By Michael A. Lebowitz
Venezuela
By Ian Angus
[Second of two articles. Click here for part one.]
See http://www.links.org.au/node/388#comment-527 for a report on the Caracas May Day March.
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Venezuela's labour movement at the crossroads
By Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes
By Michael A. Lebowitz
[Translation by J. Duckworth]
By Michael A. Lebowitz
April 24, 2008 -- As May Day approaches, there are four things that are worth remembering:
1. For workers, May Day does not celebrate a state holiday or gifts from the state but commemorates the struggle of workers from below.
2. The initial focus of May Day was a struggle for the shorter workday.
3. The struggle for the shorter workday is not an isolated struggle but is the struggle against capitalist exploitation.
International Solidarity Forum resolution: Statement of Solidarity
http://solidarityforum2007.org/?q=node/32
We came and met together from many different countries.
We came because we are some of those who have to struggle.
We have to fight the capitalists. We have to fight and win.
To fight we need to meet, and talk about our problems.
The ways we get defeated, the ways in which we are winning.
We have to talk together about our common struggle:
The issues that unite us, and where we don’t agree.
We need to make a plan that is a clear way forward.
The world is really ours. But capitalists have stolen it.
By Stalin Perez Borges
Introduction by Green Left Weekly:
April 19, 2008 -- Denouncing the “coloniser attitude” and “barbarous exploitation” of workers by the management of the Sidor steel company, Venezuelan Vice President Ramon Carrizalez announced at 1.30am on April 9 that President Hugo Chavez had decided to nationalise the company.
“This is a government that protects workers and will never take the side of a transnational company”, said Carrizalez.
The decision of the Chavez government to nationalise Sidor has begun the process of returning to state hands one of the most important steel factories of Latin America, located in the heartland of Venezuela’s industrial belt in Guayana.
Sidor was privatised in 1997, one year before Chavez was elected. The major share-holder has been an Argentinean-controlled conglomerate Techint. Since privatisation, the workforce has been slashed from around 15,000 to just over 5000 and the company has used contract labour in violation of a government decree banning the practice.
By Kiraz Janicke
Caracas, April 15, 2008 (venezuelanalysis.com) -- In a joint press conference with Venezuela's labour minister Jose Ramon Rivero on Sunday, National Assembly deputy and coordinator of the Bolivarian Socialist Workers Force (FSBT), a faction within the National Union of Workers (UNT), announced the formation of a new national union federation and called on unions to disaffiliate from the UNT.
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STOP PRESS
CARACAS, April 16 (Reuters) - Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez named a veteran communist leader as labour minister on Wednesday, days after ordering the nationalisation of a giant steelmaker whose workers are fighting for better pay. The first task facing Roberto Hernandez, a [former] long-term member of the Venezuelan Communist Party, will be to negotiate a new labour contract with the union at the Ternium Sidor steel works.
The appointment was published in the government's official gazette.
Alberto Müller Rojas, first vice president of the of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), speaks to Kiraz Janicke of Venezuelanalysis.com and to Federico Fuentes of Links - International Journal of Socialist Renewal about the significance of the formation of the PSUV for the Bolivarian Revolution -- debates within the new party, what its relationship with the government should be and the immediate tasks of the PSUV in the struggle for the socialist transformation of Venezuela
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By Eva Golinger
The US government is waging war on Venezuela -- not your typical, traditional war, but a modern, asymmetric - 4th Generation War -- against President Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. Below is a presentation I created regarding the pattern and escalation of US government aggression against Venezuela, with clear quotes and citations as evidence to back up this claim.
By Luis Bilbao, translated exclusively for Links by Federico Fuentes
Venezuela has entered a decisive phase of its revolutionary process, which has advanced rapidly, and without pause, since 1999. The failed attempt to reform the constitution in the December 2, 2007, referendum opened up a conjuncture of sharp contradictions in the short and medium term and modified the institutional framework in which this period will develop; but it does not modify the content of the confrontation underway. The forces of the revolution will be unleashed, along with those of the counterrevolution.
By Kiraz Janicke
Caracas, March 10, 2008 - The so-called ``traditional'' or moderate left wing prevailed in the elections for the provisional national executive of Venezuela's new United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) on March 9. The party's vice president, Alberto Müller Rojas, announced the results of the elections for the fifteen principal delegates to the national executive and fifteen substitute delegates at a press conference , after 87.7% of the votes had been scrutinised.
While key figures associated with the right wing of the Chavista movement, such as Diosdado Cabello and Francisco Arias Cardenas, failed to get elected to the national executive (Cabello made it on to the list of substitute delegates), the preferred candidates of the radical left, such as Fernando Soto Rojas, Vladimir Acosta and Lidice Navas, were also not elected.