Time Up, Time Down

An Agreement Was Reached

Big surprise... an agreement was reached between... different sections, different agents of the same ruling class. And on what did these different clowns in the same circus agree? They agreed on a charade. A pantomime. A folie a deux.

Said Alphonse to Gaston, "After you." Said Gaston to Alphonse, "Oh no, after you. I insist."

Said Micheletti to US assistant secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs Thomas Shannon, "I'll pretend to agree to recognize that Zelaya might return to office four weeks prior to new elections, with no control over the military, with no agitation for a constituent assembly, with no penalty to coup-iers."

Said Zelaya to Shannon, "I'll pretend that I'm actually returning to office, with no control over the military, with no constituent assembly, with no penalty to coup-iers, and proclaim a great victory."

Said Tom to Hillary, channeling the former president, "Mission accomplished."

This agreement is an attempt at misdirection, at disorientation of the resistance to the coup, which of course, is more than a resistance to the coup but the initial eruption of a revolutionary struggle.

Even if accepted by the Congress and the Supreme Court, the agreement pretends to allow Zelaya to return to office in only a ceremonial role, as the military would be under the control of the electoral commission, and the election is going to be held in 4 weeks. And of course, the old razzle-dazzle of truth commissions, a government of national reconciliation blahblahblah will function as spectacle, to obscure and distract from the real, material, economic circumstances that precipitated the movement into the streets at the opportunity of Zelaya's removal.

The police, secret police, paramilitary organizations, the practitioners of terror against the rural and urban poor, are maintained in their positions without penalty except of course the revolutionary penalty that the movement can impose itself-- and if that should occur, Zelaya, Micheletti, Shannon, Clinton, Reich, the OAS, will be united in a government of international reconciliation denouncing such self-defense by the poor as "destabilizing" to the prospects of "democracy," detrimental to the legitimacy of the truth commissions blahblahblah-- all that junk that capitalism circulates as exchange value without any corresponding use value.

The agreement prohibits action on behalf of a constituent assembly until after January, when a new government is in power. The bourgeoisie know that the key to maintaining political power when bankruptcy looms is the same as the key for maintaining property and business by any individual capitalist when economic bankruptcy looms--- delay. Restructure, reorganize, even if its only the deck chairs on the sinking ship. In short, buy time-- buy time, buying time, of course is literally what makes the bourgeoisie bourgeoisie. The time expropriated, equally of course, is that time that might,could, must be seized by others; that time that belongs to those others; that time that belongs to those others who labor in the maquiladoras, on the plantations, on their minifundias .

A constituent assembly is no solution to the problems faced by the workers and poor in Honduras as such an assembly is a political form, reproducing in essence the illusory separation of property from social struggle, an illusion that, like the buying of time, also allows the bourgeoisie to function as the bourgeoisie, as a ruling class with class obscured. The conflict in Honduras is, however, exactly the social combat that dispels such illusions, that identifies class and property as the content, the substance of the struggle. As such, success for the workers, urban and rural poor of Honduras, exists outside and beyond the demands for a constituent assembly. Any possibility of success necessarily exists only in the organizations those workers, those poor create in the self-defense of the reclamation of their own time.

The bourgeoisie, however, see, feel, sense, behind the demand for the form of the constituent assembly just that substance. In their recognition the historical impossibility, the obsolescence of their own political forms, the bourgeoisie are in substance admitting the obsolescence of their property, of themselves, of their time.

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