Building the Commune. George Ciccariello-Maher
While the councils and communes were enshrined by law in 2006 and 2010, it is a mistake to think that the Venezuelan state created the communes or the communal councils that they comprise. Just as Chávez did not create the Bolivarian Revolution, the revolutionary movements that “created Chávez” did not simply stop there and stand back to admire their creation. Instead, they continued their formative work in and on the world by building radically democratic and participatory self-government from the bottom up.
In the 1980s, long before the communal councils existed on paper and before Chávez had become a household name, barrio residents—struggling for local autonomy against corrupt two-party rule—began forming a network of barrio assemblies to debate both local affairs and how to bring about revolutionary change on the national level. Before the communes existed on paper, many of these same organizers had begun to expand and consolidate communal control over broader swathes of territory. In fact, one of the most important organizations building communal power in the present—the National Network of Comuneros and Comuneras—was founded by former state employees who broke away in favor of a more independent organization. As Marx and others have, “revolutions are not made with laws” but by the people seizing and exercising power directly.2
These communes have existed since the very moment when those who gathered in their neighborhood councils said this is not enough. It is not enough to govern this little corner of Venezuela or that little fragment of the barrio. It is not enough to make decisions about streets and water pipes while there is a broader battle to be fought. It is not enough to have direct democracy in a four-block radius while everything the neighborhood consumes is trucked in from a distance, much of it imported from abroad. It is not enough to be a tiny island of socialism in a vast capitalist sea. Local neighborhood councils would have to connect with one another; they would have to send delegates to discuss and debate questions on a larger scale: how to govern entire parishes, how to collaborate on security and infrastructure, and how to cooperate in the production and distribution of what communities actually need.
If the state did not create the communes, what the state has done is legally recognize the existence of first the councils and later the communes, formalizing their structure—for better and for worse—and even encouraging their expansion. Some 45,000 communal councils exist today, many of which have been incorporated into the now more than 1,500 communes. Within the state apparatus, these communes found no greater ally than Chávez himself, who, fully aware of his own pressing mortality, understood his “Golpe de Timón” as a sort of political will and testament. He knew that once he was gone, Chavistas of different loyalties and stripes would inevitably begin to fight over who best represented his legacy, and—if history is any guide—some would even use his name to betray that legacy. By dedicating his last major speech to the expansion of what he called the “communal state,” Chávez was making perfectly clear that his legacy was the commune, giving radical organizers the leverage they needed to insist that to be a Chavista is to be a comunero, and that those who undermine popular power are no less than traitors.3
Today, no two communes look exactly alike. Sometimes a commune is sixty women gathered in a room to debate local road construction, berating political leaders in the harshest of terms. Other times it’s a textile collective gathering with local residents to decide what the community needs and how best to produce it. Sometimes it’s a handful of young men on motorcycles hammering out a gang truce, or others broadcasting on a collective radio or TV station. Often it’s hundreds of rural families growing plantains, cacao, coffee, or corn while attempting to rebuild their ancestral dignity on the land through a new, collective form. There are some constants, however. The coffee is always too sweet, and the process is always difficult, endlessly messy and unpredictable in its inescapable creativity.
What is a commune? Concretely speaking, Venezuela’s communes bring together communal councils—local units of direct democratic self-government—with productive units known as social property enterprises (EPS). Forming a commune is relatively straightforward: participants in a number of adjacent communal councils come together, discuss, and call a referendum among the entire local population. Once the commune is approved and constituted, each communal council and production unit sends an elected delegate to the communal parliament—the commune’s highest decision-making body. Like the councils themselves, the parliament is based on principles of direct democracy. Anyone who is elected—just like all elected officials under the 1999 Constitution—is subject to community oversight and can be recalled from power. Communes even manage local security through participatory “collective defense,” and an alternative system of communal justice seeks to resolve conflicts through “arbitration, conciliation, and mediation.”4
Economically, communes are explicitly “socialist spaces,” which means that they aim to produce the things that people need locally through socialist enterprises. These enterprises are explicitly noncapitalist and defined by who owns the means of production. They can be either state-owned or, more commonly, directly owned and managed by the communes themselves. Direct ownership means that the communal parliament itself—composed of delegates from each council—debates and decides what is produced, how much the workers are paid, how to distribute the product, and how best to reinvest any surplus into the commune itself.
The goal of the communes—with EPSs as their productive heart—is to build self-managed and sustainable communities that are oriented toward their own collective internal needs. But this local emphasis does not come at the expense of consolidating a broader communal power. Instead, the Commune Law points toward the integration of the communes into a broader regional and national confederation. The goal is ultimately to “build the communal state by promoting, driving, and developing … the exercise of self-government by the organized communities” and to construct “a system of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption rooted in social property.”
As the communes expand across the national territory, the law also encourages them to claim greater authority over their local neighborhoods: building on Article 184 of the Constitution, the law allows the communes to demand the “transfer” of authority over privately held property to the communes themselves. As we will see, this ability to demand that private property be expropriated and handed over has become a key lever for the expansion of the communes and the overarching goal of “the transition toward a socialist and democratic society of equity and social justice.”
The sources and inspirations for the Venezuelan commune are many, as any comunero or comunera will tell you. They include not only the Paris Commune of 1871 but also many more local movements before and since. Indigenous communities had long managed life collectively, and when Venezuelan slaves escaped to the hills to form maroon communities, these too often anticipated communal forms: participatory, direct, and self-governed. The long history of Venezuela’s communes thus began long before Chávez and even before the great Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar helped to free the continent from Spanish domination at the outset of the nineteenth century. These experiments were not all the same, nor were they communes, strictly speaking, and some were more democratic than others. But each moment pointed toward the fundamental demand to control one’s own everyday life, a search for the kind of collective power that Marx sought when he described the commune as the “self-government of the producers.”5
As radical social movements and grassroots organizers in the barrios were experimenting with direct self-government through popular assemblies, Chávez was building a conspiratorial movement in the army. But he and other young soldiers were also in close contact with the revolutionary underground, and in particular with a figure who would be even more important for the form that the Venezuelan communes would take: the guerrilla commander Kléber Ramírez Rojas. In fact, when Chávez and others were planning their 1992 coup against the corrupt and violent two-party system, Kléber was drafting the founding documents for a new political system to be established if the coup were successful. The goal of the conspiracy, according to these documents, was not simply to seize the state but to immediately replace it with something very different, which Kléber called a “commoner state,” and which Chávez would which later call the “communal state.”6
For Kléber, a veteran of the armed struggle,