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For quite some time, the CPGB-ML has attempted to be included in the annual International Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties (ICCWP), based in Athens. Our attempts in this regard have drawn a blank from the working group of the ICCWP.
This year, in response to our request and acting on behalf of the working group of the ICCWP, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) asked the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and the New Communist Party (NCP), as the ‘recognised’ parties in Britain, to report on the eligibility of the CPGB-ML for membership of the ICCWP. In response to this request, John Foster, the International Secretary of the CPB, wrote what claims to be a report on the CPGB-ML but is in fact a sly and scurrilous attack on the latter.
We have never been asked by the working group to submit any evidence in our defence; nor have we been officially sent a copy of the CPB’s ‘report’. Fortunately, we came to have possession of a copy of this report, and we have sent our observations on it to the working party. Hitherto we have received not even an acknowledgement.
In the circumstances, we have no option but to go public and expose the arbitrary and unjust modus operandi of both the working group and the CPB. In order that nobody accuse us of misrepresenting the CPB, we are publishing that organisation’s report along with our reply.
Read the CPB’s report and our reply.
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Who can doubt it? Observers from all parts and varying shades have attended the elections in Venezuela on November 23, 2007. They have reported with absolute freedom. The oligarchy cried out like mad to the world the coarse slander that the extension of the voting hours at the polling stations, giving the citizens the possibility to cast their vote, was intended to commit fraud, even though the National Election Council had previously decided to do so and had announced it.
This is a correct measure when adopted by the United States to facilitate the indirect election of the President of that nation, which is the model for the Venezuelan oligarchy, but it is wrong in Venezuela, even though these are not presidential elections, which are direct elections, the same as all the others for executive positions.
The only thing honorable and clean to them is the contemptible submission to the empire, the flight of capital amounting to billions of dollars every year, and the prevalence of poverty, illiteracy and over 20% unemployment.
I would not dare utter an opinion with regards to any other country of this hemisphere, if I forgot that we are brothers and that Marti, who fought and died for Cuba and for Our America, said one day as he stood before the statue of the Liberator Simon Bolivar: “Venezuela only needs to tell me what to do for her, for I am her son.”
At the moment, 40 thousand highly qualified compatriots are working in that sister nation. They are willing to give their lives for Bolivar’s people with which they share the risks of an imperialist sweeping blow.
I am not an intruder giving an opinion in the country of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA).
Venezuela has the potential to become a model of socialist development with the resources formerly extracted by the multinationals from its rich nature and the efforts of it manual and intellectual workers. No foreign power shall determine its future. The people are the masters of their destiny and they march on to attain the highest levels of education, culture, health and full employment. It is an example to be pursued by other sister nations in this hemisphere and it does not give up: it does not wish to lag behind a plundering empire. Venezuela rightly claims with dignity that the UN General Assembly should design a new international financial structure, and Cuba supports it in that endeavor.
Reading the international news, it would seem that the USSR disintegrated just yesterday. As Stella Calloni would say, this Monday the media terror spin broke loose. But after the storm has passed, the truth will come up again.
Yesterday’s elections meant a qualitative step forward for the Bolivarian revolutionary process that can be measured by many aspects. It was not as the massive disinformation machinery would have it: “Castro says that the Revolution in Venezuela will continue despite the elections.” No, it’s not that! But rather that an analysis of the basic data provided by the National Election Council in its bulletins showed me clearly the great victory that has been attained.
The data were precise; an unquestionable victory of the candidates to governors in 17 of the 22 states, all of these members of the Venezuelan Socialist United Party. The voters turn out was higher than ever; 1.5 million more votes than those obtained by the opponents running for such positions, and 264 posts of mayor of the 328 up for election. There is no opposition party but a group of oppositionists with half a dozen parties, and absolute transparency. That’s why I said and now repeat that it will be very difficult to put out the flames of the Revolution in Venezuela.
Fidel Castro Ruz
November 24, 2008
6:35 p.m.
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www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3995
Three trade unionists Richard Gallardo, Luis Hernández and Carlos Requena, leaders of the pro-revolution National Union of Workers (UNT) and also members of the United Socialist Left party were shot dead late Thursday night in Aragua state, Venezuela.
The union leaders were gunned down by an armed assassin on a motorbike as they made their way home after participating that day in a labor dispute with the Colombian-owned Alpina food processing company.
There is speculation that the attack was carried out by paramilitaries hired by the Colombian company, which is reported to have utilized paramilitaries in similar disputes in its home country. Patricia Rivas writing for YKVE Mundial on November 28 pointed out that the attacks resembled a method of assassination commonly used against unionists and social movement activists in Colombia, known as sicariato, whereby hired gunmen on motorbikes carry out drive-by shootings.
However, the day before, the unionists had also been attacked by the Aragua state police aligned with outgoing opposition governor Didalco Bolivar. Bolivar, who was previously an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez but defected to the right-wing opposition in the lead up to the Constitutional reform referendum in Venezuela in 2007, has previously deployed the state police against workers in labor disputes.
In a press conference on November 27 Hernández had denounced that 400 Alpina workers had been brutally repressed by the police, “The workers were inside the factory demanding from the company that they pay, in full and quickly, the money owing, when the police unexpectedly entered the premises and in a brutal manner began to kick out the workers.”
We immediately contacted workers in the rest of the area and “in a matter of minutes the company was surrounded by workers affiliated to the National Union of Workers. Thanks to this act of solidarity we managed to recuperate control of the factory and the workers have occupied it again,” Hernandez had told the media.
Hernández, Gallardo and Requena were known as, “implacable fighters” for workers’ rights who “never bowed down in the face of constant threats by bosses, union bureaucrats and elements of the public force that are enemies of the workers,” a statement by the United Socialist Left said.
“We render tribute to our murdered comrades who showed us, by their example and behaviour, that the rights of workers must be respected. The comrades offered their life for the principle of the defence of the interests of the working class and of socialism.”
“In their name and with their example we will continue the battle for the socialist revolution, expropriating from the bosses, breaking definitively with imperialism and building a government of the workers and the people,” the statement continued.
The workers are calling for the incoming governor of Aragua Mario Isea, a member of Chavez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and the national government to immediately carry out a full investigation.
The Attorney General’s Office responded that it has launched an investigation and assigned national public prosecutor Orlando Villamizar and Aragua state prosecutor Elas Pérez, to head up investigations.
The incident highlights the growing class conflict that has erupted across Venezuela in the aftermath of the November 23 regional elections. Numerous reports have surfaced of Venezuela’s elite, US-backed opposition launching a campaign of violence and intimidation against trade unionists, grass roots community organisations and pro-revolution social movements, particularly in the areas where they won.
In a statement in solidarity with the workers in Aragua, the Carabobo section of the UNT said the incidents are not isolated and that many cases of sicariato have occurred across the country, particularly in the construction sector, against unions in the private sector and against peasant leaders fighting for land reform in the countryside.
The statement argued that there had been no serious investigations into the many cases of sicariato and that the governmental bodies such as the police and the Attorney General’s Office had been incapable of responding to such incidents.
Stalin Perez Borges, a national coordinator of the UNT argued “President Chavez and the national government must carry out an investigation to the ultimate consequences and with mobilization we must defeat impunity.”
Perez Borges added that workers could not simply rely on the “ordinary justice” system because it often sided with the right-wing opposition and bosses against workers and instead called for the formation of a special commission comprised of workers organisations whose investigations “have the force of the law.”
“For this reason, at the same time, we convoke the immediate organisation of popular workers self-defence. The government must grant all the resources for the training and armed defence of the workers and their leaders. It will not be the corrupt police, in many cases the direct assassins, who will prevent these crimes. It will be us, the workers. We propose…our own self-defence against fascism,” he said.
Similarly, in a speech on Thursday highlighting a number of opposition attacks against Cuban doctors, education and health missions and community organisations Chavez, who described himself as a “subversive” in Miraflores presidential palace called for the “permanent mobilization” of the Venezuelan people to defend the Bolivarian revolution
