Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Last night's session

Author:Tucker Goodrich
Posted:8/31/2000; 9:53:15 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 8/30/2000
Msg #:20578 (In response to 20567)
Prev/Next:20577 / 20579

If it quacks like a duck...

Casto celebrated his rise to power and his election (in that order)

He's gone to visit Qaddafi and Hussein.

The middle class is fleeing.

He was backed by the Communist parties in the election.

Castro didn't campaign as a Communist either. But there he is.

P.S. From chapter 14 of In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chávez and the Transformation of Venezuela (Verso), by Richard Gott.]

LA CAUSA R, PATRIA PARA TODOS AND POLITICS IN GUAYANA

... Ciudad Guayana is the birthplace of La Causa R, a political organization that is unique to Venezuela. Originally set up in the early 1970s, La Causa R, or Radical Cause, developed in 1997 into Patria Para Todos (PPT), the Fatherland for Everyone, now an integral part of Chávez’s governing coalition, the Polo Patriótico. The PPT provides the government with several of its most important ministers, and many of its most lucid ideas.

La Causa R was founded in the 1970s by Alfredo Maneiro, a guerrilla fighter of the Communist Party in the previous decade. Maneiro ‘s group, like the Movimiento al Socialismo of Teodoro Petkoff, had split away from the old Venezuelan Communist Party in 1970 at the end of the guerrilla war. Maneiro, born in 1939, had been a member of the central committee of the Communist Party, and a guerrilla commander on the eastern front. When the Communist Party splintered in the late 1960s, he was close to the Chinese position in the Sino-Soviet dispute, an attitude radically different from that of dissidents like Petkoff who were moving towards European-style social democracy. One of Maneiro’s disciples was Pablo Medina, once a labour organizer, now an important and prominent civilian supporter of Hugo Chávez, and a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1999.

Maneiro’s group participated in the formation of MAS in January 1971, but it soon moved off in a new direction. Maneiro had been highly critical of the old Communist Party of the 1960s, and not just because of its ideology. He began to question the desirability of political parties themselves, and soon he had formulated an ideological position hostile to these organizational constructs. In a collection of articles, Notas Neqativas, published in 1971, he outlined the political position of a new left-wing nationalist group he called ‘Venezuela 83’. It was to be the forerunner of the party known as La Causa R.



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