Venezuela: Referendum: Socialists call for a spoilt ballot

The defeat of Chavez in Sunday’s referendum in Venezuela was a political earthquake and the aftershocks are still being felt. Here we present an argument from the tendency around Orlando Chirino, a leader of the UNT trade union, explaining why they called on workers to spoil their ballots.

Introduction

A debate is raging on the Venezuelan and international left as to the reasons for the defeat in Sunday’s referendum.

People like Alan Woods, whose group Socialist Appeal is the prime mover behind the Hands off Venezuela Campaign in Britain, have no doubts – ‘backward’ sections of the masses were taken in by the right-wing media campaign; a “fifth-column” was at work inside the Chavista movement sabotaging the campaign; and “pernicious” tendencies like Orlando Chirino’s found themselves “agitating in the company with the counter-revolution”. (See In Defense of Marxism website).

Less slavish followers of Hugo Chavez have started to criticise the way the referendum and its amendments were conceived, as well as the basis of campaign led by the newly formed United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). The foundation of this party led to a split in the left wing current of the UNT – C-CURA, of which Orlando Chirino and Stalin Perez Borges were important leaders. Perez Borges led half of the C-CURA into the PSUV, where he edits the paper Marea Clasista y Socialista, while the Chirino remained outside (although the C-CURA continues to exist as a single current within the UNT - later edit SK)

In the referendum the group around Perez Borges campaigned for a “Yes vote” but in interviews afterwards have been highly critical of how the PSUV was used bureaucratically to campaign:

"None of the social organisations were consulted in the process when the Comando (Comando Zamora organized the ‘Yes’ campaign) was formed nor later when it began to function. The genuine rank and file leaders of the PSUV were not taken into account. Two representatives of the trade unions were represented by the FSTB, which is precisely the current that is most bureaucratic and needs to be questioned ...

Many of those who headed the ‘Yes vote’ acted so bureaucratically that it was impossible to convince a sector of Chavismo to vote Yes ...The Comando Zamora cut the wings of the force and initiative from the ranks, it wasn't allowed to fly, the method of deciding among a few while those below in the rank and file tried but without the power to decide or give opinions on how to develop the campaign.” (From Aporrea on 5 December)

The document below was put out by the Movement for the Construction of a Workers' Party led by Orlando Chirino before the referendum and calls on workers to cast a blank vote by spoiling their ballot papers. It explains how little participation took place in the drawing up of the amendments to the constitution and how many amendments represented a step back from the existing democratic provisions.

(Translation: Wladek Flakin, www.revolution.de.com)

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We revolutionary socialists are the Third Option

Let's reject the Constitutional Reform on December 2 - Spoil Your Ballot

Movement for the Construction of a Workers' Party, Venezuela

November 27, 2007

People who are familiar with our trajectory as trade union leaders and workers' politicians know perfectly well that we have never been on the side of the exploiters, the bosses and the big land owners, nor have we been an instrument of foreign governments trying to infringe on our sovereignty. The workers and the revolutionary political vanguard of the country recognize us as anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist fighters; defenders of trade union democracy; enemies of the political and trade union bureaucracy; fighters against corruption and promoters of the ideas of revolutionary socialism.

For decades, we have been and we will continue to be at the service of the struggles of the people and the interests of the workers. Likewise, we defended the government of President Chávez against the attacks of the bourgeoisie and imperialism in the days of the coup and the "strike"/sabotage of the oil industry, which gives us sufficient moral and political authority to speak out categorically against the Constitutional Reform presented by the Executive and Legislative Powers of the country which will be submitted to a referendum next Tuesday, December 2.

Recently, President Chávez declared that whoever isn't for the reform is part of an "international conspiracy". We reject this vision of puppet masters, a vision that tries to make anyone who questions the constitutional reform look like they're squalid and not with the revolutionary process. For this reason we say there is a "third option", that of the revolutionary socialists who have defended this process and fight to make it more profound, towards real socialism without bosses, bureaucrats or corrupt people, and for a government of the workers and the people.

The Constitutional Reform restricts democratic and political freedoms

We reject the Constitutional Reform because, despite what its initiators and defenders say, it makes time go backwards. It limits or directly de-recognizes important conquests and democratic freedoms won with great sacrifice. And what's worse, it has nothing to do with making the revolutionary process more profound from a socialist perspective.

In form and in content, the Reform is a serious blow against political and democratic freedoms. The first 33 articles were worked out by a commission hand-picked by the President which worked for four months under the most hermetic secrecy without consulting the sectors involved in each topic. The National Assembly proceeded in an equal or worse way, violating basic procedures of parliamentary activity to approve 36 further articles and 15 temporary laws.

It is a public and notorious fact that the Legislative and Executive Powers, which talk about participatory and protagonist-based democracy, have abandoned this principle in order to present a Reform that could just as well be discussed in a Constituent Assembly or a National Assembly of People's Delegates. Here the various sectors of the people in struggle could have discussed the principal economic, social and political problems of the country in a broad and democratic way, to trace the course and the measures of the transition towards socialism. In contrast to this, the President and the National Assembly, instead of facilitating democratic participation, have taken us back to the old system of representative democracy which was in force during 40 years of AD-COPEI bi-party-rule.

If the Reform is passed, greater percentages of voters will be needed to invoke any kind of referendum; privileges are extended to the national deputies; in the same way, the President will be trusted with special powers which will suffocate the electoral rights of the people, such as the right to hand-pick new authorities in the case of regional vice-presidents or district functionaries. The President will be the only person able to be re-elected in his/her function, injuring the equality of rights and responsibilities of all Venezuelas.

Special mention must be given to the de-recognition of the people's freedom of information, which has been eliminated in article 337, legitimizing the coup action carried out by the fascists between April 11 and 13, 2002, who as their first order of business eliminated the right to information.

With the Constitutional Reform we don't advance towards Socialism

The Constitutional Reform goes in the opposite direction of this great socialist dream which we as a people are fighting for. A good proof of what we say is reflected in the government propaganda deployed by the media in which they reassure that the Reform protects private property and argue that the mixed businesses as a new form of property mean an advance towards socialism. As true revolutionaries we say in all clarity that private property of the means of production and the presence of multinational corporations as partners in the oil company, in the exploitation of our national resources or in the state companies, are incompatible with socialism because private property is a keystone of the system of capitalist exploitation.

The workers of Sanitarios Maracay, those of the Solid Waste Recycling Plant or the truck drivers in the state of Bolivar, to mention only relevant cases, have understood that the defense of private property by the government isn't just a campaign slogan in support of the Constitutional Reform. The government has shown effectively, via the Ministry of Labor, the National Guard, the mayors and the governments, that it is committed to the defense of private property by itself carrying out or being an accomplice to the violent evictions of these workers who only demand their right to work, the payment of their wages and the possibility to get the businesses to start producing under workers' control.

Nowhere in the project of the Constitutional Reform does it say that the President or the National Assembly definitively break with international and national private businesses and with the big land owners. Nor does it say anything about expropriation and control of the means of production by the workers and the people, and even less does the Reform contemplate installing a genuine government composed of workers, peasants and sectors of the people. This is the only socialism which can bring the people out of the misery and tears of capitalism.

The Reform doesn't offer concrete and immediate benefits for the workers

The reduction of the working day, the grandfather clause for social benefits and the creation of a Social Stability Fund are rights that were already achieved by the workers in the Constitution of 1999, only the government and the National Assembly have shown themselves to be incapable and inconsistent in complying with the regulations of the Organic Law of Social Security and the Organic Law of Work, which guarantee all Venezuelans pension benefits, vacations, rest periods and a reduction of the working day, among other things.

The Labor Councils, besides not being organisations genuinely created by the workers or born out of their day-to-day struggles, are organisms born in tutelage and absolute control by the Executive, which injures the independence and the autonomy of the workers and their organizations. A palpable example of this is what we are experiencing in the Labor Ministry, where a Labor Council has been created by the directive of the minister. This organism takes care of absolutely everything except to defend the right to negotiate a collective contract in an institution which has gone 14 years without signing a new collective work agreement.

Thus, one recognises the interest of the National Government to continue promoting division amongst the ranks of the workers, imposing organisms that aren't autonomous and promoting decidedly anti-union policies in the present year, expressed in the de-recognition of the National Workers' Union (UNT), of the legitimate leaders of the oil unions and the workers in the public sector, who have been waiting 36 months for a new contract to be signed.

We can't say any less of the reformed article 141, which means that public employees lose their attribute of being at the service of the citizens and are converted into an instrument of central Public Power. In this way, their right to strike, to work security, to union organisation and to collective bargaining are put at risk, since employees of public administration are converted into employees of Management and confidence.

Further, the reform doesn't contemplate a general increase in salaries to counter the shortages and runaway inflation that the country is suffering under, nor even less a sliding scale of wages, nor any economic or social means to recuperate the population's standard of living.

The workers and the revolutionaries cannot vote in favor of the Constitutional Reform

Many workers are declaring themselves openly opposed to the Constitutional Reform because they know that with it they move backwards. Others are doing it in a hidden way because they feel the enormous pressure government functionaries are bringing to bear on them, especially in the sector of public administration, in state companies or in the PDVSA. The positive thing is that workers who think or act like this have nothing in common with the businessmen, big land owners, multinational corporations, nor with the professional fascist putschists.

Revolutionaries cannot be blind and deaf faced with the clamor coming from below which seeks a form to express itself against the constitutional reform on December 2. For this reason, we call on all the workers, peasants, youth and the people in general to reject this constitutional reform which doesn't lead us to the socialism that millions desire, a socialism without bosses or big land owners, without bureaucrats or "red" corrupt people.

We call on the workers to SPOIL YOUR BALLOT on December 2, not marking any of the options (YES or NO) and only pushing the VOTE button twice, a formula suggested to us by many workers who are feeling scared of being identified as abstentionists, since the National Electoral Commission (CNE) anti-democratically prohibited doing a campaign for abstention; afraid of being fired from their work in state companies or being catalogued as "counterrevolutionaries" or "people who jump across the barricades" if they vote NO.

We call for SPOILING THE BALLOTS so there is no doubt amongst the workers that we have anything to do with the putschist opposition and imperialism, who oppose the reform from an exploiter's perspective. Our rejection of the reform is from a revolutionary socialist point of view, that is, we want to construct a socialism without bosses, without big land owners, without bureaucrats and without corrupt people.

A warning to imperialism and the putschist opposition

The putschist opposition, radio-controlled from Washington, has economically and politically recovered thanks to the government's policies of class collaboration. It finds itself emboldened, assuming that if the NO triumphs, that will mean the people renounce the revolutionary conquests. We revolutionary socialists tell them that they are very mistaken in this assumption, because if they attempt any destabilising action or coup, they will be facing millions of workers in action who are ready to occupy the factories and start them producing under our control.

We say with complete clarity that the putschist opposition, renewed by sectors of the university students' movement, represents no positive perspective for the people. They only want to return us to the past of bi-party rule – corrupt, anti-worker, anti-people and pro-imperialist – to continue exploiting the working class and accumulate millions and millions while the people die of hunger. They were, are and will continue to be the main enemies of the people and the revolution which we must defeat completely, without giving them any more concessions as the government has done, expropriating from them the businesses, the land, the banks and the big stores so they are administered and controlled by the people directly. This is the socialism we fight for.

For the National Promoting Committee of the Movement for the Construction of a Workers' Party

Orlando Chirino, Miguel Angel Hernández, Emilio Bastidas, Armando Guerra, Rafael Ruiz (responsible for propaganda)

Original: www.aporrea.org/trabajadores/a45658.html

Wed 05, December 2007 @ 22:32