In August 2024 FRFI had the opportunity to speak to Hernan Vargas, the Venezuelan former vice-minister for economics in the Venezuelan Ministry of Communes, member of the political coordination of ALBA Moviementos, the continental platform of social movements, and long-time militant of the urban Pobladores movement. The interview took place in the context of renewed attempts by the US-backed right-wing opposition to destabilise Venezuela, in particular by attempting to claim, without foundation, that its candidate, Eduardo Gonzalez, had won the 28 July election, rather than the leader of the Venezuelan United Socialist Party (PSUV), Nicolas Maduro. With the working class of Venezuela having once again mobilised in defence of the Boliviaran Revolution, Hernan Vargas discussed the class struggle in Venezuela and the central role of the communal movement.
FRFI: How is the communal movement contributing to defeating the coup plot and destabilisation following the election?
1Hernan Vargas: Following the election, Gonzalez publicly called on his followers not to recognise the electoral results, to cry fraud and to be on the streets. Armed far-right followers have persecuted Chavista[1] militants. Communal leaders across the country have received threats. Twenty five people have been murdered, including two women community leaders. So, the communes and grassroots have organised together to defend our own militants and protect our communities.
It was a really difficult situation during the first weeks after the election. Fortunately we had action from the state which contained the situation, and at the same time our communal leaders established local measures in order to avoid conflict, and in order to protect themselves. The second issue is that we have faced down ten years of sanctions, more than 900 unilateral coercive measures from the United States. During these times the communes have organised together to resist and overcome the impact of sanctions. So now, from the communes we denounce the fact that the United States is refusing to recognise our presidential election results, in violation of our sovereignty and our national constitution. In addition, on 25 August we had a national consultation on communal projects, where the communes could choose the most important community projects that should be funded and executed to resolve issues like water, electricity, infrastructure, areas that have been damaged by the blockade. So in the week after the Presidential election the communes have been at the centre of the counter-attack, organising assemblies with whole communities, drawing everyone together to participate in the consultation, whether they voted for or against the government or abstained. This process of organisation and preparation for consultation has been an important step in containing the violence, and promoting peace and community participation. Not only is this an act of resistance, it is a progressive act, a step to restart the building of socialism from the communes, building on the historic proposal from Hugo Chavez, the model of building a territorial socialism from the communes upwards.
FRFI: How have the communes and social organisations been mobilising the impressive Chavista protests that took to the streets to defeat the coup attempt?
Hernan Vargas: The international disinformation media made the mobilisation of Chavista forces invisible. Instead, they promoted the idea that we have a lot of protests from the far right, from those who voted for Gonzalez. In reality, we’ve seen only two or three opposition mobilisations.
Meanwhile, almost every day Chavistas have been mobilised in all the main cities and towns of our country. This is part of the Bolivarian Revolution’s tradition; if we want to maintain peace, we need to mobilise to defend it. If they call for violence, we take to the streets, with peace, in our masses, to show we are a reality they can’t deny. Yet the media has people in Britain and other countries absolutely convinced that there is nobody supporting Chavismo. Happily, our future is not decided by public opinion manufactured by Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg.
During the weeks after the election, Nicolas Maduro called on us to mobilise in the streets permanently. Almost every day we have had a mass demonstration in Caracas to defend peace, to prove to them that we are here and you can’t defeat us.
The organisation I am part of, Movimiento de Pobladores, is a platform related to the struggles for urban land, for housing, and to defeat the urban latifundio, which is part of the revolution here in Venezuela. Practically all the left is part of the movement. We have different organisations feminists, urban movements, peace movements, youth movements, women’s movements. All the different sectors have been mobilised during this period , especially the Movimiento de Pobladores. Specifically, we have a common agenda to fight for our collective right to build our own communities, socialist communities, communal communities.
FRFI: In August there was a national consultation for communal projects. Can you say more about it?
Hernan Vargas: The 1999 Bolivarian Constitution established our model of democracy as participative and protagonistic; each constitutional right is accompanied by popular organisation. For example, the constitution upholds the right to housing and land. In 2004 an act was passed to regularise urban land in popular sectors, necessitating the organisation of an Urban Land Committee to establish the history and chain of property tenure of the land, to regulate each family’s tenancy through communal oversight. Similarly, the constitutional right of access to water was supported by technical water community committees, developing projects to ensure access to water and so on. In 2006, President Chavez proposed combining these different committees with the communal council, a building block for the establishment of a different system. At the next level, communal councils come together and form a popular commune, to establish and manage community projects. We have 440,000 communal councils in Venezuela, and around 70% of these have combined, resulting in 4,100 popular communes across the country.
This is a political model where, in order to achieve any right, people’s organisation is central. This is a communal route towards building this new system, a socialist system. Since 2007 we have had this tradition, where the government uses part of the national budget, transferring resources directly to the commune or the communal council, to enable them to fix, for example, the water network or electricity distribution system, or build new houses, or fix the school, or build a new health centre. So, over the last 25 years we have been collecting these experiences in our communities, in governance and also in the management of our livelihoods.
This process has been interrupted by the blockade, which has diminished our national budget, starving communities of resources. Many communities have had years without the possibility of executing different projects to improve the community, and have been damaged by the effects of this blockade. But at the same time, this popular power has allowed us to protect ourselves from the worst of the sanctions. Earlier this year, President Nicolas Maduro announced a stabilisation in the economy; now he is prioritising the distribution of this income to the communes.
This new communal consultation process is developing the mechanism where we can use the national budget to make resources available for the communes’ priorities. For example, a commune made up of ten communal councils holds an assembly proposing seven projects, like fixing the road, or the school. On the day of the consultation, everyone aged over 15 gets to vote for the project they think the most important. The first consultation was on 21 April, and the second on 25 August. Many of the projects chosen in April have already been executed. Maduro states this new mechanism is part of building a system of popular government, with communes at the centre, and is the antidote to both corruption and bureaucracy, because the communes manage the resources directly and have to render account, not only to the state, but to the people. They have to account to the community for how the funds were spent. In this way the commune is a system of self-governance and part of building socialism, driven by the community.
Amidst the headlines about Juan Guaido, the elections, the sanctions, the crisis, this process has been happening all the time in the background. We have this other Venezuela, this communal Venezuela that nobody knows, even within Venezuela not everyone knows about this process because the [privately-owned] mainstream news and social media tools ‘manage’ the popular perception of what is happening. So, everyone sees the economic crisis and thinks about the ideas that the global north is posing, about what is necessary to get out of the crisis and progress personally, individualistically. It is this perception that has driven a lot of people to migrate. But at the same time, we have this other Venezuela, which lives from work, from communities working together, these networks of solidarity in the communes and communal councils that allow us the possibility to stay here in Venezuela despite the hardships, in spite of the blockade. Of course, during these years some communal organisations have been damaged, and have lost some level of organisation, This people power has been the only thing that has allowed us to resist the impact of the blockade. So, we have had this crisis which has interrupted our progress, but at the same time the continuity of the communal organisation has allowed the whole country to resist through work and solidarity. This would not have been possible without the supportive relationship with the state.
Many neighbouring countries supported migration from Venezuela – Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, but when the Covid 19 pandemic began they kicked out Venezuelan migrants and we had to receive a lot of people returning every day, thousands of people crossing back through the border. Yet we never had the spike in deaths we saw in other countries, we always had a managed response. We didn’t have a lot of money or vaccines. We didn’t have a great infrastructure, but we could count on collaboration between the health sector, the military sector and the organised communities. In the Bolivarian Revolution, the military acts as a logistical sector, the civic-military alliance. This is an important point because when the international media says that we have a lot of state repression in Venezuela, actually our soldiers have spent years focusing their expertise in addressing public issues, not going to war or repressing the people. The army has been dedicated to health and social issues, disaster response like we saw recently in the mudslides. This cooperation has increased our ability to sustain the health centres, the schools, the roads, the power network, telecommunications. So in a lot of respects this is also part of the popular organisation that has allowed us to resist.
Now we have to build the alternative with this people’s organisation. We cannot go back to 2012 and the first period of constructing communal councils and communes. In 2012, the peak of economic growth, we had no sanctions, a good national income, political stability. Now, 12 years later, we have gone through a really difficult economic situation. [2] We can’t go back to the stability of 2012, no, we need to build socialism as an answer to the crisis. This is not just a national crisis in Venezuela, it is a capitalist crisis, with each day more war. The genocide in Gaza is part of this system, the capitalists live from war, they live from making the weapons used in those wars. The main manufacturers in the global north live from war, from dispossession, from inequality, from racism, from forced migration. Capitalism is a system centred in death, against life. We have a world that is in crisis, where the United States’ most important goal is to preserve its control over the whole globe. That means war against everyone who puts that hegemony at risk.
That’s why they target Venezuela. It’s not about democracy or human rights. These are just scripts for Hollywood movies. The reality is they need our oil, they need Venezuela to stop promoting integration in the continent, they need to defeat the Bolivarian Revolution, they don’t want people talking about socialism as an alternative. The commune gives us the possibility of facing this imperialist crisis of hegemony. It gives us the possibility of building a new model not dependent on oil income, the possibility of developing new productive relations, as well as defending our sovereignty. In the next decades we will have even more crises – natural crisis, a racist crisis, a crisis of war and violence, and we need to build an alternative: the future of humanity depends on it.
FRFI: Within the Bolivarian revolution there are political positions expressing different class interests. For example, Wilmar Castro Soteldo, when Minister for Agriculture, advocated for the ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’ at the same time as rural communes and campesino collectives were facing conflicts with landowners and agribusiness. Meanwhile, Angel Prado, a long-standing organiser from the ‘El Maizal’ rural commune was recently appointed Minister of Communes. How can we understand the class struggle within the revolutionary movement?
Hernan Vargas: We didn’t say in the Constitution in 1999 we would abolish latifundia [large landowners] or that overnight we could abolish class struggle. No, we have had the class struggle during the last 25 years. It’s a struggle for land, against racism, against patriarchy. It’s important to draw comparisons with different historical moments. I find the situation facing the Republic of China in the first half of the 20th century has many parallels. China was facing invasion from Japan, with the complicity of the imperialist powers. But at the same time, there was the national war, against the Kuomintang nationalists. In analysing the class struggle, Chairman Mao said that on the one hand you have the foreign imperialists and the Chinese comprador bourgeoisie, absolutely aligned with imperialist interests. However, you also have a national bourgeoisie whose interests and development are actually held back by the actions of the imperialists. This opposition to the imperialists is what they have in common with the revolution. Yet, this national bourgeoisie will at some point act against the interests of the people. The national bourgeois and the working class and poor can act together against imperialism, but their interests are counterposed.
During recent years in Venezuela, we have needed some level of national unity. Maduro posed five issues where it is possible to find a consensus even with centre-right political parties and the private sector. All want to end the blockade, all need national economic recuperation, an improved social situation, to defend our sovereignty in the dispute with Guyana, and we all need peace, not guarimbas [street violence]. This consensus recognises that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado is of the extreme pro-imperialist right. She’s dangerous, violent, she wants the blockade tightened. This consensus recognises the need to block her plans, but if we consider the economic model we want to build, whether it should be based on social property or private property, we will clearly have differences.
In 2012, Hugo Chavez, in his ‘Golpe de Timon’ (Seize the Helm) speech used this metaphor about capitalism. He said you have the sea of capitalism and in that sea, we are trying to put some islands of socialism, and they have to stand together in order not to be absorbed by the sea. Because if the imperialists are attacking us all together, we must resist all together. The Bolivarian Revolution is a boat or a ship that we have in this storm of crisis of civilisation and imperialist war.
Venezuela has an oil rentier capitalism. We have never experienced a situation where we don’t have capitalism, where we don’t have colonialism, where we are not attacked by imperialism. In the different left sectors, there is this idea that revolution is about the disappearance of contradictions, actually it’s the opposite. The revolution is the possibility of contradictions, and we face them, with this ship, moving toward this storm. We have this confrontation between those who think that by constructing a new national model that is not dependent on oil, we will create a productive capitalism in Venezuela, and on the other hand, those who propose the communes as a way of constructing different relations of production in order to build a socialist system. We are facing international aggression and at the same time going through a class struggle that will determine which system we will build. Hugo Chavez always talked about stages. We have had different stages in the Bolivarian Revolution, from the struggle against neoliberalism, to the development of the new constitution in 1999, then the era of constructing the first communal councils and communes beginning in 2006, then later the blockade from 2015, and now we are starting a new era. We are still under blockade, but we are stabilising and facing a new era where the international context is of different confrontations, where we need a clear strategy of national unity, and unity with common interests in the global south, but also a way of dealing with our inner contradictions.
Castro Soteldo has recently been removed from government. He was necessary in a different period but not in this new era. The contradiction doesn’t disappear when you change one minister for another. However, it indicates the direction we are fighting towards. Angel Prado is a local communal leader who some years ago was proposed to stand as mayor in grass-roots primary elections within the PSUV in his local area. There was a disagreement within the PSUV, and despite winning the internal elections he was blocked. But four years later, the same PSUV told him to stand again, that actually, he was the better leader, and he made it. Prado is a grass-roots leader who has battled through the inner contradictions of the PSUV yet remained within the Bolivarian Revolution. He didn’t say ‘well, I’m no longer a revolutionary’ or come out against the Bolivarian revolution He worked out a way to face the inner contradictions in favour of building socialism.
FRFI: The government have announced ‘Mega-elections’ in 2025 to renew governors, mayors and councillors. How does this system of representative traditional democracy work alongside the participatory democracy central to the communes?
Hernan Vargas: On the one hand you have elected governors that have chosen to be at the service of communal power. And you also have elected governors or mayors who don’t believe in this power or don’t understand it, or who stand against it. There also those who are trying to solve things by making alliances with the private sector or with different institutional sectors. All of these things can exist at the same time, right now we’re living a stellar moment for a dispute between these different models of politics.
We have one year to have a national discussion about this. We have the president of the State, who at the same time is the main leader of the Socialist Party, telling everyone that we have to build a new way of governance. It’s not just about sitting together and talking but also about enacting these plans. We have to build socialism because it is necessary. We will not be able to fix the roads, schools, or health centres if everyone is going in different directions. We need to work together, to forge a way forward. I believe we have to exercise what Enrique Dussel calls an obediential power – obeying the will of the people whilst commanding, using the power to serve. This concept is something that we have been referring to these last years, but it’s not just about having correct ideas. It’s about the capability to build and practise. We need to continue consulting the people, giving them the power to decide. Maybe right now they are deciding whether to prioritise the water project or the electricity power project, but in the long term they are deciding if they want this model of socialism centred in the commune. So, in the weeks ahead we will have to ride the international storm, but at the same time, we need to build this new alternative from our inner contradictions.
We have three challenges simultaneously. The first is, we have to maintain resistance against imperialism. We will face the same sanctions and even more imperial aggression. At the same time, we need to face fascism, because the far right called the people to violence against Chavismo, targeting the grassroots Chavista movement that defends the Bolivarian revolution. We can see this building of a fascist movement even in Europe, fascist parties, fascist organisations, fascist ideas that are being re-established during the recent years. And then in Latin America we have these far- right leaders, Milei in Argentina, Machado here in Venezuela, Bolsonaro in Brazil. They are practically political outsiders in that they don’t care about the consequences of their actions, they do what is necessary to defend the interests of imperialism, they have the disposition and the will to burn everything down in their country in order to defend the interests of the global north. A case in point, Corina Machado is top of the bourgeoisie here in Venezuela, an arch-oligarch. She’s absolutely devoted to the United States. The last thing that she cares about is the Venezuelan people. We have just had for a second time, a national attack, sabotage against the electrical system. This gives you an idea of how the imperialists think – how colonialists think. After ten years of blockade, they could do political work in the grassroots, to gain the political will of the people, to defeat Bolivarian revolution with votes or even with a social rebellion. But they don’t pursue this work, it isn’t their kind of politics, instead they decide ‘we’re gonna cut the power’ thinking that we will kill each other because we are beasts. They don’t believe in people, don’t believe in humanity. They only want to take the power by any means possible.
The third challenge is about the necessity of build socialism from the commune, building a new model of democracy, a new model of governance. But we are undertaking this task, not only because we think it’s fair, but because we think it’s necessary. It’s indispensable. The future of humanity depends on the possibility of building an alternative to this system that is in crisis. In the next years and decades, we will have even more crises, an environmental crisis, a racist crisis, a crisis of war, a crisis of violence, and we need to build an alternative for society. That’s what we are doing here. We are facing down imperialism and fascism in order to build socialism, which was the main issue that Hugo Chavez proposed in ‘Golpe de Timon’ when he said he said ‘comuna o nada’ – the commune or nothing. It’s independence or nada, Independence or nothing. Commune or nothing. There is no alternative. We need to build this to confront imperialism and fascism, and that’s what we are going to do.
First published in abridged form in FRFI 302 October/November 2024
[1] Chavista and Chavismo relate to supporters of the revolutionary ideas of the late president, Hugo Chavez.
[2] See ‘Venezuela: resurgent economy defies imperialist sanctions’, FRFI 290, October/November 2022.
