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Ramón Grosfoguel emphasized that Commander Chávez made a fundamental “decolonial turn” in Latin American political thought. Chávez understood that the dilemma between “statists and anarchists” is a “false dilemma” inherited from the European left, unrelated to the reality of the region. For Chávez, the strategy is not “this or that,” but “both at once”: contesting the representative state, winning elections, and thereby interrupting policies of domination (neoliberal, patriarchal, racist), while simultaneously building the framework for popular decision-making and participation, that is, communal power, from outside . Abandoning the state to the right or far right would be “handing them the occupation of its structures on a silver platter,” so the battle must be fought in both directions simultaneously.

Grosfoguel emphasized that the challenges posed by the transition to a communal state or society are “original to the Bolivarian process,” as there is no successful previous experience to serve as a model. He recalled that Hugo Chávez always encouraged us to look critically at 20th-century socialism, warning that, with the best intentions, “21st-century socialism” could repeat its problems. He historically analyzed how, after the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels conceived of a “communal communard state,” which Lenin attempted to systematize with the experience of the soviets during the Russian Revolution. However, after the civil war, the soviets were destroyed, and 20th-century socialism, for the most part, was built on that 1921 “snapshot,” with a party that “ruled by commanding” rather than “obeying.” In his speeches, Chávez warned the community members not to allow themselves to be “instrumentalized or dominated” by the party, insisting that power should be in the hands of the people and the party at the service of the commune , not the other way around, a clear reference to the Soviet experience where the communes became “transmission belts” for the party.

Given that there is no prior experience with a transition from an inherited state to a communal state, Grosfoguel affirmed that Venezuela is “innovating” on the socialist experience of the last 200 years, following Simón Rodríguez’s maxim: “we invent or we err.” The challenge is how to move from a representative state, built by the bourgeoisie and imperialism, to a communal society where power does not operate from the top down .

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President Nicolás Maduro’s call for the new era to be characterized by “handing power over to the people” represents a fundamental challenge. It entails a reconfiguration of the state’s role, where the state “disempowers itself” to transfer authority, transforming representation delegated through voting into direct and meaningful participation . The speakers analyzed how these models of representation and participation dynamically intertwine in the current moment of transition, raising crucial questions about how models of representation and participation interact in the current moment of transition and about the coexistence of future elected mayors with these ideas of political and democratic construction.