CARACAS, Venezuela – Venezuela’s Communist Party on Monday affirmed its commitment to the Marxist ideals espoused by President Hugo Chavez but resisted the leftist leader’s proposal to disband and join a single, revolutionary party.

Communists will not consider relinquishing their 76-year history as an independent party until the ideological foundation of the future ruling party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, has been clearly defined, said Oscar Figueras, secretary general of Venezuela’s Communist Party, or PCV.

“After the character of this organisation is defined, the political parties will make decisions” regarding their own future, Figueras said at the party headquarters in Caracas, where portraits of communist icons Vladimir Lenin and Ho Chi Minh hang on the walls. “It cannot occur beforehand.”

Chavez has already disbanded his own party, the Fifth Republic Movement, to make way for the forthcoming political organisation, which is to replace a long list of pro-Chavez parties.

While several parties have swiftly agreed to disband before joining Chavez’s new party, the Communist Party and two other pro-Chavez parties, Fatherland For All and Podemos, have been holdouts.

A committee appointed by Chavez, including leftist leaders from several pro-government parties, is designing a basic blueprint for the new party, but no binding decisions have been made.

“We are not going to disband,” Jose Albornoz, secretary general of Fatherland For All, told local Union Radio. “We are going to wait because the ball is currently in the committee’s court.”

During a meeting Sunday near the seaside town of Rio Chico, close to 1,000 communists – including union leaders, student activists and cooperative farmers – decided to join a debate about the ideological direction of Chavez’s new party.

Party members “accept President Chavez’s invitation to participate in the common effort of creating a new party”, said PCV president Jeronimo Carrera, 84, who was imprisoned three times for working clandestinely against the rule of Venezuela’s last dictator, Gen Marcos Perez Jimenez.

The party’s red flag, bearing a hammer and sickle, flew outside an auditorium while delegates ended the weekend meeting singing Venezuela’s national anthem.

Some wore T-shirts emblazoned with pro-Chavez slogans, and party members stressed they wholeheartedly back Chavez. But an attachment to the party’s traditions and ideology has made the idea of giving it up hard to swallow for many.

Although the Communist Party is relatively small, its popularity has surged since Chavez was first elected in 1998.

Hundreds of party members have been elected to municipal councils, nearly a dozen Communist lawmakers sit in the entirely pro-Chavez National Assembly and more young blood is constantly pumped into the movement through the Communist Youth, the party’s youth wing.

Young party leaders include David Velasquez, 28, who in January became Chavez’s first Communist Party Cabinet member when he was appointed minister for popular participation and social development.

Chavez – a close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro – says Venezuela needs a single socialist party to rein in political interests and more efficiently lead his movement.

Many analysts, however, call it an effort to consolidate party control.