Venezuela: Class struggle heats up in battle for workers’ control

Federico Fuentes, Caracas Green Left Weekly corespondent in Venezuela 25 July 2009 On July 22, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez again declared his complete support for the proposal by industrial workers for a new model of production based on workers’ control. This push from Chavez, part of the socialist revolution, aims at transforming Venezuela’s basic industry. However, it faces resistance from within the state bureaucracy and the revolutionary movement. Presenting his government’s “Plan Socialist Guayana 2009-2019”, Chavez said the state-owned companies in basic industry have to be transformed into “socialist companies”. The plan was the result of several weeks of intense discussion among revolutionary workers from the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana (CVG). The CVG includes 15 state-owned companies in the industrial Guayana region involved in steel, iron ore, mineral and aluminium production. The workers’ roundtables were established after a May 21 workshop, where industrial workers raised radical proposals for the socialist transformation of basic industry. Chavez addressed the workshop in support of many of the proposals. But events between the May 21 workshop and Chavez’s July 22 recent announcement reveal much of the nature of the class struggle inside revolutionary Venezuela.

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No Volverán — The Venezuelan Revolution Now, is a documentary about the Venezuelan Revolution, featuring factories under workers’ control. More infomation, including a downloadable version at Hands off Venezuela.