Hugo Chavez and the Failure of Social Democracy

The failure of the Chavez government of Venezuela to gain a majority approval of its constitutional reforms - empowering the people, reducing the work week and giving legitmacy to collective property – shows the limitation of social democracy. Once again, it is impossible to introduce revolutionary change via the capitalist form of democracy. Chavez, a typical social democrat, had given the class enemies of working people the right to vote on issues that concerned those same working people. As though the oligarchy, its middle class toadies and wannabees, would ever support such changes, let alone that they should have any right to make decisions for the exploited and oppressed. That the bully should have a vote on whether to cease abusing his victim! Working people have to act on their own and TAKE the power they need to make those revolutionary changes. If the oligarchy, its butt-kissers and the CIA haven't begun a process in Venezuela that ends up turning Chavez into Allende Version # 2, maybe the working population will do precisely that. For if the right-wing gets back in power, they will be its chief victims.

Peak Oil And The Suburbanites

One of the fears generated by the coming Peak Oil crisis is that the suburbanites, those stereotypically SUV-driving MacMansion dwellers will go fashy, attacking scapegoats like immigrants and environmentalists and demand wars to steal other folks remaining oil.

I suspect that some of this would be true in the US context, but I don't think this will be quite as likely for the citizens of Canuckistan. I checked the election results for the major suburban areas of the province of British Columbia where I reside. The findings are interesting. While most burbs go right, some chose the social democratic NDP. In at least two suburban ridings (electoral districts) the NDP and the Greens are a majority, yet lose to a right-whiner because of the split vote. In all others, where the NDP loses, the Green-NDP minority is significantly large. Even the most knuckle dragging, evolution-denying, First Nations-hating burb, 37% of the electorate vote left.

This means that in the worst case scenario, four out of ten people will have some sort of awareness and thus able to confront fascist ideology as it arises and help lead their lost, bewildered and frightened conservative neighbors.

Another factor is that the authoritarian personality - the psychological basis of the right-winger - leads in most cases to passivity – the famous "silent majority." We see evidence for this constantly. Tens of thousands of peace and environmental demonstrators – and yet a pathetic handful of counter-demonstrators. Other factors are cultural. We live in a culture of solipsism and narcissism, and thus many people reduce social and economic problems to personal ones. Add to this the guilt which accompanies authoritarianism, and you have people who think in terms of personal failure if things go wrong and look for personal, not social solutions to these problems. The education system and the media constantly preach a reified world-view. That which is man-made, by the conscious choice of powerful hierarchies, is made to look natural, like an unalterable, overwhelming force of nature. (Think of the "inevitability" of so-called free trade, of the need to destroy living standards "in order to compete" – all hogwash, yet sold as though it was a basic law of physics.) Our conservative neighbors swallow this propagada whole.

There are also the examples from recent history when neo-liberal policies have laid waste to large sections of the well-paid work force. Millions have lost their jobs, thousands of lives destroyed by deliberate government policies creating recessions, cut-backs, piratizations, job-exportation and down-sizing. The results? Some resistance, indeed spectacular resistance like the Great Coal Strike in the UK, but in the main, far less than you might hope. As for the seig-heilers, yes, there has been some support among poor white youth, but hardly a threatening mass movement.

Passivity has been the main response to the neo-liberal attacks, the misery and poverty of which give us a fore-taste of the Peak Oil crisis. (Passivity was also the response during the first five years of the Great Depression.)

Nevertheless it is up to us, the more aware section of the populace, to make Peak Oil an issue among our neighbors and start right away to make the changes necessary to move to a post-petroleum, post-internal combustion world.

New Anarchist Journal in Ontario

Common Cause, the new Ontario anarchist group

has launched as web site and journal, both named

LINCHPIN, available at http://linchpin.ca/

Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule Part one

Short Film About the Security and Prosperity Partnership

Common Cause Anarchist Group Formed in Ontario

On September 29th in Toronto a new Ontario anarchist-communist organization, Common Cause, held our founding conference. Preparation for this founding conference had taken place over several months culminating in a speaking tour of six Ontario cities under the title 'Building a Popular Anarchism'. --- The conference agreed a basic policy document (below), a constitution, a structure for the specific conditions of Northern Ontario, affiliation with Anarkismo.net and a basic publication plan both online in terms of a website and a free printed newspaper which will be distributed in large numbers. The name 'Common Cause' was selected for the new organization and individual officers were elected to fill various administrative tasks.

In advance of the founding conference a statement of intent had been circulated which included "Our intention is not to build yet another small group of a dozen or so people but to begin the process of building an organization of thousands that will have a presence in every town, workplace and neighborhood across the province."

By the time of the founding conference we were still a long way from this eventual goal but dozens of people in ten Ontario cities have become involved with developing Locals in Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, Sudbury, Windsor and Kitchener-Waterloo as well as other members around Ontario. It is our hope this will greatly expand in the days, months and years to come. We hope you will unite and struggle with us to build a world free from exploitation, oppression, ignorance and war.

To continue story go to http://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos19943.html

INDIGENOUS ANARCHISM IN BOLIVIA

An Interview with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui by Andalusia Knoll:

AK. Could you talk about some of the things that you have uncovered in your research about anarchism in Bolivia as related to the struggles of the Aymara and Quecha people?

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: We started as an Aymara collective that basically wanted to uncover the Aymara and Quechua struggles and we discovered that there were many links with urban Aymara communities that had organizations linked both to the indigenous communities and to the union movement, which in the 20’s was basically anarchist. What happened in Bolivia is that there have been two official histories: the official history written by the [Revolutionary] Nationalist Party—MNR—that basically denies all the agency of both workers and peasants and indigenous peoples; and the official history of the left that forgets about anything that was not Marxist, thus eclipsing or distorting the autonomous history of anarchist unions,

It's the links between the anarchists and the indigenous people that gave them another nuance, because their communities are self-sustained entities and they basically are places where anti-authoritarian type of organization can take roots. They don’t need this leadership that is like permanent leadership. The communities have leaders, but as a rotational thing that is a service to the community. It’s kind of a burden to be a leader for a community, you know? It’s something you do once in a lifetime and you do because you ought to do, and that the community says its your turn or the turn of your family. So, that creates a totally different relationship with power structures and, in a way, it decolonizes power and to a certain extent gives it back to the people.

That is what fascinated us most about the communities and, on the other hand, it led us to discover that communities were not only rural but also urban and worked with [1920s anarchist] Luis Cusicanqui and other anarchist leaders because they had such an affinity between the way they saw struggle, autonomy, domination, and oppression.

Continued at http://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos19906.html

I AM NOT A CROOK!

Álvaro Uribe , President of Colombia seems to be trying to emulate Tricky Dick at the time of Watergate. It has long been known that the Colombian right-wing is composed of death squad-organizing narcotrafficantes and the progressive movements believe that Uribe is one of them. Nor is this limited to “the left”, for the Defense Intelligence Agency, also feels the same way. To make things worse, Pablo Escobar's mistress has come out with a book detailing Uribe (and Uribe's father's) deep involvement in the “illegal” drug trade. The Prez denies all vociferously and talks of lawsuits. The New York Times has an article on this

See here.

For background information on the paramilitary-narcotrafficante right-wing see

http://www.narconews.com/Issue47/article2807.html

We should not be surprised in the least if Uribe is involved, for the War on Drugs is a scam. The people who benefit most from the drug trade are not the gangsters but the people at the top; the politicians and financial interests.

See this blog, July 19, 2005 THE SYSTEM IS A SCAM PART 1, The Illegal Drugs Fraud http://porkupineblog.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_archive.html