Venezuela

Review of Greg Wilpert, Changing Venezuela By Taking Power

Greg Wilpert, Changing Venezuela By Taking Power: The Policies of the Chávez Presidency 1999-2006, Verso 2007

Greg Wilpert is responsible for some of the most useful English-language journalism on Venezuela over the past five years. The Venezuelanalysis website he edits continues to be a valuable...

Workers Power – rrr hot air

I had an interesting altercation with some rrr-revolutionary “anti-imperialists” Workers’ Power people at a post support group meeting yesterday.

Workers Power has long denounced anyone who belongs to the Labour Party, even when they’ve been involved with struggles against the leadership (e.g...

Workers News Roundup

Iranian sugar workers strike Workers at an Iranian state-owned company went on strike at the beginning of October over several months’ of unpaid wages. Workers from the Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane Plantation and Industry Company gathered in front of the Governor’s Office in Shush city, in Khuzestan province in southern Iran and vowed to stay on strike until their demands were met. The workers have been on strike 16 times over the past two years. But for two years they got nowhere with the management or any government officials. Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane is the only sugar cane factory in Iran and was...

Workers are organising in Venezuela — the question now is: with what politics?

There are signs of a revival in worker organising in Venezuela, but it is not clear whether it will be independent of Chávez.

Last week a “unification commission” of the two major factions within the UNT union federation met to organise elections for the leadership, which are long overdue. Leaders...

Workers’ news round-up By Pablo Velasco

Venezuela By Milton D Lein of the Juventud de Izquierda Revolucionaria group in Venezuela In recent speeches [Venezuelan president Hugo] Chávez has sharply attacked the autonomy of the trade unions with respect to the government and the state. “The trade unions should not be autonomous... that has to be done away with‚” he stated. This hostile rhetoric comes as Chávez calls for the construction of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and is directed against the proposal of trade-union autonomy made by various union leaders, among them the class struggle current C-CURA, led by Orlando...

Defend union independence in Venezuela

There is a useful article in English by Venezuelan socialists fighting for class struggle trade unionism in Venezuela. Defend union independence by Milton D’León explains how Chávez has attacked the unions as part of his drive to form his new party, the PSUV.

Chavez vs trade unions in Venezuela

After the attack on Sanitarios Maracay workers recently in Aragua state in Venezuela, more evidence of anti-union activity by the Chavistas.

According to Greg Wilpert on the Venezuelanalysis website:

The UNT-Aragua issued a statement with ten points yesterday, in which it called for union...

Solidarity with Sanitarios Maracay workers

Workers from Sanitarios Maracay in Venezuela, which has been occupied and run under workers' control for more than 5 months, were subjected to brutal repression last Tuesday 24 April.

Workers were travelling by bus to Caracas to participate in a national march called by FRETECO, the Revolutionary...

Can Trotsky on Cardenas' Mexico tell us anything about Venezuela and Chávez?

By Paul Hampton In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez has nationalised companies in telecom and electricity privatised by previous administrations. Chávez says he wants to form a new Bolivarian socialist party. And he has announced the extension of communal councils and even “workers’ councils” as a means of recasting the state. These measures and others such as co-management in workplaces deserve to be assessed on their own terms, something we will continue to do in the AWL. However Chávez’s plans are not without precedent and much can be learned from the attitude earlier Marxists took to comparable...

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