Constituent Power in Motion: Ten Years of Transformation in Venezuela

Rethinking the Social and Solidarity Society in Light of Community Practice

“…The most significant of these experiences occurred in Argentina, with its beginnings in the graphic arts industry to now encompass several hundred firms in many sectors and parts of the country. In other countries, similar actions have also occurred; more than 100 in Brazil, 20 in Uruguay and two that have been able to survive in Mexico as well as numerous examples in all parts of the Venezuelan economy [42][43][44]. Elsewhere, workers cooperatives of different sizes are also being established in all productive sectors (and in some cases in public services like urban water management in Argentina), with the most important examples occurring in Cuba as a result of the economic reforms implanted during the past few years [45].…”

Utopian disjunctures: Popular democracy and the communal state in urban Venezuela

“…While some view the establishment of new statemanaged channels of political participation as a sign of grassroots social movements successfully pulling the state in a more radical direction (Azzellini 2010(Azzellini , 2013Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, 2013b, others warn that increasing centralisation will inhibit the autonomy and vibrancy of community organisations (García-Guadilla 2008;García-Guadilla 2011;Smilde 2009;Uzcátegui 2010). These debates about the role of the state have a particular quality in Venezuela, where the oil-rich "magical state" (Coronil 1997) has often struggled to deliver on its promise to provide prosperity for the majority of the population.…”

“…4 Though the president stressed that the communes must be constructed by citizens "from below" (desde abajo), a Ministry for Communes and Social Protection (MPComunas) was launched in 2008 to aid the construction process. By proposing to "transfer" the "constituted power" of the state to the "constituent power" of the people (Harnecker 2008), the communal state is envisioned as a dialectical site of struggle, in which radical elements within the existing state open up new spaces for local-level self-government, offering the general population the opportunity to eventually supplant the bourgeois state with their own structures (Azzellini 2010(Azzellini , 2013Ciccariello-Maher 2013b).…”

Infrastructure and Insurrection: The Caracas Metro and the Right to the City in Venezuela

“…Just as economic adjustment rolled back the project of the city as a shared (if hierarchical and managed) space, new social movements created counterpublics and new visions of collective life. With the electoral successes of the Bolivarian Revolution and Hugo Chávez in 1998, this uneven and contested process of negotiating life in the city entered a new stage, as the state attempted to reassert its historically strong position in Venezuelan polity and society by capturing and institutionalizing expressions of autonomous constituent power (Azzellini 2010;Beasley-Murray 2010;Kingsbury 2013). These processes can be observed in the reconstruction of the built environment of the city of Caracas and the reimagined role of the MetroCCS in processes of social transformation that pick up pace by 2006.…”

“…Innovative responses to economic decline and political implosion-such as the Mesas Técnicas de Agua (Water Working Groups), the Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Committees), the Círculos Femininos (Women's Circles), and the Asemblea de Barrios (Neighborhood Assemblies)-elaborate different aspects of a collective right to appropriation and participation that is vital to any articulation of a right to the city, even when that specific framework is not invoked (Azzellini 2010;Ciccariello-Maher 2012;Fernandes 2007;Grohmann 1996;Martinez and Fox 2010;Motta 2013). These movements were by their nature intensely local and were born of the necessity of structural adjustment rather than ideological preference.…”