Following the right-wing coup in Bolivia, there were mass protests in Venezuela in solidarity with Evo Morales and Bolivia’s indigenous movement. US-backed opposition politician Juan Guaido’s own anti-government street protests, called at the same time, drew a pitifully low turnout. After failing for a year to oust President Nicolas Maduro, Guaido has become increasingly irrelevant. Venezuela’s armed forces have reiterated their support for Maduro and his United Socialist Party (PSUV) government. The army was restructured following a failed coup in 2002 that saw rank-and-file soldiers defy orders and return socialist leader Hugo Chavez to power within 48 hours.
Despite constant destabilisation attempts and the huge economic challenges imposed by the US blockade, the Bolivarian revolution is standing firm. However, the guarantor of ensuring the fight for socialism continues in Venezuela is pressure from the grassroots, the social movements and the communes. While at the anti-imperialist conference of solidarity in Havana (see p8/9), the RCG spoke to Venezuelan Minister of Communes Blanca Eekhout and Ana Maldonado of the Francisco de Miranda Front, who works in the communal cabinet of the mayor of Caracas.
Communal councils group together neighbourhoods, organising to identify and address the needs of their communities. They link together to form communes which organise on a larger scale. The Venezuelan government records 3,192 communes, 25,772 communal enterprises and 48,169 communal councils. As Blanca Eekhout explained, these are central to determining Venezuela’s future:
‘Imperialist aggression, the blockade, economic war, illegal sanctions, the global theft of our transactions, require more than ever the organisation of our people. A commune is the construction of popular power, the subject of our revolution, the protagonist and truly participatory democracy of the 21st century. There is no other way to construct a state based on rights, justice and equality. The communes are the backbone of what we can do to sustain our revolution, as an organized and conscious people directly assuming the defence of our homeland.’
There are tensions between the participatory democracy of the communes and the traditional structures of the bourgeois state. The PSUV is a cross-class coalition encompassing activists committed to socialist revolution as well as self-serving capitalists hungry for state contracts. The working class must struggle to push the state in a revolutionary direction.
As Ana Maldonado explained: ‘The point is for the community to own the means of production in order to meet the needs of the community… There are contradictions and we see our struggle as from the state, against the state, outside the state and within the state. From the state – because the Bolivarian revolution has as a main goal to transfer state functions and resources to the communes. Against the state – because the communal state is being created against the capitalist state. Within the state – because we are trying to transform the state using positions of power wherever we can – but also outside the state because we are trying to bypass the bureaucratic oppressive state. The blockade has shown us our weak points… we didn’t push hard enough whilst we had the resources to get communes sovereign in seed production and the communes themselves didn’t succeed in this aim. There are some notable exceptions like “Papas para Vida” [Potatoes for Life] which are self-sufficient in potato seeds – but we need to learn from the landless movement, the Movimento Sin Tierra (MST) in Brazil. We’ve now sent commune activists over to MST in Brazil to learn about sustainable, sovereign agro-ecological production.’
Critics point to continued state involvement in a significant number of communes in order to downplay their validity, but as Maldonado argued ‘Around 100 are operating at a very high level, however this does not discount the important experiences of the other communes who are still building and learning…All communes are legitimate. Yes, we can look at and try to resolve the contradictions – but the imperialists love any public division.’
At times, the structures of the existing state stand in the way of building the communal movement. This includes land ministers dragging their feet over handing over deeds to idle land; mayors and governors opposing communal projects as ‘too radical’; communes struggling to get production inputs as corrupt officials instead divert goods to be sold on the unofficial market. A notable exception is Erika Farias, mayor of Caracas and national director of the Frente Francisco de Miranda, set up by Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro to develop cadre in Venezuela. Maldonado, who works in Farias’ team, explained that they are transferring power from the mayor’s office to the communes, promoting working class organisation and administration in the transformation of the state.
‘Erika talks about transferring the administration of the mayor to the communes so that when her term is done she will “close the door and leave an empty post behind”. Other mayors have paid lip service to communal power…we have transferred the entire budget of the cultural programme to youth organisations, we’re transferring power to women’s houses and working with a number of communes to produce radios, textiles and school uniforms.’
The question of state power is decisive. 70% of the economy remains in private hands, whilst some PSUV ministers promote the oxymoron of a ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’. The strength of the commune movement, its relation to state power and its role in pushing forward the Bolivarian movement in a radical direction is key to the fight for socialism in Venezuela. Events in Bolivia illustrate the limitations of trying to build socialism within the existing structures of a capitalist state, leaving the structures of the police and army intact. Building socialist consciousness and popular education is absolutely central, arming the people with the theoretical and practical tools to transform the state and defend it from counter-revolution. Maldonado reflected:
‘We underestimated the value of popular education. When the state had an abundance, we handed over money and resources but we didn’t focus on building the consciousness necessary to really build popular power. Now we are much more focused on education and popular power. Everybody is being crushed by imperialism, but this means that we have become more conscious.’
Sam McGill
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 273 December 2019/January 2020
