A-Infos (en) Venesuela, Editorial El Libertario* #33, june/july 2003

[Worker <a-infos-en@ainfos.ca>]

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"Four legs good, two legs better!", was the slogan used by George Orwell,
in his book _Animal Farm_, to illustrate how vanguard parties take advantage
of situations of social change to establish themselves as a new ruling class.
During the animal rebellion against humans, the initial slogan "Four legs good,
two legs bad" is modified by the new oligarchy in order to legitimate restoring
the old privileges. This antiauthoritarian classic, a metaphor of the events in
Stalinist Russia, provides a better understanding of the craftiness and treachery
leftist bureaucrats use when they are in charge.

Venezuela is not an isolated case within the continent. Those who celebrate the
supposed Latin American leftward turn, actually want to uphold a group that,
hiding behind an anti-US speech, are signing contracts highly profitable to
european capitalism and, with their nationalistic mongering, diverting people's
attention away from the hunger and injustices they suffer. Here in Venezuela,
you just need a little curiosity and critical thinking to see how the energy
multinationals (as in the Delta Platform) and the interests of global capital
(whose only ideology is money), i.e. banking and telecommunications, are still
filling their pockets thanks to contracts signed by the Bolivarian regime.

As political power readjusts itself in several ways, the petty-bureaucrats and
the lumpen-bourgeois keep giving us the snake oil seller's speech about
furthering a revolution that never was. Fueled by rage supressed for decades, and
blackmailed with the imperative "Do not give arguments to the right wing" (sic),
promising social movements censor their own demands in order to focus their efforts
towards a false polarization, falling under a confuse ideology based in the cult of
the personality of a statist military man. Whoever wants proof of our claims only
has to observe the ludicrous social gains after four years of bolivarian government.
If anyone thinks we'd rather have the adecos back in charge, we answer that it is
imposible to go back to a past we never left behind. It's the only way to explain
the way the "patriots" reproduce, like a carbon copy, the excluding and servile
practices of their predecessors.

It is our opinion that the chavist petty-bureocrats and the grassroots social groups
that uphold them have different motivations. But the latter surrender their autonomy
if they don't develop their own agenda and a complex understanding of reality,
complementing their class conciousness with an understanding of the nature of power
as an oppresive and divisive force. To accept blindly the "power to the people" slogan is
to repeat the dark history that led to the so-called "dictatorships of the proletariat". The
lumpenburgeois know that perfectly well, while they toy with the idea of a "bolivarian"
state, recuperating and co-opting institutionally the revolutionary discourse and
the dissenting practices, which were brought to a halt by the consolidation
of the new establishment.

Those who claim as the anarchists' duty to participate in the State's fictitious
participation are wrong. To claim that power will dissolve itself is as ludicrous as
to claim that History is a mechanical sum of events that will bring us unerringly to
freedom and social justice. These will only be conquered by keeping with the
anticapitalist struggle without abandoning, even for a second, our critical spirit
and inquisitiveness. The only way to get answers is to not stop asking questions.

Wether they like it or not, this unruly newspaper will keep on its task, to provide
libertarian counterinformation, denouncing power and injustice anywhere we find it.
To acomplish that, we weave affinity groups; we build networks; we read, we write, we
debate; we act and sing songs. Like that song that has been recently playing in our
walkman: "Here they come, with their magnificent party, here they come, with recycled
words, with old and stale thoughts.I need air, clean air, I want something new, something
fairer."


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