In this engaging discussion, Chris Gilbert, a professor at Venezuela's Bolivarian University and author of Commune or Nothing, shares insights into Venezuela's socialist communes. He details his visit to the Maizal Commune, highlighting its revolutionary educational role and production activities. Gilbert also contrasts Marxist communes with alternative models, emphasizing their anti-imperialist significance. Exploring Marx's views, he connects the historical emergence of these communes to the broader Bolivarian process and revolutionary strategies.
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Rural Commune Visit And Political Formation
Chris Gilbert recounts visiting a maizal commune that organized production across 5,000 acres and ran cattle, maize, cheese, and corn flour operations.
He emphasizes the commune's role as a school for political development and maintaining revolutionary ideals through praxis.
insights INSIGHT
Communes Embedded In A National Socialist Project
Venezuelan communes differ from hippie or anarchist models by being explicitly Marxist, anti-capitalist, and integrated into a national project.
Chavez intended communes to form part of a national communal system scaling to thousands of communes and large populations.
insights INSIGHT
Marx's Tricontinental Commune Perspective
Marx studied global communal formations and saw them as both critiques of capitalism and building blocks for associated producers.
Gilbert argues Marx's late work frames communes as anti-colonial and anti-imperialist organizational cells for socialism.
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In Part 2 of our ongoing series on Venezuela, Chris Gilbert joins us to discuss Venezuela's socialist communes from a Marxist, anti-imperialist perspective. Chris Gilbert is a professor at Venezuela’s Bolivarian University and a writer based in Caracas. Grounded in a Marxist perspective, his research includes communes, socialist strategy, social reproduction theory, and imperialism. He's the author of Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project and Venezuela, the Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution with Cira Pascual Marquina. He's also a co-host of the Marxist educational podcast and television program Escuela de Cuadros.
In this episode, we open with a discussion on the socialist commune itself and what Marx had to say about communes as they relate to socialism before we examine the Venezuelan commune movement, distinguishing it from the hippy communes of popular culture and also from more anarchist-inspired communes like the Zapatista Autonomous Regions in Chiapas or the communes of Rojava. We discuss the way the Bolivarian revolution unfolded from the early 1990s to the present and the role that communes have played in laying the foundations for anti-imperialism and socialism. In the second half of the conversation we take a look at current events, taking stock of the Trump administration's escalation of aggression and tackling the narrative of Venezuela as a narco-state, the Trump administration's obsession with Tren de Aragua, and more.
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