Venezuela: A “Critical Evaluation” of the Bolivarian Process II

Translator's Note: This is another one of the presentations broadcast on the state-owned television channel VTV. It was part of a forum "Intellectuals, Democracy & Socialism" organized by the Centro Internacional Miranda over June 2-3, which has sparked a debate about the role of criticism within the Bolivarian process.

The president is seeking criticism

Apologies for having arrived late, I'm coming directly from San Salvador, where I attended the swearing in ceremony of the president from the FMLN [Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front], Mauricio Funes.

I am in this country to be critical. I don't know if you all know that when I interviewed President Chavez - which was published under the name Hugo Chavez Frias: A Man of the People - I took advantage, as I generally do in my interviews, to ask questions which spring from the doubts and criticisms of the left, and, furthermore, I took the opportunity to convey the criticisms that I had collected from the people and from intellectuals. So it was when the president said to me, "I want you to come over here, because I want to have critical people at my side," ... What do I mean with this? That he has the desire to receive criticism and what I have done all these years is send him papers. You all know that the president isn't someone who works with a team of advisers, and apparently I am an adviser, but in fact I'm not. I only send papers and who knows if he reads them and if he takes them into consideration.

I want to tell you all that there is a big coincidence between what you have all raised here and what I have been conveying. Of course I've done it in a personal way, I haven't participated in the press and I think that I shouldn't because, in the first place, I'm a Chilean passionate for this process and I think that it's Venezuelans who are constructing [the Bolivarian revolution] and I'm more like a recorder of what is happening. That's my vocation and that's why I write so many testimonial books because I collect what they are doing in different countries.

Governments can massively promote popular participation

I only wanted to say two things. One was about something that Carmen Bohorquez already touched on... It's common to find the most radical sectors of the left in Latin America rejecting the state. Everything that is the state, the government, is bad and I think that we have to distinguish between governments that want to support their people in the struggle for liberation and governments that are a barrier to those processes.

All the left wing governments in Latin America, as many of you have said, are working with a terrible bureaucratic apparatus that they have inherited. But that doesn't mean that from the state and from the government things can't be done, and I think that this process has advanced so much because there has been a government that wanted to create two things: spaces of participation and popular power.

I would say that participation can't be decreed from above; participation is a process of cultural transformation. And that's why it's so fundamental and has been a very big stimulus in Latin America when we've had local or national governments that assume that it's necessary to create spaces of participation to achieve this and to create teams that collaborate to facilitate this participation, because in that way the participation isn't decreed, nor does it spontaneously start existing. In most cases facilitators are needed. Unfortunately it's often considered important to dedicate resources to infrastructure works and not to pay the salary of the facilitators.

Facilitator role, not supplanting role

Now, for me the government, the state, should have a facilitator role of popular participation, not a supplanting role, not the role of director. That's why I'd like to recognize the Ministry of the Communes which is planning to listen to the experiences of the communes that already exist and learn from them. And [the ministry] has said that the communes can't be decreed and that it's necessary to respect the construction processes of the people.

But there are contradictions in the proposal because, at the same time as they say this, we have the [government youth organisation] Frente Francisco de Mirando creating the Social Battle Rooms and there we would have to discuss and we would have to clarify what role this Frente is playing and if these Social Battle Rooms that they are imposing on the communities with the idea that its necessary to facilitate the processes in the communities, [we have to ask] if they aren't exercising a tutelage function instead of simply facilitating the processes.

Don't confuse popular power with political militancy

On the other hand, Vladimir Acosta said [see http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4539] something that I have always insisted upon a lot- we can't confuse the popular power with political militancy. The party is one thing and popular power another. I'd say that red can be the color of the party but it can never be the color of popular power nor should it be the color of the ministries. One of the things that we find strange and that will shock the foreigners a lot, especially in Europe, is that the state is the instrument which is constructing the party. This is something totally contradictory to our perception of the party.

Goals and timing hinder the maturing of the processes

There's one thing that I think we haven't talked about, except for yesterday morning, which is the big problem of goals and timing. I think that democratic processes require maturing, require time, but here what happens is that we give ourselves big goals and little time, so we have everyone racing around to achieve these goals. There's a terrible next-task-ism and there's no possibility to think strategically and to allow things to mature. When you are working on a process of transformation, the state intervention comes along and breaks this rhythm of maturing, pressuring the process.

And regarding this, let me say that I think that the idea of the communal councils is an excellent idea and that the president is very clear that constructing politics he has to construct social force, because some people think that constructing force is to have positions, win positions. But to construct this social force, it has to be constructed through a determined time of maturing. The mobile government vans arrive, for example, and they have to elaborate projects in five days, and instead of there being a process of formation of the communal councils there was a process that lasted at least three months. As some of us who participated in the initial idea were thinking, it was reduced to two [general] assemblies [of the community] and done: one to create the promoters commission [with the task of setting up the communal council] and the other to elect the spokespeople. To that we owe the distorting of the processes, extraordinary experiences are dying.

An abyss between the marvellous ideas and reality

I would say here that you all, that the president, have had so many extraordinary ideas, but when we examine those ideas and look at reality, that is, the application of these ideas, you see that there is an abyss between the two.

The cult of improvisation

And there's one last question, I think that you are all in the cult of improvisation. I came here to the first solidarity event after the coup [of April 2002] and I remember that [the solidarity event] was organised in two weeks, and it turned out that lots of intellectuals came and here they told me, "You see how we organize things here in Venezuela, in two weeks, when in other parts of the world and in Latin America events are prepared six months beforehand. But people don't think about how much better these events could have been if they had been better planned."

And I feel very sad when I see how many marvellous ideas are frustrated because of these types of things, because there is a lot of potential here, there's a president who has some extraordinary ideas, but time is lacking to mature them, the time to concretize them.

Popular educators and not supplanters of popular protagonism

I think the intellectuals here have a very important role to support these processes of maturing and as to the role of the party, I think the role of the party in the 21^st century has to do with facilitating the process of participation and has to do with popular education and not with supplanting popular protagonism nor with being the owner of the truth, ideas that we had decades ago about political militancy, that we are already surpassing. Thanks a lot.

Translated by Tamara Pearson for Venezuelanalysis.com

Marta Harnecker is a Chilean psychologist, journalist, and author of dozens of testimonial books about the processes and experiences of political transformation in Latin America.