[Marxism] The Militant: charting a course to the PROGRESSIVE overthrow of Chavez

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Militant's editorial this week calls for support to next year's
youth festival in Caracas, and defends Cuba and Venezuela against the
current US attacks.  At first I thought, this is pretty good.  And
most of it really was.

But I'm getting acclimated to the fact that when the Militant takes a
progressive stand on some question, there will always be a reactionary
sting in the tail.

Here it came in the interstices of the following intricate paragraph:

"What?s the crime that workers and peasants in Venezuela have
committed in the eyes of the wealthy? They have fiercely resisted, and
twice defeated, attempts by Washington and its backers among local
capitalists and landlords to overthrow the bourgeois nationalist
government of Hugo Chávez, which was elected with massive support of
working people. The toilers in Venezuela have used increasing
political space since Chávez?s election, and have taken advantage of
measures the government has passed that, if implemented, would
strengthen their ability to fight for land, jobs, housing, and other
social gains. Through these struggles millions of working people have
become more self-confident and developed higher expectations. The road
these workers and other exploited producers are following can more and
more clearly point to the historic line of march of the working class:
carrying out a popular revolution, conquering political power,
overthrowing capitalism, and joining the worldwide fight for
socialism?in other words, the dictatorship of the proletariat."


So the characterization of the "bourgeois nationalist" character of
the Chavez regime is reaffirmed. This is just an example of the
Militant's arbitrary labeling, but it is also ominous. The bourgeois
nationalist character of the leaderships of the resistance in Iraq
form part of the argument for refusing to support the opposition to
the US occupation.  So far, no such reactionary stand has appeared in
he coverage of Venezuela however.

There is no popular revolutionary process in Venezuela today, the
Militant asserts.  The measures passed by the Chavez government would
"if implemented, would strengthen their ability to fight for land,
jobs, housing, and other social gains."   So in five years, there has
apparently been no implementation yet of the progressive measures.
"The ability to fight for land, jobs, housing and other social gains"
all lie completely in the future.

This is the kind of factual description of Venezuela today that can
only be made if the facts, which in this case have been off doing
their own thing in utter disregard of the "Leninist norms," have been
placed under strict discipline to abide by the pre-established line.
The fact that the line determines the facts, rather than the other way
around, is one of the reasons why the Militant has been losing its
former considerable reliability about factual matters.

The Militant sometimes had failings of this kind in the past, of
course. These were countered by the right of leaders and members of
the Socialist Workers Party, which supports the Militant, to insist on
recognition of facts that stared them in the face.  Now such
insistence is labeled "adaptation" and the norm of "political
homogeneity," also known as "internalization" of the views of the
central leadership, is insisted upon.

In the view of the Militant, only the overthrow of the bourgeois
government of Chavez government will open the road to "conquering
political power, overthrowing capitalism, and joining the worldwide
fight for socialism -- i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat.
That stance points the road backward for the fighting people of
Venezuela.
Fred Feldman


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