As a populist slogan encapsulating the idea of mass democratic participation there is nothing wrong with the idea is “socialism from below.” The difficulty is that the categorisation of “from below” and “from above” do not correspond to the way that society is actually structured. The essence of the capitalist mode of production is between wage labourers and capitalists, but the working class develops its own institutions and structures. What is more, capitalist society involves a large number of civil, municipal and state institutions, that mediate both the appearance and reality.
Progress towards socialism requires not only a struggle for organisation in communities and workplaces, but also winning hegemony for the left in civil and state institutions...
Paradoxes therefore abound...Callinicos actually describes the issue well when he says: “The unsuccessful coup in April 2002 unleashed an unfinished process of radicalization driven by the interplay between Chávez and the movement from below, which have become progressively more dependent on one another.”
In particular the coup, and the later oil lock out, both stimulated a deepening of social participation in the revolution, “from below”; and also consolidated the position of some of the most radical supporters of the revolution within the state bureaucracy and the military – not least of which Chavez himself. The state machine has not been decisively won to the revolution, but certain important parts of it seem to have been.
Chavez has used the state to pursue certain reforms, particularly in the fields of education, health, empowerment of communities to control local radio stations, popular military training, etc. The degree of mass popular participation in and control over these initiatives make them very radical indeed.
The revolution can only be totally consolidated when the economic and political power of the boss class is eliminated, but postponing that task is not the same as avoiding it. It can be very important, As Trotsky argues in the “History of the Russian Revolution”, that the working class participate in removing the power of the bosses as a defensive struggle to defend the gains they have made.
In this way, we can see that reform and revolution are not counterposed, but that revolution is a decisive culmination of a process of uncompromising reform. This then transcends the distinction between “from below” and “from above”, as in decisively removing state and economic power from the hands of the boss class, the working class and peasantry must seize the state, incorporating those parts of the state machine already sympathetic to them, and then building links with progressive governments and mass movements abroad.
