Following up on my post from Friday, I find this reported earlier today from Agence France Press:

Shared Article from Agence France Presse

Maduro in crackdown under Venezuela emergency decree

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced a sweeping crackdown Saturday under a new emergency decree, ordering the seizure of paralyzed factories,…

Valentina OROPEZA @ msn.com

Notice, in particular:

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced a sweeping crackdown Saturday under a new emergency decree, ordering the seizure of paralyzed factories, the arrest of their owners and military exercises to counter alleged foreign threats. . . . Addressing his supporters at a rally in central Caracas on Saturday, Maduro announced some of the actions to be taken under the decree, which has not yet been published.

. . . Maduro’s decree expanded an “economic emergency” declared in January to a full-blown state of emergency.

The extent of the decree was unclear, but political analysts said it could be used to limit the right to protest, authorize preventive arrests and allow police raids without a warrant.

Maduro said the measures, which initially apply for three months, will likely be extended through 2017.

–Valentina Oropeza, Maduro in crackdown under Venezuela emergency decree
Agence France Presse (15 May 2016)

This seems unlikely to end well.

See also.

• GT 2016-05-15: Bolivarian Process
• Elsewhere 2015-09-02: Venezuelan farmers ordered to hand over produce to state
• Elsewhere 2014-08-26: Venezuela “to fingerprint shoppers”
• GT 2014-02-26: Translation of "One comrade from Mérida sounds off: Oh I've got the desire" (Viento sin Fronteras, in EL LIBERTARIO)
• GT 2014-02-23: Translation of "From Chile, a pitch for the foundation of anarcho-Madurism" (Armando Vergueiro, from El Libertario)
• GT 2014-02-22: Translation of "One comrade sounds off: What's happening now in Venezuela?" (Victor Camacho, in El Libertario)
• GT 2014-02-22: Translation of "Quick Overview of the Situation in Venezuela for the Curious and Ill-informed" (Rafael Uzcategui, El Libertario)
• GT 2014-02-22: Translation of Message from CDH-UCAB: on torture and cruel and inhuman treatment of the detainees from 12-F (Centro de DDHH de la UCAB, reprinted in EL LIBERTARIO)
• GT 2014-02-21: Translation of Report from San Cristobal, Tachira (Anonymous, reprinted by El Libertario)
• GT 2014-02-21: Translation of Caracas, 15-F: Impressions from the street (Humberto Decarli, in El Libertario)
• GT 2013-03-11: Hugo Chávez in 4 questions (Rafael Uzcátegui, from Peri?@c3;b3;dico El Libertario)
• GT 2008-03-12: Que se vayan todos.

There’s an Australian state socialist magazine called Links, which, for reasons that remain completely opaque to me, seems to believe that the old Movement of the Libertarian Left listserv wants and needs to be buried under reams of its promotional materials. Here’s a choice passage from an interview they ran, which they recently promoted on the list:

Peter Boyle: You're criticising Labor for not seriously tackling global warming but what do socialists say should be done to address the crisis?

Dave Holmes: What is needed to cope with the crisis is a sharp change of direction. We need an emergency mobilisation of society, a five- or 10-year plan to achieve a drastic reorientation of our economy and use of energy. Anything else is simply not serious.

— Links (2008-04-03): A revolutionary response to the climate change crisis

Everything old is new again.

My own views about global warming, as a phenomenon, are perhaps shockingly ordinary. From what I’ve read I see no reason to doubt that it’s real, and caused largely by human activity, and an increasingly serious concern for many people all over the world. I think that each of us individually, and together with our neighbors, ought to be giving serious thought to the problem, and especially to how hypercentralized, state-supported and state-insulated corporate capitalism (especially the state-regimented, state-subsidized, and state-cartelized fossil fuel industry) structures the problem, and what we can each of us do about both the situation as it affects us, and also about the root causes that drive it.

But when you have a problem created, in large part, by a system of massive government regimentation, privilege, and technocratic planning, in an industry whose exploration and extraction are founded in colonialism and government land-grabs, whose distribution is heavily regulated, concentrated, and promoted by government, and whose protection flows from the barrel of Coalition tanks, I am not entirely convinced that this is a good reason to call for more government regimentation, privilege, and technocratic planning, or for concluding that We need less of [the so-called free market], not more.

I am convinced that people who talk about revolution without understanding the possibility of free action outside the realm of state coercion, who never see any way to approach a pressing social problem except emergency mobilization through lock-step central plans fraudulently passed off as a big society-wide discussion, but in fact handed down in the form of government marching orders–such people are talking with a corpse in their mouths.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-03-22: It’s made of people.
• GT 2004-10-23: What do you get a Universe that already contains everything?