Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Venezuela — Interview with Stalin Pérez Borges: “It will be very difficult to defeat us.”

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Venezuela — Interview with Stalin Pérez Borges: “It will be very difficult to defeat us.”

Click here to access the interview posted by Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal.
(Because the interview was first posted in Spanish on February 7, it must have occurred before then.)

A representative from this website interviewed an important union leader from Valencia, an important industrial center in Venezuela. I believe he offers an important analysis of the Empire's latest effort at "regime change" against the government of Venezuela together with the internal problems and possibilities of resistance from the Chavista forces which have grown over the past 20 years. (Having said that, I think you can skip Borges' rather confusing and lengthy answer to the question "What did you think of the recent meeting of members of the Citizens’ Platform for the Defence of the Constitution with Juan Guaidó?")

Before commenting on the current political crisis, how would you describe the social and economic crisis in Venezuela today?

This question leads to a very long answer, so I apologise if it gets tiresome. The economic and social crisis has grown exponentially for about five years now, and has got to this rotten state of hyper-inflation that we’re barely coping with, and which is breaking world records. This is the cause for the huge discontent that we have at this stage and for the important change in the correlation of political power in this juncture. In my opinion this is a consequence of three fundamental facts: two of them circumstantial, and one structural.