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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Darrel Furlotte
Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2007 3:02 PM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: [SocialistProject] Venezuela - Constitutional Reforms
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Constitutional Reforms
<http://gringo-venezolano.blogspot.com/>http://gringo-venezolano.blogspot.com/
This will be the first post in an inevitable
series of posts reflecting on the recently
proposed changes to the Bolivarian Constitution
of 1999. For more details and on-going debate on
the reforms, you might want to check out the
goings-on at <http://www.oilwars.blogspot.com>www.oilwars.blogspot.com
On Wednesday Chávez came to the National
Assembly to deliver his proposed package of
Constitutional reforms. In true Chávez form, the
speech lasted over four hours, and touched on
much more than the 33 (of 350) articles of the
1999 constitution he would like to change.
Private media outlets in Venezuela have almost
exclusively focused on the changes he would like
to make to articles pertaining to the executive
a change in term length from 6 to 7 years and
the removal of term limits as evidence of his
pretensions to ruling Venezuela ad infinitum.
These are, unsurprisingly, decidedly not the
most important of his proposals. And lets face
it, the opposition is less upset with the idea
based on any sort of democratic principle than
it is aware that they dont have a chance in
hell of ever competing with Chávez electorally.
This betrays yet another misperception on the
part of the opposition. The other reforms
envisioned by Chávez are indeed more threatening
to their pretensions of one day returning to
power. That is to say, should the majority of
the other reforms which the National Assembly
now has to debate and approve or reject have
their intended effect, the presidency itself in
the new Venezuela will become increasingly obsolete.
Here are, thematically organized, the reforms
Chávez wants to make to the 1999 Constitution
other than the changes to the norms governing
the executive. Generally speaking, the reforms
make soft elements of the old constitution
hard from an ought to a will or provide
details where they were previously lacking.
1. Territorially, Chávez wants to realign the
countrys geo-political landscape according to
the new geometry of poweran authentic
decentralization, if you will. This takes a
few forms. On the one hand he wants to change
the language of Article 11 to allocate more
power to the federal government in times of
natural or national emergency. On the other, he
wants to open up the field of possibility for
new forms of local power to be created and
exercised. For example, the constitutional
recognition of communes and the emergence of the
Distritos Federales would, he asserts, allow for
entrenched regional powers to be unseated by
popularly initiated and federally backed exodus.
The key to this is making a longtime slogan of
Chavismo reality, and making public or popular
power the true key to sovereign power in
Venezuela. For example, proposed changes to article 136 read:
Public power is distributed territorially in
the following form: popular power, municipal
power, state power, and national power
the
people is the depository of sovereignty and it
exercises this power directly through popular
power. [Popular power] is not born in suffrage
nor in any election, but is born in human
organization
popular power is expressed in the
organization of communities, communes and the
self government of cities through communal
councils, worker councils, peasant councils,
student councils and other entities signaled by he law
Thus whereas nearly every liberal constitution
in the worldincluding the Bolivarian
Constitution of 1999ostensibly finds its
authority in the sovereign people in the
theoretical ultimate instance and the watered
down spectacle of regular elections, these
proposed changes look to make popular power a fact of quotidian existence.
----A bit of background: in Venezuela, mayors
and governors have only been popularly elected
since the 1980s. This reform was seen as a major
step towards de-centralization by many political
scientists and other observers who see the key
to democracy as being strong institutions.
However, Venezuelan decentralization, such as it
was, more often than not served only to add a
degree of democratic legitimation to a still functioning corrupt system.
(Although it should be noted that there were
important inroads made by parties such as La
Causa R [Radical Cause] in Caracas and in the
oil producing areas of the south which should be
understood as part of the prehistory of the
Fifth Republic. On the subject of Venezuelas
ostensible democracy during the Fourth
Republic, it is also important to note that many
social scientists considered the country to be
the democratic exception surrounded by
dictatorships and civil war torn neighbors. This
despite the fact that the country was BY DESIGN
run exclusively by two equally corrupt parties
(AD and COPEI) that banned third parties and
regularly assassinated opponents.)----
Though Chávez did not outline a specific plan in
this respect, he also called for the
reorganization of Caracas. This move is both
necessary and dangerous in that the current
organization, a strange form of power sharing
between 5 mayors and one mayor-mayor is not
only hard for gringos to understand, it also
makes addressing the problems of the capital
city from infrastructural concerns to road and
garbage maintenance, to who has the right to
issue parking tickets, to astronomical crime
rates and the ever-expanding population all
but impossible. However, of the 5 municipalities
3 of them Chacao, Baruta and El Hatillo are
for all intents and purposes the heart and soul
of oposicionismo. Centralizing, or at least
aligning the jurisdictional map of Caracas is
without a doubt a necessary first step in
addressing the problems of the capital, but the
opposition will without a doubt battle to the
death to maintain their islands of power. They would be stupid not to.
2. Chávez also proposed to constitutionally
restrict the working day to 6 hours. While this
is massively important in terms of workers
rights, the vast majority of non-state or petrol
sector employment takes place in the informal
sector, which definitionally doesnt care what the constitution says.
On a related front, he wants to modify article
112, which allows workers to freely choose how
and where they want to work in order to include
new forms of property communal, public, mixed
and social in addition to the more standard of
private property. Article 114 will also be
revised. Whereas in the 1999 constitution
questioned monopolies and described them as
contrary to the interests of the people, they
would now be banned, as will the latifundio (Article 307).
This last point is also rather interesting in
that Chávez seeks to change the governments
responsibility vis-à-vis food production from
providing alimentary security to alimentary
sovereignty. In other words, this reform would
constitutionally mandate the government to
develop domestic production of necessary
foodstuffs which are now being imported. The
project, then, is not only to massively realign
the productive structure of the country from a
petrol-import-economy to a self-sufficient
sovereign one but also to do it while in the
process of developing new forms of land
ownership. Not only will the emphasis be on the
small farmer, agricultural production in the new
Venezuela will take place on collective farms,
communes, mixed use government-private sector
initiatives and common public space. The days of
the massive plantation worked by campesinos are over.
3. Chávez also called for the full-scale
state-ization of the Banco Central de Venezuela.
In other words, he is seeking to politicize and
revolutionize the Venezuelan Central Bank. More on this later.
4. The Armed Force will also undergo a thematic
overhaul, incorporating militias for the popular
defense of the country and the revolution in
asymmetrical warfare situations. Chávez has
often remarked that the Bolivarian Revolution is
peaceful, but armed and of late has emphasized
the fact that the only real external threat the
country faces is the same as any other in the
world: The United States. The fact that the
empire to the north (and west, hola Colombia!)
has a military and a military budget that
outstrips the GNP of most countries means that
Venezuela simply cannot fight toe to toe with
the giant and would be stupid to try.
However, and more importantly, I think, is the
civic project of building a citizen army (as
opposed to the mercenary style of
public-military service currently employed in
the Empire). This of course ruffles the feathers
of the democracy fetishists who have long
decried the militarization Venezuelan society
(by this I mean the social scientists and
apologists for capital that see democracy as
synonymous with formal institutions separated by
firewalls). Keep in mind that the function of
the Armed Force in the Bolivarian Revolution has
been increasingly as a public servant first in
the Plan Bolívar 2000 and subsequently in many
of the Misiones, public works projects and
national emergencies. It is hoped by Chávez and
others that the development of civilian militias
will not only help organize the population to
more effectively take control of their own
lives, but also induce in them an identification
with the state and nation to replace the
cynicism germinated by 40 years of kleptocracy.
(Which, of course, opens a whole different can
of worms which I will flag here and mention in
subsequent posts. The revolutionary government
has done more for the majority of the Venezuelan
people than any other government since
independence. This all but an undeniable fact at
this point. However, it largely remains
developmentalist in its discourse and its policies.)
5. Chávez also seeks to incorporate the Misiones
and communal councils into the constitutionally
defined governing structure of the country. So,
while the 1999 constitution states that the
right to education and health care are the
patrimony of every Venezuelan and that all
sovereignty resides in the pueblo not in the
final term but in the immediate, the proposed
changes would mandate the mechanisms for making
it so. The misiones thus become definitionally
the duty of the government to the people and
communal power becomes ever more the direct
expression of governance. Also, the current
project of delivering direct budgetary and
fiscal powers to communal councils will be included in the constitution.
Thus we get yet another example of the dialectic
between Chávez, a dialectic increasingly
antagonistic to any attempt at mediation.
Institutional political power is increasingly
realized and exercised at the poles of the
traditional map of power on the one end the
power of the executive, with Chávez propelling
the initiatives and innovations of the
revolutionary process. On the other, there is
the increasing responsibility, creative
influence, benefit and activity of the organized
population. Quite apart from the dreams of
moderate Chavistas to turn Venezuela into a
Scandanavian-style welfare state social
democracy, constitutional reforms and quotidian
political reality here in Venezuela point toward
the need for a pushing beyond a friendlier face to capitalist develepment.
__._,_.___
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__,_._,___
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Director, Programme in 'Transformative Practice and Human Development'
Centro Internacional Miranda, P.H.
Residencias Anauco Suites, Parque Central, final Av. Bolivar
Caracas, Venezuela
fax: 0212 5768274/0212 5777231
http//:centrointernacionalmiranda.gob.ve
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
