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.” The Bolivarian Revolution already has too many external enemies to create internal ones, so despite Maduro’s open insistence on the need to “demolish the bourgeois state,” in practice the government has tended to skirt the question of the inherent conflict brewing between the traditional state and this new communal “state.”Roland Denis has no such hesitations: the communal state is, in his view, really just “a camouflaged name for the communist state.” This answer only begs more questions, since Marx described the Paris Commune as “a revolution against the State itself.”3 “That’s where we enter into all of the contradictions of the term—what state, if we are actually talking about a nonstate?” says Denis.“The communes could create a productive capacity that begins to compete with capitalism, with its own internal rules and logic, and this could really progressively generate a nonstate.”This competition between the traditional state and the communes is already beginning to emerge.For Alex Alayo of the El Maizal Commune, the traditional state and the communal state currently coexist (uncomfortably) as two fundamentally different powers.On one hand, there is a popular government in a bourgeois state structure; on the other hand, this expanding network of free territories is “building a new state” from below.The tensions and “frictions” that arise in such a situation are inevitable, and will only increase if the communes continue to expand.“We are fighting an outright war against the traditional bourgeois state,” Alayo adds.If popular struggles are co-opted and captured by the traditional state, even in subtle ways, the Venezuelan Revolution might share the fate of the Mexican Revolution more than a century ago, about which a general once joked that “this revolution has degenerated into a government.” For Alayo, “the institutionalization of the revolution means the death of the revolution.” In some senses, he even worries that “the revolution has stopped … Whether it will move forward or not depends on the people.”Recent months have seen sharp reminders of this tension between the new and the old, with the most conservative elements of the existing state launching counterattacks at the very heart of the communal “state” in development.Organizers continue to be harassed and arrested, and most worryingly, the appeals chamber of the Supreme Court even briefly revoked the agrarian charter for El Maizal Commune after the former owners claimed that the lands had not been idle and therefore should not have been expropriated.Social movements and President Maduro himself quickly attacked the legal maneuver, leading the Court’s constitutional chamber to put the decision on hold, but the question remains as to whether or not, without Chávez, the communes will have the support they need to survive the inevitable assault from reactionary forces within and outside Chavismo.The challenges the communal project faces are many: the economic challenge of production, especially in the urban barrios; the political challenges posed by the anti-Chavista opposition and from within Chavismo; and the cultural challenge of breaking with oil-fueled consumerism and moving toward a sustainable economy built upon a collective culture.Let no one suggest that building the Venezuelan commune is anything but a battle against all odds.Yet the fact that the battle is even possible means that much has changed since the Venezuelan poor explosively rejected neoliberalism in 1989.Where some can only see impossibility, those organizing on the ground know that they have no choice but to fight to build this concrete alternative, using whatever leverage they have.They are finding this leverage in the most unexpected places.The words of Chávez and the laws his government approved have provided important new weapons for consolidating those communes that emerged before the law and that today transcend the law itself.Chávez’s last major speech, the “Golpe de Timón,” made perfectly clear that to be a Chavista is to be a comunero, and it has become a near-universal reference point to legitimize the communal project [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]