{"id":8655,"date":"2019-04-17T22:42:42","date_gmt":"2019-04-17T22:42:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lavozlit.com\/?p=8655"},"modified":"2019-04-17T22:42:42","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T22:42:42","slug":"on-venezuela-and-building-an-anti-imperialist-movement-in-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/2019\/04\/17\/on-venezuela-and-building-an-anti-imperialist-movement-in-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"On Venezuela and Building An Anti-Imperialist Movement in the United States"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Florence Oppen<\/em>
\n\u00a0<\/strong>
\nThe U.S. government is continuing to tighten its grip over the Venezuelan people and use the growing and unsustainable social crisis to directly seek regime change by supporting Guaid\u00f3\u2019s undemocratic bid for power. This is why we participated in the action called by UNAC (United National Antiwar Coalition) against any form of U.S. intervention in Venezuela on February 23rd, and we called on workers and community organizations to join us at this demonstration. We fully agree with the UNAC call for action on February 23rd when it states that Guaid\u00f3 is \u201cthe U.S.-appointed, CIA-trained and puppet \u2018president.\u2019\u201d We also agree that \u201cin the name of delivering \u2018humanitarian aid<\/em>\u2019\u201d the U.S. is seeking to impose a \u201cregime change coup or overt military intervention and war aimed at placing the most reactionary forces in power.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a>
\nWe are committed to defend the right of self-determination of nations, and there is no question that the Guaid\u00f3 bid for power is a U.S.-initiated and backed coup that must be defeated. But we do not support the Maduro regime, nor do we think U.S. workers should. There is a difference between demanding that the U.S. government does not interfere in any way in Venezuela and giving political support to Maduro. We believe that the anti-war and anti-imperialist movement will benefit from an open discussion on the nature of the Maduro regime and the roots of the ongoing social and economic crisis in Venezuela.
\n 
\nThe Guaid\u00f3\/U.S. Intervention is Neither About Democracy or \u201cHumanitarian\u201d Aid<\/strong>
\n 
\nToday many workers are opposed to U.S. intervention in Syria, Venezuela and elsewhere. They are rightly suspicious of the real motives of the wars abroad. The main reason for this is that since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the lies of the Bush administration, the revelations of torture and illegal detentions in Guantanamo and other secret military facilities, the White House, Congress and the Pentagon have lost all political legitimacy and their claims to be committed to democracy and freedom are seen as empty and hypocritical.
\nAmong Black and Latinx workers and youth, as well as other communities of color, the opposition is even stronger. How can a government that does not enforce democracy and freedom at home, that perpetuates a system of mass incarceration, fuels police brutality and murder, and terrorizes immigrant communities with cruel and illegal policies of family separation and detention claim to have any legitimacy to restore freedom and democracy anywhere else?
\nBecause direct military intervention is so unpopular, Guaid\u00f3 and the Trump administration have devised an \u201chumanitarian aid\u201d plan, that will allow the U.S. to put its operatives on Venezuelan territory. This\u00a0 is nothing more than a covert operation to give material support to the coup. Even more, it is a despicable form of blackmail of the Venezuelan people, a maneuver that seeks to use hunger as a bargaining chip: you are hungry and sick, if you want to eat, you need to surrender your national independence and accept aid from the same economic forces that led to your starvation.
\nThe idea that the Trump administration is truly motivated by humanitarianism is not credible either. Why is the U.S. government not concerned that there were 39.7 million Americans living in poverty in 2017, 12.3% of the population? In reality, the U.S. government is threatening to cut food stamps subsidies for the poor and refuses to launch a real plan for public housing to eradicate growing homelessness. This is the anti-worker regime that left 800,000 federal workers without a paycheck for a month and just passed a cruel anti-worker tax reform.[2]<\/sup><\/a> What about first implementing\u00a0 a real humanitarian plan to eliminate poverty and fully fund public services and Medicare for All in the United States?
\nWhat is the United States\u2019 motive in supporting Guaid\u00f3 coup then? To allow U.S. corporations to regain control of oil production in Venezuela and to impose through regime change new trade agreements and zones of free investment that hurt both workers in the U.S. and Venezuela. U.S. military and intelligence capabilities are geared to defend the geopolitical and economic interests of the major American corporations, including war corporations and defense contractors, not the direct interests of U.S. workers which most often coincide with those of workers abroad.
\nThe Trump administration says that it is\u00a0 interested in \u201chelping\u201d the Venezuelan people now because since 2014 the country has been enduring a growing economic crisis which is now out of control. Last year this economic crisis unraveled into a social and political crisis, where the majority of workers either do not support or are actively trying to oust Maduro. Millions of workers have left the country because they cannot feed themselves, and protests from unions and community groups are severely repressed by the Maduro regime.
\n\u00a0<\/strong>
\nThe Hypocrisy of Liberals and \u201cLeft\u201d Democrats<\/strong>
\n 
\nUnfortunately Trump is not alone in supporting the so-called \u201chumanitarian\u201d intervention. The entire\u00a0 liberal establishment, as well as the Left wing of the Democratic Party led by Bernie Sanders, are openly supporting the \u201chumanitarian intervention.\u201d
\nThis is quite something! The same liberal establishment that made such a big deal of \u201cRussian interference\u201d during the last presidential election is now supporting the most obvious maneuver to interfere in the political life of another country. Liberals howled when Putin allegedly manipulated US elections. Why then do these liberals not apply the same logic when the U.S. is seeking to intervene and manipulate the democratic political processes of other countries?
\nWhat\u00a0 is even more tragic is that Sanders has supported the Pence and Lima Group\u2019s \u201chumanitarian plan\u201d, because he says he is a democratic socialist, and seems to be forgetting a core principle of socialism: the right of nations to self-determination and the need to combat chauvinism at home. There lies one of the main differences between two competing, and often opposed currents of socialism: democratic socialism and revolutionary socialism, two different allegiances and two different solidarities. When capitalist states oppress and attack working people, Marxist socialists side with the people against the government attacking them, questioning the legitimacy of those powers. Most \u00a0 If Bernie supports Pence\u2019s foreign policy in Venezuela because he wants to make himself a \u201cviable\u201d candidate for the 2020 presidential election and calm any anxieties in the Pentagon or CIA, in the case he gets elected.
\nThe U.S. government has proclaimed itself for the last century the \u201cleader of the free world\u201d and believes itself to be on a mission for peace and democracy. The reality of American foreign policy has proven the opposite. If Sanders wants to cling to any \u201csocialist credentials\u201d he should oppose any form of government intervention in Venezuela, and actively discredit any narrative that gives to the most violent government in the world any rights over any nation.
\n 
\nConfusion and Demoralization in the Antiwar Movement<\/strong>
\n 
\nUnfortunately there isn\u2019t a growing mobilization in our country against U.S. intervention in Venezuela. There are several reasons for this. First, the antiwar movement against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was defeated in the streets with systematic arrests and repression and a general curtailment of democratic freedoms with the Patriot Act. Second, the election of Obama raised illusions that a Democratic President will end the wars, and actions in the street drastically diminished as the DP coopted\u00a0 antiwar aspirations. Obama did not fulfill his promises to fully withdraw from both countries and restore democratic and civil liberties, but he was successful at burying the antiwar movement.
\nU.S. imperialism has gone unchallenged for the last decade and has continued to directly interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, for example, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Honduras, and Venezuela – just to name the most obvious ones.
\nBut in the case of Venezuela, like in Syria, there is a third obstacle to build a non-intervention and antiwar movement. The mass media and the U.S government are presenting a zero-sum game: it is either Guaid\u00f3, the so called \u201cdemocratic candidate\u201d or Maduro, who is portrayed as a despot. It is either the loss of sovereignty of the Venezuelan people by backing the Guaid\u00f3 coup, or\u00a0 political support for\u00a0 a Maduro regime in large\u00a0 part responsible for the current social and political crisis.
\nIn order to regroup our forces we need to have an open debate about what is really happening in Venezuela among all of us who oppose U.S. intervention from a working class perspective. It goes without saying that we should start by denouncing the real aims of the Trump administration in Venezuela. But we also need discuss and debate the nature of the Maduro government and potential Guaido regime. More importantly, we need to be able to have this debate with working class sectors who are critical of Maduro so we can win them to the importance of embracing and prioritizing a \u201cNo Intervention\u201d demand above any critiques to the Maduro regime.
\n <\/p>\n

\n

Obama\u2019s Unfulfilled Antiwar Promises<\/strong><\/span>
\nToday, after 8 years of the Obama presidency and two years into the Trump regime, the Patriot Act is still intact and the illegal Guantanamo Bay prison is still open. Despite the announced withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, the US still maintains today an important presence in that country: an embassy in Baghdad with 17,000 personnel, 5,500 U.S. regular troops stationed in 7 different military bases and 5,000 US private contractors. In Afghanistan, US military occupation is even more entrenched. The US was supposed to leave by 2014, then withdrawal got delayed to 2016. Today there are still between 8,400 and 11,000 U.S. troops in the country. In September 2017 Trump sent an additional 3,000 troops.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

 
\nWe Reject \u201cLesser Evil\u201d Anti-Imperialism\u00a0 <\/strong>
\n 
\nWe neither participated in nor mobilized for previous demonstrations against U.S. intervention (like the ones on February 9th called by the ANSWER coalition which is led by the Party for Socialism and Liberation) because they conditioned\u00a0 participation on giving explicit\u00a0 political support to the Maduro regime. A sector of the U.S. Left embraces a rigid and non-dialectical logic in order to analyze and intervene in complex realities. It automatically assumes that \u201cthe enemy of my enemy is my friend.\u201d Thus if Trump is the undisputed enemy of working people and oppressed communities in the U.S., and if he deeply hates Maduro, then Maduro must be something good for the working class and oppressed in the U.S and internationally. In this view all critiques of Maduro are either silenced or grossly minimized.
\nWe know, however, that this logic cannot withstand critical examination and debate. In fact, the same political forces that apply it to their international politics refuse it to analyze politics at home. For we all know that despite Trump\u2019s brutal aggressions against immigrant communities, Democrats have deported working class families in record numbers. This is why we do not and we should not support them politically, and why we believe that we can be staunchly opposed to Trump\u2019s immigration policy while at the same time also vehemently opposing\u00a0 Obama\u2019s and the Democrats\u2019 record on this matter.
\nThe \u201cenemy of my enemy is my friend\u201d logic also erases the many millions of Venezuelan workers who have expressed their opposition to Maduro. In the last presidential elections, those of 2018, out of the 20.5 million of registered voters, only 9.3 million voted, that is 40%, compared to 80% in the last two presidential elections.[3]<\/sup><\/a> While Maduro won the election with 6 million votes, 14 million did not express support for him: while a few voted for the right wing conservative opposition, the majority stayed home demoralized because there is not yet a strong Left alternative to Maduro. This in part due to the repression of the Maduro regime against any independent grassroots initiative, and also to the fact that pro-U.S. groups are heavily financing and supporting the right wing opposition.
\n 
\nThe Problems of \u201cNo Intervention Only\u201d Anti-Imperialism<\/strong>
\n 
\nThere is a second conception of anti-imperialism that has crystallized in the U.S., a sort of abstentionist anti-imperialism that exclusively focuses on \u201cno intervention\u201d, and which is an incomplete one and is becoming an obstacle to building an anti-intervention movement across borders.
\nAccording to this view workers in the U.S. should not have any public opinion on what is happening in Venezuela (or Syria etc.), especially no critical opinion of the Maduro government. There are two variants of this position: one argues that U.S. workers (millions of whom\u00a0 immigrants) cannot \u201cunderstand\u201d Venezuelan politics, they are not there, they are not Venezuelan and they are mostly manipulated by the liberal and conservative media. A less paternalistic variant argues that while it would be possible for U.S. workers to understand what is happening in Venezuela, they should not express any public critique of Maduro.
\nAccording to this view, in order to adopt a \u201creal\u201d anti-imperialist position, U.S. workers should raise the \u201cNo to U.S. Intervention\u201d demand, a \u201cdo not harm others\u201d demand. Going any further in discussing Venezuelan politics in the U.S., would result in betraying their brothers and sisters in Venezuela and the right of self-determination of the Venezuelan people. Thus, to articulate any critique to Maduro from a Left or working class perspective, even when backed by organized sectors of the working class in Venezuela, is perceived as risky and dangerous, as \u201cdoing the work of the CIA\u201d or even worse, as implicitly legitimizing U.S. intervention.
\nWe reject\u00a0 this approach and we believe it has no basis in the long history of revolutionary anti-imperialist politics that was inaugurated by the Russian Revolution and the Third International, which was the first international socialist organization to theorize and apply in practice the right of self determination of nations. Why? First, because we cannot use the anti-imperialist opposition to any form of U.S. government intervention to stifle the principle of working class solidarity: to oppose any political or military intervention in another country’s economy from above, that is from the state institutions that sustain class power, is not incompatible with organizing broad working class solidarity from below. Second, because politically we cannot conflate our demands against the U.S. government and our demands in the working class movement. We can simultaneously oppose the fake aid actions of Washington while demanding that labor unions and community groups send direct aid to Venezuelan working class sectors in need. Thus, the key questions should be who are they aiding and with which goal.
\nU.S. workers and the U.S. imperialist state play opposite roles in the liberation struggle of Venezuelan workers from imperialist oppression and the fight for socialism. While we are staunchly opposed to any form of U.S. intervention in Venezuela carried by the U.S. corporations and the U.S. state and its institutions, workers in the U.S. have all the right to discuss and even oppose the rule of governments that oppress and kill other workers abroad. They also have the right and obligation to stand in active solidarity with the independent political action of working class sectors against nationalist austerity governments like Bolsonaro\u2019s in Brazil or Maduro\u2019s in Venezuela.
\nWhen there was a revolution in Spain and then a Civil War against the rise of the Franco fascist regime, the international working class movement created the International Brigades to join the front and fight against fascism. 35,000 working class fighters went to Spain from all over the world, 2,800 came from the U.S. in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Similar organized efforts of working class solidarity occured when U.S. longshoremen boycotted the commercial ships that were doing business with the South African apartheid regime and the Pinochet dictatorship in the 70s.
\nThere are worker networks in Venezuela today, like the Intersindical de Trabajadores de Venezuela, which are organizing for concrete social measures of expropriation and redistribution, opposing Maduro\u2019s austerity policies. The Maduro government is repressing them and equating them with \u201cforeign intervention\u201d. We should give visibility to these voices and organize workers in the U.S. to actively support them. The fate of the Venezuelan people is in the hands of the most combative sectors of the Venezuelan working class, which are today independent and opposed to the Maduro regime.
\n 
\nThe Anti-Imperialist Movement Will Benefit From an Open Discussion on Venezuela\u2019s Crisis<\/strong>
\n 
\nWe think it is irresponsible at best, and criminal at worst to impose such a strait-jacket to the development of an independent, anti-imperialist broad working class movement. In order to defeat the dangerous pretexts and agenda of our own government, we need the broadest movement at home. Many workers in the U.S. have many legitimate questions and critiques about the Maduro regime, especially immigrant workers coming from Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Cuba etc., who have been forced to migrate due to rampant poverty and unemployment, and in many cases government repression against workers and youth mobilizations. Workers have the right to critique and rise up against the governments that exploit, impoverish, and repress them and their brothers and sisters abroad. And while we know that decades of U.S. foreign economic policies and political interference are responsible for the crisis in their countries, the national privileged elites have many times collaborated with U.S. imperialism and repressed workers\u2019 movements.
\nThere is also a new generation of young American activists that are interested in Socialism today. Some believe that Venezuela is a socialist country, others believe that it is not, and the majority have a lot of questions and want to learn more. We want to bring these youth into the anti-imperialist movement to further political discussions and debates, and not keep anyone who has questions or critiques of the Maduro regime outside of our movement.
\nWe need a united action to stop and defeat any form of U.S. intervention including\u00a0 sanctions, but we must defend the right to have political differences inside of the U.S. anti-war movement about the real nature and content of anti-imperialist politics. Democracy and free discussion are the conditions for the political development of our class. In order to defeat the capitalist powers and build socialism, we need to learn from our historic and present collective experiences.
\nIt is not an accident that the political organizations that seek to shut down the debate around the Maduro regime (like they did with Assad in Syria) come from authoritarian and bureaucratic \u201csocialist\u201d traditions, such as Stalinism and Castroism. Followers of these traditions believe that workers democracy is not needed to build socialism. And yet, these projects have failed to deliver a truly socialist and emancipatory society.\u00a0 We reject their top-down methods to impose political opinions and conduct our struggles.
\n 
\nWhat We Want: What the U.S. and Venezuela Are Not<\/strong>
\n 
\nUnfortunately, it is not true that Venezuela is a socialist country. Oil plants were only partially nationalised when Chavez imposed public-private partnership ventures.\u00a0 They were not fully nationalized and put under workers control. The Venezuelan economy relied exclusively in the first decade of the \u201crevolution\u201d on an oil-export model that yielded marginal profits. These in turn were redistributed in the form of government subsidies, but they failed to establish an\u00a0 economic basis for national independence, a real planned economy led by workers. While the profits of the oil boom temporarily benefited poor sectors of the country through social programs (like the Misiones), it mostly benefited the growingly corrupt sector of the Bolivarian bourgeoisie, linked to the military.
\nFinally, it is true that the Bolivarian Revolution initiated an impressive movement of workers\u2019 self-organization from below, known as the community councils and then the communes<\/em>. In coming to power, Chavez co-opted this process by institutionalizing it, and limited workers\u2019 push to expropriation and workers\u2019 control of land and factories. Yes, a few factories have been expropriated, but in most cases the government diluted or opposed those struggles. Expropriation under workers; control became the very rare exception and not the norm.
\nHowever, workers in the U.S. have much to learn from the Venezuelan working class movement.\u00a0 Partial nationalizations were the result of pressure from below, for example, factory occupations in the early revolutionary process of 1989-1995. Chavez did partially nationalize the oil industry because of this pressure from the workers\u2019 movement. We too should demand the nationalization of U.S. oil companies, utility companies, and automobile manufacturers. Those big companies hurt workers, are responsible for massive damage to the environment, and indeed, their very existence is based on the delusional, ecocidal idea that the planet can provide endless resources for capitalist growth. They have lost all public trust and they should be fully nationalized under workers control.
\n\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n