Chávez announced the “five component motors” for his new term
2007-2013; among those that stand out: a new Enabling Law, reform of
the Constitution and the so-called explosion of communal power. The
new Enabling Law, which grants him full powers to legislate by decrees
for a year and a half, was immediately passed by the Asamblea
Nacional, and 50 or 60 laws will be decreed in the first phase alone.

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This new law focuses all the decisions of the state in its different
spheres in Chávez, to legislate as well as execute. This has nothing
to do with the so-called “explosion of communal power” that he is
announcing. If before there existed a total exclusion of “those from
below” in the real course of events of the country, now this has been
reinforced even more, and even worse when the so-called “communal
power” will be subjected to a “presidential commission” under the
order of the Vice President of the country.

With these new mechanisms Chávez is seeking control of the movement of
the masses, those who are denied any decisive power in the central
political decisions of the government. With the new Enabling Law, the
aim of controlling any inkling of class independence is reinforced and
confirmed, by being tied to the creation of the PSUV¹Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, a political organization
promoted by Chávez in which he tries to unite the working-class,
peasant and popular sectors that support him, as well as the soldiers,
professionals and “nationalist” businessmen. See “PSUV, un partido de
conciliación de clases,” by Mario López, available at www.jir.org.ve . What Chávez
is seeking is what we Marxists call making the regime and the
government even more bonapartist, by trying to raise itself above
classes and arbitrate disputes among them, to weaken and prevent the
profound contradictions between the exploited and the economically
dominant class. And, as we know already, workers and the poor always
lose in this.

This political move goes along with reform of the Constitution and the
much-mentioned “indefinite reelection” of the President of the
Republic. Chávez talks to us about “the constituent power,” but he is
not willing to open a revolutionary “constituent process,” and he is
launching a constitutional reform “above,” by citing a “power to
originate” that the elections gave him. Where then is the so-called
“people’s power” and the “explosion of communal power”? In the hands
of Chávez and those who surround him, but not really in the exploited
and poor of the country, who are the ones who produce everything.

As all these years have shown, the key is that we workers can only
trust in our own forces and the forms of organization and struggle
that we are building. The real “explosion of communal power” can only
come from the rise of organizations of workers’ self-determination. In
this perspective, what is needed is the action of a revolutionary
party that fights for a clearly revolutionary political strategy and
program that has as its strategic aim the struggle for a government of
workers and the poor, a task posed today more than ever in Venezuela.

Full version can be read (in Spanish) in www.jir.org.ve