of a more direct and participatory democracy. But the foundations of this radical democracy had been laid long before Chávez, by the residents of Venezuela’s barrios themselves.
Today, well over 90 percent of Venezuelans live in the cities. If “perversion” literally means “turning away,” the Venezuelan economy has been perverted since oil was discovered in the early twentieth century. Since then, the entire country has been reshaped, with political life turning away from the needs of society to face the global market, creating a vast geographic distortion in the process. Peasants abandoned an otherwise lush countryside for the cities, the majority coming to inhabit the swelling barrios ringing urban areas. As Venezuelans rushed to the cities, agricultural production—indeed, all domestic production—plummeted. The contours of this perversion have everything to do with understanding the importance of the communes of today, as well as the challenges they face.
In Caracas, this process of urbanization was magnified by the oil economy: as the transit point for all wealth extracted from the subsoil, the capital city lured millions from the countryside with the symbolic glimmer of often-false promises of access to their share of the oil wealth. It was these new barrio residents—those who built informal housing in the hills while eking out a living through informal labor on the valley floor—who spearheaded the Caracazo rebellion of 1989. The collective identity and struggles emerging from the chaotic terrain of the barrios would lay the foundation for the new experiments in direct democracy.
For the most part, these were not factory workers squaring off against a boss in the workplace, but informal workers performing services or circulating the imported goods that flooded this oil economy. They confronted not a physical boss but the market itself, and their political demands centered not so much on where they worked but where they lived. As a result, in the words of Dario Azzellini, many “Venezuelans identify much more strongly with their community than with their workplace.”4 These are still very much workers in the broadest sense of the word, however, and in fact some of Venezuela’s poorest, working without a contract and benefits, or hustling for a living in the unforgiving city.
Over time, their demands for running water, education, health care, stable streets and safe housing on unstable terrain, and cultural and sporting activities for youth all translated into new instruments of community control. And since Venezuelans were struggling against a corrupt, two-party system that was democratic only in name, it was natural that they would seek out more radically democratic ways to organize themselves. Neighbors formed associations and then spontaneous assemblies and popular self-defense militias in the 1980s and 1990s, especially after the Caracazo. They began to govern and defend their own communities—their own territories—by themselves.
It was these participatory, grassroots assemblies that served as the prototypes for what would come to be known as communal councils—officially recognized institutions for directly democratic self-government on the local level. And it was these councils—with the grassroots energy and territorial identity they embodied—that would later come together under the aegis of the broader units known as the communes.
In the chapters that follow, I track the emergence of the Venezuelan communes not only from above but from below. Just as Chávez the individual did not create the Bolivarian Revolution—it was instead the long revolutionary process that “created Chávez”—so too with the communes.5 Before the Venezuelan state took on the task of building the communes from above, revolutionaries were building them from below. As a result, the relationship between the communes—the seeds of a future nonstate—and the existing state has been far from smooth.
I then turn to the ongoing struggle for urban space, to show how the urban movements that have always been the political spearhead of Chavismo are today fighting for a right to the city, storming earthly heavens by tearing down the walls separating the rich from the poor. If revolutionary Chavismo emerges from the space of the barrios, those who oppose it hail from the increasingly fortified zones housing the wealthy. In the third chapter, I analyze the opposition street protests of 2014, documenting the emergence of new right-wing movements that have skillfully appropriated tactics often associated with the left.
Next, I explain the dangerous clashes emerging within Chavismo today—offering no easy answers, simply an insistence on the creative powers of the revolutionary grassroots—before turning directly to the network of communes currently spreading across the Venezuelan political landscape. I do so with uncertainty but also with faith, both of which are essential for grasping a process that is still very much in process. The challenges confronting the communes are many, not least of which are the deepening economic crisis and the political gains made by the opposition. But as a project for seizing and governing space to produce, the communes might just provide the best escape from the crisis. Marx once described the commune as the “form at last discovered” for the emancipation of workers, and that form is today being filled with the content of hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries who are making it their own in the construction of Venezuela’s distinctively territorialized socialism.6
By the time of his last major speech on October 20, 2012—soon after winning his final reelection—Hugo Chávez knew he was dying, but he looked as energetic as ever. His government ministers, on the other hand, looked sweaty and uncomfortable, with nowhere to hide as he chewed them out before the eyes of the nation, interrogating them on live television and demanding rectification for their mistakes. For more than three hours Chávez spoke, interspersed with commentary from ministers and on-the-ground reports from various sites on different aspects of the socialist project. He railed against government corruption, ineffectiveness, and inefficiency: “Will I continue to cry out in the desert?” he pleaded with increasing exasperation.
This speech would come to be known as the “Golpe de Timón,” which literally means “Strike at the Helm” but suggests a radical change in course.1 The change in question was the transition to socialism itself, long promised but only partially delivered. It’s too easy, Chávez insisted, to simply call things “socialist” without changing their fundamental structure. Since he had come to power, social welfare had improved dramatically, but the 1999 Constitution promised more: more participation, more democracy, more equality, and a new Venezuela. By 2006, this ambitious project had a name—“twenty-first-century socialism”—and it entailed far more than simply improving social welfare or reducing poverty: the goal was to transform political power itself to create something “truly new.” For Chávez, socialism was not opposed to democracy but instead synonymous with it: “Socialism is democracy and democracy is socialism.”
The building blocks for this new socialist democracy were the communal councils, established in a 2006 law. These councils—directly democratic and participatory institutions for local governance—quickly numbered in the thousands as neighbors began to come together weekly to debate and discuss how to govern themselves. Whether in a dingy room adorned with little more than a poster or mural of Chávez, or outside around a collective stew pot, the debates ranged from banal to engaging, from the local to the national and everything in between. Whether it is building new roads and basketball courts, or strategizing how to deal with increasing drug violence, these councils have become crucial spaces for political participation in Venezuela today. But as late as 2012, it was not entirely clear what this new form of socialism would look like or how to build it. Would the role of the councils be limited to local development? Would they serve as a check on the power of the central government? Or were they instead destined to be a part of something far more ambitious?
For Chávez, the answer was increasingly clear: capitalism was a “monster” that would swallow up any and all small, local alternatives,
