[Marxism] (Vzla) Interviews with leading UNT and Aporrea activists on PSUV congress

["Fred Fuentes" <fred.fuentes@xxxxxxxxx>]

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 http://www.links.org.au/node/294

  Venezuela: Socialist Tide activists on the referendum defeat and the PSUV

 Federico Fuentes, part of the Green Left Weekly/Links Caracas bureau,
 spoke to two of the key leaders of Socialist Tide, asking them their
 opinions on the PSUV and its founding congress, particularly in light
 of the defeat of the December 2, 2007, referendum on Chavez's proposed
 constitutional reform.

 During the first week of February 2008, he spoke to Gonzalo Gomez and
 Stalin Perez Borges. Gomez is a delegate to the founding congress from
 the well-organised area of Catia in Caracas, a journalist and
 co-founder of the Revolutionary Popular Assembly (Aporrea), which was
 formed in the wake of the April 2002 coup. It brought together a large
 number of the social and community organisations in Caracas to
 organise in defence of the revolution, and whose website is the most
 read website of news and analysis on the Bolivarian Revolution.

 Stalin Perez Borges is a national coordinator of the UNT and a key
 union leader in the state of Carabobo, the private industrial
 heartland of Venezuela.

 Following the completion of the congress Links will publish interviews
 with a number of delegates and revolutionary activists in the PSUV to
 get their views on what occurred.

 ***

 Over the weekend February 29-March 2, the provisionally named United
 Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) held the last general assembly of
 its founding congress. The 1671 delegates, who since January 12 have
 been meeting each week to discuss and debate the key documents of the
 new party, will vote on the party's declaration of principles, program
 and statutes. The following week, the elected spokespeople and heads
 of commissions from the more than 14,000 socialist battalions (the
 local grassroots unit of the new party) voted for the provisional
 leadership of the party.

 Since Chavez's call on December 15, 2006, to launch a new party of the
 revolution -- a political instrument at the service of the social
 movements and the revolution – many previously existing revolutionary
 groups have joined the PSUV fighting to ensure it truly becomes a mass
 revolutionary party. Amongst those are the militants now organised
 around the newspaper Socialist Tide.

 Many of the key leaders of Socialist Tide have been decades-long
 militants in the Trotskyist movement in Venezuela. Coming from a range
 of different organisations such as the Socialist Party of Workers
 (Partido Socialista de Trabajadores), The Spark (La Chispa) and
 others. During Hugo Chavez's first presidential campaign in 1998, the
 Trotskyist movement in Venezuela split over support for his
 candidature. Over the next few years, many of these militants went on
 to form the Option of the Revolution Left (Opcion de la Izquierda
 Revolucionario) and consolidate an important base in trade union
 movement.

 Some of them played key roles in the defeat of the bosses' lockout in
 December 2002-January 2003, organising amongst the oil workers, and
 afterwards in the creation of the revolutionary trade union
 federation, the National Union of Workers (UNT), which quickly
 replaced the rotting carcass of the corrupt Confederation of
 Venezuelan Workers (CTV). With the formation of the UNT, a number of
 national and regional UNT coordinators, involving many of the current
 militants of Socialist Tide, went on to form the Classist, Unitary,
 Revolutionary and Autonomous Current (CCURA), today arguably the
 largest current within the UNT.

 In 2005, a number of these union leaders and social movement activists
 launched the Revolution and Socialism Party (Partido Revolucion y
 Socialismo, PRS) as an attempt at creating a ``independent workers'
 party''.

 With Chavez's announcement of the formation of the new party, the PRS
 underwent a split with the majority of the party, and in particular
 its union base decided to join the new party. CCURA also
 overwhelmingly voted to go into the new party, as did all the other
 major union currents in the UNT.

 ***
interview at  http://www.links.org.au/node/294

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