Venezuela, Elections 2006
Anarchists Say No to Chavez

The Fifth Estate received this communication prior to the December 3 presidential election from the Venezuelan Commission of Anarchist Relations (Comision de Relaciones Anarquistas) and its organ, El Libertario. Hugo Chavez won handily against his opponent. Venezuelan government officials announced that 70 percent of eligible voters had cast ballots.

We maintain that the two options publicized by the established order- Chavez as much as Rosales-represent the domination of financial power and empire over Venezuela, and present a scene of super-exploitation, unemployment, and social exclusion in addition to the fortification of big capital.

Eight years into the “revolution” or the so-called Process, we find that there is a social misery that has resulted from the consolidation of the State and the destruction/co-optation of social groups. In recent years, the political regimen has deteriorated into a total submission to transnational capital on the part of the Chavez government, a fact that Rosales and the opposition pretend to not be aware of

The established game consists of the following: faced with the superficial and limited reforms of the current administration — which are driven by the Stalinist left within the capitalist State — the opposition pretends that these measures are communist, when in reality they form part of the dynamic of global capitalism. What we have seen is State management with punctual payments of external debt, the surrender of the Orinoco’ Delta oil and the natural gas of Falcon state, destruction of the environment (Imataca, Perija and Paria), hegemony and the increase of the commercial sector, of financial speculation, and the creation of flexible labor and social exclusion.

The ideological discourse of the State is crushing and hegemonic and has managed to block all critical forces, which have been silenced through bribery and cronyism, entangled in a thought process that can only lead to totalitarianism. There has been increased fragmentation of the social movements while the power of the cliques has only grown.

Based on these considerations, we call upon all indigenous peoples, peasants, students, professors, intellectuals, workers, women, Afro Venezuelans, neighborhood coalitions, social groups and people in general to abstain from voting because there will be no substantial change. The reality is that representative democracy based on populism vs. opposition symbolizes nothing new, but is merely a backward sector anchored in the cold war, just like Chavismo.

Required change will never be given through the electoral process, but will rather be produced through the autonomous initiative of the social movements themselves. the grave social, economic and cultural crisis suffered by Venezuela does not find its answer in electoral politics, which banalizes and liquidates all struggle.

Faced with the bourgeois, genocidal State of the past 40 years, which is expressed in the candidacy of Manuel Rosales, the alternative cannot be support for the totalitarian State of Hugo Chavez.

El Libertario is online at nodo50.org/ellibertario

Related articles in this issue: Voting and Depolarization and Autonomy.