Vol. 71/No. 44      November 26, 2007

A wide variety of books are for sale—from poetry collections to histories of the struggles against Spanish colonial rule in South America, from cookbooks to titles on the place of the Cuban Revolution in the world today. Nearly 800 book presentations and artists’ performances offer a place for working people and others to discuss literature, the arts, and politics. Almost 200 publishing houses are participating, including 148 from Venezuela.

“The rebirth of culture being celebrated here is especially significant considering all the books and bookstores that were burned during the years of the dictatorships in our countries,” Alicia Castro, Argentina’s ambassador to Venezuela, said at the opening ceremony. She was referring to the brutal military regimes that dominated much of Latin America during parts of the 1960s and ‘70s. Argentina is the country of honor at this year’s fair.

Reflecting the Venezuelan government’s programs to preserve the languages and cultures of indigenous peoples, the inaugural ceremony was kicked off by a children’s choir that sang the national anthem in the language of the Anu people. Minister of Culture Francisco Sesto and Vice President Jorge Rodríguez were the featured speakers. Rodríguez described the expansion of publishing and book distribution in Venezuela in recent years, and the literacy campaign that has taught more than one million workers and peasants to read and write.  
 
‘United States: A possible revolution’
Ramón Medero, president of the National Book Center, welcomed the many activists for social change participating in the fair, especially those from the United States. He also introduced the fair’s theme, “United States: A possible revolution.” Noting that the fair’s central activity is a five-day rolling forum on that topic, Medero pointed to the importance of the fact that participants will be discussing “not just whether a revolution is necessary in North America, but that it is possible.”

Discussion and debate around this question has marked every aspect of the book fair’s opening days. Some 20 writers and political activists, most from the United States, are scheduled to give presentations and participate in the broad-ranging discussion with different audiences each day. Panelists will include Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United States; Amiri Baraka, a writer and poet active since the 1960s in Black nationalist and Maoist circles; Charles Hardy, a former Maryknoll priest who has lived in Venezuela for many years; Puerto Rican independence fighter Héctor Pesquera of the Hostos National Independence Movement (MINH); Luis Rodriguez, a Chicano activist and author of Always Running; Jimmy Massey, a former Marine and founder of Iraq Veterans Against the War; Richard Gott, British author and journalist; University of Minnesota political science professor August Nimtz; former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill; and Lee Sustar, editor of the Socialist Worker newspaper, which reflects the views of the International Socialist Organization.

The forum opened November 10, attended by 150 people. The panelists at the morning session were Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and president of Pathfinder Press, and Eva Golinger, a Venezuelan American lawyer and author of The Chávez Code and Bush vs. Chávez.

The afternoon panelists were U.S.-born journalist Chris Carlson, a regular contributor to the website www.venezuelaanalysis.com, and Tufara Waller, coordinator of the cultural program of the Highlander Center in Tennessee and director of the We Shall Overcome project. Their remarks and the subsequent discussion from the floor opened a debate on several of the most sharply contested issues.

“I am speaking as part of a small minority, even among those who call themselves leftists or revolutionaries, a minority that says without hesitation or qualification, ‘Yes, a revolution is possible in the United States.’ Socialist revolution,” said Waters, the opening speaker. “Not only is revolution possible in the United States, but revolutionary struggle by working people is inevitable, initiated not at first by the toilers but forced by the crisis-driven assaults of the propertied classes.”

Waters said she was addressing those who consider socialist revolution in the United States to be impossible, “a utopian dream.” Such a conclusion, she said, has to rest on the assumption “that the coming decades are going to look more or less like those many of us here knew for nearly half a century following World War II.

“You would have to be convinced that competition among imperialist rivals, as well as with more economically advanced semicolonial powers, is diminishing and profit rates, which have been on a downward trend since the early 1970s, are now going to begin to ascend for several decades on an accelerated curve,” she said. “That such a reversal can be accomplished without the massive destruction of productive capacity—human and physical—wrought by decades of war, including the interimperialist slaughter of World War II that was necessary for the capitalist rulers to get out of the last great world financial crisis and economic depression.”  
 
Developing working-class vanguard
The economic crisis of capitalism drives the bosses’ offensive against the working class in the United States, Waters said, and these assaults are generating resistance. She pointed to the mass street mobilizations on May Day the last two years demanding legalization for undocumented immigrants as evidence of the beginning development of a working-class vanguard.

She said the mobilization of tens of thousands against racist injustice at the hands of the cops and courts in Jena, Louisiana, in September was “the first national action of its size and character in decades” and “was undoubtedly nourished by the power of the recent May Day mobilizations.”

In this context, Waters said, “The lessons of the Russian Revolution and the Communist International under Lenin will be sought after once again,” as will the real history of the Cuban Revolution, “as new generations of vanguard fighters search for previous historical experiences from which they can learn not only how to fight but how to fight to win.”

“How has it been possible,” she said, “for the Cuban people to hold at bay the most powerful empire history has ever known—or ever will know—for almost 50 years? Why to this day does Cuba remain the only free territory of the Americas?”

In her remarks Golinger said, “I have to disagree that Cuba is the only free territory of the Americas. Because here in Venezuela we are also free, or we are in the process of freeing ourselves.” She said the government-supported constitutional amendments will pass in a December 2 referendum vote here despite a campaign by the pro-imperialist opposition, pointing to this as an example of how “we are freeing ourselves with the enemy living in the same house.”

Golinger also said she didn’t “share the same optimism that a revolution is possible in the United States.” Golinger, who has lived in Venezuela since 1999, said that in preparing for the book fair she had spoken “with Noam Chomsky about how the process of change will have to be very slow in such a capitalist consumer society.”

People in the United States are deadened to conditions of suffering, Golinger said, because “it’s very easy to change the channel. People are not poor or hungry in the U.S. like they were in Venezuela. You get two or three credit cards in the mail every day. There is poverty, but it’s only in a few small sectors.”

As for the movement for legalization of immigrants, Golinger said, “Even though they were demanding to be recognized, it was to live inside a capitalist consumer society.

“The only way to achieve structural change in the United States is to make advances here” in Venezuela, she said. “Then we can go there and say, ‘Look at the Bolivarian Revolution, what we’ve accomplished. You can do the same.’”  
 
Issues are joined
The two presentations were followed by a lively discussion. The issues presented on the opening day have been hotly contested at other book fair activities, too. Golinger’s remarks reflect widely held opinions here that there is little hope for revolutionary change in the United States.

The majority of those speaking during the first round of discussion at the central forum expressed doubts at such a possibility. Several Venezuelan speakers said in various ways that living standards in the United States are too high for there to be resistance, or that people are brainwashed by capitalist-owned media.

Some participants from the United States offered a different view. “I don’t consider myself to have been turned into an idiot,” said Diógenes Abreu, a Dominican-born activist living in New York. “Nor do I consider the millions who live in the United States who oppose its policies to be idiots.

“But I also don’t share all the optimism of Mary-Alice,” Abreu said. “If, as she pointed out, fewer than 7.5 percent of private-sector workers are organized, and the working class has to be in the leadership of a revolution, how can you say it’s possible sooner rather than later?”

“The people I work with have never read Noam Chomsky,” said Tufara Waller from the Highlander Center. “They are people who are hungry, who understand that they have to fight to live.” Many people in the United States don’t have credit cards, Waller added. She pointed to working people in New Orleans still confronting the social disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and tobacco farmers in North Carolina fighting to keep their land.  
 
Two-party system
The discussion continued in the afternoon, kicked off by Waller and Chris Carlson. Originally from Colorado, Carlson has lived in Venezuela for the last three years.

“Many Venezuelans, including President Chávez, say that Bush is the problem,” he said. “But Bush is not the problem. He is just a product of a system dominated by big corporations.” Carlson showed a PowerPoint presentation documenting how both the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States are financed by the same major corporations.

Contenders for the Democratic and Republican party nominations for the 2008 presidential elections, Carlson said, present fundamentally the same perspectives: driving ahead with the war in Iraq, and maintaining the economic embargo against Cuba and hostility toward Venezuela. The candidates are now debating health care, he said, but none has any proposal other than to keep health care a money-making institution at the expense of the well-being of millions.

Waller described the history of the Highlander Center and its current projects to organize against environmental degradation, intolerable working conditions, and racism.

“If both parties are so dominated by the monopolies, why don’t people rise up against them?” a Venezuelan participant asked Carlson. Referring to the idea often heard in left-wing circles in the United States that the 2000 election was stolen by Bush supporters in Florida, Carlson said the majority of people in the United States don’t see it that way and “still consider it a legitimate government.”

A young Venezuelan who just returned after living in the United States also took the floor during the discussion. He described the school he attended in a working-class area of Alabama. “The education system there is not about learning at all,” he said. The young people he went to school with wanted to change society but didn’t know how to begin.

“This forum is only the beginning of what will be several days of discussion on these themes,” said program moderator Luis Bilbao, an Argentine-born journalist, at the conclusion of the program. The forum continues through November 13. The book fair closes November 18.
 
 
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