When analyzing the changes in Venezuela, most journalists, historians, and social scientists concentrate on the prominent figure of Hugo Chávez, and give a somewhat “institutional” account of the transformation process called the “Bolivarian Revolution.”1 However, the leftist government that has held power in Venezuela since 1999 is without doubt the result of strong grassroots movements, as is the fact that it has survived several attempts to topple it. When the right-wing opposition and high-ranking military, with the connivance of the employers’ association, staged a coup in April 2002 to oust Chávez, millions of Venezuelans took to the streets and forced the self-declared government under the leadership of the employers’ association’s president to resign and flee. The overarching role of the popular movements was demonstrated by the mobilizations organized from below opposing the “business strike” in 2002–2003, and in several other destabilization attempts by the opposition since then.
Venezuela represents the most far-reaching process of social transformation of the twenty-first century so far. Massive self-organization and the recognition of the movements’ central role in social transformation are at the core of the Bolivarian process.2 The process of social transformation arose under circumstances that have a lot of similarities with many of the new movements we have seen in the last few years. Venezuela allows us also to glimpse the specific situation of a transformation “from two sides”: from both state-centered and autonomous approaches. We can learn from the rich expressions of self-organization, from the experiences with formal state institutions, and the difficulties and achievements of pursuing a society based on solidarity, not profit.
Starting in the early 1980s, Venezuela faced a serious economic and social crisis that became a systemic political crisis. It was precisely the failure of the liberal-democratic model to satisfy the basic needs of the population, or to guarantee political participation, that led people in Venezuela to roundly reject the logic of representative democracy, and instead demand direct democracy—a desire that is expressed in the new 1999 Constitution as “participatory and protagonist democracy.”
Among the mainstream scholars of the social sciences, Venezuela was considered a model democracy in Latin America, at least until the Caracazo—the popular revolt against the neoliberal structural readjustment program in 1989 (see Chapter 1). In the 1990s researchers noted an important loss of legitimacy on the part of the Venezuelan political system and traditional parties, resulting in a crisis of representation. Nevertheless, several liberal authors continued to praise Venezuela’s two-party system as an outstanding example of stability3—even though the loss of legitimacy was widespread, resulting in the collapse of the country’s party system only a few years later.
Growing social polarization and the breakdown of the existing representative framework contributed to the December 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, who had led a leftist civilian-military revolt on February 4, 1992. Chávez’s candidacy was supported by numerous leftist parties, organizations, and individuals. Following the elections, a National Constituent Assembly was elected, and a new Constitution was drafted sanctioning considerable direct popular participation, and was accepted by referendum in December 1999. The Constitution seeks a “protagonist and participatory democracy” based on a far-reaching idea of participation that, in addition to redefining political participation, includes social, economic, and cultural rights, as well as collective rights for specific groups.
During the first years, the notion of participation was consistent with a democratic discourse in search of a “third way,” beyond capitalism and socialism. Starting in 2005, the emphasis of the discussion and the mechanisms of participation has been on popular power, revolutionary democracy, socialism, and councilism. The envisioned goal is “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century” to distinguish it from the state socialisms of the past. István Mészáros, who traced his basic ideas for a transition to socialism in his book Beyond Capital, has become an important theoretical reference in Venezuela, as he proposes a “communal system” involving communal production and consumption cycles.4
Councilist structures in various sectors of society, cooperating and confederating at higher levels, would form the basis of Venezuelan socialism, and in the longer term replace the bourgeois state with a communal state. The new participatory instruments being experimented with include various councils (communal councils, workers’ councils, student councils, land workers’ councils, women’s councils, and so on), the democratic administration of socially owned businesses, by their workers, and many other communal and collective institutions. As philosopher and educator Simón Rodríguez—Simón Bolívar’s teacher and a central reference in Bolivarianism—affirmed in the nineteenth century: “Where can we find models or templates? Because Hispanic America is something original. Its institutions and its government have to be original. And the means of establishing both must be original. Either we invent or we fail.”5
The transformative “approach from two sides” in Venezuela is forging a new path that is unique among struggles and strategies of social transformation. Blending strategies from above and below, it is pursuing an anti-imperialist politics of national sovereignty. The state and institutions are reinforced, and pursue a strategy of active economic regulation, in a mixed (capitalist) economy. However, according to the normative orientation of the Bolivarian process, the popular movements must assume a central role in the development of change, and at the same time remain autonomous with respect to the state. Various popular organizations, such as the trade union federation UNT (National Workers’ Union), founded in 2004, the National Campesino Front Ezequiel Zamora (FNCEZ), the National Communards Network (RNC), and the Urban Land Committees (CTU), among many others have, despite their support for the government, repeatedly assumed positions in opposition to it. The approach from below is reflected by self-administration structures and the decentralization of state decision-making processes. These initiatives from below are an active part of the construction of a new state and a new society that seeks to eliminate the division between political society and civil society. The Venezuelan process takes into account the fundamental opposition of the state and its institutions to emancipation and the construction of a socialist society.
The “two-sides” approach is driving social antagonism toward the state’s core. New institutions are arising that have been re-tasked with assisting and supporting the grassroots and movements in building structures intended to replace the state and its institutions. At the same time, there is institutional and organizational resistance to that construction within the state. These tensions are intensified by the central role played by petroleum in the Venezuelan economy—a circumstance that encourages and strengthens statism, centralization of power, and vertical structures.6 This economic distortion also gives rise to another Venezuelan peculiarity: the rentier economy7 has shifted the locus of class struggle so that it operates within the state; in other words, it revolves around access to administrative resources, on the assumption that it is the state that redistributes social wealth.
The Venezuelan transformation process is practically re-signifying the state and society as a result of the interaction of forces from above and below, creating the possibility of overcoming capitalist relations. The main challenge is keeping this process open, and developing a modus operandi from above that supports, accompanies, and reinforces the energies emerging from below, but without co-opting or limiting them. At the same time, this is a question of developing strategies from below that would enable active participation in the construction of the new without being absorbed into the structures of the state.
The danger persists of reproducing the logic of constituted power and traditional approaches—hierarchies; representative mechanisms; division between those who govern and those who are governed, leaders and those they lead; bureaucratization. Clearly, power asymmetry between state and self-organization can easily lead to the initiatives from below being influenced by the state, and not the other way around. Initiatives from below would no longer be the seedbed of the coming society, but rather an appendage of constituted power. For that reason, the defenders of popular power emphasize the centrality of autonomy and the importance of critical debate from below.
In its 1999 Constitution, Venezuela is defined as a “participatory and protagonist democracy.” Its point of departure is its criticism of representative democracy as non-democracy. This criticism refers not only to processes and mechanisms, but also to political culture,8 given that Venezuelan culture is still very much marked by a paternalistic state and a strong patronage system.9
Participatory and protagonistic democracy is an incomplete and constantly evolving concept. It is influenced by discussions about radical and direct democracy, and particularly by concrete practices developed in Latin America and guided by historical experiences based on the concepts of autonomy and popular power.
The demand for participation in Venezuela first arose in the 1980s. The concept of participatory and protagonist democracy reached widespread popularity with Chávez’s 1997 presidential campaign, which took up this demand and translated it into a new form. The basis for overcoming inequality and marginalization is that the poor and marginalized are no longer statistical objects, but agents of strategies for attaining equality and justice in diverse social fields. The 1999 Constitution extended political rights that had previously been limited to parties, linking the economic, the social, and the political. Social and collective rights must be understood as a necessary part of participation more broadly—without these rights, social and political participation, particularly for the poor, becomes difficult or impossible.10 In other words, if someone has no access to education or does not have other basic needs covered, it is unlikely that political participation under conditions of real equality can exist.
Without question, the material situation of the general population improved a great deal under the leftist government. Poverty in Venezuela fell from 50.4 percent of the population at the end of 1998 to 19.6 percent at the end of 2013, and extreme poverty fell from 20.3 percent at the end of 1998 to 5.5 percent at the end of 2013.11 From 2011, Venezuela transformed from being one of the most unequal countries in Latin America in terms of income to being the third-most equal (after Costa Rica and Uruguay).12 A national survey in Venezuela in 2008–2009 established that 80 percent of the population was eating three meals a day, and 16.2 percent even four meals a day.13 The population has free healthcare and free access to education at all levels. Venezuela ranks among the top five countries in the world in terms of the percentage of the population studying at university level.
Protagonist participation by the population is specified in various articles of the Constitution, such as Article 62 in which the state is required to encourage participation in decision-making, and others that transfer functions and resources to organized communities, establish rights regarding associative forms of economy, status of neighborhood assemblies, and the like. Participatory and protagonist democracy therefore strengthens local communities and encourages the self-organization of the population. The popular takeover of the government during the 2002 coup and the 2002–2003 entrepreneurs’ strike were particularly important manifestations of this. Starting in 2003, a powerful organizational dynamic was established in the neighborhoods around different social programs called “missions” addressing the most urgent problems of the marginalized and excluded populations. An economy of self-organization, as well as co- and self-management initiatives for businesses supported from above, grew stronger in 2004. And while some participation mechanisms have failed, new ones continue to appear and be experimented with.14 Revolution is understood as a broad process of construction—an act of collective creation and invention, not a “seizure of power.”
Venezuela’s current president, Nicolas Maduro,15 committed publicly to Chávez’s program, and declared several times that the construction of communes was central to Venezuela’s own path toward socialism. During his electoral campaign he promised not to negotiate with the bourgeoisie, but to put popular power at the center of his politics. Initiatives for a better coordination of movement forces have proliferated, as have concrete struggles in communities and workplaces.
Venezuela’s self-organized groups are not restricted to the councils already mentioned. In fact, there are tens of thousands self-organized groups, including groups of indigenous people, Afro-Venezuelans, LGBTQ people, and environmental activists. There are also groups focusing on sports, several hundred independent or community radio stations, a dozen community TV stations, magazines, barter networks, local currencies, and many more.
Several huge, very well organized and consolidated popular movements exist. The Bolívar and Zamora Revolutionary Current (Corriente Revolucionaria Bolívar y Zamora, CRBZ) comprises the biggest peasants’ movement, the Ezequiel Zamora National Peasant Front (Frente Nacional Campesino Ezequiel Zamora, FNCEZ)—which runs its own organic farming and political training system—the National Communal Simón Bolívar Front (Frente Nacional Comunal Simón Bolívar, FNCSB), which organizes communal councils, communes, and communal cities, the Simón Rodríguez Center for Social Studies and Education (Centro de Formación y Estudios Sociales Simon Rodríguez, CEFES), and the Movement for Workers’ Popular Power (Movimiento Poder Popular Obrero, MPPO).
The Movement of Settlers (Movimiento de Pobladores, MDP) encompasses Urban Land Committees (Comités de Tierra Urbana, CTU), originally initiated for the zoning of “illegal” urban housing, and now active in planning housing and living environments; the Pioneer Camps (Campamientos de Pioneros), made up of families without homes struggling for urban land on which to build their houses collectively; the Tenants’ Network (Red de Inquilinos), mobilizing against evictions, and the janitors’ movement (Movimiento de Conserjes). In July 2011 the MDP signed eleven contracts for the administration of housing complexes in Caracas, providing 2,000 rented homes. Since 2004, there have been various workers’ networks campaigning for workers’ control. The movement consolidated its structure during the First National Encounter for Workers’ Control and Workers Councils, in May 2011. A coordinating National Collective for Workers’ Control was formed. Moreover there is the Network of Communards (Red Nacional de Comuneros, RNC). All of these popular movements and many more share the goal of building the communal state, and are an integral part of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela—but their structures are self-organized, and their discussions and decisions are autonomous. All are in a relationship of both cooperation and conflict with constituted power at all institutional levels.
Communal councils have constructed a non-representative structure of direct participation that exists in parallel to the elected representative bodies of constituted power. Communal councils began forming in 2005 as an initiative from below. In various parts of Venezuela, rank-and-file organizations autonomously promoted forms of local self-administration named “local governments” or “communitarian governments.” Chávez adopted this initiative, and the National Assembly approved the Law of Communal Councils in 2006. At this point, some 5,000 communal councils already existed. Communal councils in urban areas incorporate between 150 and 400 families; in rural areas, a minimum of twenty families; and in indigenous zones, at least ten families, various communal councils and other popular organizations can build a commune. A census carried out in September 2013 revealed the existence of 40,035 communal councils, and 1,401 existing communes or popular efforts toward their construction.16 Most are directly financed by state institutions (thus avoiding interference from municipal administrations), without any entity having the authority to reject proposals presented by the councils. The relationship between the councils and established institutions, however, is not always harmonious; conflicts arise principally from the slowness of official power to respond to demands made by the councils, and from attempts at interference.
The communal councils are not a partisan initiative. Many count on the participation of neighbors considering themselves neither “Chavistas” nor opposition supporters. Even some middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods all over the country have formed communal councils dominated by the opposition. Only hardline opposition supporters in barrios boycott the communal councils.
At a higher level of self-government, there is the possibility of creating communes, which can be formed by combining various communal councils and other forms of self-organization in a specific territory. Participating councils themselves determine the geographical reach of their communes. Communes can develop medium- and long-term projects of greater scope, while decisions continue to be made in the assemblies of the communal councils.
Communal councils and communes tend to transcend the division between political and civil society—between those who govern and those who are governed. Hence, liberal analysts who support that division view the communal councils in a negative light, arguing that they are not independent civil society organizations, but rather are linked to the state. In fact, however, they constitute a parallel structure through which power and control are gradually drawn away from the state, in order for them to govern on their own.
In the context of the creation of communes and communal cities, it is important to distinguish between political–administrative (absolute) space and socio-cultural–economic (relational) space.17 Communes reflect the latter; their boundaries do not necessarily correspond to existing political–administrative spaces. As these continue to exist, the institutionalization of the communal councils, communes, and communal cities develops and shapes the socio-cultural–economic space. Thus, the idea of council-based non-representative local self-organization creates a new “power-geometry.” The concept of power in human geography, as elaborated by Doreen Massey, has been put “to positive political use” following the “recognition of the existence and significance, within Venezuela, of highly unequal, and thus undemocratic, power-geometries.”18
Various communes can form communal cities, with administration and planning from below. The mechanism of the construction of communes and communal cities is flexible; they themselves define their tasks. Thus the construction of self-government begins with what the population itself considers most important. The first communal cities to have formed, for example, are rural, and are structured around agriculture. Organizing and constructing communes and communal cities have been easier in suburban and rural areas than in metropolitan areas, where common interests are harder to define. The councilist structures in various social sectors can be considered the foundation of the Venezuelan socialist project: they must cooperate and coordinate on a higher level in order to replace the bourgeois state with a communal state.
As Delbia, from the Commune the Seven Socialist Pillars, puts it: “To put into practice the commune and communal councils is to achieve the communal state we want—that the people take control of their projects and public policies, that it is oneself who exerts control regarding everything so that we can achieve the communal power we want.”
The form that the communal state will take is an open question that will be resolved by creating councils in various areas. The political organization of the socialist societies of the twenty-first century—as a horizontal confederation of communities or as networks of social organizations,19 has been formulated similarly, and without reference to Venezuela, by Gustavo Esteva in Oaxaca, Mexico. Esteva emphasizes socialism’s original “communal impulse” before it was transformed into “collectivism, bureaucracy, and self-destruction.” “The communities appear as an alternative because within them, unity is recovered between politics and place and the people take on a form in which they can exercise their power without having to surrender it to the State.”20
The democratization of ownership and administration of the means of production is a declared goal of movements and government in Venezuela. Between 2001 and 2006, the Venezuelan government—in addition to asserting state control over the core of the oil industry—focused on promoting cooperatives for any type of company, including models of cooperatives co-administrated with the state or private entrepreneurs. The 1999 Constitution assigned the cooperatives a special role. They were conceived as contributing to a new social and economic balance, and thus received massive state assistance. The favorable conditions led to a boom in the number of cooperatives founded, only a third of which really started working. The National Cooperative Supervisory Institute, Sunacoop, certified 100,000 cooperatives as operating in 2013.21 The initial idea that cooperatives would automatically produce for the satisfaction of social needs, and that their internal solidarity based on collective property would extend to their local communities, proved to be an error. Most cooperatives still followed the logic of capital, concentrating on the maximization of net revenue without supporting the surrounding communities.22 Nevertheless, thousands of cooperatives were also founded by communities, workers, and movements with different goals.
In response to the employers’ lockout of 2002–2003, the “entrepreneurs’ strike,” which had the stated intention of toppling the Chávez government, workers began the process of taking over workplaces abandoned by their owners. At first, the government relegated the cases to the labor courts, and then in January 2005 began expropriations. From July 2005, the government began to pay special attention to the situation of closed businesses, and since then hundreds of such companies have been expropriated. Around one hundred of these had been occupied by workers. Since 2007, expropriated enterprises are officially supposed to be turned into “direct social property,” under the direct control of workers and communities. In reality, most of them are not administered by workers and communities, but by state institutions. Working conditions have not fundamentally changed, and expropriations have not automatically produced co-management or workers’ control—although dozens of worker-controlled factories exist, and initiatives and struggles for workers’ control can be found in hundreds of companies and institutions.
The concept of “direct social property” is also supposed to apply to hundreds of new “socialist factories” built by the government as part of its industrialization strategy. The local communal councils select the workers, while the required professionals are drawn from state and government institutions. The aim is gradually to transfer the administration of the factories into the hands of organized workers and communities. But most state institutions involved do little to organize this process or prepare the employees, and this has generated growing conflict between workers and institutions.
Conflicts over working conditions, workers’ rights, participation, co-management, and workers’ control arose in 2012 and 2013 in numerous nationalized and state-owned factories. Class struggle has been strengthened, or is emerging, where it was previously weak or absent. The day-to-day experiences in enterprise management and the political training workers have often received through the same institutions—which paradoxically later prevented effective worker participation—have ultimately contributed to the formation of a movement for workers’ control.
One of the main motivations for workers to push for workers’ control relates to efficiency. Apart from better working conditions and a greater sense of dignity in their jobs, workers mainly demand workers’ control because they see it as the only guarantee of lower production costs, and of production to satisfy the needs of the majority of the population. Their experience with the state bureaucracy has shown them that representatives of the state apparatus are often not qualified for their jobs—or, for various reasons based on corruption or internal power struggles, are not interested in efficient national production with workers’ participation in management, nor in changing the relations of production.
In 2007, Chávez picked up the idea of “socialist workers’ councils,” which was already being discussed by many rank-and-file workers and by existing councils and workers’ initiatives. In fact, there was a network with the same name: Socialist Workers’ Councils (CST). Chávez presented CSTs as an example of good practice, and called on workers to form them at their workplaces. Nevertheless, since most institutions were opposed to workers’ councils, only a few councils were formed at first—mainly in recovered factories.
Growing pressure from below led several government institutions to start to accept, or even promote, the creation of workers’ councils in institutionally administered workplaces—even without the benefit of an enacted law on workers’ councils. But while, on the one hand, the majority of institutions tried to prevent the constitution of workers’ councils in their workplaces, in others, and in state-administered enterprises, the institutions often tried to assume the lead and constitute the CSTs themselves, reducing them to a representative authority dealing with work- and salary-related questions within the government bureaucracy. As a consequence, the CSTs turned into another site of struggle for workers’ control.
The most successful attempt at democratization of ownership and administration of the means of production can be found in the Enterprises of Communal Social Property (EPSC), promoted to create local production units and community service enterprises. The EPSCs are the collective property of the communities, which decide on their organizational structure, the workers to be incorporated, and the eventual use of profits. Government enterprises and institutions have promoted the communal enterprises since 2009, and since 2013 several thousand EPSCs have been constituted. Most operate within community services like public transport, or are engaged in food production and processing (see Chapter 1).
In Venezuela, thirty-four interviews were conducted between 2006 and 2013. Most people interviewed had no experience of political or social activism before the first election of Chávez in 1998, or even before the coup d’état in 2002. Most interviewees are self-organized and involved in the concrete construction of new structures where they live and/or work. This is true even for most institutional workers we interviewed, who are activists close to movements, or part of them. They do not represent a general institutional profile or approach in any way.
The economic crisis starting in the 1980s led to an extreme impoverishment of the Venezuelan population and the pauperization of huge sectors. The economic crisis accompanied a political crisis. For the people of Venezuela, the rupture that has led to the current process of struggle and creation began on February 27, 1989, with the explosion of El Caracazo. The rebellion was caused by a situation of dramatically increasing poverty. There were shortages and speculation with regard to food and most basic necessities. These abysmal conditions had resulted from a program of austerity and structural adjustment following International Monetary Fund (IMF) guidelines. The final detonator was when on the morning of February 27, people went to ride their neighborhood bus and found that the fares had doubled overnight. Public rage was immediate. Throughout Caracas people responded by destroying buses, and then setting them alight. From there, people began to walk down the hills from the poor neighborhoods, taking what they needed and looting. The rebellion spread to all Venezuelan cities, involving more than one million people during almost one week. In response, the government ordered the police and the army to suppress the uprising, killing thousands. The Caracazo was a rupture. People suddenly realized their potential collective power, and that with it they could even chase out a government. But it also showed that if they could not build their own structures of self-administration, old forms of institutional power could again return. The middle ranks of the army were the ones ordered to carry out the massacre. The outcome enforced the conviction among the already secretly organized leftist “Bolivarians” in the military that it was necessary to act quickly to stop the regime. In February and November of 1992, there were two military uprisings coordinated with leftist groups and organizations from poor neighborhoods, and even some armed revolutionary militias and former guerrilla fighters. The civil-military uprisings failed but revolutionary change did no longer seem out of reach. Amid the crisis of traditional power, popular movements adopted increasingly autonomous stances and moved gradually from specific demands (such as asking for solutions to concrete problems) to demands for self-control, self-determination, self-management, and constituent power.23
Andrés Antillano, forty, social psychologist and criminologist, founder and activist of the CTU and the MDP, is from the barrio La Vega in Caracas.
Andrés, Comités de Tierra Urbana, La Vega, Caracas: The struggle for water had been one of the most important struggles in 1989–1990. The question of water is one of the most complex problems of the poor settlements in Caracas. The water comes more than 800 miles, and has to go up 1,000 meters in altitude. Therefore water was expensive, scarce, and unevenly distributed—middle-class residential areas always had water, the poor never had it. I remember that stage in my life where I learned to shower with a jar of water. At three o’clock in the morning a neighbor would shout that the water was coming, and we would all get up to fill any available bowl with water, since we never knew when it would be coming again. [So] we blocked the roundabout. That was our main form of struggle, we could hit the nerve of the city, because blocking here, you blocked a whole part of the city’s southeast.
We blocked the roundabout, and it was almost like a ritual: the Hidrocapital water company people came and told us they could not solve our problem, and we would inevitably kidnap them. We said, “Oh, you are not responding to us,” and we took them and brought them into the barrio, and they would not get out of there until we would get water. This means of struggle happened here in La Vega, and it happened as well in other barrios. It was almost cyclical—we protested, we would get water, the service would fail again, and you had to protest again. That led us in 1991 to raise in the Assembly of Barrios that the water question could no longer focus on whether it was coming or not, but had to be about controlling the water, administrating the water, to be able to define who opens or closes the supply. If we had the ability to access that, we would increase our power. We began to mobilize for this struggle. The struggles for specific demands, instead of being political struggles, in the sense of a shallow definition of politics, turned into struggles for participation, struggles for control of the processes generating the problems. Then came the military uprising of February 4, which led to an intense politicization of popular struggles.
Jaqueline Hernández, forty-three years old, single mother of two children, is part of the financial committee of the communal council Emiliano Hernández in Caracas’s poor neighborhood Magallanes de Catia.
Jaqueline, Emiliano Hernández communal council, Caracas: Never before were marginalized people who had only studied through elementary school taken into consideration. It was like a law here that you studied first to sixth grade, and you knew that getting out of sixth grade you had to work. This government cares that the people educate themselves. That’s why, before, they kept us like that for forty years, because it was not convenient for them that one would know what was happening. Many of these opposition people had us stay on the ground under their boot. They called us “dirt people,” “bad speaking,” toothless, hordes. I came to know the Teresa Carreño Theater now, at forty-two years old, because going into the Teresa Carreño was a dream of many, and those who could get in there were very few—the wealthy. Today we all go into the Teresa Carreño.
Francisco Visconti Osorio is a former general who led the civil-military uprising in November 1992. He works for the National Institute of Agricultural and Livestock Farming Research (INIA) and is an advisor to the FNCSB.
Francisco: Following the basic philosophic principles of Bolivarianism, the party is a negation of the general will, since you don’t respond anymore to achieving the general will of the collective but have to follow the lines given by the party. This denies the essence of participation.
The CTUs were the first massive self-organization on a territorial level. They were originally initiated by the state, but have since been entirely appropriated from below, creating a space of autonomy. Andrés Antillano was among the founders of the first CTU, and has since been a CTU activist.
Andrés: The issue of the urban land committees is explained by the nature of the Venezuelan territorial structure. Venezuela is the most urbanized country on the continent after Uruguay. Its population is 87 percent urban, with brutal spatial segregation—60 percent of the population lives in barrios where people are in a situation of illegality. They occupied these spaces because there was no place for them in the city. These barrios are the result of urban exclusion and resistance to urban exclusion. [They] have problems with basic services, overcrowding, etc. But, at the same time, besides being a consequence of capitalist society, the barrios also express alternative values because the barrios are the result of the struggle of the people. We land committees are a new face of an old struggle against the segregation of the city, fighting for the right to the city. Who are the settlers? Those who are defined not by the activity they do, but by where they live, the territory they occupy. And that is a fundamental subject in the Venezuelan political process. The support for President Chávez from the barrios, has been the most important aspect of this process of change.
The regularization of land tenure was one of the main issues for the Assembly of Barrios in the late 1980s, early 1990s. We were generally threatened with eviction. Here in La Vega we had strong struggles around that in the 1990s, as in Pinto Salinas and other places, so we have been particularly sensitive. Then, in 2001, the Executive began to raise the issue of land tenure, and in early 2002 it issued a decree. Since then the land committees have met every Thursday. Initially, this dynamic was established as a space to discuss, to see how to start the process, etc., and then as a political space. It was very important that at the beginning there was a process of collective construction, interaction, and debate accompanying the whole proposal. But it was a proposal that starts from the state—a decree is an instrument of the state, but a decree that promotes self-organization of the people. So then we started meeting. We began to promote land committees with territorial organizations—the issue of territory is very important.
At the beginning we were just a few people in the meetings that started to promote land committees. Today there are about 6,000 CTUs throughout the country. We started with the regularization of land ownership. From there we started to aim at the transformation of the barrios in physical terms. That’s where the different projects started, because there is no infrastructure, no services … The role of the land committees was to generate other processes, such as the medical program In The Barrio, or the educational programs, which were very important.
We began to ask the question of housing and habitat policy, denouncing the housing and habitat policies as more of the same—they were deeply neoliberal, they did not respond to the people’s ideas. So we have been building a radical diagnosis and a proposal. We have a document titled “For a Revolutionary Housing and Habitat Policy,” and another document called “For the Humanization of the City.” These are documents we have been working on collectively in different spaces. We went from the regularization of land to what we call integral regularization. That has to do with the issue of physical regularization—i.e. the transformation of the barrio, water networks, and urban sanitation. That fellow who just walked by is from an environmental cooperative created by land committees to deal with the garbage problem, which is quite dramatic. We also work on the issue of urban regularization. We do urban spatial planning, recover the barrio’s history, following our interests and our needs. We started to understand the struggle from the barrio as a struggle for the transformation of the barrio, for the inclusion of the barrio in the city.
Atenea Jimenez, among the founders of the network, talks about the experiences with the network and the goals of their construction process. In 2013 the network connected 130 communes and communes under construction. She is engaged in building a commune in her neighborhood, Belomonte, in Caracas. Atenea, National Network of Communards: The RNC was born out of an experience we began in 2008. We started to work with a team on the issue of the communes under direct instructions from the president of the Republic. We started to explore what commune experiences were evolving in the country from their own initiative. A mapping identified twenty-one pilot experiences. But since everything is complicated on a bureaucratic level, that took a year. Really interesting work was accomplished, and the communes made a substantial advance. The Ministry for the Communes was founded, and we were all kicked out. We decided to start a process of articulation from popular power. We were sixteen communes at that time. How could we could link together our work—not to work from the state, but from ourselves—with what we had progressed? How could we articulate that? Instruct, self-instruct, co-instruct, supporting the issue of endogenous development. We worked with popular education, the exchange of knowledge … We started in 2008 with sixteen, and right now there are over eighty national experiences in the country as part of the RNC—and in every activity we do, we add more experiences. We are united in pushing the process of building the commune without subordination to any kind of power other than the community itself …
Comrades we picked up from previous movements contributed a lot with their background—also because we have really practiced an exchange of knowledge, and this kind of economy of exchange pervades the whole process. Basically, understand that there is a diversity in the background of the communities, how to build organization, the modus operandi, and even everyday reasoning … because in the east, for example, there is a fishing culture where they have a completely different dynamic compared to that of the Andes.
We reflected on how to build a commune, what categories we should handle, always understanding that each experience has particularities, and what they do is enrich the process. Through knowledge-sharing, we have tried to collect and systematize what each communitarian experience was doing, so as to enrich the process. And we did a very important thing—I think it was fundamental: we exchanged experiences among communes on site. We visited other spaces, we looked at their strengths, we shared the challenges they faced and how they could be overcome. How did they suddenly avoid any weakness, bypass bureaucratic obstacles? And how did they strengthen themselves ideologically? There are a number of communes that have advanced a lot ideologically, but very little in practical ways or popular participation. There is a tendency that, when there are politically advanced leaders, like former guerrillas or others, then the people just watched them organizing, but it was not an expression of what people felt.
Our method allows the sharing of experiences, so people can live it beyond being just told. Every time we do an exchange visit or there is a meeting in the commune, there is an exchange of knowledge regarding the practical and everyday life. This has created spaces of collective construction, always understanding there are many questions for which there will be no agreement, because it is not possible. But we continue to work, debate, and build. This space of respect has been very important. We understand there have been crucial historical processes for each communal enterprise, for every commune, and they must be respected, but we must also learn from their successes and experiences, and perhaps also from mistakes. All these experiences have nurtured us.
The new culture of participation also follows the Zapatista logic of “leading by obeying,” and a new vision and practice of gender. Participation is often described as “horizontal.” Although participation has been a central goal of movements since the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is something that has had to be learned. Participation is a process. The children of the Emiliano Hernández communal council adopted the methods they observed, and organized several demonstrations. One was to protest the intention of well-liked activist Alexander to move to a different neighborhood. The children changed the popular chant “¡Uh Ah, Chávez no se va!” (“Chávez will not leave!”) to “¡Uh Ah, Alex no se va!” In a different mobilization, the children demonstrated to demand a sports field.
Delbia Rosa Avilés, forty-five, housewife and worker in popular construction community council La Floresta, the Seven Socialist Pillars commune, Anaco, Anzoátegui.
Delbia, Comuna Los 7 Pilares Socialistas, Anaco: I have never been a member of a party. I went to vote, but not because I had an ideal … All my life I was a working woman, my life slipped away working in a private company, and it was hard because I worked rotating shifts: six to two, two to ten, night and day … that was in Caracas. Here I got involved about two years ago when I started working on the integration of the communal council. It was the need to see the change. You think things could be different. One day I said to myself: How do things change if one does not contribute? The only way to change things is that you participate. If you do not participate, you cannot change. I started to get involved, and I fell more and more in love with the process, and here I stay because I really do not see any other alternative.
Talía Álvarez, sixty-two, is a retired teacher and started participating with the Bolivarian movement before 1998. She is an activist of the Housing Committee of the Las Quintas communal council in Artigas, Caracas, a formerly middle-class neighborhood that became increasingly impoverished in the 1980s.
Talía, Las Quintas communal council, Caracas: Participatory and protagonistic democracy—that means that the people who were ignored or were only represented by someone assume power. It is what is missing in our constitution—a sixth power, popular power. I understand that we are only at the beginning, but what you can see is wonderful. Imagine all the ministries, city halls, and local representations disappear, and that everything is in the hands of the community—that it is for the community to decide, administer, and plan its own resources. Because who knows better than we ourselves what happens in our community?
Wilson Moya, forty-five, accountant, has a small garage for car repairs. He participates in the financial committee of the communal council Emiliano Hernández, Caracos.
Wilson, Emiliano Hernández communal council, Caracas: A protagonistic democracy means we all participate. It is something horizontal. No one has a rank, or anything like that, and it is protagonistic because we are the ones setting the tone … We all participate voluntarily, not because we are commanded by anyone. We don’t have bosses.
Merzolena Rodriguez, forty-four, communal council, the Seven Socialist Pillars commune.
Merzolena, Comuna 7 Pilares Socialista, Anaco, Anzoátegui: All decisions of the community councils and the commune are made in assembly. It is preferable, better than having a boss. So we all have the right to take a stand. They see what can be done and decide if they agree with what is being proposed. We all speak, we all give our opinion. No one is denied the right to speak, and we are all heard. It is preferable that way. We have no bosses at all; we are our own bosses. We are not workers in a capitalist enterprise, we are workers for ourselves—we work to build and bring that to other communities.
Atenea, Red Nacional de Comuneros y Comuneras: In Venezuela, participatory and protagonistic democracy is advancing—that’s the path. The point is to give it content. How is this democracy? In many cases it is not exercised right now. It is a process—it is under construction. There are spaces in which to exercise direct democracy, but there are others where that is not appropriate, such as if there is a confederation of communes … Surely there will be a few debates in the assembly—it will lead to electing delegates for higher levels of coordination because it is also an issue connected to scale. But we can definitely say that most of the decisions are made in assemblies—they work through what the people decide there. One or the other will be delegated to execute decisions. What we have to do is generate progressively larger spaces of decision-making.
In reality, the spokesperson’s role is sometimes relative. You get elected spokesperson of a commune, and you go to a meeting where there will be other opinions. And when things are decided you are giving your opinion as delegated spokesperson, but you will also have to give opinions immediately, when you cannot consult, so it is not absolute. Therefore, we must deal further with the question of spokespeople—who are the most appropriate spokespeople and what are their profiles. It is also an exercise in the construction of collective consciousness in the exercise of “power to” and democracy, because we can decide which characteristics the delegates should have. But if there is not a certain level of consciousness to build this democratic exercise, then it does not make any sense … For example, communal council spokespeople are not representatives … but when you are delegated as spokesperson and the community does not participate, you end up being a representative. The idea is that we grow in awareness of how democracy is exercised in our daily practices, and it is a matter of conscience that democracy is assumed as such, and that it will be built with an ongoing fine-tuning mechanism.
Communities have appropriated the communal councils, and use them as a self-organization mechanism for the improvement of their living conditions. They struggle to impose their will against institutional impositions, and defend their self-organization against any attempts at co-optation. Communal councils are not seen as an appendix of constituted power but as autonomous bodies that do not depend on any institution or the president. The communal councils’ activists consider state funding neither a problem nor a gift, but a legitimate and unconditional right.
Talía, Las Quintas communal council, Caracas: Communal councils are not comparable to the old condominium boards or the neighborhood associations; they are something entirely different. Communal councils are an expression that I think is going to be the backbone of socialism. I think the communal councils are the bull’s eye of future socialism. Of course we are just starting—we are all products of the Fourth Republic, those forty-something years of education, developing vices—bureaucracy, laziness, indifference, apathy, individualism … It is not easy to build, but that’s it. Communities discussing budgets … I think I am crazy! Peasants planning roads, making their own electricity network or direct gas system—a quick training, and there they go. Before you were taught that the technician is essential, and that is not the case—same thing in the oil company, saved by the workers when the managers went on strike … The labor movement, self-management, co-management, endogenous development—all these are key issues for the future we are glimpsing. That’s the right way.
Luz Herrera, in her late forties, is director of the training commission for communal councils, at Caracas City Hall Policy Department.
Luz, support for Consejos Comunales: What people do with their communal councils goes beyond the law. They incorporate elements. For example, the law says you have to organize one informative assembly to elect a provisional promoter committee, and then later elect a promoter committee, both to organize the process of building the communal council. And after that you have to hold your elections within ninety days, and they are done in an assembly. When a communal council is formed, they don’t have just one informative assembly—they have up to ten, until you manage to have a consolidated group. Then the provisional promoter committee becomes the regular promoter committee. They don’t elect a new committee, since this has been working already. The only elections are the elections of spokespeople, and they do not take place in a neighborhood assembly but are a full day of ballot-box elections, where you mobilize the entire population. No election is done in assembly, but the law says it has to be in assembly. If we stuck to the law, all communal councils would be no good. But who gives legitimacy to the council? It is the people! People say how they will hold their election, and that is how they do it. Other things happen as well regarding the committees—which committees are formed, how they are formed, how the control of finances works, and how the community bank works: all that is transformed by the people according to their reality. You don’t hear the same story from all communal councils—they are all different … We stick with the people and not with the conceptual, with what is written. What is written is the product of systematizing previous experiences and turning that into a law, which is not bad, but it does not reflect what exists right now.
The community does not exist automatically—it is a process of active construction. The commitment of volunteers to work for the community is honored and recognized by the community, which usually supports the spokespeople in different ways. Examples for the support given by the community to spokespeople range from taking care of their children to cooking for them and their families. The most advanced example of community solidarity we found was in the Emiliano Hernández communal council, where the community decided after several weeks of discussions to use more than US$70,000 left over from the remodeling of more than one hundred houses and the replacement of fifteen shacks with houses to buy a four-story building and give each of the four women most active in the communal council an apartment, since they did not have their own houses.
Delbia, Comuna Los 7 Pilares Socialistas, Anaco: My life has changed a lot since I got into community activities … It was a 180-degree turn. I lived all my life in Caracas, and now only ten years here in Anaco. I was a housewife and was never involved in anything like this process. I dedicated myself to my children and my husband. That was my day-to-day life. As I started working on this things changed, because this means dedication. While I’m here at this meeting of communes for three days, my family is there. But I manage to work with the commune, despite the demands of the family: “You are on the streets the whole day! You don’t even stop by! We don’t see you anymore!” I have tried to make them understand that it is a way to achieve change for their future. We think that there can be a different country for them, so they can live in a better Venezuela, that they can really be free men and women. That is the dream one has. And there are learning processes, because aside from being in these activities, we also have political studies where we sit down to discuss. We work with the magazine Poliética—we discuss many articles for Poliética, on Saturdays. At the commune meeting each communal council in the community makes some time to discuss the most relevant aspects.
Luisa, Inveval, Carrizal: I’ve changed a lot. I am no longer a passive person, dedicated simply to work, study, my daughter, and to ensuring that my parents are in good health … No, now I think that one’s mission in life should be much more transcendent. You have to contribute more—you have to worry more about others than about yourself. You do not know if the child next door ate, if the lady is OK, if the guy has work … you have to stop being selfish, and I’ve learned that—not to think only about myself. I have learned to see beyond, to get involved in some way.
Adys Figuera León, thirty-three, is a computer scientist and popular power trainer, something similar to an organizer in the US.
Adys, Comuna Los 7 Pilares Socialistas, Anaco: My life has changed a lot. I started in 2007 with popular education. You see people suddenly wake up—housewives who have never done anything political—and they begin to participate and make a change, and you change too. Your way of life changes too. How do I feel? Happy, because we will achieve the goal. We may not see the communal state as ready-made socialism, but we know that our children will see a better Venezuela, better people. Because in Venezuela, as in the rest of the world, the culture we have is the culture we have been taught. We have to change this culture. A proverb says that an old parrot cannot learn anymore how to talk. It is a lie.
The construction of communes is a step into unknown territory—a process of invention and creation based on people’s needs and desires. Various activists involved in different ways in the construction of communes speak below about this process, and the redefinition of the state based on a system of communes. Finally, communards from the Seven Socialist Pillars commune describe their process of construction.
Atenea, RNC: Following a call from Chávez in 2007, every community started to debate how the commune should be. Several communal councils built a commune—but there were also historical popular groups and organizations that were not coordinating with the communal councils, but could not be excluded from the commune. The debate took place in almost all cases, and the agreement was that, beyond the communal councils, all these movements should also be organically coordinated in the commune.
There was also the risk that the commune would replace the municipality or parish in terms of political and administrative organization, and our proposal is that it is not a space like that, because otherwise it would be as in many countries—just another instance of the liberal bourgeois state. It would change the name while the functioning remained the same. We started building with this perspective, and we began also to study other historical experiences of communes. We built a space to talk, and also invite international guests who have thought about the subject. We started thinking how to work the whole country into communes. If it is a process of construction, it means to be able to activate the constituent popular power, which is in the constitution, which is creative, which allows you to create spaces and create a number of things collectively—and people started to say, “Let’s build the communes.”
Juan Carlos Pinto, in his mid-thirties, is an activist for the FNCSB in Barinas, southwest Venezuela, and supports the construction of communes. Carmelo González, in his early thirties, is an employee of the Autonomous Municipal Institute for the Communes of the city of Barinas.
Juan Carlos, FNCSB, Barinas: The issue of people’s power deals with the ability of the people to take up the reins actively—it is this ability, this power to take action and to take control. And “popular” points to the pueblo, the grassroots. It’s the only way for us to participate, to empower and to appropriate this new institutional structure, which ultimately means the democratization of the state. This is the popular democratization in which the people adopt this new institutional arrangement and establish it in order to build up socialism. For this reason, it’s important that the people acquire the various tools.
The most important thing is for the entire community to participate in building up the commune from the very beginning. Usually the institutions of the state come together and say, “This is the project, this is the commune, this is ready,” and they present everything. And then you ask yourself, “When was this project ever discussed at all?” This destroys the essence, because the essence is the participation of the people, and the people are writing their own history.
Carmelo González, Autonomous Municipal Institute for the Communes, Barinas, during a community workshop to support the building of a commune: Water, electricity, telephones, and the establishment of the EPS [social production company]—these are matters that are supposed to be managed by the assembly. This is your power, and not ours as administrative officials. You have the opportunity to acquire the power. This is something new. This is the creation of a new kind of socialism in which there is real participation, which doesn’t exist anywhere so far. If the commune becomes a reality in the whole country, in Barinas, in Venezuela, then we can attempt to construct a communal government in transition toward socialism, toward the new geometry of power. All of these forums and talks are also meant to bring the information into your communities … because discussions create participation, and participation will enable you to create government. The government is not who has the power. The power is in your hands, in the possibility that you could build, create, establish governments, and therefore create this model of socialism … We intend to learn collectively from what you know, because that is more than we do. It’s the knowledge of the people that is expressed right now.
Atenea, RNC, Caracas: The first thematic meeting we organized with the RCN was about communal economy. We have cared much about how to move forward to a productive economy. No commune can be autonomous if it has no production of wealth that can be distributed first of all among its members. If we have a commune that depends on a third party, a governor, a mayor, or whoever, it does not depend on its own production of goods and services and wealth, then it is not a commune. The questions are: How do we think about these new social economic relations that exist in the commune? How is the surplus distributed? What are the social relationships in those enterprises of social or communal property? The other important issue is that you cannot separate the question of workers’ control from the commune. There must be workers’ control of the companies that are in the commune and the ones to be built. And not only the workers decide, but also the commune decides how they will operate, what the production process is like, and what is to be done with the surplus. The management is socialist because the commune decides.
The Seven Socialist Pillars commune is situated in eastern Venezuela, in the state of Anzoátegui, in the Anaco municipality. Anaco is a natural gas extraction site. The commune is part of RCN. Its story is told by three communard women—Adys Figuera León, thirty-three, computer scientist and popular power facilitator; Delbia Rosa Avilés, forty-five, housewife and worker in popular construction; and Merzolena Rodríguez, forty-four.
Adys: The commune arose out of the need for unity among the communal councils. We say the commune is in development because we want to develop the communes’ productivity so they can be truly a communal self-government. Our commune is composed of forty-two communal councils so far. Each community has 1,500 to 1,600 people. We are more than 50,000 inhabitants.
Delbia: The decisions in the commune and communal councils are made in assemblies. We meet every Saturday from 9 a.m., for as long as we need and want to, and decide the commune plan. During the week there is planning for everything to be done, and on Saturday we gather to make further decisions.
Adys: All communal councils participate. Spokespersons for all communal councils are present. Moreover, everybody can participate in the Saturday assemblies, not just spokespeople—people from the community, anyone who wants can attend the assembly, get involved and participate. There is good participation. Everyone likes to participate. We explain, and everyone gives his opinion and suggestions regarding what we are doing. You know some people are a little ashamed, but because of the way we do it, people who had never participated and were new have become active, attending the assemblies and joining all the others.
It all started when, in 2010, the mayor of Anaco grouped the commune councils by sector, and declared seventeen communes. Each director of the city government was appointed representative of one of the communes. That created huge discontent within the municipality. Nevertheless, the meetings with the assigned municipality directors continued. The only commune that did not accept this imposition at the time was our commune. We did not even have a name … We did not accept any of the mayor’s imposed directors. We started to work in the same communal councils that they chose at the time to form the commune. We did surveys, we continued to meet, all contributed in workgroups. We did not limit ourselves to only seven communal councils of the pretended Commune 2, but extended our work to the entire municipality. The geographic space of a commune is declared after the integration of all those who want to be part of the commune. We encountered huge obstacles during the whole process—communities withdrew, then joined again.
Merzolena: We decided to form a commune to achieve independence, be economically free. The idea is to produce our own consumption and lower costs. Doing it in the commune means supporting each other, the communal network … We have to change the way of life we have had until now.
Adys: If we are not owners of our production system, how can we be a commune? It’s like more of the same. We will continue to depend on the same institutions, and that’s not the idea. The idea is to let go of mom and dad, mayor, governor, and be ourselves—owners of our means of production. In fact, none of us develops projects to put a sidewalk in our communities, because we know that we can build the sidewalks later with our socio-productive projects. So the focus has been on socio-productive projects.
We have already realized some projects. We have the financial resources and they are under implementation. The most important is the tile factory, which is a result precisely of an encounter we had at the meeting of the RCN in Carora. We visited their all-artisan tile production and took the idea to Anaco because Anaco has the raw material—clay. We began to explore this in relation to a different project we were developing at the time—a factory of prefabricated house panels. The roof of the house needs tiles. The tile production matched the productive project we were developing. We got in touch with some tile-production specialists in Rio Caribe. They came, and we went to different communities with workshops. The first funding we looked for was to build the ovens—not like those in Carora, which are artisan ovens. We designed gas ovens. We will start with huge gas cylinders while we move forward to connect up to the gas network. Anaco is a gas city, but we have no gas in our sectors. Our project is not based on large structures. The ovens are built in the communities. We will bring the material to build them, and what we need is a space to place the oven and a space to store the production. Regarding the factory for prefabricated houses, we were working with the Ministry of Science and Technology and with people of our communities—engineers, turners, masons, etc. And we have elaborated the plans to produce the prefabricated panels to replace the cement blocks.
The waste from the production of clay tiles after burning becomes a lightweight material that will be processed for further use in the production of the panels. The panels we are producing right now are artisan, not with the molds we need, because the funding we need for the molds is very high, almost 15 million bolivars [US$3.5 million].
Delbia: That is because the house factory project is huge. It consists not only of the tile factory and the molds factory, there is also the production of the steel structure kit … Now we are building the first six ovens, distributed through various groups of communal councils. With the ovens, we will generate 1,326 workplaces.
Adys: The idea is to keep expanding the production of ovens and take them to other communities. It is not only the commune—we work with the perspective of the economic transformation of the whole municipality, in order to bring welfare to all communities. We are talking about a process of integration. A communal carpenters’ workshop is also part of the project, as well as other elements. So that we build houses and the company is owned by the community, not by private owners and administered by the community through communal councils and communes. That’s what we want.
Adys, eighteen months later in late 2013: The community is still not registered. We have already fulfilled the steps established by the law and demanded by the Fundacomunal [state institution supporting communal councils and communes]. We fought a tough political struggle in the municipality, but we are working and organizing ourselves. We are legitimized by the people. We meet every Saturday as a commune, and are building popular power. The struggle has been hard, since the old does not want to die and the new is still not totally born. There are problems especially with funds, since the municipal government is bureaucratized. The Ministry of the communes has not been helpful. But radical changes are occurring in the Ministry that were needed. We are waiting for registration, and continue to work and organize ourselves.
The greater the number of self-organized initiatives emerge, and the more participation and development of constituent power move forward, the more conflicts with constituted power emerge—particularly in production and regarding matters of autonomy and state control. The deepening of social transformation has increased the number of points where the logics of power from above and from below confront one another. The strengthening and extension of the institutions and the presence of the state led simultaneously to a growing bureaucratization, which works against opening up and transformation, and tends toward the institutional administration of social processes.
Andrés, CTU, Caracas: We learned that the problem of popular power is not a problem of managing resources. We have told the Housing Ministry that our fundamental problem is not whether they will give us resources and fund our projects, but that we want to define housing policies, and that’s part of the dispute we have today with the Ministry. We have always said that we must move forward in the construction of a new society—with the state, without the state, and against the state. The relationship with the state is not defined by us but by the state’s willingness to subordinate itself to the interests of the people.
Josefina Cadet, forty-nine, trained as a computer specialist, but gave up her job and became a taxi driver in order to have time for her political activism. She is from the Agua Viva communal council of the Cacique Terepaima Eco-Tourism and Artisanal Commune, which brings together twenty-two communal councils. Josefina is also active in the RCN.
Josefina, Comuna Ecoturística Artesanal Cacique Terepaima, Lara: We managed to force the registration of forty-two communes in the state of Lara. That struggle started the whole commune-registration process on a national level in 2012. We began with several communes meeting to study ourselves, to see what we had in common, and we concluded that for all struggles that deserved a team effort—among these was the struggle regarding the problem that state resources for farmers had not been distributed—we had to build strategies to register the communes officially. We elaborated all standards and procedures. Those who knew about standards worked on the procedures, and those who knew about strategy set up a plan. We did not omit one document. We did the work required by the Ministry, all of it. The dudes at the Ministry did not even have a form in order to receive our documents. We read that law from top to bottom, so that we did not make any mistakes. We found some lawyers from the PSUV who helped draft the charter so that it had not a single mistake …
We decided on a date for the big popular party. We never imposed on anyone to form a commune. We had planned to have fifteen, and we had nine. All nine showed up with their papers—with the agreement we had reached, with the same founding charter, with the same documents, everyone with their folders. The rest of us went to accompany them, popular movements participated, and we set up a march. The communes of Torres, Urdaneta, and Irribarren participated, as well as the commune of Palavecino in Yaracuy and a commune from Portuguesa. We agreed on implementing the same procedure to accompany the communes in the states of Portuguesa and Yaracuy. We announced we would register the communes on a certain date. We called the press, called everyone, and went to register our communes. We assembled on the street. Fundacomunal had to come out to receive our documents, and the nine communes went in to register. That was on November 21, 2011. With this action, we opened nationwide registration of communes. We’ve been monitoring and controlling it—they had to implement and activate all procedures. Then we went to accompany the commune in Portuguesa. There was a certain reluctance to register it. We blocked the place … and they had to receive us. It was televised, and the commune is now registered.
The state-owned aluminum producer, Alcasa, started a process of workers’ co-administration with the goal of workers’ control in 2005–2007, and again in 2010–2011. Though the workers did not succeed, the movement in Alcasa persists, and the experiences gained were crucial for struggles and experiences of workers’ control in other companies of the state-owned holding of basic industries CVG (Corporación Venezolana de Guayana).
Three interviews were conducted in Alcasa—all with workers’ control activists. The two workers, Osvaldo León, in his late fifties, and Carlos Agüero, in his mid-fifties, are active in the collective for workers’ control, and participants in the Alcasa workers’ education center, Centro de Formación Negro Primero. Elio Sayago, in his mid-fifties, an environmental technician, belonged to the Board of Directors of Alcasa during the first workers’ control experiment, and was president of Alcasa during the second.
The paper factory Invepal, Morón, state of Carabobo, was occupied by the workers in 2002, and nationalized after a workers’ struggle. Huge investments were necessary to restart production. The model of co-managing Invepal with the state through a workers’ cooperative failed. Financial and contractual irregularities prompted the intervention of the ministry. Today there is worker participation on different levels, but no workers’ control in Invepal.
In Invepal we spoke with Rowan Jímenez, in his mid-forties, a worker and activist in Invepal and with the communities.
Elio Sayago, Alcasa worker: What we need right now is that our union leaders and the other comrades understand that the leadership must aim for the workers to take a leading role—to make sure that the workers’ knowledge really guarantees control. How are we, as union leaders, able to get the knowledge and wisdom of our people, in these moments, to go beyond the traditional union demands? And we in these moments have the historic opportunity to construct society, to define our own destiny.
Osvaldo, Alcasa worker: Workers’ co-administration represented huge gains in consciousness. Just the fact that hundreds of workers participated actively in the process of transformation of Alcasa is very important. The fact that they spoke out in assemblies and discussed directly with the company’s management—something that had never happened before in this plant—is also an important lesson. The roundtables did not work out, and the dense bureaucracy led to the current situation of co-administration—one that is close to being paralyzed … but still, with great experiences and progress. The workers learned that it is possible to manage and control the whole production process by themselves—a great lesson! We had always been told that that was impossible.
The valve factory Inveval, Carrizal, state of Miranda, was occupied by the workers in early 2003. Five workers were interviewed in Inveval, among them Rubencio Valero, in his late fifties.
Rubencio, Inveval worker: The community helped us a lot when we occupied. We were asking for financial support right down here on the street, on Fridays and Saturdays, when people would get paid. And they gave us money. We were collecting money for coffee and water, and the community helped us a lot. Right now we help the community in the education programs by offering the factory as learning space, and there are men and women from the community studying here in the factory.
Rowan, Invepal worker, Morón: The project of communal paper stores is well underway, and there are four stores opened, most recently, in September 2013, in the state of Barinas, where 380 people benefited from it just on the first day. The communal paper stores are run by a communal council, supported by a local institution or municipal government, because of the amount of money involved—all this with a signed agreement. Invepal hands over the material and sets the sale price of each item. We also monitor to ensure compliance with the agreement. Talking to one person at a store, I was told that the products sell very quickly due to price, and that they will make a social contribution to the community because of the profit from the sale. Similarly, they are vigilant not to sell large quantities to individuals, to fight against speculation.
The valve factory Inveval is a good example of an enduring workers’ struggle that has achieved workers’ control, and submitted the factory to different criteria than those of capitalist productivity and efficiency. What initially appeared to be a solution to their problems was later to develop into a shift in the struggle toward a conflict with the state institutions. The expropriation in 2005 was followed by months of discussions and disagreements with the representatives of the responsible ministry about the enterprises’ status. After tough negotiations and eight different proposals rejected by one side or the other, the enterprise was re-established as a stock company with 51 percent state ownership and 49 percent employee ownership in a joint cooperative. All the important decisions that affect the factory were to be made in the weekly cooperative assembly.
For nearly two years the Inveval workers tried to manage the factory on their own, without being guided by capitalist logics, following the conditions of the newly conceived model of a co-management between state and cooperative. They came to the conclusion that the legal framework made direct administration by all the workers impossible. Moreover, the workers noticed how their situation as owners pushed them toward assuming capitalist logic. The cooperative had not just a share of the factory but also of the debt. The workers realized that they were forced to adopt the logic of living to work and pay the debt.
So the workers of Inveval took up Chávez’s January 2007 proposal to strengthen the revolution through the formation of workers’ councils. In the council they have created several commissions, dealing with the various functions of the organization. Each commission has to produce reports of its work and proposals, and present them to the council. The cooperative was dissolved by the workers. Inveval was transferred into full social ownership, and is managed entirely by the workers.
Five Inveval workers were interviewed over the course of several years: José Quintero, thirty-one; Julio González, in his late forties; Luisa Morales, thirty-nine; Nelson Rodríguez, in his early thirties; and Rubencio Valero, in his late fifties. All of them became politically active because of the circumstances of the transformation process; none had previous experience to rely on.
Luisa: It all started when the owner of the company joined the oil strike to topple Chávez in December 2002. He was one of the leaders of the opposition coordination. We returned to work on January 6, 2003, and the doors were closed. Only executive staff could go in. In the second week of March, the owner came, responding to the pressure of the workers at the factory gates. The guy had the nerve to propose we form a cooperative in which he would have a 90 percent stake and we would have 10 percent, but assume all the workload. We did not reach any agreement, and he began to dismiss workers. Of the nearly one hundred workers on the staff, there were sixty of us who did not accept the dismissal.
Almost a year later, the labor court decided he had to employ us again and pay all lost wages. But, as the owner is definitely not a serious person, we decided to take over the company. That was in May 2003. The lady in the kiosk outside the factory told us that they were taking out some trucks and machinery, so we occupied the factory at six o’clock in the morning. The security guard of course did not want to let us in, so we jumped the fence. We lasted about a year and a half installed here in the factory without entering the buildings. We asked unions in nearby factories for cooperation. City Hall helped us with mineral water and medical care. Most of the neighbors supported us with food. The owner of the company took us to court, and the judge came in person to evict us—but it failed. The police did not support the judge, nor did the mayor.
Over time, however, many workers had to leave the occupation to earn money. In December 2004 there was only one person here, and the company took advantage of that and started to take out some valves. We—a group of workers—met and decided to do a second recuperation, but more organized, to take over the facilities the way it should be—have access to the offices and the whole plant. When we got there we found the general manager of the company, and asked him very decently for the keys. The gentleman said he would not give us the keys, so the comrades told him, “Well, if you do not turn over the key you will not get out of here.” So in the end he reluctantly handed over the keys.
The comrades inspected the facilities. They had removed all computer equipment, a number of valves, and materials. A group of comrades related to administration went to several meetings with the ministry and the National Assembly, and they told us about the mechanism to request expropriation, because there is a legal mechanism. And we started to broadcast through community radio stations, in the communities, and then in state media, that what we wanted was the expropriation of the company—that we, the workers, were in the factory and we were fighting for its expropriation.
Julio: As this is a new process and we as workers are learning and building, there have been times when agreement has not been easy. There have been times when the differences are big, and you do not reach any consensus. We workers are clear that it is about the general good of the company, and ideas are discussed until we reach consensus. If there is no consensus, the assembly is suspended and a new meeting is prepared.
Luisa: In early 2005 we delivered all documents proving mismanagement by the owner. In late April 2005, expropriation in the name of the “common public interest” took place. A few months later we got resources to start the recuperation—to change ceilings, paint walls, restore desks, clean, and sweep, and all the work that had to be done. It took us nine months to complete the recuperation process. We started with the repair and maintenance of valves, but with a perspective to start production.
Julio: In the workers’ assembly we began to assign responsibilities—not positions, but responsibilities for every area. We wanted to break up the social division of labor and democratize knowledge, so each one of us was preparing. We had to rotate work. When we worked with the previous owner, we saw that the managers took all the credit, while it was the worker who came up with the innovation, who worked day after day on the machine—you know? We are the ones who know how the company and production processes evolve.
Luisa: We declare and believe something when we are inside the plant, but when we leave it we clash with a different world, which hasn’t changed. Inveval is identified as a stock company. So everything true for a stock company is true for Inveval: it has to be competitive on the market to sell valves. So what is the real change, that we administer it? That’s not the important aspect of the whole issue. The important aspect is that the whole work organization should be social.
Julio: What the cooperative does is feed capitalism, because it’s created as part of the capitalist system, and that’s what we don’t want here. We didn’t kick out one capitalist to create sixty new ones.
In early 2007 we began to implement the factory council to build a workers’ administration. The prior work organization scheme was vertical—its functioning was hierarchical. The organizational structure we developed is as horizontal as possible—to 100 percent. We are sixty-one workers, and the workers’ assembly is the highest authority. It is followed by the factory council, which comprises thirty-two workers, including the directors and coordinators of each area. Those who make up the factory council are elected for one year. The workers’ assembly may revoke them at any time, or they can be confirmed again for one year. This allows us not to bureaucratize ourselves in the workplace, and it allows us to break the social division of labor. For example, I was ratified, and today I am in the marketing area; tomorrow I might be at a machine or on a different task, according to my knowledge. We have to be clear: you cannot put people in a workplace they don’t know, otherwise the work is not done as it should be done.
Rubencio: Relations between the workers have changed considerably. There are no employees anymore—all are equal, and all are paid the same. If we have to contribute something for any cause, we will do it together.
Julio: People are being trained to have knowledge in all areas. There are a large number of comrades studying in universities, and some who are in missions [adult school programs] we have right here in our facilities, Mission Robinson [elementary school] and Ribas [high school], because almost 40 percent of workers are between forty and fifty years of age. Several comrades have already graduated here, and are waiting to enter universities and continue studying to provide knowledge to our organization. Twenty-two are in the Mission Ribas right now. Ten are going to college. Some are studying higher technical degrees, and others bachelor’s degrees.
Nelson: Participative and socialist administration, factory council, socialist enterprise, revolutionary government, and communal council. That is how we have been structuring and how companies are administered. We came to the conclusion that, through the factory council, we made a quantum leap to the management under a socialist model.
1 There are a small number of books that take a clear movement perspective: Dario Azzellini, Venezuela bolivariana: Revolution des 21: Jahrhunderts? (Cologne: Neuer ISP Verlag, 2007); Dario Azzellini, Partizipation, Arbeiterkontrolle und die Commune: Bewegungen und soziale Transformation am Beispiel Venezuela (Hamburg: VSA, 2010); George Ciccarello-Maher, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Roland Denis, Los fabricantes de la rebelión (Caracas: Primera Linea, 2001); Roland Denis, Rebelión en Proceso (Caracas: Nuestra América Rebelde, 2005); Sujatha Fernandes, Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
2 A reference to Simón Bolívar.
3 Miriam Kornblith and Daniel H. Levine, “Venezuela: The Life and Times of the Party System,” Kellogg Institute Working Paper No. 97 (Notre Dame, IN: Kellogg Institute, 1993).
4 Istvan Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition (London: Merlin Press, 1995), pp. 759–70.
5 Rodríguez cited in Enrique Contreras Ramírez, Educación para la nueva República (Caracas: Fundación Editorial Fabricio Ojeda, 1999), p. 112.
6 Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
7 An economy that sustains itself primarily through income from resources and capital, rather than productive activity.
8 Carlos Lanz Rodríguez, La revolución es cultural o reproducirá la dominación (Caracas: Gato Negro; 2004); Carlos Lanz Rodríguez, “La vigencia del marxismos crítico en la costrucción socialista”, aporrea, July 26, 2007, aporrea.org; MinCI (Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Comunicación y la Información), Líneas generales del Plan de Desarrollo Económico y Social de la Nación 2007–2013 (Caracas: MinCI, 2007).
9 Coronil, The Magical State; Dick Parker, “¿De qué democracia estamos hablando?” Revista Venezolana de Economía y Ciencias Sociales, 12-1, 2006, pp. 89–99.
10 Enrique Dussel, 20 Tesis de politica (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2006), p. 67; Guillermo O’Donnell, “Polyarchies and the (Un)Rule of Law in Latin America”, paper presented at the Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, LASA 1998, p. 6.
11 Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (INE), January 2014, “Resumen de indicadores sociodemográficos,” ine.gov.ve. The data are based on the same methodology employed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, and the national statistics institutes of other countries.
12 Ibid.
13 AVN and MinCI (Agencia Venezolana de Noticias and Ministerio de Comunicación e Información), “Consumo de kilocalorías del venezolano supera suficiencia energética de la FAO,” MinCi, April 28, 2011, minci.gob.ve.
14 Steve Ellner, “Las estrategias ‘desde arriba’ y ‘desde abajo’ del movimiento de Hugo Chávez”, Cuadernos del Cendes 23:62 (Caracas: UCV, 2006), pp. 73–93, p. 89.
15 Elected April 14, 2013, after Hugo Chávez died of cancer on March 5, 2013.
16 Gobierno Bolivariano de Venezuela, “Más de 70 mil organizaciones populares fueron censadas,” September 17, 2013, mpcomunas.gob.ve. As of the end of 2013, some 500 communes had been officially registered by the Ministry for Communes.
17 David Harvey, “Space as a Keyword,” in David Harvey, A Critical Reader, ed. Noel Castree and Derek Gregory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006).
18 Doreen Massey, “Concepts of Space and Power in Theory and in Political Practice,” Documents d’Analisis Geogràfica 55 (2009), p. 20.
19 Gustavo Fernández Colón, “¿Verticalismo burocrático o protagonismo popular?,” Aporrea, December 17, 2006, aporrea.org.
20 Gustavo Esteva, “Otra mirada, otra democracia,” Rebelión, February 2, 2009.
21 Dulce María Rodríguez, “67% de las cooperativas han dejado de funcionar,” El Nacional, April 10, 2013, el-nacional.com.
22 Dario Azzellini, “From Cooperatives to Enterprises of Direct Social Property in the Venezuelan Process,” in Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, ed., Cooperatives and Socialism: A View from Cuba (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 259–78; Dario Azzellini, “Economía solidaria en Venezuela: Del apoyo al cooperativismo tradicional a la construcción de ciclos comunales,” in Sidney Lianza and Flávio Chedid Henriques, eds., A Economia Solidária na América Latina: realidades nacionais e políticas públicas (Rio de Janeiro: Pró Reitoria de Extensão UFRJ, 2012), pp. 147–60.
23 “Constituent power” refers to the legitimate collective human ability to create something new, and to shape it without having to derive it from something that already exists, or submit to it to something that already exists.