- Sun Apr 06, 2014 11:44 am
#366006
Good article on Venezuela from Bhaskar Sunkara.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/16511/t ... _movements" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;Among Venezuelan workers, still overwhelmingly supportive of the Bolivarian Revolution, the mood is less Obejas’ “we are all Venezuelans” and more “they will never come back.” They being such scions of privilege as Leopoldo López Mendoza, María Corina Machado, and Henrique Capriles Radonski, whose class had a stranglehold on the nation’s future until the rise of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian movement in the late 1990s, and who have been struggling ever since to regain their advantage.
The years of left-wing activity that followed were hardly without setbacks or failures, but they witnessed the politicization of many who were previously neglected. Though unevenly implemented, assembly councils and worker cooperatives were constructed, representing a depth of democratic participation rarely seen in human history. Materially, poverty fell by well over a third during Chávez’s tenure, and extreme poverty by 58 percent. Quality healthcare and education became accessible to ordinary people.
It should be of little surprise, then, to find that every block in Venezuela is not the scene of anti-state unrest. Even the New York Times headlined a piece, “Slum Dwellers in Caracas Ask, What Protests?” In working-class communities across Venezuela, the grassroots demonstrations thriving elsewhere provoke only fear that the social and economic gains of the last decade will be rolled back and the old neoliberal regime, along with its daily humiliations of poverty and powerlessness, restored.
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.