Status Updates From We Created Chávez: A People...

From a caricature in an old online game: "Private enterprise is limited to kids selling lemonade on sidewalks, though the government is looking at stamping this out."

The role of squatters on latifundias, informal barrio economics, and "Buhoneros" (street vendors) in both support and tension with Chavismo show that the real dynamics of sustained political revolution are much more complicated.

FNCEZ organizer Brigitte Marin notes a dynamic interplay between the military and the political: without the military side, she insists, the political could not advance, and this is especially the case in a situation of low-level war against the campesinos.

This dialectic is as unavoidable as the dialectic of movements and state more generally; the most conscious workers occupying factories demand nationalization not as a relinquishment of their power but as a foothold for its multiplication.

- Cooperatives coextant with private companies.
- Worker control & social ownership.
- Transferable lessons (Echoes of Tonghua Iron & Steel Group, China).

Mass spontaneity, while fundamental in its importance, is often the result of serious organizing that, in the case of Venezuela, spans decades.

For contrasting case studies, see If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

The demand for Chavez's return was not a question of uncritical fidelity to a charismatic leader, but was instead about both the Constitution as a direct 'product' of popular struggle and the president as the symbolic mechanism serving to unify those struggles in practice.

From a narrow focus on cultural memory, the Afro-Venezuelan movement has transitioned in a few short years to locally based economic and political struggles that, through their territorial focus, have since provided the basis for an ever-broadening circle of alliances.

Some of this book’s best insights explore dialectical tensions between Bolivarian unity and Afro-Venezuelan autonomy.

"If there is one single struggle that marks the birth of the Venezuelan popular militia movement, it is the battle against drug trafficking. But what might initially seem to be a battle on two fronts --- against a repressive neoliberal state and against the infiltration of drug traffickers --- was in practice but a single struggle."

"It became clear that bourgeois democracy on the one hand allows the legality of struggles, and on the other represses with all available force any mass action that threatens security."

Carlos Lanz, Venezuelan sociologist and Minister of Education under Hugo Chavez

Global South revolutionary voices can tell you what a regressed Western left has yet to rediscover...

Genuinely awful writing