Building the Commune. George Ciccariello-Maher

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Building the Commune

      The Jacobin series features short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective, as an avenue to radical political practice. The books offer critical analysis and engagement with the history and ideas of the Left in an accessible format.

      The series is a collaboration between Verso Books and Jacobin magazine, which is published quarterly in print and online at jacobinmag.com.

      Other titles in this series available from Verso Books:

      The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

      Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant

      Utopia or Bust by Benjamin Kunkel

      Strike for America by Micah Uetricht

      Class War by Megan Erickson

      Four Futures by Peter Frase

      Building the Commune

      Radical Democracy in Venezuela

      GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER

      This edition first published by Verso 2016

      © George Ciccariello-Maher 2016

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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      ISBN-13; 978-1-78478-223-8

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-224-5 (US EBK)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-225-2 (UK EBK)

       British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

      Typeset in Fournier by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh, Scotland

      Printed in the US by Maple Press

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      1.A History of the Commune

      2.The Barrios and the Struggle for Urban Space

      3.Counterrevolution

       4.Militias and Revolutionary Collectives

       5.The Commune in Progress

       6.Culture and Production

       Conclusion: A Communal Future?

       Notes

       INTRODUCTION

      Nothing says “enough” like a bus on fire. On February 27, 1989, Venezuelans woke up to an economic reform package that saw gas prices double overnight, and with them bus fares. Workers and students on their Monday morning commute into the capital, Caracas, decided they had had enough. Instead of simply paying the new fare, they began to burn buses, occupy bus terminals, and block streets. While their anger was initially focused on the bus drivers, it wasn’t long before they set their sights on the government. Burning buses soon gave way to marches and protests, broken glass, looted stores, and nearly a week of rioting across the entire country.

      Grainy news footage from the rebellion shows the population looting unashamedly, some covering their faces but most not even bothering. After all, they were taking back things they deserved, but of which they had been deprived. Basic goods that had become too expensive or hard to find were soon discovered hoarded in warehouses and storerooms. These were now redistributed directly by the people themselves, who carried everything from imported whiskey to entire sides of beef on their shoulders up into the barrios (shantytowns) surrounding the city. In some instances, local police—who knew full well they couldn’t stop the looting if they tried—even helped to make the process more orderly.

      This was the Caracazo—the “explosion in Caracas,” although the rebellion quickly went national, lasting almost a full week in some places. The Caracazo marked the first of a series of Latin American rebellions against the spread of neoliberal economic reforms that would see presidents deposed and political parties collapse across the continent. In theory, neoliberalism claims to minimize the role of the state in favor of the free market, but in practice the state has played a major role in enforcing neoliberal reform at gunpoint, in Latin America and elsewhere. When Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende, the elected socialist president of Chile, in a 1973 coup backed by the CIA, he made the country a testing ground for radical experiments in market-based economics. And in the 1980s, a US interest-rate increase set off a debt crisis across Latin America as a whole that provided a pretext for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to step in and impose neoliberal reforms more broadly.¹

      Poor countries saddled with massive debts had no choice but to beg the IMF and World Bank for bailouts. The strings attached to these loans took the form of what has been called “structural adjustment,” but this polite term conceals a brutal reality. In practice, neoliberal reforms meant cutting wages, laying off teachers and other public-sector workers, cutting social-welfare spending, and privatizing public goods by selling off natural resources and services like water and gas—not to the highest bidder, but often to the highest briber. Under duress from international lenders, governments handed over their sovereignty by restructuring entire economies according to the dictates of the global market, giving foreign corporations free rein while they paid almost no taxes, and eliminating any and all price controls put in place to protect the poorest Latin Americans.

      In Venezuela, gas prices and bus fares were simply the last straw. Following a decade of oil-fueled growth, the Venezuelan economy had been in crisis since at least 1983, when the price of oil tanked and the currency devalued sharply, instantly making people’s wages and the money in their pockets worth much less. One newspaper greeted the decision, whose date is still known as Black Friday, with a headline announcing: “The Party Is Over.”² A series of neoliberal reform packages followed, with a single common denominator: eliminating all safeguards that existed to protect the Venezuelan population from the ravages of the global economy. This meant lifting price controls on the basic goods the population needed, freeing interest rates, reducing all sorts of subsidies—gas prices included—and increasing the cost of public utilities.

      The result in Venezuela and elsewhere was not the growth that neoliberal economists and ideologues had promised, but instead the exact opposite: what is referred to in Latin America as the “lost decade,” in which the only things that really grew were unemployment and poverty. By the end of the 1980s, nearly half of all Latin Americans were living in poverty, with nearly 70 million falling into poverty in that decade alone. By 1989, the Venezuelan economy was shrinking, inflation was running at 85 percent, and the poor were bearing the brunt: more than 44 percent of families were living in poverty, and almost half of those in extreme poverty.

      Against this backdrop, presidential candidate Carlos Andrés Pérez played the role of charismatic savior. Having