Pushed by fierce economic crisis, Nicolas Maduro regime accelerated progress towards consolidation of municipalities, groups inspired by the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution in Venezuela are to serve as the cornerstone of a state controller and more repressive , and a society with less freedoms, analysts said.
The communes, who have been some years operating in Venezuela, are designed to build an architecture of power more in line with the needs of the Bolivarian Revolution to control its citizens, which will eventually supplant the state model outlined in the Constitution of 1999 .
These organizations, which unconstitutionally intended to replace the parish as the basic cluster state, were sold to the public as a new instrument of empowerment for people in marginal areas.
However, this is not the proper role for which they were created, said Carlos Blanco, former president of the Venezuelan Presidential Commission for State Reform (COPRE).
"The communes are more than instruments designed to organize the people's power is to control citizens through an instrument that is directed from the government itself, from the Presidency of the Republic," he added.
It is an organization that is being promoted as a tool to connect people directly with the state, so that the population, particularly the inhabitants of the poor, to participate directly in decisions that affect their communities.
But the power actually flows from top to bottom, and not the reverse as is professed, and who will actually wield power in these organizations is the dome of Chavez and its leader, Nicolas Maduro.
Under Chavez's rhetoric, people power is critical because "the people" in action is direct custodian of national sovereignty, said White.
"However, the problem with this is that the Venezuelan government has called the people, it is actually a metaphor for the power that was formerly in Chavez and now rests Maduro," White said.
"In the logic of schemes like these, the people are represented by the government and ultimately by the chief minister, whose will is by definition the will of the people. They claim to represent the will of the people and when they speak, their voice, speaking the people, by their own criteria. "
Being the voice of the people's voice Maduro, Maduro decisions would also be the people's decisions, he said.
"Consequently, I organize and government, which are these communes, is what the people power and therefore, people's power is what I want to be the people's power, which I fund, which I I control. It's like a game of mirrors where the government organizes some instruments to justify the decisions without consulting those instruments "described.
The experts consulted said that Chavez aims to make the model in the new architecture of the Venezuelan state, with the communes, communal councils, the federation of municipalities and communes confederation eventually replacing what today are the parishes, townships, cities, states and the federal government.
But the model also seeks to move the state greater control over the economy.
Antonio De La Cruz, executive director of the consulting firm Inter American Trends, said the scheme Maduro is leveraging current economic crisis to accelerate the model whose control over the economy is being described by Chavez as the solution to the economic war undertaken by the business.
According to the Inter American Trends report, that's one of the reasons behind the newly introduced Law on Fair Costs and Prices, which among other things states that all assets of production considered social interest, paving the way for they can be expropriated.
But while the crisis is an excuse to accelerate the process, the application of the model was always in the mind of Chavez.
"The Communal State is the true end of XXI Century Socialism where power is exercised by the authoritarian government and not the citizens. So far everything has been a medium, "he said De La Cruz.
Leonardo Palacios, lawyer and expert in constitutional matters, said the political economic model to be applied in Venezuela are inspired by the Cuban, and provides for an almost total state control over the economy.
For this, the regime will probably increase Maduro expropriations that Cuban advisers were considered Chavez was a valid alternative to confiscation, to further weaken the economic power, which he always considered his enemy.
Those plans can now be viewed in Venezuelan legislation, Palacios said.
"The communal economic system, for example, provides two types of social property. The direct social property of the state, when the state expropriates and assumes economic exploitation, and other forms of social ownership is when the state expropriates and the delivery workers or other instances of communal power, which are defined in the law of popular will power, "he said.
But of all the recent legislation to move forward with the transformation of the state, the more worrying is the new organic law on fair prices.
"It's worse and more draconian than th
