Caracas, April 18, 2023 (Mincomunas Press) -The first conference of the Decolonial Communal School took place at the Operational Strategic Studies Institute of the FANB, in Fort Tiuna, Caracas, with the participation of relevant international professors.
The meeting focused on promoting the construction of a communal State that brings together the peoples’ struggle and the passing of their history to empower them to make decisions and solve problems.
The Puerto Rican sociologist Ramon Grosfoguel stressed that the Communes is also a project for the nation’s security and the protection of Venezuelan sovereignty in the face of imperialist aggression.
“I say this because there has to be a commitment of the FANB and the People’s Power Ministry for the Communes to work together in that resistance. Here we have to think strategically. We cannot think in the medium term. We have to understand the geopolitical context in which, until recently they were, in their backyard, intervened by the resources they had”, he said.
Grosfoguel asserted that it is impossible to build a communal State without having a decolonial look. An example of this, he said, is the rupture of the FANB concerning that position assumed for years in favor of the United States (U.S.).
“Once you have the people organized, no one can defeat them”.
Pedagogical decolonization
Katya Colmenares, a Mexican philosopher stressed the need for pedagogic decolonization because modern society always instilled the idea that peoples were at war with each other and that they had to make the most of any situation or conflict.
“It is about producing a communal State in which each one of the members can decide. The State is all of us, that is the content and that each one feels first,” he said.
Colmenares explained that people did not feel part of the State because the corrupt State abused them for years, but now it is necessary for a rapport between both.
Communal State, political challenge
“The construction of the communal State has become the greatest political challenge that humanity has posed itself. It is to empower the people and make it State, not a utopia. That is why the Bolivarian political project truly constitutes the horizon for a new stage of consciousness and human political reality,” asserted the Mexican speaker.
He also recalled that Venezuela has an enormous challenge ahead, as does the FANB. He exemplified that in Mexico, the nation’s defense services have become the leaders of all the country’s transformation strategic projects due to their discipline and management.
FANB’s decolonization
The People’s Power Minister for Communes and Social Movements, Jorge Arreaza, recalled the profound decolonization of the Venezuelan military doctrine 24 years ago.
“25 years ago, we were one step away from Venezuela’s consolidation as a U.S. neo-colony. We know that some moments led the old armed forces of the country”.
He also recalled an episode on November 27, 1992, when the U.S. military arrived in the country and took over operations that day over the generals of that time.
“You find yourselves today with a FANB that adopted a Bolivarian doctrine (…) Simon Rodriguez insisted that we could not copy models from after we emerged as a State or republic, this that would be born had to be different from that form of European State”.
On his part, the Vice Minister of Communal Economy, Hernan Vargas, emphasized that Bolivarian socialism has a long march that has been building towards a communal society and states that, from the struggle with the indigenous peoples, from that moment a struggle begins with a society that was already communal to a process then polished with the steps of these 500 years.
“To advance in the construction of Bolivarian Socialism, it is indispensable the expansion of the People’s Power, but really to be able to connect this expansion, it is fundamental to embrace that path of decolonization.”
