On November 24th the Wall Street Journal ran an article that was highly
flattering to Stalin–Ivan Stalin González, that is. Stalin (he prefers
being called by this name) is the leader of the privileged university
students who are on the front-lines opposing the proposed constitutional
reforms that would make the government more directly accountable to the
people beginning with an end to term limits.
Stalin’s background would be familiar to those who run into his
counterparts in the radical movement in their own countries:
"Mr. Chávez’s description also hardly fits Mr. González. The
27-year-old, sixth-year law student grew up in a poor household that
dreamed of a Communist Venezuela. His father, a print-machine operator,
was a high-ranking member of the Bandera Roja, or Red Flag, a hard-line
Marxist-Leninist party that maintained a guerrilla force until as
recently as the mid-1990s. Its members revered Josef Stalin as well as
Albania’s xenophobic Enver Hoxha. As a boy, Mr. González remembers
packing off to marches with his sisters, Dolores Engels and Ilyich,
named in honor of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
"As a young man, Mr. González burnished his leftist credentials, joining
Marxist youth groups and following his father into the Bandera Roja. He
traveled to Socialist youth conferences in Latin America."
(The WSJ article can only be read in its entirety by googling “Ivan
Stalin Gonzalez” through google/news.)
Hugo Chávez described Bandera Roja thusly:
"Groups like them appear to have given themselves the holy mission of
proclaiming themselves to be the only revolutionaries on the planet, or
at any rate in this territory. And those who don’t follow their dogmas
are not considered genuine revolutionaries."
Unlike miserable ultraleft sectarians like Bandera Roja, the Marxists
who have helped to elect Hugo Chávez do not see themselves on any such
“holy mission.” Indeed, it is the absence of such self-aggrandizement
that has so disoriented much of the left outside of Venezuela, at least
those sectors of the left that still clutch to “vanguardist” illusions.
While most of them are not nearly as bad as Bandera Roja, they still see
Hugo Chávez as an impediment to the True Revolution that is gathering
momentum at the grass roots level. In this scenario, the only thing that
can save Venezuela is some kind of latter-day version of the Soviets in
1917 and a working-class revolutionary party to lead them toward a
seizure of power. While Chávez’s government is a decent social
democratic alternative to the neoliberal solution that the US would
prefer, it falls short of their ideals–the operative word being ideal.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/ultraleft-counter-revolutionaries-in-venezuela/
