[Marxism] The transformative power of Venezuela's cooperatives

["Stuart Munckton" <stuartmunckton@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.pww.org/article/view/12208/
The transformative power of Venezuela's co-ops

Author: Michael A. Mancini

For over a decade, an abandoned refilling station owned by Venezuelan
oil company PDVSA in western Caracas was a place of death. Community
residents said it was a place where women were raped, murdered bodies
dumped and drugs used and dealt.

This multi-acre space embodied the fear and hopelessness gripping the
surrounding communities during the early and mid-1990s — a time when
so-called Venezuelan leaders conspired with the "Washington Consensus"
to push neoliberal policies to maintain the continued prosperity of
the few at the expense of the masses of Venezuela's poor.

Since 2004, this space has been transformed from a hopeless wasteland
to a place of production, art, sustenance and health. It now
represents the hope of a community that has been reborn.

In April 2006 and August 2007, I visited this place, now the Fabricio
Ojeda cooperative complex, with other U.S. educators, students and
activists interested in experiencing Venezuela's revolution firsthand.

The Fabricio Ojeda complex includes construction and agricultural
cooperatives, a shoemaking factory, a textile cooperative employing
some 150 women, and a cooperative producing tourist items that is
operated by people with mental and physical disabilities. It also
contains a community health clinic and pharmacy developed through
Venezuela's health care mission, Barrio Adentro (Inside the
Neighborhood), and a low-cost subsidized grocery store developed
through Mision Mercal.

The complex serves the surrounding community and provides hundreds of
jobs where the workers control the means of production and profits.
Plans for more services are in the works, including a Bolivarian
school, a day care center and expanded health services.

Since Hugo Chavez came to power he has emphasized developing programs
and policies that re-integrate the poor into the country's social,
political and economic fabric. Many programs, or missions, have been
developed to enhance access to education, health care, food and work
for Venezuela's poor.

In 2004, through Mision Vuelvan Caras (Mission About Face), Venezuela
began creating community cooperatives by providing communities with
space or land, low-interest or no-interest loans for equipment, tax
breaks and technical assistance. Since then, tens of thousands of
cooperatives have developed. The goal is to empower communities by
creating sustainable economic and political power through collective
community ownership of resources and the means of production.

We also visited a women's co-op in the town of Monte Carmelo run by
Gaudi Garcia. This co-op uses sustainable, organic agriculture to
produce organic crops breads, artwork and canned preserves to sell.
The co-op receives additional crops from surrounding agricultural
co-ops, with local communities controlling every aspect of production.
As Garcia said, "Because this is owned and operated by and for the
community, the decisions reflect community values and are thus
natural. [For instance] in 1998 we started a long struggle, we fought
and we got a high school constructed in our community so our young
people wouldn't have to leave from here."

The cooperatives also help in the spiritual transformation of
individuals and groups. "These co-ops are a universal call to love and
a way of cooperating socially," Garcia said, adding that her
cooperative has enabled women to organize for more rights and develop
a stronger voice in the community. "We are not here to produce
children, but ideas. Women have been discriminated against and
marginalized and the time has come to make our voices heard."

The cooperative movement has also experienced difficulties. It has
been hard for the government to monitor all the cooperatives that have
come online since the explosion of this form of ownership began. Many
are poorly designed and quickly fail, while others claiming to be
cooperatives do not meet the government's standards. Instances of
fraud leading to theft of government funds have also been reported.
But while the system to ensure quality control needs to be addressed,
the potential these cooperatives have to transform individuals and
communities cannot be denied.

In the run-up to Venezuela's Dec. 2 vote on constitutional reforms
proposed by President Hugo Chavez and the National Assembly, which
were defeated by the narrowest of margins, the corporate media largely
ignored reforms like decentralizing power to communal councils, social
missions, and other community organizations; shortening the workday
from eight to six hours; enabling local municipalities to establish
common land and property for their own use; and promoting a diverse
and independent mixed economy.

These and other proposed changes, had they been adopted, would have
moved Venezuela more firmly toward what Chavez has called "Socialism
for the 21st century," including elements of both socialism and
capitalism.

Regardless of the outcome, this transformation has already begun in
the hearts and minds of many of the Venezuelan poor as they have found
their voice and developed their power during the last decade of
change.

Michael A. Mancini, Ph.D., is a professor at St. Louis University.

-- 
"The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind
of dummy?" - Jarvis Cocker

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