The task is to recognize the political capacities that remain and to build relationships with those who continue to organize and struggle, here and abroad.

All of us hoped that our brigade would not only build popular power but also serve as a springboard for recharging Venezuela’s socialist project.

“When the earthquake came,” Raimelis recalled, “we already knew how to work together.”

The ground had hardly stopped shaking before Washington began advancing its agenda.

The earthquake in Venezuela, heartbreaking by every measure, has been made far more lethal—both in its immediate impact and long-term consequences—by factors directly attributable to U.S. imperialism’s ongoing, multi-level assault on the country and its people.

When people look at Venezuela from the outside, they often reduce Chavismo to its leadership. Leadership is important, of course, but it is only one part of a much broader reality. Over time, the Bolivarian Process has built institutional strength, political organization, territorial presence, and forms of popular participation that go far beyond electoral politics.

Today, the United States is acting according to its own rules. On January 3, it sent a message not only to Venezuela but to the entire continent: it remains the most powerful military force on the planet, and it is prepared to use that force.

We believe that it is not international observers, but the Chavista grassroots—the people who have sustained this revolutionary process for twenty-seven years, who buried their dead and resisted sanctions and destabilization, and who are still, slowly and stubbornly, building communes—who should carry the most weight.

The Warao people have faced brutal missionary campaigns, ecological destruction, capitalist penetration, state neglect, racism, disease, forced migration, and now the effects of one of the most aggressive sanctions regimes imposed on any country in the world.

The Bolivarian Revolution has generated a dense accumulation of lived political experience. Millions have participated in processes of organization, decision-making, and struggle. They have not only witnessed politics, they have practiced it.

What emerges in Vida Café is not simply a set of solutions to a moment of crisis. It’s the outline of a different logic: one in which production, infrastructure, and care are organized by the people themselves, and where the capacity to respond to immediate needs opens onto the possibility of something more.

The commune is not only a democratic experiment. It is also a form of national defense.

“We understood that producing green coffee was not enough. The only solution was to advance toward control over the entire production process.”

“We asked ourselves: if coffee shapes our culture as growers, if it organizes our daily life, and if we already cooperate in so many ways, why shouldn’t we also come together economically?”

In the mountainous coffee-growing region of Morán municipality, in Lara state, generations of campesino families have built their lives growing coffee. Steep slopes, misty mornings, and hard physical labor are part of daily life in this territory, where coffee is not only a crop but a way of organizing time, work, and community. In recent […]

Robert Longa is a founding member of the Fuerza Patriótica Alexis Vive, a Venezuelan grassroots organization promoting communal construction. Based in Caracas’ 23 de Enero barrio, Longa has played a central role in building El Panal Commune and in advancing a strategic vision of communal power as the backbone of the Bolivarian Revolution. This conversation […]

Shaking the World: Reports from Revolutionary Venezuela is a new biweekly column by Cira Pascual Marquina for MR Online, offering frontline analysis of imperialism, popular power, and revolutionary struggle in Venezuela. There are moments when geopolitics stops being an abstraction and becomes something you feel in your body. In Caracas, January 3 was one of […]

From the heart of the U.S. colony, a geographer and activist explains that Washington’s “new” security strategy looks a great deal like the old one.

Political theorist Borón provides a comprehensive analysis of Washington’s new military activity in the Caribbean and how to resist it.

A Chavista organizer examines the U.S. militarization of the Caribbean and the Bolivarian Revolution’s enduring resistance to imperial aggression.