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If they continue with their guarimbas, we will take over their factories, said Jesus Diaz, spokesperson for the Pio Tamayo Commune in Lara.

Several private companies in Venezuela connected to the countrys right-wing opposition are asking workers not to come in for their shifts next week.

RELATED: Bolivia's Evo Says US Wants to Overthrow Venezuela to Steal Oil

Claiming to defend their workers safety amid ongoing protests, the companies are backing opposition calls for a national strike against President Nicolas Maduro.

But for workers supportive of Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) the strike is merely a trap intended to sabotage Venezuelas economy.

These actions planned against our revolutionary people are a desperate attempt by the empire to overturn our Bolivarian Revolution, Jesus Diaz, a member of the Popular Movement of Lara, told Resumen Latinoamericano.

The Popular Movement of Lara is a coalition of communes and workers organizations in the northwestern state.

We are organized and we will defend our revolution as always.

Diaz, who also serves as a spokesperson for the Pio Tamayo Commune in Venezuelas western state, assured Resumen Latinoamericano that workers in the region will continue work as usual. The Popular Movement of Laras boycott of the right-wing strike is supported by dozens of other communes and workers councils across the country.

Workers supportive of the Bolivarian Revolution have also vowed to take over and manage factories abandoned by right-wing bosses.

RELATED: Latin America's Campesino Movement Denounces 'International Conspiracy' Against Venezuela

One of the opposition-aligned institutions supporting the opposition strike is the Catholic University of Andres Bello, one of Venezuelas largest private universities.

On Friday, the institution announced that all classes and campus activities will be suspended due to the situation of uncertainty and insecurity affecting the country. The Catholic University of Andres Bello wont reopen until April 25, when a session of university officials will be held to reassess the issue," El Universal reports.

Other opposition-aligned institutions backing the right-wing strike include privately-run supermarkets and transportation companies.

If they continue with their guarimbas, we will take over their factories, Diaz told Resumen Latinoamericano.

Guarimbas are street blockades organized by right-wing protesters who use Molotov cocktails, burningtires and rocks to attack police and civilians.

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Defending Socialism, Venezuela Workers Resist Right-Wing Strike - teleSUR English

Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - GM Quits Venezuela Over Plant Seizure Forbes General Motors has had enough and is entirely suspending its operations in that cradle of Bolivarian socialism, Venezuela. You know the one, the country where Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro promised to make things better for the industrial ... and more »

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Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - GM Quits Venezuela Over Plant Seizure - Forbes

SEP (Australia) and IYSSE public meetings 22 April 2017

Events of recent weeks constitute a warning that the reckless actions of the major imperialist powers, led by the United States, are taking humanity to the brink of nuclear conflict. The Trump administration in the UScomposed of billionaires, fascistic demagogues and military generalshas made clear that its program of America first means war everywhere.

On April 7, the US bombed a Syrian army airbase, in a flagrant act of war against Russias closest ally in the Middle East, based on lies about a chemical weapons attack. A week later, the US military signaled its preparedness to use every weapon in its arsenal by dropping the largest bomb since World War Two on Afghan villagers. In the Asia-Pacific region, the Trump administration is threatening pre-emptive strikes and an all-out war against North Korea, as part of its broader strategy of pressuring China to accept American global hegemony and subordinating it to the dictates of the Wall Street banks.

Tensions are steadily rising between the US and nuclear-armed Russia and China, while other imperialist powers such as Germany and Japan are undertaking feverish efforts to build up their own military machines.

The Australian ruling elite has supported all of Washingtons military provocations. The Coalition government, with the full backing of the Labor Party, has lined up the entire population behind the plans for war in Asia without any discussion or debate. US bases in Australia, such as Pine Gap and airfields in the north of the country, are crucial elements in the ongoing preparations for a potential attack on North Korea.

The SEP/IYSSE meetings will outline the revolutionary socialist and internationalist perspective required to prevent the descent of the global capitalist system into a catastrophic third world war. Speakers will place the current crisis in its historical context, and draw out the critical strategic lessons that must be learnt by workers and young people from the seminal historical experience of the 1917 Russian Revolutionthe first and only time, so far, that the working class has overthrown capitalism and taken political power in the fight for peace, social equality and world socialism.

Details:

Sydney:

Sunday, May 7, 3.00 p.m. Duchess Room, Coronation Club 86 Burwood Road Burwood $7/$5 concession

Melbourne:

Sunday, May 14, 2.00 p.m. Arts House Meat Market 5 Blackwood Street, North Melbourne $7/$5 concession

Brisbane:

Sunday May 14, 3.00 p.m. Woolloongabba Senior Citizens Centre 22 Qualtrough Street Woolloongabba $7/$5 concession

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SEP (Australia) and IYSSE public meetings Stop the drive to world war! For peace, equality and socialism! - World Socialist Web Site

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Posted: Apr 19, 2017 12:01 AM

PARIS -- On Sunday, France will head to the polls to vote in the first of two rounds of its presidential election. Barring the unlikely event of any candidate winning more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff on May 7 will determine the winner. One of the most remarkable aspects of this race is the stunning implosion of the French Socialist Party.

You might be tempted to ask: Does this mean French socialism is in its final throes? Well, not exactly.

Based on current polls, Socialist Party candidate Benoit Hamon is struggling to crack the single digits, currently sitting at around 8 percent, according to Opinionway's PresiTrack poll. All this really means is that current Socialist President Francois Hollande destroyed the brand.

Hollande's favorability rating is about 19 percent, according to a YouGov poll taken at the end of February. A pragmatist, Hollande might have scored better had he not been surrounded by actual Socialists for the past five years.

French citizens, however, seem tempted by the idea of electing another pragmatist from the Hollande camp, but one who isn't obligated to surround himself with Socialists.

According to an Opinionway survey from earlier this month, 50 percent of Hollande's voters now support independent presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron, a former Hollande minister who was with the Socialist party for three years. But Macron is a former investment banker whose program includes an entire section dedicated to making the lives of entrepreneurs easier. Rather than ideology, he's focused on renewal and the desire to bring outsiders into public life.

So this means that socialism is dead in France, right? Not so fast. French leftists have gravitated to Jean-Luc Melenchon, an independent candidate who wants a "fiscal revolution" that involves taxing at 100 percent any earnings over the "maximum revenue" of 400,000 euros annually. He's also expressed interest in involving France's overseas territories in ALBA (formally the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), founded by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who ran a country that represents the epitome of socialist end times. A recent Opinionway poll showed Melenchon sitting at 18 percent, behind Macron and the National Front's Marine Le Pen, both tied at 22 percent, and center-right candidate Francois Fillon at 21 percent.

Socialism as a French brand is tanking in name only. Almost all of the presidential candidates have integrated socialist policies into their platform. The least socialist option in this race is Fillon, who has a double disadvantage: He's the establishment candidate at a time when global electoral momentum is trending against the establishment, and he's facing accusations of the kind of nepotism widely practiced among the French establishment.

"Violent" is a term I've often heard used by Fillon's critics to describe the conservative aspects of his program. National Front Vice President Florian Philippot, who walks and talks like a socialist all over French media on behalf of Le Pen, called Fillon's attempt at a non-socialist program one "of unprecedented violence."

Reducing the number of civil servants? Violent. Wanting to give people the option of private health insurance instead of paying a fortune for a crumbling system with poor reimbursements? Violent. Cutting government spending through austerity? Well, if you're going to do that, then you might as well just go around punching voters in the face.

One way that socialism has been able to justify its continued presence in this race is by using former French President and General Charles de Gaulle, who consistently ranks as the country's favorite historical figure, as its shield. To those running for high office in France, de Gaulle has become what Ronald Reagan is to American candidates: an anachronistic specter evoked in a lazy attempt to justify questionable policies to the unconvinced. "You don't like my position? You're an idiot! It's Gaullist!"

I've only heard Gaullism used to defend socialist policies, however -- which is funny, because de Gaulle was hardly a socialist. In fact, the Socialist Standard (the monthly magazine of the Socialist Party of Great Britain) wrote of de Gaulle in its July 1958 issue: "Socialists are opposed to what de Gaulle stands for on principle, because he stands for French capitalism, and Socialists do not support any capitalist faction anywhere or at any time."

Much has also been made in this race of the role of supranational European Union governance, a socialist straitjacket imposed on the French economy. Nearly all of the candidates agree that it's a problem, whether they want to leave the EU or just reform it. What's rarely mentioned is that even if European governance disappeared tomorrow, France would still be stuck contending with its own socialist economic infrastructure.

Sunday's first round of voting will largely determine the extent to which the French electorate can see through the persistent socialist lie that has long worked against their interests.

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Socialist Party Implodes in French Presidential Race, but Socialism Still Omnipresent - Townhall

Last year, socialism was the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster.com. It clearly reflects growing interest, especially with the remarkable surge of lifetime socialist Bernie Sanders, who won a pile of states in pursuing the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He earned over 13 million votes nationwide. Many of those voters surely know that it gives the government more control over the so-called means of production as well as your wallet and your property, but not as much as outright Communists crave.

American interest in socialism was growing well before Bernie Sanders. A telling marker came in 2011, when a major study by the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of Americans aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, exceeding those with a positive view of capitalism. What those voters might not realize, but which I know for certain, is that socialism undermines marriage and family: Ive published an entire book on the subject. What I learned from mining the origins of the movement is that this is not an accident: The founders of socialist movements always intended their system to have this effect.

Most obviously, socialism undermines the family economically. Socialism is ineffective, unproductive and impoverishing. In that way alone, socialism adversely affects what sources as diverse as Pope Francis and Ronald Reagan have described as the fundamental cell of society: the family.

But surely socialisms founders didnt realize that their system just flat-out didnt work, right? Actually, they believed that it didand in one sense it does: It weakens families for the benefit of the state, exactly as it creators meant it to.

Since at least the early 1800s, when the effort began in earnest, extreme-left radicals have sought to undermine the natural-traditional-biblical familythe Western Judaeo-Christian model anchored in a man and woman as parents of a household. The steady assault on this timeless model has been a long march that culminated in the chaos of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and in the antics of the nature-redefiners of todays secular left.

Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto wrote of the abolition of the family, which even in 1848, they could flaunt as an infamous proposal of the communists. What, precisely, they meant by that is a complicated subject. But complexities aside, there is no question that efforts to redefine the family structure have been long at work.

A glance at the dubious characters reveals a mangled mosaic of the wide-ranging left. Among them, the earliest and maybe most revealing of the socialists specificallyat least from a family-focused perspectivewas perhaps Robert Owen.

Owen (1771-1858) was an English utopian-socialist who made his way to American soil. On July 4, 1826, Robert Owen stood atop his new ideological colony in New Harmony, Indiana, and delivered his Declaration of Mental Independence. It is a document you surely didnt read in school, but perhaps you should have, because it foretold the spirit of our modern age.

There it was: property, religion, marriage. This was Robert Owens unholy trinity.

Owen established what the 1960s hippies would call communes. Owens socialist communes pooled not only profits but people, replacing the nuclear family with the collective family.

The New Harmony colony floundered within just two years, with Owen curiously absent from his creation for sustained periods, thus setting the standard for future leftist-utopian chieftains: They rarely live according to the rules and systems they create for others. Socialism and communism have always been for the people, the masses, the ruled, but rarely for the rulers. Their socialist-communist cocoons were always intolerable because they were bankrupt and unnatural. No one chooses that misery.

But the unnatural is what so many leftist utopians pursued then and in the years and centuries ahead.

An uphill stream of Owen-like dreamers on the left would keep the flame alive, from the 1820s to the 1960s in their own communes, and into the 21st century with their own versions of marriage and family.

All of these nature-redefiners plowed new ground for new versions of the family according to each of their ideological conceptions. To borrow from Pope Francis, they were engaged in ideological colonizations.

In short, these were the bold ancestors of todays same-sex marriage movement and LGBTQ sex-gender redefiners. They all shared in common, then and today, the rejection of any notion that there is a single natural, traditional and biblical model for the family.

It is not possible to speak of the family, insisted Friedrich Engels. Indeed, just ask the broad range of leftists in the current-day organization Beyond Marriage. They agree wholeheartedly with Engels on that one.

Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. His latest book (April 2017) is A Pope and a President:

John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century.

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Socialism Attacks The Family - Greeneville Sun