Friday, March 14, 2008
Union leader shot in Venezuela steel strike clashes
A union leader was shot and wounded in the leg on Friday during clashes between workers and police over a strike at Venezuela’s largest steelmaker, Ternium Sidor, union officials said. Jose 'Acarigua' Rodriguez, the president of SUTISS, the union that has called several strikes in recent weeks in a dispute over a collective bargaining contract, was taken to the hospital to be treated for his wound, union secretary-general Nerio Fuentes. About 50 workers were also detained by police during the clashes that erupted after workers blocked a main road leading to the Argentine-controlled steelmaker.
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I don't see a worker-controlled socialist state here. I see a bourgeois state with maybe social-democratic pretensions, which lets loose its police dogs on workers who are fed up with being jerked around by management and the government.
ReplyDeleteIf Venezuela actually is undergoing a socialist revolution, then the bourgeois police have to be put in their place -- and eventually disbanded as a force in society. And if the working-class of Bolivar state is so atomized and lacks class-consciousness to the extent that the rest of the workplaces in the city won't lend total support to this strike in order to bring the bosses -- and their pigs -- to their knees, then I guess the critics of the "Bolivarian Revolution" are at least half-correct in asserting that there is little 'socialist' about the whole thing. At least so far.
I hope the workers seize all the factories in the city. And then set up permanent consejos obreros, factory by factory, and unite them city-wide to take control of the whole place, for the socialist revolution -- and then let's see what the "bolivarian" bourgeoisie has to say then.