Venezuela’s revolutionary working-class movement remains determined to continue the Bolivarian process, undeterred by December’s National Assembly electoral defeat that returned control to the right wing “dinosaurs” responsible for the sweeping inequality of the neoliberal era. Organizing in their communities, workers communes, and social movements, the movement has been identifying strategies to survive the economic warfare, responsible for the food shortages and inflation, and turn back the new right-wing political offensive.
Drawing on the legacy of Hugo Chávez, President Nicolas Maduro has called for communities across the country to debate and strategize a future for the Bolivarian process. These people’s assemblies have come together to defend the process’s considerable social gains: free health care and education, eliminating malnutrition and illiteracy, and, recently, the completion of over one million homes for working-class Venezuelans. They have also taken up the question of how to deepen the socialist character of the revolution.
These meetings taking place across the country represent an organized call from the Bolivarian government for popular participation – a cornerstone of the Bolivarian constitution – in the democratic process moving forward. Condemning the right-wing efforts to privatize public housing, President Maduro, in his annual address, drew from some of the solutions raised in these grassroots meetings.
He also recently appointed a new Minister of Urban Agriculture, Lorena Freitez, who has a background in Venezuela’s communes.
In the popular barrio San Agustín, community and cultural producers held one such meeting to brainstorm strategies to move forward. Robinson Moreno, a student at the National School of Popular Graphic Design (ENGRAPO), spoke with Liberation News about the importance of these conversations, saying, “It’s important for us to organize, each of us in our trenches.” Part of the meeting in San Agustín centered on creating communication strategies to counteract powerful propaganda from the Venezuelan right wing and their international allies. Moreno said, “All of this dialogue, all of this debate is important in order to be able to carry out these battles.”
Meanwhile, in the agricultural community of Caucagua, community members met in popular assemblies in the Plaza Bolívar. Joel Sojo, of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela Youth (JPSUV), talked to Liberation News about combating the food shortages, manipulated by right wing business owners in an effort to strangle the economy.
This has required activists to put renewed attention on developing domestic and local food production outside of the capitalist system and “increasing the productive apparatus of Venezuela.” Sojo continued, “We believe that from the masses we can build this, too – from the barrios, in the countryside, promoting spaces of production.”
The grassroots struggle is supported by measures from the PSUV legislators in the National Assembly. A law, passed in December by the outgoing majority-PSUV National Assembly, strengthened communal agricultural and subsistence farmers by banning the GMO-modified seeds that corporations have patented to push out small and indigenous producers.
In the Plaza Bolívar, thousands watched Maduro’s address projected live on jumbo screens, while, elsewhere, communities organized viewing parties, projecting the address onto walls in their neighborhoods for neighbors to watch together. Rather than defeat the Bolivarian movement, the right-wing attack on public housing and the social missions have generated new momentum to keep the Bolivarian process moving forward — with everyone active in their trenches.
