[Marxism] Venezuela - FRETECO holds second national conference of occupied factories

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                                        Venezuela ? FRETECO holds second 
national conference of occupied factories                                       
                               

                                                                

                                        

                                                

                                

                                                        

                                

                                        

                        

                                                

                        

                        

                

                                        

                                

                                        

                                                 By FRETECO                     
                

                                          

                                

                        

                                                

                                

                                        Friday, 13 October 2006                 
        

                        

                                        

                        

                                

The second national

conference of FRETECO (Revolution

Front of Occupied Companies) will be held on October 13-14 in Parque Central, 
Caracas. 





The conference

represents a major development in the role the organised workers are playing in

the revolutionary process. It is not an accident that this meeting is taking

place just a few weeks before a major turning point in the Bolivarian

revolution: the presidential elections of December 3.





The Venezuelan working

class is becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that a qualitative change

is needed to strengthen the revolution and pursue the road to socialism that

President Chávez

opened with his speech in Puerto Alegre in January 2005.





FRETECO is calling for

a mobilization of the workers in support of the campaign for 10 million votes

for Chávez and calls for an

all-out struggle for the expropriation of the capitalists. The struggle against

capitalism must be generalised the and occupations of factories spread

throughout the whole country as a first step in the direction of expropriating

the Venezuelan oligarchy. This will be a necessary step in the building of a

socialist plan of production under the democratic control of the working class

and communities. 





FRETECO finds its

roots in the magnificent movement of the Venezuelan workers against the

US-sponsored coup in April 2002 and the subsequent bosses' lockout of December

2002-January 2003, when the oligarchs of the country tried attempted to

sabotage the government of Hugo Chávez by paralysing the oil industry and most 
of the private sector. The

workers reacted by taking over some of the key economic activities of the

country and managed in a few weeks to restore the activities of PDVSA, the

state-owned oil company which is at the core of the Venezuelan economy. The

prompt reaction on the part of the workers doomed the lockout to failure and

saved the revolution from a very dangerous position.





A debate on workers'

control and management has been taking place within a section of the workers'

movement since the time of the struggle against the bosses' lockout. The

workers were becoming aware that the bosses were no longer developing the

productive forces and improving the living and working conditions of the

majority of the population. On the contrary, the bosses were, and are, actually

pursuing by any means possible the opposite - that is the sabotage of the

economy and the undermining of the revolution. Some of the more advanced

sections of the movement felt that the workers had the skills and the interest

to take the management of the workplaces into their own hands. This had been

done for a whole period during the struggle against the lockout after all!





After the defeat of

the lockout there was a wave of factory closures. Hundreds of thousands of

workers lost their jobs.  This ferocious

attack on the part of the oligarchy sparked off a reaction on the part of the

workers and the communities. The workers waged long struggles in a number of

workplaces against sell-offs and closures which finally culminated in the first

victory when President Chávez

finally decreed the nationalisation of Venepal (then Invepal), an important

paper factory, in January 2005. This was followed by the victory of the workers

of CNV (now Inveval), who won a hard-fought battle in May 2005 when their

factory was nationalised under workers' control and management.





The recent struggles

in Sel-Fex, Gottcha, Gamma, Friabasa, Promabasa, Sideroca, Sanitarios Maracay

all began with closures or attempted closures and led to the taking over of the

factories by the workers. These are only the most recent in a long list of

workers struggle which is growing larger and larger and testifies to the fact

that the workers are willing to fight.





In June 2005,

President Chávez

presented a list of 800 companies that had been closed. He also presented a

list of a further 1147 factories and companies that were not producing at full

capacity due to the sabotage on the part of the bosses. He invited the workers

to take over these firms and to run them, promising that the government would

support them. Over the course of the last year a number of other firms have

been expropriated and put under different forms of workers' management. A

movement for workers' control developed in important state companies such as

ALCASA, an aluminium smelter, and CADAFE, an electricity company.





This led to a debate

on the character of cogestión (co-management). A

large layer of state bureaucrats and advisors sent by the government tended to

stress workers' participation but held to the idea that the management and key

decision making power in the firms should be kept in the hands of the so-called

experts and managers. However, the workers had other ideas. They soon began to

discuss an interpretation of co-management which is rather different from the

model developed in Europe after the Second

World War, where co-management was used as a means to chain the workers to the

ups and downs of the capitalist system and used as means to attack the rights

and working conditions of the working class. 





In the minds of the

revolutionary workers in Venezuela

co-management means workers' control and management of production. Since this

movement began there has been a systematic attempt on the part of the reformist

wing of the Bolivarian movement, in an unholy alliance with the reactionary

bureaucracy of the Fourth

Republic, to water down

and sabotage any concrete steps in this direction. The reformists have

attempted to prove that workers' control does not work - that "workers 
cannot

manage production by themselves".





Facing the stubborn

resistance of the state bureaucracy, as well as the fact that the UNT

leadership underestimated the movement, the process of nationalisation has

developed at a much slower pace than what was possible. Initiatives have been

taken by the workers themselves.





FRETECO managed to

organise and coordinate the revolutionary workers of the occupied and

nationalised factories under workers' control, beginning with Invepal and

Inveval. FRETECO also organised two important marches to the National Assembly

and to the Miraflores Presidential palace to push forward their demands.





Once the first

nationalisations were legally decreed the workers still had to undertake a long

and tiring struggle to turn that victory into something concrete. They faced

sabotage at all levels. Bourgeois companies cut supplies, denied access to

credit and refused to buy the products of the factories run by the workers and

in the meantime very little help came from state-owned firms.





The need to organise

all the workers faced with the same situation and to campaign massively within

the mass of the working class and the Bolivarian movement for the extension of

the expropriations to key firms as well as the banks, transport and the

distribution system came out of the very experience of these workers.





That is the real aim

of FRETECO: build the consciousness of the workers, extend the process of

occupations and taking over of factories and workplaces by the workers to push

forward the revolution. The working class is the only class that can

democratically run the economy according to the interests of the vast majority

of the population.





The FRETECO Conference on October 13-14 will

mark a major step forward in the struggle for the socialist revolution in 
Venezuela.





See also:



        Venezuela: Expropriations, reformism and elections ? the contradictions 
are accumulating by Patrick Larsen (September 12, 2006)

        Venezuela - The debate on expropriations and the upcoming elections by 
William Sanabria (September 2006)

                        

                

                                

                

                 

                

                                        

                                

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