Dear editors,

Chavez is drawing some wrong conclusions about this referendum defeat. Socialism isn’t something that nation states mature into as he was attempting to do through a plebiscite. A seething fighting mass-base of Venezuelan workers, allied with the rural poor, needs to be mobilized and charged with protecting the Bolivarian Revolution as it advances under Chavez’s administration. It means forming defense guards that have teeth and operates by its own rules beyond state control—stocked with weaponry in well guarded arsenals within their buildings provided by the Chavez government under 24 hour guard while the Bolivarian Revolution advances.

Chavez’s Socialist Party is called Podemos. Unfortunately Chavez is saying maybe they are moving too fast. No matter what, the Venezuelan ruling class and their slavishly loyal intelligentsia are not going to give a real damn about the improvement of the poor since it is going to cost them money and threatens their privileged status as rulers when the poor are leaving poverty and climbing the heights where they should be as human beings.

Podemos comrades have to be seen as real forces of power like the individual barbudos and women July 26th Movement comrades who came down from the Sierra Maestra. Podemos comrades might be viewed as a bunch of do-gooders and Chavez cheerleaders unpaid with no power. With the slow pace of reforms, this will all tend to disperse the masses and have them lay low.

The only real power the international working class has is in the street lead by comrades who have their interests in mind and can lead them in the most dirtiest fight human beings engage in and that is the class struggle. It would be nice to see the workers win one after getting kicked in the teeth with so many false starts and rightwing butchery since the victory of the Cuban Revolution.

Ending on a positive note. One of the most beautiful pictures I’ve seen in years and most edifying of our revolutionary vision was in theGuardian. It was called “Barrio Photo Tour”. There is a picture of a Cuban dentist operating in the mouth of a Venezuelan child. This dentist is black and female!!!! In the United States I have never met a black dentist. I have seen white female dentists. What a testimony to the utter discriminating hopeless bankruptcy of capitalism and the assurance that Socialism is the superior economic model of organizing humanity even in the most backward of countries.

Yours for the Revolution,

Brian Schwartz