Entrance to El Maizal Commune. Photo: The Wealth of Relations.
By Ace Thelin – May 17, 2026
Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project
Commune or Nothing!
This book asks the fundamental question we often ignore, “what is required of us to continue living?” Chris Gilbert, professor of political studies at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela in Caracas, traveled the country to give a first hand account of the diverse communes growing and struggling to build socialism.
The book strikes a balance between theorising the emerging communal socialism and telling the everyday struggles of those living in and creating communes in contested terrains with little certainty of the future. Gilbert begins by quoting Marx, writing “that theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses, ” then he adds, “that happens when it connects with the ideas, projects and dreams developed by the people.”
Historical Roots
The beginning of the book situates the historical currents Venezuelans find themselves in today. While communal socialism wasn’t endorsed and championed by Hugo Chavez until 2009, it has deep historical roots. While a minority of Venezuelans can claim to be fully indigenous, the majority of Venezuelans have indigenous and/or African ancestry. Venezuela’s history includes indigenous and African maroon societies. Venezuelans in their connection to the land have a framework of history that spans centuries and defines what they believe is possible.
Peruvian Marxist intellectual Jose Carlos Mariátegui broke with the consensus of the Third International when he published Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality in 1928. He highlighted the absence of private property in Incan culture as essential in understanding and building a future socialist communal society. “The problem of the land,” the third of his seven essays, detailed a collective approach to land management and highlighted the Incan ‘ayllus,’ the social kin groups that made up the economic units of Incan society that managed land collectively.
Iraida Vargas and Maria Sanoja described 500 years of resistance and cooperative societies of weavers, potters and cultivators of roots in their book Los Hombres de la Yuca y el Maiz. Creative examples of resisting colonialism and class oppression are deeply layered throughout Venezuelan’s history.
Ezequiel Zamora 1817-1860 was an anti-oligarchical federalist who continued the Bolivarian and communal struggle and spoke of a continuing ‘historical current,’ of continuous visionary striving to create societies free from oppression.
Miguel de Buria led a rebellion in the 1500s, when enslaved Africans rebelled and allied with the Jirajara indigenous nation. Resisting Spanish colonialism successfully for 75 years, the nation led by King Miguel forced the Spanish to recognise them as a sovereign, self governing nation. The Bolivarian Revolution is built and thrives because of the ancestors that make it possible.
The Earth Belongs to (S)he Whom Works it
A new constitution, nationalising the oil and the land law of 2001 opened the door to grassroots movements in building Socialism. This land law did not take land from the ownership class. It allowed the Venezuelan working class to cultivate land that wasn’t being used, neglected land and buildings, land in the margins, land not being exploited by the capitalist class. This crack, this opening was seized by the descendants of maroons and indigenous peoples as well as those who have toiled for centuries fighting the injustices of European colonialism. “The commune is the space in which Socialism will be born,” Chavez emphasised the importance of indigenous societies in Venezuela and South America in building socialism. He often quoted a book about the Incas, El Imperio Sociaista de los Incas, by Luis Baudin.
Chávez came to the conclusion, after different trials and tribulations, that the basic cell of socialism had to be the commune. Chavez, led by the people, had succeeded in lifting millions out of extreme poverty. Using the wealth from oil revenues to fund healthcare, housing, education and food security, substantial gains were made by the working class. But Chavez learned this wasn’t good enough. He studied ceaselessly, always keeping in mind and in touch with the conditions of the majority working class. The Bolivarian Revolution was a work in progress from the beginning, ready to pivot toward a different revolution, something that could change the long term trajectory of society.
The vanguard communes were the initial cells of a post-capitalist society because they were self managed by the people living on them, committed to egalitarian principles and participatory and protagonistic democracy. In many ways, the state funded worker managed cooperatives still mirrored too much of the capitalist system.
Communes, on the other hand, teach us about direct social property, whereas the state can only teach us indirectly. There are no bosses in communes, lives and outcomes are interwoven, decisions affect everyone, we all swim or we all drown. Many communes have started their own schools, transportation, energy sourcing; the more self-sufficient the less dependent on the state. There are Evangelical Christian communes in Venezuela, based on the idea of desprendimiento, which speaks of detachment and generosity.
One of Venezuela’s weaknesses has been its dependency on the world oil market under U.S. imperial control. If oil is subsidising the economy, most people are hardly motivated to turn to the Earth and build self sufficiency. If the government is providing goods, what do you need communes for? When the cost of oil went from $100 barrel in 2014 to $30 barrel in 2016 the subsidies dramatically diminished. U.S. sanctions in 2015 “made the economy scream.” The change in conditions pushed Chavistas toward building communal socialism.
The Move Toward Communal Socialism
Cooperatives started in 2003 but were built by oil revenues. They mirrored regular capitalist business practices with hierarchies and bosses hiding behind cooperative laws. Collective private property still had adversarial relationships with other cooperatives.
After experiments with various forms of state property, Chavez formally announced in 2005, that the goal of his movement was the establishment of “21st Century Socialism.”
We have to remember that capitalist production is also social, but capitalist property is private and anti-social. Capitalism always leads to the concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. Chavez changed the discourse to ‘social property enterprises.’
Finally in 2009, Chavez moved toward communes. He was inspired by revolutionary Chinese communes and the Hungarian philosopher Istvan Meszároš.
Meszaros spelled out how the various components of the capital system all interpenetrate each other and can successfully resist any partial attempt to overthrow them. Socialists must confront the market, wage labor and private capital accumulation as well as indoctrination in schools, ownership of the media, co-opted religious beliefs, conformist culture, patriarchy, racism, legal and political institutions and the nuclear family as the cell of the economic system. We have to understand the totality or the historical superstructure if we are to create and sustain revolutionary dynamic change.
In alignment with the masses of people fuelling the Bolivarian Revolution, Chavez and the National Assembly passed the The Organic Laws of Popular Power (Leyes Orgánicas del Poder Popular) in December of 2010 that helped redirect some power toward the communes.
We must create a new organic system and the will to build it under siege, as stated by Chavez in one of his last speeches, when he implored, during a televised council of ministers, meeting on October 20, 2012, “Comuna or nada.” He died on March 5, 2013.
Moving as freely associated producers, a communal system offers a framework of social metabolic exchange usable by individuals to secure their own ends, whereas capitalism has conflict built into it. Antagonistic value production makes every commodity a battle between the owner and the worker. Communes are only viable through cooperation, leading to the manifestation of a radically different social metabolism in greater alignment with particular places, intimacy with the land and natural life rhythms.
Communes must overcome the structural conflict between capital and labor. Labourers dependence on capital is the material basis of the state. Communes, as cells of the new socialist society, make possible the long term withering away of the state. Only when the cells connect can socialism become viable. Only through the power of the motivated and determined masses, united across regions and borders, can we overcome the structural forms of imperialism and capitalism.
Louisa Caceras commune took up garbage collection in Barcelona, adding a grocery store and recycling operations as well as a community plant nursery. The key is to have control of all aspects of the business and complete self governance. Extricating ourselves from the long-standing organised capitalist relationships maybe the most difficult thing, yet we must create an ecological civilisation.
The Communal Union and Foundational Congress
Chavez warned that “socialist islands would be swallowed by the capitalist sea.”
Communal cells form a national political body by linking up to confront the external counterrevolution and the internal fifth column. In Merida in 2019, sixteen communes met at Che Guevara commune and participated in a foundational congress to form a Communal Union.
Two hundred delegates from 50 communes met in March 2022 at El Maizal commune. What is the relationship between the Communal Union and the increasingly bourgeois state? A state that under sanctions, declining oil revenues and Nicolas Maduro, reverted back to many of the capitalist patterns and compromises with the bourgeoisie.
No doubt communards are walking on the wobbly tightrope of maintaining good terms with the PSUV, ruling socialist party, while keeping an eye on the long term goal of eliminating the bourgeois state through participatory and protagonistic democracy. The goal is a communal socialist state, but at the same time communes are forced to build while the power of western imperialism, capital accumulation and monopoly control of resources still dominates. The point is to break and rupture the dependency relationship with the imperialists and the national bourgeoisie.
One good example of this is the ‘productive workers army’ that is committed to change the rules of the game and break with the conditions of dependency. Economic dependency separates workers, enterprises, and countries by imperial dictates, IMF loan entrapment and comprador ruling classes. The productive workers army wages “battles” across the country, repairing broken facilities and consciousness at the same time. Under capitalism people are not organised by neighbourhoods or place. They sell their labor to the market, buy from the same market and become dependent while reinforcing the built in exploitation of the market.
Venezuelan Deputy Jorge Arreaza: Commune is Emancipation for Working Class
El Panal Commune Seething with Popular Power.
On January 23, 1958 Venezuelan president Marcos Perez Jimenez was forced out of office and so began the compromised, corporate, even farcical fourth republic that lasted 40 years until Chavez won the election in 1998.
There was a massive rural to urban migration in the second half of the 20th century creating dense barrio communities, struggling for basic amenities, such as electricity, water and housing. The rural migration to the cities also brought solidarity, ecological values of reciprocity to the land and connection to indigenous imagination not beholden to the dominant top down capitalist values dictating policy and determining the direction of the country. Much of the construction such as highways and massive housing blocks for military officers and bourgeois loyalists, was funded by booming oil wealth. Immigration to the cites also included culture, music, small businesses and revolutionary political organising.
Robert Longa helped organise the Alexis Vive vanguard commune in 2001 well before Chavez settled upon the commune as the basic unit to create Socialism. The larger Panel commune was created in 2006. One of their livelihoods is making clothes and the cadres wear baby blue shirts that stand for open sky, dreams and hope.
The first task and accomplishment they achieved, was running the drug dealers out of the neighbourhoods and often the police aligned with them. Longa loved Che and fell for Chavez. They both spent time in Yare prison and Longa was released in 1999, when Chavez became president. This is when the drug dealers were defeated, drug dealers that the state had encouraged in order to weaken the revolutionary consciousness of the barrio.
The commune is clean, orderly and self monitored with cameras to prevent drug traffickers and their police allies from infiltrating their hard won territory. Territory that is now 20 years in the making, marking the flagship commune as a leading participatory and protagonistic model. Learning, self-discipline and embodying the highest values necessary to change the whole structure of society is the conscious metabolism of the commune that encourages people to commit themselves to take charge of their own lives and strengthen the community as a whole.
Alexis Vive is the most militant vertically commanded vanguard commune within the larger El Panal (beehive) greater commune. Their conscious discipline and moral example is diametrically opposed to the blind obedience capitalism thrives on. They think about the revolutionary side and strategic implications of every activity. Visionary leader Barbara Anacona Martinez understands those strategic aims and sees elections as choosing spokespersons, not representatives. She reminds her comrades the importance of interpretation, and understanding the strategic aims that can meld with the people.
She cites and quotes from important theoretical works such as The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism by Marta Harnecker when teaching cadres over the course of daily activities. The communes are self-educated, emphasising that anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism are essential understandings and goals of outreach and creating a long term strategy that moves beyond the social relations of capitalist inertia.
The communes have banks to manage finances and interact with the larger dominant capitalist system in Venezuela. They act as a firewall, while being a link to the state and economy at large. They are a temporal link serving the commune, an economic arm. Very different than how banking exists in the dominant society. They are not cells of market socialism, because they are under the control of the self governed communes.
The emphasis is on non-alienated labor and internal democracy. Communes seek a rupture with the logic of antagonistic value production; owner vs. worker.
Communes center right livelihood and enjoyment above the profit motive and in so doing they reveal the wealth of relations that is subjugated under the dictatorship of capital.
In 2015, the United States imposed devastating sanctions, “putting the entire population in a concentration camp.” Dazed patients were seen wandering the streets without medication, baggy clothes from severe weight loss reminded everyone what cruelty moves this world.
In 2020 El Panal expanded. They called that year, ‘Year Zero.’ It was an end and a beginning. Through the genius of the people and the will of the cadres throwing themselves into action, great things happen. The communes ‘defund the police,’ by finding jobs for the youth and unemployed, preventing drug addiction and crime by addressing the roots of problems before they can grow.
To Those Who Seize the Sky by Assault
What must be overcome is the capitalist law of value and what is needed is a change in the rules of the game. No longer will the capitalist system destroy by extracting surplus value and reinvesting it by metastasising the metabolism of extraction for private accumulation, thus creating obscene poverty and wealth by uncontrolled expansion.
This global imperialist system, twisted by the competition between capitals and states, creates artificial scarcity that plagues the world. We must throw off the reign of capital by creating social non-alienated labor, freely working for the mutual benefit of all. To break the shackles of the market and the dictatorship of capital, we must work together with the awareness of each others’ needs and desires, freeing ourselves from the senseless destructive norms of society. Internal democracy allows for self critique and corrections as part of an emancipatory process.
Communes must be the cells that grow, irreversibly and irresistibly toward the new society. This is the formula that can defeat the triad of wage labor, state power and capital. The transition moves through dual power co-existence. Communes must struggle within the larger capitalist system while maintaining autonomy.
We’ve seen how the state can return to its bourgeois foundations and the ancient regime reappears with new language that masks old patterns, such as the so-called “revolutionary bourgeoisie.”
The results are not predetermined, the future is uncertain, but we do have a solid foundation, a starting point and a deep popular psychology connected to the long struggle for freedom. We have a coherent beginning.
The Gordian knot of Socialism must be consciously and carefully untied. The educator must continue to be educated by the dynamism and multi layered calculus of an ever-changing and interconnected world. We must remodel the house from the inside out. The communes can be the soil in which a new human being is cultivated, where the sum of the processes in the building up of life creates an evolutionary metabolism that overflows and washes away the oppressive system which must be composted if we are to survive and thrive.
Venezuelans are walking the long red sacred path out of the darkness and into the light.
“¡Comuna o nada!”
