Fri Mar 29, 2024
March 29, 2024

Let’s build a workers, peasants and people alternative

Venezuela is immersed in a terrible economic, political and social crisis. In this context, we face legislative elections, in which the PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), the ruling party, together with the Great Patriotic Pole coalition, cannot motivate their own militancy.

Lack of resources, inflation, persecution and attack to the workers’ rights, not to mention the increase of misery, have boosted struggles and demonstrations.

Workers, peasants and popular sectors are abandoning their support to the govern. And also to the PSUV – a party controlled by a military-civic bloc – which uses the “Socialism of the 21st Century” speech to tie most workers to the interests of “socialist, anti-imperialist employers”. The bourgeois opposition, held essentially by the MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable), is trying to capitalize on this rupture [of the masses]. An opposition that has nothing to offer to workers but more austerity and cut of rights. Very similar to what Nicolás Maduro’s government is doing nowadays.

Discontent of million of workers opens the possibility of struggling to build a true alternative to the bosses’ options

In this regard, the UST (Socialist Unity of Workers), Venezuelan IWL-FI’s section, calls all left leadership and activists to debate a program to confront the package of measures the government is preparing against many of our rights.

This program must have a working class character to strengthen the mobilization as the only way to achieve our demands. It should start by defending and improving the standard of life of the workers and their families, with an immediate pay rise, following the cost of a representative basket of goods, as well as prices control by workers and their organizations. It must defend jobs and job stability; a program to defend the right to social protests, strikes and union organization without state interference. A program to struggle for the suspension of payment of the foreign debt, and an audit to know who are responsible for contracting the debt, and where are those funds, as well as the dollars given to national and multinational companies. A program to demand the complete nationalization of Venezuelan oil, and to end joint ventures with multinationals. For a tax reform to make employers pay the cost of the national budget, not workers, as it happens today through taxes on popular consumption. A program to demand the funding of national industry production with the money destined to the payment of foreign debt, starting by investments in basic industry, agriculture and livestock.

This program, or any other we can agree, can only be successful if is based on struggles independent of the bosses. Our goal is to struggle for a government of workers, peasants and popular sectors, relying on their democratic and fighting organizations, pointing to building a true socialism. A workers and people socialism, and not the tale of socialism built with “patriotic bosses” and exploiters.

Let’s use elections to boost an independent alternative

The Socialism and Liberty Party (PSL) stands candidates independent of the PSUV and MUD in the next elections for the National Assembly on December 6. Despite their limitations regarding confronting Nicolás Maduro’s government, and despite the fact they do not clearly pose the necessity of socialism as the only way out, they do propose a program which fights, among other things, the austerity plan, which calls to support peoples’ struggles against imperialism and dictatorships and that the working class rule the country.

These proposals can allow the construction of an independent alternative that the workers need. That’s why the Socialist Unity of Workers calls to support the independent candidates presented under PSL’s slate, as a step towards the building of a political tool for the workers’ struggle.

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