Venezuela: Capitalism and Class Struggle

The three following statements were published between 2013 and 2015 by several comrades. Although two years have passed since then, we are convinced that their content is not without relevance, and on the contrary, the assessment that they carry out quite corresponds to what is today happening in the region of the Caribbean Sea.

As everybody already knows, the materials we publish on this blog have always aimed to get out of the ideological wheel that is equally present in the left and right-wing media. If our local reality generally brings us down, more so does what happens abroad. However, to limit ourselves to abandon all efforts to generate criticism, to divulge and discuss it, has no reason to be. Contributions such as these should not be understood as definitive, but as efforts part of a continuous process, as simple (but necessary) contributions to forge our own alternatives of struggle, autonomous and genuinely revolutionary based on radical criticism. Obviously, to give a correct answer to all the implications that concern the struggle in the practical terrain, as well as the innumerable tasks that entails to organize it, all that will be neither solved in a few lines, nor achieved mechanically or in the short term, and even lesser with immediatist voluntarism. Constant failures and disruptions will have to occur in the streets so that there is even a glimpse of advances.

In the meantime, while describing a little the question we are discussing about, we must emphasize and summarize the following things: standing under the banners of the false antagonism “Yankee imperialism vs. Latin-American socialist democracy” means to blindly accept to jump off a cliff, it’s taking part into a fire-drill of opposition that will inevitably lead us to keep things the same (or worse than before). Therefore, when we raise the slogan: “Neither Chavism nor the opposition”, we are not making use of a simple disruptive motto. Far from that, we are unabashedly exposing a reality that has been confused and distorted by all factions of the bourgeoisie since years.

The self-proclaimed Bolivarian revolution is not at all opposed to capitalism. Socialism of the 21st century is nothing more and nothing less than reformism framed into the continuity of the bourgeois democratic tasks, that is to say: the defense of the economy, the value, the State, the nation, progress and developmentalism.

On the other hand, neither Hugo Chavez nor Maduro were fascist dictators, on the contrary, they are as democratic as their counterparts demanding “the release of political prisoners in Venezuela” (obviously they refer exclusively to MUD prisoners). All the citizenists, rightists, democrats who get cynically and hypocritically indignant and denounce the police repression carried out by the Bolivarian government, simultaneously in “their own countries”, also act as accomplices, denouncers, sponsors and even direct participants in the repression and the massacre of precarious, impoverished and marginalized proletarians who struggle against exploitation and looting made by oil, gas and mining companies.

The revolutionary struggle that we claim in order to destroy Capital must fight in the same vein all the national States, reducing them to less than ruins; regardless of the adjective that characterizes them, the ideology they proclaim, or the person or group that is at the head; this is an essential affirmation of our historical program.

[Materiales]

ES: https://libcom.org/library/venezuela-capitalismo-y-lucha-de-clases
FR: https://libcom.org/library/venezuela-capitalisme-et-lutte-de-classes