By LUIS BONILLA-MOLINA & OSVALDO COGGIOLA*
Any analysis of the serious situation in Venezuela that ignores the country's historical condition is condemned to superficiality and vulgar repetition, especially hypocritical when done in the name of democracy
1.
Any analysis of the serious situation in Venezuela that ignores the country's historical condition in the colonial and semi-colonial systems is condemned, at best, to superficiality and, at worst, to vulgar repetition, especially hypocritical when done in the name of democracy, of the tired clichés of the imperialism, the fundamental reality of our era. Let's look at the broad historical lines of this condition.
In the Iberian colonial era, the Venezuelan viceroyalty experienced a strong development in its exports (in the second half of the 1796th century it was already the world's largest exporter of cocoa) and economic prosperity that benefited only a small part of its population of approximately one million of inhabitants, the vast majority made up of black slaves, zambos, mulattos and Indians being kept in extreme poverty. Coro's black rebellion in XNUMX dangerously projected, for the colony's dominant classes, the shadow of the slave revolution in neighboring Haiti.
When Simón Bolivar began to develop the project for an American confederation to replace Spanish colonial domination, he came to the conclusion that, to achieve independence, the Spanish must be totally defeated (to prevent their attempts at reconquest), unifying the dispersed efforts of the regional caudillos and creating a republic to be able to face any imperial power. And simultaneously, against the Spanish, he raised the specter of the “revolution of colors”, the “barbaric anarchy” that would provoke a revolution with the direction and benefit of the dispossessed classes of society.
In a famous and controversial entry for a dictionary, Karl Marx criticized the leader of Venezuela for his limitations in the fight for national independence (“separatist yes, democrat no”), but he never placed himself in a neutral or doubtful position regarding the progressiveness and legitimacy of this fight. He highlighted the freedom of black slaves as one of the driving forces behind the rise of independence forces, although he recognized the paternity of the initiative in the president of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion (1770-1818), not in Simón Bolívar.[I]
In Gran Colombia, the ruling classes did not accept Simón Bolívar's decision to keep the region unified in a single country, promoting a coup to remove him from power. After the military victory against Spain, they exiled the military and concluded to divide the territory of the former viceroyalty of New Granada into three countries: Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. In Latin America, in general, from an economic point of view, there was continuity between the Iberian colonial period and the independent phase.
The extraction of metals was followed by agricultural and livestock exploration through which each country, articulating with the international economic system, identified itself with a product on a commercial scale. Central America specialized in supplying tropical fruits; Ecuador, bananas; Brazil and Colombia, sugar and coffee; Cuba and the Caribbean, sugar; Venezuela, cocoa; Argentina and Uruguay, meat and wool; Bolivia became a supplier of tin and Peru of fish.
In the second half of the 1814th century, the North American Congress declared its opposition to British territorial demands in Venezuela: by a treaty concluded with the Netherlands in 1887, Great Britain had acquired the territory of Guyana, and for half a century maintained a dispute with Venezuela on its western border, aspiring to an ever larger portion of its territory. Venezuela had appealed several times to the United States, which in XNUMX offered its services to Great Britain, proposing to submit the difference to arbitration. The British rejected the proposal.
Among Great Britain's territorial aspirations, the one that caused most concern was control of the mouth of the Orinoco River. The Venezuelans fueled fears by stressing in an official note that not only the “Monroe Doctrine” (“America for the Americans”) was at stake, but that “English control over the mouth of our great river artery, and over some of its tributaries , will be the cause of permanent danger to the industry and commerce of a large portion of the New World.”
A treaty was signed, granting much of the claimed territory to the British. In return, Great Britain recognized the Monroe Doctrine and US hegemony in the Southern Hemisphere. Venezuela knew the content of the agreement only when it was published. The Caracas government ratified the agreement after preventing street demonstrations in the city. In Brazil, parliament approved resolutions supporting the North American attitude. The animosity aroused among Venezuelans, as a consequence of the humiliating treatment they received, led them to take a stand against the USA in the Spanish-American war.
In the USA, the republican electoral platform in 1896 proposed an aggressive “monroism”, exploiting the nationalist pride already agitated in the Venezuelan crisis, proposing North American control of the Hawaiian islands and the projected interoceanic canal in Panama.[ii] In 1899 (February-October) the restorative revolution took place, which combined the crisis of yellow liberalism, the unrest due to Andrade's bad government with the demands for protagonism from the rich in the interior of the mountainous area (Venezuelan Andes) of the border state of Táchira . The revolution inaugurated a long hegemony of Andean presidents who would express the transition from the agrarian model of accumulation to the oil rentier model.
Soon after, Venezuela was the object of a military assault by European powers. When the Anglo-German fleet entered the port of La Guayra, imposing a maritime blockade to forcibly collect the country's debt, the USA was previously consulted and gave its consent, which meant “the transition from European interventionism to northern tutelage -American… The note from Argentine minister [Luis Maria] Drago to the State Department, stating that the public debt could not be recovered with armed military intervention, was the only official manifestation in Latin America in favor of Venezuela.”[iii] World geopolitical relations were changing with the emergence of a new power, the USA, with coasts on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and with increasingly global economic interests.
In the Venezuelan crisis of 1902-1903, the naval blockade was imposed against Venezuela by Great Britain, Germany and Italy, after President Cipriano Castro refused to pay foreign debts and damages suffered by European citizens in the country's civil wars. Castro assumed that the Monroe Doctrine would force Washington to intervene to prevent European military intervention. However, United States President Theodore Roosevelt and the State Department considered that the doctrine applied only to the seizure of territory.
The US was officially neutral in the conflict and allowed European military action to proceed without objection. The blockade saw Venezuela's small navy quickly defeated; Still, Castro refused to concede, but agreed to submit some of the claims to international arbitration, which he had previously rejected. The blockading nations agreed to a compromise but maintained the naval blockade during negotiations. Under the agreement, Venezuela committed 30% of its customs duties to resolve external complaints. The Court of Arbitration granted preferential treatment to the blockading powers against the claims of other nations. The role of the United States, as an apparent mediator, was part of the strategy to consolidate a neocolonial relationship with Venezuela.
The episode contributed to the formulation of the “Roosevelt Corollary” of the Monroe Doctrine, affirming the US right to intervene in the affairs of small Caribbean and Central American states if they were unable to pay their international debts. Thus, Venezuela and the Caribbean-Central America complex were at the center of the configuration of the “backyard” of North American imperialism. The US victory over the weakened Spanish Empire in the Spanish-Cuban-American War (1898) gave them new possessions in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico) and the Pacific (Philippines, Guam and Hawaii), over which they could project their power in Southeast Asia and in Central America.
At the same time, it inaugurated a new form of imperialism in which the political annexation of territories was not necessary: although Cuba achieved political independence in 1901, the US restricted its political sovereignty through the Platt Amendment incorporated into the Caribbean island's constitution, which it allowed intervention in its internal affairs, the establishment of military bases in its territory and its ability to make political treaties.[iv] The new Yankee imperialism was based on systematic interventionism in Latin America:
1901 – 1914 – Panama – US Navy supports the secession of the territory of Colombia; American troops have occupied the canal area since 1901, when construction began.
1903 – Honduras – US Marines disembark and intervene in the civil war.
1903 – 1904 – Dominican Republic – US troops invade the country to “protect American interests”.
1904 – 1905 – Korea – Marines disembark during the Russo-Japanese war.
1906 – 1909 – Cuba - US troops disembark during the election period.
1907 – Nicaragua – North American troops invade the country and impose a de facto protectorate.
1907 – Honduras – Marines disembark during Honduras' war against Nicaragua.
1908 – Panama – Marines are sent during the election period.
1910 – Nicaragua – US Marines land again in Bluefields and Corinto.
1911 – Honduras – Troops sent to “protect American interests” during the civil war.
1912 – Cuba – US troops sent to “protect American interests” in Havana.
1912 – Panama – Marines occupy the country during elections.
1912 – Honduras – Troops sent to the country to “protect American interests”.
1912 – 1933 – Nicaragua – US troops occupy the country to fight Sandino's insurgents during the twenty-year civil war.
2.
The USA took advantage of the “War of a Thousand Days”, which devastated the Republic of Colombia (including Panama, which was a department/province of Colombia), between 1899 and 1902. In 1903, the USA imposed, through bribes on Colombian parliamentarians, and direct military intervention, the Hay-Bunau Varilla Treaty by which they removed the province of Panama from the country, which proclaimed its independence. The USA thus conquered the area where construction of the Panama Canal had already begun. Through the secession of Panama, a new milestone of imperial expansion was defined. The interoceanic canal raised the prospect of North American naval hegemony in the Atlantic and Pacific. The US took advantage of the bankruptcy of the former French canal company, whose construction had already consumed US$250 million, and bought its shares for US$40 million.
The country's independence was proclaimed in 1903, with the support of the USA. In 1904, during the government of “Teddy” Roosevelt, the reconstruction of the canal, opened in 1914, after spending US$360 million, was resumed through a state company set up for this purpose. For the right to own the Panama Canal, the US paid 10 million dollars and agreed to pay 25.000 dollars a year, an amount that was increased to 430.000 in 1933 and to 1.930.000 in 1955.
Imperialist interference, therefore, played a central role in the political and geopolitical development of Venezuela in the 20th century. Leon Trotsky noted, exiled in Mexico, that Latin American governments tended towards Bonapartist authoritarianism due to the weakness of the national bourgeoisie, “a dwarf between two giants”, faced with the weight of external (imperialist) capital and the movement of the exploited ( workers and peasants).[v]
In the first half of the 1857th century, Juan Vicente Gómez (1935-1908), a high-ranking military officer, governed Venezuela under a repressive dictatorship from 1935 until his death in 27. In his XNUMX years of government, there was an end to the chronic civil wars , the modernization of the State and the transformation of Venezuela into an oil nation. His dictatorship tried to maintain a constitutional and democratic façade, employing presidents such as Victorino Márquez and Juan Bautista Pérez, subordinate to Gómez, who held the position of commander in chief of the Armed Forces. Gómez helped to consolidate the Venezuelan state and modernize the country, by allowing national and foreign investors to explore the newly discovered oil deposits.
Venezuela experienced substantial economic growth and became one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America in the 1950s, a prosperity reserved for the dominant classes, with the popular majority reduced to poverty, including extreme poverty, contrasting with the increasing wealth of the oligarchies and high state bureaucracy.
The beginning of oil exploration also meant the formation of the “rentier” mode of bourgeois accumulation. Imports — with the progressive replacement of national production — became the mechanism for bourgeois capture of profits derived from oil exploration. Economic incentives for imports, exemption from taxes and other import duties, import credits with preferential dollars (calculated at a price lower than the foreign exchange market), incentives for the imported parts assembly industry, forgiveness of debts contracted by the bourgeoisie through public credits , were configuring a “parasitic” form of formation of the bourgeoisie as a social class in Venezuela.
This form of constitution of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie is fundamental to understanding, decades later, the phenomenon of “bolibourgeoisie”. In 1928, Venezuelan youth led a series of protests that had the democratization of the country as their central axis. The leaders of this revolt would be those who would years later organize the creation of modern Venezuelan parties, especially Democratic Action (AD), a social democrat led by Rómulo Betancourt and other members of that generation, the Christian Social Party (COPEI) led by Rafael Caldera, the liberal Republican Democratic Union Party (URD), headed by Jóvito Villalba, and the Marxist-oriented Communist Party of Venezuela. Many members of this generation participated in the failed coup d'état attempt on April 7, 1928, which sent an important part of the so-called “generation of 28” to prison.
Years later, after Gómez's death and under the government of López Contreras (who had defeated the 1928 coup d'état attempt), on February 27, 1936, the first oil industry union was created in the state of Zulia, which between December of that year and January of the following year, he would lead the first oil strike in Venezuela, with which the organized working class burst onto the national scene.
In this strike, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) played a special role in its leadership. Manuel Taborda, Rodolfo Quintero, Jesús Faría, Olga Luzardo, among other communists, were involved in the organization and development of this protest, which combined salary and labor demands with complaints about the working conditions to which transnational companies subjected them, as well as political demands such as freedom of protest, the cessation of political persecution and the total freedom of political prisoners from the Gomez regime.
Within the framework of a chain of democratic experiences interrupted by dictatorial regimes, Venezuelan political parties built their true political identity between 1936 and 1958. During the period of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1953-1958), Rómulo Betancourt, historic leader of Venezuelan social democracy , he wrote Politics and Oil in Venezuela (1956), a book in which he justifies his position in the Revolutionary Government Junta (1945-1948), and considers oil as the economic articulator of the Venezuelan economy — the axis of the bourgeois accumulation model, in a neocolonial relationship of dependence based on the trade of this material cousin.
During the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez, the AD, COPEI and URD triad consolidated their relationship with the United States and differences with the Soviet bloc, building relationships of trust with the United States to begin the democratic period that began in 1958 and was not interrupted. until the present. Oil became the backbone of the national political regime and the determining factor in the relationship with the United States.
In 1958, the “Pact of Punto Fijo” was celebrated between the three main political parties: Democratic Action (AD), social democratic, the Independent Electoral Political Organization Committee (COPEI), center-right Christian Democrat, and the Democratic Republican Union (URD), “social-liberal ” and pro-imperialist. The agreement sought political stability in the country after the collapse of the dictatorial government of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez before the elections, scheduled for December of that year. Its effects were felt until the early 1990s.
The pact obliged the signatory parties to respect the results of the elections and to respect the alternation of power — excluding the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), which was proscribed; It was evident that for the bourgeoisie and for the accumulation model developed in the country, the PCV was a nuisance. In 1962, the URD abandoned the pact, as it disagreed with the policy adopted in relation to the Cuban revolution. Economic prosperity made it possible to neutralize and defeat the attempts to organize guerrilla groups in support of the Cuban Revolution, the main of which was headed by the legendary Douglas Bravo, without changing the political regime, in a period in which South America experienced a wave of military coups. (Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia) who took “the danger of communism” as their pretext, and the USA as their main point of support.
In 1965, US Marines invaded the Dominican Republic to prevent the inauguration of Juan Bosch, democratically elected after the long dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, known as a communist.
3.
In the last quarter of the 1974th century, the expansive wave of the global economic crisis arrived in Venezuela, in the 1975/1960 recession. The decrease in oil production was closely controlled by OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). Its creation, in XNUMX, with a central role for Venezuela with Perez Alfonzo, initiated a confrontation for a new global distribution of land income. Created by the governments of exporting countries, OPEC raised the price of crude oil, imposing limits on competition between producing countries, which maintained a high income, mainly used in imports.
The direct explorers of the oil mines, however, in most cases, were not the owning States, but rather the large multinational companies that had their technology contracted by the States, or paid them for the exploration of the deposits. It was not the producing countries that gained the most. The price fixed in the Persian Gulf fluctuated, between 1953 and 1973, between $1,60 and $2,75 a barrel; With taxes, however, it would go to $10,00 on the market. The 1973 crisis quadrupled prices. The change in the relationship between capital and agrarian property was at the heart of the oil crisis.
The dispute over crude oil prices was a struggle for the appropriation of “differential income” (originated in natural differences in fertility, or wealth, of the natural environment). It also involved a monopolistic dispute, as the “oil bill” had to be paid, first of all, by energy-consuming countries and companies that depended on imports (most European countries and Japan), which strengthened the North American bourgeoisie and, within the USA, by the business sector that found itself in the same situation. The “oil shock” was therefore part of the intensification of disputes between monopolies and imperialist countries. The large oil refiners and traders (the “seven sisters”) were, to varying degrees, the most benefited by the increase in oil bills.
With the rise in oil prices between 1974 and 1983, Venezuela experienced the most important wave of economic prosperity and expansion of the middle class, which created the illusion that it was possible to build a strong welfare state in the country. This bubble burst with the new drop in oil prices in the early 1980s, the external debt crisis and the arrival of neoliberal globalization, which required a greater and new integration of transnational and local capital. On February 18, 1983 (a date known as Black Friday), Christian social president Luis Herrera Campins interrupted the sale of the US dollar for ten days, which would lead to the establishment of a rigid exchange control mechanism (and therefore , dispute over oil income).
Black Friday is the beginning of the long cycle of economic, political, social, cultural and technological crisis that Venezuela is going through. The crisis that began in 1983 had peaks (caracazo 1989, Bolivarian military rebellions 1992, Agenda Venezuela 1994-1999, Chávez's triumph 1999, constituent process 1999, coup d'état 2002, call for 2005st century socialism in 2002, formation of the “bolibourgeoisie” 2024-2013, death of Chávez 2013 , beginning of the restoration process and bourgeois agreement 2024-XNUMX) but failed to be closed, because in reality it is a rearrangement of the bourgeoisie around oil rentierism in a phase of financialization of the world economy.
In Venezuela, the increase in oil income favored the concentration of capital and income, fueling the intensification of the class struggle and leading to an increase in popular mobilization against the current political regime, which reached its critical point in 1989 (caracazo). Half a century after the beginning of the global economic crisis, Venezuela began to experience a structural crisis that began with “Black Friday” in 1983 and still remains open. This crisis is typical of the limits of the model of bourgeois accumulation around the oil industry and the hegemony of the political regime installed in 1958.
The emergence of the “internal” crisis coincided with the arrival of neoliberalism, the turmoil of external debt and the financialization of the world economy, which boosted a new local economic dynamic, open to transnational capital. On Black Friday of February 18, 1983, the country suffered an abrupt suspension of the sale of the US dollar for ten days, which triggered the establishment of exchange control, imposing a restriction on the outflow of foreign currency, a measure severely contested by the president of the Central Bank of Venezuela.
Black Friday was preceded by several events, such as Venezuela's exit from the gold standard, the nationalization of oil, as well as the beginning of a period of mismatch between public spending and State revenues. This situation worsened and became evident with the fall in oil prices, which took oil exports from 19,3 billion dollars in 1981 to just 13,5 billion dollars in 1983 (a 30% drop). , at the beginning of the debt crisis in Latin America.
These events produced a capital flight of almost eight billion dollars and the corresponding decrease in international reserves, factors that made a monetary devaluation imminent. Until Black Friday, the stability of the currency and the reliability that characterized a free convertibility market were maintained; The episode led to a loss of confidence in the country's economy. There was a sharp drop in international reserves and the adoption of a three-type differential exchange rate regime, which survived until February 1989, amid serious cases of state corruption, popular impoverishment and the end of the stability of the Venezuelan currency.
4.
Most analyzes of the situation in Venezuela tend to focus on short time frames, which prevents a comprehensive understanding of what is happening in the current situation. The voltage spikes in the 1983-2024 crisis period are often confused as separate phases. In reality, the popular and student rebellion of 1987, the caracazo of 1989, the military uprisings of 1992, the dismissal and prosecution of Carlos Andrés Pérez, Chávez's candidacy and electoral victory, the constituent process, the failed coup d'état of 2002, the call for “socialism of the 2014st century”, the contradictions between the new bourgeoisie and popular power, the illness and death of Hugo Chávez, the candidacy and triumph of Nicolás Maduro, the beginning of the blockade of the United States and imperialist nations, the right-wing street rebellions in the years 2017 to 2792 with the death of a hundred young people, the second constituent assembly, decree 1983, the authoritarian turn of Nicolás Maduro, the loss of democratic freedoms, the judicialization of political parties, negotiations with the United States and other events, are just peaks of tension within the framework of the long bourgeois crisis in Venezuela from 2024-XNUMX.
Attempts to overcome this crisis have been fruitless, both on the right (construction of a new model of accumulation, Agenda Venezuela, involution in the social agenda, reduction of the framework of democratic freedoms) and on the institutional left (Chavismo and its project recovery of the social agenda, with the destruction of the old bourgeoisie and its representations, creation of a new bourgeoisie and destruction of the liberal system of democratic freedoms to impose a Bonapartist regime of consensus among the dominant classes).
The anti-capitalist and socialist left, contrary to the project of class conciliation, was unable over this long period to build an alternative pole for structurally overcoming the crisis of hegemony and capitalist accumulation in Venezuela. The emergence of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian military (in 1992) as political actors allowed the construction of a precarious political center in the period 1995-1998 – with supporters from the left, center and right – that tried to resolve this crisis based on a “new consensus” , the opening gave way to initiatives that sought a new hegemony (constituent process, new legal and institutional framework, new democratic paradigm) and a new model of accumulation (the Bolivarian Alternative Agenda — AAB).
O Chiripero of Rafael Caldera (name given to a political coalition that raised Caldera's candidacy for president in the 1993 elections: officially presented the name of Convergence) had opened the way for this tactic of hegemonic dispute. This “political center”, in which business sectors that felt marginalized by the majority sector of the bourgeoisie and feared the effects of the emergence of transnational capital participated, saw in the AAB proposal an opportunity to build a new architecture in the country.
During this period, Hugo Chávez spoke of the “third way” and “human capitalism”. The left valued this grouping as a lifeline in the midst of the disaster that socialist thought was experiencing in the nineties, while sectors of the radical left saw in the attempts to destroy the old model the opportunity to open the way for new correlations of forces that would support the structural change in the country.
Transnational capital and the United States were in favor of any attempt to overcome the model of capital accumulation that gave way to the process of internationalization and financialization, which is why they offered precarious resistance to the idea of change that was being launched. Since Hugo Chávez's arrival in government (1999), three faces of Chavista politics have emerged, expressing the internal contradictions of the unstable “political center”. The first, consistent with the agreed program, launched the constituent process and a new legal framework — facilitating laws, sectoral laws — for the emergence of a new bourgeois State, which required the construction of hegemony for the bourgeois sector that accompanied it.
The second was the result of the unfinished popular national identity of Chávez and Chavismo, which sought to connect with the narratives and imaginaries of the historical-social current of change. The third expressed himself in the groping path towards a radical ideological political discourse, in which he approached experiences such as that of Gaddafi in Libya, Yugoslav cooperativism, communal utopian socialism, the “cursed Marxisms”, until arriving at the “socialism of the 2004st century” (2005-2002), which in its final phase became more assimilated to the old socialism of the 2013th century. These three faces were progressively integrated and constituted the social and ideological reason for Hugo Chávez's leadership in the period XNUMX-XNUMX.
The 2002 coup d'état broke Chavismo's ties with the “nationalist” or “progressive” bourgeois sectors that had grouped around Chavismo in the period 1994-2001. In a country with a rentier accumulation model, based largely on imports, surcharges, tax and tariff exemptions, access to preferential currencies and the different corruption mechanisms required by a commercial bourgeois class (around imports), financial (legitimization of capital and expansion of usury) and assembly (importation of parts and inputs), this rupture with sectors of the “traditional bourgeoisie” left a void that had to be filled quickly.
This generated the need to constitute a new bourgeoisie that was structurally linked to the political project of the Fifth Republic, assuming for itself the accumulation model of the old bourgeoisie. This was the beginning of the decline of the radicalism of the Bolivarian project. This process, known as the economic project of the revolution, generated, between 2002 and 2013, a new bourgeoisie, the “bolibourgeoisie”, confronted with the old ruling class.
In 2004, Hugo Chávez and Chavismo had already consolidated their political identity, a new polyclassism that renewed elements of a national popular revolution and linked it to the socialist discourse. At the same time that it created the material, political and institutional conditions for the emergence of a new bourgeoisie, the Bolivarian process built the conditions for the emergence of forms of popular and communal power, which would supposedly build a social basis for the hegemonic dispute with the old bourgeoisie. Initiatives to build a social base rooted in the new hegemonic project were presented as “XNUMXst century socialism”.
The apparent strategic duality was not political schizophrenia, but in reality contained a new emerging “multiclass” political project, which required a rupture with the old institutional and social fabric, with narratives, imaginaries and correlations of force different from what democracy had been. classical bourgeois. Representative democracy became participatory democracy, the Constitution contained a new multiclass social pact.
An important part of the left focused on questioning that Chávez's program was not authentically revolutionary, when in its origins it was much more reformist and now leaned towards controlled radicalism. This was equivalent to asking Chávez for what they had been unable to do and build in a situation of the rise of the mass movement. Chávez certainly navigated the strategic duality, between a new bourgeois project and the contradictions generated by the possibility of “21st century socialism”, because it was the path to building a new hegemony that did not transcend — and perhaps never intended to transcend — the limits of the bourgeois order. .
Although there are those who argue that his final bet would be on popular power, his physical disappearance prevented this hypothesis from happening. The concrete thing is that the Bolivarian revolution became a project of class conciliation. Chávez fulfilled a sui generis Bonapartist role by arbitrating the balance of the transition to a new institutionality and new mechanisms of power relations.
5.
The death of Hugo Chávez, whose leadership was fundamental in the construction and maintenance of these balances – which in turn became the only possibility for policies of reform or revolution – gave way to a process of loss of transformative force and progressive restoration, of capitulation and abandonment of the popular and radical part of the new hegemonic project. This capitulation was generated more by the conservative spirit of the new bourgeoisie in the face of the idea of popular power, than by the break with the polyclassist idea of the Bolivarian project.
The early abandonment of the radical nature of popular power weakened the very project of a new bourgeois hegemony, therefore, it is not unreasonable to think that Maduro and the heirs of Chavismo did not fully understand the project of hegemonic dispute that Chávez led. This meant, from 2013 onwards, the sustained destruction of the social and institutional fabric not aligned with the logic of capital, which had naively opted for the existence of a socialist horizon.
The political orientation of the Nicolás Maduro governments had two moments: 2013-2017 and 2017-2024. In the first, his commitment focused on strengthening the new bourgeois class, on the definitive subordination of the precarious seeds of popular and communal power to the interests of the new bourgeoisie, and on the confrontation and attempt to annihilate the old bourgeoisie. The characterization of Venezuela as a danger to the strategic interests of the United States and the beginning of the US Unilateral Coercive Measures strengthened the confrontation between the old bourgeoisie (outside the government apparatus) and the new bourgeoisie (which was a constituent part of the government).
The clashes between 2014 and 2017 can be understood as the tension of interbourgeois contradictions. The government and the new “Bolivarian” bourgeoisie managed to crush the police-military revolts of 2017, thus imposing an unprecedented defeat on the insurrectionary logic of the old bourgeoisie, an event from which this sector has not yet managed to recover. This defeat of the old bourgeoisie and its political representations opens a new stage in the Nicolás Maduro government and in the strategic horizon of governance of the new bourgeoisie.
In the second moment (2017-2024), the Nicolás Maduro government strengthened and expanded the dialogue processes with the political right and the old bourgeoisie, but also, as we now know, a line of negotiation was opened with the United States, at the same time that it generates a set of measures that restrict the possibilities of influence of the working class and subordinate classes in force correlations.
Decree 2792, of 2018, which eliminates collective bargaining and the right to strike, ONAPRE instructions that ignore the acquired rights of an important part of public employees, workers in education, health and other sectors, are part of natural measures of containment of the labor movement and manifestation of coincidences between the new and old bourgeoisie, to promote agreements with broad sectors of national capital and their political representations. Maria Corina Machado and the bourgeois sector she represents seemed to be the free electron, the old order sector that was unable to fit into the 2018-2024 negotiations.
2024 is the year of the most disputed presidential election in recent history. There was and is a lot of talk about transition, change of government or maintenance of the current government team led by Nicolás Maduro. The most naive talk about guaranteeing the conditions for a transition, eliminating North American rewards to eliminate Nicolás Maduro, signing a national pact of non-aggression or persecution. Others talk about establishing a framework of guarantees so that the new bourgeoisie can use its accumulated wealth without any persecution or limits.
The truth is that the elections take place within the framework of an internal negotiation within the bourgeoisie and with the Americans, whose advances, stagnations or setbacks will be crucial for the practical consequences of the electoral results. The opacity with which negotiations with foreigners are conducted prevents greater precision regarding the real possibilities of transition or advancement in the new hegemony. The interbourgeois agreement appears on the horizon as a possibility, which will have to decide between the options of a national coalition government, an emergency government or a return to alternation. The United States, from a neocolonial perspective, is favored by the low-intensity confrontation between national bourgeois sectors and understands an agreement between them within the framework of deepening Venezuelan dependence and imperial tutelage over it.
6.
The candidates who presented themselves with the opposition label were Daniel Ceballos (Arepa Digital) involved in the 2014 insurrection and pardoned by Maduro in 2018, Claudio Fermín (Solutions for Venezuela), former Democratic Action activist, who has recently worked with a political line associated with government interests, Benjamín Rauseo Rodríguez (National Democratic Confederation — CONDE), comedian, who raises a market freedom program, Luis Eduardo Martínez Hidalgo (AD, Bandera Roja — ex-Maoists —, Republican Movement e National Electoral Union), Enrique Octavio Márquez Pérez (Centered on People, NETWORKS, PCV) is a well-known opponent of Chavismo, linked to MUD, Javier Bertucci (El Cambio) evangelical pastor who expresses Maduro's new relations with Protestant Christians, Antonio Ecarri (Alliance of Lápiz) who proposed a program of national adjustment and reconciliation and held meetings in Miraflores with Maduro, José Brito (First Venezuela, First Justice — placed under intervention —, Venezuela Vision Unit e Venezuela Unit) who appears as a functional opponent of the government, Edmundo González Urrutia (PUD — without electoral card —, MUD and New Time) is the candidate that Maria Corina Machado expressly supported.
The official government candidate was Nicolás Maduro Moros (PSUV, PPT — put under intervention, MEP — put under intervention, PCV — put under intervention, Tupamaros, among others), who aspires to a third term that would extend his stay in the Miraflores palace from 12 to 18 years old.
Eight of the ten candidates expressed the progress of Maduro's negotiations with the opposition that took place between 2017 and 2024; They are in favor of a peaceful transition, in search of a new model of democratic alternation and many of them question the North American blockade against Venezuela. The ninth candidacy was that of Edmundo González Urrutia (supported by MCM) who expresses the sector that did not reach a minimum understanding with the government and is for a radical change in the logic of encounter between the old bourgeoisie and transnational capital. The results proclaimed were: Nicolás Maduro, 6.408.834 (51,95%); Edmundo González, 5.326.104 (43,18%); Luis Eduardo Martínez, 116.021 (0,94%); Benjamin Rauseo, 92.903 (0,75%); José Brito, 84.231 (0,68%); Javier Bertuchi, 64.452 (0,52%); Claudio Fermín, 40.902 (0,33%), Enrique Márquez, 29.611 (0,24%); Daniel Ceballos, 20.056 (0,16%). A total of almost twelve million votes.
As for the number of Venezuelan migrants, who voted very little and were mostly prevented from doing so: the opposition insists that there are more than seven million, while the government speaks of 1.700.000; researchers such as Víctor Álvarez estimate their number at just over four million. Of the supposed eight million voters outside the country, only 65 managed to register.
The results projected by the MCM-Eduardo González opposition are radically different, they speak of a huge difference in votes in their favor. All expressions of the left in Venezuela, from autonomism, through Trotskyism, the PCV (authentic), the Tupamaros (authentic), the PPT (authentic), even the most center-left expressions, have indicated that they do not defend a result or another, but they defend the democratic right of the Venezuelan people to know the detailed results, the local sums of the votes that support the national total, and to be able to count on the minutes of scrutiny for the citizen audit.
The government of Nicolás Maduro decided to file a Contentious Electoral Appeal before the Supreme Court of Justice that removes from the judicial power the possibility of review and hierarchical appeals, limiting public access to the state of scrutiny, which increased the crisis of international and national legitimacy of the Maduro government. Everything indicates that in the short and medium term there will be difficulty in accessing voter registrations, which inaugurates a new phase of political crisis in Venezuela.
What is the current social situation in Venezuela? The minimum wage is less than five dollars a month and the average salary with bonuses barely exceeds 100 dollars a month; no candidate proposed a salary adjustment plan that would at least bring it up to the regional average. Some take refuge in the need to guarantee business productivity (which implies continuing the bourgeois assault on oil revenues) to begin a process of wage recovery, while others, in order not to allow the process of wage adjustment, hide behind the effects of the external lock.
On the other hand, in the last eight years there has been a progressive, systematic and forceful reduction, up to the point of elimination, of minimum democratic freedoms which, although increasingly diminished in recent decades, were considered an achievement of society (right to strike, freedom of organization unions and left-wing parties, freedom of opinion and criticism). No candidate proposed the recovery of democratic freedoms for the subaltern and exploited classes, but rather “market freedoms”.
All candidacies, from the government and the opposition, with different nuances, represented a project to end the political crisis that ignores the interests of the working class and the people. None proposed a program to recover the right to strike, collective contracts, sufficient wages, but they called for the sacrifice of the working class to recover the country, at the same time that they defended the elimination of taxes on big capital and spoke of the liberation of market forces, entrepreneurship and productivity.
Edmundo González's candidacy represents the program of structural adjustment, privatization and destruction of the social agenda that libertarians like Javier Milei and company embody today; while the programs of the remaining opposition candidates expressed shades of government programs that place the interests of capital above the interests of labor.
Nicolás Maduro represents the continuity of the structural adjustment program applied between 2017-2024, in a context of blockade by the United States and European imperialist nations on Venezuela, which placed the weight of the economic crisis on the working class, while the bourgeoisie (old and new ) became richer. All candidates seek to improve relations with the United States, while Nicolás Maduro is simultaneously developing a strategy of rapprochement with China, Russia and Turkey (countries where democratic freedoms are restricted and where the orientation is competitive capitalism).
The sector led by MCM-Edmundo González abandoned the ideologized discourse to tune in and appropriate the most basic desires of the Venezuelan population today: (a) the return of migrants, because each family has at least one of its members in this condition (parents, grandparents , children, grandchildren, nephews, brothers), (b) family reunification based on improving economic conditions, especially increasing productivity (taking care not to clarify how to improve the salary issue), (c) the privatization of public affairs such as path to prosperity, something that national history and regional experience deny. The change in the opposition's strategy worked for the MCM-González candidacy, to the point that the Nicolás Maduro government tried to launch plans for the return of migrants and emphasized the decrease in inflation as a sign of economic reactivation for the future.
Nicolás Maduro's government focused its speech on its survival in power as a guarantee of social well-being, which has progressively disappeared in the last ten years. The discourse of US sanctions, real and objective, lost political effectiveness in the face of the material ostentation of a sector of leadership and the mega corruption case known as crypto-PDVSA (state oil company). However, the official candidacy maintained an important social base, largely as a heritage inherited from the Chávez period and due to the material support network (basic basket program, bonuses, aid) that would be threatened by the coming to power of a candidate from right or extreme right, which proposes that everything be privatized.
The logic of survival and fear of the effects of change allowed him to gather an important social base of support for his candidacy, but based on resignation and not hope. The central opposition's candidacy grew exponentially in support last year. The government, in its desperation in the face of this phenomenon, has tried to recover the bond with the majority through different means: (a) highlighting the effect of the North American blockade and European imperialist nations on the economy and the world of work, (b ) appeal to the legacy of the achievements of the Chávez period, (c) show the opposition candidacies as part of the neo-fascist and ultra-conservative wave sweeping the world, (d) deepen authoritarianism, through the selective persecution of middle-class people and popular leaders of the opposition and labor camp candidacies, (e) use personal disqualification to try to take the electoral debate to the most favorable terrain.
7.
The 2024 presidential elections were preceded by the disappearance of some left-wing parties, which did not reach the minimum vote for their legal permanence, and by the judicialization of the rest. Currently there is no legal left-wing party in Venezuela that can autonomously mount a presidential candidacy and the support that appears on Nicolás Maduro's electoral card is the result of this situation of intervention by political instruments that belonged to the left.
The PSUV was never a party in classical terms, deliberative and autonomous from the government, but rather a political instrument to build the social viability of government plans. The sectors that responded exclusively to Hugo Chávez's leadership were separated from the party structure after the death of the historic leader of the Bolivarian process and many of them are in different forms of opposition to the Nicolás Maduro government.
The PSUV is today a monolithic polyclassist party, without significant fissures; however, the deepening wage and economic crisis eroded its foundations. The PSUV is threatened by the same phenomenon that affected Democratic Action (AD) in the 1990s, the possibility of collapse due to the loss of political effectiveness. Maduro is cleaning the PSUV of independent political cadres who were betting on the radicalization of the Bolivarian process.
The left was unable to reach an agreement on electoral tactics at this juncture. On the contrary, there were at least five visible options. The first, perhaps the majority, decided to vote for the candidate who had the most options against Maduro. For this sector, the most relevant thing is to leave the Maduro regime and then propose a recomposition of power relations that allows the recovery of democratic freedoms, such as the right to strike, collective bargaining, fair wages and the possibility of autonomous organization. Let's let the extreme right govern to recover democracy!
Another option has called for a null vote or abstention, an alternative that includes the historic leaders of the PPT, Marea Socialista, PSL and LTS, among others. Another sector, critical of some government policies, believes that we should continue to support Maduro. Among others, the expressions of Bruno Sanarde and the magazine Bolívar Vive represent this option. Finally, the option grouped around Another Campaign defines that his candidate is social struggles, that no candidate represents the interests of the working class and that what needs to be done is a campaign that denounces the loss of democratic freedoms and that opens up the possibility of class regrouping.
The CMI, Revolutionary Left, Committee of Family and Friends for the Freedom of Imprisoned Workers, Bloco Histórico Popular, LUCHAS, among others, participate in this last sector.
All presidential candidates in the 28J elections tried hard to show that they were the best option for the United States. While the Machado-González duo renewed the vows of loyalty built in the past, especially during the Bush administration, the Maduro government accelerated negotiations with the United States and even showed its sympathies for President Joe Biden, while ensuring the flow of oil to the North under neocolonial negotiating conditions.
A local interbourgeois agreement is useless if approval from Washington and the State Department is not achieved. All speculation about a strategic agreement between the Maduro government and China or Russia is nothing more than fanfare, because when US oil trade with Venezuela returned, China decided to distance itself to allow for a North American-Venezuelan agreement, especially as more and more agreements are taking place within the framework of strategic trade between the Asian giant and the USA.
Russia, for its part, is more interested in consolidating its interests in Africa than in Latin American adventures. The US is the arbiter of a neocolonial situation in Venezuela, playing its cards with the calm of someone trying to ensure that the endgame favors them as much as possible. It is worth remembering that the recent elections were the result of a pact between Nicolás Maduro and Joe Biden — the Barbados agreement — and not an achievement of the masses' struggle.
Another relevant fact are the changes in the discourses and positions of progressivism and the left. Although Pepe Mujica has distanced himself from the Nicolás Maduro government for some time, qualified voices such as Lula and Gustavo Petro have marked their differences regarding the progressive deterioration of democratic freedoms in Venezuela and have shown concern about the authoritarian tendency in Nicolás Maduro's speech.
Intellectuals such as Atilio Borón and Emir Sader, once very active in Venezuela's defense, have been very discreet, leaving the leadership of its international defense to Monedero, one of the historical leaders of the weakened We can from Spain. It is clear that Cuba and its allied organizations maintained a line of support for Nicolás Maduro, but with less and less impetus and forcefulness. This decantation of progressivism is also evidence of divergences between many of its components, which went unnoticed in the context of the growing wave, but which are now revealed in all their magnitude.
The internal crisis has increased the isolation of the Venezuelan government. For this reason, the Maduro government chose to highlight that his departure from power could generate a bloodbath in the country, as a desperate gesture for the US to think about the stability of its strategic interests. If the political right and left that oppose Nicolás Maduro coincide in one thing, it is in underestimating his political capacity. Certainly, Nicolás Maduro is not only not an educated man, but he also feels a deep contempt for those with academic training and intellectual production.
Nicolás Maduro inherited from Hugo Chávez the charm of surrounding himself with some stars of international critical politics, while at the same time despising national critical thought. But Maduro compensates for this weakness with enormous political skill to remain in power, making pragmatism his authentic ideology. Nicolás Maduro thinks and acts like a union bureaucrat who sees political, social and economic factors in all speeches, desires for power and personal fulfillment, which he identifies as needs to be covered, based on which he negotiates with his opponents. Promoter of the Boston group, he created very early on — in the first years of the Bolivarian process and with the approval of Hugo Chávez — a LOBBY American who would serve as his interlocutor. Today these efforts are attributed to its policy of dialogue with the most powerful nation on the planet.
When contradictions emerged in the projects immersed in the Bolivarian process (new bourgeoisie versus popular power), Nicolás Maduro saw the efforts to build an autonomous trade union center (UNETE), between 2004 and 2008, as a strategic danger for the new balances of power. He was the architect of the defeats that prevented the construction of an autonomous workers' central and the forger of the Central Bolivariana Socialista dos Trabalhadores (CBST), which at no point considered presiding, placing at its head a leader of little importance, a member of the former Central dos Trabalhadores of Venezuela (CTV), led by social democracy.
In this way, it guaranteed an apparatus for co-opting and dispersing the struggles of the working class. From his position as chancellor, he consolidated the relationship with Cuba, China, Russia, Turkey, Iran and governments opposed to the United States, with an important part of the communist parties of Soviet and Chinese tradition, rejecting any initiative to attract to the Bolivarian process the most critical sectors of the global left, as they knew that at some point they would criticize the authoritarian drift and the direction the process would take.
Nicolás Maduro went from being a radical Maoist militant, with an anti-religious political culture, to becoming an admirer of Sai Baba. In power, he not only married according to Catholic rituals, but cultivated a stable and growing relationship with Christian groups and religious sects, especially Pentecostal sectors, linked to the United States and the Latin American extreme right.
The left-wing supporters lost by Nicolás Maduro due to his policy of class conciliation, he recovered in numerical terms and even increased, in the interests of faith. He advanced a line of work in which Hugo Chávez had been shy, agreements and pacts with the right. It strengthened the division of the right and created doors of dialogue with each sector of it, at the same time that it promoted the return of lands confiscated by Chávez to their former owners, suspended policies to promote recovered factories and created guarantees for financial capital, as a way of to guarantee the security of capital, as a prelude to an attempt to unify the different bourgeois factions in dispute.
Nicolás Maduro privileged dialogue with the right, progressively taking the electoral left to its minimum expression, stripping it of its political instruments and reducing its capacity for influence. He froze and annulled the progressive precepts of the Organic Labor Law approved by Chávez, as a way of showing the bourgeoisie and the United States that he could achieve, in terms of labor policy, what the classical right could not guarantee.
8.
The fact is that the right-wing opposition has recovered an important part of its convening capacity, which it had lost in 2017 and which Guaidó never obtained. There will now be six months of negotiations to reach a consensus between the old and new bourgeoisie with the intention of creating governability and the approval of a package against the working class with as few protests as possible. From the perspective of the working class, we face the worst scenario since 1983 to the present.
The Venezuelan anti-capitalist class left must prepare itself for a struggle for democratic freedoms and workers' organization, for the achievement of basic conditions of survival, carried out with the methods of the united front, which is the basis for a political structure independent of the Chavismo of the exploited classes, to intervene with their own program and perspective in the political process.
The Venezuelan situation has triggered an international crisis, which involves all global political actors. Defenders of the right-wing opposition and its alleged electoral victory list the global right, led by Donald Trump, with the support of right-wing Latin American regimes, first and foremost the Argentine government of Javier Milei.
Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba and Honduras, in Latin America, with the support of Russia, China and Iran, defend Nicolás Maduro's victory. The novelty is that some “progressive” regimes, more or less allied with Chavista Venezuela in the recent past (Brazil, Colombia, Mexico), distanced themselves from Maduro, demanded the publicization of electoral records (as if any such demand had been ever made in the electoral victories of conservative or right-wing parties), allying themselves with the regimes that, with Joe Biden's USA at their head, are moving in favor of an “institutional and peaceful” (non-coup) exit of Nicolás Maduro and the Chavism.
The imperialist front is divided between supporters of this solution (Biden) and the coup plotters (Trump, Milei and their consorts). International cleavages equally affect both sides in dispute in Venezuela. International progressivism and the reactionary right agree to omit the process of intervention and judicialization of left-wing parties that Maduro promoted; as in the creation of Fixed Point Pact, the two bourgeois factions in dispute in Venezuela (old bourgeoisie versus bolibourgeoisie) agree that the danger for the interbourgeois agreement is the left that demands Chávez's progressive social program and, based on the Chavista experience, raises a socialist program for the country. At an ideological level, the two bourgeois factions coincide, but are unable to reach an agreement on how to distribute the loot from oil revenues.
The crisis in Venezuela, a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, one of the centers of business and geopolitical disputes, is an international crisis, as demonstrated by the global commotion regarding the elections. However, we see a change in the United States' position following the publication of the July 28 election results. Unlike other opportunities, the Joe Biden administration gave Nicolás Maduro “three days of grace” to try to resolve the legitimacy problems of the electoral process.
This “pause” is due to agreements reached since the war in Ukraine to supply oil under neocolonial conditions (without royalties or payment of taxes), a situation that tends to rebuild the energy relationship between the United States and Venezuela. It was only three days after the elections that the State Department intervened, recognizing González Urrutia's triumph, but without the belligerence of previous electoral situations. The United States' support for the “progressive” mediation of Lula, Gustavo Petro and López Obrador (largely also Gabriel Boric) is part of the effort to promote an agreement between the disputing bourgeois factions, based on the electoral situation of 28J.
Venezuelan reserves, totaling 300 billion barrels, are already being explored by companies from France, Italy, Spain, as well as Russia, China, India and the United States (Chevron). The Venezuelan Armed Forces try to be placed in a state of political deliberation, ignoring that they played a central role in the balance of the Chávez-Nicolás Maduro period for the emergence and consolidation of a new bourgeoisie.
The imperialist offensive against Venezuela is a central piece of the quest to tie the entire continent, especially its natural riches (in the case of Venezuela, with an interbourgeois agreement or not), to production chains and international financial capital, in the context of a crisis world that has already entered a warlike phase (Ukraine, the Middle East and Central Asia, military threats in the China Sea), which does not spare us (see the reactivation of the US Navy's 4th Fleet in the South Atlantic, not to mention the transformation of the Falkland Islands into an important NATO military platform).
As Roberto Amaral well wrote, “Washington has given itself the powers of electoral board in the country that is home to the largest oil reserves in the world, juts out over the Atlantic and the Pacific and is the gateway to the Amazon.” A Latin American anti-imperialist united front against imperialist interference in Venezuela can and must be placed on the political agenda of the left and the movement of all working classes in Latin America.
The Venezuelan issue is the first point of debate on the political agenda of the Brazilian and Latin American left. An important part of the Latin American left, however, is prisoner of the “geopolitics of power” discourse, according to which if “Venezuela falls” this will affect the possibilities for progress of progressive or left-wing governments in the region. Defenders of the geopolitical approach do not start from the material situation of the Venezuelan working class and the framework of limited political freedoms during the period of Nicolás Maduro.
Far from focusing their analyzes on the defense of the Venezuelan working class, they ask for their sacrifice so that they can maintain or advance in their countries, maintaining an embarrassing silence about the freezing of the right to strike, the loss of union freedoms and the impossibility of the class worker legalize autonomous political instruments that represent her.
The electoral results of July 28, announced by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which gave Maduro victory, generated an open crisis because they were not accompanied by records of scrutiny by voting place, nor the totalization by electoral center, city and state. The results were announced with 80% of the votes cast; 2.500.000 votes still needed to be counted, when the difference between Maduro and González Urrutia was less than 800.000. This generated strong discontent and spontaneous mobilizations in the first two days after the elections.
The response of Nicolás Maduro's government was to increase control and repression of the protests, which led to more than two thousand arrests, more than a dozen deaths and the creation of two prisons to house those detained, further promoting the climate of protest. The Venezuelan left's demand for electoral results is not a “democratic fetishism”, but an effort to restore the democratic freedoms lost in the last decade. If a transparent political framework is not guaranteed, it will be much more difficult to reopen paths for working class issues.
The fight for democratic freedoms is the fight for freedom of action for the working class, especially the right to strike, collective contracting with autonomy, salary scales adjusted to inflation levels, organization and functioning of left-wing political parties, because these have all been prosecuted and judicialized in the last political stage by the Nicolás Maduro regime.
*Luis Bonilla-Molina He is a professor of pedagogy at the Universidad Nacional Experimental de la Gran Caracas (UNEXCA).
Osvaldo Coggiola He is a professor at the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of Marxist economic theory: an introduction (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3tkGFRo]
Notes
[I] Christian Rath. Marx on Bolívar. In Defense of Marxism n° 39, Buenos Aires, August-September 2010.
[ii] Edgardo Loguercio. Panamericanism versus Latinoamericanism. A debate at the turn of the 2007th century to the XNUMXth century. Master's Dissertation, São Paulo, Prolam-USP, XNUMX.
[iii] Clodoaldo Bueno. Foreign Policy of the First Republic. Sao Paulo, Peace and Earth, 2003.
[iv] Philip S. Foner. The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Emergence of North American Imperialism. Madrid, Akal, 1975.
[v] “In backward countries, foreign capitalism plays the main role and not national capitalism; The national bourgeoisie occupies, in terms of its social situation, a much lower position than it should occupy in relation to the development of industry. As foreign capital does not import workers, but proletarianizes the native population, the national proletariat very quickly begins to play the most important role in national life. Under such conditions, to the extent that the national government tries to offer some resistance to foreign capital, it finds itself forced, to a greater or lesser extent, to rely on the proletariat. On the other hand, the governments of backward countries, which consider it inevitable or more profitable to march side by side with foreign capital, destroy workers' organizations and implement a more or less totalitarian regime. So the weakness of the national bourgeoisie, the absence of a tradition of self-government, the pressure of foreign capital and the relatively rapid growth of the proletariat cut in the bud any possibility of a stable democratic regime. The government of backward countries, that is, colonial or semi-colonial, assumes, as a whole, a Bonapartist or semi-Bonapartist character. They differ from each other because while some try to orient themselves towards democracy, seeking the support of workers and peasants, others implement a rigid police-military dictatorship”. (Leon Trotsky. Unions in the Age of Imperialist Decay. https://www.marxists.org/portugues/trotsky/1940/mes/sindicato.htm [1940]).
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