George Ciccariello-Maher

Building the Commune:

Insurgent Government, Communal State

At this point, the imperative is still the progressive

reduction of the distance between the institutions
and the organized people. To hurry up so that we can
walk at the rhythm of the real movement.
Reinaldo Iturriza, Desiring the Commune

When Venezuelan president Hugo Chvez died

in March 2013, he left behind an unfulfilled dream
that was never his alone: that of the communal
state. Amid the complicated maneuvering of the
post-Chvez era, this aspirationwhich would
see the expansion and unification of nascent
communal councils, alongside a proliferation of
other directly democratic political and productive
organshas pressed forward. This article situates
this communal state at the intersection of two tensions. I first decolonize the idea of the Venezuelan commune, excavating the broad contours of its
history as a subterraneous process oriented toward
self-government, not in an effort to romanticize
indigenous and maroon communism, but to
underline the tense relationship between the Venezuelan commune and nineteenth-century liberation struggles. Second, through the theories of former guerrilla comandante Klber Ramrez Rojas, I
show how this history of the commune enters into

The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:4, Fall 2014

doi 10.1215/00382876-2803657 2014 Duke University Press

792 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Fall 2014

tension with the state itself, and how the contemporary construction of the
commune from above is but one side of a seeming paradox gestating under
the sign of the communal state, the tense unity of government from above
and insurgency from below.
Decolonizing the Commune
Oppressed like the Israelites in Egypt under the cruel yoke of that impious
Pharaoh, they have made silver bricks at the expense of the land of our own
bodies, soaked with the blood of our own veins, and baked in the ovens of their
avarice ... these alchemists have discovered the philosophers stone to make
gold at the expense of our goods.
Comuneros of 1781 to the inhabitants of Trujillo, quoted in Roberto Lpez Snchez,
El protagonismo popular en la historia de Venezuela

The history of the Venezuelan commune is the history of a process that

begins long before Paris 1871. It refers instead to a dialectical chain stretching from before colonization to the present, a long trajectory that cuts across
the colonial and nominally postcolonial periods, in which communal forms
of self-organization swirl helically around those insurrectionary moments
that make them possible.
With Bruno Bosteels (2013: 168), and taking a cue from his own history
of the Mexican commune, I hope to snatch the history of the Venezuelan
commune from a narrow sectarianism by detaching it from the history of the
official Communist Party and embedding it within broader social dynamics
and processes, thereby excavating what he calls an other history of the commune determined by actual struggles.1 This gesture is important for practical
reasons: the Communist Party of Venezuela (Partido Comunista de Venezuela; PCV) was not founded until long after many of the events recounted
below, and even when it has played a decisive role in subsequent struggles,
this has rarely been as the spearhead of the commune. Equally important,
however, is that distinguishing commune from party helps us to abandon the
Eurocentric one-sidedness that measures communismits existence and
achievementsaccording to European standards, linear history, and fidelity
to sacred texts. Not only does such an approach render illegible most of the
history of the commune as a trajectory of struggle for self-organization
thereby contributing to what Bosteels calls the missed encounter between
communism and the Mexican Revolutionbut it also negates our ability to
move in the other direction: to craft a communism on local conditions that
looks critically, in parallax, back at the European tradition.2

Ciccariello-Maher

Building the Commune 793

But notwithstanding Bosteelss (2013: 184, 169) insistence on a

displacementfrom Commune to commune, from the example of Paris
to the commune more broadly, when he sets about the task of excavating the
Mexican commune, he has to begin with the reception of the original Paris
Commune of 1871 in the land of Porfirio Daz.3 Beyond Bosteels, then, I
want to take this displacement seriously and ask why this starting point is so
obvious. Does beginning his history of the Mexican commune with the
reception of 1871 undermine the force of Bosteelss own critical analysis
of Eurocentric one-sidedness and the missed encounter? Would not a truly
other history allow an important space for Paris 1871 without divorcing it
from the long chains of struggle that generated it and that it subsequently
unleashed, not to mention those entirely distinct from it, those struggles
that sought something similar without even hearing the news?
We find a tension here even within Marx himself, who in The Civil
War in France offered an expansive definition of the commune as the selfgovernment of the producers (Tucker 1972: 555). In the same breath, however, he grants the new Commune of Paris an unquestioned originality that
seems to contradict his definition. While Bosteels himself is the first to question the occasional linearity of Marxs (1973: 471516) formulations, drawing
attention as much to his later self-critical turn in his letters to Vera Zasulich
as well as earlier passages from the Grundrisse on precapitalist economic formations, he nevertheless hesitates to broach the question of primitive communism by beginning the history of the Mexican commune prior to 1871.
While he does not mean this as a term of opprobrium, it is nevertheless misleading, since it can erase the broad swath of dynamics and struggles stretching between colonization and 1871. These include resistance to colonization as
well as the dialectics unleashed by popular and independence struggles, and
the tension between the two, all of which have a great deal to offer the history
of the commune, precisely because they are that history.
But disrupting one-sidedness means more than simply reflecting on
the provincialism of European Marxisms on the basis of theoretical and practical experiments elsewhere; it also means revealing the powerful circularity
of Eurocentric utopia: the no-place of utopia imagined by European thinkers
was itself inspired by very real places and communal experimentsboth
colonial and precolonialin the Americas.4 Some, like Rousseau (1997: 136),
would openly wax romantic about the Caribs of Venezuela, but the thinker
most often reductively deemed a Venezuelan RousseauSimn Rodrguez
(2004: xv), today one of the three roots of the Bolivarian treefamously
reversed this circuit by insisting that Europe would fail to live up to its own

794 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Fall 2014

highest aspirations because there is no space in it for utopia.5 By virtue of its

peculiarly inventive spirit, Latin America would be prepared to do so: The
place where this will be done is not imaginary, as Chancellor Thomas More
imagined; his utopia will be, in reality, Amrica (Rodrguez 2004: 64).
Once we probe this space between colonization and independence and
after for the history of the Venezuelan commune, we shift our gaze from
Paris 1871 to its more local numerical anagram: the Comunero Rebellion of
1781, in which a popular army of twenty thousand rebelled against a series of
royal impositions in what is today Colombia. Less recognized, however, is
the extension of this commoner revolt into the Andean region of western
Venezuela, reaching almost to the central-western state of Trujillo. While
participation spanned all social sectors, radical revisionist historians have
noted the massive participation of the dispossessed social sectors: poor
whites, pardos, Indians, and blacks, insisting that 1781 marked the birth of
popular autonomy in Venezuela (Lpez Snchez 2009). Here, however, the
central actor was not strictly the pueblo (and certainly not la comuna) but
instead el comn, an identity that in its double-valenceshifting between
the community in general and the oppressed segment or popular majority
prefigures the dual function (i.e., both radical and conservative) of the concept of the people in Latin America.6
But the dialectical chains in which the Comunero, or Commoner
Rebellion, of 1781 are embedded stretch not only forward but also backward
and southward along the geographic chain of the Andes: as it turns out, the
rebellion had been inspired largely by the insurrection less than a year earlier by Tpac Amaru II in what is today Peru. Discussion of so-called primitive communism is thus unavoidable and requires that we note crucial rebellions prior to 1781 like that of King Miguel, who in 1552 led a contingent of
slaves and Jirajara Indians to attack the Spanish and form an autonomous
mountain society that survived for years and numbered in the thousands, or
those afterward like the free zambo Jos Leonardo Chirinos, who drew inspiration from both the Haitian and French Revolutions to mount a popular
rebellion against the colonial order. Tightly intertwined with these rebellions
and insurrections is the question of the communal form that persisted and
indeed survives today: whether the shabono of the Yanomami in southern
Venezuela, the better-known Incan ayllu farther south, or the rochelas and
cumbes of escaped slaves, or cimarrones (of which there were tens of thousands in Venezuela by the mid-eighteenth century), this is not a romantic
history limited to the bygone precolonial era but one profoundly entangled
with resistance to and separation from both colonial Spain and the elite

Ciccariello-Maher

Building the Commune 795

white, or mantuano elite, who would gain hegemony over the independence
struggle.
No attempt to grasp the Venezuelan commune and the insufficiency
of privileging formal independence over substantive social transformation
can afford to ignore the Asturian-born caudillo of the Venezuelan plains, or
llanos: Jos Toms Boves (Damas 1968). First a republican and then a royalist, Boves was in reality an autonomous leader who in 1812 raised a popular
army of the poor, escaped slaves, and indigenous people known as the
Legion of Hell, facilitated in no small part by the repression of slave rebellions by the elite criollo leadership. Boves armed slaves against their masters,
and his army swelled to more than ten thousand, of which only 1 percent
were white. As Lpez Snchez (2009: 12) describes it,
The popular struggle headed by Boves ... was more a class struggle than a
defense of the Spanish crown. ... The Venezuelan people [pueblo], in the strict
sense, was incorporated into Bovess army ... which was physically liquidating the entire white population of Venezuela, and which in fact also liquidated
the foundation of slavery as a mode of production. ... The triumphant action
of the popular forces under Bovess leadership was destroying [desestructu
rando] all the social relations on which European domination on the American
continent had been based.

One frightened mantuano is straightforward in his anxiety: No one can

repair this country; I believe we are going to fall into the hands of the
blacks (13).
The fact that Boves ostensibly fought on the side of the Crown against
independence, misleading though this fact is, has largely prevented his
inclusion in the pantheon of Venezuelan heroes, but his decisive role in the
way that the independence struggle played out cannot be overstated. Bovess
oppositionand the popular fighting force that he mobilizedforced Simn
Bolvar to free the slaves. The subjective action of the previously enslaved
masses embodied in Bovess army definitively destroyed white domination,
and what followed was a series of hegemonic compromises best expressed by
Bolvars own desperate but ultimately successful effort to claim those masses
for the cause of independence.7 In the centrality of slave self-activity and the
clear ambivalence of the forces under Boves toward formal independence,
this chapter in the history of the Venezuelan commune reads conspicuously
like C. L. R. Jamess Black Jacobins. Indeed, Lpez Snchez intimates that
Venezuela was very close to becoming another Haiti, but while Bovess
popular army forced Bolvars hand to free the slaves, the latters subsequent

796 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Fall 2014

execution of Manuel Piarto Bolvar as Mose was to Toussaintmakes it

perfectly clear that the shift was not total.8
Despite hesitancy on the part of the Chavista leadership, radical Chavistas have recently sought to recover Boves as the leader of a popular, commoner army. One recent account insists that we not confuse the history of
the Venezuelan People with the history of Venezuela (the official, republican version ...), sharply noting that the very same racial and classist pejoratives used to describe Bovess armythat of the hordes, in particularhad
been more recently deployed against Chavistas.9 More broadly, other popular
organizers have also sought to drive a wedge into the official history of the
Bolivarian bloc, calling themselves Antimantuanos, a way to emphasize the
gap in interests between those supporting mere independence with continued elite rule and those supporting more substantive social revolution.
Against this background, the helix of the commune continues forward
in too many explosive moments to fully do justice to it here, from the Federal
War in which Ezequiel Zamora led a fighting force much like that of Boves
to a forty-three-day general strike in 1936 that one noteworthy observer
described as not an oil strike but a strike by Venezuela as a whole, and
which was followed by a series of urban and rural rebellions (Rangel 2007).
In the aftermath of the popular military-civilian insurgency that overthrew
the dictator Marcos Prez Jimnez in 1958, the oxygen of democracy
however limitednourished an expansive wave of popular struggles and
occupations by workers, peasants, students, and the unemployed. When the
new representative democratic regime would not meet popular demands,
many took to the hills in an ill-fated guerrilla war that largely lacked mass
support, partly because of a dogmatic vanguardism that drove a wedge
between armed struggle and self-governance. Even under such conditions,
however, the commune glinted here and there, first in the early popular peasant support for the Bolvar Front under the legendary Argimiro Gabaldn,
and later in the experiments by the eastern Sucre Front to establish consolidated base areas with democratically self-managed economies.10
What the guerrilla generation did with arms in the countryside, a
younger generation did with stones in the streets, and as we approach the
Venezuelan commune of the present, we pass necessarily through the massive 1989 anti-neoliberal rebellions known as the Caracazo. Not merely rioting and looting, however, although there was plenty of that, the Caracazo
instead inaugurated a cycle of expanding popular barrio assemblies, on the
one hand, and revolutionary militias, on the other, which together constitute
as direct an expression of the commune as ever there was. If this rebellion

Ciccariello-Maher

Building the Commune 797

launched Chvez toward power, these communal organs provided inspiration from below for the more recent development from above of communal
councils, powered by resistance to the short-lived coup of April 2002 and the
self-managed takeover of a locked-out oil industry in early 2003. In the
dynamic relation between this from above and from below, the communal
state comes into view.
Desiring the Commune
The crisis of the Venezuelan state can only be resolved with its liquidation and
burial, and the creation of a new Commoner state.
Klber Ramrez Rojas, Historia documental

Jodi Dean (2012: 10) situates her discussion of communism in light of the theoretical debates and changing political sequences marked by 1968 and 1989.
In Venezuela, however, these moments unleashed a very different, if not
inverted, sequence. By 1968 the Communist Party of Venezuela had withdrawn from the armed struggle, with a small rump of duros, or hardliners,
refusing to come down from the hills and instead forming the Party of the
Venezuelan Revolution (PRV). Despite this laudable intransigence and the
persistence of other guerrilla groupings in the east, however, the armed struggle as it had existed was essentially over, and a period of deep disillusionment
and reflection followed. This was, in other words, a downswing of sorts.
By contrast, 1989 presents a picture almost diametrically opposed to
the somber soul-searching of elsewhere. Latin America had already spent
several years under neoliberalism (longer in Chile), with the mantra there
is no alternative imposed with an iron fist long before the collapse of the
Soviet Union. For a while, however, Venezuela escaped this imperative, even
reelecting Carlos Andrs Prez on an anti-IMF platform in 1988. But when
Prez immediately embarked on the Great Turnaround (Gran Viraje) shortly
after his inauguration, implementing the Washington Consensus to the letter, an active alternative appeared in the streets, looting and burning. This
was the Caracazo, a massive, weeklong rebellion that spread across the country and that has made possible everything that has come since. If 1989
marked the bloody repression of this anti-neoliberal rebellion, however, the
hope it embodied was not crushed with the thousands of piles of flesh that
were unceremoniously deposited in mass graves. Instead, while many global
communists were suffering a depressing defeat, the Venezuelan commune
was experiencing a combative renaissance.

798 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Fall 2014

No individual stood at the intersection marking the ruptures and the

continuities of Venezuelas 1968 and 1989 more than Klber Ramrez Rojas,
whom one younger comrade called a perfect crossroads of the history of the
revolutionary movement (Denis 2001: 53). A member first of the Communist Party and later the PRV alongside Douglas Bravo, a guerrilla coman
dante, Ramrez Rojas resisted the death of the armed struggle to the very last
moment. Within the PRV more than many other organizations, the theoretical experimentation that gave rise to the understudied umbrella concept of
Bolivarianism would emerge, containing within it the previously discussed
tension between independence and revolution. This included the rediscovery of both local revolutionary traditions (indigenous, Latin American,
nationalist, spiritual) as well as what another PRV cadre and later political
prisoner Carlos Lanz described to me as the forgotten Marxisms: ultraleft
Marxism, council communism, and Autonomia. Ramrez Rojas was a party
to and central participant in these profound processes of theoretical and
practical experimentation (Ciccariello-Maher 2013: 81).
As a result, PRV cadre went on to work in the revolutionary student and
barrio movements that eventually intersected in the Caracazo, and Ramrez
Rojas and others continued to engage after 1989 with the barrio assemblies
that sprang up semispontaneously as the organic organizational expression
of that revolt and of the commune more generally. Simultaneously, this veteran of the Venezuelan 1968 played a crucial role in the clandestine forging
of the military-civilian alliance that was the MBR-200, the group including Chvez that sought to propel the spirit of 1989 forward by attempting to
overthrow the Prez government in February 1992. In the run-up to the
failed coup, Ramrez Rojas himself was called on to draft the initial communiqus and governing documents, blueprints for a new state to be founded
in the event that the February coup succeeded.
In these documents, Ramrez Rojas, like many others, locates in Venezuela a peculiar tradition of popular insurgency rooted in the history of
slave and indigenous rebellions and communal experiences that date back
centuries, but which draw their coherence and permanence from the utter
inability of the stunted bourgeoisie to build hegemony and the absence of a
landed oligarchy as counterweight. While the dictator Juan Vicente Gmez
had effectively modernized the state apparatus, its developing form could
not keep pace with its decomposing content: as Ramrez Rojas (2006: 45, 47)
puts it, The maturation of the state as an institution in our country has
already reached a high level of putrescence, and as a result, Venezuela
needs to break out of, to explode the straitjacket that the Gomecista state rep-

Ciccariello-Maher

Building the Commune 799

resents, creating a new state, a commoner state.11 Such a state would distance itself from messianic presidentialism to the degree that the latter
becomes unnecessary: Centralism as such will collapse when organized
communities choose and recall their own authorities, formulate and prioritize their own plans for the development of their well-being, and whose budgets are then administered by themselves (47).
Emerging as a direct response to the imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment, this new, commoner state, as well as the continental integration it would spearhead, would have as its bywords To produce food,
science, and dignity (48; emphasis in original). It would rely heavily on cooperative and socialist production, and the organized community would play a
significant role in not only development but also security, electing its
own police commissars. In the immediate near-term (i.e., after the 1992
coup), all branches of government would be dissolved and replaced with
national committees including neighborhood representatives, and the police
apparatus would be immediately restructured and subjected to investigation. Lest these documents be perceived as either too ambitiously utopian or
as blueprints for the future, Ramrez Rojass (2006: 75) plan for an emergency government was signed with Rodrguezs famous imperative: either
we invent or we err!
Ramrez Rojas was sidelined from the MBR-200 for reasons that
remain unclear but are not hard to guess. Freed from the constraints of a balance of forces within the alliance that he likely did not respect, Ramrez
Rojas went on to found Popular Bolivarian Insurgency, insisting that the
crisis of the Venezuelan state can only be resolved with its liquidation and
burial, and the creation of a new Commoner state (34). Ramrez Rojass
very use of the term Comunero here pushes us away from the strict history of
the Paris Commune and toward a longer chain of rebellions in Spain and
Latin America that have taken this name (and thus the translation as commoner rather than communard). The fundamental structures in question, nevertheless, share much with the Parisian experience: We advocate 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 (141). This was a call to deepen the
already existing popular assemblies, alongside the simultaneous development of self-defense structures like the grassroots militias already emerging
in the Venezuelan barrios.12

800 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Fall 2014

His more radical insistence on the concept of the commoner state after
the February coup did not, however, mean that Ramrez Rojas had taken a
turn away from constituted power because of his ostracism by the soldiers. If
anything, in the tension between the governing documents he drafted from
above and the popular assemblies from below, he grew increasingly critical
of the local particularism of these dispersed communal organs. In a 1994
essay, Ramrez Rojas conceded that horizontal modes of self-organization
had emerged as a justified form of self-defense from the old and corrupt
political parties. However, he insisted that by fetishizing these dispersed
popular assemblies, this triumph has been converted into its own defeat,
adding 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 (Ramrez Rojas 2006: 203).
Out of the spiral of these assemblies and Ramrez Rojass (2006: 207)
critique of themat the intersection of the tensions that Bosteels identifies
between anarchism and communism, localism and strategic unification
the idea of the commoner state, or what Ramrez Rojas provocatively calls a
government of popular insurgency, took shape. And largely out of the relationship between these popular experiments and struggles, as well as
Ramrez Rojass own embodiment of the tension between constituent and
constituted power, the contemporary concept of the communal state would
emerge.13 In 2006, with the enemies of the Bolivarian process momentarily
on the defensive and crushed in a lopsided presidential election, the Venezuelan government prioritized the expansion of what are called communal
councils, local organs for directly democratic self-government. More recently,
however, and in light of the difficulties of practicing self-government in relative isolation and absent a direct connection to socialist production, Chvez
and others pressed forward with the establishment of broader confederations known as communes.
While the empirical task of assessing the potential and progress in the
concrete implantation of this tense relation that is the communal state
remains for the future, the similarity to Ramrez Rojass vision is evident. In
the words of Dario Azzellini (forthcoming), The Venezuelan socialist project is based on the construction of council structures from the bottom up,
in different sectors of society (workers councils, communal councils, communes, and communal cities). The creation of these councilist structures of
self-government and the control of production, and their cooperation and
coordination on a higher level, will gradually replace the bourgeois state with
a communal state.14

Ciccariello-Maher

Building the Commune 801

It would be no coincidence, then, that Chvez announced these

transformations with a quote from none other than Ramrez 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.15
But while it may seem natural and of course laudable for one late
comandante to cite another, especially given their prior role as coconspirators
against the Venezuelan Fourth Republic, simply doing so does not mean
that we have escaped the inherent tensions mentioned at the outset. For
Roland Denis (2010), one of Ramrez Rojass younger comrades, the state
does not build the commune that will be its own undoing: It is not the law
that gives the revolutionary Commune permission to enter into history, in
our case it is the echo left to us by our own ... Klber Ramrez [Rojas], of the
formation of the communal state or the self-governing republic. Against
what he deems a verticalist and even feudalist legislation of the communes from above, Denis insists that communes necessarily emerge without the law. This is not a rejection of the Bolivarian processwith which
Denis continues to identifybut rather a recognition of the profound tension between communization from below and from above.
While the replacement of the liberal state by the communes is certainly a long way off, some signs exist that the political will to push the process forward might exist. Earlier this year, Reinaldo Iturriza, a radical intellectual closely associated with barrio youth movements, was named minister
of communes, and shortly thereafter, newly elected president Nicols Maduro made clear that communes will be at the heart of his governments work.
In a reflection called Desiring the Commune, Iturriza assessed the status
of the communal project, deeming the 889 registered communes (a number
that now tops 1,000) so many trenches in the struggle to build a peculiarly
toparchic socialism. This label, however, is not meant to celebrate a diffusely localized communal system but simply to register the reality of the
starting point for a process in which the danger of excessive localismthe
doomed attempt to build small islands of socialism amid a capitalist seais
at the forefront of all minds.16
That this necessarily partial, occasionally haphazard, and arduously
slow process might be understood as a revolutionary one is not a question for
Iturriza (2013):
Maybe this revolution doesnt look like the librettos by European authors that
we read like handbooks. But when one has the strange historic privilege of

802 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Fall 2014

seeing how a people appear, how they tremble and mobilize; when one sees a
people that is reluctant to give up, when one sees a people voting forcrazy
things like the construction of Bolivarian socialism or the preservation of life
on the planet, one knows that one is in the presence of a revolution.

Here the yardsticks for progress are both objective and subjective, quantitative and qualitative, and the imperative is still the progressive reduction
of the distance between the institutions and the organized people. To
hurry up so that we walk at the rhythm of the real movement. Thats where
things are at (Iturriza 2013; translation modified).17
Communization and the State
Our moment has thrown forth a communist rebirth, and we should not be
surprised when this rebirth takes powerfully different forms, from communizing voluntarism to processes like that described above in Venezuela in
which the state plays a more prominent, albeit tense, role. The anarchists
have today become communists, an important development indeed for
those of us interested in a powerful fusion of the two, but if this development is not merely to reproduce old oppositions between anarchism and
communism within the latterwith one side insisting on communization
to the exclusion of the state while the other blandly and uncritically reaffirms statism and the partywe need to avoid mistaking form for content
and thereby overstating what separates these communist experiments from
each other.
The recent deployment and popularization of the idea of communization as a process certainly has some large and evident advantages over the
language of communism, especially in a place like Venezuela. Decades ago,
revolutionary militants struggling to connect with the masses jettisoned any
expectation of a Winter Palace moment in favor of a more profound understanding of the importance of prolonged processes and hegemonic struggles. More recently, the contours and dynamics of the Bolivarian Process
have made it clear to anyone in doubt that the stateand especially the
bloated bureaucratic monstrosity that is the Venezuelan stateis not something to be simply seized by either the ballot or the bullet. As a result, in
the words of Denis (2006), The old slogan of dual power (bourgeois and
working-class) valid for the summit of the revolutionary movement today
becomes a permanent strategy in accord with the need for the organization
of a socialized and non-state power. What once expressed the revolutionary

Ciccariello-Maher

Building the Commune 803

moment par excellence now becomes a continuous process, a negative dialectic with no telos outside its incessant deepening, dual power no longer understood from above but from below and in a tense interplay with existing
institutions.
However, while we might read into the concept of communization just
this sort of dialectical will to grasp the tensions of the commune and the
state, this is not always borne out in theory and practice. Thorie Communiste (2011: 41), for example, has insisted that the abolition of the state, like
other measures, is not an ultimate objective but an aspect of the content of
the communization process. In the Mexican context, Bosteels (2013: 161)
emphasizes the role that the anarchist-communist divide played in the
missed encounter between the history of the commune and the history of
the Mexican Revolution. In attempting to tell the other history of the commune in Venezuela and elsewhere, we must be careful not to reinscribe into
communism the very oppositions that need instead to be overcome (between
anarchism and communism, but also centralism and localism, core and
periphery). Broadly understood, communization theory (if it is advisable to
even speak of such a thing) runs this very risk, by reincorporating into communism something of the view that Marx had ascribed to Mikhail Bakunin:
by insisting on communization as a meansand even the infallible
meansrather than as an end (Marx and Engels 1974).
Following tienne Balibar, Bosteels (2011: 12) rightly identifies the
idea of a State capable of functioning as a non-State as one of the most productive problems in the entire Marxist political legacy. But it does not take a
master dialectician to realize that replacing one state with another, especially
when this new state is in reality nothing of the sort, but instead a tense relationship between forces from above and from below, is a process that will
make a lot of enemies. Many local elected leaders, mayors, and state governors in VenezuelaChavistas and opposition alikealready feel threatened
by the communal councils and the looming communes and have every reason to resist a communal process that directly undermines their own share
of the spoils of electoral victory. Without the active support of these sectors,
and with an increasingly vociferous opposition that has tasted blood, the only
path forward for the communal state in Venezuela is one increasingly lopsided toward constituent power, driven through popular mobilization and
combat from below, in which the people throw their weight behind the new
state and insist on nothing less. No condescending saviors will build it: slo
el pueblo salva al pueblo, only the people can save the people.

804 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Fall 2014

Notes
1

3
4
5

10

11

Bosteels cites the UK commune collective in the following terms: The real history of
the Commune is the history of the masses themselves, struggling for fundamentally
different conditions of existence, and not primarily the history of its leadership. Seen
in this light the history of the Commune has still to be written (16869).
Like Bosteelss revisionist approach to the temporality of the Mexican Revolution, I
have elsewhere sought something similar with Venezuelas current Bolivarian Revolution, displacing those moments centered on constituted power (1992, 1998) and
emphasizing those that represent constituent upsurge (1989, 2002). See CiccarielloMaher 2013: 88103, 16679).
See also Bosteels 2011: 12.
For example, the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay, described by one historian as semicommunism (Cunninghame Graham 1901). See also Gott 1993.
Mariano Picn-Salas (1943: 205), for example, refers to Rodrguezs sentimental Utopia taken from Rousseau, seemingly oblivious to this circularity. Translations from
Spanish throughout the essay are mine.
While John Leddy Phelan (1978: xviii) has rightly resisted the temptation to read the
rebellion as a precursor to political independence, he is incorrect to limit the possible
meaning of el comn to its ancient Castilian meaning, especially since he himself
draws out the utopian aspects of the demands put forth by non-Castilian, indigenous, and Afro rebels. Phelan, who emphasizes the Colombian side of the Comunero
without much mention of participation in western Venezuela, also notes the importance of the Tupac Amaru II rebellion some five months earlier in Peru (67). Lpez
Snchez notes the presence of a critique of not only wealth but exploitation in the
rhetoric of the comuneros.
The shift in the strategy of the patriots, formulated by Bolvar in 18151816, toward
incorporating slaves, mestizos, and poor whites [blancos de orilla] into the mantuano
project for independence, was the most important consequence of the 18121814
slave-mestizo insurrection (Lpez Snchez 2009: 14).
The same could be said of Bolvars attack on the foundations of the indigenous commune. See James 1963: 27778. James was severe in his denunciation: And to shoot
Mose, the black, for the sake of the whites was more than an error, it was a crime. It
was almost as if Lenin had had Trotsky shot for taking the side of the proletariat
against the bourgeoisie (284).
See La Horda 2011: 4445. Bolvar continued to use hordes as a derisive racial
term, as in his letter to Santander on June 13, 1821 (see Gobierno Bolivariano de Venezuela 2014).
See Ciccariello-Maher 2013: 2244. Gabaldns successes, it must be noted, drew on
both indigenous resistance and the legacy of his own father, Jos Rafael Gabaldn, an
anti-Gmez popular caudillo.
The Estado gomecista refers to the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gmez, 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 US capital.

Ciccariello-Maher

12

13
14

15
16
17

18

Building the Commune 805

I have argued elsewhere that these assemblies and militias can be understood in
terms of Lenins discussion of dual power, which itself draws on the example of the
Paris Commune. See Ciccariello-Maher 2013: 23456.
Some, like Margarita Lpez Maya, neglect the importance of Ramrez Rojas in providing the theoretical foundation for the communal state (Gonzlez 2013).
Moreover, and unsurprisingly given what we have seen already, Azzellini notes that the
communes in the heavily Afro region of Barlovento use the name Cumbes derived
from escaped slave communities.
Chvez (2010) cites this passage in his column Onward toward a Communal State!
The passage from Ramrez Rojas is from Historia documental (146).
Thus in line with Bosteelss discussion of Adolfo Gilly and Ramrez Rojass critique
of the barrio assemblies.
That Iturriza frames this construction of the commune as a desire certainly echoes
Deans insistence on communism as an ever-deferred desire as opposed to the repeating loop of a drive. What is less clear, however, is whether this desire is truly as universalist as Dean suggests.
Alain Badiou (2012) arguably makes the inverse mistake, by reinforcing the communist-anarchist divide in The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings.

References
Azzellini, Dario. Forthcoming. Self-Government and Self-Management: Building Twenty-First
Century Socialism in Venezuela.Leiden: Brill.
Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. London: Verso.
Bosteels, Bruno. 2011. The Actuality of Communism. London: Verso.
Bosteels, Bruno. 2013. The Mexican Commune. In Communism in the Twenty-First Century,
edited by Shannon Brincat, 16189, Vol. 2. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
Chvez, Hugo. 2010. Onward toward a Communal State! Translated by Kiraz Janicke. Ven
ezuela Analysis, February 22. venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5160.
Ciccariello-Maher, George. 2013. We Created Chvez: A Peoples History of the Venezuelan
Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cunninghame Graham, R. B. 1901. A Vanished Arcadia, Being Some Account of the Jesuits in
Paraguay, 16071767. London: Heinemann.
Damas, German Carrera. 1968. Boves: Aspectos socio-econmicos de su accin histrica. Caracas: Ministerio de Educacin.
Dean, Jodi. 2012. The Communist Horizon. London: Verso.
Denis, Roland. 2001. Los fabricantes de la rebelin. Caracas: Primera Linea.
Denis, Roland. 2006. Revolucin vs. gobierno (III): De la izquierda social a la izquierda
poltica. Proyecto Nuestramrica-Movimiento 13 de Abril, August 11. aporrea.org
/ideologia/a24361.html.
Denis, Roland. 2010. Por unas comunas sin ley. Aporrea.org, October 19. aporrea.org
/ideologia/a110539.html.
Gobierno Bolivariano de Venezuela. 2014. Carta de Bolvar para el general de divisin Francisco de Paula Santander. Fechada en San Carlos el 13 de junio de 1821. archivo
dellibertador.gob.ve/escritos/buscador/spip.php?article10971.

806 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Fall 2014

Gonzlez, David. 2013. El estado descomunal: Conversaciones con Margarita Lpez Maya.
Caracas: El Nacional.
Gott, Richard. 1993. Land without Evil: Utopian Journeys across the South American Water
shed. London: Verso.
Iturriza, Reinaldo. 2013. Desiring the Commune. Translated by Tamara Pearson. Venezu
ela Analysis, August 27. venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/9974.
James, C. L. R. 1963. The Black Jacobins. New York: Vintage.
La Horda y los Manosblanca del 1814. 2011. Revista Plomo 0: 4445.
Lpez Snchez, Roberto. 2009. El protagonismo popular en la historia de Venezuela. Maracaibo:
Escuela de Formacin Popular Nuestra Amrica.
Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1974. Fictitious Splits in the International. In Political
Writings, Vol. 3: The First International and After, edited by David Fernbach, 272313.
London: Penguin.
Phelan, John Leddy. 1978. The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia,
1781. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Picn-Salas, Mariano. 1943. Rousseau in Venezuela. Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 4, no. 2: 2018.
Ramrez Rojas, Klber. 2006. Historia documental del 4 de febrero. Caracas: El Perro y la
Rana.
Rangel, Domingo Alberto. 2007. Qu molleja de huelga! La huelga petrolera de 19361937.
Maracaibo: LUZ.
Rodrguez, Simn. 2004. Inventamos o erramos. Caracas: Monte Avila.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1997. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Thorie Communiste. 2011. Communization in the Present Tense. In Communization and
Its Discontents, edited by Benjamin Noys, 4160. New York: Minor Compositions.
Tucker, Robert C., ed. 1972. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: Norton.