Revolution and Counterrevolution in Venezuela

The image of a line of U.S. helicopters crossing the sky over Caracas on January 3, presumably on their way to capture Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, was undoubtedly shocking. Although some form of imperial aggression was clearly on the horizon, given the escalating tensions and the military buildup in the Caribbean over the previous months, the swift operation and the seeming lack of response from the Venezuelan forces were far from expected. But for many, particularly for people outside Venezuela, the following days were perhaps more puzzling. For those of us who had followed the mass resistance to the attempted coup of April 2002, the contrast was striking. In that year, Hugo Chávez came back to power in less than 48 hours, riding a wave of mass protests that sealed the fate of the self-appointed right-wing government headed by the president of the business association Fedecamaras, Pedro Carmona (popularly known as Carmona “the brief”). Nothing of the sort happened this time. On the contrary, thousands of Venezuelans forced to live abroad celebrated in the streets of many Latin American cities. This contrast begs the question: What was the difference in Venezuela between 2002 and 2026? What happened in the country over the last two decades? What does this crisis mean for the politics of international solidarity?

The book Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives edited by Anderson M. Bean provides valuable insights to answer these questions. The volume brings together contributions by prominent figures of the Venezuelan critical socialist Left. Some of them were part of the Chávez government and broke with Maduro; others were part of the broader revolutionary process but were oriented toward building independent revolutionary currents following different tactical approaches in their relationship to Chávez and the Bolivarian movement. These are not voices from the sidelines: Many of them played important roles in the revolutionary process. Bringing their critical analysis to an English-speaking audience is a major contribution.

The book intervenes in two critical debates for the socialist Left. First, it addresses the problem of the nature of the Venezuelan state, the Bolivarian process, and Maduro’s regime. As Anderson Bean argues in his introduction, the narrative put forward by the U.S. state and the Venezuelan right-wing opposition, as well as the narrative of the uncritical Left observers from abroad, shares the underlying assumption that Venezuela has been a socialist state (or in transition toward socialism). In the case of the state and the Venezuelan right, this should come as no surprise. But for the Left, this crisis creates serious issues for the politics of international solidarity. This perspective, that Venezuela represented socialism, papers over the important contradictions and limitations that existed throughout the Bolivarian process and the regressive transformations ushered in under the presidency of Nicolas Maduro.

Fortunately, the second contribution of the book is a roadmap for internationalist solidarity. While acknowledging and opposing the dangers of imperialist intervention and the pernicious effects of U.S. sanctions, it highlights the reactionary pressures coming from the Bolivarian leadership itself. In doing so, it underscores the point that imperialist aggression should not be transformed into a shorthand to explain away the internal contradictions of the Venezuelan experience. In short, Venezuela in Crisis is a welcome and much needed intervention.

Ruptures and continuities

The first part of the book zooms out from the current moment to provide a broader perspective of the origins, development, and crisis of the Bolivarian process. A first significant element that these chapters highlight was the acute crisis of Venezuela’s economy and political system in the last two decades of the 20th century. Beyond their differences, the authors agree that the country’s reliance on revenue from oil exports shaped a form of dependent rentier capitalism. This not only characterized the dominant form of capital accumulation but also shaped the relationship between the state, class relations, and the political system. Oly Millán Campos, for example, argues:

It is important to note that throughout Venezuela’s history in the oil sector, this substantial surplus has shaped an “oil state” that acts as a mediator in distributing income among various economic groups, both traditional and emerging, as well as the wider Venezuelan society. The connection between oil revenue, the oil state, and power elites within society has been shaped by the emergence of an extractivist and rentier culture. This culture has acted as the binding agent that has created an economic system reliant on extracting income, following the capital accumulation model prevalent in the Global South.” (p. 66)

This is a key point to understand the origins of the Bolivarian process and the structural constraints that it faced and to therefore assess the extent to which it was able to transcend these conditions.

This model allowed for a period of relative stability and economic growth during the 1960s and 1970s, consolidating the bipartisan hegemony that had emerged from the “Punto Fijo” pact of 1958 (giving birth to the period known as the “Fourth Republic”). By the 1980s, however, this hegemony showed clear signs of exhaustion. This situation led to another key historical event that many of the chapters in the book underscore: the “Caracazo.” This was a mass uprising against a package of austerity measures by then president Carlos Andrés Pérez. While the uprising was crushed by brutal repressive force, it signaled the crisis of the economic and political model. It is thus a crucial starting point to understand both the emergence of the Bolivarian movement and Chávez’s electoral victory in 1998. By highlighting this event, the authors remind us that the Venezuelan process was characterized by a massive social and political mobilization from below even before Chávez came into the picture.

Given these conditions that marked the origin of the process, the authors analyze ruptures and continuities with regard to both the previous political period and within the process itself. Although there are some differences in this regard between the different authors, there is one point on which there is a general agreement: the inability of both the Chávez and Maduro governments to transcend the extractivist rentier capitalist model. In the case of the former, this assessment is combined with a recognition of the attempts to break with the neoliberal agenda of austerity. Gustavo Marquez Marin, for example, makes the following argument about Chávez’s government:

To respond to the dilemma of addressing short-term social urgencies while advancing structural transformations of the dependent rentier capitalist economy and the clientelistic liberal democracy model, the government adopted a strategy that paradoxically reinforced political clientelism and the petro-dependent extractivist rentier model. (p. 44)

The Bolivarian process under Chávez’s leadership adopted important social measures to combat some of the worst consequences of the model and actually improved the livelihood of millions of Venezuelans. However, this reorientation fell short of transforming the pillars on which the model was based. High oil prices and increased production allowed the state to redirect part of the surplus toward social programs without having to radically alter the social property relations. This does not mean that some radical measures were not taken. Faced with pressure from below and with economic and political hostility from the traditional bourgeois sectors, Chávez undertook what Roberto Lopez Lopez characterizes as “one of the starkest expressions of the antineoliberal program” (p. 92), the nationalization of a range of important companies. The balance sheet of this policy, however, is a subject of discussion.

Additionally, as several authors within the book argue, Chávez’s government departed from the political and institutional arrangements that had characterized the “Fourth Republic.” This was epitomized by the new “Bolivarian” constitution which enshrined important social and political rights and laid the foundations for a transition toward more radical forms of democracy. These changes, however, were not without contradictions. The emergent forms of “participatory democracy” and “popular power” were often eclipsed by the concentration of power in Chávez himself and the continuity of clientelist politics tied to the state distribution of oil revenues.

A key intervention that the authors of the book make with regard to the progressive social and political transformations during this period is that they were pushed by struggles from below. Thus, for example, several authors highlight the process of popular deliberation and participation in the constitutional reform process that introduced changes that were not originally part of the government’s agenda. A clear example of this dynamic of struggle from below is given by Roberto Lopez Lopez in his description of the years-long fight of the workers’ movement for the Organic Law of Labor, Work and Workers (LOTTT), passed in 2012. The working class reactivation and radicalization during the Chávez governments was marked by initiative from below. A key element of this was the struggle against the 2002 coup and the bosses’ lockout that followed. These struggles led to the creation of a new workers federation, as workers broke with the CTV, which had sided with the coup. As Roberto Lopez Lopez points out:

This transition was not orchestrated by Chavismo; rather, it evolved spontaneously as workers opted to disengage from their long-standing unions and federations, opting instead to create fresh unions, often embracing the Bolivarian ideology through the inclusion of the term Bolivarian in their names. (p.109)

The emergent forms of popular power, from the new trade unions to the grassroots neighborhood movements and the communes, existed in a tense relationship with the state. They often confronted attempts of bureaucratic capture, which, in some cases, succeeded.

“Neoliberal authoritarianism”

While the balance sheet of the period under Chávez’s leadership is perhaps contradictory and debatable, the authors in the book fundamentally agree in their assessment of Maduro’s tenure. The notion of “neoliberal authoritarianism” is used in several of the contributions to describe the two fundamental characteristics of the regime: a turn toward austerity measures directed against the popular sectors and the repression of all forms of dissent. Carlos Carcione characterizes the transition produced by the Maduro regime as “a process of political and economical counter-reforms” which “solidified into a counter-revolution” (p.189).

The second part of the book focuses on these transformations, and, together with the insights already developed in the initial chapters, provides key elements to explain it. In his illuminating chapter on the impact of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, Omar Vazquez Heredia lays out the landscape of the contradictions of Venezuela’s economy that those sanctions impacted. As we have seen above, a fundamental limit of the Bolivarian process was its inability to transcend the rentier model of capitalist accumulation. The country’s dependence on oil exports was mirrored in its increasing reliance on foreign imports for basic products. Thus, Vazquez Heredia argues:

The encouragement of imports by the Chávez administration, facilitated through the allocation of foreign currency by the government at an overvalued exchange rate, deterred the expansion of productivity within Venezuela’s industrial and agricultural sectors. This practice also fostered opportunities for fraudulent activities, such as overinvoicing of foreign purchases, and reinforced the dominance of Venezuela’s oil industry by large importing commercial bourgeoisie. Consequently, the Venezuelan state apparatus continued to privatize and channel oil income toward financing the accumulation and external hoarding endeavors of both established and emerging dominant classes. (p.128)

Capital flight, a feature that has plagued dependent capitalist economies of Latin America, was rife under the Bolivarian process. This model was sustained by an increasing indebtedness of the state and made the country particularly vulnerable both to external economic shocks such as the fall in the price of oil, and to international sanctions. As the internal contradictions of the model became more acute and external pressure mounted through falling oil prices and sanctions, Maduro’s government opted for a path that would make the people of Venezuela pay for the crisis. The book provides ample evidence of this, from pulverizing wages to the proliferation of special economic zones outside of the scope of local legal regulations. It also documents the brutal social consequences that these policies have had, epitomized in the massive exodus of Venezuelans.

Perhaps the most important contribution that Venezuela in Crisis makes is in connecting the dots between the different measures taken by the Maduro government to illuminate the emergence of complex new economic and political arrangements. The regime articulated under Maduro’s leadership was different from its predecessors, even if it had continuities and/or was partially rooted in their legacies. Gonzalo Gomez, for example, analyzes the composition of Venezuela’s ruling class and argues that there has been a transformation in the class nature in the leading strata of the Bolivarian process:

Our thesis asserts that while the seeds of bureaucratism and corruption were sown from the beginning, alongside the blossoming of the Bolivarian Revolution (which has since withered), a structural shift occurred. This transformation led the civil-military leadership, initially connected with the masses, to gradually evolve into an emerging bourgeois class, composed of newly wealthy capitalists. They amassed their wealth through a corrupt, mafia-style mode of accumulation, characterized by embezzlement, dispossession, capital flight, parasitism, and participation in illicit economies. (p.141)

The structural conditions that allowed for this transformation were rooted in the rentier capitalist model and the central role which the state played in it, as well as the political centralization and the increased role of the military in the administration of the state that started under Chávez. This gradual process consolidated with Maduro, fostering increasingly dictatorial forms and the return of neoliberal policies.

As Carlos Carcione points out, the consolidation of this new social stratum involved “eliminating pressures from the left, which aimed to deepen the Bolivarian process, and countering the newly formed bourgeois right, which is more directly aligned with the United States and eager to regain prominence” (p.179). This is a key point. While the conflicts between the Maduro government and the right-wing opposition are well known outside Venezuela and have many amplifying voices, the fact that Maduro’s authoritarian crackdown was aimed at the Left and the popular organizations is less known. This involved the prohibition or severe restriction of the activities of different political organizations of the Left such as Marea Socialista, the PSL, the Communist Party, and others. In some cases, this also involved prosecution of their leaders and even assaults on their political offices. In their chapter, Juan Garcia and Ana Viloria extensively document the anti-worker orientation of Maduro’s human rights violations, from freezing the minimum wage in hyperinflationary context to prosecuting and imprisoning workers who organized and spoke out. In doing so, they argue, Maduro has trampled over the principles and text of the Bolivarian constitution and built up the repressive apparatus covered up in anti-imperialist rhetoric.

These policies and transformations, coupled with the exhaustion of the oil-centered rentier capitalist mode of accumulation, led to a collapse of the Venezuelan economy that has few historical parallels. In this context, Maduro’s government attempted to reboost the model by expanding the frontiers of extraction and recentering it toward minerals. The Orinoco Mining Arc was the signature project of this move. Emliano Teran provides an extensive analysis of this project and at the same time uses it as a window to analyze the broader reconfigurations of state power and capitalist accumulation under Maduro. He argues that, in the context of the collapse of hypercentralized oil governance, state power has been reconfigured in a more feudalized, fragmented way, with an increasing role for both the Venezuelan military and non-state armed actors on a local level, and a central government that retains a privileged position and shifts toward more dictatorial forms. Thus, he argues:

In this context, it is essential to perceive the AMO not merely as a formal mining megaproject but primarily as a device—an intricate set of strategies designed to promote, legitimize, and coordinate resource extraction and dispossession operations across various scales, modalities, and types. Its fundamental purpose is to facilitate the (illicit) appropriation of natural resources, with the state serving as a privileged arena for such mediations and appropriations. (p. 215)

To complete the picture, Simon Rodriguez’s chapter on the conflict with Guyana over the Essequibo region uncovers the jingoistic nature of Maduro’s regime. In a rich historical analysis, Rodriguez traces the roots of the conflict, which originated in an anti-colonial claim against British imperialism, but later morphed into a claim against an independent country after Guyana’s independence. Rodriguez argues that Maduro’s government moved away from a policy of detente toward one of aggression

has its roots in Venezuela’s internal politics, reflecting the regime’s degeneration. The dictatorship has found in the Essequibo conflict not only a red herring to distract the Venezuelan people from enduring misery, as an outlet for nationalist agitation, but also an opportunity for military mobilization, criminalization of dissent, and perhaps the opening an external front that can become an asset for future negotiations, not only with Guyana but with U.S. imperialism itself. (p. 242)

A call for critical analysis and socialist solidarity

Overall, Venezuela in Crisis encourages us to look beyond the governments and their official narratives and to base our analysis and politics on the dynamics of class struggle. It has the merit of bringing to the fore the revolutionary possibilities of the Bolivarian process (many of which remained unrealized) without losing sight of its contradictions. It also highlights the alternative possible paths that were not taken by its leadership, and explains the reasons behind their choices. This analysis helps to understand the course of events that led to the present conjuncture. Crucially, through its pages we get a detailed description of the forces that demobilized the revolutionary energies of the mass movement which had been the engine behind the birth, survival, and radicalization of the Bolivarian process. The Caracazo shattered the Fourth Republic, the 2002 coup and the bosses lockout were defeated by mass mobilization, and it was the struggle of the working class that opened the path for nationalization. If bureaucratization and vertical leadership hindered this process under Chávez, the mobilized people and their fighting social and political organizations became the target of state repression with Maduro. In this sense, Maduro and his clique were the architects of their own defeat.

Thus, the book provides a much clearer explanation of the Venezuelan crisis than the one provided by the dominant narratives within the U.S. and, in doing so, provides solid grounds for a truly revolutionary approach to internationalism. It reminds socialists that our solidarity should be with the peoples of the world, and that this stance requires us to foreground the voices of those struggling on the ground. Venezuela in Crisis goes a long way in doing this.

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