Venezuela: A Critical Moment to Challenge Intervention

A changing regional balance of power in Latin America--the re-entry into government of US foreign policy’s hard-right, adventurist wing and long-term economic hardships--have combined to present a most acute threat to Venezuela’s Bolivarian project. Venezuela is beset by a complex set of structuring contradictions: an oil-export-based economy; enduring, sharp, unattenuated social polarization; and an unremitting, coordinated project of political and economic sabotage, one directed by domestic elites and the US national-security establishment. Together, this leaves the Maduro-led government with little room to maneuver. The space that exists is afforded domestically by its political-military infrastructure, the somewhat more expansive—but much diminished of late—base of Bolivarianas/os, and the majority of Venezuelans who reject foreign intervention, and internationally by the combined Chinese-Russian counterweight to the U.S. imperial project.

As a journal aimed at informing social movement and socialist strategy, Socialism and Democracy has followed the Venezuelan encounter with 21^st-Century Socialism closely - with implicit critical support for it populist project. As such, we have published articles addressing the implementation of worker control, the development of constituent power, the nature of democracy, and critiques of extractivism in relation to the Venezuelan process.

However, with the weapons of war trained on Caracas, and the transparent attempt at regime-change currently supervised by an incoherent, but ever-lethal Trump administration, an urgent prescriptive turn is necessary.

In short, defense of Venezuelan sovereignty, including the right to develop economic alternatives and negotiate the steps needed for a durable, sustainable, and just political framework, should be an overriding concern for all those committed to genuine democracy. Any form of imperial political, economic, and/or military intervention in Venezuela’s internal affairs must be opposed by every means necessary, including most vigorously in the terrains of ideas and mass communication.

Necessary resistance measures in solidarity with the Venezuelan people should not only be grounded in the aforesaid logic of national sovereignty but also in the recognition that the imperial denunciation of Venezuela’s economic turmoil is being used to bludgeon socialist and structural-reform initiatives in the United States and elsewhere. Moreover, imperial control over the world’s largest oil reserves will only hasten the moment at which catastrophic climate change is irreversible. These interests aside, ignoring the historical and social implications for a moment, simple moral aversion the US methods should prompt their rejection: any invasion or regime-change is likely to be bloody. This is a time for action.