Workers’ Control and the

Contradictions of the Bolivarian Process

Interview with Gustavo Martínez

By Susan Spronk, Jeffery R. Webber

On June 10, 2010 we caught up with Gustavo Martinez, a union leader in the worker-controlled nationalized coffee company, Fama de América, in Caracas, Venezuela. The company has 350 workers at the national level, with two separate plants – one in Caracas and one in Valencia. We sat down with Martínez to discuss the centrality of workers’ control in the ongoing struggle to transition toward socialism and some of the most pressing contradictions of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela today.

To start off, can you tell us your name, how long you’ve worked in this coffee company, your job in the company, and your role in the union?

My name is Gustavo Martínez. I’m a union leader in Fama de América. I’ve worked here for nine years. I started in 2001. As you would expect, when I started there, Fama de América was a private enterprise, characterized by exploitation of the workers and rampant corruption. The owners of the enterprise, as capitalists, were only interested in extracting surplus; they didn’t care about the conditions of the workers. All of these characteristics we already know about capitalism.

There was a union at the time, first established in 1978, that was controlled by the [centre-right] party, Acción Democrática(Democratic Action, AD). Logically, as people on the left we were opposed to the union. I was one of those on the left. My parents are Colombian, and my father was a militant in the Communist Party in that country. He was pushed out of Colombia, displaced economically and politically, and therefore moved the family to Venezuela. He worked for a transnational and faced death threats for his political organizing in the workplace.

So I found myself here in Venezuela, working at the company, and there were others with a revolutionary background working here too.

One of the women workers suggested to us that the situation of Latin America was changing, that there would be new opportunities in Venezuela, with the rebellions in Argentina in 2001 and 2002, with elections of left candidates in Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and elsewhere, the left was starting to gain strength in South America again.

So we started to have meetings with all the workers, and decided it was time to organize ourselves. And eventually we succeeded in organizing a new union, one that is critical and holds to the ideals of the left, the importance of the proletariat, the workers. So we succeeded in establishing this new union. And, obviously, we immediately began to come into conflict with the owners of Fama de América, who wanted to continue to exploit workers as they had always done in the past.

We understood that coffee, since the colonial period, had been in the hands of capitalists, and that it would require an extraordinary change of consciousness in the workers to change this dynamic.

We have workers who have been here for 30 or 40 years. And obviously while they feared change initially, they also felt that they had been very poorly represented by their former union.

In August and September of 2009 we started our struggle under the idea that the factory had to be under workers’ control. The new union met regularly and had searching philosophical and political discussions. The issue was raised over and over again about what our main purpose was, and we agreed that it was to establish workers’ control. It is the workers who produce, and it is the workers who should be in control of the entire process. The national government eventually agreed with us on this point.

But it wasn’t easy. We started to hold workshops on workers’ control. The workers in the plant didn’t have a lot of experience with struggle, nor with political theory. Workers would ask, why workers’ control? It’s impossible. And we said, no, it is possible. We talked about the original soviets in Russia, and talked about how they really had existed. And the workers came around to the idea, and over time this is what we wanted collectively.

We’re situated here in this industrial zone of Caracas, and we decided we wanted to replace the capitalists; we wanted to transform this factory and the neighbouring factories into a socialist zone. We needed to stop the exploitation that we were suffering at their hands.

Gustavo Martinez

Before moving on to more questions about the specific experiences of the workers in this factory, can you tell us a bit more about your personal political trajectory? You mentioned your father was a revolutionary.

Personally, I was never a militant in a political party. Like so many others, I saw most political parties as corrupt, as tools of exploitation. Here in Venezuela there was the Punto Fijo Pact according to which the mainstream capitalist parties, Acción Democrática and the Christian Democratic party, Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (Committe of Independent Electoral Political Organization, COPEI), agreed to take turns in power, basically the idea that you can govern for five years, and then I’ll govern for five years. So I obviously didn’t want to be a militant in either of these parties. And you have to remember, too, that the Communist Party of Venezuela in this epoch wasn’t recognized legally, and the political left in general had a very thin presence. And we also witnessed many former left-wing guerrillas later join right-wing parties.

But after Chávez had come to power and eventually established the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), many grassroots left-wing social movement activists responded to his call to join the party. I was one of them. And within the party I’m involved in the current called Marea Socialista (Socialist Tide), which is the furthest left current within the PSUV. Marea Socialista always raises the issue of workers’ control and self-criticism of the process.

There are many contradictions in the process, and we point them out. We understand that it’s not easy to build revolutionary transformation, and that little by little the process is making advances, and that many people are working to push the process forward.

When Fama de América started, for example, there was obviously exploitation. Workers were not valued as humans, they were treated merely as machines. They had to produce results, they were measured by their numbers, and the profits were more important than the workers. Today I feel a certain satisfaction because, whatever doubts we have about the limits of the advances and the level of consciousness among the workers, we’ve achieved something.

By taking control over our workplace, workers have opportunities that they never had before. Something has been achieved. Something has been gained.

How would you describe the process of nationalization of this company, and specifically the role of workers’ militancy from below in achieving it?

The workers have learned a great deal from their own experiences about the possibility of change. The workers began to understand through their own experience with the terrible union that they had before that something had to change.

And we began to push forward the idea of confronting the old ways of doing things in our factory. And we took our struggle to the radio, to the community television, and other media to explain to Venezuelans about the conditions of the workers in Fama de América. We explained that this wasn’t ultimately about the workers of Fama de América alone fighting their bosses; this was part of a larger struggle of the people against their oppressors. Our reality was in no way distinct from what was happening elsewhere in private enterprises throughout the country. This was part of a larger struggle against our oppressors, against our exploiters, and that the people had to rise up and assume their role in the struggle.

You’ve mentioned workers’ control at various points. How does workers’ control function inside this workplace, and what are the workers’ understandings of workers’ democracy in the plant?

Right, consider the following. The workers put forward the idea of workers’ control, and began to read and investigate about the possibilities and experiences that had developed elsewhere, including in capitalist countries. One example was the hotel employees in Argentina who struggled for workers’ control, and who won control of their hotel.

We talked to comrades who participated in that struggle, around the idea that we don’t need bosses, managers, to tell us how to do our jobs, we have the knowledge ourselves. So we held workshops with the workers, and we struggled for this idea, to push it forward.

Comrades from the Ministry of Culture also worked with us on this project to push the idea along, working together alongside us. The workers launched a campaign around workers’ control, this is the most important thing.

In these workshops we showed videos about workers’ control and used other educational tactics to explain experiences elsewhere in the world, and argued that we could do the same right here in our workplace.

My vision of the role of workers’ control, essentially, is that in order to push forward the revolution, to advance toward an authentic transition to socialism, the means of production have to be in the hands of the workers. And the chances of our success in achieving this, is going to depend, above all, on the level of consciousness of the workers, and the level of commitment to achieving workers’ control among the workers themselves.

Because we’ve seen what happened elsewhere, when workers’ control and workers’ democracy were defeated and replaced with bureaucracy. In the Soviet Union a new bureaucracy was created which crushed the soviets themselves. What existed in the Soviet Union wasn’t socialism; it was a brutal, Stalinist bureaucracy. And we don’t want that to happen here, so we’re working very hard to build consciousness around workers’ control and workers’ democracy.

Socialism is the only path that exists for the world’s poor, their only alternative, because capitalism by its nature oppresses. So, in order to succeed, we need to work ceaselessly in the area of ideology, building a consciousness around workers’ control, self-governance, and autonomy.

What are the specific challenges facing the workers in this workplace?

Really, the main challenge is to consolidate the commitment to workers’ control. This continues to be the main challenge. We have to transform the idea of workers’ control into an authentic struggle in trenches as we push toward socialism.

We first have to debate and discuss openly the idea of workers’ control in this workplace and to consolidate its practice, and then it is essential to bring this debate to the streets, to extend this into other areas, and not to restrict this to our workplace.

As Trotsky suggested in his theory of permanent revolution, the idea of socialism in one country, or even in one continent is impossible. With one socialist continent, and the other four still capitalist, we’d be surrounded.

In our immediate situation we need to move out from our workplace inside this industrial zone to establish workers’ control in the other enterprises here, to construct a socialist industrial zone, and to keep extending outwards.

Ultimately we need to take on the bourgeois state and to replace it with a communal state, to establish control by the workers at all micro and macro levels, and to consolidate the idea that the oppressed need to govern themselves.

Can you elaborate on the importance of workers’ control within the wider Bolivarian process, and the processes of nationalization in various sectors?

You can’t have a revolution without the workers. This is the importance of workers’ control. And we have criticisms of the current process. Chávez, for example, has declared himself a Marxist, but sometimes there are practices that contradict this position.

In order to guarantee the triumph of this revolution, its authenticity, exploitation of the working class has to end, and workers have to have self-governance. This is the fundamental criteria of the revolution. Socialism is a society in which participation, ideas and politics have to come from the grassroots, from the workers. Chávez has declared his commitment to this, but at times he makes deals with segments of the private sector, and this isn’t our idea of revolution, this isn’t what we truly want.

Therefore we need to build an alternative to negotiating with capitalists, another form of pushing the revolution forward, pushing consistently for the control of workers from below. Chávez came to office in 1999, and over ten years later the concrete advances toward workers’ control have been very minimal.

So the most important objective is to carry this forward, to struggle for this consistently.

In what ways has the political situation for workers changed over the last decade under Chávez?

A lot has changed for the workers in this country. The ministers and politicians managing the state apparatus are now interested in debating with us, whereas before this possibility never existed.

Look, fifteen years ago, if you went to Plaza Simón Bolívar, which is in the centre of Caracas, you’d find people drinking, lying around, and things like that. If you go there today, you’ll see that the plaza has been transformed into a centre of constant debate.

People today understand the constitution, they know what PDVSA is, how it works. They debate issues of production and development in the country. On his weekly television program Aló President, Chávez talks about education, suggests that people read this or that book.

There have been advances in political education and political life. And Venezuela has become a reference for revolutionaries all over the world – Australians, Mexicans, Canadians, Germans, Dutch – we’ve talked to everyone.

What does Socialism for the Twenty-First Century mean to you?

The meaning and significance of the twenty-first century socialism has become a fulcrum of debate. But, look, this is more than a question of semantics. We are starting to understand what socialism is, and that it’s the only alternative. Today across the world there is an energy crisis, an environmental crisis, an economic crisis, and the only way to overcome these crises is to defeat capitalism.

Socialism can be a path toward liberation, whereas capitalism offers no opportunities for the world’s poor. We believe in a society in which everyone has possibilities, where health and education are a right, not a privilege for the few, for example. These can’t be the privileges of the few, they must be the rights of everyone.

But capitalism structures society in such a way that the poor have no possibilities. Or, take the issue of crime. Crime is not going to be solved with more police, with more repression. The only way to address this issue is through education, through nation-wide projects. In order to overcome violence, as such, it will be necessary to build socialism.

From your perspective, what have been the advances toward socialism thus far, and what still needs to be done in order to make this transition?

A tremendous amount still needs to be done, of course. There should be no illusions. In terms of advances, I think all revolutionaries have to respect President Chávez insofar as he’s made it possible to enrich our culture on a general level.

The sphere of education is one example. The education missions have been an important advance. People who never had access to higher levels of education are now able to educate themselves. Conventional universities were never accessible to the people in the past, for example. Now we have the Bolivarian University.

But the Bolivarian University must not become a conventional university, a traditional centre of education. It must be a place to develop the most important and radical revolutionary ideas. And there are various revolutionary student initiatives, which are still in their incipient stages, struggling to make this a reality.

Workers at the Vivex plant, which makes windshields, demanding nationalization in 2008.

In health there have been many advances, with the assistance of Cuba. We have to salute the Cubans, because Cuban doctors have such a strong commitment that they treat us like their own brothers. In the poorest barrios, through Misión Barrio Adentro, the health care is delivered to the impoverished.

Again, the general level of political consciousness is much more advanced than it was before.

If we look back to the 2002 [coup attempt] against Chávez, the people understood what was at stake and defended the Boliviarian process in the most courageous way. It should be recognized that Chávez is one of the few presidents in the world who has a commitment to his people.

So, there have been important advances. But there is also a great deal missing; there are many things to be done. We have to build much stronger links with the left in countries close to us, like Ecuador and Bolivia. Like Simón Bolívar, we believe in the necessity of uniting South America into one, huge, socialist country, in which everyone is equal.

Susan Spronk teaches in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is a research associate with Municipal Services Project and has published several articles on class formation and water politics in Bolivia.

Jeffery R. Webber teaches politics at the University of Regina. He is the author of Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (Brill, 2010), and Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket, 2011).

Bolivians mobilise. ``If our government officials are to be wise, they must be pushed by popular initiatives so that the people can feel they are doing it themselves. The state's paternalism, in building socialism, may help at first, but we must create popular protagonism.'' Photo by Ben Dangl.

Marta Harnecker

interviewed by

Edwin Herrera Salinas

For the Bolivian newspaper La Razón. Translation by MRZine's Yoshie Furuhashi.

Posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission

March 28, 2010

Edwin Herrera Salinas: What is the characteristic of the Latin American left today?

Marta Harnecker: Twenty years ago, when the Berlin Wall fell, there was no revolution foreseeable on the horizon. However, it didn't take long before a process began to emerge in Latin America with Hugo Chávez. We have gone on to form governments with anti-neoliberal programs, though not all of them are putting an anti-neoliberal economics in practice.

We have created a new left. A majority of victories are not due to political parties, except in the case of Brazil with the Workers' Party. In general, it has been due to either charismatic figures who reflect the popular sentiment that rejects the system or, in many cases, social movements that have emerged from resistance to neoliberalism and that have been the base of these new governments.

The governments that have done most to guarantee that there be a real process of change to an alternative society are the ones that are supported by organised peoples, for the correlation of forces is not idyllic. We have a very important enemy who is far from dead. It is preoccupied by the war in Iraq, but the power of the empire is very strong and is seeking to hold back this seemingly unstoppable process.

And what is happening to political thought?

What's happening is a renovation of left-wing thought. The ideas of revolutions that we used to defend in the 1970s and 1980s, in practice, have not materialised. So, left-wing thought has had to open itself up to new realities and search for new interpretations. It has had to develop more flexibility in order to understand that revolutionary processes, for example, can begin by simply winning administrative power.
The transitions that we are making are not classical ones, where revolutionaries seize state power and make and unmake everything from there. Today we are first conquering the administration and making advances from there.
Would you say that we are riding a revolutionary wave?

I believe that, yes, we are in a process of that kind. That there will be ebbs and flows, too, is true. It's interesting to look at the situation in Chile. Here we lost, but it was one of the least advanced processes.  Chile always privileged its relation with the United States; the socialist left was not capable of understanding the necessary links that we have to have in this region and betted on bilateral treaties.

During the era of [dictator] Augusto Pinochet national industry was dismantled, and the left didn't know how to work with people. The left went about getting itself into the leadership, political spaces, the political class, while the right went to work among people.

What role do you assign to Bolivia in this context?

I was in Bolivia a year and half ago. The situation was completely different then: people were in struggle and there were regional battles. Now I think you have made an enormous advance, when it comes to conquering the spaces of administrative power.

The correlation of forces in the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, the forces of separatism that were defeated, and the success of moderate and intelligent economic policy have demonstrated to the people that, with the nationalisation of basic resources, it is possible to build social programs and help the most defenceless sectors.
There is also something cultural, moral. The Bolivian people is what often doesn't show up in statistics: a people achieving dignity. Here, it's like Cuba, where many journalists were expecting to see the fall of Cuban socialism through the domino effect, which didn't happen because dignity matters to the Cuban people more than food.

I heard of improvements in Bolivia, but there still remain large pockets of poverty. Nevertheless, even the poorest citizens feel dignified thanks to the type of government that has had to understand, given Evo Morales' style, that its strength lies in organised people.

For me, it's like a symbol of what our governments ought to be in the face of difficulties. Instead of compromising and turning the process into top-down decision making, the government receives support from the organised power of people who give it the strength to continue advancing. We must understand that popular pressure is necessary to transform the state, which means we mustn't be afraid of popular pressure, we mustn't be afraid just because there sometimes are strikes against the bureaucratic deviations of the state.

Lenin, before his death, said that the bureaucratic deviations of the state were such that the popular movement had the right to go on strike against it, to perfect the proletarian state. This type of pressure is different from destructive strikes. Social movements must understand their constructive role and, if they choose to apply pressure, do so to build, not to destroy.

Do you believe that Bolivians can conquer power, not just the administration?

I believe that they will, as they are gaining ground and, well, power is also in the hands of organised people.  The socialism we want, which can be called socialism, communitarianism, full humanity, whatever, is a search for a fully democratic society, where individuals can develop themselves, where differences are respected, where, through the practice of struggle, through transformation, the culture of thought will change.

One of the greatest problems is that we are trying to build an alternative society with an inherited individualistic and clientelistic culture. Even our best cadre are influenced by this culture. So, it's a process of cultural transformation. Human beings change themselves through practice, not by decrees.

It is necessary to create spaces, or recognise already existing spaces, of participation, because the big problem of failed socialism was that people didn't feel themselves to be builders of a new society. They received grants, education, health care from the state, but they didn't feel that they were themselves building such a society.
What weaknesses do you see in the Bolivian process?

One of the problems is reflected in the leadership of cadre, accustomed as they are to thinking: when we take office, we change. We are democratic while working in a movement, but when we take office, we become authoritarian. We don't understand that, in the society we want to build, the state has to promote protagonism of people, rather than supplant their decision making. It happens in some left-wing governments: government officials think that it's up to them to solve problems for people, rather than understand that they must solve problems together with people.
If our government officials are to be wise, they must be pushed by popular initiatives so that the people can feel they are doing it themselves. The state's paternalism, in building socialism, may help at first, but we must create popular protagonism.

Can this weakness derive from not having cadre?

Of course it can. In my latest book, this idea is developed in the last chapter, called "El instrumento político que necesitamos para el siglo XXI" (The political instrument we need for the 21st century). The idea behind the term "political instrument" always seemed interesting to me. I insisted in 1999 that we use the term "political instrument" because "the party", in some cases, is a worn-out term. We were interested in creating an agency that is in accordance with the needs of the new society, rather than copying the schemas of already obsolete parties.
The party, classically, has been a group of cadre who, at bottom, are seeking to prepare themselves for taking political office, winning elections, with methods of work that we copied from the Bolshevik Party, which were democratic, not clandestine. We mechanically translated that structure.

The results of renovation of what used to be our political parties, or rather social movements that participate in this political construction, are now instruments that belong to social movements, like the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) [in Bolivia] or Pachakutik in Ecuador, which are instruments created by social movements themselves.
The leading instrument is not a party -- varied as situations are -- but a popular national front. It mustn't be forgotten that we come from the processes in which the left was in opposition, not in government, and one of the things that we are learning, with each local or national electoral victory, is that it's one thing to be the left in opposition and it's another thing to be the left in government.

Therefore we think that political instruments, whether they are fronts or whatever, must be the critical consciousness of the process. What happens often, or almost always, is that there arises a fusion of cadre in the government and cadre of the party. This is due to the shortage of cadre. We, as a group, are advocating in Venezuela for the necessity of public criticism which serves as a warning. If there are deviations, we have to have a chance to criticise them.
What, in your opinion, does public criticism consist of?

Even a little while ago, the left, including myself, thought that we should just wash our dirty laundry at home.  In Cuba, for example, that was always the case, and when we talked to the press, it was said: "Listen, be careful, don't say things that give ammunitions to the enemy." What happened in reality is that political education was greatly endangered, even in Cuba. In other words, the state, the political authority, corrupts if there is no control over it.
Therefore, I very much believe in communities exercising control. The absence of that means easy money and government officials, given various rationalisations, beginning to have a life apart, whether receiving a bigger salary, which doesn't happen often, or receiving a lot of gifts.

In Ignacio Ramonet's interview with Fidel, Cien horas con Fidel Castro (One hundred hours with Fidel Castro), the former Cuban president said: "In our country criticism and self-criticism are practiced in small groups, but it has grown stale. We need to practice criticism in classrooms, in public squares... The enemy will exploit it, but the revolution will benefit from it more than the enemy."

I am convinced that our government officials should see public criticism as something healthy. To be sure, norms of criticism should be made clear, too: for example, there should be major penalties for unsubstantiated criticisms, since in Venezuela the accusation of corruption is used against any political enemy, people getting destroyed without any evidence.

What is needed is a fundamental criticism, a criticism that presents a proposal. It is easy to criticise, but what is your own proposal? Each individual who criticises should have a proposal. Otherwise, what's the point? Also, internal spaces should be exhausted first. If the government is open to hearing criticism and capable of reacting promptly, then there is no need to make it public.

There should be a clear awareness in our countries that, if you are not behaving well, someone will expose your bad behaviour. It's like a moral pressure. Our history shows that being on the left doesn't make us saints. We have weaknesses, we can go astray.

The people must be alert, and critical intellect is very important. Intellectuals are not capable of mediating the correlation of forces: they have their schemas and sometimes are utopians at present; nevertheless, they reflect possibilities, and history often bears them out.

We are in an information world, and there's no hiding things. If we know how things are, so does the enemy.  It would be better for us to be the first to bring up solutions to problems; that way, we deprive the enemy of a weapon. It seems to me that public criticism does us good, and our officials had better understand that, too, for sometimes they don't understand it; public criticism will help the process greatly, it will go a long way to combating corruption and bureaucratism.

Who can better watch whether something is going well or badly than the service user? For example, at a bakery, who can be a better watchdog than people who eat its bread and know how the bakery works? That is to say, people should have their say and chances to make local decisions.

Has there been an opportunity to talk about this issue of public criticism with our government officials?

I have not been able to talk with Evo. I'll talk to him about it as soon as I can. In any case what I said is in my latest book. In Venezuela, I'm part of a group making efforts in that direction. We weren't well understood by many, but we understand that the president has understood it.

We are in agreement on public criticism, though there was a moment when it seemed as if our heads could roll. Now it looks like they have understood us and are giving us another kind of possibilities, and I think that this is important. The socialism of the 21st century that we want to build is an immensely democratic society that has no fear of criticism.
We offer public criticism out of pain, not out of hatred or a desire to destroy. We do so because we want a society in which the revolutionary process triumphs, and when we see deficiencies, it pains us, because we want to build something better. It's not the same as right-wing criticism that seizes upon our weaknesses to destroy us. No. We criticise to be constructive, to solve problems.

The most marvelous thing that has happened to us is that, when we made our criticisms public in Venezuela, the people felt completely identified with us, a group of critics, because it was exactly what they were feeling but didn't know how to express.

Who benefits from public criticism?

When I was editor of political journal Chile Hoy (Chile Today), I did a kind of public criticism. Sometimes intellectuals' or journalists' criticism is disliked because we are sometimes a little arrogant.  But in Chile Hoy, we gave the microphone to organised people and communicated what they saw was going wrong with the process. Our journal put out the government's communiqués, too, but my passion was to get out the opinions of copper miners and organs of workers' power (cordones industriales).

So, I'm pleased to hear Evo Morales say, in his interview with Wálter Martínez of TeleSur, that it is necessary to learn to listen, for sometimes government officials don't listen or listen to only those around them, which can only lead to the government officials getting a false picture of the country.

I don't know if it's happening in this country, but in Venezuela, when Chávez announces that he is going to visit a place, they beautify the streets and houses where the president will pass, or turn on air-conditioning in the school that he will visit, and then, on the following day, they will come and get things back to what they were. Only an organised people and a society open to criticism can put a stop to these things.

Is public criticism accepted?

I'd be happy to have an argument about this topic. If there are compañeros who think that this is wrong, I'd be happy to hear them say so. But I know historical experiences. You know that Mao Zedong, for all his life, was concerned about bureaucratic deviations and corruption. He organised six or seven campaigns that didn't bear fruit because people who led them came from the party apparatus. They were bureaucrats who were trying to do things without getting criticised.

Then came the Cultural Revolution, which was an opening for public criticism, but a book by a Chinese man, who experienced the Cultural Revolution, went to the United States, and then later returned to China has an analysis of how sectors of the party took the words of the leader to an extreme, caricatured his thought, and made it possible for it to be rejected. They did terrible things, such as cutting people's hair. They were the ones who wanted to destroy the process.

That is why there should be clear norms: we can't engage in an anarchic criticism, which is destructive. I learned from a Venezuelan community group who invited me to a meeting, where they said to me: "No one has the right to speak or propose unless the person takes responsibility for the proposal." That does away with blowhards who just love to talk on and on at meetings and never do anything.

The great virtue of Che, more than his guerrilla war and bravery in the face of imperialism, was the consistency between his thought and action. And that, for example, is what attracts the European youth. I was amazed, when I went to Europe for a commemoration of Che in 1987, to see how much he appealed to the youth. The secret wasn't that they loved to be guerrillas, too, but Che's consistency between thought and action.

[Marta Harnecker Cerdá, born in Chile, is a sociologist and popular educator. She has published more than 80 works. The focus of her current work is socialism of the 21st century and organising people in power. Her most widely read book is Los conceptos elementales del materialismo histórico (Fundamental Concepts of Historical Materialism). In 2008, she wrote a book on Bolivia's Movement Towards Socialism (MAS-IPSP), the political instrument led by Evo Morales, which emerged from social movements. Since the 1960s, she has collaborated with social and political movements of Latin America. She is now an advisor to the government of Venezuela. The original interview "'Hay que tomar en cuenta la crítica pública, conviene y ayudaría al proceso'" was published by La Razón on March 28, 2010. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi for MRZine.]

email2friend ]]> by Gabriel Ash Venezuela is changing. Fast. No other word captures the speed and magnitude of change as well as that weighty word--‘revolution.’ This is indeed the word used by many of the Venezuelans I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing during ten days in March. Venezuela is undergoing a ‘Bolivarian’ revolution. But what does 'Bolivarianism' entail? . . . Contrary to the image often portrayed in the foreign media, Chavez has gone overboard in seeking to include as many as possible in the Bolivarian state. He has time and again extended an olive branch to his enemies. To be honest, Zhou Enlai’s quip about the results of the French Revolution—that it is ‘too early to tell’—is doubly applicable to Venezuela. Radically different constituencies, political visions and potential futures are today co-existing more or less harmoniously within the dramatic process of change. This is perhaps inevitable. But some of the wide ranging ambiguity about the future direction of Bolivarianism has to do with Chavez’s crucial strategic choice in favour of peaceful social change. Contrary to the image often portrayed in the foreign media, Chavez has gone overboard in seeking to include as many as possible in the Bolivarian state. He has time and again extended an olive branch to his enemies. For example, immediately after the failed coup against him, his first act was to guarantee the constitutional rights of the coup leaders, none of whom have been harmed. Likewise, he has consistently avoided using military and police forces under his command to repress the opposition, and had been exceedingly cautious towards foreign companies and investors. Some of his strongest supporters therefore consider Chavez excessively soft. The ideological message of Bolivarianism is straddling this society -- deeply divided by class -- with a strong Venezuelan and pan-latinoamerican nationalism. The ambiguity is patently visible in the street iconography of Caracas, which combines the faces of the aristocratic liberal Simon Bolivar and the radical communist Che Guevara, both sharing the landscape with huge billboards of fashionable young women advertising beer. Yet if the future is foggy, the present is dramatically clear. Under pressure from Venezuela’s poor, on whose support Chavez’s political survival depends, the government moved decidedly leftwards over the course of the last few years. This leftward move consists in two processes: democratization and redistribution. First, redistribution. Having wrestled control of the national oil company from the old oligarchy, Chavez redirected a portion of Venezuela’s significant oil revenues to new social projects, called missions, each targeting a specific social privation. The bulk of the resources were earmarked for non-cash benefits such as education and health. But government policies have also helped more people to move out of the informal economy and take formal jobs, affecting a significant rise in cash wages for the poorest workers. An international chorus of snickers erupts whenever these social spending programs are mentioned. Most completely miss the point. Is there corruption? Inefficiency? Probably. But by relying on the army, the national oil company, and ad hoc communal organizing rather than on the traditional state bureaucracy, the social missions manage a level of efficiency that is quite stunning. As a small example, take the latest mission, ‘energy revolution,’ announced in November 2006. Its first project was to change all the light bulbs in Venezuela (52 million of them) to energy efficient ones by the end of 2007. The goal is to reduce the consumption of oil in electricity generation by about 25 million barrels a year, and cut a typical family’s monthly expenses by $4.6 (a non-trivial sum in the poor neighborhoods). The distribution of free bulbs is carried out by different means: youth organizations, community councils, and reserve units. By mid February 2007, over 30 million bulbs have been distributed, 10% faster than planned. The white glow that rises at night from both the poor neighborhoods and the houses of the better-off confirms the statistics. More complex missions, such as mission Robinson and Riba, which provide adult primary and secondary education with Cuban help, have been no less spectacular. “Proofs” that these missions are bogus are a dime a dozen in the Western media. Yet in Venezuela, even fierce Chavez’s critics I spoke with conceded that the missions were having a strongly positive effect on the life of the poor. The change is fast and visible. In a peasant community’s primary school in western Venezuela, I saw the preparation for an internet room for both the pupils and the larger community. In the nearby high school—a school that only a few years ago did not exist—students who divided their time between the classroom and their families’ coffee fields talked of going to university. Another common criticism is that the missions are not sustainable because they depend on oil prices remaining high. No doubt a drop in oil prices would force the government to cut spending (leaving aside the unresolved question as to whether high oil prices are themselves sustainable or not.) However, the thousands of people who learned to read during the oil boom would remain literate even if oil prices dropped. Nor would such a drop deprive the beneficiaries of an oil-financed cataract removal. A more enlightened view would note that access to such basic services as dental and eye care is valuable in itself. But even if one were to look at Venezuela from the most narrow-minded economic perspective, one that only values economic growth, it would be impossible to find an oil-producing country that uses its oil bonanza in a better way. Improving health, education, housing and infrastructure contributes more to prosperity and overall economic growth than the preferred choice of conventional wisdom—hoarding a large portfolio of U.S. bonds. The proof is in the pudding. Caracas is booming. Fancy consumer malls are mushrooming, trendy shops and restaurants ring the cash register. In one mall, strongly anti-Chavez store managers expressed gloom and resignation about the government’s economic policies while conceding that business was excellent. But in a restaurant off the airport highway, the owner, a man of humble background, took us with pride through the private orchard from whose fruits he serves fresh juice to his customers, and explained the situation thus: "Chavez is good for people who want to work….they dislike Chavez because the government now collects taxes from businesses.” The opposition to Chavez is surely more than just about reinvigorated tax collection; a recent (and perhaps not fully trustworthy) survey shows a loss of income over 20% at the high end of the extremely skewed income pyramid. But there is little doubt that the boost to the income of poor households (80% of the population) is driving Venezuela’s impressive economic expansion (9.4% in 2006) and also trickling up significantly to the better-off, especially those in the fast expanding retail sector—the delivery period for a new imported car, including luxury models, can be longer than six months. The democratization focus of the Bolivarian revolution involves structural changes to both politics and economics. Politically, those measures that help the foreign media paint Chavez as an autocrat are precisely those perceived in Venezuela as means of political decentralization and democratization— * the rule by decree, * the formation of a unified party, and * the direct executive control of funds. To understand the paradox, it is necessary to grasp the historical context: the political parties, the parliament and the governmental bureaucracy have been, and still are, bastions of corruption, clientelism, providing the main interface between political power and economic wealth. It is quite possible in theory that the creation of alternative political mechanisms under Chavez’s personal rule will lead to a new centralization of autocratic power. But mitigating that danger is the new sense of political entitlement of commoners, a deep cognizance of their own rights, and foremost the right to organize and take control over decisions that affect their lives. Encountering the strength of this democratic consciousness, fostered by education, public awareness campaigns, Chavez’s speeches, and the recurrence of popular mobilizations, is one of the most intense experiences one has as a visitor to Venezuela today. While Chavez is the undisputable hero of this popular awakening, the latter is anything but a docile body of followers. On the contrary. Visiting a community center in Barquisimeto, we saw a local TV and radio station run by locals. The organizers were supposed to be trained by a professional government manager. Relations with the official boss however soured quickly and the community expelled the imposed manager, locking her out of the building. It took a month of struggle, but the new locally chosen administration was eventually recognized as legitimate. He would be a strange autocrat who encouraged small communities to run their own TV and radio station, free of government control. But this is exactly what the current government’s policy is. Finally, the most important political development following the last elections is the plan to constitutionally empower local councils (of 200-400 households each) to take control of budgetary priorities and local services. This institutionalization of participatory democracy would irreversibly transform Venezuelan politics. The linchpin of the change is economic structure is the fast growth in co-operatives—worker managed businesses with a variety of internal democratic structures. The co-operative movement in Venezuela predates Chavez. However, with government support, this form of economic organization changed from a radical but marginal element to a significant component of the economy. Already in 2004 4.6% of jobs in Venezuela depended on co-operatives. By extrapolation, the over 100,000 co-operatives operating today in Venezuela probably account for 15% of jobs. Government help consists in technical support, managerial training, loans on preferential terms and often the rent-free provision of facilities. There are co-operatives everywhere, from street vendors to textile manufacturing, from organic agriculture and up to the hotel we stayed in, which used to belong to the ministry of tourism and became a co-operative in 2001. The hotel’s kitchen workers explained that most decisions were taken by general consultation but an executive committee elected for three year terms was in charge of salaries. Building successful cooperatives in Venezuela is not easier—indeed is probably more difficult—than starting a viable business anywhere. There is bureaucracy, corruption, competition, personal frictions, lack of capital, lack of know-how, etc. Time will tell how many of these co-operatives survive. It is too early to declare that Venezuela has found a cure to the endemic poverty of the urban slums that weighs so heavily on the Third World. But the Venezuelan experiment is not only real, serious and popular, but also quite uniquely so in the world. One thing the many co-operative members we met had in common was that they were all glowing with pride about their work. Finally, it is worth mentioning that co-operatives are not the only form of entrepreneurship blossoming in Venezuela. The government is pushing banks to make more small business loans to the poor, and a general sense of optimism is both palpable and reflected in surveys. We visited the home of a woman who had recently turned the front of her slum house into a general shop and ran into a young man who was planning to start a tourist business in the mountains. How unwelcome multinationals like Verizon are in Venezuela is an open question, but there is clearly a new feeling of opportunity for regular people to work and to improve their lives. There is a lot to be fearful about in Venezuela—the high level of crime, the dead weight of entrenched corruption, the unresolved tension between consumerist and socialist values, the danger inherent in Chavez’s outsized shadow, and not the least the certain intensification of U.S. destabilization efforts. But outside the small pockets of privilege and affluent ressentiment, the Venezuela I saw is not in the grip of fear. On the contrary, it is in the grip of hope, pride and an infectious sense of self-confidence and ownership. Originally published March 29 on www.sandersresearch.com

email2friend ]]> http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/04/10/venezuela-the-times-they-are-a-changin%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/04/03/venezuela-lets-in-canadian-mining-company/ http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/04/03/venezuela-lets-in-canadian-mining-company/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2007 06:00:04 +0000 Lori Mcleod http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/04/03/venezuela-lets-in-canadian-mining-company/ by Lori Mcleod- Financial Post Thursday, March 29, 2007--Gold Reserve Inc. stunned a skeptical market yesterday after winning a key permit to mine a significant gold-and-copper reserve in Venezuela, sending its stock up nearly 49% in heavy trading. The news killed fears the foreign miner might never get the green light for the mine from socialist President Hugo Chavez, which it won after making rigorous commitments to invest in the area and its residents that will extend long after the mine is exhausted and Gold Reserve has packed up and gone home. "I grew up in Canada and lived in small mining towns, and you always have to ask the question 'What happens when the mine is gone?' " said Gold Reserve president Doug Belanger. Gold Reserve's long-term plan will be hashed out with the help of a non-governmental organization and area residents. One possibility they will explore is the creation of a tourist area, which Mr. Belanger said may be feasible given the area's beauty, the project's proximity to a major highway and the airstrip and other infrastructure that will be built to accommodate the mine and its workers. While construction is underway, the mine will employ 2,000, many of whom will be drawn from the local community. Gold Reserve will build training facilities, then bring workers up to speed on modern mining techniques during the 24 to 30 months it will take to construct the mine. The area also has independent miners that may not want jobs at Gold Reserve's Las Brisas project, but will also be encouraged to benefit from its knowledge. "What he [Mr. Chavez] wants to see is the people of his country participating more in the benefits that are generated by his rich natural resources," Mr. Belanger said. Other projects could involve building clinics and other services, and helping local business people secure funding to open services, including stores and a gas station, for mine workers. The mine should be operational for 20 years or more, and Mr. Belanger estimates it will employ 1,000 full-time workers and create up to 4,000 indirect jobs. Gold Reserve's news encouraged markets, which have fretted that Mr. Chavez could move to nationalize the country's natural resources and send foreigners packing. This helped shares of Toronto-based miner Crystallex Inc., which has been waiting three years for a similar permit at its own gold project in Venezuela. In a recent interview, Gordon Thompson, Crystallex's chief executive, said the company was "closer than ever before" to obtaining this prize. "The significance for Crystallex of the Gold Reserve announcement today is enormous," said Mark Turner, an analyst for Hallgarten & Co. who is based in Peru. "It has proven once and for all that the Venezuelan government are as good as their word and that they do indeed welcome investment from foreign companies." However, foreigners looking to cash in on this resource-rich country won't find it easy to turn a quick buck, said Mr. Belanger, whose company has operated in Venezuela for 15 years and worked with the Chavez government for eight of those. In addition to wooing the government, they must satisfy a set of global banking principles that have been adopted in particular to protect the interests of developing countries. "The new issue is how to deal with the social aspects of the local community and how you impact them, and you truly do impact them. In the past, there was a tendency for companies to say you just throw money at the problem. But that's not what the Equator Principles dictate," Mr. Belanger said. The Equator Principles [EPs] are a global set of voluntary standards introduced by a group of banks in 2003 to assess the environmental and social risks of project financing. Companies that don't comply with these standards, which often include intensive consultations with local area residents, can be denied project financing by their lenders. "They are all signatories to the Equator Principles and they are going to make you adopt that or they simply won't loan you the money," Mr. Belanger said of the backers for his company's US$650-million construction project. A number of Canadian institutions, including Manulife Financial, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Nova Scotia, have signed on to the EPs, which were revised to be more stringent in 2006. "We have adopted the revised principles and I think, overall, it just shows as a company real responsibility," said Kaz Flinn, Scotiabank's vice-president of corporate social responsibility. Beyond project financing, Ms. Flinn said she has observed a noticeable overall increase in the desire for companies to tackle social and environmental issues in the past couple of years. lmcleod@nationalpost.com The article was published on VenezuelaAnalysis.com on March 30, 2007

email2friend ]]> by Lori Mcleod- Financial Post Thursday, March 29, 2007--Gold Reserve Inc. stunned a skeptical market yesterday after winning a key permit to mine a significant gold-and-copper reserve in Venezuela, sending its stock up nearly 49% in heavy trading. The news killed fears the foreign miner might never get the green light for the mine from socialist President Hugo Chavez, which it won after making rigorous commitments to invest in the area and its residents that will extend long after the mine is exhausted and Gold Reserve has packed up and gone home. "I grew up in Canada and lived in small mining towns, and you always have to ask the question 'What happens when the mine is gone?' " said Gold Reserve president Doug Belanger. Gold Reserve's long-term plan will be hashed out with the help of a non-governmental organization and area residents. One possibility they will explore is the creation of a tourist area, which Mr. Belanger said may be feasible given the area's beauty, the project's proximity to a major highway and the airstrip and other infrastructure that will be built to accommodate the mine and its workers. While construction is underway, the mine will employ 2,000, many of whom will be drawn from the local community. Gold Reserve will build training facilities, then bring workers up to speed on modern mining techniques during the 24 to 30 months it will take to construct the mine. The area also has independent miners that may not want jobs at Gold Reserve's Las Brisas project, but will also be encouraged to benefit from its knowledge. "What he [Mr. Chavez] wants to see is the people of his country participating more in the benefits that are generated by his rich natural resources," Mr. Belanger said. Other projects could involve building clinics and other services, and helping local business people secure funding to open services, including stores and a gas station, for mine workers. The mine should be operational for 20 years or more, and Mr. Belanger estimates it will employ 1,000 full-time workers and create up to 4,000 indirect jobs. Gold Reserve's news encouraged markets, which have fretted that Mr. Chavez could move to nationalize the country's natural resources and send foreigners packing. This helped shares of Toronto-based miner Crystallex Inc., which has been waiting three years for a similar permit at its own gold project in Venezuela. In a recent interview, Gordon Thompson, Crystallex's chief executive, said the company was "closer than ever before" to obtaining this prize. "The significance for Crystallex of the Gold Reserve announcement today is enormous," said Mark Turner, an analyst for Hallgarten & Co. who is based in Peru. "It has proven once and for all that the Venezuelan government are as good as their word and that they do indeed welcome investment from foreign companies." However, foreigners looking to cash in on this resource-rich country won't find it easy to turn a quick buck, said Mr. Belanger, whose company has operated in Venezuela for 15 years and worked with the Chavez government for eight of those. In addition to wooing the government, they must satisfy a set of global banking principles that have been adopted in particular to protect the interests of developing countries. "The new issue is how to deal with the social aspects of the local community and how you impact them, and you truly do impact them. In the past, there was a tendency for companies to say you just throw money at the problem. But that's not what the Equator Principles dictate," Mr. Belanger said. The Equator Principles [EPs] are a global set of voluntary standards introduced by a group of banks in 2003 to assess the environmental and social risks of project financing. Companies that don't comply with these standards, which often include intensive consultations with local area residents, can be denied project financing by their lenders. "They are all signatories to the Equator Principles and they are going to make you adopt that or they simply won't loan you the money," Mr. Belanger said of the backers for his company's US$650-million construction project. A number of Canadian institutions, including Manulife Financial, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Nova Scotia, have signed on to the EPs, which were revised to be more stringent in 2006. "We have adopted the revised principles and I think, overall, it just shows as a company real responsibility," said Kaz Flinn, Scotiabank's vice-president of corporate social responsibility. Beyond project financing, Ms. Flinn said she has observed a noticeable overall increase in the desire for companies to tackle social and environmental issues in the past couple of years. lmcleod@nationalpost.com The article was published on VenezuelaAnalysis.com on March 30, 2007

email2friend ]]> http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/04/03/venezuela-lets-in-canadian-mining-company/feed/ 0 http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/03/28/the-democratic-dialectic-the-state-markets-and-civil-society/ http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/03/28/the-democratic-dialectic-the-state-markets-and-civil-society/#comments Wed, 28 Mar 2007 06:00:34 +0000 Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/03/28/the-democratic-dialectic-the-state-markets-and-civil-society/ by Jerry Harris

SolidarityEconomy.net

Globalization opens the door on many possible futures. The fundamental changes taking place creates a host of contradictions played out at every level of society, all interlinked and simultaneously affecting one another. The integrative force of global production, finance and technology has qualitatively changed social relations along with culture, politics and the way we see the world and ourselves. Globalization, as a mode of accumulation and wealth has achieved a hegemonic position but its social structure and nationally defined characteristics continue to be formed. This is particularly true of its political expressions and the role of civil society.

Therefore far from a determined and certain future multiple alternatives exist, all dependent on human agency and struggle. On one extreme is the possible collapse of globalization into a world defined by reactionary nationalism, fundamentalist theologies and environmental collapse. Another future may be a long period of relative stability and capitalist transnational hegemony, punctuated by periodic crisis’ that are resolved by the institutional structures that come to characterize the globalist era. The habits, ideas and relations formed during the rise of nation states and industrialization may linger in various forms, only to fade with time, just as aspects of agrarian society continued to affect the world long into the twentieth century.

But there is another alternative that is mobilizing millions onto the historic stage, the construction of a world based on human solidarity and equality. This alternative is taking shape in the everyday life of common people in societies throughout the world. It entails the struggle against all forms of economic exploitation, social exclusion and political repression. At the same time these movements encompass new forms of organization and the construction of economic and institutional alternatives that counter the hegemony of capitalist globalization. Without an ideological center, vertical organizational structure or singular oppositional model, counter-hegemony is being built in a diverse, inclusive and non-hierarchical manner. We are beginning to see the emergence of a twenty-first century revolutionary movement, dialectically linked to the left of the industrial era, but with its own emerging character.

One important task for those engaged in creating counter-hegemony is to develop political theory and strategy based on the experiences of the new movements. A practice that encompasses the diversity of social forces and helps define the passionate commonalities in the struggle for justice. The Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, may offer the best theoretical framework from which to understand emerging oppositional movements. Gramsci recognized that capitalism rules with both coercion and consent. It is only the most brutal dictatorships that rely primarily on repression and it is against such regimes that a frontal attack on the state by insurrectionary forces can be organized. Gramsci saw the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in such terms. But he also argued that in developed capitalist societies a complex set of social relations are built into everyday life. Under these circumstances coercion is often hidden behind ideological and cultural hegemony that produces willing participation and political support by absorbing the entire society into bourgeois culture and market relations.

Karl Marx was the first to analyze the methods by which capitalism maintains social and political cohesion. Marx argued that a variety of mechanisms help to reproduce capitalist relations, only one of which was the use of open violence by police and armed forces. Additional methods include economic and social benefits such as today’s middle class wages, pensions and health care; the deferral of economic crisis by the use of credits for business and now its wide-spread use for consumers; and the development of imperialism whose privileges filter down to the working class. Marx also pointed to powerful ideological, cultural and political factors. These include the institutionalization of social conflicts into acceptable political forms, the domination of thought through a variety of ideological tools including education, religion, and particularly relevant for today, the ever present barrage of media. Another key element was the extension of market relations into every facet of human existence to the point that people accept capitalist social relations and crass materialism as the natural order of life. Lastly there is the coercion of survival in a competitive environment coupled with the destruction of social solidarity. This creates numerous cleavages based on class, race and gender with resulting categories such a welfare moms, alien immigrants, gang bangers and a host of identities that make everyone else the “other.” (Gallas, 2003)

Capitalism needs to be challenge at every one of these points and not just by an anti-hegemony protest movement. Even a failing system can continue unless it’s opposed by a counter-hegemony movement that offers concrete alternatives and a vision rooted to real social practice actively developed at an institutional level. The challenge for any revolutionary movement is to move from protest to power and it is here that Gramsci comes into play. Gramsci argued the multidimensional forms of capitalist rule would necessitate a long march through civil society. Therefore class struggle would be characterized by a transitional period in which the battle over politics, culture and ideology was key. Gramsci termed this a war of position in which popular social forces need to build counter-hegemonic institutions that contend with capitalism and occupy autonomous social and political space. In this context a principal condition for winning power is to exercise leadership within civil society. This was counter poised to the war of maneuver, defined as a frontal or insurrectional attack against the state, as well as periods of intensive and active struggle such as strikes and mass protest.

A war of position also allows time to build a historic bloc of social forces capable of building a new society. This convergence of interests takes place between a diverse set of oppositional movements and class sectors building counter-hegemonic institutions. For Gramsci, the more extensive civil society developed the stronger capitalism became. Democratic and consensual characteristics strengthened the system so that even when faced by crisis the “defenders are not demoralized, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future.” (Gramsci, 1971, 235) The idea, as Margaret Thatcher so well expressed, that “there is no alternative” becomes so deeply imbedded in social consciousness that even during a deep depression capitalism can survive and resist a frontal assault. To Gramsci the 1917 upheaval in Russia was possible because the “State was everything and civil society primordial.” But, he noted, “in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society (where) the State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.” (238) Gramsci concluded that after 1917 the science of politics would entail an in-depth understanding of the “whole organizational and industrial system” that composed civil society. (234-5)

Therefore political strategy necessitates deeply rooted and widespread counter-hegemonic institutions whose social forces, in a war of maneuver, eventually could take power. But Gramsci criticized Rosa Luxemburg’s theory that an economic crisis could create a general strike that “in a flash” would organize ones’ own troops and cadres with a common revolutionary objective as “historical mysticism.” (233) The struggle to delegitimatize capitalist hegemony was to take place over a prolonged period, and Gramsci even pointed to Gandhi’s passive resistance and use of boycotts as a war of position.

Alternative Globalizations

Using Gramsci’s analysis of oppositional movements we can begin to look at today’s political landscape. Here it is important to distinguish between anti and counter hegemony movements. Globalization has set-off a prairie fire of grassroots social movements big and small. The majority of these are local struggles demanding the state or transnational corporations be more forthcoming in their distribution of resources and wealth. Such demands may include higher wages, better health care, sustaining welfare payments or anti-sweatshop campaigns. Other social movements have focused on the extension of democratic and human rights for oppressed minorities, women or immigrants often linking these campaigns with political reform. The environmental movement has also mobilized millions to protest the destruction and exploitation of earth on both a local and global scale.

However, the majority of these movements limit their opposition within the dominant structures of property and global market relations. This is particularly true since the failure of industrial socialism left activists without a vision of a workable alternative society. As Fareed Zakaria comments, “The clash between socialism and capitalism created political debates and shaped political parties and their agendas across the world for more than a century. Capitalism’s victory left the world without an ideology of discontent, a systematic set of ideas that are critical of the world as it exists…In this post-ideological age, anti-Americanism fills the void left by defunct belief systems.” (Zakaria, 2004, 47-48) But simple anti-Americanism or anti-globalism fails to offer a counter ideology capable of building an alternative world or a new historic bloc capable of replacing the old system. This vacuum has been recognized by many activists and led to the founding of the World Social Forum with its slogan that “Another World is Possible.” The question of how to move the anti-corporate or anti-American agenda to one that articulates a counter-hegemony anti-capitalist project is now engaged at many levels and in many countries.

Those that proclaim themselves to be the most revolutionary are sure to be more militant in their condemnation of capitalism. But even the few remaining armed revolutionary groups with some popular base as with FARC in Colombia, the Maoist in Nepal and the New People’s Army in the Philippines have all called for negotiations that would establish an expansion of democracy within a parliamentary republic. They may harbor dreams of a “People’s Republic” but none call for the establishment of socialism as a condition to end the armed struggle. Thus they find themselves essentially in the same position as the FMLN in El Salvador, the guerrillas in Guatemala and the IRA in Ireland, all of who became a parliamentary opposition.

Broader mass based left political parties have also faced a crisis. In the 1990s the Workers Party in Brazil (PT) and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa seemed to point in an exciting new direction. These organizations came together by merging numerous political trends and social movements. With historic roots in popular struggles and courageous and legitimate popular leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Lula de Silva, these parties pointed to a post-Bolshevik left which was mass and democratic, but more militant than the tired and compromised social-democratic parties of Europe. Combing grassroots social movements with an electoral challenge they offered a strategic political direction for a left demoralized by the demise of the Soviet Union and the victory of world capitalism that was portrayed as the “end of history.” But the acceptance of many neo-liberal policies, continued privatization of state held assets, the slow pace of meaningful reforms and corruption scandals has undermined the support and enthusiasm held by many core activists. This failure has renewed the debate over political strategies with particular focus on the relationship between social movements and the drive for state power.

Adding to the debate has been various government initiated experiments with the market. Economic reforms in China have led to rapid growth, but the state has guided the process, with Chinese leaders proclaiming their new strategy as market socialism. In Venezuela the government of Hugo Chavez has used co-operatives in a mix economy to promote social justice. And in Brazil the democratization of city budgeting by the municipal government in Porto Alegre has stirred interest in the state’s interaction with social movements. Their successful experiment in participatory budgeting attracted widespread attention and helped make the city home for the World Social Forum. For 15 years the common people of Porto Alegre have gathered on a yearly basis in their neighborhoods to oversee local infrastructure and service projects that encompass about ten percent of the total municipal budget. Initiated under the leadership of the PT, participatory budgeting continued even after the party lost control of the city government.

Debates over the market, state and social movements are also fueled by the economic engagement of grassroots organizations occurring throughout the world. This has grown in reaction to the neo-liberal abandonment of welfare and support services as well as the privatization of state industries that led to the lay-off of millions worldwide. This retreat from state led economics and the resulting social crisis of poverty pushed people to create their own solutions for survival. Concretely this has meant the development of rural and urban cooperatives, militant land seizures and factory occupations as seen in the aftermath of the economic collapse in Argentina. In addition, there are the powerful historic experiences in the success of Mondragon in Spain and the cooperative movement in northern Italy led by the Italian Communist Party centered in Bologna. All this has created a broad discussion over the use of markets as a tool for social justice, its relationship to state planning and the role of autonomist movements.

Dialectical Democracy

As transnational capitalism becomes dominant, alternative globalization projects begin to play prominent oppositional roles. Resistance based on the old industrial Fordist social relations tend to recede and forms of struggle arising from the new contours of social relations become more visible and viable. This transitional dialectical has two major manifestations. The first takes place at the level of the world system as contradictions within transnational circuits of accumulation; the second set of contradictions takes place within each country as it rearticulate its local social structure for insertion into the global economy.

Conflicts that typify contradictions in global accumulation concern relations between nations and problems faced by transnational capitalists in their efforts to build a global system. These become apparent over issues such as fair trade, access to markets, political rights in determining the policies of global institutions and maintaining sovereignty in the face of transnational corporate power. Such issues create shifting alliances that often erupt in debates in the WTO or UN. Conflicts do not simply pit national class forces against transnational actors, but also contingents of transnational capitalists competing over specific concerns and interests.

One important manifestation of the first contradiction has been the growing alliance of Third World globalists in their attempt to gain greater power within the transnational economy and world political bodies. Their challenge to traditional Western domination is one form of alternative globalization that could lead to a major shift in the world system. (Harris, 2005a) But the strategy is unlike the twentieth century wars for national liberation or the Bandung era strategy of state led industrialization and import substitution. Rather it is a struggle for a fair share of profits and trade within the new circuits of global accumulation. Thus the struggle is not a desire to opt out of globalization and form an independent parallel structure, but an attempt to have greater influence within by changing the character and balance of global relationships.

The second contradiction is found within nation states as they struggle to adjust their social and political structures to accommodate globalization. This is conditioned by their own institutions, history and culture, and mediated through local forms of class conflict.[1] (Harris, 2005b) But common to countries the world over are struggles that pit neo-liberalism with its low road economic model against movements demanding justice and social solidarity. Demands tend to focus on the means of social reproduction, control over state assets, and the protection of our environmental heritage. This covers a wide range of issues including education, health, housing, employment, privatization and the use of natural resources.

These contradictions are manifested with particular force between the state, market and civil society. While these are closely linked in everyday life we can separate the relationships of state/market economics and those of state/ civil society politics to develop a working theoretical framework to understand dialectical democracy. But key to this concept is that both the state and market are necessary for a functioning economy, that an independent civil society is essential for functioning democracy, and that together they constitute an organic and interdependent whole.

One of the great ideological accomplishments of capitalism is the belief that all markets are by definition capitalist. But markets existed before capitalism and certainly forms of post-capitalist markets will also exist. Another fallacy is the insistence from the traditional left that state directed economic planning is superior and more just than market socialism. But there is simply no historic proof for this position. One can argue there were important advances in the Soviet Union, China and other centrally planned economies. But these ultimately failed to survive and leave us no convincing evidence that state socialism is a better guarantor of equality or success than market socialism; particularly in light of the tendency to develop authoritarian regimes.

Nevertheless, many on the left have dedicated themselves to attacking the market and call for its eradication or severe restriction. This has been true of traditional Marxists tied to state-centric forms of socialism, as well as anarchists who demand the end of the state for good measure.[2] (Albert 2003, Hart-Landsberg & Burkett 2005, Keeran &Kenny 2004) Both traditional Marxists and anarchists see the relationship between the state and market in irresolvable antagonistic terms. For state orientated Marxists, government is the best site for economic planning and development. But central planning is continually challenged by the corrupting influences of the market where the rule of competition and profits can only end in the exploitation of labor and the rise of capitalist class forces. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there is general recognition that far greater input from workers at the enterprise level is necessary, but the state is still seen as the guardian against the demon of market deviations. From the anarchist point-of-view market relations are the basis of social inequality and therefore worker co-operatives must coordinate their activities based on the exchange of equal values and equal efforts without competition or market pricing. The state should have no role since it can only lead to authoritarian bureaucracy and the destruction of participatory democracy.

The essential problem for both these radical strains of thought is their one-sided approach that ignores the historic ties that bind together the state and market in a dialectical relationship. They resolve the contradiction by attempting to destroy either the market or the state, rather than understanding the transformation of both and their continuing linked relationship. Both the state and market have necessary economic functions in post-capitalist society and both present problems and dangers to equality and democracy. Their relationship is dialectical, interconnected and in permanent tension, as well as historically defined by the level of culture, education, technology and class relations. There can never be a permanent balance or equilibrium because the relationship shifts depending on the needs of society and the demands and level of organization of different class strata. In fact, a dynamic disequilibrium characterizes the relationship, while periods of stability and smooth economic growth should be understood as temporary periods in which contradictions have yet to clearly manifest. Therefore those that make an eternal principal for the dominant role of a single social institution are not only idealistic in their concept of historical process, they also fail to understand the essence of politics is to accept the existence of contradictions and chart a course of progress that seeks to resolve them in a non-antagonistic manner.[3] (Mao, 1977)

Each society faces a whole set of economic tasks that continually change depending on the level of development in a variety of areas. For example, the state of the infrastructure, energy sources, schools, health services, information technologies and scientific research are always temporal questions of historic development. In each area the balance of responsibility, planning, funding and work needs to be resolved between the best mix of state and market mechanisms. In addition, as soon as any policy is implemented it changes the conditions that brought it into existence, therefore shifting the balance between the effectiveness of the market or state. On top of this process is a complex matrix of local, regional, national and global relationships, each embedded in the market/state dialectic. Policies tend to radiate through each of these interconnected levels with unforeseen consequences, sometimes with effective synergies, sometimes creating problems that create new conflicts and demands.

In building a post-capitalist society the key question becomes how can the market and state be used best to accomplish the social goals decided upon in the political process? In recognizing this we also acknowledge a shifting relationship and emphasis between the state and market that becomes reflected in political struggle and policy. The material and social interests of different class strata will tend to push political solutions that seek greater state control over the market or greater freedom for market forces. This is the central tension that needs to be accepted as a fundamental aspect of social reality and resolved through non-antagonistic democratic political struggle. Whether we use the Marxist terminology of socialism, the environmental language of sustainability, or a different formulation, democracy needs to encompass the dialectical tension between the state and market and the social interest inherent in each. By recognizing both these aspects there exist the possibility that the market can limit tendencies toward an authoritarian bureaucracy and state corruption, and that the state can impose limits on market inequalities and prevent the destructive exploitation of labor and the environment.

This means preventing contradictions from erupting in a manner where the final victory of one class, or one party, is the only conceivable resolution. The forced suppression of one’s opposition only appears when class forces attached to the privileges of power and wealth refuse to accept change and turn to violence. When this occurs democracy as a form of social struggle is abandon by popular forces not as a choice of political strategy, but only as necessity. There is nothing inherent in the structure of the state or market that makes this historical fate, particularly so in post-capitalist society. The anarchist argument that the continued existence of the state inherently leads to corruption, or the Marxist argument that the continued existence of the market inevitably leads to capitalism, elevates historical determinism over human agency. They thereby abandon dialectics for dogmatism in their defense of ideology, making the suppression of the market or state a predetermined necessity outside of historic context. This leads to the distortion of dialectical democracy and the suppression of institutions and social interests that need to be part of an alternative capitalist society.

David Schweickart has done some of the best current work on the relationship between the markets and state in post-capitalist society, or what he prefers to call “economic democracy.” Schweickart combines three essential elements; grassroots democracy through worker self-management, the flexibility and initiative of the market and the social control of investment through the use of national, regional and local levels of governmental banks. As the author argues, “Worker self-management extends democracy to the workplace. Apart from being good in itself, this extension of democracy aims at enhancing a firm’s internal efficiency. The market also aims at efficiency, and acts to counter the bureaucratic overcentralization that plagued earlier forms of socialism. Social control of new investments is the counterfoil to the market, counteracting the instability and other irrational consequences of an overextended market---what Marx calls the “anarachy” of capitalist production.” (Schweickart, 2002, 56-57) It is important to note that Schweickart doesn’t abandon a role for the state, far from it. What he does accomplish is to conceive of an open relationship between the market and state mediated by a democratic political process.

If the dialectic between the state and market is characterized by dynamic disequilibrium so too is the dialectic between the state and civil society. The only way to contain this tension within the framework of non-antagonistic political struggle is with a flexible and plural democracy. Contradictions must be accepted as a normal functioning of political society in order to maintain social cohesion. The suppression of differences through authoritarian uses of state power or false claims of unity will only result in an eventual explosion of tensions through violent and antagonistic methods.

An important lesson can be learned by looking to the American Revolution that enclosed state authority within the framework of institutional checks and balances that separated the three main branches of government into the presidency, the courts and congress. This was a historic political advance and has been a key element in maintaining constitutional democracy for over 200 years. While space was provided for public input through the Bill of Rights, society was structured as a representative democracy with real power always dominated by the elite. Nonetheless, the concept of checks and balances can be extended to include civil society through the formal inclusion of grassroots organizations in the decision making process that oversees social wealth and assets. Such an arrangement will extend the space for democracy and create autonomist centers of power. Political struggle over policy direction would certainly take place within these institutions as well as between these institutions and the state, extending the field of political competition. Creating plural political territory can also help avoid the stagnation of ideologies that become trapped in the justification of privilege or cornered by a pope or chairman. The key is to give institutional expression to civil society in the praxis of power. This concept of checks and balances can also be applied to the relationship between the state and market.

By expanding democratic space we open the possibilities for a Gramscian war of position and a long transitional period in which oppositional forces can progressively develop institutional power. This would happen in both the political and economic realm, locally as well as globally. The struggle for a new society not only begins in the space of the old, but also continues to consolidate and expand in building the new. Revolutions are too often seen as a total break from the past. Both the French Revolution and Pol Pot in Cambodia officially reset the calendar to Year One thinking to immediately recreate their worlds. But new class relations need time to take hold and create forms of cultural hegemony that permeate all social relations. Capitalism didn’t consolidate its social structures until after World War I and the fall of the Russian Czar, Ottoman Empire, Austrian-Hungarian King and German Kaiser. Even after such tremendous upheavals the codification in laws, habits and culture of capitalist relations took years to fully develop. The same should be expected in post-capitalist societies. Social transitions take time, even when punctuated by wars or revolutions. With this context in mind, we see Gramsci’s emphasis on wars of position rooted in the historic material process of change, building a surer foundation for continuing transformation.

Thus the democratic dialectic acts as a transitional agent between historic periods by establishing economic and political power in civil society and connecting the movement for change in both pre and post revolutionary society. This process occurs with the building of mass organizations rooted in popular democratic practice that establish positions of counter-hegemony within capitalism. Through such institutions people are trained and prepared for leadership. But creating counter-hegemonic space also prepares the way for a more rapid advance during times of crisis, resulting in the consolidation of greater social territory. Therefore there is a dialectic between Gramsci’s wars of position and maneuver, each preparing the condition for the advance of the other. This process continues in post revolutionary societies as the struggle to consolidate counter hegemony is extended. Having a complex layer of mass democratic institutions, networked in both civil society and the economy, with years of experience and popular participation, can act as the best guarantor for the cause of social justice.

Alternative Globalizations: Autonomy from Below

Far from the “end of history” the twenty-first century has witness the birth of widespread alternatives to neo-liberal capitalism. These new political struggles create the mass experience, practice and consciousness that will help determine the future course of global society. If we hope to develop a relevant theory of social change we need to study the important battles of today that have raised the banner of alternative globalizations.

One such battle has been taking place in Bolivia. Neoliberalism came to Bolivia in 1985 with the government privatizing most state owned industries to foreign interests, cutting social services, and all but destroying the once powerful unions. Although manufacturing grew it became fragmented and decentralized into small workshops, permanent jobs dropping from 71% to just 29% of all employment between 1989 and 1996. As self-employment, temporary labor and subcontracting grew, wages were cut to half their previous value. (Olivera, 2004, 111 -113) The IMF, typically blind to the human toll, praised Bolivia as one of Latin America’s best examples of globalization. Writing on Bolivia’s submersion into global capital Alvaro Garcia Linera explained, “Today transnational capital, which has become the principal agent promoting a modern economy, controls the economic areas representing the greatest capital investment, the highest rate of profit, and the fullest articulation with the world market.” (Linera, 2004, 66)

When the government sold Bechtel the municipal water rights of Bolivia’s second largest city, Cochabamba, the people erupted in what became known as the Water Wars. The types of resistance that developed in this mass mobilization, and the following political battles over gas resources, are rich examples of alternative forms of democracy and social organization. The battle over Bolivia’s resources was not lead by the old industrial unions or a united front of political parties, but by the Coordinadora, a representative body of social movements and popular sectors organized through grassroots and participatory methods. Oscar Olivera, a key leader of the movement, points out, “The formation of the Coordinadora responded to the political vacuum uniting peasants, environmental groups, teachers, and blue and white-collar workers in the manufacturing sector…there could be no individual salvation. Social well-being would be achieved for everyone, or for no one at all.” (Olivera, 28)

The Coordinadora responded to the fragmentation of the working class with a new type of diverse and plural social solidarity, one that reflected the change of social relations under globalization. Industrial capitalism had massed workers into concentrated work sites creating a common experience and consciousness expressed through their unions and classed based political parties. Having lost these affiliations and common identities new collective forms arose in civil society based on neighborhood groups, small businessmen and market vendors, rank and file labor groups, peasant and craft unions, and professional and student associations. The Coordinadora acted as the central node, building a horizontal network of these mainly territorial based organizations. Each sector was organized into assemblies that met and sent spokespersons to represent their viewpoint in the Coordinadora. The meetings of representatives decided on strategy and wrote up communiqués, which were then presented at large-scale town meetings that at times were attended by fifty to seventy thousand people and finalized the decisions. After a number of mass mobilizations and intense street battles the government retreated and broke their contract with Bechtel. The Coordinadora had succeeded in creating an autonomist democratic space in civil society based on assembly-style communal politics. In Gramsci’s language the Water Wars were a war of maneuver with the diversely represented sectors creating a new historic bloc of actors.

But large collective actions and common decision making is often an aspect of mass, but temporary, social rebellions. The task now was to turn this newly won space into an institutional form with a permanent position in civil society. As intellectual activist Raquel Gutierrez-Aguilar wrote, “How could we sow the seeds of full autonomy in relation to the state through our proposals to regulate water…reclaiming decision-making and through it, of recovering alienated ‘social wealth’.’’(Gutierrez-Aquilar, 2004, 55) Fellow activist Alvaro Garcia Linera was also concerned about the transitory nature of the mass movement. As he noted, “sometimes the Coordinadora consists of half a million inhabitants; at other times it can claim no more than one hundred active and permanent members. Perhaps the way of overcoming this organizational weakness is to consecrate, institutionalize, and symbolically ritualize the local and regional assemblies as institutionalized assemblies of the Coordinadora.” (Linera, 83)

This was accomplished with an ambitious plan to create water committees in every neighborhood, independent of any political association. Creating more than 100 committees these groups, working with technical staff, solve a multitude of problems arising over services, sanitation, maintenance, environmental concerns and costs. In addition, as formal ownership of the water reverted back to SEMAPA, the municipal water company, the Coordinadora named the general manager and created room on the executive board for union representatives and professional organizations. As Gutierrez-Aquilar explains, the effort is “to convert SEMAPA into a socially owned and self-managed enterprise in which its property form would transcend existing legal provisions in order to make room for new means of management, decision-making, citizen participation, and social control.” (60)

This process went on in a continual battle with the government that sought to bring SEMAPA under more formal state control. The social movement in Cochabamba understood this as a strategic battle, viewing the market as a question of democracy and a space to contest transnational power. The object is not to simply demand more resources from the state, but to occupy autonomist institutional positions that democratize decision-making power over social wealth. In this manner participatory management over state run services was connected to civil society and popular participation in the economy.

Another important aspect of the Water Wars was breaking free of the culture of cynicism, apathy and defeat. Neoliberalism had achieved ideological hegemony, isolating people and destroying their collective social belief that people could change and manage society. But the successful mass mobilization and victory of the people in Cochabamba created a counter-consciousness that spread throughout Bolivia, helping to mobilize further battles over the recovery of gas resources and the extension of democracy. This is a vitally important aspect of the war of position, wherein autonomist space creates a new confidence and self-awareness that propels people to become agents of change and consciously build a historic bloc of popular forces.

But change in social consciousness is a long drawn-out process. Popular organizations always face the danger of becoming an appendage of state clientelism as mass participation withers. Under such circumstances leaders are often incorporated into the state as local mediators with the power to distribute resources. Another problem is organizations based on specific social sectors often fail to develop lasting solidarity and a united political strategy. This can result in growing isolation and competition over social resources based solely on their immediate needs. This makes it easy for the state to incorporate some and attack others, controlling certain social movements to strengthen the state’s hold over civil society. These are dynamics that need to be recognized as points of continuing conflict, particularly by those who tend to portray social movements as the only pure representation of grassroots democracy. In fact, under certain circumstances a popular democratic government may be the best vehicle to maintain a strategic plan for social justice and overcome the petty squabbles that can dominate local and regional groups.

In order to expand counter-hegemonic space from the local to the national level the Coordinadora proposed a Constituent Assembly. The Assembly would be as a mass participatory democratic challenge to the traditional state apparatus composed of “citizen representatives elected by their neighborhood organizations, their urban or rural associations, their unions, their communes.”(Olivera, 136) According to Olivera the “Constituent Assembly is basically an instance of the political organization of civil society…not based on the reform of the political constitution of the existing state…but a general transformation of political institutions” for self-government. (136-7) The use of democratic means to fashion revolutionary institutional space differs significantly from twentieth century socialist strategies that focused on the seizure of the existing state by armed struggle. The effort here is to reapropriate democracy from a restricted and statist form with an expanded and participatory model. In part it is similar to worker councils or soviets that appeared in the early stages of previous socialist revolutions, before these grassroots structures became absorbed by the state.

But the autonomist strategy does not encompass all the social movements in Bolivia. Movement To Socialism (MAS) under the leadership of Evo Morales has a powerful presence and became focused on winning the presidency of the country. MAS developed out of the cocalero struggle against the militarized anti-drug campaign brought to Bolivia by the US. The coca growers symbolized a peasant movement fighting for economic survival, and came to occupy a militant and historical cultural position within Bolivian society. As an important sector in the social movement MAS launched electoral campaigns in 2002 that won the second most seats in congress and in the presidential race placed Morales just one percentage point behind winner Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Lozada was consequently run out of office by the gas war rebellion, setting the stage for a new presidential campaign. While continuing to take part in the mass social mobilizations Morales concentrated the efforts of MAS on an electoral strategy for power. With Alvaro Garcia Linera as his running mate, Morales won a historic and decisive victory in December 2005 that many saw as the culmination of the mass movements that had forced two governments from office. El Alto, the poor and highly organized community sitting above La Paz, was an important stronghold of Morales support. As one resident commented, “We have all supported Evo. It is not just what he says. It is that this is his base and he knows us.” (Forero, 2005)

But the social movements were not fully united behind Morales’ campaign for president. There were serious debates over the best form of ownership of Bolivia’s gas resources, as well as questions over electoral strategy and political alliances. As Olivera commented, “What the social movements need to do now is to continue accumulating popular forces, as we have been doing since 2000, to build up our ability to pressure whatever government that comes. A Morales government would be less difficult to move, but it will still be difficult.” (Schultz, 2005) Many activists feel that Morales will not be able to fulfill his campaign promises because of Bolivia’s relationship to powerful oil and gas transnationals and the country’s international debt overseen by the IMF. Therefore the autonomy of the social movements acts as a necessary counterbalance on the government, pressuring the state to withstand the demands of transnational capitalism.

The lack of a common and coherent political project for the seizure of power is not isolated to Bolivia. In many countries there are clear tensions between those focused on creating autonomous space in civil society and those intent on winning political power by building mass electoral parties. In Mexico, the Zapatistas have sought to build democratic autonomy without competing for state power. As pointed out by Neil Harvey, “Their strategy is not to seize power and wield it over others, but to democratize power relations in every sphere of life.”(Harvey, 2005, 14) Their efforts have been twofold; to build over 30 autonomous municipalities among their base communities in the Chiapas jungle known as the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Councils of Good Government); and to seek alliances and dialogue with other social movements to create a diverse but common democratic agenda for social change. Meanwhile on the electoral front, the Party of Revolutionary Democracy (PRD) set-out to win the presidency with the populist mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, as their candidate. The left-center party was formed in a merger of the Mexican Communist Party, two socialist parties, and the left-wing of the traditional ruling party, the PRI. The PRD has had their greatest success in states with large indigenous populations, winning governorships in Guerrero, Michoacan and in the Zapatista’s own backyard of Chiapas. Yet the autonomist movement remains skeptical of the PRD’s progressive legitimacy. As Zapatista spokesperson, Sub Comandante Marcos has stated, “Yesterday they were on the left, today they are on the center, where will they be tomorrow?” (Ramirez, 2005) But the Zapatista’s have their critics too, as activist and writer Tariq Ali has argued “the Zapatistas have failed to make serious gains, because the proposal to ‘change the world without taking power’ is only a ’moral slogan’ that does not pose any threat to dominant groups in Mexico or their foreign allies.” (Harvey, 14) The call to boycott the election by Marcos may have been enough to give a razor thin margin of victory to the conservative candidate Felipe Calderon. While millions of Mexican workers and poor mobilized to contest possible electoral fraud, Marcos and the Zapatistas were left standing in silence on the sidelines.

This same tension is seen in Brazil between the Landless Rural Worker’s Movement (MST) and Lula’s Workers Party (PT). The MST may well be Latin America’s most powerful social movement with hundred of thousands of members. Founded in 1984 with the help of liberation theology church activists the MST is focused on the collective struggle for land and cooperative farms, having won 20 million acres for 350,000 families. They maintain a grassroots organization starting with groups of about ten families that constitute a “Base Nucleus,” participatory local general assemblies, on up to regional, state and national levels. MST members voted in large numbers for the PT when Lula won the presidency, but the organization never joined the Party. As founding member Joao Pedro Stedile explains:

“From all we have learned from history, we realize that the health of the social movement depends on a large degree of political and ideological independence. We have always understood that only they who travel on their own feet and think with their own heads can go far. Therefore, we always insist that the MST and other social movements have to be autonomous in their relations with political parties, the government, the state, the Church and all other institutions…We are in permanent negotiations with the governments in search of our objectives. But we always set our own goals and methods.” (Stedile, 2005, 25)

The MST has good cause for caution, land distribution under Lula’s government declined sharply to the lowest level since the military government of 20 years before. Although the MST extended tactical support to Lula and limited their number of land occupations, after his first year in office they resumed widespread activities mobilizing in 20 states and marching on the federal capital demanding action.

These different strategies for social change between state and civil society naturally create tensions, and at times bitter disagreements. Activists in civil society often label those involved in the electoral arena as untrustworthy reformists or worse, as traitors to the mass democratic project. On the otherhand, party militants getting out the vote see autonomists as unwilling to confront the real problems of power and responsibility. Meanwhile, millions of mobilized people participate in multiple forms of social organizations as well as vote for left candidates in local and national elections. Perhaps more pragmatic than their ideologically driven leaders, a vast majority of workers and poor see no problem with participating in both forms of activism. In fact, this is an essential aspect of the democratic dialectic.

In the pages of Science and Society Marta Harnecker discussed how popular forces should use all available space to organize alternative models and how the state and society interlink. As she explains, “governments can generate spaces conducive to the creation of cultural and political conditions that promote organizational autonomy of society and in this form move in the direction of the self-constitution of the subject, which is the only base upon which an alternative socialist society can be constructed. I believe that is it necessary to attempt to transform not only local leftist-run governments into showcases; the same holds for all other spaces that the left conquers.” (M. Harnecker, 2005, 150) Although focused on autonomous civil space, Harnecker is also stating that a war of position needs to take place within the state as well as society, an important (although controversial) extension of Gramscian strategy.

The tension between the two strategies, state power versus autonomous civil society and what can be accomplished in either political realm, will and should continue to be a contradiction within any truly dynamic democratic society. Establishing counter-hegemonic positions within the state and society are both necessary, with both having their strengths and dangers of co-option and corruption. Sometimes they will compliment and strengthen each other; sometimes their interaction will reflect different needs, perspectives, pressures and strategies. Since the ultimate goal is to restrict the state until society can be govern by the producers themselves, the dialectic is solved in the long run by a synthesis to a fully democratic and participatory civil society that ultimately replaces the state. Or as Gramsci put it, “the State’s goal is its own end, its own disappearance, in other words the re-absorption of political society into civil society.” (Gramsci, 253) That, to say the least, is a very long-term project, the results of which are unknowable. So in considering the historic transition, understanding the dynamics of the democratic dialectic becomes a strategic orientation for guiding social change. There is a necessary democratic linkage between state and society, only by recognizing this unity of opposites and through understanding its inherent contradictions can an appropriate transitional strategy be created.

The State and Change from Above

The most exciting example of change from the top is the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, which has pushed a radical agenda at home and abroad. Chavez was elected with the overwhelming support of the countries’ poor, which constitutes 80% of the population. His party, the Fifth Republic Movement (MRV), has won a large majority in congress and most of the provincial governors and local offices throughout the country. One of the government’s important first acts was to rewrite the nation’s constitution. While private property was protected, the constitution extended fundamental political, social and economic rights in favor of the poor. In a campaign of political education, committees were formed throughout working class barrios to study the new constitution. This was an important opening in the political culture of Venezuela, convincing many that they held a personal stake in the government.

When Chavez was overthrown in a coup it was the massive mobilization from the urban barrios that saved his government and brought him back to power. A radical awakening of consciousness over questions of democratic inclusion and defending the constitution propelled people into the streets. Rather than overthrowing the state, (as in Russia, China and Cuba), people fought to defend the state and save legally structured democracy. This experience is mirrored in Bolivia where the demand for a constituent assembly to rewrite the countries’ laws and create a new democratic framework is a strategic aim of the social movement. People’s aspirations for social justice are being articulated through structural participatory democratic forms that create institutional positions of strength and act as a convergence point for a new historic bloc. As a characteristic of the revolutionary left in the twenty-first century it is a marked departure from the model of vanguard parties, whose platforms were pronounced in organizational manifestos that assumed to speak for the entire working class.

The temporary coup, followed by a hard fought two-month strike in the oil industry, radicalized Chavez and his movement. This process was similar to the effect of the US sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion that radicalized Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Revolutionary paths are always defined in part by the opposition, the two opposing sides linked in a process of action and reaction. It was only after the failed invasion that Castro declared a socialist direction for Cuba, as Chavez did after three attempts to oust him from office. His intent was made clear at the World Social Forum in Brazil where Chavez stated, “We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one that puts humans, not machines or the state, ahead of everything.” (Ellner, 2005a, 24) But the process in Venezuela is significantly different from the Cuban experience. Most capitalists have not fled the country but continue to operate their corporations and make profits, and Venezuela is firmly linked to the transnational economy rather than niched into some socialist bloc. In fact, Chavez signed a new contract with Chevron-Texaco in the middle of the oil strike provoked by his pro US opposition. Furthermore, there have been no nationalizations nor is socialism mentioned in the new constitution.

As Latin American scholar Steve Ellner explains, the “approach envisions an extended process of revolutionary change which is without precedent in history and which some claim may take several decades to complete. The end result will be a complete replacement of old structures created by the Chavista government and movement…replacing the current capitalist system with a mixed economy or association of medium-sized cooperatives.” (Ellner, 2005b, 171-72) Clearly this line of march is Gramscian, rather than an insurrectionary strategy as advocated by Lenin or Che Guevara. Ellner adds that the Chavistas are committed to a “peaceful democratic revolution (and) have ruled out the suppression of the existing institutions controlled by their adversaries in economic, political and state spheres and instead opted for parallelism.” (187)

But a war of position is far from a static process. In fact, the opposition has plunged the country into repeated crises initiating confrontations that they continue to lose. In response, participation and mobilization have been keys to the continuing battle for change, with an expansion of programs and goals after every major confrontation. This is the dialectic in Gramsci’s concept of position and maneuver, one state leading to the other in a process of advance. In consolidating the transformational process, radical forces in state positions have united with social movements to help build counter-hegemonic space throughout civil society. This is where the PT and ANC failed, causing severe political contradictions to develop between the state and organized social sectors. But in Venezuela the link between the state and social movements have for now a revolutionary character and expanded potential lacking in countries where autonomist power remains isolated from the government.

Of course autonomist activists have cause for caution, twentieth century revolutions used unions, community organizations and peasant associations as transmission belts for state led projects and party control. As University of Havana professor Jorge Luis Acanda Gonzalez explains, “With the advent of the ‘institutionalization process’ (civil society) was transformed into a paternalistic top-down political system based on the all-embracing presence of the state. The state occupied nearly all aspects of social life: livelihoods were inextricably linked to its presence, and it played a key role in ideological production displacing the (church and the market).” (Gonzalez, 2006, 35) As in Cuba, there is a danger that the Venezuelan state may come to dominate and consume the independent role of the social movements. But the thrust of the revolutionary project so far has been to decentralize state power into the hands of civil society, using the state to guard and guide the process.

One good example of this dynamic is to compare the autonomist cooperative movement in Argentina with the state facilitated cooperative movement in Venezuela. When the Argentine economy collapsed after being looted by neo-liberal speculators there were protests and mobilizations by almost every sector of society. One result was the takeover of about 200 factory enterprises turning them into worker-run and managed cooperatives after they had been abandon by their owners. In addition self-managed neighborhood and food cooperatives arose in different communities as a means of survival in an economy that had all but ceased to function. All toll the various autonomist cooperatives firms encompassed about 10,000 people. While workers quickly proved they could profitably operate their factories the former owners and government challenged their efforts. Some enterprises won legal recognition from the state, but this was never an easy process. Other worker cooperatives had to defend themselves from police attacks and fought to remain operating their factories.

As examples of courage, initiative and solidarity the worker cooperatives have been inspiring, but they have failed to develop into a widespread movement within the working class. When anarchist activist and intellectual Michael Albert interviewed the president of a glass manufacturing cooperative about the possibility that workers in traditionally owned plants would take over and run their factories the president “without hesitating said no.” Pursuing the point by asking members of the cooperative council why they couldn’t convey their experience and motivate others to act, Albert writes, the president “shrugged, he didn’t see it as likely. Worse, it wasn’t on his agenda. His horizon of interest was his own plant and not beyond. Others agreed.” Albert, who visited many of Argentina’s enterprise cooperatives, writes “Perhaps the weakest feature of the Argentine movement, is the insularity of each firm and the workers’ seeming lack of desire to organize non-recuperated firms by demanding changes in them too.” What Albert found was not a mass autonomist movement for revolutionary change, but worker’s turning to each other and relying on their mutual efforts in their common fight for survival. (Albert, 2005)

On the other hand, in Venezuela there are 83,769 cooperatives active in every sector of the economy with some 946,000 members. The new constitution defines cooperatives as key economic institutions for mass participation and state decentralization. Taking advantage of state run educational missions over 195,000 students have been trained in technical and managerial subjects and upon graduation created 7,592 new cooperatives. These cooperatives join together to design projects and become part of Endogenous Development Zones where they receive credit, technical support and physical space. Newly formed lending agencies such as the Women’s Bank and the People’s Bank help to facilitate this process. As of 2005 there were 115 active zones covering 960 cooperatives, 75 percent in agricultural, 15 percent in industrial enterprises and ten percent in tourism. The cooperative enterprises are not state run employment programs, but are expected to make profits and pay-off their loans. While most production is geared towards providing for a stronger and sustainable internal market, the Ministry of Popular Economy facilitates the integration of cooperatives with small and medium size companies to create production chains that can contract with foreign buyers linked to regional and global markets. Thus a parallel economic structure is being created alongside the traditional market. (C. Harnecker, 2005)

In addition to the new cooperatives in the Development Zones, many state run industries have moved to co-management or cooperative management forms. Efforts have also included urban neighborhood organizations in the planning and decision making process over municipal public services similar to SEMAPA in Cochabamba. This includes supervision, prioritizing projects and hiring cooperatives to carry out the work. To promote the social economy the government also hands out land titles and work contracts to those who self-organize into cooperatives, promoting collectively owned production capacity. All this is directed towards generating wealth in an egalitarian and internally sustainable fashion in a country where oil makes up 30 percent of the GDP, 50 percent of the state income and 80 percent of exports.

Oil wealth, as in many countries, created a corrupt political culture in Venezuela. Although owned by the state, the petroleum industry only benefited the elite, wealth flowing into the hands of those who controlled the industry and government. As Jorge Giordani, Minister of Planning and Development noted, “Everything has been ‘Mama State, Papa State, give me oil money.’ To organize people is extremely hard.” (Parenti, 2005) Creating a counter-hegemonic culture will be a long transformative struggle that must be based in an alternative economic project. The strategy of the Bolivarian revolution is to support the cooperative movement to build economic strength and develop a counter ideology and culture. From this position of strength the popular movement can contest and eventual replace the neo-liberal capitalist model with a decentralized system based on a social market economy. Those who believe the Chavez government will fall when oil prices drop fail to perceive the rich web of organizations sinking roots in civil society.

Of course there are many old habits in both the state and market that can undermine the revolutionary process. The state may turn the cooperatives into a cliental relationship demanding political support in return for economic support. Easy credit and poor technical and managerial skills may lead to economic failure or state support that turns into debt and deficits. And problems of unlawful accounting, undemocratic decision-making and managers excluding members from their share of profits have occurred. Such internal contradictions are not uncommon in the history of cooperative movements. And debates always exist over internal organization, membership and market strategies.

But what is also evident in Venezuela, as throughout Latin America, is a strategy by social movements to become producers rather than just groups marching to demand more services. Both social and state actors have made the market contested territory to develop an alternative model. Counter-hegemony needs to be based in a different set of labor relations as represented in the cooperative movement and by economic democracy. Not only is there a need to build an alternative economic vision, but alternative economic activity that generates new social relations. Social movements need to go beyond the political struggle between civil society and the state to include the market, while state actors need to use their institutional power to decentralize economic decision making into a participatory democratic process.

Co-operative Success in Italy

Perhaps the most advanced experience in developing cooperatives as part of a transformative project has been in the Emilia-Romagna area of northern Italy. Although cooperatives had historic roots in the region their expansion and development became a key component in the political strategy of the local Italian Communist Party (PCI). Emilia-Romagna was continuously governed by the PCI from 1945 to 1989, and then for another decade by a center-left coalition. Today there are 7,000 cooperatives in every sector of the economy providing a major source of employment, growth and innovation. The most developed area is the Imola district where, as described by Matt Hancock, “More than 50% of the total population are members of a cooperative, and more than half of the total industrial output comes from the district’s 15 industrial cooperatives, three of which are global market leaders and manage multinational networks of private subsidiaries, with sales offices and production on at least four continents…producing more than two billion euros in annual revenues.” (Hancock, 2005a) In fact, a number of cooperatives in the region have become transnational companies, as has Mondragon in Spain. Cooperatives are normally conceived as local or regional companies that only serve the internal economy. But if they can develop a democratic corporate model that is competitive on a global scale the transnational market may become contested political territory.

Of course the idea of globally competitive cooperatives is controversial, but controversy is not new to the movement. There have been many important debates over managerial organization, who has rights of membership, the relationship of the parent company to subsidiaries, the role of profits and inheritance, and the conflict between entrepreneurial functions and social responsibility. Cooperatives have experimented with different models and functioned under different social/political visions. But consistent in their history has been the development of a high road strategy that pursues democratic management, loyalty to its members and community, competitive innovation and the protection of productive capacities and long-term value.

The PCI has been part of these debates and evolved a number of different theoretical stands in their approach to the cooperative movement. But overall the PCI has seen cooperatives as part of a mass social bloc laying foundations for the socialist project. In effect, part of Gramsci’s war of position, carving out autonomist space in the counter-hegemonic struggle. The strategy linked cooperatives to an “Italian way to Socialism” that argued for a series of economic and political advances that would eventually change the relationships of power. For the CPI the cooperative movement was part of a broad strategy for transformation, a way to bring democracy to the economic field.

But as Hancock points out, “Today, a shared vision for profound social change is largely absent in the cooperative movement.” (Hancock, 2005b) The left has lost the political and cultural hegemony it once held, and cooperatives are seen in more local terms, as the “patrimony of the local community.” As Hancock says, “this is profound and radical. Nonetheless, as a vision, it doesn’t imply movement, or a larger context of social change. Instead, the implication is conservation, of consolidating the gains of the cooperative and assuring that it endures over time. Both, of course, are essential, but not enough.” (Ibid)

Given the difficulties of autonomist, state and market strategies for social transformation we can see that no easy answers exist, no silver bullet, in the quest for a just society. The relationships between state, civil society and market are deeply complex, each having its own dynamic while interconnected and modifying the others. The idea that any one theory or strategy can encompass and account for the whole of these complexities assumes a narrow and reductionist approach. Only views that recognize the constant interchange and overdeterminations of social forces can hope to offer the tools for a fruitful analysis. Once we recognize the dialectical character of the relationships we can begin to develop political strategies that make room for historic transformational processes that encompass broad social forces that condition each other. This allows us to see the necessary ebbs and flows between institutional structures and social movements, each with strengths and weaknesses, each with their historic moment of influence and importance. The democratic dialectic is recognition of this process.

Endnotes:

1.For a detailed analysis of the second contradiction using Germany as an example see Harris, Globalization and Class Struggle in Germany, 2005.

2. Michael Albert offers such a complex array of managerial committees and social organizations in his effort to replace the state that his ideas can be labeled “ bureaucratic anarchism.” For his full view see Parecon, Life After Capitalism, 2003. For a traditional Marxist critic of the inevitable “slippery slope” of market socialism see Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle, 2005. And for an argument that still defends the Soviet statist model refer to Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 2004.

3. I am using the term non-antagonistic contradictions not to argue for an absence of political struggle, but as contradictions to be solved among social class using democratic methods when the common goal is to build a post-capitalist society. This is to be distinguished from contradictions between the people and violent or reactionary forces. Although Mao articulates this in his 1957 essay “On the Correct Handling of the Contradictions Among the People,” the failure to carry out this policy led to the disaster of the Cultural Revolution.

References: Albert, Michael. 2003. Parecon, Life After Capitalism. London: Verso Books.

Albert, Michael. December 2005. “Argentina’s Occupied Factories, Practicing Participatory democracy in the workplace.” Z Magazine On-line, 18:2. http://zmagsite.zmag.org/curTOC.htm

Ellner, Steve. September/October 2005a. “Venezuela: Defying Globalization’s Logic.” NACLA Report on the Americas, 39:2. 20–24.

Ellner, Steve. 2005b. “Directions of the Chavista Movement in Venezuela.” Science & Society, 69:2. 160-190.

Forero, Juan. December 19, 2005. “Coca advocate Wins Election For President in Bolivia.” www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/international/americas/19bolivia.html

Gallas, Alexander. 2003. “A review of Entfesselter Kapitalismus: Transformation des europaischen Sozialmodells, Joachim Bischoff, VSA Hamburg, 2003.” Dialectical Materialism.

Gonzalez, Jorge Luis Acanda. January/February 2006. “Cuban Civil Society, Reinterpreting the Debate.” NACLA Report on the Americas, 39:4, 32-36.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.

Gutierrez-Aguilar, Raquel. 2004. “The Coordinadora, One Year After the Water Wars.” Pp. 53 –64 in Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia. Cambridge: South End Press.

Hancock, Matt. 2005a. “The Cooperative District of Imola, Forging the High Road to Globalization.” University of Bologna, School of Economics.

Hancock, Matt. 2005b. “The Communist Party in the Land of Cooperation.” University of Bologna, School of Economics.

Harnecker, Camila Pineiro. May 12, 2005. “The New Cooperative Movement in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Process.” http://mrzine.monthlyreveiw.org/harnecker051205.html

Harnecker, Marta. 2005. “On Leftist Strategy.” Science & Society, 69:2, 142-151.

Harris, Jerry. 2005a. “Emerging Third World Powers.” Race & Class, 46:3, 7-27.

Harris, Jerry. 2005b. “Globalization and Class Struggle in Germany.” Nature, Society, and Thought, 18:3, 383-412.

Hart-Landsberg, Martin and Paul Burkett. 2005. China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Harvey, Neil. September/October 2005. “Inclusion Through Autonomy: Zapatistas and Dissent,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 39:2, 12-16.

Keeran, Roger and Thomas Kenny. 2004. Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union. New York: International Publishers.

Linera, Alvaro Garcia. 2004. “The Multitude.” Pp. 65-86 in Cochabamba! Water Wars in Bolivia. Cambridge: South End Press.

Mao TseTung. 1977. “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), Pp. 350 – 421 in Selected Works of Mao TseTung, Volume V. Beijing: Foreign Language Press.

Olivera, Oscar. 2004. Cochabamba! Water Wars in Bolivia. Cambridge: South End Press.

Parenti, Christian. March 24, 2005. “Hugo Chavez and Petro Populism.” www.thenation.com/doc/20050411/parenti/8

Ramirez, Vladimir Escalante. November 2005. “Why Does the PRD Lose?” http:// db.uwaterloo.cal/~alopez-o/politics/prdlose.html

Schultz, Jim. November 2005. “Bolivia’s Unplanned Elections.” www.democracyctr.org/newsletter/vol67.htm

Schweickart, David. 2002. After Capitalism. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Stedile, Joao Pedro. March/April 2005. “Memories of Struggle in the MST.” NACLA Report on the Americas, 38:5, 21-26.

Zakaria, Fareed. September/October 2004. “Hating America.” Foreign Policy, No. 144, 47-49.

email2friend ]]> by Jerry Harris

SolidarityEconomy.net

Globalization opens the door on many possible futures. The fundamental changes taking place creates a host of contradictions played out at every level of society, all interlinked and simultaneously affecting one another. The integrative force of global production, finance and technology has qualitatively changed social relations along with culture, politics and the way we see the world and ourselves. Globalization, as a mode of accumulation and wealth has achieved a hegemonic position but its social structure and nationally defined characteristics continue to be formed. This is particularly true of its political expressions and the role of civil society.

Therefore far from a determined and certain future multiple alternatives exist, all dependent on human agency and struggle. On one extreme is the possible collapse of globalization into a world defined by reactionary nationalism, fundamentalist theologies and environmental collapse. Another future may be a long period of relative stability and capitalist transnational hegemony, punctuated by periodic crisis’ that are resolved by the institutional structures that come to characterize the globalist era. The habits, ideas and relations formed during the rise of nation states and industrialization may linger in various forms, only to fade with time, just as aspects of agrarian society continued to affect the world long into the twentieth century.

But there is another alternative that is mobilizing millions onto the historic stage, the construction of a world based on human solidarity and equality. This alternative is taking shape in the everyday life of common people in societies throughout the world. It entails the struggle against all forms of economic exploitation, social exclusion and political repression. At the same time these movements encompass new forms of organization and the construction of economic and institutional alternatives that counter the hegemony of capitalist globalization. Without an ideological center, vertical organizational structure or singular oppositional model, counter-hegemony is being built in a diverse, inclusive and non-hierarchical manner. We are beginning to see the emergence of a twenty-first century revolutionary movement, dialectically linked to the left of the industrial era, but with its own emerging character.

One important task for those engaged in creating counter-hegemony is to develop political theory and strategy based on the experiences of the new movements. A practice that encompasses the diversity of social forces and helps define the passionate commonalities in the struggle for justice. The Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, may offer the best theoretical framework from which to understand emerging oppositional movements. Gramsci recognized that capitalism rules with both coercion and consent. It is only the most brutal dictatorships that rely primarily on repression and it is against such regimes that a frontal attack on the state by insurrectionary forces can be organized. Gramsci saw the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in such terms. But he also argued that in developed capitalist societies a complex set of social relations are built into everyday life. Under these circumstances coercion is often hidden behind ideological and cultural hegemony that produces willing participation and political support by absorbing the entire society into bourgeois culture and market relations.

Karl Marx was the first to analyze the methods by which capitalism maintains social and political cohesion. Marx argued that a variety of mechanisms help to reproduce capitalist relations, only one of which was the use of open violence by police and armed forces. Additional methods include economic and social benefits such as today’s middle class wages, pensions and health care; the deferral of economic crisis by the use of credits for business and now its wide-spread use for consumers; and the development of imperialism whose privileges filter down to the working class. Marx also pointed to powerful ideological, cultural and political factors. These include the institutionalization of social conflicts into acceptable political forms, the domination of thought through a variety of ideological tools including education, religion, and particularly relevant for today, the ever present barrage of media. Another key element was the extension of market relations into every facet of human existence to the point that people accept capitalist social relations and crass materialism as the natural order of life. Lastly there is the coercion of survival in a competitive environment coupled with the destruction of social solidarity. This creates numerous cleavages based on class, race and gender with resulting categories such a welfare moms, alien immigrants, gang bangers and a host of identities that make everyone else the “other.” (Gallas, 2003)

Capitalism needs to be challenge at every one of these points and not just by an anti-hegemony protest movement. Even a failing system can continue unless it’s opposed by a counter-hegemony movement that offers concrete alternatives and a vision rooted to real social practice actively developed at an institutional level. The challenge for any revolutionary movement is to move from protest to power and it is here that Gramsci comes into play. Gramsci argued the multidimensional forms of capitalist rule would necessitate a long march through civil society. Therefore class struggle would be characterized by a transitional period in which the battle over politics, culture and ideology was key. Gramsci termed this a war of position in which popular social forces need to build counter-hegemonic institutions that contend with capitalism and occupy autonomous social and political space. In this context a principal condition for winning power is to exercise leadership within civil society. This was counter poised to the war of maneuver, defined as a frontal or insurrectional attack against the state, as well as periods of intensive and active struggle such as strikes and mass protest.

A war of position also allows time to build a historic bloc of social forces capable of building a new society. This convergence of interests takes place between a diverse set of oppositional movements and class sectors building counter-hegemonic institutions. For Gramsci, the more extensive civil society developed the stronger capitalism became. Democratic and consensual characteristics strengthened the system so that even when faced by crisis the “defenders are not demoralized, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future.” (Gramsci, 1971, 235) The idea, as Margaret Thatcher so well expressed, that “there is no alternative” becomes so deeply imbedded in social consciousness that even during a deep depression capitalism can survive and resist a frontal assault. To Gramsci the 1917 upheaval in Russia was possible because the “State was everything and civil society primordial.” But, he noted, “in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society (where) the State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.” (238) Gramsci concluded that after 1917 the science of politics would entail an in-depth understanding of the “whole organizational and industrial system” that composed civil society. (234-5)

Therefore political strategy necessitates deeply rooted and widespread counter-hegemonic institutions whose social forces, in a war of maneuver, eventually could take power. But Gramsci criticized Rosa Luxemburg’s theory that an economic crisis could create a general strike that “in a flash” would organize ones’ own troops and cadres with a common revolutionary objective as “historical mysticism.” (233) The struggle to delegitimatize capitalist hegemony was to take place over a prolonged period, and Gramsci even pointed to Gandhi’s passive resistance and use of boycotts as a war of position.

Alternative Globalizations

Using Gramsci’s analysis of oppositional movements we can begin to look at today’s political landscape. Here it is important to distinguish between anti and counter hegemony movements. Globalization has set-off a prairie fire of grassroots social movements big and small. The majority of these are local struggles demanding the state or transnational corporations be more forthcoming in their distribution of resources and wealth. Such demands may include higher wages, better health care, sustaining welfare payments or anti-sweatshop campaigns. Other social movements have focused on the extension of democratic and human rights for oppressed minorities, women or immigrants often linking these campaigns with political reform. The environmental movement has also mobilized millions to protest the destruction and exploitation of earth on both a local and global scale.

However, the majority of these movements limit their opposition within the dominant structures of property and global market relations. This is particularly true since the failure of industrial socialism left activists without a vision of a workable alternative society. As Fareed Zakaria comments, “The clash between socialism and capitalism created political debates and shaped political parties and their agendas across the world for more than a century. Capitalism’s victory left the world without an ideology of discontent, a systematic set of ideas that are critical of the world as it exists…In this post-ideological age, anti-Americanism fills the void left by defunct belief systems.” (Zakaria, 2004, 47-48) But simple anti-Americanism or anti-globalism fails to offer a counter ideology capable of building an alternative world or a new historic bloc capable of replacing the old system. This vacuum has been recognized by many activists and led to the founding of the World Social Forum with its slogan that “Another World is Possible.” The question of how to move the anti-corporate or anti-American agenda to one that articulates a counter-hegemony anti-capitalist project is now engaged at many levels and in many countries.

Those that proclaim themselves to be the most revolutionary are sure to be more militant in their condemnation of capitalism. But even the few remaining armed revolutionary groups with some popular base as with FARC in Colombia, the Maoist in Nepal and the New People’s Army in the Philippines have all called for negotiations that would establish an expansion of democracy within a parliamentary republic. They may harbor dreams of a “People’s Republic” but none call for the establishment of socialism as a condition to end the armed struggle. Thus they find themselves essentially in the same position as the FMLN in El Salvador, the guerrillas in Guatemala and the IRA in Ireland, all of who became a parliamentary opposition.

Broader mass based left political parties have also faced a crisis. In the 1990s the Workers Party in Brazil (PT) and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa seemed to point in an exciting new direction. These organizations came together by merging numerous political trends and social movements. With historic roots in popular struggles and courageous and legitimate popular leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Lula de Silva, these parties pointed to a post-Bolshevik left which was mass and democratic, but more militant than the tired and compromised social-democratic parties of Europe. Combing grassroots social movements with an electoral challenge they offered a strategic political direction for a left demoralized by the demise of the Soviet Union and the victory of world capitalism that was portrayed as the “end of history.” But the acceptance of many neo-liberal policies, continued privatization of state held assets, the slow pace of meaningful reforms and corruption scandals has undermined the support and enthusiasm held by many core activists. This failure has renewed the debate over political strategies with particular focus on the relationship between social movements and the drive for state power.

Adding to the debate has been various government initiated experiments with the market. Economic reforms in China have led to rapid growth, but the state has guided the process, with Chinese leaders proclaiming their new strategy as market socialism. In Venezuela the government of Hugo Chavez has used co-operatives in a mix economy to promote social justice. And in Brazil the democratization of city budgeting by the municipal government in Porto Alegre has stirred interest in the state’s interaction with social movements. Their successful experiment in participatory budgeting attracted widespread attention and helped make the city home for the World Social Forum. For 15 years the common people of Porto Alegre have gathered on a yearly basis in their neighborhoods to oversee local infrastructure and service projects that encompass about ten percent of the total municipal budget. Initiated under the leadership of the PT, participatory budgeting continued even after the party lost control of the city government.

Debates over the market, state and social movements are also fueled by the economic engagement of grassroots organizations occurring throughout the world. This has grown in reaction to the neo-liberal abandonment of welfare and support services as well as the privatization of state industries that led to the lay-off of millions worldwide. This retreat from state led economics and the resulting social crisis of poverty pushed people to create their own solutions for survival. Concretely this has meant the development of rural and urban cooperatives, militant land seizures and factory occupations as seen in the aftermath of the economic collapse in Argentina. In addition, there are the powerful historic experiences in the success of Mondragon in Spain and the cooperative movement in northern Italy led by the Italian Communist Party centered in Bologna. All this has created a broad discussion over the use of markets as a tool for social justice, its relationship to state planning and the role of autonomist movements.

Dialectical Democracy

As transnational capitalism becomes dominant, alternative globalization projects begin to play prominent oppositional roles. Resistance based on the old industrial Fordist social relations tend to recede and forms of struggle arising from the new contours of social relations become more visible and viable. This transitional dialectical has two major manifestations. The first takes place at the level of the world system as contradictions within transnational circuits of accumulation; the second set of contradictions takes place within each country as it rearticulate its local social structure for insertion into the global economy.

Conflicts that typify contradictions in global accumulation concern relations between nations and problems faced by transnational capitalists in their efforts to build a global system. These become apparent over issues such as fair trade, access to markets, political rights in determining the policies of global institutions and maintaining sovereignty in the face of transnational corporate power. Such issues create shifting alliances that often erupt in debates in the WTO or UN. Conflicts do not simply pit national class forces against transnational actors, but also contingents of transnational capitalists competing over specific concerns and interests.

One important manifestation of the first contradiction has been the growing alliance of Third World globalists in their attempt to gain greater power within the transnational economy and world political bodies. Their challenge to traditional Western domination is one form of alternative globalization that could lead to a major shift in the world system. (Harris, 2005a) But the strategy is unlike the twentieth century wars for national liberation or the Bandung era strategy of state led industrialization and import substitution. Rather it is a struggle for a fair share of profits and trade within the new circuits of global accumulation. Thus the struggle is not a desire to opt out of globalization and form an independent parallel structure, but an attempt to have greater influence within by changing the character and balance of global relationships.

The second contradiction is found within nation states as they struggle to adjust their social and political structures to accommodate globalization. This is conditioned by their own institutions, history and culture, and mediated through local forms of class conflict.[1] (Harris, 2005b) But common to countries the world over are struggles that pit neo-liberalism with its low road economic model against movements demanding justice and social solidarity. Demands tend to focus on the means of social reproduction, control over state assets, and the protection of our environmental heritage. This covers a wide range of issues including education, health, housing, employment, privatization and the use of natural resources.

These contradictions are manifested with particular force between the state, market and civil society. While these are closely linked in everyday life we can separate the relationships of state/market economics and those of state/ civil society politics to develop a working theoretical framework to understand dialectical democracy. But key to this concept is that both the state and market are necessary for a functioning economy, that an independent civil society is essential for functioning democracy, and that together they constitute an organic and interdependent whole.

One of the great ideological accomplishments of capitalism is the belief that all markets are by definition capitalist. But markets existed before capitalism and certainly forms of post-capitalist markets will also exist. Another fallacy is the insistence from the traditional left that state directed economic planning is superior and more just than market socialism. But there is simply no historic proof for this position. One can argue there were important advances in the Soviet Union, China and other centrally planned economies. But these ultimately failed to survive and leave us no convincing evidence that state socialism is a better guarantor of equality or success than market socialism; particularly in light of the tendency to develop authoritarian regimes.

Nevertheless, many on the left have dedicated themselves to attacking the market and call for its eradication or severe restriction. This has been true of traditional Marxists tied to state-centric forms of socialism, as well as anarchists who demand the end of the state for good measure.[2] (Albert 2003, Hart-Landsberg & Burkett 2005, Keeran &Kenny 2004) Both traditional Marxists and anarchists see the relationship between the state and market in irresolvable antagonistic terms. For state orientated Marxists, government is the best site for economic planning and development. But central planning is continually challenged by the corrupting influences of the market where the rule of competition and profits can only end in the exploitation of labor and the rise of capitalist class forces. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there is general recognition that far greater input from workers at the enterprise level is necessary, but the state is still seen as the guardian against the demon of market deviations. From the anarchist point-of-view market relations are the basis of social inequality and therefore worker co-operatives must coordinate their activities based on the exchange of equal values and equal efforts without competition or market pricing. The state should have no role since it can only lead to authoritarian bureaucracy and the destruction of participatory democracy.

The essential problem for both these radical strains of thought is their one-sided approach that ignores the historic ties that bind together the state and market in a dialectical relationship. They resolve the contradiction by attempting to destroy either the market or the state, rather than understanding the transformation of both and their continuing linked relationship. Both the state and market have necessary economic functions in post-capitalist society and both present problems and dangers to equality and democracy. Their relationship is dialectical, interconnected and in permanent tension, as well as historically defined by the level of culture, education, technology and class relations. There can never be a permanent balance or equilibrium because the relationship shifts depending on the needs of society and the demands and level of organization of different class strata. In fact, a dynamic disequilibrium characterizes the relationship, while periods of stability and smooth economic growth should be understood as temporary periods in which contradictions have yet to clearly manifest. Therefore those that make an eternal principal for the dominant role of a single social institution are not only idealistic in their concept of historical process, they also fail to understand the essence of politics is to accept the existence of contradictions and chart a course of progress that seeks to resolve them in a non-antagonistic manner.[3] (Mao, 1977)

Each society faces a whole set of economic tasks that continually change depending on the level of development in a variety of areas. For example, the state of the infrastructure, energy sources, schools, health services, information technologies and scientific research are always temporal questions of historic development. In each area the balance of responsibility, planning, funding and work needs to be resolved between the best mix of state and market mechanisms. In addition, as soon as any policy is implemented it changes the conditions that brought it into existence, therefore shifting the balance between the effectiveness of the market or state. On top of this process is a complex matrix of local, regional, national and global relationships, each embedded in the market/state dialectic. Policies tend to radiate through each of these interconnected levels with unforeseen consequences, sometimes with effective synergies, sometimes creating problems that create new conflicts and demands.

In building a post-capitalist society the key question becomes how can the market and state be used best to accomplish the social goals decided upon in the political process? In recognizing this we also acknowledge a shifting relationship and emphasis between the state and market that becomes reflected in political struggle and policy. The material and social interests of different class strata will tend to push political solutions that seek greater state control over the market or greater freedom for market forces. This is the central tension that needs to be accepted as a fundamental aspect of social reality and resolved through non-antagonistic democratic political struggle. Whether we use the Marxist terminology of socialism, the environmental language of sustainability, or a different formulation, democracy needs to encompass the dialectical tension between the state and market and the social interest inherent in each. By recognizing both these aspects there exist the possibility that the market can limit tendencies toward an authoritarian bureaucracy and state corruption, and that the state can impose limits on market inequalities and prevent the destructive exploitation of labor and the environment.

This means preventing contradictions from erupting in a manner where the final victory of one class, or one party, is the only conceivable resolution. The forced suppression of one’s opposition only appears when class forces attached to the privileges of power and wealth refuse to accept change and turn to violence. When this occurs democracy as a form of social struggle is abandon by popular forces not as a choice of political strategy, but only as necessity. There is nothing inherent in the structure of the state or market that makes this historical fate, particularly so in post-capitalist society. The anarchist argument that the continued existence of the state inherently leads to corruption, or the Marxist argument that the continued existence of the market inevitably leads to capitalism, elevates historical determinism over human agency. They thereby abandon dialectics for dogmatism in their defense of ideology, making the suppression of the market or state a predetermined necessity outside of historic context. This leads to the distortion of dialectical democracy and the suppression of institutions and social interests that need to be part of an alternative capitalist society.

David Schweickart has done some of the best current work on the relationship between the markets and state in post-capitalist society, or what he prefers to call “economic democracy.” Schweickart combines three essential elements; grassroots democracy through worker self-management, the flexibility and initiative of the market and the social control of investment through the use of national, regional and local levels of governmental banks. As the author argues, “Worker self-management extends democracy to the workplace. Apart from being good in itself, this extension of democracy aims at enhancing a firm’s internal efficiency. The market also aims at efficiency, and acts to counter the bureaucratic overcentralization that plagued earlier forms of socialism. Social control of new investments is the counterfoil to the market, counteracting the instability and other irrational consequences of an overextended market---what Marx calls the “anarachy” of capitalist production.” (Schweickart, 2002, 56-57) It is important to note that Schweickart doesn’t abandon a role for the state, far from it. What he does accomplish is to conceive of an open relationship between the market and state mediated by a democratic political process.

If the dialectic between the state and market is characterized by dynamic disequilibrium so too is the dialectic between the state and civil society. The only way to contain this tension within the framework of non-antagonistic political struggle is with a flexible and plural democracy. Contradictions must be accepted as a normal functioning of political society in order to maintain social cohesion. The suppression of differences through authoritarian uses of state power or false claims of unity will only result in an eventual explosion of tensions through violent and antagonistic methods.

An important lesson can be learned by looking to the American Revolution that enclosed state authority within the framework of institutional checks and balances that separated the three main branches of government into the presidency, the courts and congress. This was a historic political advance and has been a key element in maintaining constitutional democracy for over 200 years. While space was provided for public input through the Bill of Rights, society was structured as a representative democracy with real power always dominated by the elite. Nonetheless, the concept of checks and balances can be extended to include civil society through the formal inclusion of grassroots organizations in the decision making process that oversees social wealth and assets. Such an arrangement will extend the space for democracy and create autonomist centers of power. Political struggle over policy direction would certainly take place within these institutions as well as between these institutions and the state, extending the field of political competition. Creating plural political territory can also help avoid the stagnation of ideologies that become trapped in the justification of privilege or cornered by a pope or chairman. The key is to give institutional expression to civil society in the praxis of power. This concept of checks and balances can also be applied to the relationship between the state and market.

By expanding democratic space we open the possibilities for a Gramscian war of position and a long transitional period in which oppositional forces can progressively develop institutional power. This would happen in both the political and economic realm, locally as well as globally. The struggle for a new society not only begins in the space of the old, but also continues to consolidate and expand in building the new. Revolutions are too often seen as a total break from the past. Both the French Revolution and Pol Pot in Cambodia officially reset the calendar to Year One thinking to immediately recreate their worlds. But new class relations need time to take hold and create forms of cultural hegemony that permeate all social relations. Capitalism didn’t consolidate its social structures until after World War I and the fall of the Russian Czar, Ottoman Empire, Austrian-Hungarian King and German Kaiser. Even after such tremendous upheavals the codification in laws, habits and culture of capitalist relations took years to fully develop. The same should be expected in post-capitalist societies. Social transitions take time, even when punctuated by wars or revolutions. With this context in mind, we see Gramsci’s emphasis on wars of position rooted in the historic material process of change, building a surer foundation for continuing transformation.

Thus the democratic dialectic acts as a transitional agent between historic periods by establishing economic and political power in civil society and connecting the movement for change in both pre and post revolutionary society. This process occurs with the building of mass organizations rooted in popular democratic practice that establish positions of counter-hegemony within capitalism. Through such institutions people are trained and prepared for leadership. But creating counter-hegemonic space also prepares the way for a more rapid advance during times of crisis, resulting in the consolidation of greater social territory. Therefore there is a dialectic between Gramsci’s wars of position and maneuver, each preparing the condition for the advance of the other. This process continues in post revolutionary societies as the struggle to consolidate counter hegemony is extended. Having a complex layer of mass democratic institutions, networked in both civil society and the economy, with years of experience and popular participation, can act as the best guarantor for the cause of social justice.

Alternative Globalizations: Autonomy from Below

Far from the “end of history” the twenty-first century has witness the birth of widespread alternatives to neo-liberal capitalism. These new political struggles create the mass experience, practice and consciousness that will help determine the future course of global society. If we hope to develop a relevant theory of social change we need to study the important battles of today that have raised the banner of alternative globalizations.

One such battle has been taking place in Bolivia. Neoliberalism came to Bolivia in 1985 with the government privatizing most state owned industries to foreign interests, cutting social services, and all but destroying the once powerful unions. Although manufacturing grew it became fragmented and decentralized into small workshops, permanent jobs dropping from 71% to just 29% of all employment between 1989 and 1996. As self-employment, temporary labor and subcontracting grew, wages were cut to half their previous value. (Olivera, 2004, 111 -113) The IMF, typically blind to the human toll, praised Bolivia as one of Latin America’s best examples of globalization. Writing on Bolivia’s submersion into global capital Alvaro Garcia Linera explained, “Today transnational capital, which has become the principal agent promoting a modern economy, controls the economic areas representing the greatest capital investment, the highest rate of profit, and the fullest articulation with the world market.” (Linera, 2004, 66)

When the government sold Bechtel the municipal water rights of Bolivia’s second largest city, Cochabamba, the people erupted in what became known as the Water Wars. The types of resistance that developed in this mass mobilization, and the following political battles over gas resources, are rich examples of alternative forms of democracy and social organization. The battle over Bolivia’s resources was not lead by the old industrial unions or a united front of political parties, but by the Coordinadora, a representative body of social movements and popular sectors organized through grassroots and participatory methods. Oscar Olivera, a key leader of the movement, points out, “The formation of the Coordinadora responded to the political vacuum uniting peasants, environmental groups, teachers, and blue and white-collar workers in the manufacturing sector…there could be no individual salvation. Social well-being would be achieved for everyone, or for no one at all.” (Olivera, 28)

The Coordinadora responded to the fragmentation of the working class with a new type of diverse and plural social solidarity, one that reflected the change of social relations under globalization. Industrial capitalism had massed workers into concentrated work sites creating a common experience and consciousness expressed through their unions and classed based political parties. Having lost these affiliations and common identities new collective forms arose in civil society based on neighborhood groups, small businessmen and market vendors, rank and file labor groups, peasant and craft unions, and professional and student associations. The Coordinadora acted as the central node, building a horizontal network of these mainly territorial based organizations. Each sector was organized into assemblies that met and sent spokespersons to represent their viewpoint in the Coordinadora. The meetings of representatives decided on strategy and wrote up communiqués, which were then presented at large-scale town meetings that at times were attended by fifty to seventy thousand people and finalized the decisions. After a number of mass mobilizations and intense street battles the government retreated and broke their contract with Bechtel. The Coordinadora had succeeded in creating an autonomist democratic space in civil society based on assembly-style communal politics. In Gramsci’s language the Water Wars were a war of maneuver with the diversely represented sectors creating a new historic bloc of actors.

But large collective actions and common decision making is often an aspect of mass, but temporary, social rebellions. The task now was to turn this newly won space into an institutional form with a permanent position in civil society. As intellectual activist Raquel Gutierrez-Aguilar wrote, “How could we sow the seeds of full autonomy in relation to the state through our proposals to regulate water…reclaiming decision-making and through it, of recovering alienated ‘social wealth’.’’(Gutierrez-Aquilar, 2004, 55) Fellow activist Alvaro Garcia Linera was also concerned about the transitory nature of the mass movement. As he noted, “sometimes the Coordinadora consists of half a million inhabitants; at other times it can claim no more than one hundred active and permanent members. Perhaps the way of overcoming this organizational weakness is to consecrate, institutionalize, and symbolically ritualize the local and regional assemblies as institutionalized assemblies of the Coordinadora.” (Linera, 83)

This was accomplished with an ambitious plan to create water committees in every neighborhood, independent of any political association. Creating more than 100 committees these groups, working with technical staff, solve a multitude of problems arising over services, sanitation, maintenance, environmental concerns and costs. In addition, as formal ownership of the water reverted back to SEMAPA, the municipal water company, the Coordinadora named the general manager and created room on the executive board for union representatives and professional organizations. As Gutierrez-Aquilar explains, the effort is “to convert SEMAPA into a socially owned and self-managed enterprise in which its property form would transcend existing legal provisions in order to make room for new means of management, decision-making, citizen participation, and social control.” (60)

This process went on in a continual battle with the government that sought to bring SEMAPA under more formal state control. The social movement in Cochabamba understood this as a strategic battle, viewing the market as a question of democracy and a space to contest transnational power. The object is not to simply demand more resources from the state, but to occupy autonomist institutional positions that democratize decision-making power over social wealth. In this manner participatory management over state run services was connected to civil society and popular participation in the economy.

Another important aspect of the Water Wars was breaking free of the culture of cynicism, apathy and defeat. Neoliberalism had achieved ideological hegemony, isolating people and destroying their collective social belief that people could change and manage society. But the successful mass mobilization and victory of the people in Cochabamba created a counter-consciousness that spread throughout Bolivia, helping to mobilize further battles over the recovery of gas resources and the extension of democracy. This is a vitally important aspect of the war of position, wherein autonomist space creates a new confidence and self-awareness that propels people to become agents of change and consciously build a historic bloc of popular forces.

But change in social consciousness is a long drawn-out process. Popular organizations always face the danger of becoming an appendage of state clientelism as mass participation withers. Under such circumstances leaders are often incorporated into the state as local mediators with the power to distribute resources. Another problem is organizations based on specific social sectors often fail to develop lasting solidarity and a united political strategy. This can result in growing isolation and competition over social resources based solely on their immediate needs. This makes it easy for the state to incorporate some and attack others, controlling certain social movements to strengthen the state’s hold over civil society. These are dynamics that need to be recognized as points of continuing conflict, particularly by those who tend to portray social movements as the only pure representation of grassroots democracy. In fact, under certain circumstances a popular democratic government may be the best vehicle to maintain a strategic plan for social justice and overcome the petty squabbles that can dominate local and regional groups.

In order to expand counter-hegemonic space from the local to the national level the Coordinadora proposed a Constituent Assembly. The Assembly would be as a mass participatory democratic challenge to the traditional state apparatus composed of “citizen representatives elected by their neighborhood organizations, their urban or rural associations, their unions, their communes.”(Olivera, 136) According to Olivera the “Constituent Assembly is basically an instance of the political organization of civil society…not based on the reform of the political constitution of the existing state…but a general transformation of political institutions” for self-government. (136-7) The use of democratic means to fashion revolutionary institutional space differs significantly from twentieth century socialist strategies that focused on the seizure of the existing state by armed struggle. The effort here is to reapropriate democracy from a restricted and statist form with an expanded and participatory model. In part it is similar to worker councils or soviets that appeared in the early stages of previous socialist revolutions, before these grassroots structures became absorbed by the state.

But the autonomist strategy does not encompass all the social movements in Bolivia. Movement To Socialism (MAS) under the leadership of Evo Morales has a powerful presence and became focused on winning the presidency of the country. MAS developed out of the cocalero struggle against the militarized anti-drug campaign brought to Bolivia by the US. The coca growers symbolized a peasant movement fighting for economic survival, and came to occupy a militant and historical cultural position within Bolivian society. As an important sector in the social movement MAS launched electoral campaigns in 2002 that won the second most seats in congress and in the presidential race placed Morales just one percentage point behind winner Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Lozada was consequently run out of office by the gas war rebellion, setting the stage for a new presidential campaign. While continuing to take part in the mass social mobilizations Morales concentrated the efforts of MAS on an electoral strategy for power. With Alvaro Garcia Linera as his running mate, Morales won a historic and decisive victory in December 2005 that many saw as the culmination of the mass movements that had forced two governments from office. El Alto, the poor and highly organized community sitting above La Paz, was an important stronghold of Morales support. As one resident commented, “We have all supported Evo. It is not just what he says. It is that this is his base and he knows us.” (Forero, 2005)

But the social movements were not fully united behind Morales’ campaign for president. There were serious debates over the best form of ownership of Bolivia’s gas resources, as well as questions over electoral strategy and political alliances. As Olivera commented, “What the social movements need to do now is to continue accumulating popular forces, as we have been doing since 2000, to build up our ability to pressure whatever government that comes. A Morales government would be less difficult to move, but it will still be difficult.” (Schultz, 2005) Many activists feel that Morales will not be able to fulfill his campaign promises because of Bolivia’s relationship to powerful oil and gas transnationals and the country’s international debt overseen by the IMF. Therefore the autonomy of the social movements acts as a necessary counterbalance on the government, pressuring the state to withstand the demands of transnational capitalism.

The lack of a common and coherent political project for the seizure of power is not isolated to Bolivia. In many countries there are clear tensions between those focused on creating autonomous space in civil society and those intent on winning political power by building mass electoral parties. In Mexico, the Zapatistas have sought to build democratic autonomy without competing for state power. As pointed out by Neil Harvey, “Their strategy is not to seize power and wield it over others, but to democratize power relations in every sphere of life.”(Harvey, 2005, 14) Their efforts have been twofold; to build over 30 autonomous municipalities among their base communities in the Chiapas jungle known as the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Councils of Good Government); and to seek alliances and dialogue with other social movements to create a diverse but common democratic agenda for social change. Meanwhile on the electoral front, the Party of Revolutionary Democracy (PRD) set-out to win the presidency with the populist mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, as their candidate. The left-center party was formed in a merger of the Mexican Communist Party, two socialist parties, and the left-wing of the traditional ruling party, the PRI. The PRD has had their greatest success in states with large indigenous populations, winning governorships in Guerrero, Michoacan and in the Zapatista’s own backyard of Chiapas. Yet the autonomist movement remains skeptical of the PRD’s progressive legitimacy. As Zapatista spokesperson, Sub Comandante Marcos has stated, “Yesterday they were on the left, today they are on the center, where will they be tomorrow?” (Ramirez, 2005) But the Zapatista’s have their critics too, as activist and writer Tariq Ali has argued “the Zapatistas have failed to make serious gains, because the proposal to ‘change the world without taking power’ is only a ’moral slogan’ that does not pose any threat to dominant groups in Mexico or their foreign allies.” (Harvey, 14) The call to boycott the election by Marcos may have been enough to give a razor thin margin of victory to the conservative candidate Felipe Calderon. While millions of Mexican workers and poor mobilized to contest possible electoral fraud, Marcos and the Zapatistas were left standing in silence on the sidelines.

This same tension is seen in Brazil between the Landless Rural Worker’s Movement (MST) and Lula’s Workers Party (PT). The MST may well be Latin America’s most powerful social movement with hundred of thousands of members. Founded in 1984 with the help of liberation theology church activists the MST is focused on the collective struggle for land and cooperative farms, having won 20 million acres for 350,000 families. They maintain a grassroots organization starting with groups of about ten families that constitute a “Base Nucleus,” participatory local general assemblies, on up to regional, state and national levels. MST members voted in large numbers for the PT when Lula won the presidency, but the organization never joined the Party. As founding member Joao Pedro Stedile explains:

“From all we have learned from history, we realize that the health of the social movement depends on a large degree of political and ideological independence. We have always understood that only they who travel on their own feet and think with their own heads can go far. Therefore, we always insist that the MST and other social movements have to be autonomous in their relations with political parties, the government, the state, the Church and all other institutions…We are in permanent negotiations with the governments in search of our objectives. But we always set our own goals and methods.” (Stedile, 2005, 25)

The MST has good cause for caution, land distribution under Lula’s government declined sharply to the lowest level since the military government of 20 years before. Although the MST extended tactical support to Lula and limited their number of land occupations, after his first year in office they resumed widespread activities mobilizing in 20 states and marching on the federal capital demanding action.

These different strategies for social change between state and civil society naturally create tensions, and at times bitter disagreements. Activists in civil society often label those involved in the electoral arena as untrustworthy reformists or worse, as traitors to the mass democratic project. On the otherhand, party militants getting out the vote see autonomists as unwilling to confront the real problems of power and responsibility. Meanwhile, millions of mobilized people participate in multiple forms of social organizations as well as vote for left candidates in local and national elections. Perhaps more pragmatic than their ideologically driven leaders, a vast majority of workers and poor see no problem with participating in both forms of activism. In fact, this is an essential aspect of the democratic dialectic.

In the pages of Science and Society Marta Harnecker discussed how popular forces should use all available space to organize alternative models and how the state and society interlink. As she explains, “governments can generate spaces conducive to the creation of cultural and political conditions that promote organizational autonomy of society and in this form move in the direction of the self-constitution of the subject, which is the only base upon which an alternative socialist society can be constructed. I believe that is it necessary to attempt to transform not only local leftist-run governments into showcases; the same holds for all other spaces that the left conquers.” (M. Harnecker, 2005, 150) Although focused on autonomous civil space, Harnecker is also stating that a war of position needs to take place within the state as well as society, an important (although controversial) extension of Gramscian strategy.

The tension between the two strategies, state power versus autonomous civil society and what can be accomplished in either political realm, will and should continue to be a contradiction within any truly dynamic democratic society. Establishing counter-hegemonic positions within the state and society are both necessary, with both having their strengths and dangers of co-option and corruption. Sometimes they will compliment and strengthen each other; sometimes their interaction will reflect different needs, perspectives, pressures and strategies. Since the ultimate goal is to restrict the state until society can be govern by the producers themselves, the dialectic is solved in the long run by a synthesis to a fully democratic and participatory civil society that ultimately replaces the state. Or as Gramsci put it, “the State’s goal is its own end, its own disappearance, in other words the re-absorption of political society into civil society.” (Gramsci, 253) That, to say the least, is a very long-term project, the results of which are unknowable. So in considering the historic transition, understanding the dynamics of the democratic dialectic becomes a strategic orientation for guiding social change. There is a necessary democratic linkage between state and society, only by recognizing this unity of opposites and through understanding its inherent contradictions can an appropriate transitional strategy be created.

The State and Change from Above

The most exciting example of change from the top is the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, which has pushed a radical agenda at home and abroad. Chavez was elected with the overwhelming support of the countries’ poor, which constitutes 80% of the population. His party, the Fifth Republic Movement (MRV), has won a large majority in congress and most of the provincial governors and local offices throughout the country. One of the government’s important first acts was to rewrite the nation’s constitution. While private property was protected, the constitution extended fundamental political, social and economic rights in favor of the poor. In a campaign of political education, committees were formed throughout working class barrios to study the new constitution. This was an important opening in the political culture of Venezuela, convincing many that they held a personal stake in the government.

When Chavez was overthrown in a coup it was the massive mobilization from the urban barrios that saved his government and brought him back to power. A radical awakening of consciousness over questions of democratic inclusion and defending the constitution propelled people into the streets. Rather than overthrowing the state, (as in Russia, China and Cuba), people fought to defend the state and save legally structured democracy. This experience is mirrored in Bolivia where the demand for a constituent assembly to rewrite the countries’ laws and create a new democratic framework is a strategic aim of the social movement. People’s aspirations for social justice are being articulated through structural participatory democratic forms that create institutional positions of strength and act as a convergence point for a new historic bloc. As a characteristic of the revolutionary left in the twenty-first century it is a marked departure from the model of vanguard parties, whose platforms were pronounced in organizational manifestos that assumed to speak for the entire working class.

The temporary coup, followed by a hard fought two-month strike in the oil industry, radicalized Chavez and his movement. This process was similar to the effect of the US sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion that radicalized Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Revolutionary paths are always defined in part by the opposition, the two opposing sides linked in a process of action and reaction. It was only after the failed invasion that Castro declared a socialist direction for Cuba, as Chavez did after three attempts to oust him from office. His intent was made clear at the World Social Forum in Brazil where Chavez stated, “We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one that puts humans, not machines or the state, ahead of everything.” (Ellner, 2005a, 24) But the process in Venezuela is significantly different from the Cuban experience. Most capitalists have not fled the country but continue to operate their corporations and make profits, and Venezuela is firmly linked to the transnational economy rather than niched into some socialist bloc. In fact, Chavez signed a new contract with Chevron-Texaco in the middle of the oil strike provoked by his pro US opposition. Furthermore, there have been no nationalizations nor is socialism mentioned in the new constitution.

As Latin American scholar Steve Ellner explains, the “approach envisions an extended process of revolutionary change which is without precedent in history and which some claim may take several decades to complete. The end result will be a complete replacement of old structures created by the Chavista government and movement…replacing the current capitalist system with a mixed economy or association of medium-sized cooperatives.” (Ellner, 2005b, 171-72) Clearly this line of march is Gramscian, rather than an insurrectionary strategy as advocated by Lenin or Che Guevara. Ellner adds that the Chavistas are committed to a “peaceful democratic revolution (and) have ruled out the suppression of the existing institutions controlled by their adversaries in economic, political and state spheres and instead opted for parallelism.” (187)

But a war of position is far from a static process. In fact, the opposition has plunged the country into repeated crises initiating confrontations that they continue to lose. In response, participation and mobilization have been keys to the continuing battle for change, with an expansion of programs and goals after every major confrontation. This is the dialectic in Gramsci’s concept of position and maneuver, one state leading to the other in a process of advance. In consolidating the transformational process, radical forces in state positions have united with social movements to help build counter-hegemonic space throughout civil society. This is where the PT and ANC failed, causing severe political contradictions to develop between the state and organized social sectors. But in Venezuela the link between the state and social movements have for now a revolutionary character and expanded potential lacking in countries where autonomist power remains isolated from the government.

Of course autonomist activists have cause for caution, twentieth century revolutions used unions, community organizations and peasant associations as transmission belts for state led projects and party control. As University of Havana professor Jorge Luis Acanda Gonzalez explains, “With the advent of the ‘institutionalization process’ (civil society) was transformed into a paternalistic top-down political system based on the all-embracing presence of the state. The state occupied nearly all aspects of social life: livelihoods were inextricably linked to its presence, and it played a key role in ideological production displacing the (church and the market).” (Gonzalez, 2006, 35) As in Cuba, there is a danger that the Venezuelan state may come to dominate and consume the independent role of the social movements. But the thrust of the revolutionary project so far has been to decentralize state power into the hands of civil society, using the state to guard and guide the process.

One good example of this dynamic is to compare the autonomist cooperative movement in Argentina with the state facilitated cooperative movement in Venezuela. When the Argentine economy collapsed after being looted by neo-liberal speculators there were protests and mobilizations by almost every sector of society. One result was the takeover of about 200 factory enterprises turning them into worker-run and managed cooperatives after they had been abandon by their owners. In addition self-managed neighborhood and food cooperatives arose in different communities as a means of survival in an economy that had all but ceased to function. All toll the various autonomist cooperatives firms encompassed about 10,000 people. While workers quickly proved they could profitably operate their factories the former owners and government challenged their efforts. Some enterprises won legal recognition from the state, but this was never an easy process. Other worker cooperatives had to defend themselves from police attacks and fought to remain operating their factories.

As examples of courage, initiative and solidarity the worker cooperatives have been inspiring, but they have failed to develop into a widespread movement within the working class. When anarchist activist and intellectual Michael Albert interviewed the president of a glass manufacturing cooperative about the possibility that workers in traditionally owned plants would take over and run their factories the president “without hesitating said no.” Pursuing the point by asking members of the cooperative council why they couldn’t convey their experience and motivate others to act, Albert writes, the president “shrugged, he didn’t see it as likely. Worse, it wasn’t on his agenda. His horizon of interest was his own plant and not beyond. Others agreed.” Albert, who visited many of Argentina’s enterprise cooperatives, writes “Perhaps the weakest feature of the Argentine movement, is the insularity of each firm and the workers’ seeming lack of desire to organize non-recuperated firms by demanding changes in them too.” What Albert found was not a mass autonomist movement for revolutionary change, but worker’s turning to each other and relying on their mutual efforts in their common fight for survival. (Albert, 2005)

On the other hand, in Venezuela there are 83,769 cooperatives active in every sector of the economy with some 946,000 members. The new constitution defines cooperatives as key economic institutions for mass participation and state decentralization. Taking advantage of state run educational missions over 195,000 students have been trained in technical and managerial subjects and upon graduation created 7,592 new cooperatives. These cooperatives join together to design projects and become part of Endogenous Development Zones where they receive credit, technical support and physical space. Newly formed lending agencies such as the Women’s Bank and the People’s Bank help to facilitate this process. As of 2005 there were 115 active zones covering 960 cooperatives, 75 percent in agricultural, 15 percent in industrial enterprises and ten percent in tourism. The cooperative enterprises are not state run employment programs, but are expected to make profits and pay-off their loans. While most production is geared towards providing for a stronger and sustainable internal market, the Ministry of Popular Economy facilitates the integration of cooperatives with small and medium size companies to create production chains that can contract with foreign buyers linked to regional and global markets. Thus a parallel economic structure is being created alongside the traditional market. (C. Harnecker, 2005)

In addition to the new cooperatives in the Development Zones, many state run industries have moved to co-management or cooperative management forms. Efforts have also included urban neighborhood organizations in the planning and decision making process over municipal public services similar to SEMAPA in Cochabamba. This includes supervision, prioritizing projects and hiring cooperatives to carry out the work. To promote the social economy the government also hands out land titles and work contracts to those who self-organize into cooperatives, promoting collectively owned production capacity. All this is directed towards generating wealth in an egalitarian and internally sustainable fashion in a country where oil makes up 30 percent of the GDP, 50 percent of the state income and 80 percent of exports.

Oil wealth, as in many countries, created a corrupt political culture in Venezuela. Although owned by the state, the petroleum industry only benefited the elite, wealth flowing into the hands of those who controlled the industry and government. As Jorge Giordani, Minister of Planning and Development noted, “Everything has been ‘Mama State, Papa State, give me oil money.’ To organize people is extremely hard.” (Parenti, 2005) Creating a counter-hegemonic culture will be a long transformative struggle that must be based in an alternative economic project. The strategy of the Bolivarian revolution is to support the cooperative movement to build economic strength and develop a counter ideology and culture. From this position of strength the popular movement can contest and eventual replace the neo-liberal capitalist model with a decentralized system based on a social market economy. Those who believe the Chavez government will fall when oil prices drop fail to perceive the rich web of organizations sinking roots in civil society.

Of course there are many old habits in both the state and market that can undermine the revolutionary process. The state may turn the cooperatives into a cliental relationship demanding political support in return for economic support. Easy credit and poor technical and managerial skills may lead to economic failure or state support that turns into debt and deficits. And problems of unlawful accounting, undemocratic decision-making and managers excluding members from their share of profits have occurred. Such internal contradictions are not uncommon in the history of cooperative movements. And debates always exist over internal organization, membership and market strategies.

But what is also evident in Venezuela, as throughout Latin America, is a strategy by social movements to become producers rather than just groups marching to demand more services. Both social and state actors have made the market contested territory to develop an alternative model. Counter-hegemony needs to be based in a different set of labor relations as represented in the cooperative movement and by economic democracy. Not only is there a need to build an alternative economic vision, but alternative economic activity that generates new social relations. Social movements need to go beyond the political struggle between civil society and the state to include the market, while state actors need to use their institutional power to decentralize economic decision making into a participatory democratic process.

Co-operative Success in Italy

Perhaps the most advanced experience in developing cooperatives as part of a transformative project has been in the Emilia-Romagna area of northern Italy. Although cooperatives had historic roots in the region their expansion and development became a key component in the political strategy of the local Italian Communist Party (PCI). Emilia-Romagna was continuously governed by the PCI from 1945 to 1989, and then for another decade by a center-left coalition. Today there are 7,000 cooperatives in every sector of the economy providing a major source of employment, growth and innovation. The most developed area is the Imola district where, as described by Matt Hancock, “More than 50% of the total population are members of a cooperative, and more than half of the total industrial output comes from the district’s 15 industrial cooperatives, three of which are global market leaders and manage multinational networks of private subsidiaries, with sales offices and production on at least four continents…producing more than two billion euros in annual revenues.” (Hancock, 2005a) In fact, a number of cooperatives in the region have become transnational companies, as has Mondragon in Spain. Cooperatives are normally conceived as local or regional companies that only serve the internal economy. But if they can develop a democratic corporate model that is competitive on a global scale the transnational market may become contested political territory.

Of course the idea of globally competitive cooperatives is controversial, but controversy is not new to the movement. There have been many important debates over managerial organization, who has rights of membership, the relationship of the parent company to subsidiaries, the role of profits and inheritance, and the conflict between entrepreneurial functions and social responsibility. Cooperatives have experimented with different models and functioned under different social/political visions. But consistent in their history has been the development of a high road strategy that pursues democratic management, loyalty to its members and community, competitive innovation and the protection of productive capacities and long-term value.

The PCI has been part of these debates and evolved a number of different theoretical stands in their approach to the cooperative movement. But overall the PCI has seen cooperatives as part of a mass social bloc laying foundations for the socialist project. In effect, part of Gramsci’s war of position, carving out autonomist space in the counter-hegemonic struggle. The strategy linked cooperatives to an “Italian way to Socialism” that argued for a series of economic and political advances that would eventually change the relationships of power. For the CPI the cooperative movement was part of a broad strategy for transformation, a way to bring democracy to the economic field.

But as Hancock points out, “Today, a shared vision for profound social change is largely absent in the cooperative movement.” (Hancock, 2005b) The left has lost the political and cultural hegemony it once held, and cooperatives are seen in more local terms, as the “patrimony of the local community.” As Hancock says, “this is profound and radical. Nonetheless, as a vision, it doesn’t imply movement, or a larger context of social change. Instead, the implication is conservation, of consolidating the gains of the cooperative and assuring that it endures over time. Both, of course, are essential, but not enough.” (Ibid)

Given the difficulties of autonomist, state and market strategies for social transformation we can see that no easy answers exist, no silver bullet, in the quest for a just society. The relationships between state, civil society and market are deeply complex, each having its own dynamic while interconnected and modifying the others. The idea that any one theory or strategy can encompass and account for the whole of these complexities assumes a narrow and reductionist approach. Only views that recognize the constant interchange and overdeterminations of social forces can hope to offer the tools for a fruitful analysis. Once we recognize the dialectical character of the relationships we can begin to develop political strategies that make room for historic transformational processes that encompass broad social forces that condition each other. This allows us to see the necessary ebbs and flows between institutional structures and social movements, each with strengths and weaknesses, each with their historic moment of influence and importance. The democratic dialectic is recognition of this process.

Endnotes:

1.For a detailed analysis of the second contradiction using Germany as an example see Harris, Globalization and Class Struggle in Germany, 2005.

2. Michael Albert offers such a complex array of managerial committees and social organizations in his effort to replace the state that his ideas can be labeled “ bureaucratic anarchism.” For his full view see Parecon, Life After Capitalism, 2003. For a traditional Marxist critic of the inevitable “slippery slope” of market socialism see Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle, 2005. And for an argument that still defends the Soviet statist model refer to Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 2004.

3. I am using the term non-antagonistic contradictions not to argue for an absence of political struggle, but as contradictions to be solved among social class using democratic methods when the common goal is to build a post-capitalist society. This is to be distinguished from contradictions between the people and violent or reactionary forces. Although Mao articulates this in his 1957 essay “On the Correct Handling of the Contradictions Among the People,” the failure to carry out this policy led to the disaster of the Cultural Revolution.

References: Albert, Michael. 2003. Parecon, Life After Capitalism. London: Verso Books.

Albert, Michael. December 2005. “Argentina’s Occupied Factories, Practicing Participatory democracy in the workplace.” Z Magazine On-line, 18:2. http://zmagsite.zmag.org/curTOC.htm

Ellner, Steve. September/October 2005a. “Venezuela: Defying Globalization’s Logic.” NACLA Report on the Americas, 39:2. 20–24.

Ellner, Steve. 2005b. “Directions of the Chavista Movement in Venezuela.” Science & Society, 69:2. 160-190.

Forero, Juan. December 19, 2005. “Coca advocate Wins Election For President in Bolivia.” www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/international/americas/19bolivia.html

Gallas, Alexander. 2003. “A review of Entfesselter Kapitalismus: Transformation des europaischen Sozialmodells, Joachim Bischoff, VSA Hamburg, 2003.” Dialectical Materialism.

Gonzalez, Jorge Luis Acanda. January/February 2006. “Cuban Civil Society, Reinterpreting the Debate.” NACLA Report on the Americas, 39:4, 32-36.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.

Gutierrez-Aguilar, Raquel. 2004. “The Coordinadora, One Year After the Water Wars.” Pp. 53 –64 in Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia. Cambridge: South End Press.

Hancock, Matt. 2005a. “The Cooperative District of Imola, Forging the High Road to Globalization.” University of Bologna, School of Economics.

Hancock, Matt. 2005b. “The Communist Party in the Land of Cooperation.” University of Bologna, School of Economics.

Harnecker, Camila Pineiro. May 12, 2005. “The New Cooperative Movement in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Process.” http://mrzine.monthlyreveiw.org/harnecker051205.html

Harnecker, Marta. 2005. “On Leftist Strategy.” Science & Society, 69:2, 142-151.

Harris, Jerry. 2005a. “Emerging Third World Powers.” Race & Class, 46:3, 7-27.

Harris, Jerry. 2005b. “Globalization and Class Struggle in Germany.” Nature, Society, and Thought, 18:3, 383-412.

Hart-Landsberg, Martin and Paul Burkett. 2005. China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Harvey, Neil. September/October 2005. “Inclusion Through Autonomy: Zapatistas and Dissent,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 39:2, 12-16.

Keeran, Roger and Thomas Kenny. 2004. Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union. New York: International Publishers.

Linera, Alvaro Garcia. 2004. “The Multitude.” Pp. 65-86 in Cochabamba! Water Wars in Bolivia. Cambridge: South End Press.

Mao TseTung. 1977. “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), Pp. 350 – 421 in Selected Works of Mao TseTung, Volume V. Beijing: Foreign Language Press.

Olivera, Oscar. 2004. Cochabamba! Water Wars in Bolivia. Cambridge: South End Press.

Parenti, Christian. March 24, 2005. “Hugo Chavez and Petro Populism.” www.thenation.com/doc/20050411/parenti/8

Ramirez, Vladimir Escalante. November 2005. “Why Does the PRD Lose?” http:// db.uwaterloo.cal/~alopez-o/politics/prdlose.html

Schultz, Jim. November 2005. “Bolivia’s Unplanned Elections.” www.democracyctr.org/newsletter/vol67.htm

Schweickart, David. 2002. After Capitalism. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Stedile, Joao Pedro. March/April 2005. “Memories of Struggle in the MST.” NACLA Report on the Americas, 38:5, 21-26.

Zakaria, Fareed. September/October 2004. “Hating America.” Foreign Policy, No. 144, 47-49.

email2friend ]]> http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/03/28/the-democratic-dialectic-the-state-markets-and-civil-society/feed/ 5 http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/03/15/a-shameful-injustice/ http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/03/15/a-shameful-injustice/#comments Thu, 15 Mar 2007 06:00:32 +0000 Philip Agee, The Guardian http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/03/15/a-shameful-injustice/ Cuba's 50-year defiance of US attempts to isolate it is an inspiration to Latin America's people by Philip Agee, The Guardian There is a wave of progressive change sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean after the many lonely years in which Cuba held high the torch, with free universal healthcare and education, and world-class cultural, sports and scientific achievements. Although you won't find a Cuban today who says things are perfect - far from it - probably all would agree that compared with pre-revolutionary Cuba, there is a world of improvement. George Bush, the antithesis of this process, is now in Brazil at the start of a mission to lure five countries away from regional economic integration. However, the many thousands in the streets demonstrate the region's vast repudiation of Bush and what he stands for, something polls reflect unanimously. All Cuba's achievements have been in defiance of US efforts to isolate Cuba; every dirty method has been used, including infiltration, sabotage, terrorism, assassination, economic and biological warfare and incessant lies in the media of many countries. I know these methods too well, having been a CIA officer in Latin America in the 1960s. Altogether nearly 3,500 Cubans have died from terrorist acts, and more than 2,000 are permanently disabled. No country has suffered terrorism as long and consistently as Cuba. The Cuban revolution has always needed intelligence capabilities in the US for defence purposes, even before it took power in 1959. Such was the fully justified mission of the Cuban Five, who have been in jail since 1998 after being convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in Miami, where they had no chance of a fair trial. Their sights were set exclusively on terrorist operations against Cuba - activities ignored by the FBI - and they neither sought nor received any classified government information. Their cases are still on appeal, and will be for years, but their biased convictions rank with the legal lynching in the 1920s of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist immigrants, among the most shameful injustices in US history. Current US policy can be found in the 2004 report of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba (updated last year with a secret annexe). A fundamental goal - the same, I remember, as in 1959 - is the isolation of Cuba to stop this bad example spreading. If successful, this would mean no less than annexation by, and complete dependence on, the US, in fact if not in law. Other goals still intact are to foment an internal political opposition and economic hardship, leading to hunger and despair. Yet nearly 50 years of US economic warfare hasn't worked, even though Cubans estimate the cost to them at more than $80bn. After the freefall in the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economy began to recover in 1995. By 2005 growth was 11.8% and in 2006 12.5%, the highest in Latin America. Exports of services, nickel and pharmaceutical and other products are booming, and the US has not been able to stop this. In the end efforts to isolate Cuba have failed. Last September Cuba was elected, for the second time, to lead the Non-Aligned Movement of 118 countries, and two months later the UN voted for the 15th consecutive year to condemn the US embargo, by 183 to 4. In 2007 Cuba has diplomatic or consular relations with 182 countries, and Havana hosts seemingly endless international conferences. In recent years Cuba's resorts have been attracting more than 2 million tourists annually. Far from isolating Cuba, the US has isolated itself. More than 30,000 Cuban doctors and health workers are saving lives in 69 countries, many in difficult areas. Meanwhile 30,000 young people from dozens of countries are studying medicine in Cuba on full scholarships. All come from areas lacking doctors. Cuba's literacy programme, known as "Yes I can", has been adopted in nearly 30 countries, with thousands of Cuban volunteers teaching. The scheme, conducted in Spanish, Portuguese, English, Creole, Quechua and Aymara, has helped some 2 million people to read and write, most of whom continue their education afterwards. Thanks to this international assistance, Cuban prestige and influence - and international solidarity with Cuba, - have never been greater. It was to defend these worthy programmes that the Cuban Five, unjustly convicted, went to Miami in the 1990s. Freedom for them should be the cause of everyone for whom human rights and justice are important, both in the US and around the world; and that cause can be supported in 300 Free the Five solidarity committees in 90 countries. Philip Agee, a former CIA secret operations officer, is author of Inside the Company: CIA Diary. He travels in Cuba and Latin America as a campaigner, and manages an online travel service to Cuba. philipagee@yahoo.com Article published in The Guardian Saturday March 10, 2007

email2friend ]]> Cuba's 50-year defiance of US attempts to isolate it is an inspiration to Latin America's people by Philip Agee, The Guardian There is a wave of progressive change sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean after the many lonely years in which Cuba held high the torch, with free universal healthcare and education, and world-class cultural, sports and scientific achievements. Although you won't find a Cuban today who says things are perfect - far from it - probably all would agree that compared with pre-revolutionary Cuba, there is a world of improvement. George Bush, the antithesis of this process, is now in Brazil at the start of a mission to lure five countries away from regional economic integration. However, the many thousands in the streets demonstrate the region's vast repudiation of Bush and what he stands for, something polls reflect unanimously. All Cuba's achievements have been in defiance of US efforts to isolate Cuba; every dirty method has been used, including infiltration, sabotage, terrorism, assassination, economic and biological warfare and incessant lies in the media of many countries. I know these methods too well, having been a CIA officer in Latin America in the 1960s. Altogether nearly 3,500 Cubans have died from terrorist acts, and more than 2,000 are permanently disabled. No country has suffered terrorism as long and consistently as Cuba. The Cuban revolution has always needed intelligence capabilities in the US for defence purposes, even before it took power in 1959. Such was the fully justified mission of the Cuban Five, who have been in jail since 1998 after being convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in Miami, where they had no chance of a fair trial. Their sights were set exclusively on terrorist operations against Cuba - activities ignored by the FBI - and they neither sought nor received any classified government information. Their cases are still on appeal, and will be for years, but their biased convictions rank with the legal lynching in the 1920s of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist immigrants, among the most shameful injustices in US history. Current US policy can be found in the 2004 report of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba (updated last year with a secret annexe). A fundamental goal - the same, I remember, as in 1959 - is the isolation of Cuba to stop this bad example spreading. If successful, this would mean no less than annexation by, and complete dependence on, the US, in fact if not in law. Other goals still intact are to foment an internal political opposition and economic hardship, leading to hunger and despair. Yet nearly 50 years of US economic warfare hasn't worked, even though Cubans estimate the cost to them at more than $80bn. After the freefall in the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economy began to recover in 1995. By 2005 growth was 11.8% and in 2006 12.5%, the highest in Latin America. Exports of services, nickel and pharmaceutical and other products are booming, and the US has not been able to stop this. In the end efforts to isolate Cuba have failed. Last September Cuba was elected, for the second time, to lead the Non-Aligned Movement of 118 countries, and two months later the UN voted for the 15th consecutive year to condemn the US embargo, by 183 to 4. In 2007 Cuba has diplomatic or consular relations with 182 countries, and Havana hosts seemingly endless international conferences. In recent years Cuba's resorts have been attracting more than 2 million tourists annually. Far from isolating Cuba, the US has isolated itself. More than 30,000 Cuban doctors and health workers are saving lives in 69 countries, many in difficult areas. Meanwhile 30,000 young people from dozens of countries are studying medicine in Cuba on full scholarships. All come from areas lacking doctors. Cuba's literacy programme, known as "Yes I can", has been adopted in nearly 30 countries, with thousands of Cuban volunteers teaching. The scheme, conducted in Spanish, Portuguese, English, Creole, Quechua and Aymara, has helped some 2 million people to read and write, most of whom continue their education afterwards. Thanks to this international assistance, Cuban prestige and influence - and international solidarity with Cuba, - have never been greater. It was to defend these worthy programmes that the Cuban Five, unjustly convicted, went to Miami in the 1990s. Freedom for them should be the cause of everyone for whom human rights and justice are important, both in the US and around the world; and that cause can be supported in 300 Free the Five solidarity committees in 90 countries. Philip Agee, a former CIA secret operations officer, is author of Inside the Company: CIA Diary. He travels in Cuba and Latin America as a campaigner, and manages an online travel service to Cuba. philipagee@yahoo.com Article published in The Guardian Saturday March 10, 2007

email2friend ]]> http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/03/15/a-shameful-injustice/feed/ 0 http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/01/25/venezuela%e2%80%99s-legislature-approves-emergency-sessions-for-mother-of-laws/ http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/01/25/venezuela%e2%80%99s-legislature-approves-emergency-sessions-for-mother-of-laws/#comments Thu, 25 Jan 2007 06:00:04 +0000 VenezuelaAnalysis.com http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/01/25/venezuela%e2%80%99s-legislature-approves-emergency-sessions-for-mother-of-laws/ [From SolidarityEconomy.net editors: While there's been plenty of coverage of Chavez's 'ruling by decree,' little has been said about the matters concerned and how its part of his country's legal system. It also gives an idea of how something like 'Economic Democracy' might be brought into being in other countries as well.] By Venezuelanalysis.com, Caracas, January 17, 2007 Venezuela’s National Assembly approved a resolution yesterday, according to which the legislature would declare emergency sessions for the approval of an "enabling law," which will allow President Chavez to pass law-decrees on specific issues in the next 18 months. The National Assembly (AN) will begin deliberations on the law tomorrow. Chavez had asked the AN for an "enabling law," during his swearing-in ceremony last week, saying that such a law is necessary to accelerate the process of creating 21st century socialism in Venezuela. Chavez presented the AN with the proposed law last Saturday. The proposed law, for which there is express permission in Article 203 of Venezuela’s 1999 constitution, would allow Chavez to pass decrees that have the legal standing of laws in ten different areas. The last time Chavez was allowed to make use of this provision was in 2001, when he passed 49 law-decrees. Previous presidents, such as Carlos Andrés Perez in 1976, were also given temporary authority for such laws. The ten areas in which Chavez will be allowed to legislate are: 1. Transformation of the institutions of the state. Chavez would be allowed to change state institutions so that these become more efficient, include greater citizen participation, and are more transparent. 2. Popular participation. Here the President would be allowed to develop norms that enable citizen participation in public oversight. Also part of this is the "enabling of the direct exercise of popular sovereignty." Exactly what is meant by this has so far not been explained. 3. Establishing norms for the eradication of corruption. This would also involve changing the civil service system. 4. The creation of norms for adopting existing legislation to the construction of a new social and economic model, in order to achieve equality and equitable distribution of wealth, under "the ideals of social justice and economic independence." 5. Finances and tax collection. The development of norms to modernize monetary, banking, insurance, and tax sectors. 6. Citizen and judiciary security. The development of norms for updating the systems of public health, citizen security, prisons, identification, migration, and judiciary. 7. Science and technology. Norms for the development of science and technology to satisfy the needs of education, health, environment, biodiversity, industrialization, quality of life, and defense. 8. Territorial order. Norms that establish a new territorial organization on the sub-national level, so as to optimize state action. 9. Security and defense. Norms for enabling the co-responsibility of state and organized communities by establishing a new functioning of the institutions of security and defense of the nation. 10. Infrastructure, transport, and services. Norms that support the use of the human and industrial potential and the existing infrastructure to improve transport systems, public services, home construction, and telecommunications, among others.

email2friend ]]> [From SolidarityEconomy.net editors: While there's been plenty of coverage of Chavez's 'ruling by decree,' little has been said about the matters concerned and how its part of his country's legal system. It also gives an idea of how something like 'Economic Democracy' might be brought into being in other countries as well.] By Venezuelanalysis.com, Caracas, January 17, 2007 Venezuela’s National Assembly approved a resolution yesterday, according to which the legislature would declare emergency sessions for the approval of an "enabling law," which will allow President Chavez to pass law-decrees on specific issues in the next 18 months. The National Assembly (AN) will begin deliberations on the law tomorrow. Chavez had asked the AN for an "enabling law," during his swearing-in ceremony last week, saying that such a law is necessary to accelerate the process of creating 21st century socialism in Venezuela. Chavez presented the AN with the proposed law last Saturday. The proposed law, for which there is express permission in Article 203 of Venezuela’s 1999 constitution, would allow Chavez to pass decrees that have the legal standing of laws in ten different areas. The last time Chavez was allowed to make use of this provision was in 2001, when he passed 49 law-decrees. Previous presidents, such as Carlos Andrés Perez in 1976, were also given temporary authority for such laws. The ten areas in which Chavez will be allowed to legislate are: 1. Transformation of the institutions of the state. Chavez would be allowed to change state institutions so that these become more efficient, include greater citizen participation, and are more transparent. 2. Popular participation. Here the President would be allowed to develop norms that enable citizen participation in public oversight. Also part of this is the "enabling of the direct exercise of popular sovereignty." Exactly what is meant by this has so far not been explained. 3. Establishing norms for the eradication of corruption. This would also involve changing the civil service system. 4. The creation of norms for adopting existing legislation to the construction of a new social and economic model, in order to achieve equality and equitable distribution of wealth, under "the ideals of social justice and economic independence." 5. Finances and tax collection. The development of norms to modernize monetary, banking, insurance, and tax sectors. 6. Citizen and judiciary security. The development of norms for updating the systems of public health, citizen security, prisons, identification, migration, and judiciary. 7. Science and technology. Norms for the development of science and technology to satisfy the needs of education, health, environment, biodiversity, industrialization, quality of life, and defense. 8. Territorial order. Norms that establish a new territorial organization on the sub-national level, so as to optimize state action. 9. Security and defense. Norms for enabling the co-responsibility of state and organized communities by establishing a new functioning of the institutions of security and defense of the nation. 10. Infrastructure, transport, and services. Norms that support the use of the human and industrial potential and the existing infrastructure to improve transport systems, public services, home construction, and telecommunications, among others.

email2friend ]]> http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/01/25/venezuela%e2%80%99s-legislature-approves-emergency-sessions-for-mother-of-laws/feed/ 3 http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/01/12/in-venezuela-conditions-for-building-socialism-of-the-21st-century-have-been-created/ http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/01/12/in-venezuela-conditions-for-building-socialism-of-the-21st-century-have-been-created/#comments Fri, 12 Jan 2007 06:00:46 +0000 Cristina Marcano http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/01/12/in-venezuela-conditions-for-building-socialism-of-the-21st-century-have-been-created/ Interview with Heinz Dieterich By Cristina Marcano, Rebelion.org Q. Professor Dieterich, did you invent the concept of "Socialism of the 21st Century"? A. Yes. I developed it, beginning in 1996. It has been published with its corresponding theory in book form, from 2000 on, in Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, Central America, Brazil, and Venezuela, and, outside Latin America, in Spain, Germany, the People's Republic of China, Russia, and Turkey. Since 2001, it has been appropriated all over the world. Presidents like Hugo Chávez and Rafael Correa use it constantly, and so do labor movements, farmers, intellectuals, and political parties. Along with the theory of socialism of the 21st century, I advanced the theory of Latin American transition that is expressed in key concepts like the Regional Block of Power (Bloque Regional de Poder -- BRP), also already in general use in Latin America. However, the concept Regional Block of Popular Power (Bloque Regional de Poder Popular -- BRPP) was proposed by a Venezuelan friend, Douglas Pérez, in a business meeting three months ago. Q. In short, what does this new socialism consists of? A. In brief: a socialism in which the majorities have the greatest historically possible degree of decision-making power in the economic, political, cultural, and military institutions that govern their lives. Q. There are politicians and intellectuals of the Left who say that nobody knows how to build socialism. Why do you maintain the opposite and why does President Chávez aspire to build what is impossible? A. Because their pronouncement is totally false. And no matter how often it is repeated, it continues to be false. Contemporary science does not leave any mystery about what socialism of the 21st century is or its difference from contemporary capitalism and historical socialism. Nor about how we ought to construct it nowadays. It is, simply, a mistaken epistemological position. Q. In your opinion, has there been any socialist country in the modern era? A. It depends on the criteria that are used for such judgment. As a scientific economist and sociologist, I prefer the parameters that Marx and Engels used: economy of value and participatory democracy. And under those criteria, there has been no socialist society since the French Revolution, although, yes, there have been many heroic and tragic attempts to achieve it. Q. Do conditions for implementing socialism of the 21st century exist in Venezuela? A. Yes, now indeed they do. I mention only some. Two thirds of the population voted for the President with full knowledge of his banner of Socialism of the 21st Century. This is a substantial mandate of citizens. The advance of the educational and economic system and of the consciousness of the people has been remarkable. Latin American integration and the destruction of the Monroe Doctrine seem already unstoppable. The Armed Forces now are reliable, and three key sectors of the national economy are in the hands of the government: the State, PdVSA-CVG, and more than one hundred thousand cooperatives. Q. What would be the decisive step that the President would have to take to arrive at socialism of the 21s century in Venezuela? A. They are two: 1. to gradually replace the regulating principle of market economy, price, by the regulating principle of socialist economy, value, understood as time inputs (insumos de tiempo) necessary for the creation of a product; and 2. to advance the economic participation of citizens and workers at three levels: 1. at the macroeconomic level (e.g., national budget); 2. at the mesoeconomic level (municipality); and, 3. at the microeconomic level (enterprise). Q. Is the economy of socialism of the 21st century, then, a barter economy? A. No. That is as erroneous as the pronouncement that nobody knows how to build socialism of the 21st century. The problem of economic injustice does not lie in money. It has nothing to do with whether economy is monetized or functions through exchange in kind (by barter). In the exploitative relation between slave and master, once the initial payment is amortized, money does not intervene, and yet it is one of the worst brutalities in history. Injustice exists when a product "A" is exchanged for a product "B," and their values -- the labor time necessary to produce each one of them -- are not equal, that is to say, when equivalents are not exchanged. Whether that exchange of unequal values (unequal labor efforts) is monetized -- that is to say, whether it is expressed in monetary or natural form -- is secondary. Q. What would be the decisive step of the President, then? A. It is not generalized nationalization of private property, because it does not solve the cybernetic problem of the market. It did not do so in the past and it would not do so today. Socialism today is essentially a problem of informatic complexity. Hence, the transcendental step consists in establishing socialist accounting (value) next to capitalist accounting (price), in the State, PdVSA-CVG, and cooperatives, in order to construct an economic circuit of production and circulation parallel to that of the capitalist market economy. The economy of state and social institutions can move step by step toward the economy of value and gain ground against the circuit of capitalist reproduction, until it displaces it in the future. Since the scales of valuation by prices, values, and also volumes are commensurable, there are no ruptures in economic exchanges that could cause a political problem to the government. In all this, the State and the majorities play an important role, but both are nowadays mainly with the project of the President. To create this parallel circuit of the economy of value would be relatively easy, because values exist in underlying form in the present capitalist accounting. Values exist in it in such a way that, with the development of corresponding software, it would be very easy to establish this socialist economic circuit next to the capitalist one. Without this passage to the economy of equivalency, it is not possible to have a socialist economy. This interview was published in Rebelión on 2 January 2007. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

email2friend ]]> Interview with Heinz Dieterich By Cristina Marcano, Rebelion.org Q. Professor Dieterich, did you invent the concept of "Socialism of the 21st Century"? A. Yes. I developed it, beginning in 1996. It has been published with its corresponding theory in book form, from 2000 on, in Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, Central America, Brazil, and Venezuela, and, outside Latin America, in Spain, Germany, the People's Republic of China, Russia, and Turkey. Since 2001, it has been appropriated all over the world. Presidents like Hugo Chávez and Rafael Correa use it constantly, and so do labor movements, farmers, intellectuals, and political parties. Along with the theory of socialism of the 21st century, I advanced the theory of Latin American transition that is expressed in key concepts like the Regional Block of Power (Bloque Regional de Poder -- BRP), also already in general use in Latin America. However, the concept Regional Block of Popular Power (Bloque Regional de Poder Popular -- BRPP) was proposed by a Venezuelan friend, Douglas Pérez, in a business meeting three months ago. Q. In short, what does this new socialism consists of? A. In brief: a socialism in which the majorities have the greatest historically possible degree of decision-making power in the economic, political, cultural, and military institutions that govern their lives. Q. There are politicians and intellectuals of the Left who say that nobody knows how to build socialism. Why do you maintain the opposite and why does President Chávez aspire to build what is impossible? A. Because their pronouncement is totally false. And no matter how often it is repeated, it continues to be false. Contemporary science does not leave any mystery about what socialism of the 21st century is or its difference from contemporary capitalism and historical socialism. Nor about how we ought to construct it nowadays. It is, simply, a mistaken epistemological position. Q. In your opinion, has there been any socialist country in the modern era? A. It depends on the criteria that are used for such judgment. As a scientific economist and sociologist, I prefer the parameters that Marx and Engels used: economy of value and participatory democracy. And under those criteria, there has been no socialist society since the French Revolution, although, yes, there have been many heroic and tragic attempts to achieve it. Q. Do conditions for implementing socialism of the 21st century exist in Venezuela? A. Yes, now indeed they do. I mention only some. Two thirds of the population voted for the President with full knowledge of his banner of Socialism of the 21st Century. This is a substantial mandate of citizens. The advance of the educational and economic system and of the consciousness of the people has been remarkable. Latin American integration and the destruction of the Monroe Doctrine seem already unstoppable. The Armed Forces now are reliable, and three key sectors of the national economy are in the hands of the government: the State, PdVSA-CVG, and more than one hundred thousand cooperatives. Q. What would be the decisive step that the President would have to take to arrive at socialism of the 21s century in Venezuela? A. They are two: 1. to gradually replace the regulating principle of market economy, price, by the regulating principle of socialist economy, value, understood as time inputs (insumos de tiempo) necessary for the creation of a product; and 2. to advance the economic participation of citizens and workers at three levels: 1. at the macroeconomic level (e.g., national budget); 2. at the mesoeconomic level (municipality); and, 3. at the microeconomic level (enterprise). Q. Is the economy of socialism of the 21st century, then, a barter economy? A. No. That is as erroneous as the pronouncement that nobody knows how to build socialism of the 21st century. The problem of economic injustice does not lie in money. It has nothing to do with whether economy is monetized or functions through exchange in kind (by barter). In the exploitative relation between slave and master, once the initial payment is amortized, money does not intervene, and yet it is one of the worst brutalities in history. Injustice exists when a product "A" is exchanged for a product "B," and their values -- the labor time necessary to produce each one of them -- are not equal, that is to say, when equivalents are not exchanged. Whether that exchange of unequal values (unequal labor efforts) is monetized -- that is to say, whether it is expressed in monetary or natural form -- is secondary. Q. What would be the decisive step of the President, then? A. It is not generalized nationalization of private property, because it does not solve the cybernetic problem of the market. It did not do so in the past and it would not do so today. Socialism today is essentially a problem of informatic complexity. Hence, the transcendental step consists in establishing socialist accounting (value) next to capitalist accounting (price), in the State, PdVSA-CVG, and cooperatives, in order to construct an economic circuit of production and circulation parallel to that of the capitalist market economy. The economy of state and social institutions can move step by step toward the economy of value and gain ground against the circuit of capitalist reproduction, until it displaces it in the future. Since the scales of valuation by prices, values, and also volumes are commensurable, there are no ruptures in economic exchanges that could cause a political problem to the government. In all this, the State and the majorities play an important role, but both are nowadays mainly with the project of the President. To create this parallel circuit of the economy of value would be relatively easy, because values exist in underlying form in the present capitalist accounting. Values exist in it in such a way that, with the development of corresponding software, it would be very easy to establish this socialist economic circuit next to the capitalist one. Without this passage to the economy of equivalency, it is not possible to have a socialist economy. This interview was published in Rebelión on 2 January 2007. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

email2friend ]]> http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2007/01/12/in-venezuela-conditions-for-building-socialism-of-the-21st-century-have-been-created/feed/ 0 http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2006/12/25/true-solidarity-in-a-cold-world-hugo-chavez-is-%e2%80%98black%e2%80%99-santa-claus-for-us-poor/ http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2006/12/25/true-solidarity-in-a-cold-world-hugo-chavez-is-%e2%80%98black%e2%80%99-santa-claus-for-us-poor/#comments Mon, 25 Dec 2006 06:00:53 +0000 Glen Ford http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2006/12/25/true-solidarity-in-a-cold-world-hugo-chavez-is-%e2%80%98black%e2%80%99-santa-claus-for-us-poor/ by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford

“Hate against me has a lot to do with racism. Because of my big mouth, because of my curly hair. And I’m so proud to have this mouth and this hair, because it’s African.” – Hugo Chavez, Democracy Now, September 20, 2005

For tens of thousands of needy Americans this holiday season, “Saint Nick” arrived in the person of a former paratrooper with straight-from-the-barrio Afro-Indian features, commanding fleets of trucks bearing millions of gallons of heating oil heavily discounted for the poor. Through his year-round policy of international solidarity – which is quite different than seasonal generosity – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the most frequently and fairly elected head of state in the history of the Americas, has revealed the identity of the real Global Grinch: George Bush and the multinational oil companies and fat cats he serves. It’s a lesson even reality-starved North Americans should comprehend, and one that should find particular resonance among African Americans. Had he been born in Georgia, rather than in the backwater interior of a Spanish-speaking country, Hugo Chavez would certainly have been considered a Black man. The white elites of Venezuela seem to feel the same way – Chavez is routinely referred to as a “monkey” in his homeland’s oligarchic media. Indeed, Chavez’s status as the most popular politician in Latin America has resulted in a kind of perverse North-South hemispheric solidarity among white elites, who collectively tremble at every stirring of Black-brown political power.

“Chavez is routinely referred to as a ‘monkey’ in his homeland’s oligarchic media.”

From the suites of Wall Street to San Francisco’s counter-culture enclaves, both leftist and rightist adherents of various narrow “economics-only” worldviews insist that Washington’s Chavez-phobia is all about oil, and that race is secondary or diversionary. They fail – or refuse – to acknowledge that race and class are intertwined in both halves of the hemisphere, although with different, local particularities. The conquests, exterminations, and re-populations of the Americas were race-based. Democracy and true self-determination of the peoples of the Americas cannot be achieved absent the awakening of those who were – and largely remain – chained by the legacy of history. Hugo Chavez is waking folks up. His discounting, sharing and bartering of Venezuela’s most valuable natural resource, oil, is but one part of a larger vision of cooperation among peoples, that could serve as a model to resist, combat and replace the Global Rule-Of-Capital Order. Cuba, for example, has little oil, but doctors aplenty. Capitalism is incapable of fairly distributing medical services or of maintaining any other edifice of civilization that is not based on ever-escalating rates of profit for the rulers – a formula for vast suffering and eventual global collapse. In return for discounted oil, Venezuela imports more than 10,000 Cuban doctors to tend to the needs of the poor Venezuelan majority. That’s functional solidarity outside the dollar-dominated Order. The quality of life of both nations is enhanced through rational, voluntary exchange, rather than the coercive, race-to-the bottom international relationships of late-stage, armed-to-the-teeth global capitalism. Chavez’s vision is not Stop the World, I Want to Get Off. Rather, it is Change the World, So That We All Can Prosper. Solidarity is a people-to-people enterprise. When governments are not representative of their people, and/or oppress minority populations, solidarity means forging direct ties with the beleaguered people, not their government. Such is the spirit in which poor Americans, and especially African Americans, should receive Venezuela’s discounted oil and Chavez’s many other offers of people-to-people assistance. Chavez presents African Americans with a fundamental challenge: Are U.S. Blacks really a big enough, wise enough people to assume their unique place in the world as self-determiners, ready and eager to act in their own interests with partners with whom they share common goals – peace, a more equitable distribution of wealth, racial equality – as well as a parallel history of oppression at European hands? Or will African Americans crawl into the oppressor’s tent – a very cold place in which Blacks are usually unwelcome, except when needed in defense of Empire.

“Are U.S. Blacks really a big enough, wise enough people to assume their unique place in the world as self-determiners, ready and eager to act in their own interests with partners with whom they share common goals?”

African Americans are called upon to demonstrate in word and deed that they are receptive to honest overtures from others in the diaspora, without first having to request permission from America’s rulers. Some have failed the test, most sadly, Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel (D). “This is one country, whether we're Democrat or Republicans,” said Rangel, in a bizarre outburst after Chavez called George Bush “the Devil” the at the United Nations, in September. “And to come here, at the invitation of our people, and insult the president of the United States, you insult the flag; you insult the president; you insult the country; and you insult my constituents.” In other variations of his weird rant, Rangel spoke of “my president” being so cruelly maligned – a kind of twist on the old “Is we sick, boss?” Black servant line. (“Is we insulted, boss?”) Later, Rangel “clarified” his remarks, reiterating his “extreme displeasure” with Chavez’s “personal and disparaging” characterization of Bush as Beelzebub. Chavez’s demeaning public attack against [Bush] is viewed by Republicans and Democrats, and all Americans, as an attack on all of us.” Really? Only if one feels in need of an exorcism every time the president becomes possessed by otherworldly forces, as regularly occurs. (“Is we haunted, boss?”) The congressman acknowledged that his own constituents were slated to become major recipients of Chavez’s discount oil deliveries – but it was a backhanded thank-you: “Venezuela's generosity to the poor, however, should not be interpreted as license to attack President Bush.  Those who take issue with Bush Administration policies have no right to attack him personally.  It was not helpful when President Bush referred to certain nations as an ‘axis of evil.’  Neither is it helpful for a head of state to use the sacred halls of the United Nations to insult President Bush.” Although Rangel’s rant is three-month-old news, it remains one of the baldest, most pitiful recent examples of contradiction in the behavior of a supposedly progressive African American politician. Rangel’s irate expression of solidarity with Bush – the most virulently anti-Black president since Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal bureaucracy in 1913 – clashes violently with the president’s own total lack of solidarity with African Americans. Nevertheless, Rangel maintains that an insult to Bush is “an attack on all of us.” ( Tonto’s rejoinder, “What you mean we, White Man?” comes to mind.)

“Rep. Rangel maintains that an insult to Bush is ‘an attack on all of us.’”

Nonplussed, Chavez traveled to Harlem’s Mount Olivet Baptist Church. "They told me that I should be careful after I called [Bush] the devil — and I think he is the devil — because he might kill me,” Chavez told the overflow crowd in Rangel’s own district. Bush has been trying to dispose of Chavez at least since the U.S.-inspired April, 2002 coup attempt, yet murderous designs on the part of “his” president mean less to Rangel than perceived insults “to us all” from the crinkly-haired brown Latino bearing gifts, Hugo Chavez. Rangel’s misplaced solidarity can be partially explained by comments from “his” House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, the purported progressive from San Francisco. Chavez, she said, “is an everyday thug” who “demeaned himself and he demeaned Venezuela.” So maybe, Rangel was really expressing solidarity with Democratic leadership – the people who will elevate him to chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, next month. Will he then find “ways and means” to reciprocate for Venezuela’s good deeds in Harlem? Such as cutting off all funds to Washington’s destabilization campaign against Chavez’s democratically elected government? Which Side Are You On? Rangel may have been especially uncomfortable with Chavez’s unabashed expressions of racial solidarity with the African diaspora over the years. Better to denounce the visiting head of state than to be suspected of divided “loyalties.” Or maybe he’s just confused. If so, the congressman has lots of company among those Blacks who suspect that Latinos feign solidarity with African Americans for narrow political advantage. But Chavez’s racial awareness is homegrown, the product of his own society. As author Richard Gott (In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chavez and the transformation of Venezuela [Verso]) observed in a visit to Caracas in 2002, Chavez’s third year in office: “A mass of humanity passes by, in perpetual movement. Some are white or of mixed race, but the great majority are dark skinned. Venezuela is poised geographically between Brazil and the islands of the Caribbean, and the children of slaves and native Americans far outnumber those of the European settlers. In one of the richest countries in Latin America, they live in permanent and absolute poverty. Many scratch a living as hawkers in the valleys below. “My impression is that a rock-solid majority for Chavez, based on class and race, remains intact. For the first time in Venezuelan history, the country's hidden majority – black, indigenous and mestizo – have a president with whom they can identify. Things may not have gone too well for them in the past three years, and some sections of the poor may have got even poorer. But they also face overt racism from the country's ruling elite. It is clear that Chavez is a president in whom they still have faith, and whom they will defend.”

“A rock-solid majority for Chavez, based on class and race, remains intact.”

As of this month, Chavez and his allies have won ten free and fair elections and referendums since coming to power in 1998 – far more than can be said of Bush or any other American president with the possible exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whose four terms and multiple Democratic congresses were all achieved when more than half of Blacks could not vote). Chavez’s base is the 70 percent non-white Venezuelan majority, a proportion that overlaps with the lower classes of society. When Chavez speaks of white racism, he knows what he’s talking about. “We are all equal, Black, white, Indian, Brown or mixed,” Chavez told a visiting African American delegation in January, 2006. “We need to put the fight against racism at the forefront of our struggle.” The delegation, organized by TransAfrica, responded to Chavez’s solidarity, in kind. But how do Afro-Venezuelan activists rate their president? In July, 2005, SeeingBlack.com published an interview with Jesus "Chucho" Garcia, a leader of the 30-group Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations. Diaspora correspondent Karen Juanita Carrillo wrote: “The network wants a reform of the constitution, so that it recognizes the nation's multi-ethnicity and respects Afro-Venezuelan rights; the creation of a new census that categorizes and counts Venezuela's Black population; the acknowledgement of Afro-Venezuelan history in school curriculum; the creation of a federal-level ministry to implement the World Conference Against Racism's ‘Durban Plan of Action’; the creation of a ministry to implement UNESCO's Convention on Diversity; and the creation of an Afro-Venezuelan Ministry, to address the everyday lives of Blacks in the country.” Network spokesman Garcia said his groups were engaged in “constructive criticism” of Chavez’s government: “We're not part of the government and we're not at all part of the opposition to the Chávez administration. We just think that with the implementation of these six principles, we will make the Bolívarian revolution complete.” We see that the Venezuelan racial conversation is not solely for export, but an extension of a peaceful internal project in progress, only made possible by Chavez’s 1998 election and subsequent victories. This conversation has spread throughout Latin America, shaking the foundations of de facto white elite rule. It is a dialogue – plus deeds – that African Americans must join, if they are to fulfill their domestic and international obligation as a civilizing force in the belly of the superpower beast. “What is the nature of Solidarity?” We must be serious about the nature of solidarity – who is deserving of ours, and what that means in terms of African American domestic political behavior. Rep. Charles Rangel presented a terrible example of egregious contempt for Chavez’s outstretched hand of political and material solidarity. Others, including folks on the Left, offer a bleached-out geopolitical-economic paradigm that rejects the international realities of race and history, thus consigning African Americans to the status of spectators or “yes” men for the foreign policies of Republican or Democratic U.S. administrations. What is the nature of Solidarity? Obviously, it is a quality of which US-based multinational corporations are totally lacking, as they export millions of jobs while importing lower wage and living standards. In late 2005, thirteen U.S. Senators appealed to every major U.S. oil company to offer heating fuel discounts to the poor. Only Citgo – the Houston-based, Venezuelan government owned firm – responded positively. The U.S. corporate media, a group of interlocking cogs in a global corporate machine, claims Chavez and Citgo are out to “embarrass” President Bush – as if the White House can’t make itself look uncaring and inhumane on its own. Despite effective censorship, millions of African Americans know that Hugo Chavez was among the first foreign leaders to offer assistance to the Katrina-ravaged Gulf states – much of which was snarlingly refused by the Bush men. The Venezuelan pledge of people-to-people friendship and true solidarity is still extended. Mature African Americans and progressives should accept these overtures at face value, “From The Venezuelan Heart to U.S. Hearths,” as Citgo says. The world requires internal U.S. opposition to both War Parties if it is to survive. However, Hugo Chavez needs none of our assistance to keep getting elected at home. With more than 60 percent of the vote, Chavez addressed a huge crowd of supporters early this month: "It's another defeat for the devil, who tries to dominate the world. Down with imperialism! We need a new world!" BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford can be reached at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

email2friend ]]> by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford

“Hate against me has a lot to do with racism. Because of my big mouth, because of my curly hair. And I’m so proud to have this mouth and this hair, because it’s African.” – Hugo Chavez, Democracy Now, September 20, 2005

For tens of thousands of needy Americans this holiday season, “Saint Nick” arrived in the person of a former paratrooper with straight-from-the-barrio Afro-Indian features, commanding fleets of trucks bearing millions of gallons of heating oil heavily discounted for the poor. Through his year-round policy of international solidarity – which is quite different than seasonal generosity – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the most frequently and fairly elected head of state in the history of the Americas, has revealed the identity of the real Global Grinch: George Bush and the multinational oil companies and fat cats he serves. It’s a lesson even reality-starved North Americans should comprehend, and one that should find particular resonance among African Americans. Had he been born in Georgia, rather than in the backwater interior of a Spanish-speaking country, Hugo Chavez would certainly have been considered a Black man. The white elites of Venezuela seem to feel the same way – Chavez is routinely referred to as a “monkey” in his homeland’s oligarchic media. Indeed, Chavez’s status as the most popular politician in Latin America has resulted in a kind of perverse North-South hemispheric solidarity among white elites, who collectively tremble at every stirring of Black-brown political power.

“Chavez is routinely referred to as a ‘monkey’ in his homeland’s oligarchic media.”

From the suites of Wall Street to San Francisco’s counter-culture enclaves, both leftist and rightist adherents of various narrow “economics-only” worldviews insist that Washington’s Chavez-phobia is all about oil, and that race is secondary or diversionary. They fail – or refuse – to acknowledge that race and class are intertwined in both halves of the hemisphere, although with different, local particularities. The conquests, exterminations, and re-populations of the Americas were race-based. Democracy and true self-determination of the peoples of the Americas cannot be achieved absent the awakening of those who were – and largely remain – chained by the legacy of history. Hugo Chavez is waking folks up. His discounting, sharing and bartering of Venezuela’s most valuable natural resource, oil, is but one part of a larger vision of cooperation among peoples, that could serve as a model to resist, combat and replace the Global Rule-Of-Capital Order. Cuba, for example, has little oil, but doctors aplenty. Capitalism is incapable of fairly distributing medical services or of maintaining any other edifice of civilization that is not based on ever-escalating rates of profit for the rulers – a formula for vast suffering and eventual global collapse. In return for discounted oil, Venezuela imports more than 10,000 Cuban doctors to tend to the needs of the poor Venezuelan majority. That’s functional solidarity outside the dollar-dominated Order. The quality of life of both nations is enhanced through rational, voluntary exchange, rather than the coercive, race-to-the bottom international relationships of late-stage, armed-to-the-teeth global capitalism. Chavez’s vision is not Stop the World, I Want to Get Off. Rather, it is Change the World, So That We All Can Prosper. Solidarity is a people-to-people enterprise. When governments are not representative of their people, and/or oppress minority populations, solidarity means forging direct ties with the beleaguered people, not their government. Such is the spirit in which poor Americans, and especially African Americans, should receive Venezuela’s discounted oil and Chavez’s many other offers of people-to-people assistance. Chavez presents African Americans with a fundamental challenge: Are U.S. Blacks really a big enough, wise enough people to assume their unique place in the world as self-determiners, ready and eager to act in their own interests with partners with whom they share common goals – peace, a more equitable distribution of wealth, racial equality – as well as a parallel history of oppression at European hands? Or will African Americans crawl into the oppressor’s tent – a very cold place in which Blacks are usually unwelcome, except when needed in defense of Empire.

“Are U.S. Blacks really a big enough, wise enough people to assume their unique place in the world as self-determiners, ready and eager to act in their own interests with partners with whom they share common goals?”

African Americans are called upon to demonstrate in word and deed that they are receptive to honest overtures from others in the diaspora, without first having to request permission from America’s rulers. Some have failed the test, most sadly, Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel (D). “This is one country, whether we're Democrat or Republicans,” said Rangel, in a bizarre outburst after Chavez called George Bush “the Devil” the at the United Nations, in September. “And to come here, at the invitation of our people, and insult the president of the United States, you insult the flag; you insult the president; you insult the country; and you insult my constituents.” In other variations of his weird rant, Rangel spoke of “my president” being so cruelly maligned – a kind of twist on the old “Is we sick, boss?” Black servant line. (“Is we insulted, boss?”) Later, Rangel “clarified” his remarks, reiterating his “extreme displeasure” with Chavez’s “personal and disparaging” characterization of Bush as Beelzebub. Chavez’s demeaning public attack against [Bush] is viewed by Republicans and Democrats, and all Americans, as an attack on all of us.” Really? Only if one feels in need of an exorcism every time the president becomes possessed by otherworldly forces, as regularly occurs. (“Is we haunted, boss?”) The congressman acknowledged that his own constituents were slated to become major recipients of Chavez’s discount oil deliveries – but it was a backhanded thank-you: “Venezuela's generosity to the poor, however, should not be interpreted as license to attack President Bush.  Those who take issue with Bush Administration policies have no right to attack him personally.  It was not helpful when President Bush referred to certain nations as an ‘axis of evil.’  Neither is it helpful for a head of state to use the sacred halls of the United Nations to insult President Bush.” Although Rangel’s rant is three-month-old news, it remains one of the baldest, most pitiful recent examples of contradiction in the behavior of a supposedly progressive African American politician. Rangel’s irate expression of solidarity with Bush – the most virulently anti-Black president since Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal bureaucracy in 1913 – clashes violently with the president’s own total lack of solidarity with African Americans. Nevertheless, Rangel maintains that an insult to Bush is “an attack on all of us.” ( Tonto’s rejoinder, “What you mean we, White Man?” comes to mind.)

“Rep. Rangel maintains that an insult to Bush is ‘an attack on all of us.’”

Nonplussed, Chavez traveled to Harlem’s Mount Olivet Baptist Church. "They told me that I should be careful after I called [Bush] the devil — and I think he is the devil — because he might kill me,” Chavez told the overflow crowd in Rangel’s own district. Bush has been trying to dispose of Chavez at least since the U.S.-inspired April, 2002 coup attempt, yet murderous designs on the part of “his” president mean less to Rangel than perceived insults “to us all” from the crinkly-haired brown Latino bearing gifts, Hugo Chavez. Rangel’s misplaced solidarity can be partially explained by comments from “his” House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, the purported progressive from San Francisco. Chavez, she said, “is an everyday thug” who “demeaned himself and he demeaned Venezuela.” So maybe, Rangel was really expressing solidarity with Democratic leadership – the people who will elevate him to chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, next month. Will he then find “ways and means” to reciprocate for Venezuela’s good deeds in Harlem? Such as cutting off all funds to Washington’s destabilization campaign against Chavez’s democratically elected government? Which Side Are You On? Rangel may have been especially uncomfortable with Chavez’s unabashed expressions of racial solidarity with the African diaspora over the years. Better to denounce the visiting head of state than to be suspected of divided “loyalties.” Or maybe he’s just confused. If so, the congressman has lots of company among those Blacks who suspect that Latinos feign solidarity with African Americans for narrow political advantage. But Chavez’s racial awareness is homegrown, the product of his own society. As author Richard Gott (In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chavez and the transformation of Venezuela [Verso]) observed in a visit to Caracas in 2002, Chavez’s third year in office: “A mass of humanity passes by, in perpetual movement. Some are white or of mixed race, but the great majority are dark skinned. Venezuela is poised geographically between Brazil and the islands of the Caribbean, and the children of slaves and native Americans far outnumber those of the European settlers. In one of the richest countries in Latin America, they live in permanent and absolute poverty. Many scratch a living as hawkers in the valleys below. “My impression is that a rock-solid majority for Chavez, based on class and race, remains intact. For the first time in Venezuelan history, the country's hidden majority – black, indigenous and mestizo – have a president with whom they can identify. Things may not have gone too well for them in the past three years, and some sections of the poor may have got even poorer. But they also face overt racism from the country's ruling elite. It is clear that Chavez is a president in whom they still have faith, and whom they will defend.”

“A rock-solid majority for Chavez, based on class and race, remains intact.”

As of this month, Chavez and his allies have won ten free and fair elections and referendums since coming to power in 1998 – far more than can be said of Bush or any other American president with the possible exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whose four terms and multiple Democratic congresses were all achieved when more than half of Blacks could not vote). Chavez’s base is the 70 percent non-white Venezuelan majority, a proportion that overlaps with the lower classes of society. When Chavez speaks of white racism, he knows what he’s talking about. “We are all equal, Black, white, Indian, Brown or mixed,” Chavez told a visiting African American delegation in January, 2006. “We need to put the fight against racism at the forefront of our struggle.” The delegation, organized by TransAfrica, responded to Chavez’s solidarity, in kind. But how do Afro-Venezuelan activists rate their president? In July, 2005, SeeingBlack.com published an interview with Jesus "Chucho" Garcia, a leader of the 30-group Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations. Diaspora correspondent Karen Juanita Carrillo wrote: “The network wants a reform of the constitution, so that it recognizes the nation's multi-ethnicity and respects Afro-Venezuelan rights; the creation of a new census that categorizes and counts Venezuela's Black population; the acknowledgement of Afro-Venezuelan history in school curriculum; the creation of a federal-level ministry to implement the World Conference Against Racism's ‘Durban Plan of Action’; the creation of a ministry to implement UNESCO's Convention on Diversity; and the creation of an Afro-Venezuelan Ministry, to address the everyday lives of Blacks in the country.” Network spokesman Garcia said his groups were engaged in “constructive criticism” of Chavez’s government: “We're not part of the government and we're not at all part of the opposition to the Chávez administration. We just think that with the implementation of these six principles, we will make the Bolívarian revolution complete.” We see that the Venezuelan racial conversation is not solely for export, but an extension of a peaceful internal project in progress, only made possible by Chavez’s 1998 election and subsequent victories. This conversation has spread throughout Latin America, shaking the foundations of de facto white elite rule. It is a dialogue – plus deeds – that African Americans must join, if they are to fulfill their domestic and international obligation as a civilizing force in the belly of the superpower beast. “What is the nature of Solidarity?” We must be serious about the nature of solidarity – who is deserving of ours, and what that means in terms of African American domestic political behavior. Rep. Charles Rangel presented a terrible example of egregious contempt for Chavez’s outstretched hand of political and material solidarity. Others, including folks on the Left, offer a bleached-out geopolitical-economic paradigm that rejects the international realities of race and history, thus consigning African Americans to the status of spectators or “yes” men for the foreign policies of Republican or Democratic U.S. administrations. What is the nature of Solidarity? Obviously, it is a quality of which US-based multinational corporations are totally lacking, as they export millions of jobs while importing lower wage and living standards. In late 2005, thirteen U.S. Senators appealed to every major U.S. oil company to offer heating fuel discounts to the poor. Only Citgo – the Houston-based, Venezuelan government owned firm – responded positively. The U.S. corporate media, a group of interlocking cogs in a global corporate machine, claims Chavez and Citgo are out to “embarrass” President Bush – as if the White House can’t make itself look uncaring and inhumane on its own. Despite effective censorship, millions of African Americans know that Hugo Chavez was among the first foreign leaders to offer assistance to the Katrina-ravaged Gulf states – much of which was snarlingly refused by the Bush men. The Venezuelan pledge of people-to-people friendship and true solidarity is still extended. Mature African Americans and progressives should accept these overtures at face value, “From The Venezuelan Heart to U.S. Hearths,” as Citgo says. The world requires internal U.S. opposition to both War Parties if it is to survive. However, Hugo Chavez needs none of our assistance to keep getting elected at home. With more than 60 percent of the vote, Chavez addressed a huge crowd of supporters early this month: "It's another defeat for the devil, who tries to dominate the world. Down with imperialism! We need a new world!" BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford can be reached at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

email2friend ]]> http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2006/12/25/true-solidarity-in-a-cold-world-hugo-chavez-is-%e2%80%98black%e2%80%99-santa-claus-for-us-poor/feed/ 0 http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2006/12/07/chavez-venezuela-backs-socialism-shift/ http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2006/12/07/chavez-venezuela-backs-socialism-shift/#comments Thu, 07 Dec 2006 05:00:55 +0000 Christopher Toothaker http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2006/12/07/chavez-venezuela-backs-socialism-shift/ by Christopher Toothaker President Hugo Chavez snubbed a U.S. overture for dialogue, saying Tuesday he doubts Washington sincerely wants to improve relations. Chavez, who overwhelmingly won another six-year term in elections Sunday, said if the U.S. really wants to take meaningful steps, it would halt the war in Iraq and extradite a jailed Cuban militant who is wanted in Venezuela for a 1976 airliner bombing. "They want dialogue but on the condition that you accept their positions," Chavez said at his first news conference since Sunday's vote. "If the government of the United States wants dialogue, Venezuela will always have its door open," he said. "But I doubt the U.S. government is sincere." The comments from Chavez came shortly after U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield congratulated Venezuelans on a peaceful vote and expressed Washington's willingness to seek a less conflictive relationship with Chavez. "The president was re-elected by the decision of the Venezuelan people," Brownfield told the Venezuelan broadcaster Union Radio. "We recognize that and we're ready, willing and eager to explore and see if we can make progress on bilateral issues." Brownfield said the United States and Venezuela share an interest in cooperating on issues including combatting drug trafficking, international crime and terrorism, as well as trade and energy issues. "Venezuela is a partner of the United States, for geographical reasons, for historical reasons," he said. The United States remains the No. 1 buyer of Venezuelan oil, but tensions have often precluded dialogue. Chavez accuses Washington of backing a 2002 coup against him, while U.S. officials worry about the health of Venezuela's democracy in a government dominated by Chavez and his allies. Chavez also said his landslide re-election victory in a vote marked by the highest turnout in years showed Venezuela supports a radical turn toward socialism. Chavez spoke after the elections council formally declared him the winner, defeating Manuel Rosales with nearly 63 percent of the vote. Electoral officials said turnout was about 75 percent. "Those who voted for me didn't vote for me. They voted for the socialist plan, to build a profoundly different Venezuela," Chavez said, praising the Rosales camp for accepting his victory. "I want to salute the responsible opposition ... It was time they assumed the attitude of true democrats." Chavez won some 7.2 million votes out of more than 11 million cast, the results showed. "These more than 7 million votes are votes for socialism," Chavez told reporters. "Socialism is democracy. ... With capitalism, a true democracy is impossible." Recent polls suggest Venezuelans hold a variety of opinions about socialism. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll last month found that 37 percent favored a socialist economic system, 22 percent favored capitalism and 33 percent preferred a mix of the two. Eighty-four percent opposed adopting a political system similar to that of Cuba, which has become Venezuela's close ally under Chavez. During the news conference, Chavez read a note from ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro congratulating him on his victory. Chavez said he could tell from the signature that Castro was gaining his strength back. Chavez has said he plans to seek constitutional reforms to end presidential term limits and enable him to run again in 2012. He also has said he plans to deepen oil-funded social programs aimed at reducing poverty. He says he will fully respect private property, though he also pledged to deepen agrarian reform and has hinted he might nationalize Venezuela's largest telecommunications company. Electoral observers from the European Union said in a preliminary report Tuesday that they backed the results of Sunday's election and that overall the vote was carried out smoothly and securely. However, the EU mission noted a few areas of concerns, including a high participation of public employees in Chavez's campaign events, unbalanced coverage in both state and private media, and a heavy use of government advertising by Chavez, and to a lesser degree, Rosales. Monica Frassoni, the Italian head of the EU mission, said complaints had been received of alleged pressure on public employees to vote for Chavez. She said such pressure would violate electoral laws, but the mission was not able to evaluate those complaints. Originally in Forbes, December 5, 2006

email2friend ]]> by Christopher Toothaker President Hugo Chavez snubbed a U.S. overture for dialogue, saying Tuesday he doubts Washington sincerely wants to improve relations. Chavez, who overwhelmingly won another six-year term in elections Sunday, said if the U.S. really wants to take meaningful steps, it would halt the war in Iraq and extradite a jailed Cuban militant who is wanted in Venezuela for a 1976 airliner bombing. "They want dialogue but on the condition that you accept their positions," Chavez said at his first news conference since Sunday's vote. "If the government of the United States wants dialogue, Venezuela will always have its door open," he said. "But I doubt the U.S. government is sincere." The comments from Chavez came shortly after U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield congratulated Venezuelans on a peaceful vote and expressed Washington's willingness to seek a less conflictive relationship with Chavez. "The president was re-elected by the decision of the Venezuelan people," Brownfield told the Venezuelan broadcaster Union Radio. "We recognize that and we're ready, willing and eager to explore and see if we can make progress on bilateral issues." Brownfield said the United States and Venezuela share an interest in cooperating on issues including combatting drug trafficking, international crime and terrorism, as well as trade and energy issues. "Venezuela is a partner of the United States, for geographical reasons, for historical reasons," he said. The United States remains the No. 1 buyer of Venezuelan oil, but tensions have often precluded dialogue. Chavez accuses Washington of backing a 2002 coup against him, while U.S. officials worry about the health of Venezuela's democracy in a government dominated by Chavez and his allies. Chavez also said his landslide re-election victory in a vote marked by the highest turnout in years showed Venezuela supports a radical turn toward socialism. Chavez spoke after the elections council formally declared him the winner, defeating Manuel Rosales with nearly 63 percent of the vote. Electoral officials said turnout was about 75 percent. "Those who voted for me didn't vote for me. They voted for the socialist plan, to build a profoundly different Venezuela," Chavez said, praising the Rosales camp for accepting his victory. "I want to salute the responsible opposition ... It was time they assumed the attitude of true democrats." Chavez won some 7.2 million votes out of more than 11 million cast, the results showed. "These more than 7 million votes are votes for socialism," Chavez told reporters. "Socialism is democracy. ... With capitalism, a true democracy is impossible." Recent polls suggest Venezuelans hold a variety of opinions about socialism. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll last month found that 37 percent favored a socialist economic system, 22 percent favored capitalism and 33 percent preferred a mix of the two. Eighty-four percent opposed adopting a political system similar to that of Cuba, which has become Venezuela's close ally under Chavez. During the news conference, Chavez read a note from ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro congratulating him on his victory. Chavez said he could tell from the signature that Castro was gaining his strength back. Chavez has said he plans to seek constitutional reforms to end presidential term limits and enable him to run again in 2012. He also has said he plans to deepen oil-funded social programs aimed at reducing poverty. He says he will fully respect private property, though he also pledged to deepen agrarian reform and has hinted he might nationalize Venezuela's largest telecommunications company. Electoral observers from the European Union said in a preliminary report Tuesday that they backed the results of Sunday's election and that overall the vote was carried out smoothly and securely. However, the EU mission noted a few areas of concerns, including a high participation of public employees in Chavez's campaign events, unbalanced coverage in both state and private media, and a heavy use of government advertising by Chavez, and to a lesser degree, Rosales. Monica Frassoni, the Italian head of the EU mission, said complaints had been received of alleged pressure on public employees to vote for Chavez. She said such pressure would violate electoral laws, but the mission was not able to evaluate those complaints. Originally in Forbes, December 5, 2006

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