Chris Gilbert's study sketches out a contextualization of the so-called “communes” in contemporary Venezuela. These are understood as “a production model based on social property [and] oriented toward eliminating the social division of labour that is typical of capitalist model” (p. 17). The comunas should not be regarded as mere cooperatives, as these are, so Gilbert tells us, “still private property”, i.e. “collective private property with their adversarial relations with other enterprises, including other cooperatives, with which they compete, and with society at large” (p. 88). The author, who lives in Venezuela, visited several “communes” in the country, and describes and analyses the functioning of this (alleged) new type of economic model. Their implementation, Gilbert argues, means the very “recovery of original Marxism” (p. 23) and even “an important hope for the world” (p. 195).
The book contains nine chapters, all covering different types of “communes”, divided by geographical or sectoral criteria. Digressions are also inserted into each chapter in order to contextualize historical aspects, such as Venezuela's indigenous inherence, its successive struggles for political independence, the social and intellectual roots of Venezuela's leftist political forces, Hugo Chávez's biography, and correlated aspects. Digressions also allude to theoretical problems, particularly to Marxism, the history and legacy of the Soviet Union, and the work of the Hungarian philosopher István Mészáros. As a whole, the book can be described as offering enthusiastic support for Chávez's legacy, and particularly the “communes”, and as an attempt to back them in theoretical terms. Critiques of the Soviet model of socialist planning play a major part in Gilbert's analysis.
High hopes were attributed to the “communes” by Hugo Chávez, who ascribed to them a central role in the new post-1999 Venezuelan laws; they were expected to solve the economic and social problems that marked both Venezuela's underdevelopment and socialist central planning – which Chávez, for reasons connected to his particular interpretation of Soviet history, did not wish to emulate. As a consequence, under a very specific interpretation of Marxism, the communal model was assumed to overcome a wide range of problems, such as “alienation”, “patriarchal” and “paternalistic” social relations, economic hierarchies, the division of labour, the “law of value” (production made at profit); even money was to be abolished (it was taken to be a “capitalist fetish”). At the same time, the build-up of “communes” was also envisaged as a means to address the impact of “externally imposed production plans”.
The most valuable parts of Gilbert's study relate to the specific stories of ordinary men and women trying to effectively implement and operate those economic units, which are, the author says, “socialist islands adrift in a capitalist sea” (p. 170). Working-class barrios freed from drug dealing and police violence; bankrupt enterprises, garbage collection, and coffee plantations organized and put to work under socialized property and a more equal labour division; political and cultural upbringing; the creation of meanings for living: “communes” are described with enthusiasm and can in fact be taken as interesting case studies of local social and economic development. However, the book contains a variety of theoretical and methodological deficiencies, and great effort is required to separate its useful parts from the confusion that results from excessive use of clichés, prejudices, and historical misconceptions.
Failure and disillusion were persistent hallmarks of attempts at gradual social reform, or revolution.Footnote 1 Unintended results frequently follow well-intentioned policies. As Gunnar Myrdal often stressed in his methodological works, objective analysis does not need to be “neutral”, but it cannot elude reality. Gilbert does not discuss in detail the problems eventually faced by the “communes”, enthusiasm and idealism assumed to be sufficient to overcome all difficulties. Rather than Gilbert simply describing and assuming the pros and cons of the “communal project” when compared to public enterprises, “conventional” cooperatives, or mere small-scale private production, the reader is expected to assume that the “communes” are the only legitimate way towards an alleged “socialist transition” – which is assumed to be happening in Venezuela, despite all empirical evidence to the contrary. Therefore, the book's title, Commune or Nothing, has something of an authoritarian flavour about it. This is reinforced by grandiloquent sentences such as the following.
[…] what the Venezuelan people did in the twenty-first century was simply to restore Marxism to its original proposals, though these were mostly buried under the detritus of false doctrine [p. 23]; as the transition process advances, the state will be transcended and surpassed by the forces of communal organization [p. 65]; the communal project in Venezuela, however small and however embattled it may be, represents such an important hope for the world. This is because it constitutes a solid and coherent beginning. It therefore has a high degree of irreversibility and offers an example that could be emulated in other parts of the world [p. 195].
There is not enough space here to dwell on the several misjudgements in this book; a brief summary will have to suffice. Strictly speaking, the book merges an eclectic mix of romanticism, anarchism, and Marxism, against all kinds of productive private property (even limited ones), as well as all social hierarchies, divisions of labour, and state policies. The book's approach is a condensed adoption of Mészáros's mainly philosophical critiques both of capitalism and the so-called “real existing socialism”. Accordingly, social democrats and communists are curiously put together and both disdained for the role the state assumed in their respective doctrines. Under this banner, the long accumulation of struggles of past generations is ignored for not being “radical enough” (p. 31). Gilbert accepts the very debatable interpretation of Marx, which claims that “the concrete form of decision-making in labor contexts was taken to be more important than formal property relations”, the latter feature allegedly marking the Soviet Union and its model (p. 181). Thus, the gradual multiplication of individual “communes”, the sum of their individual and “free” activities, is expected to eliminate the problems caused by “capitalist” domination, “oppressive” official legislation, and also by the very socialist planning. In its turn, “communes” are implicitly taken as being free from contradiction.
The author offers no discussion of – say – fiscal or monetary policies, nor of the macroeconomic decisions that could potentially foster national markets and the economic development required for the “communes” to perform properly (i.e., effective demand). Much emphasis is put on describing superficial aspects instead of elementary variables, such as internal conflicts, costs, credit, and official subsidies. Theoretical intersubjectivity – in the form of contributions from other economic perspectives and political trends – is discarded with disdain, especially all non-“Marxist” theoretical approaches. In particular, the author seems to ignore entirely the work of Alec Nove and Michael Ellman. Any decision not to belong to a “commune”, in the form of cooperatives, small enterprises, or any other activity that cannot be performed inside it, is always implicitly taken as “alienated”. The need by the central government to organize a national system of health, education, import policy, etc. is also implicitly taken as old-fashioned, as the main decisions should always have a local basis.
It is not unreasonable to claim that, had M. Gorbachev's original goals succeeded, the Soviet system could have evolved towards a social-democratic economic model, with a lower degree of centralization, less comprehensive economic plans, and more cooperatives and private small-scale firms operating on the side of state firms. Without a radical and one-sided “neoliberal turn”, the adoption of more balanced economic suggestions, such as those once made by Oskar Lange, Michał Kalecki, Joan Robinson, and particularly Alec Nove – with his realistic model of “feasible socialism” – would have helped the socialist bloc to avoid the huge economic crisis that followed 1991. In this case, the positive legacies of economic history could have been incorporated by new types of indicative planning, in parallel with a discarding of what was manifestly wrong in the old model (including strict physical targets, complete socialization of the means of production, and excessive centralization).
Gilbert argues that cooperatives have “adversarial relationships” with consumers and other economic agents; in turn, communes are supposed to be free of these alleged negative features. However, both cooperatives and “communes” supply workers with an income and the market with useful goods; they should be taken as complementary and not self-excluding. In fact, a better vindication of the “communes” could have been provided by means of plainer arguments, defined in objective language free from heavy jargon, such as: raising employment and security levels; improving urban cleanliness; fostering social equality and import substitution; or simply creating more reasons to live in a world of material scarcity. In any case, “communes” should not exclude other types of rational economic activity. At the same time, a national policy for development, political independence, and social equality cannot be based only on decentralized levels and spontaneous activity. Much of the author's exclusive appeal to the “communes” is based on dilettante approaches and excessive optimism about spontaneous activity, to the detriment of specialized economic literature, particularly regarding the need for planning on a national scale.
