Ayelén Correa Ruau | Network of Media and Communication Collectives (Argentina)
This text is a reflection on the Guerreros de Azua, La Integración del Pueblo, Los Kenikes, and Juan Pablo Peñaloza Communes, experiences from the state of Táchira in western Venezuela. It represents a sounding board for dialogues that took place in a context of trust, reflection on practice, and the construction of horizons for deepening communal democracy in Venezuela between 2014 and 2017.
The organisation of the communes in Venezuela bears witness to a geo-historical accumulation (Vargas Arenas & Sanoja Obediente, 2017) of community, neighbourhood, and district associations that have been articulated with social movements, peasant movements, political organisations, and state mechanisms for citizen participation and the transfer of powers to the organised community. Through the communes, we can also see the construction of a new Venezuelan statehood.
This work is based on the experience of citizen participation in the communes, made possible by a constituent process of transformation of the nation-state in Venezuela beginning in 1999. The time frame constructed takes as its reference points milestones in the recent socio-historical context related to Chavista statehood initiatives for what Vargas (2020) calls the densification of democracy. The first event considered is the approval of the first Law on Community Councils in 2006, which was the legal framework that promoted the first system of territorial aggregation, a precursor to the commune. In turn, this law underwent modifications until 2010, when the foundations were laid for what, starting in 2007, Chavismo would call ‘revolutionary, protagonist democracy.’ The event that closes the time frame is the Presidential Council of Popular Government with the communes, a political forum for dialogue and co-management between spokespersons from communes across the country and high-ranking officials from different areas of the executive branch, which was introduced in 2015.
The objective is to problematise the symbolic disputes that exist in the experiences of citizen participation in the communes, providing a perspective on the statehood that builds the participatory democracy promoted by Chavismo.
It should be noted that there is an ongoing debate on this issue, with at least three fluctuating and interrelated positions: those who analyse the communes as part of a clientelist network with the state, Chavismo in government, and the official party; those who deny any linear relationship between the state and popular power, with a somewhat naive view that there is a harmonious articulation without power relations; and, on the other hand, exploratory work on the micro-social experience of the communes as a construction of popular power and new political subjectivities. I intend to contribute to this last field, problematising the first two positions.
The microsocial approach allows us to generate knowledge from specific subjective processes, but it also builds bridges between that particular experience and larger contexts of reference; it is a matter of being able to simultaneously articulate, through a dialectical process, the universal in the singular and the singular in the universal (Alfonso and Catino, 2009). Subjectivation processes are understood as part of collective history, and instead of dividing them into scales (micro–macro), we prefer to mix them in a geometry that recognises their comings and goings.
In this sense, based on the experience of the communes recovered in this work, political subjectivities are configured in a problematic field where:
a) popular protagonism is opposed to anti-politics;
b) people not linked to “politics” enter politics (Offerlé, 1996; Ferraudi Curto, 2010); and
c) participants in the communes―who had been considered pre-political―constitute a new political subject (Iturriza López, 2016).
In the Venezuelan context, the commune is a territorialised social organisation that defines a geographical area of scope, which may be located in a municipality or combine different municipal jurisdictions, without affecting its organisation administratively. It holds a popular referendum in that geographical area to approve its formation, for which it must consolidate a census of its electoral population, as well as a census of needs, a Community Development Plan, and a proposal for spokespersons for the communal government. It acquires legal status, which enables it to implement co-management mechanisms in public policies, take on services and activities, and manage loans and public and/or private subsidies. The mass organisation of communes began in 2010, following the approval of the Organic Law.
Despite the absence of a law, the communes began to organise themselves in 2007, following important social debates on an attempt at constitutional reform promoted by Chavista forces, which proposed decentralising power through the recognition of communal governments. This is not a minor detail in approaching the subject, because despite being constitutionally and legally legitimised instances of organisation and participation, much of their history is similarly marked by intuitive action, interacting with Chávez’s performativity and existing public policies. At the same time, community members claim that citizen participation laws are rights that enable places of possibility―a gateway (Ferraudi Curto, 2010) to political life in the country.
To understand the communes, one must include the community councils, not only because they are community-based and territorialised organisations that preceded them, but also because, in order to obtain legal status, the communes require a certain number of community councils (CCs) within them.
The territorial tensions expressed in the organisation of the communes and community councils are manifold: within communities, between pro-Chávez and anti-Chávez neighbours; in relation to the construction of state authorities, between different areas of public policy implementation, appointed officials and elected officials (mayors, legislators), and the different structures of the ruling party. Whether because they were seen as areas of power accumulation or because they were attempting to meet state planning goals, the territorial organisation of these mechanisms of participatory democracy is strongly influenced by the power relations that arise in other spheres of Venezuelan political life.
It is interesting to look at the ways in which these networks generate meaning, as a living process that can be explored as it unfolds (Fernández Álvarez, Gaztañaga, and Quirós, 2017), taking into account the profound impact they have had on the politicisation of society, revealing social constructions of political and social power which, according to Rauber (1999), generate processes of complexity ranging from the simple to the complex, without assuming that they belong to a pre-political “level.”