removing his gag. "It means that we are remembering the silent victims of Iraq. And it means that the censorship will not shut me up."

If President Bush needed a reminder of his growing unpopularity in Latin America, it was here in Sao Paulo in the shape of a 10,000-strong human wave marching noisily through the financial district.

There was none of the famed Brazilian hospitality. Even before Mr Bush arrived in Brazil on Thursday to begin a six-day tour of Latin America the protesters were out en masse. "Persona non grata" read one placard. "Get out you Nazi" said another. In case the message still hadn't hit home, there was one other taunt - this time in English: "Bush, kill yourself."

Even the New York Times could not deny the depth of popular protest against Bush in Brazil:

The police have clashed with thousands of protesters, many carrying signs calling Mr. Bush a murderer and a fascist. A group of Mayan priests in Guatemala said Friday that they would “purify” a sacred site of “bad spirits” after Mr. Bush visits it early next week.

Security was intense, the most elaborate ever for a visiting head of state in Brazil, local officials said. Two helicopters hovered above Mr. Bush’s extended motorcade here Friday, and his hotel was ringed with military sharpshooters and other security officers, though demonstrators burned an American flag close by.

Bush and Chavez went head to head yesterday, even if Chavez delivered his remarks from nearby Buenos Aires, with the tacit approval of the Argentinian government:

“I don’t think America gets enough credit for trying to help improve people’s lives,” Mr. Bush said, speaking at a joint news conference with Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

But while President Bush pressed that point, President Chávez led an “anti-imperialist” rally at which he railed against what he called American hypocrisy and greed, and called Mr. Bush a “political cadaver.”

“The Bush plan is ridiculous,” Mr. Chávez said at the gathering in Buenos Aires, across the Río de la Plata from Montevideo, Uruguay, Mr. Bush’s next stop. “He thinks he is Columbus, discovering poverty after seven years in power.”

Mr. Bush kicked off his tour — the longest Latin American trip of his presidency — by completing an agreement with Mr. da Silva to increase the development of ethanol as a leading alternative to oil. Mr. Chávez’s influence in the region stems from Venezuela’s oil wealth, which he is using to build a loose coalition of left-leaning, anti-American countries.

But Mr. Chávez quickly shot back in an interview on a popular morning television program in Argentina, dismissing the ethanol plan as “a crazy thing, off the wall.” He accused the United States of trying “to substitute the production of foodstuffs for animals and human beings with the production of foodstuffs for vehicles, to sustain the American way of life.”

Bush administration officials have sought to play down Mr. Chávez, contending his influence is overblown by the news media and noting that South American polls show him with regional ratings no better than Mr. Bush’s. President Bush refuses even to mention his name.

At the rally Friday night, Mr. Chávez said he had watched Mr. Bush on television in Brazil and concluded that “he is afraid to say my name” because Mr. Chávez’s vision of “21st century socialism” is advancing in the region.

“Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, terrorism, security, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq,” he said mockingly. “He seems incapable of developing even a single idea.”

Beyond the popular discontent with Bush and the US that is being exposed by Bush's tour, a discontent that Chavez has encouraged and championed, there are a couple of other things were noting.

First, to state the obvious, South America is becoming more socially and economically independent of the US as it emerges from the catastrophe of the neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s and 1990s. Leaders need not present themselves as supplicants when a US President deigns to visit, and the public is not shy about confronting a President, like Bush, they hold in contempt. Of course, this is somewhat of a simplification, as the evolution away from neoliberalism is not clear and consistent, yet the trend is unmistakeable, with the countries of the continent looking towards regional integration and trade with other parts of the world as an alternative to direct US investment.

Second, as an extreme instance of this trend, Chavez does not censor himself out of concern as to how he will be perceived by people in the US. During a tour to Venezuela in 2005, with a group of others from the US, I would periodically hear one of them say that Chavez was too sharp in his rhetoric, and that he should be advised to tone it down. I did not share this perspective, nor do I do so today, because, while it may make it more personally comfortable to publicly support Chavez in this country when he is more restrained, such an attitude is based upon a lack of understanding that it will ultimately be Venezuelans, Argentinians, Chileans, Bolivians . . . in short, South Americans . . . who will determine whether Chavez succeeds or fails in his challenge to US imperialism in the region.

Chavez speaks to them directly, in their language, having concluded that liberal Americans will do little, if anything, to protect him if Bush goes after him again. Indeed, in a typical instance of liberals catering to the power elite, some actually go out of their way to attack him, as Nancy Pelosi did when she called him a thug. Chavez has always been politically astute, and he doesn't waste time seeking the approval of people who will do nothing for him. He survived the coup of 2002 when the populace poured out in the streets to demand his release from prison, at a time when the entire US political establishment expressed its willingness to accept the coup leaders as the new government.

Lastly, the depth of anger towards Bush displayed by the protesters foreshadows the explosion of hostility that will erupt if we attack Iran. Yet again, as he has frequently done in the last year, as he did here before the UN, Chavez is energizing opposition to this impending attack, even when he does not make specific reference to it. He has been the most active, most vocal opponent of it outside the Middle East, and he deserves great praise for his effort to make the protection of the Iranian people an issue of global concern.

Labels: Activism, Bolivarian Revolution, Bush, Hugo Chavez, Neoliberalism, War with Iran

From the McClatchy Washington Bureau:

The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy's review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn't confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty - the highest rate since at least 1975.

Meanwhile, from Oilwars, in early September 2006 (apologies for the lack of the chart referenced here, but I think it is fully explained in the text, and, if you are still curious, please click on the link):

Readers will recall from previous discussions that Venezuelan social classes are indicated by the letters A through E with those in class A having the highest incomes but being a very small percentage of the population while those in social class E have the lowest incomes but constitute more than half the Venezuelan population.

Now this chart is interesting in several ways. Like the chart from Datos that we recently examined we see monthly average household incomes. Some of the numbers are virtually identical; for example, the average monthly income in 2006 for social class D is given 890,990 Bolivares (about $356) by Datos while Datanalysis pegs it at 892,000 Bolivares. You can’t get much closer than that. Yet there are also some differences. For social class E Datos says their income is 680,419 Bolivares ($272) while Datanalysis puts it significantly lower at 515,000 ($206).

What all of that means is that these numbers need to be taken as approximations, maybe even crude approximations, rather than as something that is exact. I’m not sure how the numbers are compiled. But given that they are put together by polling firms I suspect they simply ask people how much they earn and so these numbers could suffer from all the same types of problems one runs across when doing polling on something like people’s sex lives.

Nevertheless, even recognizing these numbers may not be precise there is still valuable information to be gleaned from them. First, we see even the lower Datanalysis numbers show that income is rising for Venezuela’s poor majority. With a rise in income of 445% versus accumulated inflation of 376% social class E has seen its standard of living rise in real terms 45%. And keep in mind, this is just hard cash. It doesn’t include the numerous in-kind benefits given via discounted food being sold at Mercal or expanded health care benefits through Barrio Adentro. Not to mention, if one uses the Datos income number of 680,419 then the accumulated income rise would be 620% which represents a whopping increase of 92% in real terms.

This means that since Chavez came to power in 1999 the income of Venezuela’s poorest has increased between 45% and 92% depending on whose numbers you believe. Either of those numbers represents a stunning increase and go a long ways towards explaining Chavez’s overwhelming popularity.

Secondly, there is another trend that can’t be missed looking at that chart. In the column on the far right side it gives the percent increase in income for each social class between 1998 and 2006 (in nominal terms). It clearly shows that the poorest people, those in social classes E and D have seen much larger increases than those in the better off classes of A, B, C. In fact straight down the column one sees that the poorer people are the more their income has increased under Chavez. Chavez was elected precisely to help those who had the least and he has done exactly that.

Two different countries, two different directions.

Labels: American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Bush, Hugo Chavez, Neoliberalism, Poverty

Radical hip hop, courtesy of Immortal Technique:

Hat tip to lenin over at Lenin's Tomb.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Culture, American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Hip Hop, Music, Neoliberalism, Racism, YouTube

Labels: Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez, Neoliberalism

Labels: Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez, Neoliberalism

From the secure confines of the US, the possibility that the US, along with the upper class Venezuelan opposition, will seek to annul the result of the Venezuelan presidential election on December 3rd seems improbable. After all, opinion polls have consistently shown Chavez far ahead of rival, Manuel Rosales, so any attempt to persuade the rest of the world that Rosales was deprived of victory through fraud would be comical.

The opposition, in the aftermath of the 2004 referendum to recall Chavez, alienated its liberal allies in the US, requiring even sympathetic friends like the Carter Center to repudiate their paranoid claims. But, for people in Venezuela, where memories of the 2002 coup are still fresh, there is no margin for error. There is also the troubling fact that US efforts to destabilize the Chavez regime have intensified.

Eva Golinger Describes the Threat

As Golinger recently explained to Green Left Weekly, the US is attempting to do so financially, diplomatically and militarily:

“One of them is the financial front, which the US has been pursuing over the last five years or so, by financing the opposition. This has increased over the past year, doubled in some instances. In fact, funding by USAID [the US Agency for International Development], through its Office of Transition Initiatives (set up here after the coup), is now up to US$7.5 million a year. But, more interestingly, the recipients of the funding have increased dramatically.

“Two years ago, there were about 63 organisations receiving funding and, today, according to the latest documents I’ve gotten under the US Freedom of Information Act, there are 132 groups. When we talk about financial power, it’s not just the money; it’s about the penetration of Venezuelan society by using money to get into the various sectors. They find groups that are allegedly human rights groups, groups that work in the education system and so on, but are really working for the opposition.

“Basically, the US is funding these organisations in civil society ... to obtain control in all different parts of the country. There are large concentrations of programs in Merida, for example, also in Tachira, Zulia, and then in the interior of the country - places like Barquisimeto, and the states of Lara, Monagas, and Anzoategui. . . .

“So, USAID money has increased, and the same with [money from] the National Endowment for Democracy. And it’s not just the money. They’re bringing down their best experts. For example, in the case of the [presidential] election campaign right now, they’re bringing in political strategists, communications experts, to help them craft the entire [opposition] campaign. It’s not just money, because in the case of Venezuela, which is different from Haiti, or Nicaragua, or even Bolivia, the opposition doesn’t need the money. The dollars don’t really compare, if you contrast it to the new Plan for Transition in Cuba, for example. The total there is about $80 million. In Venezuela, the total is about $9 million a year.

Golinger's description of US military efforts reveals a coordinated, sophisticated effort:

I’ve done a lot of investigating this year on the island of Curacao [in the Caribbean], close to Venezuela, where the US has a military base. I have a chapter devoted to it in my new book, because it is really alarming.”

“[The US build-up] is with the support of the Dutch government, less so with the Antilles government”, Golinger explained. She said there is a government-owned refinery in Curacao that has been rented to Venezuela since 1984. The contract is set to expire in 2019. Golinger said the refinery “produces most of the oil for Central America and the Caribbean. It’s incredibly important and strategic.”

Washington is trying to convince the Curacao government to break the contract and sell the refinery to a US company. “All the major infrastructure companies, water, gas, electricity, telephone, [in Curacao] are US-owned. And now they want the refinery. You can see Venezuela from Curacao ... You could launch a missile attack from Curacao, easily.”

“So, there’s Curacao, and then there’s Colombia”, Golinger told GLW. “There’s a major build-up of military bases there. While we are not certain of the exact number of US troops in Colombia, we do know from official documents that the sum total of US forces in the Latin American region is 40,000 troops ... That’s a huge number. It’s enough to invade any Latin American country.

“The US conducts military exercises regularly. I went to Curacao to check out some of the warships involved. It’s pretty freaky ... that’s all intended to intimidate. They haven’t done that since the end of the Cold War.

“Another part of the military front are the psychological operations. It’s a media war, but it goes beyond use of the regular media and gets into all kinds of propaganda ... There’s a doctrine of psychological warfare prepared by the Pentagon ...

“The use of Colombian paramilitaries by the US is also included in the military front. And the intervention of US Special Forces is part of that as well.”

Golinger explained: “I actually interviewed a paramilitary here in Caracas. What he told me is that all the paramilitaries work jointly with the US and the Special Forces in Colombia. They’re trained by them, in command-and-control operations.

The paramilitaries are the “actors”. “For example, they’re the ones sent over to try to assassinate Chavez. But the command-and-control is directed and controlled by the US Special Forces. The US forces come in, and are on the ground in Colombia, but they send the paramilitaries to do the dirty work, together with the Colombian army.

“The US has been building up a secret base near the border with Venezuela, next to Apure state. It’s a small base, but the US is building airplane hangars for spy planes. It’s basically a launching point for espionage operations and monitoring of Venezuela. They also have large amounts of high-ranking US Special Forces there. At every one of these bases ... there are always the high-ranking US Special Forces, the high-ranking Colombian forces, then the low-ranking Colombian forces, and finally the paramilitaries. It’s like a chain of command, but at the head of that command are the US Special Forces.”

Golinger said that there were attempts to push the FARC into Venezuela to provide an excuse for Colombian troops to enter the country. “They want to increasingly make that border area a combat zone - to declare it an uncontrollable international zone, so they need to bring in international forces to control it. This would include all of that area, from Apure to Zulia.”

In her new book there is a chapter on Plan Balboa, a 2001 military exercise underwritten by the US that is “basically the invasion plan for Venezuela”. “What they do is come in from Colombia, Panama and from bases in Curacao. What they do on their map is take over Zulia and the border area and declare it an international zone ....

“In the case of Venezuela, Plan Balboa is the virtual, trial stage of invading the country, and then over the past five years they have been trying it out. The April 2002 coup was the first stage. The US had military forces here, and brought in submarines and other equipment, and their Black Hawk helicopters. How did it play out? It didn’t work, and since then they have been preparing for the next stage. For example, the movement for Zulia to secede, or to become an autonomous state, is related to all that.”

Right now, most of Venezuela’s developed oil industry is located in Zulia and Falcon. “So, the idea is to expand Plan Colombia into that region, and the border area that requires international forces, and, at the same time, move for secession of Zulia. Eventually, they would just divide the country and take the oil wealth. And from there they would deal with the rest of the country.”

GLW asked Golinger about Washington’s ability to stage a military intervention while it was bogged down in Iraq. She explained that, on top of the 40,000 US troops stationed in Latin America, “the recent military exercises in the Caribbean showed their strength ... right in the area near Venezuela, they had about eight major warships, one of which was the aircraft carrier USS George Washington, with 85 combat planes and 6500 troops on board. In all, they had about 10,000 troops. That’s a total of 50,000 [soldiers] in the region.

George Ciccariello-Maher Describes the Response

In a highly informative Counterpunch article, Ciccariello-Maher explains how the US and opposition may activate these resources by seek to manufacture an electoral crisis after the election results are announced, an endeavor that he identifies as Plan B:

. . . unfortunately, this doesn't mean that the opposition will be passively accepting their electoral defeat on December 3rd. Instead, rather than complaining of electoral conditions beforehand and talking the abstentionist talk, the opposition is rallying around the slogan of "defend the vote." This vague slogan has some clear consequences, as became clear when opposition ideologue Rafael Poleo appeared recently on Globovisión. Poleo, who has links to the Bush clan and the CIA, who was thoroughly implicated in the April 2002 coup, and whose daughter has been directly implicated in the assassination of Danilo Anderson, the judge whose job it was to collect evidence against the coup-plotters, laid out the strategy of the radical opposition in the clearest of terms on November 6th: "On the 3rd, it is up to the citizens to align themselves with the opposition, they need to go and vote. On the 4th, it's up to Manuel Rosales to lead the protests against the fraud that has been set up. And on the 5th, it's up to the Armed Forces to decide if it will continue forcing those in the Venezuelan opposition to put up with a shameful regime."

According to Poleo, Rosales could be the most important Venezuelan of the 21st century "if he does what he needs to do." The Electoral Committee (CNE) "will announce the victory of Hugo Chávez, regardless of what the numbers say," and "at 6am on the 4th, the streets will fill with people decrying fraud, and then we will see the true size of Rosales." Revealingly, Poleo declares that "that day after, the 4th, will be even more important than December 3rdOn the 4th, it's up to the people to do what the Ukranians did, to carry out an 'Orange Revolution,' to hurl themselves onto the streets, because the fraud has already been arranged, they already have the numbers ready." The Chavistas will not abandon power for the simple reason that "they are Nazis." A coup attempt is in the works, and it has been publicly announced beforehand (all claims of a lack of press freedom in Venezuela thereby proven false).

While Poleo seems uncertain about which path Rosales will choose, the ground is already being laid for his participation in this coup attempt. Hence, Rosales has been clearly evasive when faced with questions about his recognition of the election results: when Chávez publicly agreed to respect the results of the election and challenged his opponent to do the same, the response from Rosales echoing the "democratic" doublespeak of the Northern superpower. Rosales made the very question sound silly: Venezuela is, according to Rosales, the "only country on earth" in which there would even exist a doubt regarding the recognition of elections, but despite this the opposition candidate would not agree to accept these results without the significant caveat that said results must be fair. In terms of the second step of the plan-appeals to the military-Rosales even beat Poleo to the punch, openly calling on November 5th for a meeting with the military high command, a request which was flatly denied by Minster of Defense General Raúl Baduel on the basis that such a meeting would constitute an unconstitutional intervention of the military into the electoral process.

Predicably, the Chavistas have their own contingency plan:

. . . So we shouldn't be surprised to find that the most radical sectors of Chavismo are also making plans. Specifically, several armed self-defense organizations rooted in the Tupamaro movement and largely-defunct Bolivarian Circles, which claim a particularly powerful following in the barrios of western Caracas, are preparing plans for the defense of Chavista neighborhoods.

Such plans are centered in the historically revolutionary neighborhood of 23 de Enero (January 23rd), in the climbing foothills in western Caracas. 23 de Enero has long represented the organizational "brain" of radical Caracas, as opposed to the "heart" of revolt represented by the slums of Petare, that powderkeg standing far to the east of the city which gave rise to the epic 1989 Caracazo riots. The spirit of revolt has often been sparked in the utter destitution of Petare, the largest and most dangerous of Caracas' slums, but the organizational structure which fans the flames can generally be found in 23. In the short lived April 2002 coup against Chávez, several ministers were spirited away for safe keeping in the "bunker" of 23 de Enero, only to reemerge and participate in the efforts to recover the president.

Given this role as radical safe haven, the many radical armed groups populating the neighborhood-from the Carapaica, who made their plans public in local newspapers, to Cepa Cartolini, to the Colectivo Alexis Vive (most of these groups descended from the earlier Coordinador Simón Bolívar and later Tupamaros)-think first of protecting the "bunker": a source close to sectors of the Tupamaros tells me that "the general line is that, in the event of trouble, if it's a confrontation with lead, they'll guard 23 de Enero, keep in contact with other organizations, and mobilize resistance." Specifically, I am told, most organizations have adopted a bifurcated approach to resisting the "Plan B" of the opposition: half of their forces will be devoted to rearguard defense of the bunkers, while half will form "mobilization groups" traveling throughout the city.

It should be pointed out that, while the Metropolitan Mayor's office has "fulfilled a necessary support role" by providing logistical support to radical neighborhoods (cellphones, motorcycles), this role is precisely that: support. That is to say, these neighborhood organizations are best considered as "base movements" engaged in a revolutionary process of local administration. In the words of one participant, the resistance to threats from the opposition has led these groups to "create new forms for organizing the local self-defense of sovereignty." These new forms are not limited to urban areas, either: from the Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front-several thousand of whom marched through the city in military formation on November 20th-to the much more shadowy rural resistance army deemed the "Bolivarian Liberation Front," grassroots resistance to any efforts to put the brakes on the revolutionary process is ubiquitous.

Predictably, the Neoconservative Media is Frightened

The London Telegraph, known for its notorious role in libeling George Galloway and advocating the launching of the war in Iraq, is concerned about the creation of groups capable of resisting an attempt to topple Chavez:

With Mr Chavez hoping to win another six years in power, the opposition fears that even if it wins at the ballot box it will never be able to take power.

After purging the armed forces of elements opposed to his populist Left-wing rule, Mr Chavez has ensured that a new reserve force is outside the normal military command chain, answering only to him.

The former paratrooper colonel, who led a failed coup in 1992, has military men in most ministries, in politics, and even on the Supreme Court.

"What we have now is a form of Praetorian government," said Domingo Irwin, a defence analyst at the Pedagogical University in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital.

Not surprisingly, the article neglects to mention two things, beyond the failure to acknowledge Chavez's string of electoral victories from 1998 to date: (1) that the Venezuelan civil service has historically been both corrupt and aligned with the opposition, necessitating his recourse to people that he has encountered in the military that he considers more competent and trustworthy; and (2) that polls have consistently shown Chavez with substantial leads over Rosales, most recently by nearly 2 to 1 by Zogby.

Neither omission is a coincidence, as the first serves the purpose of casting doubt on a electorally victorious politician's entitlement to appoint his own people to leadership positions, while the second one is consistent with the attempt to persuade people outside Venezuela that opposition claims of fraud, should they lose as indicated by the polls, are credible. Psychologically, however, the problem is much simpler:

For Alberto Garrido, a leading political analyst in Caracas, the president is building up and arming his support base, should he lose elections or be removed from power by other means.

"He believes in the revolutionary principle of a people in arms, and he believes that he can never be beaten should his people be armed," said Mr Garrido.

Let's examine this outwardly short, simple comment with care. Contrary to the implication of Garrido's remark, as already observed by Ciccariello-Maher, Chavez has already expressed his willingness to accept the result, while Rosales has equivocated. So, once this has been clarified, we can see how Garrido gives the game away: the president is building up and arming his support base should he . . be removed from power by other means. And, just what might those be? The implementation of Plan Balboa, as described by Golinger? US military support for an armed rebellion launched by the opposition after the election? Or, more simply, the assassination of Chavez?

And, then, Garrido's direct quote: . . . he believes that he can never be beaten should his people by armed. Sadly, according to the standards of the Telegraph and Garrido, Chavez isn't playing by the rules. After 2002, he's not going to diminish the significance of the threat because he is naive enough to think that the US cannot blatantly remove a popularly elected president of another country from power. He's not even going to wait for the attack, in whatever form it comes, and then, unlike the Republican government in Madrid in 1936, respond to the call of the people for arms. No, he believes that an attack is coming, as do many in Venezuela, and they are going to be armed and ready before it happens.

Let's hope that the US remains preoccupied with Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East. Let's hope that my distanced American perspective about the plausibility of a US inspired opposition uprising is correct, because if Marines are ever sent into the slums of Petare, 23 de Enero and elsewhere, they will find themselves in the Sadr City of South America, and the boundaries of that allegorical Sadr City could rapidly extend from Santiago to Mexico City, anywhere with a combustible mix of an American presence, a wealthy elite and a large populace impoverished as a consequence of neoliberalism.

If that happens, there will be no nonsense about Support the Troops, rather, it will be unconditional support for the right of the Venezuelans to prevail by any means necessary. Many rightly fear that a war with Iran could quickly become uncontrollable, but we ignore the prospect that an attempt to remove Chavez could initiate an equally calamitous conflict.

Labels: American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez, Neoliberalism

UPDATE: Two good sources for news and commentary about events in Venezuela: Oil Wars and venezuelanalysis.com.

INITIAL POST: Last year, I visited Venezuela as part of a tour conducted by Global Exchange, and post several entries about it here. One of them addressed the resistance to the privatization of the aluminum and steel industries in Puerto Ordaz. Sadly, the public steel company, SIDOR was privatized, but ALCASA and VENALUM, the aluminum companies, were not, as Chavez arrived on the scene just in time.

The consequences of the privatizations of the 1990s in Venezuela remains an enduring issue, as the following article demonstrates, and reveals that the social reality of Venezuela is far different than what is described by right wing sources in the US media:

A large scale protest yesterday by workers from the Sidor steelworks secured the release of five of their co-workers after they were arrested by the National Guard on charges of undue expropriation and seizure of plant machinery. The protest, supported by the unions at the plant, partially closed down the steelworks and brought the city of Puerto Ordaz, in Venezuela’s Bolívar state to a standstill. The five men deny any wrongdoing and say the management tried to intimidate them.

On exiting the Palace of Justice where they were held, Juan Valor, Leonel Grisset, Richard Gregorio Alfonzo, Joel Hernández Ruiz and Osmel Ramírez spoke in front of thousands of supporters. Valor, who is the press secretary of Sutiss, the largest steelworkers union said, “The union won’t shut its mouth, and we’re going to keep struggling for workers’ rights. There are more than 8,000 workers that are being exploited and the Ministry of Work doesn’t try to solve the problems that exist in the country.”

The five men work for Transporte Camila, one of 232 private contracting companies that employ workers on a casual basis – on lower wages and with less benefits than permanent workers. The General Secretary of Sutiss, José “Acarigua” Rodríguez, spoke fully in support of the protest and said the situation was a “reflection of what occurs in many other contracting firms that exploit the workers of Sidor in order to obtain large profits, without consideration to their salary and social rights.”

The protests started at six o’clock on Tuesday morning when the workers of the plant blocked the routes in and out of Puerto Ordaz. They then made their way in their thousands towards the Palace of Justice, blocking the streets on their way. By 10.30 they had blocked all the main arteries of the city. Outside of the palace they shouted slogans such as “freedom for our comrades.” According to Rodríguez, at least 3,000 of the protesters were permanent workers in solidarity with their less fortunate compañeros.

Rodríguez also claimed that the protests, while focused mainly on the five arrested men, were about other more general grievances the workforce has towards the management. Outstanding wages, unpaid benefits such as health insurance & holiday pay and bad safety practices by employers are just some of the issues around which workers are united.

Orlando Aguilar the owner of Transporte Camila and the president of the Chamber of Service Industries (CESA) said the five men forcefully took machinery which caused losses to the steelworks and for that reason, “there remained no alternative but to call the law.” He also said the industrial action by the workers will have exceeded $2 million.

Francisco Rangel Gómez, governor of Bolívar State, also condemned the protests and called the continuous militancy of the unions in the state, which he said often leads to battles between unions, “union terrorism.”

Sidor, a former state-owned company, was privatised in 1998. Until then it had 18,000 permanent workers employed under a collectively negotiated contract. After privatization the total number employed was reduced to 15,000 with 10,000 of those forced to accept temporary contracts. Inevitably, conflict between management and workers has been common with many strikes occurring over the last eight years. During the opposition sponsored oil industry shutdown in 2002, the Sidor management closed down the plant in solidarity. At the time the workers backed the government and worked across the state to keep gas flowing.

While the protesters can claim a victory from their organisation it wasn’t outright. The five freed men still have to present themselves at the Palace of Justice every thirty days. Officials there may have a surprise waiting for them on October 5, however.

“They have imposed the ruling that we present ourselves every thirty days, and I want to make a call to the conscience of all the workers so that we all present ourselves here every thirty days at the tribunals,(..), I’ll see you all on October 5”, shouted Juan Valor at the end of his speech.

Such a seemingly simple story, a labor dispute, but rich in its implications. Upon a cursory examination, we immediately recognize that the American discourse about Chavez subjecting Venezuela to a dictatorial regime is false. Look at the cast of characters: the Chamber of Service Industries, SUTISS, the steel workers labor union, the Governor of Bolivar state, Francisco Rangel Gomez, five organizers of steel plant temporary workers, Juan Valor, Leonel Grisset, Richard Gregorio Alfonzo, Joel Hernández Ruiz and Osmel Ramírez, and the owner of the private contractor, Transporte Camilia, Orlando Aguilar, pretty much the same cast that you would except to encounter during the course of an American, European, Brazilian or Japanese labor dispute, and all acting to aggressively assert what each perceives as their self-interest. Protests, arrests, job actions, public statements to the press . . . this is not the behaviour of people fearful of reprisal.

After this observation, more subtle revelations specific to Venezuela come to the surface. As I emphasized in a post here in October 2005, Chavez has encouraged the implementation of a labor policy known as cogestion, roughly translated as co-management, to empower workers in the Venezuelan economy:

Currently, cogestion is an evolving concept, as Chavez has yet to seek legislation to provide for its implementation throughout the country, rendering it highly susceptible to people projecting their own societal visions upon it. According to BBC reporter Iain Bruce, it is only being attempted within some publicly owned companies, primarily within the aluminum industry, and a couple of bankrupt ones. Elie Sayago, an environmental specialist at CVG Alcasa, the state controlled aluminum company in Puerto Ordaz that produces primarily for the domestic market, defined cogestion as a radical break with the traditional hierarchical methods of management. Workers participate in the fundamental decisions of the company, such as the methods of production, the election of managers, including the director, and the preparation of the budget. Both myself and Bruce, who must have visited the facility shortly after I left the region, had similar conversations with line workers, workers who expressed improved morale and enhanced productivity as a result of their direct involvement in the management of the company. Carlos Lanz, the recently appointed president of CVG Alcasa, told Bruce, "This is about workers controlling the factory and that is why it is a step towards socialism of the twenty-first century."

Clearly, the organizers of temporary workers at SIDOR were motivated to put cogestion into practice, and, given that they were not collectivized and lacked labor representation, they selected a particularly radical form of it: the seizure of SIDOR machinery and equipment in one of the plants. Accordingly to the article, the action was part of a larger pattern of labor unrest at SIDOR that commenced with the privatization of the plant in 1998, and, in fact, even before, as I was told by labor organizers in Puerto Ordaz.

While it appears that the seizure was an escalation of this ongoing conflict, it is not possible to make such a statement with certainty. It should additionally be noted that the conflict also has roots in the late 2002-early 2003 sabotage, the attempt by the management of PDVSA, the state run Venezuelan oil company, to depose Chavez after the failed coup by shutting down production. The article helpfully informs us that the management of SIDOR shut down the plant in solidarity, so the temporary workers, and their unionized allies in SUTISS, undoubtedly have a more serious political purpose to take control of the plant away from its anti-Chavez managers and owners.

One would therefore assume that the recently elected governor of Bolivar state, Francisco Rangel Gomez, described as a close friend of Venezuelan Hugo Chavez, would support the workers. Such an assumption is incorrect: Francisco Rangel Gómez, governor of Bolívar State, also condemned the protests and called the continuous militancy of the unions in the state, which he said often leads to battles between unions, “union terrorism.”

Why? A couple of explanations suggest themselves. First, as I said in my post from September 2005, linked at the top of this article:

It is perhaps a telling indication of the Chavez regime's sensitivity towards the need to attract foreign investment and technology that no effort has been made to renationalize SIDOR.

Second, there is fact that the relationship between Chavez and the labor unions of Venezuela is an ambiguous one, as I noted in the October 2005 post already linked as well:

According to Sayago, the concept of cogestion has been driven more by the government than by trade unions, which is consistent with their past collaboration with the political parties of the pre-Chavez era in facilitating privatization.

Perhaps, there is a residue of mistrust that persists to this day.

Labels: Activism, Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez, Neoliberalism, Unions

UPDATE: Charlie Hardy, an American expatriate who lives in Caracas, observed the following response to Chavez's speech:

I watched Chavez's speech in the office of a public building. The secretaries were all cheering Chavez as he spoke the words.

Here is the link for the rest of Charlie's perspective about the speech that emphasizes how much of the rest of the world views the US.

INITIAL POST: Chavez elaborates on his UN speech in this interview with Tim Padgett of Time:

TIME: Why do you attack President George W. Bush with such jolting language?

CHAVEZ: I believe words have great weight, and I want people to know exactly what I mean. I'm not attacking President Bush; I'm simply counterattacking. Bush has been attacking the world, and not just with words--with bombs. When I say these things I believe I'm speaking for many people, because they too believe this moment is our opportunity to stop the threat of a U.S. empire that uses the U.N. to justify its aggression against half the world. In Bush's speech to the U.N., he sounded as if he wants to be master of the world. I changed my original speech after reading his.

TIME: But doesn't your rhetoric--referring to Bush, for example, as an "alcoholic"--risk alienating potential allies?

CHAVEZ: First of all, Bush has called me worse: tyrant, populist dictator, drug trafficker, to name a few. I was simply telling a truth that people should know about this President, a man with gigantic power.

Chavez specifically describes the evolution of his thought in light of the hubris of the United States in the mid-1990s, as it, through the International Monetary Fund, ruthlessly imposed structural adjustment plans throughout the Americas, and, indeed the world:

TIME: You said recently that you believe the "Bolívar Doctrine is finally replacing the Monroe Doctrine" on your watch. Why?

CHAVEZ: For two centuries in this hemisphere we've experienced a confrontation between two theses--America's Monroe Doctrine, which says the U.S. should exercise hegemony over all the other republics, and the doctrine of Simón Bolívar, which envisioned a great South American republic as a counterbalance. Bush has spread the Monroe thesis globally, to make the U.S. the police of the world--if you're not with us, he says, you're against us. We're simply doing the same now with the Bolívar thesis--a doctrine of more equality and autonomy among nations, more equilibrium of power.

TIME: What's the difference between your "socialism for the 21st century" and past attempts to fix the region's economic inequality?

CHAVEZ: When I was released from prison [in 1994] and began my political life, I naively took as a reference point Tony Blair's proposal for a "third way" between capitalism and socialism--capitalism with a human face. Not anymore. After seeing the failure of Washington-backed capitalist reforms in Latin America, I no longer think a third way is possible. Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation, of the kind of misery and inequality that destroys social values. If you really look at things through the eyes of Jesus Christ--who I think was the first socialist--only socialism can really create a genuine society.

It is this refusal to accept direction from the United States and its G-8 allies that earned Chavez the honor of being described as an everyday thug by Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Like Samson in the temple, Chavez repudiated the edifice of neoliberal technical and financial assistance as it has evolved in institutions created by United States, Europe and Japan, since the end of World War II.

While the trial of Saddam Hussein goes on and on, with the trial of O. J. Simpson now looking like an example of judicial efficiency by comparison, Chavez indicted, tried and convicted an engrained model of global social control in about half an hour. With the rise in commodity prices, including, but not limited to, oil and natural gas, empowering him, and the leaders of other developing countries, Chavez publicly shattered the chains of a debtor/creditor relationship that has required that they remain subservient to the United States, so subservient, in fact, that any public pronouncements other than obsequious gratitude are received as the most grave insults.

Poor Nancy. Upon seeing Chavez's speech, she must have experienced an overwhelming visceral sensation of abject fear as if discovering that the residents of San Francisco housing projects like Sunnydale were now financially and politically independent. Conservatives may ruthlessly exploit the peoples of the developing world, but it is liberals like Pelosi that must rationalize their abuse as an inevitable aspect of global economics so as to justify a privileged position as the intermediary of their grievances. Chavez pretty much said, I don't need you, anymore, I can speak and act for myself.

Faced with such an assertiveness, predictably received quite favorably by people all over the world, especially among people of color, Pelosi stared into an abyss of irrelevancy, feeeling herself disappear as if Dorothy had thrown water on her. Only a thug could do such a terrible thing, just as the only solution to rulers like Chavez and Ahmanijedad is military force, because only the use of such force constitutes an effective example of discipline to keep others in line.

It brings to mind the need to execute rebellious slaves like Nat Turner, because, after all, if we do not make an example of them, others might join the resistance. It is an insight into the times in which we live that Turner was hung for actually organizing a violent uprising against slavery, but rulers like Chavez and Ahmanijedad face threats from the US, as well as covert operations, for merely opposing US policy.

According to wikipedia, Turner was skinned, beheaded and quartered, with body parts kept by whites as souvenirs. One can grotesquely imagine US special forces turning Chavez's corpse over to the Venezuelan elite for similar treatment. Times have changed, however, and the price of regime change in Venezuela, as in Iran, is nothing less than the collapse of the American empire, and its transformation into a pariah state. But are Bush and the neo-conservatives alarmed about such a prospect, or have they been incorrigibly seduced by the allure of self-destruction?

Labels: American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Democrats, Hugo Chavez

UPDATE: Too funny:

But compared with Mr. Ahmadinejad, Mr. Chávez was just more colorful. He brandished a copy of Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” and recommended it to members of the General Assembly to read. Later, he told a news conference that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to meet Mr. Chomsky before he died. (Mr. Chomsky, 77, is still alive.)

INITIAL POST: In his own words:

Representatives of the governments of the world, good morning to all of you. First of all, I would like to invite you, very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it.

Noam Chomsky, one of the most prestigious American and world intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, and this is one of his most recent books, 'Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States.'" [Holds up book, waves it in front of General Assembly.] "It's an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century, and what's happening now, and the greatest threat looming over our planet.

The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads. I had considered reading from this book, but, for the sake of time," [flips through the pages, which are numerous] "I will just leave it as a recommendation.

It reads easily, it is a very good book, I'm sure Madame [President] you are familiar with it. It appears in English, in Russian, in Arabic, in German. I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house.

The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house.

"And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here." [crosses himself] "And it smells of sulfur still today.

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.

I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday's statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.

An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: "The Devil's Recipe."

As Chomsky says here, clearly and in depth, the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its system of domination. And we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated.

The world parent's statement -- cynical, hypocritical, full of this imperial hypocrisy from the need they have to control everything.

They say they want to impose a democratic model. But that's their democratic model. It's the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that's imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons.

What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy.

What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs?

The president of the United States, yesterday, said to us, right here, in this room, and I'm quoting, "Anywhere you look, you hear extremists telling you can escape from poverty and recover your dignity through violence, terror and martyrdom."

Wherever he looks, he sees extremists. And you, my brother -- he looks at your color, and he says, oh, there's an extremist. Evo Morales, the worthy president of Bolivia, looks like an extremist to him.

The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It's not that we are extremists. It's that the world is waking up. It's waking up all over. And people are standing up.

I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism, who are shouting for equality, for respect, for the sovereignty of nations.

Yes, you can call us extremists, but we are rising up against the empire, against the model of domination.

The president then -- and this he said himself, he said: "I have come to speak directly to the populations in the Middle East, to tell them that my country wants peace."

That's true. If we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They'll say yes.

But the government doesn't want peace. The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war.

It wants peace. But what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela -- new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?

He spoke to the people of Lebanon. Many of you, he said, have seen how your homes and communities were caught in the crossfire. How cynical can you get? What a capacity to lie shamefacedly. The bombs in Beirut with millimetric precision?

This is crossfire? He's thinking of a western, when people would shoot from the hip and somebody would be caught in the crossfire.

This is imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal, the empire and Israel firing on the people of Palestine and Lebanon. That is what happened. And now we hear, "We're suffering because we see homes destroyed.'

The president of the United States came to talk to the peoples -- to the peoples of the world. He came to say -- I brought some documents with me, because this morning I was reading some statements, and I see that he talked to the people of Afghanistan, the people of Lebanon, the people of Iran. And he addressed all these peoples directly.

And you can wonder, just as the president of the United States addresses those peoples of the world, what would those peoples of the world tell him if they were given the floor? What would they have to say?

And I think I have some inkling of what the peoples of the south, the oppressed people think. They would say, "Yankee imperialist, go home." I think that is what those people would say if they were given the microphone and if they could speak with one voice to the American imperialists.

And that is why, Madam President, my colleagues, my friends, last year we came here to this same hall as we have been doing for the past eight years, and we said something that has now been confirmed -- fully, fully confirmed.

I don't think anybody in this room could defend the system. Let's accept -- let's be honest. The U.N. system, born after the Second World War, collapsed. It's worthless.

Oh, yes, it's good to bring us together once a year, see each other, make statements and prepare all kinds of long documents, and listen to good speeches, like Abel's yesterday, or President Mullah's . Yes, it's good for that.

And there are a lot of speeches, and we've heard lots from the president of Sri Lanka, for instance, and the president of Chile.

But we, the assembly, have been turned into a merely deliberative organ. We have no power, no power to make any impact on the terrible situation in the world. And that is why Venezuela once again proposes, here, today, 20 September, that we re-establish the United Nations.

Last year, Madam, we made four modest proposals that we felt to be crucially important. We have to assume the responsibility our heads of state, our ambassadors, our representatives, and we have to discuss it.

The first is expansion, and Mullah talked about this yesterday right here. The Security Council, both as it has permanent and non-permanent categories, (inaudible) developing countries and LDCs must be given access as new permanent members. That's step one.

Second, effective methods to address and resolve world conflicts, transparent decisions.

Point three, the immediate suppression -- and that is something everyone's calling for -- of the anti-democratic mechanism known as the veto, the veto on decisions of the Security Council.

Let me give you a recent example. The immoral veto of the United States allowed the Israelis, with impunity, to destroy Lebanon. Right in front of all of us as we stood there watching, a resolution in the council was prevented.

Fourthly, we have to strengthen, as we've always said, the role and the powers of the secretary general of the United Nations.

Yesterday, the secretary general practically gave us his speech of farewell. And he recognized that over the last 10 years, things have just gotten more complicated; hunger, poverty, violence, human rights violations have just worsened. That is the tremendous consequence of the collapse of the United Nations system and American hegemonistic pretensions.

Madam, Venezuela a few years ago decided to wage this battle within the United Nations by recognizing the United Nations, as members of it that we are, and lending it our voice, our thinking.

Our voice is an independent voice to represent the dignity and the search for peace and the reformulation of the international system; to denounce persecution and aggression of hegemonistic forces on the planet.

This is how Venezuela has presented itself. Bolivar's home has sought a nonpermanent seat on the Security Council.

Let's see. Well, there's been an open attack by the U.S. government, an immoral attack, to try and prevent Venezuela from being freely elected to a post in the Security Council.

The imperium is afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices. It calls us extremists, but they are the extremists.

And I would like to thank all the countries that have kindly announced their support for Venezuela, even though the ballot is a secret one and there's no need to announce things.

But since the imperium has attacked, openly, they strengthened the convictions of many countries. And their support strengthens us.

Mercosur, as a bloc, has expressed its support, our brothers in Mercosur. Venezuela, with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, is a full member of Mercosur.

And many other Latin American countries, CARICOM, Bolivia have expressed their support for Venezuela. The Arab League, the full Arab League has voiced its support. And I am immensely grateful to the Arab world, to our Arab brothers, our Caribbean brothers, the African Union. Almost all of Africa has expressed its support for Venezuela and countries such as Russia or China and many others.

I thank you all warmly on behalf of Venezuela, on behalf of our people, and on behalf of the truth, because Venezuela, with a seat on the Security Council, will be expressing not only Venezuela's thoughts, but it will also be the voice of all the peoples of the world, and we will defend dignity and truth.

Over and above all of this, Madam President, I think there are reasons to be optimistic. A poet would have said "helplessly optimistic," because over and above the wars and the bombs and the aggressive and the preventive war and the destruction of entire peoples, one can see that a new era is dawning.

As Silvio Rodriguez says, the era is giving birth to a heart. There are alternative ways of thinking. There are young people who think differently. And this has already been seen within the space of a mere decade. It was shown that the end of history was a totally false assumption, and the same was shown about Pax Americana and the establishment of the capitalist neo-liberal world. It has been shown, this system, to generate mere poverty. Who believes in it now?

What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceanea. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision.

We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.

Venezuela joins that struggle, and that's why we are threatened. The U.S. has already planned, financed and set in motion a coup in Venezuela, and it continues to support coup attempts in Venezuela and elsewhere.

President Michelle Bachelet reminded us just a moment ago of the horrendous assassination of the former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier.

And I would just add one thing: Those who perpetrated this crime are free. And that other event where an American citizen also died were American themselves. They were CIA killers, terrorists.

And we must recall in this room that in just a few days there will be another anniversary. Thirty years will have passed from this other horrendous terrorist attack on the Cuban plane, where 73 innocents died, a Cubana de Aviacion airliner.

And where is the biggest terrorist of this continent who took the responsibility for blowing up the plane? He spent a few years in jail in Venezuela. Thanks to CIA and then government officials, he was allowed to escape, and he lives here in this country, protected by the government.

And he was convicted. He has confessed to his crime. But the U.S. government has double standards. It protects terrorism when it wants to.

And this is to say that Venezuela is fully committed to combating terrorism and violence. And we are one of the people who are fighting for peace.

Luis Posada Carriles is the name of that terrorist who is protected here. And other tremendously corrupt people who escaped from Venezuela are also living here under protection: a group that bombed various embassies, that assassinated people during the coup. They kidnapped me and they were going to kill me, but I think God reached down and our people came out into the streets and the army was too, and so I'm here today.

But these people who led that coup are here today in this country protected by the American government. And I accuse the American government of protecting terrorists and of having a completely cynical discourse.

We mentioned Cuba. Yes, we were just there a few days ago. We just came from there happily.

And there you see another era born. The Summit of the 15, the Summit of the Nonaligned, adopted a historic resolution. This is the outcome document. Don't worry, I'm not going to read it.

But you have a whole set of resolutions here that were adopted after open debate in a transparent matter -- more than 50 heads of state. Havana was the capital of the south for a few weeks, and we have now launched, once again, the group of the nonaligned with new momentum.

And if there is anything I could ask all of you here, my companions, my brothers and sisters, it is to please lend your good will to lend momentum to the Nonaligned Movement for the birth of the new era, to prevent hegemony and prevent further advances of imperialism.

And as you know, Fidel Castro is the president of the nonaligned for the next three years, and we can trust him to lead the charge very efficiently.

Unfortunately they thought, "Oh, Fidel was going to die." But they're going to be disappointed because he didn't. And he's not only alive, he's back in his green fatigues, and he's now presiding the nonaligned.

So, my dear colleagues, Madam President, a new, strong movement has been born, a movement of the south. We are men and women of the south.

With this document, with these ideas, with these criticisms, I'm now closing my file. I'm taking the book with me. And, don't forget, I'm recommending it very warmly and very humbly to all of you.

We want ideas to save our planet, to save the planet from the imperialist threat. And hopefully in this very century, in not too long a time, we will see this, we will see this new era, and for our children and our grandchildren a world of peace based on the fundamental principles of the United Nations, but a renewed United Nations.

And maybe we have to change location. Maybe we have to put the United Nations somewhere else; maybe a city of the south. We've proposed Venezuela.

You know that my personal doctor had to stay in the plane. The chief of security had to be left in a locked plane. Neither of these gentlemen was allowed to arrive and attend the U.N. meeting. This is another abuse and another abuse of power on the part of the Devil. It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us and I embrace you all.

May God bless us all. Good day to you.

Labels: American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez, United Nations

A trailblazing utopian who pressed beyond the constraints of Marxism and anarchism, as described in this excerpt from an obituary by Brian Tovar:

Murray Bookchin, the visionary social theorist and activist, died during the early morning of Sunday, July 30th in his home in Burlington, Vermont. During a prolific career of writing, teaching and political activism that spanned half a century, Bookchin forged a new anti-authoritarian outlook rooted in ecology, dialectical philosophy and left libertarianism.

During the 1950s and '60s, Bookchin built upon the legacies of utopian social philosophy and critical theory, challenging the primacy of Marxism on the left and linking contemporary ecological and urban crises to problems of capital and social hierarchy in general. Beginning in the mid-sixties, he pioneered a new political and philosophical synthesis-termed social ecology-that sought to reclaim local political power, by means of direct popular democracy, against the consolidation and increasing centralization of the nation state.

From the 1960s to the present, the utopian dimension of Bookchin's social ecology inspired several generations of social and ecological activists, from the pioneering urban ecology movements of the sixties, to the 1970s' back-to-the-land, antinuclear, and sustainable technology movements, the beginnings of Green politics and organic agriculture in the early 1980s, and the anti-authoritarian global justice movement that came of age in 1999 in the streets of Seattle. His influence was often cited by prominent political and social activists throughout the US, Europe, South America, Turkey, Japan, and beyond.

Even as numerous social movements drew on his ideas, however, Bookchin remained a relentless critic of the currents in those movements that he found deeply disturbing, including the New Left's drift toward Marxism-Leninism in the late 1960s, tendencies toward mysticism and misanthropy in the radical environmental movement, and the growing focus on individualism and personal lifestyles among 1990s anarchists. In the late 1990s, Bookchin broke with anarchism, the political tradition he had been most identified with for over 30 years and articulated a new political vision that he called communalism.

Infoshop has reprinted an article by Bookchin from 1980, an article in which he addresses the challenges faced by utopian socialists of every stripe:

These far-reaching distinctions between Anarchism as a social movement and Marxism as a political one require further emendations. I have no quarrel with the great wealth of Marx's writings, particularly his work on alienation, his analysis of the commodity relationship and the accumulation of capital. His historical theories require the correction of the best work of Max Weber and Karl Polanyi. But it is not Marx's writings that must be updated. Their limits are defined by their fundamentally bourgeois origins and their incredible susceptibility to political, that is, state-oriented ideologies. Historically, it is not accidental that Anarchism in Spain, in the Ukraine, and, in its Zapatista form in Mexico, could be crushed only by a genocidal destruction of its social roots, notably the village. Marxian movements, where they suffer defeat, are crushed merely by demolishing the party. The seeming "atavism" of Anarchism -- its attempts to retain artisanship, the mutual aid of the community, a closeness to nature and enlightened ethical norms -- are its virtues insofar as they seek to retain those richly articulated, cooperative, and self-expressive forms of human consociation scaled to human dimensions. The seeming "effectiveness" of Marxism -- its attempt to replicate the state in the form of the party, its emphasis on a political apparatus, its scientific thrust and its denial of a prophetic ethical vision -- are its vices insofar as they do not demolish the bourgeois state but incorporate it into the very substance of protest and revolution.

Not accidentally, Marxism has been most sharply alienated from itself. The attempt to "update" Marxian theory, to give it relevance beyond the academy and reformist movements, has added an obfuscating eclectic dimension to its ideological corpus. In response to the Russian general strike of 1905, Rosa Luxemburg was obliged to make the "mass strike" -- a typical Anarchist "strategy" -- palatable to the Second International -- this, not without grossly distorting Engel's view on the subject and the Anarchist view as well. Lenin was to perform much the same acrobatics in State and Revolution in 1917 when events favored the Paris Commune as a paradigm, again assailing the Anarchists while concealing Marx's own denigrating judgment of the uprising in the later years of his life. Similar acrobatics were performed by Mandel, Gorz, et al in May-June 1968, when all of France was swept into a near-revolutionary situation.

What is significant, here, is the extent to which the theory follows events which are essentially alien to its analysis. The emergence of the ecology movement in the late 1960s, of feminism in the early 1970s, and more belatedly, of neighborhood movements in recent years has rarely been viewed as a welcome phenomenon by Marxist theorists until, by the sheer force of events, it has been acknowledged, later distorted to meet economistic, Marxist criteria, and attempts are ultimately made to absorb it. At which point, it is not Anarchism, to which these issues are literally indigenous, that has been permitted to claim its relevancy and legitimacy to the problems of our era but rather Marxism, much of which has become the ideology of state capitalism in half of the world. This obfuscating development has impeded the evolution of revolutionary consciousness at its very roots and gravely obstructs the evolution of a truly self-reflexive revolutionary movement.

By the same token, Anarchism has acquired some bad Marxist habits of its own, notably an ahistorical and largely defensive commitment to its own past. The transformation of the sixties counterculture into more institutionalized forms and the decline of the New Left has created among many committed Anarchists a longing for the ideological security and pedigree that currently afflicts many Marxist sects. This yearning to return to a less inglorious past, together with the resurgence of the Spanish CNT after Franco's death, has fostered an Anarchism that is chillingly similar in its lack of creativity to sectarian forms of proletarian socialism, notably anarcho-syndicalism. What is lacking in both cases is the proletariat and the historical constellation of circumstances that marked the hundred-year-old era of 1848 to 1938. Anarchist commitments to the factory, to the struggle of wage labor versus capital, share all the vulgarities of sectarian Marxism. What redeems the anarcho-syndicalists from outright congruence with authoritarian Marxism is the form their libertarian variant of proletarian socialism acquires. Their emphasis on an ethical socialism, on direct action, on control from below, and their apolitical stance may serve to keep them afloat, but what tends to vitiate their efforts -- this quite aside from the historical decline of the workers movement as a revolutionary force -- is the authoritarian nature of the factory, the pyramidal structure fostered by syndicalist theory, and the reliance anarcho-syndicalists place on the unique role of the proletariat and the social nature of its conflict with capital.

Although he moved beyond anarchism, Bookchin respected its capacity for incorporating new, essential challenges to the concentration of power within the state:

At a time when the proletariat is quiescent -- historically, I believe -- as a revolutionary class and the traditional factory faces technological extinction, Anarchism has raised almost alone those ecological issues, feminist issues, community issues, problems of self-empowerment, forms of decentralization, and concepts of self-administration that are now at the foreground of the famous "social question." And it has raised these issues from within its very substance as a theory and practice directed against hierarchy and domination, not as exogenous problems that must be "coped" with or warped into an economistic interpretation subject of class analysis and problems of material exploitation.

No doubt some Marxists will take umbrage at Bookchin's blunt celebration of anarchism as the source of most contemporary social movements. It is the argument that will never go away, always returning in new variations. Is it only possible to carry forward the revolution by taking control of the instruments of state power, or, must the revolution, if it is to succeed, aspire to the eradication of the state itself?

Nowhere is the question more acute than in Venezuela, where the Chavistas have seized control of the state, through recourse to a paradoxical ideology that emphasizes the nationalism of Bolivar and the universality of Guevara, using it to defend against the imperial intervention of United States, while social movements exploit the newly opened space for experimentation, frequently relying upon the broad anarchist principles enunciated by Bookchin, artisanship, the mutual aid of the community, a closeness to nature and enlightened ethical norms.

Al Giordano touched upon it during the course of an interview in December 2002:

nessie: Are you saying that, win or lose, Chávez is being driven from below, by the ordinary working people themselves, that the Bolivarian Circles are the wave that is sweeping society, and Chávez is surfing it?

Al Giordano: The Bolivarian Circles are very similar to the Workers Councils of Paris 1968. There's also a Situationist tendency in some of what we see in the Venezuelan revolution. One of my best writers recently put that word, revolution, in quotation marks, but I don't. The surrounding of the TV stations, the confrontation with "the spectacle," Chávez's own willingness to confront the corrupt Commercial Media and legalize Community TV and radio, these things are showing the entire world a way out of this media mess. I love it.

None of this means I think that a Chávez government or a Lula government or a Lucio government or any other government is all honey over cornflakes. But the insistence that any movement be "perfect" or "correct" is the quickest route to a permanent state of defeat. What we've seen in Venezuela is that the government (the classic concept of the state) has taken very key actions, like legalizing Community Media as a Constitutional right, and smashing to bits the previous corrupt two-party system, has opened a space for more anarcho-syndicalist and self-valorized activity to gain a foothold in society, where previously it had none.

And this is the change that will outlast the Chávez government. Even the "squalid ones," the former ruling class, admits this over and over again in its discourse: that the damage is already done and every month that goes by and these tendencies (non-governmental tendencies, popular and cultural tendencies) grow, the door slams on tyranny from establishing a foothold ever again.

And, then, there are the movements that have emerged in Argentina since the revolt over the collapse of the currency in December 2001, as profiled in a documentary by Fernando Solanas, The Dignity of the Nobodies, movements of impoverished, dispossed people necessitated by the urgency to find ways to survive in a society shattered by neoliberalism.

Clearly, there are strong anarchist currents within South American social movements, but perhaps, it is something else, or, at least, equally influenced by something else as well, something described by Bookchin in 1994:

. . . Unless everyone is to be so psychologically homogeneous and society's interests so uniform in character that dissent is simply meaningless, there must be room for conflicting proposals, discussion, rational explication and majority decisions -- in short, democracy.

Like it or not, such a democracy, if it is libertarian, will be Communalist and institutionalized in such a way that it is face-to-face, direct, and grassroots, a democracy that advances our ideas beyond negative liberty to positive liberty. A Communalist democracy obliges us to develop a public sphere -- and in the Athenian meaning of the term, a politics -- that grows in tension and ultimately in a decisive conflict with the State.

Confederal, antihierarchical, and collectivist, based on the municipal management of the means of life rather than their control by vested interests (such as workers' control, private control, and more dangerously, State control), it may justly be regarded as the processual actualization of the libertarian ideal as a daily praxis.

Of course, the state remains, and Bookchin's sentiments are typically utopian, but, as Giordano's remarks suggest, the peoples of the Americas appear to be increasingly relying upon a social ethics that mirrors Bookchin's ideal, even as they pragmatically confront the world in which they live. They are confronting the coercion of global neoliberalism through a conscious rejection of hegemonic models, and workers, peasants and indigenous people are in the forefront of creating alternative communal approaches.

It is no doubt psychologically disconcerting to educated activists who have, either consciously or subconsciously, been induced to believe that they must perform a vanguard role in order to successfully transform society. But, if the tone of Bookchin's writing is any indication, the paradoxcial emergence of them by synthesizing indigenous and European cultural experience is something that probably excited him, although, certainly, his students and those closest to him would know best.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Argentina, Bolivarian Revolution, Murray Bookchin, Obituaries