If you’re looking for successful cases of municipal socialism, Torres, a municipality in the Venezuelan state of Lara, deserves to be high on the list. From 2005 to 2016 Torres was one of the most deeply democratic cities in the world. During these years, ordinary citizens exercised an extraordinary level of control over local political decision-making. Their most powerful tool? A participatory budget, which gave residents binding control over the full municipal investment budget.
In district-level assemblies, predominantly working-class participants (agricultural laborers, domestic caregivers, small farmers, students, teachers, and others) thoughtfully weighed the merits of spending their limited funds on various projects. There was no exclusion based on class, race and ethnicity, gender, religion, or political views, with both ruling and opposition party supporters participating. Turnout was massive, with between 8 and 25 percent of Torres’s population of 185,000 taking part in the process. In addition to providing actual popular control over decision-making, Torres’s Participatory Budget simply worked. Decisions were effectively linked to outcomes, with over 85 percent of projects completed in a timely manner. And the process benefited the local incumbent party, which was subsequently reelected multiple times.
Torres’s success and the way it was achieved offer important lessons to democratic socialists elsewhere, including the one very likely to be New York City’s next mayor. In fact, there are striking parallels between the rise of Zohran Mamdani and Torres’s mayor Julio Chávez. Like Mamdani, Julio (as he is universally called in Torres) entered his race for mayor, in 2004, as a long-shot far-left candidate backed by a social movement party and facing the incumbent mayor and other powerful opponents supported by both Hugo Chávez’s national ruling party and local elites. Like Zohran, Julio was given little chance to win, and like Zohran he…
Auteur: Gabriel Hetland
