On Venezuelas communes, idyllic future is just over the rainbow
CUA, Venezuela With an Iranian tractor, and two big subwoofers blasting salsa music across his onion patch, Ivan Lora says he is turning his weedy hillside into a building block of Venezuelan socialism.
Comrades, Lora said, taking leaders of his newly formed commune on a tour of his two-acre farm, with this land and an irrigation system, we could be growing food year-round.
Surely, the Eternal Commander the late Hugo Chvez would have been proud.
Lora, 65, a lifelong city dweller with no farming experience, settled here with his family four years ago on land expropriated by the Chavez government. Today he is a member of one of the 900 officially registered communes that have become the focus of a far-reaching government effort to remake Venezuela into a socialist society.
It aims to use communes as the central organizing feature of Venezuelan life, complete with new forms of government, public services, and socialist-minded farms and businesses that spurn the profit motive.
Loras commune, an hour outside Caracas, is named El Sueo del Commandante the Commanders Dream. It is a far cry from the flower-powered, yurt-dwelling, free-love version that flourished farther north in the 1960s and 1970s.
Although Lora got some land and the little red tractor from the government, he and his family live in a scrap-metal shack along an isolated stretch of highway. For rides, he relies on the communes leaders, who insist on being called spokespeople because they say they disavow hierarchies.
Loras main contribution to socialism has been a willingness to sell onions, peppers and cucumbers at a 60percent discount to his fellow communards at the weekend farmers market. He calls them his socialist prices, in contrast to the capitalist prices he puts on the rest of his produce during the week.
Supporters of the commune effort say it will transform Venezuelas economic, social and political relations into something more wholesome and authentically democratic. At its best, it inspires poor and once marginalized Venezuelans to work closely with their neighbors and take control of the planning, execution and fiscal oversight of community projects that improve their lives.
Hundreds of thousands of comrades are carrying out this vital step toward socialism, said Jos Luis Hernan, a former presidential palace aide elected chief spokesman of the Commanders Dream last year.
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On Venezuelas communes, idyllic future is just over the rainbow