The second national
conference of FRETECO (Revolution
Front of Occupied Companies) will be held on October 13-14 in Parque Central, Caracas.
The conference represents a major development in the role the organised workers are playing in the revolutionary process. It is not an accident that this meeting is taking place just a few weeks before a major turning point in the Bolivarian revolution: the presidential elections of December 3.
The Venezuelan working class is becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that a qualitative change is needed to strengthen the revolution and pursue the road to socialism that President Chávez opened with his speech in Puerto Alegre in January 2005.
FRETECO is calling for a mobilization of the workers in support of the campaign for 10 million votes for Chávez and calls for an all-out struggle for the expropriation of the capitalists. The struggle against capitalism must be generalised and the occupations of factories spread throughout the whole country as a first step in the direction of expropriating the Venezuelan oligarchy. This will be a necessary step in the building of a socialist plan of production under the democratic control of the working class and communities.
FRETECO finds its roots in the magnificent movement of the Venezuelan workers against the US-sponsored coup in April 2002 and the subsequent bosses' lockout of December 2002-January 2003, when the oligarchs of the country attempted to sabotage the government of Hugo Chávez by paralysing the oil industry and most of the private sector. The workers reacted by taking over some of the key economic activities of the country and managed in a few weeks to restore the activities of PDVSA, the state-owned oil company which is at the core of the Venezuelan economy. The prompt reaction on the part of the workers doomed the lockout to failure and saved the revolution from a very dangerous position.
A debate on workers' control and management has been taking place within a section of the workers' movement since the time of the struggle against the bosses' lockout. The workers were becoming aware that the bosses were no longer developing the productive forces and improving the living and working conditions of the majority of the population. On the contrary, the bosses were, and are, actually pursuing by any means possible the opposite - that is the sabotage of the economy and the undermining of the revolution. Some of the more advanced sections of the movement felt that the workers had the skills and the interest to take the management of the workplaces into their own hands. This had been done for a whole period during the struggle against the lockout after all!
After the defeat of the lockout there was a wave of factory closures. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs. This ferocious attack on the part of the oligarchy sparked off a reaction on the part of the workers and the communities. The workers waged long struggles in a number of workplaces against sell-offs and closures which finally culminated in the first victory when President Chávez finally decreed the nationalisation of Venepal (then Invepal), an important paper factory, in January 2005. This was followed by the victory of the workers of CNV (now Inveval), who won a hard-fought battle in May 2005 when their factory was nationalised under workers' control and management.
The recent struggles in Sel-Fex, Gottcha, Gamma, Friabasa, Promabasa, Sideroca, Sanitarios Maracay all began with closures or attempted closures and led to the taking over of the factories by the workers. These are only the most recent in a long list of workers' struggle which is growing larger and larger and testifies to the fact that the workers are willing to fight.
In June 2005, President Chávez presented a list of 800 companies that had been closed. He also presented a list of a further 1147 factories and companies that were not producing at full capacity due to the sabotage on the part of the bosses. He invited the workers to take over these firms and to run them, promising that the government would support them. Over the course of the last year a number of other firms have been expropriated and put under different forms of workers' management. A movement for workers' control developed in important state companies such as ALCASA, an aluminium smelter, and CADAFE, an electricity company.
This led to a debate on the character of cogestión (co-management). A large layer of state bureaucrats and advisors sent by the government tended to stress workers' participation but held to the idea that the management and key decision making power in the firms should be kept in the hands of the so-called experts and managers. However, the workers had other ideas. They soon began to discuss an interpretation of co-management which is rather different from the model developed in Europe after the Second World War, where co-management was used as a means to chain the workers to the ups and downs of the capitalist system and used as means to attack the rights and working conditions of the working class.
In the minds of the revolutionary workers in Venezuela co-management means workers' control and management of production. Since this movement began there has been a systematic attempt on the part of the reformist wing of the Bolivarian movement, in an unholy alliance with the reactionary bureaucracy of the Fourth Republic, to water down and sabotage any concrete steps in this direction. The reformists have attempted to prove that workers' control does not work - that "workers cannot manage production by themselves".
Facing the stubborn resistance of the state bureaucracy, as well as the fact that the UNT leadership underestimated the movement, the process of nationalisation has developed at a much slower pace than what was possible. Initiatives have been taken by the workers themselves.
FRETECO managed to organise and coordinate the revolutionary workers of the occupied and nationalised factories under workers' control, beginning with Invepal and Inveval. FRETECO also organised two important marches to the National Assembly and to the Miraflores Presidential palace to push forward their demands.
Once the first nationalisations were legally decreed the workers still had to undertake a long and tiring struggle to turn that victory into something concrete. They faced sabotage at all levels. Bourgeois companies cut supplies, denied access to credit and refused to buy the products of the factories run by the workers and in the meantime very little help came from state-owned firms.
The need to organise all the workers faced with the same situation and to campaign massively within the mass of the working class and the Bolivarian movement for the extension of the expropriations to key firms as well as the banks, transport and the distribution system came out of the very experience of these workers.
That is the real aim of FRETECO: build the consciousness of the workers, extend the process of occupations and taking over of factories and workplaces by the workers to push forward the revolution. The working class is the only class that can democratically run the economy according to the interests of the vast majority of the population.
The FRETECO Conference on October 13-14 will mark a major step forward in the struggle for the socialist revolution in Venezuela.
See also:
- Venezuela: Expropriations, reformism and elections – the contradictions are accumulating by Patrick Larsen (September 12, 2006)
- Venezuela - The debate on expropriations and the upcoming elections by William Sanabria (September 2006)