Featured illustration by Mirko Rastić.

Have you heard about Venezuela’s communes? Have you heard that there are hundreds of thousands of people in nearly 1,500 communes struggling to take control of their territories, their labor, and their lives? If you haven’t heard, you’re not the only one. As the mainstream media howls about economic crisis and authoritarianism, there is little mention of the grassroots revolutionaries who have always been the backbone of the Bolivarian process.

This blindspot is reproduced by an international left whose dogmas and pieties creak and groan when confronted with a political process that doesn’t fit, in which the state, oil, and a uniformed soldier have all played key roles. It’s a sad testament to the state of the left that when we think of communes we are more likely to think of nine arrests in rural France than the ongoing efforts of these hundreds of thousands. But nowhere is communism pure, and the challenges Venezuela’s comuneros confront today are ones that we neglect at our own peril.

“Revolutions Are Not Made by Laws”

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 production enterprises. The latter can be either state-owned or, more commonly, directly owned by the communes themselves. Direct ownership means that it is the communal parliament itself—composed of delegates from each council—that 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.

Just as the late Hugo Chávez did not create the Bolivarian Revolution, the Venezuelan state did not create the communes or the communal councils that they comprise. Instead, the revolutionary movements that “created Chávez” did not simply stop there and stand back to admire their creation—they have continued their formative work in and on the world by building radically democratic and participatory self-government from the bottom-up.

Before the communal councils existed on paper, barrio residents were forming assemblies to debate both local affairs and how to bring about revolutionary change on the national level. And before the communes existed on paper, many of these same organizers had begun to expand and consolidate communal control over broader swathes of territory. After all, as Marx insisted among others, “revolutions are not made with laws.”

But what the state has done has been to recognize the existence of first the councils and then the communes, formalizing their structure—for better and for worse—and even encouraging their expansion. Within the state apparatus, the communes found no greater ally than Chávez himself who, knowing full well that his days were numbered, dedicated the last major speech before his death to the expansion of what he called the “communal state.” And since his death, grassroots revolutionaries have seized upon his words for the leverage they provide: insisting that to be a Chavista is to be a comunero and that those who undermine popular power are no less than traitors.

Communes against the State

And traitors there are plenty. Not only did the state not create the communes, but the majority of the state apparatus is openly hostile to communal power. This is especially true of local elected officials—Chavistas very much included—who positively loathe these expressions of grassroots democracy that cut into their territory and resources and threaten their legitimacy as leaders. Thus while many local leaders wear Chavista red while mouthing the words of popular participation and revolution, in practice they routinely attack, undermine and obstruct the most participatory and revolutionary spaces in Venezuelan society today.

Ángel Prado, a spokesperson for the sprawling El Maizal commune in the central-west of the country that today cultivates 800 hectares of corn, explains how the history of the commune is a testament to the tense relations between communal power and the state. It took grassroots pressure for Chávez to throw his weight behind these comuneros by expropriating the land, but even when he did so, the lands passed into the hands of the state agricultural corporation.

Organizers were left wondering, “why is the state here if this belongs to the commune?” and had to undertake a second struggle against the “revolutionary” state. By organizing themselves and nearby communities and by proving they could produce even more effectively than corrupt bureaucrats, El Maizal eventually gained the support of Chávez to take over the land for themselves. But even today, Prado argues that local Chavista leaders and the PSUV represent their “principal enemies,” and are actively attempting to “extinguish the commune.” “We comuneros share very little with the governing party,” he insists.

For some—like the longtime militant Roland Denis—this clash comes as no surprise. The phrase “communal state” is “a camouflaged name for the communist state,” and even an outright oxymoron. If Marx had described the Paris Commune as “a revolution against the State itself,” Denis wonders: “What state, if we are actually talking about a non-state? The communal state is a non-state, otherwise it’s a bureaucratic-corporative state.” Ideally, “the communes could create a productive capacity that begins to compete with capitalism, with its own internal rules and logic, and this could really progressively generate a non-state. There are some very interesting communes moving in this direction.”

Free Socialist Territories

Alongside the political antagonism of local leaders, the communes face a daunting economic challenge that is, in fact, their raison d’être. Since the discovery of oil in the early 20th century, the Venezuelan economy has been almost entirely reshaped in its image: cheap imports and a lack of support for the peasantry saw an exodus from the countryside into the cities, making Venezuela simultaneously the most urban country in Latin America—93.5 percent of the population lives in cities—and the only country in the region to import more food than it exports (nearly 80 percent of food by the 1990s).

The communes are an ambitious attempt to reverse this trajectory by encouraging self-managed production geared toward what people actually need on the local level, and what the country needs as a whole. It is therefore no surprise to find the bulk of Venezuela’s communes in the countryside—the entire communal project requires reversing this migration, decentralizing the Venezuelan population and its production. Toward this end, the communes are producing—directly and democratically—millions of tons of coffee, corn, plantains and bananas annually, and straining upward for increased regional and national coordination.

Groups of communes are coming together from below to form regional structures known as “communal axes” or “political-territorial corridors.” According to Alex Alayo, a member of the El Maizal commune, the goal is to develop what he calls “free socialist territories” in which communes exchange directly with one another, cutting out the global economy and the domestic capitalists entirely. Through this broader integration, the communes will be able “to communalize or even communize” entire territories not from above, but as an expansive form of self-government from below.

This expansion has led to a tense dual power situation, the uncomfortable and even antagonistic coexistence of the new with the old. On the one hand, there is what Alayo considers a popular government in a bourgeois state structure, and on the other hand, this expanding network of communal territories “building a new state” from below. Tensions and “frictions” are inevitable, and will only increase as the communes expand: “Here we are fighting an outright war against the traditional, bourgeois state. Chávez invited us to build the communal state, and that’s going to have a lot of enemies. Chávez may even have been the only public functionary who agreed with it completely.”