Fight Back News service is circulating the following August 31 article from Tribuna Popular , a publication of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV). The article was translated by the staff of Fight Back!

PCV: MASS PRESSURE FOR THE ANC TO APPLY POPULAR MEASURES

The successful completion of the July 30 election of members to the National Constituent Assembly (ANC), as well as their subsequent installation on August 4 and the beginning of the Assembly's operation, constitute a resounding defeat to imperialism’s attempt to throw our country into chaos and break up our institutions.

This was one of the conclusions of the 4th Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), which was held on August 6 to analyze the new scenarios that arose out of the development of the constituent process, according to Oscar Figuera, Secretary General of the PCV.

Figuera said that “this is an anti-imperialist victory for the whole people, not only chavismo, but it will be short-lived if the ANC only sticks to changing the political superstructure of the country and is not able to immediately generate a set of measures and constituent acts that attack the essential problems of our people.”

Faced with the policy of imperialism, which drew the line of terrorist violence to try to prevent the ANC election, the PCV positively views the speed with which this constitutional period began, as well as the formation of the ANC Directive and the decision to restructure the Public Ministry.

As part of the imperialist plans to try to delegitimize the ANC, the PCV denounced the position taken by the owners of Smartmatic to play a role.

Popular-Worker Leadership

“The Central Committee agreed to call on the ANC and its constituents to keep in touch with the masses, with the people, and to take on genuinely revolutionary proposals that emanate from the labor movement and popular organizations,” said Figuera.

The highest body of collective leadership of the PCV, between one Congress and another, determined the immediate tasks that the militant communist activists will carry out through all their structures, especially focusing to “deepen the efforts with the diverse expressions of the revolutionary movement, and to promote the holding of constituent popular assemblies at the territorial and sectoral levels.”

Figuera explained that the guidance from the mass movements is to feed and expand the programmatic proposals that were presented during the electoral campaign, in order to “bring them to the ANC to be incorporated in their agenda, but also to exercise before the ANC the mass pressure necessary to ensure that these proposals are immediately implemented as measures and constituent acts.”

“In the context of advancing the worker-peasant and popular alliance, for the unrestricted defense of the people’s rights and with the objective of a revolutionary deepening of the Bolivarian process, the PCV and other patriotic organizations will fight for the ANC to assume and implement policies that transcend the administrative institutionality of the state and the government, and have as its central axis the leadership of workers-popular control,” emphasized Figuera.

The Communist leader said that “it is urgent to combat the high cost of living, speculation, corruption and insecurity; to restore the rights of workers who have been violated, as a matter of labor stability, in which the ANC must approve all decisions ordered by Labor Inspectorates that have not been complied with by the public and private employers.”

Peace with social justice

“The ANC has a historic responsibility not to disappoint the message expressed on July 30, of widespread condemnation to foreign intervention and the violence of the fascist extreme right at the service of imperialist capital,” reflected Figuera.

According to the PCV, there was a wide participation of the popular sectors and the middle strata that identify with the Bolivarian process, but there was also the participation of important sectors that do not support the approaches or policies of the [Bolivarian] process, even openly oppose it; but all expressed their opposition to fascist and terrorist violence and the threat of foreign intervention.

“For this reaction of unity from the Venezuelan people, there was an important role played by the popular movements and the revolutionary forces; so we are convinced that the aggressive policy of imperialism, accompanied by the aggression of oligarchic and right-wing governments in Latin America, will increasingly raise and mobilize the Venezuelan people,” said Figuera.

“The general approach to building a society of peace,” said the Secretary General, “can only materialize and be durable if it is a product of social justice, because true peace is not possible in a society controlled by the exploiters, because exploitation is class violence, violence of a minority against a majority of the people, because poverty is violence of the capitalist society against wide sections of the people.”

Active Presence of the People

The PCV stressed that the interpretation of the results of the ANC election should not be of domination, sectarianism, or arrogance, but of critical and self-critical analysis that correctly evaluates the current political moment and leads all of the revolutionary forces — popular, democratic and progressive — to collectively build a national approach that serves to profoundly transform our dependent capitalist society.

“The ANC is an opportunity to deepen the debate about what the new society should be, a society that is not governed by the principles of capitalist domination and exploitation. That is why it is necessary for the working class and the working people to raise their levels of organization, awareness, participation and leadership, so that they can fulfill the vanguard role that historically corresponds to them in the process of change, in order to give this new cycle of popular offensive a more definite and precise class content, and a new level of combativeness,” added Figuera.

For the communists, in Figuera’s words, “the ANC has to rely on the active presence of the people, debating and defending their own proposals. The ANC is a space in which the pressure of the masses must be present, because the masses must mobilize, they must make their demands felt, they must raise their flags, they must bring to the ANC their own proposals, not only in terms of changes to the Constitution, but also in regard to constitutive acts which signify the immediate defense of the interests and rights of the people, the working class, the peasantry, the intelligentsia, the youth, the students and the women.”

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