Venezuela from Below
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/188019/12/2008
(1) I thought it might be best to begin the conversation by getting a sense of your personal political trajectory, how you were drawn to Venezuela, some of your most memorable experiences from your time in Caracas, and how all of this has translated into your perspective on revolutionary change. In short, what did Venezuela do to you?
I decided to move to Venezuela in an effort to both get to know and to participate in what seemed—at least from afar—to be a unique and exciting political process. What I found was infinitely more complex than anything that I had read about either academically or in the U.S. press. Instead of the successful socialist experiment we hear about from the left or the authoritarian populism decried by both Fox News and some U.S. anarchists, what I found in the Bolivarian Revolution is an instance of political struggle, one composed itself of thousands of micro-instances of struggle. By describing the process as a struggle (and I could equally say "battle), I just mean that the verdict isn't in yet.
If radicals worried about the conservative or authoritarian elements of the process fail to fight for it, then it will certainly come to fulfill their negative expectations. But, on the other hand, if revolutionaries throw their weight into the struggle, strategically attacking and winning increasingly more space within the process, it will be radicalized. And this is what history has shown us is happening. When Chávez was elected, he was a moderate social democrat. But as his political reliance on the power of revolutionary grassroots organizations to mobilize has increased—after all, without such organizations, he would never have returned to power after the April 2002 coup—the process itself has come to reflect the perspectives of those same revolutionary movements.
