- Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission (2025), Revolutionary Communist Group. Available at youtube.com/@rcgfrfi
Over five million social homes have been built by the Venezuelan state since 2011. The Great Housing Mission is one of the many successes the working-class Bolivarian revolution has achieved since coming to power in 1998 with the election of President Hugo Chávez, who went on to found the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). But rather than report these achievements, British media such as the BBC and The Guardian instead spread lies about the legitimacy of the election results that returned Chávez’ successor Nicolás Maduro to power in 2024. In January 2025, a group of comrades from the Revolutionary Communist Group visited Venezuela to attend the inauguration of President Maduro. To counter the pro-imperialist narrative, they set out to learn the truth about the country’s housing programme, visiting working class comunas and projects. The result is a short film showcasing the Santa Rosa estate, one of 19 housing missions in the capital, Caracas. The film features inspiring firsthand accounts of residents’ and activists’ experiences of turning the goal of safe and secure housing for the masses into a reality.
The film describes how the Great Housing Mission was accelerated in response to the need for housing exacerbated by severe flooding and landslides in late 2010. The disaster killed 35 people and displaced 130,000, including many from the precarious shanty towns outside Caracas that were a relic of the pre-revolution 1970s oil boom, which saw US oil companies and a Venezuelan elite profit from the exploitation, poverty and repression of the masses. The PSUV government has since taken control of the country’s oil wealth, using it to fund free healthcare, education and culture, and to ensure the working class are securely and sustainably housed. Following the 2010 storms, Chávez’ battle cry, ‘Expropiese!’ (Expropriate it!) rang out through the streets as parasitic profiteers were chased off the land they had appropriated, so that the working families they had exploited for so long could be housed in the heart of the cities. When families began moving into Santa Rosa in 2011, the government ensured that their flats were already furnished and stocked with food. Today, 507 residents live comfortably in the estate’s 140 apartments. Because the housing missions are organised collectively by the residents themselves, with the backing of the state, people’s basic needs, including regular provision of food, are guaranteed. This is despite over 900 economic sanctions imposed by US imperialism as it desperately tries to bring down the PSUV government and recommence its plunder of Venezuela’s resources.
Santa Rosa’s facilities include a doctor’s surgery, food distribution centre, meeting space and a police office. But unlike police in an imperialist country like Britain, the National Bolivarian Police (PNB) are not imposed on the community by the state, but are instead comprised of local residents under the direction of the communal council. As resident Betty Dominguez says in the film, ‘All this is being done by the people. Nothing is imposed directly here… Coming up, we have the popular communal consultations for selecting community projects, which has been another well implemented policy because it is through this the people themselves are going to improve their own community.’ This communal system of democracy has boosted the empowerment of women, who make up around 70% of community leaders.
As the US escalates its military aggression towards Venezuela through a buildup of warships in the Caribbean (see p.7), it has been inspiring to see the people mobilising to support the Bolivarian Militia and wider National Bolivarian Armed Forces in defence of their homeland and the achievements of their revolution. Dominguez, who is also a member of the Hugo Chávez Battle Units (UBCh), exemplifies this spirit when she declares, ‘We are revolutionaries… We are in the streets… We are not obliged to be in the streets; we are there because we want to be. We do not want sanctions and we will continue with the revolution!’
The contrast between Venezuela and Latin American countries that have not managed to break the stranglehold of imperialism is stark. Brazil has built 500,000 fewer social homes than Venezuela since 2009, despite a population 7.5 times higher; the number of people living on the streets increased tenfold between 2013 and 2023, before ballooning further throughout 2024 from 261,653 to 327,925. Between one to two thirds of households are living in substandard accommodation in Argentina, Peru and Honduras, all countries with heavy austerity measures imposed by the IMF and World Bank.
In capitalist Britain, housing is a commodity for making profit, not a right of the working class. Under Labour and Conservative governments, yearly net losses of social housing have been the norm since 1981, forcing families into expensive, poor-condition, and insecure private rented accommodation. Since 1995, the proportion of households living in overcrowded conditions has risen by over 70%, and today the number of homeless children in temporary accommodation is at a record high of 169,050. Housing is yet another tool for dividing the working class, with blame for shortages aimed at migrants while it is the state decimating social housing in favour of developers, investors, and landlords. Social cleansing is forcing working-class communities out of inner cities across the country.
However, in Britain as in Venezuela, workers demonstrate what can be achieved through organisation and struggle against the forces of profit and privatisation. Examples include Tottenham Family Fight Back, a group of women fighting to save the Living Under One Sun community centre in north London from demolition by Labour-run Haringey Council, to make way for a footpath linking new luxury flats to the tube station. Over the summer, the group have blockaded and occupied the centre – which provides vital childcare and services for young people and families – and have continued to run events there despite the council’s attempts to evict them. An escalation of this kind of organising, coupled with solidarity with workers’ movements in Venezuela and wherever they arise, is what is required to weaken the grip of imperialism around the world.
Viva Venezuela!
Imperialism out of Latin America!
Felix Lancashire
FRFI 308 October/November 2025
