A necessary measure to defend a revolution from coup attempts and color revolutions by the imperial powers, who rely on their control of information through their omnipresent media, is to build a people’s media and a people’s social media. A revolution must propagate and make universal new tools of popular grassroots communication.
Caracas hosted the Grand National Workshop on Popular Communication “Communal Think Tanks,” sponsored by the government. The event concluded with a call for the organization and coordination of the communication forces of the Venezuelan population.
In this regard, the Minister of Communication and Information, Freddy Ñáñez, emphasized the need to develop strategies to confront the media war and the information blackout that seeks to obscure the voices of communities, especially through the use of new technologies.
“Social media is an attempt to rob us of our political capacity; it’s an attempt to flatten humanity’s cultural uniqueness and pigeonhole us into the extreme individuality of the algorithm,” the minister said.
Ñáñez emphasized the need to leverage inherited experiences and “build a new method of liberation in the 21st century. The hegemonic centers have an advantage in technological methods; Venezuela has an advantage in grassroots organization, inventiveness, and the creation of spaces for renewed communication. We will come together to make the most of what we have. We will communicate for the homeland and for humanity,” Ñáñez explained.
The workshop, sponsored by the Ministry of People’s Power for Communication and Information (MIPPCI), is part of a series of initiatives that seek to strengthen the role of popular communication as a tool for resistance and social organization.
Communicate to resist
Jessica Pernia, director of the School for New Digital Communication at MIPPCI, offered Sputnik an analysis of popular communication and the role that new communal think tanks play in the battle within this field.
Jessica Pernia believes that popular communication is, above all, an act of organization and resistance against the dominant information models controlled by large media and technology conglomerates.
“We’re talking about how popular communication, in response to the needs of the people, is a genuine manifestation of resistance in the realm of ideas, culture, identity, and thought,” she explains.
This alternative communication model has played a key role in Venezuela’s recent history. Pernia recalls that popular communicators were instrumental in times of political and social tension.
“If Venezuelan popular communicators hadn’t come out in 2002 promoting the restoration of constitutional order, if they hadn’t resisted the promotion of hatred and despair in 2014 and 2017, if popular communication hadn’t played its enlightening role after the July 28 elections, fascism would have triumphed.”
Autonomy and articulation with the State
The main challenge for community and alternative media is the lack of access to and control over critical technological infrastructure. In this regard, the director charged that political and economic powers impose an information blockade that privileges the dissemination of their own narratives, limiting the reach of popular discourse.
Thus, she considers that this reality is linked to a structural problem that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had already identified in The German Ideology, where it is stated that the ruling class not only controls the means of material production, but also the means of spiritual production.
For the director of the School for New Digital Communication at MIPPCI, popular communication must confront this established order with new strategies and methodologies for action.
One of the central points in the discussion about popular communication is its relationship with state institutions. According to Pernia, the autonomy of popular communicators is not in contradiction with their connection with the government, as long as there is ongoing critical interpellation.
“Precisely because of the ongoing questioning of the organized people regarding their government and institutions, President Nicolás Maduro has proclaimed that we are facing a change of era,” she maintains.
This change, she emphasizes, is linked to the construction of the communal state, a model promoted by Commander Hugo Chávez and now seeking to consolidate itself with new forms of participation and organization.
“In the face of new communication and information technologies, civilizational change, and the global geopolitical reconfiguration, traditional media are losing their reach,” the expert asserts. In this context, she emphasizes that people must take ownership of communication tools and turn them into an instrument of struggle.
A new method of fighting
The Communal Think Tanks were born as a strategy for articulating and coordinating the communication forces of the grassroots community. The director explains that this proposal seeks to overcome dispersion and strengthen community organization.
“From this perspective, we believe we can overcome the dispersion to which we are sometimes forced by the dynamics of everyday life, but also, through joint planning, allow ourselves to open spaces for training, broad debate, and the development of specific proposals,” she added.
The goal, she said, is to modernize methods of struggle in the communications field and ensure early victories against the challenges posed by the cultural and cognitive warfare of technocapitalism.
“By modernizing our method of struggle, we have no doubt that we will have early responses and victories against technological determinism, against hegemonic narratives, against hyper-individualization, depoliticization, and demoralization.”
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