By Arthur Shaw
After jumping to Number One on the Venezuelan Twitter charts, President Chavez has launched a blog, a web page and totes a blackberry to keep his followers up to date and inform on his daily activities. The Bolivarian Revolution has quickly gain its footing in the Internet battleground.”
The blog, web page, and twitter are only a few of the moves that Venezuelan revolutionaries are making to update their electoral tactics. Golinger is a strong supporter of and participant in these tactical changes.
Lenin, who along with glorious Fidel and the glorious Ho Chin Minh, was one the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th century, said in his book ‘What Is To Be Done’ that the class struggle has three main manifestations … the political, economic, and ideological … and each of the three manifestations are at par with the other two.
[We have not overlooked the fact that Fidel’s presence still blesses us in the 21st century.]
What a section of Venezuelan revolutionaries are doing with their laptops and cell phones has ramifications in both the political and ideological struggles within the wider class struggle.
Let’s look at the genesis of these changes. Howard Dean, the 2004 bourgeois liberal candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the USA, massively introduced propaganda and organization through laptops and cell phones into the electoral struggle. But Dean and his forces overestimated the role of “high technology” and underestimated the continued importance to person-to-person organization in the 2004 Democratic Party primaries in the USA. So, Dean blew his big chance and let US Senator John Kerry whip Dean for the 2004 presidential nomination.
Then, the reactionary middle class college students in Venezuela appeared on the world stage with their laptops and cell phones in 2007, repeatedly organizing and marching in large numbers around the issue of the non-renewal of the broadcast license of RCTV and later that year for the defeat of the constitutional reform proposed by Venezuelan revolutionaries led by Hugo Chavez.
The reactionary middle class students and their allies won the constitutional reform … that is, the reactionary youth made a big contribution to the defeat of the constitutional reform. But these reactionary middle class college students never understood or cared how politically powerfully the tool … the laptops and cell phones …. they held in their hands were.
Many people wondered whether what the reactionary middle class college students did was just a “Venezuelan thing,” and therefore inapplicable to the rest of the world.
Next, in 2008, appeared Barack Obama, assisted by the evil electoral genius, David Axelrod, and blew everybody’s minds. In 2008, Axelrod, intensified the impact and expanded the applications of laptop and cell phone campaigning like nobody would believe. The standard departments of electoral struggle are planning and budgeting, fundraising, targeting, voter contact, free media, paid media, candidate activity, opposition research, volunteers, get-out-the-vote, and anti-fraud operations.
In 2004, Howard Dean used his laptop and cell phone capabilities mostly for fundraising. In 2007, the reactionary middle class college students in Venezuela used their similar capabilities mostly for mobilizing volunteers to march and to throw Molotov cocktails. But Axelrod, the electoral monster, applied with savage and barbaric intensity those capabilities to ALL eleven departments of the campaign in 2008.
AKP&D Message and the Media is the cutting-edge US electoral and media consulting firm catering to both liberal and reactionary candidates in the USA and abroad. For example, the reactionary Francisco de Narvarez in the Argentine 2009 legislative elections and the reactionary Kamla Persad-Bissessar in May 2010 general election in Trinidad & Tobago are two recent instances of the firm’s handiwork.
Before 2009, the firm known as Axelrod & Associates was the predecessor firm of AKP&D Message and Media with the above-mentioned David Axelrod as the managing partner of the firm. AKP&D is named after its four original partners: David Axelrod, John Kupper, David Plouffe, and John Del Cecato. All four were members of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, with Plouffe serving as campaign manager, Axelrod as senior strategist, and Del Cecato as media advisor. Axelrod left AKP&D to serve as senior advisor to the President and sold his interest in the firm to Kupper, Del Cecato and Larry Grisolano.
AKP&D did very well in Trinidad in May when Obama’s political consulting firm openly helped to stab Patrick Manning, Obama’s top and most servile ally in the Caribbean, in the back and substitute a bourgeois reactionary in Manning’s place. But, in the same month of May, things didn’t turn out so well in Suriname where revolutionary Desi Bourterse, aspires for power, contending against AKP&D which disguised itself as Dutch and no-name US operatives. The results of the Suriname contest in May are still indeterminate. Bourterse, in Suriname, used AKP&D tricks against AKP&D. Bourterse cleverly reached out to young voters who are more familiar with cell phones and laptops and therefore more familiar with electronic voting machines … and vice versa … than their older compatriots. But the effort of Bouterse was somewhat different because it assumed a participatory character. The campaign mostly supplied the scripts which supporters individually and independently reached out to voters. It worked.
The National Endowment For Democracy (NED) … the US government’s front organization in international electoral struggle, which corrupts the political processes of other countries with millions of dollars in bribes … seems to be struck in prolong negotiations with AKP&D over whether AKP&D or NED will boss the so-called “opposition” in the September 26 legislative elections in Venezuela.
AKP&D must be slobbering or foaming at the mouth to get at Venezuela, because Venezuela is a cell phone heaven. The outcome of the inter-imperialist tug of war is a foregone conclusion since since NED answers to US Sen. John McCain and AKP&D to the Oval Office.
A some people, like Eva Golinger, are trying to alert the workers and revolutionaries about the unique challenges that the September 26 electoral contest poses for the revolution. But suddenly some of these people, like Golinger, who side with the workers and revolutionaries, find themselves surrounded by bizarre specie of animals … barking, growling, snarling, screeching, and … last but not least, howling,
Long before the repulsive breakthrough of the reactionary middle class college students in Venezuela in 2007, Eva Golinger saw and spoke about the possibilities of a class struggle waged, in large part, on laptops and in cell phones in both the spheres of political and ideological struggle. Indeed, Golinger pioneered some of the tactics in the ideological struggle now used in cyberspace.
Often, these tactics, which Golinger initially developed, are used by opportunists to disparage Eva Golinger herself.
Now, the mass of the workers’ and revolutionary movement is looking at the recent moves of Hugo Chavez in cyberspace. But this time, the masses are looking at Chavez, not as his audience to be persuaded and entertained. Now, the masses are looking at Chavez as his students to be informed. How can they harness themselves the potentialities of the Internet and IT stuff to advance the workers’ and revolutionary movement without the intervention of the State or the Party?
If the workers and revolutionaries themselves seize the possibilities of Internet and IT stuff, their advance will become unstoppable in the class struggle.
The advance of the workers’ and revolutionary movements doesn’t make everybody happy. Some people are jealous and envious by nature or others by habit or still others by congenital depravity (an aberration of nature). So, these jealous and envious people sneak up behind other people who contribute to the workers’ and revolutionary advance and these sneaky people take a bite out of these contributors. The jealous and envious say they bite because they believe in “the truth” and the people, whom they bite, don’t believe in “the truth.” But this “truth,” about which jealous and envious brag, is only a pretext to bite.
Fortunately, Golinger carries a stick with her and keeps her eyes open for these bizarre people who bite.
Using her stick, Eva Golinger has cracked many of these people, who bite, over their big heads as they neared her.