What is happening in Venezuela?
This is just like Florida 2000, only the contest in Venezuela wasn’t between bad and badder, but between a genuine choice for progressive change to serve as a beacon to the rest of the downtrodden and subaltern in the world versus stagnation and tepidness.
After having initially called the referendum for Chavez, sadly, virtually all of the Western media is now calling the referendum definitively for the ‘no’ side and thus against Chavez.
With Chavez having just, as I write this, apparently conceded defeat, I am reminded of the words of Robert Frost who wrote:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
May we socialists and Marxists continue to find the strength to pursue, in the words of Walt Whitman, “the struggle ever renew’d” and not be disheartened by this shocking stillbirth.
Sadly, depressing. Way to whip out the Frost… as if this wasn’t depressing enough!
Your, uh, “friend” hasn’t been back to visit you yet… interesting…
There is a lot of interesting things about this. First, its interesting to compare and contrast this with virtually every other so called ‘democratic country. How often has a canadian PM or an american president gone to a referendum for, well, ANYTHING. I seem to recall earlier this year Bush made significant changes to the executive powers of the President, how often did the word ‘referendum’ come up?
However, remember the doc ‘the revolution will not be televised’. The ‘revolution’ in Venezuela is being run by the population, NOT Chavez. Hopefully Chavez will work towards setting up a more democratic system so that the changes will not be dependant on the executive.
It seems at first to be a quite sad setback, but I agree with matinp, there were some good things in that referendum, but it was also aimed at strengthening the change which would come from above; the working class needs to push for itself. A true revolution can only work from the bottom up.