Venezuela: Bolivarianism and the Commune

DRAFT Chapter Thirteen Venezuela Bolivarianism and the Commune George Ciccariello-Maher [13.0] [13.1] The Bolivarian Revolution currently underway in Venezuela sits at the overlapping intersection of a series of identities—the people, the class, revolutionaries, Chavistas, Bolivarians—and at the tense interplay of forces “from above” and forces “from below.” 1 Despite an understandable emphasis on Venezuela’s late president, Hugo Chávez Frías, who played a fundamental role in unifying and driving the Bolivarian Revolution forward, the process itself emerged long prior to Chávez the individual. Before Chavismo there was Bolivarianism, a concept that emerged out of the Venezuelan armed struggle to refer not only to the political legacy of the liberator, Simón Bolívar, but also encompassed a broad range of other figures and, more generally, the attempt to rediscover local inspiration for revolutionary change. As Venezuela’s corrupt representative-democratic two-party powersharing agreement known as puntofijismo entered into severe crisis in the 1980s, Bolivarianism gained force, helping to gather together the broad range of diffuse social movements that had developed to resist the regime (McCoy 1999). If these social movements provided the motor force for the Bolivarian process, however, this was nevertheless not simply a story of horizontalism, of the gradual accumulation of directly democratic and participatory practices. Horizontalism, at least in the demand for a more participatory democracy, was indeed one historical horizon of the movements struggling against the corrupt, elite representative democracy. But radical and revolutionary movements in Venezuela have rarely limited the means at their disposal to the strictly horizontal, nor have they refused to engage the state a priori. Instead, the history of those movements coalescing around the Bolivarian process is a George Ciccariello-Maher history of armed vanguards, coups, mass revolts and riots, strikes, and horizontalism, with each of these subjected in turn to critical and strategic assessment. As a result, not all revolutionary or grassroots movements involved in the process could be understood as strictly horizontal in terms of their methods or practices (see Sitrin and Azzellini 2012, 36), but most nevertheless do aspire toward a revolutionized, antihierarchical society based on participatory and directly democratic principles. In this sense, such movements are horizon-tal in the vein of Enrique Dussel’s insistence that political postulates serve as horizons to orient strategic action. Central among these postulates for the revolutionary left is the “dissolution of the state,” and Dussel writes: “We must operate in such a way as to tend toward the (empirically impossible) identity of representation with the represented, in such a way that State institutions become always increasingly transparent, effective, simplified,” and, I would add, unnecessary (Dussel 2008, 96, 132). It is by aiming at such an impossible and utopian horizon—the total elimination of the gap between representative and represented—that we can “orient praxis toward its goals and to transform institutions, thus fixing a horizon of empirically impossible realization but one that opens up a space of practical possibility beyond the current system” (113). In the words of Venezuela’s current commune minister, Reinaldo Iturriza, to whom I will return at the end of the chapter, “the imperative is still the progressive reduction of the distance between the institutions and the organized people” (Iturriza 2013). Progress toward this utopian withering away of the Venezuelan state—while very real and inspiring—is both limited in its scope and tenuous, under constant threat both from within Chavismo and from without. This chapter charts the historical relationship between the decades-long struggle for a Venezuelan revolution, one which eventually hoisted the banner of Bolivarianism, and the much more recent phenomenon that was the spectacular irruption of Chávez into politics. To do so requires disentangling the two threads: Chavismo is not the entirety of the Bolivarian revolutionary movement, and the movement is not simply one that aims at seizing state power. Rather, both Bolivarianism and the Chavista identity that would come to complement it are dialectical constructs that serve to unify and consolidate the popular will of grassroots movements. Chávez in life, and Chavismo after his death, have needed to walk a fine line between horizontalism in the state in order to allow the movement to surge forward through pressure from below, taking aim at the state not merely to seize but also to radically transform it. Gesturing toward the asymptotic extreme of this transformation— Dussel’s “dissolution of the state”—in the post-Chávez era, we turn finally to the figure looming so large on the revolutionary horizon: the commune. DRAFT [13.2] [13.3] DRAFT Venezuela: Bolivarianism and the Commune [13.4] BOLIVARIANISM [13.5] The process of change currently underway in Venezuela is often referred to as the “Bolivarian Revolution,” but this has never been strictly about the figure of the eighteenth-century liberator of Latin America, Simón Bolívar. While Karl Marx’s acerbic comments on Bolívar have colored an entire legacy of Marxist derision toward his historical significance, the reemergence of Bolivarianism as an identity within the late stages of the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle in the 1970s was not reducible to either this caricature or the very real limitations of Bolívar, but instead represented an attempt to broadly rethink revolutionary change on the basis of local conditions. 2 While a popular upsurge against the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez led to the establishment of formal representative democracy in 1958, this was a heavily mediated and buffered form of democracy whose early leaders were eager to prove their pro-U.S. and anticommunist credentials. When popular movements continued to press the regime, repression ensued, which in turn sparked a guerrilla war in the 1960s. Despite early optimism—fueled in no small part by the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959—the armed struggle in Venezuela soon stalled, and a period of crisis and reflection ensued. In the waning days of the guerrilla struggle, and in part due to its failure to resonate with the population, a generation of young revolutionaries, many of them Marxists, found themselves increasingly skeptical of Eurocentric theories of and strategies for revolutionary change, and turned toward more local sources of inspiration. These included religious cult figures like María Lionza, Indigenous groups and caciques renowned for ferociously resisting the Spanish, and rebellious Afro-Venezuelans—free as well as slave—who led resistance to slavery and colonialism, and played major roles in the independence struggle. On the theoretical level, José Carlos Mariátegui’s foundational text Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality was read and re-read as a model for rethinking Marxism on the basis of local conditions (Mariátegui 1971; Vanden and Becker 2011). Last but not least was Simón Bolívar himself, who revolutionaries sought to liberate from the dusty confines of the National Pantheon, reconnecting national liberation with the class struggle. While widespread, this renewed emphasis on Bolívar and Bolivarianism emerged above all within the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution (PRV), a splinter group of hard-line guerrillas that had refused to leave the mountains when the Communist Party (PCV) withdrew its support. For the PRV, Bolivarianism came to refer to this broad process of breaking with European dogmas to rethink revolutionary change in Latin America in general and Venezuela in particular, and PRV members began to study liberation theology, María Lionza, Mariátegui, and the history of slave rebellions in Venezuela and elsewhere. Much like the syncretic cult to Lionza—whose pantheon [13.6] [13.7] George Ciccariello-Maher encompasses Indigenous caciques, Catholic leaders, Afro-Venezuelan figures, and even Bolívar himself—this new Bolivarianism was transformed by its content to exceed its namesake. Bolivarianism, moreover, fit well with the PRV’s strategy for a “militarycivilian alliance” that sought to draw together leftist members of the military with revolutionary social movements to overthrow an increasingly corrupt and violent representative democracy. Thus it was that, under the banner of this renewed Bolivarianism, the PRV connected with disgruntled mid-level officers who in 1983 had formed a conspiratorial grouping known as the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement (MBR-200). Among others, this group included a young Hugo Chávez. Chávez was not merely a soldier with a conscience who attempted an isolated coup before then emerging as a popular hero. Rather, understood in the context of the subterranean world of clandestine revolutionary movements, he was part of an organized response to economic crisis, corrupt democracy, state repression, and neoliberalism. When Chávez and others formed the MBR-200, the Venezuelan economy had just entered into a serious crisis marked by the severe devaluation of the bolívar on what is still known as viernes negro, or Black Friday (López Maya 2005). As the economy tanked and the state withdrew, revolutionary movements were expanding their reach and threatening to connect to the mass unrest developing in the rapidly expanding barrios. Especially important was the growing connection between a rebellious student movement—which was on the upswing with militant demonstrations in 1987—and the urban poor: many students abandoned the universities to test their street-fighting tactics in the popular trenches of the barrios. When the state realized the danger of previously isolated revolutionary groups igniting the explosive kindling that had been stacking up around Venezuela’s major cities, it responded in kind: to the expanding and broadening aspirations of revolutionaries, the government answered with the broadening of repression to ultimately engulf the poor as a class. On February 27, 1989, poor Venezuelans responded to the imposition of a neoliberal structural adjustment program by rebelling, burning, looting, and taking over cities for nearly a week in what was called the Caracazo, before a mass slaughter of up to 3,000 momentarily quelled the revolt (Ciccariello-Maher 2013, 88–104). Chávez, whose elder brother was a member of the PRV, was not ignorant of these developments, and when he and his coconspirators attempted to oust the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez on February 4, 1992, they did so both as a direct response to the Caracazo, and with the active support of a multitude of revolutionary movements. 3 With the coup, and with his fateful words uttered on live television—that they had failed por ahora, for now—Chávez stepped consciously and decisively into the breach that the people, in the imagery of Walter Benjamin, DRAFT [13.8] [13.9] [13.10] [13.11] DRAFT Venezuela: Bolivarianism and the Commune had “blasted” open in the “continuum of history” (1968, 261). In his failure, his imprisonment, and later pardon, and above all his promise that the defeat was merely temporary, Chávez’s irruption into Venezuelan politics strikingly parallels that of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and in particular Castro’s similar insistence in his 1953 trial speech that “history will absolve me.” The 1992 coup attempt was but one of many possible responses to this moment of rupture, and its success or failure was not predetermined, but once it did fail, Chávez and his por ahora—a promise to supporters and a threat to established elites—became indelible and inescapable focal points around which questions of power coalesced. But if Chávez emerged on the national stage as a political actor in the 1992 coup, Chavismo proper—as a political identity— would only emerge a decade later. [13.12] HORIZONTALISM [13.13] The guerrilla struggle and its aftermath saw revolutionaries grappling seriously with the limitations of vanguardism and engaging in new experiments in mass organizing. The revolution, as became increasingly clear, would emerge not from small and isolated focos of revolutionaries in the mountains, but instead from the participation of the poorest masses of Venezuelans, which had been gathering increasingly rapidly in the barrios surrounding the large cities. It was in part the threat of this fusion of revolutionary elements with the increasingly militant barrio population amid the economic crisis of the 1980s that generated the both the rebellion of 1989 and the slaughter that followed shortly thereafter, but this was not the end of the story. The period following the repression of the Caracazo saw an organic blossoming of popular barrio assemblies, directly democratic and participatory institutions that became the most important expressions of a surging wave of demands for radical change whose spontaneous form had emerged in the Caracazo. The PRV was one group among many that participated in the development of these assemblies alongside its conspiratorial role within the military and the MBR-200, and a central figure in the development of assemblies, both on a theoretical and practical level, was PRV comandante Kléber Ramírez Rojas. An engineer-turned-militant, born in the Andean state of Mérida, Ramírez was among the first Venezuelan communists to take to the mountains in the guerrilla struggle, and among the last to leave: when the PCV withdrew its support from the armed struggle, he and others remained, establishing the PRV. For decades, Ramírez was a central if unrecognized contributor to what had become an essential plank of the PRV’s program: the establishment of a military-civilian alliance with the potential to carry out a leftist coup in Venezuela. It was this objective as well as Chávez’s brother’s PRV militancy [13.14] [13.15] George Ciccariello-Maher that brought these soldiers and guerrillas together. Prior to the 1992 coup, Ramírez was even called upon to draft what would have become early government decrees in the event that Chávez and the others successfully seized power (these and other documents are collected in Ramírez Rojas 2006). Soon after the coup’s failure, however, and with the seizure of the state momentarily blocked, Ramírez began to have doubts about the strategic usefulness of what he considered an exaggerated horizontalism among popular movements of the time. In a 1994 essay, Ramírez conceded that horizontal modes of self-organization—which he rooted in the student movement of the mid-1980s—had emerged as a justified and necessary form of “self-defense from the disastrous mediatic, opportunistic, and anti-national influence of the political parties” and therefore represented “a well-deserved social and political accomplishment.” However, he insisted that through the fetishization of these dispersed popular assemblies, this “triumph has been converted into its own defeat,” by isolating barrio communities from national struggles. These participatory organs, whose horizontalism protected them from political parties, decisively weakening the party system in the process, had nevertheless failed to present an alternative, thereby leaving the political field open to those parties, however discredited. 4 Ramírez concluded that, “From a strategic perspective, horizontality will be necessary for the development of the commoner state; but tactically, at this moment it becomes a serious error because it foments the isolationism of the popular bases from national struggles” (2006, 203). This was not an argument to abandon the horizontal—far from it. Ramírez was instead urging revolutionaries to think hard about how these dispersed and isolated forces, subsisting and maintaining their autonomy on the basis of horizontal and participatory practices, would be able to unify and coalesce into a new alternative power. No longer a task to be accomplished from above, Ramírez instead saw potential for these grassroots movements— unified and consolidated—to effectively devour the existing state from the ground up, “explod[ing] the straitjacket that the exhausted Gomecista state represents, creating a new state, a commoner state” (2006, 47). 5 This would be a “state” only in the loosest sense of the term: rooted in cooperative, socialist production and directly democratic decision making, Ramírez’s “commoner state” would see a “broadening of democracy in which the communities will assume the fundamental powers of the state, electing and recalling their own authorities” (122). The path toward such a broadening of democracy implied “install[ing] parallel popular powers” in the barrios and communities, thereby “beginning the construction of the new state” from below, from the popular and horizontal movements themselves (Ramírez 141). This was therefore not a call to abolish horizontalism but to deepen and consolidate the already existing DRAFT [13.16] [13.17] [13.18] DRAFT Venezuela: Bolivarianism and the Commune popular assemblies, alongside the simultaneous development of self-defense structures like the grassroots militias already emerging in the Venezuelan barrios. 6 The result, for Ramírez, would in theory be “a new democracy led by a government of popular insurgency” (207). The tense relationship between horizontalism and the state is embedded within the very idea of the commoner state itself, simultaneously a “government” and its nominal opposite: an “insurgency” of the very sort that Kléber Ramírez himself had previously led against a rotten state. How to combine the two? [13.19] CHAVISMO [13.20] Suffice it to say that history did not follow the course proposed by Ramírez, at least not on the surface of things. Alongside the deepening of grassroots organs for popular resistance—the “parallel popular powers” of which Ramírez wrote—the Bolivarian movement eventually overcame its allergy to elections, propelling Hugo Chávez to the presidency in January 1999. Against the exaggerated picture common to the mass media and even most scholarly accounts, however, this movement was never strictly about a fidelity to Chávez. In fact, the movement was not even initially “Chavista,” and was certainly not reducible to either personalism or verticalism. Rather, Chávez can be understood as playing a major role in the very same sort of political unification that Kléber Ramírez had advocated under the sign of the commoner state. While the existence of this centralizing force within the state introduces an undeniable tension and even threat to popular horizontalism, it has nevertheless also facilitated the emergence of a “communal state” that shares much with Ramírez’s “commoner state.” As we have seen, the Bolivarian movement both preceded Chávez—in the four decades of struggle against the existing liberal-democratic order that paved the way for his appearance—but also crucially exceeded Chávez and “Chavismo” as well. The revolutionary movements that cohered around Chávez’s presidency did not simply hand over authority to a “leader,” but instead sought to use him as a strategic spearhead to break open an increasingly important political space for grassroots organizing that they continued to fill with autonomous practices. In this sense, Chávez played the role of what the philosopher Ernesto Laclau would call an “empty signifier,” into which the movements and disaffected members of the population could simultaneously deposit their varying and shifting political demands and aspirations. For Laclau, such broad-based movements need a basis for unity, but any attempt to rigidly fix that basis would paradoxically undermine the movement by excluding its component parts. The need for an empty signifier thus “arises from the need to name an object which is both impossible and necessary,” and for Laclau, the concept of “the people”—arguably the central [13.21] George Ciccariello-Maher identity for the Bolivarian process—is the paradigmatic example (Laclau 2005, 72). Despite Chávez’s unifying function, his ability to symbolically and practically unify diverse and dispersed movements and individuals, he did not accomplish this task single-handedly, but instead did so alongside a series of other such “empty signifiers.” For longtime organizer and popular intellectual Roland Denis, the 1999 constitution—written shortly after Chávez’s election through a process of popular participation—represents another such signifier: DRAFT [13.22] Here there was no revolutionary organization that assumed role of driving force. There were only insurrectionary movements—first of the masses (in the uprising of 1989), then of the military (in the coup attempts of 1992). These movements were heterogeneous, dispersed, fragmented. What united them was the project to develop a common foundation—that is to say the constitution. Nobody had been able to centralize this movement around a program, not even Chavez. His leadership is unquestioned, but his ideas were not sufficient to unite the movement. The constitution filled this emptiness (quoted in Wilpert 2006, 253). [13.23] And it bears mentioning that it is not only the concrete content of the constitution that serves to unify, but also a sort of collective pride at having participated in its crafting, a sense by many that this is our constitution. Alongside Chávez and the constitution, moreover, the Bolivarian revolutionary movement crafted its unities in the overlapping interplay of a series of painful memories of the past and the Caracazo in particular, of identities—the people, the poor, women, Afro, and Indigenous—and aspirational demands like the loose idea that is “twenty-first-century socialism.” Into each of these, hopes and dreams are deposited, but more than that, the movement itself is performatively drawn closer and stitched together in the process. 7 Furthermore, the revolutionary movement exceeded Chávez not only in its attachment to these identities, these concrete and often horizontal grassroots practices, and the fact that it was clearly always about more than a single individual. The movement also exceeded Chávez because he was as much the product of the movements as the cause for their success. This was not only because the movements created a space into which Chávez was able to step, but even more so in the transformation of Chávez himself: the Chávez of 1998, a moderate reformer who spoke of a third way between capitalism and socialism, was nowhere to be found especially after the shortlived coup of 2002 and the turn toward socialism in 2006. That the movements exceeded Chávez is also visible, finally, in the nuanced progression of political identities, and specifically in the way that the very idea of “Chavismo” emerged and was filled dialectically with the content provided by the movements. [13.24] [13.25] DRAFT Venezuela: Bolivarianism and the Commune [13.26] The former vice president of Venezuela, Elías Jaua, locates the recent origins of the Bolivarian movement in both “the rebellions of the people and the military in 1989 and 1992.” But at first, the movement was precisely that: Bolivarian. As late as 2001, “very few people identified themselves as Chavista,” 8 but this all soon came to an end around the 2002 coup against Chávez and the constitution: [13.27] The moment that the dominant elites decided to put an end to this revolutionary experiment, they used their entire arsenal of social hatred against the poor people who followed Comandante Chavez. That’s how they added the new epitaph “Chavista” . . . to the long and historic list of adjectives used to criminalize the people (scum, hordes, bandits, black trash, thugs etc.). In reality it was an attempt to strip us of our identity as Bolivarian, it was the oligarchy’s final effort to preserve the term Bolivarian within the moldy archives of the Academies of History. However, not only could they not steal from us the essence of the name “children of Bolivar,” but we took on the name of Chavistas as well, resignifying it with dignity. (Jaua 2013, n.p.) [13.28] [13.29] It was thus not Chávez and not the movements supporting him that identified as Chavista, but instead the opposition and elites who imposed that identity onto them. This was not, however, a one-way street, and rather than simply conforming to the personalistic contours of the identity, revolutionary movements effectively resignified and transformed the idea through their self-activity into a more direct expression of popular struggles. Just as Bolivarianism exceeded the limitations of Simón Bolívar the individual, so too did Chavismo “transcend” Hugo Chávez, and similar processes of reappropriation and resignification can be tracked with other pejorative terms on the “historic list of adjectives used to criminalize the people” (Jaua 2013). “Chavismo is,” in the words of Iturriza, “a universe in which many worlds fit, many forms of recreating the popular world” (Iturriza 2014b). [13.30] THE COMMUNE [13.31] As the Bolivarian process became increasingly radicalized, demands for increasing the scope of popular power and direct democracy became increasingly vociferous. While the experience of the popular barrio assemblies had not faded, instead merging into a series of informal institutions from “Patriotic Circles” (around 1999) to “Bolivarian Circles” (in the early 2000s), the question remained as to how the popular participatory impetus enshrined in Article 184 of the 1999 constitution would be put into systematic practice. The first major step in this process was the formal recognition of communal councils—directly democratic assemblies with significant decision-making authority on the very local level—in 2006, in some ways making official and granting resources to decades of popular democratic practices. George Ciccariello-Maher DRAFT While more than 40,000 such councils currently exist, today these councils face a challenge that is arguably similar to the limits of horizontalism that Kléber Ramírez had diagnosed in the mid-1990s, albeit on a shifted terrain. The task twenty years ago was to build an alternative power through the coordination and strategic unification of organic, horizontal barrio assemblies as the first step to replacing the traditional state from the outside and from below (Ramírez’s “commoner state”). Today, this task has shifted from the realm of the constituent power of the people to the constituted power of state institutions, however decentralized, from the extrainstitutional to having at least one foot in the institutional sphere. The goal is to coordinate and unify the communal councils into a broader power that aims not to replace the state from the outside, but to devour it from within. As a result, if the task previously required the unification of the Bolivarian movement, today it demands in part the consolidation of a revolutionary sector within Chavismo, with this struggle within the movement serving as a point of leverage. Strategically unified and endowed with a participatory political vision, these councils—in alliance with the persistent and pervasive organizations outside the state—can provide a fulcrum for the radicalization of the revolutionary process against more conservative sectors of Chavismo. If Chávez the individual is not present to serve as the unifying instance for this radical vision for Chavismo, radical sectors of the Bolivarian process are nevertheless currently coalescing around one crucial aspect of Chávez’s political legacy: the dream, not his alone, of a “communal state.” Shortly after his final reelection in October 2012, Chávez gave his last important speech in the form of a wide-ranging and critical televised cabinet meeting. In what has come to be known as his golpe de timón (roughly indicating a dramatic shift in direction), Chávez insisted only months before his death that communal power should be at the heart of the Bolivarian project as it moves forward (Chávez 2012). But for popular participation to play this role, the communal councils would need to both grow economic teeth and to gain broader competencies. The figure of the commune envisions both. Dario Azzellini (2014, 217) describes the emerging communal structure as a “multilevel self-government” in which “nonrepresentative structures for local self-administration—based on assemblies, direct democracy, spokespeople, and higher levels of coordination (the communes and communal cities)” have become increasingly consolidated. This communal state, which is emerging through efforts both from above (from the state) and from below (popular organizations and direct participation), consists of three broad categories. On the most local level we find the communal councils, directly democratic and participatory political organs. Then: [13.32] At a higher level of self-government there is the possibility of creating socialist communes, which can be formed from various communal councils in a [13.35] [13.33] [13.34] DRAFT Venezuela: Bolivarianism and the Commune specific territory. . . . These communes can develop medium- and long-term projects of great impact for their locales, while also the decisions concerning the commune continue to be made in the neighborhood assemblies of the communal councils that are part of the commune. Communes can develop projects and planning on a bigger scale. Various communes can form communal cities, with administration and planning from below, if the whole territory is organized in communal councils and communes (229). [13.36] [13.37] [13.38] The economic aspect of this consolidation is central: a major limitation of the local councils is their dependency on state funding, which can both limit the ambitiousness of their scope but also subject them to sudden shifts in the direction of the political winds. At the commune level, councils interface directly with several forms of property and production: worker-run cooperatives, state-owned factories, and many forms of social property and comanagement in between. This integration can protect against traditional dangers of cooperatives and worker control when set apart from the local community, while more importantly granting the political claims of the commune more social weight. While the final step of this consolidation—the establishment of socialist cities—still has no basis in law, just as with the councils and communes themselves, these have leapt forward in practice nevertheless in experiments. The first socialist city, Ciudad Caribia, perched in the hills separating Caracas from the coast, was inaugurated more than two years ago; a handful of similar experiments have sprung up across the country, often pressed by social movements like the Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front (Azzelini and Ressler 2010). While the process of building communal councils, communes, and socialist cities has emerged both from above (from the state institutions, or constituted power) and from below (from direct participation and social movements, or constituent power), Azzellini (2014, 218, 237) rightly argues that “the role of the state is deeply ambivalent” due to a “power asymmetry” in favor of the state. Not only do state administrators wield disproportionate political and economic influence in these processes and within the Bolivarian process as a whole, but there is a built-in tendency for such figures to adopt top-down approaches at best, and conservative policies at worst. These profound and intractable tensions between the “from above” and “from below” have manifested in all instances of popular participation in Venezuela, be they cooperatives (Piñeiro Harnecker 2007), the communal councils (Fox and Leindecker 2008), and the nascent communes themselves (Azzellini and Ressler 2010). Venezuela’s National Commoner Network, which was established by the government in 2008 only to declare its autonomy within a year, walks this fine line (Azzellini 2014). Despite the current coexistence between a nascent “communal state” and the liberal-bourgeois state, moreover, this tense relationship that I have elsewhere discussed in terms of “dual power” (Ciccariello-Maher 2013, 234–55) must ultimately be George Ciccariello-Maher resolved in favor of a communal power that displaces the existing state: “Future Venezuelan socialism is thought to be built based on various council structures that cooperate and converge at a higher level so as to transcend the bourgeois state and replace it with a communal state” (Azzellini 2014, 219). Despite his own position within the state apparatus, Hugo Chávez played a significant role not only in unifying popular movements against the old regime, but also often as a radical spearhead within Chavismo and against its more moderate and bureaucratic proponents. It is this space, which draws together the most radical sector of Chavismo as a fulcrum to leverage against governing inertia and the economic self-interest of elites, that has been left vacant with the death of Chávez, and it is this space that the communes must fill in both symbolic and practical terms. As Chavismo enters a phase of heightened contradiction between conservative and radical sectors of the process, there is an increasingly acute need for a consolidated counterweight to the wealth and power of moderate Chavistas and government bureaucrats. This is where the communes enter the picture, walking the fine line between constituent and constituted, power from below and power from above, a form provided by the latter to be filled with revolutionary content by the former. But this task cannot be accomplished as long as the communal councils remain dispersed. Given this revolutionary affinity between the late Chávez and the communal project—one that he championed tirelessly until his death—it is perhaps unsurprising that Chávez first announced the idea of a “communal state” by referencing a quote from none other than Kléber Ramírez Rojas himself, stating: “The time has come for communities to assume the powers of state, which will lead administratively to the total transformation of the Venezuelan state and socially to the real exercise of sovereignty by society through communal powers” (Ramírez Rojas 2006, 146, cited in Chávez Frías 2010). But while it may seem natural and of course laudable for one late comandante to cite another, especially given their prior role as coconspirators, simply doing so does not mean that we have escaped the inherent tensions between the state and participatory social movements. For Roland Denis, one of Ramírez’s younger comrades, the state cannot build the commune that will be its own undoing: “It is not the law that gives the revolutionary Commune permission to enter into history.” Against what he deems a “verticalist” and even “feudalist” legislation of the communes from above, Denis insists that communes necessarily emerge “without the law” (Denis 2010, n.p.). In other words, the communal state as a governing project is not simply Kléber Ramírez’s commoner state under a slightly modified name. The commoner state, as I have explained, was Ramírez’s attempt, from a position outside the state, to theorize the unification and consolidation of existing popular and horizontally organized movements. The establishment of the communal state, by contrast, while not a purely top- DRAFT [13.39] [13.40] [13.41] DRAFT [13.42] [13.43] [13.44] Venezuela: Bolivarianism and the Commune down endeavor, is nevertheless an attempt from above to channel both resources and popular energies toward a communal infrastructure. 9 Neither of these terms simply drops away faced with the other, however, and it is instead between the two—and in reference to other forms of direct grassroots participation—that we can best triangulate the coordinates for a radical popular power in today’s Venezuela for which horizontal direct democracy and what Dussel (2008, 131) calls the “dissolution of the state” operate as political postulates. In the gaping space left by the death of Chávez, it seemed at least initially that President Nicolás Maduro would maintain his predecessor’s devotion to the communal project. Maduro soon named a radical—Reinaldo Iturriza—to head the commune ministry, promised increased attention and resources, and even affirmed the most radical aspirations of the commune, suggesting that “We’ve inherited the structure of the bourgeois government, the bourgeois state. We need to erect a new structure” (Robertson 2013, n.p.). However, much can change in Venezuela’s complex political atmosphere, and after a strong result for Chavismo in December 2013 regional elections, many opponents of the Maduro government took to the streets decrying economic hardships and insecurity to demand his ouster. In the context of this destabilization effort, many worry that Maduro and his close advisors have opted for the route of “treasonous pacts” with big business (Denis 2014). But the very fact that the Maduro government has been caught in the double-bind of the import economy—in which confronting currency and import corruption leads to empty shelves—only points more directly to the need for a communal economy capable of bypassing the import sector entirely. It is in this sense that Iturriza, the current commune minister, understands the tense interplay between institutions and movements in the construction of a Venezuelan communism. Every commune—and there are now hundreds registered—represents for Iturriza one of many “trenches” in the struggle to build a peculiarly “toparchic” socialism emerging from a multitude of dispersed points, and indeed the same could be said of the communal councils themselves (Iturriza 2013). 10 Despite this dispersal, however, those struggling in these trenches are gaining new confidence every day, with their claim for the scope of popular power expanding in accordance with—and indeed ahead of—the establishment of institutions, pressing ever toward what Iturriza calls the “territorialization of our socialism,” and, quoting Chávez himself, the construction of the “territory of the new” (Iturriza 2014a; Chávez Frías 2012, 16). “More than simply a new instance of participation,” Iturriza (2014a, n.p.) argues, “the Commune is the organizational advance guard of socialist democracy under construction.” As with any “advance guard,” the experiences of Venezuela’s communards of today are mixed. Many complain of resistance, lack of support, and even sabotage from above, as well as the occasionally more deleterious dan- George Ciccariello-Maher DRAFT ger of inertia and apathy on the grassroots level. According to one commune organizer in Mérida State, Antonio Portillo, There are still difficulties. Sometimes we call a general meeting and only 40% of the community attend, it’s a lot of effort to get that many people, normally we just get 15%. There are people in my community who have a negative influence on the process, they tell people that the commune and the communal councils are useless, and the people have to listen to this every single day, and some of them start to believe it. (Pearson 2013, n.p.) [13.45] But difficulties aside, the dedication of many revolutionaries to the communal project is gradually growing and becoming consolidated in regional networks and national conferences designed to share experiences and formulate a new path forward. For Portillo: [13.46] I want to build my commune because it’s a totally different form of life. I dream about this, about building something with different values. I don’t think “commune” is just a word, just another meeting, it’s a lot deeper than that. Many of us still aren’t clear about what a commune is, it’s not an event, it’s a new state of things, where there’s no exploitation, there’s equality, love, simpleness, well-being for all, not just for me and my pocket . . . that’s why I fight for it. (Pearson 2013, n.p.) [13.47] The task of revolutionaries, for Iturriza (2013), is not so much to lead as to recognize the advanced status of popular movements, and—here echoing the Marx of The German Ideology—to “hurry up so that we walk at the rhythm of the real movement,” a movement that is itself communism. [13.48] NOTES [13.49] 1. For a recent collection analyzing participation in contemporary Venezuela, see Smilde and Hellinger 2011. For a more recent comparative view of the tension between “from above” and “from below,” see Ellner 2014. 2. Among these real limitations, it is worth mentioning that for much of his early career, Bolívar stood on the side of the wealthy, white Mantuano elite and against the aspirations of Indigenous people, slaves, and the poor. The danger of Bolivarianism as an identity lay precisely in the obscuring of the real tensions within and beyond the independence movement around these questions, dangers that resonate in the current tension between national liberation and revolutionary socialism. This reemergence of Bolivarianism placed this prócer of independence alongside local religious cults, Afro and Indigenous leaders, and critical Marxists in the vein of José Carlos Mariátegui (see Ciccariello-Maher 2013, 48–50). For Marx’s critique of Bolívar, see Marx 1858. 3. There is much debate over the balance between military and civilian actors in the February coup. According to some movement organizers, the soldiers did not trust or support the civilian side enough; according to some soldiers, the radical movements failed to live up to their promise of mass support in the streets. 4. Two parties in particular attempted to fill this space: first the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) and later the more innovative Radical Cause. Both, however, suffered the fate of participating in a discredited political system, and lost support as a result, clearing the way for [13n1] [13n2] [13n3] [13n4] DRAFT [13n5] [13n6] [13n7] [13n8] [13n9] [13n10] Venezuela: Bolivarianism and the Commune Chávez as an “anti-party” alternative. On the MAS, see Ellner 1988; on Radical Cause, see Buxton 2001. 5. The “Estado Gomecista” refers to dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, who ruled Venezuela directly or indirectly from 1908 to 1935. This period saw the modernization of the state and military apparatus and the centralization of authority, alongside an obedient openness to the interests of U.S. capital. 6. I have argued elsewhere that these assemblies and militias can be understood in terms of Lenin’s discussion of dual power, which itself draws upon the example of the Paris Commune (Ciccariello-Maher 2013, conclusion). 7. Dussel (2008, 72) would call this, departing slightly from Laclau, a process of dialogue and translation. 8. A LexisNexis search would seem to confirm this, showing almost no news results for “Chavismo” or “Chavista” prior to 2002. 9. While it is true that Ramírez uses both “commoner state” (estado comunero) and “communal state” (Estado Comunal), he uses the latter only once and capitalizes it as a proper noun. Chávez, however, referred almost exclusively to the communal state, and given the prevalence of the term comunero among grassroots movements like the National Commoner Network, it seems justified to see comunero as referring tendentially to the “from below” and comunal as referring tendentially to the “from above.” It is worth noting that the current commune minister, Reinaldo Iturriza, who has so consistently sought to immerse his work in popular struggles, also speaks of the “commoner state” (Iturriza 2014a). 10. According to Azzellini (2014, 221), Bolívar’s mentor Simón Rodríguez introduced the concept of toparchy, which refers to “a confederation of local self-governed communities,” as a counterweight to excessive centralization.