Description
Book SynopsisSince 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.
Table of ContentsChapter One: Communes in Theory and Practice
Chapter Two: Theorizing Participatory Democracy, Popular Power, and Counter-Hegemonic Globalization from Below
Chapter Three: Popular Power, Participatory Democracy and the Communes from Punto Fijismo to the Present
Chapter Four: Networks of Popular Power: Communes as Globalization from Below
Chapter Five: Crisis, the Decline of the Pink Tide, and the Future of the Communes
