Popular Sovereignty from Below: The Venezuelan Commune in Times of Imperialist Siege

This talk explores Venezuela’s communes as experiments in popular power, where communities collectively govern, produce, and organize their daily lives. Amid years of U.S.-led sanctions and political pressure, these communal projects demonstrate how collective action can sustain self-governance, build political capacity, and transform popular sovereignty from an ideal into lived practice.

Cira Pascual Marquina is a researcher, writer, and educator based in Venezuela. She teaches at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela and works with Pluriversidad, the educational initiative of El Panal Commune. Her work focuses on popular power, communal democracy, and the Bolivarian Revolution. She co-authored Venezuela, the Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution and co-founded Escuela de Cuadros, a political-educational project dedicated to Marxist theory.