Workers' Liberty

By Pablo Velasco

Venezuela

Recently Hugo Chávez declared the nationalisation of telecom and electricity firms. Now the Venezuelan government has announced that this would not be the expropriation of capital without compensation. According to Steven Mather, writing on the Venezuelanalysis website: “The Finance Chairman of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Ricardo Sanguino, said… that his government would compensate those companies that are to lose out over the nationalisation plans of his government.”

Mather added: “It was unclear last week whether EDC [electricity company] would be included in the nationalisation plan because it has always been a privately held company… small shareholders in EDC would not be affected by the nationalisation.”

Similarly, a proposal on Communal Councils (CC) appears to be in the same mould as previous efforts at “participatory democracy”, such as the Bolivarian circles, co-management etc, that have been top-down, government funded and controlled.

There is a description of the councils by the pro-Chávez (and Castroite) Marta Harnecker in Green Left Weekly (6 December 2006), which underlines their limitations. When asked “What role does the workers’ movement play in relation to community organising?”, Harnecker replied: “Logically, we accept that in general the experience of popular power means that, as it is based on territorial spaces, the workers do not appear [directly] as active members.”

These realities have not stopped some on the left hailing the introduction of socialism. The worst examples have come from Socialist Appeal in Britain.

Last week, Jorge Martin took seriously the idea that Chávez is a revolutionary socialist, reporting a phone conversation Chávez had with the new minister of labour. “When I called him” Chávez explained, “he said to me: ‘president I want to tell you something before someone else tells you... I am a Trotskyist’, and I said, ‘well, what is the problem? I am also a Trotskyist! I follow Trotsky’s line, that of permanent revolution.”

In another article on the nationalisations, Fred Weston wrote that, “the list of measures announced by Chávez would mean striking at the very heart of Venezuelan capitalism”, adding that “capitalism could be eradicated in Venezuela quite easily.”

These apologists sow illusions in Chávez, suggesting that he will institute socialism etc – by implication peacefully through an “enabling law”. It is the worst caricatured fulfilment of what their predecessors in Militant used to preach in Britain.

Indonesia

Papernas, which means the National Liberation Party of Unity in English was launched last year by the People’s Democratic Party (PRD and includes socialists such as Dita Sari. A report by Max Lane in Green Left Weekly (17 January) gives some indication of its development.

The PRD says it has cadre in 25 towns and rural sub-provinces throughout Indonesia, but had been able to organise Papernas branches in only around 100 towns and regions. Restrictive Indonesian electoral law requires 250 branches in at least two-thirds of the country’s provinces for Papernas to register to participate in elections. The PRD leadership told Lane that the new Papernas branches “were based on recruiting peasants” and that “urban-based branches were in the minority”.

Papernas campaigns around demands such as the nationalisation of the oil and gas industries and the cancellation of the foreign debt, and wants the money spent on providing free education and health care to the people.

But the party appears to be discussing which bourgeois candidates it might support in the presidential elections in 2009. Dita Sari is also on the list and appears the only one who would stand for any kind of independent working class politics. Clearly Papernas politics are extremely contradictory but the initiative appears a rightward shift from the PRD. Let’s hope that assessment proves premature.