Venezuela: 15 Cops Sentenced in Unionists’ Deaths

[The Vegan Marxist]

Venezuela: 15 Cops Sentenced in Unionists’ Deaths
By WEEKLY NEWS UPDATE

The Venezuelan Attorney General’s Office announced on Aug. 2 that the Fourth Trial Court of the eastern state of Anzoátegui had handed down prison sentences to 15 police agents for the Jan. 29, 2009 shooting deaths of two unionists at the Mitsubishi Motors Corp (MMC) Automotriz auto factory in the Los Montones de Barcelona industrial park, located outside the city of Barcelona [see Update #977 (http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/2009/02/wnu-977-2-workers-shot-in-venezuelan.html)]. Five agents were sentenced to 12 years and nine months for voluntary homicide in the killing of Pedro Jesús Suárez Poito, a plant employee, and Javier Marcano, who worked at the Macusa auto parts factory, and for injuries to Alexander García, a worker at the Barcelona plant. Ten agents received three-year prison terms for their involvement, and six were acquitted.

The same court sentenced police agent Juan Carlos Álvarez Rojas to 16 years and 10 months in prison last December for his part in the killings.

The killings took place when police tried to remove striking Mitsubishi workers who had occupied the Barcelona plant. Workers said they threw rocks and bottles at the police in response to the attempt to end the sit-in and that the police fired tear gas canisters and then shot at them. Company executives claimed that the workers were armed, but the announcement of the court’s decision didn’t mention any charges against the workers.

The leftist news site Laclase.info claims that an Anzoátegui state official initially blamed the strikers for the confrontation and that Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez implied at first that the workers were armed. The site called the sentencing of the police agents “an important victory, although still incomplete,” pointing out that the judge who ordered the operation was not tried. The site also called for an investigation of the role of Anzoátegui governor Tarek William Saab Halabi, a Chávez ally. (Dow Jones 8/2/10 (http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2010/08/02/ex-police-venezuela-sentenced-mitsubishi-killings/) via Fox Business News;Laclase.info (Venezuela) 8/3/10 (http://laclase.info/nacionales/condenados-15-policias-de-anzoategui-por-asesinato-de-dos-trabajadores-automotrices))

http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5561

[Svoboda]

Big Deal, check this out.


In Venezuela, Rise Of Labor Unions Turns Deadly

by Juan Forero


August 2, 2010
In Venezuela, socialist President Hugo Chavez frequently touts his country as a workers' paradise, where workers run nationalized companies and the oligarchs are kept in check.
But Venezuela is among the world's most dangerous countries for union organizers.
Trade union activists are being murdered at an alarming rate — 75 in the past two years — as new unions vie with traditional unions for power and control. Some union chiefs say government meddling in the unions is stirring the violence.
One after another, union members are being killed in Maracay, a historic city along Venezuela's northern fringe. One union leader was shot dead in his home. Three others died when two gunmen unloaded their handguns in the roadside restaurant where they were eating.
The latest victim was Jerry Diaz, a union activist killed by two gunmen in April. He was shot moments after getting into his car outside his house, says his brother, Cherry Diaz. Diaz says he was half a block away, ran to his brother and found him dying on the street.
The murder remains unresolved. Diaz says he doesn't know why his brother was killed.
But he says that a renegade union had been trying to oust his brother's established union in the paper-making company where he worked.
Anti-Chavez Unions
Under Chavez, unions have multiplied exponentially, promoted by the government to counter what officials here call stridently anti-Chavez unions.
The government calls itself solidly pro-labor. It has repeatedly hiked the minimum wage. And it has handed once-private companies to the workers to run.
But some union leaders describe a dark side, saying the new, pro-Chavez unions go head to head with established ones.
The objective is to control work sites. And the pay-off is controlling the jobs at those sites. That's because in Venezuela, workers often pay union leaders kickbacks for their jobs.
Marino Alvarado, an investigator for the Provea human rights group in Caracas, has been looking into the murders.
Business Of Unions
Having a union has become a business, Alvarado says, and that's led to a Mafia-like atmosphere where union leaders end up dead.
The violence has claimed 75 victims in the last two years, according to figures compiled by the Catholic Church. That's more than in Colombia, which over the years has been known as the most dangerous country for union organizing.
Emilio Bastidas is a regional leader of the UNETE confederation of unions in Maracay. UNETE has already lost eight members, the latest being Jerry Diaz.
Bastidas says using hit men to kill off union leaders is a tactic designed to weaken unions opposed to Chavez.
He blames the government and says that most of the slayings are unsolved. He says that sends the message that killing union members will go unpunished.
But he doesn't know if anyone in the government is giving the orders or if it is simply the work of renegade unions taking advantage of the general impunity in Venezuela.
Calls to the attorney general's office and to the Labor Ministry to discuss the problem were not returned.
Anair Medina, Jerry Diaz's wife, says she raised the question of safety with her husband shortly before he was killed. But he told her that he had to keep fighting for his workers, she recalls.
Now, she says, she is alone, left only with the memories of her husband.




Chavez dosen't really give a shit about the workers.

[The Vegan Marxist]

^ That's the biggest bullshit I've ever heard in my life. I hope you realize who you're promoting here: Juan Forero (http://nprcheck.blogspot.com/2009/02/going-nowhere-with-juan-forero.html)

[Volcanicity]

Venezuela: 15 Cops Sentenced in Unionists’ Deaths
By WEEKLY NEWS UPDATE

The Venezuelan Attorney General’s Office announced on Aug. 2 that the Fourth Trial Court of the eastern state of Anzoátegui had handed down prison sentences to 15 police agents for the Jan. 29, 2009 shooting deaths of two unionists at the Mitsubishi Motors Corp (MMC) Automotriz auto factory in the Los Montones de Barcelona industrial park, located outside the city of Barcelona [see Update #977 (http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/2009/02/wnu-977-2-workers-shot-in-venezuelan.html)]. Five agents were sentenced to 12 years and nine months for voluntary homicide in the killing of Pedro Jesús Suárez Poito, a plant employee, and Javier Marcano, who worked at the Macusa auto parts factory, and for injuries to Alexander García, a worker at the Barcelona plant. Ten agents received three-year prison terms for their involvement, and six were acquitted.

The same court sentenced police agent Juan Carlos Álvarez Rojas to 16 years and 10 months in prison last December for his part in the killings.

The killings took place when police tried to remove striking Mitsubishi workers who had occupied the Barcelona plant. Workers said they threw rocks and bottles at the police in response to the attempt to end the sit-in and that the police fired tear gas canisters and then shot at them. Company executives claimed that the workers were armed, but the announcement of the court’s decision didn’t mention any charges against the workers.

The leftist news site Laclase.info claims that an Anzoátegui state official initially blamed the strikers for the confrontation and that Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez implied at first that the workers were armed. The site called the sentencing of the police agents “an important victory, although still incomplete,” pointing out that the judge who ordered the operation was not tried. The site also called for an investigation of the role of Anzoátegui governor Tarek William Saab Halabi, a Chávez ally. (Dow Jones 8/2/10 (http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2010/08/02/ex-police-venezuela-sentenced-mitsubishi-killings/) via Fox Business News;Laclase.info (Venezuela) 8/3/10 (http://laclase.info/nacionales/condenados-15-policias-de-anzoategui-por-asesinato-de-dos-trabajadores-automotrices))

http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5561
Good to see justice being done in Venezuela.If only the uk could follow suit.

[Obs]

Big Deal, check this out.


In Venezuela, Rise Of Labor Unions Turns Deadly

by Juan Forero


August 2, 2010
In Venezuela, socialist President Hugo Chavez frequently touts his country as a workers' paradise, where workers run nationalized companies and the oligarchs are kept in check.
But Venezuela is among the world's most dangerous countries for union organizers.
Trade union activists are being murdered at an alarming rate — 75 in the past two years — as new unions vie with traditional unions for power and control. Some union chiefs say government meddling in the unions is stirring the violence.
One after another, union members are being killed in Maracay, a historic city along Venezuela's northern fringe. One union leader was shot dead in his home. Three others died when two gunmen unloaded their handguns in the roadside restaurant where they were eating.
The latest victim was Jerry Diaz, a union activist killed by two gunmen in April. He was shot moments after getting into his car outside his house, says his brother, Cherry Diaz. Diaz says he was half a block away, ran to his brother and found him dying on the street.
The murder remains unresolved. Diaz says he doesn't know why his brother was killed.
But he says that a renegade union had been trying to oust his brother's established union in the paper-making company where he worked.
Anti-Chavez Unions
Under Chavez, unions have multiplied exponentially, promoted by the government to counter what officials here call stridently anti-Chavez unions.
The government calls itself solidly pro-labor. It has repeatedly hiked the minimum wage. And it has handed once-private companies to the workers to run.
But some union leaders describe a dark side, saying the new, pro-Chavez unions go head to head with established ones.
The objective is to control work sites. And the pay-off is controlling the jobs at those sites. That's because in Venezuela, workers often pay union leaders kickbacks for their jobs.
Marino Alvarado, an investigator for the Provea human rights group in Caracas, has been looking into the murders.
Business Of Unions
Having a union has become a business, Alvarado says, and that's led to a Mafia-like atmosphere where union leaders end up dead.
The violence has claimed 75 victims in the last two years, according to figures compiled by the Catholic Church. That's more than in Colombia, which over the years has been known as the most dangerous country for union organizing.
Emilio Bastidas is a regional leader of the UNETE confederation of unions in Maracay. UNETE has already lost eight members, the latest being Jerry Diaz.
Bastidas says using hit men to kill off union leaders is a tactic designed to weaken unions opposed to Chavez.
He blames the government and says that most of the slayings are unsolved. He says that sends the message that killing union members will go unpunished.
But he doesn't know if anyone in the government is giving the orders or if it is simply the work of renegade unions taking advantage of the general impunity in Venezuela.
Calls to the attorney general's office and to the Labor Ministry to discuss the problem were not returned.
Anair Medina, Jerry Diaz's wife, says she raised the question of safety with her husband shortly before he was killed. But he told her that he had to keep fighting for his workers, she recalls.
Now, she says, she is alone, left only with the memories of her husband.




Chavez dosen't really give a shit about the workers.
Workers are never reactionary. :rolleyes:

[Victory]

Big Deal, check this out.


In Venezuela, Rise Of Labor Unions Turns Deadly

by Juan Forero


August 2, 2010
In Venezuela, socialist President Hugo Chavez frequently touts his country as a workers' paradise, where workers run nationalized companies and the oligarchs are kept in check.
But Venezuela is among the world's most dangerous countries for union organizers.
Trade union activists are being murdered at an alarming rate — 75 in the past two years — as new unions vie with traditional unions for power and control. Some union chiefs say government meddling in the unions is stirring the violence.
One after another, union members are being killed in Maracay, a historic city along Venezuela's northern fringe. One union leader was shot dead in his home. Three others died when two gunmen unloaded their handguns in the roadside restaurant where they were eating.
The latest victim was Jerry Diaz, a union activist killed by two gunmen in April. He was shot moments after getting into his car outside his house, says his brother, Cherry Diaz. Diaz says he was half a block away, ran to his brother and found him dying on the street.
The murder remains unresolved. Diaz says he doesn't know why his brother was killed.
But he says that a renegade union had been trying to oust his brother's established union in the paper-making company where he worked.
Anti-Chavez Unions
Under Chavez, unions have multiplied exponentially, promoted by the government to counter what officials here call stridently anti-Chavez unions.
The government calls itself solidly pro-labor. It has repeatedly hiked the minimum wage. And it has handed once-private companies to the workers to run.
But some union leaders describe a dark side, saying the new, pro-Chavez unions go head to head with established ones.
The objective is to control work sites. And the pay-off is controlling the jobs at those sites. That's because in Venezuela, workers often pay union leaders kickbacks for their jobs.
Marino Alvarado, an investigator for the Provea human rights group in Caracas, has been looking into the murders.
Business Of Unions
Having a union has become a business, Alvarado says, and that's led to a Mafia-like atmosphere where union leaders end up dead.
The violence has claimed 75 victims in the last two years, according to figures compiled by the Catholic Church. That's more than in Colombia, which over the years has been known as the most dangerous country for union organizing.
Emilio Bastidas is a regional leader of the UNETE confederation of unions in Maracay. UNETE has already lost eight members, the latest being Jerry Diaz.
Bastidas says using hit men to kill off union leaders is a tactic designed to weaken unions opposed to Chavez.
He blames the government and says that most of the slayings are unsolved. He says that sends the message that killing union members will go unpunished.
But he doesn't know if anyone in the government is giving the orders or if it is simply the work of renegade unions taking advantage of the general impunity in Venezuela.
Calls to the attorney general's office and to the Labor Ministry to discuss the problem were not returned.
Anair Medina, Jerry Diaz's wife, says she raised the question of safety with her husband shortly before he was killed. But he told her that he had to keep fighting for his workers, she recalls.
Now, she says, she is alone, left only with the memories of her husband.




Chavez dosen't really give a shit about the workers.


People like you will never be taken seriously.

[Nolan]

Chavez dosen't really give a shit about the workers.


Because Chavez totally controls the state governments and the older, established unions are never, you know, diseased with AFL-CIO syndrome and are appendages of capital.

[Svoboda]

^ That's the biggest bullshit I've ever heard in my life. I hope you realize who you're promoting here: Juan Forero
Yeah I don't know who he is and I don't really give a shit, I'm tired of the promotion of Chavez as some sort of savior of the worker and as a true socialist.

Workers are never reactionary. :rolleyes:
What about the two world wars? Or really an instance when nationalism comes into play?


People like you will never be taken seriously.
Why?

[KurtFF8]

Yeah I don't know who he is and I don't really give a shit, I'm tired of the promotion of Chavez as some sort of savior of the worker and as a true socialistThis is of course a point of debate, but I hardly see how the article you posted demonstrates one way or the other. It's clearly using poor logic and anti-Chavez propaganda without any real evidence showing that Chavez's policies are the cause of this rise in union deaths. Nor does it explain (or even hint at) why going against the pre-established trade unions in the country is a bad thing. (I think many people on this forum can give you first hand accounts of why this may indeed be a good thing in some places).

One thing that Mao said which can be pretty useful here was that even under socialism, the class struggle is not over (regardless of whether you're a Maoist or not, this should be quite relevant). Venezuela has not even achieved "state socialism" or socialism-by-any-label according to anyone I've heard, so of course class struggle will continue there, it likely would if a "workers revolution" occurred tomorrow.

I don't get these critics who are like "see, Venezuela isn't a workers paradise!" as if Chavez or anyone is claiming it is. It really frustrates me to see some on the Left repeat this "criticism"

[RadioRaheem84]

Yeah I don't know who he is and I don't really give a shit, I'm tired of the promotion of Chavez as some sort of savior of the worker and as a true socialist.

You should care who about the author of your dumb article is. Chavez is a not a real deal socialist but he has offered the working class something better than what was touted before by the past oligarchs. There is more worker mobilization than ever before.


What about the two world wars? Or really an instance when nationalism comes into play?

I think he was being sarcastic. Of course workers can be reactionary.


Why?

Because of your article. And because your didn't catch a comrade's obvious sarcasm.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Yeah I don't know who he is and I don't really give a shit, I'm tired of the promotion of Chavez as some sort of savior of the worker and as a true socialist.

First of all, it is important on who you're supporting through their articles, because Juan is a known anti-chavez critic who's been known to distort facts to back up his claims. I know some conservatives who don't trust Juan.

Second of all, whatever you may feel about Chavez, you can't deny that Chavez has saved the people of Venezuela, particularly the working class, from what use to be Venezuela many years ago.

Third of all, Chavez nor any of us have stated he's a "true socialist" nor will bring socialism to Venezuela. Chavez even stated, himself, through a speech to the working class & peasantry during the armed march that he is only the beginning & that it was up to the working class & peasantry to fight against capitalism & to bring forth socialism in Venezuela, NOT him.


What about the two world wars? Or really an instance when nationalism comes into play?

Like everyone else stated, he was being sarcastic.


Why?

Can it be anymore obvious?

[Svoboda]

This is of course a point of debate, but I hardly see how the article you posted demonstrates one way or the other. It's clearly using poor logic and anti-Chavez propaganda without any real evidence showing that Chavez's policies are the cause of this rise in union deaths. Nor does it explain (or even hint at) why going against the pre-established trade unions in the country is a bad thing. (I think many people on this forum can give you first hand accounts of why this may indeed be a good thing in some places).

I think the article just shows that union deaths are still happening after Chavez has been in power for over a decade where one would expect for that thing to be mostly eradicated.


First of all, it is important on who you're supporting through their articles, because Juan is a known anti-chavez critic who's been known to distort facts to back up his claims. I know some conservatives who don't trust Juan.
Just because someone is ant-Chavez dosen't mean that they are biased necessarily does it? It seems like you may dislike him(I may be wrong) just because he's against Chavez. Do you think that all people that are anti-Marx or anti-communist are also all biased?



Second of all, whatever you may feel about Chavez, you can't deny that Chavez has saved the people of Venezuela, particularly the working class, from what use to be Venezuela many years ago.

I could also say that FDR "saved" the workers from the worst of the Depression in the 30s, but the fact is the workers in both situations were not given any real power, the fundamentals of Capitalism and a central authoritarian figure would ultimately run the show.



Third of all, Chavez nor any of us have stated he's a "true socialist" nor will bring socialism to Venezuela. Chavez even stated, himself, through a speech to the working class & peasantry during the armed march that he is only the beginning & that it was up to the working class & peasantry to fight against capitalism & to bring forth socialism in Venezuela, NOT him.


If he really wants to them power he better centralizes power so heavily and give the workers and peasants real opportunity to attain power.

Also I apolgize for missing the sarcasm.


And why can't I be taken seriously? I don't understand?

[KurtFF8]

I think the article just shows that union deaths are still happening after Chavez has been in power for over a decade where one would expect for that thing to be mostly eradicated.

Why exactly would you expect that? Especially if Chavez is doing what the Left wants him to do: intensify and try to win the class struggle for the side of the working class.

As history (including especially contemporary) shows us: the ruling class (aka the capitalist elite) is more than willing to use repression to prevent the working class from making even modest gains in places like Latin America. Just look at Colombia.

Why should we be surprised that such reactions continue when the Left takes bourgeois state power? They are obviously quite threatened in Venezuela so they are reacting to that.

[RadioRaheem84]

Do you think that all people that are anti-Marx or anti-communist are also all biased?

Against Marx and Communism, yes. They certainly do not aid us in class struggle.

[pranabjyoti]

Well, Venezuela is not a workers paradise, BUT IT IS CERTAINLY BETTER THAN MOST OF THE PLACES OF THE WORLD. At least, it's the second best (second to Cuba) in the whole third world, perhaps most of the first world. At least, far better than the World Police state.

[Artemis3]

More importantly, isn't this a hijacking of a thread? What about the news of sentencing the cops? If something occurs which isn't bad, must it be buried into oblivion?

I don't remember who was, on this forum last year was accusing Chavez himself for the murder of these unionists, and i seem to recall saying the cops and the (corrupt) judge giving the (illegal) orders were being prosecuted, etc.

If it was me, i would say those sentences are ridiculous; but the worst you can get in this country is a whole 30 years. No adding possible; no double life sentences plus 15 years like one of the 5 Cuban anti-terrorism heroes were given in the United terrorists haven States of America.

In any case the important thing here is to hijack the thread, because any sort of good news from Venezuela are unacceptable... The judicial system in Venezuela is highly corrupt, so its short of a miracle something like this happened.

Last time a prosecutor was going against the interests of the oligarchy, he was blown up with C4 in his car. Now most if his suspects are happily self-exiled in USA (usually FL), after scamming people of their savings, ordering assassination, among other beauties.

[Obs]

What about the two world wars? Or really an instance when nationalism comes into play?
Sarcasmo, compañero.

[Barry Lyndon]

The ultra-lefts on revleft are fanatical in their hatred of Chavez. First they tried to pin the deaths of these Mitsubishi workers on him, now they are trying to bury this article of the perpetrators being punished by posting reactionary propaganda posing as 'left' criticism. With 'communists' like this, who needs right-wingers?

[Svoboda]

Against Marx and Communism, yes. They certainly do not aid us in class struggle.
Sure, but are they necessarily biased or wrong?

Well, Venezuela is not a workers paradise, BUT IT IS CERTAINLY BETTER THAN MOST OF THE PLACES OF THE WORLD. At least, it's the second best (second to Cuba) in the whole third world, perhaps most of the first world. At least, far better than the World Police state.
You like Cuba and Venezuela so much you go move there. As far as I can tell from the refugees from Cuba and the immigrants coming from Latin America they feel their situation isn't all too great where they are.

[RadioRaheem84]

Sure, but are they necessarily biased or wrong?Things concerning leftism, most likely.


You like Cuba and Venezuela so much you go move there. As far as I can tell from the refugees from Cuba and the immigrants coming from Latin America they feel their situation isn't all too great where they are. What a rightist argument; "Go move there". It's such a cop out. As if people have the resources and opportunity to just get up and move. Secondly, many Cubans flee Cuba because they're usually seeking more not because they're not getting enough to live. It's a different situation then when a Haitian or a Guatemalan leaves their country.

[Obs]

You like Cuba and Venezuela so much you go move there. As far as I can tell from the refugees from Cuba and the immigrants coming from Latin America they feel their situation isn't all too great where they are.
Mr. O'Reilly, this is low, even for you.

[Barry Lyndon]

You like Cuba and Venezuela so much you go move there. As far as I can tell from the refugees from Cuba and the immigrants coming from Latin America they feel their situation isn't all too great where they are.

I actually am considering moving to live in Venezuela(or another progressive nation in Latin America), once I have the means to do so and my Spanish is good enough. So sick of this thoroughly reactionary society where even the 'left' spits on hopes for an alternative to capitalism.

[RadioRaheem84]

I actually am considering moving to live in Venezuela(or another progressive nation in Latin America), once I have the means to do so and my Spanish is good enough. So sick of this thoroughly reactionary society where even the 'left' spits on hopes for an alternative to capitalism.

Yes, it sucks to think of abandoning one's community to help another but the reality of the ground makes me think that the situation is nearly hopeless in the States. People in here argue that Czarist Russia was worse so it can happen here, but in Czarist Russia there wasn't a lot of access to all the information we have now. People in the States have the means in which to liberate themselves intellectually yet choose reactionary politics willingly. It's not really a matter of the mind here in the States, which is why I am fearful of a growing nationalist movement.

I think it is time for me to prepare myself to leave the States in the next five years or so too.

[KurtFF8]

You like Cuba and Venezuela so much you go move there. As far as I can tell from the refugees from Cuba and the immigrants coming from Latin America they feel their situation isn't all too great where they are.

This plus an Adam Smith quote in a sig. I predict a short amount of time between now and when this user posts something that will make them restricted.

[KurtFF8]

Yes, it sucks to think of abandoning one's community to help another but the reality of the ground makes me think that the situation is nearly hopeless in the States. People in here argue that Czarist Russia was worse so it can happen here, but in Czarist Russia there wasn't a lot of access to all the information we have now. People in the States have the means in which to liberate themselves intellectually yet choose reactionary politics willingly. It's not really a matter of the mind here in the States, which is why I am fearful of a growing nationalist movement.

I think it is time for me to prepare myself to leave the States in the next five years or so too.

One of the philosophers in the documentary "Examine Life" went to go aid the rebels of Nicaragua, and the rebels response to his presence was "It's great that you're hear to show international solidarity and help us, but what would help us the most is for you to go organize in the United States and bring a revolution there."

The US doesn't have very many committed revolutionaries compared to many other even "First world" countries. Thus losing the few we have because you want to go experience a place that is already going in a better direction seems a bit selfish to me.

/2cents

[RadioRaheem84]

The US doesn't have very many committed revolutionaries compared to many other even "First world" countries. Thus losing the few we have because you want to go experience a place that is already going in a better direction seems a bit selfish to me.But what work can be done to overcome what has been the most insane reactionary practice in anti-leftist propaganda in the history of the bourgeoisie class warfare. We're talking about whole generations influenced by absolute false hoods when the correct information is just a click away on the internet or at library card swipe away.
It isn't a matter of reasoning with people in the States anymore. We're dealing with smashing an near alternate universe the right has created to supplant any leftist critique of the status quo. What the ruling classes presume has been seared into the collective conscious of many in the States. You want our organizations to muster all the intellectual and activist muscle to go against a juggernaut like that?
When people in Cuba, Venezuela, Nepal, and even West and Eastern Europe have at least more of an understanding of what's going on and are in some of those areas are mobilizing to construct something useful for workers, an alternative, and I am being selfish for wanting to join them someday?

Are we missionaries supposed to stay in a harmful territory to the very last breath? C'mon, Kurt, I will do what I can but I at least want to experience what my nation is missing and has been missing for a very long time.

[pranabjyoti]

You like Cuba and Venezuela so much you go move there. As far as I can tell from the refugees from Cuba and the immigrants coming from Latin America they feel their situation isn't all too great where they are.
At least I know that they are better than my India, the world's biggest demo(no)cracy(!). And I also clearly want to say the policy of immigration of the world police and self proclaimed champions of DEMOCRACY is two faced, least to say. If the immigration policy of US will be same to the Indians as Cubans, I am sure that US now would be another overseas state of India.:lol:
I am very much willing to go to Cuba or Venezuela and I think I can serve the revolution well. But, for that, the governments of those countries should have some proper immigration policy. Moreover, India was under Britain's colonial rule and English is still the official language here. But, the language of Cuba and Venezuela are Spanish and Portuguese respectively. That's also a problem because I have to learn those languages from the scratch.

[Barry Lyndon]

You like Cuba and Venezuela so much you go move there. As far as I can tell from the refugees from Cuba and the immigrants coming from Latin America they feel their situation isn't all too great where they are.

You know that Cubans are the only refugees who automatically get US citizenship immediately upon arriving on North American shores?
Do you know that far larger numbers of people are trying to get out of the capitalist hellhole that neighbors Cuba called Haiti, but are forced by the Coast Guard to turn back?
Why is it that the people who leave Cuba are an indictment of socialism, but the huge waves of millions of refugees fleeing Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Cambodia, the Philippines, and countless other sweatshop havens are never used as an indictment of neo-liberal capitalism? Are you really that stupid?
Or are you a dedicated ultra-left troll hell bent on burying any article that portrays real existing socialism in a positive light?

[Nolan]

You like Cuba and Venezuela so much you go move there. As far as I can tell from the refugees from Cuba and the immigrants coming from Latin America they feel their situation isn't all too great where they are.

Venezuelan Americans, when they do have an opinion, overwhelmingly hate Chavez from my experience. In Venezuela itself, though, it's a completely different story.

Those who are more likely to immigrate are the ones who are anti-whoever anyway - or just neutral and looking for better work.

[RadioRaheem84]

Venezuelan Americans, when they do have an opinion, overwhelmingly hate Chavez from my experience. In Venezuela itself, though, it's a completely different story.

Those who are more likely to immigrate are the ones who are anti-whoever anyway - or just neutral and looking for better work.


Surprisingly, I have heard from most Indian American who immigate to the States for working class positions tell me India is horrible right now, rife with corruption and the poor are getting poorer. Contrast this with the glowing news of India and from the Indian upper crust.

I always hear about how great Chile is and how it's the model for Latin American nations to follow. But everyone of my relatives who comes to the States from Chile say that the nation is for the rich. One can only enjoy all the tales of the bourgeoisie press if one has the funds for it.

[The Vegan Marxist]

The US doesn't have very many committed revolutionaries compared to many other even "First world" countries.

I don't know if this is true or not. From a comrade that I talk to who lives in Britain, according to him, there's more "revolutionaries" in the States rather than where he lives. He says it died down drastically, which is what's allowing the emergence of the privatization of the NHS.

[Svoboda]

I actually am considering moving to live in Venezuela(or another progressive nation in Latin America), once I have the means to do so and my Spanish is good enough. So sick of this thoroughly reactionary society where even the 'left' spits on hopes for an alternative to capitalism.
Good I hope you have fun there.

This plus an Adam Smith quote in a sig. I predict a short amount of time between now and when this user posts something that will make them restricted.
What's wrong with Adam Smith? Or even the quote? Smith was a very misunderstood guy, he's not the "founder" of Capitalism like everyone thinks he was, Chomsky actually called him a Libertarian Socialist.

You know that Cubans are the only refugees who automatically get US citizenship immediately upon arriving on North American shores?
Do you know that far larger numbers of people are trying to get out of the capitalist hellhole that neighbors Cuba called Haiti, but are forced by the Coast Guard to turn back?
Why is it that the people who leave Cuba are an indictment of socialism, but the huge waves of millions of refugees fleeing Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Cambodia, the Philippines, and countless other sweatshop havens are never used as an indictment of neo-liberal capitalism? Are you really that stupid?
Or are you a dedicated ultra-left troll hell bent on burying any article that portrays real existing socialism in a positive light?
The reason why the US accepts Cuban immigrants is obviously strictly political, its not because they actually care about the Cubans, that's pretty obvious. But that's irrelevant the point I was trying to make is that if Cuba really is a "socialist paradise" why the hell do so many people want to leave it?

And I'm not in any way denying that people from developing countries are trying to come to America because of exploitation caused by Western Capital in their countries. I'm just curious why they go to the exploitative United States instead of the socialist paradise?

Real socialism? The people in Cuba and Venezuela do not have any legitimate control over the means of production, everything ultimately has to be funneled from top down by the state, if you want to call that socialism, fine. But as far as I know socialism means workers control of the means of production. And if you want to bring Marx into it socialism or the first part of the revolution is supposed to to be the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as far as I can tell in Cuba and Venezuela it is the dictatorship of the party.

[pranabjyoti]

And I'm not in any way denying that people from developing countries are trying to come to America because of exploitation caused by Western Capital in their countries. I'm just curious why they go to the exploitative United States instead of the socialist paradise?
Pretty simple reasons. English is the topmost foreign language taught in most of the countries, specially those which was previously under British rule and now under US influence. Those, who knows English well comes from the upper class of that country (though backward, but still those countries have class division, worse than capitalism in most cases). So, as they know English, their obvious choice would be either US or UK.
Though, in my opinion, you have pointed pointed out a very important inability of the socialist countries so far. Rarely they have programmes for immigration and rarely they have a good immigration policy. And most tragically, they are less aware about that point.

Real socialism? The people in Cuba and Venezuela do not have any legitimate control over the means of production, everything ultimately has to be funneled from top down by the state, if you want to call that socialism, fine. But as far as I know socialism means workers control of the means of production. And if you want to bring Marx into it socialism or the first part of the revolution is supposed to to be the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as far as I can tell in Cuba and Venezuela it is the dictatorship of the party.
Every class needs some representative party or organization to implement its class rule. Working class is no different. In my opinion, the real question is how much they have control of the party which represents its interests and how strictly they can watchdog its moves, so that it cannot betray the working class. What you have said is proof of emergence of working class as a ruling class for a very short time, in short it's now learning how to walk like a baby. It may be have fallen many times more, but ultimately it will learn to walk on its own feet.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

and Venezuela it is the dictatorship of the party.

what, Venezuela is a single-party state now, since when

Chomsky Shmonsky, Adam Smith was at the very least a social democrat.

[LETSFIGHTBACK]

I actually am considering moving to live in Venezuela(or another progressive nation in Latin America), once I have the means to do so and my Spanish is good enough. So sick of this thoroughly reactionary society where even the 'left' spits on hopes for an alternative to capitalism.


My brother and I constantly talk about it. I'll never forget when the war started, my brother and I were marching against the war, and the people standing on the side were spiting at us, cursing, and one guy even threw a punch at me. A homeless man even verbally attacked me and called me "anti American". A man sleeping on a steam vent, eating out of dumpsters, who is a vet, still will not part with his Illusions while this government craps all over him.But he attacks me.Yeah, I would like to move, but where? this nation exports it stupidity all around the world.

[jake williams]

^ That's the biggest bullshit I've ever heard in my life. I hope you realize who you're promoting here: Juan Forero (http://nprcheck.blogspot.com/2009/02/going-nowhere-with-juan-forero.html)
It's actually really funny because as soon as I saw your post all I could think was "queue the first person to complain because they think Chavez is being 'authoritarian'" - in using what state power he has to fight what state power the fascists still have.

[Svoboda]

Every class needs some representative party or organization to implement its class rule. Working class is no different. In my opinion, the real question is how much they have control of the party which represents its interests and how strictly they can watchdog its moves, so that it cannot betray the working class. What you have said is proof of emergence of working class as a ruling class for a very short time, in short it's now learning how to walk like a baby. It may be have fallen many times more, but ultimately it will learn to walk on its own feet.
Cuba has had over fifty years now hasn't it? And who's still really in control their?

what, Venezuela is a single-party state now, since when

No, but with Chavez constantly trying to block out the oppostion and limit freedom of the press its starting to look like one.

[Obs]

Cuba has had over fifty years now hasn't it? And who's still really in control their?
It's been besieged for fifty years, too. The workers are in control of production in Cuba. Not that this thread is about Cuba, but whatever.


No, but with Chavez constantly trying to block out the oppostion and limit freedom of the press its starting to look like one.
The opposition is the right wing. Why do you want to allow them to spread their propaganda? Can't you see what a silly idea that is?

[pranabjyoti]

Cuba has had over fifty years now hasn't it? And who's still really in control their?
Fifty years may seem long enough from the viewpoint of a single man's life, but for a class in historical context, it's not enough. Capitalism takes more than 3 centuries to develop and moreover, the task before the proletariat is much tougher than the bourgeoisie.

No, but with Chavez constantly trying to block out the oppostion and limit freedom of the press its starting to look like one.
What kind of freedom of press are you talking about? Does that exist anywhere in the world? US and other imperialist countries are very "good" examples of "freedom of press".:laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:

[Svoboda]

It's been besieged for fifty years, too. The workers are in control of production in Cuba.

No the state is in control of production


The opposition is the right wing. Why do you want to allow them to spread their propaganda? Can't you see what a silly idea that is?
If you destroy dissent you destroy the revolution.

Fifty years may seem long enough from the viewpoint of a single man's life, but for a class in historical context, it's not enough. Capitalism takes more than 3 centuries to develop and moreover, the task before the proletariat is much tougher than the bourgeoisie..
So the bourgeoisie still have sway in Cuba now?


What kind of freedom of press are you talking about? Does that exist anywhere in the world? US and other imperialist countries are very "good" examples of "freedom of press".
???How is the US a bad example or at least a worst example of freedom of the press than venezula.

[Kotze]

No, but with Chavez constantly trying to block out the oppostion and limit freedom of the press its starting to look like [a single-party state].What do you mean by freedom of the press?

Are you thinking about the freedom of a TV station? Do you own a TV station? Do you know anyone who owns a TV station? Do you think some of those who have posted here own a TV station or two? What does a TV station have to do with my freedom? Genuine communication, a back and forth between participants, happens on the street, over the telephone, online. Do you believe that freedom of the rich to bullshit the public has anything to do with genuine freedom of speech?

Not only does the law of modern western democracies, in its majestic equality, forbid the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread; it also gives the rich as well as the poor freedom of the press, freedom to show disapproval of certain content by refusing to buy ad space, and freedom to criticize films or texts alongside extensive excerpts if the copyright holder is cool with that or if you are willing to defend yourself in court with the notoriously fuzzy fair use doctrine.

If you destroy Fox News, you destroy freedom. :rolleyes:

[Svoboda]

What do you mean by freedom of the press?

Are you thinking about the freedom of a TV station? Do you own a TV station? Do you know anyone who owns a TV station? Do you think some of those who have posted here own a TV station or two? What does a TV station have to do with my freedom? Genuine communication, a back and forth between participants, happens on the street, over the telephone, online. Do you believe that freedom of the rich to bullshit the public has anything to do with genuine freedom of speech?

Not only does the law of modern western democracies, in its majestic equality, forbid the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread; it also gives the rich as well as the poor freedom of the press, freedom to show disapproval of certain content by refusing to buy ad space, and freedom to criticize films or texts alongside extensive excerpts if the copyright holder is cool with that or if you are willing to defend yourself in court with the notoriously fuzzy fair use doctrine.

If you destroy Fox News, you destroy freedom.
I don't support the corporate control of media, which I agree naturally makes it reactionary. But the basic fact of the matter is that I can print a newspaper or start a blog or whatever and say what I want without the government interfering. The only time the US government would really interfere would be if their would be if there authority was legitimately questioned to the extent that the people might actually try to change the power structure, ie any US war, the red scares. While Chavez and especially Castro blocks out all dissent questioning them.

And yes if you destroy Fox News you do destroy freedom.

[Blackscare]

While Chavez and especially Castro blocks out all dissent questioning them.

You do realize that's bullshit right? The private news outlets in Venezuela are all rabidly anti-Chavez, and all that he's really done to counter that is create government funded community radio.

The private news outlets are still far larger than the pro-Chavez community run outlets anyway.


So, rather than limiting freedom of speech, he's actually empowering average people with the ability to share their views and fight against the tide of right-wing lies.




Do you actually know anything about Venezuela or are you just assuming things to be true?

[Bright Banana Beard]

Corporation are against freedom of speech, basically because they think they are fighting for it when in fact they are trying to rationalize the freedom of speech to themselves and not to others.

Basically, Chavez done a great deal to promote freedom of speech in Venezuela. Corporations are no friend to freedom of speech.

[pranabjyoti]

So the bourgeoisie still have sway in Cuba now?
If you have some common sense, I think you can understand that I don't want to mean that. In Cuba, the working class has more control over the means of production and the state than perhaps most of the places of the world. But, as I have said, the working class as a ruling class is still in its infancy, therefore it has to learn how to rule and the irregularities may cause due to their lack of knowledge regarding being a ruling class. Even during the industrial revolution, much of the remains of feudalism can be observed all over Europe. But, those can not stop the advancement of capitalism over feudalism.

???How is the US a bad example or at least a worst example of freedom of the press than venezula.
JUST FOLLOW ANY US BASED NEWS CHANNEL, SPECIALLY THOSE WHICH ARE UNDER FOX OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT KIND OF COMPANY, you can understand that easily. Or better ask any comrade from US.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

And yes if you destroy Fox News you do destroy freedom.

Then it's a worthless form of freedom that must be utterly destroyed.

[Svoboda]

You do realize that's bullshit right? The private news outlets in Venezuela are all rabidly anti-Chavez, and all that he's really done to counter that is create government funded community radio.

The private news outlets are still far larger than the pro-Chavez community run outlets anyway.


So, rather than limiting freedom of speech, he's actually empowering average people with the ability to share their views and fight against the tide of right-wing lies.

So what if the private media areanti-Chavez they should be allowed to say what they want, and I must wonder if this "community radio" that Chavez has created would ever be allowed to say a word against Chavez.


Basically, Chavez done a great deal to promote freedom of speech in Venezuela. Corporations are no friend to freedom of speech.
And the state is a friend of free speech?

If you have some common sense, I think you can understand that I don't want to mean that. In Cuba, the working class has more control over the means of production and the state than perhaps most of the places of the world. But, as I have said, the working class as a ruling class is still in its infancy, therefore it has to learn how to rule and the irregularities may cause due to their lack of knowledge regarding being a ruling class. Even during the industrial revolution, much of the remains of feudalism can be observed all over Europe. But, those can not stop the advancement of capitalism over feudalism.

Alright, fine lets say the working class are actually in control as you believe. If this is so then why is Castro (or I assume the workers) beginning a slow process of privatization now?

Then it's a worthless form of freedom that must be utterly destroyed.
Fine, ignorance and dogmatism then.

[Blackscare]

So what if the private media areanti-Chavez they should be allowed to say what they want, and I must wonder if this "community radio" that Chavez has created would ever be allowed to say a word against Chavez.

The point is that they are able to say what they want, and they have a great deal of power.

[Svoboda]

The point is that they are able to say what they want, and they have a great deal of power.
Great deal of Power?

[pranabjyoti]

Alright, fine lets say the working class are actually in control as you believe. If this is so then why is Castro (or I assume the workers) beginning a slow process of privatization now?
At least I don't have any information about that. If, what you have said is true, that clearly indicates the weakness of working class to take proper decision in such a hard scenario. I hope you can understand the level of hardship put on the Cuban working class by world imperialism as embargo. I will agree with you if such kind of privatization occurs without embargo.

[Obs]

So what if the private media areanti-Chavez they should be allowed to say what they want, and I must wonder if this "community radio" that Chavez has created would ever be allowed to say a word against Chavez.
If you're a communist, you should be against the right of corporate media to even exist - why are you defending its right to speak?

And the state is a friend of free speech?Get it through your skull that there's no such thing as free speech in a class society.

Alright, fine lets say the working class are actually in control as you believe. If this is so then why is Castro (or I assume the workers) beginning a slow process of privatization now? Not this shit again.

Fine, ignorance and dogmatism then.I hope you understand why it's a laugh to hear you talking about ignorance.

[Ocean Seal]

The workers get more justice in Venezuela than almost anywhere else. The cops were sentenced, how often are they sentenced in the United States.

[Artemis3]

No, but with Chavez constantly trying to block out the oppostion and limit freedom of the press its starting to look like one.

Really? I wonder how come stuff like this gets printed then?

http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/4451/fotoportada.jpg

I suppose this is the freedom you defend. Can you do the same where you live? Are the newspapers there allowed to do this? How come "Chavez's iron grip" hasn't closed this media and arrested all its owners?

Oh, because there is this old fashioned concept of an independent judiciary branch, a very corrupt one, which Chavez can't control, and keeps allowing stuff like this...

When asked, the editor stated they wanted to support CNN's series of "Venezuela's violence" shows, so they dug this 2 years old picture of a facility which was renewed, just so they could cause some "shock". Unfortunately for them, this broke a law for protecting children (this newspaper is sold in open kiosks nationwide).

Fortunately for them, in Venezuela it would take something like the owner of this US funded newspaper to do some rather stupid and unrelated crime, such as stealing, scamming or killing someone, for some action to be taken; which is plain sad.

But of course, in your rainbow colored dream, it is innocent and oppressed "opposition" media which evil Chavez has tortured and disappeared or something; for some reason your heroes of justice always end rich living in mansions in Florida, and sometimes Peru.

We have 12 years hearing the same "Chavez starting to limit freedoms" speech, it got boring here long ago, and you are only able to keep it in misinformed foreign circles. Heck, i know people angry with Chavez for not taking drastic actions, but that would mean breaking laws, suppressing civil rights (oh the irony) etc. So much for your ruthless freedom limiting tyranny...

[Svoboda]

If you're a communist, you should be against the right of corporate media to even exist - why are you defending its right to speak?
I'm not a communist,


Get it through your skull that there's no such thing as free speech in a class society.
You seem to just be asserting that you hold undeniable truth and want to never question it, communism in your form is the only way, and I'm not going to even listen tothe other side because they obviously are evil and corrupt, I will follow my dogma to the end.

Not this shit again.
?


I hope you understand why it's a laugh to hear you talking about ignorance.
?

[Artemis3]

So what if the private media areanti-Chavez they should be allowed to say what they want, and I must wonder if this "community radio" that Chavez has created would ever be allowed to say a word against Chavez.

And the state is a friend of free speech?

Alright, fine lets say the working class are actually in control as you believe. If this is so then why is Castro (or I assume the workers) beginning a slow process of privatization now?

Fine, ignorance and dogmatism then.

For starters, community radios are created by communities Nationwide. And if you think they don't criticize the process, your ignorance is absolute.

What Chavez did, if something, was to promote a law for their legalization. In many countries, and in the Venezuela of the past, these were considered "pirate" stations, were prosecuted, shutdown, etc.

Private media is, in fact, against the workers. Community media is in the hands of the workers already, because its them who made them. What we want is more community/alternative media, not less. Venezuela's airwaves are dominated by private, for profit, wannabe plutocrats. Both the state and community media are a small minority, but at least the people can now start making and owning their own media, which was exclusive to the rich before Chavez.

We need less private media, and more in the hands of the workers. If we can take existing private media under workers control, thats good too. The State owned media is a minority already, 20% or less, and can stay there for all i care.

[Svoboda]

Really? I wonder how come stuff like this gets printed then?

http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/4451/fotoportada.jpg

I suppose this is the freedom you defend. Can you do the same where you live? Are the newspapers there allowed to do this? How come "Chavez's iron grip" hasn't closed this media and arrested all its owners?

Oh, because there is this old fashioned concept of an independent judiciary branch, a very corrupt one, which Chavez can't control, and keeps allowing stuff like this...

When asked, the editor stated they wanted to support CNN's series of "Venezuela's violence" shows, so they dug this 2 years old picture of a facility which was renewed, just so they could cause some "shock". Unfortunately for them, this broke a law for protecting children (this newspaper is sold in open kiosks nationwide).

Fortunately for them, in Venezuela it would take something like the owner of this US funded newspaper to do some rather stupid and unrelated crime, such as stealing, scamming or killing someone, for some action to be taken; which is plain sad.

But of course, in your rainbow colored dream, it is innocent and oppressed "opposition" media which evil Chavez has tortured and disappeared or something; for some reason your heroes of justice always end rich living in mansions in Florida, and sometimes Peru.

We have 12 years hearing the same "Chavez starting to limit freedoms" speech, it got boring here long ago, and you are only able to keep it in misinformed foreign circles. Heck, i know people angry with Chavez for not taking drastic actions, but that would mean breaking laws, suppressing civil rights (oh the irony) etc. So much for your ruthless freedom limiting tyranny...
Actually Chavez recently put some sort of ban on violent pictures in the newspapers for a short period of time, I don't know the details but I know he carried something like that out.

And if you want to hear about distortion of the judiciary by Chavez, there a few examples, first back in 04 when he tried to pack the Supreme Court by changing the amount of justices from 20 to 32 and then he changed the amount of assembly members needed to hire or fire a justice from a two thirds majority to a regular majority, he then created a law that allowed people to be imprisoned for up to 5 years for "causing panic" by spreading "false information". And in his first referendum he tried to give himself unlimited terms to run as president and failed, so he put up billboards all over the place saying "por ahora" or for now, you know Uribe also tried to extend the amount of terms he could run in but when it was rejected in court he just gave up.

[Obs]

I'm not a communist,
Then what the fuck are you doing here?

[Svoboda]

Then what the fuck are you doing here?
The symbol on the top of my page for revleft says "home of the revolutionary left" not home of the revolutionary communists.

[Obs]

So what are you? A revolutionary social-democrat? Because, and I hate to break this to you, but anarchists oppose the idea of corporate media, too. The real ones, anyway.

[Svoboda]

So what are you? A revolutionary social-democrat? Because, and I hate to break this to you, but anarchists oppose the idea of corporate media, too. The real ones, anyway.
I'd say I'm a Left-Libertarian or Libertarian socialist, and I do oppose the idea of corporate media too, but I support markets.

[Obs]

I'd say I'm a Left-Libertarian or Libertarian socialist, and I do oppose the idea of corporate media too, but I support markets.
Ho boy

[Svoboda]

Ho boy
?

[Obs]

Corporate media is a market. You can't selectively "support" markets.

[Svoboda]

Corporate media is a market. You can't selectively "support" markets.
I support a legitimate free market free of the domination of Capital, I understand what you're trying to say.

[Uppercut]

I support a legitimate free market free of the domination of Capital, I understand what you're trying to say.

There's no such thing as a "free market". Markets require intervention and support in one form or another, usually through corporatism, in order to achieve maximum growth. What kind of support what be needed in order to achieve the maximum amount of growth in the "free market" that you speak of? A worker run market is still capitalism.

[Svoboda]

There's no such thing as a "free market". Markets require intervention and support in one form or another, usually through corporatism, in order to achieve maximum growth. What kind of support what be needed in order to achieve the maximum amount of growth in the "free market" that you speak of? A worker run market is still capitalism.
If it's Capitalism then so be it, and sure you could say there has been no such thing as a "free market" but there has also never been such a thing as "communism", and if you accuse markets of needing gov intervention then I'll counter by saying that communism as far as I can tell would need a hierarchical centralized state.

[Artemis3]

Actually Chavez recently put some sort of ban on violent pictures in the newspapers for a short period of time, I don't know the details but I know he carried something like that out.

And if you want to hear about distortion of the judiciary by Chavez, there a few examples, first back in 04 when he tried to pack the Supreme Court by changing the amount of justices from 20 to 32 and then he changed the amount of assembly members needed to hire or fire a justice from a two thirds majority to a regular majority, he then created a law that allowed people to be imprisoned for up to 5 years for "causing panic" by spreading "false information". And in his first referendum he tried to give himself unlimited terms to run as president and failed, so he put up billboards all over the place saying "por ahora" or for now, you know Uribe also tried to extend the amount of terms he could run in but when it was rejected in court he just gave up.

There is no such thing. A group of people are suing this newspaper for using such awful images, and were requesting a judge to put a temporary ban.

About "justices", the national assembly decided this, not Chavez. Its still much better than the finger appointing still done in the US...

There is no such law. People spreading false information is responsible for their acts, but the opposition usually disguises their propaganda as opinion. I can show you a video where this same newspaper claimed once a worker of the oil industry was burned to death, Chavez showed him the next day live on public TV, to the shame of this fascist US funded pamphlet.

There have been 14+ elections, "Chavism" has won 13 and lost 1. The one lost, had a huge reform to the constitution including unlimited reelection for the president only. Later another referendum attempt was only a single amend to remove the limit of consecutive reelection, for all elected authorities, and it was won and passed.

Uribe bribed half the congress to pass a similar change (the other half threaten to death), but the scandal broke and he had to back down, only to try again but then their Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional; then he appointed his ministry of Defense Santos as his successor, who is now dutifully continuing US domination policy while Uribe lives happily in the US running errands such as defending the Zionist piracy to the Peace Fleet for Gaza acting in a mockery of investigation committee for the UN or such.

[Obs]

If it's Capitalism then so be it, and sure you could say there has been no such thing as a "free market" but there has also never been such a thing as "communism", and if you accuse markets of needing gov intervention then I'll counter by saying that communism as far as I can tell would need a hierarchical centralized state.
Then you have no fucking clue what communism is, and should be restricted.

[Svoboda]

Then you have no fucking clue what communism is, and should be restricted.
And I'll respond by saying that you have no fucking clue what free market means.

[Svoboda]

Uribe bribed half the congress to pass a similar change (the other half threaten to death), but the scandal broke and he had to back down, only to try again but then their Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional; then he appointed his ministry of Defense Santos as his successor, who is now dutifully continuing US domination policy while Uribe lives happily in the US running errands such as defending the Zionist piracy to the Peace Fleet for Gaza acting in a mockery of investigation committee for the UN or such.
At least Uribe accepted defeat when the court ruled that there was no way for him to run in another election, while Chavez again his first referendum failed he did not give up.

Also I have read up a bit on why Chavez put a ban of newspapers from printing violent images, and he basically wanted to cover his ass in the face of the coming elections. The newspapers were essentially printing violent images in order show the rampant amount of crime and violence in the country, for example the murder rate in Venezula is currently 49 per 100,000 the fifth highest in the world and it is 13 more than in Columbia . While the murder rate in Caracas is at 130 per 100,000 and under Chavez's reign the murder rate has risen, in 1998 before he became president the amount of people murdered was around 4,550, in 2009 it was 19,113.

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

Don't take the word of the social-fascists who glorify the social-imperialist regime in Venezuela, read what the actual combative workers' movement in Venezuela has to say:



Orlando Chirino, a revolutionary Venezuelan labor leader, has recently denounced the Bolivarian government as "anti-worker and anti-union." It would be difficult to accuse Chirino of being a "golpista" or an "ally of imperialism." In the year 2002, he condemned the coup, mobilizing to defend the state oil industry from the work stoppage driven by management leadership. In each occasion presented him, he supported and accompanied workers' attempts to control factories closed by their bosses. He is rooted among the workers and was made a leader in the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), the labor union promoted by his own president Hugo Chávez.

If Orlando has been part of the so-called Bolivarian movement for many years, what has happened in 2009 to get him to make these kinds of statements about the government he once defended? The main part of the answer is: because Chirino is an iron defender of the unions' autonomy.

The attempt to control the workers' movement from above began as soon as Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela. In 1999 a clash began with the traditional Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV), a labor union created in 1947 by the influence of Acción Democrática [a center-left political party—AD], and changed, since 1959, into the main negotiator of the labor policies developed by the state. Nevertheless, in spite of Chavistas' questions about the irregularities and vices of this organization, in the absence of their own labor movement, they participated in its internal elections in October 2001. The Bolivarian candidate, Aristóbulo Isturiz, was defeated by the AD candidate Carlos Ortega, who became the president of the CTV. A year and a half later, repeating the same history of the CTV, the government created by decree what it called "the real labor union": the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), which quickly reproduced the corruption that it claimed to fight.

One Marxist organization that participated in its foundation, Opción Obrera, says it more clearly than us: "The UNT was born under agreements from above, and was ridden for a show for the rank and file; few authentic union leaders had power in it..." The UNT was born with governmental protection, which lifted it up. The criticized 'perks' of the old CTV unionism are now granted to the leaders of the UNT, who are staunch supporters of the government." Paradoxically, faced with the limited acceptance of the new labor union among the mass of workers, and the resistance of some sectors of the union to their cooptation, the Bolivarian power promoted new organizations in order to displace the UNT, as is the case of the Frente Socialista Bolivariano de los Trabajadores (FSBT).

A second milestone, justified with the argument of weakening the CTV bureaucracy, was the promotion of the so-called "union parallelism" [paralelismo sindical] from the seat of government, creating unions artificially, from outside, in the principal industries of the country. In this way Chavismo would be able to boast that with almost 700 registered unions, the Bolivarian process has promoted the organization of workers like nothing has before. However, this rise of the unions has not meant their greater influence on labor policies. One indicator is the end of the discussion of collective contracts in the public sector, with 243 expired, paralyzed and unsigned contracts at the end of 2007, in a sector that in May 2009 employs 2,244,413 people, a quarter of those employed by the private sector.

The decisions on salaries, labor conditions, and labor law are made unilaterally by the institutions of the state, after which they are mechanically ratified by the spokespersons of the UNT. In addition to the fragmentation and loss of capacity for pressure and negotiation, union parallelism has exacerbated the disputes for control of workplaces in the areas of oil and construction—in which the union can place 70 out of 100 recruits. This has increased the cases of assassination of union leaders and workers in inter-union strife. Between June 2008 and when this text was written, there have been 59 murders, that spread with the greatest impunity.

A third element is the creation of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), a partisan body that, in president's own words, should absorb all organizations that support the Bolivarian process, including the unions. A few defended the independence of the workers' organizations, but dissent from the official line was not tolerated. In March of 2007 Chávez affirmed in a speech: "The unions should not be autonomous... We must end with that." This was followed by successive declarations in the same line, reaching a zenith in March of 2009, when after ridiculing the demands of the basic industries of Guayana—the biggest industrial belt of the country—Chávez threatened to use the police to crush any attempts at demonstrations or strikes there. For a revolutionary like Orlando Chirino, it was unbearable. He stated at the time that it "constituted a declaration of war against the working class."

Various initiatives are currently being developed to increase control over the country's workers. For one thing, laws have been passed that limit and criminalize protest, requiring people to report periodically to the courts, in addition to prohibiting them from participation in meetings and demonstrations—such as occurred this past July 13 to five union leaders of the oil refinery of El Palito, in the west of the country. [The five refinery workers received a judicial order barring them from "promoting or initiating assemblies, gatherings or meetings that place in risk the normal functioning of installations of the petroleum complex."]

According to spokespersons of the affected communities, at least 2,200 people would be currently subject to this scheme. It must be brought out that, curiously, more than 80% are part of the movement to support the national government. This detail is significant because since 2008 there has been increasing social unrest in the face of the miseries and limitations of material life for workers on the ground. The protests for social rights have displaced the mobilizations for political rights, that set the scene during the years 2002 and 2006. The failure to meet the expectations generated by Bolivarian rhetoric, the weakening of patronage networks by declining oil revenues, and the stagnation and decline of populist social policies (known as "missions") have catalyzed the accumulated discontent in the absence of profound transformations to significantly improve the quality of life for the majority of the country.

Another initiative underway, again by decree from above, is the replacement of unions with "workers' councils" for discussing working conditions in companies, a proposal entered in the reform of the Organic Labor Law (LOT) that has been discussed in secret in the National Assembly, a body that is promoted around the world as a champion of "participatory democracy."

Other laws, that seem to have no connection to the world of work, have also been restricting workers' rights. That's the case with the reformed Law of Land Transit, which in its article 74 prohibits the closure of streets to obstruct pedestrian and vehicle traffic—the historical practice of protest by the popular sectors, especially in demanding their labor rights.

Meanwhile, on August 15 an Organic Law of Education was passed, which has provoked protest by opposition groups for its secularism and for establishing strict regulations for private education institutions. However, what this center-right and social-democratic opposition does not question—much less Chavismo—are the limitations to the right of association, unionization, and collective bargaining, which is not guaranteed [to education workers]. One sign of the reactionary character of the order is section 5.f of the first provision, which states that teachers and professors engage in serious misconduct "by physical aggression, speech, and other forms of violence" against their superiors. To make matters worse, the fifth provision regulates the use of scabs "for reasons of proven necessity" in order to break strikes and work stoppages—a practice that has become habitual in so-called "Bolivarian Venezuela."

In addition, the Chavista movement has unleashed an onslaught against media outlets that don't accommodate the government, whose principal concern is the visibility of the conflicts and protests that they provide in contrast to the scarce coverage of the state and para-state media—self-declared as "alternative and community," but without editorial and financial independence of any kind.

The role of Venezuelan anarchists in this moment of fracture of Bolivarian hegemony is to participate, accompany, and radicalize the conflicts, from below and with the people—and in this way to stimulate the recovery of the belligerent autonomy of the social movements. They must also become actively involved in the construction of a different, revolutionary alternative to the inter-bourgeois conflict for the control of the oil revenues that has engulfed the political scene in recent years, fighting the Bolivarian bourgeoisie in power with the same impetus as the potential rearticulation of those political parties it has displaced. In this way we walk, as always, without giving any concession to power and having our old values—self-management, direct action, anti-capitalism and mutual aid—as a bright horizon.

Life in Venezuela is no different than any other capitalist regime - it's a life of wage-toil, rape, police harassment, imprisonment, and acute degredation of human and ecological health by the capitalist mode of production.

[Barry Lyndon]

This interesting article exposes Chirino and other assorted ultra-left critics for what they are- bedfellows of the right-wing Venezuelan opposition and their CIA backers:

November 29, 2007

Ultraleft counter-revolutionaries in Venezuela (http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/ultraleft-counter-revolutionaries-in-venezuela/)

Filed under: Venezuela (http://en.wordpress.com/tag/venezuela/),state capitalism (http://en.wordpress.com/tag/state-capitalism/) — louisproyect @ 4:49 pm

[Begin article] On November 24th the Wall Street Journal ran an article that was highly flattering to Stalin–Ivan Stalin González, that is. Stalin (he prefers being called by this name) is the leader of the privileged university students who are on the front-lines opposing the proposed constitutional reforms that would make the government more directly accountable to the people beginning with an end to term limits.
Stalin’s background would be familiar to those who run into his counterparts in the radical movement in their own countries:
Mr. Chávez’s description also hardly fits Mr. González. The 27-year-old, sixth-year law student grew up in a poor household that dreamed of a Communist Venezuela. His father, a print-machine operator, was a high-ranking member of the Bandera Roja, or Red Flag, a hard-line Marxist-Leninist party that maintained a guerrilla force until as recently as the mid-1990s. Its members revered Josef Stalin as well as Albania’s xenophobic Enver Hoxha. As a boy, Mr. González remembers packing off to marches with his sisters, Dolores Engels and Ilyich, named in honor of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
As a young man, Mr. González burnished his leftist credentials, joining Marxist youth groups and following his father into the Bandera Roja. He traveled to Socialist youth conferences in Latin America.
(The WSJ article can only be read in its entirety by googling “Ivan Stalin Gonzalez” from google/news.)
Hugo Chávez described Bandera Roja thusly:
Groups like them appear to have given themselves the holy mission of proclaiming themselves to be the only revolutionaries on the planet, or at any rate in this territory. And those who don’t follow their dogmas are not considered genuine revolutionaries.
Unlike the miserable ultraleft sectarians in Bandera Roja, the Marxists who have helped to elect Hugo Chávez do not see themselves on any such “holy mission.” Indeed, it is the absence of such self-aggrandizement that has so disoriented much of the left outside of Venezuela, at least those sectors of the left that still clutch to “vanguardist” illusions. While most of them are not nearly as bad as Bandera Roja, they still see Hugo Chávez as an impediment to the True Revolution that is gathering momentum at the grass roots level. In this scenario, the only thing that can save Venezuela is some kind of latter-day version of the Soviets in 1917 and a working-class revolutionary party to lead them toward a seizure of power. While Chávez’s government is a decent social democratic alternative to the neoliberal solution that the US would prefer, it falls short of their ideals–the operative word being ideal.
To his great credit, James Petras–a former ultraleft critic of Hugo Chavez–has a much better understanding of the true political stakes in Venezuela now and has repudiated the ultraleft in a Counterpunch article (http://www.counterpunch.org/petras11272007.html):
The CIA-Embassy reports internal division and recriminations among the opponents of the amendments including several defections from their ‘umbrella group’. The key and most dangerous threats to democracy raised by the Embassy memo point to their success in mobilizing the private university students (backed by top administrators) to attack key government buildings including the Presidential Palace, Supreme Court and the National Electoral Council. The Embassy is especially full of praise for the ex-Maoist ‘Red Flag’ group for its violent street fighting activity. Ironically, small Trotskyist sects and their trade unionists join the ex-Maoists in opposing the constitutional amendments. The Embassy, while discarding their ‘Marxist rhetoric’, perceives their opposition as fitting in with their overall strategy.
Unfortunately, the International Socialist Organization, a sizable state-capitalist group in the US, still retains the kind of ultraleft conceptions that Petras once held.
In the latest issue of their newspaper, there’s an article on the showdown in Venezuela which basically describes three camps in Venezuela: the rightwing that is getting its marching orders from the US, a center consisting of Hugo Chávez, many of his well-meaning radical supporters plus a status-quo minded elite getting rich off the oil exports, and a genuine working-class left that shares their ideals of “revolution from below.”
One of the most cited figures from this unblemished leftwing group in the pages of Socialist Worker is a self-described Trotskyist trade union leader named Orlando Chirino:
For Orlando Chirino, a national coordinator of the National Union of Workers (UNT) labor federation, Chávez’s reforms herald the “Stalinization” of the state and state control of the labor movement “along the lines of the Cuban CTC labor federation,” he said in an interview.
Chirino, a key leader of the C-CURA class-struggle current of the factionalized UNT, is among the most prominent figures on the left to oppose the reforms. He made waves on the left when he granted an interview with a leading opposition newspaper and appeared on the platform with leaders of the CTV, the corrupt old trade union federation implicated in the 2002 coup.
Today Chirino, along with an oil workers union official, José Bodas, is a founder of a new group calling for an independent workers party.
Well, what can one say? Despite his Trotskyist bona fides, Chirino opposes the reforms alongside comrade Stalin Gonzalez. He also is cozy with the rotten newspapers and trade union that tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela. Politics makes strange bedfellows, doesn’t it?
If you read the Socialist Workers newspaper, as I do, you will be familiar by now with their split personality. They are a source of excellent analysis and information on the class struggle in the US but when it comes to Cuba and Venezuela they are–how should I put it–full of shit. For them, Cuba occupies the same place as Dante’s Inferno while Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is a purgatory that will be rescued by the likes of Orlando Chirino. But maybe not Chirino himself since the ISO still has a shred of good sense to support the constitutional reforms even if it is only grudgingly.
In the past Orlando Chirino has been a kind of North Star for them, a source of goodness and received wisdom. In August of 2005, they had a breathless article titled “Venezuela’s left comes together” that would leave the reader with the unmistakable impression that the cavalry was coming to the rescue in Venezuela. It reported on a July 9 meeting that included Orlando Chirino’s Opción de Izquierda Revolucionaria and a student collective from the Central University of Venezuela, a bastion of counter-revolutionary resistance to Hugo Chávez today and where Stalin Gonzalez is enrolled. One can only wonder if Comrade Stalin was at this meeting hyped by the Socialist Worker newspaper as a sign of hope for Venezuela. I bet that he was.
I imagine that the odyssey of Chirino and these students to the right probably did not pique the interest of the brain trust that runs the ISO too deeply.
They must have been totally smitten with a figure like Orlando Chirino who told them:
Therefore, I think that [Chávez’s] project has a short lifespan. I’m not talking in terms of years, but rather as a historic project of a way out of the crisis and misery that capitalism offers. That model doesn’t provide a way out, and today, there isn’t the space nor is there a sector of the capitalist class that wants a decisive confrontation with imperialism.
So in less than three years, Chirino discovered that the way to decisively confront imperialism was to make common cause with its chief supporters in Venezuela. As Larry David would say on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”: “Interesting, very interesting.”
Now, if I were the editor of “Socialist Worker,” I might want to try to reconcile two apparently contradictory positions. Is Chirino still a representative of the left? If so, maybe it is because he stills says that he is for a working-class revolution. But then again, so does Stalin Gonzalez. According to the WSJ:
For all his disappointment with Mr. Chávez’s brand of leftism, Mr. González still holds a candle for his revolutionary heroes. He has a signed copy of a seven-hour speech Fidel Castro delivered at the university several years ago. “I never got bored,” he says.
Apparently, being a member of the Fidel Castro fan club does not ensure that one will not lose one’s way politically.
Although it took me a while to get over my own initial skepticism toward Hugo Chávez, I never for a minute thought that ultraleftists like Orlando Chirino were some kind of revolutionary alternative. I had seen them in operation in Nicaragua in the 1980s and figured out that small groups posturing as Bolsheviks trying to wrest power from the Menshevik FSLN were more than a nuisance–they were doing the CIA’s work.
In George Black’s very fine chronicle on the Nicaraguan revolution titled “Triumph of the People”, there is a chapter on the counter-revolution that is mainly focused on the contras and their “peaceful” supporters. Within the chapter, there are also a few pages devoted to groups led by the Stalin Gonzalez’s of those times.
The most notorious of them was the Simon Bolivar Brigade, a guerrilla group composed of Latin Americans who fought alongside the FSLN. They regarded the FSLN in the same exact way that Orlando Chirino and Stalin Gonzalez regard Chavez today–as an obstacle to the full flowering of the revolution. The Brigade was led by the Socialist Workers Party in Colombia, a section of the Morenoite Fourth International that can best be described as virulently ultraleft. Considering the bad reputation of this group and a similarly named group in the US that used to be in an alliance with the Morenoites, my recommendation to aspiring Leninists worldwide is to not use this name. Of course, if you have already adopted it–like the group led by Alex Callinicos–you have my permission to continue using it.
Part of the problem dealing with the Brigade, which had embarked on a series of premature strikes and land occupations, was that it insisted on remaining armed and existing outside of the framework of the Sandinista military command.
When the FSLN sat down for a meeting with the Brigade on August 14, 1979, it found itself confronted with a demonstration of 1,000 workers who had been brought there by the Brigade in the belief that the meeting was about wages and trade union questions. After deciding that the Brigade was not serious about becoming part of the broader revolutionary process, the FSLN expelled sixty non-Nicaraguan members to Panama.
The Frente Obrero (FO) was not Trotskyist, but it posed the same kind of threat to the revolution as the Simon Bolivar Brigade. Originally a faction of the FSLN, the FO was expelled in 1972 after being implicated in a plot to assassinate the entire FSLN leadership. Fortunately, the plot failed because the FO could not recruit enough members to carry out the task. As George Black describes the FO, the kinship with Stalin Gonzalez’s Bandera Roja should be obvious:
From the early 1970s there were suspicions that the FO had close ties to Somoza’s Office of National Security (OSN). Although its ideology was not consistent, the FO’s basic orientation was towards Peking, and it held this line until the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, when it switched its allegiance to Enver Hoxha’s Albania. Towards the end of the decade, it managed to build a limited base in the working class, and had its own student movement, the Comites de Lucha Estudiantil Universitaria (University Students Fighting Committees: CLEUS).
In the early stages of the revolution, the FO proposed a government that would include bourgeois parties and themselves. Just like Stalin Gonzalez, they were adept at cloaking opportunist behavior in fire-breathing revolutionary rhetoric.
After the FSLN took power and began to concentrate on the immediate tasks of reviving an economy that had been devastated by earthquake and civil war, the FO’s newspaper demanded the ‘active sabotage of the economic plan in order to bring power back into the hands of the people’. To show that they meant business, the FO, which had far more members and influence than the Morenoites, launched a series of paralyzing strikes in the sugar refineries. In Chinandega the results were devastating. Stacked sugar cane rotted, causing the loss of a half-million cordobas per day–all in the name of socialist revolution.
Eventually the sugar refinery workers called off the strike in exchange for immediate social wage improvements, as well as government action on local health and housing problems.
The FO was determined to push on, however. When cane cutters returned to the fields, they were met by FO supporters who slashed their truck tires and threatened them with guns and machetes, just as Stalin Gonzalez’s goons did recently at the Social Work building in the Central Venezuelan University.
One cartoon in Barricada, the FSLN newspaper, depicted an FO activist floating on a cloud above a group of workers, with his head buried in a book. The caption read “Having seized political power, proceed to…” George Black said that the cartoon “summed the FO up nicely.” Too bad that it sums up some of our comrades today who decided to promote a wing of the radical movement in Venezuela that was on a collision course with the revolution.[End article]


http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/ultraleft-counter-revolutionaries-in-venezuela/

There is a fine between principled criticism of a revolutionary movement and engaging in class treason.

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

ultra-left

Here the term "ultra-left" is used to attack the entire social revolutionary left in Venezuela from anarchists to Marxist-Leninists.


bedfellows of the right-wing Venezuelan opposition and their CIA backersIt is a standard tactic for proponents of a particular imperialist faction to associate all critics with the efforts of a rival imperialist faction. In a different time and place, someone like Barry Lyndon could be ranting about how Dr. King was a pawn of the KGB. Regardless, both arguments have the same intellectual substance, which is to say, not much intellectual substance at all.


privileged university studentsAh, here we go, the western leftist's favorite bad-jacketting tool, the accusation of "privilege". Also attacking student-workers as "privileged" is a standard playbook tactic of bourgeois hack-sociologists who have no coherent analysis of class.


on the front-lines opposing the proposed constitutional reforms that would make the government more directly accountable to the people beginning with an end to term limits.Read: Opposing the autocratic will-to-power of the Bolivarian bourgeoisie. Nothing says "accountability" like "no term limits"....


Its members revered Josef Stalin as well as Albania’s xenophobic Enver Hoxha. As a boy, Mr. González remembers packing off to marches with his sisters, Dolores Engels and Ilyich, named in honor of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.Yep, typical "ultra-leftist". :laugh::laugh:
Groups like them appear to have given themselves the holy mission of proclaiming themselves to be the only revolutionaries on the planet, or at any rate in this territory. And those who don’t follow their dogmas are not considered genuine revolutionaries.Another standard line of social-democrat bureaucrat parasites, anyone who criticizes the excesses and atrocities of the social-democratic state is a "dogmatic" and judgmental elitist who wants to exclude people from their hip clique of "genuine revolutionaries".

Ignore the fact that the Venezuelan masses are objectively oppressed by the bourgeoisie - the right-wing opposition has more material interest in common with the ruling Bolivarian regime than either camp has with the genuine proletarian resistance.


the Marxists who have helped to elect Hugo Chávez do not see themselves on any such “holy mission.”Regardless of what state of mind they are operating in, they are granting intellectual legitimacy to the ideology of capitalism through the participation in bourgeois elections.


they still see Hugo Chávez as an impediment to the True Revolution that is gathering momentum at the grass roots level.That's because the "True Revolution" will disempower the bureaucratic administrators and public state-bourgeoisie, of which Chavez is the chief figurehead in Venezuela.


In this scenario, the only thing that can save Venezuela is some kind of latter-day version of the Soviets in 1917 and a working-class revolutionary party to lead them toward a seizure of powerYes, how awful that would be.


While Chávez’s government is a decent social democratic alternative to the neoliberal solution that the US would preferOver "decency" I prefer truth...you could just as easily make an argument that the constitutional republicanism of the US is a "decent alternative" to Saudi Arabia, or whatever. (Or being tortured to death by the villain from Saw is a "decent alternative" to being transformed into a human centipede) Either way it's the prisoner's dilemma of a social patriot who can't escape the intellectual confines of bourgeois indoctrination.

And anti-"neoliberalism" is the anti-capitalism of imbeciles. Protectionist capitalism is no less exploitative. (And Venezuela has shown itself happy to be part of the global "neo-liberal" market)


it falls short of their ideals–the operative word being ideal.I personally am not dealing with ideals but the practical option of proletarian autonomy, which is as realistic in Venezuela as it is in the US, but, in both cases, is dependent upon total secession from the capitalist state.


has repudiated the ultraleft in a Counterpunch articleOf course, counterpunch, a haven of dethawed Stalinist flunkies...


The CIA-Embassy reports internal division and recriminations among the opponents of the amendments including several defections from their ‘umbrella group’. The key and most dangerous threats to democracy raised by the Embassy memo point to their success in mobilizing the private university students (backed by top administrators) to attack key government buildings including the Presidential Palace, Supreme Court and the National Electoral Council. The Embassy is especially full of praise for the ex-Maoist ‘Red Flag’ group for its violent street fighting activity. Ironically, small Trotskyist sects and their trade unionists join the ex-Maoists in opposing the constitutional amendments. The Embassy, while discarding their ‘Marxist rhetoric’, perceives their opposition as fitting in with their overall strategy.So we should stand with a social-fascist regime in arresting and imprisoning Maoists and Trotskyites because US intelligence are opportunistically exploiting the situation for their own geo-political gain. (As usual...) Of course this rationale could also be used to commend the suppression of the social revolutionary left in Iran, Ba'athist Iraq, etc. (not that this would be anything new for the "anti-imperialists" of the capitalist "left" who will cheer-lead any opponent of Western hegemony)


In the latest issue of their newspaper, there’s an article on the showdown in Venezuela which basically describes three camps in Venezuela: the rightwing that is getting its marching orders from the US, a center consisting of Hugo Chávez, many of his well-meaning radical supporters plus a status-quo minded elite getting rich off the oil exports, and a genuine working-class left that shares their ideals of “revolution from below.”Oh I forgot, the state bureaucrat parasites are the "genuine working-class left"


Well, what can one say? Despite his Trotskyist bona fides, Chirino opposes the reforms alongside comrade Stalin Gonzalez.Read: anyone who opposes the ascension of a Peronist autocrat is an enemy of the state and must be disciplined


He also is cozy with the rotten newspapers and trade unionAny specifics or are we just supposed to take these vague ad hominem attacks-by-association at face value?


that tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela.The goal is to overthrow "democratically elected governments" and impose communism.


Politics makes strange bedfellows, doesn’t it?Yep, like when western "marxists" chearlead a Bolivarian right-populist regime for jailing and suppressing Marxist-Leninist rebels


They are a source of excellent analysis and information on the class struggle in the US but when it comes to Cuba and Venezuela they are–how should I put it–full of shit.In other words, they are internationalists who consistently support the proletariat in every context, as opposed to hypocritically falling for the lies of "socialist" regimes which in no way serve as a threat to capitalist global order.


For them, Cuba occupies the same place as Dante’s Inferno while Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is a purgatory that will be rescued by the likes of Orlando Chirino.Actually, along with the US they are both layers of inferno.


it took me a while to get over my own initial skepticism toward Hugo Chávez
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.


I had seen them in operation in Nicaragua in the 1980s and figured out that small groups posturing as Bolsheviks trying to wrest power from the Menshevik FSLN were more than a nuisance–they were doing the CIA’s work.Yes because the CIA was trying to impose a Bolshevik regime in Nicaragua? :confused: Wouldn't the Western imperialists much prefer the Mensheviks?


that can best be described as virulently ultraleft.As any intelligent person has already deduced, "ultraleft" in this context is a derogatory codeword for anyone who refuses to roll over for oppression by any random populist regime which happens to make an ire of US imperialists. The real question is - how is an authentic revolutionary left in any way congruent with the goals of US imperialists?


Part of the problem dealing with the Brigade, which had embarked on a series of premature strikes and land occupations, was that it insisted on remaining armed and existing outside of the framework of the Sandinista military command.In other words they wouldn't subordinate itself to the hierarchical top-down command of a centralized state which sought the preservation of capital. How terrible of them...


the Brigade was not serious about becoming part of the broader revolutionary processMore euphemisms. "Not serious" = unwilling to participate in class collaboration. "Broader revolutionary process" = uncritical support for dead-end left-capitalist regimes.


Fortunately, the plot failedYes, fortunate for the social-democrat bourgeoisie in Nicaragua.


Although its ideology was not consistent, the FO’s basic orientation was towards Peking, and it held this line until the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, when it switched its allegiance to Enver Hoxha’s Albania.Vile, but no viler than supporting the Chavez regime in Venezuela.


reviving an economyThe point is to destroy the capitalist economy


the ‘active sabotage of the economic plan in order to bring power back into the hands of the people’. To show that they meant business, the FO, which had far more members and influence than the Morenoites, launched a series of paralyzing strikes in the sugar refineries. In Chinandega the results were devastating.Yes the workers should remain obediently toiling away in the sugar refineries to avoid further "devastation" to the capitalist economy, how revolutionary...


Stacked sugar cane rotted, causing the loss of a half-million cordobas per day–all in the name of socialist revolution.Who cares? Sugar cane is an opiate for the masses and any actual socialist revolution would totally abolish all capital.


Eventually the sugar refinery workers called off the strike in exchange for immediate social wage improvements, as well as government action on local health and housing problems.In other words they were bribed, just like the US workers in the 30s during the New Deal. I guess "government action on local health and housing problem" and "social wage improvement" are more important than proletarian self-emancipation

It should be obvious from these words that the populist "left" in Latin America and elsewhere is no friend of the workers and in fact prides itself on demanding stricter discipline than even its supposed enemies.

[Barry Lyndon]

a) It is a standard tactic for proponents of a particular imperialist faction to associate all critics with the efforts of a rival imperialist faction. In a different time and place, someone like Barry Lyndon could be ranting about how Dr. King was a pawn of the KGB. Regardless, both arguments have the same intellectual substance, which is to say, not much intellectual substance at all.

b)Read: Opposing the autocratic will-to-power of the Bolivarian bourgeoisie. Nothing says "accountability" like "no term limits"....

c)Yep, typical "ultra-leftist". :laugh::laugh:Another standard line of social-democrat bureaucrat parasites, anyone who criticizes the excesses and atrocities of the social-democratic state is a "dogmatic" and judgmental elitist who wants to exclude people from their hip clique of "genuine revolutionaries".

d) Ignore the fact that the Venezuelan masses are objectively oppressed by the bourgeoisie - the right-wing opposition has more material interest in common with the ruling Bolivarian regime than either camp has with the genuine proletarian resistance.

e) Over "decency" I prefer truth...you could just as easily make an argument that the constitutional republicanism of the US is a "decent alternative" to Saudi Arabia, or whatever. (Or being tortured to death by the villain from Saw is a "decent alternative" to being transformed into a human centipede) Either way it's the prisoner's dilemma of a social patriot who can't escape the intellectual confines of bourgeois indoctrination.

f) And anti-"neoliberalism" is the anti-capitalism of imbeciles. Protectionist capitalism is no less exploitative. (And Venezuela has shown itself happy to be part of the global "neo-liberal" market)

g) I personally am not dealing with ideals but the practical option of proletarian autonomy, which is as realistic in Venezuela as it is in the US, but, in both cases, is dependent upon total secession from the capitalist state.

h) Of course, counterpunch, a haven of dethawed Stalinist flunkies...

i) So we should stand with a social-fascist regime in arresting and imprisoning Maoists and Trotskyites because US intelligence are opportunistically exploiting the situation for their own geo-political gain. (As usual...) Of course this rationale could also be used to commend the suppression of the social revolutionary left in Iran, Ba'athist Iraq, etc. (not that this would be anything new for the "anti-imperialists" of the capitalist "left" who will cheer-lead any opponent of Western hegemony)

j) Read: anyone who opposes the ascension of a Peronist autocrat is an enemy of the state and must be disciplined

k) Any specifics or are we just supposed to take these vague ad hominem attacks-by-association at face value?

l) The goal is to overthrow "democratically elected governments" and impose communism.

m) Yep, like when western "marxists" chearlead a Bolivarian right-populist regime for jailing and suppressing Marxist-Leninist rebels

n) In other words, they are internationalists who consistently support the proletariat in every context, as opposed to hypocritically falling for the lies of "socialist" regimes which in no way serve as a threat to capitalist global order.

o) Actually, along with the US they are both layers of inferno.

p)Yes because the CIA was trying to impose a Bolshevik regime in Nicaragua? :confused: Wouldn't the Western imperialists much prefer the Mensheviks?

q) In other words they wouldn't subordinate itself to the hierarchical top-down command of a centralized state which sought the preservation of capital. How terrible of them...

r) Vile, but no viler than supporting the Chavez regime in Venezuela.

s) The point is to destroy the capitalist economy

t) Who cares? Sugar cane is an opiate for the masses and any actual socialist revolution would totally abolish all capital.

u) In other words they were bribed, just like the US workers in the 30s during the New Deal. I guess "government action on local health and housing problem" and "social wage improvement" are more important than proletarian self-emancipation

It should be obvious from these words that the populist "left" in Latin America and elsewhere is no friend of the workers and in fact prides itself on demanding stricter discipline than even its supposed enemies.

Your post is filled with so many ad hominems, misrepresentations and flat-out lies, its hard to know where to even begin. But I will try.

a) Except Martin Luther King Jr. never gave an interview to Pravda in which he praised the KGB, while your beloved 'true revolutionary' directly collaborated with the right wing 2002 coup by granting a friendly interview to their propaganda outlet.

b) That is a lie, parroted from the bourgeois press. They are elected terms, he isn't making himself president for life. The workers of Venezuela have repeatedly voted for Hugo Chavez and the PSUV in transparent and fair democratic elections. Apparently the will of the workers only matters when they tow your narrow sectarian line- in other words, not at all.

c) What excesses and atrocities, besides those you learned about from Fox News.

d) You don't launch a coup de tat against those you share 'objective interests' with.

e) The only person who needs to escape the "intellectual confines of bourgeois indoctrination", is you, who repeats right-wing slanders against the Bolivarian Revolution verbatim, accusations of Chavez being a 'dictator' included.

f) Participating in the 'neo-liberal' global market? You mean trade with the outside world? What is Venezuela supposed to do? Just cut itself off from the rest of the world and starve?
And yes, it has to trade with other capitalist countries for the most part because their is no longer a socialist bloc to trade with(with the exception of Cuba). A development that ultra-lefts like you cheered as a victory for your 'true socialism'.

g) And how would this socialist utopia sustain itself? On your hot air?

h) No ad-hominem's here, so siree.

i) So now the Bolivarian Republic is 'Social-fascist' now? Lol. The exact langugage that the Stalinists used for refusing the unite with the Social Democrats against the Nazis(on the grounds that the Social Democrats were 'as bad as' the Nazis), and look how that turned out. Your idiotic, dogmatic approach will lead to the same outcome in Venezuela.

j) Do you think of about the meaning of anything you say or write, or do you just pull any old description out of your ass? Juan Peron never supported workers-managed factories, and didn't create workers and peasants militias. I know that all people south of the border seem the same to you, but you might want to read a history book before you make such stupid comparisons.

k) Speak for yourself.

l) How do you propose to achieve that 'goal', besides pompous rhetoric?

m) Just a few lines above, you called them 'left-populist', now their 'right-populist'? You can't even keep your own slanders straight.

[Continued]

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

a) Chirino is not particularly "beloved" by myself, I would be interested in reading the interview in question, learning as to what sort of intellectual content was articulated in the interview, and so forth. If you have any links to provide me with in Spanish or in English I'd be happy to check it out. I don't consider a "friendly interview" to be a form of direct collaboration, Chomsky has given "friendly interviews" to Neo-Nazi presses and the misogynistic porn magazine Hustler.

Even if Chirino was a collaborate with right-wing reactionaries this would not negate the totality of resistance to the Chavist regime by the autonomist worker's groups of the Venezuelan left, which are comprised mostly of the most dispossessed and exploited segments of the working class, (eg: Indians, women) nor would it establish that any resistance to the Chavez regime is inherently beneficial to right-wing reactionaries and US imperialism.

Also in order for your analogy to be coherent the "propaganda outlet" in question would have to be directly controlled by the US state and Chirino would have to "praise" the CIA in said interview, whereas you are not even specific as to what "propaganda outlet" is being discussed...

For what it's with the Venezuelan anarchists who I most strongly identify with have consistently and vocally denounced and attacked the reactionary "opposition"

b) regardless bourgeois elections will always exist under the implicit condition of a monopoly of force by the state-security apparatus of the bourgeoisie. This sort of rhetoric confuses the issue by granting legitimacy to the notion that bourgeois elections are sources of popular power rather than spectacular distractions.

Hitler and Reagan were also "democratically elected" by the reactionary masses, at least to the satisfaction of the intrinsically fraudulent electoral process of the bourgeois state.

My issue isn't with the term limits but with the hierarchical state apparatus itself. "Fair democratic elections" are a substitute for genuine proletarian control on the autonomous local level.

My care is not for the democratic "will of the workers" (since plenty of individuals workers consistently act against their own interests, arguably the majority currently do) but for the advancement of communism and the objective emancipation of the workers.

c) Namely; the continual collaboration of the state-run Venezuelan petroleum industry with Western "private" oil companies in the rapine of the Venezuelan ecology, (which is of detriment to the health and well-being of the people) the continual massacre, rape, and robbery of workers by the corrupt Venezuelan police force, the continual stocking of Venezuelan prisons with "criminals", mostly indigenous people. But I did hear on Fox News that Obama has teamed up with Chavez to create more death panels.

d) The CSA launched a coup de'tat against the USA but both factions of the bourgeoisie were happy to agree on the subjugation of blacks and Indians. In the case of Venezuela the right-wing "resistance" has praised and stood in unanimity with the Bolivarian regime when it comes to supressing indigenous groups, radical trade unions, etc.

e) When I say Chavez is a dictator I am referring to the Marxist notion that the bourgeoisie (Chavez among them) collectively dictates capitalist society. The proletariat should be the dictators, which is not in any way shape or form happening in Venezuela despite the delusions of Chavists.

f) What you are saying in so many words is that the Venezuelan state is still in every way a faction of the internatonal capitalist market, has not taken any substantive stand against the global capitalist economy, and operates within its own interests as you would expect any capitalist state to do.

Which makes it totally disengenous to fall back on 'at least Venezuela's better than the US/India/whatever' arguments...

g) I am not a utopian socialist and do not believe in making utopian blueprints but on a fundamental level any relevant socialist movement will take a principled oppositions to all manifestations of capitalism.

h) All I am saying is that Counterpunch has pretty lax editorial standards when it comes to this sort of authoritarian trash....

i) Look how well it turned out for the proletarian left in WWII Europe to strategically ally with the anti-fascist bourgeoisie against Nazism...communism now reigns supreme in Europe as a consequence. :lol:

Social democracy, fascism, and Stalinism are all seperate means to the same end - co-option of capitalist contradictions and reinforcement of bourgeois rule

j) Since the "militias" in question are merely paramilitary apparatuses of the Venezuelan state, specifically the Chavez faction, they are nothing to be praised or hailed. The populist right (A camp to which the Chavists fall squarely in) has always used paramilitary means to mobilize the masses in support of their tyrannical political projects. What needs to be created are autonomous militias for the overthrow of capitalism, not support of the social-democratic state.

Furthermore "workplace self-management" in this context is a lie, it merely signifies the creation of newer and more sophisticated stratum of workplace control. But feel free to blindly praise all pretenses of "workers' self-management" even when it means the naked perpetuation of capitalist commodity production through wage labor.

k) I can't help but read this as a failure to source citations.

l) Through total secession with all bourgeois forces.

m) To be honest I simply don't hold the distinction to be that significant. The difference between "left-wing" and "right-wing" politicians is not as important as the difference between the political forces of the bourgeoisie and the political fores of communism.

I eagerly await the continuation of your response

[manic expression]

Even if Chirino was a collaborate with right-wing reactionaries this would not negate the totality of resistance to the Chavist regime by the autonomist worker's groups of the Venezuelan left, which are comprised mostly of the most dispossessed and exploited segments of the working class, (eg: Indians, women) nor would it establish that any resistance to the Chavez regime is inherently beneficial to right-wing reactionaries and US imperialism.
How absurd. First you wave around Chirino's condemnation of Chavez as the voice of that heroic "actual combative workers' movement"...and when Chirino is exposed as a crony for reaction, you say his actions don't matter. But they do matter, for they show that when push comes to shove, your beloved "actual combative workers' movement" is a ready pawn for the right wing in their attempts to undermine Chavez.

Apparently, you've already made up your mind about all players...whatever Chavez or your so-called "autonomist worker's groups" do, your entirely subjective and warped opinion of the subject remains the same.

And your opinion is certainly warped. Chavez is demonstrably opposed to the capitalists of the country; the coup of 2002, the relentless attacks against him before, during and after that struggle, the attempts by the bourgeoisie to undermine the Bolivarian Revolution every which way...there's no avoiding it, Chavez is against the bourgeoisie because he's acting as an anchor for the workers. He has been instrumental in the formation of working-class organs of power throughout the country, expropriation of capitalist businesses and otherwise.

But again, your beloved "revolutionary" (the man you yourself chose to hold up as an example of the "actual combative workers' movement") DID collaborate with the Venezuelan right against Chavez as they tried to stamp out all progress made by the workers. If this is what you call an "actual combative workers' movement", it's clear you're just trying to fool yourself.


For what it's with the Venezuelan anarchists who I most strongly identify with have consistently and vocally denounced and attacked the reactionary "opposition"That's cute, too bad they both have the exact same immediate political goals.


b) regardless bourgeois elections will always exist under the implicit condition of a monopoly of force by the state-security apparatus of the bourgeoisie. This sort of rhetoric confuses the issue by granting legitimacy to the notion that bourgeois elections are sources of popular power rather than spectacular distractions.

Hitler and Reagan were also "democratically elected" by the reactionary masses, at least to the satisfaction of the intrinsically fraudulent electoral process of the bourgeois state.First, by your logic, working-class participation in production confuses the issue by "granting legitimacy" to industry under the control of capitalists. We learn from Marx that every aspect of bourgeois society is subverted to the interest of the capitalist...but in this lies the issue: how can the workers do anything without "granting legitimacy" to some section of capitalist society? The answer is that the concept of "granting legitimacy" is ludicrous. It is as if to say that a rebel force "grants legitimacy" to its enemy by firing their weapons. Really, it's an idiotic suggestion based on an idiotic assumption.

Elections, at the very least, allow workers to combat the lies of capitalists (in certain situations it gives even more opportunities to workers), but you want them to concede this battlefield without a fight. If you're so eager to run away from this area of struggle, we need not guess how ineffectual your ideology is when it comes to every other area of struggle.


My care is not for the democratic "will of the workers" (since plenty of individuals workers consistently act against their own interests, arguably the majority currently do) but for the advancement of communism and the objective emancipation of the workers.So you, honestly and truthfully, have absolutely no care for what workers want.

Imagine my surprise.


c) Namely; the continual collaboration of the state-run Venezuelan petroleum industry with Western "private" oil companies in the rapine of the Venezuelan ecology, (which is of detriment to the health and well-being of the people) the continual massacre, rape, and robbery of workers by the corrupt Venezuelan police force, the continual stocking of Venezuelan prisons with "criminals", mostly indigenous people. But I did hear on Fox News that Obama has teamed up with Chavez to create more death panels.Well yes, you would care more about keeping the Venezuelan environment pristine than making workers' lives better. You just said you don't give a solitary crap about what workers want. Makes sense.


d) The CSA launched a coup de'tat against the USA but both factions of the bourgeoisie were happy to agree on the subjugation of blacks and Indians. In the case of Venezuela the right-wing "resistance" has praised and stood in unanimity with the Bolivarian regime when it comes to supressing indigenous groups, radical trade unions, etc.This tangent might be useful, in its own way...are you saying you wouldn't support the Union over the Confederacy during the Civil War? Answer this directly.

Otherwise, the right-wing can do what it wishes with its words. Its actions are consistently anti-Chavez. So that's a strawman, which you're attempting to use to cover up the fact that you're really on the immediate side of the anti-Chavez right.


e) When I say Chavez is a dictator I am referring to the Marxist notion that the bourgeoisie (Chavez among them) collectively dictates capitalist society. The proletariat should be the dictators, which is not in any way shape or form happening in Venezuela despite the delusions of Chavists.Chavez isn't a capitalist.

The proletariat has not conquered full state power in Venezuela. On this issue, finally, you have a point. The only problem is that no one is arguing the opposite. Are you sure you're representing the "Chavist" line correctly? :lol:


f) What you are saying in so many words is that the Venezuelan state is still in every way a faction of the internatonal capitalist market, has not taken any substantive stand against the global capitalist economy, and operates within its own interests as you would expect any capitalist state to do.No, that's what you're saying, and what you're saying has been proven wrong by recent history. Venezuela's foreign policy and domestic economic policies are enough to refute this. Pushing forth nationalization over the objections of the bourgeoisie, challenging imperialism over the protestations of its proponents...that is precisely not "as you would expect any capitalist state to do".


Which makes it totally disengenous to fall back on 'at least Venezuela's better than the US/India/whatever' arguments...It's hard to fall back on an argument that only exists in your imagination.


g) I am not a utopian socialist and do not believe in making utopian blueprintsWell, if your blueprints are non-utopian, then perhaps you'd be kind enough to show us a real-life example of your ideology being put into practice on a wide scale.

Take your time. I know you will.


h) All I am saying is that Counterpunch has pretty lax editorial standards when it comes to this sort of authoritarian trash....Translation: I don't want to deal with the facts of the situation, so I'll just say something about Stalinism and hope no one notices how paper-thin my arguments are.


i) Look how well it turned out for the proletarian left in WWII Europe to strategically ally with the anti-fascist bourgeoisie against Nazism...communism now reigns supreme in Europe as a consequence. :lol:Yeah, because the fall of the socialist bloc was caused by the Popular Front strategy 50 years earlier. :rolleyes:


j) Since the "militias" in question are merely paramilitary apparatuses of the Venezuelan state, specifically the Chavez faction, they are nothing to be praised or hailed.And as we see, you are more concerned with aiding the right wing in criticizing Chavez than in pinpointing the significance of an armed working class. Workers are being armed and trained to defend themselves and their rights...why do you oppose this?


Furthermore "workplace self-management" in this context is a lie, it merely signifies the creation of newer and more sophisticated stratum of workplace control.Yes, and that "newer and more sophisticated stratum of workplace control" is what we call greater working-class control. Progress usually introduces newer and more sophisticated things.


l) Through total secession with all bourgeois forces.Chavez did that, and for his troubles he was kidnapped by tanks and almost removed from power.

By the way, you have the same short-term political goals as the Venezuelan right wing, so it's silly for you to talk of "total secession with all bourgeois forces" when your own tongue can't accomplish the feat.


m) To be honest I simply don't hold the distinction to be that significant. The difference between "left-wing" and "right-wing" politicians is not as important as the difference between the political forces of the bourgeoisie and the political fores of communism.Right, which is why Chavez is on the side of the workers. The bourgeoisie declared total war against him, and he has fought back by chipping away at their power, their voice and most importantly their property. At the same time, Chavez has empowered the workers of Venezuela politically and economically, through the formation of various working-class organs and expropriation.

So beyond your vaguely left-wing rhetoric, your position boils down to nothing but petty opposition to the working-class movement in Venezuela. Merely because it's not the revolution you imagine in your head, you think it reactionary...and so you naturally hold up right-wing collaborators as examples to be admired.

The battle lines in Venezuela are drawn. The workers are on one side and the bourgeoisie is on the other. By taking potshots at the central figure of the workers' struggle, you've chosen your side. But at least you're honest:

My care is not for the democratic "will of the workers"

No, your care is precisely the opposite.

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

First you wave around Chirino's condemnation of Chavez as the voice of that heroic "actual combative workers' movement"...

Actually I have re-read the exchange and it was clearly Barry Lyndon who brought up Chirino, not myself.

Nor did I ever say that Chirino is the "voice" of, in my words, the "actual combative workers' movement"...

I criticized Barry Lyndon for standing with the Venezuelan state against the actual combative workers' movement.


when Chirino is exposed as a crony for reactionSuch "exposure" has yet to occur as the factual specifics I requested have not been provided.


when push comes to shove, your beloved "actual combative workers' movement" is a ready pawn for the right wing in their attempts to undermine Chavez.Leading up to WWII, W.E.B. DuBois, one of the brilliantest intellectuals of black liberation in the US, wrote “I have never received a cent from Japan or from any Japanese and yet I believe in Japan. It is not that I sympathize with China less but that I hate white European and American propaganda, theft and insult more. I believe in Asia for the Asiatics and despite the hell of war and the fascism of capital, I see Japan as the best agent for this end.” Does the eggrarious error of a single important intellectual celebrity point to the fact that the enourmous mass of internally colonized African youth, struggling in their day-to-day lives against the US regime at the time, were in fact agents of Japanese imperialism? Of course not!

Social patriotism: Sublimely capitalist, sublimely anti-working class

True communism: 100% worker, 100% for the liberation of the working-class


Apparently, you've already made up your mind about all players...I'd made up my mind about the Venezuelan bourgeois and their beureaucratic lackies.


Chavez is demonstrably opposed to the capitalists of the countryYes and if the SS had gotten their way they would have gunned down the entire old German bourgeoisie.

As to your pathological insistence that Chavez is not bourgeois....


As may be seen from the above, it would be sheer nonsense, in an analysis of the commodity—since it presents itself on the one hand as a use-value or goods, on the other hand as value”—to “tie up” at this juncture all sorts of banal reflexions about use-values or goods which do not enter into the world of commodities, such as “state goods,” “communal goods,” etc. as Wagner and the German professor in general does, or about goods like “health,” etc. Where the state is itself a capitalist producer, as in the exploitation of mines, forests, etc., its product is a “commodity” and hence possesses the specific character of every other commodity.


the coup of 2002, the relentless attacks against him before, during and after that struggle, the attempts by the bourgeoisie to undermine the Bolivarian Revolution every which wayRival imperialist factions deserve each other. What about the relentless attacks by the US bourgeoisie against the people of Japan and Germany during WWII? Does that justify Japanese and German imperialism? Or what about the US bourgeoisie's relentless attacks against its own population during the US Civil War? Does that justify the imperialism of the CSA?

Anyway the US and Venezuela at this point have basically agreed to "play ball"...Western imperialist corporations are keeping the "Bolivarian revolution" afloat. (See "Sealing Shift, Chávez Gives Contracts to Western Oil Companies", from the New York Times, February 11th '10, and "Halliburton reveals Venezuela assets amid dispute", from Reuters, Jul 24 '09, although you will likely claim these are the lies of the "imperialist press")

...there's no avoiding it, Chavez is against the bourgeoisie because he's acting as an anchor for the workers. He has been instrumental in the formation of working-class organs of power throughout the country, expropriation of capitalist businesses and otherwise.


That's cute, too bad they both have the exact same immediate political goals.This claim is self-evidently absurd, akin to Glenn Beck's claim that Obama is an anarchist. It's safe to guess that you've done no research into the subject.


First, by your logic, working-class participation in production confuses the issue by "granting legitimacy" to industry under the control of capitalists.Working-class "participation" in production is mandatory for survival under capitalism, voting is not. (In regimes where voting is optional, absenteeism among the majority is the norm, in regimes where voting is compulsory there are large numbers of ballot-spoiling and satirical votes)

And obviously it is progressive when the workers refuse to produce, it's called a strike.


We learn from Marx that every aspect of bourgeois society is subverted to the interest of the capitalist...but in this lies the issue: how can the workers do anything without "granting legitimacy" to some section of capitalist society?By rebelling against bourgeois society, something that's beyond the conceptual frame-work of individuals who see the Chavist regime in Venezuela as an example of "socialism"...


The answer is that the concept of "granting legitimacy" is ludicrous. It is as if to say that a rebel force "grants legitimacy" to its enemy by firing their weapons.Voting is the intellectual equivalent of throwing down one's weapon and exposing one's chest to the enemy's bullets.


Elections, at the very least, allow workers to combat the lies of capitalistsWhich they do, through absenteeism, ballot spoiling, satirical votes, etc. Not through supporting the sincere electoral efforts of social-democratic and fascist parasites.


(in certain situations it gives even more opportunities to workers)These "opportunities" are bribes, they are gained not through voting but are in fact instituted in an attempt to alleviate contradictions. Your reasoning is equivalent to asserting the New Deal occurred because people voted for Roosevelt, not because of the organized mass-unrest by workers in the US.

Furthermore many times these "opportunities" are Trojan Horses for newer, more sophisticated forms of exploitation. (eg. Social Security in the US) And these "opportunities" are never expressions of proletarian power, since they can be just as easily taken away....(austerity, etc.)


you want them to concede this battlefield without a fight.Actually you are conceding the battlefield to the 'left-wing' bourgeois.


So you, honestly and truthfully, have absolutely no care for what workers want.What about the French workers who cheer lead Sarkozy as his regime brutally expels Roma? Or the Euro-American workers in Arizona who cheer lead "Sheriff Joe" and the creation of stricter legal requirements for the enforcement of state identification in congruence with a white supremacist immigration policy? Or the Ugandan workers who are rallying for the death penalty for homosexuals? Or the Indian workers who join reactionary anti-Naxalite vigilante groups?


Well yes, you would care more about keeping the Venezuelan environment pristine than making workers' lives better.The two conditions are mutually dependent.


are you saying you wouldn't support the Union over the Confederacy during the Civil War? Answer this directly.My direct answer: No.

Circumstances of inter-imperialist rivalry are opportunities for the proletarian left to build its own concrete material foundation in the fault-lines of the conflict. Within the context of the US civil war this applies to the maroon and 'land-pirate' communities of the Africans, the anti-colonial resistance of Indian tribes, and among the whites we have mass-military desertions on both sides of inter-imperialist fratricide, myriad riots and strikes, and the militant abolitionists of the German Anabaptist and Scotch-Irish hillbilly communities who also resisted the encroachment of the US war machine. The ascention of the US bourgeoisie did not liberate the proletariat, it only lead to the further enslavement of the workers (as evidenced by the modern US prison system which incarcerates millions, mostly African) and the valorization of capital at the expense of North American ecology.

Feel free to call me a Neo-Confederate, to distract from your support of an unpopular bourgeois regime.


you're really on the immediate side of the anti-Chavez right.Actually I would think it was pretty funny if the entire "anti-Chavez right" was dragged out into the street and gunned down. The same scenario should befall the reactionaries in the US whining about "socialist medicine" and the "Ground Zero mosque", that doesn't mean, however, that I'm going to cheerlead the Obama regime as plenty of "anarchists" and "Marxists" in the US did during the '08 elections...


The proletariat has not conquered full state power in Venezuela.My goal is not to "conquer state power", my goal is to impose the "social state" of the proletarian dictatorship through the total destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus.


nationalization'Nationalization' is not the same thing as socialism...might as well praise the 'nationalization' policies of the Putin faction in the Russian Federation at the expense of "the bourgeoisie". Your half-baked social democratic ideology needs to be buried quickly in the rubbish heap of history.


challenging imperialismHow is Venezuela, or its primary political allies, (Brazil, Bolivia, Iran, PRC, Russian Federation) not "imperialist" by any coherent definition?


Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will.


We have seen that in its economic essence imperialism is monopoly capitalism. [...] monopoly arose out of the concentration of production at a very high stage. This refers to the monopolist capitalist associations, cartels, syndicatess, and trusts.


perhaps you'd be kind enough to show us a real-life example of your ideology being put into practice on a wide scale.The point is not to impose "ideology"...


I don't want to deal with the facts of the situation, so I'll just say something about Stalinism and hope no one notices how paper-thin my arguments are.I just think it's pretty amusing that throughout Barry Lyndon's pro-Chavez tirade, his only listed academic source was a crackpot article from a website littered with, among other gems, global warming conspiracy theories and defenses of child pornographers.


Yeah, because the fall of the socialist bloc was caused by the Popular Front strategy 50 years earlier. :rolleyes:"The socialist bloc" was not even a potential force of communism at the outbreak of WWII. If you actually believe the Soviet Union was an example of "socialism" even during the great purges of the 30s, you deserve Hugo Chavez. However you instead seem to think the Soviet Union was a force of "socialism" even during the decades of the Cold War after 'de-Stalinization', which makes you ten thousand times more delusional. Why not just go the Christopher Hitchens route and decide the US is 'socialist'?


the significance of an armed working class.There's nothing "significant" about an armed working class. Bourgeois states recruit the working class into their armies and police forces. The US arms industry manufactures cheap and ineffective hunting rifles and 'women's' firearms which they sell in circus-like gun shows. And here in the US, as elsewhere in the world, there are plenty of armed "working class" drug gangs and right-wing militias. Communism does not mean jizzing at the thought of an "armed working class"...(I'll be awaiting your Columbine killer slashfiction)


Workers are being armed and trained to defend themselves and their rights...why do you oppose this?The same reason I oppose Salwa Judum, Russian Neo-Nazis, and Al-Qā'ida. Reactionary state paramilitaries" defend[ing] themselves and their rights"...have you been watching too many Charles Bronson films?


Yes, and that "newer and more sophisticated stratum of workplace control" is what we call greater working-class control.What you call "greater working-class control", I call the perpetuation of wage labor through the further ascension of a bureaucratic middle management.


Progress usually introduces newer and more sophisticated things.Yes like surveillance cameras, WMDs, state-of-the-art prisons, and nanotechnology, all of which are benign 'tools' that need to be in the hands of the 'workers' state'


for his troubles he was kidnapped by tanks and almost removed from power.I feel so much empathy for the "troubles" of someone who currently lives in a mansion. :laugh: That's what you have to live with when you are a bourgeois, there's no honor among thieves! :lol:


you have the same short-term political goals as the Venezuelan right wingRepetition of a claim is often a surrogate for substantial evidence



Chavez has empowered the workers of Venezuela politically and economically, through the formation of various working-class organs and expropriation."Of all the classes that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.", Marx, Communist Manifesto


The battle lines in Venezuela are drawn. The workers are on one side and the bourgeoisie is on the other.I couldn't agree more! Guess which side of the line Chavez and co. fall on? :D

Luckily you are not in charge of deciding the direction of the Venezuelan proletariat....

[manic expression]

Actually I have re-read the exchange and it was clearly Barry Lyndon who brought up Chirino, not myself.
That changes nothing, as we will see.


Nor did I ever say that Chirino is the "voice" of, in my words, the "actual combative workers' movement"...
Huh:

Don't take the word of the social-fascists who glorify the social-imperialist regime in Venezuela, read what the actual combative workers' movement in Venezuela has to say:

Then you post an article defending that very individual.


I criticized Barry Lyndon for standing with the Venezuelan state against the actual combative workers' movement.
Too bad your "actual combative workers' movement" is in the pocket of the Venezuelan right.


Such "exposure" has yet to occur as the factual specifics I requested have not been provided.
But the factual specifics you didn't request prove the statement.


Leading up to WWII, W.E.B. DuBois, one of the brilliantest intellectuals of black liberation in the US, wrote “I have never received a cent from Japan or from any Japanese and yet I believe in Japan. It is not that I sympathize with China less but that I hate white European and American propaganda, theft and insult more. I believe in Asia for the Asiatics and despite the hell of war and the fascism of capital, I see Japan as the best agent for this end.” Does the eggrarious error of a single important intellectual celebrity point to the fact that the enourmous mass of internally colonized African youth, struggling in their day-to-day lives against the US regime at the time, were in fact agents of Japanese imperialism? Of course not!

Social patriotism: Sublimely capitalist, sublimely anti-working class

True communism: 100% worker, 100% for the liberation of the working-class
:lol: So Du Bois writing positive things about Japan before WWII is equal to providing support for a coup against Chavez? The most eggrarious error here is that you think this has something to do with the conversation. Stop trying to cover up the reality of your positions.

Your allies: capitalist.

Our allies: for the working class.


I'd made up my mind about the Venezuelan bourgeois and their beureaucratic lackies.
And you have the same exact immediate political objectives as they do. So obviously your mind is definitely made up.


Yes and if the SS had gotten their way they would have gunned down the entire old German bourgeoisie.
The SS did get their way, and that didn't happen.


As to your pathological insistence that Chavez is not bourgeois....
But Marx was not talking of a government which expropriated capitalist property and empowered workers politically and economically. So you have no argument here.


Rival imperialist factions deserve each other. What about the relentless attacks by the US bourgeoisie against the people of Japan and Germany during WWII? Does that justify Japanese and German imperialism? Or what about the US bourgeoisie's relentless attacks against its own population during the US Civil War? Does that justify the imperialism of the CSA?
Again, this has no relevance. Chavez was undermining the power of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, and so they moved against him (and failed). The examples you blindly throw out were wars between competing ruling classes.

But yeah, the coup of 2002 and WWII/US Civil War are exactly the same! :lol:


Anyway the US and Venezuela at this point have basically agreed to "play ball"...Western imperialist corporations are keeping the "Bolivarian revolution" afloat. (See "Sealing Shift, Chávez Gives Contracts to Western Oil Companies", from the New York Times, February 11th '10, and "Halliburton reveals Venezuela assets amid dispute", from Reuters, Jul 24 '09, although you will likely claim these are the lies of the "imperialist press")
Except the US has unceasingly tried to slander Chavez and his policies, and give support to his enemies within and without Venezuela.

That Halliburton has assets in Venezuela doesn't back up your conclusions.


This claim is self-evidently absurd, akin to Glenn Beck's claim that Obama is an anarchist. It's safe to guess that you've done no research into the subject.
...Cause you said so. Let me know when you have an argument, k?


Working-class "participation" in production is mandatory for survival under capitalism, voting is not. (In regimes where voting is optional, absenteeism among the majority is the norm, in regimes where voting is compulsory there are large numbers of ballot-spoiling and satirical votes)

And obviously it is progressive when the workers refuse to produce, it's called a strike.
Don't run away from your own logic...does working-class participation in capitalist production "grant legitimacy" to capitalist society? No? I thought so...so why do you make such an idiotic leap in logic when it comes to elections? Oh, right, it's because you have no idea how to promote the struggle of the workers.

And secondly, it's more progressive for workers to take control of production, just like it's progressive for workers to push forward their struggle through electoral participation. Electoral politics, at the very least, is a platform by which workers can challenge and defeat capitalist lies, as well as reach their fellow workers. But you don't want anything to do with that because you don't care what workers want (your words, not mine :lol:).


By rebelling against bourgeois society, something that's beyond the conceptual frame-work of individuals who see the Chavist regime in Venezuela as an example of "socialism"...
Nice strawman, nice try.


Voting is the intellectual equivalent of throwing down one's weapon and exposing one's chest to the enemy's bullets.
It's not an intellectual exercise, child, it's political. That's the whole point of electoral politics, to advance the political character of revolutionary socialism. The fact that you can't even grasp this shows that you have no business talking of the subject.

Further, if we see electoral politics as an arena where workers do pay more attention to arguments (which is demonstrably true), then abandoning that is counterrevolutionary, for it is retreating from an ideological battlefield without even a fight. That's what you want...that you want to misinterpret the plainest metaphor means that you're afraid to deal with the facts of the matter. Which condemns you as worthless to the working-class cause.


Which they do, through absenteeism, ballot spoiling, satirical votes, etc. Not through supporting the sincere electoral efforts of social-democratic and fascist parasites.
But that's hardly the situation, is it?

What you're saying is that if genuine revolutionaries can get into office in a capitalist society, they shouldn't. Marx, Engels and every other actual revolutionary disagrees with you. As does history.


These "opportunities" are bribes, they are gained not through voting but are in fact instituted in an attempt to alleviate contradictions. Your reasoning is equivalent to asserting the New Deal occurred because people voted for Roosevelt, not because of the organized mass-unrest by workers in the US.
:lol: So bringing more workers to revolutionary politics is a bribe? By that standard, you won't advance the revolution one inch, because you see all progress as a bribe.


Furthermore many times these "opportunities" are Trojan Horses for newer, more sophisticated forms of exploitation. (eg. Social Security in the US) And these "opportunities" are never expressions of proletarian power, since they can be just as easily taken away....(austerity, etc.)
Revolutionaries had nothing to do with Social Security or austerity. Try again, make sure to buy new dancing shoes this time.


Actually you are conceding the battlefield to the 'left-wing' bourgeois.
No, you're doing that. By challenging capitalist campaigns, we take the field. By sitting on your backend and whining about how elections don't do anything, you're leaving the bourgeoisie with control of the field. I'll take your opinion seriously when you can comprehend the concept of class warfare.


What about the French workers who cheer lead Sarkozy as his regime brutally expels Roma? Or the Euro-American workers in Arizona who cheer lead "Sheriff Joe" and the creation of stricter legal requirements for the enforcement of state identification in congruence with a white supremacist immigration policy? Or the Ugandan workers who are rallying for the death penalty for homosexuals? Or the Indian workers who join reactionary anti-Naxalite vigilante groups?
Two things. First, those are not independent working-class voices, and as they are under the ideological and practical control of capitalist forces, we cannot see them as fully proletarian in the political sense.

Second, the job of a revolutionary is to listen to workers, to find out what they want and translate it back to them in a language they can understand. The workers join reactionary causes are fooled into thinking they want things they wouldn't otherwise.

And how do you reach these workers? Part of that is elections. Which means you have no part in what the job of a revolutionary is.


The two conditions are mutually dependent.
Not in the short-term, no, they are not.


My direct answer: No.
So you're an anti-Marxist who has no conception of progress for the working class. Noted.


Actually I would think it was pretty funny if the entire "anti-Chavez right" was dragged out into the street and gunned down.
But in terms of political goals, you and then are in the same boat, whether or not you like it.


My goal is not to "conquer state power", my goal is to impose the "social state" of the proletarian dictatorship through the total destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus.
That's a nice way of saying you want to conquer state power. If only you had the slightest idea as to how to make it happen, though...


'Nationalization' is not the same thing as socialism.
No one's saying Venezuela is socialist. Your "argument" is a lie, told by a liar.


How is Venezuela, or its primary political allies, (Brazil, Bolivia, Iran, PRC, Russian Federation) not "imperialist" by any coherent definition?
Venezuela isn't imperialist because of the relationship between the state and monopoly capital. Simply put, monopoly capital is not driving the state's interest (or at least a central layer of the state: Chavez' layer). So by any coherent definition, you're making stuff up.


The point is not to impose "ideology"...
Good thing, then, that I didn't ask you for that. I asked you for an example of your ideology being put into practice.

But since you're refusing to answer it, I take it as proof that your ideas have absolutely no bearing on the realities of working-class struggle. You're welcome to try to prove otherwise, but you won't, because you can't. :lol:


I just think it's pretty amusing that throughout Barry Lyndon's pro-Chavez tirade, his only listed academic source was a crackpot article from a website littered with, among other gems, global warming conspiracy theories and defenses of child pornographers.
Your sources condemn you enough.


"The socialist bloc" was not even a potential force of communism at the outbreak of WWII. If you actually believe the Soviet Union was an example of "socialism" even during the great purges of the 30s, you deserve Hugo Chavez. However you instead seem to think the Soviet Union was a force of "socialism" even during the decades of the Cold War after 'de-Stalinization', which makes you ten thousand times more delusional. Why not just go the Christopher Hitchens route and decide the US is 'socialist'?
Unlike you, however, I look at social relations (the relationships of classes to the means of production). The position of the proletariat in the Soviet Union shows that it was socialist, as the vanguard party held state power and thus control over production. Have fun arguing with Marxism, again.


There's nothing "significant" about an armed working class. Bourgeois states recruit the working class into their armies and police forces.
This, again, shows your utter inability to understand the dynamics involved. This is not a case of workers joining capitalist-controlled armies, were that the case then there would be nothing new to talk about. Instead, we are seeing workers organized as workers to defend their interests.

But I know how much you hate that, because workers seem to never agree to your absurd ideas.


The same reason I oppose Salwa Judum, Russian Neo-Nazis, and Al-Qā'ida. Reactionary state paramilitaries" defend[ing] themselves and their rights"...have you been watching too many Charles Bronson films?
They're not reactionary, they're progressive, for they are examples of working-class organizations. But again, you hate that, so it's no surprise you'd compare the Venezuelan working class to Neo-Nazis.


What you call "greater working-class control", I call the perpetuation of wage labor through the further ascension of a bureaucratic middle management.
Translated into reality-talk, that means greater working-class control. You can make up as many subjective labels for that as you want, it only shows you to be an anti-worker hack with an overactive imagination.


Yes like surveillance cameras, WMDs, state-of-the-art prisons, and nanotechnology, all of which are benign 'tools' that need to be in the hands of the 'workers' state'
They do.


I feel so much empathy for the "troubles" of someone who currently lives in a mansion. :laugh: That's what you have to live with when you are a bourgeois, there's no honor among thieves! :lol:
Yeah, because heads of state should live in shacks and wear hairshirts. :laugh: I think you need to head back to your monastic cell.


Repetition of a claim is often a surrogate for substantial evidence
And an inability to refute a claim is often helpful in showing the validity of the claim.


"Of all the classes that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.", Marx, Communist Manifesto

I couldn't agree more! Guess which side of the line Chavez and co. fall on?
On the side of the proletariat. That's why your allies the Venezuelan bourgeoisie tried to get him out of power. That's why every two-bit reactionary in Latin America froths at the mouth when his name is mentioned. That's why the Venezuelan workers now see who their friends and their enemies are. That's why you're an anti-socialist who has no relevance to the revolution.


Luckily you are not in charge of deciding the direction of the Venezuelan proletariat....
No, the Venezuelan proletariat is...and guess who they support? Thanks, you're making this almost too easy. :lol:

[Barry Lyndon]

Isn't it interesting that when an article about police getting punished for murdering workers is posted(something that you would be hard pressed to find happening in almost any 3rd World country, or even a 1st world country), the ultra-lefts swarm all over the thread, posting articles by right-wing hacks disguised as left criticism, with the objective of getting people stop talking about the topic and instead get us arguing about how Chavez is a 'social-fascist' who 'doesnt care' about workers?
It's like ultra-lefts are terrified of any good news coming out of Venezuela, because it highlights their own utter uselessness and shameless opportunism. And exposes them as liars with zero credibility.

Everyone who has derailed this thread with their nonsense should be restricted for trolling.

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

a) Then you post an article defending that very individual.
b) Too bad your "actual combative workers' movement" is in the pocket of the Venezuelan right.
c) But the factual specifics you didn't request prove the statement.
d) So Du Bois writing positive things about Japan before WWII is equal to providing support for a coup against Chavez? The most eggrarious error here is that you think this has something to do with the conversation. Stop trying to cover up the reality of your positions.
e) you have the same exact immediate political objectives as they do.
f) So obviously your mind is definitely made up.
g) The SS did get their way
h) a government which expropriated capitalist property
i) empowered workers politically and economically.
j) The examples you blindly throw out were wars between competing ruling classes.
k) the coup of 2002 and WWII/US Civil War are exactly the same!
l) the US has unceasingly tried to slander Chavez and his policies, and give support to his enemies within and without Venezuela.
m)That Halliburton has assets in Venezuela doesn't back up your conclusions.
n) does working-class participation in capitalist production "grant legitimacy" to capitalist society?
o) why do you make such an idiotic leap in logic when it comes to elections?
p) you have no idea how to promote the struggle of the workers.
q) it's more progressive for workers to take control of production,
r) it's progressive for workers to push forward their struggle through electoral participation. Electoral politics, at the very least, is a platform by which workers can challenge and defeat capitalist lies, as well as reach their fellow workers. But you don't want anything to do with that because you don't care what workers want (your words, not mine :lol:).
s) child,
t) it's political. That's the whole point of electoral politics, to advance the political character of revolutionary socialism.
u) Marx, Engels and every other actual revolutionary disagrees with you. As does history.
v) you won't advance the revolution one inch, because you see all progress as a bribe.
w) Revolutionaries had nothing to do with Social Security or austerity.
x) By challenging capitalist campaigns, we take the field. By sitting on your backend and whining about how elections don't do anything, you're leaving the bourgeoisie with control of the field. I'll take your opinion seriously when you can comprehend the concept of class warfare.
y) First, those are not independent working-class voices, [...] as they are under the ideological and practical control of capitalist forces
z) we cannot see them as fully proletarian in the political sense.
aa) the job of a revolutionary is to listen to workers, to find out what they want and translate it back to them in a language they can understand.
ab) And how do you reach these workers? Part of that is elections.
ac) Not in the short-term, no, they are not.
ad) So you're an anti-Marxist who has no conception of progress for the working class. Noted.
ae) But in terms of political goals, you and then are in the same boat, whether or not you like it.
af) That's a nice way of saying you want to conquer state power.
ag) If only you had the slightest idea as to how to make it happen, though...
ah) No one's saying Venezuela is socialist.
ai) Simply put, monopoly capital is not driving the state's interest (or at least a central layer of the state: Chavez' layer).
aj) I asked you for an example of your ideology being put into practice.
ak) You're welcome to try to prove otherwise, but you won't, because you can't. :lol:
al) The position of the proletariat in the Soviet Union shows that it was socialist, as the vanguard party held state power and thus control over production.
am) Instead, we are seeing workers organized as workers to defend their interests.
an) workers seem to never agree to your absurd ideas.
ao) it's no surprise you'd compare the Venezuelan working class to Neo-Nazis.
ap) [Capitalist labor-restructuring] means greater working-class control.
aq) They do.
ar) Yeah, because heads of state should live in shacks and wear hairshirts. :laugh:
as) And an inability to refute a claim is often helpful in showing the validity of the claim.
at) every two-bit reactionary in Latin America froths at the mouth when his name is mentioned.
au) No, the Venezuelan proletariat is...and guess who they support?

a) Chirino as an individual is utterly insignificant compared to the mass of the proletariat struggling against the 'left' and 'right' Venezuelan bourgeoisie. (And it is obvious you did not read past the first few sentences of the article I posted) However it is clear that the Chavist ideologues are going to find any excuse to express their patriotism for the Venezuelan state.
b) Citation needed.
c) Witticisms do not sufficiently distract from your lack of factual citations. So far the only 'evidence' that the struggle for proletarian emancipation against the bourgeois Venezualan state is a 'front' for US imperialism is an unsourced claim that one individual personality was interviewed by an unspecified 'right-wing newspaper' during the '02 Coup.
d) Yep, it's siding with the 'underdog' imperialist faction out of sheer personal resentment. (Most of the Chavez apologists on RevLeft are slaves of the US regime)
e) If you repeat a falsehood enough it does not become true. How does struggling for proletarian autonomy in Venezuela strengthen the reactionary right or the interests of US imperialism?
f) It did not take Chavez for "my mind" to be "made up" about social democratic parasites who co-opt class struggle. The history of the USSR, the PRC, The Cuban Republic, the DPRK, the DDR, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Socialist People's Republic of Albania, the People's Republic of the Congo, the People's Republic of Hungary, and so on, were sufficient for that.
g) Wow, you know as much about the history of the 3rd Reich as you do about the current political situation in Venezuala!
h) juggling capitalist property from the "private" to the "public" sector is not the same thing as the proletarian expropriation of capitalist property, it can more accurately described as the pruning and maintanance of the capitalist property system.
i) As a Marxist I believe it is the job of the workers to empower themselves. This will be achieved by war against the political economy.
j) Your belief that the current regime in power in Venezuela is not a "ruling class" has not been factually demonstrated by yourself or anyone else. It is more akin to a personal religious dogma. Clearly the Chavez regime are managers of capital, and are very wealthy as a consequence. All you have pointed to are differences in policy, not fundamental steps towards the abolition of capital and the disempowerment of the bourgeois class.
k) They are both, primarily, conflicts between rival gangs of bourgeoisie. This is obvious to anyone who has not plunged their head like an ostritch into the barren ground of social-patriot dogma.
l) The US also slandered France and the center-right Chirac in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. But Chirac & co. were only trying to protect their Middle East investments. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
m) It is enough to conclude that the Venezuelan state collaborates with Western imperialism on a consistant basis
n) Only in the sense that it is heroic when the relationship of production is broken by the exploited party.
o) The "idiotic leap of logic" in question would be the leap of logic that equates voting with wage labor.
p) No need for a high horse here, comrade. I'm not trying to "promote the struggle of the workers" by arguing about Hugo Chavez on RevLeft, I'm trying to sharpen my own teeth by debating with intellectual opponents.
q) Which does not occur under the creation of new layers of bureaucratic workplace mediation.
r) Yep, we should stand as "socialists" for Chirac against Le Penn, Nixon against Wallace, and so on! This tactic has been proven in the past...
s) "Adults are just obsolete children and to hell with them" - Dr. Seuss
t) Bourgeois parliamentary elections are political in the same way the OJ Simpson trial was political.
u) I guess the Indian Naxalites aren't "actual revolutionaries", at least not compared to the president of Venezuela. As per Marx's thoughts on the subject, read the Critique of the Gotha Programme.
v) "The revolution" requies less and less dependence on capitalist hegemony to meet our needs. We need autonomy from capital, not more bribes.
w) And they have nothing to do with the hand-outs of the Venezuelan state
x) We "take the field" of mediocre capitulation to social democracy and total intellectual incoherence.
y) And I would apply the same reasoning to the 'Bolivarian' brown-shirts brainwashed by Chavez's macho, anti-Semitic tyrades
z) This is sort of derranged. They are proletarian, but are failing to act on the objective interests of their class. It is also not in the objective interests of the working-class to side with any faction of the bourgeoisie or its bureaucratic organs.
aa) Paternalistic trash. The job of the revolutionary is to be a partisan of freedom, not a focus group.
ab) I agree, for example if there were satirical votes placed in favor of martyred revolutionaries this would be a good propaganda victory for the social revolutionary left. However what you are discussing is participating in elections for their intended purpose: propaganda for the legitimacy of bourgeois state. (Including its 'socialist' players)
ac) Please elaborate.
ad) Being a "Marxist" does not mean slobbering on Marx's knob and agreeing with his interpretation of every event of his contemporary, even when one has a century and a half of hindsight. (And even if it did, fuck the ideological label of 'Marxism', Marx and Engels were not Marxists, or champions of ideology, they were whatever singularity) Has the US proletariat emerged victorious from the US Civil War? Or are the Africans in the US jailed and imprisoned in more numbers than ever before?
ae) Translation: I must choose between factions of the bourgeoisie "whether [I] like it or not". Not the politics of emancipation, but rather the politics of bourgeois serfdom. Also for what it's worth the US would much prefer the current 'Bolivarians' to some hypothetical Marxist-Leninist state.
af) The conquest of state power for the creation of communism requires the negation of the bourgeois state. This could have happened in Russia, China, and elsewhere at the early half of the 20th century. However, it has never come close to happening in Venezuela thanks to the efforts of 'Bolivarian' crusaders...but to think otherwise provides the comfort and thrill of an armchair revolutionary.
ag) Not through capitulating to the energy industry, global capital, and the anti-Semitic macho masses.
ah) Good. Then let's work together to destroy Venezuala and all other capitalist nations.
ai) How so? Unless you're using "monopoly capital" as a euphamism for US interests specifically and exclusively, which would be purile.
aj) You don't have a clear understanding of what the word 'ideology' means, which in my opinion is a central flaw in your conceptual framework.
ak) Don't enjoy the pleasures of that super-kawaii emoticon quite yet, my friend. You're trying to distract from the central question at hand, which is: Does the "Chavez layer" of the bourgeois Venezuelan state champion the cause of the proletariat? Or the cause of money-making bureaucrats? Regardless of our differences in political vision, is it useful on a practical level to defend the left-wing of the Venezuelan state, even against progressive forces (such as Marxist-Leninists, left-communists, anarchists, environmentalist and indigenous rights advocates, etc.) ? Or does it further cement our practical irrelevance?
al) More religious delusion. The primary problem was that the vanguard party failed to impose abolition of wage labor, thus creating communism. But that's a debate for another time, the 'socialist' hellhole of the Stalinist USSR was a paradise (or at least a purgatory) compared to modern-day Venezuela.
am) And if the interests of the workers ever conflict with the Bolivarian state, it will mean brutal devestation at the hands of the professional police and military forces. Might as well say the Boy Scouts are "workers organized as workers to defend their interests"...just give them guns!
an) Maybe not workers who praise anti-Semitic politicians, no...
ao) The comparison was drawn by the reactionary workers themselves, who comprise the Venezualan national police and vigilante forces, through their campaigns of terrorism against their Jewish class brethren and through their palatable digestion of Silvia's, Ceresole’s and Chavez's lies about the "same people that crucified Christ", "Jewish businessmen", the "Jewish problem", "escuálidos", "patos" and so on. (All exact quotes, by the way)
ap) No, it means more power for middle management within the system of capital. US workers do not have "greater control" as a consequence of the New Deal, they are still as much slaves as ever.
aq) This is a highly significant confession. This is our future if we follow your direction of "revolution"; the old instruments of exploitation in the hands of new masters.
ar) See, you're not even interested in pretending to care about income equality. Extraordinary people, heads of state, deserve better than the masses, for all their 'hard work' leading us in the right direction. Despicable. But there's still hope for you, you can transform your resentful fantasy of a future 'socialism' where the party bureaucrats live in mansions and bureaucratic police forces spy on the workers to ensure obedience, into a positive vision of genuine proletarian liberation. But in order to do so you must put yourself in the shoes of all exploited.
as) One example out of many: The right-wing official 'opposition' stood with el Aissami and Cabello in their October 2009 decision to attack Yukpa workers who opposed land demarcation.
at) "Every two-bit reactionary" in the US "froths at the mouth" when Obama's name is mentioned, for obvious reasons. Obama is still acting in his own bourgeois class interests at every move. I will commend you on your colorful verbal imagery, though. Stop wasting your talents defending a brutal capitalist state.
au) Recent polls suggest declining approval ratings for Chavez among the Venezuelan workers...

[manic expression]

Chirino isn't insignificant in the sense that he embodies the anti-socialist politics you represent. You tried to defend him, and now that we know he's an enemy of the Venezuelan workers, you go back to hiding behind vagueness. That's because your politics have no relevance to the Venezuelan proletariat, and everyone knows it.

And your own words are my citation. You've been here defending the only individual you've held up, and he's nothing but an anti-worker gusano. That's enough of a citation...but it's nice to see you abandoning your arguments like a rat on a sinking ship. The burden of evidence is on you, you haven't pointed to anything, you're just repeating the same buzzwords. Our side, on the other hand, has shown the true nature of your politics. So keep complaining about lack of proof, because you're only talking about your own side of the issue.

The definitions of imperialism you brought up comfortably define Chavez as non-imperialist. Monopoly capitalism is not in full control of the Venezuelan state, so you're wrong. Chavez isn't a capitalist and the writers you cited agree. Nice try.

Because your so-called "proletarian autonomy" happens to share the exact same political objectives as the Venezuelan bourgeoisie. Both you and the capitalists want Chavez out...and you're willing to collaborate with your allies in order to make this happen. That's why Chirino the gusano is so significant here, he was defended by your so-called forces for "proletarian autonomy" when he was in bed with the imperialists.

No, it did not take Chavez for you to make up your mind about opposing socialism and the cause of the workers, you're right about that (for a change). :laugh:

I know more than you do, apparently. More to the point, your lack of any counterargument is sufficient for me to say that you have no support for your ramblings. This is becoming a theme in your posts.

Ah, but it ceases to be capitalist property in that sense when taken out of the hands of the capitalists. When capitalists no longer control it, it takes on a different character. Good to see you ignoring Marxism once again.

And that's what the Venezuelan workers are doing by using their allies in the Venezuelan executive to wage class war against the capitalists. The capitalists, for their part, are fighting back by striking at the workers' allies such as Chavez. You stand with the capitalists in this struggle.

The current regime in power is a mix of many factors and layers. It would be idiotic to say that the Venezuelan state, in this case, is a single entity with homogeneous interests. It has conflicting class interests, and so we must look at it as such. Chavez represents a pro-working class layer of the state, whereas other layers of the state promote capitalism. But regardless, the current ruling class is the bourgeoisie, and Chavez is helping to fight them. You're just helping them.

Not rival gangs at all, for Chavez is clearly the enemy of the bourgeoisie. There is no other explanation for the 2002 coup (you know, the one your buddy supported :lol:) or the campaign of slander against Chavez since that point. Chavez, again, has expropriated the property of the capitalists and facilitated the political and economic empowerment of the workers. So no, this is class war, perhaps you should learn a thing or two about it.

But the US bourgeoisie hardly tried to expropriate the French capitalist class. That's what we're talking about here. Do try to keep up, if you can.

Well, you're free to conclude that, but that's only because you have such an overactive imagination. As for "heroism", your idea of the concept is to collaborate with the bourgeoisie. You don't consistently apply your logic of participation in capitalist society: voting and production are both participation. But you run away from your own logic as soon as my comparison sinks in. That's why you're no longer making the argument but protesting a leap in logic that you're guilty of. Makes sense...like a rat on a sinking ship.

I don't have a high horse, and yet I tower over your pathetic excuses for argumentation. If you want to sharpen your teeth, perhaps you should go through teething first. As it stands, you're feeding yourself intellectual baby food.

Which is also what we call greater working-class control, something you evidently oppose.

I'd like to see you quantify those comparisons. Go ahead, support your argument.

Dr. Seuss...so that's what you've been reading instead of Marx.

:lol: Again, make my day and try to support that assertion.

The Naxalites are definitely revolutionaries...

And more autonomy is what Chavez is helping to establish. That's why workers have far greater control over their workplaces, that's why capitalists are being expropriated left and right, that's why working-class communes are gaining more prominence. That's why you're blind.

Wrong. By opposing capitalist rhetoric and lies, and being able to defeat them in front of the eyes of the workers, we gain support and confidence and position with which to prosecute class war. It's an arena of class struggle, something you wouldn't know much about (at least from the working-class perspective).

Keep making stuff up, child.

Interesting, so you're saying you're not aligning with the interests of the proletariat when you get in bed with the Venezuelan bourgeoisie. At least you admit it.

Obviously you have little experience organizing in the streets. Being a "partisan for freedom" might sound all cool when you're playing dress-up, but actual communist work means talking to workers, being sensitive to what they desire and translating it back to them in terms of class.

And what makes you think you'll get more attention promoting "joke votes" than votes for candidates who actually exist? Both mean participating in the capitalist system whether you like it or not...one just works in real life, the one you don't promote.

So to you, being a Marxist means not supporting the cause of the workers and sitting with your thumb in your ass when it comes to the fight against slavery? I see. Too bad that's not Marxism, it's idiocy.

Just so we're clear, you admit you don't stand with the workers, and that you're neutral when it comes to chattle slavery. Thanks for proving all of my points in one sentence. :lol:

It's about defeating the bourgeoisie politically. That's what Chavez wants, that's what you're trying to stop.

Yes, because producing oil is bad for the workers...just tell that to families who happen to live where it's cold, Agrippa.

So you want to destroy Venezuela. Your anti-worker tendencies are, again, noted.

No, I'm using it the way Lenin used it. Go re-read your own citations.

Ideology means, in this case, the application of political positions. Your ideology has never seen the light of day, it has never influenced or guided the struggle of the workers. That's probably why you say you hate workers and you don't care what they want, and it's probably why you get in bed with the Venezuelan capitalists.

Yes, it does champion the cause of the proletariat by acting as its anchor. I've outlined how so in many instances. Keep ignoring them.

Wage labor was abolished, in the capitalist sense. With no commodity production, you can't say wage labor remained in place. The entire nature of the thing shifted, was twisted upside-down.

But the head of the Bolivarian state is on their side. Funny how those little details throw such a wrench into your childish fantasies.

Well you're not a worker and you praise, indirectly, the racist Venezuelan bourgeoisie, so that one's on you.

Good thing, then, that the anchor for the workers does not display such tendencies. Keep dancing.

Translation: workers have more control over their workplaces and you don't like that because you don't stand for their interests.

It's the present, not the future. You can't even get the small things right, can you?

A head of state requires such things to do their job correctly. I'm not one to condemn a pharmacist for having extraordinary access to drugs...condemning a head of state for having luxurious quarters would make about as much sense.

The right is a bunch of opportunist slugs. What's your point?

Not so. Many reactionaries support Obama. One reactionary is Obama.

Such things fluctuate, and have. But since you won't object to the assertion that Chavez enjoys exceptional support from the Venezuelan workers, we know that you can't object to it. Because it's true. Sucks how that always seems to get in the way of your little games, doesn't it? :lol:

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

You tried to defend him, and now that we know he's an enemy of the Venezuelan workers, you go back to hiding behind vagueness.I will still defend him, you have refused to provide any factual evidence for your claims against him. But individual personalities and celebrities will never be as important as the mass of rebellious workers. (This is hard to understand if your idea of "communism" is erecting a marble shrine to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, and Hoxha)


That's because your politics have no relevance to the Venezuelan proletariatGood to see a US worker deciding what's of "relevance to the Venezuelan proletariat" in the face of exasperating capitalist contradictions in that region.


gusano.A traditional slur against Cuban-Americans, classy...


it's nice to see you abandoning your arguments like a rat on a sinking ship.As I said, I'll still defend Mr. Chirino in the light of absence of evidence. However, digging up skeletons in Mr. Chirino's closet will not weaken my support for the struggle of the combative communist left against the social-fascist Chavez regime and its conservative official opposition.


you haven't pointed to anythingThe writing is on the wall for those who care to read it.

http://signalfire.org/?s=venezuela


The definitions of imperialism you brought up comfortably define Chavez as non-imperialist.Monopoly capitalism is not in full control of the Venezuelan stateVenezuela and its allies (Iran, Russia, etc.) are obviously monopoly capitalist, this is more willful ignorance of reality


the writers you cited agree.I have to respect your warped logical contortionism on comrade Lenin's theory of imperialism, (even though it requires a willful blindness to the material circumstances) I don't see how Rosa Luxemburg's theories of imperialism could ever be used to make the argument that Venezuela is anti-imperialist, then again you probably secretly think Rosa Luxemburg was a lumpen "ultra".


Because your so-called "proletarian autonomy" happens to share the exact same political objectives as the Venezuelan bourgeoisie.The autonomy of the proletarian class on any level would be disastrous for the official Venezuelan right. Anyway you have an ideological rather than material conception of the "bourgeoisie". (In your Alice in Wonderland world, the "bourgeoisie" is anyone who isn't "progressive", it has nothing to do with objective class interests)


Both you and the capitalists want Chavez outI want the entire bourgeoisie out, preferably out of a helicopter into the ocean, Chavez and his right-wing "opponents" all included.


gusanoAgain more infantile and chauvinistic expletives in favor of journalistic evidence.


he was in bed with the imperialists.Again more assertions without proof.


No, it did not take Chavez for you to make up your mind about opposing socialism

In the language of traditional Marxism, revolution and the emergence of a new society has always been addressed as the question of the "transition": of the passage through socialism to communism. Negri argues forcibly that this is totally inconsistent with Marx's analysis in the Grundrisse. The only "transition" in that work is the reversal and overthrow of all of capital's determinations by the revolutionary subject. Because capital's central means of social domination is the imposition of work and surplus work, the subordination of necessary labor to surplus labor, Negri sees that one of the two most fundamental aspects of working class struggle is the struggle against work. Where profit is the measure of capitalist development and control, Negri argues that the refusal of work measures the transition out of capital. The refusal of work appears as a constituting praxis that produces a new mode of production, in which the capitalist relation is reversed and surplus labor is totally subordinated to working-class need.
The second, positive side to revolutionary struggle is the elaboration of the self-determined multiple projects of the working class in the time set free from work and in the transformation of work itself. This self-determined project Negri calls self-valorization. Communism is thus constituted both by the refusal of work that destroys capital's imposed unity and by the self-valorization that builds diversity and "rich, independent multilaterality."
By this time it should be clear that Negri rejects "socialism" as, at best, an advanced form of capitalism. His major objection is that while socialism is understood as the planned redistribution of income and property, it invariably retains the planned imposition of work, and thus fails to escape the dynamic of capitalist extortion of surplus work and the subordination of needs to accumulation. Any existing socialist regime or socialist party program could be taken as an example. But the point is more than a critique of the Italian Communist Party's participation in the imposition of austerity, or of the Soviet labor camps. It is an affirmation that the concept of socialism has never grasped the real issue: the abolition of work or the liberation of society from narrow production fetishism. Socialism can only constitute a repressive alternative to the collapse of market capitalism - a more advanced level of capitalist planning at the level of the state. Today, when there is a growing "socialist" movement in the United States calling for national planning, the nationalization of industry, and "more jobs," Negri's arguments deserve the closest attention.


I know more than you do, apparently.I'm not an expert on the subject but I know the Schutzstaffel was originally a division of the Sturmabteilung, until the Night of the Long Knives when the paramilitary forces of the populist extreme right were repressed and those loyal to the relatively moderate Hitler were absorbed into the Ordnungspolizei. There were plenty of brownshirts who wanted to gun down the entire old German bourgeoisie, that does not make them anti-bourgeois revolutionaries since fascists seek to perpetuate the social order and political logic of the bourgeoisie.


it ceases to be capitalist property in that sense when taken out of the hands of the capitalists.Which has not occurred in Venezuela by any means.


that's what the Venezuelan workers are doing by using their allies in the Venezuelan executive to wage class war against the capitalists.The Venezuelan executive are not "allies" of the working class, they are "allies" of capital who are eking out their own parasitic existence in the capitalist bureaucracy. Their "class war" is a war against rival factions of bureaucrats, along with of course an all-out war on the disobedient proles.


The capitalists, for their part, are fighting back by striking at the workers' allies such as Chavez.You could just as easily say "the capitalists" were "striking at the workers' allies such as" Roosevelt in 1933. However, Roosevelt was no "ally" of the worker, he was a 'progressive' bourgeoisie.


You stand with the capitalists in this struggle.Actually, I don't really care either way. Chavez, Carmona, it's all the same festering pile of shit. The workers should never submit to this sort of prisoner's dilemma which is all too common within spectacular 'democracies' such as the US and Venezuela.


The current regime in power is a mix of many factors and layers. It would be idiotic to say that the Venezuelan state, in this case, is a single entity with homogeneous interests.You could say that about any bourgeois state, however elements of the bourgeois state cannot fight for the interests of the workers (without committing class suicide as bourgeois state bureaucrats) just as a Christian cannot serve both God and Mammon


Chavez represents a pro-working class layer of the state, whereas other layers of the state promote capitalism.As demonstrated though we have a fundamental disagreement regarding concepts of "capitalism" and what it means to be "pro-working class". Were Lincoln and Roosevelt "pro-working class"? Or were they opportunistic, forward-thinking capitalists?


the current ruling class is the bourgeoisie, and Chavez is helping to fight them.Try applying this reasoning to other historical events such as the American Revolution. Were Hamilton and Madison trying to "help" the working class "fight" the British bourgeoisie? Or were they trying to co-opt the revolutionary struggles of the workers away from freedom and towards the creation of a newer, more powerful bourgeois ruling-class? The subsequent 230+ years of US imperialism give us the answer clear as day.


Not rival gangs at all, for Chavez is clearly the enemy of the bourgeoisie. There is no other explanation for the 2002 coupYes there is, you are just choosing to ignore it.

Was the coup de'tat against Bhutto by Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan a sign that either party was motivated by the interests of the workers? Or merely a sign that rival factions of bourgeoisie fight each other all the time?


the campaign of slander against Chavez since that point.Politicians always slander each other, watch television or listen to the radio during the election season sometime.


Chavez, again, has expropriated the property of the capitalistsHe has juggled property from the private to public sector. In order for something to be an expropriation it has to be the illegal and daring seizure of any type of bourgeois property, by the workers themselves, against all forces of the bourgeois state. (If successful the seized property is no longer property-as-such but rather the commonly held resources of the autonomous workers' movement)

You might as well call Theodore Roosevelt an enemy of capitalist property for "trust-busting" and creating the Park system.


facilitated the political and economic empowerment of the workers.There is a difference between social welfare and "political and economic empowerment", empowerment of the working-class can only ever be achieved by the workers themselves.


this is class warAll capitalist conditions are class war, that doesn't mean Chavez is fighting for the proletariat.


But the US bourgeoisie hardly tried to expropriate the French capitalist class.And no such thing has occurred in Venezuela, only the creation of social-fascist paramilitaries, new citizen's and workplace bureaucracies, a slight increase in social spending, and the redistribution of wealth from the 'private' to the 'public' sector of capital.

"Expropriation of the capitalist class" will involve the total abolition of wage, rent, taxation, the patriarchal family, income inequality, bureaucratic, hierarchical, centralized police and military forces, bourgeois ideological hegemony, compulsory formal education, prisons, and the ecologically disastrous urban-rural contradiction. None of this has occured thanks to Chavez, only the continual brutalization of women, prisoners, youths, Indians and Jews and the bribery of the masses with "half a loaf of bread and no revolution".


voting and production are both participation.And in the cases of the communist left it is or duty to disrupt both forms of participation. In the case of production, through strikes and sabotage. In the case of voting, through organized campaigns against capitalist politicians and for voter absneteeism and ballot-spoiling, not support of 'socialist' thug politicians claiming to act on behalf of 'the workers'.


I don't have a high horse, and yet I tower over your pathetic excuses for argumentation.So in other words you do have a high horse, which is why you want to lead the Venezuelan working-class from behind


you're feeding yourself intellectual baby food.Touche, however supporting the 'left-wing' bourgeoisie in Venezuela is analogous to feeding an infant honey.


Which is also what we call greater working-class controlSaying something does not make it true, your arguments are 60% mantra. Does the working class have "greater control" in the US thanks to the Department of Labor and the AFL-CIO? Hell no!


I'd like to see you quantify those comparisons.Nixon for one supported 'socialist' medicine, created the EPA, and so forth, which is more than Wallace would have done. I guess Nixon was acting on behalf of "the workers", not his own political popularity.


Dr. Seuss...so that's what you've been reading instead of Marx.Touche, however even Dr. Seuss was more of a Marxist than you are, and that's saying a lot considering he drew racist cartoons for US imperialist propaganda mocking the Indian national liberation movement.


Again, make my day and try to support that assertion.They're both political spectacular distractions for the masses utilized by the capitalist press to avoid discussing the relevant contradictions of capitalist society, expressions of rivalry between factions of the ruling class, in both cases the working class has 'no horse in the race'. The real question is; should we have 'critical solidarity' for OJ Simpson or the prosecution? Which bourgeoisie best represents the interests of the workers?


The Naxalites are definitely revolutionaries...And they definitely oppose bourgeois elections unlike parasites such as Prachanda and Chavez.


And more autonomy is what Chavez is helping to establish. That's why workers have far greater control over their workplaces, that's why capitalists are being expropriated left and right, that's why working-class communes are gaining more prominence. That's why you're blind.Again making assertions does not prove the assertions. The broad mass of workers still live the same lives in Caracas as they do in New York or London; going to work, toiling away for a paycheck, having their labor stolen to build mansions for the wealthy ruling-class, being harassed, intimidates, and assaulted by police, placed in jails by bureaucratic judges, inhaling toxic fumes from factories and automobiles, being raped by their husbands, and so on and so on.


It's an arena of class struggleYes which is why advocates of the left-wing bourgeois (such as yourself) want to trick elements of the actual communist left into conceding the arena.


child."Where are the leaders of the young who have not run their heads up against ‘fatherly benevolence’ and the ‘well-intentioned advice’ of older men? It is high time that an end be put to the fairy tale of disinterested and selfless friendship of age to youth" - Free Socialist Youth manifesto, 1919


when you get in bed with the Venezuelan bourgeoisie.Sometimes when we attack our enemies, we describe our own actions. You yourself admitted you have no ethical problem whatsoever with the ruling-class living in luxury off the stolen labor of the workers.


Obviously you have little experience organizing in the streets.Activist crotch-grabbing is not a substitute for logic or reason.


actual communist work means talking to workers, being sensitive to what they desire and translating it back to them in terms of class.None of which necessitates collaboration with state-bureaucrats and the 'left-wing' bourgeois.


And what makes you think you'll get more attention promoting "joke votes" than votes for candidates who actually exist?I would get the most attention by shaving half my head and running around screaming and foaming at the mouth with my genitals exposed. But that would not send a coherent message propagating the values of communism.

On the other hand rallying behind the bourgeois-state left, from Nader in the US to Chavez and Morales in Latin America, will not get any attention at all because it will just blur into the fog of capitalist politics. Look at how the CPUSA abandoned agitating for class struggle in favor of total collaboration with the democratic bourgeoisie on the onset of WWII. That was really useful in helping to raise class-consciousness. :rolleyes:


participating in the capitalist system whether you like it or notThis is your message to the workers: Participate in the capitalist system whether you like it or not. An informative moment for anyone who erroneously assumes your ideological platform stands for the emancipation of the working class.


So to you, being a Marxist means not supporting the cause of the workersThis is what it means to you to be a Marxist when you defend the jails, oil refineries, mansions, and police forces of the Venezuelan state.


that you're neutral when it comes to chattle slavery.I wish you were as good at following Marxism to it's rational conclusion as you are at building strawman arguments and writing colorful poetry about rats abandoning sinking ships and right-wing bourgeoisie foaming at the mouth, as sort of an MSG to distract from the nutritive substance of your argument.

Obviously the destruction of chattel slavery was in the immediate best interests of the African working-class, however by siding with the white Yankee colonist bourgeoisie they were inevitably betrayed (as indicated by reconstruction in the Deep South) and now the African working-class is more subjugated than ever. The victory of the Northern bourgeosie also laid the foundations for genocidal Westward Expansion. (I guess you're neutral about that....)

I'm "nuetral when it comes to chattle slavery" in that I don't think it's inherently more exploitative than other forms of proletarian slavery such as urban factory work.


It's about defeating the bourgeoisie politically. That's what Chavez wants

Chavez is a bourgeoisie, you've admitted this yourself implicitly, now just admit it explicitly and move on with your life.


because producing oil is bad for the workers...For the workers who have to live on the desecrated land, for the workers who have to toil away at great risk to their health and safety producing the oil, for the workers who have to inhale gasoline fumes.....


just tell that to families who happen to live where it's cold, Agrippa.People can heat their houses without the capitalist mode of production, also I can't make any sense of your reference to a Roman military official.


So you want to destroy Venezuela.Yes and all other nations. Nationalism is the enemy of communism. Go back to Marxism 101.


Your anti-worker tendencies are, again, noted.To you, "pro-worker" means "pro-nationalism"


No, I'm using it the way Lenin used it.How so?


Ideology means, in this case, the application of political positions.Well "in this case" you are ignoring the traditional Marxist definition of ideology, possibly because you're afraid to dismantle your own ideology.


Yes, it does champion the cause of the proletariat by acting as its anchor.The proletariat must be its own "anchor", not the supposed 'conspiracy of equals' by a supposedly enlightened left-bourgeoisie.


Wage labor was abolished, in the capitalist sense.Blatant falsehood.


With no commodity production, you can't say wage labor remained in place.Commodity production still exists in Venezuela, stop lying to yourself.


The entire nature of the thing shifted, was twisted upside-down.The only thing "twisted upside-down" is your logic and reasoning, perhaps your entire perception of reality.


But the head of the Bolivarian state is on their side.The head of the 'Bolivarian state' is on the side of the 'Bolivarian state', and the 'Bolivarian state' is just a current rearrangement of the colonial bourgeois state of Venezuela, which must be abolished along with all other states for the sake of the international proletariat.


Funny how those little details throw such a wrench into your childish fantasies.Funny how the "little detail" such as the further demarcation of indigenous land for industrial development, the further imprisonment of the working-class, the further murder and rape of workers by Venezuelan police, the unchanging nature of commodity production and wage in Venezuela, throw a wrench into your cowardly and oppertunistic fantasies


you're not a workerI'm not?


the racist Venezuelan bourgeoisieThe official opposition is no less racist than the Chavist anti-Semites. White supremacy still exists in Venezuela and the Chavez regime is doing nothing to change that.


Good thing, then, that the anchor for the workers does not display such tendencies. Keep dancing.

Translation: workers have more control over their workplaces and you don't like that because you don't stand for their interests.Blah blah blah, more repetition of the same stale lies. "The anchor of the workers" brings to mind amusing images of erotic maritime Chavez fantasies, though.


It's the present, not the future. You can't even get the small things right, can you?Those who forget the past are condemned to the future, maybe you should take lots of LSD so you can "live in the moment" like Ram Dass and not worry yourself about the catastrophic failures of the historical left.


A head of state requires such things to do their job correctly.No he doesn't, he just enjoys living in bourgeois decadence like every other capitalist.


I'm not one to condemn a pharmacist for having extraordinary access to drugs...Me neither. I would condemn instead the capitalist medical industry which monopolizes the resources of the workers and forces them to deal with an economically and politically privileged labor aristocracy to obtain drugs. But in your 'socialist' future political and economic inequality will still exist, you've made this crystal clear.


condemning a head of state for having luxurious quarters would make about as much sense.It does make as much sense because they are both examples of bourgeois inequality. But I can't wait for the socialist revolution when the party bureaucrats get to live in the White House and the rank-and-file such as ourselves get to continue toiling away in the factories so they can have flat-screen plasma TVs, sports cars, and chlorinated swinning pools


The right is a bunch of opportunist slugs.Just like the capitalist 'left'. Actually that's an insult to slugs.


Not so. Many reactionaries support Obama. One reactionary is Obama.And another reactionary is Chavez.


Such things fluctuate, and have.Proof that bourgeois ideological hegemony has rendered the majority of our class brethren intellectually incoherent. We have a lot to do and you are making it difficult by jumping in bed with a capitalist politician.


you won't object to the assertion that Chavez enjoys exceptional support from the Venezuelan workersNo more 'exceptional' than that of Reagan or Clinton.


Sucks how that always seems to get in the way of your little gamesIt "sucks" that the reactionary ideology of the unconscious masses gets in the way of the "little game" of creating communism. I guess it's better to support a marginally popular political regime that in no way stands for communism, so you can pretend you're accomplishing something.

But it's not too late for you to realize the energy you've wasted in support of the bourgeoisie. You should sincerely travel to Venezuela, it would be informative.

[manic expression]

Factual claims have already been established. He was in bed with the Venezuelan bourgeoisie when they were trying to roll back all the progress of the workers, and you're defending him. Thanks for admitting to being an ally of capitalism. There is no absence of evidence (unless we're only talking about your "side")...there is an absence of mature politics from your end.

Good to see you not understand what's happening in Venezuela...at all.

If the shoe fits, gusano/a.

:lol: Yes, the writing is on "the wall"...your facebook wall. Well done.

Venezuela certainly is not, especially considering the position of the banks and the state, the two are not aligned politically as in all imperialist countries. Too bad Lenin's own words (which you originally cited) make a greater fool of you.

Proletarian empowerment has been a disaster for the Venezuelan right...why do you think they've tried every dirty trick in the book (tricks your friends are a part of) to get Chavez out of power? Unfortunately for us, your mental capacities have not advanced to connect-the-dots.

Yes, you get mad when I call a gusano a gusano, because you love their politics so much. Makes sense. Like I said, if the shoe fits....

Assertions backed up by your own posts.

Ah, yes, you know so much about German fascism that you compare it to workers who are protecting their rights against the aggression of their bosses. Equivocation of fascism and socialism is the hallmark of every cheap anti-socialist...like you.

Of course expropriation has happened. If you read the news you'd know this. There are posts on the subject in this very forum. Try getting the facts first for a change.

Yes, the Venezuelan executive is capitalist...'cause you said so. Again, let me know when you have an argument.

And when did FDR organize workers' militias?

No, you do stand with the capitalists when you admit that you oppose Chavez. When you say "stinking pile of shit" you're talking the same crap as every Venezuelan reactionary. Again, thanks for making this much easier.

Wrong. Not every bourgeois state has proletarian forces in power...much less in executive power.

Very different leaders (I assume you mean FDR). Lincoln did represent progress for the proletariat when he finally got on the side of abolition (took him awhile, but still...). FDR represented capitalism's last gasp of saving its system from itself. WWII, actually, was what saved capitalism's ass in the US. But Chavez is very different from both of them, not only because of the times we live in and the political realities of the day, but because he has, much unlike the other two, represented a force for working-class organization and political empowerment. Workers now have independent organs by which they can control their communities and wage class war more effectively against their oppressors. Chavez has been a central figure in that. But you hate that, because you're an anti-socialist hack who doesn't want workers' desires fulfilled.

The American proletariat hadn't found its voice by 1776. Your comparisons are idiotic.

Again, a stupid comparison. Was Bhutto forming working-class organs of community rule? Armed working-class militias for defense against capitalist aggression? No and no.

And classes slander their enemies. The capitalist-controlled media was and is unanimous in their condemnation of Chavez. But you don't want to talk about that, because you agree with them.

Juggling: expropriation. Thanks, better luck next time. :laugh:

Yes, and Chavez represents the latter. Once again, nice try.

Oh, but it has. Chavez is expropriating capitalist firms and putting them in the hands of greater working-class control. But I know how much you hate that, because you don't want workers getting what they want.

Which means disrupting the advancement of working-class consciousness. Strikes don't happen out of thin air, they take the organization of workers who are participating in production. Without that happening first, you have nothing. In the same way, workers can only reject the capitalist state by first winning the ideological battles within electoral campaigns. Unless you reach workers through elections, they won't hear what you're trying to say, an will only see a bunch of impatient children screaming at them when there should be a discussion. You wouldn't know anything about that, though, since you have no relevance to the working-class cause.

No high horse, just your inability to make an argument. It's not my doing if you can't make a serious case.

So you think the Venezuelan workers are "infants", do you? So much for that last shred of ideological consistency. :lol:

They're not mantra if they're backed up by every serious post on the subject in this forum. Or are these expropriations just a figment of our collective imagination?

Now you shared Glenn Beck's definition of socialism! :lol: Reactionaries of a feather...

You know so much about Dr. Seuss, you should stick with what you're good at, I'll stick with the adult stuff.

The workers do have a horse in the race. Quite a few horses, actually. But you're not one of them, which is probably why you hate the revolutionaries who do stand for working-class progress.

They oppose elections...in India. Certain conditions call for boycotts of elections, certain conditions do not. The Bolshevik experience leading up to the October Revolution confirms this in every key.

There are similarities and differences, one difference being that the Venezuelan executive comes down on the workers' side. You can read the threads in this forum if you don't believe me (but you probably won't).

It's only an arena if you show up. You don't, and thus your irrelevance is no surprise. Don't go with what you think is "pure", go with what works, what aids the workers' cause. That's Marxism in a nutshell. Read about it sometime.

The fact that you think I was using it in the sense of age means the label applies to you perfectly.

Not the ruling class, heads of state. You'd know they aren't necessarily the same things if you knew the first thing about Marxism. But you don't, so you don't. And yes, you're defending a reactionary who gave aid and comfort to the anti-worker coup of 2002. We know where you stand quite well.

So you're admitting that you don't do jack shit in the streets. Not only are you theoretically bankrupt, but you're too lazy and too elitist to do anything for the struggle. Worthless, I think, sums it all up.

So why do you collaborate with the bourgeoisie, then? Socialists are the ones trying to fight them, why not just step aside and do nothing? Oh, that's what you actually do in practice...right....:lol:

We're talking about substantive attention...attention to a message of revolution. If you can't keep up, you might need to slow down next time.

Workers don't have a choice on that. They have to participate or they die. Our message is that we can organize and topple it together. Your message is...worthless, as we know.

No, defend the executive of the Venezuelan state. Many layers of that same state are not to be supported by the workers. Once again, you're falling behind...try reading what I write next time.

Chavez is not a "bourgeoisie" :laugh:. You're making stuff up because reality doesn't agree with you.

People can't heat their houses without power, Agrippa, perhaps you can tell them they're more "pure" when their children freeze to death. Some "revolutionary" you are.

Nationalism is hardly the enemy of Marxism when Marx said the proletariat must "constitute itself the nation". When you know what Marxism is about, let me know.

To everyone who knows what Marxism is, hating the Venezuelan nation is anti-worker and reactionary.

The proletariat doesn't always have an ally in power as the executive. It's a good idea to use it, in that case, instead of cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Not a falsehood at all. It's based on materialist analyses, something you don't know anything about.

:lol: I was talking about the USSR. But yeah, you really won that point...:laugh:

Explain how it's "imprisonment" on the basis of materialism, not hazy moralism.

Politically speaking? Hardly.

Again, you have no concept of the history of Venezuela, or what Chavez represents. Read a book.

You mean the same facts that you can't refute. Keep dancing.

"Catastrophic failure"...as in revolutions in almost every continent in the world? What has your ideology done for the revolution lately? I thought so. You lose.

So you agree that necessities of a job are not to be condemned. Heads of state do need such quarters to do their job, that's all there is to it. Thanks for proving my point.

Too bad Chavez has gone the opposite way of Obama. Too bad you're politically numb.

No one gets all support all the time...such things fluctuate, but Chavez enjoys the support of the workers. I know you get mad at that, but it's true.

More exceptional, and from a working class that has independent means of organization (something you hate).

No, it sucks how workers roundly reject your idiotic politics because people know a fake when they see one. You talk of revolution, and yet you have absolutely nothing to do with organization in the streets. You talk of "autonomy" for workers, and yet you denounce one of the strongest figures for working-class autonomy in all of Latin America. That's why you have no relevance, that's why you're an anti-socialist.

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

Factual claims have already been established. He was in bed with the Venezuelan bourgeoisie when they were trying to roll back all the progress of the workers, and you're defending him.

Just to be clear the specific piece of factual evidence I am seeking is the alleged document (preferably in its original Spanish) of a supposed "friendly" interview between Mr. Chirino and a right-wing press outlet. Said document has not been delivered by yourself or your fellow Chavez cheerleader Barry Lyndon.

There's no good reason for me to trust your claims on faith alone, nor the claims of Counter[-revolutionary]Punch

As I've said before Noam Chomsky, the most prominant socialist academic in the US, has given "friendly interviews" to Neo-Nazi rags and to Hustler. Does this mean the socialist movement in the US is "in bed" with Nazi pornographers?

Note that when the Marxist-Leninist al-Zaidi became a folk hero in Iraq for his attempted assault on president Bush, proponents of US imperialism attempted to erroniously associate him with the Islamist radical right. Rival imperialist factions form this sort of abrasive symbiosis where they distract the masses from any genuine alternative.

Rather than continue this boring exchange, which is surely of no interest to anyone reading this message board other than ourselves, (and my interest is quickly waning) I will conclude with a quote from your beloved Chavez, regarding the '08 bank bailouts:


Bush is to the left of me now, Comrade Bush announced he will buy shares in private banks.

Are these the words of a Marxist? Or a cynical opportunist? Thankfully that's up to the Venezuelan masses to decide, not yourself.

[Barry Lyndon]

Rather than continue this boring exchange, which is surely of no interest to anyone reading this message board other than ourselves, (and my interest is quickly waning) I will conclude with a quote from your beloved Chavez, regarding the '08 bank bailouts:



Are these the words of a Marxist? Or a cynical opportunist? Thankfully that's up to the Venezuelan masses to decide, not yourself.

It's called a joke, moron. Chavez was being ironic.

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

It's called a joke, moron. Chavez was being ironic.

It's called playing the fiddle while Rome burns.

Chavez's self-described comrade George Bush understands irony as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgYGOpYgFnM&feature=related

[Barry Lyndon]

It's called playing the fiddle while Rome burns.

Chavez's self-described comrade George Bush understands irony as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgYGOpYgFnM&feature=related

So revolutionaries aren't allowed to make jokes, I guess. About anything.

Chavez was making a joke at Bush's expense, Bush was making a joke at the expense of the soldiers he sent to die in his war of imperial conquest. There's a difference.

[gorillafuck]

Don't take the word of the social-fascists who glorify the social-imperialist regime in Venezuela
Lol, "social fascist".

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

Chavez was making a joke at Bush's expense

In which he candidly admitted that his idea of "leftism" is nationalization of finance capital (at the expense of working-class taxpayers) on par with the '08 bail-out of US banks engineered by an RNC-DNC consensus. All good jokes are a reflection of some reality.

Also, I want to re-address something Manic Expression said earlier in the debate:


The position of the proletariat in the Soviet Union [and also, by implication, in Venezuela], shows that it was socialist, as the vanguard party held state power and thus control over production.compare this to a recent quote from an Obama speech in New Orleans:


When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us

I guess Obama is a Marxist after all. I must not be the only one who's been watching Fox News.

Now, to re-address Manic Expression's point about Chavez's mansion, the sense behind obscene income inequality between us and our supposed 'political leaders', and the necessity of a pharmacutical bureaucracy to mediate the masses' consumption of drugs, I quote from The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, a play by an east-German Marxist play-write Peter Weiss, drawing a historical parallel between the French Revolution and the revisionism of the DDR:


We invented the Revolution
but we don't know how to run it
The Convention is still run by individuals
each with his own ambition
and each trying to hold onto something from the past
this man decides to keep a painting
this one keeps his mistress
this man keeps his mills
this one keeps his army
this man keeps his kingManic Expression and Barry Lyndon can have their king, the rest of us want to burn this entire fucker down...


Lol, "social fascist".

It's my favorite slur, better than "authoritarian socialist" by far. :D

[manic expression]

There's no good reason for me to trust your claims on faith alone, nor the claims of Counter[-revolutionary]Punch
And what good reason do you have to throw this evidence out the window without the slightest bit of rational argumentation?


As I've said before Noam Chomsky, the most prominant socialist academic in the US
:laugh::lol::laugh::lol: Irrelevant anti-worker elitists of a feather...


Rather than continue this boring exchange, which is surely of no interest to anyone reading this message board other than ourselves, (and my interest is quickly waning) I will conclude with a quote from your beloved Chavez, regarding the '08 bank bailouts:
So basically, since your arguments have been roundly trounced, you have nothing to do but take a quote completely out of context. Well, if you can't understand the context of revolution, we should come to expect this sort of abject obliviousness from you.


Are these the words of a Marxist? Or a cynical opportunist? Thankfully that's up to the Venezuelan masses to decide, not yourself.
And the Venezuelan masses are speaking...if you summoned the wherewithal to listen to them, they'd teach you a thing or two about what revolutions are made of. And as we know, that's exactly what you need.

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

And what good reason do you have to throw this evidence out the window

Because the original Spanish document in question has not been provided after continual requests, nor any other proof of the libertarian left's alleged collaboration with right-wing elements in the '02 coup, only rhetoric. Dull, monotonous rhetoric.


Irrelevant anti-worker elitist

I agree that Chomsky is mostly an "irrelevant anti-worker elitist", hence why he supports Chavez. :lol:


you have nothing to do but take a quote completely out of context.Here is the "context" of Chavez's quote...


socialism has now washed over free market capitalism


[The Bush] administration is tossing aside 'Atlas Shrugged and speed-reading 'Das Kapital.'


The Bush administration has come full circle -- from Karl Rove to Karl Marx


[The Bush administration has forgotten] the invisible hand of the free market [in favor of] the red hand of Lenin

So we have a cacophony of capitalist-apologist jackals, slandering Marxism and socialism by erroneously associating them with a highly unpopular policy, (the US bank bailouts) and Chavez jumping on board with the libelous disinformation in order to win political clout.

What a bold champion of Marxism and socialism....:blushing:

[manic expression]

Because the original Spanish document in question has not been provided after continual requests, nor any other proof of the libertarian left's alleged collaboration with right-wing elements in the '02 coup, only rhetoric. Dull, monotonous rhetoric.
Those continual requests are only a pathetic attempt by you to cover up the fact that you have absolutely no argument.


I agree that Chomsky is mostly an "irrelevant anti-worker elitist", hence why he supports Chavez. :lol:
...Along with the Venezuelan workers. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.


So we have a cacophony of capitalist-apologist jackals,
So you pay attention to what capitalists say, and base your opinions around that. I thought as much, given your blushing infatuation for Venezuelan reaction. But once again, you can't understand the context of the quote. Try again.


What a bold champion of Marxism and socialism....:blushing:
Pop a squat and take notes.

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

Those continual requests are only a pathetic attempt by you to cover up the fact that you have absolutely no argument.

I have listed examples of the atrocities of the Venezuelan state.



-The Chavez administration has created oil contracts with ChevronTexaco, BP, ExxonMobil, and Shell. (In Chavez's own words to ChevronTexaco officials, "Somos buenos amigos, buenos socios y buenos aliados de muchas empresas estadounidenses que trabajan con nosotros y cada dia estamos mas alineados en el trabajo")
-Chavez and Lula have merged Petrobas and PetroVenezuela to make PetroAmerica. Petrobas previously drilled for oil in the Yasuni national park in Ecuador, in which Huaorani, Tagaeri, Taromenane workers live alongside an uncounted number of unique tree species.
-Chavez went along with 11 other capitalist states in Latin America in signing the IIRSA to build "development corridors" of superhighways, military bases, petroleum pipelines, and hydroelectric dams, to facilitate the further valorization of Latin America's natural resources by energy and mining interests. (In Alo Presidente episode #155, Chavez described this quite honestly as "the promotion of productive commercial models")
-Chavez has expanded coal-mining in Zulia, obviously mostly on parkland and Wayuu, Bari, and Yukpa land.
-Chavez has gotten investments from the World Bank to build the Puerto America megaport on a bird sanctuary on the island of Los Olivitos, whose indigenous inhabitants object to the project.
-On May 23rd of this year, six Caracas inmates were gunned down by the Venezuelan National Guard (of course those are just the "reactionary" elements of the "progressive" Venezuelan state)
-Interior Minister El-Aissami admitted himself in October of 2009 that Venezuelan police commit 20% of the crimes in the country. The Chavez administration's proposed solution to the problem is to set up a national police force. As one Venezuelan police bureaucrat put it, "we need to transform the police, we need to standardise them and make them professional.”
-In September of 2009, Venezuela borrowed $2 billion from Russia to buy fighter jets, T-72 tanks, and surface to air missiles, purchased submarines from France, and invested hundreds of millions in a nuclear submarine project. (Of course Chavez's good buddy Lula defended these actions as any capitalist would)
-Venezuela's closest ally in Asia is Iran, an openly anti-Semitic regime, and the Venezuelan police have conducted semi-legal raids on multiple synagogues.

(I can provide citations from news organization for every one of these incidences)

You have failed to provide concrete evidence of collaboration between the left-wing opposition and the Venezuelan right.


So you pay attention to what capitalists sayYes, which is why I noticed that the capitalist Hugo Chavez was saying the same thing about the US bank bail-out as Eugine Robinson and Jon Stewart; attacking it by erroneously associating it with "Marxism" and "the left". Shameful!

Then again Chavez also said the Haitian earthquake was caused by a US tectonic weapons test! :D Should I "take notes"?

[Kotze]

Then again Chavez also said the Haitian earthquake was caused by a US tectonic weapons test! :D Should I "take notes"? Given that Chávez has never claimed that and the lie about him you are repeating here has been debunked on this forum several times, I think you should take notes.

[manic expression]

I have listed examples of the atrocities of the Venezuelan state.
And they are neither atrocities nor valid. Try again.


You have failed to provide concrete evidence of collaboration between the left-wing opposition and the Venezuelan right.You have failed to refute the evidence presented. You lose.


Yes, which is why I noticed that the capitalist Hugo Chavez was saying the same thing about the US bank bail-out as Eugine Robinson and Jon Stewart; attacking it by erroneously associating it with "Marxism" and "the left". Shameful!No, it's that you refuse to understand the context to the most elementary degree. Whether you're unwilling or utterly unable, you're still failing to get what the quote means.


Then again Chavez also said the Haitian earthquake was caused by a US tectonic weapons test! :D Should I "take notes"?One thing you should take notes on is how to support a working-class movement. You don't know how to do that, so yes, get out your notebook. You'll be tested on this by reality.

[Barry Lyndon]

Then again Chavez also said the Haitian earthquake was caused by a US tectonic weapons test! :D Should I "take notes"?

This alone proves that you are a traitor to the Left who is mouthpiece of the capitalist class, uncritically parroting every right-wing hit piece against socialist leaders and movements. As Kotze said, this news story was flat-out invented by an obscure Spanish-language newspaper. Chavez never said it.
Christopher Hitchens also claims that Chavez said the moon-landings never happened. Do you believe a serial liar like Hitchens too?

Not a word you write should be taken seriously.

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

There is footage of Chavez making the alleged remarks on YouTube.

However as manic expression said, "a stopped clock is right twice a day":

http://hcvanalysis.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/chavez-idea-that-haiti-earthquake-was-manmade-may-not-be-so-far-off-climate-weapons-more-than-just-a-conspiracy-theory/

However the war-monger Chavez would jump at the opportunity to posses the same weapons.

[Omnia Sunt Communia]

they are n[ot] atrocities

Easy for manic expression to say considering s/he is not personally impacted by any of the events I have referred to.

[Kotze]

There is footage of Chavez making the alleged remarks on YouTube.What do you remember? Was it Chávez talking in Spanish with subtitles? Or was it maybe stock footage of Chávez with a voice-over of a reporter repeating the rumour? Let me guess: It was the latter and the clip in question was from Russia Today.

At the top of this site, there are two rows with links. I want you to look at the lower row. There is a link called Search. Clicking on it will show you a form that allows you to look up instances when the words you enter were written during a discussion on this board. For example, you can type chavez earthquake weapon. Don't forget to also enter the letters or digits you see in the image to prove that you are human.

After doing that, you will see several threads. The words you typed on the search form will be highlighted.
Hugo Chavez Says U.S. Weapon Caused Haitian Earthquake (http://www.revleft.com/vb/hugo-chavez-says-t127606/index.html?t=127606&highlight=chavez+earthquake+weapon)
This is a thread from January 22 2010. Note that the OP, because he isn't a fucknozzle, added these words:

Anyone know if Chavez actually said this? Seems wacky to me. The first answer, posted on the same day, debunks it. (There are further posts with links about that on the second page if you care.)

Chavez On the Way Out? (http://www.revleft.com/vb/chavez-way-outi-t127937/index.html?t=127937&highlight=chavez+earthquake+weapon)
Note that the article posted by Bud Struggle there (Washington Post, Jackson Diehl) repeats the rumour. Note that Bud Struggle posted it several days (January 26) after the debunking. This is because Bud Struggle is a fucknozzle. Note that the article half a year later still doesn't have a correction attached. This is also because of fucknozzledom.

Don't be a fucknozzle. Thanks for reading.

[Artemis3]

Ah, Chirino and "El Libertario" again... For starters, nobody knows who this guy is, i live in Caracas, Venezuela, mind you. I only learned about their existence in this forum, and then, i learned they chose to side with the true fascists, the right wing counter-revolutionary scum of the past, just to help "get rid" of Chavez. Well, thanks but no thanks. The workers don't support Chirino, they support Chavez, however distorted or limited his ideology might be, he is advancing where "El Libertario" isn't.

[el_chavista]

Ah, Chirino and "El Libertario" again... For starters, nobody knows who this guy is, i live in Caracas, Venezuela, mind you. I only learned about their existence in this forum, and then, i learned they chose to side with the true fascists, the right wing counter-revolutionary scum of the past, just to help "get rid" of Chavez...
Hi there, compa. You haven't learned about Orlando Chirino until you came to this forum because: the working class movement in Venezuela has not had that importance in politics (as a matter of fact the Bolivarian movement had almost no representatives in it before 2000) until the oil-employers strike from 2003-2004. But you should bear in mind that Chirino is a professional trade-unionist. Unfortunately, when it comes to his personal interests, he uses his C-CURA trade union and his recently founded left party USI for his own sake.