Building Communal Hegemony: A Conversation with Robert Longa 

Robert Longa is one of the founders of the Alexis Vive Patriotic Force, a cadre organization that played a leading role in building the renowned El Panal Commune in the 23 de Enero barrio in Caracas. Longa’s many years of organizational work have been accompanied by profound reflections on the role of the bases in a revolutionary process. In this conversation, Longa analyzes the strategic importance of the commune in the current context of imperialist aggression and global power shifts. For Longa, the commune is not just a place of resistance but the space from which the new, emancipated society is being built. He believes that the construction of a new popular hegemony based on communal power must be centered on economic and political self-management. 

Based on your experience in building El Panal Commune, how do you interpret the objective of the commune?

The strategic objective of the commune is to reorganize the whole of society, from the communal council to the commune to the communal confederation. With this objective in mind, we have combined two lines of thought: the Gramscian and the Leninist. These lines are traversed by the Bolívar-Chávez Doctrine, which is important to us because it links our struggle to our history and to the perspective of the “Patria Grande.” Furthermore, the Bolívar-Chávez Doctrine opens the path to 21st Century Socialism, a term coined by Heinz Dieterich, who would later become a critic of our revolution.

At the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Chávez opened the gates to socialism and linked it to participatory and protagonistic democracy. At the time, Chávez acknowledged that he had once considered Anthony Giddens’ “Third Way” but later realized that the notion of “capitalism with a human face” was a fallacy.

Shortly thereafter, in 2006, Chávez called for the creation of communal councils, which are expressions of organized popular power and exercises in participatory and protagonistic democracy in the territory. Communal councils broke with the old logic of condominium boards and neighborhood associations of Venezuela’s Fourth Republic [1958-1999], which were spaces designed to safeguard private property and functioned as appendages of the bourgeois state. These latter are the fourth or fifth level of governance [below the national, regional, and city level] that responded to the interests of the potestas [Enrique Dussel term referring to instituted power].

For us, the commune is the space from which the people’s potentia [originary power] must displace the potesta. In the period 2005-2010, Chávez designed an architecture that goes from communal councils to the commune, from the commune to communal cities, and from communal cities to the communal state. This architecture guides our daily work.

However, we also view the communal state as a transitional phase and, therefore, not as an end unto itself. Our goal, following Lenin, is the abolition of the state as a mechanism for the reproduction of a system that privileges the interests of a particular class. We aspire to live in a classless society, where the new human being leads both production and politics. In a very incipient way, we can already see glimpses of this in some communes.

The highest synthesis of this society of self-emancipated human beings is expressed in the confederation of communes, a term coined by Chávez. The confederation would be nothing less than a collective subject which, through participatory and protagonist democracy, would direct the purpose of the whole of society, thereby breaking with the old scheme of liberal bourgeois democracy and its institutional counterpart, the state.

You have said before that the work of both Gramsci and Lenin is especially important to your current thinking. Why is that?

After the October Revolution [1917], the idea of seizing power became central to revolutionary theory. Most revolutionary movements operated with this conception for decades, yielding victories as wonderful as the Cuban Revolution. Following the Cuban people’s victory, armed revolutionary organizations emerged in Latin America with the Maoist idea that a spark could ignite the prairie: the foco [small guerrilla] would generate the subjective conditions for seizing power. 

That history is very much ours, and we stand by it. However, we also recall Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity Government [1970-73], which, although overthrown by fascists and their imperialist bosses, came to power through electoral means and began a process of transformation with organic intellectuals and the working class. This moment in history suggests that there may be multiple paths to socialism beyond the one proposed by the Soviet experience.

I must emphasize that this does not mean turning our backs on the Soviet model. After Lenin’s death, Stalin’s government implemented the party’s radical program and established the dictatorship of the proletariat, while developing the country’s productive forces. That example is one we can learn from. The project should have later transitioned into a democratization process, but that is another matter: the fact remains that the USSR defeated fascism and emerged as an alternative.

All this is a dialectical process: any revolution will go through moments of advancing and others of stagnation, and correctly identifying contradictions is key to overcoming the latter.

In our process, which is full of beautiful elements and contradictions, we are advancing in a Gramscian register towards the construction of a new hegemony. The government proposes communal circuits [aggregations of several communal councils] as an intermediate step towards communal organization in areas where communes are not yet established. We see this as a tactical step to strengthen the communal project, which must now advance toward the construction of communal cities and communal federations that could lead to the communal state. However, this communal state—and I repeat this because we are very Marxist and Leninist on this matter—must ultimately be abolished.

In any case, we are living through an exciting moment where the national government is wagering on the communal project. This has a lot to do with the upcoming constitutional reform that our Worker-President Nicolás Maduro is promoting. The commune will be incorporated into the new constitutional text, but we must participate in the national debate to correctly position the commune in its relation to the state. We also have to make an economic proposal for the commune in the context of the constitutional reform so that the communal economy is not marginal. We must also develop an educational proposal. I emphasize education because the challenge we face in terms of developing communal means of production is significant. To achieve our goals, we must prepare ourselves both technically and politically.

In “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” Che Guevara says that a revolution must bring about a change in the consciousness of the subject. In fact, there is an episode from the Cuban Revolution that illustrates his conception: During a Politburo meeting where Soviet representatives were also present, someone told Che that the revolution couldn’t be built on mere pats on the back, that there had to be material incentives. In response, Che asked a comrade who had fought in the Sierra Maestra what he expected to gain from his participation. He answered, “I suppose nothing.” We cannot build a new society if it is driven solely by material incentives.

Unlike Cuba in the late 1950s, Venezuela’s revolutionary process didn’t come to power through an armed struggle, and the seizure of power is not being pursued in the way Lenin envisioned. In our case, the goal is to construct a new popular hegemony through the communes. That makes the question of education all the more central, especially since we live in a world where alienation reigns.

Today, the US empire is wavering in the context of a “Thucydides Trap” [referring to the conflict that emerges when a rising power threatens to displace an established hegemon], with China as the rising rival power. At this moment, imperialism is trying to regain its monopoly position in the world economy by any means necessary.

They are coming for us through economic warfare and multifaceted war. The logic of war is even stronger today: imperialism is trying to create failed states. The clearest example of this is the ongoing restructuring—or rather, catastrophe—that imperial forces are causing in the Middle East. But they also provoked the war between Russia and Ukraine and are trying to ignite a conflict between China and Taiwan. Closer to home, when Álvaro Uribe was president of Colombia, they attempted to unleash a fratricidal war with Venezuela, just as they are now trying to provoke a war between Guyana and our country over the Essequibo. The aim of imperialism is to implode nations, create failed states, and then penetrate them. They are vultures and scavengers!

Communes now have a strategic role because they have developed in the context of hybrid warfare. Let’s remember that Trump, in an interview at the end of his first term, said he was very close to seizing Venezuela’s oil. I believe he has returned to the White House with that same objective. That is why it is time for the communes to move from a phase of resistance to one of offense, advancing a sovereign production model that differs from capitalism.

What President Nicolás Maduro is doing is correct: the revolution must be radicalized through the commune. The Alexis Vive Patriotic Force is going to issue a kind of “Decreto de guerra a muerte” [“War-to-the-Death Decree”] on June 15. Just as Simón Bolívar declared on June 15, 1813, “Spaniards and Canarians, count on death,” we will say the same regarding imperialism. 

The point is not to adopt a radical stance for its own sake, but to deepen the process—to turn the compass 90 degrees to the left. Communards must not, consciously or unconsciously, drive the revolution forward with material incentives alone, which is, incidentally, the only thing imperialism can offer anyone at best—besides, of course, death and destruction for the majority.

We need to take control of the means of production and change the economic structure. If we succeed in this, we will indeed be taking a leap toward sovereignty and the communal state as a transitional phase. This requires both revolutionary theory and practice, and an awareness of recent history. Let’s recall that when Chávez launched the constitutional reform in 2007—the one we lost and that he described as a “pyrrhic victory” for the counterrevolution. In that moment, it was the greed of the potestas that led us to the defeat: red-clad individuals wanted to maintain their positions of power, which were threatened by the reform, and did not allow the revolution to advance. That situation cannot be repeated.Álvaro García Linera spoke of counter-hegemonic construction to describe the moment when potestas within institutions becomes aware of the strategic objective and transfers power to the people to dismantle the bourgeois state from within. This subject [potestas], if conscious, must give way to the real subject of transformation—the people organized in communal councils, communes, or communal circuits.

What do you mean by the commune becoming counter-hegemonic?

Against the hegemony of capital, the commune must go beyond resistance and establish itself as the central counter-hegemonic space in our society. In this process, we must break with the historical pattern where the people are merely sacrificed. Although sacrifice is necessary—and that is why we speak of Che and the “new human being”—the commune aims for collective emancipation. 

People organized in communes are the agents of change, what we call the subject-territory. The people moving toward a communal confederation are the people-leader. Here, the people and the collective vanguard merge in a process of revolutionary transformation.

Will the commune at some point have to move from being a counter-hegemonic space to becoming the hegemonic core of the process?

That’s right. The commune must transition from being a counter-hegemonic space to becoming the hegemonic core of the political, economic, and social process. There are those who talk about colonizing outer space and saving themselves from the catastrophe they have caused. The commune is the opposite. 

However, the commune as a hegemonic nucleus cannot be achieved through mere discourse: we must first be counter-hegemonic, work hard and think creatively beyond existing frameworks. For example, as the Alexis Vive Patriotic Force, we talk about a transition period based on the thesis of the “crossed economy” [partial participation in the capitalist market] as a means of socialist accumulation. 

We are building 21st-century socialism, which is based on the commune. The commune must become, I repeat, hegemonic—but not by decree.