World

Venezuelan opposition groups are planning to use “all means possible to stop the constitutional reform referendum”, scheduled to take place on December 2, reported the October 25 Ultimas Noiticias. Describing the proposed constitutional reforms as a “constitutional coup”, a coalition of opposition parties — some of which participated in the short-lived military coup against the government of socialist President Hugo Chavez in 2002 — have called for a massive protest on November 3, demanding that the National Electoral Council (CNE) suspend the constitutional reform referendum.

After winning a stunning 82% of the vote in the April 14 referendum for a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution, Ecuador’s left-wing president Rafael Correa scored his third major victory in a year on September 30 with his party, Country Alliance, winning 70% of the votes for the new assembly.

Despite China’s spectacular GDP growth of nearly 10% per year since 1978 — and despite Beijing’s claim that the country remains on a socialist course — in the eight years to 2005, workers’ wages as a proportion of GDP plunged from 53% to 41.4%.

Fractures have emerged in Respect — the Unity Coalition, a group formed in January 2004 by an alliance that drew together expelled Labour MP George Galloway (now Respect’s sole MP), the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and anti-war activists. On August 23, Galloway issued a letter to Respect’s National Council titled “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” criticising the group’s lack of organisation and “custom of anathematisation in the organisation which is deeply unhealthy and has been the ruin of many a left-wing group before us”.

According to an October 8 report from Venezuela’s Presidential Press Office report, a new poll conducted by polling company Seijas has revealed that only 3.4% of Venezuelans think capitalism is the best system of government; 22.6% said it was preferable to socialism and 62.7% said they preferred socialism to capitalism.

“You’re only killing a man”, revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara said in a school in La Higuera, before he was shot. Forty years later, in that exact spot, among the fog of the Bolivian forest and darkness of night, flags representing social movements from all over Latin America waved in the wind and their bearers danced together until sunrise. That night of October 7 we remembered Che and the struggles of that time, through speeches and song, and we thought about the future as the continent turns red with the idealism, humanism, rejection of neoliberalism, and collective ownership of resources that Che had talked of and fought for.

Two-hundred people protested outside the Wellington District Court on October 17 to protest the arrest of four Wellington men appearing in the court following massive police raids on the homes of many social activists two days earlier, according to a NarcoNews.com article by Julie Web-Pullman. Aotearoa Indymedia reported on October 17 that 80 people protested in Christchurch and 30 in Melbourne on October 16, and 50 protested in Rotorua and 30 in Sydney the following day.

On October 3 Caribbean Net News reported that the South American nation Guyana, which borders Venezuela to its west, will soon benefit from a US$12.5 million debt write-off by Venezuela under an agreement expected to be finalised in the near future.

US President George Bush has opposed US Senate legislation to fund health care for the nuclear-test-affected Marshallese. Sixty-seven US nuclear bombs were detonated in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958.

Across the board, the right made gains in Greater Auckland’s council elections at the expense of both the political centre (Labour-aligned tickets) and the grassroots left (notably RAM — the Residents Action Movement).

Andy Newman, an editor of British blog Socialistunity.com, spoke to Salma Yaqoob for Green Left Weekly. Yaqoob is the national vice-chair of anti-war coalition Respect — the Unity Coalition, as well as a leader of Birmingham’s Stop the War Coalition and a Birmingham city councillor.

Some 130,000 post office workers in the Communication Workers Union (CWU) have brought mail deliveries in Britain to a standstill by holding two 48-hour strikes over pay and working conditions. The strikes, which began on October 5 and October 8 respectively, are over management plans to axe 40,000 jobs, to close workers’ final salary pension scheme, to offer a below inflation pay rise, and to tear up all existing national and local agreements on working hours.