building the commune: insurgent government, communal state

The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:4, Fall 2014

doi 10.1215/00382876-2803657 2014 Duke University Press

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 ten-sions. I first decolonize the idea of the Venezue-lan 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 Ven-ezuelan commune and nineteenth-century libera-tion struggles. Second, through the theories of for-mer guerrilla comandante Klber Ramrez Rojas, I show how this history of the commune enters into

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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 stretch-ing 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 com-mune determined by actual struggles.1 This gesture is important for practical reasons: the Communist Party of Venezuela (Partido Comunista de Venezu-ela; 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-organizationthereby 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 self-government of the producers (Tucker 1972: 555). In the same breath, how-ever, he grants the new Commune of Paris an unquestioned originality that seems to contradict his definition. While Bosteels himself is the first to ques-tion 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 for-mations, he nevertheless hesitates to broach the question of primitive com-munism 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 mis-leading, since it can erase the broad swath of dynamics and struggles stretch-ing 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 prac-tical 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




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 majorityprefigures the dual function (i.e., both radical and conservative) of the con-cept 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 ear-lier by Tpac Amaru II in what is today Peru. Discussion of so-called primi-tive communism is thus unavoidable and requires that we note crucial rebel-lions 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 inspi-ration 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 thou-sands 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




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 royal-ist, 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 rebel-lions 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 liquidat-ing 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 [desestructurando] 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




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 Chavis-tas have recently sought to recover Boves as the leader of a popular, com-moner army. One recent account insists that we not confuse the history of the Venezuelan People with the history of Venezuela (the official, republi-can version . . .), sharply noting that the very same racial and classist pejora-tives 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 contin-ued 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 democracyhowever 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 peas-ant support for the Bolvar Front under the legendary Argimiro Gabaldn, and later in the experiments by the eastern Sucre Front to establish consoli-dated 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 mas-sive 1989 anti-neoliberal rebellions known as the Caracazo. Not merely riot-ing 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




launched Chvez toward power, these communal organs provided inspira-tion 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 the-oretical 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 with-drawn 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 strug-gle 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 let-ter, an active alternative appeared in the streets, looting and burning. This was the Caracazo, a massive, weeklong rebellion that spread across the coun-try 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.




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 Commu-nist Party and later the PRV alongside Douglas Bravo, a guerrilla comandante, Ramrez Rojas resisted the death of the armed struggle to the very last moment. Within the PRV more than many other organizations, the theoreti-cal 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 redis-covery 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 Ram rez 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 vet-eran of the Venezuelan 1968 played a crucial role in the clandestine forging of the military-civilian alliance that was the MBR-200, the group includ-ing 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 commu-niqus 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 Ven-ezuela 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-




resents, creating a new state, a commoner state.11 Such a state would dis-tance 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 priori-tize their own plans for the development of their well-being, and whose bud-gets are then administered by themselves (47).

Emerging as a direct response to the imposition of neoliberal struc-tural adjustment, this new, commoner state, as well as the continental inte-gration it would spearhead, would have as its bywords To produce food, science, and dignity (48; emphasis in original). It would rely heavily on coop-erative 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 investiga-tion. Lest these documents be perceived as either too ambitiously utopian or as blueprints for the future, Ramrez Rojass (2006: 75) plan for an emer-gency 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 bal-ance 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 com-moner rather than communard). The fundamental structures in ques-tion, nevertheless, share much with the Parisian experience: We advocate a broadening of democracy in which the communities will assume the funda-mental 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 begin-ning the construction of the new state (141). This was a call to deepen the already existing popular assemblies, alongside the simultaneous develop-ment of self-defense structures like the grassroots militias already emerging in the Venezuelan barrios.12




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 unificationthe idea of the commoner state, or what Ramrez Rojas provocatively calls a government of popular insurgency, took shape. And largely out of the rela-tionship 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 Venezu-elan 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 rela-tive isolation and absent a direct connection to socialist production, Chvez and others pressed forward with the establishment of broader confedera-tions 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 proj-ect is based on the construction of council structures from the bottom up, in different sectors of society (workers councils, communal councils, com-munes, 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




It would be no coincidence, then, that Chvez announced these transformations with a quote from none other than Ramrez Rojas him-self, 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 com-munes from above, Denis insists that communes necessarily emerge with-out the law. This is not a rejection of the Bolivarian processwith which Denis continues to identifybut rather a recognition of the profound ten-sion between communization from below and from above.

While the replacement of the liberal state by the communes is cer-tainly a long way off, some signs exist that the political will to push the pro-cess forward might exist. Earlier this year, Reinaldo Iturriza, a radical intel-lectual closely associated with barrio youth movements, was named minister of communes, and shortly thereafter, newly elected president Nicols Mad-uro 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 dif-fusely 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




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 for crazy 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, quanti-tative 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 commu-nizing 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 develop-ment 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 reaf-firms 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 communiza-tion 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 under-standing of the importance of prolonged processes and hegemonic strug-gles. 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 some-thing 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




moment par excellence now becomes a continuous process, a negative dialec-tic with no telos outside its incessant deepening, dual power no longer under-stood 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 Commu-niste (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 com-mune 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 com-munism 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 pro-ductive 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 rela-tionship between forces from above and from below, is a process that will make a lot of enemies. Many local elected leaders, mayors, and state gover-nors in VenezuelaChavistas and opposition alikealready feel threatened by the communal councils and the looming communes and have every rea-son 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 lop-sided 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.




Notes

1 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).

2 Like Bosteelss revisionist approach to the temporality of the Mexican Revolution, I have elsewhere sought something similar with Venezuelas current Bolivarian Revo-lution, displacing those moments centered on constituted power (1992, 1998) and emphasizing those that represent constituent upsurge (1989, 2002). See Ciccariello-Maher 2013: 88103, 16679).

3 See also Bosteels 2011: 12. 4 For example, the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay, described by one historian as semi-

communism (Cunninghame Graham 1901). See also Gott 1993. 5 Mariano Picn-Salas (1943: 205), for example, refers to Rodrguezs sentimental Uto-

pia taken from Rousseau, seemingly oblivious to this circularity. Translations from Spanish throughout the essay are mine.

6 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, indige-nous, and Afro rebels. Phelan, who emphasizes the Colombian side of the Comunero without much mention of participation in western Venezuela, also notes the impor-tance 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.

7 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).

8 The same could be said of Bolvars attack on the foundations of the indigenous com-mune. 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).

9 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 Ven-ezuela 2014).

10 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.

11 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 moderniza-tion of the state and military apparatus and the centralization of authority, alongside an obedient openness to the interests of US capital.




12 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.

13 Some, like Margarita Lpez Maya, neglect the importance of Ramrez Rojas in pro-viding the theoretical foundation for the communal state (Gonzlez 2013).

14 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.

15 Chvez (2010) cites this passage in his column Onward toward a Communal State! The passage from Ramrez Rojas is from Historia documental (146).

16 Thus in line with Bosteelss discussion of Adolfo Gilly and Ramrez Rojass critique of the barrio assemblies.

17 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 repeat-ing loop of a drive. What is less clear, however, is whether this desire is truly as uni-versalist as Dean suggests.

18 Alain Badiou (2012) arguably makes the inverse mistake, by reinforcing the commu-nist-anarchist divide in The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings.

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building the commune: insurgent government, communal state

Documents

venezuelan commune

mexican commune

communal stateat

venezuelan commune

venezuelan commune

south atlantic quarterly

long trajectory

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