Fw: Venezuela: Chavez calls for counter-mobilizations; bosses' united front fractures

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg@tin.it>]

   From: "Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@netzero.net>
Subject: Venezuela: Chavez calls for countermobilizations, bosses' united
front
fractures

    Despite the claims that the bosses' cartel fedecamaras represent all
economic activity in the country and that they are all 100% behind the Dec.
10 general lockout, various fedecamaras sectors are OFFICIALLY dropping out
of the planned action, and it remains an open question how many workplaces
will heed the call to shut down even in those sectors which haven't formally
reneged.

    The latest to turn tail and run are the airlines. Below I''ll reproduce
the AP wire. In addition, NOT participating in the lockout are the radio and
TV stations, the petroleum industry and, of course, government ministries
and offices.

        Meanwhile, President Chávez has announced a series of mass
countermobilizations to the capitalist's campaign.

        The popular offensive will begin December 6, third anniversary of
Chávez's (first) election as President, with a nationwide address by Chávez
and will culminate December 17 with a relaunching of the Movimiento
Revolucionario Bolivariano 200. Along the way there will be a night-time
vigil December 6, a "conquest of Caracas" by peasants and workers on Dec. 9
and 10, the formal signing of the agrarian reform merasure that has provoked
the ire of the oligarchy on the 10th itself, and a summit of the Association
of Caribbean States on the 11 and 12th.

    Everything appears to suggest that the package of economic and other
laws recently promulgated by Chávez, with the agrarian reform as its
centerpiece, could be a turning point in the evolution of the process opened
by Chávez's elections three years ago, and one which brings to the fore in a
much clearer way the social forces involved.

    On one side are the tattered remnants of the traditional bourgeois
political parties, the news media, and the bosses. Allied with the former
are the international news media and the United States, which is carrying
out a provocative campaign of little-noticed (by the media in the US)
statements trying to force Chávez to recant his criticism of the U.S. was
against the people of Afghanistan.

    On the other side are the working people of Venezuela, with growing
sympathy from working people all over Latin America.

    There are several historical references from post-WWII Latin American
history that it would be useful to keep in mind in thinking about the
Venezuelan process. One, obviously, is Cuba, but also the Allende experience
in Chile, the Perón period in Argentina, the Bolivian revolution of the
1950s, the Arbenz government in Guatemala, and the Nicaraguan revolution.

    The point isn't so much that the latter processes were reversed, but
rather, that this kind of movement for national salvation are not at all
uncommon in Latin America. The Cuban revolution taken as a whole is
misleading because we know how the story comes out: the establishment of a
socialist country led by conscious Communists in a process where the
fundamental social classes were the peasants and workers.

    But looked at as it was in 1959 and the first half of 1960, the Cuban
process seemed as undefined and incoherent as Venezuela might appear to many
today. It was through a series of political battles and confrontations that
the worker-peasant social character of what may have seemed at first just a
revolt against a dictatorial regime and for clean government emerged.