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<h1><b>Onwards towards a Communal State! </b></h1><font size=3>February
25th 2010, by Hugo Chávez <br>
<a href="http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5160" eudora="autourl">
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5160<br><br>
</a><b>I <br>
</b>"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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>II <br>
</b>"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.” <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br>
<br>
<b>III <br>
</b>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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br><br>
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. " <br><br>
Let’s go, with Zamora, with Robinson and Bolivar, towards a Communal
State! <br><br>
Towards socialism! <br><br>
Venceremos! <br>
Hugo Chávez Frías<br><br>
21 February 2010 <br><br>
<i>Translated by Kiraz Janicke, for Venezuelanalysis.com <br><br>
<br><br>
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