Venezuela

Steve Ellner — María Corina Machado’s rise as the supreme leader of the Venezuelan opposition is part of a worldwide trend in which far-right leaders and movements have achieved major inroads.

Steve Ellner lays down the political stakes and US meddling ahead of Venezuela's electoral race.

Venezuelan trade union leader and political activist Stalin Pérez Borges is currently in intensive care in a hospital in Argentina due to pancreatitis.

Reinaldo Iturriza looks at the realignment of forces following the Barbados agreement and the lack of representation of the disaffiliated popular masses in Venezuela.

Steve Ellner — The war on Venezuela, along with other unfavorable conditions, lent itself to Maduro’s defensive strategy. However, that approach was not without a major risk.

Reinaldo Iturriza looks back at the history of communes and how they are supposed to be more than "appendages" of state institutions.

In a hypothetical therapy session, Andreína Chávez looks at how the Venezuelan government could deal with traumatic events and focus on the path forward.

Chris Gilbert — To frame the ecological promise of Venezuela’s communal project, it is useful to consider some of its main features, and contrast them with the capital system.

Venezuela is the target of a brutal economic blockade. Gregory Wilpert helps us understand why.

Pablo Stefanoni discusses the situation in South America after the Brazilian elections, the challenges posed by the far-Right, the impact of the Ukraine war and prospects for the Left.

Venezuela entered a profound economic crisis beginning in 2014. There are many heated debates about its origins and causes. Among the most recent contributions to these debates is Malfred Gerig, a young researcher who has written extensively about economic and political issues. His soon-to-be-published book La Larga Depresión Venezolana [The Long Venezuelan Depression], pinpoints the origins of the crisis in a closing cycle of capital accumulation that was based on oil exports.

By John Bellamy Foster

June 1, 2022 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Monthly Review — István Mészáros was a global thinker strongly committed to anti-imperialist struggles. In this respect, he allied himself with those fighting for socialist transformation in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil, and elsewhere. He argued that in the descending phase of capitalism there was a “downward equalization of the rate of exploitation,” by which he meant a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions, enforced by a global system of monopolistic competition.¹ In 1978, he edited and introduced a book consisting of thirteen essays by the great Filipino historian and political theorist Renato Constantino, titled Neo-Colonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness: Essays in Cultural Decolonisation, in which Constantino developed the concept of counter-consciousness into a powerful philosophy of cultural liberation.² Mészáros took great interest as well in Brazilian developments and struggles over the state, supporting various socialist movements there. But his most singular contribution to struggles in the Global South was the role he was to play in his strong strategic support of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.