Reimagining Society

Re-Imagining Society by Constructing Popular Power
Julio Chavez; member of Lara State Assembly, Venezuela, and former Mayor of Carora. (Translated)
Part 1

Capitalism has created a global catastrophe, punctuated by the richer countries like the US.
This has caused a lack of democratic representation, exhausting the effectiveness of traditional political methods. This representative crisis has caused us to revisit the method of participation in democracy.

"We don't order, nor do we obey we construct rather people's power, we construct liberally democratic ideas."

This returns the power to the people.

The political plan goes from the Municipal, to Participatory Budget, to Communal Advice, to Socialist Commune, to Economic Component (Direct Translation from: Constituyente Minicipal, Presepuesto Participativo, Consejos Comunales, Comuna Socialista, Constituyente Economica)

It was focused on creating the democracy that was wanted, and not to patch the democracy that existed at the time.

Formerly the Mayor of a Municipal area decided on the budgets, but the people never were consulted, so a methodology was created called the "Participatory Budget" (Presepuesto Participativo), where everyone in the community went to a planning council to decide the use of this money. In other words the Mayor of the town did not determine how to invest the money in the plan, but rather it was decided by the popular base. This allows the town to decide their own fate, and not allowed to be decided by a single person.

Do you know, in your city, who decides what needs to be fixed? How many people are on that committee? Is it enough, is it transparent? This is what was sought to be fixed. To take these decisions to the people they affected most, the population.

The businesses which carried out the projects of the community were dismantled and were incorporated into the municipalities, making the responsibility for fixing the city in the hands of the citizenry, and not an outside operation.