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January 2008, Volume 59, Number 8 c o n t e n t s The victory of the No vote in the Venezuelan constitutional reform referendum in December is being treated by Washington as a major defeat for Chávez’s efforts to promote a socialism for the twenty-first century in Venezuela. But the opposition to the Bolivarian Revolution was so aware of its own weaknesses that it adopted as its final slogan “Chávez, Yes; Reform, No.” The defeat of the constitutional reform was guaranteed by the fact that 44 percent of the population, many of whom had supported Chávez previously, chose not to vote. This may simply be due to the fact that the proposed constitutional reforms were enormously complex with changes in 69 articles. But it is also true that a propaganda campaign authored and choreographed by Washington and the CIA, and implemented by the Venezuelan elites who control the private media, had a considerable effect in blocking the reform effort. | more |
Review of the Month: The Class-Divided Society
Against the Market Economy: Advice to Venezuelan Friends I am here to salute you—because you are attempting to do what nobody has ever succeeded in doing before—help autonomous groups of workers and consumers plan their interrelated activities democratically, equitably, and efficiently themselves. You have already created the elements of what you call the “social economy”—worker-owned cooperatives, communal councils, municipal assemblies, participatory budgeting, subsidized food stores, health care clinics, and nuclei of endogenous development. Now you want the cooperatives and communal councils to display solidarity for one another rather than treat each other as antagonists in commercial exchanges. And sooner rather than later you want the benefits of this kind of participatory, socialist economy to encompass the entire economy and all Venezuelans.
Living the 11th Thesis When I was a boy I always assumed that I would grow up to be both a scientist and a Red. Rather than face a problem of combining activism and scholarship, I would have had a very difficult time trying to separate them.
Labor Market ‘Reform’ in Australia:
The New Industrial Relations Law and the Elections
For the first time in decades, the role of the state in industrial relations became a central issue in an election in an English-speaking first-world nation-state. The Australian election of November 24, 2007, resulted in an emphatic win for the Labor Party opposition led by Kevin Rudd. It was the second largest winning margin since the Second World War.
Poetry: Denise Bergman is the author of Seeing Annie Sullivan (Cedar Hill Publications, 2005), poems based on the early life of Helen Keller’s teacher, and editor of City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry. Her poems have been published widely and an excerpt from her poem “Red” is permanently installed in a public park in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Review: Reviewed: Matt Meyer, Time Is Tight: Urgent Tasks for Educational Transformation: Eritrea, South Africa, and the U.S. (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007), 202 pages, paperback, $24.95. Particularly since the fall of apartheid, the U.S. left has not looked to African social movements for political mentorship. Many who rightly look to Bolivia, Mexico, and Venezuela for inspiration do not similarly focus on the emerging movements of Kenya, Nigeria, or Tanzania. The difficult challenges of building socialism under post- and neocolonial conditions have, too often, superseded the varied lessons that many movements on the African continent have to offer a global left bent on securing a viable alternative to empire. |
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