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<font size=3><b>Venezuela: New moves to build people's power<br><br>
</b></font><font size=1>
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/venezuela-new-moves-to-build-peoples-power-by-frederico-fuentes" eudora="autourl">
http://www.zcommunications.org/venezuela-new-moves-to-build-peoples-power-by-frederico-fuentes<br>
<br>
</a></font><font size=3>By
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/federicofuentes">Frederico
Fuentes</a><br>
<br>
Source: <a href="http://www.greenleft.org.au/2010/831/42766">Green Left
Weekly</a><br>
Thursday, March 25, 2010<br>
<br>
(Caracas, 22 March 2010) -- “The free, sovereign and independent homeland
of our dreams will only come true if we radicalize the process and speed
up the transition to socialism”, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez wrote
in his March 14 weekly column “Chavez Lines”.<br>
<br>
The Venezuelan government has launched a number of initiatives in recent
weeks aimed to tackle threats to the revolutionary process including
from elements within the pro-Chavez camp that seek to undermine plans to
deepen the revolution.<br>
<br>
Central to this are new measures aimed at speeding up the transfer of
power to organized communities.<br>
<br>
Chavez wrote in his February 21 column: “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>
Participatory democracy<br>
<br>
The previous day, Chavez announced the creation of the federal government
council in front of thousands of armed peasants that are part of the
newly created peasant battalions in the Bolivarian militia.<br>
<br>
As well as the vice president, government ministers, state governors and
mayors, the council includes representatives of communal councils,
communes and other representatives directly elected by the people.<br>
<br>
The communal councils are grassroots bodies that bring together existing
community organizations that have sprung up in Venezuela’s poor
neighborhood around issues such as access to health, education, water and
electricity.<br>
<br>
The councils encompass 200-400 families in urban areas and 20-50 families
in rural areas. Decisions on which problems to prioritize and how to
tackle them are made in citizen assemblies open to the entire
community.<br>
<br>
Funding for the councils comes from the government, but a strong emphasis
is placed on relying on local cooperatives, volunteer labor and local
expertise to bypass private contractors and empower the community.<br>
<br>
Communes bring together various local communal councils and other social
organizations in order to tackle problems on a larger scale. There are
187 communes are in the process of being created nationally.<br>
<br>
Communes are being encouraged to play a direct economic role, such as
creating cooperatives, taking over idle factories to be reopened under
worker-community control, and setting up communal markets to sell
produces from other communes.<br>
<br>
The federal government council brings together representatives of the old
state structures with the new, emerging communal state. The council aims
to help transfer various powers now held by the national government,
state governorships and mayoralties to these emerging organs of peoples’
power.<br>
<br>
Such organs include workers’ and peasants’ councils, which will also be
represented on the council.<br>
<br>
Workers’ control<br>
<br>
There are also indications the government is moving to transfer control
over the running of important state industries to their workers.<br>
<br>
One example is Plan Socialist Guayana, which involves tens of thousands
of workers in the industrial complex in Bolivar state.<br>
<br>
Workers, backed by Chavez, have been discussing, and in some cases
implementing, a radical transformation in the running of local aluminum,
iron ore, steel and mining companies.<br>
<br>
There are also important moves in the electrical sector, which has been
plagued with problems. Hydroelectric dams that are at critically low
levels due to ongoing droughts generate some 70% of Venezuela’s
electricity.<br>
<br>
The sector also suffers from years of under-investment by pre-Chavez
governments that were preparing to privatize the state-own industry.<br>
<br>
Declaring a state of emergency in the electrical sector, Chavez has
called on the workers to actively participate in management.<br>
<br>
This has long been a demand of the workers themselves, who finally won
this year an important 15-month-long battle against state management for
a new collective contract.<br>
<br>
The new contract not only equalizes pay and conditions across the
electricity sector (as part of integrating newly nationalized companies
with the pre-existing state industry), it also enshrines worker and
community participation in management.<br>
<br>
Since then, the Federation of Electrical Workers (Fetraelec) and new
electricity minister Ali Araque Rodriguez have been removing managers who
have operated against the interests of the workers and sabotaged the
industry.<br>
<br>
In some places, workers have begun to take control over local affiliates
of Corpoelec, the national state-owned power company.<br>
<br>
Chavez also named Raul Arocha as president of CADAFE, a key component of
Corpoelec. Arocha is an engineer who was elected by workers as manager of
the Merida zone of CADAFE and helped develop workers’ participation
there.<br>
<br>
Fetraelec proposed Arocha’s appointment due to his proven commitment to
promoting worker participation.<br>
<br>
Fetraelec is organizing nation-wide workers’ assemblies to develop a plan
for how workers can run the sector. The assemblies will culminate with a
mass meeting with Chavez where workers will present their proposals to
restructure Corpoelec.<br>
<br>
In a March 18 press conference with Fetraelec leaders, Jaua said: “Chavez
wants the workers to convert themselves in protagonist subject ... via
the creation of socialist companies, with the decisive and active
participation of the workers.” In response to allegations by the
right-wing opposition that Chavez is seeking to concentrate power in his
own hands, Vice-President Elias Juau told the February 20 gathering of
armed peasants: “We did not come here to concentrate power but rather to
dismantle the national oligarchy.<br>
<br>
“For us, the only way to avoid the concentration of political and
economic power in the hands of the oligarchy is to return power to the
people.”<br>
<br>
This encroachment on the economic and political power of local and
Western capitalist interests has provoked a violent reaction.<br>
<br>
One example is the response of large landowners to the government’s land
reform program, in which 2.5 million hectares have been redistributed to
poor peasants since 2001.<br>
<br>
In that time, more than 250 peasant leaders have been killed at the hands
of paramilitaries hired by large landowners.<br>
<br>
In response to this violence, and as part of preparing for a potential
foreign military attack, peasant battalions of the Bolivarian militia
have been formed this year.<br>
<br>
Chavez has also argued for the creation of worker battalions organized in
factories.<br>
<br>
He said: “The Bolivarian Militia, 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>
A new state<br>
<br>
Chavez said creating a new state was needed “to demolish the old perverse
vestiges and new threats of bueaucratizm”. He said, “the best and most
radically democratic of the options for defeating bureaucracy and
corruption is the construction of a communal state”.<br>
<br>
A recent example of government moves to tackle corruption was the arrest
of a number of bankers.<br>
<br>
Many of the arrested claimed to support the revolutionary process. But
via deals signed with government ministries and other state institutions,
they had created a network of corruption with state funds.<br>
<br>
More than 30 bankers face charges. The state intervened into eight banks
(of which six are now run by the state) and several dozen companies owned
by the bankers were nationalised.<br>
<br>
Reformist and corrupt practices within state companies and the government
have set back past attempts to move towards workers’ control.<br>
<br>
The push by electricity workers between 2004-06 for workers’
participation in management was rolled back by reformist sectors within
the company and the government. The workers are confronting some of these
same forces in the renewed battle for workers’ control.<br>
<br>
In Guayana, aluminum workers have denounced a number of attempts by
management, and national and state officials, to sabotage workers’
participation which has increased discontent and disillusionment among
workers toward the government.<br>
<br>
One recent example is a contract signed by management to sell
semi-finished materials to the multinational Glencore for the next six
years, with no consultation with the workers.<br>
<br>
Such corrupt deals with multinationals remove the possibility of workers
deciding where production should be geared.<br>
<br>
Venezuela is an underdeveloped nation heavily reliant on its oil
industry. One of the key aims of the revolution is to overcome this
through national development. Production for foreign markets on behalf of
multinationals undermines this goal.<br>
<br>
It contradicts Chavez’s January 24 announcement that all state firms
should hand their products to a state entity to distribute them according
to the needs of the people at cheaper prices.<br>
<br>
The aluminum workers are demanding such contracts be rescinded.<br>
<br>
Revolution, not reform<br>
<br>
On February 20, Chavez again called on the people to continue to “prepare
themselves for the transference and redistribution of political,
economic, social and military power”.<br>
<br>
Chavez said on March 5: “We are not here to carry out a reform, no!<br>
<br>
“This is a revolution, and if we are not clear about what we are dealing
with, we could end up carrying out a simple reform so that nothing
changes in the end.”<br>
<br>
Chavez quoted Polish-born revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg’s famous 1900
pamphlet Reform or Revolution: “Only when the great mass of workers take
the keen and dependable weapons of scientific socialism in their own
hands, will all the petty-bourgeois inclinations, all the opportunistic
currents, come to naught.”<br>
<br>
Chavez argued that ideological weakness and ties to business interests
where behind the defection in February by Lara governor Henri Falcon, who
left the Chavez-led United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) to join
the Homeland For All (PPT) party.<br>
<br>
On March 13, Chavez said: “He couldn’t take it any more because he is not
a real revolutionary ... A special fibre is required in order to confront
the oligarchy.”<br>
<br>
He said the “regional bourgeoisie” surrounded Falcon.<br>
<br>
Chavez urged the pre-candidates in the internal PSUV elections to
determine the candidates for September national elections to strengthen
themselves ideologically by reading Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Che
Guevara.<br>
<br>
“We have a clear target for the next elections: an overwhelming triumph
so that the National Assembly continues being a space to strengthen and
deepen the socialist dynamic.”<br>
<br>
Rather than simply being a question of the number of PSUV candidates
elected, Chavez said, “what we are dealing with is a qualitative
revolutionary challenge”.<br>
<br>
“If we want that the parliament to dismantle the old capitalist state and
open the doors to the socialist state, we have to increase our
revolutionary conscience and our real socialist praxis [practice].”<br>
<br>
Chavez said the aim was moving beyond simple representation to a
situation where the people themselves will govern.<br>
<br>
“This is about legislating in accordance with the socialist praxis and
obeying the people. Those who do not understand it must choose another
path.”<br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
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