 Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. We are reporting from Caracas, where an international solidarity meeting with Venezuela is being held. Delegates from more than 85 countries are here to express solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution. Today, we are joined by Cira Pascual-Marquina, a professor of political science, as well as one of the communicators behind the site, Venezuela Analysis. Cira, thank you for joining us. Could you talk a bit about the phenomenon of the Workers' Army that is currently being seen as well as well? Thank you. Basically, the Productive Workers' Army began about three years ago. It's an initiative of self-organized workers. Here in Venezuela, it should be important to understand that with the crisis, the productive system has been suffering. These are workers who are highly capable trained workers who do initiatives, one-week self-organized voluntary initiatives where they go to a factory or a commune, and they help restart the technical, self-technical problems. It's important because it's not only about initiating and re-initiating the productive process, but it also shows that it's possible to solve problems. So there's a patriotic South-South initiative here where we could call it a gavarist perspective, voluntary work perspective. Different problems are solved. So we could say that there is jump-starting production, but there is also remoralization in the whole process. Could you talk a bit about the internal dynamics of these processes? What is the organizing process for these workers to come together and say, for instance, the administration, the decision? Basically, it's very horizontal, the process of organization. There is about 50 to 100 very committed workers, although there are about 1,500 committed workers who are voluntary, who can go at any time if they are called on it, who have said, who have expressed their intention to participate. But there is a group of workers who are sort of mapping spaces where there's problems in terms of production, and then there's proposals to go to a commune or a worker-run factory or a state-owned factory to solve problems from, I don't know, ovens that are not working, electrical problems, machinery problems, etc. So basically that would be, I would call it the processes, sort of spontaneous in the sense that people from all around the country are working class men and women who are involved in different experiences, kind of like spot spaces where there's a need, and then from their conversation with the people who are in charge of it, with the workers, with the commune people, is it started then from then on when there is an agreement to go to work in space, somebody from the workers party goes to do a diagnostic, and from the diagnostic, well then the whole process begins to recruit workers who have the capacities, the capabilities to address the problems that are faced in that factory, in that commune, etc. And you talked about the communes currently in Venezuela right now. So could you give us also a brief context about the functioning of the communes and their current situation? Sure, and actually I will say before that the workers' army, it's called the Productive Workers' Army, and now it's going also to focus on Campesino and communal work, so strengthening the ties, especially with communal organizations. So what are communes? Communes basically are spaces of self-organization, democratic self-organization for the reorganization, both in economical and in political terms of the society. The commune is Chavez's proposal for the transition to socialism in Venezuela. So they are territorially based, they are not based on a factory, for instance, they are based on a territory, and there's both urban and rural organizations, communes. For instance, I can talk to you about one rural and one urban experience. The rural one, which is well-known, one is the Comunal Maisal, and the Comunal Maisal has a long plot of land that has been recovered through workers' organizations, through Campesino organization in this case, taken from private owners of land who had it unused, and there's a law in Venezuela, a law from 2002, that grants Campesinos the right to take land that's not being productive. So these Campesinos have taken land that was not productive and are producing corn, but they also have a pig farm, and there's other exercises in terms of production. So it's a main industrial agrarian production with the objective of, well, of course, producing and addressing the problems of the people, but also the processes of organization are highly democratic, where the assembly of the people, of the community is the highest instance, and then there's delegates, we could say, or representatives who have different responsibilities, but it's a highly democratic form of organizing society, of reorganizing society, and for us, for Chavismo, for the left of Chavismo, we can see there are many of us, we can see that really the commune is the way to come out of the current crisis, and then with the productive workers' army, which is beginning to work precisely with communes, we have committed to helping jump-start production faced with the problems that I was telling you earlier, the problems with production under the crisis. Thank you so much. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.