Participatory Democracy

Academic Steve Ellner discusses the differences between Venezuela's radical and "social-based" democratic model and that of reformist and social democratic governments.

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An interesting phenomenon, this one of recent days. It appears that the faucet has finally been opened, allowing the free flow of opinions, critiques, and self-criticisms in the Revolutionary Bolivarian camp. 

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Yoly Fernandez lives in a barrio in the city of Valencia, Venezuela. She has been involved in community politics all her life and is a member of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), headed by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. In this interview she speaks of life for Venezuelan women during the Chavez administration.

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Venezuela's communal councils are an effort to combat red tape and the corruption related to it. They are also the product of a long history of movement politics.

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In mid-June, 2010, we met with Pedro Eusse, National Secretary of the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) and part of the provisional executive committee of the labour confederation, Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (National Union of Workers, UNT). Refusing to be interrupted by the constantly ringing phone, Pedro spoke passionately for two hours about the centrality of organized workers in the revolutionary struggle and the need to unite the labour movement.

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During the 2007 constitutional referendum, one might have thought that the party created by Hugo Chávez in 2006 was stillborn since fewer people voted ‘Yes’ than the number of people officially enrolled in the party. But this impression was partially belied in the following months.

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We caught up with Wilder Marcano, director of the network of Comunas in Caracas, on the morning of June 18, 2010. He talked with us just before addressing a crowd of a few hundred representatives of different comunas from around the capital who had gathered to discuss issues related to building popular power from below in the poorest barrios.

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An interview with Antenea Jimenez, who is working with a national network of activists who are trying to strengthen Venezuela's communes. She discusses the important advances in the process, as well as the significant challenges that remain in the struggle to build a new form of popular power from below.

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The most serious aspect of the crisis facing the global capitalist system is not the bankruptcy of financial corporations, or the global economic downturn, or the discrediting of its institutions of political control. It is the environmental crisis caused by the irrational destruction of nature, to the point of jeopardizing the ability of self-regeneration of the ecosystems on which our survival depends.

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From Venezuela's Communal Councils, to Brazil's Participatory Budgeting; from Constitutional Assemblies to grassroots movements, recuperated factories to cooperatives across the hemisphere - this documentary is a journey which takes us across the Americas, to attempt to answer one of the most important questions of our time: What is Democracy?

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