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Chris Gilbert | “Reform will give more power to the people within the democracy”
teleSUR English
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1/12/2025
Chris Gilbert, Professor of Political Studies of the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, analyzes what's coming for Venezuela during the 2025-2031 mandate of President Nicolás Maduro.
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00:00
And to go deep into the relevance of this event, I'm joined once again by Chris Gilbert,
00:06
professor of political studies at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.
00:10
Hello and welcome, professor.
00:12
Thank you for joining us once again.
00:14
Happy to be here.
00:15
Well, the constitution, the current constitution of Venezuela is turning 25 years.
00:21
Why is a reform called on this moment of the Bolivarian revolution?
00:26
And let's also mention that on our first special program, we discussed about the importance
00:30
that the government is giving to the communal spaces of the base of the society.
00:35
Do you believe that this reform could be a step towards that direction?
00:40
For sure.
00:41
In fact, Nicolas Maduro, President Maduro said that that would be one of the important
00:43
components of the reform.
00:45
I mean, in a general sense, I think it's always important to update constitutions.
00:50
In fact, I come originally from a country that has a very old constitution.
00:54
And that's highly problematic because no one really understands it.
00:57
In fact, there's a huge business of constitutional law that has to explain the constitution to
01:02
people and interpret it.
01:04
So it ceases to be a document that's useful for people.
01:09
And so the Bolivarian constitution is 25 years old.
01:12
But surely along the way, one faces new challenges.
01:14
I think one of the important challenges that's been faced, we can see actually in this recent
01:19
electoral conjuncture.
01:21
Basically what we saw was a lot of interference from the United States.
01:24
They support a candidate.
01:25
In the first place, they twist the arm of the people with sanctions, which is quite
01:30
a lot like war.
01:31
It's quite analogous with actually carrying out a war against the people of Venezuela,
01:34
saying we're going to go on twisting your arm until you vote for the person we like.
01:39
And then another challenge is simply the old problems of the state, corruption, things
01:43
like that.
01:44
In fact, a big achievement of the revolution in the last couple of years was the fight
01:49
against corruption, and specifically the neutralizing of Tarak Al-Assami's corruption.
01:54
You can see how constitutional reform, and specifically a constitutional reform that
01:58
puts emphasis on popular power, more democracy, more socialism, could be used to solve those
02:03
two problems, to make a more democratic country, and the communes might be an important instrument
02:08
in doing that.
02:09
And in this sense, what would this reform mean for the people, for the Venezuelan people,
02:14
for the common people?
02:15
Well, I think that what it should mean is more power for the people, more democracy
02:20
for the people.
02:23
I think that many people have an ambiguous idea of the state.
02:27
If you ask someone on the street, on the one hand, everyone wants the state to solve their
02:31
problems.
02:32
On the other hand, everyone has complaints about the state.
02:35
And that actually corresponds to ideas in political philosophy.
02:38
I mean, liberal philosophy has traditionally been against the state.
02:42
And then you have the other side of the coin, Hegel, maybe the greatest political philosopher,
02:46
or greatest philosopher, European philosopher of modernity, saying the state was the realization
02:51
of the ethical idea.
02:53
So basically, the state is a highly contradictory phenomenon in capitalism.
02:58
And I think the basic solution, which was proposed by Chavez, proposed in part through
03:04
the Hungarian philosopher István Mazaros, was to end the alienated state.
03:09
And that sounds like fancy words, or end alienated institutionality.
03:12
But everyone knows that institutions everywhere in the world, especially, well, in the capitalist
03:16
world, institutions end up being separated from the people.
03:19
People no longer control them.
03:21
So the solution is to bring those institutions under popular control.
03:26
And there's a long history of that in the Bolivarian process.
03:29
From even before the community councils, there were Mesas Tecnicos de Agua, and then the
03:33
community councils, and then the communes.
03:36
So there are all these instances of popular power that have actually been very successful
03:40
when they've been employed.
03:41
In fact, recently, we've seen three consultations in the communes.
03:46
And those consultations, people can vote on problems.
03:48
They propose those problems.
03:50
But it's one important thing, because one problem with formal bourgeois democracy, representative
03:55
democracy, is that people get to vote for things that they don't like.
03:59
They usually have two options they don't like.
04:02
And in these consults, people can actually propose ideas, and their ideas get incorporated
04:07
in the process.
04:08
So I think there's been a hugely successful project of popular democracy, of going to
04:14
the bases to solve problems.
04:15
So that's why it's such a wise idea to go further into that, in that direction, with
04:20
the upcoming constitutional reform.
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