the reforms and the PSUV:
Despite their overall contradictory and transitional nature, key aspects of the reforms are aimed squarely at the heart of the capitalist system, specifically measures which although they don't abolish private property altogether, provide a framework for further inroads into the rights of capital and the "new geometry of power" aimed at transforming the capitalist state through the construction of organs of popular power, such as communes, workers councils, student councils, and campesino councils.
(...) When Chavez first announced the formation of the PSUV in December 2006 he clearly conceived of it as an anti-bureaucratic measure, as a tool to broaden the leadership, overwhelmingly centered on Chavez himself, and push forward with the revolution. "A new party needs new faces," he said.
(...) However, despite Chavez's intentions to build a party with "new faces" from below, many of the old faces remain and a key contradiction the new party faces is the struggle between the radical grass roots and what many on the Venezuelan left refer to as, the "endogenous rightwing" of Chavismo (based on a nexus between the state bureaucracy and sections of capital). As José Miguel Casado points out, "This is the objective reality that reflects the true contradictions of the complex political universe that is the Bolivarian Revolution, it is the live expression of the class struggle, a phenomenon that the PSUV will not escape, nor any other social or political space."[13]
(...) However, despite this there are in reality a myriad of radical left groupings organizing within the PSUV. These include; the majority of the most class-conscious workers from all the union currents that organize in the National Union of Workers (UNT), including the majority of C-CURA (whose rank and file workers agitated for and voted to go into the PSUV, while a smaller section around Orlando Chirino stayed out), the Revolutionary Front of Workers in Occupied and Co-managed Factories (FRETECO), and the Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front (FNCEZ).
(...) Bilbao points to the extraordinary potential of the PSUV, "The possibility of carrying out the battle [for socialism] in a scenario of 5.7 million people who want to construct a revolutionary party is," he says, "something that changes the political face of the planet, not just Venezuela and Latin America."
(...) What the struggle for the constitutional reform and the construction of the PSUV has revealed most clearly is that the battle lines are drawn between the endogenous rightwing and the revolutionary grassroots of Chavismo. Chavez has designated 2008 as the year of the "revolution within the revolution"- it remains to be seen if the PSUV can truly become "a political instrument that puts itself at the service ...of the people and the revolution, at the service of socialism."[18]