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southern africa / the left / opinion / analysis Tuesday June 25, 2019 22:09 byJonathan Payn

Twenty-five years into democracy the black working class majority in South Africa has not experienced any meaningful improvements in its conditions. The apartheid legacy of unequal education, healthcare and housing and the super-exploitation of black workers continues under the ANC and is perpetuated by the neoliberal policies it has imposed.

The only force capable of changing this situation is the working class locally and internationally. Yet to do so, struggles need to come together, new forms of organisation appropriate to the context are needed; and they need both to be infused with a revolutionary progressive politics and to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Outside the ANC alliance, there have indeed been many efforts to unite struggles – but these have largely failed to resonate with the working class in struggle and form the basis of a new movement. Nowhere is this more evident than with the newly-formed Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) – which got less than 25 000 votes in the national elections, despite the fact that the union that conceived it, Numsa, claims nearly 400 000 members.

[Part 2]

After the election dust settles: Class struggle, the Left and power

Jonathan Payn (ZACF)

Twenty-five years into democracy the black working class majority in South Africa has not experienced any meaningful improvements in its conditions. The apartheid legacy of unequal education, healthcare and housing and the super-exploitation of black workers continues under the ANC and is perpetuated by the neoliberal policies it has imposed.

These troubles are part of the world’s troubles; this neoliberalism is part of global neoliberalism. As the global economic crisis deepens, the global ruling class is making the working class pay, transferring the costs to workers and the poor, leading to increased poverty, unemployment, inequality and insecurity. And so in South Africa neoliberal oppression is piled on top of national oppression.

The only force capable of changing this situation is the working class locally and internationally. Yet to do so, struggles need to come together, new forms of organisation appropriate to the context are needed; and they need both to be infused with a revolutionary progressive politics and to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Some such struggles have occurred over recent years, including the historic platinum mineworkers’ strike and farmworkers’ strike in 2012; but the many struggles have not yet pulled together into a new movement.

Outside the ANC alliance, there have indeed been many efforts to unite struggles – but these have largely failed to resonate with the working class in struggle and form the basis of a new movement.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the newly-formed Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) – which got less than 25 000 votes in the national elections, despite the fact that the union that conceived it, Numsa, claims nearly 400 000 members.

NUMSA’S NON-MOMENT

When the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) announced its resolutions, following its historic 2013 Special National Congress, to break with the ANC and SACP and to form a “United Front against neoliberalism”, many on the left were hopeful that this would give working class movements the new ideological and organisational direction they need.

The United Front, Numsa said, was not about building a new organisation, party or labour federation but “a way to join other organisations in action, in the trenches”, gaining community support for Numsa campaigns and building “concrete support for other struggles of the working class and the poor wherever and whenever they take place”.

It looked as if there hopes were not misplaced when, for example, unemployed youth and community activists across the country responded positively to Numsa’s call by supporting the 19 March 2014 actions against the Youth Wage Subsidy. Branches were set up and, despite initial scepticism, community activists joined.

By August 2017, however, the Johannesburg branch of the United Front had declared that, “After the initial enthusiasm, there is now a feeling the UF has largely collapsed, with only a couple of local structures still active.” Numsa had shifted its focus and resources to establishing a “Movement for Socialism” because “the working-class needs a political organisation committed in its policies and actions to the establishment of a socialist South Africa”.

Having gained some community support for its campaigns, including the United Front itself, the success of the United Front in building working class unity going forward depended on whether Numsa would reciprocate by putting its resources and capacity at the service of building “concrete support for other struggles of the working class and the poor wherever and whenever they take place”.

Instead, Numsa energies were shifted into calling for a new workers’ party, while presenting itself as the vanguard of the whole working class, and in so doing missed its moment.

THE SRWP WON’T SET YOU FREE

Numsa undertook to “conduct a thoroughgoing discussion on previous attempts to build socialism as well as current experiments to build socialism” and “commission an international study on the historical formation of working-class parties, including exploring different type of parties – from mass workers’ parties to vanguard parties”. But it already knew what it was aiming for. It had said that a new political party was on the cards – to replace the SACP, which had become corrupted by the neoliberal state, as the political vanguard of the working class.

The potential of the United Front approach for building working class unity is precisely because it accommodates ideological differences in order to build the unity of working class formations in struggle. But Numsa still looks to the legacy of Communist Parties. And these parties have historically used united fronts to create unity in action in struggles against capitalist attacks, but also with the aim of winning over the majority in these struggles to their programme – in this case the formation of a new party, that they would lead – under their Party leadership and no one else’s.

While Numsa has broken with Cosatu and the SACP organisationally, it has not broken with them ideologically. The belief by a section of full-time Numsa leaders that they are the vanguard of the working class and their insistence on building a party to contest state power are founded on the same ideological certainties and theoretical understandings of class, power and the nature of the state as the SACP – with the same strategic implications that, invariably, will have the same disappointing outcomes.

If we really want to build a movement for socialism, and to avoid merely replacing one set of rulers for another, the state-centric left needs to rethink its understandings class, power and the nature of the state in light of the imperial evidence and learn from the mistakes of the past, instead of repeating them and expecting a different outcome.


This article first appeared in issue 112 of Workers World News, produced by the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG)

ireland / britain / the left / opinion / analysis Thursday June 13, 2019 18:04 byEimhéar Ní Fhearóir

Eimhéar Ní Fhearóir responds to the election analysis offered by Sinn Fein's Natalie Treacy. Eimhéar Ní Fhearóir is an anarchist who was previously involved with republican activism.


In the wake of this year’s local elections, activists from the right across the broad left were left in a state of astonished mourning, cursing an electorate that didn't turn up on the day. One Sinn Féin office was heard being described as “like a wake-house” by an activist in the days following the count.

Natalie Treacy’s post-#LE19 election analysis is worth reading, not only because it (unintentionally) speaks volumes about the state of local representative democracy in this jurisdiction, but also because it has something to say about where Sinn Féin, and indeed a lot of social-democractic/leftish political groups go wrong when it comes to their engagement with the people they represent.

So it's a week now since the elections and I received that devastating phone call to tell me that the people of my core area's didnt bother to take 10 minutes out of their day to go and vote for me and that I am probably not going to be 're elected. Now this would be perfectly fine ,if I hadn't of worked my arse off for the last 5 year's on behalf of the people I represent. This would be perfectly fine ,if you the people I represent didnt believe I deserved to be 're elected.

This would be perfectly fine, if you believed that our council would be better off without Sinn Féin fighting your corner in Fingal but NO, this was simply because the people in my core area's just didn't bother to come out and vote!

As I sat in a room last night with all my other Sinn Féin elected comrades from across Dublin and listened to them all talking about what we did wrong in the elections because we did make mistakes of course we did. And we will learn by our mistakes and we will move on. But one thing we can't do is work any harder than we did. Every one of our Councillor's and their team's worked their hardest on behalf of the community's they represent. However what stood out in the room most was the hurt. Yes the hurt ,hurt we all felt that our core area's didnt bother to take the time to come out and vote for us.


Some candidates and elected representatives put in serious graft. Others would sleep on the floor if there was work in the bed, and depend very much on the work of their party comrades. Whatever approach they take, it is very much seen that The Core Area is “their patch.” There are estates that some parties will not canvass because they don’t see it as worth their while. It’s a Shinner estate. Or it’s full of Fine Gaelers etc. If you’re in the business of running in elections, knowing where your core vote comes from has a value. You can focus your resources more efficiently (in theory) or you might use a different amount of posters because you are well known there.

The problem for Cllr. Treacy and others who think like her, is that they do not merely see their core area as the place in which they have received the majority of their electoral support in the past, but as a place where that past support entitles them to it forevermore. There is no suggestion here that Cllr. Treacy did not “work her arse off” for the past five years, but to look at an election result in which you didn’t do as well as you expected, and come to the conclusion that the fault lies with the residents of the core area who “didn’t bother to take ten minutes out of their day to go and vote,” displays a stunning level of arrogance. The absence of any reflection as to the reason why people didn’t flock to their polling stations reveals the sense of entitlement that is at the heart of clientelism and is embedded within Irish electoral politics.

It is clear that there was no pause to assess why people didn’t turn out to vote; Was the choice offered on the ballot so uninspiring that it wasn’t worth leaving the house “for ten minutes”? Or perhaps people see how limited the scope of local democracy is. Or maybe the electorate felt that the sitting councillors did not do what they expected them to do. If it is true that people couldn’t be arsed get off their sofas, it is also true that Sinn Féin failed to convince those people that they were worth getting up for.

There is no point in telling people that if they just vote, that the Councillors will then have “the power to make a difference in your area” when many people haven’t seen any betterment from voting Sinn Féin, or anyone else, in local elections. In fact, many will have seen a deterioration in their quality of life, finding it more and more difficult to get somewhere to live or a place for their child to go to school or transport to their place of work. Telling communities that when the funding gets cut and their area is neglected that “You need to take some responsibility for that. You need to realise that all the moaning in the world is not going to help you. You had the power to make a change and you just didn't bother to come out and vote” is a disgraceful way to speak to or about constituents. By that logic, the people who voted Labour in 2011 deserved to have their child benefit cut. It smacks of victim blaming and also attributes far more power to councillors than they actually have. We have a largely centralised budget system and councillors, regardless of how hard they work, don’t have a role in the Dáil budget process. Housing was one of the biggest issues of the election and councillors, in most cases, cannot deliver housing for people.

There are people voting for Sinn Féin since they turned 18 and are still living in their Ma’s boxroom with a child because they’re 10 years on the council house waiting list. That person doesn’t need to take responsibility for that, and she does not need to have it explained to her that moaning won’t help her. She knows it won’t, but she also knows that taking the ten minutes to go and vote isn’t going to help her either.

Cllr. Treacy, as an aside, concedes that people can vote for whoever they want - “that’s democracy” though other republicans and lefties have made similar comments about "people with short memories" voting Green, FF, and Labour. But some of us see the limitations of local and parliamentary democracy compared to community led direct action. Communities do not need anyone to stand up and fight for their corner. If the anti-water charges campaign taught us anything it’s that communities are already standing up for themselves. Compared to the results achieved through community organising and direct action there is nothing in representative democracy for us. Cllr. Treacy does not understand that abstention is not simply dispensing with responsibility for what happens within communities, but an acknowledgement that representative democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Of course, abstention does not always imply a conscious ideological break with liberal democracy, but, having seen no tangible improvement in their area in the years in which they voted SF and other poles of opposition, why should people in "core areas" feel obliged to go out and vote?

The central weakness of local government in the 26 Counties is that it is entirely controlled by a central government that is determined to dispense with the State delivering public services, moving closer towards dependency on the community and voluntary sector to deliver them instead. What most political parties fail to recognise is that the network of councils that we have do not provide a facility to engage in local democracy but rather, provides a system of local administration. Those that fail to see this hold up the local council as the place where decisions affecting your community are genuinely made, and they need to keep up that pretence in order to justify people voting for them, and by doing so they actually hamper any prospect of developing or engaging in something that might count as participatory democracy.

The political system is dominated and corrupted by the privileged, paralysed by clientelism and dynastic politics, and resistant to change - Sinn Féin General Election Manifesto 2011


For decades, people in Ireland have watched stories of corruption emerge to the point where it is an embedded part of the political structure. Cllr. Hugh McIlvaney, a man caught on video asking for “loads of money” in exchange for supporting a wind farm, which was subsequently aired on national television, was reelected in Monaghan this year. The line between McIlvaney’s corrupt “Give me money and I’ll give the nod to your wind farm” and a local councillor’s “Vote for me and I’ll help you get a house from the council” differ in financial value and beneficiary, but the mechanism is the same. Theoretically, the core area of an elected councillor’s vote is usually the one where they’ve engaged in the most clientist based exchanges (as per Cllr. Treacy’s post). For Sinn Féin representatives, it will likely be working class areas where the councillor or TD will exercise what influence they can to ensure that person gets their medical card or social housing, and the representative expects that they will receive a vote from that person in return.

The councillor’s power in this circumstance is not that they can actually get the medical card or the house, but they can help with form filling or find the right person in the council to speak to; they can navigate a bureaucracy that appears labyrinthine to many. In their view, doing this is them exercising their role and “standing up for their community” and entitles them to a vote, but providing a clear route to information and a pathway to the people that actually allocate resources is not, and should be mistaken for, actual local democracy. They are basically doing a job that citizens information and council offices exist for. The nature of clientelism in Irish politics and the withholding of direct information to the public means that many communities are beholden to the local councillors, and given that they have such little a role in resource allocation in the first place, spending their days writing housing representations for people, it doesn’t really matter which party is elected.

When a councillor tells a person that they are in X place on the housing list and there are some houses currently being renovated they could be in line for, it can often create the illusion that there is someone pulling strings on their behalf, “I’ve put a word in with the council. You’ll get a letter soon.” It doesn’t matter that all the Councillor did was write to an administrative officer to clarify their position on the housing list. Maintaining the appearance of having influence and control in the process of resource allocation suits the purpose of the political party.

It is a curious situation when politicians can simultaneously tell people they have the power to change the system but they will only have themselves to blame if the wrong decisions are made, given that politicians need to uphold the idea that people are powerless in the absence of “representation” in order to maintain their own positions as relevant. The benefit for the bureaucrats of the Council is that they don’t have to engage with the “great unwashed” day in, day out, leaving dialogue with the public to the politician. The politician can then portray themselves as a great worker for the community mandated to engage with the people who actually have the power to make decisions affecting people’s lives.

This theatre is made routine by the constituency office and the advice clinic generally staffed by the party loyal who carry out the brokerage with the council about fixing windows and doors; the attendance at funerals and residents association meetings and an apparition-like ability to appear when a local photographer arrives with a camera; followed by an increased omnipresence during election season. When the local representative goes from residents association to community policing forum to the local hospice fundraiser, it doesn’t matter that they didn’t actually do anything at any of them, but it matters that they were seen. Being seen equates to doing work, and in this respect they work their arses off for you, so you must vote for them in exchange. Except that there was no exchange as all they have done is claim credit for you getting what you were entitled to in the first place.

The State cannot keep pace with demands for state benefits, so the politician becomes the mediator, simultaneously managing the expectations of the community on behalf of the council and increasing their profile in the area by saying what they are doing is advocacy. The middle classes often have increased access and less need for state services so the politician services them differently. The local politician in this sphere is more concerned with getting them an Educate Together school rather than more social housing. They will have no role in it, but by making enquiries with the civil servant who has respect for their mandate they can market their work as being an integral part of the “democratic” process.

It is common practice for those who do the nerdwork of crunching election numbers to look at tallies from count centres to check *how many votes came from that box covering streets X and Y* against *how many people from streets X and Y were assisted by the councillor or TD*. Where there are fewer votes for the politician in the box than there were in the pool of people, the result is hurt feelings, because as far as the councillor is concerned, those people have gotten work for free. They did not pay for assistance with their votes. But ballots are not currency and real democracy is not a transaction. Nobody has a moral obligation to vote for the person who assisted with them navigating bureaucracy.

Maybe it’s time that Cllr. Treacy and others from SF, across the republican movement and the left considered the possibility that the problem is not their core constituents, it is a system that is not democratic and does not work for those communities.

venezuela / colombia / la izquierda / opinión / análisis Saturday March 23, 2019 07:41 byViaLibre

En la tarde del pasado miércoles 13 de marzo se realizó una concentración en defensa de la Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP), ante las objeciones que el gobierno de Iván Duque del Centro Democrático, presento a puntos sustanciales de esta legislación, surgida en marco del proceso de paz entre el gobierno de Juan Manuel Santos con la antigua insurgencia de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP), proceso al que Duque y su partido se opusieron de forma sistemática y hoy en el poder se han propuesta “hacer trizas” de forma progresiva.

En la tarde del pasado miércoles 13 de marzo se realizó una concentración en defensa de la Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP), ante las objeciones que el gobierno de Iván Duque del Centro Democrático, presento a puntos sustanciales de esta legislación, surgida en marco del proceso de paz entre el gobierno de Juan Manuel Santos con la antigua insurgencia de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP), proceso al que Duque y su partido se opusieron de forma sistemática y hoy en el poder se han propuesta “hacer trizas” de forma progresiva.

La concentración que se extendió entre las 4:00 y las 7:00 pm, se ubicó en el costado nororiental de la Plaza de Bolívar frente a la escaleras de la Catedral Primada, y reunió algo más de 1.000 personas y algunas decenas de organizaciones sociales y políticas, que se encontraron para defender esta herramienta de justicia trasicional, clave en la concreción del Acuerdo de Paz entre la era la guerrilla más grande del país y el Estado colombiano, acuerdos que vienen siendo atacados desde hace años, y especialmente desde la asunción del nuevo gobierno, labor en la que se han destacado tanto la coalición uribista-conservadora en el parlamento, como la Fiscalía General de la Nación a la cabeza del abogado de Odebrecht Néstor Humberto Martínez y el oscuro sistema judicial de los Estados Unidos.

En este acto participaron dispersas en diferentes puntos de la plaza mayor, organizaciones de defensoras de derechos humanos como el Movimiento de Victimas de Crímenes de Estado (MOVICE) con coloridas pancartas contra la guerra y los Comités Locales por la Paz, sectores sociales como la Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia (ONIC) con una bandera gigantesca, sindicatos docentes como ADE o bancarios como la UNEB que se presenta con una pequeña comparsa, la Tremenda Revoltosa batucada de mujeres feministas, así como organizaciones políticas como la nueva FARC, Marcha Patriótica, Juventud Rebelde, Unión Patriótica, TJER, el Partido Comunista y el fragmentado movimiento de Colombia Humana. También se hizo presente la campaña contra la extradición del ex líder guerrillero Jesús Santrich hoy detenido y en proceso de expatriación hacia los Estados Unidos, al tiempo que sobresalían pancartas llamando a abrazar la JEP, una gran bandera arcoíris del orgullo gay y los colores anapistas del M-19, así como la presencia de sectores estudiantiles y de docentes universitarios.

En la concentración se coreaban consignas a favor de la JEP y la paz, por el cese de los asesinatos de líderes sociales y contra la fiscalía de Martínez y el gobierno Duque. Un sector también entono cantos a favor de las FARC y el PCC, contra el imperialismo y a favor de los debilitados gobiernos progresistas de América Latina y reitero su culto a Bolívar, en su ya tradicional acto de rodear y encapuchar la estatua del prócer oligárquico, ubicada en el centro de la plaza.

Algunas reflexiones

Esta concentración surgió de forma más o menos espontánea, como respuesta rápida a la coyuntura política, pero la falta de preparación y difusión se hiso notar en las calles. Convocatorias débiles y cruzadas en redes sociales y movilizaciones paralelas minúsculas, son síntoma que la coordinación puramente digital no es suficiente a la hora de organizar una protesta social de magnitud.

La mayoritaria presencia comunista era explicable y legítima en un acto de estas características, pero es claro que la defensa de los aspectos más progresistas de los acuerdos de paz es y debe seguir siendo una causa general de los movimientos sociales y populares, y no un asunto limitado a los directamente afectados por la guerra y la desmovilización militar. Por lo anterior es importante continuar desarrollando una perspectiva más amplia sobre la importancia de la solución política dialogada al conflicto armado y los enormes costos de la política de seguridad del gobierno Duque, bajo cuya administración aumenta el manto de impunidad sobre los crímenes del terrorismo de Estado y aumentan los asesinatos de líderes sociales.

Hoy tienden a converger las lucha contra los asesinatos de líderes sociales, el movimiento de protesta contra la corrupción de la Fiscalía, los movimientos de garantía de los derechos humanos negados sistemáticamente por el Estado y las acciones de defensa del proceso de paz con las FARC. Hoy a que movilizarse contra la guerra y en defensa de la vida.

¡Arriba las que luchan!
Grupo Libertario Vía Libre

ireland / britain / the left / non-anarchist press Wednesday February 27, 2019 18:03 byJeremy Gilbert

It’s the changing nature of class and capital that’s caused this split – and should shape the Left’s response to it. But discussing class meaningfully is the last media taboo.

This week’s split of several MPs from the Parliamentary Labour Party comes as no surprise at all. It’s been clear since the moment of Corbyn’s election as leader that a section of the most right-wing and/or most ambitious MPs would simply never be able to reconcile themselves either to his leadership or to a Labour Party composed mainly of his supporters. This is probably a large section: about a third of the current PLP would be a reasonable estimate.

This isn’t just because of the political differences between them. It definitely isn’t because Corbyn is an anti-semite, or indifferent to antisemitism. It has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the leadership’s stance on Brexit. It has everything to do with the fact that that stance has not been dictated by the City of London and the CBI.

The politics of the Labour Right
It’s interesting to try to parse the precise political affiliates and character of the eight. The collection of MPs who have left might seem to come from notionally different strands of the Labour Right. Although he has flirted with a Blue Labour, anti-immigration position (as he has with many others), Chuka Umunna has had most success at convincing Blairite true believers that he is their natural leader: cosmopolitan, pro-business and rich. Mike Gapes, by contrast, belongs to that strand of the traditional, Gaitskellite Labour right that has never really got over its disappointment at the end of the cold war, and tries to compensate by hating pro-Palestinian campaigners and millennial Corbynites as much as they once hated the USSR. But they both nominated Blairite candidate Liz Kendall for the leadership: as did all of the eight apart from Luciana Berger and Chris Leslie.

In fact what seems apparent is that the notional difference between an ‘old right’ tradition represented by the Labour First organisation and the Blairite faction represented by Progress has now almost entirely broken down. Since the moment of Corbyn’s leadership election the two networks have been acting entirely in concert in their efforts to prevent Momentum from gaining influence in constituency parties and to undermine Corbyn and his supporters at every available opportunity. There is no longer any clear or stable ideological difference between them, and it seems evident that the clearest way of understanding their position is in basic Marxist terms. They are the section of the party that is ultimately allied to the interests of capital. Some may advocate for social reform and for some measure of redistribution, some may dislike the nationalism and endemic snobbery of the Tories more than others; but they will all ruthlessly oppose any attempt to limit or oppose the power of capital and those who hold it.

One reason for the erasure of difference between them is the changing composition of the British capitalist class itself. Going back to the 1940s, the old Labour Right was traditionally allied to industrial capital: manufacturers and the extraction industries. The Blairites have always been allied to the City and the Soho-based PR industry. But the long decline of British manufacturing, and the financialisation of the whole economy, has left a situation in which industrial capital is now an almost negligible fraction of that class. Today, in the UK, all capital is finance capital. So on the Labour Right, they’re all Blairites nowadays. A very similar process can be observed taking place in the centrist mainstream of US politics right now, as anti-Trump neocon Republicans and Clintonite, Third Way Democrats increasingly converge upon a common political agenda (this observation was made very persuasively by Lyle Jeremy Rubin on the latest episode of the Chapo Trap House podcast).

Whatever their political lineage, most MPs and their supporters on the Labour Right are therefore not just reluctant to engage in any radical project of social transformation. They are deeply and implacably opposed to any such project. This isn’t to say that they are bad people. It’s a perfectly reasonable position for anyone to take, in the Britain of 2019, that there is simply no point making vain efforts to limit or oppose the awesome power of the City and the institutions that it represents. In the era of globalisation, of China’s rise and the Trump presidency, anyone could conclude that it can only be counterproductive to try to work against it. Many of us take a different view, believing that without severely limiting the power of capital, and soon, the planet itself is probably doomed. But a difference of view is what it is. It shouldn’t lead to moral condemnation.

Appalled and disgusted?
A good example of the latter is the model motion circulated earlier this week by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (a long-standing, small, Bennite factional organisation) for their supporters to take to their local party meetings. The motion begins with the line “This Constituency Labour Party is appalled and disgusted that seven MPs elected by Labour voters have rejected our party and crossed the floor to assist our opponents.”

I regard myself as sharing almost all of the politics, objectives and analysis of CLPD. But this is unhelpful. Apart from anything else, it is disingenuous. We all know that the Blairites simply have a completely different conception of politics, of the useful function of the Labour Party, and of the kind of role they want to play, than do we on the Labour Left. No supporter of Corbyn or CLPD wants to have these people representing us in parliament. To claim that we are disgusted is to imply that somehow, we naively imagined that we were all on the same side. This is, at best, to admit to profound naivety and stupidity. At worst, it is simply dishonest. Why pretend? Why not just accept, calmly and clearly, that these perspectives simply cannot be contained within the same party, and wish the splitters all the best in pursuing their own agendas?

By all means, we should be pointing out that the splitters, and the allies who have just joined them from the Tory Party, are clearly servants of a very particular set of class interests and a very narrow conception of what progressive politics looks like in the 21st century. But the language of outrage only makes us look like we don’t understand the situation.

As I’ve pointed out before most of the Blairite MPs became Labour MPs on the basis of a particular implicit understanding of what that role entailed. According to this understanding, the purpose of a Labour MP is to try to persuade the richest and most powerful individuals, groups and institutions to make minor concessions to the interests of the disadvantaged, while persuading the latter to accept that these minor concessions are the best that they can hope for. That job description might well entail some occasional grandstanding when corporate institutions are engaged in particularly egregious forms of behaviour (such as making loans to very poor people at clearly exorbitant rates), or when the political right is engaged in explicit displays of racism or misogyny. But it doesn’t entail any actual attempt to change the underlying distributions of power in British society; and in fact it does necessarily, and structurally, entail extreme hostility towards anybody who proposes to do that.

It is crucial to understand that what I’m describing here is not a moral or ethical disposition. It doesn’t make you a bad person to have taken up the role I’ve just described. It’s the simple logic of having a particular place in a system of social relationships, and being allied to a particular set of interests within it.

The crisis of the political class
In wider British society, the immediate political base for the centrist MPs is obviously wider than City millionaires; though not much wider. It is in fact very narrowly rooted in the managerial class: very senior managers in the public and voluntary sectors, a larger section of affluent, property-owning salaried employees in the private sector. Any anthropological investigation of a local Labour Party branch is likely to confirm this claim: it is precisely the people from this narrow demographic who are still the most enthusiastic about Blair, or Umunna, and the most vitriolic in their detestation of Corbynism. Of course there are many exceptions to this characterisation (there always are), but the general tendency is clear and unsurprising. The narrow professional political elite of journalists, lobbyists and politicians is, in a certain sense, the leading cadre of this wider managerial class; so it is natural that the latter look up to the former.

Again: there’s nothing wrong or morally reprehensible about this. There’s nothing wrong with being a senior manager, with a vague commitment to an ideal of social mobility and a dislike of the Tories’ explicitly reactionary politics, who really admires Chuka Umunna. There’s nothing wrong with being that, and with violently disliking the people to your left, who probably wouldn’t do that much to limit your own wealth and immediate institutional power if they got into office, but who wouldn’t let you or people like you or the people you most admire run the country to quite the extent that you are used to.

The problem is that in British public life (well, English public life in particular), there is a strong prohibition on ever acknowledging that there are such things as class differences and class interests. And no social group dislikes thinking in such terms more intensely than the professional and managerial classes (and this includes most journalists and political pundits). It is absolutely central to their specific view of the world that such vulgar realities never be acknowledged or discussed, and to assume that only Communists or violent right-wing populists could possibly want to break this liberal taboo.

This is arguably quite different from the perspectives of actual full-blooded capitalists for example: who, when pressed, will often admit that their only aim in life is to make money and keep it, and that they really don’t give much of a damn about ideology, or about the question of who gets hurt. The political elite, along with its most enthusiastic followers in the managerial class, cannot make any such admission to others or to themselves, partly because their whole job is to come up with clever stories about the world and to mediate between the interests of different social groups. If they can’t present themselves as neutral, honest, professionals just trying to make the world a better place, then just what good are they for anything? (This is why the fantasy narratives of Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, are such a key element of their culture: Sorkinism presents a universe in which political wonks, journalists and tv personnel are all just honest, hard-working professionals doing their best to make the world a better place, and doing a damned good job of it. Again, see Chapo Trap House’s several dedicated episodes for the best critique available of this phenomenon.)

This is also the political elite who cannot acknowledge even to themselves that what is motivating their politics right now is a defence of a set of elite privileges. Which is why they need a narrative like the one about ‘Labour antisemitism’ in order to justify their actions to themselves and others. It would be very difficult indeed for any objective observer to concur with Joan Ryan's claim today that Tony Blair and all previous Labour leaders unstintingly "[stood] up to racism in all its forms", and that antisemitism "simply did not exist in the party before [Corbyn's] election as leader" (as Ryan should presumably know if she’s actually spoken to Luciana Berger). It would be clear to an objective observer that the right has been using the claims that Labour is "institutionally anti-semitic", and blind and inactive where issues do arise, in a cynical and shameless fashion to try to justify their implacable hostility to Corbyn.

For months, campaigners on the Right insisted that the only way Corbyn could demonstrate his commitment to fighting antisemitism was by accepting the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in full, despite the fact that even the original author of that definition had publicly disowned it as not fit for purpose, and Labour’s modification of it was a clear legal improvement. No sooner had the Labour NEC finally accepted the definition, then campaigners switched to claims that ‘complaints of antisemitism were not being properly investigated’, despite the evidence that complaints were now being investigated considerably more thoroughly than they were whilst the Right, under McNicol, retained control of the party bureaucracy.

So it is important to understand why a certain section of the public are so willing to believe this narrative. The reason is that they are members of a particular social group that crystallised and came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, as the traditional professional classes declined (having been subsumed into the public sector during the post-war years, then battered into resentful compliance along with the rest of that sector by Thatcher and her successors). It is this group - the professional political elite and their most loyal followers amongst the wider managerial class - that is now suffering a traumatic and disorienting existential crisis.

Neither the professional elite nor the managerial class ever enjoyed much authentic legitimacy amongst the wider public. The broader public deferred to their new bosses for as long as they got the compensations offered by an ever-expanding consumer culture, enabled by cheap credit and Chinese imports. Since 2008, fewer and fewer members of that wider public have been offered the same compensations, and so the authority and legitimacy of the political / managerial class has been in terminal decline. Both Corbynism and the Brexit vote are symptoms and examples of the public finally refusing their authority.

That is why Brexit represents such a traumatic existential crisis for these elites, and why they cannot separate it from Corbynism in their collective imagination. It is clearly absurd, in objective historical terms, to blame Corbyn for Brexit, or to keep demanding that he ‘come out’ against it when his doing so would make no difference at all to the parliamentary reality (there is no majority in the house of commons for a people’s vote). But the members of this declining, delegitimated social elite have experienced both Brexit and Corbynism as part of exactly the same process; the process by which the people that they have governed and managed for a generation have turned around and rejected their authority and their world-view. Embracing the idea that Labour is institutionally antisemitic and racist, and that Brexit is Corbyn’s fault, are understandable psychosocial responses to the experience of this historical trauma. (And again, Chapo Trap House’s excellent recent analysis of the way in which claims of antisemitism have been mobilised against the Left in the US is pertinent). Such a response allows the members and partisans of this elite to tell themselves that they are defenders of liberal values, so that they do not have to face up to the fact that, in opposing Corbyn, they are defending nothing but their own sectional privileges and those of their corporate liege lords. What these stories are not is rational, descriptive accounts of any kind of objective social reality, that can be reasoned with politically or morally.

What do we do?

For the Labour left, the political conclusions to be drawn from this analysis are stark, but important. As I’ve already suggested - we should not be responding to the behaviour of the centrists with simple moral indignation. Their entire project is to wrap up their defence of their own elite interests in a language of moral indignation – accusing the Left of racism, of being responsible for Brexit, of ‘bullying’ (ie expecting elected representatives to be accountable to members and constituents). But the more that we respond to them with our own language of outrage and betrayal, the more that we legitimate these fairy-tales, rather than exposing them for what they are.

By the same token, it is crucial not to fall into the sentimental trap of imagining that if only we are nice enough to them, then we will be able to prevent the Right from doing everything in their power to prevent the success of Corbynism. The split was always going to happen, and the only thing we could truly do to stop it would be to let the neoliberal centrists have control of the party once again. Tom Watson’s recent interventions make this very clear. He calls movingly for a kinder and gentler approach to politics, expressing moral outrage over the horror of antisemitism. But what he wants is a shadow cabinet reshuffle to represent ‘the balance of opinion in the Parliamentary Labour Party’. Presumably he doesn’t want one that would actually represent the politics and views of the current membership: if it did, then it probably wouldn’t include Tom Watson.

Either we’re going to give them what they want - full control of the party once again - or we’re not. And if we’re not, then they will do everything in their power to damage our cause. Because there can be no real doubt that this is the aim of the split, and that the long-term split is planned to come in waves rather than all at once, and this has been planned not because it is the most effective way to launch a new party, but because it will maximise the long-term damage to Corbyn’s Labour.

This is a surprisingly unpopular view amongst mainstream Corbynites. The caricature of Corbynites is that they are all wild-eyed sectarians, hell-bent on deselecting every MP to the right of Chris Williamson. This isn’t true at all. Frankly, I think it isn’t true because many Corbyn supporters are actually rather naive about the political character of the Labour Right. They, like Corbyn himself, do not actually see the world in terms of Marxist (or Gramscian) political sociology; rather they see it in moral terms, as a conflict between decency and justice on the one hand, greed and militarism on the other. They know that the majority of even the most right-wing Labour MPs are not Bad People, and so they assume that sooner or later they will come round to supporting Corbyn, if only he shows willing to address their legitimate concerns on Brexit and antisemitism.

This is just a categorical analytical mistake. Corbyn could convert to Judaism, apply for Israeli citizenship and call for a People’s Vote tomorrow: their attacks on him would not relent for one second unless he agreed to give up control of the party; or at least to commit to a policy agenda approved by Merrill Lynch.

The view that there is no point trying to prevent the right from splitting is also unpopular because, for all of its radicalism and democratic potential, mainstream Corbynism remains a left-wing version of Labourism. Labourism is the ideology that assumes that the Labour Party and only the Labour Party must be the vehicle to bring socialism to the UK, and that the only route to that objective must lie through the securing of a parliamentary majority for Labour in the House of Commons. The problem now is that if there is a significant split in the party, then it will put Labour back in the position it seemed to be before the 2017 election: unable to realistically aspire to a parliamentary majority of its own, forced to face (if not to answer) uncomfortable questions about its possible future relationships with the SNP, the Greens, even the Liberal Democrats, in a complex ecology of parties, factions and tendencies. The Labourist imaginary abhors this vision. It wants to live in a world in which the Labour Party, alone, united under a relatively progressive leadership, can win a large parliamentary majority against a once clearly-defined opponent (the Tories), and implement a progressive programme. It wants, very very much, to live in 1945.

The trouble is we don’t. We don’t live in 1945, and the ideological differences between the Blairites and the Corbynites are of a different existential order to the ones between Bevanites and Bevinites in the 1940s. They may have hated each other, they may have had entirely different attitudes to both capitalism and communism. But they didn’t represent social constituencies whose interests simply could not be reconciled even in the short term. The miners, the skilled engineers and even the manufacturers all stood to make immediate gains from the success of Labour’s programme, as did all their leaders.

This is unlike the current situation in some key ways, although it is similar to it in others. Many of the managerial class in fact have a great deal to gain from a Corbyn victory, because their own children are suffering so badly from labour-market precarity and unaffordable housing (and this, as much as Brexit, is why so many of them voted Labour in 2017). But if they are going to achieve those gains, then they will have to make some significant concessions to groups lower down the social hierarchy. In the public sector, for example, senior managers may well have to accept some relative reduction in their salaries and some increase in the autonomy of those they manage. This potential loss puts them in an ambivalent position, potentially supportive of Corbyn’s agenda, but anxious about what it might cost them. But their symbolic leaders in the media and full-time political elite have absolutely nothing to gain, and can only lose, from the success of Corbynism. For this reason, they simply will not stop trying to do everything in their power to drive a wedge between their followers and the rest of the Labour Party. There’s no point pretending that they might.

At the same time, there is no point pretending that in the volatile world of 21st century politics, the political divide between those inside the party and outside of it is the most important one that matters. There are members of every other party - even the Tories - who have more in common with Corbyn’s ideological agenda and more sympathy for his political programme than do those MPs who are reported to be considering joining the split. More importantly, there are members of every other party - even, indeed, the Tories - who are less clearly aligned with class interests that are inimical to Labour’s project.

Political success is always about leading complex coalitions of interests. The Labourist fantasy is that all elements of such a coalition can always be contained inside the Labour Party. As the split deepens, it will become apparent that Labour’s remaining vote and support will not be enough on its own, or even after another period of considerable growth, to win the battles that Labour needs to win.

Labour must seek to lead a coalition of progressive forces. All parts of that formula are important. It cannot keep pretending that all sections of the Labour Party are even potentially progressive in character. It cannot afford to ignore the existence of progressive forces outside of Labour or the need to make common cause with them. It must seek to lead that coalition. Nobody is suggesting that it submerge its identity or dilute its programme: that isn’t what leadership means.

But Labour must also be alive to the specific political objective of the ‘Independent Group’. There is a clear international precedent for the path that they are taking, in trying to establish a centrist party that could only ever be small, only ever appeal to the managerial class, and never hope to command a mass base, while pursuing a pure neoliberal agenda. In Germany, the Free Democratic Party conforms to precisely this description, only ever winning around 10% of the vote. From this position, it has held the balance of power in almost every West German and German parliament since 1948.

It’s always been logical that the legatees of the Third Way would eventually opt for this as their ideal political model. Labour, the traditional party of the organised working class, was always a strange and uncomfortable home for them in many ways. The problem for Labour is that if this group manage to establish this position for themselves, then they will pose a permanent obstacle to progressive government unless a very broad-based movement can be built to stop them. In 2016 and 2017 many of us hoped that the dream of Labour becoming a million-member party might be realised. There seems little chance of that now. Ultimately the social and political terrain of 21st century Britain is still too complex and too variegated for any one organisation to unite that many people. But we still need a million-member movement, if any chance of real progress is going to come onto the horizon. This is the movement that Labour must seek to lead, and must accept that it can never entirely contain.

If the Labour leadership really wanted to engage with the current situation meaningfully, this is what it would do. It would not retreat into ideological purism. It would not lift another finger to prevent the Blairites from leaving the party. It would convene a national conference, inviting Greens, social democrats, communists, socialists, liberals, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, trade unionists, NGOs and others to discuss the political and social crisis facing the country. The explicit aim of the conference would be to find an inclusive and effective road-map to take the country beyond neoliberalism. Those who share no such commitment need not be included. But everyone who shares it should, including those stalwart social democrats of the old Labour right who retain some authentic commitment to a political objective other than defeating Corbynism. This would be a meaningful way of neutralising the charge that Labour is not a broad church, and would help to isolate those elements who want to claim the mantle of diversity in order to sustain the neoliberal order.

Is this exactly the right solution? I don’t know. Maybe there are many other possible answers. But I know that the question is the right one: how do we assemble all of the potential allies at our disposal, to build an alternative to neoliberal hegemony, without getting bogged down in pointless debates with those who only want to defend it? That’s the question that the party and the leadership must now answer, if the splitters – who want nothing more than to maintain neoliberal hegemony – are not to get their way.
venezuela / colombia / la izquierda / other libertarian press Wednesday February 27, 2019 04:16 byRafael Agacino

Palabras sobre el momento y a vuelapluma.



1. En Venezuela se jugó en estas jornadas – y continúa en juego-, en primer lugar y para América Latina, la vigencia y legitimidad del orden mundial que el capital construyó post segunda Guerra Mundial. Nos referimos con ello no sólo a la validez de la institucionalidad política como las NN.UU., sino también a la concepción liberal del derecho internacional público y las reglas del derecho económico internacional. Es cierto; el consenso en torno a las Naciones Unidas y el derecho internacional ya venía trizado desde la intervención europea en la crisis de Yugoslavia y de Busch padre en Irak, pero en América Latina esta sensación de arbitrariedad imperialista era parte del pasado a pesar de la Honduras de Zelaya (2009) y el Paraguay de Lugo (2012).

2. En segundo lugar se jugó la vigencia del principio de autodeterminación de los pueblos que, si bien nunca respetó, por lo menos siempre buscó soslayar su violación formal aduciendo tratados y pactos internacionales. En nuestro caso, EE.UU., apeló a los TIAR´s y otros similares utilizando la OEA o la OEACS. Sin embargo, esta vez no pudo conseguir ni a Naciones Unidas ni a la OEA por lo cual simplemente las desconoció e intervino directamente: expropió 30 mil millones de dólares de PDVSA e instó a Inglaterra a que hiciera lo mismo con mil doscientos millones de dólares de reservas en oro; llamó a la sedición a las FANB y digitó las operaciones de provocación en la frontera; las desconoció amenazando sin ningún pudor con la intervención militar directa y amenazando con Guantánamo a Maduro y los generales de las FANB. Esto no sucedió ni siquiera con la intervención en el golpe en Chile en 1973 en que operaron con mano mora y cuidaron las formas. Lo más cercano fueron las invasiones de los marines a Granada en 1983 y a Panamá en 1989; pero aun así las formas importaban, mal que mal se trataba del orden internacional que el propio EE.UU. había construido acorde a sus propios intereses. Al nuevo imperialismo su propio orden se volvió una camisa de fuerza y decidió romperla ante sí y por sí.

3. En esta peligrosa y delicada coyuntura, sin embargo, el chavismo resistió exitosamente. No pudo el desparpajo de Duque, Piñera y Abdo, todos digitados por Trump y Abrams, de concurrir como avanzada multilateral por la paz a la frontera colombo-venezolana y prestarse para el montaje “Venezuela Aid Live” y la operación “Ayuda humanitaria”. No pudieron la provocación y los dramáticos llamados a la Policía Nacional Bolivariana a la reconciliación que no era sino un llamado a la deserción. No pudieron los parlamentarios de la derecha europea ni la CNN con su transmisión especial y en directo de casi todo el día por quebrar la resistencia de un pueblo que, según mostraba, sobrevive famélico y muere masivamente. No pudieron y no pasaron.

4. Lo de hoy ha sido francamente notable. Una maniobra de laboratorio diseñada por la inteligencia estadounidense que al menos en esta vuelta fracasó y que ha terminado fortaleciendo a Maduro. ¿Qué disparate pronunciará Piñera a su regreso? ¿Qué le dirá Duque a Abrams esta noche? ¿Y qué hará el tonto de Almagro ahora? No lo sabemos. Sólo sabemos que la crisis no se ha resuelto y que continúa aunque la opción Guaidó se disipe en el ridículo pues la burguesía venezolana no tiene prestancia para sostener nada, y de seguro, se hundirá en otra reyerta fratricida en las próximas semanas. Pero aun así, no está claro cuál será el verdadero curso de los acontecimientos. Menos con Trump y Abrams en la conspiración.

Sin embargo, podemos sugerir que el affaire Venezuela puede transformarse en el mediano plazo en un acontecimiento clave para EE.UU. y la crisis de hegemonía mundial; constituirá un ejemplo universal de la fractura de la institucionalidad internacional, del derecho y de las reglas de las RR.II. Venezuela reafirma el descrédito que sigue a EE.UU. desde Busch con las fake news sobre armas químicas de destrucción masiva y lo debilita como actor confiable de la política internacional. Más aún con un Trump que ataca a las NN.UU. y desconoce acuerdos internacionales como aquellos sobre Cambio Climático, el Libre Comercio o sobre el desarrollo de armas nucleares. Lo que fue Vietnam en el ámbito político y cultural interno, Venezuela lo puede ser respecto del ámbito político internacional.

Por otra parte, la coyuntura resulta muy útil para reafirmar que la lucha antiimperialista está de regreso en América Latina, y a la vez, para avanzar en la caracterización de este imperialismo de nuestros días. Sin detenernos en lo primero, podemos valorar los hechos de la coyuntura como fuente de nuevas evidencias para dos tendencias que en los últimos años se han venido anunciando en la política de EE.UU. en Europa y Oriente.

5. La primera, resultado de lo señalado respecto del orden mundial trizado y del irrespeto del principio de auto determinación de los pueblos, es la comprobación del carácter a-civilizatorio de la política del imperialismo de esta época, del imperialismo occidental del siglo XXI, por denominarlo de algún modo. A diferencia de la política imperialista de mediados del siglo XX, esta ya siquiera proclama los “valores e instituciones modernas” que fueron la justificación del intervencionismo; hoy, ni la “democracia” ni la “economía de mercado” son instituciones ejes de su argumento civilizatorio con el que justificaba sus incursiones despóticas. No; el imperialismo de esta época, por ser expresión de su momento de declive y decadencia, sólo conlleva desorden y destrucción de los Estados, naciones y pueblos que ataca; su objetivo no es la inclusión de los satélites en un orden sino su desestructuración política, social y económica. Se protege debilitando a los enemigos que deja fuera de su muros políticos y económicos. Es un animal que política y culturalmente está estratégicamente herido; su “destino manifiesto” es hoy su “muerte anunciada” y lo que lo hace peligroso como nunca; su racionalidad y cálculo carece de todo aire, por tenue que fuera, de civilización y progreso alguno.

6. Esta política internacional del imperialismo es coherente con una segunda tendencia: el carácter intrínsecamente destructivo de la fase actual del capitalismo mundial. En efecto, el nivel, la escala de la acumulación de capital del presente, ha impuesto a las economías dominantes imperativos cada vez más exigentes por el control de los recursos naturales y por extensiones territoriales para producir, garantizar conectividad y depositar millones de toneladas de residuos tóxicos, sin resistencias de las comunidades. Por ello la disputa por zonas estratégicas sean ricas en recursos, necesarias para circulación o sean espacios de sacrificio; por ello la expulsión y migración forzosa de poblaciones y comunidades; por ello la destrucción de los Estados nacionales otrora reconocidos como los sujetos por antonomasia de la política mundial. La dinámica de la acumulación actual no es sino la dinámica con que el nuevo imperialismo impone y exporta la barbarie a los territorios físicos y subjetivos que coloniza. El capitalismo bajo la forma imperialista del siglo XXI involuciona rápidamente hacia un tipo de dominación mundial que no reconoce Estados sino colonias, que no reconoce naciones sino poblaciones prescindibles a las que someter o exterminar. Ni siquiera se trata de una dependencia al estilo de la del siglo XX sino de un dominio auto centrado y depredador de las naciones y pueblos que no constituyen su núcleo.

7. La política de los halcones y los Pluto respecto de Venezuela, los Trump y los Branson, por nombrar actores menores, es un buen ejemplo de este doble carácter a-civilizatorio y destructor del imperialismo del siglo XXI. Aquí, en esta América Latina, las reservas de petróleo, metales raros, biodiversidad y agua de Venezuela, son un botín en torno al cual el capital mundial no tiene consideraciones éticas, jurídicas o de Relaciones Internacionales, más allá de aquellas que permitan satisfacer su voracidad. Hoy en la frontera, digitando las operaciones no titubearon frente a la posibilidad de desatar una guerra fratricida entre venezolanos y colombianos o azuzar una guerra civil entre venezolanos de ambos lados de los puentes. No, no; por el contrario, de eso se trata. Como en Libia, como en Irak o Siria, la estrategia no es la implantación de un nuevo orden sino la fragmentación, el caos. Y esto incluye trizar geográficamente Venezuela y repartirla entre buitres del capital – ya algo anunciaron con Guyana- o en un plano más general, la balcanización de América Latina gatillando una implosión de naciones y pueblos enfrentados entre sí. Este es el imperialismo que enfrentamos hoy.

8. En esta perspectiva, la defensa de Venezuela en su lucha contra la política imperialista es un ingrediente inexcusable de la táctica de aquella izquierda que se plantee en el mundo de hoy un proyecto emancipador. Y todo esto lo afirmo más allá que el programa del chavismo no consista en más que una distribución de la renta y en la defensa de su soberanía nacional, o que el bloque en el poder actual sea una alianza entre la burocracia civil estatal, el ejército y una fracción de burguesía, que excluye a las masas populares, o que la política esté contaminada por el clientelismo y por la corrupción de ese mismo bloque en el poder, o que el país dependa crecientemente de las inversiones chinas, y que por todo esto esté muy lejos de cualquier proyecto de transformación socialista.

Si en el siglo XX el imperialismo fue enemigo de los trabajadores y los pueblos lo fue porque era la manifestación de la internacionalización de la explotación del capital; pero ahora, el imperialismo del siglo XXI, es enemigo de la humanidad – de ese segmento mayoritario conformado por trabajadores, pueblos indígenas y afrodescendientes, campesinos, sectores populares y movimientos político-sociales emancipadores como las mujeres, jóvenes e intelectuales independientes- porque la magnitud de la masa de capital que movilizar y que necesita reproducir ya no sólo depende de la explotación del trabajo sino de la depredación de las bases naturales y comunitarias que permiten la vida misma. La acumulación de capital sobrepasó un umbral que lo hace incompatible con las posibilidades de la vida en tanto tal.

9. Como hemos dicho en otra parte, puestos en esta encrucijada, no queda más que levantar una estrategia de resistencia contra la barbarie del capital mundial, un Programa por la Autodefensa de la Humanidad cuyo sujeto sea esa masa mayoritaria cuyas condiciones naturales, sociales y comunitarias de vida están siendo destruidas. Es sólo en el curso de esta lucha – lucha ineludible por lo demás- que surgirán posibilidades para construir las condiciones sociales y programáticas, es decir políticas, de un proyecto emancipador, de un proyecto de un modo vida socialista. Y en la Venezuela de hoy, la lucha anti imperialista no implica apoyar al bloque actual sino disputarle la influencia en los sectores populares y la dirección del proceso levantando como programa mínimo inmediato las ideas contenidas en el “Golpe de Timón” formulado por Chávez en octubre de 2012, cinco meses antes de su muerte en marzo de 2013. En este reclamó por hacer efectiva la ley de las Comunas – ley muerta hasta hoy – como intento de construir poder popular, abogó por impulsar las nuevas formas de propiedad y por el desarrollo del Sistema Nacional de Medios Públicos. Nada más pero nada menos. El chavismo no es patrimonio de la burocracia, de la élite del PSUV ni menos de la boli-burguesía. El chavismo es el pueblo mestizo y zambo, el pueblo pobre, el pueblo que resiste, y puede reemerger si encarna en organizaciones populares autónomas e independientes que, en el curso de la lucha de resistencia contra la sedición y el imperialismo, retoma las banderas de la emancipación.

Hoy no pudieron y no pasaron; pero sólo se ha ganado un segundo: el capital y su forma imperialista no descansa en su dinámica voraz que destruye la vida por doquier. Como siempre todo depende de nosotros y nosotras.

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