Lessons We Can Learn from the Electoral Setback in Venezuela

[Judi Lynn]

January 6, 2016
Lessons We Can Learn from the Electoral Setback in Venezuela
by Stansfield Smith

The most important lesson for solidarity activists and opponents of the US Empire is the crucial role of our international solidarity in defending Third World countries under threat. The constant corporate media disinformation war on target countries such as Venezuela is as much a weapon of aggression and a tool for regime change as missiles and bombers. This disinformation propaganda against the Chavistas – e.g., dictatorship, drug running, political prisoners, police violence – is not simply widely echoed and often believed inside Venezuela. This media war is also directed at us, the US people, against our broad anti-war sentiment. Some of us may mistakenly feel like we are ants up against the elephant of the US Empire, but the corporate rulers understand its media must confuse us about Venezuela. It must sow disenchantment with Venezuela, make us question our support for the Bolivarian government and process.

If the Empire can make us feel that Venezuela, or any other US target, is not worth our active defense, then they have already won much of the war. The Empire is aware it faces major obstacles if it cannot neutralize domestic opposition to its interventionist plans. It learned this lesson in Vietnam, then again in the 1980s Central American interventions, and again in the 2003 war on Iraq.

A second lesson is that socialism cannot be built using the state inherited in an election, seeking to grow it over into a socialist state. Socialism was built in Russia, China, Cuba, for instance, after the old state was destroyed and a new one constructed, representing the working people. And then, socialist nationalizations of large capitalist enterprises and large landholdings occurred only in response to sabotage and counterrevolutionary actions by their foreign and domestic owners.

Chavez did recognize that to fulfill the goals of the Bolivarian process the old constitution must be scrapped and a new one created, which more fully represented the people. He sought to build local community councils and regional communes to replace the old state structures still in place. He also saw the need to build peoples cooperatives to produce goods and to take control of distributing essential products in order to counter the oligarchy’s economic control. Similarly Chavez recognized the need to build a new people’s police force to replace the one they inherited. However, all these projects remained only partially realized. These new cooperative-communal economic and governmental powers the Chavistas initiated can only be realized through an active and continuous struggle of the people to replace the inherited economic and government system run in the interests of the ruling capitalist elite.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/06/lessons-we-can-learn-from-the-electoral-setback-in-venezuela/

[Marksman_91]

1. Here's a lesson:

Don't treat anybody who doesn't agree with your political ideology as enemies. And don't fucking be the most corrupt government in the history of the country. Maybe if the Chavista leadership had taken that into account, they wouldn't have lost the support of the majority of Venezuelans.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

2. Does this guy know or care how much like a parody of himself he sounds? N.T.