❈ ❈ ❈

The Commune and Popular Sovereignty in Times of Imperialist Siege

Cira Pascual Marquina

I write these lines at a particularly difficult moment for Venezuelan sovereignty. The imperialist attack of January 3 and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and Congresswoman Cilia Flores marked a new escalation in an aggression that now spans more than twenty-six years against the Bolivarian Revolution. This is not an isolated episode. It is a new chapter in a broad and multifaceted strategy aimed at taking away the Venezuelan people and government’s power of decision and, ultimately, reversing the political path inaugurated in 1999.

In this context, the leadership of the revolution has been forced to make difficult decisions. There has been no shortage of tedious and often legalistic debates about the reform of the Hydrocarbons Law. However, that reform had in fact already been under discussion prior to the attack. By contrast, what does constitute a tactical concession affecting our national sovereignty is how the United States now oversees and controls our oil sales.

No one who has historically defended energy sovereignty can ignore the weight of this blow. Nevertheless, the immediate alternative to this concession was not maintaining sovereignty—an idea often invoked by “leftists” in the global North as they hastily declare the end of our revolution—but rather an all-out bloody war under extremely unfavorable conditions, accompanied by a naval blockade. Under imperialist siege, even revolutionary processes may be forced to maneuver to preserve life and ensure their continuity.

It was a hard blow. But it was also the result of a prolonged economic war whose objective has been precisely to close off all avenues for the country’s material reproduction.

Lenin knew these situations well. In the most difficult years of the Soviet Revolution, he defended the New Economic Policy as a necessary tactical retreat to preserve what was fundamental. Revolutionary politics, he insisted, requires distinguishing between what can be defended at a given moment and what constitutes the strategic core of a historical process.

Today, that distinction becomes crucial once again. National sovereignty is not reducible to control over a strategic resource, however important it may be. In Venezuela, there exists another equally important dimension: organized popular sovereignty.

This is the terrain of the commune.

When Karl Marx analyzed the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, he wrote a phrase that retains all its force: “The Commune was the direct antithesis of the Empire.” What was revolutionary about that experience was not a change in government, but the emergence of a new political form: a structure in which the working people began to govern themselves.

The commune thus represented more than a local institution or a mechanism to address specific territorial problems. It was a political form capable of embodying collective emancipation.

This idea takes on particular relevance in the contemporary world, and it is precisely for this reason that Chávez conceived the commune as a superior organizational form aimed at undermining the foundations of the bourgeois state, overcoming the metabolism of capital, and transforming the social relations of production.

Capitalism, whose tendency toward concentration and expansion Marx had already anticipated, now takes the form Lenin conceptualized as imperialism: a global system of domination and dispossession in the service of big capital, sustained by financial, military, and—increasingly—communicational power.

In this context, the communal question takes on strategic significance.

As Chris Gilbert argues in his essay “Socialist Communes and Anti-Imperialism: A Marxist Perspective,” for communes to have real anti-imperialist potential, they cannot be conceived as spaces of local autonomy disconnected from the national political process. When this happens, the communal project risks being neutralized or reduced to a marginal experience.

The Marxist—and Chavista—perspective points in another direction. The commune is not a local refuge from the system, but a fundamental component of a broader strategy of power and social transformation.

As Gilbert further explains, when Hugo Chávez proposed communes as the “basic cells” of Venezuelan socialism, he did so within an explicitly anti-imperialist horizon. The goal was not to build isolated communities, but to reorganize the country as a whole and open the path toward a social metabolism different from that of capital.

Chávez made this clear in 2009. “An isolated commune is counterrevolutionary,” he said.

Communes must be articulated into communal cities, federations, and ultimately into a confederation capable of progressively displacing the old state. This was not a localist project. It was a national one.

Today, this wager takes on even greater significance!

Under conditions of imperialist siege, a society’s ability to reproduce life with dignity depends to a large extent on the organization of the working class. Communal production, collective management of services, and collective decision-making become concrete mechanisms both of resistance and of building new social relations that point toward emancipation.

The recent National Popular Consultation, held on March 8, International Working Women’s Day, expresses precisely this dynamic.

Thousands of communes across the country debated and prioritized projects aimed at addressing concrete needs: water systems, productive initiatives, community infrastructure, educational, sports, and cultural spaces. The consultations might appear to be simple administrative measures within the state apparatus, but their significance runs much deeper.

Every time a community collectively decides how to organize its material life, it exercises a concrete form of sovereignty. And we are not speaking here of an abstract sovereignty proclaimed in speeches, but a sovereignty that is practiced.

This popular sovereignty acquires strategic value when a country faces unilateral coercive measures and military aggression. The objective of such attacks is not only to pressure a government: it is to disorganize social life and fracture the collective fabric that allows a society to reproduce itself with dignity.

In the face of this strategy, communal organization operates as a form of social resilience.

Communities that produce food, organize economic circuits, manage services, or collectively prioritize their resources, build a capacity for resistance that no blockade can fully destroy.

This is why the commune is not only a democratic experiment. It is also a form of national defense.

In this sense, it is politically significant that, just two months after the January 3 attack, the national government—with Acting President Delcy Rodríguez at the helm—chose to center these popular consultations. At a moment when imperialism presses for the dismantling of popular power, the decision has been the opposite: to maintain communal democracy as the backbone of the revolutionary process. This reflects a strategic understanding: in the midst of siege, the principal strength of the Bolivarian Revolution does not lie solely in state institutions, but in the territorial organization of the working class. In times of imperialist aggression, strengthening popular power is not a political luxury—it is a historical necessity.

As Gilbert reminds us, Marx argued that communal relations constitute the fundamental antithesis of a system based on commodity exchange. Whereas capitalism transforms social relations into relations between things—relations that are mediated by money, the markets and capital—communal production implies collective control over productive activity.

That collective control is, ultimately, a form of sovereignty.

In Venezuela, sovereignty is being built in thousands of communes—some more robust and consolidated, others still incipient—where politics ceases to be a distant affair and becomes a daily practice.

Of course, commune-building is full of contradictions. The construction of the communal state coexists with inherited bureaucratic structures, enormous economic difficulties, and the tensions inherent to any process of historical transformation.

Yet even amid these tensions, the commune remains the strategic horizon. In a world where power is increasingly concentrated in corporations and financial centers, the idea that communities can directly govern key aspects of their collective life carries a profoundly subversive potential.

Defending Venezuela against imperialism does not mean only denouncing external aggression. It also means defending and deepening the forms of popular organization that can sustain daily life with dignity.

If, at times, national sovereignty must maneuver or concede ground in specific areas in order to withstand the siege, there is one sphere in Venezuela where there can be no retreat: that of popular sovereignty in the territory.

It is there that the deepest root of our historical process is found.

Oil may be subject to tactical negotiations. Geopolitical correlations may shift. Economic conditions may force difficult decisions. But as long as there exists an organized pueblo capable of governing its territories, the possibility of building a different society remains alive.

In Venezuela, that possibility has a name: the commune.

And in times of imperialist siege, defending the commune as a national project means defending the deepest form of sovereignty: the sovereignty of an organized people that produces and shares collectively. But this defense cannot be reduced to resistance. The commune is also a strategic wager for popular offensive action: rebellious yet disciplined, creative yet organized—capable of transforming the defense of life into the conscious construction of a new society.

But such an offensive requires acting without naivety or false hopes. As Ramón Grosfoguel recently argued, the moment demands combining tactical flexibility with strategic firmness; constantly assessing the balance of forces with realism; working to recover lost ground; and preparing for future attacks. If the history of imperialism teaches us anything, it is that its ultimate objective is not merely to pressure or discipline processes of change, but to defeat and bury them.

In the Venezuelan case, defeating the Bolivarian Revolution would mean doing so in all its dimensions, including erasing or blurring the historical horizon embodied in communal construction, with its transformative potential. For this reason, defending the commune cannot be limited to the local management of daily life or territorial resistance to siege. It must be conceived as part of a national project of collective emancipation, capable of sustaining, deepening, and projecting organized popular power toward a socialist future.

Ultimately, what is at stake is not only the survival of the government—though that must be secured—but the historical possibility of the working class governing itself.

That is where popular sovereignty resides.

And that possibility—as Marx reminded us—has a concrete political form: the commune.

[Cira Pascual Marquina is Political Science professor at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela in Caracas. She is also a popular educator at the Pluriversidad Patria Grande, the educational initiative of El Panal Commune; as well as a member of the International Communal Democracy Network. Courtesy: MR Online, a forum for collaboration and communication between radical activists, writers, and scholars around the world, started by Monthly Review, the famed socialist magazine published from New York.]

❈ ❈ ❈

Rats and Bananas: Western Media, Violence, and Freedom in Venezuela

Celina della Croce

On the morning of 26 March 2026, two crowds gathered outside of the federal courthouse in Manhattan where President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores sat awaiting their trial, set to begin at 11AM that day. On one side was a group of protestors gathered behind a large yellow banner that read “Free President Maduro and Cilia Flores.” On the other, separated by a metal barrier, was a smaller group, largely of Venezuelans cheering on the prosecution. Nearly the entire press presence was located on the anti-Maduro side: around the time the trial was set to begin and during the two hours leading up to it, there was roughly one journalist for every member of the opposition from outlets such as CNN, AP News, The Guardian, and BBC.

“I wonder how many of those people [supporting Maduro] are actually invested in this issue in the long-term,” The Guardian’s reporter told me after I casually asked who she was reporting for and if she had talked to both sides. When I mentioned that I had returned from 3.5 months in Venezuela the day before, and that I was in Venezuela during the 3 January bombing of Caracas, she promptly told me that she had to “circulate some more” and scurried off to talk to more members of the anti-Maduro side of the protest.

The Rat, Banana, and Right-Wing Violence

Prominently featured in the center of the anti-Maduro protest was an effigy of the president dressed in orange prison clothes, with a chain around his hands and his neck; red, bulging, rat-like eyes; and oversized hands with pointed fingers that appeared almost rodent-like. Stuffed into the effigy’s handcuffs was a banana, not unlike the racist imagery that US President Donald Trump recently used to degrade former President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama. The latter was met by outrage, yet the ape-ish prop adorning Maduro went largely unnoticed—or unreported—by the press.

This sort of symbolism speaks volumes: what Maduro, and Chávez before him, represent to the Venezuelan elite is a process through which the poor and working class stood up to demand not only access to basic human rights such as literacy and health care, but also dignity and a say in the direction of their country. To them, Maduro, a former bus driver, is a banana-holding ape, a less developed species that should have stayed in the barrio from which he came.

“I’m from Venezuela! They [are] not from Venezuela!” shouted one man holding the shackled Maduro and banana. Others hit the effigy in the eyes, strangled its neck, and hung it from a tree as others cheered and laughed. The zealous violence inflicted upon this effigy is not merely symbolic: it is a defining feature of Venezuela’s right wing. In the guarimbas, violent right-wing protests that swept the country in 2004, 2014, and 2017 and were championed by opposition leader María Corina Machado and others, Chavistas—or anyone assumed to be a Chavista if they were dark enough or looked poor enough—were attacked, beheaded, stabbed, shot, and even burned alive. (It is worth noting that Corina Machado’s role leading this violence is among the reasons she was not eligible to run for president). Accountability for such crimes—or even common crimes, if perpetrated by the right wing—are portrayed by the ‘international community’ as authoritarian repression.

William Camacaro, a pro-Maduro Venezuelan activist protesting in front of the courthouse on Thursday, told me about the historic impunity of the elite in Venezuela, and how the justice system had changed over the 26 years of the revolution. Before the revolution, he said, “suspending constitutional rights was a sport… People would be murdered in the street without anyone being held to account”—even when the state killed thousands of Venezuelans in the Caracazo uprising, including three of his cousins. Since Chávez’s election in 1998, he continued, “there have been gross excesses on the part of the opposition. There have been takeovers, arson attacks, people have been burned alive. They have done everything, and yet constitutional guarantees have not been suspended.”

Social Debt

The revolution marked a significant change not only in the long-held impunity of the elite, but in paying the ‘social debt’ owed to the Venezuelan population at large and democratizing society, allowing historically disenfranchised sectors of the population to be the drivers in creating a new, democratic society. Whereas the Venezuelan elite had previously been the primary beneficiaries of the wealth from the country’s oil reserves (the largest in the world), after the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, 75 percent of national spending was directed towards social investment for the population at large. A series of social missions focused on lifting the population out of poverty: Mission Robinson taught three million people how to read and write and achieved 100 percent literacy in the country while Mission Sucre graduated over 600,000 professionals from universities; Mission Vivienda granted over 5 million homes to families across the country; Mission Barrio Adentro built health clinics across the country; and Mission Milagro restored the eyesight of some 300,000 Venezuelans while providing eye surgery to 1 million. Dozens of missions focused on various aspects of well-being that had long been out of reach for the majority of Venezuelans. Beyond the services they provided, missions were also a way for working-class people to take a leading role in building the new vision for their country and the organizational structure to sustain it, such as by sending Venezuelans to Cuba to learn from the country’s hugely successful literacy campaign and lead the campaign back home.

Yet these programs have suffered tremendously since the imposition of US sanctions, when Venezuela experienced a “deep deterioration in health, nutrition, and food security indicators… [that reflected] the largest economic collapse outside of wartime since 1950,” as Venezuelan economist and opposition supporter Francisco Rodríguez reported. By March 2020, former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas estimated that 100,000 Venezuelans had died as a result of the sanctions. Outside of the courthouse on 26 March, this hardship was a common point of discussion—but the factors causing it were not. Nor was there any mention of what life was like for the majority before 1998.

That day—as is often the case in discussions about Venezuela within the US—the theme that centered “the Venezuelan perspective” came up again and again. The opposition supporters claimed to speak for all Venezuelans, a narrative that the press eagerly amplified. Yet, in addition to seeming only to interview Venezuelans on one side of the barrier in front of the courthouse, press coverage left out the voices of Venezuelans in Venezuela. So, what do Venezuelans in Venezuela think? What would they have told the reporters?

Freedom

Over the last three and a half months, I asked Venezuelans across Venezuela what they thought of the diaspora in the United States’s claims that they represent the voice of their country in celebrating freedom after the fall of a dictatorship, as many in front of the courthouse expressed. “If this is a dictatorship”, Andreína Álvarez, a young afro-Venezuelan woman, told me the day of the communal consult on 8 March, “I don’t know what you call the actual dictatorships in the world, which the oppressors and, well, the empire, don’t [say anything about]”. “The dictatorship that those… stateless people talk about, who aren’t even here in our country fighting the fight—it’s a complete fabrication”, Jenifer Lamus, a mother and leader of the Maizal Commune, told me. ”Those of us who are here are working and we’re pouring our heart and soul into every organizational process.”

One taxi driver in Caracas who never voted for Chávez or Maduro, and supported neither, told me with horror what it was like to be woken up at 2 AM with hundreds of helicopters descending upon his city. Anaís Marquez, a mother of three and member of the 5 de Marzo Commune, recounted that ‘When [the bombing] started, I was with my children, and they didn’t know what to do. They asked me, “mom, what’s going on?”. My youngest daughter is seven years old, and she thought it was a tsunami or an earthquake. I hugged them and I told them to be still, to stay calm, and to get dressed to find out what was going on.’

Was it worth it, I asked her? Did she feel that she had been freed, as many Venezuelans abroad were claiming? Her voice shook with anger. “We’re not a repressed people; we are a free and sovereign people, and we are fighting… for our president Nicolás Maduro and for our [first] combatant Cilia Flores… And now, more than ever, [for] Trump to get out of Venezuela.”

What was clear to me was that Venezuelans in Venezuela—both those who support and oppose the revolution and President Maduro—were overwhelmingly horrified by the actions of the United States and want the right to determine their own path, and to sort through their own internal contradictions, without foreign intervention. “Bullets don’t care if you’re a Chavista” was a phrase I heard over and over again.

Venezuelans across the political spectrum each had a story of the collective trauma imposed by the 3 January bombing and kidnapping, from tending to their children who could no longer sleep without being woken by nightmares to the common experience of jumping up at each sound, unsure if it the backfiring of a motorcycle was just that or the dropping of another missile. Despite years of foreign intervention—from illegal US sanctions and unliteral coercive measures to an information war and US funding of opposition groups—support for US actions within the country is a marginal phenomenon blown out of proportion by Western media.

[Celina della Croce is the Coordinator of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Courtesy: Globetrotter, a project of Independent Media Institute, a nonprofit organization that educates the public through a diverse array of independent media projects and programs.]