From the bourgeois capitalist state to the socialist state

The following is a continuation of my translation of the PSUV's "Red Book" (i.e. party program). Here is section 4 from the 'Declaration of Principles'.

4. From the bourgeois capitalist state to the socialist state

Restore power to the people: building popular power

Translated by Owen Richards

The conclusion is clear: "to end to end poverty, it is necessary to give power to the poor" and to build socialism. This power is born in the participation and activism of the people.

The United Socialist Party Of Venezuela must be the motor of the direct participation of the people and its instrument in the construction of socialism. This participation—of workers, campesinos, youth, intellectuals, professionals, artists, housewives, small producers, city and country traders, indigenous people and afro-decendientes [those of African heritage]—must be full and democratic, in the make up and functioning of all of the organs of power, in the elaboration, discussion and resolution of programmes and strategies and in the promotion and election of its leaderships, in conditions of equality, to achieve the collective leadership of the revolutionary process.

To that end, the fundamental task of the party is to raise the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, to organize and educate them in in the struggle for the conquest of power, to raise their level of philosophical, political, ideological, moral and organisational consciousness, in order to achieve their transformation from patrons of representative democracy into patrons of participatory democracy. It means training the people for the exercise of power in such functions as planning and the drawing up of budgets, making decisions, execution and control, guided by socialist values.  It also represents, ideologically, upholding Bolivarian socialism as our chief ideal of society, as the political model of the state.  Within this framework, the party should be an instrument of struggle for emancipation, a unifying political tool and an organ of political, economic, financial and social control of the whole structure of the government, based on the foundation of a socialist conception of the party.

The party frames its strategic approach towards the construction of popular power in the elaboration, formulation, and the pre- and post- inspection of the implementation of government programmes, with a sense of equity, equality, humanism and following socialist principles, in the process of generating the new hegemony 

In building Popular Power, the focus is on territorial organisation according to the New Geometry Of Popular Power.  With this focus, the social movements will be strengthened from the grass roots.

The party must aim to give power to the organized and conscious masses, socialising political power through the direct exercise of the power of the people in the search for ethical, social, scientific, artistic and cultural development.

The party, as the instrument of struggle of millions of free men and women, likewise points out the need for centralised action in the great battles already outlined: the battle against poverty, exploitation, corruption, against the degradation of the human being, and against the internal reactionaries and their imperial overlords.

It must be the unifying political mechanism of the great majority, based on the conviction that the people face a constant military threat by the internal and external enemies of the revolution, and in doing so the party in all of its plans assumes the responsibility for defending the homeland, for confronting and defeating imperialism.

To advance towards the socialist society that we want, we must replace the bourgeois capitalist state with a socialist state.  The newly outlined state advances toward the planned and organic communal state whose concretion takes place through the dialectical interaction between the old passive and obsolete organising cells, and the new forms of superior organisation like the communes, communal councils, workers' revolutionary councils, students' revolutionary councils, among others.

The party, together with the people, must strengthen the fight against corruption, creating the conditions and mechanisms to combat this cancerous vice in the structures of the bourgeois state, a vice that spreads moral and ethical degradation in institutions and human beings and generates practices that conflict with ethical principles; as a consequence, the party must motivate a constant striving for the revolutionary transformation in the consciousness of social duty, along with the application of legal measures to liquidate impunity, and resolutely punish acts committed against public ethics and morality. As every act of corruption is a counterrevolutionary act, the party will work on the strengthening of revolutionary ethics, which is the nexus between what is said and what is done, between words and deeds.