Communal Consults and Venezuela’s Fight for the Future |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
Communal Consults and Venezuela’s Fight for the Future
Communards at an assembly in Merida approve the projects that will appear on the ballot for the communal consult (2025). Photograph by Víctor Hugo Rivera.
“This is a system of ants,” Dulce Esperanza, a member of the Candelaria Heroica Commune in Caracas, Venezuela, explained to me as we sat outside of a voting center in her commune. Bit by bit, Dulce told me, she and her neighbors have built a part of the labor, and love, that has sustained her commune of 5,000 families, carrying out the vision outlined by leader and former president Hugo Chávez two decades ago. Here, communards organize citizens’ assemblies to debate and make decisions about their communities, build and manage productive processes, and, ultimately, create an organizational structure that serves as a fundamental building block of Venezuelan democracy and society.
On March 8, Dulce, a woman with a beaming smile and short, grey hair, was among millions of communards around the country who voted to select which projects in her commune would receive government funding (USD $10,000 per project, with one to two winning projects funded per commune). The communal consults, she explained to me, were started by President Nicolás Maduro in April 2024 and take place approximately every 3 to 4 months to fund the projects selected by members of the community based on their most pressing needs, from improving potable water systems and infrastructure[*] to funding productive mechanisms such as bakeries and textile factories that are operated by the commune (known as Socially Owned Companies, or EPSs). After Maduro presented the 7 Transformations national development strategy in early 2024, each consult has begun to focus on specific elements of that plan – this time, the productive economy (T1) and humane cities (T2). The consults are a dynamic process, with improvements identified and made each time.
There are thousands[†] of communes across Venezuela, which function as a form of self-governance with a vision of ultimately replacing the bourgeois state with a communal one driven by popular power. Socialism, Chávez said, “should not be decreed. It must be… a popular creation of the masses.” Communes are the expression of this creation, “the space from which we will give birth to socialism.” The communal consults have become a fundamental aspect of how this process plays out, a school for how decisions are made at a grassroots level, how to build productive mechanisms that build toward economic independence, and how to allocate resources in alignment with the revolution’s values and strategic thinking while expanding the reach of communes and communal circuits. This school rests on two decades of advances of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, which has dedicated roughly three quarters of the state budget to social spending, eradicated illiteracy, and expanded education at every level, to name a few examples of many – skills that have been put to use by Venezuela’s working class to improve their communities and build a revolution that has been able to outlive the foreign interference that has sought to overthrow it from the onset. As Chávez put it quite frankly in the early years of the revolution, “It is unfair that, despite being a resource-rich country, Venezuela has a population where 70% live in poverty.”
An assembly in Yaracuy, Venezuela, where communards discuss proposals for the upcoming communal consult (December 2024). Photograph by Víctor Hugo Rivera.
The Communes as a School: Self-Governance, Anti-Imperialism, and the New Human Being
Chávez, who was elected in 1998 through popular vote, was aware of the challenge of governing within the confines of a bourgeois state and the inherited structures set up first under colonialism and then under the Venezuelan elite, working hand in hand with the United States. In dialogue with the Venezuelan people and allies such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro, alongside study and a system of trial and error, Chávez would eventually come to see the commune as the core building block – “the cell,” as he called it – of Bolivarian socialism. These communes are made up of smaller communal councils, or “nuclei,” he said, in his metaphor in which the cells and nuclei, together, make up a body, “the new body of the nation.” This model of self-governance gave the working class not only the skills but also the confidence and experience to govern their territory and resources in this “new body.”
Vice Minister of Communes Albanys Montilla explained the importance of this vision today more than ever, as the US has escalated its aggression against Venezuela.[‡] Speaking at one of the thousands of citizens’ assemblies that took place across the country in the lead up to the consult to propose and select projects that would appear on ballot, Albanys told a packed room at a commune in Antímano, Caracas, on February 6:
We are in a very difficult situation. … Even though Maduro isn’t here, we’re still holding the reins in this country. How? In assemblies, deciding where our resources will go, we’re going to carry out the project so that living conditions in the neighborhood and the commune improve. That’s self-governance, isn’t it? Allocating these resources so that we can take matters into our own hands.
We are in a very difficult situation. … Even though Maduro isn’t here, we’re still holding the reins in this country. How? In assemblies, deciding where our resources will go, we’re going to carry out the project so that living conditions in the neighborhood and the commune improve. That’s self-governance, isn’t it? Allocating these resources so that we can take matters into our own hands.
Albanys is in her late twenties, a towering figure with a booming voice and a fire that ignites and grounds any room that she is in. The activities of the communes, she explained at the assembly, are a training ground for a country run completely by its people, toward a communal state: “We can apply the same approach we use in our commune to all the resources that come into this country… But to do that, we must remain organized within the commune, showing ourselves, Venezuela, and the world that only the organized people of the territory will provide an answer for ourselves.”
As a part of this exercise, in which the commune is the school to create the “new human being” and the building block to transform society, communards campaigned first for their neighbors to attend the assembly and select the projects, then to garner support for the projects deemed most strategic and turn out the vote on March 8, and finally to plan and implement the projects selected.
Members of the Socialista Luchadores del Comandante Supremo Commune in Altímano, Caracas, suggest and then vote on which seven proposals will appear on the March 8 communal consult ballot, ranked in order of most to least votes received (February 6, 2026). Photograph by Celina della Croce.
At the assemblies, communards identified the most pressing issues in their communities and then voted to determine which had the most support, tallying them in order of most to least popular, with the seven selected projects appearing in that order on the ballot. One communard in Antímano, at the Socialista Luchadores del Comandante Supremo Commune, advocated for cisterns to combat water shortages........