Sunday, February 15, 2009
Venezuela Vote
No Problem For The Yes Vote
to Accomplish a Landslide Victory!
VHeadline commentarist, University of Los Andres (ULA) political sciences professor, Dr. Franz J. T. Lee writes: On Sunday, February 15, 2009, the Venezuelan people are going to the polls ... again. Seemingly, the electoral issue is very simple: the Venezuelan sovereign (the people), the working masses have to amend the constitution, have to extend their popular power to elect their representatives and leaders for as many terms as they deem necessary, something that is already a reality in many countries for ages.
Judged by the red avalanche of potential voters for Chavez, the more than two million people who filled the streets of Caracas on Thursday, it should be no problem for the 'Yes' (the Si) to accomplish a landslide victory.
Even the opposition finds permanent re-election not such a bad thing after all.
In fact, in Caracas, in all probability, President Chavez mobilized more fans than President Obama during his 'coronation' in Washington DC.
However, like its neighbor, Guyana, Venezuela is not only the land of many waters, a small Venice ... it is also a land of many contradictions ... of troublesome 'miracles'. Like Houdini, sometimes three million socialist voters just vanish into thin imperialist air. One thing is definite, revolution is in the global air, also the love of Chavez for the poor, and vice versa.
That many around Chavez do not perform their sacred duties is another story ... but, Zulia, the strongest bastion of the opposition, with nearly two million voters could turn the tables.
Nonetheless, like I explained in a previous article, if we do nothing, we could end up with world fascism ... if we launch a classical workers revolution, the result could be similar: Socialism cannot be constructed on an infested, radio-active debris, on destroyed international flotsam and jetsam, on Fallujah or Gaza.
President Chavez said it last year during the elections of governors, mayors, etc. The counter-revolution tried to capture political terrain, in preparation 'to come for Chavez'. Apart from the obvious victories for the Bolivarian Revolution, we did lose central strategic sectors, or we could not capture them. Whether the Yes or No wins or fails on Sunday, we will be in the same trouble ... unless we win with at least a million votes ahead of the No votes. The opposition is already sowing wind, with threats of an approaching military storm as President Chavez warned a few days ago.
Globalization is pregnant with labor pain, with human abortion, with Thanatos, with death. However, it is not a matter of investigating whether there exists a social or a socialist revolution in Venezuela or anywhere else. As Trotsky stated decades ago, we live in the epoch of permanent world revolution. The only question is whether this world revolution will end up in 'Yes', in socialism, or in 'No', in barbarism. The global permanent revolutionary waves strike on the coasts of Venezuela, with their clarion call: Yes to logical, scientific, philosophic Socialism!
In reality it is not Chavez as a person, as an individual, whom corporate America and the mafias in Russia fear ...it is the Bolivarian Revolution which could overflow into scientific, philosophic socialism, and further towards a still possible human emancipation.
In his speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has warned the USA to learn from Russian history of the last century, that is, the White House should not exercise "excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state's omnipotence."
It seems that Putin, the former head of the KGB, very faintly still remembers what Lenin, after having studied Marx' 'Capital,' in the midst of a world war, wrote about the 'root causes' of global economic depression in his famous work 'Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism' (1916). What the Russian Prime Minister fears is what Trotsky later had explained in the wake of the Great Depression of 1929, of the coming of the next world war, about the decay of capitalism and the rise of structural fascism, which more than ever before are generating radical mass movements, world protests, mass revolts, fierce class struggles, that is, the global conditions for the advent and spreading of permanent global revolutionary situations, for possible international socialist praxis and theory.
Putin formulated this general capitalist fear as follows: "The time for enlightenment has come. We must calmly, and without gloating, assess the root causes of this situation and try to peek into the future." It is true that we urgently need a new age of enlightenment, however, not bourgeois class consciousness, notfeudal obscurantism, not Periclean democracy, also not any other forms of theocracy, kleptocracy, technocracy or mediocrity.
As I stated in other writings, it is the galactic dawning of a new logic, the coming age of a new science, the naissance of a classless authentic human philosophy and the triumphant victory of homo novum, that is, of the collective, cooperative and wise species, of the aeons of creating wisdom and of creative emancipation, of natura naturata and of natura naturans. If this is not possible anymore, if we cannot daydream this anymore, well, then farewell to doubly sapient humanity, then may he rest in world peace (Rosa Luxemburg called it rest in 'barbarism').
Judged by the red avalanche of potential voters for Chavez, the more than two million people who filled the streets of Caracas on Thursday, it should be no problem for the 'Yes' (the Si) to accomplish a landslide victory.
Even the opposition finds permanent re-election not such a bad thing after all.
In fact, in Caracas, in all probability, President Chavez mobilized more fans than President Obama during his 'coronation' in Washington DC.
However, like its neighbor, Guyana, Venezuela is not only the land of many waters, a small Venice ... it is also a land of many contradictions ... of troublesome 'miracles'. Like Houdini, sometimes three million socialist voters just vanish into thin imperialist air. One thing is definite, revolution is in the global air, also the love of Chavez for the poor, and vice versa.
That many around Chavez do not perform their sacred duties is another story ... but, Zulia, the strongest bastion of the opposition, with nearly two million voters could turn the tables.
Nonetheless, like I explained in a previous article, if we do nothing, we could end up with world fascism ... if we launch a classical workers revolution, the result could be similar: Socialism cannot be constructed on an infested, radio-active debris, on destroyed international flotsam and jetsam, on Fallujah or Gaza.
President Chavez said it last year during the elections of governors, mayors, etc. The counter-revolution tried to capture political terrain, in preparation 'to come for Chavez'. Apart from the obvious victories for the Bolivarian Revolution, we did lose central strategic sectors, or we could not capture them. Whether the Yes or No wins or fails on Sunday, we will be in the same trouble ... unless we win with at least a million votes ahead of the No votes. The opposition is already sowing wind, with threats of an approaching military storm as President Chavez warned a few days ago.
Globalization is pregnant with labor pain, with human abortion, with Thanatos, with death. However, it is not a matter of investigating whether there exists a social or a socialist revolution in Venezuela or anywhere else. As Trotsky stated decades ago, we live in the epoch of permanent world revolution. The only question is whether this world revolution will end up in 'Yes', in socialism, or in 'No', in barbarism. The global permanent revolutionary waves strike on the coasts of Venezuela, with their clarion call: Yes to logical, scientific, philosophic Socialism!
In reality it is not Chavez as a person, as an individual, whom corporate America and the mafias in Russia fear ...it is the Bolivarian Revolution which could overflow into scientific, philosophic socialism, and further towards a still possible human emancipation.
In his speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has warned the USA to learn from Russian history of the last century, that is, the White House should not exercise "excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state's omnipotence."
It seems that Putin, the former head of the KGB, very faintly still remembers what Lenin, after having studied Marx' 'Capital,' in the midst of a world war, wrote about the 'root causes' of global economic depression in his famous work 'Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism' (1916). What the Russian Prime Minister fears is what Trotsky later had explained in the wake of the Great Depression of 1929, of the coming of the next world war, about the decay of capitalism and the rise of structural fascism, which more than ever before are generating radical mass movements, world protests, mass revolts, fierce class struggles, that is, the global conditions for the advent and spreading of permanent global revolutionary situations, for possible international socialist praxis and theory.
Putin formulated this general capitalist fear as follows: "The time for enlightenment has come. We must calmly, and without gloating, assess the root causes of this situation and try to peek into the future." It is true that we urgently need a new age of enlightenment, however, not bourgeois class consciousness, notfeudal obscurantism, not Periclean democracy, also not any other forms of theocracy, kleptocracy, technocracy or mediocrity.
As I stated in other writings, it is the galactic dawning of a new logic, the coming age of a new science, the naissance of a classless authentic human philosophy and the triumphant victory of homo novum, that is, of the collective, cooperative and wise species, of the aeons of creating wisdom and of creative emancipation, of natura naturata and of natura naturans. If this is not possible anymore, if we cannot daydream this anymore, well, then farewell to doubly sapient humanity, then may he rest in world peace (Rosa Luxemburg called it rest in 'barbarism').
About the future of ruling class homo sapiens sapiens, about his coming mode of destruction, in 1876 Friedrich Engels already warned us.
In his famous essay 'The Part played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man,' written in May-June 1876 and first published: in Die Neue Zeit 1895-06, Engels stated:
"Only Man has succeeded to put his stamp on nature; not only is he transferring plants and animals from one place to another; also by changing the climate and their natural habitat and even by modifying the flora and fauna to such an extent that the consequences of his activities will only disappear with the universal extinction of the entire earthly globe."
(A translation from the German original)
