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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://mronline.org/2026/04/30/what-cannot-be-unlearned-the-defense-of-the-bolivarian-revolution/">mronline.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">What Cannot Be Unlearned: The Defense of the Bolivarian Revolution </h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Cira Pascual Marquina - April 30, 2026</div></div>
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<img src="cid:ii_moq72o2o0" alt="image.png" width="503" height="335"><br><p>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.</p>
<p>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 \u201chigh
politics\u201d\u2014institutional declarations, negotiations, geopolitical
responses\u2014while overlooking the dense fabric of everyday political
practice that sustains the process.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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\u2014what I have referred to
elsewhere as \u201c<a href="https://mronline.org/2026/03/27/the-commune-and-popular-sovereignty-in-times-of-imperialist-siege/">popular sovereignty</a>.\u201d This is where the question of popular education becomes central.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This pedagogy extends into the symbolic realm. Mainstream media
narratives speak of \u201cnormalization\u201d in Venezuela\u2014that is, a gradual
realignment with a global order dictated from the North\u2014or,
alternatively, they refer to a \u201cdictatorship\u201d 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.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, some Left sectors end up reproducing a similar
framework, albeit in a different language. When they suggest\u2014explicitly
or implicitly\u2014that 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.</p>
<h3>Learning Through Struggle</h3>
<p>Yet this discourse encounters limits when it confronts a politically
organized society. In Venezuela, imperialism\u2019s attempt to impose a <em>pedagogy of resignation</em> collides with something I encounter daily: a <em>pueblo</em>
that has learned, through practice, to interpret and act upon its
conditions. Of course, this process has unfolded unevenly\u2014as 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.</p>
<p>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 \u201cTree of Three Roots,\u201d which
includes not only independence leader Simón Bolívar and <em>campesino</em> revolutionary Ezequiel Zamora, but also Simón Rodríguez.</p>
<p>Rodríguez, the teacher of Bolívar, argued that emerging Latin
American republics could not be built on inherited colonial forms of
thought. His insistence that \u201cwe either invent or we err\u201d served as a
methodological principle: social transformation requires the production
of new ways of thinking, grounded in practice. Chávez\u2019s emphasis on
popular education can be read as a continuation of this Robinsonian
tradition (Robinson was Rodriguez\u2019s pseudonym) under contemporary
conditions.</p>
<p>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\u2014through 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.</p>
<p>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\u2014capable of understanding, organizing, and
transforming their reality.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Irreversibility: What Cannot Be Undone</h3>
<p>It is here that the question of irreversibility, which <a href="https://mronline.org/2026/04/01/defending-venezuela-the-problems-with-brest-litovsk-and-cosmopolitanism/">Chris Gilbert brought up in a recent article</a>,
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, <em>molecular</em>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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\u2014the capacity to interpret and organize\u2014does not
disappear so readily. People (including the political direction of the
process) cannot simply \u201cunlearn\u201d what they have lived.</p>
<p>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\u2014where, potentially,
cooperation displaces competition, and where politics becomes
inseparable from the organization of life itself.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This is not an abstract concern. From where I stand, it is clear that
communes\u2014still marginal in the national economy\u2014cannot 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Against the \u2018Safe\u2019 Bet</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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\u2014and,
through that practice, are also able to identify errors, advance
critique, and push for rectification when needed.</p>
<p>This omission is not neutral. It often reflects either a Eurocentric lens that renders the <a href="https://monthlyreview.org/articles/global-south-struggles-for-socialism-and-the-workers-side-of-marxism/">Global South\u2019s political subject invisible</a>,
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 \u201cover\u201d from afar. From where I stand, that claim does not hold.</p>
<p>Declaring that \u201cit\u2019s over\u201d 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.</p>
<p>It is always, of course, a much \u201csafer\u201d intellectual wager to declare
capitulation, to distance oneself, to preserve analytical purity\u2014it 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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\u2014sometimes critical of specific
policies but supportive of the government\u2014matters: it makes it possible
to distinguish between what is said about our reality and what is
actually lived.</p>
<p>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 <em>pueblo</em> 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.</p>
<p>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\u2014unevenly but decisively\u2014to organize, to study reality,
and to struggle collectively.</p>
<p>That accumulated experience cannot be dismissed or wished away. Nor
can it be abandoned in favor of the intellectually \u201csafe\u201d 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.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><strong>Shaking the World: Reports from Revolutionary Venezuela </strong>is
a biweekly column by Cira Pascual Marquina for MR Online, offering
frontline analysis of imperialism, popular power, and revolutionary
struggle in Venezuela.</em></p>
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