On the Transition to Socialism in Venezuela

By John Bellamy Foster
Monthly Review – April 2015

On October 20, 2012, less than two weeks after being reelected to his fourth term as Venezuelan president and only months before his death, Hugo Chávez delivered his crucial El Golpe de Timón (“Strike at the Helm”) speech to the first meeting of his ministers in the new revolutionary cycle.1 Chávez surprised even some of his strongest supporters by his insistence on the need for changes at the top in order to promote an immediate leap forward in the creation of what is referred to as “the communal state.” This was to accelerate the shift of power to the population that had begun with the formation of the communal councils (groupings of families involved in self-governance projects—in densely populated urban areas, 200–400 families; in rural areas, 50–100 families). The main aim in the new revolutionary cycle, he insisted, was to speed up the registration of communes, the key structure of the communal state. In the communes, residents in geographical areas smaller than a city unite in a number of community councils with the object of self-governance through a communal parliament, constructed on participatory principles. The communes are political-economic-cultural structures engaged in such areas as food production, food security, housing, communications, culture, communal exchange, community banking, and justice systems. All of this had been legally constituted by the passage of the Organic Laws of Popular Power in 2010, including, most notably, the Organic Law of the Communes and the Organic Law of the Communal Economic System.

Chávez’s “Strike at the Helm” speech, which insisted on the rapid construction of communes, was to be one of the most important and memorable speeches of his career. It offers the key to the past, present, and future of the Venezuelan revolution. More than that, it presents us with new insights into the whole question of the transition to socialism in the twenty-first century.2

In March 2011, when I was the sole U.S. participant in a small group of socialist intellectuals from the Americas and Europe invited to Caracas to confer with the country’s top ministers on the future of the Bolivarian Revolution, it was already apparent that the full implementation of Venezuela’s 2010 “Organic Law of the Commons,” the most crucial enactment of the revolution, faced major obstacles.3 Although there were thousands of communal councils there were as yet no registered communes—the larger territorial organizations of which communal councils were to form a part, and which would represent the real basis for popular power. Nor at that point, during a presidential election cycle that was to determine the future of the Bolivarian Revolution, was it easy to move forward in this respect. Indeed, there was clearly considerable confusion at the ministerial level around the question of how the establishment of the communes, the most important element in the revolutionary process, would be accomplished, if at all.4

Hence, it was a historic moment when Chávez in his October 2012 speech crossed this Rubicon. He insisted on a full-scale socialist political transformation, with the intention of decisively shifting political power to the people, and by that means making the revolution irreversible. In addressing the communes in his “Strike at the Helm” speech, Chávez commenced by referring to István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital, not only in order to lay down certain basic principles, but also with the aim of once again urging those engaged in the Bolivarian Revolution to study Mészáros’s analysis, as the most developed and strategic theory of socialist transition:

Here I have a [book written by] István Mészáros, chapter XIX called “The Communal System and the Law of Value.” There is a sentence that I underlined a while ago, I am going to read it to you, ministers and vice president, speaking of the economy, of economic development, speaking of the social impulses of the revolution: “The yardstick,” says Mészáros, “of socialist achievements is the extent to which the adopted measures and policies actively contribute to the constitution and deep-rooted consolidation of a substantively democratic…mode of overall social control and self-management.”

Therefore we arrive at the issue of democracy. Socialism is in its essence truly democratic, while, on the other hand, there is capitalism: quintessentially anti-democratic and exclusive, the imposition of capital by the capitalist elite. But socialism is none of these things, socialism liberates; socialism is democracy and democracy is socialism, in politics, the social sphere, and in economics.5

Presenting an age-old principle of revolutionary theory, associated most famously with Marx, Chávez argued: “It must always be this way: first the political revolution, political liberation and then economic revolution. We must maintain political liberation and from that point the political battle is a permanent one, the cultural battle, the social battle.”6 The problem of a transition to socialism was then, first of all, a political one: creating an alternative popular, participatory, protagonist base. Only then could changes in economics, production, and property take place. This new popular base of power had to have equivalent power in the organization of what Mészáros called the necessary “social metabolic reproduction” to that of capital itself, displacing the latter. It needed, in Chávez’s words, to “form part of a systematic plan, of something new, like a network…a network that works like a gigantic spider’s web covering the new territory.” Indeed, “if it didn’t work this way,” he insisted, “it would all be doomed to fail; it would be absorbed by the old system, which would swallow it up, because capitalism is an enormous amoeba, it is a monster.” (Continued)

Chávez’s analysis was clearly rooted in Mészáros’s concept of “social metabolic reproduction.” The capital system, in this view, was an overall system of reproduction, a kind of organic metabolism, albeit in a form that alienated human beings from themselves, each other, their communities, and external nature. To create a genuine socialist political economy thus required instituting an alternative communal state, as the basis of social production and exchange; one that would have an organic metabolism that was as vital (indeed more vital since unalienated) as capitalism itself, basing itself on the power of protagonist democracy. As Chávez insisted in his “Strike at the Helm” speech, such a democratic-communal political organization, as an absolute necessity of socialism, stood in sharp contrast to the practice that emerged in the Soviet Union where “there was never democracy, there wasn’t socialism, it was diverted.” Hence, the goal in the transition to twenty-first-century socialism, he said, was to create “a new democratic hegemony which obliges us not to impose, but rather to convince.”

Chávez went on to suggest that for all of the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution it had not yet taken the decisive step: the real transfer of power to the people, the creation of the communes. Although the first commune had been registered in August 2012, the process had been slow, not conforming to the necessary acceleration of revolutionary progress.7 Without the communes, the communal state (“the commune”) could not be built. Demanding of the government the “Self-Criticism Which Clarifies,” Chávez asked “Where is the commune?” Turning to Vice President Nicholás Maduro, he said: “Nicholás I entrust you with this task as I would entrust my life to you: the communes…. There is already a Law of the Communes, of communal economy. Therefore, how will we make it happen…?”8 The communes of the people that were already in the making, Chávez stated, “dictate that we search out the Law of the Communes, that we read it, and study it. Many people, I am sure, and I am not necessarily speaking about those of you here, haven’t read it, because it is believed that it isn’t important to us. Many people haven’t even read the Law of Communal Economy because they believe No, it doesn’t have anything to do with me.” In answer, Chávez declared, the principles should be “either independence or nothing, either the commune or nothing.”9

What made the communes so important was that “Socialism Cannot Be Made By Decree.” The formation of socialism, Chávez stated, “is about creating, as Mészáros says, a coordinated combination of parallel systems and from there the regionalization, the initiative districts. But we still haven’t created a single one, and we have the law, we have our decree, but it was just a decree, and inside the initiative districts are the communes.” How then to create the communes?

A similar, integrated approach was to be directed at other areas of the Bolivarian Revolution. Chávez insisted “we must implant social property with the spirit of socialism.” This meant that parallel, interconnected developments should take place, social housing should be coupled with social production, social property in land should support “small producers,” transportation and highways would need to be geared to communities and their cultural and economic needs. Efficiency in meeting all these needs demanded “a level of communication, of coordination, a crossing, or an intersection of plans, of diagnosis, of problems, of coordinated action. It’s like a war…. We are nothing without integrating our vision, in our work, in everything, it will be hard but we will persevere.” Likewise there was a need for “Reinforcing the National Public Media System.” Speaking especially to Ernesto Villegas, Minister of Popular Power for Communication and Information, Chávez asked Villegas to convert himself “into the leader of this system” and demanded greater popular involvement and communication at every level. “Why not,” he asked, “have [television] programs with workers? Where we can voice our self-criticisms, we should not be afraid to criticize, nor to self-criticize. We need it, it gives us nourishment.”

The creation of the communes demanded also the furthering of social property, of communication, and of a national media system, so that all of these developments in the formation of a protagonist democracy could feed on each other, generating an entirely different social metabolism. But the core of the new cycle of revolutionary transition, Chávez insisted, was to be the creation of the communes upon which the future of the Bolivarian Revolution depended: “either the commune or nothing.”

The Political Theory of the Communal State

Despite the extraordinary role he played in the liberation struggles in South America against Spain, resulting in his being given the unique title El Libertador in Venezuela, Simón Bolívar famously described himself as “a weak piece of straw caught up in the revolutionary hurricane,” thereby dramatizing how he had been swept along by the force of the revolution of the people. There is no doubt that Chávez viewed the part that he himself had played in the revolutionary hurricane of the Bolivarian Revolution in these same terms, even quoting Bolívar in this respect.10 Chávez constantly stressed the role of the people as the protagonist of the revolution, and tied the Bolivarian struggle to the larger insurgent tradition in Venezuela, represented by the heroic triad of: Bolívar, El Libertador himself; Simón Rodríguez, Bolívar’s teacher and mentor; and Ezequiel Zamora, the leader of the peasant revolt of the 1850s and ’60s. In this way Chávez depicted as the historical antecedents of the Bolivarian Revolution: (1) the great struggle for liberation from Spain, legal equality, and the freeing of the slaves via Bolívar; (2) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French Revolution, and utopian socialism via Rodríguez; and (3) the continual struggles for freedom on the part of Venezuela’s peasants via Zamora.

Chávez portrayed the Bolivarian Revolution as the outcome of a historical process with deep, centuries-long roots, arising out of interconnected liberation struggles in Europe and the Americas: marking a long struggle for freedom. This conception was later extended through the critical incorporation of Marxian theory and a thoroughgoing reexamination of the question of the state, as it had presented itself in the revolutions of the twentieth century.

All of this contributed to a view of the institutionalization of popular power as the main revolutionary objective in a socialist transition, and to a critique in this respect of the Soviet model. The new, emerging synthesis was what Chávez called the new model of “twenty-first-century socialism,” and what Marta Harnecker has referred to as a “sui generis revolution.”11 The key strategic element in Chávez’s overall conception was Mészáros’s notion of capital as an alienated system of social metabolic reproduction and the need to replace this with an organic system of social metabolic reproduction emanating from below.

Writing from Yare prison in 1993—where he had been confined for his role in the abortive military coup unleashed by the Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionário (MBR-200) following the Caracazo uprising and subsequent state repression—Chávez insisted that “the sovereign people must transform itself into the object and the subject of power. This option is not negotiable for revolutionaries.” He argued on this basis for a vast structural change in the political system:
a veritable polycentric distribution of power, displacing power from the centre towards the periphery, increasing the effective power of the decision making and the autonomy of the particular communities and municipalities. The Electoral Assemblies of each municipality and state will elect Electoral Councils which will possess a permanent character and will function in absolute independence from the political parties. They will be able to establish and direct the most diverse mechanisms of Direct Democracy: popular assemblies, referenda, plebiscites, popular initiatives, vetoes, revocation, etc…. Thus the concept of participatory democracy will be changed into a form in which democracy based on popular sovereignty constitutes itself as the protagonist of power. It is precisely at such borders that we must draw the limits of advance of Bolivarian democracy. Then we shall be very near to the territory of utopia.12

Chávez’s initial Bolivarian revolutionary strategy was thus envisioned as one that would promote a participatory and protagonist form of democracy. It would institute structures of direct democracy and popular power, retaining a relation to existing political structures but nonetheless constituting a revolutionary attack on bourgeois representative democracy. It was this vision that Chávez was to promote as a “Third Way” when he ran for and won election as president in 1998, followed by the election of a constituent assembly and codification of these principles into a new Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in 1999.13 Yet, these changes were only made possible by a massive revolutionary popular mobilization, which had its own logic, and revolutionary political thrust.

In political theory going back to the eighteenth century the question of democratic popular power and its relation to the state is often treated as one of constituent versus constituted power. The best known contemporary work on this history is Antonio Negri’s Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, which Chávez read in prison concurrently with Rousseau’s Social Contract.14 Constituent power, or direct democracy based on popular sovereignty, of the kind theorized by Rousseau, is generally considered by political theorists to be the rare exception, exercising its force in modern times mainly in periods of revolutionary ferment. From the standpoint of constituent power, the political is not a separate, superstructural realm alienated from the people, but must be rooted in popular sovereignty. Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel writes in a similar vein of the “necessary institutionalization of the power of the people,” which he calls potestas. This is the real delegation of power, which is democratic only insofar as it conforms with the potentia (constituent power) of the people.15

In sharp contrast to constituent power, constituted power goes hand in hand with the subordination of labor to capital, for which such concentrated state power is essential. Here political representation, the mainstay of the bourgeois liberal-democratic state, “presents itself,” in Negri’s words, as a “centralized mediation” between the people and the state apparatus.16 Edmund Burke penned the classic defense of limited democratic or representative government as a form of constituted power—whereby representatives, once they are elected, are free for their entire term of office to make decisions independent of and even in opposition to their constituencies—in his famous “Speech to the Electors of Bristol” in 1774. Political representatives, Burke argued, owe to their constituencies only their independent judgments. “Your representative…betrays instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it [his judgment] to your opinion.” In his 1791 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, one of his works in response to the French Revolution, Burke coupled a long, vituperative attack on Rousseau, with the contention that “the people at large, when once these miserable sheep have broken the field,” were ill fit to rule, representing a “retrograde order of society.”17

Marx, in sharp contrast to such reigning liberal views, can be seen as arguing passionately for a system of constituent power in the first draft of The Civil War in France, defending the Paris Commune, when he stated:
The true antithesis to the Empire itself—that is to the state power, the centralized executive, of which the Second Empire was only the exhausting formula—was the Commune…. This was, therefore, a Revolution not against this or that, legitimate, constitutional, republican, or Imperialist form of State Power. It was a Revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life. It was not a revolution to transfer it from one fraction of the ruling classes to the other, but a Revolution to break down this horrid machinery of Class domination itself. It was not one of those dwarfish struggles between the executive and the parliamentary forms of class domination, but a revolt against both these forms, integrating each other.18

In the final version of The Civil War in France, Marx stated: “The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the State parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society…. It was essentially a working-class government…the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.”19

Lenin too had addressed such issues, in The State and Revolution, which was based primarily on Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune and argued for the withering away of the state. A more direct response to the institutionalization of constituent power was his article on “Dual Power,” addressing the emergence of the Congress of Soviets of Soldiers’, Workers’, and Peasants’ Deputies in the 1917 revolution. “The basic question of every revolution,” he wrote, “is that of state power.” The emergence of the Soviets represented, “an entirely different kind of power,” the “direct initiative of the people from below.” Lenin recognized the need for a system of dual power in the revolution itself. Nevertheless, the constituent power of the Soviet was largely displaced by the time of Lenin’s death in 1924, and thereafter more completely—the result of a complex series of historical circumstances, emanating from party, state, bureaucracy, and the pressure of external forces, leading to a new kind of constituted, and ultimately repressive, power.20

Dario Azzellini, writing in 2013 on “The Communal State: Communal Councils, Communes, and Workplace Democracy,” presented the dynamic tension between dual—constituent and constituted—power as the secret of the entire Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela, we are told, adopted “a two-track approach,” participatory and protagonistic democracy, on the one hand, constituted power within the state, on the other.21 The complex aspect of the revolution under Chávez, however, was that the constituted state power had as its main objective the creation of a communal state, the shifting of power to the populace through a myriad of structures: constituent assemblies, plebiscites, social missions, cooperatives, socialist workers councils, communal councils, communes, and communal cities. The emphasis on the promotion of constituent power was already underway by the time of the attempted coup against Chávez in 2002 (defeated by the Venezuelan population who rose up against the coup). It was accelerated in 2005 with Chávez’s declaration of the new strategy of “socialism in the twenty-first century” and his insistence that it was necessary to build a communal economy and state.

Chávez was to draw increasingly on Mészáros’s Beyond Capital as a source of theoretical and strategic insight and revolutionary inspiration. In 1993, when Mészáros was completing Beyond Capital, he read Chávez’s political pamphlet, Pueblo, Sufragio y Democracia, written while Chávez was confined in Yare prison (and quoted from above). Mészáros not only laid stress on the extraordinary revolutionary conception of Chávez, but connected it to the theory of constitutive power embedded in Rousseau’s Social Contract. Rousseau, Mészáros argued, had insisted, rightly, on the fact that the legislative power cannot be represented, and must rest directly on the people’s sovereignty, expressing the general will. However, Rousseau, in contrast to standard interpretations, had argued quite differently with respect to the executive power: that it could and must be delegated.22 A socialist revolution, building on this conception and recognizing the failure of the Soviet model, would need to rely on a combination of direct and delegated power controlled by the associated producers: going against representative government and the separation of the state from the people. It would have to put political revolution, and the reabsorption of the state within society, before even economic emancipation, creating the cell structure for a socialist revolution. The division between political and civil society would have to be dissolved altogether. “For without the progressive and ultimately complete transfer of material reproductive and distributive decision making to the associated producers there can be no hope for the members of the postrevolutionary community of transforming themselves into the subject of power.”23

Chávez was soon aware of Mészáros’s analysis. Beginning in 2001 with the appearance of the Spanish translation of Beyond Capital, Chávez began studying it voraciously, meeting on a number of occasions with Mészáros for extensive talks. Two strategic elements of Mészáros’s work were central for Chávez. The first of these, as we have seen, was Mészáros’s conception, drawn from Marx, of capital as a system of social metabolic reproduction, a self-reinforcing, integrated system of complex reproductive relations, which could not simply be abolished, but which had to be replaced with an alternative organic metabolism, based in communal relations.24 The second was Mészáros’s understanding of the necessary framework of “The Communal System and the Law of Value,” which provided the strategic foundation for the revolutionary institutionalization of a system of “communal social relations,” whereby the population reabsorbed sovereign rule into itself: a new kind of communal state or system. Such shifting of power to the people was at the same time a way of making the revolution, in Mészáros’s terms, “irreversible,” since the people would defend what was their own.25 In the Organic Law of the Commune, passed in 2010, those elected by the communal assemblies are not representatives, as in bourgeois representative democracy, but delegates or spokespeople, voceros.26

It was in 2005, as a key part of the building of twenty-first century socialism, that Chávez, rooting his analysis in Mészáros’s work, began to call for the immediate building of a communal economy and state: “The Point of Archimedes, this expression taken from the wonderful book of István Mészáros, a communal system of production and of consumption—that is what we are creating, we know we are building this. We have to create a communal system of production and consumption—a new system…. Let us remember that Archimedes said: ‘You give me an intervention point [a point on which to stand] and I will move the world.’ This is the point from which to move the world today.”27 Such a permanent political revolution was the means to the creation of new, creative, socialist human beings able to make their own culture, their own economy, their own history, and their own individual and collective needs. As Mészáros put it in 2007, in his article “Bolívar and Chávez: The Spirit of Radical Determination,” “it remains as true today as it was in Bolívar’s time that one cannot envisage the sustainable functioning of humanity’s social macrocosm without overcoming the internal antagonisms of its microcosms: the adversarial/conflictual constitutive cells of our society under capital’s mode of social metabolic control. For a cohesive and socially viable macrocosm is conceivable only on the basis of the corresponding and humanly rewarding constitutive cells of interpersonal relations.”28 This demanded substantive equality in the cell structure of society: the family, community, and communal structures.29

The goal of twentieth-century socialism initiated by Chávez, as Michael Lebowitz has pointed out, was to build “socialism as an organic system.” In January 2007, Chávez presented the general economic-social objectives of the Bolivarian socialist revolution by introducing (once again on the basis of Mészáros) the notion of “‘the elementary triangle of socialism’—the combination of social property, social production, and satisfaction of social needs.” For Lebowitz—who, at Chávez’s request, had played a key mediating role in the interpretation of the relevant passages of Mészáros’s Beyond Capital in this respect, leading to Chávez’s formulation of the elementary triangle of socialism—this represented a crucial theoretical turning point:
Once again, Chávez’s theoretical step can be traced back to Mészáros’s Beyond Capital. Drawing upon Marx, Mészáros had argued the necessity to understand capitalism as an organic system, a specific combination of production-distribution-consumption, in which all the elements coexist simultaneously and support one another. The failure of the socialist experiments of the twentieth century, he proposed, occurred because of the failure to go beyond “the vicious circle of the capital relation,” the combination of circuits “all intertwined and mutually reinforcing one another” that thereby reinforced “the perverse dialectic of the incurably wasteful capital system.” In short, the lack of success (or effort) in superseding all parts of “the totality of existing reproductive relations” meant the failure to go “beyond capital.”30

The goal of the creation of a communal system of production and exchange required first the formation of communal councils, proposed by Chávez in 2005, based on already existing revolutionary developments in this area. This was followed by his promotion of the larger communes, in 2007—territorial entities large enough to act as the basis of the new communal state. In a speech in 2010 entitled “Onward Towards the Communal State!”—the same year as the enactment of the Organic Law of the Commune—Chávez declared: “Símón Rodríguez 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.” He also quoted the Venezuelan revolutionary, Kléber Ramírez, who said in 1992, in what Chávez called “the purest Robinsonian spirit” (referring to the ideas of Simón Rodríguez): “The time has come for the communities to assume the powers of the 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.” As Chávez himself put it: “By socialism we mean unlimited democracy…. 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…. Let’s go, with Zamora, Robinson [Rodríguez] and Bolívar, towards a Communal State! Towards Socialism!”31

Indeed, what was most extraordinary about Chávez’s leadership in the Bolivarian revolutionary process was that at each new, successive phase over a fourteen-year period (during which Venezuela had sixteen nationwide votes), he sought to shift more and more power and responsibility to the population, encouraging their own self-organization and the invention of new structures with which to direct and delegate power from below. Hence the Bolivarian Revolution under Chávez’s guidance and inspiration relentlessly sought to devolve the sovereign power, formerly constituted in the state, transferring it to the people themselves.32 His “Strike at the Helm” speech, insisting on “the commune or nothing,” was an attempt to fulfill the promise of twenty-first century socialism by bringing about the most urgent shift: the creation of an irreversible socialist revolution.

Maduro and the Communal State

In the two years since Chávez’s death, the Venezuelan opposition and the United States have stepped up the attempts to overturn the democratically established Bolivarian Republic through pressures exerted both within and without. New presidential elections were held in April 2013, and Nicolás Maduro—who as vice president under Chávez became interim president on the latter’s death, serving in that capacity for a month—was elected by a slim margin. From the moment of Maduro’s ascendance to the presidency, the political and economic pressures imposed on Venezuela have been relentless. A key factor threatening the Bolivarian Republic has been the 38 percent drop in oil prices between June and December 2014, caused by the increased supply of oil and natural gas from fracking—together with the decision of Saudi Arabia to maintain production rather than support prices and the slowdown in economic growth in China and Europe.33 The result has been a severe economic crisis in Venezuela. The crisis was complicated by the violent tactics of the Venezuelan opposition’s “exit now” strategy in spring 2014, aimed at bringing down the government, leaving forty-three people dead. The pressure on the Bolivarian Republic has been further intensified with widespread hoarding of imported goods—a form of economic corruption introduced by vested interests of the rentier-importer economy, directed at thwarting price controls introduced to regulate the growing inflation. In addition, food purchased at relatively low prices in Venezuela has been transported over the border to sell for higher prices in Colombia.

Seeing Venezuela as vulnerable, Washington introduced sanctions (restricting visas and freezing assets of Venezuelan officials) under the name of the “Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014.” In February 2015 (as the present article was being written), Venezuela thwarted a coup plot against the government, which would have taken the combined form of: (1) an economic assault on the country, (2) violent, opposition-led demonstrations, (3) the bribing of key officials, and (4) a series of coordinated bombings of government buildings and strategic sites throughout the country. The bombings, it was soon discovered, were to be carried out by a Brazilian-manufactured Super Tuscano attack aircraft, registered to Blackwater Worldwide—pointing to Washington’s involvement in the planned coup. Subsequent evidence (including a recorded Skype call) revealed that the coup was planned in the United States. On March 3, Maduro indicated that a member of the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela had met with the opposition, handing over documents related to the preparation of the coup.34

Yet even while these crises and attacks on the Bolivarian Revolution were occurring, Maduro’s government was pushing the revolution forward. The key slogan of Maduro’s presidential campaign was the “Commune or Nothing!” taken from Chávez’s “Strike at the Helm” speech. At the time that Chávez gave his speech to the ministry of the new revolutionary cycle in October 2012, there were almost no registered communes—although many were in formation (some of which had begun to emerge at the grassroots level as early as 2010). By September 2013 there were more than 40,000 registered communal councils (some going back to 2006), while the number of registered communes had topped a thousand, with substantial political power devolving to the emerging communal state.35 Despite cutbacks in government spending (starting with his own salary), Maduro increased the 2015 budget for the communes by 62 percent. He has called the communes “the maximum expression of democracy” and “pure socialism.” The goal, he declared at the National Communal Economy Conference in February 2014, was not just creating the communal state but the communal economy as well: “democratizing property, generating new forms of social property such as communal ones, is necessary for strengthening participative and protagonistic democracy.”36

Although the communes are at the heart of the Bolivarian Revolution, they do not stand alone. Venezuela has moved forward in promoting the elementary triangle of socialism. The Bolivarian Revolution has thus progressed on multiple fronts. Already by 2011, 3.6 million acres of land had been expropriated for distribution. By 2010, over 70,000 cooperatives had been formed with some 2 million members. At the same time 26,000 agricultural units had been developed in the cities and suburbs aimed at food security and food sovereignty. Socialist workers councils have proliferated. “The most successful attempt at a democratization of ownership and administration of the means of production,” Azzellini states, “is the model of Enterprises of Communal Social Property (ESPQ), promoted to create local production units and community service enterprises.” These enterprises “are collective property of the communities, which decide on the organizational structure of enterprises, the workers incorporated and the eventual use of profits.” The Bolivarian state has promoted these collective enterprises since 2009, and by 2013 there were several thousand.37

Nevertheless it is the growth of the communes that occupies a central place, creating a system of dual power with regional and local governments, understood as a process of co-responsibility—but with the stipulation that local governments should be “obedient” to the communes and that more and more political power will devolve to the communal state. In September 2014, Maduro announced the program called the “Five Big Revolutions”: (1) the economic revolution, promoting social production; (2) the knowledge revolution, emphasizing education, culture, and science; (3) the social missions, crucial to building socialism; (4) the creation of a new democratic and communal state, ending “what remains of the bourgeois state”; and (5) the “territorial socialism” revolution, requiring the creation of a “new ecosocialist model.”

One of the five “historical objectives” of Venezuela’s present national development plan, drawn up by Chávez, is to “contribute to the preservation of planetary life and to save the human species.” In May 2014, over a thousand Venezuelan environmental organizations met in a conference aimed at promoting “ecosocialism.” The primary goal of Bolivarian ecosocialism is to emphasize local, sustainable, communal, and diversified production. The “ecosocialist model,” Maduro argues, is “not about environmentalism, it’s about ecosocialism, environmentalism is not enough.”38 As Chávez repeatedly warned, it was necessary for Venezuela to break with its dependence on the rentier-oil economy.

Lessons in the Transition to Socialism

“Transitions from one social order to another,” Paul Sweezy stated, “involve the most difficult and profound problems of historical materialism.” Such revolutionary historical transitions are never the same, occur over protracted periods, with all sorts of forward and backward motions, and arise within unique conditions and cultures. Nevertheless, broad conclusions can be drawn. The greatest difficulty, Sweezy emphasized, is posed by the fact “that the transition to socialism does not, and in the nature of the case cannot, take the same course as the transition from feudalism to capitalism.” Bourgeois society arose as a kind of alternative cell structure within feudal society, which was not immediately threatening or antagonistic to the latter. A “newly emergent ensemble of social relations” and with it a new kind of human nature, laws, and customs emerged, particularly in the urban centers of feudal society. As Sweezy stated: “Bourgeois relations grew up within the framework of feudal society and molded bourgeois human nature over a period of several centuries.” This is not possible in the same way with respect to the transition of capitalism to socialism. There are no pores in bourgeois society in which socialist relations can readily emerge; rather capitalism is an aggressive social metabolic system of reproduction that constantly moves to incorporate everything within itself.39 This is what Mészáros means when he refers to the centrifugal tendencies that characterize capital as a system, constantly seeking to reproduce its own organic, if alienated, microcosms, integrating this with its destructive macrocosm.40

Socialist and radical democratic strategies have thus generally focused by default on seizing the state and using the state apparatus or constituted power as the sole means of instituting socialism. But in the process the revolutionary, constituent power becomes first subordinated and then negated. The result is a new system of political alienation. The force of the people and the people’s sovereignty is lost. Indeed, in Chávez’s analysis, like that of Mészáros, the Soviet model of the state, standing above society, perpetuated the necessary element (the political alienation enforcing economic alienation) of the capital system, even with the formal abolition of capitalism and private ownership. The simple replacement of private property by state property (a change in social ownership) does not alter the essential relations. Rather, a “withering away of the state,” as Marx and Engels contended, is necessary in any socialist transition.41

This has been the conundrum that all attempts at the transition to socialism have faced. The Venezuelan revolution, as a sui generis revolution arising out of roots in both Latin American and European revolutionary traditions, has sought, as we have seen, to cut this Gordian knot with a sword, through the promotion, growing in each new revolutionary cycle, of participatory and protagonist democracy, as a constitutive basis for what Marx called the absorption of the state by society. At the same time, more and more parts of the economy are removed—as Che insisted in his famous “Man and Socialism in Cuba” speech—from the domination of the law of value. The new social foundation is thus to be increasingly based on communal production and exchange—relying on the exchange of use values and of direct labor, a new social accountancy.42 The goal is to produce the communal cell structure for an organic socialist metabolism, nurturing new, creative, human-social relations, in revolutionary opposition to capitalist class relations: the concrete constitutional construction at every level of the collective power of the people.

Whatever the final outcome of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution it has forever changed the debate on the transition to socialism, mapping a whole new terrain of struggle. The struggle is determined by the endless quest for the widest possible human fulfillment, and the satisfaction of people’s own needs. Twenty-first century socialism, Chávez insisted, is the active, relentless pursuit of the values always associated with socialism, namely, “love, solidarity, equality between men and women and equity among all”—the social institutionalization of which becomes possible as the result of a practice that is uncompromising and irreversible. “When one sees a people voting for crazy things like the construction of Bolivarian socialism or the preservation of the planet,” Venezuela’s Minister for Communes, Reinaldo Iturriza, declares, “one knows that one is in the presence of a revolution.”43

Notes

    1. El Golpe de Timón is a nautical idiom that translates literally as “Strike at the Helm,” the title that is used here. It is quite similar in its meaning to “Shift the Helm” or “Right the Helm,” common nautical terms in English; see Admiral W.H Smyth, Sailor’s Word Book (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1996), 380, 574. But Chávez was clearly emphasizing the need for a strong collective political effort to strike at the helm or right the rudder of the state in order to get back on course, and hence the literal “Strike at the Helm” is most appropriate. An English translation of the entire speech has been posted under this title on the Monthly Review website. All unreferenced quotes from Chávez in this article are taken from that speech.
    2. On the definition of community councils and communes see Leyes del Poder Popular (Caracas, 2011); Marta Harnecker, A World to Build (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 72–74, 133–39; Frederick B. Mills, “The Commune or Nothing’: Popular Power and the State in Venezuela,” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, September 26, 2013, http://coha.org. On the mass popular basis of the Venezuelan Revolution see George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
    3. Although our group of socialist intellectual invitees (including István Mészáros and Eduard Dussel, both of whose work is treated below) had lengthy discussions with the Bolivarian Ministers, with the meetings presided over by Vice President Elías-Jose Jaua Milano (now Venezuela’s Foreign Minister), a sudden onset of illness prevented President Chávez himself from meeting with us as scheduled. My own role in the discussions was mainly to put a strong case for a social-ecological metabolism as a defining aspect of twenty-first century socialism.
    4. A key issue that arose in our discussions was the conflict in jurisdiction between regional and municipal governments and the communal councils, which would become more complex with the emergence of the communes.
    5. In the first paragraph of his sentence here Chávez was quoting from István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 739. Chávez himself was using the Spanish translation, Más Allá del capital: Hacia una teoría de la transición (Caracas: Vadell Hermanos, 2001).
    6. As Marx put it, “political emancipation” must necessarily proceed “human emancipation.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 3, 155.
    7. The Organic Law of the Communes had been passed in December 2010. For Chávez the fact that almost two years later there were still virtually no registered communes, despite all the work done at the ground level to organize the communes was a failure of the government, requiring self-criticism.
    8. Chávez’s emphasis on self-criticism was understood as a crucial dialectical-strategic component of the revolutionary process. Thus Mészáros has insisted on the imperative of “a dialectical correlation between the qualitatively different type of organic system needed in the future and the necessary orienting principle of self-critique in conjunction with which that new type becomes feasible at all.” István Mészáros, “The Communal System and the Principle of Self-Critique,” Monthly Review 59, no. 10 (March 2008): 36.
    9. In his “Strike at the Helm” speech Chávez added: “Once I actually had Carmen Meléndez make, I don’t remember how many, copies of Mao Zedong’s writings on communes from his little red book, now I want to make 30 more copies to give, once again, to each minister.”
    10. Símón Bolívar, Selected Works (New York: Colonial Press, 1951), vol. 1, 174; Jon Lee Anderson, “The Revolutionary,” New Yorker, September 10, 2001, http://newyorker.com. The translation from Bolívar is according to Anderson’s rendition. See also Miguel Acosta Saignes, Bolivar: Acción del hombre de las difficultades (Caracas: Government of Venezuela, 2010), 481–94. István Mészáros, “Bolívar and Chávez: The Spirit of Radical Determination,” Monthly Review 59, no. 3 (July–August 2007): 58.
    11. Marta Harnecker, “Venezuela: A Sui Generis Revolution,” September 16, 2003, http://venezuelanalysis.com.
    12. Chávez quoted in Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 710–11; on the Caracazo economic uprising, the subsequent state massacre, and the MBR-200 coup attempt see Bart Jones, ¡Hugo!: The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2007), 125–76.
    13. Harnecker, A World to Build, 59.
    14. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Hugo Chávez, Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution: Hugo Chávez Talks to Marta Harnecker (New York: Monthly Review Press), 41; George Ciccariello-Maher, “Dual Power in the Venezuelan Revolution,” Monthly Review 59, no. 4 (September 2007): 44, 55.
    15. Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 18–20. In an approach that parallels the distinction between constituent and constituted power, Dussel uses the term potentia to refer to direct, undifferentiated, unconstituted, consensual power, and potestas to refer to institutional, controlled, constituted power. The issues of democracy and unalienated power then becomes one of keeping potestas in accord with potentia.
    16. Negri, Insurgencies, 313.
    17. Edmund Burke, “Speech to the Electors of Bristol,” in Works, vol. 2 (London: John C. Ninmo, 1887), 90–98, and Letter to a Member of Parliament (London: J. Dodsley, 1791), 11–13, 31. Burke is a complex figure but Negri’s interpretation of him as representing a reform-based advocate of constituent power, “who wrote a revolutionary work against the [French] revolution” misses the main thrust of his political theory. This complements Negri’s odd downgrading of Rousseau, as a theorist of constituent power with “a paradoxical relation to the masses.” See Negri, Insurgencies, 195–202, 232–40.
    18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 150.
    19. Marx and Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune, 75–76.
    20. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974, first printing), 38–39. See also Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 180–90. On Lenin’s resistance at the end of his life to the bureaucratization of the Soviet state see Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggles (New York: Pantheon, 1968).
    21. Dario Azzellini, “The Communal State: Communal Councils, Communes, and Workplace Democracy,” NACLA Report on the Americas 46, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 25–30, https://nacla.org. On the 1998 Bolivarian Constitution see Michael A. Lebowitz, Build It Now (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 49–50, 72, 89–95.
    22. Negri here makes the mistake of saying that “Rousseau distinguished the legislative from the executive power,” making a “purely terminological distinction, which derives from Montesquieu and Locke”—as if this were not a crucial component of Rousseau’s thought. Negri, Insurgencies, 199.
    23. Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 709–12; Jean-Jacque Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 82, 114–15.
    24. For a summary of this aspect of Mészáros thought see John Bellamy Foster, “Foreword,” in István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Change (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 1–21.
    25. Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 758–68; István Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 251–53.
    26. Harnecker, A World to Build, 74–77; Leyes del Poder Popular, 57 (Ley Orgánica De Las Comunas, Articulo 35). The committee that drafted the organic law of the commons was chaired by David Velásquez, then a member of the Communist Party and later minister of participation and Social Development. See Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez, 245.
    27. Chávez quoted in Michael A. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 80–81; István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 76–77.
    28. Mészáros, “Bolívar and Chávez,” 61.
    29. Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 187–223.
    30. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, 24–25, 85; Michael A. Lebowitz, “Proposing a Path to Socialism: Two Papers for Hugo Chávez,” Monthly Review 65, no. 10 (March 2014): 1–19; Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 823.
    31.Hugo Chávez, “Onwards Towards a Communal State,” February 21, 2010 (posted February 25, 2010), http://venezuelanalysis.com; Jones, ¡Hugo!, 472; Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez, 18–19. When in Europe for around a quarter-century, Bolívar’s teacher, Símón Rodríguez, used the name Samuel Robinson (taken from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which he admired). He later resumed his original name in returning to South America at age fifty-four. Bolívar often referred to him affectionately as “Robinson” and his thought is often referred to as “Robinsonian.” See Richard Gott, In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chávez and the Transformation of Venezuela (London: Verso, 2000), 109–17.
    32. Roger Burbach, Michael Fox, and Federico Fuentes, Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions (London: Zed Books, 2013), 159.
    33. “Why the Oil Price is Falling,” Economist, December 8, 2014, http://economist.com. It is conceivable that Saudi Arabia was encouraged to maintain its production levels by the United States, thereby keeping oil prices low and destabilizing a number of states that the United States has targeted in its geopolitical strategy, including Russia, Iran and Venezuela; while Saudi Arabia itself has a direct interest in the destabilization of Iran. See Jackie Northam, “Why Does Saudi Arabia Seem So Comfortable with Falling Oil Prices?,” October 28, 2014, http://npr.org.
    34. William Camacaro and Frederick B. Mills, “Rapprochement Between the United States and Cuba and Sanctions Against Venezuela,” January 2–4, 2015, http://counterpunch.org; Lucas Koerner, “Amid International Outcry, Venezuelan Officials Allege Blackwater, U.S. and Canadian Links to Thwarted Coup,” February 16, 2015, http://venezuelanalysis.com; Telesur, “Coup Plot in Venezuela Thwarted,” February 13, 2015, http://venezuelanalysis.com; “Maduro Outlines More Evidence of Coup Plot Planned in New York,” March 3, 2015, http://telesurtv.net; Carl Meacham, “Oil-Poor and On the Brink of Default: Is Change Imminent in Venezuela?,” Center for Strategic International Studies, December 11, 2014; George Ciccariello-Maher, “Venezuela at a Tipping Point,” September 8, 2014, http://venezuelanalysis.com.
    35. Ewan Robertson, “Expectations Surpassed as Over 1000 Communes Registered in Venezuela,” September 9, 2013, http://venezuelanalysis.com.
    36. “On Venezuela’s Communes, Idyllic Future Is Just Over the Rainbow,” Washington Post, November 15, 2014, http://washingtonpost.com; Tamara Pearson, “National Communal Economy Conference Calls for Communal Markets, Increased Funding of Communal Banks in Venezeula,” February 4, 2014, http://venezuelanalysis.com.
    37. Burbach, Fox, and Fuentes, Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions, 61, 68–70; Mills, “‘The Communes or Nothing,’”; Azzellini, “The Communal State.”
    38. Telesur, “Maduro Announces ‘Five Big Revolutions’ in Venezuela, Overhauls Cabinet,” September 3, 2014, http://venezuelanalysis.org; Ewan Robertson, “Venezuelan Leftists Meet to Discuss Future Directions in Political Ideology and Eco-socialism,” http://venezulanalyis.org, May 12, 2014.
    39. Paul M. Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim, On the Transition to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 107–12.
    40. Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 411.
    41. See Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control, 246–50; Harnecker, A World to Build, 59, 71; Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), 387.
    42. Che Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” http://marxists.org; Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 758–70.
    43. Chávez quoted in Harnecker, A World to Build, 58; Reinaldo Iturriza, “Desiring the Commune,” August 10, 2012, http://venezuelanalysis.com.

By Marta Harnecker, translated by Federico Fuentes

[Paper presented at the International Scientific Academic Meeting on Methodology and Experiences in Socio-environmental Participatory processes, Cuenca University, November 13-15, 2014.*]

December 19, 2014 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — These words are aimed at those who want to build a humanist and solidarity-based society. A society based on the complete participation of all people. A society focused on a model of sustainable development that satisfies people’s genuine needs in a just manner, and not the artificial wants created by capitalism in its irrational drive to obtain more profits. A society that does all this while ensuring that humanity’s future in not put at risk. A society where the organized people are the ones who decide what and how to produce. A society we have referred to as Twenty-First Century Socialism, Good Living or Life in Plenitude.

The question is how can we achieve this complete participation? How can we guarantee as much as possible that all citizens, and not just activists or leftists, take an interest in participation? How can we achieve the participation of middle class sectors alongside popular sectors? How can we ensure that solidarian interests prevail over selfish ones? How can we attend to the concerns of the poorest and most forgotten and repay the social debt inherited by previous governments?

I am convinced that it is through what we have called “decentralized participatory planning” that we can achieve these objectives. We have reached this conclusion not on the basis of reading books and academic debates, but through the study of practical experiences of participatory budgets and participatory planning, primarily in Brazil, Venezuela and the Indian state of Kerala.

We were very attracted to the experience of participatory budgeting undertaken by the regional Workers’ Party government in Porto Alegre, Brazil, because we saw it as a new, transparent, rather than corrupt, way of governing, that delegated power to the people.

In Venezuela, we got a strong sense of how the popular subject was strengthened through the initiative taken by Chávez to promote the creation of communal councils and his decision to grant them resources for small projects. This was not done in a populist manner, with the state coming in to satisfy the community’s demand; rather it occurred after a process of participatory planning where the citizens of the community implemented what he called “the communal cycle”, which involved the following actions: diagnosis, elaboration of a plan and budget, execution of the project, and control over how it was carried out.[1]

Lastly, our work was been greatly enhanced by what we learnt from one of the first experiences in the world of “decentralized participatory planning” that occurred in the Indian state of Kerala. There, a communist government decided to carry out an important process of decentralization, not only of monetary resources, but also material and human resources, to aid with the implementation of local development plans that were based on the active participation of local residents. The end result of this has been a more egalitarian economic development when compared to the rest of India, and a growth in resident’s self-esteem and self-confidence. This type of decentralization allowed for greater local government autonomy when it came to planning their development, which facilitated the progress of a much more effective participatory planning.

I. A decentralised participatory planning proposal

The type of planning we advocate is the antithesis of the centralized planning implemented under the Soviet Union. In the old USSR, it was thought that to coordinate all efforts towards building a new society, a central authority was required to decide objectives and means. It was a process in which decisions were always made from above, on many occasions without taking into consideration that down below was where people best knew the problems and possible solutions.

Similarly, often processes that claim to be participatory limit themselves to being processes of simple consultation. Rather than promoting a process of decision-making by citizens, local politicians limit themselves to consulting citizens. The people in the local area are called upon to participate in working groups where they are asked to point out their main priorities for public works and services for their respective communities. A technical team collects these and it is the technicians and not the people who decided upon which projects to implement. We don’t deny that a willingness to listen to people represents a step forward, but it is very limited.

We advocate a more integral process in which it is the people who genuinely discuss and decide upon their priorities, elaborate, where possible, their own projects and carry them out if they are in the condition to do so without having to depend on superior levels. We seek to fully involve citizens in the planning process, which is why we refer to it as participatory planning.

To achieve complete citizen’s participation we must take the plans of small localities as our starting point, where conditions are more favorable for peoples’ participation, and apply the principle that everything that can be done at a lower level should be decentralized to this level, and only keeping as competencies of higher up levels those tasks that cannot be carried out at a lower level. This principle is referred to as subsidiarity.

Of course, we are not talking about an anarchic decentralization. The ideal situation would involve the existence of a strategic national plan that could integrate community, territorial/communal and municipal/canton plans with plans developed by other levels of government.

Moreover, we are thinking about a decentralized that is infused with a spirit of solidarity, that favors those localities and social sectors most in need. One of the important roles of the state and local governments is to redistribute resources in order to protect the weakest and help them develop.

The type of planning, while recognizing the need for a central national plan, allows local institutions to play a fundamental role. They do so not only by contributing to the elaboration of the central plan, but also by having the autonomy to plan within their own territory and carry out an important part of the plan.

In order to emphasis the issue of decentralization as a crucial aspect of planning we are proposing, we have called this process decentralized participatory planning.

You might be asking why are we talking about participatory planning and not the more commonly used concept of participatory budget.

We cannot ignore the contribution made by participatory budgeting, a process whereby people participate in the elaboration of annual investment plans, that is, in making decisions regarding where resources assigned to municipal public works and services are invested. This process has been implemented in various regions across the world and has helped increase the level of resident participation in public policy making, as well as helping improve the performance of municipal governments and, above all, made municipal governance more transparent, thereby benefiting the most helpless sectors.[2]

It has becomes an excellent means for monitoring the actions of administrations and an effective weapon in the fight against corruption and the diversion of funds as people not only prioritize certain public works and services but also organized themselves to ensure they are carried out, monitor to make sure that allocated resources are used for their specific objective and not for others, and that quality works or services are carried out.

It is also an ideal means for speeding up the administrative machinery, making it more efficient and decreasing bureaucracy given so many eyes are monitoring the process and pressuring to make sure public works are completed in time.

This process has also achieved a decrease in tax evasion because when people see the efficiency and transparency with which resources that come from their taxes are used, they begin to feel more willing to comply with taxation regulations.

However, the participatory budgeting process also has its limitations.

For example, the fact that participatory budgeting is restricted to the framework of an annual investment plan limits the scope and horizon of the government’s actions and, in many cases, public works and services prioritised by the population do not fit within any plan, which can lead to chaotic development.

Moreover, given that the objective of participatory budgeting is to determine what public works or services should be prioritized given the resources available each year, the discussion tends to focus solely on these issues rather than on longer term goals that can allow us to move towards the kind of society we want to build.

On the other hand, participatory planning is not limited to discussing public investment in public works and services that the population deems necessary, it goes further. It propose actions that affect society as a whole: the development of cooperative industries that offer employment to underemployed or marginalised sectors; finding self-sustainable solutions based on the natural and human resources available within the territory; the elimination of intermediaries in the distribution of food produce; mechanisms for the redistribution of natural resource rents, etc. In sum, we aim to use participatory planning to lay the basis for a new, more just and humane society.

II Necessary conditions for participatory planning

The following conditions must exist in order to carry out a genuine process of participatory planning.

1) Creation of suitable territorial meeting spaces

The first step that a municipal council must take if its wants to implement a process of participatory planning is to create territorial meeting spaces within which this process can be carried out.

This is one of the most serious problems that those in local government who advocate an increasingly participatory and protagonistic democracy face.

In many cases, there are territorial subdivisions, such as parroquias (parishes), that date back to colonial times and no longer response to any rational criteria. There are municipalities that have a large population, enormous barrios (slums) that are much bigger than many other municipalities, while there are other much smaller ones. These distortions have negative repercussions on a just, equitable and efficient territorial distribution of resources and make it more difficult for the population to participate. That is why there is necessary to move towards a new political-administrative division of the national territory.

In rural municipalities, these sub-divisions tend to be more suited to peoples’ participation.

Based on the experiences we have studied, it seems that the ideal scenario for carrying out a process of participatory planning involves municipal territorial sub-divisions that are or can be transformed into spaces of self-government that can assume competencies previously handled by superior bodies. At the same time, the territory should have the conditions to generate its own resources, allowing it to operate in the most autonomous manner possible, without this meaning that it no longer articulates its actions with those other levels of government.

Before turning to the issue of spaces for self-government, I would like to reflect on what is the ideal space for citizens’ participation.

In Venezuela, after much debate and studying successful experiences in community organization such as the urban land committees (CTU), which involved 200 families organizing to fight for titles to the land their homes were built on, and health committees, which united 150 families with the objective of supporting doctors working the poorest areas, it was decided that the idea space was the community.

What did they understand community to mean? A community is a group of families that live in a specific geographic space, that know each other and can easily relate to each other; that can meet up without needing to rely on transport; and that, of course, share a common history, the same cultural traditions, use the same public services and share similar economic, social and urban planning problems.

The number of people that make up a community can vary greatly from one reality to another. In a densely-populated urban area, where barrios and urbanizations exist with tens of thousands of residents, it was decided that the number oscillated between 150 and 400 families. On the other hand, in rural areas a community is seen to made up of between 50 to 100 families and even less in remote rural areas where residents formed small villages.

Now, each community is different to the next. Some have an important tradition of organization and struggle, and therefore house various community organizations. Others only have one or two organizations, and other perhaps have none. Among the organizations we can find in a community are: health committees, cultural groups, sports clubs, neighborhood associations, environmental groups, grandparents clubs, cooperatives, micro-businesses, and others. Each of these organizations tends to do their own thing.

President Chavez’s idea was to create an organization that would be able to cohere all of these organizational efforts into one body that in turn could acts as a community government. He called this organization “communal council”.

And what is the best instrument for cohering the different demands and organizational efforts of a community? Chavez had the brilliance to see that the best instrument for this was the elaboration of a single work plan dedicated to resolving the community’s most deeply felt problems.[3]

Designing this single plan is therefore one of the key tasks of the communal council. To do this, it is necessary to start with a participatory diagnosis that allows residents themselves to detect the biggest problems that exist in their community. When it comes to prioritising problems, I believe that a method should be used that ends up prioritizing those problems that the community can resolve with its own human and material resources.

This methodology was proposed by the World Health Organization and was successfully put into practice in various Cuban communities in the period following the collapse of the old socialist bloc, when the economic situation in the country was critical and the Cuban state did not have sufficient resources – as it always had until then – to attend to peoples’ demands.

Setting realistic goals that can be achieved in the short-term and with the active participation of as many community members as possible allows one to more quickly realize a project, meaning residents see quick results and with this the self-esteem of the community increases and people become more motivated to participate with greater enthusiasm in future tasks. What tends to occur when a diagnosis is not carried out with these criteria is that, rather than stimulating participation, the community remains with its arms folded waiting of a higher up body to resolve problems.

When the cost or complexity of the solution is too much for the community, the communal council should come up with a list of problems, ranking them from most to least pressing, and elaborate project ideas to resolve them. These should be presented during the process of participatory planning to other government bodies.

Another function of the communal council is to promote community supervision over all projects carried out in the community by state, community or private entities.

Residents should be elected to the communal council by citizens’ assemblies within the community.

Those that are elected are called spokespeople because they are the voice of the community. When residents lose confidence in them, they should be recalled, as they can no longer be said to be the voice of the community. Venezuelan activists refuse to use the term “representative” because of the negative connotations this term has acquired in the bourgeois representative system. Candidates only talk to the community at election time, promising “all the gold in the world”, but are never seen once they are elected.

I think it is important to point out that in Venezuela, they discussed whether this communitarian body should simply be the sum of the leaderships of the different organizations that exist within a community or whether it was better to hold a citizen’s assembly and let the assembly elect its spokespeople. The second option was agreed upon because reality dictated that the leaderships of many of the existing community organizations had become removed from the grassroots that had elected them. Elections via assemblies allowed them to correct his situation. If these leaders have popular support, then they will surely be elected.

Each member of the communal council elected by the community fulfils a different function, but it is the residents who, in an assembly, get to analyse, discuss, decide and elect. The citizen’s assembly is the highest decision-making body in the community. Its decisions are binding on the communal council. This is where peoples’ sovereignty and power reside.

That is why it is so important to ensure that the public invitation is issued as broadly as possible, and that effort is made to guarantee that those who turn up genuinely represent the interests of all residents. We have to avoid situations were the only people invited are friends, acquaintances or those who share the same political outlook, thereby leaving out those who have different opinions or who don’t follow the same local leaders. The best way to avoid this is by ensuring that quorum requires the presence of people from every corner of the community. No important decision should be taken if some of these spaces are not represented in the assembly. What spaces are we referring to? The street, the stairwell, the laneway, the apartment block, the building, the block….

These spaces tend to be made up of small groups of families that, due to the fact they live close together, maintain a deeper relationship and bond. A community could therefore be made up of various neighborhood areas. Some places have decided the best way to elect spokespeople is to first get families to elect a spokesperson and then bring them together so that they can elect one of them to act as spokesperson for the area on the communal council.

The idea of a delegate (spokesperson) per neighborhood area is very important to ensuring the proper functioning of the assembly. It is a manner by which to ensure that assemblies are representative of the entire area that the council covers and the different political opinions that exist within it.

Furthermore, it should be clear that the formation of a communal council cannot happen overnight. The community has to pass through a process of maturation. That is why an external promotional team has been proposed to promote the formation of an internal promotional team that is elected in an assembly by the community.

The main task of this internal promotional team would be to create the conditions for residents to elect their own communal council with complete understanding of what is occurring. This team has to elaborate a database of the community based on information obtained by visiting families door-to-door. Entrusting them with these tasks means that the potential future members of the communal council will have been involved in grassroots work, have intimate knowledge of the problems in the community, and have shown in practice their consistency and dedication to work. Depending on how they carry out this task, all or some of the members of the promotional team may be elected as communal council spokespeople

I want to insist a lot in the need to avoid any political, or other type of manipulation during the process of forming communal councils.

It is not about creating communal councils that only involve government supporters; these communitarian institutions should be open to all citizens, regardless of their political stripes.

President Chavez initially thought that the community was the ideal space for participation, and that therefore the communal council could be the first level of government. However, he later realized that in order to transfer competencies that belonged to the municipal council, it was necessary to organize on a larger territorial scale, one that he called commune. Therefore, the ideal space for peoples’ participation does not necessarily seem to also be the ideal space for self-government, if we understand self-government to mean “system of territorial units of administration that have autonomy to administer themselves”.

Now, having the capacity to administrate oneself does not mean ignoring the necessary interrelationship that must exist between the various government levels and bodies.

Further, not every form of self-government implies participation. There could be territorial units whose governments have administrative autonomy but are run undemocratically.

When we use the term self-government, we are referring to peoples’ self-government, that is, where the people govern themselves. In this sense, there is no self-government without full citizen’s participation, which means that we are talking about a process that can always be improved.

I believe this issue can be clarified by looking at the example of Kerala.[4]

This densely populated state in India is one of the few states in the country that has put into practice article 40 of the 1950 constitution. This article establishes the need to organize “Grama Panchayats” (village or rural town governments), giving them as much power as is necessary to allow them to function as units of self-government. At the same time, it is one of the few states that put into practice the idea of incorporating peoples’ participation in the process of drafting up development plans.

In 1992, amendments 73 and 74 were introduced into the Indian constitution, giving the Panchayats constitutional status and laying the basis of a process of decentralization at a national level. These amendments proposed the decentralization of administration via the creation of three levels of local self-government: the lowest level of self-government is the Grama Pachayats, that is, the village or town government (the equivalent of our territories, or rural parishes in Ecuador, or communes in Venezuela); this is followed by the Block Panchayats, which for us would be the equivalent of municipalities or cantons; and lastly, the District Panchayats or provincial governments.

In 1994, the government of Kerala passed the Panchayat Raj Law, thereby providing a solid legal basis for the system of local government and unifying the transference of institutions and personnel to local self-governments according to the principle of subsidiarity.

This meant that the Grama Panchayats began to assume many of the functions that were previously carried out at a higher level.

In 1996, the Communist Party of India – Marxist led a coalition of progressive forces to electoral victory, winning a majority in the state parliament. That year they launched the “Peoples’ Campaign” for decentralized planning.

This campaign signified a fundamental change in the role that the different levels of local and regional governments would play from then on.

The starting point for the Peoples’ Campaign was an afternoon long citizens’ assembly held in the community, where people could express these most deeply felt needs. In order to stimulate peoples’ participation in these assemblies, the State Planning Commission decided to hand over 35-40 per cent of the money dedicated to its development plan to local governments. Of this money, the Grama Panchayat (that is, the local village government, which represents the lowest level of the decentralization structure) received around 70 per cent; the following level, the Block Panchayat (rural municipality) received 15 per cent; and the District Panchayat received the other 15%. As you can see, there was evidently a clear desire to decentralize the majority of resources to those local governments closest to the people.

This meant that the people who participated felt that they were the ones making decisions regarding investments in their community, rather than being restricted to simply approving decisions made from on high.

The following stages of the campaign involved additional assemblies, the election of delegates to various specialized meetings, the recruitment of volunteer technical personnel from among retirees, the prioritization of projects by elected rural or urban councils, and community control and evaluation of the process. The administrative apparatuses of higher up levels of government were equipped in order to be able to insert local projects into regional plans. A massive educational campaign was launched and there was an exchange of experiences among activists across all levels. It was a very ambitions initiative that demanded the mobilization of energies and resources of the whole society.

The essential components of the decentralized participatory planning process in Kerala were the following:
a) Each level of local government must be autonomous from the functional, financial and administrative point of view. Central government supervision should be limited to setting out general guidelines.
b) Everything that have be done at a lower level should be carried out at that level and not at a higher up level. Only residual and complementary functions should be carried out at higher levels.
c) The different levels of decentralization need to understand exactly which functions they have to carry out, in order to avoid overlap and crossover with other levels of government.
d) Functions should be complemented via horizontal and vertical processes of integration.
e) The norms and criteria for selecting who to benefit and which activities to prioritize should be the same for all programs.
f) It is necessary to foment the maximum level of participation possible at all levels and in all phases of the process.
g) There must be permanent community control over elected representatives and over the entire participatory planning process.
h) People have to have the right to be inform about every detail of the process.

After much reflection and investigation, it was decided that the most appropriate geographical and demographical unit for self-government that was most closely tied to the people would be the rural village or town called “Grama”, which is why the rural government is called Grama Panchayat (government of the town or village). Alongside the three levels of self-government in more rural zones, there exist urban municipalities and municipal corporations in the big cities.

Once the lowest level of self-government was defined, it did not take along for those overseeing the process of participatory planning to realize that convening an assembly of all residents in a town, in such a densely populated territory as Kerala, implied having to hold assemblies of more than 1000 people, something that did not facilitate peoples’ participation. That is why they decided to hold popular assemblies (grama sabhas) not at the level of the village but instead at the level of the electoral wards they were divided into.

The meetings in the wards included plenaries involving all participants and working groups that were working on different issues, with the aim of ensuring that people could more efficiently participate. Yet, even then these spaces turned out to be too large. That is why for some task they set up neighborhood groups (40-50 families) that began to carry out many of the functions of the grama sabha, such as discussing the local plan, revising the plan’s implementation and selecting which people or entities should receive resources.

It is very likely that in the majority of municipalities in Latin America, the first step that will need to be taken by a municipal government in order to advance the process of participatory planning will be establishing territorial sub-divisions whereby the territories (communes, areas, parishes or villages, depending on the name each country uses) will become the first level of self-government.

2) Decentralizing competencies

Where no national policy exists in terms of transferring competencies from municipalities to territorial sub-divisions, another step that municipal governments should take, and that is even more complex than the first one, is the decentralization of competencies to the territorial sub-divisions, applying the principle of subsidiarity, which we referred to above. For example, it is necessary to transfer competencies over resource administration, tax collection, civil registry, administration of state companies, urban planning, surveillance and security, asphalting roads, attention to homes with elderly people and popular feeding halls that might exist within its territory, along with the general maintenance of infrastructure related to healthcare, education, culture and sports.

It is not possible to set rigid criteria for this decentralization. Each reality needs to be taken into consideration. For example, while the centralized management of services such as sanitation and street cleaning might seem reasonable in a city due to economies of scale and the possibilities available for mechanization, it is obvious that in the case of a relative isolated rural area with small communities, decentralized management would not only be possible but would in fact ensure better results.

3) Decentralizing resources to the territories

The other fundamental premise of participatory planning is the decentralization of resources to the territories, including material resources (finances, equipment) and human resources (personnel).

a) Financial resources

Where existing regulations did not foresee the possibility of decentralization, the municipal or communal government could take initiatives in this direction.

In the experience developed in Torres municipality, in the state of Lara, Venezuela, the municipal government transferred the resources it had for public works to the 17 parishes so that they could decide upon and carry out the works they wanted to prioritise. [5] The fundamental criteria used to transfer monies were: size of territory (much of which was rural), number of inhabitants, population density and an index of inter-territorial compensation that Venezuela uses when handing over budgets in order to lessen inequalities between territories.

b) Equipment and personnel

It is also necessary to transfer personnel, that is, relocate functionaries by taking them out of the central apparatus and deploying them in the community. There is also a need to provide offices and equipment.

4) Training participants

Nevertheless, it is not enough to simply transfer human resources and hope that citizens will participate to the maximum extent possible. It is also crucial to train up technical personnel, elected representatives and the population itself, providing them with instruments that can help them to partake effectively in the process of decentralized participatory planning.

One of the strongest points of the participatory planning process in Kerala was precisely the big emphasis they placed on training up different participants: residents, technicians, representatives, volunteers. One piece of information demonstrates the emphasis they have places on training cadres: in the first year alone, they provided one-day workshops to 100,000 activists in a state with a population of 38 million people.

5) Generating a database

Another fundamental premise for decentralized participatory planning is the need to generate an up-to-date database that can allow planning to occur on the basis of a complete knowledge of the local reality. A fundamental element in this is mapping the presence of social actors. There is generally a lot of data at the central level, but this data is not organized and available in such a way that it can be used for participatory planning at the local level. It is therefore important to have access to this data in order to complement it with data obtained in the local area itself, with the participation of experts and local residents.

Conclusion

The more the participatory planning process is able to count upon a biggest number of organized communities in the municipality, the more fully developed it will be. Citizen’s participation is greater when the diagnosis and prioritization of problems occurs in much smaller assemblies.

As well as elaborating their own communitarian development plan, these communities should: issue statements regarding proposals for territorial divisions elaborated by the municipal council, the decentralization of competencies, the distribution of resources to territories, and the areas of development they consider should be prioritized; raise demands on higher up levels of government, and their prioritization; be present via their representatives (spokespeople, delegates, councilors) in the remain levels of the participatory planning process; and be informed and consulted on plans elaborated on the basis of these processes.

The participation of communities organized into communal councils is the most specific and enriching contribution of the Venezuelan experience to the process of participatory budgeting carried out in municipalities governed on Workers’ Party mayors in Brazil and the experience of decentralized participatory planning in Kerala.

Finally, I am convinced that such a planning process can ensure that society as a whole, and not only an elite, manages the wealth of society and begins to put it at the service of society. That is why I believe that decentralised participatory planning is an essential feature of the new democratic society we want to build.

As this process should have no political coloration, with all citizens invited to participate in the elaboration of the development plan, contribute their criteria and collaborate in the diverse tasks involved in this process, it can help facilitate a broad space for an ideal encounter of people from across the political spectrum, those that have never been members of a party, and those that reject parties and politicians due to their bad practices.

This form of planning is the ideal instrument for achieving complete citizens’ participation in the management of public affairs, and at the same time, the people involved in the planning process feel dignified, increases their self-esteem and, what’s most important, no longer feel like beggars demanding solutions from the state. On the contrary, they feel like they are creators of their own destiny and society.

In this activity, as in all human activity, there is a double product: the first product which is objective and material for all to see, in this case the plan, which has been elaborated in a participatory manner; and a second subjective, spiritual product, which is much less tangible and can only be seen by an attentive eye: the transformation of people through their practice, their human development.

The whole process is an educational process in which those that participate learn to inquire about the causes of things, to respect the opinion of others, to understand that the problems they face are not exclusive to their street or neighborhood but are related to the overall situation of the economy, the national social situation, and even the international situation. They learn that everyone’s problems and every community’s problems should be examined within the context of the reality of other people and other communities that may face a much more difficult and urgent situation. Through this, new relations of solidarity and complementarity are created that place the emphasis on the collective rather than the individual.

All this means that those who participate in this process broaden out their knowledge in political, cultural, social, economic and environmental terms, and thereby become politicized in the broader sense of the term. This allows them to develop an independent mind that can no longer be manipulated by a media that remains overwhelmingly in the hand of the opposition.

Although an ideal scenario would involve the central state deciding to decentralize an important part of the nation’s resources designated to development, there is no doubt that a majority of countries are a long way from finding themselves in such a situation. Nevertheless, we believe that this should not stop local authorities who want to kick start decentralized participatory planning processes in their local area from doing so, thereby contributing to training up residents, through practical experience, to become protagonists of the new society we want to build, one in which peoples’ participation is a central feature.

Our greatest hope is that we might be able to interest and enthuse some mayors into implementing our proposal as a pilot project that can be enrich through practice.

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Notes

* This speech is a synthesis of ideas that are more fully developed in a book I am currently working on, with the help of José Bartolomé and Noel López.

[1]. De los consejos comunales a las comunas. Construyendo el socialismo del siglo XXI (2009) Online at: http://www.rebelion.org/docs/97085.pdf

[2]. See Marta Harnecker, Delegando poder en la gente: presupuesto participativo en Porto Alegre, Brasil, Monte Ávila, Venezuela, 2004. Online at: http://www.rebelion.org/docs/95167.pdf

[3]. This method was successfully applied in the rural Cuban community of Guadalupe, in the province of Ciego de Ávila, and is outlined in the book Marta Harnecker, Buscando el camino (método de trabajo comunitario) Cuba, MEPLA, 2000. Online at: http://www.rebelion.org/docs/95168.pdf . A documentary on this experience can also be viewed online at: http://videosmepla.wordpress.com/documentales-de-participacion-popular/ciclo-video-debate/5-buscando-el-camino/

[4]. See Richard Franke, Marta Harnecker, Andrés Sanz Mulas & Carmen Pineda Nebot, Estado Kerala, India, Una experiencia de planificación participativa descentralizada, Centro Internacional Miranda. Online at: http://www.rebelion.org/docs/97086.pdf ). I would also recommend reading  T.M. Thomas Isaac & Richard W. Franke, Democracia local y desarrollo (campaña popular de planificación descentralizada de Kerala) Diálogos L’Ullal Editions, Xativa, España, junio 2004, and Rosa Pinto y Tomás Villasante, Democracia participativa en Kerala: Planificación descentralizada desde la base, El Viejo Topo, España, 2011.

[5]. For information see Marta Harnecker, Transfiriendo poder a la gente. Municipio Torres, Estado Lara, Venezuela, CIM-Monte Ávila, Venezuela, 2008. Online at: http://www.rebelion.org/docs/97082.pdf.

Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro with Marta Harnecker at the award ceremony.

 The speech was given by Marta Harnecker on August 15, 2014, accepting the 2013 Liberator’s Prize for Critical Thought, awarded for her book, A World to Build: New Paths towards Twenty-first Century Socialism; translated by Federico Fuentes

By Marta Harnecker

Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

August 24, 2014 –  I completed this book one month after the physical disappearance of President Hugo Chávez, without whose intervention in Latin America this book could not have been written. Many of the ideas I raise in it are related in one way or another to the Bolivarian leader, to his ideas and actions, within Venezuela and at the regional and global level. Nobody can deny that there is a huge difference between the Latin America that Chávez inherited and the Latin America he has left for us today.

That is why I dedicated the book to him with the following words:

To Commandante Chavez, whose words, orientations and exemplary dedication to the cause of the poor will serve as a compass for his people and all the people of the world. It will be the best shield to defend ourselves from those that seek to destroy this marvellous work that he began to build.

When Chávez won the 1998 presidential elections, the neoliberal capitalist model was already foundering. The choice then was whether to re-establish this model, undoubtedly with some changes such as greater concern for social issues, but still motivated by the same logic of profit-seeking, or to go ahead and try to build another model. Chávez had the courage to take the second path and decided to call it “socialism”, in spite of its negative connotations. He called it “21st century socialism,” to differentiate it from the Soviet-style socialism that had been implemented in the 20th century. This was not about “falling into the errors of the past”, into the same “Stalinist deviations” which bureaucratised the party and ended up eliminating popular participation.

The need for peoples’ participation was one of his obsessions and was the feature that distinguished his proposals from other socialist projects in which the state resolved all the problems and the people received benefits as if they were gifts.

He was convinced that socialism could not be decreed from above, that it had to be built with the people. And he also understood that protagonistic participation is what allows people to grow and achieve self-confidence, that is, to develop themselves as human beings.

I always remember the first program of “Theoretical Aló Presidente”, which was broadcasted on June 11, 2009, when Chavez quoted at length from a letter that Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, wrote to Lenin on March 4, 1920:

Without the participation of local forces, without an organization from below of the peasants and workers themselves, it is impossible to build a new life.
It seemed that the soviets were going to fulfil precisely this function of creating an organization from below. But Russia has already become a Soviet Republic in name only. The party’s influence over people … has already destroyed the influence and constructive energy of this promising institution – the soviets.

That is why very early on I believed it necessary to distinguish between the socialist project and a model. I understood project to mean the original ideas of Marx and Engels, and model to refer to one form that this project has historically taken. If we analysis Soviet-style socialism, we see that in those countries that implemented this model of socialism, one that Michael Lebowitz has recently called the socialism of conductors and conducted based on a vanguardist mode of production, the people were no longer the protagonist, organs of popular participation were transformed into purely formal entities, and the party was transformed into an absolute authority, the sole depositary of truth that controlled all activities: economic, political, cultural. That is, what should have been a popular democracy was transformed into a dictatorship of the party. This model of socialism, that many have called “real socialism” is a fundamentally statist, centralist, bureaucratic model, where the key missing factor is popular participation.

Do you remember when this socialism collapsed and there was all this talk about the death of socialism and the death of Marxism? At the time, Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer that all of you know, said that they had invited us to a funeral we did not belong at. The socialism that died was not the socialist project we had fought for. What happened in reality had little to do with the kind of society Marx and Engel envisaged would replace capitalism. For them, socialism was impossible without popular participation.

Marx and Engel’s original ideas were not only distorted by the actions of the Soviet regime and the Marxist literature disseminated by this country among the left; they were also downplayed or simply ignored in those countries outside of the Soviet orbit, given the opposition generated by the model that came to be associated with the name of socialism.

It is not commonly known that, according to Marx and Engels, the future society they called communist would facilitate the integral development of all the potentialities of human beings, a development that could only be achieved through revolutionary practice. People would not develop by magic, they would develop because they struggle, they transform (in transforming circumstances, the person transforms themselves).

That is why Marx affirmed that it was only natural that the workers with which the new society would begin to be built would not be pure beings as “the muck of ages” would weigh on them. Which is why he did not condemn them, but rather placed confidence in them, that they would go about liberating themselves from this negative inheritance through revolutionary struggle. He believes in the transformation of people through struggle, through practice.

And Chavez, probably without have reads these words by Marx, also understood this. In his first “Theoretical Aló Presidente” on June 11, 2009, he warned communities that they have to be on guard to avoid sectarianism. He explained:

… if there are people, for example, residents who are not participating in politics, who do not belong to any party, well, it doesn’t matter, they are welcome.
What’s more, if some from the opposition lives there, call them. Let them come and work, come and demonstrate, be useful, because, well, the homeland is for everyone, we have to open spaces and you will see that through praxis many people will transform themselves.

Praxis is what transforms oneself, theory is theory, but theory cannot touch the heart, the bones, the nerves, the spirit of the human being and in reality nothing will change. We will not transform ourselves reading books. Books are fundamental, theory is fundamental, but we have to put it into practice, because praxis is what really transforms humans.

It is also the case that the “collectivist” practices of real socialism, which suppresses individual differences in the name of the collective, had nothing to do with Marxism. Remember, Marx criticised bourgeois law for trying to make people artificially equal instead of acknowledging their differences. By pretending to be the same for everyone, bourgeois law ends up being an unequal right. If two workers collect potatoes and one collects twice as much as the other, should the first be paid twice as much as the second? Bourgeois law says yes, without taking into consideration that the worker who only collected half as much that day may have been sick, or was never a strong worker because he was always malnourished growing up, and therefore perhaps while putting in the same effort as the first person was only able to do half as much

Marx, on the other hand, said that any truly fair distribution had to take into account people’s differentiated needs. Hence his maxim: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Another of Marx’s ideas that was distorted by both the bourgeoisie and Soviet practice was his defence of common or collective property.

What did the ideologues of the bourgeoisie say? The communists (or socialists) will expropriate everything, your fridge, your car, your home, etc.

How ignorant! Neither Marx nor any socialist or communist has ever thought of expropriating peoples’ personal belongings. What Marx proposed was the idea of giving society back what originally belonged to them, that is, the means of production, but which was unjustly appropriated by an elite.

What the bourgeoisie does not understand, or does not want to understand, is that there are only two sources of wealth: nature and human labour, and without human labour, the potential wealth contained in nature can never be transformed into real wealth.

Marx pointed out that there is not only real human labour but also past labour, that is, labour incorporated into instruments of labour.

The tools, machines, improvements made to land and, of course, intellectual and scientific discoveries that substantially increased social productivity, are a legacy passed down from generation to generation; they are a social heritage – a wealth of the people.

But the bourgeoisie, thanks to a whole process of mystification of capital – one that I don’t have time to go into here – has convinced us that the capitalists are the owners of this wealth due to their efforts, their creativity, their entrepreneurial capacity, and that because they are the owners of the companies they have the right to appropriate what is produced.

Only a socialist society recognises this inheritance as being social, which is why it must be given back to society and used for society, in the interest of society as a whole, and not to serve private interests.

These goods, in which the labour of previous generations is incorporated, cannot belong to a specific person, or a specific country, but must instead belong to humanity as a whole.

The question is: how do we ensure this happens? The only way is to de-privatise these means of productions, transforming them into social property. But since the humanity of the early 21st century is still not a humanity without borders, these action must begin on a country-by-country basis, and the first step is therefore the handing over of ownership of the strategic means of production to a national state which expresses the interests of society.

But simply handing over the strategic means of production to the state represents a mere juridical change in ownership, because if the change in these state companies is limited to that, then the subordination of workers to an external force continues. A new management, which now calls itself socialist, might replace the capitalist management but the alienated status of the workers in the production process remains unchanged. While formally collective property, because the state represents society, real appropriation is still not collective.

That is why Engels argued, “state-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution to the conflict”, although “concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.”

Furthermore, Marx argued that it was necessary to end the separation between intellectual and manual labour that transforms workers into one more clog in the machine. Companies need to be managed by their workers. That is why Chavez, following through on his ideas, maintained a lot of emphasis on the notion that 21st century socialism could not limit itself to being a state capitalism that left intact work processes that alienate workers. Workers must be informed about the production process as a whole, they must be able to control it, to review and decide on production plans, the annual budget, and the distribution of the surplus, including its contribution to the national budget. Wasn’t this the aim of Plan Guayana Socialista?

But, then we have the argument of the socialist managerial bureaucracy that says: how can we hand over management to the workers! They are not prepared to participate actively in the management of enterprises! And they are right, minus some rare exception, precisely because capitalism has never been interested in providing workers with the necessary technical knowledge to manage enterprises. Here I am referring not only to production, but also to matters related to marketing and finance. Concentrating knowledge in the hands of management is one of the mechanisms that enables capital to exploit workers. But this, for a revolutionary cadre, cannot be a reason to not advance towards the full participation of workers. On the contrary, processes of co-management must be initiated that allow workers to appropriate this knowledge. To do this, they must begin engaging in practical management, while at the same time acquiring training in business and management techniques in order to reach a stage of complete self-management.

And at the level of communities and communes, an issue like many others that I would like to talk about but can’t go into detail here, I always remember what Aristóbulo Istúriz said: “we have to govern with the people so that the people can learn to govern themselves.” I understand that President Maduro is seeking to do this by promoting the participation of the organised people in his government through what he has called Councils of Popular Government.

I have said on various occasions that, for me 21st century socialism is a goal to aspire to, and I refer to the long historic period of advancing towards this goal as a socialist transition.

But what type of transition are we talking about? We are not dealing with a transition occurring in advanced capitalist countries, something that has never occurred in history, nor of a transition in a backward country where the people have conquered state power via armed struggle as occurred with 20th century revolutions (Russia, China, Cuba). Instead, we are dealing with a very particular transition where, via the institutional road, we have achieved governmental power.

In this regards, I think the situation in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s is in some way comparable to that experienced by pre-revolutionary Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. What the imperialist war and its horrors were for Russia, neoliberalism and its horrors was for Latin America: the extent of hunger and misery, increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, destruction of nature, increasing loss of our sovereignty. In these circumstances, our peoples said “enough!” and embarked on a new path, resisting at first, and then going on the offensive, making possible the victory of left or centre-left presidential candidates on the back of anti-neoliberal programs.

Faced with the evident failure of neoliberalism as it was being applied, there emerged the following dilemma: or the neoliberal capitalist model is rebuilt, or advances are made in constructing an alternative project motivated by a humanist and solidarity-based logic. And as we said before, it was Chavez who had the audacity to take this second path and I believe President Maduro is trying to continue with his legacy. Other leaders such as Evo Morales and Rafael Correa later followed him. All of them are conscious of the fact that the objective economic and cultural conditions, and the existing correlation of forces at a global and national level, obliges them to co-exist for a long time with capitalist forms of production.

And I say audacity because these governments confront a very complex and difficult situation. They not only have to confront backward economic conditions but also the fact that they still do not have complete state power. And they have to do it on the basis of an inherited state apparatus whose characteristics are functional to the capitalist system, but are not suitable for advancing towards socialism.

Nevertheless, practice has demonstrated, contrary to the theoretical dogmatism of some sectors of the radical left, that if revolutionary cadres run this apparatus, it can be use as an instrument in the process of building the new society.

But we must be clear, this does not mean that the cadres can simply limit themselves to using the inherited state, it is necessary to – using the power in their hands – go about building the foundations of the new political system and new institutions, creating spaces for popular participation that can help prepare the people to exercise power from the most simple to the most complex level.

This process of transformation from government is not only a long process but also a process full of challenges and difficulties. Nothing ensures that it will be a lineal process; there is always the possibility of retreats and failures.

We should always remember that the right only respects the rules of the game as long as it suits their purposes. They can perfectly tolerate and even help bring a left government to power if that government implements the right’s policies and limits itself to managing the crisis. What they will always try to prevent, by legal or illegal means – and we should have no illusions about this—is a program of deep democratic and popular transformations that puts into question their economic interests.

We can deduce from this that these governments and the left must be prepared to confront fierce resistance; they must be capable of defending the achievements they have won democratically against forces that speak about democracy as long as their material interests and privileges are not touched. Was it not the case here in Venezuela that the enabling laws, which only slightly impinged on these privileges, was the main factor in unleashing a process that culminated in a military coup supported by right-wing opposition parties against a democratically elected president, supported by his people?

It is also important to understand that this dominant elite does not represent the entire opposition. It is vital that we differentiate between a destructive, conspiratorial, anti-democratic opposition and a constructive opposition that is willing to respect the rule of the democratic game and collaborate in many tasks that are of common interests. In this way we avoid putting all opposition forces and personalities in the same basket. Being capable of recognisng the positive initiatives that the opposition promotes and not condemning a-prior everything they suggest will, I believe, help us win over many sectors that today are not on our side. Perhaps not the elite leaders, but the middle cadres and broad sections of the people influences by them, which is the most important.

Furthermore, I think that we would gain much more by combating their erroneous ideas and mistaken proposals with arguments rather than verbal attacks. Perhaps the latter are well received among the most radicalised popular sectors, but they are generally rejected by broad middle class sectors and also many popular sectors.

Another important change these governments face is the need to overcome the inherited culture that exists within the people, but not only among them. It also persists among government cadres, functionaries, party leaders and militants, workers and their trade union leaderships. I’m talking about traits such as individualism, personalism, political careerism, consumerism.

Moreover, advances come at a slow pace and confronted with this, many leftists tend to become demoralised. Many of them saw the capture of governmental power as a magic bullet that could quickly solve the most pressing needs of the people. When solutions are not rapidly forthcoming, disillusionment sets in.

That is why I believe that, just as our revolutionary leaders need to use the state in order to change the inherited balance of forces, they must also carry out a pedagogical task when they are confronted with limits or brakes along the path – what I call pedagogy of limitations. Many times we believe that talking about difficulties will only demoralise and dishearten the people, when, on the contrary, if our popular sectors are kept informed, are explained why it is not possible to immediately achieve the desired goals, this can help them better understand the process in which they find themselves in and moderate their demands. Intellectuals as well should be widely informed so they are able to defend the process and also to criticise it if necessary.

But this pedagogy of limitations must be simultaneously accompanied by the fomentation of popular mobilisations and creativity, thereby avoiding the possibility that initiatives from the people become domesticated and prepare us to accept criticisms of possible faults within the government. Not only should popular pressure be tolerated, it should be understood that it is necessary to helping those in government combat errors and deviations that can emerge along the way.

I feel a sense of frustration not being able to talk about so many other issues, but I need to finish up, and to do so I want to read out some of the various questions that I pose in the book, and which I believe can help us evaluate whether or not the most advanced governments I have referred are taking steps towards building a new socialist society:

Do they mobilise workers and the people in general to carry out certain measures and are they contributing to an increase in their abilities and power?

Do they understand the need for an organised, politicised people, one able to exercise the necessary pressure that can weaken the state apparatus and power they inherited and thus drive forward the proposed transformation process?

Do they understand that our people must be protagonists and not supporting actors?

Do they listen to the people and let them speak?

Do they understand that they can rely on them to fight the errors and deviations that come up along the way?

Do they give them resources and call on them to exercise social control over the process?

To sum up, are they contributing to the creation of a popular subject that is increasingly the protagonist, assuming governmental responsibilities?

In this regard, I believe the proposal to open up a national discussion that includes all social sectors in the country over the issue of the price of petrol is of transcendental importance. I believe it is transcendental because it is calling on the people, not the party, to discuss this issue. I believe the role of the party should be to fully involve itself in the discussion as an instrument for facilitating the debate.

I would like to finish up by insisting in something I never tire of repeating:

In order to successfully advance in this challenge, we need a new culture on the left: a pluralist and tolerant culture that puts first what unites us and leaves as secondary what divides us; that promotes a unity based on values such as solidarity, humanism, respect for differences, defence of nature, rejection of the desire for profit and the laws of the market as guiding principles for human activity.

A left that understands that radicalism is not about raising the most radical slogans nor taking the most radical actions, which only a few follow because the majority are scared off by them. Instead, it is about being capable of creating spaces for coming together and for struggle, that bring in broader sectors, because realising that there are many of us in the same struggle is what makes us strong and radicalises us.

Schafik Handal, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro and Evo Morales, in Havana in 2004

By Roger Burbach

Telesur, July 1, 2014

Something remarkable has taken place in Latin America in the new millennium. For the first time since the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, radical left governments have come to power in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, raising the banner of socialism. The decline of the US empire, the eruption of anti-neoliberal social movements, and the growing integration of the region on its own terms have created a space for the rejuvenation of socialism after the dramatic setbacks of the last century. Cuba is part of this transformative process as its leadership moves to update the country’s economy while the Cuban people experience new freedoms.

In what follows, the theoretical debates and the praxis of socialism in the twenty-first-century socialism will be explored. The intent is not to provide a singular theory of the new socialism, but to put forth some of the interpretations of the contemporary struggles that are taking place in Latin America.

Theories of Twenty-First-Century Socialism

Drawing on the wide-ranging discussions of twenty-first-century socialism taking place in the hemisphere, political theorist Marta Harnecker, who served as an informal adviser to Hugo Chavez, outlines five key components of what constitutes socialism. First, socialism is “the development of human beings,” meaning that “the pursuit of profit” needs to be replaced by “a logic of humanism and solidarity, aimed at satisfying human needs.” Secondly, socialism “respects nature and opposes consumerism – our goal should not be to live ‘better’ but to live ‘well,”’ as the Andean indigenous cultures declare. Thirdly, borrowing from the radical economics professor Michael Lebowitz, Harnecker says, socialism establishes a new “dialectic of production/distribution/consumption, based on: a) social ownership of the means of production, and b) social production organized by the workers in order to c) satisfy communal needs.” Fourthly, “socialism is guided by a new concept of efficiency that both respects nature and seeks human development.” Fifthly, there is a need for the “rational use of the available natural and human resources, thanks to a decentralized participatory planning process” that is the opposite of Soviet hyper-centralized bureaucratic planning.(1)

To construct a socialist utopia along these lines will be a long endeavor, taking decades and generations. Today different explorations, or counter-hegemonic processes, are at work throughout the hemisphere. As Arturo Escobar – a Colombian-American anthropologist known for his contribution to post-development theory– writes in ‘Latin America at a Crossroads’:

“Some argue that these processes might lead to a re-invention of socialism; for others, what is at stake is the dismantling of the neo-liberal policies of the past three decades – the end of the ‘the long neo-liberal night,’ as the period is known in progressive circles in the region – or the formation of a South American (and anti-American) bloc. Others point at the potential for un nuevo comienzo (a new beginning) which might bring about a reinvention of democracy and development or, more radically still, the end of the predominance of liberal society of the past 200 years founded on private property and representative democracy. Socialismo del siglo XXI, pluri-nationality, interculturality, direct and substantive democracy, revolución ciudadana, endogenous development centered on the buen vivir of the people, territorial and cultural autonomy, and decolonial projects towards post-liberal societies are some of the concepts that seek to name the ongoing transformations.” (2)

Orlando Núñez, a leading Marxist theorist from Nicaragua, amplifies our understanding of the long transition to socialism with a more orthodox approach. Rejecting 21^st century socialism as a concept to describe what is occurring in Latin America today, he asserts that the region is in a very preliminary phase of “transitioning to socialism in which we should not pretend we are constructing socialism.” Rather we are confronting neoliberalism and each country in Latin America is “facing different conditions.” He adds, “new flags are appearing in the social struggle against the dominant system that cannot be resolved by the logic of capitalism.” It is “a post-neoliberal or post-capitalist struggle” against woman’s inequality and patriarchy, racial and ethnic discrimination, and the degradation of the environment. More fundamentally it is against “savage capitalism,” and “neo-colonialism,” both internally and externally. (3)

The Brazilian political scientist Emir Sader, in The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left, argues that the setback for socialism in the 20^th century was so severe that it is still recuperating to this day. Socialism can be part of the agenda, but the priority must be on forming governments and political coalitions to dismantle neoliberalism, even if that means accepting the broader capitalist system for the time being.(4) This in part explains why the construction of socialism in the coming years and decades will be a diverse process – differing widely from country to country. There is no single definition or model–we are indeed witnessing, two, three, many transitions to socialism..

Part 2: Rise of the Social Movements and New Theories of Social Struggle

The origins of twenty-first century socialism are found in the wave of social movements led by peasants and indigenous organizations that swept the rural areas of Latin America as state socialism was collapsing. By the mid-1990s they had assumed the lead in challenging the neoliberal order, particularly in Ecuador, Mexico, Bolivia, and Brazil. These new organizations were generally more democratic and participatory than the class-based organizations that traditional Marxist political parties had set up in rural areas in previous decades. In general, they came to fill the gap left by a working class that was fragmented, disoriented, and dispersed due to the assault of neo-liberalism. With a broad range of interests and demands, including indigenous and environmental rights, these new social movements transcended the modernist meta-narratives of both capitalism and traditional socialism.

At the dawn of the new millennium, social struggles and popular rebellions irrupted primarily in the cities that often overlapped with existing rural-based struggles. The uprising in Buenos Aires and other major Argentine cities in late-December 2001, and the popular rebellions in Quito, Ecuador in January, 2000 and then in April, 2005, dramatically altered these countries histories. The urban organizations that participated in these rebellions and mobilizations varied greatly, some with a distinct class basis and others having a multi-class composition.

Post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri broke with classic Marxism in their theoretical approach to the new social movements. In The Multitude they declare: “Some of the basic traditional models of political activism, class struggle, and revolutionary organization have today become outdated and useless." They add, "The global recomposition of social classes, the hegemony of immaterial labor, and the forms of decision-making based on network structures all radically change the conditions of any revolutionary process …" (5)

For Hardt and Negri, the Zapatista movement in Mexico–with its national and international networking, democratic decision-making process, its horizontal forms of organization, and its insistence on changing the world from the bottom up—is part of what they call the multitude. Whereas older Marxist theories lumped all the groups involved in global rebellion into one category called "the masses," the concept of "the multitude" recognized the diversity of the groups involved. It also differs from the classical Marxist belief that the industrial working class has to be the vanguard of any revolutionary movement.

While Goan Therborn does not break as sharply with classical Marxism, in his article "Class in the Twenty-First Century" in New Left Review, does see a new social and geographic dynamic emerging that breaks with the twentieth century: “The red banner has passed from Europe to Latin America, the only region of the world where socialism is currently on the agenda, with governments in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia speaking of ‘21st-century socialism’.” Unlike the century past when the industrial working class drove socialist politics, the new socialism “will find its base among workers and the popular classes in all their diversity—the plebeians, rather than the proletariat.” He adds: “The ‘socialism’ of Morales, Correa and Chávez is a new political phenomenon, which stresses its independence from 20th-century Eurasian models of left-wing politics and is itself quite heterogeneous.” (6)

Orlando Núñez takes a somewhat different tack in characterizing the current social and economic struggles by using Karl Marx’s concept of “freely organized associate producers.” The term originally meant that the workers in a socialist society would run the factories and work places as associate producers, setting the direction for the state and the economy as a whole. Today Núñez argues that there is a “via asociativa hacia el socialismo,” a path to socialism that is constructed by producers from below. (7)

Núñez points out that in most third world countries formal employment in large scale capitalist enterprises is being replaced and/or augmented by an ever increasing number of self-employed workers many of whom are part of what he calls “the popular economy.” It includes street vendors, micro-entrepreneurs, artisans, sellers in open air markets, fishermen, loggers, small farmers, bus and taxi cab owners, truckers and many more. This is the new proletariat that is being exploited in the realm of commerce and circulation. Most of its participants earn subsistence incomes as they sell their services and commodities in a market dominated and manipulated by big capital and transnational corporations.

Many in the popular economy become freely organized associate producers as they affiliate in credit and producer cooperatives, merchant and peasant associations, and transportation collectives. They pressure the government for resources and become conscious of their exploited role in society, demanding a more socialized state that provides universal education, health services, access to credit, etc. Núñez as well as radical theorists like Marcos Arruda of Brazil believe that a social solidarity economy is being constructed in Latin America in which networks of collaboration and equal exchange proliferate among the workers and independent producers at the base of the economy. (8)

Part 3: Contesting the State via Democratic Insurgencies

A groundbreaking perspective on how social forces and the popular movements maneuver and engage in a struggle for control of the state comes from Katu Arkonada and Alejandra Santillana in their 2011 article from Le Monde Diplomatique, "Ecuador and Bolivia: The State, the Government and the Popular Camp in Transition."

They assert that the state should be viewed as "an historic aspiration of the popular organizations and the indigenous peoples, and as a space open to political dispute." (9) In recent years the popular movements have sought to alter the state, to make it responsive to their interests and needs.

With the ascent of democratically elected new left governments, the contest over who will control the state is becoming even more intense. Arkonada and Santillana argue that "the construction of hegemony comes out of civil society," meaning that the "popular camp" in this period of transition is presenting its projects and interests, hoping to capture ever more space within the state. The popular forces will become hegemonic, they believe, as the state becomes an instrument of "collective interests," and "a universalizing political project."

A central question facing the popular forces is what type of democracy should be constructed. At present the political systems where the new left has come to power can be described as liberal in the classical sense. Broadly speaking, this liberal paradigm emerged with the philosophies of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. It consolidated in the eighteenth century with the American, French, and industrial revolutions, based on the concepts of private property, representative democracy, individual rights, and the market as the organizing principle of the economy and social life. (10) With the rise of capital, the dominant economic interests have manipulated the state, resulting in controlled democracies where citizens are allowed to vote every few years for candidates that generally do not question the capitalist order or respond to the interests of the people. Today in Latin America there is growing disillusionment with this liberal form of government and representative democracy.

The popular forces are envisioning a democracy that is more substantive, integral, and participatory, starting at the local level. Like never before, communal self-rule is being embraced in Latin America. We see it taking hold in Bolivia’s indigenous communities and Mexico’s Zapatistas in the state of Chiapas. In 2006 the citizens of Oaxaca occupied the state capital and formed the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca that kept federal forces at bay for several months in a manner reminiscent of the Paris Commune of 1871. Over the past decade and a half, hundreds of Brazilian municipalities have launched participatory budgeting to engage local communities in the allocation of city funds. Venezuelan communities have founded over 40,000 neighborhood-organized communal councils. (11)

A central characteristic of the three countries in South America that have raised the banner of socialism is that they are deeply committed to democratic procedures. During the fourteen years of Hugo Chávez, starting with his first presidential election, there were sixteen national elections or referendums. Under Evo Morales there have been seven in seven years and during Rafael Correa’s six years in office eight elections and referendums have occurred.(12)

The commitment to democratic procedures means that twenty-first-century socialism in Latin America is tied to the electoral cycle. A likelihood exists that in Venezuela, Bolivia or Ecuador, the incumbent presidents or their designated successors will eventually be voted out of office. This will mark a new unpredictable phase in the struggle for socialism. Will the new non-socialist leaders seek to overturn the deep reforms of their more radical predecessors? Or will they have to accept many of the changes, particularly the social and economic reforms that have benefited the popular classes? Will new openly socialist candidates win back the presidential office in future elections? Given that Rafael Correa won a resounding reelection in 2013 and that Evo Morales will probably be victorious in 2014, the most immediate challenge is in Venezuela where President Nicolas Maduro is facing a renewed right wing offensive as the oligarchy moves to destroy the economy, using tactics and strategies reminiscent of those employed by the Chilean bourgeoisie and the CIA  against the popular unity government of Salvador Allende (1970-73).

Part 4: Renovating Cuban Socialism

is important to discuss the trajectory of socialism in Cuba and its relationship to 21^st century socialism. Aurelio Alonso, sub-director of the magazine Casa de las Américas, in Havana, draws a distinction between socialism in the 21^st century vs. socialism of the 21^st century (socialismo en el siglo 21 vs. socialismo del siglo 21).

This difference in wording reflects the fact that the socialism being constructed in the rest of Latin America is unique to the new millennium whereas in Cuba it has a much longer trajectory. Alonso told me that “the ‘punta de partida’ (point of departure) is different for Cuba and the rest Latin America,” both in terms of time and politics: “The Cuban process today is an attempt to advance the socialism that triumphed in the 20^th century while in Latin America at large the left is in a protracted struggle with the oligarchy to construct a new socialism of the 21^st century.” (13) Socialism has very different protagonists and antagonists in each region. For Cuba the opposition is not the oligarchy, but the bureaucracy and elements within the Communist party that want to hold onto the old 20th century order with a centralized economy and an authoritarian state.

Cuba is also different from the Latin American continent in that its historic trajectory is related to the other surviving socialisms of the 20^th century, particularly China and Vietnam. All three countries in their earlier stages adopted the Soviet model in one form or another with the centralization of their economies and state ownership of the means of production. The market played only a marginal role as the state set prices and issued five year plans to determine production goals.

The two Asian countries moved much earlier than Cuba to market economies; China beginning in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping with its “modernization” policies, and Vietnam in 1986 with its “renovation” program that it adopted in the face of widespread food shortages and famine. Both were largely rural societies at the time, and many of the early reforms were directed at the countryside and quickly succeeded in increasing agricultural production. Although only a quarter of the Cuban population is rural, the early economic reforms are aimed at unleashing agriculture by granting 10 hectare parcels in usufruct to small scale producers who sell a portion of their produce in the free market. And like China, the Cuban government is encouraging food processing and rural light manufacturing via municipal enterprises and cooperatives that also operate in the open market. Measures opening up the sales of houses and motor vehicles, along with the creation of 171 self employment categories, are designed to place many of the smaller enterprises and economic activities–ranging from taxis and barber shops to restaurants and produce venders– in the hands of independent owners, merchants and producers who set their own market prices. (14)

China, Vietnam, and now Cuba share the belief that the market should not be identified exclusively with capitalism. The market functioned in feudal societies and it can help distribute resources in an efficient manner in a socialist economy. But free reign cannot be given to individuals to dominate and manipulate the market. The market place itself needs to be regulated.

The Cuban leadership does not express an official view point on the large scale accumulation of private capital and the emergence of a new bourgeoisie in China. However, Cuban academics and some party officials assert that their reform process will be different from both the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences, because they are “Asiatic societies,” whereas Cuba is firmly rooted in the “Western tradition.” There are critical differences in culture and history, perspectives on leadership, and the role of the peasantry and the workers. Differences in geography and the size of the populations also weigh heavily in determining what types of economic and political institutions evolve under market socialism in each country.(15)

There are different schools of thought in Cuba on how to move the economy forward. Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, in an essay titled “Visions of the Socialism That Guide Present-Day Changes in Cuba,” describes three different visions: (a) a statist position, largely reflecting the old guard, (b) a market socialist perspective, advanced by many economists, and (c) an autogestionario, or self-management, stance that calls for democratic and sustainable development primarily through the promotion of cooperatives.(16)

The statists recognize that Cuba faces serious economic problems but argue that they can be corrected through a more efficient state, not through a dismantling of the state. They call for more discipline and greater efficiency among state industries and enterprises. A loosening of state control, they contend, would result in greater disorganization and even allow capitalist tendencies to emerge. This position points to the disaster that occurred in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s after an attempt to end central control over state enterprises.

The statist position is most deeply entrenched among midlevel bureaucrats and the party cadre, who fear a loss of status and income with the end of direct control over Cuba’s economy. Some heads of the Cuban military enterprises—which include food and clothing factories, as well as hotels, farms, and telecommunication stores—also manifest this tendency, although surprisingly many officers, including Raúl Castro, are in favor of decentralization and a greater use of market mechanisms.

Those committed to a socialist market economy contend that only the market can unleash Cuba’s productive forces. To increase productivity and efficiency, the state needs to grant more autonomy to enterprises and allow competitive forces to drive the market. In the short term, privatization is necessary, even if this means an increase in inequality, the exploitation of wage workers, and environmental degradation. As the country develops, the state can step in to level the differences and distribute the new surpluses to support social programs.

The economists who argue for market socialism tend to be located in what is referred to as academia—the research institutes and centers, many of which are affiliated with the University of Havana. Academia looks to the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences, particularly their appeal to foreign investment, although they believe that Cuba should do a better job of controlling corruption. This position also finds support among state technocrats and some managers who want to see their enterprises expand and become more profitable as they are privatized. There is also significant support for the market economy among self-employed and working people who feel that they can enjoy the material prosperity of China or the Western world only through more individual initiative and private enterprise via the market.

The autogestionario position, which Piñeiro advocates, has a fundamentally different view from the economists over how to break with the old statist model. Instead of relying on competition and the market to advance productivity, the democratic socialist values of participation, association, and solidarity should be at the heart of the workplace and the new economy. Control should not come from the top down but from the bottom up, as workers engage in self-management to further their social and economic concerns. As Piñeiro writes, “The autogestionarios emphasize the necessity of promoting a socialist conscience, solidarity, and a revolutionary commitment to the historically marginalized.” These principles can be practiced in cooperatives and municipal enterprises, leading to increased consciousness and productivity in the workplace.

Piñeiro admits that support for the autogetionario position is less consolidated, coming from intellectuals, professionals, and those involved in the international debates over 21st-century socialism. One of the problems is that the old statist model used the terms participation, autonomy, and workers’ control to characterize the relations in the factories, enterprises, and cooperatives that operated poorly in Cuba, and this language has now fallen into disfavor. Today those who try to revive these terms are often seen as making a utopian attempt to resuscitate failed policies.

Ultimately, Piñeiro is optimistic, seeing “a new path for the nation.” It will be a hybrid composed of “a state socialism better organized, a market,” and “a truly democratic sector.”

While the debate within the government and the Cuban Communist Party over the direction of the economy is comprehensive, the leadership has made it clear that Cuba will remain a one party state. Here Cuba differs from the emerging socialist societies in the rest of Latin America that are committed to holding multiparty national elections. However, important changes are taking place within the political and state apparatus. With the demise of Fidel Castro and the limits of Raúl, who is now in his 80s, a new generation is coming to the fore that will act more collectively.  Raul has announced he will be stepping down in 2018 and Miguel Diaz-Canal who is in his early fifties–with broad experience in the Communist party and the state, particularly at the provincial level–is Raul’s apparent successor as the new vice-president. Legislation is being advanced in the National Assembly that limits all upper level government positions to two five-year terms. The National Assembly itself is also becoming more important as a center of debate and discussion over policies, while the election of delegates is more competitive than in the past.

Part 5: Economic Challenge: Extractivism and Socialism in Latin America

The Achilles heel of the counter-hegemonic and anti-systemic processes in South America is the difficulty of  breaking with the old economic model.

The new left governments are heavily dependent on extractivist exports: petroleum in Venezuela, natural gas and minerals in Bolivia, petroleum and agricultural commodities in Ecuador.

The Uruguayan sociologist Raúl Zibechi argues that dependence on extractive exports means that countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are mired in a second phase of neoliberalism and have not escaped from dependent capitalist development. (17) But this criticism is too harsh and absolute.

The economies of Latin America have always been driven by extractive exports. To expect this to change in a decade or so is unrealistic, especially in a global system dominated by transnational capital. What we are witnessing in the short term is the determination of these countries to capture a much larger portion of the rents that come from exports and to use this revenue to expand social programs and to encourage endogenous development. Zibechi is tapping into the debate within the left over how to exploit these natural resources, with many indigenous and ecological organizations insisting that the earth should not be ravaged and that the environment needs to be respected.

In the sphere of international trade, the socialist oriented countries are promoting innovative policies. Venezuela and Cuba founded ALBA in 2004, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas, which encourages "fair trade" not free trade, and promotes integration through complementarity and solidarity. Bolivia joined in 2006 and later Nicaragua, Ecuador, and five Caribbean countries.

The exchange of Cuban medical personnel for Venezuelan oil is just one early example of the type of agreement reached under ALBA. Cuba and Venezuela have also collaborated under ALBA to provide literacy training to the peoples of other ALBA member countries, such as Bolivia. The key concept is to trade and exchange resources in those areas where each country has complementary strengths and to do so on the basis of fairness, rather than market-determined prices. (18)

Along with these state-level economic initiatives, a transformative and radical dialogue is taking place at the grassroots that may not be explicitly socialist but it is anti-systemic. Civil society and local movements are questioning the process of development itself because it harms the environment and is intricately linked to capitalism. Social movements and many of the new left governments have increasingly clashed with their governments over developmental projects. In Bolivia the dispute over a road that would link previously unconnected parts of the country, but which would bisect the TIPNIS Indigenous Territory and National Park, raised fundamental questions about issues of development, indigenous autonomy, and the rights of Mother Earth.

In Ecuador the social movements even after President Rafael Correa’s resounding reelection in February, 2013 continue their criticism of his policies of exploiting the country’s petroleum and mineral resources at the expense of local communities. CONAIE, the major indigenous organization in Ecuador, is openly challenging Correa’s developmentalist approach in mining, water rights, and the exploitation of oil reserves in one of the most biodiverse areas in the world.

Bolivian vice-president Alvaro García Linera puts a positive spin on these developments, asserting that these conflicts are inherent in a transformative process. The popular forces will have different factions that try to push their particular interests and visions of where they want the society to go. The vice-president calls these ‘creative tensions’ and even argues that they are essential for social and political progress to take place. (19)

Venezuela made significant advances during the eight years after Hugo Chavez’ call for 21st century socialism at the World Social Forum in Brazil in early 2005. Later in that year he urged citizens to form communal councils. The Law of Communal Councils defined these councils as "instances for participation, articulation,and integration between the diverse community-based organizations, social groups and citizens, that allow the organized people to directly exercise the management of public policies and projects." To date over 40,000 communal councils have been formed. Cooperatives are also a major form of constructing socialism from below. Many factories are now administered by workers councils, particularly in the steel, aluminum and bauxite industries. Food distribution centers are also controlled by the workers. (20) The road to socialism, however is fraught with difficulties, as shortages and inflation have gripped the economy, undermining the stability of the government of Nicolas Maduro. Even Chavez acknowledged in his final days that Venezuela had by no means achieved a socialist utopia.

Part 6: Transitional Turbulence and the New Socialisms

This is a period of turbulence and transitions. It is not an age of armed revolution as was the century past.

Socialism in twenty-first-century Latin America is part of a complex process of change sweeping the region.

Cuba is striving to update its economy while on the South American continent the socialist banner is unfurling at very distinct paces. In Venezuela the quest for socialism is most advanced politically and economically while in Ecuador, although Rafael Correa proclaims he is undertaking a “citizens revolution” and is a twenty-first century socialist, his government has taken virtually no steps in the direction of a socialist economy. Bolivia occupies a middle ground in which innovative discussions are taking place within and between the government and social movements that relate socialism to the indigenous concept of buen vivir.

Socialism is making an appearance in other countries through a variety of social actors. In Chile the 2011 student rebellion ignited Chilean social movements, which are now rethinking the country’s socialist legacy. They have been instrumental in compelling the second presidency of Michelle Bachelet to call for a series of progressive reforms, including a new constitution, that break with the neo-liberal agenda of her first term. In Brazil the MST, Movement of Landless Rural Workers, the largest social organization in the hemisphere, continues to espouse socialism in its platform and in the daily practices of its land reform settlements. It does not look to a paternalistic state, as demonstrated by its frequent criticism of the policies of President Lula da Silva when he held office 2003 to 2011. The MST seeks to maximize the participation of its own members in the running of their own cooperatives and communities.

While the wording is not explicitly socialist, the constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador call for people to live in harmony with “Pachamama,” Mother Earth, and for buen vivir, or good living – a holistic cosmovision of the world where people strive for harmony. It is more than a hollow dream; it influences contemporary policies in opposition to capitalist development. For example, food sovereignty as it is conceived of in the Andean countries is adapted to buen vivir. It breaks with the traditional concept of development, asserting that food production should not be driven simply by the marketplace, especially the international market. Food sovereignty means that people have access to nutritious and sanitary foods that are produced at the community level by local producers in accordance with local needs and cultures, be they Andean or non-Andean. As Francisco Hidalgo Flor, an Ecuadorean sociologist, asserts in his October 2011 article ‘Land: food sovereignty and Buen Vivir,’ ‘the state has the responsibility to stimulate production … to provide support to small and medium scale producers,’ ensuring that they have adequate technical assistance and credit. (21) Land should be controlled or owned by those who work it. The promotion of cooperatives and a solidarity economy are part of the effort to construct a participatory society, be it in Brazil with the MST or in Bolivia with the indigenous communities.

Latin America is a cauldron of political and social ferment. There are no discernible laws of history driving this upheaval, but socialism is a central component of the brew that is being stirred up by the social movements and the popular forces. Rather than a lineal historic clash between capitalism and socialism that classic Marxism envisioned, we are now witnessing a plethora of struggles and confrontations that veer across the pages of history–between classic liberalism and post-liberal politics; extractivism and post-development; transnational agribusiness and food sovereignty; patriarchy and feminism; exclusionary educational systems and free democratic centers of learning; nation-states dominated by the descendants of the colonizers and the new plural-national states.

Francois Houtart, a leading organizer of the World Social Forum and the executive secretary of the World Forum of Alternatives, argues that it is not important whether we call this new project buen vivir, socialism of the twenty-first century or something else. What is important is that it is a “post-capitalist paradigm” that projects a new utopia. “We need it because capitalism destroys every utopia, it considers itself the end of history. If there is no utopia there are no alternatives.” (22)

A multiplicity of groups and movements are now imagining new utopias. ‘One world with room for many worlds,’ proclaim the Zapatistas. In the short term, twenty-first-century socialism could flounder or experience setbacks in any one of the countries in the Americas where the socialist banner has been planted – Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, or less likely, Cuba. But it will not disappear. Socialism runs deep in the historic waters of the hemisphere, and the quest for a renovated socialism in Latin America offers hope to a world torn asunder by wars and economic crises.

Endnotes:

1.Marta Harnecker, ‘Cinco reflexiones sobre el socialism del siglo XXI,’ Rebelión, 26 March 2012, www.rebelion.org/docs/147047.pdf.

2.Arturo Escobar, ‘Latin America at a crossroads,’ Cultural Studies, 24(1) (2010): 2.

3.Orlando Núñez Soto, ‘La via asociativa y autogestionaria al socialismo,’ Revista Correo, No. 24, Noviembre-Diciembre, 2012 Managua, Nicaragua, p. 11

4.Emir Sader, The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left (Verso, 2011), p. 104-5.

5.Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 68–9.

6.Göran Therborn, Class in the 21st Century, New Left Review No. 78, Nov.-Dec. 2012, p. 20.

7.Núñez, pp. 16-18.8.For an insight into  Marco Arruda’s extensive work on the solidarity economy, see: http://programaeconomiasolidaria.blogspot.com/2010/06/economista-marcos-arruda-lanca-amanha.html

8. Also http://www.tni.org/users/marcos-arruda

9. Katu  Arkonada and Alejandra Santillana,‘Ecuador and Bolivia: The State, the Government and the Popular Camp in Transition.’ Rebelión, 13 September 2009, www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=135502.

10.Escobar  p. 9.

11. Roger Burbach, Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes, Latin Americas Turbulent Transitions: The Future of Twenty First Century Socialism, London, Zed Books, 2013, pp, 7-8.

12. Ibid., See Appendix: Nationwide Elections in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, pp. 159-60.

13. Aurelio Alonso, Interview, April, 2012.

14.For a more extensive discussion of the transformations and debates occurring in Cuba, see Roger Burbach, A Cuban Spring, NACLA Report on the Americas, (January-March), 2013.

15 Julio Díaz Vázquez, “Un balance critico sobre la economía cubana: Notas sobre dirección y gestión,” Temas, (April-June 2011): 128. Also interview with Juan Valdes Paz, April, 2012.

16.Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, “Visiones sobre el socialismo que guían los cambios actuales en Cuba,” Temas, no. 70 (April–June, 2012): 46–55.

17.Raúl Zibechi, ‘Ecuador: A new model of domination,’ Latin America Bureau, trans. Alex Cachinero-Gorman, 5 August 2011.

18. ‘¿Que es el ALBA-TCP?’, Portal ALBA-TCP, 3 December 2009, www.alianzabolivariana.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=2080.

19.Álvaro Garcia Linera, Las Tensiones Creativas de la Revolución: la quinta fase del Proceso de Cambio (Vicepresidencia del Estado, 2010).

20.Roger Burbach, “”Chavez Renewed Latin America and Revived Socialism, The Progressive Magazine, March 6, 2013. www.progressive.org/chavez-renewed-latin-america

21. Hidalgo Flor, ‘Tierra: soberanía alimentaría y buen vivir,’ La Línea de Fuego, 14 October 2011, lalineadefuego.info/2011/10/14/tierra-soberania-alimentaria-y-buenvivir-por-francisco-hidalgo/.

22.François Houtart, “El Desafio Fundamental Para Bolivia, Venezuela y Ecuador es Definir La Transicion Bajo Un Nuevo Paradigma Poscapitalista: Entrevista por Katu Arkonada, Publicado por lalineadefuego  November 8, 2013, http://lalineadefuego.info/2013/11/08/el-desafio-fundamental-para-bolivia-venezuela-y-ecuador-es-definir-la-transicion-bajo-un-nuevo-paradigma-poscapitalista-entrevista-a-francois-houtart

About the author:

Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) based in Berkeley, California. He has written extensively on Latin America and US foreign policy for over four decades. His first book, Agribusiness in the Americas (1980), co-authored with Patricia Flynn, is regarded as a classic in the research of transnational agribusiness corporations and their exploitative role in Latin America. His most notable book is Fire in the Americas (1987), co-authored with Orlando Núñez, which is an informal manifesto of the Nicaraguan revolution during the 1980s. With the collapse of twentieth-century socialism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe he began to study the emergent system of globalization and to write about the new Latin American social movements and the renewed quest for socialism, His most recent book is: Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Socialism, co-authored with Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes. See the web site: www.futuresocialism.org

[Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal urges its readers to consider taking out a subscription to Monthly Review, where this article first appeared.]

By Michael Lebowitz

March 2014 — Monthly Review — It is now one year since the unfortunate death of Hugo Chávez on March 5, 2013. Shortly after, the editors of Monthly Review quoted a letter from István Mészáros to John Bellamy Foster which described Chávez as “one of the greatest historical figures of our time” and “a deeply insightful revolutionary intellect” (“Notes from the Editors” in the May 2013 Monthly Review). Whether Chávez will be remembered over time this way, however, depends significantly on whether we build upon the foundations he began.

As important as his vision and his deep understanding of the necessary path (so clearly demonstrated by his focus upon communal councils as the basis of a new socialist state—“the most vital revolutionary achievement in these years,” as the editors indicated) was Chávez’s ability to communicate both vision and theory in a clear and simple way to the masses. As demonstrated by Chávez’s articulation of the concept of “the elementary triangle of socialism,” that is what revolutionaries must learn to do.

Following Marta Harnecker’s long interview with Chávez (later published as Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution by Monthly Review Press), he asked her to come to Venezuela in 2003 to serve as his advisor and explained that he wanted someone around him who would not hesitate to criticize him. And that’s how we ended up in Venezuela. At the beginning of 2004, I became an adviser to the Minister of the Social Economy and, during that year, Marta and I became convinced that it would be important to create a center which could bring together foreign advisors who supported the Bolivarian Revolution. Accordingly, she proposed to Chávez that an institute be established for this purpose; he agreed, and, after we assembled people and found a home for the Institute (ultimately in the Ministry of Higher Education), the Centro Internacional Miranda (CIM) was formed in early 2006.

Since it was clear that Chávez would be re-elected in December and would be thinking seriously about directions for the new mandate, those of us involved in CIM decided to prepare a series of papers proposing initiatives which we felt could advance the process of building socialism in Venezuela. Although several of us engaged in these discussions, ultimately only three of the CIM directors (Marta Harnecker, Haiman El Troudi, and I) completed papers for transmission to Chávez in early December. In what follows, I include an excerpt from one paper I prepared plus a second paper subsequently developed in response to Chávez’s reaction to the first.1

Building new productive relations now

Everyone understands that it is impossible to achieve the vision of socialism for the twenty-first century in one giant leap forward. It is not simply a matter of changing property ownership. This is the easiest part of building the new world. Far more difficult is changing productive relations, social relations in general, and attitudes and ideas.

To transform existing relations into the new productive relations, we need first of all to understand the nature of the existing relations. Only then can you identify the mechanisms by which the new relations can be introduced. At this time, there is a great variety of experiments and approaches to changing productive relations which are being pursued. There is no attempt to set out specific proposals here but only to provide the framework in which such changes should be explored in order to move toward socialist productive relations.

The first step is to understand the direction of change. The precise pace of transformation will depend upon the existing conditions, the conjuncture, and the correlation of forces (national and international).

A. Existing productive relations

It is essential not to confuse property relations with productive relations. For example, a state-owned firm could be (a) worker-managed and functioning in a market with the goal of maximizing income per worker (as in the self-managed enterprises in the former Yugoslavia), (b) a profit-maximizing state capitalist firm, or (c) what we call for our purpose here a “statist” firm—a productive unit directed by the state to achieve specific targets in terms, e.g., of output or revenue. Similarly, a cooperative may be focused upon maximizing the income of its members or solving local needs. And, in all these cases, there is always the possibility of managers and managerial elites directing the enterprises in their own personal interests because of the difficulties in, for example, the state or stockholders monitoring and sanctioning their activity (as occurred in the old PDVSA).2

1. Capitalist productive relations

We understand capitalist productive relations as those in which workers enter into a relationship with capitalists in which they surrender their ability to work (and their claim upon what they produce) to capitalists. What workers get from this transaction is a wage that provides for their maintenance; what capitalists get is the right to direct their employees in such a way as to profit from their ability to work, the right to own everything that workers produce, and the right to determine what is produced and how it is produced. These relations may take different forms—e.g., workers may have more or less control over the production process and they may receive a portion of their wage in the form of profit-sharing (which means that they share in the risks of the capitalist); however, characteristic of capitalist productive relations is (a) that everything is subordinated to the generation of profits and the accumulation of capital, and (b) the capitalist is working constantly to increase those profits however possible.

Thus, the system drives toward the greatest possible exploitation of workers and the greatest possible use of resources for which the capitalist does not have to pay (e.g., clean air and water); workers and society may succeed in winning some battles from time to time, but the logic of capital is always to attempt to undermine and reverse those victories sooner or later. And that is because the logic of capital is opposed to the logic of human development and human needs.

2. Cooperative productive relations

Cooperative relations exist where workers are associated in particular enterprises in their mutual interest as producers. Both in the case where workers are the owners of the means of production or where the means of production are owned by the state and entrusted to the collective of workers, the inherent logic of the cooperative as a separate unit is the same: maximize the income per member of the cooperative. Accordingly, characteristic of a cooperative is that it looks upon members of other cooperatives (and members of society as a whole) as either competitors or as potential sources of income as customers. The logic of the cooperative is the self-interest of the group; in this respect, taxation of the cooperative by the state, by reducing the net income of its members, appears as a burden contrary to the interests of the group.

Thus, the logic of the cooperative as such is not a focus upon human development and solidarity within society as a whole. The cooperative retains the self-orientation of the capitalist firm and may function atomistically in the market in the same way as capitalist firms. Nevertheless the differences between cooperatives and capitalist firms are immense. In the cooperative, workers do not surrender their ability to work or their right to determine how they will produce or their claim over what they produce. Rather, they combine or pool their capacities in their common interest and, instead of keeping their tacit knowledge to themselves and finding ways to minimize their work, the logic of the cooperative leads them to share their knowledge and their ability because they are the beneficiaries.

Precisely because of this collective interest and this conscious combination of activity, cooperatives build solidarity within the specific group and teach a lesson about the benefits of cooperation. At the same time, however, this orientation toward the interests of the specific group (and toward “group property”) is consistent with the exploitation of other workers (non-cooperative members) as wage-laborers and with actions in the interest of the group which are contrary to the interests of society. Nevertheless, the two-sided nature of relations within cooperatives suggests the potential of building new productive relations upon them.

3. Statist productive relations

Characteristic of statist relations is that enterprises are given specific directives by the state and are expected to fulfill these. Insofar as the goal of the state is to meet a specific output or revenue target or to maximize revenue for the state budget, the resources of the statist unit will be directed toward meeting this goal.3 Further, the counterpart of the directive or command given to the statist enterprise will be the directive or command transmitted within that enterprise; hierarchy is characteristic of the statist enterprise: orders are transmitted downward. Thus, democracy and worker decision-making are not characteristic; rather than the disruptions in state goal achievement that may result from the differing goals of workers, the preferred role of an organization of workers from the statist perspective is to mobilize human resources to meet the selected goal—i.e., to serve as a transmission belt for state directives. In this respect, from the perspective of workers the statist firm may be no different than the capitalist firm.

Similarly, insofar as meeting the chosen output or revenue targets is paramount, efficient use of resources (including the environment) may tend to be sacrificed in the interests of reaching those targets. Despite state goals which are formulated in the interests of society as a whole, the fact that specific directives are given to individual productive enterprises means that their efforts to achieve them may stimulate behavior which is in the interests of the particular enterprise rather than in that of the whole. Such a pattern is particularly likely where the income or career path of enterprise managers depends upon their success in meeting these assigned targets. In fact, the private interests of those managers may yield many anti-social effects with the result that the statist firms do not act in the interest of society as a whole. Where statist enterprise managers are not committed to the goals of the state and where their behavior is not easily monitored, the performance of those enterprises will appear incoherent because they reflect the presence of a different set of relations. The existence of managers with their own goals and the difficulty of monitoring them from above was characteristic of the enterprise in the former USSR.4

The logic of the statist enterprise, accordingly, is two-sided. While it potentially can be directed in the interests of society as a whole and is essentially oriented toward production of use-values rather than profits, in the absence of specific directives which stress the interests of workers and society as a whole, and the transparency which is a precondition for monitoring and empowering of workers and communities, the statist enterprise can be captured by particular interests.

B. Transforming existing productive relations

The steps that must be taken to make a transition from existing relations to the new productive relations and the pace at which the changes can be made depends upon the starting point.

1. Transforming statist enterprises

Without question, the easiest transition can be made in the statist firm—it is already at the threshold of new productive relations. Unlike the explicit private interests in capitalist and cooperative productive relations, the statist firm already is in form the property of society as a whole and has as its explicit directive to act in the interests of society as a whole.

The path to transform the logic of statist enterprises, then, is to change the directives which they are given by the state. If the new productive relations which are to be built emphasize as a goal the full development of human potential and the creation of new socialist human beings, the nature of these institutions and the instructions given by the state must include the conditions necessary for the realization of this goal. With the development of workers councils and the growing orientation of their activity toward meeting the needs of communities (as expressed by those communities themselves) and with the transparency which allows waste, corruption, and bureaucratic self-interest to be challenged, statist enterprises increasingly can be characterized by socialist productive relations. This is not an easy process, of course, because the habits, traditions and common sense of both capitalist and statist firms is that decisions should be made at the top and transmitted downward; for this reason, success in this process depends upon the selection of managers who share the vision.

To the extent that the statist enterprise moves in the direction of new socialist relations emphasizing the full development of human capacity, it no longer can be evaluated by the measures of traditional capitalist accounting. State directives such as, for example, transformation of the workday to include education in the workplace, transitional phases in the development of worker participation, and improvement of environmental conditions are directives to invest in human development. Thus, rather than view the specific enterprises which follow such social policies as “uneconomic” or money-losing, those policies are social investments whose cost must be born by society as a whole.

2. Transforming cooperatives

The transformation of cooperatives concerns not only those where the means of production are owned by a group of workers but also the case of state-owned enterprises which are self-managed and enterprises which are a combination of state and group ownership. Despite the difference in property ownership, common to all is that the prevailing logic is to maximize income per worker within the group.

Besides this group self-interest, however, this institution contains the essential ideas of cooperation and democracy—which are at the core of the new relations which must be built. The transition here, then, must take the form of encouraging the cooperative to move beyond its narrow self-orientation and to develop organic links to society.

A first step would be to develop links between groups of workers, i.e., members of differing cooperatives. With the establishment of a Council of Cooperatives in each community, it would be possible to explore the way in which these groups of workers could cooperate in activities rather than compete and, in general, to investigate ways in which cooperatives can integrate their activities directly without being separated by market transactions. Further, links could be established between the Councils of Cooperatives in each community and communal councils. With the support of the communal banks, the needs of local communities could be communicated to the organized cooperatives as a way of moving toward production for communal needs and purposes.

The process of transforming the productive relations of cooperatives, thus, is one of guiding them step-by-step beyond their own narrow interests into a focus upon the needs of communities. In other words, cooperatives are at another threshold of socialism for the twenty-first century. Both the statist enterprise and the cooperative have in common that they are not capitalist enterprises; rather, they are part of the social economy, which can “walk on two legs” on a path toward socialist productive relations.

However, there is nothing automatic about this process. The logic of capital can dominate both, and can turn both statist firms and cooperatives into complements and supports for capitalism. Being on the threshold of socialist productive relations does not mean you will ever cross that threshold.

3. Transforming capitalist enterprises

Capitalism is not at that threshold, and it will never be. The essence of capitalism is the exploitation of workers and the orientation toward profit at the expense of every human being and every human need. We can never use the logic of capital to build new social relations. Rather, it is necessary to go beyond capital and to subordinate its logic to the logic of the new society.

Part of the process of subordinating capitalism to a new social logic is by introducing the transparency necessary to monitor the activity of capitalist enterprises. With a new law on transparency, making the financial records (including records of transactions with other entities) of all business enterprises of a minimum size (e.g., over twenty-five workers) available to inspection by workers and tax officials, the information available for a democratic, participatory, and protagonistic society would be increased. Those enterprises unwilling to provide this information would be understood to be acting against the public interest and, thus, would be operated in a transparent way instead by the state or groups of workers.

A rupture of property rights in this way—i.e., nationalization by the state or a take-over by collectives of workers—is one of three ways to subordinate existing capitalist enterprises within a country. Certainly, this does remove these capitalist enterprises and the capitalist interests behind them as threats to a new socialist society. As noted earlier, however, changing property rights is not the same as developing new productive relations. At best, this only takes us to the threshold (in the form of statist firms and cooperatives) of those new relations. In fact, a private capitalist firm may simply be replaced by a state capitalist firm which exploits workers and destroys the environment—all in the interests of maximization of profits. Thus, while existing capitalist enterprises may be subordinated in this way, we have seen that more is needed to introduce new productive relations.

A second way to subordinate existing capitalist firms is by extracting and transferring the surpluses generated in those firms. Through taxes or prices (e.g., forms of “unequal exchange”), surpluses generated within these firms may be siphoned off to other sectors (e.g., new firms being created) or to the support of social programs—rather than realized as profits. A similar assault on the profitability of these enterprises could be through competition with state-owned firms or subsidized cooperatives. Certainly, such inroads upon the profits of capitalist firms will reduce their viability, and their subsequent absorption by the state or workers would likely follow in the public interest in order to maintain jobs and production.

Whereas the above cases involve an external assault on existing capitalist firms, a third approach to their subordination involves the invasion of an alien logic, the logic of new productive relations within those enterprises. The premise here is not that capitalism can be reformed or that it can change but, rather, that its orientation toward profit-maximization will be constrained by the existence of new requirements. For example, the existence of strict environmental standards compels the capitalist enterprise which wants to remain in operation to accept these as a cost of doing business and to continue, within this new constraint, to attempt to maximize profits. In the same way, government directives which require enterprises to transform the workday to include educational training, introduce specific forms of worker decision-making (such as workers councils), and devote a specific portion of resources to meet local community demands will impose costs upon these firms which would be still consistent with the logic of capital—the drive to maximize profits.

But, why would capitalist enterprises accept such imposed costs when they can go to other locations in the world where those particular costs are not present? They would do so if this were a condition to having access to scarce local resources, to credit from state banks, and to the market that state enterprises and the state offer. In other words, the state can use its leverage (where it wishes) to change the ground rules under which capitalist enterprises which are not footloose can do business with it.

Does this change them from being capitalist firms? Does it mean that they no longer exploit workers? Obviously not. Why, then, would a state which wishes to transform productive relations accept the continued existence of these capitalist firms? It would do so only if the limited economic and technical resources at its disposal make it rational for it to work for a period with capitalist firms constrained in this way.

The process of introducing these conditions (“socialist conditionality”), though, is the insertion of new, alien productive relations within the capitalist firm. The combination of state directives which enforce the development of workers councils (with increasing responsibilities) and a growing orientation toward meeting community needs makes the capitalist enterprise contested terrain. And, the struggle within these firms will continue: just as capitalist firms in this case will be constantly attempting to lessen and reduce the burden of “socialist conditionality,” the state—in cooperation with workers and communities—will be working to introduce into these enterprises further elements characteristic of the invading socialist society. In short, we are describing here a process of class struggle in which the goal of socialism for the twenty-first century is the complete replacement of the logic of capital by the logic of a new socialist society.

From Mészáros to concrete proposals for transforming Venezuela

In the following week, Marta Harnecker received a call from Chávez in relation to our papers. He said, “Could Michael look at the paragraph from István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital where Mészáros described capitalism as an organic system of production, distribution and consumption, a system in which everything is connected? If everything is connected, how is it possible to change anything? So, ask Michael to indicate concrete proposals for change in this context.”

Frankly, I was blown away by the question, and my immediate reaction when she passed this message to me was—“What paragraph???” Happily, I had Mészáros’s book with me in Caracas, and so I searched for the paragraph in question. It was not easy, though, to isolate a single section because that is what the whole book is about—the necessity to go beyond all sides of capital if socialism is to be built. Ultimately, I concluded that the paragraph Chávez had in mind was in section 20.3.5 where Mészáros talks about “the inescapable dialectical relationship” between production, distribution, circulation, and consumption, stressing that “the capital relation is made up of many circuits, all intertwined and mutually reinforcing one another.” Here, then, was why Mészáros concluded that “it is inconceivable to achieve the socialist objectives without going beyond capital, i.e. without radically restructuring the totality of existing reproductive relations.”5 And, here was the problem that concerned Chávez and which now concerned me—what concrete measures were possible in this context? That led to the second of these papers for Chávez in December 2006.

Rereading István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital, I am very impressed by the way he goes to the heart of the new society that must be built. It is true that he draws very heavily upon Marx’s discussion in the Grundrisse (and I have often stressed this point); however, what is so remarkable is how sharply he hones Marx’s point. Especially significant is the way he stresses a “twofold tyrannical determination” in capital (to which the market socialist reformers in the USSR were oblivious)—(a) “the authoritarianism of the particular workshops,” and (b) “the tyranny of the totalizing market.”6

Precisely because this double tyranny is so clear for him, Mészáros is unequivocal in identifying as characteristic of the new socialist society that (a) control of production be “fully vested in the producing individuals themselves,” and (b) that “the social character of labour is asserted directly,” not after the fact. In other words, productive activity in this socialism is social not because we produce for each other through a market but because we consciously produce for others. And, it is social not because we are directed to produce those things but because we ourselves as people within society choose to produce for those who need what we can provide.

Here is the core of this new socialism as Mészáros saw it—“the primacy of needs.”7 Our needs as members of society—both as producers and as consumers—are central. This is a society centred on a conscious exchange of activity for communal needs and communal purposes. It is a society of new, rich human beings who develop in the course of producing with others and for others; these are people for whom the desire to possess and the associated need for money (the real need that capitalism produces, Marx noted) wither away. We are describing a new world in which we have our individual needs, needs for our own “all-round development,” but where we are not driven by material incentives to act. It is a world in which our activity is its own reward (and is, indeed, “life’s prime want”) because we affirm ourselves as conscious social beings through that activity, a world in which we produce use-values for others and produce ourselves as part of the human family.

But, obviously, those people do not drop from the sky. They are formed by every aspect of their lives. Not only their activity as producers but also in the spheres of distribution and consumption. In this complex dialectic of production-distribution-consumption, Mészáros stresses, no one part can stand alone—it is necessary radically to restructure the whole of these relations because capitalism is a “structure of society, in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another” (Marx). So, how can you make any real changes if you have to change all relations—and you cannot change them all simultaneously?

In the same way that capitalism developed. Capitalism developed through a process, a process of “subordinating all elements of society to itself” and by creating for itself the organs which it lacked. The new socialist society similarly must develop through a process of subordinating all the elements of capitalism and the logic of capital and by a process of inserting its own logic centred in human beings in its place. It proceeds by assembling the elements of a new dialectic of production-distribution-consumption.

Elements of the new socialism

What are those elements? At the core of this new combination are three characteristics: (a) social ownership of the means of production which is a basis for (b) social production organized by workers in order to (c) satisfy communal needs and communal purposes. Let us consider each in its turn and their combination.

Social ownership of the means of production is critical because it is the only way to ensure that our communal, social productivity is directed to the free development of all rather than used to satisfy the private goals of capitalists, groups of individuals, or state bureaucrats. Social ownership, however, is not the same as state ownership. State property is consistent with state capitalist enterprises, hierarchical statist firms, or firms in which particular groups of workers (rather than society as a whole) capture the major benefits of this state property. Social ownership implies a profound democracy—one in which people function as subjects, both as producers and as members of society.

Production organized by workers builds new relations among producers—relations of cooperation and solidarity; it furthermore allows workers to end “the crippling of body and mind” and the loss of “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” (Marx) that comes from the separation of head and hand characteristic of capitalist production. As long as workers are prevented from developing their capacities by combining thinking and doing in the workplace, they remain alienated and fragmented human beings whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things. Further, as long as this production is carried out for their private gain rather than that of society, they look upon others (and, indeed, each other) as means to their own ends and thus remain alienated, fragmented, and crippled. Social production, thus, is a condition for the full development of the producers.

Satisfaction of communal needs and purposes has as its necessary condition a means of identifying and communicating those needs and purposes. Thus, it requires the development of the democratic institutions at every level which can express the needs of society. Production reflects communal needs only with information and decisions which flow from the bottom up. However, in the absence of the transformation of society, the needs transmitted upward are the needs of people formed within capitalism—people who are “in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society” (Marx). Within the new socialist society, the “primacy of needs” is based not upon the individual right to consume things without limit but, rather, upon “the worker’s own need for development”—the needs of people in a society where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. In a society like this where our productive activity for others is rewarding in itself and where there is all-round development of individuals, society can place upon its banner: to each according to one’s need for development.

As consideration of these three specific elements suggests, realization of each element depends upon the existence of the other two—precisely Mészáros’s point about the inseparability of this distribution-production-consumption complex. Without production for social needs, no real social property; without social property, no worker decision-making oriented toward society’s needs; without worker decision-making, no transformation of people and their needs. The presence of the defects inherited from the old society in any one element poisons the others. We return to the essential question: how is a transition possible when everything depends upon everything else?

Building revolutionary subjects

In order to identify the measures necessary to build this new socialist society, it is absolutely critical to understand Marx’s concept of “revolutionary practice”—the simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self-change. To change a structure in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another, you have to do more than try to change a few elements in that structure; you must stress at all times the hub of all these relations—human beings as subjects and products of their own activity.

Every activity in which people engage forms them. Thus, there are two products of every activity—the changing of circumstance or things (e.g., in the production process) and the human product. This second side of production is easily forgotten when talking about structural changes; however, it was not forgotten in the emphasis of the Bolivarian Constitution upon practice and protagonism—in particular, the stress upon participation as “the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective.”

What is the significance of recognizing this process of producing people explicitly? First, it helps us to understand why changes must occur in all spheres—every moment that people act within old relations is a process of reproducing old ideas and attitudes. Working under hierarchical relations, functioning without the ability to make decisions in the workplace and society, focusing upon self-interest rather than upon solidarity within society—these activities produce people on a daily basis; it is the reproduction of the conservatism of everyday life.

Recognizing this second side also directs us to focus upon the introduction of concrete measures which explicitly take into account the effect of those measures upon human development. Thus, for every step two questions must be asked: (1) how does this change circumstances, and (2) how does this help to produce revolutionary subjects and increase their capacities? There are often several ways to make changes, but the particular battles which will build this new socialism more certainly will be those which not only win new ground, but also produce an army capable of fighting new, successful battles.

Choosing concrete steps

When we focus upon human beings and their development, it is easy to see how the elements within the new dialectic of production-distribution-consumption are connected. The process is one of synergy—the effects of changes in the sphere of production will be felt in the spheres of distribution and consumption; thus, this whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Let us consider each of the elements in turn.

Producing for communal needs and communal purposes

The Bolivarian Revolution has taken a giant leap into the twenty-first century with the creation of the Communal Councils, an essential cell of socialism for the twenty-first century. The communal councils provide a means by which people can identify communal needs democratically and learn that they can do something about these by themselves as a community. In this respect, these new community organizations are a school of socialism—one in which there is simultaneously a changing of circumstance and the development of people, “both individual and collective.”

They are also a base upon which to build. As the councils begin to function successfully, they can take further steps in identifying the needs of the community—what are those needs (both individual and collective) and what are the local resources that can satisfy those needs? For example, the councils can conduct a census of the local cooperatives and other enterprises that could produce for local needs. Further, they could bring together workers and the community to discuss ways to produce for communal needs and purposes.

The communal councils in this respect are a paradigm for this process. Not only are they a vehicle for changing both circumstances and the protagonists themselves but they also move step by step to a deepening of the process. Inevitably, all councils will not develop at the same pace, so uniformity cannot be imposed; however, this unevenness provides an opportunity for more advanced communities to share their experiences (a process which helps to build solidarity among communities). Further, the transmission of their needs upward for participatory budgeting at higher levels is an essential part of the process of developing planning from below for communal needs and purposes.

Of course, not all decisions to satisfy social needs belong at the level of the neighborhood and community. The decisions to reject neoliberalism, to pursue endogenous development, to seek food sovereignty, to create new education and health programmes, to create a new transportation infrastructure, to build new socialist relations—these are decisions which must be made at the national level. So, where is the place for revolutionary practice, the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change, in such cases?

There is no automatic place for the protagonism of the people in such state decisions. Perhaps some day a new state which is based upon the communal councils will emerge, and perhaps at some point computers will permit instant referenda on a host of national issues. On such matters at this point, however, the participation from below that allows people to develop their capacities will only occur as the result of a political commitment, one which makes real the Constitution’s understanding that the sovereign people must become not only the object but also the subject of power.

In short, national-level decisions can all be made at the top, which is characteristic of both dictatorships and representative democracies, or there can be a dedicated search for mechanisms which incorporate people below so they not only can affect the nature of the decisions, but also recognize the decisions as theirs. The “parliament of the streets” is an obvious example of a mechanism which can incorporate people into the discussions of laws, improve the quality of information available for good decisions, and create an identification with these decisions. However, finding ways to institutionalize this process so that people view it as their right to participate (and punish National Assembly deputies who do not honor this right) is important both in empowering people and attacking bureaucracy and elitism.

National decisions on such matters as the sectors of the economy that should be expanded and the social investments that need to be made are most critical at a time when the rapid and dramatic transformation of the structure of the economy from an oil economy is desired. And, these decisions have the profoundest effect upon which needs of society can be satisfied in the present and future. The significance of such decisions is precisely why it is important that they be pursued transparently, that the information that people need to be able to understand the logic behind these proposals be circulated in a simple and clear way and that the proposed plans and directions be discussed in advance in assemblies of workers and communities.

Just as in the case of discussions in communal councils and the development of links between the community needs and local producers, the dissemination and discussion of information about nationwide needs and purposes will be important in mobilizing support and initiatives from below in communities and workplaces to meet the needs of society. Sometimes, too, it will prevent serious errors when national initiatives do not take into account local and regional impacts (especially their environmental effects). Thus, not only do these democratic processes disseminate information downward. They also are an essential means of transmitting information upward.

For goals identified at both the community and national levels, the greater the spread of information and discussions through which people take ownership of the decisions, the more likely that productive activity will occur to ensure the successful achievement of those goals (rather than out of self-interest); in this way, producing for communal needs and purposes emerges as common sense.

Social production organized by workers

The preconditions for successful worker organization of production are dissemination of the information necessary to carry out the activity and the ability to use this information efficiently. Thus, transparency (“open books”) and worker education (through a transformation of the traditional workday to include education) should be introduced in state, private capitalist, and cooperative enterprises.

While some aspects of enterprise activity (such as production statistics and information about purchasing decisions) can be monitored by workers relatively easily, examination of financial data and evaluation of management proposals require the development of more skills. Thus, for an interim period, workers should have access to worker auditors and advisors who can serve on their behalf. These specialists could be part of the group of educators assigned to the enterprise or could be provided to the enterprise by the Ministry of Work or by a trade union or trade union federation.

The steps in which workers assume direction of the organization of production should be set out clearly in advance in each enterprise; these steps and the pace pursued will vary in accordance with the history, culture, and experience in each case. While individual cases will vary, one of the first areas where workers can demonstrate the benefits of worker decision-making is through the reorganization of production. With their knowledge of existing waste and inefficiency, workers should be able to improve productivity and reduce costs of production.

To encourage the efficient production of use-values and to deepen the development of social production, the gains from these worker initiatives should not accrue to the enterprise (especially in the case of private capitalist firms!). Rather, in principle, these benefits should be divided up among enterprise workers and the local community following discussions in worker assemblies and the direct coordination of worker representatives with local communal councils. The links between workers and community built upon this basis are then an important part of the creation of these new relations.

In general, the process by which worker decision-making advances in the enterprise should start from the bottom up. Beginning from worker veto over supervisors (on the logic that supervisors unacceptable to workers are inconsistent with any worker management), the degree of worker decision-making would grow on a step-by-step basis. Starting from a phase in which workers identify the profile of acceptable managers and begin discussions of production and investment proposals of managers, the development of knowledge and worker capacities through this process would proceed toward the goal in which workers (including the managers who represent them and society as a whole) organize social production for communal needs and purposes.8

Under ideal circumstances, the steps in this process will be determined through negotiation and agreement between workers and management of enterprises and will be filed with the Ministry of Work as a social contract. Where timely agreement is not possible, enterprise workers can bring the matter to the Ministry of Work for its action (and for referral to the National Assembly in the case of privately owned enterprises).

It should be pointed out that two characteristics often identified with co-management—worker election of top directors and worker ownership shares—play no role in the above discussion. Both measures contain within them the potential for old ideas and familiar patterns to penetrate into the new relations of worker management and to make them simply new forms of the old relations.

As in the case of representative democracy in the political sphere, worker election of enterprise directors has often served to create a separation between those directors and the people they presumably represent. The club of directors develops its own logic, which is one distinct from the interest of workers. In particular, within the contested terrain of capitalist firms, co-management in this form means cooptation—a means of incorporating workers into the project of capitalists. In contrast, the process described here in which workers organize production is one of protagonistic democracy in which workers’ power proceeds from the bottom up and does so for the purpose of serving communal needs.

Similarly, the idea that workers’ interests in enterprises (state-owned or private capitalist) should be secured by giving workers shares of ownership—whether those shares are individually held or owned by a cooperative—is a case where co-management can be deformed into self-oriented private ownership. Instead of workers functioning as socially conscious producers, expressing themselves as cooperating producers and members of society, they are transformed into owners whose principal interest is their own income (which means the economic success of their particular company). This is not the way to build social production—i.e., the exchange of activity based upon communal needs and purposes.

Social ownership of the means of production

Social ownership of the means of production is often presented as a matter of ideology. However, in a society oriented toward “ensuring overall human development” and “developing the creative potential of every human being,” social ownership of the means of production is common sense.

The point of social ownership is to ensure that the accumulated products of the social brain and the social hand are subordinated to the full development of human beings rather than used for private purposes. If the private ownership of the means of production does not support the creation of food sovereignty, endogenous development, and investment that generates good jobs, then the interest of society is advanced by introducing social ownership in its place.

Similarly, if private owners are not prepared to be transparent, to introduce education into the workplace, to accept growing worker decision-making, and to direct their activity increasingly to satisfying communal needs and communal purposes, then they thereby declare that they rank the privileges and prerogatives of private ownership over ensuring overall human development. Where they refuse to support public policies oriented toward creating a society based upon the logic of the human being, they demonstrate that there is no alternative for such a society than social ownership of the means of production.

Thus, it is not the socialist project which excludes them—they exclude themselves by demonstrating that they are incompatible with the full development of human potential.

One month later, on his regular Sunday “teach-in” (Aló Presidente #264 on January 28, 2007), Chávez drew upon the concepts developed in this second paper and introduced (to my excitement as I watched!) what he called the “elementary triangle of socialism”: social property, social production, and satisfaction of social needs (by setting out three points on his desk and explaining each side).9 This was one of many examples of his unique ability to take complex theoretical concepts (most evident in his regular references to Mészáros’s Beyond Capital) and to communicate these to the masses of viewers without a theoretical background.10 With simple commonsense language, Chávez succeeded in grasping the minds of masses, and that was an essential aspect in the combination which was building a path to socialism in his (truncated) lifetime. If we can learn to do that, then Chávez no se va.

Notes

1. ↩An additional paper I prepared, “Year of Total Education” (stressing education within worker-managed enterprises, education through practice, and an educational television station) was expanded upon by Haiman El Troudi (subsequently Minister of Planning and currently Minister of Transport) to add political and ethical education, and this was an inspiration for the program “Moral y Luces” announced in 2007 by Chávez.
2. ↩In the period before Chávez, managers of the state-owned oil company (PDVSA) succeeded in performing the magical feat of ensuring that revenues of the firm disappeared from Venezuela (and thus as state revenues) and appeared instead on the books of subsidiaries such as off-shore refiners.
3. ↩In Venezuela, PDVSA was the obvious example of such a “statist” firm. Its revenue was critical for supporting, among other things, state programs such as the social missions.
4. ↩I subsequently explored the incoherence and dysfunction characteristic of “real socialism” in The Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’: The Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
5. ↩István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 823.
6. ↩Ibid, 974–75, 837.
7. ↩Ibid, 835.
8. ↩The idea of “profiles” and of the step-by-step emergence of full worker management was developed in the course of meetings in 2005 between the managers of CADAFE (the major state electrical firm at the time) and FETRAELEC (the electrical workers federation) where Marta Harnecker and I played the role of marriage counselors after a breakdown in the process of “co-management” within the firm. Both sides agreed to this proposal but after management consulted with the Ministry of Oil and Energy, all such discussions of worker management were ended (presumably because they were contrary to the policy of the ministry, whose minister was, and remains, also the president of PDVSA).
9. ↩A few days earlier, I had incorporated much of the above discussion of socialism as an organic system into a talk (subsequently published as “New Wings for Socialism,” Monthly Review 58, no. 11 [April 2007]: 34–41) at the launch of the Venezuelan edition of my Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006). But there was no mention of a socialist triangle there because that graphic image had yet to be invented by Chávez. Subsequently, though, I drew explicitly upon his concept of the socialist triangle as a way to represent socialism as an organic system—beginning with two books published in Venezuela in 2008 (El Camino al Desarrollo Humano: Capitalismo o Socialismo? and La logica del capital versus la logica del desarrollo humano) and in the essay “The Path to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?” (Monthly Review 60, no. 9 [February 2009]: 41–63). This was followed by The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review, 2010), where the socialist triangle served as the organizing theme.
10. ↩Some examples of his discussion of the socialist triangle were incorporated in the video, “Worker’s Control: Theory and Experiences,” which was based on a conference on October 26–27, 2007, organized by the Program on Human Development and Practice of Centro Internacional Miranda; available at http://socialistproject.ca.