Water: ‘When Federated Farmers asks, the Government listens’

by Pat O’Dea


Wondering what is behind the sacking of the Canterbury Regional Council over the control of Canterbury’s water resources? When Federated Farmers ask, the Government listens.

New Zealand’s biggest business pressure group put out their wish list in early February. Since then the Government has been ticking the boxes one by one.

Community action saves Mangere East post office

At the picket of the Mangere East Countdown store, community activist, Roger Fowler, receives unanimous support for a boycott and free shuttle service to a rival supermarket. Photo credit Manukau Courier.

When food giant Progressive Enterprises served an eviction notice on the Mangere East Post Office recently, they didn’t factor in the united outrage of the local community.

Progressive have a grand plan to demolish the Mangere East shops they own and build a bigger Countdown store on the site. Their four-weeks eviction notice on their neighbour was to be their first move.

When local residents found out, they called an urgent meeting at the community hall. Over 250 turned up to campaign to save their Post Office & Kiwibank, and set about organising a series of protest actions. Mangere MP Su’a William Sio, several city councillors, community & church leaders and the Mangere Community Board swung in behind the campaign. The walls of the shopping centre were plastered with well-read daily wall-newspapers with updates on the campaign. A community petition attracted over 6000 signatures.

Over 200 angry locals picketed the Countdown store and loudly endorsed a plan to boycott Countdown and run a free shoppers’ bus service to the rival Pak ‘N Save store in Mangere. The community centre offered their bus for a half-hourly free shuttle service.

After the rowdy lunchtime protest the Post Office manager received an email from Progressive bosses agreeing to drop the eviction notice, and offered a public apology and to meet with protest leaders. At that meeting the company also agreed to on-going consultations with the protesters regarding their development plans, and to offer the Post Office a prime position in the new Countdown store.

Progressive, is renowned for being arrogant & stubborn – remember their infamous lock out three years ago. But after just two weeks of concerted community protest action they were forced to back down.

Saving Public Water & defending democracy in Canterbury

Environment Canterbury’s (Canterbury Regional Council) elected councillors are getting the sack, to be replaced by a Government appointed commissioner.

This anti-democratic move will save supporters of industrial dairying from humiliation at October’s local elections, and allow industry and government to get on with their goal of polluting and privatising Canterbury’s water.

The Water Forum has called a public meeting to bring together water campaigners to discuss the next step.

Saving Public Water

Saturday April 10

4 to 6 pm

WEA, 59 Glouchester St

Christchurch

The 2010 Sri Lankan presidential election, and beyond

In this lengthy and detailed article, Brian Senewiratne (pictured right) considers the political background to this weeks’ Sri Lankan presidential election. The article was written just before the election, in which the main contenders were the incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa and the former army commander, General Sarath Fonseka. According to Senewiratne, who wins the election “is irrelevant since it will be by one of two criminals. More relevant is how it will be won.” He writes that General Fonseka was most likely to win, “Unless the current President, Mahinda Rajapakse indulges in massive election fraud, serious intimidation, disappearances of ballot boxes, etc (all of which are possible).” In the event, Mahinda Rajapakse won, and General Fonseka is indeed alleging fraud, and reportedly preparing to flee the country. The 2010 Sri Lankan presidential election, and beyond By Brian Senewiratne 25 January 2010 In the scores of talks, interviews, and meetings, that I have been involved in over the past four decades, on the problems facing the Sri Lankan Tamils (and the Plantation Tamils) in Sri Lanka, I have rarely been asked absurd questions. This has changed. I have been bombarded with one question, “Whom should the Tamils vote for in the up-coming Election – the current President Mahinda Rajapaksa or the former Army Commander, Sarath Fonseka?” That I have been asked to chose between two mass murderers guilty of Genocide of the Tamil people, crimes against Humanity and the Violation of International Law and Sri Lanka’s own Constitution and Laws, is a manifestation of the widespread confusion and despondency among the expatriate Tamil community, which I, as a Sinhalese, find difficult to comprehend. These two men (and their associates) should be on their way to an International Criminal Court, not to the Presidency.

Rajapaksa Fonseka

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Open Letter to John Key, Prime Minister of New Zealand

26 November 2009

Kia ora Mr Key,

We've never met, but since I'm a longtime socialist and you're Minister for the Security Intelligence Service, you have undoubtedly read SIS reports about me and my fellow promoters of a more democratic, just and ecological society.

However, it's in your capacity as Prime Minister that I'm writing you this Open Letter.

Recently one of my friends (who I shall name Jason to protect his identity) was sacked from his job by a fairly new manager. The reason given was that Jason's job was supposedly "redundant". Yet another worker was hired just days before Jason was sacked to do essentially the same job which Jason had been doing for some years, earning praise from his previous manager.

Here's what I see as the core facts. The new manager is a bully. He set out to squash Jason who, having a mind of his own, was regarded as a threat. Meanwhile, the business owner instructed managers across the company to axe some jobs and cut all wages, regardless of employment agreements. That would allow the firm to keep on making healthy profits at a time of capitalist slump, at the expense of loyal staff, of course. The bully-manager took advantage of this directive from the top boss to knife Jason, opening the way for a lower-paid substitute to be taken on.

I'm guessing that, as Prime Minister, your reaction to what I'm saying may be two-fold. First, Jason could take a complaint to the Employment Relations Authority, as allowed under the Employment Relations Act. And second, you have important affairs of state to deal with, and cannot possibly involve yourself in the affairs of workers.

Well, Jason did attend a mediation session at the Employment Relations Authority. Here he ran up against a wall of weasel words from company managers, aided by a smooth and expensive lawyer whose speciality is getting bosses off the hook. They insisted Jason's sacking was a "genuine redundancy".

The mediator informed Jason that he could take the complaint further, to a hearing of the Employment Relations Authority, but in the event of losing he faced having to pay several thousand dollars towards the other side's legal costs. With Jason made poor by his sacking, how can he afford to take such a risk? So the legal winners look likely to be those with money on their side, regardless of the truth.

I readily admit that, under current legislation, you and your political colleagues could not get involved in this one particular case, even if you so wanted. I do believe, however, that at the heart of the affairs of state should be the affairs of workers, who together with their families compose the great majority of people living in New Zealand.

Right now there's a marvelous opportunity for you, as Prime Minister of New Zealand, to do something really practical to help workers help themselves. And to do so on an international stage.

You are attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Trinidad & Tobago which will discuss a democracy report from the Commonwealth's policy studies unit. This report notes that "the development of a democratic culture demands that democracy is practiced not only in political parties, but also in most other social, political, cultural and economic institutions, organisations and communities".

You see, the unjust sacking of Jason could not have happened if his "economic institution" had been a place where "democracy is practiced", to quote from the Commonwealth report. In any firm operating in a democratic manner, proposed sackings and other important issues would be decided by majority vote after all sides had been heard. Then it would be hard for some boss, acting like a dictator, to impose unjust decrees on the majority working at the firm.

So, Mr Key, I hope you will support the Commonwealth report's proposal to extend democracy to "economic institutions" and other areas of society where, at present, the great majority of people have absolutely no democracy.

And, when you return to New Zealand, I hope you will begin the process of passing this extension of democracy into law.

I do realise that, if you were to stand up strong for democracy, you would run into heavy flak from your old corporate mates. And from those states around the world which want to stop democracy from breaking out in the workplace in order to privilege the wealthy few who make most of their money from other people's labour.

However, Mr Key, you would get rapt support from Jason, and all his friends, and all workers under the thumb of their bosses, in fact the great majority of people in New Zealand and around the planet. You would become an international people's hero if you advocated democracy in the workplace, and passed a law to make it happen in New Zealand.

I hope you will reply in a meaningful way to my Open Letter. Even if you don't, I guess we will see how much of a democrat you are by what you say at the Commonwealth meeting and, more important, by what you do upon returning home.

Grant Morgan
021 2544 515
grantmorgan@paradise.net.nz

Zimbabwe: Vote Mugabe or else!

A one candidate presidential election was held in Zimbabwe on 27 June. Vote Mugabe or else was the non-alternative for people. Below is article from Ken Olende for British Socialist Worker written prior to the "election". See also Zimbabwe election not 'illegitimate', says UN Security Council from the NZ Herald (28 June). The Left in New Zealand needs to be thinking about how we can give practical support to the brave democracy fighters in Zimbabwe.

Mugabe cracks down on opposition by Ken Olende 24 June 2008 The situation in Zimbabwe continued to deteriorate as Socialist Worker went to press. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai had sought refuge in the Dutch embassy, while the government crackdown on opposition supporters continued. This followed the opposition’s withdrawal from the presidential run-off election, due to take place on Friday of this week, in the face of intimidation from Robert Mugabe’s governing Zanu-PF party. More than 80 MDC activists have been killed during the campaign. There have been arbitrary arrests of civic leaders.

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Socialism is the future - Build it now

by Michael A. Lebowitz from LINKS - International Journal of Socialist Renewal Ideas become a material force when they grasp the minds of masses. This is true not only of ideas which can support revolutionary change. It is also true of those ideas which prevent change. An obvious example is the concept of TINA – the idea that there is no alternative, no alternative to neoliberalism, no alternative to capitalism. Certainly we know that there have been significant changes in the terrain upon which the working class must struggle – changes which are a challenge because of a new international division of labour and because of the role of states in delivering a passive, docile working class to international capital. It is not only changing material circumstances which affects the working class, however. It is also the loss of confidence of the working class that makes these material changes a deadly blow. Even the Korean working class that has demonstrated so clearly in the past its militancy in the struggle against capital has been affected. But it does not have to be that way. Because things are changing. Look at Latin America where the effects of global restructuring and neoliberalism took a very heavy toll. People said ultimately – enough! And they have said this not only to neoliberalism but, increasingly, they have moved further and say no to capitalism. For many, it came as a great shock when Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, said at the World Social Forum in January of 2005 in Brazil that "we have to reinvent socialism". Capitalism, he stressed, has to be transcended if we are ever going to end the poverty of the majority of the world. "We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything." That statement, however, did not drop from the sky. It was the product of a spontaneous rejection of neoliberalism by masses in 1989, the election of Chavez with a promise to change things in 1998 and the response to the combination of the domestic oligarchy and imperialism in their attempt to overthrow Chavez in 2002 and 2003. The embrace of this new socialism, in short, was the product of struggle. The struggle continues. And, we can see that out of struggle comes creativity. In particular, the struggle in Venezuela has stressed the importance of a revolutionary democracy – a process in which people transform themselves as they directly transform circumstances. Through the development of communal councils representing 200 to 400 families in urban areas and as few as 20 in the rural areas, people have begun to identify their needs and their capacities and to transform the very character of the state into one which does not stand over and above civil society but rather becomes the agency for working people themselves. "All power to the communal councils" has been the call of Chavez; “The communal councils must become the cell of the new socialist state.” Ideas can become a material force when they grasp the minds of masses. In Latin America, the idea of a socialism for the 21st century is beginning to move the masses, with its emphasis upon Karl Marx's concept of revolutionary practice – the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change. At its core is the concept of revolutionary democracy. In contrast to the hierarchical capitalist state and to the despotism of the capitalist workplace, the concept is one of democracy in practice, democracy as practice, democracy as protagonism. Democracy in this sense – protagonistic democracy in the workplace, protagonistic democracy in neighbourhoods, communities, communes – is the democracy of people who are transforming themselves into revolutionary subjects. Here is an alternative to capitalism – the concept of socialism for the 21st century with its emphasis upon struggle from below, upon solidarity and upon building the capacities of working people through their own activities. It is an idea that a working class with a tradition of struggle against capital should have no difficulty in grasping. Socialism is the future – build it now. This the Preface to the forthcoming Korean edition of 'Build It Now: Socialism for the 21st century'.

The struggle to redefine the workday

In the photo above ordinary Venezuelans meet together in a Communal Council to discuss community issues and the revolutionary process. The Venezuelan constitution recognises the importance of everyone having time in the day to participate in these democratic structures. In his article 'The capitalist workday, the socialist workday' (included below) Micheal Lebowitz says that the Communal Councils are part of the struggle to redefine the workday.

In New Zealand today there's a democratic and social deficit being created by low pay and overwork. Working people are struggling (and often failing) to earn enough money to meet the most basic human needs, like housing, food, electricity etc. This is having a terrible impact on the health and well-being of individuals, families and communities. Lebowitz argues that this human cost is ingrained in capitalism, it's the direct result of the exploitation of workers' labour - the source of the capitalist's profits.

In his conclusion Lebowitz says:

"[W]hen we look at the workday from the perspective of socialism, we see that the simple demand for reducing the workday is a demand from within capitalism. Its message is simple - end this horror! This is an "infected" conception of the workday. It starts from a view of labour as so miserable that the only thing you can think of doing is reducing and ending it.

When we think about building socialism, however, we recognise that the demand is to transform the workday - to recognise all parts of our workday explicitly and to transform that day qualitatively. Rather than only "free time" being time in which we can develop, from the perspective of socialism it is essential to make the whole day time for building human capacities.

In short, there are two ways of looking at the demand for the reduced workday: one way talks simply about a shorter work week and thus longer weekend vacations; in contrast, a second way stresses the reduction of the traditional workday in order to provide the time on a daily basis for education for self-managing, for our work within the household and our work within our communities. In other words, it is the demand to redefine and transform our workday."

Should we in New Zealand make the struggle to redefine and transform the workday a core part of the broad left project?

The capitalist workday, the socialist workday

by Michael A. Lebowitz

from Links - International Journal of Socialist Renewal
24 April, 2008

As May Day approaches, there are four things that are worth remembering:

1. For workers, May Day does not celebrate a state holiday or gifts from the state but commemorates the struggle of workers from below.

2. The initial focus of May Day was a struggle for the shorter workday.

3. The struggle for the shorter workday is not an isolated struggle but is the struggle against capitalist exploitation.

4. The struggle against capitalist exploitation is an essential part but not the only part of the struggle against capitalism.

What I want to do today is to set out some ideas about the capitalist workday and the socialist workday which I hope can be useful in the current struggles in Venezuela and, more immediately, in today's discussion.

Continue

RAM calls for an Auckland Parliament

RAM - Residents Action Movement Media release 22 April 2008 On the last day of submissions to the Royal Commission on local governance, a de facto Auckland Parliament has been proposed by RAM - Residents Action Movement. "Bringing all the region's elected mayors, councils and community board representatives together for all-in discussions twice a year could serve as an antidote to undue corporate influence over councils," said RAM chair Grant Morgan. RAM's submission to Royal Commission on local governance in Greater Auckland by Grant Morgan Chair of RAM - Residents Action Movement RAM wishes to make a verbal submission to the Royal Commission that expands on this brief written one. RAM is generally supportive of the submission to the Royal Commission made by Manukau City Council, with the proviso of this one major addition: RAM proposes a twice-yearly General Assembly of all elected local government representatives in Greater Auckland. Such a General Assembly, which included all mayors, councillors and community board members, would begin life as a whole-of-region discussion forum, probably over time evolving into a decision-making institution. It could grow into something like an Auckland Parliament which could help to narrow the democratic deficit in Greater Auckland. This democratic deficit has arisen because of the market-based power that corporate elites have over local governance in this region. This can be seen in the moves towards the commercialisation and contracting out of council services despite majority opposition. Increasingly we are seeing councils coming under the sway of the corporate principle of "one dollar, one vote" rather than the democratic principle of "one person, one vote". So it's not surprising that only about one person in three now votes in council elections. Until this democratic deficit is bridged, any type of political mechanism for local governance in Greater Auckland will suffer from a lack of popular legitimacy. RAM believes that a General Assembly, evolving in the direction of an Auckland Parliament, is a practical proposal to enhance the role of all elected representatives and roll back the undue influence of unelected corporate elites. We think our proposal could sit comfortably alongside the proposals made by Manukau City Council. RAM will be happy to expand on these brief comments in our verbal submission.

NZ Labour - a party without principle

A recent headline in The Guardian (18 April) reads: ‘Chinese ship carries arms cargo to Mugabe regime’. Here we have a ship full of arms for Robert Mugabe so he can repress the democratic revolt in Zimbabwe, supplied by the same Chinese regime which the Labour government in New Zealand has embraced in a free trade deal, held up by a dockers’ strike in South Africa which, if done in New Zealand, would be illegal under the Employment Relations Act passed by Helen Clark's administration in 2000. Makes you think doesn’t it? This series of events on the on other side of the world highlights just how far Labour is from a progressive politics grounded in basic human rights. It’s all about the almighty dollar, and to hang with basic principles like democracy and workers’ right to strike. To secure a free trade agreement with China that will boost the profits of Fonterra and other NZ companies, Labour is willing to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses in China. And what chance that Helen Clark is going to loudly condemn gun-running by China to help a despotic Zimbabwe regime crush a broad based democratic movement? Not likely. This is the tangled world of pro-corporate profit driven politics without principle that the Labour Party has embraced. The party is no longer a progressive force in New Zealand.

Chinese ship carries arms cargo to Mugabe regime by David Beresford in Johannesburg The Guardian 18 April 2008 A Chinese cargo ship believed to be carrying 77 tonnes of small arms, including more than 3m rounds of ammunition, AK47 assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, has docked in the South African port of Durban for transportation of the weapons to Zimbabwe, the South African government confirmed yesterday. It claimed it was powerless to intervene as long as the ship's papers were in order. Copies of the documentation for the Chinese ship, the An Yue Jiang, show that the weapons were sent from Beijing to the ministry of defence in Harare. Headed "Dangerous goods description and container packing certificate", the document was issued on April 1, three days after Zimbabwe's election. It lists the consignment as including 3.5m rounds of ammunition for AK47 assault rifles and for small arms, 1,500 40mm rockets, 2,500 mortar shells of 60mm and 81mm calibre, as well as 93 cases of mortar tubes. The carrier is listed as the Cosco shipping company in China. Continue

Women's struggle within the Venezuelan revolution

Contradictions and Tensions in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Process

February 6th 2008, by James Suggett - Venezuelanalysis.com

Carmen Pulido quietly sits on a crowded public bus in Mérida, Venezuela. The bus overflows with impeccably dressed students who tend to their tightly gelled hair and top-of-the-line clothing as they head to class on University Avenue. The bus driver's favorite Reggaetón songs blast through the breeze on this bright day in the Andes Mountains. Out the tinted window Pulido gazes upon row after row of glossy posters of ultra-skinny, mostly lighter-skinned beauty pageant contestants who are half-wearing lingerie and pointing their limbs in all directions. Alternating with the posters are beer ads portraying excited, ordinary-looking men holding bottles at waist level pointed towards the sky, surrounded by everything except women's heads. Pulido studies audio-visual media in the prestigious University of the Andes, but her destination this afternoon is not the classroom. Instead, she plants her feet on the six-lane Avenue of the Americas where she and three hundred others, mostly supporters of President Hugo Chávez, block traffic with linked arms and angrily chanting voices. Overhead, a pedestrian overpass is plastered with the "revolutionary" municipal government's message, "Mérida awaits you." Surrounding the words are seductive portraits of the beauty pageant contestants, the logos of giant commercial retail corporations and luxury hotels, and a matador boasting triumphantly over a dying bull. The annual International Sun Festival has once again swept through Mérida, a city just south of the oil powerhouse Lake Maracaibo where rural agricultural quaintness rubs shoulders with bustling, high tech, petroleum-richness. The festival's controversial "Girlfriend of the Sun" beauty pageant, bullfights, and massive commercial promotion have re-ignited internal dialogues among supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution over the types of cultural and material progress to which Venezuelan socialism should aspire. Mérida's mayor, Carlos León, compromised with protesters this year by using festival funds to put on three days of flamenco dancing activities and assured that the police kept the protesters safe as they exercised their rights. But he claims the yearly activities must continue because they are part of regional tradition, art, and culture. Meanwhile, León appears on billboards sporting a bright red shirt and raising his left fist in the air along side cut-and-pasted images of President Hugo Chávez. For Pulido and others, however, the torrent of the Sun Festival remains an assault on their values, sexual identity, and vision of what "Socialism of the 21st Century" should be. Their counterproposal hits the streets this week as they stage defiant tomas culturales, or "cultural takeovers" of institutional and public spaces, filling them with peaceful artistic expressions of what participants assert are truly socialist values. Demonstrators pass out flyers to receptive pedestrians, denouncing the bullfights as "Not Art nor Culture: TORTURE". However, participants in the protest are adamant that this is about more than animal rights. "The Sun Festival is a huge business deal that diverts public resources toward an imperialist inheritance from Spain, bullfighting, and private companies that contract with the government to promote consumerism and commerce and contaminate the environment," Pulido assails, adding that "women are submitted to total sexual exploitation." She explains her group's view that "art and culture are necessities of the People for re-creating the world they live in," avowing that social movements must fight for "the vindication of women and the vindication men through values that promote respect for life and humanity." Even though a major target of the demonstrations is the mayor, Pulido thinks this struggle is not really against the government, but instead "it is an internal struggle among the People over our conceptions of the world." Confrontations of this sort are common amidst el proceso, "the Process," which is how masses of Venezuelans proudly describe their country's current political project. More than just another name for radical Chavista politics, it has a deeper cultural meaning that seems indefinable in normal political and academic language. It legitimizes all the ambiguous changes and hopeful new relationships that go along with deconstructing a historically oppressive social order and emerging from marginality. El proceso takes shape outside of major centers such as Caracas, through the creative community work of unpretentious organizers who relentlessly tend to society minute-by-minute without needing to pledge allegiance to a vanguard, political parties, or Marxism. Mérida is a historically agricultural state that was uprooted by Venezuela's hyper-specialization in oil exportation in the latter half of the twentieth century. Dominant cash crops like coffee had already pushed out traditional farming, but even those declined in the face of burgeoning service and tourism economies glossed with oily economic and cultural appeal. Displaced workers all over Venezuela were left to migrate precariously to the fringes of the cities and grapple for leftovers. Rural Transformations Braided into the organizing philosophy of the Chávez administration is a response to this devastating history called municipalización, "municipalization". This principle of development prioritizes local decision-making processes and social change grounded in well-organized neighborhoods. In Mérida, this has spurred a fervor of municipal organizing that is most advanced in the rural countryside where it plays upon concepts of community already embedded in the local culture. In rural Mucuchíes, an hour and a half and a world away from Mérida's metropolitan area, María Vicenta Dávila's 27 years of community organizing have made municipalization like her blood type. She exalts that since an April 2006 law laid the foundation for consejos comunales ("community councils"), her community has been galvanized. The 92 councils formed in Dávila`s municipality in the past year have given birth to projects that "seemed unimaginable in the past." In the prolific community council system, the federal government delivers funds directly to neighborhoods which organize into democratic assemblies and petition resources they need to solve the local problems they understand best. The idea is to avoid state and local bureaucracy and dismiss trickle-down myths. Every council in Mucuchíes has received the full amount promised by the federal government, but collectively deciding how to use the money has not been a smooth journey. When Dávila and a group of women proposed that they launch a worm composting project, they were "demonized," Dávila recalls, "People called me crazy, especially the men, who said it was not women's work." Persuading the assembly to allocate funds required patient efforts to educate the community about the value of organic trash and the importance of women's economic and social activity. The federal government's Misión Vuelvan Caras pitched in with cooperative business management training. Now, worms are a hub of community interaction. Neighbors deliver organic waste to a team of women (and a few helpful men) who operate the composting assembly, and then regional farmers purchase the rich product as an alternative to contaminative fertilizers. In the process, women have developed deep bonds and a bit of economic freedom beyond their domestic life. Instead of bragging about her revolutionary eco-feminism, hard-nosed Dávila admits, "we have a long way to go... we are still learning the concept of cooperativism." Community councils in Mucuchíes also collaborate with the Misión Sustitución Rancho por Vivienda (Substitution of Shack for Home) to organize unemployed construction workers into cooperatives and link them to people in their communities who need more dignified dwellings. This was how Dávila crossed paths with Ingrid Martínez, an architect who passed up a job designing commercial banks to work in the mission. Martínez draws up plans for the new homes so they fit with the communities' budgets, environment, and skills. She emphasizes informal connections with folks in order to overcome their preconceptions about people in her position who are traditionally patronizing and punitive. She is frustrated by co-workers who will not enter the poorer areas. In her opinion, "it's not about fear; it's that we do not recognize those people as legitimate ‘clients'. We are trained by the system to think of ourselves as educated professionals working under or over others." Martínez huffs that many of her higher-ups in the mission arrogantly believe that the locals are ignorant and act as though their college degrees make them the guardians of knowledge. She walks me through a community of new adobe homes built with support from the mission. Builders on this hillside are proficient in molding mud bricks from the mountain they live on, a style Martínez was not taught in college. "The people of this neighborhood know things that this institution will never understand if it does not listen," Martínez cries. Opening spaces for new voices to be heard is something Dávila attributes partly to the Bolivarian Constitution, passed by popular referendum in 1999. She and other Mucuchíes organizers benefitted from a gender-sensitive budgeting workshop meant to fulfill the constitution's principles of gender equality. Dávila optimistically comments, "Despite strong resistance among the men," who traditionally dominate public matters, "women are organizing ourselves to be present at the assembly every Wednesday when decisions are made, to ensure that community council budgets address women's issues". As a result, some community councils have created on-site childcare facilities so parents can attend public meetings calmly. While Dávila is ecstatic about what she calls the "beautiful revolution" and its abundant improvements to people's quality of life, she puts the president in his historical place: "I was revolutionary long before Chávez." El proceso seems to transcend the president as critically engaged citizens create new values, traverse cultural boundaries, and humbly facilitate new systems of power. The new constitution and the laws which fortify it open doors, but the communities pick themselves up and walk through. Gender and Cultural Transformations Undeniably, the efficiency with which the government has shifted money and prerogative to local communities has outpaced the necessary psychological and cultural conversion. This conversion requires dedicated "work that is not seen," according to Laura Díaz, who helps communities organize local cultural events with government support. Venezuelan cultural work is amidst a stormy sea of shifting methodological tides. The federal policy of the Misión Cultura, phrased el pueblo es la cultura ("the People are culture,") supports Díaz´s vision that culture is not sequestered in museums, theatres, or imported dance companies, but rather shines from the everyday customs and sounds of local communities. At the same time, Díaz has been pushed around by classist higher-ups who refer to her as chancletuda, a slur that chides her roots in the vast, economically poor, low plains northeast of Mérida where knowledge of bourgeois art is scant. Díaz needs no university degree to philosophically diagnose her country's politics. "There is an immense concentration of power, not in Chávez but in the mass of once passive historical objects like myself demanding change, and the only manner in which it will disperse is through the creation of new historical subjects." The most challenging aspect is that "change must be internal... we must honestly criticize our own lifestyles." That is why she insists on community council autonomy, assuring that "what they do with their funds is less important than that they be protagonists of those funds." I ponder the fact that in the middle class neighborhood where I live, 90% of the community council funds were used to build an imposing, remote controlled gate at the front and back of the community, with the remaining 10% going to fund youth theater activities. The image of a pretentious, paranoid middle class neighborhood is penetrated by smiling adolescents in fluorescent costumes waltzing through the gates on stilts. Díaz's experience tells her that local communities have more potential for deep cultural change than revolutionary activist groups, many of which are male-dominated. Díaz joined the Tupamaros after being radicalized by the April 2002 coup. The Tupamaros is a decades-old organization that has taken the electoral path in recent years but not left behind its guerrilla past. Laura found that when things got intense, she was converted into a servant of food, coffee, and moral support for the "completely machista" Tupamaros. The Tupamaros' black and white, territorial worldview is the reason Díaz finally left them. She tells me they posit themselves as the "moral reserve of the revolution", as opposed to other Chavistas who are corrupt. With this rationale, they domineeringly confiscate public spaces from potential allies they deem ideologically impure. Díaz thinks things are not so simple; el proceso takes many forms within every group, every person. She imagines that "those public spaces will be revolutionary only when communities peacefully occupy them, and collectively organize them into educational facilities and public cafeterias." Perhaps the Tupamaros, like the America's Cup, reflect social systems based on domination. Everybody must haughtily compete for higher status in some form, sexual if not economical or political. Díaz poetically describes her role in all of this: "I am pueblo and I am of the institutions, not one or the other. I am both at once." It is like she exists within a melee of social forces and does not identify with any one in particular, but traverses all of them. It is ironic but also promising that a rather militant Tupamaro man introduced the urbanization called Santa Elena to the Misión Madres del Barrio (Mothers of the Neighborhood Mission). Anyhow, residents Maribel Dávila and her adolescent daughter Elimar have since organized 20 Santa Elena mothers in situations of abuse, extreme poverty, and isolation to receive the benefits of the mission. The first phase will provide 80% of the minimum wage, and the second will go beyond this wages-for-housework concept by funding local micro-enterprises led by the women. The committee's funds are managed by their community council, which has been stifled by general apathy and power struggles. Thus, women with new hope for economic inclusion have emerged from social isolation, propelled into the grittiness of communal organizing. The mission has encouraged one mother to believe that "we too are capable of growing, producing, and constructing sovereignty". Dávila expresses confidence that this is all part of a hopeful process. "Beautiful things are happening in Venezuela," she smiles and takes a drag of her cigarette, "little by little". But it is clear that serious obstacles remain even within these hopeful new paradigms of community work. The experience of Angélica Gómez in the cultural center of rural Tabay is demonstrative. Gómez and her co-workers had a revolutionary organizing philosophy. Instead of working on museums and beauty pageants, they trudged up and down mountain streets for two months crafting a registry of local theatrical and musical artists. These artists were defined as "common people who practice artistic expression, with or without formal training." Once the thousands of registrations were collected, locals were hired to give piano lessons to middle-aged mothers, drum lessons to young fusion rock bands, and mount puppet shows in elementary schools about recycling. Gómez even set up an after-school workshop for adolescents to practice writing lyrics to hip-hop and Reggaetón songs, become conscious of the sexism in mainstream hits, and then record themselves in the community radio up the road. This innovative project was on a roll until Gómez pushed limits by organizing tertulias. These women-only "get-togethers" in quaint, local settings had the intention of creating safe, healing spaces where trustful relationships could be built among neighbors who are victims of domestic violence and domestic isolation. Putting an end to women's separation was not the ultimate goal of the tertulias, but a temporary tactic. Men were invited by Gómez to lend support by preparing pamphlets and local resources for participants, and assist with logistics. Even so, Municipal Culture Director Hector Arriaga (who had scraped by as a kid-friendly street puppeteer for years before being promoted as a cultural worker by the Bolivarian government) became "visibly uncomfortable and threatened" that women were organizing without men, Gómez recalls. Advocating that the revolution requires teamwork, Arriaga crashed the tertulias with lengthy, overbearing discourses on what he said was a "balanced" approach to women's rights, threatening to withhold funding if Gómez objected. When Gómez and her co-worker Salomé García refused to stamp "for a culture of community and gender equality" along with Arriaga's official signature on institutional correspondences, they were abruptly informed that their jobs had become part-time, one working mornings and the other afternoons. Arriaga claimed the local legislative council had reprimanded him and threatened to cut his budget because "a director should not have the privilege of two secretaries," never mind that the women's jobs were not secretarial. Gómez and García grieved, having been divided and conquered by someone who was simultaneously benefiting from patriarchy and the government`s new empowering philosophy of culture. Like many Venezuelans, they ask, what are the values of "Socialism of the 21st Century"? Maybe the state coordinator of the Misión Sucre (a free higher education mission) in Mérida, Oscar Araque, knows the answer. "We must un-learn the anti-human values of the past, so we can re-learn... how to co-learn," he quips. Or maybe not. In my own distasteful experience volunteering for Araque, I have found that his sincere efforts at innovative educational strategies are frequently accompanied by the typical vices of authoritarian male-supremacist bureaucrats. Perhaps everyone involved in el proceso is inevitably on a journey through old, transforming, and new standards. Everyday people are spliced as they carry out acts of ambiguous cultural renewal. They are led by a Bolivarian compass that is useful but thwarted by a bubble of decrepit past traditions. The Bolivarian Revolution is a boiling pot of newness into which Venezuela is being dipped and will emerge redefined.

Source URL: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/ Printed: February 12th 2008 License: Published under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-nd). See creativecommons.org for more information.

Venezuela's communal councils in action

People's Power in Venezuela

January 14th 2008, by John Riddell - MRZine

"If we want to talk of socialism," says Argenis Loreto, "we must first resolve the people's most urgent needs: water in their homes, accessible health care, easy access to housing."

In the Venezuelan municipality of Libertador (state of Carabobo), of which Argenis is mayor, "we have 90% poverty. Ending that is our first task. I am convinced that the existing state cannot do this." It's essential that "the majority of the people become part of the decision-making process."

But when Argenis was elected in 2000, the second year of the Bolivarian government headed by president Hugo Chávez, he found that "the people did not possess the tools needed for their participation."

That insight led Chávez and the Bolivarian government to initiate the formation of neighborhood councils across the country -- councils that they view as the embryo of a new people's state.

Suzanne Weiss and I spent two days in Libertador, one of the first municipalities where such councils were formed, talking to Argenis and dozens of others. This report is based on what we saw; it also draws on Marta Harnecker's outstanding study of the Libertador experience.^*

A Devastated Community

With 200,000 residents, Libertador sprawls across a mainly rural territory the size of Metro Toronto (20 km. x 30 km.). Most of its employed population works in nearby Valencia, the country's heartland of privately owned industry. Jouncing over its ruined roads in the back of a pickup, we saw a district that had been devastated not by natural catastrophe but by a social calamity -- decades of systematic neglect.

"Before we had many problems," recalls Félix Hernández, member of a community government. "The roads were super-awful. The electricity worked one or two days and then shut off. Health service was chaotic. Water service was complete chaos."

Appealing to city hall was a waste of time. "It was horrendous," says another council member, Virginia Diaz. "We'd go with petitions and explain. They'd visit and approve the project." But nothing would happen. "When we went back to the office, they'd never heard of us, didn't know anything. . . . As useful as tits on a bull."

The result was public apathy, says municipal social activist Fidel Hernández -- like Argenis, a published poet. "The people had let itself be convinced that it could not govern. There was a deliberate policy for this . . . that's why we had 1 1⁄2 million who were illiterate."

Tools for People's Power

Of peasant origins, Argenis Loreto finished only six years of schooling before starting his working life in factories, industrial management, farming, and again in factories. He joined a revolutionary group at age 17, took part in the Bolivarian movement's unsuccessful coup in 1992, and became mayor after two decades of underground activity.

Convinced that only the poor and disenfranchised could reconstruct his municipality -- and his nation -- he sought to bridge the gulf between them and the instruments of government. Argenis and his colleagues set out to do this by extending governmental structures to the community level and by delegating power to community governments. Such a shift was authorized by a decentralization clause (Article 184) in the Bolivarian constitution adopted in 1999.

Progress was slow at first. The right-wing coup and bosses' strike of 2002-2003 delayed restructuring. The Libertador plan ran into strong opposition from some Bolivarian national legislators, who accused Argenis of "creating illegal associations."

Finally, in 2006, the community structure was in place: 35 "social territories," which united residents who shared similar problems, a common project, and a sense of belonging to a common environment. They ranged in size from 1,000 to 15,000 residents. Each territory elected a government through assemblies of its residents, usually choosing between competing slates of candidates. All community government work is voluntary -- no salaries are paid -- but relevant expenses are reimbursed.

In one of the social territories, skeptical residents declined to name a council. In another, a center of Libertador's small middle class, the opposition slate was elected. "Many right-wing oppositionists join in community council activity," says Argenis. "They feel they cannot stand aside from the social programs and local projects that the councils carry out. . . . The opposition's role in local government has helped ease political tensions here."

The people's power structure has two tiers. Each social territory or commune includes smaller and more homogenous communities, each of which has its own communal council. The size of component communities is determined by social geography: urban councils typically unite 200-400 families; rural councils, 20-50 families. The smallest social territory by population (Mont Vernont) is composed of dispersed mountain hamlets: it therefore includes the largest number of communities. In Libertador, there are 204 such communal councils.

Participatory Budget

Each communal council and social territory holds assemblies to choose and prioritize its ten most needed projects for the coming year. The municipal planning council then evaluates the top three proposals from each territory -- more than three, if finances permit. A value of 1 to 9 is assigned to each of a number of criteria: number of residents, number who will benefit, cost, how long the request has been pending, the number of previous projects in this community, etc.

This ranking creates a proposed project list that is presented to an assembly in each territory, which can change its priorities and request reconsideration -- if for example a favored project turned out to be impossibly expensive.

Once the project list is decided, the required funds are allocated to the community bodies, which handle administration, buy materials, and engage workers or contractors, giving preference to cooperatives. Community networking and know-how helps keep costs down, and any savings stay in the community for other purposes. Argenis estimates that $1 million a year is saved simply by eliminating private profits.

"For example, a flood control project was approved with a budget of 184 million bolivars [about $90,000]," says Fidel Hernández. "But in fact the community councils did it for 47 million and had lots left over for fixing roads.

"In another case, the local council got a price of 80 million to bring electricity to a district. But in fact they managed to do three districts for that price.

"Last year the community councils spent 84% of the municipal budget [for projects]," Fidel notes.

Accomplishments

Popular control has steered funding toward small, plain, and inexpensive projects densely spread through local neighborhoods. Urgent human needs have taken priority over infrastructure requirements like road upgrades.

Argenis highlights the 74 primary-care health centers built by neighborhood councils, which at first sometimes even manufactured the bricks. "We had only nine centers before," he says. In addition, Libertador boasts four Integral Diagnostic Centers -- small hospitals -- "the pride of our community," according to Felix Hernández. Another community government member, Aixa Silvera, calls the Cuban doctors working in these centers "the most spectacular thing we have in the communities.

Indeed, Libertador led the way in Venezuela by arranging for Cuban doctors to work in the communities, before this became a national program.

Argenis says that community governments are building 48 primary schools this year -- mostly one-room structures serving a neighborhood. There are also now three university campuses in Libertador -- part of a national program to "municipalize higher education."

"As for sports, there are now only two or three communities that do not have a minimal installation" which means a playing field.

The citizens of Libertador are also trying to establish cultural centers in each social territory, usually an "open-air amphitheatre." Eight cultural centers are now under construction. In some cases, resident assemblies gave building a cultural centre priority over fixing the road or installing street lighting. "You can't have a revolution without beauty," Fidel Hernández says.

The obvious progress is confirmed by two surveys that were taken at the beginning of the community government program and again in May 2007. The first survey showed that the most urgently felt needs were for health care and educational facilities. In the second, no one cited health care as a concern, and almost no one mentioned education. Moreover, "we now have hardly any kids on the streets," says Argenis, "and the problem of homelessness is almost solved."

The Housing Bottleneck

According to official estimates, Venezuela has a shortage of 2.7 million homes, while another 1.3 million dwellings are inadequate home-made shacks. In 2006, 200,000 homes were built -- a positive achievement, but far less than what is needed.

Argenis believes that community councils, who feel this urgent need acutely, are best suited to build houses. Sometimes they "build 10, 12, even 15 houses with the money provided for seven," he says.

"But we desperately need raw materials. Our economy was destroyed, and now we don't have the capacity to make the cement blocks, the paint, the ceramic toilets. We're working with Iran, China, and Brazil to meet these needs."

And Venezuela is building six factories to produce plastic building materials -- "we have oil, after all," says Argenis. This project, called Petrocasa, will supply materials for 15,000 new houses a year. One of these factories, is close by, in the state of Carabobo.

National Expansion

In 2006 Hugo Chávez endorsed the establishment of communal councils as a priority across Venezuela. In January 2007, he declared them institutions of "people's power," an embryo of a new people's state. An enabling law was passed in April, and there are now more than 10,000 councils across the country.

While vindicating the innovative program in Libertador, this expansion also caused the municipality many headaches. The national government intended the councils to be free of the deadening hand of the traditional state bureaucracy. Among other things, word went out that mayors should not get involved with these people's organizations. This directive might be appropriate in the nearby industrial city of Valencia, ruled by the opposition, but in Libertador it was totally at odds with reality.

Unfortunately, the Carabobo state government, led by critics of Argenis's initiatives, seized on this opening to create problems for Libertador's government. Utilizing its own statewide network of paid social activists, it promoted the notion that communal councils don't need to work with Libertador's larger social territories or with the city government.

"That caused a terrible process of fragmentation and division between the two levels of popular power," says Argenis.

Much effort has gone into knitting the two levels of people's government back together, Argenis says. "When they work together they're unbeatable."

People's power was an element of the constitution reform narrowly defeated in the December 2, 2007, referendum. The communal councils are still authorized under Article 184 of the constitution and the April 2006 legislation, and there is no legal barrier to expanding the structures beyond this framework. However, the referendum setback may encourage the councils' critics.

Bureaucratic Obstruction

The community government bodies in Libertador aren't perfect. Among the occasional abuses noted by Argenis:

• Only one community is represented in a social territory council.
• One slate takes all the leadership positions.
• Elected officers take decisions on their own without convening the residents' assembly.
• The assembly functions poorly because of lack of interest.

These can be viewed as growing pains. As community government officer Omaira Carvallo comments, "When people see what is accomplished, it will break through their apathy."

More troubling is the conduct of other branches of government, such as the problems with Carabobo State. Among the many stories of this sort that Argenis tells, the pig manure episode is enough to illustrate what people's power is up against.

The city government makes special efforts to help Libertador's many farmers, a number of whom raise pigs. Some time ago the Ministry of the Environment banned hog-raising in the municipality because of concerns for water quality, but did not enforce the regulation. Libertador tried to help farmers solve the water problem on their own, by providing septic tanks for environmentally safe treatment of pig manure. The manure's polluting gas discharge was captured and burned for cooking. "This is a miracle," says Argenis. "It cuts out the smell and uses the gas!"

But the ministry intervened and nixed the project, which they said broke their rule against raising pigs. The bureaucratic method could not be better demonstrated: only the formal regulation counted; the real-life problem of manure pollution was of no interest.

What explanations do the ministry provide? "None whatsoever," says Argenis. "Just as we always say: this bureaucracy is eating us alive. . . . We can't change things with this type of state."

Even among inherited municipal officials, "the apathy is barbaric. We have to establish a new conception of a staffer," Argenis says. "I'd like to dissolve the municipal administration . . . and create a confederation of community governments."

Reflections

At first glance, Venezuela's people's power can seem to be just a formal structure -- municipal government on a street level. This is misleading. The councils have appeared and made gains only as part of an immense popular movement on a national level: the Bolivarian revolution.

This revolution was born in the mass mobilizations against the U.S.-backed oligarchy's attempts to overthrow the country's elected government -- by a military coup in 2002, by an economic shutdown in 2003, and by an anti-Chavez referendum in 2004. All were defeated by the initiatives of masses of working people.

In Libertador, Argenis recalls, the embryonic community governments acted as defense committees, struggling to ensure that food, cooking gas, and gasoline reached the people. "That was just so wonderful," he says. "Quickly we had a network of more than 200 Bolivarian shops," distributing necessities and helping defend the revolution. Such national struggles were the true birth of people's power.

Venezuela's success at forging constructive ties with other non-imperialist states has also played a role, not just through Cuba's contribution to health services, but above all in building alliances to help fend off, for now, a U.S.-led assault.

The sometimes destructive role of national and state authorities is also a reminder that the power of working people will not flourish at the street level unless it is consolidated nationally.

Yet the community councils in Libertador call to us, Sí se puede! -- Yes we can do it! Enlisting the majority, the working people, in government is indeed possible. Venezuela's people's power -- while still embryonic -- is a living, viable reality.

Zimbabwe: Mugabe cracks down on opposition

by Ken Olende from British Socialist Worker 24 June 2008 The situation in Zimbabwe continued to deteriorate as Socialist Worker went to press. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai had sought refuge in the Dutch embassy, while the government crackdown on opposition supporters continued. This followed the opposition’s withdrawal from the presidential run-off election, due to take place on Friday of this week, in the face of intimidation from Robert Mugabe’s governing Zanu-PF party. More than 80 MDC activists have been killed during the campaign. There have been arbitrary arrests of civic leaders. Fourteen leaders of the Women of Zimbabwe Arise (Woza) opposition group were detained for nearly a month for protesting at the delay in releasing the election results. Two of their leaders are still in detention. NGOs have effectively been closed down by the regime – those providing food relief, drugs and support to Aids/HIV patients have been particularly hit. But the MDC has borne the brunt of the attacks. Tsvangirai has been repeatedly arrested, his rallies banned and campaign buses impounded. The state-controlled media is ignoring the MDC, while people are being forced to remove satellite dishes to prevent them from viewing media independent of the state. Detained MDC secretary-general Tendai Biti faces treason charges, which carries the death penalty. In the face of the crisis, some in the Western media have called for military intervention. Such intervention is extremely unlikely as military leaders are aware that Western troops would face mass hostility – not just from people in Zimbabwe but from all surrounding countries. As Britain is the former colonial power, any British troops would be viewed as imperial invaders. Hardship Zimbabweans are suffering terrible hardship, not just from repression, but also from economic collapse. But they are only too aware that it was Western-imposed structural adjustment programmes that began the country’s economic crisis in the 1990s. No African Union or regional Southern African Development Community (SADC) negotiators would consider military intervention. Their preferred solution is the establishment of a government of national unity, which would include Mugabe, his supporters and the MDC. They point to Kenya, where violence has subsided following the recent election crisis after the appointment of a government with both the sitting president and the opposition. But rather than end political violence, a government of national unity would integrate it into the political structure. The relative support for each party would not affect its representation. All trade unions and left organisations reject the call for a government of national unity, arguing that it would benefit the elite and further distance the country from any real democracy. It also disarms any mass action that could challenge the corruption at the top. It is a tragedy that the general strike it called in April against the fixing of the election results collapsed within a day. The workers of Zimbabwe are still enormously powerful and mass action would be the most effective way to challenge Mugabe. However the movement faces a real problem of direction. It is no small thing to go out on strike against a repressive regime in a time of severe hardship. The leadership offered by the MDC was at best vacillating, and often non-existent. Since the MDC was founded it has steadily moved away from its trade union roots to embrace neoliberalism. It is hardly a surprise that workers do not see the party as a reliable leadership. Fought Repression has been stepped up since the failure of the strike. But Zanu-PF has not had everything its own way. Groups of opposition supporters have fought them on the street in areas like Epworth, Bikita, Zaka and Chimanimani. But these were isolated actions, with no central leadership. The International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe commented that, “the alternative is a regrouped united front of civic society and the opposition to launch a serious and determined programme of civil disobedience and mass action. “Any struggle that fails to do this will be outflanked on its left by this crafty regime, which has shown strong capacity to cynically manipulate the poor’s concerns and demonise the opposition as a stooge of the West. “Without such a united front and a pro-poor, pro-working people and anti-capitalist ideology we shall not prevail against this regime.”

The capitalist workday, the socialist workday

by Michael A. Lebowitz from Links - International Journal of Socialist Renewal 24 April, 2008 As May Day approaches, there are four things that are worth remembering: 1. For workers, May Day does not celebrate a state holiday or gifts from the state but commemorates the struggle of workers from below. 2. The initial focus of May Day was a struggle for the shorter workday. 3. The struggle for the shorter workday is not an isolated struggle but is the struggle against capitalist exploitation. 4. The struggle against capitalist exploitation is an essential part but not the only part of the struggle against capitalism. What I want to do today is to set out some ideas about the capitalist workday and the socialist workday which I hope can be useful in the current struggles in Venezuela and, more immediately, in today's discussion. The capitalist workday What is the relation between the work the capitalist workday and exploitation? When workers work for capital, they receive a wage which allows them to purchase a certain amount of commodities. How much is that wage? There is nothing automatic about the wage level. It is determined by the struggles of workers against capital. Those commodities which form the worker’s wage contain a certain quantity of labour, and those hours of labour on a daily basis are often described as the "necessary labour" of the worker - the hours of labour necessary for workers to produce the commodities they consume on a daily basis. But, in capitalism workers do not just work their hours of necessary labour. Because they have been compelled to sell their ability to work to the capitalist in order to survive, the capitalist is in the position to demand they work longer than this. And the difference between their hours of necessary labour and the total work that workers perform for capital is surplus labour - the ultimate source of capital's profits. In other words, capitalist profits are based on the difference between the workday and necessary labour; they are based upon surplus labour, unpaid labour, exploitation. So, the more the capitalist is able to drive up the workday, the greater the exploitation and the greater the profit. Marx commented that "the capitalist is constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum and extend the working day to its physical maximum". How true. Marx continued, though, and noted "while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction". In other words, class struggle: workers struggle to increase wages and to reduce the workday; they struggle to reduce exploitation by capitalists. Of course, your workday is more than just the time spent between clocking in and clocking out. There is the time it takes you to get to work, the time it takes to buy the food you need to survive, the time to prepare that food - all this is really necessary labour and part of the worker’s workday. But since this labour is free to the capitalist, since it is not a cost for him, it is therefore invisible to him. So, when the capitalists want to drive down necessary labour by driving down wages (or by increasing productivity relative to wages), it is not the labour he does not pay for that he wants to reduce. Rather, he wants as much free labour is possible, as much unpaid labour as possible. It is not surprising that workers want to reduce their unpaid labour for capital and to do so by struggling to reduce the capitalist workday. But it is not only the unpaid labour in the workday that is a burden for workers; it is also the paid labour that they are compelled to do for capital. In other words, the problem is not only exploitation. It is the way that capitalist production deforms working people. In the capitalist workplace, the worker works for the goals of capital, under the control of capital and with an organisation of production which is designed not to permit workers to develop their capabilities but, rather, has the single goal of profits. "All means for the development of production", Marx stressed about capitalism, "distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him" and "alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process". In other words, the process of capitalist production cripples us as human beings. Life in the capitalist workplace is a place where we are commanded from above, where we are mere tools that capital manipulates in order to get profits. That is why we want to reduce the capitalist workday. That is why we cannot wait to escape. It is not only the exploitation, the unfairness and the injustice in the distribution of income. Time away from capitalist production appears as the only time in which we can be ourselves, a time when our activity can be free time, time for the full development of the individual. This is what it necessarily looks like within capitalism. But we have to recognise that so many of our ideas within capitalism are infected. The most obvious example is the phenomenon of consumerism - we must buy all those things! What we own defines us. The socialist answer, though, is not that everyone should own the same things - in other words, equalisation of alienation; rather, the socialist idea is to end the situation in which we are owned and defined by things. The battle of ideas, which is central to the struggle for socialism, is based on the alternative conception of socialism. Its focus is not to reform this or that idea that has developed within capitalism but, rather, to replace ideas from capitalism with conceptions appropriate to socialism. So, is our idea of the workday within capitalism infected? And, can we get any insights into the workday by thinking about the workday within socialism? The socialist workday Firstly, what do we mean by socialism? The goal of socialists has always been the creation of a society which would allow for the full development of human potential. It was never seen as a society in which some people are able to develop their capabilities and others are not. That was Marx's point in stating clearly that the goal is "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." And this is clearly the point, too, of Venezuela’s Bolivarian constitution where it stresses in article 20 that "everyone has the right to the free development of his or her own personality" and in the explicit recognition in article 299 that the goal of a human society must be that of "ensuring overall human development". In contrast to capitalist society, where "the worker exists to satisfy the need" of capital to expand, Marx envisioned a socialist society where the wealth that workers have produced "is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development". So, what is the nature of the workday in a society oriented toward ensuring overall human development? Let us begin by talking about necessary labour - quantitatively. There is the labour which is contained in the products we consume daily - just like before. To this, however, we need to add the labour that workers want to devote toward expanding production in the future. In socialism, there are no capitalists who compel the performance of surplus labour and invest a portion of the profits in the search for future profits. Rather, workers themselves in their workplaces and society decide if they want to devote time and effort to expanding satisfaction of needs in the future. If they make this decision, then this labour is not surplus to their needs; it forms part of what they see as their necessary labour. Thus, the concept of necessary labour changes here. In a socialist society, further, we recognise explicitly that part of our necessary labour is labour within the household. In other words we acknowledge that our workday does not begin after we leave the household but includes what we do within the household. Article 88 of the Bolivarian constitution recognises the importance of this labour when it notes that labour within the household is "economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth". The concept of necessary labour and our workday within a socialist society also includes the labour which is required to self-govern our communities. After all, if socialism is about the decisions we make democratically in our communities, then the time we need to do this is part of our necessary labour. Similarly, if socialism is about creating the conditions in which we are all able to develop our potential, then the process of education and of developing our capabilities is also activity which is necessary. When we think about the socialist workday, in short, we think about the workday differently. Our view of the quantity of necessary labour, for example, is not distorted by the capitalist perspective of treating as necessary only that labour for which capital must pay. That is the difference between the political economy of capital and the political economy of the working class. From the perspective of workers, we recognise as necessary labour all the labour that is necessary for "the worker’s own need for development". But the difference is not only quantitative. In socialism, the workday cannot be a day in which you receive orders from the top (even in strategic industries). Rather, it is only through our own activity, our practice and our protagonism that we can develop our capabilities. Article 62 of Venezuela’s constitution makes that point in its declaration that participation by people is "the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective". In other words, in every aspect of our lives (the traditional workplace, the community, the household), democratic decision making is a necessary characteristic of the socialist workday; through workers’ councils, communal councils, student councils, family councils, we produce ourselves as new socialist subjects. Thus, when we look at the workday from the perspective of socialism, we see that the simple demand for reducing the workday is a demand from within capitalism. Its message is simple - end this horror! This is an "infected" conception of the workday. It starts from a view of labour as so miserable that the only thing you can think of doing is reducing and ending it. When we think about building socialism, however, we recognise that the demand is to transform the workday - to recognise all parts of our workday explicitly and to transform that day qualitatively. Rather than only "free time" being time in which we can develop, from the perspective of socialism it is essential to make the whole day time for building human capacities. In short, there are two ways of looking at the demand for the reduced workday: one way talks simply about a shorter work week and thus longer weekend vacations; in contrast, a second way stresses the reduction of the traditional workday in order to provide the time on a daily basis for education for self-managing, for our work within the household and our work within our communities. In other words, it is the demand to redefine and transform our workday. The first of these is simply a reform within capitalism. For socialists, May Day should be the day to struggle for the whole worker's day, to struggle for the socialist workday. Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class and Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century. This article was presented as initiating remarks to the "Roundtable Discussion on the Reduction of the Workday" held on April 24, 2008, at the Centro International Miranda, Caracas, Venezuela. The event brought together leaders from different union federations and currents, as well as a representative from the women’s movement, to discuss the importance of the demand of the reduction of the workday in the lead up to May Day. The event was organised by the program "Human Development and Transformatory Practise" coordinated by Lebowitz, at the Centro Internacional Miranda. Michael Lebowitz's book 'Build It Now: socialism for the 21st century' is reviewed by Daphne Lawless, editor of UNITY journal. Go to Book review: 'Build it Now' by Michael Lebowitz

NZ Labour - a party without principle

A recent headline in The Guardian (18 April) reads: ‘Chinese ship carries arms cargo to Mugabe regime’. Here we have a ship full of arms for Robert Mugabe so he can repress the democratic revolt in Zimbabwe, supplied by the same Chinese regime which the Labour government in New Zealand has embraced in a free trade deal, held up by a dockers’ strike in South Africa which, if done in New Zealand, would be illegal under the Employment Relations Act passed by Helen Clark's administration in 2000. Makes you think doesn’t it? This series of events on the on other side of the world highlights just how far Labour is from a progressive politics grounded in basic human rights. It’s all about the almighty dollar, and to hang with basic principles like democracy and workers’ right to strike. To secure a free trade agreement with China that will boost the profits of Fonterra and other NZ companies, Labour is willing to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses in China. And what chance that Helen Clark is going to loudly condemn gun-running by China to help a despotic Zimbabwe regime crush a broad based democratic movement? Not likely. This is the tangled world of pro-corporate profit driven politics without principle that the Labour Party has embraced. The party is no longer a progressive force in New Zealand.

Chinese ship carries arms cargo to Mugabe regime David Beresford in Johannesburg The Guardian 18 April 2008 A Chinese cargo ship believed to be carrying 77 tonnes of small arms, including more than 3m rounds of ammunition, AK47 assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, has docked in the South African port of Durban for transportation of the weapons to Zimbabwe, the South African government confirmed yesterday. It claimed it was powerless to intervene as long as the ship's papers were in order. Copies of the documentation for the Chinese ship, the An Yue Jiang, show that the weapons were sent from Beijing to the ministry of defence in Harare. Headed "Dangerous goods description and container packing certificate", the document was issued on April 1, three days after Zimbabwe's election. It lists the consignment as including 3.5m rounds of ammunition for AK47 assault rifles and for small arms, 1,500 40mm rockets, 2,500 mortar shells of 60mm and 81mm calibre, as well as 93 cases of mortar tubes. The carrier is listed as the Cosco shipping company in China. South Africa's national conventional arms control committee issued a permit on Monday for the trans-shipment of the cargo from Durban to Harare. The head of government information in South Africa, Themba Maseko, said yesterday: "We are not in a position to act unilaterally and interfere in a trade deal between two countries." South Africa had to "tread very carefully", given the complexity of the situation in Zimbabwe, Maseko said. South Africa was not encouraging the purchase of weapons by Zimbabwe, he said, pointing out that there was no UN trade embargo against that country. But Tony Leon, the South African opposition foreign affairs spokesman, said the shipment was tantamount to "putting a fuse in a powder keg". Dockers in Durban were refusing last night to unload the ship. The SA Transport and Allied Workers Union's general secretary, Randall Howard, said: "Satawu does not agree with the position of the government not to intervene with this shipment of weapons. Our members will not unload this cargo, neither will any of our members in the truck-driving sector move this cargo by road." Despite international criticism, the Chinese government has been a longstanding backer of Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe's authoritarian regime, supplying it with jet fighters, military vehicles and guns. China, or Chinese businesses, are reported to have sold radio-jamming devices to prevent independent stations from contradicting the state-controlled media, and have signed vital agriculture deals. Even the blue tiles on Mugabe's latest 25-bedroom mansion, reminiscent of Beijing's Forbidden City, were a gift from China. China has in the past used its veto at the UN security council to prevent the Zimbabwe issue from being raised, on the grounds that the country's problems were an internal matter. In Britain, William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, said last night: "The international community must speak with one voice on Zimbabwe. We call on China, as part of that community, to suspend arms sales to Zimbabwe. "The Mugabe regime continues to deny the right of the people of Zimbabwe to choose their leaders. To supply arms to it at time when opposition activists are being intimidated and attacked, not only sends the wrong signal, but will harm the reputation of China. "In addition, it is time that neighbouring states like South Africa made clear that such shipments are not welcome." The Foreign Office was more cautious. A spokeswoman said that Britain backed an EU ban on arms sales to Zimbabwe and was encouraging other governments to do the same. The FO said it was monitoring the situation and seeking to verify reports about the ship's cargo. A spokesman for China's foreign ministry said it was aware of the reports about the shipment, but needed more time to look into the matter. The disclosure about the ship's cargo follows claims by an official from the Zimbabwe opposition Movement for Democratic Change that Chinese soldiers had been seen in the country. There were some signs yesterday that South Africa may at last be bending under international pressure, when the cabinet joined calls for the release of Zimbabwe's election results. Zimbabwe's opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, called on South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, to stand down as the chief mediator in the country's election crisis, as the US criticised African governments for lack of action on the issue. "It is time for Africa to step up," the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said. Tsvangirai told a news conference in Johannesburg: "President Mbeki needs to be relieved from his duty." Mbeki, is also under pressure from Jacob Zuma, the leader of the ruling African National Congress. Zuma has adopted a more hostile attitude towards Mugabe, saying that "the region cannot afford a deepening crisis in Zimbabwe".

BURMA- Protest against the Chinese Embassy

Invitation To Protest against the Embassy
of the People's Republic of China, Wellington,

March in Wellington to express solidarity with the ongoing peaceful demonstrations of monks, students and political activists against recent fuel price hikes, and ongoing Burmese struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma.

To request Chinese policy-makers to uphold international moral responsibilities in the global arena, especially to be polite and support democracy and human rights in Burma in line with the wishes of the people of Burma.

We, Burmese Democracy Advocates cordially invite all the people who support democracy and human rights living throughout New Zealand to join the Wellington March.

Programme Date: 15.Oct .2007 Monday
Time: 10:00 to 12:00 am
Place: 2-6 Glenmore Street, Kelburn, Wellington,

Postal Address: PO Box 17257, Karori, Wellington, New Zealand Country & Area Code: +64-4 Telephone: 4721382 Facsimile: 4990419 Emergency call: +64-21-528663

Contact Persons (1) Ko Naing Ko 021-121-8118 (2) Ko Sunny Tin Zaw Moe 09- 521-3627 (3) Ko Soe Thein-021- 163-071 (4) Ko Aung Pe Khin - 021- 170-4352 (5) Ko Ko Kyaw - 021-107-3962

Note: Buses are going to leave from Auckland at 6 pm on Sunday 14 Oct, 2007 and will depart from Wellington at 8 pm on Monday 15 Oct, 2007. Meeting points are: Zabuaye monastery in Auckland and the NZ parliament in Wellington respectively.

PSUV "manifestly an instrument of presidential power"

How right wingers in Venezuela attack Hugo Chavez. Will some socialists now join them?

Shaping the future in Venezuela

Feature by Mike Gonzalez, October 2007

As town square debates on Hugo Chavez's constitutional amendments rage in Venezuela, Mike Gonzalez considers whether they will deepen democracy or further centralise power.

It is Saturday afternoon in La Candelaria, a working class district of Venezuela's capital Caracas. A huge awning covers the main square (it's the rainy season) to shelter the 200 or so people sitting in groups of 12 at round tables. They are all wearing the red T-shirt of the Bolivarian revolution, and they are spending this Saturday, and many to come, discussing reforms to the constitution proposed by the president Hugo Chavez. In December these 120 or so amendments will be put to referendum.

The noise of everyone talking at once is deafening - that is the Venezuelan way. But there is something uplifting about what certainly looks like genuine popular involvement in political debate and discussion. It might even be that this is what Chavez means when he talks about "socialism for the 21st century" or "popular power", the slogans and watchwords that accompany his portrait wherever you go in the country.

Yet there is real confusion about what these key ideas mean, and the experiences of those in the mass movement, the trade unions and the social organisations who are most deeply committed to the Bolivarian revolution often add to the lack of clarity.

The gathering in La Candelaria, for example, is repeated every weekend across the whole of Venezuela. For the most part, they are meetings of local branches of the recently established United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) whose formation was announced six months ago by Chavez and whose first congress is likely to take place in December. The problem is that neither the structure nor the direction of the party have yet been defined. Instead small national commissions nominated by Chavez have been given the task of defining its character and form, though not its programme or aims. Because there is no formal organisation, these nominees become the effective leadership, and it is they who dictate the topics for discussion at the round tables every Saturday.

There has been some resistance, and in some cases people have insisted on writing their own agendas. An original proposal that their views should be represented by a single appointee at regional level has been withdrawn because it provoked so many objections. But it is still the case that the reforms will have to be voted on as a package, and that the debate on the detail is therefore largely formal.

In the end what promised to be a major public debate on the next phase of the Bolivarian process, the building of a 21st century socialism, will in fact be another referendum supporting Chavez. In every advert and presentation of the reforms it is stressed that these have all been written personally by Chavez. The right wing opposition, such as it is, focuses its attention on the clause that will allow him to extend his presidential term to seven years and apply for indefinite re-election. This serves to reinforce the sense among the majority of people that this is once again a vote on the popularity of Chavez.

Within the PSUV itself the same argument, that this is a test of loyalty, has created an atmosphere in which it is in fact very difficult to dissent or to argue particular points. The party has become more or less analogous with the state, so that the expression of doubt can be interpreted as hostility to, or at best scepticism about, the revolution. It is true that the PSUV membership is enormous - around six million. But it was not intended to be such a mass organisation.

The original conception seems to have been to create a political apparatus, perhaps along the lines of the Mexican PRI, which could cement the relationship between the people holding office in the state at all levels and create a mechanism for advancement or promotion. Not untypically, though, Chavez suddenly announced on one of his long Sunday TV programmes that he was inviting everyone and anyone to join. This changed the character of the party and served at the same time to create the kind of organised relationship with the mass movement which Chavez had failed to build previously. But it is a one-way relationship, as recent weeks have shown.

The Venezuelan left debated what to do earlier this year. There were divisions inside the UNT, the national trade union federation and several other organisations. For example, Orlando Chirino, a highly respected leader of the UNT, remained outside the PSUV; others in the leadership opted to go in. The same argument developed within other organisations of the left. Eventually, given the mass affiliation, most decided to join in the hope that it would be possible to build a critical current within the new party. That seems less and less likely.

Wheels within wheels

This tension between the expectation of a developing power at the grassroots and the reality of a growing concentration of control is increasingly defining political life.

Let this example stand for this deepening contradiction. The elected representatives of Fentrasep, the public employees' trade union with some 1.5 million members, went to the Ministry of Labour in mid-August to renegotiate the collective contract for their members. The minister, Ramón Rivero, is a member of the Bolivarian Trade Union Federation and an ex-Trotskyist. He refused to meet with the delegation and locked them inside a room in the ministry. No food or drink was provided; the delegates' families passed them through the windows. After six days they were driven out by hired thugs.

The legacy of bitterness and anger this left behind was extraordinary. I attended a meeting between the union executive and a trade union lawyer. The lawyer read to them the minister's deposition to the industrial tribunal in which he referred repeatedly to "so-called trade union representatives" and their "self proclaimed right" to represent their members. What most perplexed the delegates was the silence of Hugo Chavez, despite the fact that the treatment the delegation received was widely reported.

This points to the deeper processes that are unfolding beneath the surface. For Roland Denis, respected analyst and long-time leading activist of the 13 April Movement, many of the constitutional reforms and the construction of the PSUV are signs of a strategy conceived and pursued by Chavez himself.

In the present situation, the threat to the Bolivarian revolution does not come primarily from the right which, despite its continuing domination of the media, is divided and disorganised politically. The bureaucrats and government functionaries around Chavez, by contrast, are well organised. When he came to power in 1998, Chavez gathered around him a layer of supporters in the Movement for the Fifth Republic (MVR).

Many of them were opportunists who had enjoyed the privileges of the previous corrupt regime and switched to Chavez late in the day. Some proved to be fair weather friends, and supported the attempted coup against him in 2002. Others kept their powder dry and remained within government - but they maintained the habits of previous times, above all the habit of corruption. They interlocked with the powerful state governors too, as well as many of the city and town mayors, and they began to establish relationships with elements of private capital.

We could define these people as the Chavista right. There is no suggestion that they are planning any attempt to bring Chavez down - he was and remains the single key unifying factor ensuring support for the government. But they could evolve a series of instruments to hold back the Bolivarian Revolution and restrain Chavez's power. The rumbling frustration that palpably affects many of the best activists at local and grassroots levels suggests that the strategy is working - and the labour minister and his attendant team of trade union bureaucrats should be seen as part of that layer. The treatment of Fentrasep and the refusal to respond to the demands of the workers in factories like Sanitarios Maracay (where workers occupied the plant demanding nationalisation nearly a year ago) or the iron and steel plant at Sidor in Ciudad Guyana are a clear indication of where the minister's commitments lie.

The second power is Chavez himself, and his direct and complex relationship with the majority of the Venezuelan people who have repeatedly shown their unequivocal support for him. At community and grassroots level the corruption and lack of serious revolutionary commitment among many local bureaucrats often blocks the work of the best activists, as a number of recent local protests have shown. Yet those same activists insist that Chavez is unaware of what is happening on the ground, despite his obvious grasp of the most complex local issues.

Against this background, the constitutional reforms (or at least some of them) suggest a strategy on Chavez's part to counter what is happening at the level of government, which commentators refer to as "the established power". The political reforms include a longer presidential term and a right to constant re-election. Many clauses leave a final determining power in the president's hands - to define and redefine the administrative organisation of the country, and to make economic decisions over a state sector of the economy that will probably amount to half of the whole. The new political arrangements set out in the reforms are often contradictory, as are the economic divisions. And national security will increasingly fall to the army, despite the recommendations of a recent government appointed commission that the police should come under local control.

This is combined with a statement by Chavez just a couple of weeks ago that promotion within the military will also be within the president's brief and that the existing procedures (questionable and often corrupt though they are) will fade away.

Add to that a PSUV which is manifestly an instrument of presidential power and one in which debate will be virtually impossible, and the fact that there will be no possibility of voting for individual clauses, only the whole package. The excellent provisions for a shorter working day and a Social Security Fund for casual and precarious workers can only be approved in tandem with all the other provisions.

It is absolutely true, of course, that the reforms reiterate that "people's power" (poder popular) is the foundation of the constitution, that power lies with the people. The economy will be socialised to reinforce this. In fact, in the division between private, state and "socialised" property, the latter will be a tiny proportion of the whole (perhaps 5 percent) and divided into different kinds of property regime, including cooperatives whose dynamic corresponds more closely to the ethos of small business than to collective ownership. The consejos comunales, or community councils, will be given responsibilities at local level, as will the missions, but their strategic direction will be determined at the level of government and regional/state structures.

If this is poder popular, is it then the decentralisation of power and the government by the majority that the concept suggests? There exists within the Venezuelan constitution a clear mechanism for genuine democratic involvement from below - the delegate constituent assembly, like the one that agreed the 1999 Bolivarian constitution. Such a body could represent a real advance towards a 21st century socialism from below. It could conduct the open debate about the reform of the constitution that would give the mass organisations the sense that they were something more than simple blocs of support for a president who was in fact the only revolutionary subject.

There is, of course, another point of reference in the discussion about what poder popular can mean. The Cuban model of people's power is pyramidal and centralised, with a leadership appointed from the state and nominated delegates, with a national assembly meeting twice a year for a few days to give (invariably) unanimous support to the proposals coming from the state. The organs of local power in this model are simply given the role of executing those decisions and discussing how best that might be done. The Cuban influence on the Venezuelan government is an open secret. The fact that what Denis calls the "democracy of the people's assembly" is replaced by what is simply another vote of confidence in Chavez, with which no one could disagree, is a sign of the limitations of people's power.

The recent history of Venezuela yields one fundamental lesson. The Bolivarian revolution, which began with Chavez's election in 1998, became a revolutionary process in 2002, when the mass of Venezuelan people became the subjects of history and defeated the attempted coup against Chavez. In April 2002 the mass movement entered the stage of history not simply as insurrectionists (as they had during the wave of protests of 1989) but as potential revolutionaries, ready to shape the Bolivarian revolution by their collective action. In 2007 the struggle for socialism built from below - true people's power - continues.