Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis (Social Movements in the Americas)

Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis (Social Movements in the Americas)
by: Anderson Bean (Author)
Publisher: Lexington Books
Publication Date: 2022/3/1
Language: English
Print Length: 172 pages
ISBN-10: 179364084X
ISBN-13: 9781793640840
Book Description
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.
About the Author
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. Read more