Modelo Operário Venezuelano: uma contribuição latino-americana à formação de trabalhadores

Abstract

The world is currently going through a severe economic crisis that threatens historical achievements of the working class; we see in developed and emerging economies measures involving a setback in working conditions like the legalization of precarious work, flexibilityof contracts, wage cuts, privatization or restriction of access to social benefits such as health and education, increased violence against workers and in the number of accidents and fatalities in the workplace. The crisis meets a weakened and divided working class, where fascismfinds fertile ground: today, its political and military rise is undeniable. In this context, Latin America appears as an interesting territory to economies in crisis, due to the quantity and quality of its natural and human resources. However, the region is experiencing a period ofpolitical ascent as an actor that emerges before the world system more united and strengthened than before, through regional integration mechanisms pointing to greater sovereignty, even if still economically dependent. A key driver of this principle of regional integration andsovereignty was Venezuela, whose people refused, in the late 1989, the neoliberal measures that are currently being used worldwide to mitigate the economic crisis, also known as austerity. The process lived in Venezuela puts workers back in the center of the theoretical debateand as the protagonist of the practical construction of a new society, with a commitment to, on the one hand, pay back a historic social debt in relation to decent living conditions for the entire population and, on the other, rescue humanity's accumulated history and generalknowledge and make it available to the class that builds its own reality through its work: the proletariat. Advances in Venezuelan education are social achievements that not even the international bourgeoisie can deny and constitute a framework for action that goes beyond the institutions and the mere transfer of information. Part of this effort is the Venezuelan Model Worker (MOV) experience, a methodology for training workers to defend their health and safety at work; an experience inspired by the Italian Worker Model from the 1960s, based on participatory research that conceives integral human formation through self-management and collective construction of knowledge beyond the workplace. This study is an attempt to apply the historical and dialectical materialist method to understand the specific and the universalaspects of the MOV experience, trying to understand it as part of a much larger and complex context - addressing in depth its constituent elements: work, Venezuela's economic-social formation and education - to abstract from this context the essential contributions to an emacipatory human development, not only for us Brazilians but for Latin American workers in general.