Venezuelan communists say ’You win peace by defeating fascism’

Tribuna Popular, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), reports on the party’s Feb. 24 news conference on the situation following an imperialist-backed coup attempt earlier in February. The report included a comment on a “peace dialog” convened by the government that same day to which all political forces were invited. Translated by WW Managing Editor John Catalinotto.

The Communist Party of Venezuela reaffirmed its support for the peace initiatives advanced by the national government led by President Nicolás Maduro, and warned that this dialog must not lose sight of the sharpening class struggle we face in the country.

“You win peace by defeating fascism,” said Oscar Figuera, secretary general of the PCV, after insisting that it is necessary that the dialog serve “to deepen the process of change and the defense of popular advances and to raise the level of organization and militancy of the masses.”

Figuera warned of the risk of “conciliation with imperialism and its internal forces” and said that conciliation “has historically led to submission and defeat of the processes of liberation by the counterrevolution.”

The communist leader said that in this context, marked by a pro-imperialist reactionary offensive of an international character, the central question is “how imperialism, its transnational corporations and the Venezuelan oligarchy associated with imperialist interests regain their privileges to once again exploit the wealth of our people.”

He recalled that the PCV Program had postulated that the organization “will make every effort to bring about the anti-imperialist, anti-monopoly, anti-oligarchic, democratic and popular transformations, and the transition of Venezuela to socialism with the least numbers of sacrifices possible,” and they will win support through “the organization of workers, adding all possible forces to make sure the will of our people is expressed, reducing the enemy to impotence, avoiding provocations, but without hesitating to use the highest forms of struggle in pursuit of victory for the workers and the people, to defend the social and political gains, should the ruling classes use fraud or counterrevolutionary and fascist violence in their selfish interests to violate the people’s will.”

Popular counteroffensive

The PCV appealed to the entire popular movement, to all working people and to their political and social organizations to launch a mass-based counteroffensive centered on defending the people’s public spaces and the revolutionary advances.

“We must not allow the fascist sectors, which are trying to crush Venezuela with a bloodbath, to make any advances in the popular neighborhoods, … we must isolate them in their territories and defeat them with the strength and organized mobilization of our people and its revolutionary vanguard,” he said.

Figuera denounced the attempt by the right wing to camouflage their paramilitary groups, “which are the product of the incursion of [rightist Colombian ex-President Álvaro] Uribe’s forces in the country” to develop a theater of confrontation and war in strategic places such as the state of Tachira.

The PCV rejected the media campaign directed against revolutionary groups in the popular movement. “Those are not paramilitary groups, but are the Venezuelan people’s organizational expressions, which have the legitimate right to take action and to exercise the responsibilities entrusted to them by the same people.”

Faced with the action of the counterrevolution and imperialism, Figuera emphasized, “we must make the ‘Simón Bolívar’ Great Patriotic Pole into the broad national patriotic front, into the force capable of bringing — as the class confrontations develop — to the popular and revolutionary forces, which are the genuinely democratic forces, the ability to isolate, weaken and defeat the fascist core.”

Figuera urged a response to violent actions by “the broadest and most unbending unity, without arrogance, without organizational hegemony, without unilateral impositions and without artificial unanimity.”