By Marea Socialista
There is no way out for the working class and popular sectors in the midst of an economic crisis that seems endless, within the current lumpen-capitalist and corrupt-predatory model that has been imposed on the country from the degeneration of the Bolivarian revolution.
The miserable minimum wage (less than 20 dollars a month) seems to be a long journey through a desert to which the political and business leaders have condemned us, as they are getting more and more in touch, in their eagerness to offer to the highest bidder of world capitalism the conditions for them to come and invest since we are a irresistible labor force for such interests.
The vaunted economic recovery that both the national government and their peers of FEDECAMARAS boast about, is nothing more than the success that they have scored in the general design of all the big businesses that can be observed at plain sight and that is the result of the political economic program is beginning to show, framed in the central laws that have been forged in the heat of corruption and secrecy among clans, such as the Anti-Blockade Law and the Law of Special Economic Zones, among others.
It is within this framework that we can see an apparently more consolidated “Madurist” government and a classic right-wing opposition engaged in an uproar to hold primaries in order to choose a candidate for the upcoming presidential elections, the date of which is at the mercy of the negotiations that the government has been carrying out, among others, with the United States, and not of what is established by the National Constitution. The background of all this is speculative business, the plundering of national resources and the super-exploitation of the working class, which is what explains the opportunist “agreements” in replacement (for now) of the coup tactics they have unsuccessfully tried.
A conference on Climate to the rhythm of capitalist cynicism
It could be seen how the government propaganda machine was ecstatically showing the handshakes and conversations that Nicolás Maduro had with presidents and prime ministers of countries from several continents, during the development of the so-called United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt. It is no small thing that the Venezuelan president was greeted so warmly by Emmanuel Macron, Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa and the cordial contact with the U.S. envoy, John Kerry.
In other words, some of the representatives of world governance who until recently not only did not recognize Nicolás Maduro as president of Venezuela, but also called him a dictator, now effusively show their affection and give a mutual message of being in the best disposition to do whatever is necessary, aiming at greater progress as governments representing the system that is precisely destroying the planet.
The aforementioned climate summit not only gave the impression of being really a meeting of fossil fuel lobbyists, but serves to illustrate more and more clearly what we anti-capitalist fighters vehemently affirm: there is no way out for the peoples of the world within the capitalist system.
Nicolás Maduro has the nerve to affirm that the powers of the world are destroying the planet with their greed and developmentalism, which is true, but it is said by someone who is not only negotiating with those responsible for the climate crisis and others, but also who leads a government that is carrying out a devastating project like the Orinoco Mining Arc (AMO), which is nothing more than the destruction of the most important natural reserve of Venezuela, for the profit of a few.
What are we workers doing then?
The situation that we workers in Venezuela are living, taking into account the elements that we wielded above, is the result of the anti-worker, anti-popular and profoundly capitalist policies of the government headed by Nicolás Maduro, the high bureaucracy of the PSUV and the military chiefs. To this must be added the co-responsibility of the other political leadership, the classic right-wing opposition and the private business sector.
This characterization is extremely important for the workers to have in the perspective of the possibility of recomposing our forces and organization as a class, even more so in a scenario of demobilization and ebb of the workers’ struggles such as the one we are going through, with some gestures of labor resistance.
Another important factor, which we experience more immediately, is the role of the trade union organizations, most of them aligned with the political parties of the bosses, whether they are pro-government or pro-opposition, whose maneuverability is a slab for the emergence of new trade union leaderships that genuinely express the feelings and spirit at the base level of the workers, and also a blockage for the political organization and struggle of the workers’ movement.
In this sense, and aiming to find the keys to a definitive overcoming of all the adversities that lie ahead, it is important to point out that we workers cannot expect anything favorable from any summit agreed from any type of leadership, whether from governments for a climate summit or from a tripartite summit between government, employers and union bureaucracies.
It is necessary to reaffirm with greater strength that without struggle we will not be able to recover all that has been taken from us, and that precisely this is a task solely and exclusively ours. It will always be necessary to come together democratically around a program based on our basic needs, that expresses our response to the crisis that they have unloaded on our shoulders and with this framework of a working class and popular character, try to turn around the reigning situation of demobilization and atomization to which they have led us.
Then, for us, it is not the governmental summits that we need, but our own spaces to find all the workers, labor and struggle forces that are and will continue to show themselves in attempts to channel the claims for wages, for benefits, against repression, for union rights, among other axes, and to advance in a democratic way to motorize and organize all that energy in the form of claims that again will come back before the impossibility of surviving quietly. This at the national level, because at the international level it is not the agreements between governments of the exploiters but the meeting of the oppressed peoples in struggle, linking protests and initiatives on a global scale, which can allow us to confront the climate situation caused largely by the same people who oppress and exploit us.
As always, from La Marea, on a national scale, we put ourselves at the order to join with the workers who through different ways express such disposition, as it has been happening to us through social networks and in the street scenarios that have been presented, which is nothing other than a reflection of everything that is underneath is agitated, although it still does not yet reach the necessary relief in its form, intensity and orientation of the struggle, but it is there and sooner or later it will emerge. For this we must prepare ourselves collectively and fine-tune the mechanisms that will facilitate a joint response to this challenge.
At the same time, at the international level, we continue trying to link the mobilizations and demands of the working class, peasants, women, and discriminated sectors… And we do it, in our case, by sharing, in the first place, the effort to build a world organization that groups the anti-capitalist and anti-bureaucratic revolutionaries; a task that we carry forward together with the International Socialist League (ISL) with other national organizations of countries of the different continents.