Socialist Communes and Anti-Imperialism: The Marxist Approach

“The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune.”

–Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

 

Chris Gilbert

Worldwide, but especially in Latin America, there is currently much interest in communes just as there are, even more importantly, actual projects of communal construction. Some of the most compelling examples of the latter are the efforts to build communal socialism or “socialismo comunitario” (communitary socialism) that have emerged in Venezuela and Bolivia respectively. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez proposed in 2009 that Venezuelan socialism—a project initiated three years earlier—would be built based on communes as its “basic cells” of democratic self-government and collective production. In Bolivia, the process of change that began in 2006 and has roots in both the country’s Indigenous resistance and its workers’ struggles also proposed a variant of communitary socialism. Connected to the concept of buen vivir, Bolivia’s socialism was to be built relying on Indigenous communes, or ayllus, as one of its main “levers.” A parallel can be found in Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), which struggles for agrarian reform by occupying land and subsequently establishing communal living and production arrangements called acampamentos and assentamentos. Although a social movement, MST has long defended the goal of building a sovereign nation in the face of imperialism, and since 1990 has included socialism as one of its strategic aims. These are, in my opinion, some of the most promising examples.

In what follows, with the goal of determining when and where a socialist commune qualifies as anti-imperialist, I will look at Karl Marx’s own reflections on the commune, which took on greater centrality in his vision of social change in his last years, taking them to be a kind of model for what it is to be a socialist, anti-imperialist commune. My aim will be to show how these reflections by Marx, despite being most fully developed in his last period (1870–1883), are nevertheless connected to his whole theoretical apparatus and project. That project involves a revolutionary intervention in the state, followed by a transformation of the whole economy and society, and it is by its very nature opposed to imperialism. Thus, if communes are assumed in the way defended by Marx, they will be part of an unfolding anticapitalist and anti-imperialist strategy.

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