Sunday, August 25, 2024

 

Venezuela’s diverse lefts need internationalist solidarity

By Yoletty Bracho
Published 
LINKS.ORG.AU
Chavez mural Caracas

First published in French by Contretemps: Revue de Critique Communiste. Translated to English by Alejandro Coriat for NACLA.

“Everyone knows what happened” is the phrase that was on the lips of Venezuelans when the results of the presidential election were announced after midnight on July 28 (so it actually was July 29). Elvis Amoroso, president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), reported that President Nicolás Maduro had won with 51.2 percent of the vote, and Edmundo González Urrutia, the candidate for the mainstream opposition, trailed behind with 44.2 percent.

However, these results contradicted indicators that suggested the opposite: from the former bastions of Chavismo, particularly working-class urban neighborhoods, results unfavorable to Maduro seemed to emerge throughout the day. What happened? How can we from the left make sense of Venezuela’s presidential election? And how can we imagine a solution that respects democracy and the votes cast by Venezuelans?

Doubts and demoralization: Diverse lefts divided

Claiming to be on the left in Venezuela while opposing the Maduro government is no easy feat. The testimonies that I collected during a month of exchanges with various representatives of the Venezuelan left — including people who still claim to be Chavistas — show the difficulty of organizing while being targeted by the government’s political and social repression. This is all the more evident during election periods. A former Chavista government official told me: “It is striking to see that the right was able to have its candidate, but that it is us on the left who do not have the right to have a candidate. We have no representation in these elections.”

For these left-wing activists and members of popular organizations — many of whom acted as intermediaries for social policies under the Chavista governments — the question arose of whether or not to vote at all on July 28. On the one hand, voting for González Urrutia seemed unthinkable — there was no way these people would give their vote to the flag-bearer of María Corina Machado, the leader of the mainstream opposition who has in the past forged alliances with repulsive figures such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Javier Milei.

But voting for Maduro? The one who for years has been pushing the grassroots left away from the government? The one who made the poorest bear the brunt of the economic crisis brought about by corruption in the state oil company and U.S. economic sanctions? The one who repressed the working classes during the 2015-2017 security program called “Operations for the Liberation of the People” (OLP), killing thousands of young and Black men in the barrios? No, that wasn’t possible either.

So, for some of these activists, abstention seemed to be the only option — a solution that contrasts with years of Chavismo’s vindication of voting as the best political tool to resolve conflicts between Venezuelans.

Some divergent positions also exist: among those I spoke with, one person decided to vote for González Urrutia to “block” Maduro. Another said that it was his duty as a Chavista to vote for the opposition, to show the president in power that he no longer represents the ideals of the Chavista movement.

Others within trade union, Trotskyist, or communist forces that had more or less close relations with Chavismo opted for spoiled ballots — although this route requires a little technical effort from voters. Voting in Venezuela is electronic, done through machines installed in polling stations that transmit the votes to the CNE and issue a voting receipt, which is then deposited in a ballot box. The only way to obtain a spoiled vote is to initiate the voting process on the touch screen, wait the three minutes given in total to vote, and collect a “voto nulo” receipt.

But beyond the electoral choice, the question coming to the surface is about how to organize a united collective of the diverse leftist currents that oppose the Maduro government. Divided into many political parties, trade unions, social movements, and other plural spaces such as think-tanks and literary journals, coalition-building seemed difficult before the election, when leftists reproached each other for their divergent positions vis-à-vis the history of Bolivarian Revolution. Language is becoming a central strategic question: during a general assembly that sought to build a post-election alliance, it was surprising to see how some words have fallen out of use. Terms like “popular power” or “the people” are substituted for a language of “workers” versus “elite pacts.” It is a sort of victory on the part of trade union activists and some of the Trotskyist parties who can boast of never having joined the Chavista ranks.

In this context, an activist and researcher who I spoke to on July 19, just over a week before the election, told me: “It will be the moment after the elections that will bring us together. A few days before the election, we can still talk about the recovery of the oil company by making it operate through cooperatives, or the nationalization of private hospitals... but only after the election will we know if we are going to have the space necessary to fight for our social and collective rights, or if we will have to fight for the simple right to exist politically.”

This opinion aligns with that of a leader of a large grassroots organization: “Nicolás cannot win. They don’t have the votes,” the leader said. “And if Nicolás takes the election by force, we will have nothing left to do but to defend our ability to do politics.” Since the elections, these same activists seem to agree that this is what has come to pass.

July 28: The end of revolutionary democracy?

The evening before the July 28 election, I went to visit community leaders in a working-class neighborhood in the west of Caracas, a historic bastion of Chavismo. Their positions had changed compared to a month earlier. They were convinced that the electoral machinery — the mobilization structures of Chavismo — could prevail. After a month of exchanges with various sectors of the Venezuelan left, it was the first time I was hearing such a statement. Even more surprising, a Chavista activist told me: “And even if we don’t win, we have to win. The danger is too great.” Fear was indeed taking hold among Chavista-identified people in working-class neighborhoods about what could happen if the opposition won.

At the same time, an opposition slogan began circulating on the streets of Caracas and social networks: “Ahora vamos a cobrar” — now we will collect what is due to us. The mainstream opposition seems to be referring to a new strategy that will allow them to claim this election — in contrast to what they see as the surrender of Henrique Capriles Radonski to Maduro in 2013 in what they believe was a stolen election, even though the CNE audit confirmed Maduro’s victory.

But for historical Chavista activists, the slogan carries a different connotation: cobrar sounds like a threat of material and physical harm against their neighborhoods, their activism, and them and their families. A recognized researcher who has participated for years in negotiation efforts in Venezuela understands these fears. “Unfortunately,” the researcher told me, “the discourse of the most radical mainstream opposition does not reassure the Chavistas, which prevents progress, including in the highest levels of negotiation.”

On July 28, election day, Caracas and the country were calm. Even though irregularities were reported during the installation of polling stations, Venezuelans queued from dawn to dusk to vote. But it was not an “electoral celebration” as under Chavismo. While previous elections were days of lots of movement, citizen mobilization, and meetings of families, friends, and activists, this time everything seemed strangely calm — too calm. It was difficult to find people with whom to spend the day and wait for the results, apart from closed election monitoring meetings organized by NGOs. In the east of Caracas, in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, the absences are felt: the oldest generations vote but the young people who have been living abroad for years are not present. More than 7 million Venezuelans, a fourth of the population, have left for other countries; working-class neighborhoods feel most emptied out.

The announcement of the results comes late — very late. This is not exceptional in itself, but certain facts sow doubt. We hear reports from various witnesses that the results are not being transmitted to the CNE, or that these witnesses for the political parties, despite being authorized by the CNE, are encountering difficulties obtaining the actas, the print-outs where results per polling station are collected. We also hear from various sources that the authorized representatives of González Urrutia were forbidden from entering the CNE’s tabulation room, where the general results of the election are validated by the members of the CNE and representatives of the political parties.

Past midnight, the CNE president Elvis Amoroso finally announced Maduro’s victory, after denouncing a terrorist attack against the results transmission system — an attack that must have been overcome in order to issue results based on, according to Amoroso, 80 percent of the votes. In Venezuela, only the CNE has the right to announce results, which it does once the tally shows a so-called irreversible trend — a lead for the winner that the difference in the remaining votes would not be able to change. However, in Amoroso’s announcement, the difference between Maduro and González Urrutia was 700,000 votes. The remaining 20 percent ​​of ballots represented more than 2 million votes. The reversal of the results was still mathematically possible. And the testimonies from the polling stations, as well as the popular mobilization that followed, say a lot.

Popular and citizen mobilization: Democracy in the face of repression

At 7 a.m. on July 29, having crossed Caracas from west to east, I am surprised to see how empty the city is even though the capital usually wakes up with the sun, between 5:30 and 6 a.m. A friend, a feminist activist, shared the same worries later expressed in a feminist statement. “Six more years of this is too much!” she told me. “What are we going to be able to do?”

She had worked for the CNE in the past, and according to her knowledge, the alleged terrorist attack was impossible. But she, a feminist activist in a country where abortion is still penalized by law, drew a more important conclusion: “The only thing I still trusted was the electoral system. But now it’s like with the apagones, it turns out an iguana came to cut everything off, and now we have no suitable explanation, only results that we must take their word for.” During widespread power cuts (apagones) in 2019, when authorities offered explanations from forest fires to cyberattacks, many used the image of an iguana to ironically criticize the government’s lack of answers.

A few hours later, Caracas and the rest of the country began to move. A popular revolt took to the streets. These mobilizations went beyond political organizations and beyond the binary divide that has historically been at the heart of analyses on Venezuela. Women and men in the barrios, many undoubtedly once supporters of Chavismo, took to the streets demanding respect for their votes and for their right to live in democracy. These mobilizations are not remotely guided by the Venezuelan right or by U.S. imperialism. Dissident leftists and local researchers who work in the barrios argue that the traditional opposition did not have the means to strategically seize these mobilizations. The same goes for the government, which quickly responded with repression.

In just three days, more than a thousand people were imprisoned. More than 20 deaths have been recorded, and more have been forcibly disappeared. On August 1, Maduro announced the development of new high-security prisons where there will be forced labor and re-education “like in the old days.” In his speech, the president recalled the times of the last military dictatorship under Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who put prisoners to work on the construction of roads. “Let them go build roads,” Maduro said.

One of my acquaintances, a researcher, is now sheltering in her home a woman whose child was a victim of an OLP police raid and who was an electoral witness at her polling station. Electoral witnesses are accredited by the CNE to observe the electoral process on behalf of political parties and obtain copies of the vote tallies. Police are searching neighborhoods for electoral witnesses, and reports are multiplying of police and paramilitary repression and control of the barrios where the demonstrations started. We are witnessing relentless repression and criminalization of a popular revolt.

Latin American diplomacy and internationalist solidarity

As various international actors seek to mediate the Venezuelan political conflict, Latin American diplomatic relations are central. In a joint statement, left-governed Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico challenged the Maduro government by calling for a public audit of the votes cast on July 28 — the only institutional tool that would facilitate a sovereign and orderly off-ramp from the tensions, uncertainty, and repression afflicting the Venezuelan people.

Unlike U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recognition of González Urrutia as the winner of the elections, which provokes even more tension, Latin American diplomatic bodies are doing the arduous work of maintaining channels of dialogue with the stakeholders in this political conflict, seeking to build negotiations among them.

The international left can do their part. Our comrades, as well as the Venezuelan people as a whole, need our support. The call to respect democracy is undoubtedly the best tool to move forward in this situation. “Everyone knows what happened,” including our comrades who are now seeking to build a political space worthy of the name. We owe ourselves to the popular struggles of which they are the spokespersons.

Yoletty Bracho is a Venezuelan activist and researcher based in France. She has devoted her research to the relationships between working-class neighborhood organizations and the state that emerged from the Bolivarian Revolution. Present in Venezuela in the weeks preceding and during the July 28, 2024 elections, she met with representatives of various components of the left and Chavismo.


Venezuela: Not losing sight of imperialism

By Ricardo Vaz
Published 
LINKS.ORG.AU
anti-imperialist mural Venezuela

First published at VenezuelaAnalysis. 

The July 28 presidential elections saw Venezuela thrust once again into the global spotlight. Amid renewed political violence political violence, street protests, media misinformation and especially ramped-up imperialist aggression, we return the focus to the big picture as Venezuelans brace themselves for even harder battles to come.

The question of democracy

Right off the bat, it is important to get something out of the way: the Venezuelan elections were not “free and fair.” There is no way for that to happen in a country under a brutal blockade, incessant economic terrorism that punishes a project that refused to bow to Washington’s neocolonial diktat. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Venezuelans went to the polls with a gun to their heads.

Fighting back against US-led imperialism and its corporate media artillery begins by recognizing this vastly uneven playing field. Though the recent vote did leave questions to be answered, to zero in on the electoral controversy while ignoring or downplaying the context of US hybrid warfare is an intellectually and politically dishonest exercise.

Secondly, the Bolivarian Revolution at its core is all about democracy. But a deeper, more substantive concept of democracy, one that extends way beyond casting votes for representatives at different levels every so often.

Instead, over the past 25 years, Venezuela has been home to a number of revolutionary experiments of grassroots, assembly-based democracy, with the commune being its most advanced expression. In Hugo Chávez’s conception, communes are the “unit cells” for the construction of socialism as self-governments in the territories.

Though popular power has faced plenty of challenges and setbacks in recent years, it has also showcased impressive advances and remains full of potential for the transformation of society.

Washington’s reaction

After the CNE declared Maduro as the winner, the reaction from the United States was all too familiar, with officials feeling entitled to speak on behalf of “the Venezuelan people.”

Once the hardline opposition proclaimed its own triumph, Secretary of State Antony Blinken could not help himself from recognizing far-right candidate Edmundo González as “president-elect,” recalling Juan Guaidó’s infamous “interim presidency.” Subsequent statements partially walked back the recognition, but nevertheless emphasized a “transition” and endorsed the regional mediation efforts from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

From overt coup attempts and economic sanctions to media disinformation and NGO financing, US regime-change efforts have been a constant over the past 25 years, especially since the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013. In the run-up to the election, the corporate media had already declared González the victor while anonymous US officials talked about “calibrating” sanctions depending on the outcome, a traditional euphemism for a policy of mass murder that has claimed tens of thousands of civilian deaths every year since 2017.

Nevertheless, with its attention focused on actively facilitating Israel’s genocidal war in West Asia in addition to prolonging its NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Washington might prioritize energy market stability in the short term. Stemming Venezuelan migration, which has dramatically increased in recent years largely due to US economic terrorism, will be another priority for the Biden administration in the run-up to November. As such, it appears that Washington is not in an optimal position to escalate its regime change campaign, at least before next year.

The road ahead

The Maduro government and the Chavista movement more broadly face no shortage of challenges in the times to come.

July 28 saw a very significant portion of the electorate vote for arguably the farthest-right presidential candidacy in Venezuelan democratic history. Though María Corina Machado was not on the ballot, she was openly pulling the strings of the actual candidate Edmundo González.

Machado needs no introduction. A faithful US ally since the George W. Bush era, her rap sheet includes support for virtually every previous coup attempt of the past quarter of a century, enthusiastic endorsement of US-led sanctions and even calls for a foreign invasion, for which she was only banned from holding public office.

Machado’s program is unfettered neoliberalism – including selling off strategic state enterprises like PDVSA – coupled with pledges to “eradicate socialism,” all but promising a dirty war against Chavismo. There is little doubt that Machado – and by extension, her proxy, González, – was the chosen candidate of the Biden administration, which consistently favored her over other opposition hopefuls more inclined to negotiate with the Maduro government such as Zulia Governor Manual Rosales.

Much like Argentina’s Milei and Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Machado must be viewed as the local Venezuelan manifestation of peripheral fascism, which has metastasized across the South amid the devastating social fallout of income deflation, sanctions, wars of encroachment, and other modalities of “ accumulation by waste” pursued by an ever more rabid, if senile imperialism.

These forces, representing the most retrograde neocolonial classes and settler fractions, make no secret of their subservience to the democratic fascists ruling in Washington and other Western capitals and proudly wave the blood-stained banner of the genocidal Zionist colonial entity in Palestine. It is no wonder the Bolivarian grassroots movements are entrenching themselves against this existential threat.

At the same time, the Maduro government faces the prospect of ramped-up sanctions or even a return to “maximum pressure” should Trump return to the White House in November.

This means an increasingly difficult balancing act to promote economic growth in the wake of one of the world’s worst “peacetime” GDP contractions without further increasing poverty and inequality. The present liberalization strategy that extends benefits to capital, so as to attract badly needed investment, while asking for patience and sacrifice from the working majority, may prove increasingly untenable in the face of growing threats from inside and outside.

Furthermore, the election’s results have been surrounded by questions, even by people who have been sympathetic to the Bolivarian Revolution, as the National Electoral Council (CNE) has not published detailed tallies by voting center. In the past, these publicly available totals have dispelled all doubts about the process and exposed the absolute lack of evidence behind the opposition’s perennial “fraud” allegations. Instead, the CNE’s silence has allowed the opposition and its media backers to make victory claims based on a dubiously parallel results page.

International solidarity

What is nonetheless clear is that the liberal hand-wringing from outside Venezuela, above all from the global North, is consummate bad faith. Imperialist functionaries and their intellectual assets of all political stripes are in absolutely no position to speak in the name of “democracy.” Their hands and pens are thoroughly stained by the blood of not just Palestine’s Shuja’iyya and Tel al-Sultan but also Bolivia’s Senkata and Sacaba, among countless other heinous crimes against Third World sovereignty from Haiti and the Congo to Libya and Syria, perpetrated with the support of sections of the Western left.

The frequently overlooked reality is that Venezuela is a country besieged by US-led imperialism, which shapes every aspect of the Bolivarian Revolution’s internal contradictions. This is as true the morning after the election as it was the day before.

Beyond the vast natural resources and strategic location, Venezuela will remain in Washington’s crosshairs because its revolution – notwithstanding the errors, setbacks, and deviations over the years – still represents a beacon of hope that racialized and immiserated working people of the global South can build a sovereign alternative to the Western imperialist order, founded on over 500 years of colonial and neocolonial barbarism. This radical potentiality was already apparent in the 1989 “ Caracazo” popular insurrection and subsequently found its most mature expression in the Bolivarian movement led by Hugo Chávez, who played a leading role in establishing the emerging South-South alliances and resistance axes alongside China, Iran, and other major anti-systemic actors.

It is evident that Venezuela today represents one of the key battlefronts in the class war waged against the peoples of the global South. There is no middle ground.

As US-sponsored fascism advances to menace working people not just in Venezuela but the world over, our internationalist solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution must be as unconditional as ever.

Venezuela's presidential elections and the left: Debating democracy, anti-imperialism and sovereignty

By Ana Cristina Carvalhaes & Luís Bonilla-Molina
Published 
Venezuela fraud protests

Translated from Revista Movimento by Federico Fuentes for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Unlike what has happened for the past 25 years with Venezuela's elections — there have been dozens since Hugo Chávez’s victory in 1998 — the presidential vote on July 28 has split the broad Latin American left, including supporters of ‘progressivism’, from top to bottom. An ever shrinking but still numerous sector, which is full of intellectuals, has echoed the arguments of the São Paulo Forum1, according to which to save Venezuela and the region from US imperialism it is necessary to support the Nicolás Maduro government at any cost. This cost, it seems, includes even possibility that, unlike previous elections, Maduro may have lost, given he has so far refused to prove his victory.

According to this logic, based more on classical geopolitics than Marxism, anything can be justified as necessary so as to "not hand over" power (and oil) "to the right" in Venezuela. Within this geopolitical logic, whether Maduro won or lost the election is secondary to the "progressive nationalist" imperative of preventing US imperialism, embodied by opposition candidate Edmundo González, from taking up residence in Miraflores Palace and thereby jeopardising state ownership over PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela SA), owner of one of the largest oil and gas reserves on the planet. Another sector of neo-Madurists, it is true, places less emphasis on oil and more on the tragedy that a defeat for Maduro, seen as a leftist, would represent given the backdrop of the advance of the extreme right in the region and globally. For both groups, there is no option but to stick with Maduro — not even a negotiation between the two sides of the Venezuelan dispute, as Brazilian president Lula da Silva and Colombian president Gustavo Petro have proposed, probably with the aim of agreeing to a division of powers between the two sides that includes some guarantees of democratic rights and PDVSA's integrity.

History and facts don’t matter

It is worth reminding ourselves, what is it that differentiates the right and left: our discourse or action? Maduro's rhetoric certainly maintains a lot of left-wing verbiage. He says his government is a "military-police-popular alliance against imperialism and for socialism". He needs to legitimise himself internally and externally as Chávez's successor, when all he has done is roll back the achievements and legacy of the years of progress of the Bolivarian process.

Putting aside appearances, the fact is that his policy for remaining in government since 2013 has been to encourage the enrichment of a new business sector in the country and, like a Bonaparte, negotiate between the different fractions of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, new and old (with the exception of the faction most closely linked to the US far right, represented by Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo González). Maduro has always favoured business sectors, particularly those in the oil services industry, whose profits feed the new bourgeoisie and are partly distributed to the top brass of his armed forces and police (hence the alliance). More than 800 luxury cars were seized just from among the hundred involved in the PDVSA cryptocurrency mega-corruption scandal uncovered in 2023, one reflection of the deteriorating morale of the government's leadership..2

Even under the intense fire of Western imperialist sanctions against Venezuela — which date back to the Barack Obama administration, were tightened by Donald Trump and have become more flexible under Joe Biden — the Maduro government has never taken steps to confront the globalised financial system and its domestic supporters. It has allocated a substantial part of the dwindling national budget to private banks to guarantee the sale of foreign currency to private and rentier companies, which is essentially a policy of subsidising and favouring the rich..3

At the same time (since Decree 2792 issued in 2018), it has banned strikes, the presentation of demands, the right of the working class to mobilise, and the organisation and legalisation of new unions, while prosecuting and sending to prison union leaders who question internal company practices or simply ask for a pay rise and health insurance. This was the case at Siderúrgica del Orinoco (Sidor), home to the largest concentration of proletariats in Venezuela: after mobilising for wages and benefits between June-July 2023, striking workers and their leaders became victims of intense repression. Leonardo Azócar and Daniel Romero, both union delegates, have been imprisoned ever since..4

The "anti-imperialism" of Maduro and his entourage does not stop him from delivering the oil that the US needs, through Chevron and other big foreign companies (such as Repsol), in a context where the US Treasury Department authorises them to extract Venezuelan black gold while prohibiting them from paying taxes and royalties to Venezuela..5The acceptance of these neo-colonial conditions shows the limits of Maduro’s anti-imperialism.

The sanctions against Venezuela have become more flexible under Biden (pressured by the war in Ukraine), but Maduro maintains the discourse that everything is the fault of the sanctions as a pretext for moving forward with a structural adjustment that fundamentally affects those who live off their own labour. In political terms, within Venezuela, talk of US sanctions (real, concrete and detestable) has lost its political effectiveness in the face of the ostentatious and luxurious lifestyle (exposed by billionaire corruption cases) of those who govern the country.

The working class as an ancillary issue

The pro-Maduro left has replaced assessing the situation of the Venezuelan working class as the basis of left-wing analysis with the "geopolitics of oil". This binary geopolitics only sees the contradiction between imperialism and the Venezuelan state (undoubtedly a real and important contradiction). It is not dialectical enough to take into account the material and political situation of working class people, their aspirations and options amid a scenario of multiple contradictions. It is as if this were an ancillary issue, or a secondary contradiction. The "mantra" of the pro-Maduro left for omitting class analysis is the need to prevent the right from coming to power, ignoring the fact that Venezuela has a government that applies the structural economic recipes of the right, just with left-wing rhetoric.

You only have to talk to the workers (not the bureaucracy of the Bolivarian Socialist Workers Confederation bosses) at Sidor and PDVSA, or with teachers and university professors to see the terrible material situation in which they live (a minimum wage of US$4 a month, an average salary of US$130 a month, made up of 80% bonuses), amid the worst loss of democratic freedoms in decades in terms of their organisation, mobilisation and struggle.

The new geopolitics of progressivism look at the J28 elections in much the same way as the international mainstream media (CNN, CBS and others), but simply support the opposite side. They do not defend the interests of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, but those of Maduro and the new bourgeoisie, behind the false axiom that Maduro equals the working class but without analysing his government's anti-worker and anti-popular policies. They fall into the trap of "legal fetishism" by limiting their analysis of the situation to the election results. The issue is not just that Maduro and the CNE have not demonstrated how the president won the J28 elections, but how this situation affects the framework of concrete democratic freedoms in which the working class operates and survives.

If there is no transparency and legitimacy in the national elections, in which the registered candidates represented different shades of bourgeois programs, it is difficult to imagine restoring the minimum democratic freedoms that the working class needs to defend itself against capital’s offensive against it (the right to decent wages, the right to strike, freedom of association, freedom to mobilise, express opinions and organise in political parties). The working class is fundamentally interested in how the situation after J28 allows or restricts, in the short term, the freedoms it needs to express itself as an exploited class. But this contradiction does not enter into the logic and discourse of new progressive geopolitics.

Compromising omissions and silences

These "progressives" are not concerned by the repression against workers' trade unions and political organisations6, nor that Maduro prevented any left-wing sector of the PSUV from taking part in the country's elections — even at the cost of infiltrating, taking to court and attacking the leadership of the Popular Electoral Movement (MEP), the Fatherland for All Party (PPT), the Tupamaros and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) in order to have them intervened!7 Maduro’s supporters fail to mention that since J28, the government has intensified its repression, no longer against the middle class, but fundamentally against the working class, sending about 2500 young people to prison under the discourse of re-education, which means subjecting them to vexatious public rituals of brainwashing.

They are silent about the construction of two maximum security prisons for those caught protesting or inciting protests on social media. They ignore the imprisonment of several opposition politicians and the direct threats made against others on television — as the minister of the "hammer", Diosdado Cabello, threatened the former mayor of Caracas Juan Barreto, Vladimir Villegas, the brother of the Minister of Culture and the chair of a parliamentary committee .8 If they can threaten public figures like this, the situation is worse for ordinary people who lack such a media profile. Recently, we have seen the deployment of plainclothes security forces to threaten activists — as happened on Saturday July 10 against Koddy Campos and Leandro Villoria, leaders of the LGBTQI community in Caracas. In the days following the election, activists' houses in the traditional Chavista stronghold of 23 de Enero in Caracas were marked with an X of Herod by government officials to scare them against possibly protesting.

The geopolitical left is silent on the number of deaths after J28 (close to 25, according to estimates by human rights organisations and social movements), spreading the narrative that they are just right-wingers. This is not only untrue, but constitutes a step backwards in the human rights gains made in the post-dictatorship periods in the region.

Geopolitical progressivism reproduces the mirage of a popular government that no longer exists, which has been erased by Maduro's transformism and anti-worker policies. They seem to be asking the Venezuelan working class to fight for their rights only within the framework that the government allows, in order to feed, from the outside, the utopia that they cannot build in their own countries. This progressivism does not see that the growth in support for the right-wing candidate is the result of the illegalisation and denial of the possibility of a left-wing alternative. The electoral success of the Machado-González duo is largely the result of Madurismo's political mistakes.

What about oil?

All the serious facts mentioned above are considered by supporters of Maduro's "victory" to be "formal-democratic" details that are secondary to the danger of having the "squalid" right once again in government in Venezuela. Their reasoning is as devoid of class criteria as it is of basic monitoring of the country's reality.

Since November 2022, in the context of the war in Ukraine, the US Secretary of the Treasury has authorised Chevron to explore and export Venezuelan oil, on the condition that it not pay taxes or royalties to the Venezuelan government. Such neo-colonial conditions were not even seen in the pre-Chavez governments but have been accepted by Maduro. Since then, Venezuela has once again been a stable supplier of oil to North America. This explains the delicate nature of Biden's positions who prefers to wait out and see if the efforts by the progressive triad Lula, Petro, AMLO succeed (AMLO withdrew from the triad last week).

You have to be careful when talking about the US embargo on Venezuela. There are embargoes and embargoes. Those sanctions that have affected food, medicine and spare parts for buses and cars have contributed decisively to the exodus of four to five million workers. But the Venezuela of those at the top has managed to become the sixth largest supplier of oil to the US, surpassing countries such as the UK and Nigeria9, without this new revenues from this ‘oil opening up’ improving people's material living standards.

What is at stake in Venezuela is which sector of the ruling classes — be it the old, squalid oligarchic bourgeoisie or the new business sectors linked to the "Bolivarian" military that has enriched itself under Maduro — controls the oil industry. It is a dispute over who gets the lion's share of the oil revenue. Any one of them will guarantee the geostrategic supply of oil to Western capitalist powers and will increasingly restrict the distribution of oil income to the people — because this is in the nature of capitalist sectors, and because the nature of the fossil-exporting mono-extractivist state has not been touched by the Bolivarian process. Maduro, despite his rhetoric, is neither a socialist nor an anti-imperialist. It is naive and ill-informed to imagine a Maduro with a program and enough courage to confront imperialist plans to put the oil that Venezuela can produce back on the world market. It is a huge mistake, in the name of supposed sovereignty, to turn a blind eye to the growing authoritarian tendency of the Maduro regime against the disgruntled workers and people.

(Tragically, the geopolitical Madurists continue believing that Venezuela's salvation comes from what is, in reality, its historical curse: its oil wealth. Something that even the great Brazilian developmentalist Celso Furtado, without being a socialist or ecologist, already pointed out as a major problem for the country he lived in in the 1950s).

Is there a way out?

Of course, the strength acquired by the right-wing opposition, which has already been defeated at the ballot box several times by Chávez and once by Maduro, and which now has its most extreme wing, the oligarch Maria Corina Machado, at its head, is a tragedy. An even greater tragedy is the fact that this extreme right wing may have won or come very close to winning the elections — there is no other reason for Maduro's insistence on refusing to present the results and repressing the people so harshly. Precisely for this reason, because a peaceful solution is difficult and simply handing over the government to this sector is hard to swallow, the way to avoid the "bloodbath" that both sides threaten Venezuela with may be the one indicated by the governments of Brazil and Colombia: presentation of the results, negotiations between both sides, starting with Maduro (the group of governments refuses to dialogue and review the opposition's results). If it is possible to expect minimum democratic freedoms to be guaranteed, the release of political prisoners, a halt to repression, broad trade union and party political freedom, it is also possible to negotiate clauses to protect PDVSA.

At the moment, supporting the negotiated solution proposed by Colombia and Brazil — which has the support of Chile and the repudiation, of course, of Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega — is the right policy, because it is much more prudent and favourable to the workers and people of the country. This policy cuts against an increasingly authoritarian regime that represses young people, trade unionists and left-wing opponents, and is not as naive and bureaucratically biased as simply endorsing the government's irregularities and arbitrariness. On the one hand, it makes it possible to argue that the extreme right should not slice and dice PDVSA and the few remaining social achievements. On the other hand, it does not start from the mistaken premise that Maduro and his bureaucratic-bourgeois military-police entourage will guarantee Venezuelan "sovereignty" over anything.

National sovereignty and popular sovereignty

Latin American progressivism, as well as Third Worldism and the Stalinist left, use the term sovereignty to amalgamate two different meanings: national sovereignty and popular sovereignty. Of course, national sovereignty is usually a condition for the full exercise of popular sovereignty. The problem is that quite varied regimes (and movements of opinion), both progressive and regressive, can appropriate the defence of national sovereignty in the face of pressure from the world market and imperialism.

National sovereignty was at the centre of the anti-colonial and national independence movements, as well as the national development populisms of the 20th century. But it is also at the heart of the defence of military dictatorships (such as those of the Latin American Southern Cone in the 1960s), theocratic dictatorships (like Iran), state bureaucracies and, as we see with Modi and Trump, extreme right-wing governments. Yes, defence of national sovereignty and even confrontations with imperialism can be carried out by very regressive regimes. For us, defence of national sovereignty makes sense in conjunction with defence of popular sovereignty, the democratic self-organisation of the masses, and the conquest of freedoms and rights that strengthen the historic bloc of the working classes, which can build alternatives to global capitalism and the imperialisms that structure it.

In the same way, as with the Stalinist experiences of the 20th century, we cannot mechanically identify peoples with their political leaders, who may or may not represent them, in a relationship that is always dynamic. When this relationship breaks down — as it has or is breaking down in Venezuela — democratic freedoms become a fundamental point of support for any struggle for sovereignty, both popular and, incidentally, national. Therefore, no force can guarantee Venezuela's sovereignty over its territory and its wealth without recovering popular sovereignty.

Is democracy no longer important?

Bourgeois-democratic regimes are not the regime to which we socialists strategically aspire: we dream of and fight to build grassroots democratic organisations, direct democracy, people's power — as embryos of a new and more vital form of democracy, exercised by the workers and popular sectors — amid processes of revolutionary offensives. But is formal democracy so despicable that we do not give a damn about manipulated elections results?

In a world increasingly threatened by a constellation of extreme right-wing forces, the fight is and will be, for a long time, in defence of freedoms and democratic rights, even of institutions of bourgeois-democratic regimes against the onslaught of the extreme right — as we have already experienced with Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Tayyip Recep Erdogan, Viktor Orbán and so on. Where does that leave a left that despises democracy to the point of endorsing the manipulation of elections for the peoples and workers of the world and in (increasing more) countries where the fight against the far right is vital?

These sectors that call themselves left-wing and endorse repressive regimes are also badly failing, from a strategic point of view, in the necessary process of political, theoretical and practical construction of a new anti-capitalist utopia — one that is capable of enchanting large sections of the youth, women, those who live off their labour and oppressed peoples once again. A new mass anti-capitalist left must be democratic, independent and confront authoritarian "models" — or it will not be.

Finally there is still the most important question for any socialist militant and organisation in Latin America and the world: how do we look in front of the eyes and expectations of the workers, the people and what remains of the non-bureaucratic left in Venezuela? Will those sectors to the left of the PSUV, or hidden critics within the PSUV, today fragmented, persecuted,  in some cases imprisoned, many in full activity against authoritarianism, be abandoned to their fate?10 For us, supporting their struggles, encouraging their unity to resist, helping them to survive and breathe is the priority internationalist task. Everything else that does not take them into account may be geopolitics, but it is certainly not internationalism. After all, the only strategic guarantee for a sovereign Venezuela, for better living and working conditions, for reorganisation and popular power in the medium term, lies in the hands of those social and political subjects who were the protagonists of the golden years of the Bolivarian process, not in the hands of the gravediggers of this process.

Ana Cristina Carvalhaes, journalist and federal civil servant, is a founding member of the PSOL and a member of the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International. Luís Bonilla-Molina is a Venezuelan university lecturer, critical pedagogue and president of the Venezuelan Society of Comparative Education.

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