Aporrea’s website is full of articles where its authors criticize Nicolás Maduro, accusing him of being a traitor to Commander Chávez’s legacy, of validating the capitalist economic system and of not taking the correct measures that will lead us to the socialist paradise. I am not going to go out and defend the President, because he does not need me to defend him and I might muddle him more; but I do think that I should give my opinion, since I have been among trade unionists almost all my life and I know their way of thinking and acting.
The first thing to clarify is that the Government and the Union are not original products of any revolution and that both are the creation of capitalist economic liberalism; therefore, “you cannot ask the elm for pears” and unless a trade unionist makes a socialist revolution within a capitalist government. No system does the Hara Kire, that is, commit suicide, as the Japanese do for honor.
The second thing to clarify is that no government is formed or constituted in a country to revolutionize anything, the laws that will govern it were made to preserve the dominant status quo economically and socio-culturally. It is the internal forces who can modify or guide the government’s action and it is not the other way around. For example, if the majority of the population accepts and loves the capitalist economic system, they will resist any initiative of a ruler who tries to impose another model on it. If in Venezuela the majority of the population were organized in Self-Sustainable Productive Communes, the possibility of implementing the System of Socialist Property of the Means of Production would be easier.
The third thing to agree on is that the political parties and the organized people are called upon to implement and direct social processes with a formed militancy, which will carry out educational and legal transformations, which will make any internal change possible within the government structures that should favor and facilitate the revolutionary action of the population towards the desired model.
Having made the previous observations, we are going to try to explain why the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela cannot be accused of being a traitor to the revolutionary cause that he inherited from Commander Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. The first thing we observe is that, in Venezuela, as in all the countries of the world, the presidents swear before the Constitution that governs them, that they will defend it to the death and will faithfully comply with the norms that are established there. In our current Constitution, it does not appear anywhere that the elected President is obliged to carry out a Socialist Revolution or to expropriate the Means of Production. Chávez, while he was in office, what he did was create structures parallel to those established in order to show that another model of society was possible. From there arose Las Misiones, the new universities and the popular militias.
Economically, something has least been done, which can be classified as revolutionary, since the majority of the population is convinced that private property is sacred, that the US dollar is the one that is really worth and that the production process of goods and services It must be carried out through the private capitalist company where employers and employees must converge. Such is this conviction that the Code of Commerce has not been touched by our legislators or with the petal of a rose and the first Law, issued by President Nicolás Maduro, was the Fair Prices to ensure businessmen a profit margin greater than 30% in each capital investment transaction.
And why did Nicolás Maduro do that? Very simple to explain, because the first thing any union member must do is collaborate with the employer so that the company where they work flourishes and can pay the wages to the workers who are members of the union. If the company is well, its workers must also be there and the union member will enjoy the necessary prestige for protecting them and for their re-election every time there are elections.
A second action that is worth noting by the President of the Unionist Worker is the Carnet de la Patria. In all companies, the person who really manages the payroll of their workers is the employer through their managers. The unionist finds out how many workers there are in the company through the payroll that the Human Resources management or Chief of Personnel gives him and from there he does his job of organizing them in the union he directs, then pass them the names so that it can deduct him the union dues to support the union. If the union organization is professional and numerous, it can have headquarters and administrative staff, if it is small, the Secretary General’s briefcase is enough. For a trade unionist like Nicolás Maduro, the second priority is to know and control the payroll of workers that the company has, which is now called Venezuela and creates the Carnet de la Patria to affiliate them and know for sure how many are those who are registered to give it union protection (government).
The third thing that every trade unionist knows is that firefighters do not step on the hose and that the union and the company form a monolithic unit, where one depends on the other. This is the reason why the Unionist –President, does not take any measure that affects employers and will rather stimulate their profits in order to favor the workers that he represents. Their logic is, the more the employers earn, the more they benefit my affiliated workers, and this is so true that nowadays no private company worker receives minimum wages, because if this were the case, neither the company could be exploited by the employer. That is why the government as such is not interested in controlling the prices of the goods produced by the workers, since any control, not established in collective bargaining, is considered an attack against the freedom of trade and the trade union rights of free hiring , in addition to a violation of the sacred laws of Supply and Demand that govern the capitalist economy.
Fourth: Every unionist knows that he is part of a binomial with his Employer, where if one of the factors is attacked, the other is also affected, that is why the work of every worker leader is to preserve the company in which Prest your services. In the Venezuelan atypical case, the Employer resides in the USA and the Managers are in Venezuela. Because of Chávez, the bosses’ labor relations deteriorated and Maduro has had a hard time rebuilding them.
Chávez’s idea of building an organization of the social sector exploited by capitalism at the continental level, (that is, a Professional Union with affiliates in all the countries of the continent = UNASUR) failed and this reduced Maduro’s strength. Seeing him weak, the Boss replaced him with another leader (Juan Guaidó) to fulfill the mission that Maduro could not carry out.
This is more or less a synthesis of the worker-employer relations with which every worker leader has to deal and Nicolás Maduro says and proclaims to be one of them and “by confession, relief of evidence” … … as the lawyers say. So those who are waiting for a Socialist Revolution to take place here with Maduro as President, get off that cloud. So far nowhere in the world has it happened, not in Poland with Lech Walesa, not in Brazil with Lula, not in Bolivia with Evo; rather the social and economic demands, achieved by the workers during long years of struggles and sacrifices, were annulled.
For those who hate me and cannot stand me and are going to invent that I am jumping the fence, also attacking Nicolás Maduro, I tell them that Nicolás is the best thing that could have happened to us, that Chávez was not wrong and that we will have Maduro until 2025 safe.
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