Ten years after the Urban Revolution Manifesto: HOUSING, SELF MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNITY!

Communes, community councils, AVVs, and the diversity of organizations of the inhabitants of Venezuela.

Ten years ago, in a public dialogue with Comandante Chávez in Ezequiel Zamora Park (El Calvario), we started a process of Urban Revolution that allowed the Venezuelan people to rescue lands that before were abandoned or underused, where today there are millions of houses built, thousands of them produced by the power of the people, including through self-management. The right to housing for working families has also been protected, which before were thrown out on the streets by the capital with the complicity of the state.

These advances, but what achievements, are seeds whose fruits are part of the shield that allowed us to resist the imperialist blockade that reduced our oil income to 1%, affecting the investment capacity of Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela and its ability to guarantee supplies and machinery, putting at risk the right to land and decent housing for millions of Venezuelan families.

After seven years of siege and hybrid warfare, the class struggle in Venezuela has intensified between the gringo and the European capital, which demands that Venezuelan oil keep its control, the national bourgeoisie that wants to rebuild the rentier system based on inequality, and the people who fight for their lives with the conviction that we cannot go backwards.

Today, October 4, remembering Comandante Chávez on Bolivar Avenue in 2012, in that historic closing of the campaign: we call for a new cycle of united mobilization of the organized people who during the last twenty-two years have built socialism in the territories and who, thanks to this, have been able to fight and resist the blockade.

That is why from communes, city councils, AVVs and the diversity of organizations of the inhabitants of our neighborhoods, we raise the common banners of struggle:

• For the defense of the idle lands and properties recovered from capital by the Bolivarian Revolution. We demand that none of them be returned to the bourgeoisie, because they really belong to the people, and to protect their sovereignty we demand the transfer of collective ownership to the organizations that have recovered the land for life.
• We propose the creation of a law for self-management of housing production that guarantees collective ownership and a self-managed fund so that popular housing organizations can produce new communities for families in need, because private companies only care about capital accumulation and not the right to housing for poor families.
• We demand that the state decriminalize the recovery and popular occupation of land and property in order to stop criminalization. It is necessary to stop calling the families that rescue unoccupied properties invaders, which is what the inhabitants of the neighborhoods called them before Chávez, the only ones who invade are the imperialists. The people occupy and that is why we demand the elimination of article 471-A of the penal code, which is one of the only articles in Latin America that classifies as a criminal offense something that is a civil action, even in countries where the right wing governs.