Venezuela has been the stuff of frontpage news extravaganzas,
especially since the death of Hugo Chávez. With predictable bias,
mainstream media focus on violent clashes between opposition and
government, coup attempts, hyperinflation, U.S. sanctions, and massive
immigration. What is less known, however, is the story of what the
Venezuelan people—especially the Chavista masses—do and think in these
times of social emergency. Denying us their stories comes at a high
price to people everywhere, because the Chavista bases are the real
motors of the Bolivarian revolution. This revolutionary grassroots
movement still aspires to the communal path to socialism that Chávez
refined in his last years. Venezuela, the Present as Struggle is an eloquent testament to their lives.
Comprised of a series of compelling interviews conducted by Cira
Pascual Marquina, professor at the Bolivarian University, and
contextualized by author Chris Gilbert, the book seeks to open a window
on grassroots Chavismo itself in the wake of Chávez’s death. Feminist
and housing activists, communards, organic intellectuals, and campesinos
from around the country speak up in their own voices, defending the
socialist project and pointing to what they see as revolutionary
solutions to Venezuela’s current crisis. If the Venezuelan government
has shown an impressive capacity to resist imperialism, it is the
Chavista grassroots movement, as this book shows, that actually defends
socialism as the only coherent project of national liberation.