Constituent Power in Motion: Ten Years of Transformation in Venezuela

During the last decades one of the biggest controversies among the international left has been the quetion wether to „seize“ power or not, if to rely on the state in a process of change or refuse an institutional path and rely on movements. This logics are questioned strongly by the the Venezuelan process of social transformation, which includes among its participants both traditional organizations and autonomous groups; it encompasses both state-centric and anti-systemic currents. The two-track approach, combining bottom-up and top-down strategies as in Venezuela, has come to characterize various contexts of social transformation in Latin America. The principal agent of change is understood to be the constituent power (poder constituyente), that is, the legitimate collective creative capacity of human beings, expressed in movements and in the organized social base. At the same time, the constituted authority – the State and its institutions – must guarantee the framework and conditions of the process. Although not free of contradictions and conflicts, this two-track approach has been able to uphold and deepen the process of social transformation in Venezuela. The article analyzes the first 10 years (1999-2009) of the venezuelan process from this perspective and sets up a theoretical frame.