Chávez arms community groups as he anticipates US invasion
By Alfonso Daniels in Caracas, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 6:47am BSTÂ 24/04/2007
A dozen people gather inside a rudimentary, two-story brick house in
Catia,
the most dangerous of all the slums that ring the Venezuelan capital,
Caracas.
Â
President Chávez is arming community groups
They talk excitedly about plans to repair crumbling walls, clear sewage
and
help local enterprises. It is the business of civic leaders everywhere --
yet
this gathering is also the vanguard of Leftist president Hugo Chávez's
21st-century "socialist revolution".
By the time they have been trained and armed, they will also be ready to
defend Venezuela against outside interference, including the US invasion
that Mr.
Chávez says he expects.
"El Comandante (Mr Chávez) told us to create communal groups and to
tackle
problems ourselves," said Lenny Guerrero, 35, to nods of assent from
others in
the room. "Some government officials came here to help us create the
groups.
Power will now rest with the people."
On Mr Chávez's order, 17,000 communal councils have now been set up
across
the country, and an estimated £1 billion earmarked to fund them. As the
official
slogan, "Build power from below", proclaims, their stated purpose is to
promote grass-roots democracy and hand power directly to the people - in
particular
the urban poor who make up the bulk of his most fervent supporters.
But as well as grappling with the grim conditions in slums such as Catia,
members of these voluntary groups will constitute a nationwide militia,
schooled
in Cuban-style tactics for both guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency.
Gen Alberto Mueller, an advisor to Mr Chávez, told The Sunday Telegraph:
"Some communal groups have already received military training. They'll
train in
their own neighbourhoods and will be equipped with any arms - guns,
grenades,
knifes - the community can provide. We have a right to defend ourselves,
like
the UK has, and be sure we'll do it."
The move has caused alarm among Mr Chávez's critics, who claim the groups
will be used to repress internal dissent. They point out that, unlike
Venezuela's
military reservists, the communal councils come under Mr Chávez's direct
control, including the appointments of their oversight committees and
allocation
of funding.
They are being created in tandem with plans to expand Venezuela's military
reserve fivefold, from about 200,000 people to one million - a move Mr
Chávez
has introduced in the belief that his sworn foe America is planning some
kind of
military intervention.
Tensions with Washington and the West are likely to escalate further next
month, when the Chávez government plans to begin taking control of the
main
European and American-owned oil fields in Venezuela - a move ordered by
presidential decree in February.
The communal councils project is being overseen by David Velasquez, a
communist who is the president's new "minister of the popular power for
participation
and social development".
Although the favoured blueprint for the scheme is the Paris Commune of
1871,
under which socialism briefly reigned in the French capital, critics say
it is
more reminiscent of "mini-Soviets", which will be used to monopolise
Venezuelan local politics. (See Below R.S.)
Emilio Grateron, an opposition councillor from the rich Chacao area,
claimed
that communal councils which did not toe the Chávez line were usually
denied
permission to set up. "When we went to the ministry to set them up, they
asked
us our political affiliation. When they saw we're not Chavistas they
didn't
say no, but flooded us with requests until you feel like giving up," he
said.
Luis Enrique Lander, a sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela,
said that some official regulatory committee members were pushing for
"non-Chavista" groups to be denied acceptance and funding.
Ironically the new communal council in Catia has been devoting its energy
to
fighting the expansion of the nearby Fabricio Ojeda industrial complex,
which
is built with state oil money and which the Chávez administration
portrays as
an example of its new socialist co-operative model. Local residents are
sceptical of promises to resettle them in better conditions.
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In his April 1918 writings, Lenin defined the character of soviet
organization. He wrote:
"The Socialist character of the Soviet democracy that is, of proletarian
democracy in its concrete particular application insists first in this:
that the
electorate comprises the toiling and exploited masses???that the
bourgeoisie is
excluded. Second in this: that all bureaucratic formalities and
limitations of
elections are done away with???that the masses themselves determine the
order
and the time of elections and with complete freedom of recall of elected
officials. Third, that the best possible mass organization of the vanguard
of the
toilers of the industrial proletariat???is formed, enabling them to direct
the
exploited masses, to attract them to active participation in political
life, to
train them politically through their own experience, that in this way a
beginning has been made for the first time actually to get the whole
population to
learn how to manage and to begin managing.
"Such are the principal distinctive features of the democracy which is
being
tried in Russia and which is a higher type of democracy, which breaks away
from bourgeois distortion, and which is a transition to socialist
democracy and
to conditions which will mean the beginning of the end of the state.
"Of course, the chaotic petty bourgeois disorganization (which will
inevitably manifest itself in one or another degree during every
proletarian
revolution, and which in our revolution, on account of the petty bourgeois
character of
the country, its backwardness, and the consequences of the reactionary
war,
manifests itself with special strength), cannot but leave its mark on the
Soviets.
"We must work unceasingly to develop the organization of the Soviets and
Soviet rule. There is a petty bourgeois tendency to turn the members of
the
Soviets into 'parliamentarians' or, on the other hand, into bureaucrats.
This should
be combated by attracting all members of the Soviet to practical
participation in management. The departments of the Soviets are turning in
many places
into organs which gradually merge with the commissariats. Our aim is to
attract
every member of the poor classes to practical participation in the
management,
and the different steps leading toward this end (the more diverse the
better),
should be carefully registered, studied, systematized, verified on broader
experiences, and legalized.
"It is our object to obtain the free performance of state obligations by
every toiler after he is through with his eight-hour session of productive
work.
The transition toward this end is especially difficult, but only this
transition will secure the definite realization of socialism. . . .
"The outcome of struggle with the bureaucratic distortion of the Soviet
organizations is assured by the firm bond between the Soviets and the
people (in
the sense of the exploited toilers), by the flexibility and elasticity of
this
bond. The bourgeois parliaments even in the most democratic capitalist
republics are never looked upon by the poor as 'their' institutions. But
the Soviets
are for the masses of the workers and peasants, 'their own,' and not alien
institutions. . . .
"This proximity of the Soviets to the toiling people creates special forms
of
recall and other methods of control by the masses which should now be
developed with special diligence. For instance the councils of popular
education
deserve the fullest sympathy and support as periodical conferences of the
Soviet
electors and their delegates to discuss and to control the activity of the
Soviet authorities of the particular region.
"Nothing could be more foolish than turning the Soviets into something
settled and self-sufficient The more firmly we now have to advocate a
merciless and
firm rule and dictatorship of individuals for definite processes of work
during certain periods of purely executive functions, the more diverse
should be
the forms and means of mass control in order to paralyze the very
possibility of
distorting the Soviet rule, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to remove
the
wild grass of bureaucratism." (V. I. Lenin, "The Soviets at Work," New
York,
The Rand School of Social Science, 1919, page 39. Not the Stalinist
translation
of V. I. Lenin???sThe Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government found at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm)
Lenin saw the soviets as the means to combat the bureaucratic deformations
that existed in 1918. He also explained that the soviets were the
champions of
the people and a key means for the education of the population on the
problems
of the day.
To strengthen the Venezuelan revolution, Venezuela should be patterned on
the
workers' council (or soviet) form of democracy established by the October
Revolution -- the communal groups shouted be transformed into such a
model. (The
New England Town Meeting Form of government was very similar.)
This is the opposite of what the Stalinists imposed throughout Eastern
Europe
and the former Soviet Union.
This email was sent as a service by Roland Sheppard.
My website is http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret.
Read my book, The View From The Painter's Ladder is available at
Amazon.com
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