Moira Blanco Cardona. Photo: Venezuelanalysis.
The “communal feminism” project emerged from the experiences of women building popular power at the local level.
Moira Blanco Cardona is a founding member of the Communard Union, an organization that brings together some 100 Venezuelan communes. She is also a spokesperson for the Women and Gender Equality Committee of the Vencedores de Carorita Commune in Lara state. Blanco Cardona has been promoting communal feminism—a class-based, grassroots feminism rooted in the struggle to build anti-patriarchal communes—and helped organize the First National Gathering on Communal Feminism that took place last month. In this interview, she traces the origins and development of communal feminism while also considering the contradictions and challenges it faces.
The First National Gathering on Communal Feminism took place in Caracas on March 29, with the participation of some 1800 women. How did the proposal for communal feminism come about?
Broadly speaking, the project dates back to 2018, when we began promoting the idea of anti-patriarchal communes—calling for the gradual dismantling of patriarchy within communities and, by extension, across society. Then, in 2019, the proposal for a national organization emerged: the Communard Union. The Union was conceived as a political and social instrument to unite and integrate the communal movement into a single organization with a socialist horizon.
The Communard Union was born with the aim of regrouping and promoting the communal movement at a time when it had been rendered practically invisible. This situation had much to do with the economic crisis brought on by the unilateral coercive measures and later by the global pandemic. This crisis made access to food and basic services difficult and increased extreme poverty, which in turn demobilized and demoralized community leaders, particularly women. Many of these women, who had played a vital political and social role in their communes, were pushed back into the private sphere, leading to increased gender-based violence and worsening health conditions.
In 2020, the Communard Union launched a broad effort to mobilize people that included regional gatherings in Lara, Anzoátegui, Mérida, Apure, and Caracas. These meetings allowed us to reflect on the challenges we faced, how the communes had resisted, and our achievements. We also strategized about how to keep alive our historic socialist project, which was first led by our “Comandante Eterno” Hugo Chávez and is now led by President Nicolás Maduro. These debates, involving over 2000 people, led to the creation of a working group where women could reflect and propose strategies for building anti-patriarchal communes based on their lived experiences.
This working group generated rich debates about feminism, how to define it, and how to practice it. Some expressed concern that feminism might introduce divisions in the broader struggle. We knew, however, that we needed a class-based, grassroots feminism that would have its own characteristics. While we supported the feminist struggles of our sisters in Caracas, we felt that parts of their project didn’t correspond to our own reality. Over time, we realized that our feminism and our way of organizing were different, rooted in our own life projects and in the historical task of building communes.
This is how, on January 23, 2020, during a regional meeting organized by the Argelia Laya Collective in Lara [a campesino group that had reclaimed some land], I coined the term “communal feminism.” It was a name for what we were already doing every day. The term unified our struggles, our lived experiences, and our shared hopes.
In truth, communal feminism is the legacy of Venezuelan women like Argelia Laya—a guerrilla fighter known as “Comandanta Jacinta,” teacher, and feminist—and of the millions of women who, during the most difficult times in Venezuela, distributed food, carried gas cylinders on their shoulders, developed alternative food options, and recovered ancestral medical practices and plant-based medicines.
From that moment forward, an intense debate began within the Communard Union. It was full of challenges and had to address many contradictions, but there were also valuable insights and reflections. Now, six years later, we can see the fruits of this process in the First Gathering on Communal Feminism that occurred two weeks ago. That meeting was a historic victory for women organized in the territories and a milestone for our organization.
Today, after years of debate and organizing, communal feminism has become an important rallying cry that the Communard Union proudly embraces. It emerges from the concrete realities of women in Venezuela’s communes and from spaces of collective debate and deliberation. Communal Feminism seeks to overcome the contradictions of capitalism and patriarchy by transforming the social, economic, political, and cultural relations within the communes, which represent our path toward socialism.
There seems to be a broad consensus within the Communard Union that feminism is not divisive. However, there are obviously tensions inside the communal movement because of patriarchal domination. How do you address such tensions?
We address them through coherent, transformative actions that embody a new way of doing and living politics. In our organizational work, we understand that we have to promote policies that respond to the specific needs of each communal territory. Some of these needs, however, are shaped by patriarchy. We see this every day in decision-making spaces—communal council assemblies, economic and healthcare committees, and among communal spokespeople in executive and parliamentary roles.
To overcome these problems and contradictions, we must first make them visible and acknowledge them. Only then can we begin to change the power dynamics between men and women.
For example, women’s participation in the public sphere grows every day, but men’s “participation” at home is not growing, and this is an obstacle to building a more just society. We need to make this situation visible in order to overcome it.
We recognize women as active, autonomous subjects whose political subjectivity emerges from their daily lives—within their families, social circles and cultural environments. To this end, we promote educational processes rooted in our realities, where the unity of theory and social practice is essential for transforming our society into a communal and feminist one.
The document “Lines of Action for Communal Feminism,” presented at the recent gathering in Caracas, highlights the centrality of consciousness-building and education. What kind of educational work do you promote, and how do you link it to the project of commune-building?
We believe that people develop critical consciousness through their interaction with the world around them. This awareness doesn’t develop in isolation: it requires debate and recognizing our diversity, and it requires the sharing of popular, ancestral, and scientific knowledge. We are constantly reviewing our practices, questioning our methods, and examining the causes and consequences of our actions.
Our educational initiatives must challenge our roles as activists and as people who participate in communal life. There’s something Chávez said in his first Aló Presidente Teórico that captures our perspective on education:
You’ll see that through praxis, many people begin to transform themselves—because it is praxis that transforms us. Theory is theory, but when that theory takes root in the soul, in the bones, in the nerves, in the spirit of a human being and in reality—then, everything is transformed.
Our educational work must respond to the real needs of people in the communes and promote individual and collective processes of consciousness and organization. As working women, as mothers, as caregivers at home, at work, in schools, in healthcare, in politics and culture—we must recognize how capitalist and patriarchal systems reproduce themselves in all spheres of life.
By identifying the forms of oppression we experience, we can begin to dismantle the system that produces them. Why? Because it’s in everyday life that the system is reproduced… and it’s in everyday life, through grassroots practice, that it will be transformed! This is how we aim to build a new collective consciousness capable of making historical changes irreversible.
Venezuelan People, Main Foundation of the Revolutionary Process
There has been an ebbing of Venezuela’s feminist movement, even as communal construction is gaining momentum. Could Communal Feminism reignite the feminist struggle in the country?
Yes, I’m convinced that the commune is where socialism will be born—and with it, feminist struggles and women’s organizing will be reborn as well. The commune is where we will build a better world, a world based on equity rather than division.
I believe that the Women and Gender Equality Committees that already exist in every communal council are the tools we need to drive transformative processes. These are spaces of self-organization and power-building that can reach every corner of society. They are natural spaces for meeting, debating, organizing, and building power. Through these committees, we are already working towards the empowerment and liberation of women in the commune.
This isn’t about building communes just for women or just for men. It’s not about dividing the struggle, as we’ve often been accused of doing. What we are doing is not about simply flipping the cake so that the other side is on top, but, as a wise friend once said, about changing the recipe altogether.
Change must come from the grassroots!
Historically excluded and rendered invisible, women now make up 70% of spokespeople in communal councils and communes, and 43% of communal peace judges are “compañeras,” according to the Ministry of Women. That means we’re no longer in the background: we are on the frontlines.
Women’s Committees are key to making visible the oppression and discrimination we face under capitalism and patriarchy. As women, we are active subjects in our own liberation—and in doing so, we also help liberate our sons, our brothers, our male friends and comrades… Through unity, we will give birth to the new woman and the new man of the communal society.
(Venezuelanalysis) by Cira Pascual Marquina
