Venezucommunism

...MAS has worked diligently to popularize the idea of socialism in a campaign which clearly shows the mark of Antonio Gramsci, the ideological mentor of the Italian Communist Party (PCI...

...The orthodox Marxist parties accuse MAS of shying away from the struggle for socio-economic change in order to maintain a respectable image...

...The Movimiento al Socialismo 'MAS) proposes a "Venezuelan Road to Socialism" which retains the nation's constitution and the pre-existing democratic structure...

...The Venezuelan electorate has thus given MAS a mandate to put aside its reserves and line up with other parties on the left...

...Commonweal: 70...

...The overthrow of the government of Salvador Allende in 1973 raised serious doubts about the feasibility of democratic socialism and spurred the PCI and MAS to embark upon their newborn strategies...

...They maintain that Allende should have offered ample guarantees to small and medium-size companies rather than sanctioning their takeovers by workers...

...As a result, however, MAS candidates suffered a series of reversals in student and trade union elections to rivals who defended unity of the left...

...If unity is to mean anything in the long run, the leftist parties will have to come to terms with their outstanding differences...

...This is no ordinary task...

...Communists in Italy, France and Spain have considered entering into alliances with parties to their right, whereas MAS has chosen the option of allying itself with groups considerably to its left...

...Most importantly, the party has devised a' 'transitional'' program based on mass participation in decision-making at all levels, a plan which is designed to appeal to large numbers of people of non-socialist persuasion...

...In the recent municipal elections, the united left drew 18 percent of the votes, double the intake of four individual leftist presidential candidates just six months earlier...

...Both MAS and the Italian Communists have confronted the formidable problem of trying to influence a polarized electorate which fails to provide the left with its sought-for majority...

...The MASistas deny that the moderateoriented Chilean Christian Democrats adopted a position of unqualified resistance to the government which ruled out the possibility of arriving at an understanding with them, as some have contended...

...For MAS, the answer lies in breaking away from what it calls a leftist "ghetto" of time-worn formulas and rhetoric which are alien to the majority of Venezuelans...

...The PCI, for its part, came up with the proposal of the "historic compromise" whereby Communists would share power—rather than compete for it—with the ruling Christian Democrats...

...Since then, MAS leaders have criticized Allende for having precipitated a confrontation before his government had won over a majority to its side...

...Up until recently, MASistas had ruled out such a pact for fear that it would blur the democratic image which they were trying to project...

...at that time the Venezuelan Communist Party, from which MAS later emerged, attempted to impose radical solutions on the nation through guerrilla 15 February 1980: 69 warfare, and even carried out sabotage in an effort to impede presidential elections...

...The party promises to maintain a pluralistic society and to turn over the reins of power to any non- socialist group that manages to secure a majority of votes...

...IT'S A LONG WAY from Caracas to Rome, but the largest group in Venezuela's leftist bloc has combined some Italian Eurocommunist themes with an originality of its own...

...In fact some claim that MAS's defense of small and medium-size enterprises is but a throwback to the days of competitive capitalism...

...Given these developments on the Venezuelan left, Eurocommunism can no longer be considered a purely European phenomenon, steve ellner (Steve Ellner is a member of the faculty at the Universidad de Oriente in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela...

...This strategy of winning over the general populace to socialism arose out of the trauma of military defeat in the 1960s...

...Nevertheless, many of MAS's leftist critics have acknowledged the party's electoral successes by modifying their own stands and copying MAS's style...

...At any rate, MAS sees in the Chilean experience that which has often occurred in other historical circumstances: the shadow of a previous revolution—in this case that of Cuba—hung over the nation, distorting reality for leftists who were all too disposed to accept preconceived notions...

...MAS has even considered eliminating the words "leftist" and "rightist" from its vocabulary in order to cut down on the tendency of political stereotyping...

...the oft-heard commentary— frequently voiced in Europe as well—is, as long as those favoring socialism do not get together, they cannot be considered serious contenders and thus do not deserve to be elected...