Chavez lost that referendum

Hmm interesting. The thing is pgh is that they have played played up the constitution card so much, and their strategy has been so dependant on a charismatic leader that this is a very serious blow. As well much of the workers movement's emphasis in Venezuela has been channeled into political avenues, switching gears to that sort of mass direct action- while adviseable may be dificult. Also doing so would open them up to criticisms of behaving in an anti democratic manner, as the 6 hour day was a major referendum issue.

I'm curious how differently things would have gone if they had tossed out all of the 'terribles' that MJ listed along with the removal of term limits, which is also pretty crummy in my opinion, and had run the referendum just on the 6 hour day. Of course the reason they were bundled together is pretty telling of what brand of populism we are talking about here. I mean its not an accident that a bunch of very popular reforms for the working class were packaged in with others that were entirely political in nature.

But hey I'm just the son of the north american upper class, so if you excuse me I'm going to go for a drive in my Jaguar.

indeed.

middle class is a vague political term i think.... perhaps be a bit more specific?

i can't believe he lost! That's insane.

that ole chavez charisma.

err!

Aha!

wow. So the question is not 'why didn't he win this by a landslide' but indeed 'why didn't 45% of the population give a fuck?'

The IFA section in Venezuela might have something to say, though i have ansty suspicion they might be celebrating the result.

tbh, your guess is as good as mine from over in poland.

That's what we have in Canada, what they have in Australia. The key word was "re-election". As in they still have to get voted in, rather than having any type of comic-book cold-war style authoritarian totalitarianism power.

The Bolivarian movement lost by a hair:
the margin on the first block of reforms (there were 2 things to vote on on the voting cards), the ones proposed by the Chavez group, lost by 0.3%, that is, less than half a percentage point. The second block (proposed by the parlaiment) lost by about one percent. In all, about 125,000 additional votes would have been needed in order to pass the reforms.

Chavez has been quoted that reformers should be happy to lose, rather than deal with the internal instability that would have occurred had the reformers won by a tiny fraction of a percentage point.

With abstention at 45%, the turnout was proportionately greater than many national elections in developed countries. The fact that just under half the voters voted for reforms leading towards democratic "socialism for the 21st century" represents a huge victory in itself, and a barometer of where where Venezuelans are at, where revolutionaries need to focus in the future.

I suspect the full equal legal recognition and protection of homosexuals was a tough to promote in that strongly christian country. An recently intercepted CIA memo stated that 8 million dollars had been spent by one agency in just the 30 days preceding the referendum. I've heard of color brochures explaining that small business would be expropriated, and children would be taken away by the state if the reforms passed.
In that intercepted memo, the CIA claimed they had managed to reduce the total of expected pro-reform voters by 6%, but still felt they would lose in their intervention aims.
So this result was a surprise to all sides.

Xavier, Canada, most of the parlaimentary and dare I say all the republics in the world have this type of law on the books. What with all the 2002 coup plotters still running round free, and the corporate media still allowed to diss the Bolivarian movement every minute of every hour in national bradcasts, it's pretty hard to allege that anyone was trying to get :almost total power on all levels of the State".

Tacks, there was no move toward autocracy, unless you would portray Canada and Australia and other parlaimentary liberal universal-suffrage democracies as autocratic.
This was a move toward decentralization. The decentralization of state functions down to the local and regional levels (communal councils), where projects can be tailored to suit specific and contingent conditions, and reflect local and regional needs. The whole point was to constitutionally decentralize and democratize the system so much that it would be beyond the control of the elite minority of politically skilled people that thrive off of inequality and the disaffection of the masses.

This was not a referendum on adopting democratic centralism, Cuba's political format.
The co-existence of types of communal property with private property sought by the reformers does not coincide with Cuba's complete socialization of private property.

people who wanna actually hear from people on the ground (lots in engrish too) in Venezuela can listen now to

http://radiovenezuelaenvivo.blogspot.com/

Chavez has conceeded to the opposition but there's all sorts of concern in the news over how the radical wing of the pro-Chavez movement is going to react. Should be interesting.

Jonny, the first question that comes to my mind is why if 'the Bolivarian revolution' is doing so much for the working class, and the poor, they didn't turn out to support it.
Devrim