President Hugo Chávez and his close ally Cuba's Raúl Castro (File photo)

Politics
1. A question for Obama and Chávez
Obama's crushing election defeat can be explained for three reasons. The first one is the Republican counteroffensive plan conceived in January 2009, eleven days before the Democrat's inauguration. The second reason deals with strategic mistakes and the White House blindness to the objective evolution of strength correlation. The third reason resulted from the populist-media social movement of the Tea Party, which was directly controlled by neither party.

The big question mark in Obama's last election year has been why the president continued his happy crossing on board the sinking Titanic, without realizing or changing the course of his policy, when he was in time to do it. And this is the same question to be asked in Venezuela.

2. The Venezuelan Titanic
Three events over the past few weeks in Venezuela have shown that Hugo Chávez's government model entered a chaotic development stage which could end, in the words of ex Minister Eduardo Samán, in "a crushing defeat" of the revolution: the defeat of the election on September 26 (S26); the presidential eulogy for the defeat before deputies-elect, on October 2, and the appeal made by the Bolivarian website www.aporrea.org to work on a radical, "party leftwing" current, headed by trade union leader Stalin Pérez Borges and ex Minister Eduardo Samán.

3. The election defeat
The protracted and pointless argument about who won the election for the National Assembly is just a smokescreen. The real question is: Did the election reveal an evolution trend which allows anticipating the outcome of the election for president in 2012? The answer is yes and was given one year and six months ago, before S26, by national Bolivarian deputy Luis Tascón, anathematized by the president for asking for reasonability, transparency and joint efforts to lead the Bolivarian process.

In a thorough scientific analysis, engineer Tascón had reviewed the election background of Hugo Chávez's government and found a slow, yet growing accrual of new votes in favor of the opposition over the past few years, particularly in urban and most populated areas in the country.

After S26, a sound study authored by Edgardo Lander reasserted Tascón's early assumptions. The conclusion for the 2012 election is clear: Hugo Chávez will likely lose the election for president if he does not manage to reverse the election trend statistically found by Tascón in March 2009 and confirmed in 2010. Like Obama, Chávez has two years left. And he, like Obama, has one way only to make it: changing the government model.

4. Eulogy and surrender
On October 2, Hugo Chávez met at the Teresa Carreño Theater with incoming pro-government deputies for the National Assembly, in order to make a "necessary socialist insight" into the S26 parliament election. It was a great opportunity to start a debate on the suffered setback, but the president did not seize it.

Rather than making a critical analysis, he gave a eulogy for the government model. And it was followed by triumphalism as usual, rhetorical self-criticism and total absence of a specific conversion project able to change the harmful trend found by Tascón and confirmed by Lander. No real willingness for debate or rectification was noted.

Sure enough, the president is swamped with his model contradictions and depletion: the economic model is unsustainable; the speech is worn, and his personal input, of the essence for the process, is losing momentum. The strategic horizon of the Fifth Socialist International just vanished; neither Cuba nor China supported it; the dream of the communes and the communal currency has collapsed; radicalization of the revolution was de facto abandoned before the election, when the bourgeoisie asked for Eduardo Samán's head and the president handed it over to them, without giving the people any explanation. Today, such strategic surrender is intended to be covered with high-flown speeches and straight-to-the-point nationalizations which do not change the structural field at all.

5. The Aporrea rebellion
The attempt of the Bolivarian website, www.aporrea.org, at a radical, "leftwing" current inside the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) bumps into a stumbling bloc of power and another of strategy. Historically, any attempt at more transparency, reasonability and involvement in governance made by the leftwing or the center has been anathematized by the president. The appeal made by Aporrea challenges such a background. Let us see whether such attempt will have the same destiny as the previous ones.

6. What is real, possible and desirable in a leftwing project?
The main goal of the newborn PSUV leftwing subject is pragmatic: working on an economic-political model which consolidates the economy; an efficient management model, and a speech which dodges the political triumph of the opposition in 2012. For such purpose, it should be based on reality, and what is possible and politically desirable. The real thing in Venezuela, like in China and, increasingly, in Cuba, are their mixed economies, that is, state sectors coexisting with market economies and State different degrees of influence. Any attempt at finishing off either one would be doomed to demise.

The possible -the arts of politics- in Venezuela means recovering its economy from unsustainable structural unbalances and fallacies of the current model and laying the social foundations for victory in 2012. The desirable refers to gradual introduction of the means of production of the 21st Century socialism, through its central institutions, democratic planning, value economy and checks and balances.

We expect that the heterogeneous leftwing convened by Aporrea will succeed in becoming a subject, always remembering a fundamental axiom in ethics: "Every proposal for social change, in order to be ethical should be viable."

Translated by Conchita Delgado