Communes and Workers' Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below

Historical Materialism #133

by Dario Azzellini

Too often the story of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution is told with an excessive focus on former president Hugo Chávez. In this history from below, Dario Azellini turns our attention toward the ways workers, peasants, and the poor in urban communities have led the struggle for 21st century socialism. This fascinating account draws on extensive empirical studies and participant interviews.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

316 pages, Paperback

Published February 20, 2018

About the author

Dario Azzellini is assistant professor for sociology at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, writer and documentary director. He holds a PhD in political science at the Goethe University in Frankfurt (Germany) and a PhD in sociology at the BUAP in Puebla (Mexico). His research and writing focuses on social and revolutionary militancy, popular power and self-administration, workers control, migration and racism, social movements and extensive case studies in Latin America. Azzellini published several books, essays and documentaries about social movements, privatization of military services, migration and racism, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia and Venezuela. Among them: The Business of War (Assoziation A 2002), a book about privatization of military services, translated and published in Germany, Argentina, Bolivia, France, Indonesia, Italy, Spain and Venezuela. Azzellini is co-editor of Ours to Master and to Own: Worker Control from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket 2011). With Marina Sitrin he is co-author of "Occupying Language" (Occupied Media Pamphlet 2012) and "They Can’t Represent Us. Reinventing Democracy From Greece to Occupy" (Verso 2014).

Azzellini served as Associate Editor for The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) and was primary editor for Latin America, the Spanish Caribbean, and the new left in Italy. He serves as Associate Editor for WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society and for Cuadernos de Marte, an academic publication on the sociology of war published through the University of Buenos Aires. Azzellini also is a documentary filmmaker. His latest film is “Comuna under construction“(2010) on local self-government in Venezuela. Azzellini has been invited to conferences in Europe, North America, South America and Asia. His art projects focus on socio-political themes and have been exhibited in galleries, museums and biennales around the world.

Reviews

[Lou Corn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been reading this 21st Bolivarian history of Venezuela "from below" in little chunks for MONTHS. There were some dense chapters of sociological study in the middle re: the particulars of communal councils, worker co-ops, worker's councils, communes and other related democratic grassroots and state supported projects. Those took some time to read through but were also some of my favorite sections because there were longer interview excerpts with the various people involved in these projects. I'll return to those when thinking through similar forms.

Theoretically this book offers the constituted power/constituent power contradiction as the primary analysis of twenty-first socialism in Venezuela. This culminates in the question of the communal state, a chewy, paradoxical-seeming, already pre-figured form that resonates to me with the call from Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui to generate new, divergent concepts and forms for the heroic creation of Indo-American socialism.

"Driven by its contradictions and conflicts, constituent power is a concept of crisis. For this reason, the new society cannot be created in planning offices, but only in real-world practice." What I appreciate is that in describing the practice (emphasis on this word) of constructing and maintaining these different communal democratic groups and projects, the author engages failings, conflicts, impasses.

I've been recommending this one a lot and will here again!

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Azzellini has succeeded in capturing in a clear manner the dynamics of the Boliviarian process. Among the handful of books on the revolutionary movements in Venezuela that I've read, this is by the far the most insightful.

The author compellingly elucidates the theoretical framework of 'two tract construction' (ie from above/from below or from the institutions/from the grassroots) which has animated Venezuela since at least 1998. More so than other authors, Azzellini dives into the contradictions between constituent and constituted power and details how these tensions play out in the construction of popular power.

I think this book ranks as among the first order as a work of historical materialist investigation, packed full with quantitative and qualitative descriptions of the construction of workers' councils, communes and many more sites of class struggle.

Without a doubt, this books contains a great deal of practical lessons for the construction of socialism in the 21st century, whether in Venezuela or for the left movements in the imperial core. The one downside of this text (through no fault of its own) is that much has transpired in Venezuela since it's publication in 2015. I'm eager to explore Azzellini's work in the last (nearly) decade.

Finishing this book left me with a profound sense of the depth of revolutionary change unfolding in Venezuela. Surely, the Boliviarian process represents one of the most dynamic, experimental and fundamentally new approaches to building an alternative to capitalism of the last 100 years. This book dispels many of the critiques foisted at Venezuela from the left in the imperial core. It is clear that not only do the revolutionary cadres there not only have a completely clear eyed perspective on the character of the bourgeoisie liberal state, but that their most basic struggle is to construct a state of a new type (the communal state), leveraging the old apparatus of governance where possible and building from the ground up when not. I believe that the insights of the revolutionaries on the ground constitute a true Leninism for the 21st century. I hope other comrades will read this vital book.

[Viral · Rating 5 out of 5]

While dense, this book represents an excellent piece of scholarship for discussions about the political economy of Venezuela. It's definitely a tough one to read, so I'd warn readers that it is a heavy academic text, but it's incredibly rewarding. A fascinating view into the world of the Venezuelan communes.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

A governmental bureaucrat from Europe coming with the old tried and true: if something does not work, just spend more in the same direction.