[News] Chavez - Onwards towards a Communal State!

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Onwards towards a Communal State!

February 25th 2010, by Hugo Chávez
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5160

I
"Zamora lives, the struggle continues," is the 
slogan that lives among our people. There could 
not be a more propitious framework for enacting 
the Organic Law of Federal Government than the 
act of unveiling the statue of Sovereign People’s 
General Ezequiel Zamora at the park El Calvario 
in Caracas. Accompanying us on this bright day 
are representatives of community councils across 
the country, together with the Legislature.

It is 151 years since the start of the Federal 
War (1859-1863): it was February 20, 1859 when 
Tirso Salaverría commanded the Battle of Coro and 
then raised the cry of Federation. We couldn’t 
give Zamora a greater tribute then, than giving 
our people a law to help with their definitive liberation.

II
"I always put the community before the 
individual," wrote our liberator Simón Bolívar on 
October 28, 1828 to General Antonio José de 
Sucre. This is the spirit and driving force of 
our current Bolivarianism: the communal and 
social are foremost above all things. Simon 
Rodriguez was right when he said in his American 
Societies in 1828: "You will see that there are 
two kinds of politics: popular and governmental: 
and that the people are more political than their governments.”

Today we can say that we have a highly 
politicised society, in the true sense and 
meaning of the term, and that our Bolivarian 
Revolution is a direct consequence of such 
politicisation, whose point of rupture was on 27 
February 1989, the popular rebellion that on 
Saturday reaches its twenty-first anniversary. 
Remember what the great Venezuelan revolutionary 
Kleber Ramirez said in the documentary 'History 
of February 4 (1998) - back in August 1992 in the 
purest Robinsonian spirit: "... the time has come 
for communities to assume the powers of state, 
which will lead administratively to the total 
transformation of the Venezuelan state and 
socially to the real exercise of sovereignty by 
society through communal powers.”

These are the reasons why this Saturday 20 
February, we have enacted and launched the new 
Organic Law of the Federal Government Council. 
With it we further open the door to advancing in 
the distribution of power in the hands of the 
people, and to achieving a more efficient and 
effective state, and, above all, unity to fulfill 
its functions under the constitution.

Over and over again I have said: the Venezuelan 
territorial reality must be transformed and, 
therefore, it is necessary to configure a new 
geometry of power that becomes a popular, 
communal and socialist restructuring of the geopolitics of the nation.

By socialism we mean unlimited democracy, 
following in this sense the great Portuguese 
theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos. From this 
comes our firm conviction that the best and most 
radically democratic of the options for defeating 
bureaucracy and corruption is the construction of 
a communal state which is able to test an 
alternative institutional structure at the same 
time as it permanently reinvents itself.

With this law, we must begin in earnest and in 
reality, as Garcia Bacca would say, to 
disassemble the entire corroded colonial 
scaffolding on which a territorial organisation 
was erected and that was intended to smash 
national unity to pieces. And of course people's 
power will play a major role; I would say an 
essential role, in the radical transformation of our country.

III
Since the Land and Agricultural Development Law 
came into force in 2001, the landowning oligarchy 
has launched a violent agenda against the rescue 
of common land and the full exercise of rights 
enshrined by the Land Law and the Constitution 
itself. Faced with the backlash against the 
peasants via an escalation of attacks, sabotage 
and paid assassinations by the most retrograde 
forces in our society, the non-delegable duty of 
the Bolivarian national state and the 
revolutionary government is to protect the 
peasantry: to defend it with all means at its 
disposal. The peasant militia has been created to 
fulfill that duty, placing emphasis on the 
protagonism and responsibility of the peasantry 
as a collective subject in function of their own defence.

The first exercises of the peasant militia, that 
we did in El Pao, Cojedes state last Friday, are 
just an initial indication of developing a 
popular armed force to safeguard our integrity 
and our sovereignty in the fields of Venezuela. 
Who else but the community knows best the 
dynamics, activities, failures and essential 
aspects of safety in their locality? This is the 
same with geographical, spiritual and material issues.

The peasant militia and the Bolivarian Militia as 
a whole are not paramilitary forces, as the 
brainy analysts always try to suggest, even less 
so if we conceive of such a word within the 
reactionary Colombian semantics. On the contrary, 
the Bolivarian Militia (a body absolutely 
governed by the Law), as well as community 
councils, are expressions of the new communal 
state, an integral part of the new structure of 
the communal power we are building.

The Bolivarian Militias are a component of the 
Bolivarian Armed Forces and, therefore, do not 
undermine it, even less is there any intention to 
supplant it. What bothers and annoys those who 
spread such lies is that the Armed Forces have 
been reunited with their original identity: the people in arms.

The Peasant Militia today embodies a transcendent 
principle: defending the homeland, our land. 
Defence against any outside aggressor, but also 
against the internal aggressor who has been 
protected, for too long, in a real state of 
impunity that has counted with the venality of 
certain courts of the Republic which safeguard 
and protect the landowners and criminalise 
peasants and farmers who want to enforce the Land Law.

On 15 February, 191 years passed since the 
memorable speech at Angostura. The Revolutionary 
War had not ended but the words of our Liberator 
embodied the recapture of our identity as a 
nation and the libertarian stamp was put on 
Venezuela. Let’s recall these brilliant lines 
which confirm the reason for our peasant 
militias, our Zamoran militias: "The chains of 
slavery have been broken, and Venezuela has been 
surrounded by new sons and daughters, grateful 
sons and daughters who have converted the tools 
of their captivity into weapons of freedom. Yes, 
those who once were slaves, are free, those who 
once were enemies of a stepmother, are now advocates of a homeland. "

Let’s go, with Zamora, with Robinson and Bolivar, towards a Communal State!

Towards socialism!

Venceremos!
Hugo Chávez Frías

21 February 2010

Translated by Kiraz Janicke, for Venezuelanalysis.com




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