11th Anniversary Celebration of El Maizal Commune (2020) | Katrina Kozarek / Venezuela Analysis
In the central western region of Venezuela, a vast scenery of fertile land blends with the llanero (herdsman) culture of the people of Simón Planas township. Adults make use of children’s bicycles (received as Christmas gifts from the government) to meet the exigencies of day-to-day life, evoking “a forgotten episode in a magical realist novel,” in the words of author Chris Gilbert. Traditional music, with lyrics recounting the struggles of the campesino and their battle against the landlord, fills the air. Once occupied by large haciendas, this is now the site of a radical experiment in democratic self-organization: El Maizal Commune, one of the hundreds of communes established in the country in its recent history.
For at least a decade, international depictions of Venezuela have been dominated by narratives of humanitarian tragedy and political corruption. In Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project (Monthly Review Press, 2023), Chris Gilbert bucks the conventional trope to identify the insurgent communal movement as a key moment in the struggle for human emancipation, one which embodies the professed political values of the Bolivarian Revolution.
Gilbert structures his book as a “chronicle,” weaving together diverse modes of storytelling. The book’s chapters cycle between lessons from on-the-ground experience—featuring anecdotes and interviews from the communards themselves—to the higher-level political context of the history of the now 26-year-old Bolivarian Revolution; Gilbert also dives into the broader theory and philosophy of communal organization, including the influence of revolutionary romanticism, the commune form explored in Marx’s writing, and Hugo Chávez’s encounter with Hungarian political philosopher István Mészáros.
As a US academic, Gilbert approaches his research from the vantage point of an outsider; at the same time he’s now a long-time Venezuelan resident, one primarily interested in practical politics. He traces the origins of Venezuelan communal organization to a historical memory of Indigenous and African communal ownership and liberation struggles. The commune itself, he writes, is an incipient form of “a regime of directly social labor,” which aims to overcome the alienated labor of capitalist society by organizing social production (and reproduction) democratically—the fruits of labor being collectively appropriated by the “free association of producers” and managed according to a democratic plan that accords with both human and environmental needs.
But the commune experiment has been anything but linear. President Chávez formalized communes as the basic unit of Venezuela’s transition toward socialism with the passage of the Leyes del Poder Popular in 2009. But in a period of relative social prosperity brought on by the oil boom (sembrando el petróleo), the communal model gained little traction among a population satisfied by the basic success of the Venezuelan welfare state.
After Chávez’s death, however, the economy collapsed under the pressure of “shock therapy”—the implementation of a brutal US sanction regime and a rapid decline in oil prices which decimated Venezuela’s export-oriented economy. When Nicolás Maduro’s new government turned toward capitalist austerity—defunding social programs, eliminating price controls, and reducing wages—grassroots collectives self-organized to resurrect the communal model as their own response to the crisis.
In the face of widespread hunger, communards at El Maizal went on the offensive: They occupied neighboring farms and an abandoned university campus and put them into the service of the community. Runaway inflation and the collapse of the Venezuelan bolívar led communards at the Colímar Cooperative in the Venezuelan highlands to issue its own currency, the cafeto, pinned to the value of a kilo of coffee and backed by an equivalent stockpile. In coastal Barcelona, the Luisa Cáceras commune took over local trash collection and recycling. El Panal commune in Caracas began to manage its own security in a community of thousands, keeping out both organized crime and the local police.
At the founding congress of the national Communard Union in 2022, the relationship between the communal movement and the Venezuelan state emerged as an open question—critical, antagonistic, or synergistic? As Gilbert observes, this relationship became increasingly complex in the face of the government’s renewed support for communal organization and the creation of the new “Ministry of Communes.”
The communards see themselves as nothing less than partisans in an “all-or-nothing existential struggle,” writes Gilbert. Communes are “embattled outposts”; the staple foods produced in El Maizal are, in the words of the communards, “war crops.” Workers organized in the “Productive Workers Army” export specialist productive knowledge to other cooperatives in “battles” to sustain worker-controlled production. All of these efforts emerge from fighting what Gilbert identifies as the “non-conventional war” brought on by the sanctions regime.
Gilbert’s picture of a magic-realist village may strike some as too rosy a picture; in fact, Gilbert takes pains to emphasize that it remains to be seen whether these small-scale efforts will succeed in the grand project of transforming Venezuelan society. But that vision of music, fields, and bicycles is part of the “battle,” along with trash collection and land occupancy: The success of the communal movement will require both resilience and imagination.
