On September 26 the people of Venezuela will be electing a new National Assembly. The reactionary Oligarchy, backed by imperialism, is taking advantage of the shortcomings of the revolution to strengthen its position and prepare for the counter-revolution. The Venezuelan revolution has gone a long way, but key economic levers are still in the hands of the Oligarchy. What is required is to fully carry out the socialist revolution and expropriate the capitalists and landlords. That is the only way of making the revolution irreversible.
The work of the Pakistani Marxists of The Struggle has been noted, both by our friends in the labour movement and also our enemies. The work has been extremely successful. Unfortunately, in the course of building a principled Marxist tendency, some comrades can fall victims of opportunist adaptation. This is the case of former IMT member and ex-member of the National Assembly, Manzoor Ahmed. In this Statement of the EC of The Struggle we set the record straight on what happened.
On the night of March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was shot through the heart by killers, carrying out orders that came straight from the reactionary oligarchy that rules over the country. He was killed because he was giving voice to the needs of the oppressed. To this day justice has not been done and the masses are still waiting.
The coup in Honduras and the stepping up of a US military presence in Colombia are serious warnings to the masses of Latin America. On top of this the present world economic crisis is having an impact on the Venezuelan economy. All this is posing very sharply the need for a turn to a genuine revolutionary programme on the part of the Bolivarian movement.
In the last couple of months events in Venezuela and other Latin American countries have enormously sharpened the contradictions between revolution and counter-revolution. First there was the coup in Honduras at the end of June, which acted as a warning for the masses in El Salvador, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Then there was the announcement of the plans to upgrade the US military presence in Colombia, which has provoked a severe diplomatic crisis between Venezuela and Colombia and a state of alert among the Bolivarian masses. Most importantly, however, the world economic recession has had profound effects on the situation in Venezuela, where workers are now facing ferocious attacks from the bosses.
