Contested Spaces

The Communal Councils and Participatory Democracy

Neighborhood organizations in Venezuela’s barrios have historically demonstrated a great diversity of political thought and action. At various points since the 1950s, they have practiced close clientelist ties to political parties (Karst, 1973; Peattie, 1968; Ray, 1969), adopted antagonistic positions against the establishment (Fernandes, 2010), and occupied a space between the two, expressing a “contingent autonomy, neither fully independent nor fully beholden to the state” (Velasco, 2011: 181). Most recently, barrio actors played a leading role in pro-Chávez bodies such as the Bolivarian circles and the electoral battle units, as well as in community-focused organizations like the urban land committees and the technical water committees (García-Guadilla, 2008; 2011; López Maya, 2008). Given the multiplicity of autonomous and semiautonomous positions that neighborhood bodies have taken in relation to the state and political parties, the launch of the communal councils can be read as an effort by the Bolivarian government to “simplify” a myriad of organizational and ideological tendencies by creating state-managed umbrella bodies that subsume existing groupings (Gill, 2012). ²

In order to establish a communal council, residents must undergo a lengthy registration process that requires a series of public assemblies, elections, and bureaucratic procedures. According to the law, in urban areas communal councils must be drawn from communities of between 200 and 400 households. Local residents hold elections for spokespeople (voceras or voceros), who then take responsibility for specified work committees in areas such as finance, social control (meaning accountability), health, water, food, land, and education. When these positions have been chosen, the communal council must put forward three projects that will contribute to endogenous development in the community. If they receive state approval, these projects are usually funded by central government bodies such as the Fundación para el Desarrollo y Promoción del Poder Comunal (Foundation for the Development and Promotion of Communal Power —FUNDACOMUNAL) or the Fondo Intergubernamental para la Descentralización (Fund for Intergovernmental Decentralization —FIDES). In addition to long-term projects, the communal councils administer funds for small-scale microfinance initiatives called social enterprises (empresas sociales), which receive funding from the government’s Fondo de Desarrollo Microfinanciero (Microfinance Development Fund —FONDEMI). By 2010, over 20,000 communal councils had been formed in Venezuela (Ellner, 2010b: 67), with an estimated US$1 billion being transferred directly to them in the first year of their launch (López Maya and Lander, 2011: 74).

The structural design of the communal councils bears some similarities to initiatives such as the much-vaunted participatory budgeting model in Porto Alegre, Brazil, but there are also key differences. As Baiocchi (2001; 2005) points out, the Porto Alegre system was funded and organized by municipalities. It owed much to both well-organized neighborhood organizations and the political will of local politicians, who strongly advocated a “radical democratic vision of popular control of city government” (2001: 65). By contrast, the communal councils in Venezuela receive their funding directly from centralized state agencies, a decision made after problems emerged at the municipal level with the forerunners to the communal councils, the local public planning councils. ³ Partly in response to the problems associated with these bodies, the communal councils can be understood as an effort to circumvent political conservatism within municipalities by devolving political and economic power directly to “local action units” (Fung and Wright, 2001: 21). As several other Latin American cases indicate (Chavez, 2004; Rodgers, 2010), the specific arrangements of local and national political power in which neighborhood bodies are situated significantly shape their capacity to access resources and determine their own political agendas.

To date, the communal councils have received a mixed response from scholars and political actors within Venezuela. The most enthusiastic have suggested that they offer Venezuelan citizens the opportunity to build parallel structures of governance and gradually transfer power away from the central state (Azzellini, 2010; 2013). Ciccariello-Maher (2013b) describes the relationship between the Bolivarian government and the Chavista bases as a complex dialectic in which elements of the constituted power—chiefly Chávez before his death—respond to pressure from below by using the legislative authority of the state to open new spaces for the development of self-government. Others have acknowledged a number of “rough edges” associated with the bodies but pointed to real benefits that can be derived from the injection of state funding into historically excluded communities (Ellner, 2009). The most critical warn that financial dependence on the rentier state endangers the autonomy of grassroots organizations and therefore their ability to either articulate independent political claims (García-Guadilla, 2011; Uzcátegui, 2010) or avoid co-optation (Smilde, 2008). We are beginning to see more detailed studies of how communal councils function in day-to-day terms, such as that of Azzellini in this issue, which cumulatively should enable a more comprehensive examination of how ordinary Venezuelans understand and make use of them. This article contributes in this regard by providing a detailed ethnographic study of how everyday political practice unfolds in these councils.

Gendered and Generational Patterns of Participation

The formation of the communal councils in El Camoruco marked a significant shift for locals, who had been accustomed to working with a single neighbors’ association that covered the community’s entire population (around 4,000 people). Because the 2006 law states that communal councils must represent between 200 and 400 households, the original neighbors’ association was forced to divide into four separate communal councils (Sectors 1–4), each with its own communal bank and separate set of spokespeople. ⁴ Some local activists were unhappy with this division, suggesting that the size rule should be a guide rather than a law and voicing concerns that it would lead to factionalism and conflict. At the same time, sectorization did mean that a larger number of people had the opportunity to be elected as community spokespeople.

My local communal council in Sector 4 was formed in August 2007. After holding its elections, the local community agreed to apply for money to establish a day center for elderly residents (La Casa de Los Abuelos), materials to repair some of the most rundown houses in the community, and a project to fill in the dirty and polluted canal that marked the border between El Camoruco and its neighboring barrio. Ten social enterprises were established with microfinance loans from FONDEMI, seven of which were still functional in 2009, including a carpentry workshop, a confectioner, a small ceramic block producer, and a piñata workshop.

One of the most notable features of Sector 4’s communal council was that it was largely run by a small group of elderly women—Esme, Juliana, Carla, and Natalia. ⁵ At the time of its launch, the community had elected 28 spokespeople, but since then the number of public meetings had decreased significantly as the projects themselves became the communal council’s main focus. In place of public assemblies, this group of dedicated women—known locally as Las Señoras—had assumed responsibility for the bulk of the unpaid labor required to run the communal council. ⁶ When they assumed their new roles, they received official identity cards from FUNDACOMUNAL and attended a series of training workshops at institutions such as the government’s Instituto para Capacitación y Educación Socialista (National Institute for Socialist Training and Education—INCES). The workshops detailed how to facilitate meetings, draft funding proposals, manage budgets, and organize community events. There were also optional courses in personal development, self-esteem, and leadership. Juliana, who had never been involved in community work before the communal councils were launched, had been inspired by the workshops and was now studying social management in the Sucre Mission, a university-level initiative also funded by the Chávez government:

I’ve learned so much so quickly, but it’s a lot of work. My family is always complaining because I’m always here in the house working on things for the communal council! I’ve attended all the workshops, which are tiring because they often start at eight in the morning and end at three in the afternoon. I’m so busy with work for the communal council and my course at the mission, there’s no time for anything else.

Together with the training schemes, regular contact with a myriad of state institutions was evident in the reams of political propaganda and official documentation that cluttered the houses of Las Señoras. These included copies of the 1999 constitution, booklets of recently passed laws, and manuals on everything from microfinance to socialist family values.

Engaging with bureaucracy was also a key component of the spokespeople’s everyday practice and was critical to the maintenance of the communal council’s three long-term projects. Frequent contact with the state funding providers and work contractors required constant letter writing, form filling, photocopying, and telephone calls. Budgets, account statements, and work contracts also needed constant monitoring, and everything had to be countersigned by Esme, the social control spokesperson. Yet bureaucratic efficiency on the part of the spokespeople was no guarantee of a project’s going ahead smoothly. In the case of the canal project, for example, 7,000 Bs.F (US$1,628) had been transferred to the communal council and used to clean the canal in preparation for its concrete filling, but a second sum of money promised by FUNDACOMUNAL never arrived. Juliana had written several letters to the organization but had yet to receive a satisfactory response. She then tried directly contacting the engineer contracted to carry out the work but was told that he was waiting for the second payment from FUNDACOMUNAL. The canceled meetings and unanswered letters that accompanied Juliana’s efforts to complete the project clearly tested her patience. “I don’t know whether it’s a problem with FUNDACOMUNAL— whether they’re not doing their job—or if they’ve got so many projects [they lack the funding for ours],” she commented.

As committed as Juliana was, it was obvious that she found it difficult to balance her role as a spokesperson with her family commitments. Both of her daughters worked during the day, and I would often find her simultaneously preparing the family’s food, fielding phone calls, and separating her bickering grandchildren. This merging of community work and domestic reproduction was in keeping with the observations of Friedman (2000: 266–269), Fernandes (2007: 98–107), and Motta (2013), who point out that though women have traditionally been excluded from formal political spheres in Venezuela—including those of the political left—there is a long history of their involvement in neighborhood organizing. As Moser (2009: 68) notes, poor Latin American women often act as social “shock absorbers” by combining domestic reproduction with wage labor and community work—a “triple burden” that has also been observed by ethnographers such as González de la Rocha (2001) and Roy (2002).

Sara Motta (2013: 41) argues that, in Venezuela, gendered norms that depict women “through a desexualized and dependent articulation of mother, daughter, and wife” persist in spite of the fact that they have historically been at the center of collective struggles around health, water, and community improvements. Drawing on the insights of the Venezuelan feminist Alba Carosio (2007), Motta suggests that such struggles both confronted and reinforced exclusionary gendered norms. On the one hand, the caring maternal role was transgressed as it was politicized through community mobilizations, but, on the other, “the politicization of their role as ensurers of the reproduction of the family and community, which came at great personal cost, also reproduced more traditional representations of the women as self-sacrificing caregivers” (2013: 44; see also Briceño and López, 2010; Carosio, 2007; Rantala, 2009; Vargas, 2007).

The case of Las Señoras in El Camoruco indicates that these tensions were not only gendered but also generational. Well aware that they were taking on a heavy burden, the women nonetheless reasoned that those of a younger age were unable to do so because of their employment commitments. They also reported that the introduction of a regular and secure state pension under the Chávez government had given them the financial security to dedicate themselves to such work. ⁷ Esme explained, for example, that her efforts were part of her gratitude to Chávez and the revolution, which had prioritized elderly people through its welfare programs: “I have a lot of love for el pueblo, for this work. I feel really appreciative toward the Chávez government. . . . Right now you won’t be able to find elderly people in their houses, because they’re out at the missions or La Casa de Los Abuelos. ⁸ The quality of life has changed a lot for us.” Part of this gratitude lay in the fact that the communal council also provided a number of personal opportunities for the women. Although becoming a spokesperson was undoubtedly a commitment that meant hours of unpaid labor, it was also a chance to develop new skills, cultivate self-esteem, and, in many ways, become semiprofessionalized community activists, even quasi-state functionaries. As Esme’s statement above highlights, becoming a communal council spokesperson was an articulation of citizenship closely tied to established ideals of solidarity, self-sacrifice, and altruism. But on top of these subjective benefits, the role also offered the opportunity for modest financial gains. Esme had established a piñata workshop with a microfinance loan from FONDEMI and could often be found at work with paint and papier-mâché in the front room of her house. As a known person at the center of community life, she was the first person to call for anyone in need of a piñata. The communal council thus facilitated the expansion of social networks and material opportunities, meaning that community leadership and social enterprise became mutually beneficial endeavors.

Such were the demands that came with the spokesperson role, however, that few people seemed willing or able to take it on. Since there was now a clear set of institutional channels and ascribed funding providers, the need to “capture the attention” of the state through collective mobilizations appeared less pronounced than in the pre-Chávez era (see Fernandes, 2010; Velasco, 2011). Instead, spokespeople had to learn how to plan, implement, and maintain projects, confirming Nancy Postero’s (2007: 77) observation that such initiatives privilege particular actors who demonstrate the strongest capacity to launch projects. As far as Sector 4 of El Camoruco was concerned, this capacity was both gendered and generational, an outcome of existing traditions of neighborhood organizing, recent improvements to social welfare, and the particular dynamic that existed among Las Señoras.

Participatory or Representative Democracy?

Although the well-documented failings of the pre-Chávez era resulted in the wholesale rejection of the political system known as puntofijismo (Ellner and Hellinger, 2003; McCoy and Myers, 2004), Venezuelan citizens continue to value democracy as both a principle and a set of practices. Indeed, Hellinger (2011: 28–29) argues that one of the enduring legacies of the Fourth Republic (1958–1998) is that many Venezuelans retain a belief in the importance of pluralist or representative democracy. For Chávez’s supporters, meanwhile, it is clear that a strong connection with the former president galvanized those who might otherwise have turned away from electoral politics. This was apparent in the support Chávez received during the coup of 2002 (Motta, 2013: 45), as well as in the large voting turnouts in numerous local and national elections since 1998.

An enthusiasm for democracy was also evident in the elections for El Camoruco’s communal councils, which directly replicated national elections in their form and process. Mirroring electoral procedures for professional politicians, there were lists of prospective spokespeople on the walls of the local school when residents arrived to cast their votes, ballot boxes identical to those used for political parties, and officials from the National Electoral Council overseeing the proceedings. While this attention to the formalities of democratic practice worked symbolically to incorporate the communal councils into the broader political system, it also contributed to the view that spokespeople were, like professional politicians, in some way institutionally removed from rest of the community. This was at odds with the rhetoric surrounding the role, which emphasized that spokespeople should merely act as delegates who carry out the community’s will. In practice, however, a slippage in this definition was often observable. Faced with the minutiae of practical challenges associated with the projects, on occasion spokespeople would make decisions independently. As a result, there were many local residents who viewed the communal councils as did my neighbor Graciela: “Ach, those people with their projects.”

In Sector 4, such views were a by-product of the patterns of participation described above. Although a wave of enthusiasm had accompanied the formation of the bodies in 2007, these numbers had fallen dramatically by 2009. My own estimate regarding the number of regular participants, gleaned principally from attending meetings and talking to local residents, was that El Camoruco’s four communal councils usually had 5–10 core spokespeople and another 20–40 people who would attend meetings and contribute to decision making. Occasionally, when the communal councils organized events for public celebrations such as Children’s Day, a large proportion of the community would turn out and participate. But the reality was that for many people who worked, maintained families, or simply preferred to spend their free time doing other things, the demands of running a communal council were too great to justify the kind of commitment made by Las Señoras. Santiago, a young man who had been involved in a number of Chavista organizations, described how the succession of different community bodies in the Chávez era had left him and others cynical about the arrival of the communal councils:

The first thing we had here were the Bolivarian circles. When they arrived everyone was, like, “Whoo, great, let’s get involved!” But in truth they didn’t really do anything. Then it was the cooperatives, but nothing seems to be happening with them now. Now we have the communal councils, but there are a lot of problems with them, too. People aren’t doing what they should be.

As comments like this suggest, the continual exhortation to participate seemed to leave some fatigued, and as a result they deferred decision making to those who were willing to take on the burden. With their ID cards, official documents, and daily involvement in the state’s workings, spokespeople certainly accumulated trappings of the “mystique of sovereignty” (Taussig, 1997: 18). But with these trappings came the more problematic perception that they were quasi-professional politicians who operated in a representative capacity rather than delegates of a body that was supposed to be participatory.

Many active spokespeople viewed cynicism toward the communal councils as a symptom of selfishness and disloyalty. Because of their close interaction with state bodies, spokespeople were exposed to current debates about the health of the revolution that circulated in the Chavista party-state milieu. A common opinion among officials of the Partido Socialista de Venezuela (Socialist Party of Venezuela—PSUV) and the state was that the persistence of “capitalist” or “individualistic” attitudes in the general population was inhibiting the government’s push for twenty-first-century socialism. During a workshop I attended with spokespeople from across the urban parish at the city hall, this was the main topic of discussion. Our trainer, a government official, said that cooperatives had struggled in Venezuela because of the lack of a “socialist mentality.” “People still believe they can stop working when they go home at three in the afternoon,” he told us, mentioning Cuba as an example to be followed. “But you have to sacrifice yourself.” Many of the spokespeople nodded their agreement, and the bus journey home was spent discussing why participation seemed to be dwindling in the community.

A few days later at a communal council meeting in one of El Camoruco’s neighboring communities, a spokesperson named Marielvis, who had been at the workshop, began berating a number of locals who, in her eyes, were not pulling their weight:

There are really only four or five of us working in this communal council. We’ve all been at meetings at the city hall for the last few days, but you know what they always ask us? “What projects have you got? What are you doing?” They won’t start sending us funds until we’ve got projects ready. I’ve heard some people saying, “Oh, I don’t want to work,” “Oh, I’m busy with my work and my kids,” but I’ll tell you this: you all have responsibilities.

This outburst revealed how an ideal of participatory democracy from below could be turned on its head. Rather than opening up the institutions of governance to the population at large, the communal council placed demands from above on local communities by using participation as a disciplining idiom. Marielvis’s words effectively transferred accountability from the state to local communities, using a discourse of revolutionary sacrifice to rebuke those who were perceived to be indolent or individualistic. The adoption of critical party-state discourses by communal council spokespeople thus enabled them to cultivate what Bourdieu (1991: 111) terms the “delegated authority” of institutions of power. As they became specialists in Bolivarian bureaucracy and discourse, spokespeople could subjectively remake themselves as local-level guardians of the revolution. But in adopting this position, they also contributed to a blurring of the boundaries between community organizing and government diktat.

Discourses of Corruption

Local people, however, sought to hold their spokespeople to account in equal measure. While complaints about low levels of participation came from one direction, rumors about corruption within the communal councils began to emerge from the other. Some residents suggested that funding for the microfinance initiatives was being misused and speculated that spokespeople were spending communal bank money without the community’s consent. A typical conversation of this nature took place at a barbecue I attended one Sunday afternoon:

A subtext running through such conversations was the belief that corruption was an inevitable companion to the handling of money, with many people arguing that the communal councils were merely a new setting for a presumed national proclivity for thievery (see Coronil, 1997: 321–366). Because politics and politicians, Chávez excepted, were generally regarded as inherently contaminated, the communal councils and their spokespeople were increasingly associated with what locals termed la misma vaina, the same old problem of corruption.

Sector 4’s spokespeople responded to these rumors by arguing that people should participate if they wanted to stamp out corruption. By mid-2010, Juliana was eager to call elections so that she could relinquish her role. She was tired of the constant criticism and argued that people were merely making excuses for their own lack of involvement:

I’ve left my studies, my husband, and my family for this job. And for what? To be accused of corruption when I’ve spent every day of the last two years working for this community. This is the problem here. There’s only a small group of us who actually commit to working, but then everyone else says that we’re not doing things properly or that we’re just working for ourselves. You can’t win.

These disagreements were compounded by the fact that accusations also circulated between El Camoruco’s different communal councils when projects were organized by the whole community. Because funding could only be paid into one communal council’s bank, arguments would break out over who was controlling it. In one case, during the organization of a trip for the neighborhood’s elderly residents, Sector 3 refused to release its pot of money because residents suspected that the money had “disappeared” from the other three sectors. The issue was resolved only after a series of ferocious arguments.

Although the emergence of these accusations just three years after the communal councils were launched might suggest that a culture of mistrust pervaded the bodies, such exchanges can also be understood as an attempt to establish a culture of accountability for new political institutions. As Gupta (1995) points out, discourses of corruption can be central to the way that citizens imaginatively construct relationships between themselves and the state. By leveling accusations at politicians or state officials, citizens hold more powerful actors to account by judging them against an ideal of how they should conduct themselves. Though this ideal may be a long way from the real-life encounters the poor have with the state, it nonetheless works to articulate the kinds of rights and responsibilities that should exist between state actors and citizens. As Gupta writes, “The discourse of corruption, by marking those actions that constitute an infringement of such rights, thus acts to represent those rights to citizens themselves” (1995: 389). Similarly, Lazar (2004: 90) argues that in local democratic arenas, rumor and accusation work to form preemptive accountability so that both existing and future leaders know what is expected of them. Even though suspicions and tensions may appear potentially destructive, “contestation is much of what actually makes the community.”

Seen in this light, the discourse of corruption that pervaded everyday discussions of El Camoruco’s communal councils can be understood as an attempt to hold spokespeople to account and promote a set of values to which they should adhere. This was, in a sense, a direct response to the criticisms of nonparticipants by spokespeople: if such leaders became “state-like” or “politician-like” by admonishing local people or making decisions on their behalf, they would be subjected to the same accusations that might be leveled at state officials or professional politicians. Ironically for a policy that claims to value grassroots protagonism, an unintended consequence of the communal councils’ emergence in El Camoruco was thus that voluntary actors risked becoming tarnished by their association with politics and money. As the lines between state functionaries and community organizers became increasingly blurred, one might speculate that the communal councils decentralized not only power and resources but also “the corroding force of accumulated toxins, waste, and excrement” (Coronil, 1997: 353) that is seen to accompany governance and politics in Venezuela.

Self-Government and Revolution

It is widely acknowledged that the Bolivarian movement is made up of a number of competing ideological and organizational tendencies (Ellner, 2013). The radical Venezuelan intellectual Roland Denis (2011), for example, has argued that contemporary Chavismo is divided between two broad currents: the “bureaucratic-corporatist republic” and the “self-governing socialist body” (cited in Spronk et al., 2011: 247–248). Denis contends that while the Bolivarian government seeks to lead the popular movements that give it legitimacy, the second current possesses “an entirely different logic, based in self-government of land, social spaces, and spaces of production” (248). In El Camoruco, although not all actors in the communal councils displayed coherent ideological positions, tensions between these two broad currents were evident in disputes between newly elected spokespeople and older community leaders whose activism predated the establishment of the communal councils. In these exchanges, accusations of self-interest and bureaucratism reflected conflicting views of how political power and decision making should be organized in the communal councils.

Among the most vocal critics of the new spokespeople was a group of Chavista leaders who had been central members of the neighbors’ association before the launch of the communal councils. Two of the group—the neighbors’ association’s former president, Rafael, and his close friend, Rosa—had viewed the development of the communal councils with growing concern for some time. With a wealth of experience as community activists, they considered themselves more ideologically “prepared” than many of the newer spokespeople and regarded the bickering over money as a threat to the revolutionary process. As they saw it, the clamor to receive funding and the disputes it generated served to divert the energies of activists and residents away from a more important long-term goal: the establishment of self-governing institutions that could form the building blocks of a socialist society. As Rafael commented,

It sounds like a contradiction, but all the money that the government sends to the communal councils can work against the revolution. You know, when we ran the neighbors’ association in 1999, we achieved really high levels of participation because of the way we allowed people to become incorporated. Now, the vision is different in the sense that what [the communal councils] have achieved is possible only because of the funds. A lot of people [in the communal councils] are really dedicated to organizing whatever scheme in order to get the funds, but they’re not worrying about the general participation of the people.

Fearing that a culture of community mobilization was being lost, the former neighbors’-association activists began to challenge local spokespeople by making two demands in public meetings. First, they proposed that anyone should be able to organize a project rather than this being the sole preserve of spokespeople. Second, they argued that spokespeople should prioritize community mobilization over the search for funding. The overarching aim of these proposals was to repoliticize the communal councils and move toward a greater degree of self-government within the barrio.

Rafael and Rosa’s major public challenge to the spokespeople came when municipal government announced that it was canceling the contracts of the zone’s private waste collectors, who were consistently accused of corruption and criminality. The two of them had been looking for a way to launch a project that could provide employment for local people, and they spotted an opportunity when they heard the announcement. Their plan was to establish a community-run waste collection cooperative through the local communal councils. Local workers would be sourced from El Camoruco and its surrounding barrios and would be offered jobs as waste collectors. The municipal government would pay initially, but funding applications would be made for trucks and equipment so that the cooperative could eventually become self-sufficient, with its profits administered by the communal councils. After positive discussions with the municipality’s environmental institute, Rosa convened a meeting in El Camoruco and invited interested workers and spokespeople from the local communal councils to attend. As people began to arrive on the day of the meeting, she noted down the names of the barrios and sectors that were present. “We have Barrio Macuto here, José Felix here, El Camoruco Sector 1? Yes. Sector 2 and Sector 4 too? Yes, good. And Sector 3? Well I’m from Sector 3, so that’s all four sectors from El Camoruco covered.” At that moment, Angel, a spokesperson from Sector 3’s communal council who had been observing the meeting from across the street, shouted at her, “You’re not communal council!” “How can I not be communal council? I live in Sector 3. I’m part of this community,” she replied. “But you’re not a member of the council, you weren’t elected,” Angel spat back angrily. The argument was put on hold to conclude the meeting, but later on Rosa said that the two of them had continued when it finished. Angel had refused to concede that, as a nonspokesperson, Rosa had any right to organize meetings or speak for Sector 3. In turn, she regarded him as typical of many new spokespeople who had become intoxicated by what she called their pedacitos (little pieces) of power. She argued that spokespeople were supposed to be community delegates rather than elected decision makers and stressed that anyone from the community should be able to put forward proposals and participate in the communal council’s running. “People think that only spokespeople, only people from the committees, are the communal councils, but the communal council is the community. It’s the assembly of citizens. That’s the most important part,” she asserted. Disappointingly for Rafael and Rosa, in what they regarded as an act of sabotage the project had to be abandoned when the spokespeople refused to allow their communal banks to be used to deposit money. Furious, Rosa repeated her claim that such attitudes were reproducing the rotten practices of the pre-Chávez era. “These people are still thinking, like, ‘This is my communal council. I am the communal council.’ They don’t understand how a communal council is supposed to work.”

The episode demonstrated how one understanding of participation—the ideal that anyone could and should take an active role in running a communal council—clashed with the assertion that only elected “members” could arrange meetings or launch projects. While personality clashes certainly played their part in the dispute, it also centered on a struggle to determine how participatory democracy and decision making should work in a communal council. The main issue was not that Rafael and Rosa had attempted to organize the project without the communal councils but that they had done so without going through the spokespeople—a sign, as Angel seemed to view it, of usurpation and disrespect. Rosa’s response was that people like Angel remained beholden to self-serving bureaucratism and therefore needed challenging. Overall, the exchange showed that the raison d’être of the communal councils remained contested and unresolved in El Camoruco. For some residents, participation in the communal councils was a means of accessing state resources and taking advantage of new openings in order to benefit both themselves and the wider community. Spokespeople like Angel appeared to enjoy the small trappings of power that came with their roles and went to substantial effort to protect the status that came with it. For others, like Rafael and Rosa, participation was interpreted through social imaginaries in which community bodies sat at the center of a political struggle. An actor’s motivations and loyalties were important not only in terms of how resources were controlled and distributed locally but also in terms of defending the revolution and building self-governing communities. Therefore the communal councils were understood as part of a broader struggle between socialist and capitalist moralities in which perceived individualism was seen as a threat to the moral legitimacy and functional efficacy of emergent collectivities.

Conclusion

In this article I have analyzed the development of political practice among El Camoruco’s residents since the Communal Councils Law was passed in 2006 and have made four key points concerning the Bolivarian government’s attempt to stimulate participatory democracy through the communal councils. First, I have argued that the emphasis on small-scale, community-managed projects produced both new opportunities and new burdens for local residents. Those who took on responsibilities as spokespeople, many of them older women, acquired new skills and developed as political subjects. Yet they also encountered existing patterns of gendered inequality, which were arguably reproduced as much as they were challenged by the communal councils. Secondly, despite the repeated valorization of participatory democracy at the level of discourse, there was a notable gap between the state’s drive for participation and the real-world ability and willingness of locals to dedicate their time to the communal councils. One problematic outcome of an emerging institutional distance between spokespeople and non- (or infrequent) participants was that barrio residents could be admonished, often by their own neighbors, for failing to live up to Chavista aspirations of participation. Thirdly, such trends were to some extent countered by accusations of corruption and self-interest, which reflected attempts to create a culture of accountability around the communal councils. Finally, many of these tendencies were at odds with more radical visions of self-government and revolution, which remain significant currents in the Bolivarian movement. Activists who envisioned more overtly political, self-governing neighborhood organizations were constrained in their ability to forge alternatives by the political-legal framework of the bodies and their own loyalty to Chávez and his legacy. The prospect of forming alternatives to the communal councils or transforming them into more combative entities was politically and logistically problematic. As things stood, divergent currents coexisted uneasily.

These conclusions show that a set of unresolved tensions shapes political practice in the communal councils. I argue that they are best understood as contested spaces in which a complex interplay between individual self-interests, state agendas, and broader ideological imaginings intersect on a daily basis. Such findings suggest that current debates about participatory democracy in Venezuela, particularly those around the relationship between constituted and constituent power (see Azzellini, 2010; 2013; Ciccariello-Maher, 2013a), may require some refining. While such discussions often describe the Bolivarian project as fraught with tensions, they often seem to assume that these lie largely in the contingent alliances made between grassroots organizations and the state. This article has highlighted the fact that significant tensions also exist among grassroots actors themselves. Although the most radical may indeed conceptualize the communal councils as a site in which to “subject constituted power to constant constituent pressure, binding the two in a dialectical chain toward ever more radical and direct representation” (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013a: 129), it is evident that not all individuals share this view. The danger of catch-all characterizations of the Chavista bases is that they may overlook the highly diverse ways in which grassroots actors perceive and make use of participatory initiatives.

By the same token, those who paint the communal councils as a “subordinated social movement” (Uzcátegui, 2010: 205, my translation) may equally neglect the level of contestation that exists within them. While the government’s discursive promotion of self-government from below does seem to be at odds with the communal councils’ reliance on national funding agencies, this fact does not go unchallenged by grassroots actors. The struggle to define precisely what the communal councils should be is clearly a central problem at the local level, but it is also one that barrio residents are attempting to tackle. ¹¹ The evident tensions between bureaucratism and self-government, liberalism and socialism, undoubtedly reflect contradictory tendencies that run throughout the Bolivarian project as a whole (Hellinger, 2011: 36), while the ways in which these dynamics play out in practice may vary greatly according to the political histories and cultures of different locales.

To the extent that El Camoruco can be taken as indicative, this article has shown that the communal councils are characterized by both instrumentalist and ideological uses and myriad confusions and conflicts among grassroots actors. There are unquestionably significant individual and collective benefits that arrive with the communal councils’ projects, and it would be unfair to underestimate the value of the material improvements they can achieve. Yet it is also clear that both their structural framework and their everyday interpretations significantly complicate the drive to establish embryos of a revolutionary democracy.