Quotations from the El Libertario website

One of the reasons I find these forums useful is it reminds me that there is no one anarchist movement. There is the anarchist movement, and then there is the anarchyist movement. good luck with all that, and let me tell you, it's not worth getting worked up over.

You should probably explain what you mean more by "Defending the IRA", or even *which* IRA. Personally if I was living in a working class neighbourhood in Ireland, I would probably be defending a section of one of the progressive IRA groups too.

I have exhaustively worked through the CRA's written material and demonstrated several times over how odious their position is. The only person who has even made anything resembling an attempt to refute that is Joseph K, and he only addresses about half my points, some of them in a conciliatory fashion, and his oppositional conclusions are dodgy at best, and generally rely on ignoring crucial points I make in the ensuing commentary on the quotes.

Perhaps you could explain to everyone here my "stalinist methodology". You seem keen on repeating the accusation that I'm a maoist and stalinist [or I guess to you these are one in the same], despite the fact that I've never claimed either ideology, or title for that matter, and I've been known to critically engage maoists in debate in and on public forums.

Which is particularly amusing to see an American slagging of Venezuelan working class people as the wealth elite.

Quote:

Which is particularly amusing to see an American slagging of Venezuelan working class people as the wealth elite.

...well he's actually Canadian.

What's up with that? That kind of shtuff would have been right up Uncle Joe's alley.

What is the Anarchist Relationships Commision (CRA - in spanish "Comision de Relaciones Anarquistas") from Venezuela?

* It's an affinity group. Born from a convergence of individual interests and aspirations, a correlation of opinions about fundamental theoretical and practical issues, a compatibility between different temperaments and lifestyles, and a mutual trust and friendship between all its members. being an association between like-minded people, the CRA is a free association of individuals.

* It's an egalitarian association. There are no leaders or commanders; and the social division of labor, so common in capitalist societies, is absent. Also, there is no subordination of the will of the minority to the majority; there is no "common interests" or "common will" as abstractions, separated and set over the actual desires and aspirations of the individuals it's made of. The activities of the CRA stem from agreements freely entered into by all its members; such agreements can be modified at any moment.

* The CRA is fully accountable for its actions (actions involving its internal agreements, or agreements between it and other groups). The CRA is an autonomous association, made by autonomous individuals. The actions of the CRA don't necessarily include the totality of the activities of every member. The individual is not exhausted into the group, just as the group itself doesn't exhaust itself into its relationships with other organizations.

* The CRA is not a merely symbolic association. It doesn't exist because its members pay a regular quota or assist periodically to meetings. Its existence is manifested by the actions it performs: "if there is no anarchist practice, there is no anarchist group". Its main goal is the propagation of anarchist ideas, so it makes a newspaper called "El Libertario", as well as other means to communicate the libertarian thought. It is both a means of propaganda by the deed, a means of propagating anarchist ideas, a means of coordinating and joining individual efforts, a means to support the practical activities of every one of its members, and a means to discuss the many questions related to the anarchist movement.

* The CRA does not live inside an ivory tower. Its members can (and do) participate, by means of direct action, in every kind of social struggles and intervenes, without commanding, in many different popular associations.

* Since anarchism is a total negation of authoritarian society, the CRA is not institutionalizable. It's not interested in being part of democratic legality.

_El Libertario: What it is and how you can participate_

El Libertario is a bi-monthly publication, who has been published 49 issues since November 1995, inspired by the antiauthoritarian ideal of anarchism and promoted by the CRA. The CRA is an affinity group opened to the participation and collaboration of people with libertarian leanings, as long as there is always an atmosphere free of sectarianism and of mutual respect. The central criterion of the affinity group is that we share the anarchist or libertarian ideal, whose aim is the creation of a society based on direct democracy, social justice, self-management, mutual aid and the free contract without the authoritarian imposition of neither the law or the force.

Each issue is made with the voluntary cooperation of those of us who believe it is important to circulate a pedagogical voice of counter-information, which is autonomous, without receiving any subsidies from any structure of power, and on
the free agreement of those who are members of it. You are invited to become part of this experience. Here there are no leaders nor bosses, instead there is a learning process and a permanent debate to fortify an horizontal and
antiauthoritarian network of social action to change things. We are trying to inform about the theory and action of the anarchists in Latin America and the entire world, but also to support all libertarian factors present in social
movements in our compass.

We do not receive - nor do we want to - any types of subventions from State organizations or any other power institution. Our activities are self-managed 110%. Because of this, one of the central task of El Libertario is its own distribution and its self-financing.

For contacts via snail mail, write to us (preferably in Spanish) to:
RAUL FIGUEIRA
Apartado Postal 128,
Carmelitas, Caracas,
VENEZUELA

By e-mail (also preferably in Spanish):

Websites:
< www.nodo50.org/ellibertario> (in spanish)
< www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/seccioningles.htm> (in english). On this section of the website we will be posting english articles based around the anarchists perspective on issues in Venezuela and around Latin America.

Our place: Centro de Estudios Sociales Libertarios < www.centrosocial.contrapoder.org.ve>
Calle Blasina, esquina San Luis, Sarria, Caracas, Venezuela.

****************************************************
* A Call and an Alert to Public Opinion *

[Public declaration, by the CRA - El Libertario and other people, in November 2006, before the presidential election in Venezuela]

As a group of activists of critical tendencies we have found it necessary before the present situation to signal an alert to all popular forces: workers, indigenous peoples, Afro Venezuelans, students, women, neighborhood groups, intellectuals and social groups.

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 finacial 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 though bribery and cronyism, entangled in a thought process that can only lead to totalitarianism. There has been a increased fragmentation of the social movemements while the power of the cliques has only grown.

In the same way, there is an exercise in direct militarism when the high branches of the public sector are in the hands of the military forces. The popular imagination has been channeled into the civil-military lie; arbitrariness is the actual situation, and the military sector need not look upon the past with nostalgia, since El Amparo in the 90`s is exactly the same as La Paragua today (two military massacres). As a result, Chavismo is simply the reproduction of puntofijismo, as demonstrated by its corruption and impunity.

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.

This call for abstention is not based on the problem of electoral fraud, which we do not deny; nor does it coincide with the opportunistic call to abstention coming from certain quarters. 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.

We bring this alert forward so that all agents of social change may actively organize around and promote absentionism through their own struggles, without messiahs or authoritarian bureaucrats, in order to demonstrate to the scaffold of power that it is ineffective and antidemocratic. Only the collapse of the existing system will guarentee transformation. Otherwise, we alert you to increases in repressive practices in the immediate future within the framework of the worsening of the structural crisis of the country.

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.

---------------------------------------------

* Depolarization and autonomy: Challenges to Venezuela’s social movements after D-3 *

[El Libertario, # 49, january 2007, Editorial]

Visualizing what will happen to Venezuela’s social movements after the elections scheduled for December 3 – with the re-election of president Chavez – cannot be done without at least a general understanding of their historical path. During the second half of the 80’s the economic crises after the “black Friday” was the catalyst of new forms of organizing and demanding that began to develop in this Caribbean country: student and neighborhood movements, women, counterculture, ecological and pro-human rights. Subjective efforts that although coming from the left, did not automatically follow the organizational schemes of the guevarist-lenninists who claimed to be the heirs of the armed insurrection of the 60’s. The “Caracazo” (February 1989) as the expression of the growing malaise, marks the beginning of a civil society as alienated from the traditional political parties - networks of State’s clients - as it is from the left political parties. The effervescence that ensues weaves a social fabric out of infinite socio-political initiatives, with varied and developing levels of mutual interaction, which played a lead role in the mobilizations for the greatest objective at the time: getting Carlos Andres Perez out of power.

Chavez’s original movement raises itself above this dynamic and becomes the face of the people’s malcontent, achieving legitimacy at the polls in 1999 by capitalizing on the prevailing wish for change that ran through the country, but also revitalizing the populist, statist and caudillista ethos so much a part of Venezuela’s historical make-up. The imposition of a personal mode of domination was preconditioned to the break up of the citizen-led dynamics that brought it to power. Among the many causes driving this process there is the polarization imposed by the contending elites: those banned from power representing the traditional productive sectors, and the new “leftist” bureaucracy giving legitimacy to the interests of those sectors crucial to the economic globalization of the country.

After 1999 the social fabric is fragmented (neighborhood, student and ecologist movements), neutralized (human rights) and co-opted (indigenous, women, counterculture) by the expectations created by a government rhetorically of the left. In turn this has caused some expression of popular organization with no autonomy within a new network of clients, amidst one of the greatest economic windfalls ever, brought on by the high oil prices.

These popular initiatives, instructed from above, have some common elements that distinguish them from other social movements:
(1) Vertical solidarity supplants intra-class solidarity: mobilizations follow a political agenda imposed by the top; their calls for solidarity when others in the movement suffer repression are almost non-existent.
(2) An identity permeated by personality cult and a lack of history and arguments different from those originating in the seat of power, which prevents any hypothetical “deepening of the revolution”.
(3) Their praxis aims to legitimize government’s projects, without any other parallel or different process.
(4) A progressing wearing out due to its adoption of politico-electoral cumulative logic.

Default on the expectations generated by Chavez has caused the exponential increase of popular protests during 2006, something that will continue to grow in the coming year. But it is precisely the blackmail of polarization – “to give weapons to the right”, “manipulated by imperialism” – which contains the growing discontent against a state that neither transformed itself when it could, nor has a new bureaucracy able to make policies different from Latin American populist welfare.

The challenges facing the social movements, after the hypothetical presidential re-election, are not only of a practical order such as its autonomous configuration or experimenting with diverse practices and spaces of learning and counter hegemony. They are also theoretical. Overcoming imperialist Manichaeism, centered exclusively on George Bush, would entail squeezing the multiple dynamics of money flow and the power of global capital. It is precisely the social movements, from both poles, which have internalized the discipline of being a cheap energy exporting country, in spite of any consideration for the environment, deepening in the role assigned to Venezuela by economic globalization. Sticking to the events of the last few months – actions against carbon exploitation in Zulia, protests by street vendors in Caracas and traditional fishermen in Guiria – and how they have been opposed and criminalized by the Chavez’s rank and file, we foresee a long period of conflict among the oppressed: some protesting for a few structural improvements and other opposing them to climb up to positions within the hierarchy of those embedded in the personal state.

Wow, I have even less respect for the CRA after reading that. What a gong show.

Its main goal is the propagation of anarchist ideas, so it makes a newspaper called "El Libertario" ... It is both a means of propaganda by the deed ...

Wow, I have even less respect for the CRA after reading that. What a gong show.

This call for abstention is not based on the problem of electoral fraud, which we do not deny; nor does it coincide with the opportunistic call to abstention coming from certain quarters....

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 Lib urges people not to support Chavez, because he is a dictator

That El Libertario quote is encouraging people not to vote, (a key strategy of the far right as well, as it could make the election seem illegitemate to observers, and less valid to all), while curiously claiming to not be affiliated with the other people (the far right) telling Venezuelans not to vote for the same reasons. The reason for such a denial could only be that it looks as though El Lib has gone right over to the insurrectionist or occupation-seeking sector of the ultra-conservative Venezuelan elite.

As I understand, we anarchists don'
't generally intricately dovetail our campains with the ultra-conservative domestic elite.
Maybe I'm wrong about that though, cuz 888 and daniel seem to beg to differ.

Arrr Captain Haddock. Thanks for your 2 shillings, you've really upped the level of debate here. Fliver the kivers, hoist the sail. Arrr.

You seem to be infected with a nasty strain of platformism.

revol68 wrote:

You seem to be infected with a nasty strain of platformism.

Are you saying he's repeating a line decided on by a group he's a member of?

MJ wrote:

revol68 wrote:

You seem to be infected with a nasty strain of platformism.

Are you saying he's repeating a line decided on by a group he's a member of?

no i'm just pointing out that his line of argument is very similar to that put forward by some people in the WSM and Nefac for defending national liberation.