In a Venezuelan election fiasco driven by the world’s biggest imperialists, the U.S.-backed challenger to the country’s fake-leftist leadership has fled the country for political asylum in Spain (Aljazeera, 9/8). After President Nicholas Maduro declared himself the winner, the right-wing camp behind candidate Edmundo Gonzalez claimed the election had been rigged. Gonzales went into hiding to escape arrest. The U.S. government, hell-bent on regime change in Venezuela, called out the alleged fraud, slapped sanctions on Maduro’s allies, and organized 28 countries to refuse to recognize the results.
Gonzalez is just a stand-in for the pro-U.S. Maria Machado, who was banned from holding office. Their “Unitary Coalition” calls for harsh attacks against the working class: privatization of industry, massive cutbacks in social services. The Machado camp has gone so far as to advocate for tougher U.S. sanctions against their country, hoping that even more poverty in Venezuela will hurt Maduro and open the door to U.S. control (El Pais, 10/1/23).
Maduro is using fascist terror to crack down on protestors, union officials, and any organization that steps out of line. Twenty-four people have been killed and more than 2,400 arrested (Human Rights Watch, 9/4). But don’t be fooled by the howls of outrage by the likes of Joe Biden. The U.S. bosses have no problem collaborating with less-than-democratic rulers, from Saudi Arabia to Haiti, as long as they serve U.S. imperialism and its profits. The Central Intelligence Agency has been used to subvert and overthrow elected leaders in Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, and the Congo, while orchestrating the slaughter of communists and reformists alike.
Workers have no stake in the rulers’ electoral farces. Under capitalism, elections are used to conceal the capitalists’ dictatorship under the veil of liberal democracy. In reality, all elections are rigged for the bosses, whether or not they count all the votes—including the contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump (see back page). The meltdown in Venezuela is another flashpoint in the rivalry between the U.S. and arch-rivals China and Russia as they head toward World War Three. As the international crisis of capitalism intensifies, inter-imperialist rivalry is driving instability worldwide. We can’t predict the winner of this dogfight, but one thing is sure in Venezuela. Regardless of which set of bosses prevail, workers will lose.
False promises and poverty
Despite his grand promises, Venezuela’s previous president, Hugo Chavez, never brought the working class to power with his “Bolivarian Revolution.” Instead, the new government and its capitalist backers seized control of the country’s vast oil reserves and bought off workers with a handful of anti-poverty social programs. Despite bitter complaints by U.S. capitalists, Chavez also kept investments flowing from outside capital, including the U.S., and continued selling oil to U.S. firms (Washington Post, 1/29/19).
Instead of building communism, a dictatorship of the working class, Chavez consolidated a petrostate that relied on the global oil exchange, which accounted for nearly two thirds of state revenue (Reuters, 12/5/22). Not long after Maduro succeeded Chavez in 2013, global oil prices plummeted. This triggered a long and severe recession that U.S. sanctions made worse. It soon became obvious that Venezuela produced almost nothing of its own. Even today, Venezuela imports 60 percent of its food supply, much of it from the U.S. (USDA, 10/3/22).
With loyal backing from Russia and China, Maduro has presided over a catastrophic collapse of the Venezuelan economy. Between 2014 and 2021, the country’s GDP fell by 75 percent while inflation has risen as high as 130,000 percent (Council of Foreign Relations, 7/31). The result is unspeakable misery for the working class. More than 90 percent of the population live in poverty. There are deadly shortages of essentials, and millions suffer from malnutrition. Children die of starvation while their families scavenge in dumpsters for food (Bread for the World, 2/8/19).
Soaring prices have forced workers to the black market to survive. Three days of work buys just two pounds of rice, for which workers must stand in line all day. Hospitals have less than 5 percent of the medications they need (Reuters, 10/10/22).
As a result, 7.7 million people, or one quarter of Venezuela’s population, have made the heartbreaking decision to flee their country and migrate to Peru or Chile or Colombia, where they are greeted by racist discrimination (aljazeera.com, 8/14/19). More than half a million have risked their lives to make their way to the U.S. (BBC, 8/5), where they are welcomed by violent border guards and slandered by gutter racists like Trump.
Imperialists vie for control
Instead of relying on the might and ingenuity of workers to build a decent society, Chavez and then Maduro turned to Russia and China, who were eager to penetrate the U.S. strategic “backyard.” Russia’s military alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela involve training and weapon sales (Institute for National Strategic Studies, 12/2022). China has sunk $60 billion in the Venezuelan economy and is the largest importer of Venezuelan oil. These profit-seeking deals have done nothing to alleviate the suffering of the impoverished masses. But they have won Maduro Chinese backing for his dubious election victory (VOA, 8/3).
The betrayal of workers by the fake left in Venezuela stands in sharp contrast to the historic advance made by revolutionary communists in the Soviet Union in the early 20th century. They built an economy of and for the working class that could stand on its own feet and meet workers’ needs. Soviet leaders were so successful that the USSR proved immune to the plague of the Great Depression, which devastated capitalist countries in the 1930s. (See PLP.org for how the Soviet revolution was reversed).
Don’t vote, revolt!
There are no shortcuts to an egalitarian world. The Bolivarian “Revolution” was doomed from the start because it failed to organize workers to smash capitalism and to build communism. Like the rest of the “Pink Tide” across Latin America, it won only limited and short-term reforms while replacing the old group of bosses with a new one.
With the collapse of the old liberal world order, as China and Russia exploit the decline of U.S. imperialism, the international working class is caught in the middle. If we line up behind one candidate or another, or one imperialist superpower or the other, we’ll be signing our own death warrants. We must reject capitalist misleaders like Nicolas Maduro, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, or Top Cop Kamala Harris in the U.S. They will lead our class into the hell of nationalism, racism, and imperialist war. They have no choice in the matter; their profit system has decayed to the point where it can’t survive without war and fascism.
Progressive Labor Party is building the only force that can solve the crisis of capitalism: an international communist movement. We must begin this work by banding together, building solidarity with migrants, and organizing multiracial fightback wherever we are. We must attack rotten capitalist ideas on campus, on the job, in the military. These day-to-day reform struggles will build workers’ confidence in our class’s ability to create a world with enough housing, jobs, healthcare, and education for all. But we can’t get there by voting. The bosses won’t let us vote away their money and power. We must destroy capitalism, root and branch—with communist revolution. Join us!
