On the presidential election in Venezuela

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The presidential election in Venezuela will be organized on the 7th October 2012. The president Hugo Chavez, a former member of the Bonapartist-nationalist army and a defender of the “Bolivarian revolution”, runs the election for the third time. His candidacy is supported worldwide by bourgeois workers’ parties (representatives of the French Left Party take part to the campaign) and even by “Trotskyist” trends, like the IMT, in the name of “anti-imperialism”, of the “ongoing citizen revolution”…

To be sure, it happens that Colonel Chavez, like all the bourgeois leaders did before him, including Colonel Perón in Argentina, sometimes used the popular mobilization for relaxing the grip of the imperialist pressure, in aid of the national bourgeoisie. In return he had to concede to the masses some gains, which are entirely questioned by the crisis.

The communists support any real step against imperialism from oppressed countries, and they support an oppressed country against an imperialist attack, whatever the government may be (like during the attempt of coup d’État against Chavez in 2002). Yet only the working class and the workers’ international can remove world capitalism.

But this is only elections. And, by way of revolution, Chavez as a leader and his party PSUV keep the bourgeois army and police, they refuse the distribution of lands to peasants and the expropriation of national industrial and banking groups, they try to integrate the unions into the bourgeois State, they restrict the right to strike and they tolerate the murders of unionists.

By way of anti-imperialism, Colonel Chavez protects all the important foreign firms – Chevron, Ford, Mitsubishi, Total, Alstom… – which freely operate in Venezuela and he collaborates with the Russian and Chinese imperialisms.

By way of internationalism, Colonel Chavez has friendly relations with the regime that restores capitalism in Cuba. He openly supports bloody dictatorships in Iran or in Syria, as he supported Kaddafi in Libya. Colonel Chavez and his international supporters pretend that he represents the only means to “defend the revolution” against Capriles, the candidate of the fraction of the bourgeoisie which is the most directly related to imperialism. But Chavez himself and his PSUV are the architects of the reinforcement of the bourgeoisie in Venezuela, at a time when their politics discourage and disgust entire sectors of urban and countryside workers. Chavez himself amnestied the perpetrators of the two missed military putsches.

To support Colonel Chavez in this election amounts to support his politics against the working class in Venezuela, in Cuba, in North Africa and in Middle-East; it amounts to disarm the masses in presenting a colonel and the president of a capitalist country as a supreme savior, as a guide who would lead them to socialism.

In that case, the CoReP and the CCI(T) support the only workers’ candidacy in the 7th October presidential election in Venezuela, namely the activist Orlando Chirino, member of the PSL, a former laid off oil worker, who fights against the integration of unions in the bourgeois State, despite the frequent opportunism of his international current, the UIT.

The positions rightly defended by Chirino against the capitalist austerity, against the payment of the public debt by the workers, for the nationalization of banks and of the important industrial groups under the control of workers, for the distribution of lands to the peasants, for the recognition of the Indians’ rights, for the independence of unions… are utopian without a proletarian revolution, without workers’ and peasants’ councils, without taking the power, without dismantling the repressive State machinery, without a workers’ and peasants’ government which fights for the Socialist United States of Latin America.

4th October 2012
Permanent Revolution Collective / Austria, France, Peru
Internationalist Communist Committee / France