Lessons from the Book Shelf

Ever taken a book from the SNCK book shelf and thought about sharing your thoughts on it? Our community member and volunteer Michael has done just that! Read on for his thought provoking piece on Maher’s Building the Commune and why he thinks its message is important to the SNCK space. 

"A continuous theme throughout Maher’s work is in his earnest belief that local communities, if given the chance, fully have the skills and means to sustain themselves and that this will have to be the basis of a society beyond capitalism. The conditions that created the famed communes of Venezuela lie in the revolt against the advance of neoliberalism and the leaders of the corrupt Venezuelan state, who up until that point - was dominated by a white, wealthy elite, and its purported social democracy functioned as a clientelist relationship with the United States. 

“local communities, if given the chance, fully have the skills and means to sustain themselves”

The uprising known as ‘The Caracazo’ was a reaction to the price hikes of basic goods, and met with massive state repression. It was also symptomatic of the continent-wide economic crisis caused by the spread of neoliberalism, and also pushed impoverished local communities to organise themselves against gangs that would do them harm as much as the state with the same intentions - as well as a young colonel and his allies in the Venezuelan military to take action against the country’s corrupt leadership.

The story of Chavismo and its central figure - Hugo Chavez, really begins with an attempted coup that he and the group he led - the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement (RBM) enacted on February 4th, 1992 against President Carlos Andres Perez which ended in failure. The following televised arrest of Chavez propelled his infamy and popular appeal among Venezuela's poor, and following Chavez’s transition to civilian representation, brought him into office in 1998. It is for this reason that Maher states that rather than Chavez creating Chavismo, which is composed of Venezuela’s poor, racial minorities and indigenous populace, it is these social formations that “created Chavez” - a theme that he later expands in the book, We Created Chavez. Chavez was not just created by the activated social formations, but sustained by them, for his very political (and even literal) life was severely threatened by an attempted coup against his own government in 2002, only for him to be saved within a matter of hours by his Chavista base and the army officers that were loyal to him.

Maher asserts that the Bolivarian Revolution could only have the level of success it had, if it had resisted the classical Marxist framework of mobilizing the workforce to achieve revolution, quoting Dario Azzellini as saying, “Venezuelans identify much more strongly with their community than their workplace” (p.10). The workers that Maher emphasizes are those who are outside of contracted employment and have to hustle for a living, mention is made of the various spontaneous assemblies and autonomous communities already politicised to a communist or autonomist stance, and characterises Chavismo as defined as much by the history of the Venezuelan anti-colonial struggle as it is to European Marxism. The Constitution of Venezuela was rewritten in 1999 with the principle that those excluded from civil life will be empowered to participate in the running of their society. Chavez himself constantly pushed his ministers to set up the communes that were as much a part of the promise of the Bolivarian Revolution as the widespread social welfare projects enacted, and an essential part of the Chavez vision to resist the encroachment of “the monster known as capitalism”. The communes themselves were the incorporation of communal councils, cooperatives, social property assemblies (SEPs) and the networks of barrio assemblies. The communes had by the latter part of the Chavez presidency formed, and even expanded after his death in 2013. 

However, despite Chavez’s expressed commitment to his mentor and principal ideologist of RBM Kleber Ramirez Rojas’ vision of a ‘communal state’, major contradictions emerged within Chavismo which Maher notes - and is particularly prescient today, threatens to “become its own gravediggers” (pg. 41). A class conflict emerged within ‘mainstream’ Chavismo in its parliamentary representation - and the grassroots represented by the barrios, peasantry, autonomous communities, and the squatter’s movement. Chavista political leaders viewed the urban poor with contempt, not seeing them as active participants of social transformation but passive recipients of the social welfare programs that they presented. Chavismo had created its own middle-class ‘with its own interests and new fears’ - ones that replicated some of the old fears of Venezuela’s existing upper classes with their fears around barrio youth clamouring at the gates. More to the point, these grassroots existed, survived and were politicised with the knowledge that the state was the adversary. Chavismo presented a different relationship - even a synthesis between the state and the grassroots with a wider anti-capitalist project. But contradictions persisted with the management of the state, and the fiercely defended autonomy of the grassroots networks, and in time - these grassroots met the violence of the police under Chavismo, with the same brutality as the pre-Chavismo era. It is these tensions that have intensified today in the ten years since this book was published with the popular appeal of Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro going into significant decline, and the political coalition that United Socialist Party (PSUV) is composed of under considerable strain. 

With PSUV now openly catering to the business elite (a trend that started with Chavez) to sustain ‘petro-socialism’, a fully actualised “communal state” of anti-capitalist possibility remains out of reach, and what praise that Maher had of Chavismo became more muted over time. Even so, there is a cautious optimism from him that Venezuela’s communes represent the first seeds of a world beyond capitalism. The Venezuelan masses themselves for better or worse, fiercely defend the Revolution from a return to the elitism, racism, and hyper-exploitative past that its opponents seek to return the country to. In terms of us, the questions presented lie in what there is to take from Maher’s illustration of the experimental communes? Clearly, the conditions of here and Venezuela are radically different, and the pressures that led to the establishment of the communes as a political bloc are unique to Venezuela, but there is something to be taken in them starting out as communities organising for themselves providing everything from food, clean water, housing maintenance, spaces of leisure, and self-protection. In our context, structural violence while sometimes lacking in overt spectacle is also done in an almost completely diffused and personalised manner, which itself represents the atomisation of social bonds presented in neoliberalism, and more so encouraged in Western countries. The building of community bonds, and a shared understanding of distinct yet intersecting and interrelated struggles is the main ingredient for community self-organisation, and even inter-communal networks amidst the backdrop of a decaying, yet decidedly vicious neoliberal atmosphere.

Michael