Both the shoe and garment factories were clean, spacious, and airy, quite unlike the factories I’d visited outside Manila. Like most shoe and garment factories, the majority of the workers were women. In the garment factory the conventional gender division of labor prevailed; that is, the cutters were men. What departed from convention was that the cutters were not paid more than the sewers. But the most unusual sight for me was that of women working together on a whole outfit, rather than each sewer being confined to, say, sewing only a sleeve or a collar. One could see how labor here was not alienated, the workers themselves deciding how they would go about the production process. Our guide, a journalist, told us that these women came from neighboring slums who were working for the first time and, under no pressure by a supervisor, tended to work at a leisurely pace.

Free food

Nearby was a government-subsidized food cooperative that sold basic foodstuff for half the price. We walked through the aisles poring over the food products and toiletries and making a few purchases. We learned that almost half the population procures food at subsidized prices, and one million get food for free. Add that to the fact that 17 million are for the first time receiving universal health care and free medicine, and it is clear that this was a government determined to meet the needs of the majority, not the privileged few.

We visited the new Bolivarian University that is located in what were formerly the central offices of PdVSA, Venezuela’s oil company. Ironically, these offices constituted the nerve center of planning for the aborted coup in April 2002 (engineered with thinly-veiled U.S. support) and, in December of the same year, a work stoppage intended to cripple the Chavez government. Now they had become the site for the construction of an alternative worldview, a transformation that is necessary if the Bolivarian ideals are to take hold. In line with the goals of the Bolivarian Revolution, the new University has two priority areas of study: medicine and education. According to the young Dean who addressed our group, the goals are well-being and social justice, both of which are possible only in opposition to neoliberalism and empire. In practical terms this means educating doctors to work in poor communities rather than in expensive private hospitals, and shaping people’s thinking to uphold humane values over purely material, acquisitive ones.

It was interesting to learn that as the new Bolivarian University is being developed, the old one is allowed to continue. The propertied send their children to the latter, while the formerly excluded, who now enroll for free, are recruited to the new University. The two institutions that we visited, the medical clinic and the university, represent the manner in which the society is being transformed. Parallel structures are set up alongside the old, rather than the latter being torn down. It is perhaps because of this gradual, peaceful process of change that everyone we met and talked to who openly admitted that they had some criticisms and that they were not “Chavistas” would nonetheless declare their support. “I’m with the process,” is what we resoundingly heard everywhere we went. Along with a few others in our group, I wondered about the absence of a party formation and what its ramifications might be for the endurance of this unprecedented revolutionary movement. There are no easy answers in response to this particular concern, of course. Needless to say, the total freedom with which people we approached spoke up and the absence of a toe-the-line mindset were quite appealing.

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