*ZNet | Venezuela*
*Venezuela's Path*
*by Michael Albert; November 06, 2*
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=9067
Going to Venezuela? There are beautiful waterfalls and mountains. There is rich surf, sand, and sun. But nowadays the biggest attraction is revolution.
This October I spent a week in Caracas. That's not much information to work with but for what it's worth, here's what I found and felt.
*Toward a New Political System*
My first and arguably most personally surprising encounter with the Bolivarian Revolution was at the Ministry for Popular Participation, which was created in accord, I was told, with Chavez's desire "that the people should take power."
I asked the officials we interviewed, "What does that mean, that the people should take power?" After noting thousands of years of "empires obstructing people from participating in politics," all culminating in "the North American empire," the official said the "U.S. has had 200 years of representative government, but in your system people turn over control to others." Instead, in Venezuela, "we humbly are proposing a system where people hold power in a participatory and protagonist democracy. We want a new kind of democracy to attain a new kind of society."
On the wall was a diagram of their aims. It had lots of little circles, then other larger ones in another layer, and so on. The idea, they said, "was to establish numerous local grassroots assemblies or councils of citizens where people could directly express themselves." These local councils would be the foundational components of "a new system of participatory democracy."
The bottom layer of the vision focuses on communities with "common habits and customs," the officials said. "We define them as comprising 200 to 400 families, or 1000 to 2000 people each." One could of course imagine sub units within each local unit, as well, but that wasn't immediately on their agenda, nor was it in their diagram. The local units would in turn send "elected spokespersons" to units another layer up. Units in this second layer would "encompass a broader geographic region," and then from there, "spokespeople would be elected to another layer, and so on," creating a network covering "parishes, municipalities, states, and the whole society."
The participation officials, explaining their diagram and their goal, said the smallest units were meant to become "the decision-making core of the new Venezuelan polity." Chavez and this ministry hoped to have, they said, "3,000 local assemblies in place by the new year." Their goal was to have "enough in place, throughout the country, in 4 or 5 years, to account for 26 million Venezuelans."
They didn't want "a dictatorship of the proletariat or of any other kind," they said. Strikingly, they also said they didn't want "what Che died for, though they wanted to learn from that." They wanted to build something new, from the bottom.
I asked, "What happens if the local assemblies want some new policy, and the ministers, legislature, or Chavez don't want it?" "No matter," they said, "the assemblies, once they are in place and operating, rule."
But, I said, "you don't want an assembly of 100 families making a decision for the whole country, surely." "Correct," came the answer, "the local assemblies can only make final decisions bearing just on their own area."
"Suppose one assembly decides it wants some change bearing on crime that has to do with federal courts or police or whatever, extending beyond that community?" I asked. "What happens? When does the law or policy change?"
Continued - at