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In his support of Mike Gonzalez' obiter dicta, John Reinmann has pontificated on the communal councils in Venezuela as follows:
when I was in Venezuela in 2005. At that time, you could see that the community meetings were not centers of mobilization for the working class. If the one I attended was any example (and I believe it was), they were gatherings where different elements got together to compete for the fruits of power.
Chris refers to the community councils. According to several people, these were always a means of the Chavez regime exerting its influence on the communities, and if the one that I attended was any example, it certainly wasn't a venue for workers to exert their power.
Frankly, anyone who spent any time going around to communal councils there would recognise this as so much crap. What was obvious was the pride and sense of power that members of those councils had when talking about the projects and collective work they had engaged in. [You can see this these days from activists in the communes-- which you can read about in venezuelanalysis, glw and links.] As for John's observations when he visited as a tourist in 2005, it is worth noting that the law on communal councils [which greatly stimulated this as a national project] was not until 2006. There were, of course, earlier local initiatives [especially based on land committees]. One notable council [which became the model for the national law] was in the city of Cumana in the state of Sucre; the people who had taken the lead in organising and developing it for a few years came from the Liga Socialista [and one of the key people explained, we decidcd to focus upon the community because we concluded that we'd been trying to organise the wrong working class].
michael -- --------------------- Michael A. Lebowitz Professor Emeritus Economics Department Simon Fraser University 8888 University Drive Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6 Home: Phone 604-689-9510 Cell: 604-789-4803 _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
