Caracas Daily Journal (Jeremy Morgan): Mixed news surrounded President Hugo Chávez' proposed United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in the wake of its founding convention. While members waited to hear of the president's choice of people he wants on the directive elected last weekend, party Vice President Alberto Müller Rojas said the PSUV still had to designate officials who would be in control at the regional level.
This is the key to Chávez' much-vaunted new "geography of power," which has yet to materialize as a fact, and about which party activists privately say there is still much discussion.
Activists were still poring over the list of members of the directive. Most of them are well-known figures from Chávez' Fifth Republic Movement (MVR) or its two smaller allies, Patria Para Todos (PPT) and the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV).
Dissident elements in both PPT and the PCV are said to have complained that the MVR was bagging all the best jobs in the top echelon. Discontent reportedly reached the point of opposing the plan for their parties to merge with – and in effect disappear into – the PSUV. However, it's now claimed that feathers have been smoothed and formerly disgruntled activists at PPT and the PCV are willing to sign up at the PSUV.
Talk of setting up a "Patriotic Pole" made up of the president's supporters resumed in the background. Whether this would go against or work towards forming the PSUV is a moot point.
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This is a frankenstein freak of a party as it stands. I foresee many problems if most of the people in it do not stick strongly to the democratic process of building leadership and party power from the grassroots up. And since this party already has all sorts of opportunists clamoring their way to the top of the heap, it looks like a sure thing to be an abortion of a party in any truly democratic and socialist sense -- unless it quickly becomes recognized, and becomes conscious, official policy, that factions do indeed exist inside this party. And must exist as well: because in no way is there any unity of vision here, other than maybe the growing 'cult of personality' around the person of Hugo Chávez.
ReplyDeleteAnd that is not a very good basis on which to build a socialist movement and society.
People have to understand that "factionalism" is not necessarily a bad thing; indeed, factions are in fact expressions of ideological difference and must be worked thru in "dialog" in order to reach some synthesis or understanding of a way forward. And only in this way can this rather counterfeit simulacrum of a "party" actually become a real class-struggle party of the laboring masses.
It can be done -- and it had better be done.