The bottom line is that you are holding up as an exemplar of the authentic left a senior member of a government which has Saddam's labor law on its books, supplemented by Decree 8750, and which has just been using the army against striking oil workers, whom it has promsed to repress with - I quote comrade Mailiki - 'with an iron fist'.

You criticise Chavez for threatening to get the state to supervise the CTV's 2000 elections - an action he never carried through. Well, I agree with Lenin, contra Trotsky, that trade unions should always remain independent of the state, no matter what the character of the state. I have no problem, then, agreeing that Chavez was wrong in 2000. But this matter rather pales into comparison, doesn't it, beside legislation like the 1987 Labor Law, Decree 8750, and the persistent violent repression of trade unions and left-wing parties like the Worker-Communists by the government of your authentic leftist?

This sentence is perhaps deliberately vague, but if it is supposed to imply that the unions and the Communist Party support the occupation of Iraq, then it is contradicted by all the recent statements I've seen:

'Trade unionists and the Communist Party are still consistently the moral seconds on the American and British-led reconstituion of Iraq'

The Iraqi Communist Party's two members of parliament supported the recent cal for a timetable for withdrawal. Iraqi trade union leaders have been outspoken about the same issue for years. I'm with them rather than the government of Decree 8750.