that the communal councils, not to mention other cooperative or socialist enterprises, were doomed on their own. For the councils to provide a true counterweight to the corruption and bureaucracy of the oil state, they would need to be unified and consolidated into something much bigger. This something was the communes themselves, legally established in a 2010 law designed to bring the communal councils and other participatory units together in increasingly larger self-governed areas. Two years later, however, not a single commune had been established, leading the president to emphasize one question above all: “Where is the commune?”
The question was for his government ministers, and they had no answer. “We keep distributing homes, but the communes are nowhere to be seen.” This was not only a question of the absence of legally registered communes, but something far deeper: What was still lacking, according to Chávez, was “the spirit of the commune which is much more important, communal culture.” The error of government ministers was not that they had failed to create communes from above, but that they had forgotten that those communes needed to be born from below: “The commune—popular power—does not come from Miraflores Palace, nor is it from such and such ministry that we will be able to solve our problems.”
If Chávez had addressed his question—“Where is the commune?”—to those grassroots organizers who have always been the backbone of Chavismo, the answer might have been very different. Some would have no doubt pointed to the very ground on which they stood, as though to say: The commune is here, Comandante.
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
