Venezuela's Adjunct Ambassador to the United Nations, Julio Escalona writes:  The Socialist International is the proposal of the moment and places President Chavez at the center of international debate. I am inside the process and from that position can offer an opinion.

Liberation must be worldwide but takes place in concrete spaces. As a result, the program is planetary but rooted locally. It is defined and undertaken in a house for house struggle that must be unleashed in the whole world. Not in cabinets. If that doesn't happen, the International will lose its base of sustentance.

• A concise look at the world panorama defines the program as a fight for the liberation of humanity and nature.

At the next Copenhagen summit countries of the North do not want to enter a legally binding agreement; they want to free themselves from the Kyoto Protocol and seek a new treaty; they reject their historic responsibility for the destruction of the planet and commitment to limit greenhouse gases to urgently needed levels; and their commitment to transfer funding and technology for countries of the South to adapt to and overcome hunger, while combating climate change.

In the same way, they reject a UN resolution to legitimize the rights of Mother Earth.

In Rome they sabotaged the food security summit, refusing to accept 2025 as the deadline to eradicate hunger and facilitate corresponding funding. They ratified confrontation with peasant agriculture ecologically sustainable.

Instead, they continue a war-mongering policy headed by the USA organizing military bases, such as those in Colombia. War is the path to overcome the Capitalist crisis, discharging its effects over peoples and nature.

In this panorama it is convenient to seek the source of inspiration in the First International organized by Marx. He showed the way to the unity of a diversified revolutionary movement: common practice and reflection on that common practice.

So, the problem has always been the liberation of humanity, as expressed in the words of the International hymn: humankind is the International through the liberation of the starving masses.

Marx' advice is essential: The revolution ... cannot take out its poetry of the past but only that of the future.

Julio Escalona
julio.escalona@gmail.com

H.E. Ambassador Julio Escalona is Venezuela's Adjunct Ambassador to the United Nations in New York.  He holds degrees in economics, geopolitics and environmental issues, and is a former director of the School of Economics at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) in Caracas and head of its department of human development. He is a professor of economics, general economic history, economic education in Latin America, contemporary Marxism and contemporary social problems.  He has coordinated research seminars on economic integration, local economies and local development, and alternative technologies and has been a participant and guest lecturer at seminars, forums, academic institutions in Peru, Brazil, Japan, Paris, Mexico and Venezuela.

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