Status Updates From Building the Commune: Radic...

You can do politics against the state or with the state, but you would be fucked trying to do politics without the state.

- Andrés Antillano, militant organizer and leader of a participatory research project in several communes of Caracas

The goal, according to Alex Alayo, a member of the El Maizal Commune, is to establish a 'new productive matrix' that would be able to move beyond basic goods and absorb industrial production. Regional consolidation, Alayo argues... [through economies of scale] would share not only goods but technological advances [between communes] through popular education campaigns.

According to [Ángel Prado, an elected spokesperson for the El Maizal commune], the...'principle enemies' are actually Chavistas: local mayors and state governors feel threatened by successful experiments that cut into their resources and make them look bad...Even local sustainability...seems to threaten the economic status quo [with a] clash between the state, private sector, and communes.

Like the sansculottes [French Revolution grassroots], Venezuelan revolutionaries are dedicated to the slow and difficult construction of radically democratic and participatory socialist alternatives. This promise, however, is also a warning that Nicolas Maduro neglects at his own peril: it is not the Venezuelan Jacobins that will save the Bolivarian Revolution, but the sansculottes.

"Sitting around debating local infrastructure projects is not what most teenagers consider a good time."

Best part of this short book so far is how it explores the tensions with/the role of lumpenproletariat in the barrios in sustaining the Bolivarian Revolution.