A Special Issue on Communes in Socialist Construction

Shortly before dying, Hugo Chávez delivered his famous “Golpe de Timón” speech in a nationally televised meeting with his ministerial cabinet. That discourse repeatedly mentioned the issue of communes and their role in socialist construction. Over the course of several hours, Chávez insisted that commune-building should be promoted by all his cabinet members, and he specifically said to future president Nicolás Maduro that he entrusted the communal project to him “like his own life.”¹ In the time since Chávez’s death, the Venezuelan communal project has had an uneven trajectory. At first, commune-building seemed to fall by the wayside in the struggle to survive intensified imperialist attacks on the country. Later, it reemerged as a project driven mainly by the most committed bases of Chavismo. In the last couple of years, however, the government itself has returned explicitly to the communal project with renewed support and enthusiasm, effectively joining hands with Venezuela’s communard bases once again in a way that seems especially propitious for socialist construction.

This special issue of Monthly Review on the theme of Communes in Socialist Construction was inspired by the Venezuelan communal movement, which has advanced a strategy of socialist construction that, we believe, deserves consideration as a contribution to the universal body of socialist thought. In order to engage with the many questions raised by that proposal, we have brought together a range of contributions. Some examine the Venezuelan initiative and kindred ones, while others delve into the theoretical (mainly Marxist) foundations of the project of building socialism via the commune. Given that our inspiration for taking on this theme comes from the Venezuelan communal movement, it is worth briefly examining the history of this project and how it emerged out of the Bolivarian revolutionary process.

In the early years of the Venezuelan revolution, many noted that one of its most distinctive features was the consistent effort to combine state-level politics with grassroots popular power. For example, the seasoned scholar of Venezuelan history Steve Ellner noted how the revolution simultaneously employed two approaches, one that was “from below,” involving popular power and the grassroots, and another that was “from above,” involving the state and government.² What was important about the Venezuelan approach is that, unlike Zapatismo and other contemporary movements that had largely set aside the question of state power, the Bolivarian movement actually took political power in 1999. From there, it went forward using both transformed state power and grassroots construction in the pursuit of the project of national liberation that it called the “Second and True Independence.”

This dual approach, we contend, was a key contribution of the Venezuelan revolution. By contrast, many have pointed to “twenty-first century socialism,” which Chávez announced as the national project in 2006, as the Venezuelan revolution’s most important contribution to contemporary left debates. However, that focus is too vague, we feel, since it sidesteps the all-important question of how the project of socialism was to be pursued and materialized. This brings us to the second major contribution of the Bolivarian Process to the project of the left, which is less recognized but closely tied to the previously mentioned combination of grassroots power and revolutionary state power: the ongoing search for concrete organizational and institutional forms that could make the grassroots-state combination of powers into a vibrant reality.

As with the first contribution to left theory and practice, this one can best be understood in relation to the historical context of the revolution’s emergence. Since the 1990s, there had been an almost worldwide celebration of grassroots power, with a highly visible part of left intellectuality waxing poetic about “horizontality,” “swarm logics,” or the “potency of the multitude.” Yet the Bolivarian Process took an epoch-making step when, in contrast to such misty-eyed rhetoric, it worked to create a series of concrete institutions of grassroots power, which were put into law. By developing organizational forms and institutions that were actively sponsored by the state, the idea of popular empowerment ceased to exist as a postmodern vagary and instead became an organizational reality within a nationwide movement.

The Venezuelan revolution’s trajectory of experimentation with grassroots institutions had several notable successes that included water management boards (2001), urban land committees (2002), and health committees (2003) before landing on communal councils (2006), which constituted an important milestone. The communal council was conceived as a mostly political and very local institution (involving approximately two hundred families in urban areas and one hundred in rural areas), but it was extremely important because it was implemented nationally. From the communal council, it was a relatively short, though significant step to forming the larger structure of communes, which combined grassroots political and economic democracy. Chávez declared the communes to be the “fundamental cells” of Venezuelan socialism in 2009. Through this declaration and by engaging in ongoing pedagogic and legislative work to back it up, Chávez established the project of building socialism via the commune as the revolution’s backbone.

It is worth pointing out that the Bolivarian movement’s practice of combining grassroots forms such as community councils and communes with revolutionary state power was not just a corrective to the errors and limitations of movements such as Zapatismo that existed at the time. It was also a response to some of the problems faced by an earlier wave of twentieth-century national liberation processes. For the projects of national liberation in Global South countries that inspired so much hope during the second half of the last century—a sweeping and glorious movement that challenged colonial, capitalist, and imperialist hegemony for decades—turned out, in a great many countries, to be constrained by the inability to maintain an organic connection with the masses over the long term. This is the conclusion that emerges from the better surveys of that period, such as Vijay Prashad’s classic The Darker Nations.³ The Bolivarian Process addressed this problem not only through its constant discursive promotion of popular power and mass participation, but, as we have said, by constructing institutional forms through which popular power could be built and maintained, with the commune being the most developed one.

From the above, it should be clear that the Venezuelan commune did not drop from the sky or come out of anyone’s head like Athena is supposed to have emerged from Zeus’s. It is true that distinguished Marxist intellectuals such as Marta Harnecker and István Mészáros, along with Chávez himself, played key roles in conceptualizing it. However, despite their important contributions, the Venezuelan commune should mainly be seen as developing through a complex, sometimes tortuous process of experimentation that was frequently justified by the slogan of Venezuelan pedagogue Simón Rodríguez: “Inventamos o erramos” (“We invent, or we err”). An important part of the material roots of Venezuela’s socialist communes reaches back into the region’s long history of Indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan resistant self-governance, which includes maroon communities called cumbes that once existed in much of the Venezuelan territory. In a more proximate sense, the commune model drew on Venezuela’s recent experiences of factory and latifundia occupations, and its efforts at territorial organization.⁴

In the long trajectory that led up to the commune, self-critique clearly played an important role. For example, to overcome the limitations of some of the smaller initiatives, the commune was to be relatively large and comprehensive, each involving up to ten thousand people. The commune was also meant to transcend the merely political character of the community councils to include an economic dimension, especially means of production under the regime of social property (thereby incorporating the lessons of historical materialism regarding the centrality of production). Additionally, to correct the bureaucratism of co-managed factories and their narrow point-of-production focus, the Venezuelan commune fostered participative democracy in commune-wide assemblies and communal parliaments while aiming to extend democratic control to the whole of communal life. Stressing the latter, Chávez said that the process of socialist construction was to be judged by the degree to which it implemented overall substantive democracy in the communities.⁵

By identifying and emphasizing the project that has inspired us, we wish to make clear how the theme of this special issue emerged not because of an abstract thesis about socialism, but because a real-world revolutionary project has led us to consider the role of communal models in socialist projects. We are convinced that the key reason that so much Marxism today has ceased to be revolutionary is precisely its divorce from revolutionary activity. This separation was not a feature of Karl Marx’s own work, which continually engaged with the most radical movements of his time, but is rather a result of how today so much Marxist study is fostered and promoted in institutional frameworks that are removed from the real mainsprings of revolutionary activity, which presently exist mostly in the Global South. In this way, highly conditioned by its nonrevolutionary social context, an important part of Marxism in our time has become not only Eurocentric, but also excessively idealist, in as much as it develops autonomously from the material reality of the current South-centric revolutionary drive.

In developing this special issue of Monthly Review, as in our earlier work, we have tried to follow the opposite approach, which we believe to be the original Marxist one.⁶ That approach involves engaging with real revolutionary movements and using the Marxist method and the body of thought arising from it to interpret and accompany their developments. This approach is not an academic “recollection in tranquility,” but is rather historical materialism applied in the “moment of danger,” as Walter Benjamin would have said.⁷ Although our starting point and inspiration is the Venezuelan revolution, we cast a wider net in this issue, looking at similar proposals in the attempt to draw out shared knowledge and connections among kindred projects. This search for points of contact and congruous elements is an essential procedure within the framework of Marxist science, since beyond the specificities of the Venezuelan movement, it belongs to the universal project of socialist construction and thus shares numerous intersections and commonalities with other processes worldwide.

Among the common challenges of socialist construction evoked by the Venezuelan experience—some of which are addressed in the articles brought together here—are: the aforementioned issue of conjugating (post)revolutionary state power with grassroots participation; the question of how to carry out socialist construction in a world traversed by an imperialism that has an increasingly exterminist character (expressed in genocidal wars and sanctions); the need to address the full range of capitalist social domination, which manifests not only in the exploitation of the labor force, but also in the oppression that is rooted in gendered and racialized structures of unpaid or underpaid reproductive labor; and the question of how to overcome the metabolic rift that capitalism introduces between social and natural processes, with consequences that are especially dire for the peoples and nations of the Global South. In relation to all of these challenges, the commune model has proven a promising and flexible format precisely because it is a comprehensive form of social and territorial organization that allows for the deliberate reorganization of the political, economic, and even cultural dimensions of life.

This special issue brings together an array of articles and interviews, along with a historical text, all of it connected in some way or another to the project of socialist construction by way of the commune. In soliciting contributions, we encouraged authors to keep the debate on communes in dialogue with the broader project of anti-imperialist and socialist struggle. We also asked them to eschew idyllic attitudes to past or existing communes, which embody a complex legacy that is not necessarily conducive to socialism. Finally, we highlighted the need to avoid fetishizing decentralized communities in the way typical of “small-is-beautiful” and anarchist approaches, which dangerously ignore the need for centralized state and party strategy to advance in a world traversed by imperialism, to say nothing of an ecological crisis that transcends any merely local solutions. In the end, however, it was the writers themselves, whose commitment to both real-life struggles and to the legacy of Marxism guaranteed a sober and rigorous approach to the commune. They have responded with contributions that, despite their diversity, are united by an approach to communal construction that emphasizes context, conditions, and strategy, while maintaining in view the totality of social and material relations.

As we write these lines, the world has entered into a crisis of a depth never before seen in our lifetimes. Among the expressions of this crisis are the ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza by Israel and the United States and the New Cold War that Washington is promoting against China and the Global South. All the while, environmental degradation proceeds apace. Many recognize how grave the situation is, and denunciations by individuals and collectives have grown in recent years. Such protests are necessary, and they need to be extended. However, if we remain only in the act of denunciation, we are falling short of the historical mission of the Marxist left, which has been to combine denunciation and critique with the project of fostering and accompanying the real movement of working peoples toward their emancipation. In that sense, it is a sign of lost ground that the left’s energy today goes mostly into outcry and critical analysis, while so little effort is directed at understanding and promoting the current-day construction of alternatives, whether it is the Chinese project of building an ecological and socialist civilization, the Palestinian resistance’s pursuit of national liberation, or the socialist project that is being built in Venezuela. We hope that this special issue of Monthly Review contributes to correcting that error and thereby restoring the active side of Marxism.

Notes

1. ↩ Hugo Chávez, English translation: “Strike at the Helm (October 20, 2012),” trans. Jamie Weiss, MR Online, April 1, 2015, mronline.org.
2. ↩ Steve Ellner, Rethinking Venezuelan Politics: Class, Conflict, and the Chávez Phenomenon (London: Lynne Reinner, 2008), see chapter 7.
3. ↩ Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007).
4. ↩ Chris Gilbert, Commune or Nothing!: Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), chapter 4.
5. ↩ Chávez quoted Mészáros’s claim that “The yardstick…of socialist achievements is the extent to which the adopted measures and policies actively contribute to the constitution and deep-rooted consolidation of a substantively democratic…mode of overall social control and self-management.” Chávez, “Strike at the Helm.”
6. ↩ See Cira Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert, Venezuela, The Present as Struggle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020); Gilbert, Commune or Nothing!; Chris Gilbert and Cira Pascual Marquina, Resistencia comunal frente al bloqueo imperialista book series (Caracas: Observatorio Venezolano Antibloqueo, 2021–2025).
7. ↩ Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006), thesis VI, 391.