Contents "The internationalist proletarian" n.14
Workers of the world, unite!
PARLIAMENTARY CIRCUS AND MATERIAL MISERY FOR THE WORKING CLASS IN VENEZUELA
GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION THE SAME EXPLOITATION!
The real fraud is the electoral farce, the parliamentary illusion itself
Last July 28, 2024, presidential elections were held in Venezuela. Officialism proclaimed itself the winner of such elections, which was later ratified by the CNE. Fraud and trickery? It can do it because it is the Party of the Army and controls the official and unofficial bodies of repression.
What really determines who wins the elections in Venezuela is who has the support of the Armed Forces, of the Army, which for the moment does not intend to give up its parliamentary projection that has served it well in recent times.
But, comrades, what we must UNDERSTAND is that PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY is a profound FRAUD by definition. It is a fraud by which the exploited are made to choose which group of exploiters will dominate in the next six years.
Officialism and "opposition" are ultimately disputing to see which gang will despoil the result of the exploitation of the Venezuelan proletariat and of the oil rent. But there is something deeper that unites officialism and "opposition": both bourgeois factions need ILLUSION and PARLIAMENTARY NARCOTIC.
Parliamentary circus and social control
What is behind the calls for peaceful demonstrations by the government and the "opposition"? Paradoxical as it may seem, the reality is that neither officialism nor the "opposition" itself can allow the so-called "opposition" to win these elections.
If they let the "opposition" win, the economic and social program it would have to deploy to recover the capitalist economy would be as anti-working class or even more than the current economic and social policy of officialism. Venezuelan capitalism would have been left without the decoy, the carrot, the ILLUSION with which it narcotizes the working class. Venezuelan capitalism would be left without the life insurance of parliamentary ILLUSION and would risk an EXPLOSIVE SOCIAL SITUATION. What would they use to maintain the DECEPTION of the exploited working masses? What ILLUSION would they use to maintain the SOCIAL PEACE and the SEDATION with which they control the working class? What alternative would be left for the working class after it becomes clearly proven by the facts that officialism and "opposition" are the same exploitation?
We would only be left with the alternative of UNDERSTANDING and LEARNING that whoever rules, the Venezuelan capitalist economy demands the sacrifice of the working class, its redoubled exploitation and that only by recovering the methods of class struggle, through the recovery of class unionism as well as the struggle for the overthrow of bourgeois power, will we be able to put an end to the situation of MISERY to which CAPITALISM condemns us.
This is the reason why the "opposition" itself is in charge of holding back the protest and controlling the situation. It is all about maintaining the ILLUSION, about entangling the working class by promising them that the day they are allowed to hold "real" elections everything will be fixed.
Thus, the reaction of those who had hoped and have seen their illusions vanish, has remained a parliamentary indignation. One of less intensity than it has been made to appear: many of the videos that have been circulated refer to situations of years ago, during the “guarimbas”. This does not exclude the fact that the Venezuelan capitalist State has deployed a selective but systematic repression: arrests, house raids, cell phone requisitions, etc.
The situation of Venezuelan capitalism
What is happening in Venezuela is that the deluded great-grandchildren of Bolivar abandoned the entire industrial park, dedicated themselves to the export of capital and oil. High oil prices facilitated credits and they got into debt up to their necks. They promoted the liquidation of their own industry by selling oil in exchange for manufactured products. These commodities have then flooded the Venezuelan market, first destroying their own industry and agriculture and then producing a runaway inflation, plunging the proletarian masses into an unprecedented misery.
In these 25 years of government, the Bolivarian Army, the most centralized Party of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, has developed a policy of repression and subjugation of the working class with the incorporation of organized crime groups called "colectivos", used to control the demonstrations from the neighborhoods to the factories. In the proletarian neighborhoods they control the proletariat, with the incorporation of the lumpenproletariat distributing the CLAP bag and domestic gas. Prison-like rules of coexistence are imposed, and the government calls these neighborhoods "peace zones", where there is no longer any need for the police because they are controlled by organized crime, guaranteeing what they call social peace. Besides this, in these 25 years the government has mitigated the discontent and the proletarian struggle with an intensive use of the PARLIAMENTARY ILLUSION, since they came to power they have held 23 parliamentary elections, including the current one.
Officialism and the "opposition" have succeeded with the electoral campaign to demobilize the proletariat, they have paralyzed its energy, its class instinct. The Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict (OVCS) registered 1,243 protests during the first quarter of 2024, equivalent to 14 demonstrations per day on average. This figure represents a 56% decrease compared to the same period last year.
Material misery for the working class
Public services are clearly deteriorated throughout the country: power outages have been extended for up to 5 hours daily and drinking water service has been restricted. As for wages, March 2024 will be two years since the last increase in the base minimum wage, which remains frozen at 130Bs ($3.55 according to BCV, and $3.11 according to the parallel dollar, at the current exchange rate). In July 2024, the government announced an increase in the so-called integral salary, increasing the amount of the so-called war bonds (paid in Bs, indexed to the BCV dollar). For pensioners it was increased to $45 (1,640Bs). For public employees, the war bonus payment is $90 from the BCV, the $40 basket ticket, and the payroll salary is frozen. These "war bonuses" do not affect the payment of allowances, vacations or “aguinaldos” (complying with the commitments made to Fedecámaras to gradually eliminate allowances). And, while the food basket in March 2024 reached $554.26, the basic basket in Venezuela (which in addition to food expenses includes other items such as education, health, transportation and services), reached a cost of $1,200 for a family of five members, according to the Center for Documentation and Social Analysis of the Federation of Teachers (Cendas-FVM, 09-05-2024). The Venezuelan bourgeoisie pays part or all our salaries in bolivars when the entire economy is dollarized.
This situation of crisis will always push the dispossessed class, the proletariat, to revolt, to fight for bread, for food. But in the absence of a network of class union struggle outside the control of the State and in absence of the influence of the International Communist Party, this rebellion will consume itself or will be channeled by each fraction of the bourgeoisie which will enlist a part of the proletarians to fight for the interests of that fraction, falsely promising it the solution of all its problems with its electoral triumph.
The big lie of socialism in Venezuela
The major victory of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie -both of officialism and of the "opposition"- has been to manage to identify the Party of the Army with socialism and communism. It is an imperative necessity for the working class to eliminate this BIG LIE. In Venezuela there is no socialism, there is CAPITALISM. Capitalism is based on wage labor, on the fact that our labor power is just another commodity and has a price: the wage. This is why capitalism inevitably means exploitation and hunger for the working class. No change of parliamentary government is going to mean a real change for the working class under capitalism. The capitalist State is at the service of capital, whoever rules, whoever governs.
Parliamentary illusion only serves to distract us while they kill us with hunger or bullets: parliamentary governments pass, and hunger remains. Proletarians will continue to suffer the consequences of this system as long as the bourgeoise keeps tricking us into thinking that we have to change the government when what we have to do is to abolish this system of exploitation.
This is the reality that the working class and the Venezuelan proletariat live and face, theoretically disarmed without a class organization to serve as an instrument for the fight for better working conditions and wages. The working class will not be able to fight even for its immediate demands if we do not break with the bourgeois policy that influences and directs the entire labor union apparatus, breaking with its organizational control, tending to form classist organisms for the economic struggle, independent from the parliamentary political parties, fighting the policy of submission or solidarity to the national or corporate economy, fighting and unmasking the parliamentary democratic regime as a classic instrument of domination of the dictatorship of capital.
We need to recover a program of revolutionary overcoming of capitalism. Only in this way will we be able to fight for better labor and social conditions while preparing the conditions for the abolition of the slavery of wage labor.
DOWN WITH THE FALSE "SOCIALISM" OF THE PARTY OF THE ARMY!
DOWN WITH THE EXPLOITING CAPITALISM THAT STARVES THE WORKING CLASS!
FOR THE RESUMPTION OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE!
FOR THE ABOLITION OF WAGE LABOR!
august 4, 2024