The promise of 21st century socialism was the development of a new radical democracy and the construction of a new kind of state, responsive to and representative of the mass base of the revolution, the working class, the poor and the indigenous peoples. Instead the relationship between the Bolivarian state and the people is one of dependency in which resources, far from providing the means to achieve an increasing level of autonomy and initiative at the grassroots, have been used to forge new networks of power within the state and to reinforce centralism. It is true that there have been occasions when Chavez has restrained the bureaucracy—the excesses of the intelligence and counter-intelligence law are one example. But by and large occasional moves against elements of the bureaucracy have had more to do with internal power politics than with any fundamental challenge to the structures themselves.
(...) If it was the case that the referendum vote in 2007 was an expression of the gathering discontent and frustration of the Chavista base, the 2008 results are, it seems, the expression of similar, still unresolved, feelings. Diosdado did not convince the rank and file of the PSUV, nor did Silva. Yet those grassroots members had been unable to influence the party they had joined so enthusiastically in the preceding year and a half. The PSUV has 5.7 million members; fewer than half that number voted for the party’s candidates.
(...) The telephone and electricity companies were nationalised last year, and a major milk producer was nationalised as the problem of food supplies and deliberately created shortages became more serious. In each case, however, nationalisation involved the state purchasing firms at market prices and with considerable compensation. So while the Alcasa experiment suggested a very different kind of nationalisation, under workers’ control, the state takeovers seem more consonant with a burgeoning state capitalism.
(...) The movements of Venezuela have a history of mass mobilisation and a high degree of political engagement. The level of political preparedness and education, however, is low and rhetoric has replaced genuine critical debate, as the recent election campaign so clearly and poignantly showed. The instrument of that political coordination cannot, in my view, be the PSUV. Its purpose was entirely electoral and the discourse of participation proved to be hollow. Nonetheless, it is the people who joined the party and built its base organisations who will drive the revolutionary project forward.
(...) Chavez’s response to the elections has been to reopen the question of his re-election after 2012 (the constitution currently forbids that) and has launched a campaign to win the amendment to the constitution. At a time when there should be sober and critical discussion of the implications of the 23 November, an honest assessment of the nature of the PSUV and the beginnings of a “revolution within the revolution”, the whole public debate will once again be centred on the character and future of Hugo Chavez. He is an extraordinary individual. But revolutions are the expression of collective liberation, of the moment when vast numbers of the excluded become the conscious shapers of their own destiny. How to achieve that, how to accelerate the redistribution of wealth and how to create the long promised democracy from below are the critical issues. The campaign for re-election will divert attention from those issues, silence criticism and harden the existing structures, which have already done so much damage to the Bolivarian revolution.

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]

chavez, democracy, and RCTV:
When RCTV's licence to use the free-to-air Channel 2 expired on May 27, the concession was awarded to a new independently produced station, Venezuelan Social Television (TVes), to provide a national space for those previously excluded from the media. This has been used as the latest pretext for an escalating assault against the revolutionary government and people of Venezuela. An international media war has been launched to create the mirage of a democratic protest movement mobilising against the supposed authoritarian, anti-democratic Chavez government. Anti-Venezuela resolutions have been passed by US Congress, the European Union and the right-wing-controlled Brazilian senate.
(...) "Only 140 days have passed" since the new government's inauguration, Chavez explained, yet a "new period has started up, accelerating the process of revolutionary transformation". He pointed to the recuperation of state control over the oil fields in the Orinoco Belt, the re-nationalisation of the telecommunications company CANTV and six electricity companies, as well as the mammoth turnout to register interest in the new united socialist party, the PSUV (by that day, 4.7 million people had registered, reaching more than 5 million by the end of the following day when registrations closed).
(...) Drawing on the "great Italian revolutionary thinker Antonio Gramsci", Chavez outlined why this process has encountered the reaction of imperialism. Referring to Gramsci's thesis — "a truly historic crisis occurs when there is something that is dying, but has not finished dying, and at the same time there is something that is being born but which also hasn't finished being born" — Chavez explained that already by the 1980s, "Venezuela had entered into a historic crisis … [today] we are in the epicentre of the crisis".
(...) For Chavez, the Fourth Republic represented the rule of the "US empire and its lackeys here in Venezuela, the oligarchy, the bourgeoisie, the class that dominated Venezuela for 200 years". This is the same class, he stressed, "that betrayed [Simon] Bolivar, that killed [Jose Antonio de] Sucre, that murdered [Ezequiel] Zamora", all prominent leaders of Venezuela's 200 years of struggle for independence.
(...) According to Gramsci, the superstructure of the dominant historic bloc has two levels, the political society — "the institutions of the state" — and the civil society, consisting of economic and private institutions, specifically the church, media and education system, which are used by the ruling class "to spread among the social and popular classes its dominant ideology".
(...) Chavez noted that one of the "great contradictions" in Venezuelan society today existed between these two factors. "We have been coming along liberating the state", said Chavez. "Bourgeois civil society used to control" the Venezuelan state, government, legislative and judicial power, state companies, government banks, and the national budget, but "they have been losing all of that". Elucidating the battles that lay ahead for the Venezuelan masses, Chavez said that the bourgeoisie was retreating into its last remaining refuges in the media, church and education system.

world bank, imf in latin america:
Other countries may follow. President Rafael Correa of Ecuador announced last week that it was kicking the World Bank's representative out of the country. It was an unprecedented action, which President Correa punctuated by stating that "we will not stand for extortion by this international bureaucracy." In 2005, the World Bank withheld a previously approved $100 million loan to Ecuador to try to force the government to use windfall oil revenues for debt repayment, rather than the government's choice of social spending.
(...) Over the last 25 years Latin America has had its worst long-term economic growth performance in more than a century.
(...) On April 12, 2002, just hours after Venezuela's democratically elected government was overthrown in a military coup, the IMF stated publicly that it was "ready to assist the new administration [of Pedro Carmona] in whatever manner they find suitable." This instantaneous show of financial support for a newly installed dictatorship - one which immediately dissolved the country's constitution, general assembly, and Supreme Court - was unprecedented in the IMF's history. Typically the IMF does not react so quickly, even to an elected government. It is no wonder that this move was seen in Venezuela and elsewhere as an attempt by the IMF to support the coup itself.
(...) The scandal over Paul Wolfowitz's leadership at the World Bank, which is about to topple the Bank's most unwanted president ever, is just the tip of the iceberg. Last month the IMF's Independent Evaluation Office stated that since 1999, nearly three-quarters of aid to the poor countries of Sub-Saharan Africa are not being spent. Rather, at the IMF's request, it is being used to pay off debt and accumulate reserves. This is a terrible thing to do to some of the poorest countries in the world, who desperately need to spend this money on such pressing needs as the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
(...) Whether this will spur reform that can actually change the colonial relationship that these institutions maintain with their borrowers remains to be seen. More likely, they will simply continue to become less relevant to the developing world, as has happened drastically over the last decade.

chavez [populist?]:
The first morning here I attended a meeting called by one of the currents in the National Union of Workers (UNT) to discuss the formation of Bolivarian Councils of Workers, more commonly dubbed workers' councils. Describing the nature of the discussion over these councils, Marcela Maspero, a national coordinator of the UNT, said that the councils had to be "political organisations of the working class, based on direct democracy and control over production." They had to play the role of "eradicating capitalist exploitation, and transforming relations of production in order to create socialised ownership over the means of production." Although these councils have only just begun to appear in a handful of companies, an intense debate at both the governmental and grassroots levels is unfolding over their nature and role.
(...) In the social sphere, Chávez has called for "an explosion in communal power," urging the rapid construction of Communal Councils. These councils are based on the coming together of 200-400 families in urban areas, even less in rural areas, in order to plan and execute projects for the benefit of the community. In some areas, this has already progressed to the point where discussions have begun on the need to establish federations of Communal Councils, in order to tackle larger projects. There are now more than 19,000 Communal Councils. In essence, the aim of the Communal Councils is for power to reside in the communities. This has led to some cases where these councils have come into conflict with the existing state structures, where those who currently hold power fear losing it — a constant battle the revolution encounters as it comes up against the structures of the old state bureaucracy.
(...) Next, the new joiners will be divided up into basic cells of 200 people based on territorial divisions, universities and factories. Out of each, a spokesperson will be elected to participate in the founding congress. No quotas have been set aside for party officials, nor will anyone automatically secure a place in the congress. Even Chávez will have to be elected by his local cell if he is to participate in the conference.

from venezuela