The traditional, modern conception of society and politics says that power is concentrated in the State, or at least that it is in it where a privileged place of power is found. The same tradition tells us that the State consists of the institutions of the Government.
We get used to understanding that who is in the Government is who has the power. But reality forces us to think that this scheme is not exactly the one that operates in the real world. Power is in the entire network of social, political, economic and cultural relations, and it is concretized in each particular act of exercise; that is, power cannot be grasped as a good and therefore cannot be transferred or abandoned, it cannot even be taken away.
Power is made possible in its own exercise and is determined by the relations of force that define sovereignty over things and facts. Power, after all, is an act of relationship that produces the form of events.
This can be seen specifically in the current economic situation of the country. It cannot be said that power in Venezuela is exclusively held by the Government. In fact, it seems that the Government is increasingly "powerless" to the extent that it cannot effectively control or influence public affairs such as inflation, the production and circulation of food and other goods, not even the cost of a passage. The extreme of this is that control over monetary determination has been lost, since nothing prevents the dollar from progressively displacing the bolivar as a unit of account, exchange and store of value.
In all these cases, those who have demonstrated to have or exercise power are the private economic actors, the owners of large capitals. They have managed to impose their economic model in practice, passing through the crystalline structure of the State.
The Government is absent before a forced liberalization of all prices for goods and services. Public companies are imperceptible. Peasants denounce "reappropriations" of land by landowners, workers demand "rope privatizations" of state companies.
It is not necessary to overthrow a government to dominate the course of events. So where's the pode
