The Bolivarian Project

President Chavez's policies have once and for all refuted the notion that the competitive demands of ‘globalization’ are incompatible with large-scale social welfare policies. Chavez has demonstrated that links to the world market are compatible with the construction of a more developed welfare state under a popularly-based government.

Six years after the coup against the democratically elected government of Hugo Chávez was defeated by the magnificent mobilization of the masses, the contradictions within the Venezuelan revolution are as sharp as ever.

In an in-depth interview, Müller Rojas speaks about the significance of the formation of the PSUV for the Bolivarian revolution - debates within the new party, what its relationship with the government should be, and the immediate tasks of the PSUV in the struggle for the socialist transformation of Venezuela.

The organisation of a revolutionary international, far from being a distant perspective is an immediate necessity. Defence of the revolutionary processes underway in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador cannot be postponed, nor can effort towards the recomposition of revolutionary social forces in the rest of the countries in the region.

Since January 12, more than 1,600 delegates to the founding congress of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) — along with thousands of local socialist battalions (branches — have been discussing the new party’s program, principles and statutes, and in large part the future of the Bolivarian revolution.

Despite the rightwing press campaign against him, Chavez is still popular in Venezuela, since his tenure has made a difference.

The combination of policies with a transfor- mational potential and a discourse that empowers people is particularly evident in the case of the Chávez government and explains why it faced open resistance from the business sector and the U.S. government.

Something is being attempted in Venezuela that has no precedent in human history -- building socialism from the bottom up in the midst of a capitalist society in a manner that is profoundly democratic (as well as chaotic).

Ordinary Venezuelans are led by a Bolivarian compass that is useful but thwarted by a bubble of decrepit past traditions. The Bolivarian Revolution is a boiling pot of newness into which Venezuela is being dipped and will emerge redefined.

Convened on January 12, 2008, some 1,676 congress delegates elected from almost 15,000 socialist battalions -- local units of the PSUV -- will discuss and debate this draft program, as well as the proposed priniciples and statutes of the new party, over the next two months.