(Re)constructing Popular Power in Our America: Venezuela and the regionalisation of ‘revolutionary democracy’ in the ALBA–TCP space

With Nicaragua’s Sandinista People’s Revolution (1979–90) as an ideological reference point, this paper adopts an historical approach to a theorisation of the contemporary (re)construction of popular power in Latin America and the Caribbean through the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America–Peoples’ Trade Agreement (ALBA–TCP). At the core of the analysis is the Venezuelan government’s concept of ‘protagonistic revolutionary democracy’ which, by drawing on Marxist direct democracy and CB Macpherson’s participatory democracy, can be understood as the definitional foundation of the envisioned ‘21st century socialism’. Mechanisms for the exercise of direct democracy and of participatory democracy promotion are identified at the national and regional scales, through which the ALBA–TCP emerges as a counter-hegemonic governance regime composed of two dialectically interrelated forces: the ‘state-in-revolution’ and the ‘organised society’. They drive the regionalisation of ‘revolutionary democracy’, thus (re)constructing popular power in the production of the ALBA–TCP space.