A-Infos (en) Venezuela, Elections 2006: Anarchists Speak* II. - Depolarization and autonomy: Challenges to Venezuela’s social movements after D-3

Visualizing what will happen to Venezuela’s social movements after the elections 
scheduled for December 3 – every indication points to the re-election of 
president Chavez – cannot be done without at least a general understanding of 
their historical path. During the second half of the 80’s the economic crises 
after the “black Friday” was the catalyst of new forms of organizing and 
demanding that began to develop in this Caribbean country: student and 
neighborhood movements, women, counterculture, ecological and pro-human rights. 
SubAnarchists SpeakAnarchists Speakjective efforts that although coming from the 
left, did not automatically follow the organizational schemes of the 
guevarist-lenninists who claimed to be the heirs of the armed insurrection of 
the 60’s. The “Caracazo” (February 1989) as the expression of the growing 
malaise, marks the beginning of a cAnarchists Speakivil society as alienated 
from the traditional political parties - networks of State’s clients - as it is 
from the left political parties. The effervescence that ensues weaves a social 
fabric out of infinite socio-political initiatives, with varied and developing 
levels of mutual interaction, which played a lead role in the mobilizations for 
the greatest objective at the time: getting Carlos Andres Perez out of power.

ChaAnarchists Speakvez’s original movement raises itself above this dynamic and 
becomes the face of the people’s malcontent, achieving legitimacy at the polls 
in 1999 by capitalizing on the prevailing wish for change that ran through the 
country, but also revitalizing the populist, statist and caudillista ethos so 
much a part of Venezuela’s historical make-up. The imposition of a personal mode 
of domination was preconditioned to the break up of the citizen-led dynamics 
that brought it to power. AmonAnarchists Speakg the many causes driving this 
process there is the polarization imposed by the contending elites: those banned 
from power representing the traditional productive sectors, and the new 
“leftist” bureaucracy giving legitimacy to the interests of those sectors 
crucial to the economic globalization of the country.

After 1999 the social fabric is fragmented (neighborhood, student and ecologist 
movements), neutralized (human rights) and co-opted (indigenous, women, 
counterculture) by the expectations created by a government rhetorically of the 
left. In turn this has caused some expression of popular organization with no 
autonomy within a new network of clients, amidst one of the greatest economic 
windfalls ever, brought on by the high oil prices.

These popular initiatives, instructed from above, have some common elements that 
distinguish them from other social movements:
(1) Vertical solidarity supplants intra-class solidarity: mobilizations follow a 
political agenda imposed by the top; their calls for solidarity when others in 
the movement suffer repression are almost non-existent.
(2) An identity permeated by personality cult and a lack of history and 
arguments different from those originating in the seat of power, which prevents 
any hypothetical “deepening of the revolution”.
(3) Their praxis aims to legitimize government’s projects, without any other 
parallel or different process.
(4) A progressing wearing out due to its adoption of politico-electoral 
cumulative logic.

Default on the expectations generated by Chavez has caused the exponential 
increase of popular protests during 2006, something that will continue to grow 
in the coming year. But it is precisely the blackmail of polarization – “to give 
weapons to the right”, “manipulated by imperialism” – which contains the growing 
discontent against a state that neither transformed itself when it could, nor 
has a new bureaucracy able to make policies different from Latin American 
populist welfare.

The challenges facing the social movements, after the hypothetical presidential 
re-election, are not only of a practical order such as its autonomous 
configuration or experimenting with diverse practices and spaces of learning and 
counter hegemony. They are also theoretical. Overcoming imperialist Manichaeism, 
centered exclusively on George Bush, would entail squeezing the multiple 
dynamics of money flow and the power of global capital. It is precisely the 
social movements, from both poles, which have internalized the discipline of 
being a cheap Approved: Nestoren

gg

by CRA - El Libertario, Venezuela - Comision de Relaciones Anarquistas - 
Venezuela Tuesday, Nov 21 2006, 4:04pm
ellibertario@nodo50.org
venezuela/colombia / anarchist movement / other libertarian press

    From the Commision of Anarchist Relations (Comision de Relaciones 
Anarquistas) and its organ El Libertario, we disseminate three texts in which we 
publically express our perspective on the upcoming Venezuelan elections of 
December 3, 2006.

A Call and an Alert to Public Opinion
As a group of activists of critical tendencies we have found it necessary before 
the present situation to signal an alert to all popular forces: workers, 
indigenous peoples, Afro Venezuelans, students, women, neighborhood groups, 
intellectuals and social groups.

We maintain that the two options publicized by the established order - Chavez as 
much as Rosales - represent the domination of financial power and empire over 
Venezuela, and present a scene of super-exploitation, unemployment, and social 
exclusion in addition to the fortification of big capital.

Eight years into the "revolution" or the so-called Process, we find that there 
is a social misery that has resulted from the consolidation of the State and the 
destruction/co-optation of social groups. In recent years, the political regimen 
has deteriorated into a total submission to transnational capital on the part of 
the Chavez government, a fact that Rosales and the opposition pretend to not be 
aware of.

The established game consists of the following: faced with the superficial and 
limited reforms of the current administration - which are driven by the 
Stalinist left within the capitalist State - the opposition pretends that these 
measures are communist, when in reality they form part of the dynamic of global 
capitalism. What we have seen is State management with punctual payments of 
external debt, the surrender of the Orinoco' Delta oil and the natural gas of 
Falcon state, destruction of the environment (Imataca, Perija and Paria), 
hegemony and the increase of the commercial sector, of finacial speculation, and 
the creation of flexible labor and social exclusion.

The ideological discourse of the State is crushing and hegemonic and has managed 
to block all critical forces, which have been silenced though bribery and 
cronyism, entangled in a thought process that can only lead to totalitarianism. 
There has been a increased fragmentation of the social movemements while the 
power of the cliques has only grown.

In the same way, there is an exercise in direct militarism when the high 
branches of the public sector are in the hands of the military forces. The 
popular imagination has been channeled into the civil-military lie; 
arbitrariness is the actual situation, and the military sector need not look 
upon the past with nostalgia, since El Amparo in the 90`s is exactly the same as 
La Paragua today (two military massacres). As a result, Chavismo is simply the 
reproduction of puntofijismo, as demonstrated by its corruption and impunity.

Based on these considerations, we call upon all indigenous peoples, peasants, 
students, professors, intellectuals, workers, women, Afro Venezuelans, 
neighborhood coalitions, social groups and people in general to abstain from 
voting because there will be no substantial change. The reality is that 
representative democracy based on populism vs. opposition symbolizes nothing 
new, but is merely a backward sector anchored in the cold war, just like Chavismo.

This call for abstention is not based on the problem of electoral fraud, which 
we do not deny; nor does it coincide with the opportunistic call to abstention 
coming from certain quarters. Required change will never be given through the 
electoral process, but will rather be produced through the autonomous initiative 
of the social movements themselves. The grave social, economic and cultural 
crisis suffered by Venezuela does not find its answer in electoral politics, 
which banalizes and liquidates all struggle.

We bring this alert forward so that all agents of social change may actively 
organize around and promote absentionism through their own struggles, without 
messiahs or authoritarian bureaucrats, in order to demonstrate to the scaffold 
of power that it is ineffective and antidemocratic. Only the collapse of the 
existing system will guarentee transformation. Otherwise, we alert you to 
increases in repressive practices in the immediate future within the framework 
of the worsening of the structural crisis of the country.

Faced with the bourgeois, genocidal State of the past 40 years, which is 
expressed in the candidacy of Manuel Rosales, the alternative cannot be support 
for the totalitarian State of Hugo Chavez.energy exporting country, in spite of 
any consideration for the environment, deepening in the role assigned to 
Venezuela by economic globalization. Sticking to the events of the last few 
months – actions against carbon exploitation in Zulia, protests by street 
vendors in Caracas and traditional fishermen in Guiria – and how they have been 
opposed and criminalized by the Chavez’s rank and file, we foresee a long period 
of conflict among the oppressed: some protesting for a few structural 
improvements and other opposing them to climb up to positions within the 
hierarchy of those embedded in the personal state.
Eleven reasons not to vote on Dec. 3
(…and without making concessions to the opportunist Accion Democrática)
1.- Chavez and Rosales signify the continuation of and not the break up from the 
political tradition of Venezuela. They represent, in these times of economic and 
technological globalization, varieties of the statist, populist and caudillista 
ethos that dominated the country in the XX century.

2.- Chavez and Rosales don’t represent the largest minority of Venezuelans: that 
percentage of the population that according to all the surveys and previous 
electoral results does not identify with either.

3.- Chavez and Rosales base their political strategy on a watershed of support 
for their charisma and the absolute subordination to their person, denying the 
diversity, plurality and democratic tolerance they claim to uphold in their 
speeches.

4.- Chavez and Rosales discourses are an insult to Venezuelan’s intelligence.

5.- Chavez and Rosales help each other, sustaining and promoting the blackmail 
of political polarization and the “with me or against me” logic.

6) Both candidates’ governing programs are improvised electoral demagogies based 
on the high price of oil. Their hypothetical application will not change the 
complex structural problems of the country, nor will they significantly reduce 
poverty and insecurity.

7.- Both candidates’ electoral campaigns and their past political praxis that 
avails them have not said anything about human rights, the environment, 
protecting minorities and improving the standard of living of the people; based 
almost exclusively on the intensity and prevalence of traditional assistance in 
Latin American populism.

8.- The lack of widespread and combative social movements with their own and not 
negotiable political agenda condemns the next government to be a collection of 
impositions from the seat of power.

9.- Chavez and Rosales governments have granted impunity to the corruption and 
obvious enrichment of their functionaries

10.- Refusal to opt for the “lesser evil” upholds our right to change: to be 
different, to wish for another alternative, here and now.

11.- Whether it is the “Castro-communist threat” or the “imperialist invasion” 
Chavez and Rosales attempt to politically capitalize fear by promoting 
hysterical explanations about the country’s future without them in power, via 
the media they control.

No more blackmail: Don’t vote, reject equally the sad past and the demagogic 
present. It’s a bet on the future.

ellibertario(a)nodo50.org
www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/seccioningles.htm

http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/seccioningles.htm

uzcategui.rafael(a)gmail.com
================================
* See: http://www.ainfos.ca:81/06/nov/ainfos00274.html
(en) Elections 2006: Venezuelan Anarchists Speak
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