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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element" dir="ltr"> <font
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<h1 class="reader-title">Rebuilding the Hegemony of Chavismo: A
Conversation with Gerardo Rojas (Part I)</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Cira Pascual Marquina –
August 2, 2019</div>
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<p><em>Gerardo Rojas is a Barquisimeto‐based Chavista
intellectual and <a
href="https://gerojasp.wordpress.com/">blogger</a>.
His work as an organizer began in the early 1990s,
when he was in middle school. Later in that decade,
Rojas participated in the occupation of a building
in the barrio where he was born, which became a
community center and later, in 1998, the first
community radio in Venezuela. Rojas was one of the
founders of <a
href="https://vocesurgentes.wordpress.com/">Voces
Urgentes</a> in 2002, a communication collective,
and participated in the organization of one of the
first urban communes, Ataroa Socialist Commune, in
2007. More recently, he was vice minister at the
Ministry of Communes. </em></p>
<p><strong>In recent years, you have focused on the
issue of communal and popular organization,
examining the correlations of forces and bringing to
the forefront a debate about the pending tasks for
the popular movement. One of the tasks you identify
is to resurrect Chavez's core proposal, in the face
of hegemonic currents in the government. The
government currently proposes that the way out of
the crisis will be achieved with more capitalism
instead of more communes and more socialism.</strong></p>
<p>For me, Chavismo is the synthesis of Comandante
Chavez’s thinking, which was itself rooted in the
interests and experiences of the popular movement and
of the working people but also grew out of the
revolutions of the world, and the thinking, theory and
imaginary of the Left.</p>
<p>Three elements synthesize his thinking. The first is
<em>The Blue Book</em> [short book written in 1991 by
Hugo Chavez, in which he presents his views on history
and democracy]; the second is <em>Alo Presidente
Teorico N° 1</em> [2009 speech]; and the third is
the <em>Strike at the Helm</em> speech [2012]. In
those three milestones, we find no more and no less
than a clarion call for self‐government, direct
democracy, social control of the public sphere, and
development at a territorial or local level. Yet we
also find the outline of a national system that would
bring all this together.</p>
<p>With those elements at hand, it is not hard to see
what line we should pursue in our struggle, a path for
popular action that goes hand in hand with a
governance model committed to participatory and
protagonist democracy, which for us is nothing other
than Bolivarian socialism. That is a synthesis of
Chavez’s legacy.</p>
<p>When one reads <em>The Blue Book</em>, which
precedes Chavez’s electoral victory [1998], one is
surprised to find direct, participatory democracy and
self-government at its core. We are talking about the
1990s – that is when Chavez wrote it. Direct democracy
and self-government, were always at the core of the
Bolivarian Revolution. However, with time, experience,
the practice of governing, the emergence of internal
contradictions, together with advances and setbacks,
the proposal gained precision and became a fully
outlined integral project.</p>
<p>Later, in the <em>Alo Presidente Teorico N° 1</em>
speech, we can see Chavez consolidating the mature
proposal. The discourse touches upon various
experiences of popular power, beginning with the <em>Mesas
Tecnicas de Agua</em> [barrio-level organizations
for getting access to running water] and <em>Comites
de Tierra Urbana</em> [Urban Land Committees, formed
in the early days of the Bolivarian Process to
struggle for urban land titles]. However, in that
speech, we find an important leap forward in the
proposal regarding territorial organization and
popular self‐government. The new proposal comes out of
historical experiences, and also from a tangible,
immediate experience: the <em>pueblo</em> had already
demonstrated its capacity to organize in communal
councils, opening up the real possibility of efficient
and transparent self‐governance and collective
control. The potential to go further, now crystallizes
in the proposal of the commune.</p>
<p>In addition to the <em>Alo Presidente Teorico N° 1</em>
landmark speech, we also have the last political
address of Chavez, the testament which he leaves us
before he goes to Cuba to address serious medical
problems. That is the speech known as <em>Strike at
the Helm</em>, which he delivered in the first
cabinet meeting shortly after the 2012 elections and
was publically broadcast nationwide. There Chavez
severely criticized his ministerial team and their
administrative methods. But he didn’t just question
the ministers, he also made some concrete proposals,
based on the collective experience so far and also
based on his own analysis, and taking into account the
correlation of forces at that moment.</p>
<p>Many who talk about <em>Strike at the Helm</em>
limit its scope to the “Commune or nothing” slogan,
and that of course is key – it is one of the sentences
that best synthesizes Chavez’s thinking – but “Commune
or nothing” was essentially already there in <em>Alo
Presidente Teorico N° 1</em>, where the communes
were conceived as the base for the territorial
development of socialism. However, the commune as
expressed in <em>Strike at the Helm</em> transcends
the earlier, merely local proposal, and its scale now
becomes national. Thus, Chavez now introduces
mechanisms of political, administrative, and
institutional coordination regarding the key issue of
planning that range from the communal territory (the
“commune” as expressed in the <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5852">popular
power Laws</a>) to the national scale.</p>
<p>In this speech, Chavez talks about the diverse
modules, territorial units, and stages of popular
development. He talks about weaving socialism into the
fabric of the whole country, with the commune as the
base, and the emergence of an economy based on social
property. So there, in <em>Strike at the Helm</em>,
Chavez acknowledges problems and makes contributions
which, as I just said, take for granted the commune as
a project on a national scale... He also envisions the
project growing from the communal council to the
commune, then to the communal cities, and even later
to the developmental districts and developmental axes
all the way up to the communal state. In other words,
Chavez imagines a process that goes from the local to
the regional and then to the national, recognizing
that planning is very important.</p>
<p><br>
The coming together of the local projects of popular
power (the communes) with the regional and national
governments must go through a democratic debate in
which there is planning process and people agree on
the objectives. That is why the <em><a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7091">Homeland
Plan</a></em> [2012] is also a key to
understanding the communal proposal. It is a guide for
a collective process of planning and action, where
revolutionary imagination and the political project
feed into a plan.</p>
<p><strong>Would you say that within the government,
there is an excessively pragmatic and superficial
use of Chavez’s thinking?</strong></p>
<p>Yes. Today Chavez’s thinking is presented in a
fragmented way by the hegemonic sectors in the
government. His ideas are not presented in a timeline
that is rich, that advances, but that is also
contradictory at moments. Instead, Chavez’s thinking
is deployed with particular interests in mind and in
specific conjunctures. Above all, <em>Strike at the
Helm</em> is cast aside because, as I was saying
earlier, it is Chavez’s political testament.
Additionally, the <em>Homeland Plan</em> is being
made invisible. In fact, a new Homeland Plan was
developed without evaluating the original proposal.
There was absolutely no public evaluation of the first
Homeland Plan, but the government moves onto the next
plan without reflection and input!</p>
<p>Obviously, the country’s situation is radically
different from the one that existed when Chavez was
alive and the <em>Homeland Plan</em> came out. We are
now facing a multifaceted crisis, but that is not an
argument not to evaluate the first plan. On the
contrary! The problem is that contextualizing and
reevaluating that effort would lead back to some key
ideas, from self‐governance and participatory
democracy to social control and political and
territorial reorganization. In all that, we have a
basis from which to build and we have the tangible
experiences... that, in the context of this wretched
crisis, recognizing that we have very few resources
and many weaknesses, is tremendously important! I
think this kind of reflection (and the action that
would ensue) is one of our outstanding tasks.
Postponing that task or sidelining it is one of the
most evident shortcomings of the Bolivarian Revolution
today.</p>
<p><strong>We should talk about the subject of the
revolution. As you mentioned, Chavez went through a
theoretical‐political evolution, but there was
always a focus on poor people’s participation in the
questions that impact their daily lives. That is
evident very early on, in the proposal for
substantive democracy (direct or participatory
democracy) that is envisioned in <em>The Blue Book</em>.
Toward the end of Chavez’s life, the same concern
reemerges in the idea of a new communal society.
However, today we find that the government's
discourse is based on the idea that the people will
be saved by private investment or the "revolutionary
bourgeoisie” that Agriculture Minister Wilmar Castro
Soteldo’s champions. This amounts to a <em>Strike
at the Helm</em> to the right! </strong></p>
<p>From <em>The Blue Book</em> forward, the <em>pueblo</em>
and direct democracy became central to Chavez’s
thinking. With the project of a profound, substantive
democracy we have in effect a guiding principle to
rebuild the hegemony of Chavismo. In this way, it
would be possible to bring together more and more
people, to build a collective subject with our main
ideas clearly defined: the fight against corruption
and the exercise of direct democracy together with the
defense of the Venezuelan people as subjects that are
part and parcel of a historical emancipatory struggle.
Currently, the recovery of our historical memory as a
fundamental base for revolutionary thinking is
important, as Chavez’s early writings show.</p>
<p>So here are three keys. First comes the
reconstruction of ourselves as a collective subject, a
<em>pueblo</em> with a history and a defined popular
identity: Venezuelans but also Latin Americans. That
was, is, and will always be fundamental to
constructing hegemony, because from there we can
project an identity. Second is the fight against the
corrupt political system, against the Fourth Republic
[the 1958 to 1999 period], which also comes early on
in Chavez, and brings us to the present and a
necessary critical reflection about the old mechanisms
that are quite evidently [coming back] now.</p>
<p>Third is democracy, and when we talk about democracy,
we are talking about integral democracy, democracy in
the economic, social, and political spheres.
Obviously, there can be no real democracy if there is
no economic democracy. Without that, we encounter
again the farce of representative democracy, against
which emerged one of the early struggles and debates
in which the revolution naturally favored the
constituent <em>pueblo</em>.</p>
<p>Those are the main teachings from the early days of
the revolution. There, the subject was the <em>pueblo</em>.
Early on, the key was to add not subtract, and one of
the sentences that Chavez repeated most in his
discourses was his call for the “defense of the <em>pueblo</em>,”
the <em>pueblo</em> that has a history and a present
of struggle, the <em>pueblo</em> that has an identity
and gets together to transform its own reality, and
that questions the historical interests of the
dominant class. That class included the landowning
oligarchy, which in some cases is the same that we are
struggling against still today, as well as the
bourgeoisie, with its corporate and media interests.</p>
<p>Overall, it was a question of the <em>pueblo</em>
combatting the powers-that-be both inside and outside
the state. This is tremendously urgent to think about
today, because recovering it goes hand in hand with
the issue of corruption. At least in his public
discourse, Chavez was adamantly against corruption and
self‐critical. He called for a fight against the
corruption in the bureaucracy and called for the
government and the people to put the breaks on this.</p>
<p>For us, as I was saying, the <em>pueblo</em>’s
identity and the construction of hegemony are key.
Initially, part of that construction was the very
recognition of the <em>pueblo</em> (for the first
time) in the political discursive sphere. The <em>pueblo</em>
as a subject brings together campesinos, women
(paraphrasing Chavez, “the Bolivarian Revolution will
be <a href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/video/13321">feminist</a>
or it won’t be”), and barrio dwellers.</p>
<p>But, of course, in the process of building hegemony,
the Bolivarian Revolution added sectors of society to
the project with rather diverse interests. Today, an
important part of the government is occupied by those
other sectors, and they seek the restitution of the
logic of capital. Here we should acknowledge the
obvious: capitalism was never totally displaced, but
we did advance towards the constitution of a social
state of justice with rule of law, and they want to
revert it.</p>
<p>Certain sectors of our government, the hegemonic
ones, aim to minimize or eliminate all the social,
economic and political advances made previously. For
instance, they reject the objective of social
inclusion from an economic point of view. Mind you,
inclusion should be understood not in a superficial
sense; we are talking about inclusion as the
construction of power, of popular power, with transfer
of the means of production to the people, which was
clearly established by Chavez in <em>Strike at the
Helm</em>.</p>
<p>Today, I would say that the main contradiction, more
so than the contradiction with the opposition, is
actually within [Chavismo]: this is where people have
to assume positions. It is in this area where there is
a dispute regarding how to proceed and how to build a
social base to continue with the revolution.</p>
<p>In 2015, or perhaps before, the hegemonic bloc that
involved the people was left behind. That was when the
government began to close in more and more on itself,
leaving the <em>pueblo</em> out. Today we can say
that the space of power is reduced to a handful of
people, and their tendency goes against the original
Chavista proposal.</p>
<p>What can we say about those people? They have de
facto power, and the people that surround them manage
a lot of money which was captured through privileged
access to subsidized dollars or contracting services
with the state... So we are talking about the making
of a new “national” bourgeoisie that comes out of the
profits produced by oil production. We must be
critical about the ambiguous class character of the
government, but we should also be self‐critical to the
degree that we weren’t able to take charge of the
spaces of power. That is true to the degree that we
didn’t call for another way of doing politics at the
highest levels.</p>
<p><strong>I agree with your assessment. However, you
have also talked about the survival of the Chavista
way of doing politics. Where do you think that it is
still present in Venezuelan society today?</strong></p>
<p>That is important. We should recognize that there is
a Chavista way of politics that is alive and well, and
it expresses itself in communal work, in local
organization, and in direct popular participation to
solve daily problems. These are ways of doing politics
that are not supported by the government, that are
invisibilized or made visible in the worst way
possible. The latter is done to reduce the
revolutionary potential of Chavez’s way of doing
politics.</p>
<p>Let me give you an example: recently state media did
some coverage of the <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14478">Altos
de Lidice Commune</a>, and they reported that a
pharmacy opened there. But when you go to the commune,
you discover that there is no pharmacy there. Instead
there is something much larger and more important: an
integral communal health system, an initiative that
brings together popular canteens [solidarious lunch
canteens, known as “comedores populares”], primary
attention to the most vulnerable at home, the
coordination of at least four or five <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/tag/barrio-adentro">Barrio
Adentro</a> [public health] ambulatories, etc. We
could say that this initiative amounts to popular
power recovering Chavez’s Barrio Adentro initiative.
What is there, in Altos de Lidice, is not a mere
pharmacy, it’s a system. If you go to the so-called
pharmacy, you won’t be able to buy anything. On the
other hand, you will be given free medication (which
is received through fraternal donations mostly from
Chile and Italy), if a request is made by the doctors,
who are integrated into the communal system.</p>
<p>So the state media reports that a pharmacy opened in
Altos de Lidice, implying that it is the outcome of
governmental policies, when what we are witnessing is
really the outcome of popular, autonomous
organization, which produced a lot more than a
pharmacy. It is a grassroots initiative to build a
communal healthcare system.</p>
<p>Chavismo is alive in a subject that is present
everywhere, in every corner of the country. But we can
say also that this subject is dispersed and facing
political blackmail. In this very harsh reality, we
may ask ourselves everyday how to raise our voices, we
may ponder if our criticisms could amount to treason
or if we could be accused of treason. But Chavismo,
this popular subject, is alive and well. Now the issue
is how to make it visible, how to bring it together,
and how to develop a collective line of action.</p>
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