From Venezuelan Communes to U.S. Blocks: Same Struggle, Same Fight.

It’s a different country, but the same question: who does a government serve?

By now it seems clear that with the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, the Trump crime organization didn’t topple a regime in Venezuela so much as acquire one, in a deadly takeover that swapped the CEO but seems willing to keep the board in the form of Maduro’s former VP, Delcy Rodríguez and her loyalists, as long as they’ll manage the populace while the new owners raid the store.

It’s too soon to tell much about how the Trump takeover will work out, but while the money media focus entirely on the boardroom, the story with the most lessons for the rest of us lies outside of it, with Venezuela’s experiment attempting to shift who actually wields power in the state.

Chávez’s Bottom-Up Bet

In a slip, at his press conference Saturday announcing the snatch-and-grab invasion, Donald Trump said Venezuela was “a great country twenty years ago.” He didn’t mean it, but plenty might.

Twenty years ago, a popular military officer called Hugo Chávez was president. Chavez sought to redistribute power downwards by pouring state funds into bottom up architecture: “Bolivarian Circles”, communal councils, and communes were funded to manage local resources, build popular confidence and essentially, run neighborhoods. Neighbors could directly decide on projects, manage funds, and even run services like trash collection, food distribution, or security. Chavez spent hours every week on state radio talking with citizens and invested in public media to bring news from the provinces to the cities, and from around the world to Venezuelans. In the capital, the Chavez administration built Caracas’s stunning Metro systemwhich flew residents from isolated hilltop barrios down into the capital below in graceful, gap-bridging, cable cars, affordably, and fast.

Even years after his death in 2013, Chavez’s populist fire lingered. On my one and only brief trip to Caracas in 2015, I gazed at that impressive Metro and met students and artists who had been squatting in a gleaming office building without government interference for years. High above a bustling downtown street, the residents showed us proudly, how they’d turned a foreign capitalists’ suite into a collective home for former shanty town dwellers. They sent earnest messages of solidarity and encouragement to the revolutionaries of Occupy Wall Street.

Smothered

But the abandoned office was also a sign of capital flight. The US’s relentless embargo and internal destabilization campaign put Chavez under political and economic siege, and depending entirely on oil to fuel the state’s operations gradually smothered more distributed approaches not only to energy – but to governance. The communes’ budgets—and often their legal authority—were tied to central-state funding, party structures, and oil revenues far beyond neighborhood say-so. When Venezuela’s economy crashed under pressure from the Obama administration and destabilization stepped up during Trump’s first term*, the same communal structures that were supposed to empower the masses became militarized mechanisms of patronage and control.

By this fall, as Edgardo Lander, a retired professor at the Central University of Venezuela and leading thinker of the independent left, told Tempest Magazine,

“What we have is a government that long ago abandoned any political project. The whole discourse of deepening democracy, of socialism—those have simply disappeared from the horizon. The government’s practically sole objective now is its own survival in power.”

Echoes and Warnings

As anti-imperialist Americans condemn Trump’s illegal assault and defend, absolutely, Venezuela’s independence, it’s worth spending at least a moment to consider the fate of the Bolivarians. Theirs is a story the US media will never tell but we should, not to fight sectarian wars — for and against — but for the lessons we just might learn from it.

In the US, we too, are facing rogue rule, fueled by concentrated wealth, thug power, and the corrosion of local democracy. Opposition parties still stand, but the resistance to fascist consolidation is being led by the grassroots. Local mutual aid networks, neighborhood defense collectives, public defenders, workers unions, and community-based coalitions are at the forefront, not politicians.

Venezuela’s lesson, about the danger of funding traps, seems worth paying attention to. Especially, as we head into an election year with urgent enticements to co-optation. You can almost hear the Bolivarians cry: build self-reliance now, while your institutions creak but stand. Chávez’s attempt to build popular power from above didn’t fail absolutely. Huge early gains came in the form of literacy, clinics, poverty reduction and electrification. But alongside Washington’s criminal embargo and efforts to destabilize the regime, oil’s extractive curse led inevitably to conflict and repression.

Think Globally, Act Locally

In the U.S., democracy is being defended from below. The question for change-seekers here is, can it be rebuilt from below, too — sans oil overlords, or dependence on party patrons — with real resilience, and self-reliance?

Finally, and crucially, can our home front resistance movements rekindle some sense and practice of internationalism? If we’re ever going to reverse the takeovers, we’re going to need viable alternatives – and those, as we learned again this week, cannot survive long within the borders of a single nation.

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