[News] What Cannot Be Unlearned: The Defense of the Bolivarian Revolution

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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<https://mronline.org/2026/04/30/what-cannot-be-unlearned-the-defense-of-the-bolivarian-revolution/>
What Cannot Be Unlearned: The Defense of the Bolivarian Revolution
Cira Pascual Marquina - April 30, 2026
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I was recently in an assembly in the west of Caracas where communards were
debating how to prioritize scarce resources. The discussion was not easy.
People disagreed about whether to invest first in a water system, a
productive initiative, or repairing a community space. Voices overlapped at
times, arguments were made and remade, and decisions did not come quickly.
>From the outside, it might look like a routine and even tedious meeting.
>From within, it is very much something else: a collective effort to think
through material life under pressure.

Assemblies like this are not exceptional. They are part of the ordinary
functioning of a society that, even under conditions of imperialist siege,
continues to organize its material and political life. This is something
that is often missed in accounts of Venezuela written from afar, where
attention tends to focus on “high politics”—institutional declarations,
negotiations, geopolitical responses—while overlooking the dense fabric of
everyday political practice that sustains the process.

My argument here is that what might be perceived as simple inertia is
better understood as something deeper: the expression of an ongoing
historical process that has, over more than two decades, transformed not
only institutions, but the capacities of the people themselves.

To grasp the durability of the Bolivarian Revolution just four months after
the kidnapping of President Maduro and the attack on the country, it is not
enough to look at the state, leadership, or even economic policy, although
we should not forgo the analysis on that terrain. One also has to examine a
different terrain: the production of political consciousness. What is at
stake is not only sovereignty in its formal sense, but the extent to which
a society has developed the capacity to understand, organize, and reproduce
itself—what I have referred to elsewhere as “popular sovereignty
<https://mronline.org/2026/03/27/the-commune-and-popular-sovereignty-in-times-of-imperialist-siege/>.”
This is where the question of popular education becomes central.

Imperialism operates not only through material force, but through the
production of meaning. Its violence is not merely destructive; it is
pedagogical. Coups and coup attempts, bombardments, kidnappings, and
blockades are designed to weaken a country materially, but also to instill
lessons: that resistance is futile, that sovereignty is unsustainable, that
submission is inevitable.

This pedagogy extends into the symbolic realm. Mainstream media narratives
speak of “normalization” in Venezuela—that is, a gradual realignment with a
global order dictated from the North—or, alternatively, they refer to a
“dictatorship” still in place, over which looms imminent collapse. In both
cases, the operation is the same: to overwrite lived reality and produce a
common sense in which alternatives to the capitalist and imperialist order
appear unthinkable. In this way, imperialism seeks to shape not only what
people can do, but what they believe is possible.

Unfortunately, some Left sectors end up reproducing a similar framework,
albeit in a different language. When they suggest—explicitly or
implicitly—that what has occurred in Venezuela after January 3 amounts to
treason or capitulation, they not only misrepresent the process; they also
erase the agency of the Venezuelan people. In doing so, they reproduce a
logic that reduces Chavistas to spectators, rather than recognizing them as
protagonists of a process they have actively built and sustained.
Learning Through Struggle

Yet this discourse encounters limits when it confronts a politically
organized society. In Venezuela, imperialism’s attempt to impose a *pedagogy
of resignation* collides with something I encounter daily: a *pueblo* that
has learned, through practice, to interpret and act upon its conditions. Of
course, this process has unfolded unevenly—as is the case in any
revolutionary experience, where political consciousness and organization
develop at different rhythms across territories and sectors. But that
unevenness does not negate the transformation. What exists here today is a
society marked by the experience of shared political practice that spans
close to three decades.

>From its inception, the Bolivarian Process placed education at the center
of its project. Under the leadership of Hugo Chávez, it was never treated
as a secondary or technical matter, but as a decisive terrain of struggle.
This orientation drew from the “Tree of Three Roots,” which includes not
only independence leader Simón Bolívar and *campesino* revolutionary
Ezequiel Zamora, but also Simón Rodríguez.

Rodríguez, the teacher of Bolívar, argued that emerging Latin American
republics could not be built on inherited colonial forms of thought. His
insistence that “we either invent or we err” served as a methodological
principle: social transformation requires the production of new ways of
thinking, grounded in practice. Chávez’s emphasis on popular education can
be read as a continuation of this Robinsonian tradition (Robinson was
Rodriguez’s pseudonym) under contemporary conditions.

This perspective found concrete expression in initiatives such as Misión
Robinson, which, with the support of Cuban internationalist brigades,
brought literacy to 1.5 million Venezuelans. But to reduce the pedagogical
dimension of the revolution to formal programs would be to miss its most
decisive aspect. What has unfolded over the years is something broader: a
vast process in which learning takes place through participation in social
and political life itself—through assemblies, mobilizations, land
struggles, and organized action. It was complemented by a sustained effort
at political formation, in which Hugo Chávez played a central role as a
popular educator, consistently linking history and theory to the concrete,
lived challenges of building socialism.

Land struggles, countercoups, and communal assemblies are not only forms of
action; they are processes of formation. In them, people learn to
deliberate, to confront entrenched relations of domination, to manage
collective resources, to overcome non-antagonic contradictions, and to
assume responsibility for shared outcomes. Through these practices, new
political subjects are formed—capable of understanding, organizing, and
transforming their reality.

The result has been a broad, if uneven, transformation. The revolution has
not only altered access to resources or institutions; it has expanded the
number of people able to think and act politically.
Irreversibility: What Cannot Be Undone

It is here that the question of irreversibility, which Chris Gilbert
brought up in a recent article
<https://mronline.org/2026/04/01/defending-venezuela-the-problems-with-brest-litovsk-and-cosmopolitanism/>,
becomes decisive. Drawing on the work of the Hungarian philosopher István
Mészáros, Chávez argued that revolutionary processes could, under certain
conditions, reach a point of no return. This notion is often interpreted in
institutional terms, but its most profound dimension is at the grassroots
level, where change is, for lack of a better word, *molecular*.

After more than twenty-seven years, 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.

>From within that process, it becomes clear that such experience cannot be
easily reversed. Institutions can be transformed, policies overturned, and
resources reallocated. But the knowledge produced through lived
practice—the capacity to interpret and organize—does not disappear so
readily. People (including the political direction of the process) cannot
simply “unlearn” what they have lived.

If the Bolivarian Revolution has functioned as a vast field of political
learning, its most developed expression lies in the communes. There,
collective decision-making is a daily practice. The commune is not a local
refuge from the system, nor a mere administrative unit. It is a space where
new social relations are forged—where, potentially, cooperation displaces
competition, and where politics becomes inseparable from the organization
of life itself.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to treat the communal project as
self-sufficient or all-encompassing. From a Chavista, Marxist, and Leninist
perspective, the commune cannot remain isolated to fulfill its truly
revolutionary potential. It must become national, articulated with other
spheres of power, including the government. The horizon is not a mosaic of
disconnected local experiences, but the transformation of society as a
whole.

This is not an abstract concern. From where I stand, it is clear that
communes—still marginal in the national economy—cannot sustain or expand
themselves if the state is lost to forces hostile to the revolution. Losing
the government would not mean the immediate disappearance of popular
organization, but it would interrupt the possibility of advancing toward a
substantive democracy capable of eroding the metabolism of capital that
begins to emerge in the communes.

This does not imply that support for the government must be uncritical. The
relationship between popular power and the state has been contested at
times since the early days of the revolution. There have been moments when
the government distanced itself from the communal project, only to return
to it later under pressure from organized sectors.
Against the ‘Safe’ Bet

This brings us back to the defeatist declarations of Left intellectuals
that I was mentioning earlier, who insist that the Bolivarian Revolution
has already ended, that the government has capitulated, that what remains
is little more than a hollow shell. From the outside, this can appear as
realism. From within, it reflects a profound misunderstanding of the
process. At its core lies a failure to grasp irreversibility.

Those who declare or imply that everything has been lost tend to focus on
the government as if it were the sole repository of the revolution. From
that perspective, any concession or retreat appears as definitive proof of
collapse. What disappears from view is the accumulated political experience
of millions of people who have learned, over decades, to organize,
deliberate, and act collectively—and, through that practice, are also able
to identify errors, advance critique, and push for rectification when
needed.

This omission is not neutral. It often reflects either a Eurocentric lens
that renders the Global South’s political subject invisible
<https://monthlyreview.org/articles/global-south-struggles-for-socialism-and-the-workers-side-of-marxism/>,
or a crude geopolitical lens that privileges institutional form over lived
experience and underestimates the agency of organized people. From that
vantage point, the revolution becomes something that can be declared “over”
from afar. From where I stand, that claim does not hold.

Declaring that “it’s over” is not simply an analytical mistake; it has
political consequences. It makes it harder to struggle in a very difficult
historical moment, contributes to demoralization, and weakens the
collective capacity to navigate difficult terrain.

It is always, of course, a much “safer” intellectual wager to declare
capitulation, to distance oneself, to preserve analytical purity—it is
safer since the reality on the ground is rarely pretty and never certain.
But that is a wager made from the outside. Within the Bolivarian Process,
the defining feature has been different: a refusal to abandon the struggle
while conditions remain open. Moreover, accusations of treason or
capitulation are not only false but also politically harmful. They flatten
complex dynamics into moral judgments and obscure the strategic terrain on
which the process unfolds.

This is not simply a question of competing narratives, but of how reality
itself is produced and understood. In Venezuela, these narratives encounter
a specific difficulty: they collide with a politically organized movement
that has learned to interpret reality together.

There are, of course, decisions in which people do not participate
directly, but the debate is always present. Moreover, in robust communes,
life does not follow a logic imposed from above; it is produced together,
forged in assemblies and in everyday practices. That is why listening to
the Chavista base—sometimes critical of specific policies but supportive of
the government—matters: it makes it possible to distinguish between what is
said about our reality and what is actually lived.

To defend the Bolivarian Revolution in 2026, then, is not only to denounce
external aggression. It is to defend and deepen the processes through which
a *pueblo* is learning to govern itself. And what has been learned does not
disappear with a policy shift or a moment of retreat. It persists as
capacity and consciousness. And that, of course, has material implications
in the struggle.

There are no guarantees of victory. Revolutionary processes unfold in
adverse conditions, shaped to some degree by forces that are often beyond
their control. Marx compared the revolution to a mole that might go
underground but remained a telluric force. What exists in Venezuela today
is not an exhausted project waiting to collapse. It is a people that has
learned—unevenly but decisively—to organize, to study reality, and to
struggle collectively.

That accumulated experience cannot be dismissed or wished away. Nor can it
be abandoned in favor of the intellectually “safe” prediction of defeat.
Chavismo, forged through years of struggle and marked by a historical
accumulation of political learning, remains a force with the capacity to
defend, correct if necessary, and advance the process.
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*Shaking the World: Reports from Revolutionary Venezuela is a biweekly
column by Cira Pascual Marquina for MR Online, offering frontline analysis
of imperialism, popular power, and revolutionary struggle in Venezuela.*
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