Juan Lenzo: ‘We Need To Integrate the Communal Economy To Face the Capitalist Maelstrom’

A Venezuelan activist takes stock of the Communard Union’s present strengths and challenges, particularly in consolidating a communal economy.

Juan Lenzo is a Venezuelan activist, thinker and member of the Communard Union, having served on the organization’s first elected national leadership. He is also one of the founders of alternative media outlet Tatuy TV. In this interview, Lenzo offers an overview of the Communard Union’s present context, including its challenges on the economic front and approach to contradictions with the state.

It’s been over three years since the Communard Union held its founding congress. How do you evaluate the organization’s present situation? In particular, how many communes currently belong to the Union?
Since the Founding Congress on March 4, 2022, the dynamics and activity of the Communal Union have oscillated. Although it has experienced ups and downs, it maintains a growing trend and is consolidating its work on several fronts. The Union has developed an identity and become an organizational alternative to integrate the Venezuelan communal movement. This has been especially relevant in the midst of the reactivation experienced in the last year as a result of the national popular consultations.

There are 117 communes that can be counted today as part of this effort, with the expectation of adding new grassroots organizations through the work being carried out both at the National Training School and through the Argelia Laya Brigade. The latter is an initiative that brings together communard activists to drive processes of territorial activation and building links among communes.

 

¿What process does a commune go through in order to join the Communard Union?
The Argelia Laya Brigade plays a central role in this process of bringing new communes into the Communard Union fold. It allows us to explore new territories, to visit the communes that have expressed their desire to join the movement in different ways.

The brigade carries out an integral diagnostic of the commune in question, joins the assemblies, provides spaces for debate and accompanies its organizational processes closely. It evaluates the exercise of self-government, the characteristics of the assembly processes, the degree of legitimacy of the spokespersons as seen by the people, the economic activity, the territorial struggles and the grassroots mobilization capacity.

These criteria serve as a guide for the Communard Union’s regional bodies (these are spaces where the different communes of a particular region get together) to discuss, analyze and approve (or deny) the entry of a commune into the organization.

Beyond merely growing in number, the Union aims to integrate really existing communes with processes that can boost the organic life of the movement. Right now we are about to deploy brigades in six Venezuelan states to evaluate the incorporation of some 40 communes into the organization.

One of the main challenges for the communes is at the economic level. In the Union, for example, we have seen several attempts to establish distribution routes that have not been sustained over time. What are the organization’s main economic initiatives presently?
There have been several attempts to distribute, exchange and trade what is produced in the Union’s communes. Some of those experiences continue, but in general we insist on the priority of building initiatives that manage to integrate all the links in the productive chain.

We are currently carrying out an exercise to measure our economic activity, in order to organize the productive information of the 117 communes and generate useful indicators for economic planning. This information will allow us to have an accurate picture of the current state of the communal productive forces, after years of economic crisis. This in turn will allow us to identify both critical points and the main opportunities to reconstitute and expand the economic fabric at the grassroots level.

On the other hand, in concrete terms, we are advancing projects in cattle rearing, coffee and sugar cane to strengthen the economy of different communes. At the same time, we are beginning to roll out a financing system that will allow the Union to have resources to develop its own productive policies.

You mentioned cattle, coffee and sugar cane. Most of the Communard Union’s communes have primary production as their main economic focus. What are the main obstacles for communal production to compete in the current context in Venezuela?
Most of the productive communes are indeed in the Venezuelan countryside, where primary production predominates, mainly around agricultural output, with some experiences of small-scale industry transformation and processing.

However, there are several critical challenges that they face in their productive activities. Some of these include serious struggles in access to fuel, both for agricultural mechanization and for industrial processes and transporting crops. There are difficulties in distribution and marketing, due to insufficient logistics, production costs that make it difficult to “compete” with imported production, and we also need to take into account the voraciousness of the agro-industrial oligopolies that have consolidated during the economic crisis. Likewise, the context of exchange rate volatility and continuous inflation affects all links in the production chain, depressing surpluses received by the communal economy for its exercise of self-government in the territories.

The communal economy faces the challenge of rebuilding and sustaining its productive capacity, improving processes by updating technological capabilities, optimizing management and administration tasks. There is also a need to link economic activity among different communes and generate aggregation processes to integrate the communal economy as a whole and face the capitalist maelstrom in stronger conditions.

Needless to say, the ultimate goal is to strengthen communal self-governments with the growing resources from these economic activities.

In March, the government announced a large productive project in the “Hato La Vergareña,” in Bolívar state. What has been the Communard Union’s role in this initiative? And what are the challenges and realistic objectives of this project?
Together with the Ministry of Communes, Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and other popular organizations, the Communard Union has been participating in this project called Patria Grande del Sur, which we consider to be of great importance.

The estate, expropriated by Hugo Chávez in 2006, spans an immense territory. We are talking about 187 thousand hectares, with great conditions for cattle rearing, cereal and forestry production, as well as growing lots of agricultural produce. If we think about its potential, the sky is the limit.

There we have set up a camp together with the MST, from which we have reached out to the campesino communities that live in surrounding areas to give shape to this construction of the Patria Grande del Sur commune.

Due to its sheer magnitude, the project is being conceived in phases. The first phase includes multiple initiatives to reactivate roadways, build ties with the local communities, set up infrastructure and start launching productive activities. An agroecology school is being built together with the MST, which is the organization that is taking the reins of this project.

It is a process that has its sights set on the integral development of this territory, organized on the basis of a communal system logic and with its productive efforts conceived through the agroecological lens.

Although there is no shortage of obstacles, with plenty of organizations joining hands, there are ever-improving conditions to create campesino family settlements in order to progress to the next stages of the project.

Chávez defined the relationship between the state and popular power as one of “creative tensions.” How do you see the present relationship with state institutions? Has Ángel Prado’s appointment as minister of communes changed the overall dynamics?
The arrival of Ángel Prado to the Ministry of Communes has meant an acceleration and deepening of communal processes in Venezuela. His track record as a communard in El Maizal and then as mayor of the Simón Planas municipality has given him abilities that translate into a political approach that manifests itself in the streets, in contact with the people. He is constantly in the territories, taking part in hundreds of assemblies and in permanent communication and joint work with hundreds of grassroots spokespeople.

In spite of the major efforts from the ministry and the public support expressed by President Nicolás Maduro himself, there are still contradictions and resistance from officials and institutions at all levels of government. The bureaucratic expressions of the old state manifest themselves in multiple ways, hindering the progress and relegating the demands of the Venezuelan communards.

However, at present, the communes are in a much better position to face these tensions in light of the growing protagonism they have acquired.

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Another challenge is the absorption of communal cadres in state institutions. In the case of the Communard Union, how do you walk this tightrope without the grassroots work ending up subordinated to institutional priorities?
I think this is an unavoidable contradiction in political processes such as the one we are living. We assume a dual tactic, with one foot inside the state and the other in the street, or rather in the commune. This generates permanent tensions, as expected, due to the asymmetry of power between the different spheres, but fundamentally, because the state we have still runs on a bourgeois structure and essence. So we face the risk that the people who occupy institutional posts end up co-opted and absorbed by the state, distanced and removed from the grassroots.

Still, we are clear that the task before us is not to strengthen the existing state, but rather to use it as an instrument to boost and strengthen a new communal state, and beyond that, a communal society.

In this colossal effort to dismantle the state we have to advance in the radical transformation of society: we have to work from above and from below, from inside and from outside.

The truth is that when it comes to managing this equilibrium that you mention, many factors come into play: the levels of political education of the militants, the degree of organic maturity of the organization, its programmatic foundations, the attitude towards institutions and the very identity of the communal project.

For us as a movement this is something totally new, although many of us who come from prior organizational experiences have already lived this contradiction with troubling past outcomes for popular movements. What is certain is that, as long as the organization understands the dialectic of the relationship, embraces the tensions, promotes a permanent debate, revolutionary consciousness, reflection and self-criticism, we will be able to use this tactical element to continue pushing our political program forward.

Venezuelan communes have regained protagonism in the official discourse, and the popular consultations have been the main policy priority in this area. In the case of the Union’s communes, how do you evaluate the impact of the consultations?
The consultations have been useful to reactivate and strengthen the grassroots assembly spaces. These had been marred by low participation in recent years. It has been an opportunity to rebuild community spaces with renewed organizational dynamics and communal life. After all, there is an opening of spaces to intervene and address the most pressing territorial needs. That is only possible through organization.

However, there is a risk of what Chávez called the “politics of management,” that is to say, that the consultations reduce the communal project to a mere exercise of receiving state resources and executing specific projects, which are furthermore confined to the local sphere. The danger would be diluting the spirit and transformational and revolutionary potential of the commune as an instrument conceived to transform social relations, the way of doing politics and to lead the construction of socialism.

Although, as you rightly point out, the communes have reemerged in the official discourse, there is still a long way to go in order for this recognition to translate into concrete policies to support and boost the communal project.

 

 

(Venezuelanalysis) by Ricardo Vaz