managed life collectively, and when Venezuelan slaves escaped to the hills to form maroon communities, these too often anticipated communal forms: participatory, direct, and self-governed. The long history of Venezuela’s communes thus began long before Chávez and even before the great Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar helped to free the continent from Spanish domination at the outset of the nineteenth century. These experiments were not all the same, nor were they communes, strictly speaking, and some were more democratic than others. But each moment pointed toward the fundamental demand to control one’s own everyday life, a search for the kind of collective power that Marx sought when he described the commune as the “self-government of the producers.”5
As radical social movements and grassroots organizers in the barrios were experimenting with direct self-government through popular assemblies, Chávez was building a conspiratorial movement in the army. But he and other young soldiers were also in close contact with the revolutionary underground, and in particular with a figure who would be even more important for the form that the Venezuelan communes would take: the guerrilla commander Kléber Ramírez Rojas. In fact, when Chávez and others were planning their 1992 coup against the corrupt and violent two-party system, Kléber was drafting the founding documents for a new political system to be established if the coup were successful. The goal of the conspiracy, according to these documents, was not simply to seize the state but to immediately replace it with something very different, which Kléber called a “commoner state,” and which Chávez would which later call the “communal state.”6
For Kléber, a veteran of the armed struggle, who was influenced not only by European Marxism but also by the Venezuelan struggle against slavery and colonialism, this new alternative state was in fact no state at all. Instead, building communal power meant dissolving political power into the community itself; it meant a “broadening of democracy in which the communities will assume the fundamental powers of the state.” This was not mere “decentralization,” however, the buzzword of choice for the neoliberal reformers of the 1990s, who sought to reduce the role of the state to benefit not the community but capital. The communal alternative Kléber and Chávez envisioned was never about decentralizing power but organizing power in the barrios and the country from the bottom up.
While a commoner state would thus be no state at all, it would nevertheless involve thousands upon thousands of directly democratic neighborhood councils, through which Venezuelans would increasingly take control over their own lives. They would elect their own political delegates and police forces; they would decide what to produce and for whom. Everyday people would be constantly involved in managing their local communities, and institutions would no longer stand above and apart from the people. This kind of organization was already emerging in the barrio assemblies that sprouted up around the time of the Caracazo, but Kléber saw a danger in these dispersed assemblies, with their celebrations of horizontal democracy and local autonomy. Communal power, he argued, could not remain dispersed; it needed to unify into a broad horizon for national struggle, becoming in the process a power, an alternative.
Instead of the state over the people, a communal power would instead embody a dynamic relationship between institutions and the people that Kléber would describe—provocatively and paradoxically—as a “government of popular insurgency.” This was the vision, but the 1992 coup failed, Chávez and others were jailed, and the horizon of the commune dipped once again out of sight, only to reemerge later. From prison, Chávez began to expand on these ideas to theorize the transition toward a new form of political power in Venezuela. The young soldier placed a particular emphasis on the need to build a radically reorganized, “polycentric” system of participatory power that would, in the young Chávez’s words, “be very near to the territory of utopia.” These two words—territory and utopia—are essential for grasping the communes today.
When Chávez began his “Golpe de Timón” address twenty years later, he did so holding a thick copy of István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital in his hand. Like Kléber Ramírez, Mészáros—a Hungarian Marxist—had a major impact on Chávez’s own understanding of the role of communes in the transition toward a socialist society. In particular, Mészáros had foregrounded the need for socialism to be radically democratic, even going so far as to argue that participatory self-management is the “yardstick” by which progress toward socialism can be measured. But while Chávez was citing Mészáros as an authority and inspiration, it was Chávez himself who had, in part, inspired Mészáros’s own emphasis on participatory, radical democracy.7
So where is the commune? When Chávez asked the question in 2012, the future of this ambitious communal project was far from certain. But since then—in large part due to the momentum provided by his “Golpe de Timón” speech—the communal project has advanced by leaps and bounds. After Chávez died on March 5, 2013, the newly elected president, Nicolás Maduro, named Reinaldo Iturriza commune minister. A radical with deep roots in barrio and youth movements, and with a militant emphasis on popular participation and culture, Iturriza oversaw the revitalization of Chávez’s vision and the dramatic expansion of the communes. From a small handful registered between 2010 and 2013, there were soon dozens, then hundreds, then more than a thousand communes, and Maduro was speaking openly of the need to “demolish the bourgeois state.” As I write this, the real-time tally of registered communes on the ministry’s website reads 1,546, in addition to more than 45,000 communal councils, and thousands of EPSs already registered by 2013.
In a major step forward, 2014 saw the communes begin to stretch their authority upward, consolidating an integrated national structure. Communes now elect delegates to state-level confederations with their own parliaments, which in turn send delegates to a national presidential council that interfaces directly with Maduro. While some—especially outside Venezuela—might interpret such a direct connection to the president as reinforcing the centralized authority of the president himself, many organizers reject this view. For national commune organizer Gerardo Rojas, who travels the country facilitating the establishment and consolidation of the communes, the presidential council represents a meeting among equals: the confederated force of communal power and a president who, up to this point at least, has supported the communes.
While formally working for the government—“until they fire me,” he chuckles—Rojas nevertheless has a flexible and open-ended vision of the construction of this communal power. When I ask him whether the communes have been a success or failure, whether we are winning or losing, he rightly scoffs at the naivety of the question. The project is advancing, he insists, although his words are measured. Do some communes function better and enjoy a higher degree of participation than others? Do some communes produce more than others? Yes, some produce more material goods—corn, plantains, coffee, sugar—while others, as we will see in later chapters, don’t produce much of anything at all. But these too are spaces in which residents are attempting to build a new culture and a new form of radically democratic self-government that, according to Rojas, “exists and is tangible in many parts of the country right now.”
It would be a mistake, Rojas insists, to define the commune in too rigid a way, to straitjacket it from above when its ultimate form needs to be determined by the grassroots participation of millions from below. He insists that, if anything, the commune is best understood as a sort of revolutionary myth that, rather than prescribing a fixed form, can instead help to mobilize the masses to do the impossible and create something altogether new. If Marx once described the commune as a “sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind,” contemporary Venezuela shows that it can be equally tantalizing to those who see their own future in it.
Such revolutionary myths are more urgently necessary now than ever before, and the years since Chávez’s death have been trying times for Venezuelan revolutionaries. Chávez’s death coincided with a collapse in global oil prices drastic enough to throw the stability of the Bolivarian process into question and to embolden its opponents. Anti-Chavista forces have seized upon the economic crisis—which has seen dramatic inflation and shortages of basic goods—to rally disaffected voters, handing the Chavistas an unprecedented
