Chávez won’t go

CHÁVEZ won’t go. Class conflict-ridden history shall not allow Chávez to go. He is part of history, part of people struggling against dispossession, exploitation and poverty, part of people struggling for democracy and dignity. ‘Those who die for life can’t be called dead,’ said Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan vice-president. This makes Chávez live forever among the people.
Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez has passed away ‘after battling a tough illness for nearly two years.’ A number of persons celebrated the news by honking their car horns. Reaction of his class enemies tell the cause Chávez stood for. Identity of his class enemies tell the class position Chávez chose. The cause and the class position make Chávez part of people, part of people’s history, part of class struggle toilers carry forward.
It was not his personal cause. It was a cause an old republic created with its failures, a cause determined by society’s history. It was a cause the multitude demanded. It was a cause to which exploitation and inequality, injustice and lies, all practised by the elite, provided the rationale. The cause was not driven by personal vendetta.
So, Chávez stood for the excluded, for the poor, for the prisoners of poverty, for the captives of starvation. So, Chávez stood for the shackled, for those compelled to live with indignity and dishonour. So, Chávez stood for labour tied to the yoke of capital, to the yoke of capital’s dictatorship and tyranny. So, began the historic political journey by Comandante Chávez.
Thus, a ‘sin’ was committed in the court of the rich, the propertied classes, the appropriators, the land speculators, the oil wealth thieves, the world capitalist system. Hence, Chávez turned a sworn-in class enemy of the powerful, of the key keepers of property, of the custodians of undue privileges.
Chávez united workers, peasants, small and medium business people, women, indigenous communities, youths and students, professionals, members of the military, and activists and almost the entire leadership in the camp striving to make a forward journey, a new political practice for exercising national sovereignty and the independence free from all external influences and interferences. He forged the largest progressive social-political force in Venezuela. Over the years, he led a struggle so that power belongs to the people, not to the rich.
He engaged the armed forces en masse into activities aimed at social protection and national development. An archaic state machine was pressed to gear a transformation process, frustrating at times, yet a challenging task.
Chávez made unique effort by cementing a Bolivarian civic-military political force relying on the people’s yearning for freedom and dignity. The aim was to reconstruct state institutions, a transformation process, and claim people’s sovereignty with the goal of transforming the social, political and state structures.
He mobilised the poor and the most excluded parts of the society. This was his constituency and strength. In response, the rich tried to flood mass psyche with lie-stuffed media, and employed Guarimba, violent mobilisations using firearms to provoke the government to resort to repressive measures.
Despite conspiracies the people of Venezuela achieved victories over the years. The latest victories include the people’s patience and unity in the face of propaganda on the health condition of Chávez and electoral victory by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela in 20 of 23 states.
Chávez initiated unique experiments. With the existing reality these are difficult indeed. These provide people spaces for learning, getting mobilised, taking leadership role, initiating plans, increasing awareness.
Venezuela can be called a land of cooperatives. Thousands of cooperatives are being organised in spheres of society. There are thousands of farming cooperatives. It’s an initiative to change the way food is produced and to move towards sustainable and community-based food production. Lands expropriated from land speculators are being used to achieve food sovereignty. There are cooperatives of taxi drivers, janitors, small producers.
Chávez initiated projects for the benefit of the people, especially the poor. At the centre, it’s the Bolivarian Revolution. There are missions, projects, for heath, education. The housing program constructs dignified homes for the poor. More than half-a million houses for the poor have already been constructed. The public housing programme plans to construct two million homes in the next 6 years. The project of community urban agriculture with an aim to produce food free of agro-chemicals by not damaging soil and recycling organic waste has been initiated. The project contributes to attaining food sovereignty, and break down alienation in community. People are initiating ‘socialist’ direct community production enterprises. Alternative, free and community media aims feminism, gender diversity, and wages anti-patriarchal fight. There is effort to initiate a new type of policing aimed at dealing with the problem of crime through prevention and community engagement.
Mass debate over Venezuela’s Socialist Plan of the Nation 2013-2019 was initiated. People participated in hundreds of assemblies to specify the draft plan proposed by Chávez. On this plan he was re-elected as president. It is part of the struggle he began.
The struggle, a persistent fight to collectively transform society, goes on. Thousands of revolutionary social movements join hands to consolidate the Great Patriotic Pole, a platform of all the popular organisations and political parties supporting the Bolivarian Revolution. Peasant organisations with thousands of people are struggling for ‘democratic radicalisation’ and land reform, and against bureaucracy as bureaucracy sabotages socialism. It’s people’s fight against bureaucracy. Their demands include acceleration of the land reform program and the elimination of corruption and obstacles to construct of a socialist economy. Workers are struggling to run industrial units properly. They are getting mobilized.
These are part of a fight for what Chávez called the 21st century socialism. It’s a long struggle. A bitter and longer struggle is there in the coming days. Already there are news of destabilisation plans by the right wing and their international masters.
People are rallying to mourn the death of their president. They are expressing the defiant hope: ‘The struggle has already been ignited.’ People gathered in Plaza Bolivar, in front of Miraflores Palace, in central squares across the country voiced ‘Chávez lives, the struggle continues’, ‘people united will never be defeated’, the Venezuelan bourgeoisie ‘will never return to the Miraflores Palace’. These hopes keep Chávez alive.
It is people, their steadfastness, awareness, organization, unity that will determine the future path. Still, the voice of the people is saying to the Comandante, Alo Presidente (Hello President), ‘Nobody is Surrendering Here.’

Chávez Wins, Chávez es el pueblo , Chávez Is The People

Frustrating status quo-aspiration and falsifying most of the mainstream expectation coated with predictions, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has won a fourth term in office. It's a victory of the under-classes. His new six-year term will begin next year, on the 10 th of January, and the common people expect: the Bolivarian revolution, as Chávez identifies, will continue.

“The revolution has triumphed”, Chávez told the jubilant citizens from the people's balcony , a balcony of the Miraflores presidential palace in the capital city Caracas . “ Venezuela will continue its march toward the democratic socialism of the 21st century. Viva Venezuela ! Viva the fatherland! The battle was perfect and the victory was perfect”, Chávez said.

From Argentina , President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner tweeted: “Your victory is our victory! And the victory of South America and the Caribbean !”

With a turnout of about 81% voters Chávez had won more than 54% of the votes while his opponent Henrique Capriles was able to bag about 45%. A subdued Capriles, leader of a coalition of about 30 parties opposing Chávez and standing for the interests of the rich, admitted defeat. Capriles and his cohorts are also close to the empire and opposed to Cuba .

The information in the four paragraphs above provide, in brief, the perspective of the election victory in Venezuela, an old republic striving for a new society based on equity and equality, dignity and fraternity, and standing opposed to the strongest empire in human history – the US. The struggle is within the country and in the external arena. The perspective leaves no confusion concerning the tone of politics and its debates.

Wide expectation in the mainstream was that Capriles, the Justice First candidate, would kick out Chávez as the country is being oppressed by an overvalued currency, slow moving industry, crumbling infrastructure, alarming murder rate, corruption and inefficiency.

Oil accounts for more than 90% of the country's foreign currency inflows, but the economy is still to be diversified. Inflation in the fifth largest economy in Latin America is 20% a year. “Soaring inflation and government spending – coupled with currency and capital controls – have created a widening fiscal deficit”, informed Consensus Economics, a survey organization. “The authorities are increasingly reliant on external debt to finance this.”

The China Development Bank, Bloomberg news agency informs, has lent Venezuela $42.5bn over the past five years.

Arturo Franco of the Center for International Development at Harvard University cites Venezuela as “the worst performer in GDP per capita growth.”

And, there are similar other statistics that can be easily cited as evidence of underperformance of the state Chávez leads.

During election campaigns, Capriles, who had a privileged upbringing, opposed nationalization. His argument: Nationalization discourages investment. His other arguments against Chávez included increasing autocracy, harassment of the private sector, government's involvement in the economy, which is detrimental to private sector, spiraling crime and power cuts. Capriles also referred to scandals that surface occasionally.

The line of criticism and the argument for opposition to Chávez is clear: Neoliberalism that puts everything to the “pity”, “benevolence”, cruelty and greed of capital that seeks profit only. To the poor Venezuelans, Capriles is an agent of oligarchy and the US .

A closer look into the performance by Chávez makes the demarcation line, along opposing class interests, clear: Poverty has decreased, health indicators have improved, thousands have got jobs in the expanding state sector. A house-building program has sheltered thousands of families in new homes. Billions of dollars have been channeled into misiones , social programs for the poor: healthcare, education, low-price shops, transport, cooperatives. Now, with a gradually decreasing income inequality all the citizens have a more equal slice of the cake. Venezuela is having the fairest income distribution in the region.

Chávez, who casts himself as the unlikely friend of the wealthy, who always claims somos la mayoría , we are the majority, has nationalized strategic industries and expropriated millions of hectares of land that the rich kept idle with the only purpose of speculation with land. The constitution framed under his leadership addresses social exclusion, and facilitates participation, transparency and accountability.

Chávez, who declared himself a socialist and whose campaign slogan was Chávez es el pueblo , Chávez is the people, is close to the poor, and is alienated from the elites. His opponents called him a monkey. Rich Venezuelans are angry with Chávez.

Prior to the emergence of Chávez, two political parties were peacefully altering state power. Poverty and corruption was wide and deep. A plunderocracy was reigning. Opposing the corrupt system and the elites' squandering of the oil wealth Chávez promised pro-poor social policies. He now plans to build three million homes by 2018 for the low-income people.

Capriles dared not antagonize the poor. He had to say, during campaign, he would not automatically return expropriated assets to private owners. He praised a number of programs initiated by Chávez. He had to commit he would, if elected, push building health clinics and schools for the poor.

The stage is set: the poor are aspiring for a better life for them while despising the rich for their predatory and squandering lifestyle. In a country divided between the rich and the poor with respective politics Chávez's voice against the wealthy is well-known: “predatory oligarchs”, the rotten elites, “squealing pigs”, “vampires”, who looted the oil wealth, corrupt servants of international capital, living in “luxury chalets where they perform orgies, drinking whisky”.

His opponents propagate a contradictory demand. They oppose his programs while they say he could and should have done more.

With petrodiplomacy, PetroCaribe program, standing close to Cuba , organizing ALBA with soft loans to neighbors, Chávez takes a stand for solidarity, mutual cooperation and fraternity among countries. This position can't endear him to a section in the world arena, the sections that practices Shock Therapy .

It's not an easy task to steer an old state machine on a new socio-economic-political path. All parts of the machine are old. Efforts for a gradual transformation are being made. Reality imposes a lot of limitations. There are limitations within the social forces upholding the dream for change. Chávez is operating within this limitation.

It would be a utopia to expect a corruption-free Venezuela overnight. A comparison will tell the truth: billions of dollars are “traceless”, unaccounted in two war fields. Is the amount of Venezuelan corruption to that level? Corruption in other countries that are integral part of the world system, Ben Ali's Tunisia or Mubarak's Egypt or some other similar country needs no mention. Is speculators' corruption, of rating agencies and banks, being exposed through the Great Financial Crisis comparable? Should not one compare “efficiency” of banks and real estate developers that are getting exposed at the center of the world system and in countries near to the center with the Venezuelan inefficiency? A comparison between Venezuelan power cut and power cuts in countries integrated with the world system will provide a hard truth. Should not one compare the number of schools being closed and teachers being thrown out of jobs in an advanced capitalist country and the number of schools being established and students being enrolled in Venezuela ? Should not the number of homeless families and the number of families being evicted from homes in advanced capitalist countries and the number of poor families getting home in Venezuela be compared?

Despite the facts mainstream don't refrain from its task: vilify people's efforts to build up a dignified, decent life. This reality compels one to say Chávez es el pueblo , Chávez is the people as people turn tired of inequality, deception, corruption, wasteful luxury, and as Chávez inspires the poor.