The main country road that passes by

Las Cuadras, a poor rural area in the zone of El Valle, in the

Venezuelan state of Mérida, sports a new roofed waiting area and

sidewalk. Julio Cerrada, a spokesman for the Las Cuadras community

council, shows me these and other recent projects, including a

decorative arch at the neighborhood’s entrance and a large metal

garbage container. Then Cerrada takes me to the end of the mountain

road, where the community council of La Culata has constructed a

pathway consisting of two paved tracks extending about 300 yards

uphill, which allows potato and carrot farmers to transport their

produce by vehicle and also opens the area to tourism. A small

cooperative, called Paseos a Caballo de La Culata, takes tourists on

horseback up the pathway, whose entrance is now marked by a large

plaque celebrating the figure of Simón Bolívar. Cerrada tells me the

cooperative is requesting state financing to construct a tourist

station at the pathway’s upper end.

Twenty-four community councils in El Valle have received government

financing for a diversity of such undertakings. Nationwide, Venezuela’s

some 20,000 local councils, legally established in 2006, are tackling

development projects considered priorities by their respective

communities. Most of the completed works in El Valle were carried out

by the voluntary labor of community members, while materials and tools

were purchased with state funds. About half of the able-bodied members

of Las Cuadras participated in that community’s joint efforts, Cerrada

tells me, and tools, including a wheelbarrow, shovels, pickaxes, and

machetes, are now being lent to families. “There is a greater sense of

trust and cooperation in communities of several hundred families than

you get when larger numbers of people are involved,” he says.

The Law of Community Councils, enacted in April 2006, offers

neighborhoods funding once they organize democratically and submit

feasible projects to state agencies. Each council represents between

200 and 400 families who approve of priority projects in neighborhood

assemblies. By planning, administering, and financing public works and

housing construction in their barrios, the community councils represent

not only the government’s most recent success in jump-starting popular

participation, but also a radical break with the past, when these

activities were undertaken by the city, state, or national government.

The structure of the community councils, as defined by the 2006 law,

differs from that of the Venezuelan worker cooperatives, which had

their heyday in 2004 and 2005. Whereas the cooperatives were headed by

presidents, some of whom abused their position by pocketing state

funds, the community councils are horizontally structured, with all of

their leaders (called voceros, or “spokespeople”) working free

of charge and considered of equal rank. Spokespeople can belong to no

more than one of their council’s various commissions, which include a

communal bank, which handles grant money; a “social controllership,”

which monitors spending; and an “employment commission,” which enlists

qualified community members for remunerative jobs and attempts to

ensure that they receive preferential hiring. All decisions, including

the selection of spokespeople, are ratified in an “assembly of

citizens,” which represents the community council’s “maximum instance

of decision making,” according to the 2006 law.

The large number of community councils established in 2006 eclipsed

the Local Planning Councils created by the Hugo Chávez government in

2002 to permit community members to devise projects, but which ended up

largely under the control of mayors who packed them with their own

followers.1 The 2006 law was designed to achieve greater

independence vis-à-vis local government by allowing the community

councils not only to conceive their own projects but also to execute

them.

The councils thereby put into practice the “participatory democracy”

embodied in the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution drafted by Chávez’s

followers. Some of their activities also reflect Chávez’s discourse,

which minimizes the importance of “experts” or “technocrats” and

stresses the will of the people and their capacity to solve all

problems, even highly technical ones. Thus, for example, the community

council members in charge of handling money act collectively in

commissions, but many lack prior financial experience or training,

following a “learn as you go” approach.

Advanced technical skills are required for some projects, like

extending electric lines to new communities and constructing dozens of

houses, as well as converting shacks into houses (known as ranchos por viviendas dignas).

Typically, community councils in nonprivileged sectors contract a

company or a cooperative for these more ambitious jobs, but insist that

a large number of positions, including skilled ones, be filled by

neighborhood residents.

The funding for the councils’ projects comes from a variety of

sources, including gubernatorial and municipal governments, the

Ministry of Participation and Social Protection, the state oil company

PDVSA, FIDES (a fund derived from the value-added tax), and LAEE

(derived from mining and oil revenue). Lengthy procedures are designed

to ensure that the money assigned to community councils is well spent,

unlike what happened with many of the cooperatives. However, due to the

diversity in sources of financing, the application and requirements for

funding vary, as do inspection procedures, thus complicating the

councils’ everyday operation.

In most cases, the state allocates money to the councils in two or

more tranches and inspects the results, taking numerous photographs

midway through the job. “Promoters” who work for the state government

or the FUNDACOMUNAL office of the Ministry of Participation and Social

Protection provide guidance to individual councils and then inspect

their work on the basis of “social criteria” in order to confirm that a

given project benefits the anticipated number of families. The Ministry

of Infrastructure and other ministries also carry out inspections on

the basis of “technical” criteria. The community council is required to

send a balance statement each year to the National Superintendency of

Cooperatives, which the Communal Bank is registered with (even though

it is not a “cooperative”).

The successful completion of these steps qualifies the council for

additional financing, either to complete a given project or begin work

on a new one. FUNDACOMUNAL keeps a registry of all community councils,

which other government offices check against in order to avoid funding

councils in bad standing. This year, FUNDACOMUNAL plans on making the

registry public by posting it on its Web page (www.fundacomun.gob.ve).

These procedures have proved just partly effective in ensuring

efficiency and discouraging corruption. The threat of state funding

being suspended weighs heavily on those community members who have

invested considerable time and effort in creating a community council.

Nevertheless, just as in the case of the workers’ cooperatives, the

state has failed to act decisively against unscrupulous council

spokespeople.

“Community activists who accuse fellow council members of

misspending money often complain that the case goes through the courts

at a snail’s pace, during which time they are unable to get further

funding,” says Leandro Rodríguez, adviser to the National Assembly’s

Commission of Citizen Participation, Decentralization and Regional

Development. He adds that the 2006 law fails to establish any formal

link between the community council’s social controllership commission

and the National Controller, who should be in charge of working closely

with the communities to give them legal information.

In addition to these problems, the councils’ downsides include their

use for political purposes and the government’s laxness in enforcing

requirements, which in turn is conducive to snags and deficiencies in

performance. On balance, the government has leaned over backward in

implementing its various social programs, including the community

councils, as it lifts controls, provides diverse monetary and

non-monetary incentives, and in general assumes a flexible position in

order to avoid dampening popular enthusiasm.

The creation of community councils was partly a reaction to the

inefficiency of the state bureaucracy, particularly at the municipal

level. In his congressional address unveiling a constitutional reform

proposal in August 2007, Chávez affirmed that he had “misgivings

regarding established local authorities” and had greater faith in the

capacity of the people at the local level. He went on to point to the

high abstention rates in city and state elections as placing in doubt

the legitimacy of local officials.2 More recently, Chávez’s

proposal to group community councils in a given zone in “communes”

(which in turn would form part of a “commune city”), in order to solve

common problems, threatens to substantially undermine the power of

municipal government by creating a parallel structure. In private,

local authorities, including mayors, have expressed fear that the

scheme is designed to phase out city government, as National Assembly

adviser Rodríguez and Sergio Lugo, an adviser to the Mérida

municipality’s Department of Local Planning Councils, told me.

Nevertheless, the community councils are not in a position to

supplant municipal government. At this point, they are undertaking work

only on priority projects, a far cry from taking on the myriad

functions of municipal government. Applied to the community councils,

the Rousseau-inspired utopian ideal of direct democracy displacing

representative institutions—a vision sometimes embraced by Chavistas—is

thus highly misleading.3 A more realistic assessment comes

from Marisol Pérez, who heads the state government of Anzoátegui’s

community council office. “This is an experimental process,” she says.

“The celebrated phrase of Simón Rodríguez [Simón Bolívar’s tutor] so

frequently invoked by our president, ‘Either we invent or we err,’ is

applicable in a big way to the community councils.”

*

Chavista political leaders, whose rhetoric typically emphasizes

popular decision making, have increasingly highlighted the activities

of the community councils. Aristóbulo Istúriz and Jorge Rodríguez, the

Chavista candidates in Caracas’s two major mayoral races in November,

divided their respective platforms into two parts: programs directly

undertaken by the state and support for “popular power” consisting

mainly of the community councils. In another mayoral race in Caracas,

the Chavista candidate pledged to construct a “metrocable” up the

slum-ridden hills of Petare, similar to another one that is near

completion in the barrios of San Agustín. According to the plan, each

station would contain a facility, such as a library or theater, that

would be placed under the administration of a community council.

Meanwhile, government critics argue that the community councils are

inefficient and warn that they weaken representative democracy by

undermining all intermediate bodies between the national executive and

the people—be it the municipal government, state planning agencies, or

even the Chavista party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela

(PSUV). Américo Martín, a former leftist who ran for president in 1978,

calls the community councils an “atom bomb” bound to produce chaos by

making clientelistic demands of a magnitude impossible to satisfy.4

Another leftist turned anti-Chavista, Teodoro Petkoff, harps on the

quixotic nature of community councils, which he likens to the worker

cooperatives and worker-management schemes also promoted by the Chávez

government. Petkoff argues that these experiments bring to mind Marx’s

indictment of the utopian socialists: “Instead of recognizing the

historical conditions of emancipation, they envisioned fantastic

conditions and a reorganization of society invented by themselves.”5

These arguments against the viability of the community councils

overstate the case against them. The fact is that thousands of projects

throughout Venezuela have already been satisfactorily completed, and

many more are under way—an accomplishment entirely new in the nation’s

history. In addition, community council leaders are engaged in a wide

variety of activities and programs that have no precedent in

Venezuela’s community movement.

Politics and the state are very much at the center of the community

council phenomenon. Council leaders often find themselves on both sides

of the line separating civil society and political activism. Thus, for

instance, council meetings sometimes devote time to discussing

electoral strategy and logistics. After the PSUV was created in 2007,

it canvassed for Chavista candidates in the communities, causing the

community councils to recede somewhat from the electoral arena.

Nevertheless, in early 2009, Minister of Participation and Social

Protection Erika Farías called on the community councils to form

brigades to campaign in favor of the Chávez-sponsored constitutional

amendment to eliminate term limits on all elected positions, a

proposition that was approved in a referendum held February 15. The

electoral activity of those connected with the community councils and

other government-funded social programs overshadowed the PSUV in the

campaign.

Some writers stress the need for Venezuelan social organizations,

including community councils, to strive for absolute autonomy vis-à-vis

state and party.6 These include leading Venezuelan activists

and writers Roland Denis, Javier Biardeau, and Rafael Uzcátegui (of the

anarchist periodical El Libertario). John Holloway, a renowned

theoretician who defends this viewpoint, stated at the time of the

World Social Forum in Caracas in 2006: “The great danger that exists in

Venezuela today . . . is that the movement ‘from above’ will swallow .

. . the movement ‘from below.’ ”7

The fixation on autonomy, however, is somewhat misplaced. Social

programs and the organizations they create—and not autonomous social

movements—are the backbone of the Chavista movement. Prior to Chávez’s

election in 1998, Venezuela lacked the type of vibrant, well-organized

social movements that paved the way for the election of Evo Morales in

Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. For many years in Venezuela,

neighborhood and worker cooperative movements were independent of the

state, but they failed to flourish or play a major role in the lives of

nonprivileged Venezuelans.

In contrast, the Chávez government’s injection of large sums of

money into community councils and other social programs has served to

stimulate the marginalized sectors and show them ways to take control

of their lives. Specifically, state resources in the form of allotments

for community council projects, loans for worker cooperatives, and

stipends for students enrolled in makeshift educational programs (known

as “missions”) have been essential in activating people along organized

lines. In spite of financial dependence on the state, rank-and-file

Chavistas tend to be critical, and their support for the government is

hardly unqualified, thus explaining, for instance, Chávez’s defeat in

the constitutional referendum of 2007.8

For the Chavistas, the “revolutionary process” consists of people

gaining control of their lives in the areas where they live, more so

than in the workplace (as Communists, Trotskyists, and other hard-line

Chavistas advocate). This emphasis is reflected in the the fact that

the community councils have received far more attention and resources

than the worker-management schemes ever did.

The councils are subject to a host of problems, including poor

management of financing, “free riders,” and the deep-rooted skepticism

among many community members toward neighborhood leaders’ intentions.

Pro-Chávez writers who focus on the community councils and similar

social programs, while providing useful information, generally skirt

these thorny issues.9 The pro-government media also shy away from open

discussion of knotty problems of this type, even though they frequently

refer to the community councils. Furthermore, critical debate is

lacking within the PSUV. By avoiding nitty-gritty problems, the

Chavista leadership ends up glorifying the community councils and

creating the myth that they are a panacea for countless problems, a

notion that may be designed to pay electoral dividends. The shortcoming

is particularly serious given the government’s stated commitment to

more than double the program’s funding in 2009.

As the community councils gain experience, two processes fraught

with tension are under way. First, marginalized and semi-marginalized

sectors of the population gain confidence and experience in collective

decision making. Second, steps toward institutionalization are designed

to create viable mechanisms that monitor and guard against

ill-conceived projects and misuse of public funds.

But the effort to achieve incorporation, on the one hand, and

institutionalization, on the other, is a complicated balancing act.

Mechanisms and procedures to ensure efficiency cannot be imposed all at

once. The massive and ongoing participation of the nonprivileged

depends on the flexibility and comprehension of those in charge of

public financing.

“We don’t hound the council spokespeople, and we give them the

benefit of the doubt,” says Marisol Pérez of the Anzoátegui state

government. “After all, many of them are novices who could easily drop

out if they perceive that the obstacles are too great.”

In addition to the social and institutional dimensions, a third

objective is political: the mobilization of those who benefit from the

community councils in order to defend the government in the face of an

intransigent opposition with extensive resources. Indeed, achieving

distinct and not always compatible objectives is a formidable challenge

for Venezuela’s unchartered path to socialism.

Steve Ellner has been teaching at the Universidad de Oriente in

Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, since 1977. His Rethinking Venezuelan

Politics: Class, Conflict and the Chávez Phenomenon Lynne Rienner

Publishers, 2008) will be released in paperback in October.

1. Luis Bonilla-Molina and Haiman El Troudi, Historia de la

revolución bolivariana: pequeña crónica, 1948–2004 (Caracas: Impresos

Publigráfica, 2005), 232.

2. Hugo Chávez, Ahora la batalla es por el sí: discurso de

presentación del Proyecto de Reforma Constitucional (Caracas:

Biblioteca Construcción del Socialismo, 2007), 63–65.

3. Steve Ellner, Rethinking Venezuelan Politics: Class, Conflict and

the Chávez Phenomenon (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008), 176–80.

4. Américo Martín, “Segunda Parte,” in Martín and Freddy Muñoz,

Socialismo del siglo XXI: huida en el laberinto? (Caracas: Editorial

Alfa, 2007), 160–70.

5. Teodoro Petkoff, “Comuna Comeflor,” Tal Cual, September 30, 2008.

6. See Roland Denis, “Venezuela: The Popular Movements and the

Government,” International Socialist Review 110 (spring 2006): 29–35,

and Hilary Wainwright, “Democracy Diary,” Red Pepper, December 2007.

For a discussion of community council autonomy, see Sara C. Motta

“Venezuela: Reinventing Social Democracy From Below?” in Geraldine

Lievesley and Steve Ludlam, eds., Reclaiming Latin America: Experiments

in Radical Social Democracy (Zed Books, 2008), 84–88; George

Ciccariello-Maher, “Dual Power in the Venezuelan Revolution,” Monthly

Review 59, no. 4 (September 2007): 42–56.

7. Quoted in María Pilar García-Guadilla and Carlos Lagorio, “La

cuestión del poder y los movimientos sociales: reflexión pos-Foro

Social Mundial Caracas 2006,” Revista Venezolana de Economía y Ciencias

Sociales 12, no. 3 (December 2006).

8. Sujatha Fernandes, In the Spirit of Negro Primero: Urban Social

Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela (Duke University Press, forthcoming

2010).

9. Enrique Rodríguez, “Política social actual: una visión desde el

gobierno,” in Thais Maingon, ed., Balance y perspectiva de la política

social en Venezuela (Caracas: ILDIS and CENDES, 2006), 281–90; Camila

Piñeiro Harnecker, “Workplace Democracy and Collective Consciousness:

An Empirical Study of Venezuelan Cooperatives,” Monthly Review 59, no.

6 (November 2007): 27–40.