Dario Azzellini, Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below, trans. Ned Sublette, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017, 315 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-30011-8.
Dario Azzellini’s Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela examines the Bolivarian transformation process in Venezuela through the lens of communal self-management, workers’ control, and social transformation from below. At the centre of the book is the relationship between transformation initiatives pursued from above through state institutions and the forms of organisation developed from below by workers, communities, and social movements. Azzellini conceptualises this relationship as “two-track construction”: while the state can provide legal space and material resources for new forms of organisation emerging from below, it can also bureaucratise, restrict, or obstruct them. The relationship between constituent and constituted power is therefore not one of harmony, but rather an open-ended process in which cooperation, tension, and conflict are intertwined.
A significant part of the study examines communal councils and communes that developed in Venezuela as new forms of local self-government. These structures seek to develop direct participation, collective decision-making processes, and the capacity of communities to govern their own living spaces in place of representative institutions. From here, Azzellini moves to the discussion of the “communal state” and the “communal economy,” arguing that social transformation can be conceived not only through taking over or expanding the existing state, but also through the gradual assumption of state functions by popular power organised from below. At the same time, he identifies the possibility that communes may become administrative extensions of the state and undergo bureaucratisation as one of the fundamental contradictions of the process.
The most important sections of the book from the perspective of workers’ control are those examining worker-recuperated enterprises, nationalisations, workers’ councils, and experiences of self-management developed in factories. Azzellini demonstrates in particular that nationalisation and workers’ control are not the same thing: the transformation of private property into state property does not in itself mean the disappearance of relations of production or workplace hierarchies. In cases examined in detail, such as Inveval and Alcasa, the fundamental struggle is not simply for workers to hold a share in ownership or participate in management, but to collectively take control of decision-making power over production and the enterprise. At Inveval, the transformation of the general workers’ assembly into the highest decision-making body, the requirement that elected spokespeople implement the assembly’s decisions rather than decide on its behalf, and their recallability constitute some of the clearest examples of this approach.
Azzellini also emphasises that cooperative ownership does not automatically create workers’ self-management. Although tens of thousands of cooperatives were established in Venezuela with state support, the insufficient development of alternative production and circulation networks, financing problems, and the cooperatives’ own internal contradictions led a significant proportion of them to become reintegrated into capitalist market relations. Similarly, co-management models that merely turned workers into minority shareholders did not transfer genuine decision-making power to them. Drawing on these experiences, the book makes the central issue not so much the form of ownership as who controls production, through which decision-making mechanisms, and toward which social objectives.
One of the distinctive contributions of the study is that it does not confine workers’ self-management within the boundaries of the factory. By linking the democratic control of production through workers’ councils with social and territorial self-government through communes, Azzellini argues that production concerns not only the employees of an enterprise but also the surrounding communities. In this context, the approach of “direct social property” highlighted in the book aims at enterprises being administered by workers together with communities organised in communal councils and communes. Workers’ control thus moves beyond individual self-managed enterprises and becomes connected to the problem of constructing a broader solidarity-based and communal economy.
Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela does not present the Venezuelan experience as a completed or contradiction-free model of self-management. It regards the struggle between workers’ control and bureaucratic management, horizontal organisation and state hierarchy, constituent power and constituted power as an integral element of the transformation process. It argues that the practices of direct democracy developed in workers’ assemblies, workers’ councils, and communes are not merely new forms of administration, but processes that transform both the participants themselves and their social relations. In this respect, the book is an important contribution to discussions of the relationship between collective democratic control over production and broader forms of social self-management without reducing workers’ self-management to a form of ownership.