Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project

As the US shifts the focus of its gargantuan death machine towards Venezuela and the Caribbean, the socialist project there has been getting a lot of attention on the left. Discussions about grassroots mass democracy, economic recovery, and especially communes have begun to build a stronger appreciation for the progress of the Bolivarian Revolution. Chris Gilbert and his intellectual comrade Cira Pascual Marquina have been doing the podcast and Youtube rounds to share the lessons they’ve learned from the courageous Venezuelan people. That circuit got me connected to this book, which I grabbed last week to read on a couple of long Amtrak rides.

I finished the book up last night - it’s a pretty brisk read - and I am absolutely compelled by the ghosts of Marx and Chavez to share what I’ve learned with the comrades here at Hexbear.

First and foremost is an overwhelming sense of excitement and inspiration. What the Venezuelan communards are achieving right now is, in my opinion, the cutting edge of socialist construction. The Venezuelan people are taking the revolution into their own hands, a historical necessity, and creating true communes across the country to meet their material needs and build socialist democracy. Here’s the big takeaway: these communes are genuinely in the early stages of abolishing the value form.

Without liberal or anarchist demonization, Gilbert plainly and directly criticizes the ultimate failure of ML states in the 20th century to transition to the next stage of socialism. He doesn’t condemn them as wicked statists, he just recognizes that they never figured out how to progress beyond state-owned enterprises to the worker-self managed systems. He does so by following in the footsteps of the Bolivarian communards, who are, by-and-large, extremely politically literate Marxist-Leninists who have, though practice, innovated the answer to the question of why prior ML states stalled out or fell apart in their progress.

What is that answer?

Only grassroots democratic processes can build socialism, but these are impossible under a capitalist state. A popular socialist state, however, can use its resources to facilitate the socialist accumulation necessary to create high-productivity communes at sufficient scale to unlock network effects of democratic planning and production for use rather than commodity production. Though the Venezuelan state faces issues of corruption, backsliding, and a devastating economic war, it is far more an ally of the commune building process than an opponent. The law on communes passed under Chavez enshrines the right of workers to occupy and seize unutilized productive property (land, buildings, and equipment) for the process of establishing a commune. The state does not always deliver on this right, and sometimes sides with capitalists, but the friction produced in this process is more productive than destructive. And in many, many cases, the sympathetic socialist state finances and protects the communes, aids in their development with technical expertise, and ensures certain legal rights and protections.

These are not hippie communes. Though incredibly restrained by Venezuela’s forced impoverishment, they are filled with serious, disciplined Marxist revolutionaries dedicated to using communes to create a society-wide socialism with internationalism built in. They are constantly seeking to elevate their productive capacity and innovating new means of building communal economies locally and nationally. They are industrial, agricultural, and urban. They are dedicated to the defense of the Bolivarian state as a sometimes-reluctant, sometimes-enthusiastic partner in the project. And they are deeply historically rooted in both the international Marxist tradition and Venezuelan indigenous, Afro-Caribbean, and anti-colonial resistance movements, including the pre-colonial and pre-capitalist communal systems that existed in some native nations in the Amazon, Andes, and Caribbean,

Folks, this shit is legit. Defending Venezuela from imperialist aggression needs to far beyond bog-standard anti-imperialism. Venezuela is not just a country that could be destroyed by the US - it is potentially the heart of the world’s most-effective-yet effort at building socialism in all senses: a society prepared to leave behind the value form, wage labor, and the state. If the Venezuelan project is destroyed, it will not just be a tragedy for the people of that country but for all socialists across the planet.

Instead, we need to learn how to communicate a vociferous defense of the Bolivarian Revolution that goes beyond counter-atrocity propaganda and supporting Maduro and demonstrates the practical construction of actually existing socialsim in the most dire of circumstances. We must learn from their revolutionary praxis just as we do from the Soviet Union, Cuba, and China.

There may be no greater hope for humanity right now than the success of the Bolivarian Revolution and the triumph of the Venezuelan people in their pursuit of socialism.