By ANA C. CARVALHAES & LUÍS BONILLA-MOLINA*

It is worth asking as a reminder: what is the line that marks the difference between the right and the left — speech or action?

Unlike what has been happening for 25 years in relation to elections in Venezuela — and there have been dozens since Hugo Chávez's victory in 1998 — this time, after the July 28 election, the broad Latin American left, including the entire basis of “progressivism”, was divided from top to bottom.

An increasingly smaller sector, but still numerous and full of intellectuals, echoes the argument of the São Paulo Forum,[I] according to which, to save Venezuela and the region from North American imperialism, it is necessary to support Nicolás Maduro's government at any cost. This cost obviously includes the possibility that, unlike previous times, Nicolás Maduro may not have won the elections, because after all, until now he refuses to prove his victory.

According to this logic, more based on classical geopolitics than on Marxism, not only is everything valid, it is also necessary to “not hand over” Venezuelan power (and oil) “to the right”. According to geopolitical reasoning, the fact that Nicolás Maduro won or lost the election is secondary in relation to the “progressive nationalist” imperative of preventing US imperialism, embodied by the opposition candidate Edmundo González, from installing itself in the Miraflores Palace, and with that endanger the state ownership of PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela SA), owner of one of the largest oil and gas reserves on the planet.

A sector of progressivism, it is true, places less emphasis on oil and more on the tragedy that would be recognizing the defeat of Nicolás Maduro, seen as left-wing, in a scenario of advancement of the extreme right in the world and in the region. For all of them, however, there would be no other way out than to stay with Nicolás Maduro. Not even a negotiation between the two sides of the Venezuelan dispute, as Lula and Gustavo Petro propose — probably to seek a division of powers between the two sides, with some guarantee for democratic freedoms and some protection for the integrity of PDVSA.

History, facts don't matter

It is worth asking as a reminder: what is the line that marks the difference between the right and the left — speech or action? Nicolás Maduro certainly maintains a discursive grammar with left-wing verbiage. He says his government is an “anti-imperialist military-police-popular alliance for socialism”. He needs to legitimize himself internally and externally as Hugo Chávez's successor, when all he did was set back the achievements and legacy of the years of advancement of the Bolivarian process.

Beyond appearances, the fact is that its policy, since 2013, has been to encourage the enrichment of a new business sector in the country and, like Bonaparte, to negotiate between the different fractions of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, new and old (with the exception of more umbilically linked to the Yankee extreme right, which is that of Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo González) to remain in government. Nicolás Maduro has always favored business sectors, in particular services to the oil industry, whose dividends feed the new bourgeoisie and part of which is distributed to the top of its armed forces and police (hence the alliance). More than 800 high-end luxury cars were seized just among the hundred involved in the PDVSA cryptocurrency mega-corruption, discovered in 2023, which is just a reflection of the deteriorating moral situation of the government leadership.[ii]

Even under the intense fire of Western imperialist sanctions against Venezuela — which came from the Barack Obama government, went through Donald Trump and became more flexible with Joe Biden — it never took any measures to confront the globalized financial system and its internal supporters. It has been allocating a substantial part of the dwindling national budget to private banks to guarantee the sale of foreign currency to private companies and rentiers, which has become a policy of subsidy and favoring the rich.[iii]

At the same time (since decree 2792 of 2018), it prohibits strikes, the presentation of demands, the right to mobilize the working class, the organization and legalization of new unions, while prosecuting and sending to prison union leaders who question internal practices in companies , or simply ask for a salary adjustment and health insurance. This was the case of Siderúrgica del Orinoco (Sidor), the largest concentration of the proletariat in Venezuela: after a mobilization for wages and benefits, between June and July 2023, the strikers and leaders were victims of intense repression. Leonardo Azócar and Daniel Romero, union delegates, have been in prison since then.[iv]

The “anti-imperialism” of Nicolás Maduro and his surroundings does not prevent him from now delivering the oil that the USA needs through Chevron and other large foreign companies (such as Repsol), in a context in which the Ministry of Finance of the The US authorizes them to extract Venezuelan black gold, prohibiting their companies from paying taxes and royalties to Venezuela.[v] The acceptance of these neocolonial conditions shows the limits of Madurista anti-imperialism.

Sanctions against Venezuela have become more flexible under Joe Biden (pressured by the war in Ukraine), but Nicolás Maduro remains unchanged in his speech that everything is the fault of the sanctions, as a pretext to move forward with a structural adjustment that fundamentally affects those who live in the country. work. In political terms, within Venezuela, the discourse of US sanctions (real, concrete and detestable) ended up losing its political effectiveness in the face of the ostentatious, luxurious lifestyle (entitled to cases of billion-dollar corruption) of those who now govern the country. .

The working class as an accessory element

The analysis of the situation of the Venezuelan working class as the basis of left-wing analysis is replaced, by the pro-Maduro, by the “geopolitics of oil” fashion. This binary geopolitics only sees the contradiction of imperialism versus the Venezuelan state (undoubtedly an important contradiction in reality). It does not have enough dialectics to take into account, in a scenario of multiple contradictions, the material and political situation of workers and popular classes, their aspirations and options. It is as if this were an ancillary issue, or a secondary contradiction. The pro-Maduro “mantra” for omitting class analysis is 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, only with left-wing rhetoric.

It would be enough to talk to the workers (not the bureaucracy of the CBST bosses) at Sidor, PDVSA, professors and university professors to see the terrible material situation in which they live (minimum wage of US$4 or R$24 per month, average salary of US$130 or just over R$700 per month, made up of 80% bonuses), amid the worst loss of democratic freedoms in decades for its organization, mobilization and struggle.

The new geopoliticians of progressivism place the issue of the July 28th elections on the line of dispute in the mainstream international media (CNN, CBS and others), but on the opposite side of the sidewalk. They do not defend the interests of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, but those of Nicolás Maduro and the new bourgeoisie, with the false axiom according to which Maduro would be equal to the working class, without a line of analysis of what anti-worker and anti-popular policies have been. of your government.

They fall into the trap of “legal fetishism” by limiting the analysis of the situation to the results of the elections. The issue is not just the fact that Nicolás Maduro and the CNE have not shown what calculations they made to give the president victory in the July 28 elections, but how this situation affects the structure of concrete democratic freedoms in which the working class operates and survives.

If there is no transparency and legitimacy in national elections, in which the registered candidates represented different shades of bourgeois programs, it is difficult to think about restoring the minimum democratic freedoms that the working class needs to defend itself against the offensive of capital on its work ( the right to decent wages, the right to strike, freedom of association, freedom of mobilization, opinion and organization in political parties).

The working class is fundamentally interested in knowing whether the situation after the 28th of July will allow or restrict, 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 discourses of the new progressive geopolitics.

Omissions and compromising silences

It matters little to these “progressives” the repression of the union and political organization of workers and the people,[vi] nor that Nicolás Maduro prevented any sector to the left of the PSUV from participating in the country's last elections — even at the cost of infiltrating, judicializing and attacking the leadership of the Popular Electoral Movement (MEP), the Patria para Todos Party (PPT), the Tupamaros and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) itself to intervene in it![vii] Nicolás Maduro's supporters omit that the government, after July 28, intensified repression, no longer on the middle class, but fundamentally on the popular sectors, sending around 2.500 young people to prison with a speech of re-education, which means submitting them to shameful public brainwashing rituals broadcast on official networks.

They are silent about the construction of two maximum security prisons for those caught protesting or inciting protests on social media. They ignore the arrest of several opposition politicians and the direct threats on television to others — as the “hammer” minister, Diosdado Cabello, did to the former mayor of Caracas Juan Barreto,[viii] or with Vladimir Villegas, brother of the Minister of Culture and a parliamentary committee president. If the threat to public figures is like this, it is worse in the territories of ordinary people who are not media figures.

Recently, we have seen the deployment of undercover security forces to threaten activists — as happened on July 10 against Koddy Campos and Leandro Villoria, leaders of the LGBTQI community in Caracas. As we saw in the following days in the traditional Chavista stronghold of February 23, in Caracas, where activists' houses were marked, by government people, with an X of Herod, to scare against the possibility of demonstrations.

The geopolitical left is silent about the number of deaths after the 28th of July (close to 25, according to estimates from human rights organizations and social movements), expanding the narrative that it was only about right-wing people. This is not only false, but it constitutes a setback in the gains in human rights made in the post-dictatorship periods in the region.

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

And what about oil after all?

All the serious facts mentioned above are considered by supporters of Nicolás Maduro's “victory” as secondary “democratic-formal” details given the danger of having the “squalid” right again in the Venezuelan government. The reasoning is as devoid of class criteria as it is devoid of basic monitoring of the country's reality.

Since November 2022, as part of the war in Ukraine, the US Treasury Secretary has authorized Chevron to explore and export Venezuelan oil, on the condition that it does not pay taxes or royalties to the Venezuelan government, which constitutes neocolonial conditions that do not even were known in governments prior to Hugo Chávez and were accepted by Nicolás Maduro. From that moment on, Venezuela returned to being a stable supplier of oil to North America. This explains the sensitivity of Joe Biden's positions and the long wait for the efforts of the progressive triad Lula, Petro, AMLO (from which AMLO withdrew last week).

One must be careful when talking about the US embargo on Venezuela. There are embargoes and embargoes. What affected food, medicine and spare parts for buses and cars that moved the people contributed decisively to the exodus of four to five million workers. But Venezuela of those at the top has managed to become the sixth largest supplier of oil to the US, surpassing countries like the UK and Nigeria,[ix] without the new revenues from this “oil opening” having in any way improved the material living conditions of the popular classes.

What is at stake in Venezuela is which sector of the ruling classes — be it the old and squalid oligarchic bourgeoisie or the new business sectors linked to the “Bolivarian” military, enriched under Maduro — controls the oil business. Therefore, a dispute over who pockets the lion's share of oil revenue. Either of them will guarantee the geostrategic supply of oil to the Western capitalist powers and will increasingly restrict the distribution of oil rents to the people — because this is in the nature of capitalist sectors, and because the nature of a fossil-exporting mono-extractive state has not been touched by the Bolivarian process. Because Nicolás Maduro, despite his speech, is neither socialist nor anti-imperialist.

It is naive and ill-informed to imagine a Nicolás Maduro with enough program and courage to face the imperialist designs of returning the oil that Venezuela can produce to the world market. It is a gross error, in the name of supposed sovereignty, to turn a blind eye to the growing authoritarian tendency of the Nicolás Maduro regime against discontented workers and people.

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

Is there any way out?

It is clear that the strength acquired by the right-wing opposition, which has already been defeated at the polls several times by Hugo Chávez and once by Nicolás Maduro, and which now has its most extremist wing, the oligarch Maria Corina Machado, at its head, is a tragedy . An even greater tragedy is the fact that this far-right wing may have won or came very close to winning the elections — there is no other reason for Maduro's insistence on denying the presentation of the results and repressing the people so harshly.

Precisely for this reason, because a peaceful solution is difficult and the government's simple surrender to this sector is hard to swallow, the way to avoid the “bloodbath” with which both sides threaten Venezuela may be the one indicated by the governments of the Brazil and Colombia: presentation of results, negotiations between both sides, firstly with Nicolás Maduro himself (the group of governments refuses to dialogue and review the opposition's results). If it is possible to hope to guarantee minimum democratic freedoms, release of political prisoners, suspension of repression, broad trade union and party political freedom, it is also possible to negotiate PDVSA protection clauses.

At this moment, supporting the negotiated solution proposed by Colombia and Brazil — which has the support of Chile and the repudiation, of course, of the dictator Daniel Ortega — is the correct policy, because it is much more prudent, and favorable to workers and the people of the country. This policy is at odds with an increasingly authoritarian regime, which represses young people, trade unionists and left-wing opponents, and is less naive and bureaucratically biased than simply endorsing the government's irregularities and arbitrariness.

On the one hand, it allows us to argue that the extreme right does not slice up and destroy PDVSA and the few remaining social achievements. On the other hand, it does not start from the mistaken premise that Nicolás 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 left marked by Stalinism, use the term sovereignty by amalgamating two different meanings: national sovereignty and popular sovereignty. Of course, national sovereignty is normally a condition for the full exercise of popular sovereignty. The problem is that the most different regimes (and opinion movements), progressive and regressive, appropriate the defense of national sovereignty in the face of pressure from the world market and imperialism.

National sovereignty was at the center of anti-colonial and national independence movements, as well as national development populisms of the 1960th century. But it is at the heart of defending military dictatorships (like those in the Latin American Southern Cone in the XNUMXs), theocratic dictatorships (like Iran), state bureaucracies and, as we see with Modi and with Trump, far-right governments. .

Yes, the defense of national sovereignty and even confrontations with imperialism can be carried out under very regressive regimes. For us, the defense of national sovereignty makes sense together with the defense of popular sovereignty, the democratic self-organization of the masses, the conquest of freedoms and rights that strengthen the historical bloc of the working classes, which can build alternatives to global capitalism and to the imperialisms that structure it.

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

Isn't democracy important?

Bourgeois-democratic regimes are not the regime to which we socialists strategically aspire: we dream and fight to build grassroots democratic organizations, direct democracy, popular power — as embryos of a new and more vital form of democracy, exercised by workers and popular sectors — in the processes of the revolutionary offensive. But is formal democracy so despicable that we don't give a damn about elections, to be polite, with manipulated results?

In a world increasingly threatened by a constellation of far-right forces, the struggle is and will be for a long time to defend freedoms and democratic rights, even institutions of bourgeois-democratic regimes against the attack of the far-right — such as we have already tried it with Trump, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Orbán and so on. What happens, in this scenario, to a left that despises democracy to the point of endorsing the manipulation of elections for the people and workers of the world and in countries (increasing numbers) where the fight against the extreme right is vital?

These sectors that call themselves left-wing and endorse repressive regimes are, furthermore, in a very bad position, from a strategic point of view, in the necessary process of political, theoretical and practical construction of a new anti-capitalist utopia — capable of once again enchanting broad layers of youth, of women, those who live from work and oppressed peoples. A new mass anti-capitalist left must be democratic, independent and confront authoritarian “models”, or it will not be.

But there is still one question that should be more important than all for any socialist activist and organization in Latin America and the world: how do we stand in the eyes and expectations of the workers, the people and what remains of the non-bureaucratic left in Venezuela? Will these sectors to the left of the PSUV, or hidden critics within the PSUV itself, today fragmented, persecuted, some arrested, many in full activity against the will, be left to their own devices?[X]

For our part, supporting their struggles, encouraging their unity to resist, helping them survive and breathe is the priority internationalist task. Everything else, which does not take them into account, may be geopolitics, but internationalism is not. After all, the only strategic guarantee of a sovereign Venezuela, of better living and working conditions, of reorganization and popular power in the medium term, is in the hands of those social and political subjects who were protagonists of the golden years of the Bolivarian process and not in the hands of the gravediggers of the process.

*Ana C. Carvalhaes is a journalist and has a master's degree in International Political Economy from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

*Luis Bonilla-Molina is a professor of pedagogy at the Universidad Nacional Experimental de la Gran Caracas (UNEXCA).

Notes

[I] A broad union of left-wing parties, created by the PT in 1990 and today made up of more than 100 organizations, including the Communist Party of Cuba, the party of Ortega of Nicaragua, Evo Moralez and his part of the MAS of Bolivia. Uruguay's Broad Front has been distancing itself from Maduro for more than a year. Now, Lula, Petro and López Obrador have definitively “divided” the bloc.

[ii] An embezzlement of funds from PDVSA estimated at US$15 billion overthrew the president of the state-owned company and former oil minister Tareck El Aissami last April. See https://g1.globo.com/mundo/noticia/2024/04/09/ex-vice-presidente-de-nicolas-maduro-na-venezuela-e-preso.ghtml

[iii] About Maduro's economic policy and its relationship with the country's business sectors, see: https://nuso.org/articulo/venezuela-elites-Maduro-fedecamaras/

[iv] https://www.aporrea.org/trabajadores/n393080.html

[v] These are the conditions established by the so-called License 44, with which the Biden administration, in October 2023, once again allowed the legal sale of Venezuelan oil to private American and foreign companies.

[vi] See Bonilla's article on the subject at: https://luisbonillamolina. com/2024/07/25/las-elecciones-presienciales-en-venezuela-del-28j-2024-una-situacion-inedita/ “Decree 2792 of 2018 that eliminates collective contracts and the right to huelga, the ONAPRE instruction which ignores the acquired rights of an important part of public employees, workers in education, health and other sectors, forms part of a natural containment measure and a breakdown of coincidences between the new and old bourgeoisie, to advance in agreements with broad sectors of national capital and its political representations.”

[vii] The Communist Party of Venezuela was intervened, preventing it from launching candidacies in August 2023.

[viii] Diosdado Cabello presents a TV program in which he condemns disloyal people as traitors and smashes them with a huge hammer. No, this is not a tale of Latin American fantastic realism.

[ix] https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2024/06/03/usa-buying-increasingly-more-petroleum-from-caracas-while-while-making-sales-venez difficultuelanas-to-other-countries

[X] Here, three of the sectors that make up this left outside the PSUV: https://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n395391.html#google_vignette

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