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Interview by Susan Spronk and Jeffery R. Webber (from The Bullet ) In Caracas, we caught up with Gonzalo Gómez, a founder of the radical website aporrea.org and militant in the Trotskyist organization, Marea Socialista. In this interview, Gonzalo describes his own path to militancy, the different phases of the Bolivarian process, and the dangers of bureaucracy, the “boli-bourgeoisie,” and the stultifying internal life of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV). He also stresses the centrality of the creativity and dynamism of social movements from below, the complexities of workers’ control, and the dynamics of the current conjuncture prior to the October 7, 2012 general elections. Susan Spronk and Jeffery R. Webber (SS and JRW): Can you tell us about your own political formation and history? Gonzalo Gómez (GG) : I began my political activism when I entered university in the 1970s. I became involved as an active militant in political struggle when I was 19 years old, but I had already been involved in various student activities for a few years before this. I studied at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello because my first attempt at entering the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) failed; the university had been shut down at the time by the government of Rafael Caldera. There were serious confrontations between the students and the state at the UCV. So, instead, I applied to the Catholic university, which was a new university, a private university run by the Jesuits. But as a result of a process of radicalization amongst Venezuelan youth during those years, the Catholic university also entered into a situation of crisis and conflict.