Chris Gilbert, Professor of Political Studies of the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, analyzes what's coming for Venezuela during the 2025-2031 mandate of President Nicolás Maduro.
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00:00President Nicolás Maduro referred to the necessity that the country has of building
00:05a self-sustainable economic model. How can it be possible to fulfill from the communes?
00:12Well, actually, sustainability is an important option. Two things, you know, sustainability and
00:18diversity. Because the Venezuelan economy for the last hundred years has been dominated by
00:23petroleum, essentially the international division of labor and capitalism determines that if your
00:29country sits upon huge petroleum reserves, that will be your role exclusively in the world
00:34economy. So that's been a huge problem in Venezuela for the past hundred years, is the increasing or
00:39the long-standing dependence on petroleum. And then, of course, sustainability too is another
00:44global issue. We've seen 1.5 degrees Celsius warming in this last year, which is a huge
00:52problem, perhaps one of the hugest problems facing humanity. So the communes actually offer
00:57an important possibility to overcome to solve those two problems. In the case of diversifying
01:03the economy, one thing is communes mean planning. Planning, people can plan, decide how their
01:09production will go. In capitalism, people have to produce what's profitable, and here profit means
01:14petroleum. But in a controlled economy, in a planned economy like the communal one, you can
01:19decide what you're going to produce and that can focus on humanly useful goods. In fact, everywhere
01:24in the world, especially in the global south, there's a need to achieve food sovereignty,
01:29and the communes have made important steps in that direction, but they could go further.