Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis

Anderson Bean

doi:10.5771/9781793640857

Summary

Since 2006, Venezuela has witnessed an explosion of different forms of popular power and participatory democracy. Over 47,000 grassroots neighborhood-based communal councils and 3,000 communes have been constructed. In Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis, Anderson Bean offers a critical analysis of these experiments in popular and workers' power and their potential for societal transformation within and beyond Venezuela. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Bean demonstrates how workers and peasants, through networks of popular power, exercise agency over their own development while facing challenges from the capitalist state. Most importantly, this book connects with the far-reaching implications that the communal movement in Venezuela has for building a society responsive more to the needs of ordinary people than to the desires of the elites.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2022
Copyright year: 2022
ISBN-Print: 978-1-7936-4084-0
ISBN-Online: 978-1-7936-4085-7
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 156
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgments No access
3. List of Abbreviations No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 12
1. Communes in Theory and Practice No access Pages 13 - 26
2. Theorizing Participatory Democracy, Popular Power, and Counter-Hegemonic Globalization from Below No access Pages 27 - 56
3. Popular Power, Participatory Democracy, and the Communes from Punto Fijismo to the Present No access Pages 57 - 76
4. Networks of Popular Power No access Pages 77 - 106
5. Crisis, the Decline of the Pink Tide, and the Future of the Communes No access Pages 107 - 132
Bibliography No access Pages 133 - 144
Index No access Pages 145 - 154
About the Author No access Pages 155 - 156