Venezuela's presidential elections and the left: Debating democracy, anti-imperialism and sovereignty

By Ana Cristina Carvalhaes & Luís Bonilla-Molina
Published
Venezuela fraud protests

Translated from Revista Movimento by Federico Fuentes for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Unlike what has happened for the past 25 years with Venezuela's elections — there have been dozens since Hugo Chávez’s victory in 1998 — the presidential vote on July 28 has split the broad Latin American left, including supporters of ‘progressivism’, from top to bottom. An ever shrinking but still numerous sector, which is full of intellectuals, has echoed the arguments of the São Paulo Forum1, according to which to save Venezuela and the region from US imperialism it is necessary to support the Nicolás Maduro government at any cost. This cost, it seems, includes even possibility that, unlike previous elections, Maduro may have lost, given he has so far refused to prove his victory.

According to this logic, based more on classical geopolitics than Marxism, anything can be justified as necessary so as to "not hand over" power (and oil) "to the right" in Venezuela. Within this geopolitical logic, whether Maduro won or lost the election is secondary to the "progressive nationalist" imperative of preventing US imperialism, embodied by opposition candidate Edmundo González, from taking up residence in Miraflores Palace and thereby jeopardising state ownership over PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela SA), owner of one of the largest oil and gas reserves on the planet. Another sector of neo-Madurists, it is true, places less emphasis on oil and more on the tragedy that a defeat for Maduro, seen as a leftist, would represent given the backdrop of the advance of the extreme right in the region and globally. For both groups, there is no option but to stick with Maduro — not even a negotiation between the two sides of the Venezuelan dispute, as Brazilian president Lula da Silva and Colombian president Gustavo Petro have proposed, probably with the aim of agreeing to a division of powers between the two sides that includes some guarantees of democratic rights and PDVSA's integrity.

History and facts don’t matter

It is worth reminding ourselves, what is it that differentiates the right and left: our discourse or action? Maduro's rhetoric certainly maintains a lot of left-wing verbiage. He says his government is a "military-police-popular alliance against imperialism and for socialism". He needs to legitimise himself internally and externally as Chávez's successor, when all he has done is roll back the achievements and legacy of the years of progress of the Bolivarian process.

Putting aside appearances, the fact is that his policy for remaining in government since 2013 has been to encourage the enrichment of a new business sector in the country and, like a Bonaparte, negotiate between the different fractions of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, new and old (with the exception of the faction most closely linked to the US far right, represented by Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo González). Maduro has always favoured business sectors, particularly those in the oil services industry, whose profits feed the new bourgeoisie and are partly distributed to the top brass of his armed forces and police (hence the alliance). More than 800 luxury cars were seized just from among the hundred involved in the PDVSA cryptocurrency mega-corruption scandal uncovered in 2023, one reflection of the deteriorating morale of the government's leadership..2

Even under the intense fire of Western imperialist sanctions against Venezuela — which date back to the Barack Obama administration, were tightened by Donald Trump and have become more flexible under Joe Biden — the Maduro government has never taken steps to confront the globalised financial system and its domestic supporters. It has allocated a substantial part of the dwindling national budget to private banks to guarantee the sale of foreign currency to private and rentier companies, which is essentially a policy of subsidising and favouring the rich..3

At the same time (since Decree 2792 issued in 2018), it has banned strikes, the presentation of demands, the right of the working class to mobilise, and the organisation and legalisation of new unions, while prosecuting and sending to prison union leaders who question internal company practices or simply ask for a pay rise and health insurance. This was the case at Siderúrgica del Orinoco (Sidor), home to the largest concentration of proletariats in Venezuela: after mobilising for wages and benefits between June-July 2023, striking workers and their leaders became victims of intense repression. Leonardo Azócar and Daniel Romero, both union delegates, have been imprisoned ever since..4

The "anti-imperialism" of Maduro and his entourage does not stop him from delivering the oil that the US needs, through Chevron and other big foreign companies (such as Repsol), in a context where the US Treasury Department authorises them to extract Venezuelan black gold while prohibiting them from paying taxes and royalties to Venezuela..5The acceptance of these neo-colonial conditions shows the limits of Maduro’s anti-imperialism.

The sanctions against Venezuela have become more flexible under Biden (pressured by the war in Ukraine), but Maduro maintains the discourse that everything is the fault of the sanctions as a pretext for moving forward with a structural adjustment that fundamentally affects those who live off their own labour. In political terms, within Venezuela, talk of US sanctions (real, concrete and detestable) has lost its political effectiveness in the face of the ostentatious and luxurious lifestyle (exposed by billionaire corruption cases) of those who govern the country.

The working class as an ancillary issue

The pro-Maduro left has replaced assessing the situation of the Venezuelan working class as the basis of left-wing analysis with the "geopolitics of oil". This binary geopolitics only sees the contradiction between imperialism and the Venezuelan state (undoubtedly a real and important contradiction). It is not dialectical enough to take into account the material and political situation of working class people, their aspirations and options amid a scenario of multiple contradictions. It is as if this were an ancillary issue, or a secondary contradiction. The "mantra" of the pro-Maduro left for omitting class analysis is the need to prevent the right from coming to power, ignoring the fact that Venezuela has a government that applies the structural economic recipes of the right, just with left-wing rhetoric.

You only have to talk to the workers (not the bureaucracy of the Bolivarian Socialist Workers Confederation bosses) at Sidor and PDVSA, or with teachers and university professors to see the terrible material situation in which they live (a minimum wage of US$4 a month, an average salary of US$130 a month, made up of 80% bonuses), amid the worst loss of democratic freedoms in decades in terms of their organisation, mobilisation and struggle.

The new geopolitics of progressivism look at the J28 elections in much the same way as the international mainstream media (CNN, CBS and others), but simply support the opposite side. They do not defend the interests of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, but those of Maduro and the new bourgeoisie, behind the false axiom that Maduro equals the working class but without analysing his government's anti-worker and anti-popular policies. They fall into the trap of "legal fetishism" by limiting their analysis of the situation to the election results. The issue is not just that Maduro and the CNE have not demonstrated how the president won the J28 elections, but how this situation affects the framework of concrete democratic freedoms in which the working class operates and survives.

If there is no transparency and legitimacy in the national elections, in which the registered candidates represented different shades of bourgeois programs, it is difficult to imagine restoring the minimum democratic freedoms that the working class needs to defend itself against capital’s offensive against it (the right to decent wages, the right to strike, freedom of association, freedom to mobilise, express opinions and organise in political parties). The working class is fundamentally interested in how the situation after J28 allows or restricts, in the short term, the freedoms it needs to express itself as an exploited class. But this contradiction does not enter into the logic and discourse of new progressive geopolitics.

Compromising omissions and silences

These "progressives" are not concerned by the repression against workers' trade unions and political organisations6, nor that Maduro prevented any left-wing sector of the PSUV from taking part in the country's elections — even at the cost of infiltrating, taking to court and attacking the leadership of the Popular Electoral Movement (MEP), the Fatherland for All Party (PPT), the Tupamaros and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) in order to have them intervened!7 Maduro’s supporters fail to mention that since J28, the government has intensified its repression, no longer against the middle class, but fundamentally against the working class, sending about 2500 young people to prison under the discourse of re-education, which means subjecting them to vexatious public rituals of brainwashing.

They are silent about the construction of two maximum security prisons for those caught protesting or inciting protests on social media. They ignore the imprisonment of several opposition politicians and the direct threats made against others on television — as the minister of the "hammer", Diosdado Cabello, threatened the former mayor of Caracas Juan Barreto, Vladimir Villegas, the brother of the Minister of Culture and the chair of a parliamentary committee .8 If they can threaten public figures like this, the situation is worse for ordinary people who lack such a media profile. Recently, we have seen the deployment of plainclothes security forces to threaten activists — as happened on Saturday July 10 against Koddy Campos and Leandro Villoria, leaders of the LGBTQI community in Caracas. In the days following the election, activists' houses in the traditional Chavista stronghold of 23 de Enero in Caracas were marked with an X of Herod by government officials to scare them against possibly protesting.

The geopolitical left is silent on the number of deaths after J28 (close to 25, according to estimates by human rights organisations and social movements), spreading the narrative that they are just right-wingers. This is not only untrue, but constitutes a step backwards in the human rights gains made in the post-dictatorship periods in the region.

Geopolitical progressivism reproduces the mirage of a popular government that no longer exists, which has been erased by Maduro's transformism and anti-worker policies. They seem to be asking the Venezuelan working class to fight for their rights only within the framework that the government allows, in order to feed, from the outside, the utopia that they cannot build in their own countries. This progressivism does not see that the growth in support for the right-wing candidate is the result of the illegalisation and denial of the possibility of a left-wing alternative. The electoral success of the Machado-González duo is largely the result of Madurismo's political mistakes.

What about oil?

All the serious facts mentioned above are considered by supporters of Maduro's "victory" to be "formal-democratic" details that are secondary to the danger of having the "squalid" right once again in government in Venezuela. Their reasoning is as devoid of class criteria as it is of basic monitoring of the country's reality.

Since November 2022, in the context of the war in Ukraine, the US Secretary of the Treasury has authorised Chevron to explore and export Venezuelan oil, on the condition that it not pay taxes or royalties to the Venezuelan government. Such neo-colonial conditions were not even seen in the pre-Chavez governments but have been accepted by Maduro. Since then, Venezuela has once again been a stable supplier of oil to North America. This explains the delicate nature of Biden's positions who prefers to wait out and see if the efforts by the progressive triad Lula, Petro, AMLO succeed (AMLO withdrew from the triad last week).

You have to be careful when talking about the US embargo on Venezuela. There are embargoes and embargoes. Those sanctions that have affected food, medicine and spare parts for buses and cars have contributed decisively to the exodus of four to five million workers. But the Venezuela of those at the top has managed to become the sixth largest supplier of oil to the US, surpassing countries such as the UK and Nigeria9, without this new revenues from this ‘oil opening up’ improving people's material living standards.

What is at stake in Venezuela is which sector of the ruling classes — be it the old, squalid oligarchic bourgeoisie or the new business sectors linked to the "Bolivarian" military that has enriched itself under Maduro — controls the oil industry. It is a dispute over who gets the lion's share of the oil revenue. Any one of them will guarantee the geostrategic supply of oil to Western capitalist powers and will increasingly restrict the distribution of oil income to the people — because this is in the nature of capitalist sectors, and because the nature of the fossil-exporting mono-extractivist state has not been touched by the Bolivarian process. Maduro, despite his rhetoric, is neither a socialist nor an anti-imperialist. It is naive and ill-informed to imagine a Maduro with a program and enough courage to confront imperialist plans to put the oil that Venezuela can produce back on the world market. It is a huge mistake, in the name of supposed sovereignty, to turn a blind eye to the growing authoritarian tendency of the Maduro regime against the disgruntled workers and people.

(Tragically, the geopolitical Madurists continue believing that Venezuela's salvation comes from what is, in reality, its historical curse: its oil wealth. Something that even the great Brazilian developmentalist Celso Furtado, without being a socialist or ecologist, already pointed out as a major problem for the country he lived in in the 1950s).

Is there a way out?

Of course, the strength acquired by the right-wing opposition, which has already been defeated at the ballot box several times by Chávez and once by Maduro, and which now has its most extreme wing, the oligarch Maria Corina Machado, at its head, is a tragedy. An even greater tragedy is the fact that this extreme right wing may have won or come very close to winning the elections — there is no other reason for Maduro's insistence on refusing to present the results and repressing the people so harshly. Precisely for this reason, because a peaceful solution is difficult and simply handing over the government to this sector is hard to swallow, the way to avoid the "bloodbath" that both sides threaten Venezuela with may be the one indicated by the governments of Brazil and Colombia: presentation of the results, negotiations between both sides, starting with Maduro (the group of governments refuses to dialogue and review the opposition's results). If it is possible to expect minimum democratic freedoms to be guaranteed, the release of political prisoners, a halt to repression, broad trade union and party political freedom, it is also possible to negotiate clauses to protect PDVSA.

At the moment, supporting the negotiated solution proposed by Colombia and Brazil — which has the support of Chile and the repudiation, of course, of Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega — is the right policy, because it is much more prudent and favourable to the workers and people of the country. This policy cuts against an increasingly authoritarian regime that represses young people, trade unionists and left-wing opponents, and is not as naive and bureaucratically biased as simply endorsing the government's irregularities and arbitrariness. On the one hand, it makes it possible to argue that the extreme right should not slice and dice PDVSA and the few remaining social achievements. On the other hand, it does not start from the mistaken premise that Maduro and his bureaucratic-bourgeois military-police entourage will guarantee Venezuelan "sovereignty" over anything.

National sovereignty and popular sovereignty

Latin American progressivism, as well as Third Worldism and the Stalinist left, use the term sovereignty to amalgamate two different meanings: national sovereignty and popular sovereignty. Of course, national sovereignty is usually a condition for the full exercise of popular sovereignty. The problem is that quite varied regimes (and movements of opinion), both progressive and regressive, can appropriate the defence of national sovereignty in the face of pressure from the world market and imperialism.

National sovereignty was at the centre of the anti-colonial and national independence movements, as well as the national development populisms of the 20th century. But it is also at the heart of the defence of military dictatorships (such as those of the Latin American Southern Cone in the 1960s), theocratic dictatorships (like Iran), state bureaucracies and, as we see with Modi and Trump, extreme right-wing governments. Yes, defence of national sovereignty and even confrontations with imperialism can be carried out by very regressive regimes. For us, defence of national sovereignty makes sense in conjunction with defence of popular sovereignty, the democratic self-organisation of the masses, and the conquest of freedoms and rights that strengthen the historic bloc of the working classes, which can build alternatives to global capitalism and the imperialisms that structure it.

In the same way, as with the Stalinist experiences of the 20th century, we cannot mechanically identify peoples with their political leaders, who may or may not represent them, in a relationship that is always dynamic. When this relationship breaks down — as it has or is breaking down in Venezuela — democratic freedoms become a fundamental point of support for any struggle for sovereignty, both popular and, incidentally, national. Therefore, no force can guarantee Venezuela's sovereignty over its territory and its wealth without recovering popular sovereignty.

Is democracy no longer important?

Bourgeois-democratic regimes are not the regime to which we socialists strategically aspire: we dream of and fight to build grassroots democratic organisations, direct democracy, people's power — as embryos of a new and more vital form of democracy, exercised by the workers and popular sectors — amid processes of revolutionary offensives. But is formal democracy so despicable that we do not give a damn about manipulated elections results?

In a world increasingly threatened by a constellation of extreme right-wing forces, the fight is and will be, for a long time, in defence of freedoms and democratic rights, even of institutions of bourgeois-democratic regimes against the onslaught of the extreme right — as we have already experienced with Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Tayyip Recep Erdogan, Viktor Orbán and so on. Where does that leave a left that despises democracy to the point of endorsing the manipulation of elections for the peoples and workers of the world and in (increasing more) countries where the fight against the far right is vital?

These sectors that call themselves left-wing and endorse repressive regimes are also badly failing, from a strategic point of view, in the necessary process of political, theoretical and practical construction of a new anti-capitalist utopia — one that is capable of enchanting large sections of the youth, women, those who live off their labour and oppressed peoples once again. A new mass anti-capitalist left must be democratic, independent and confront authoritarian "models" — or it will not be.

Finally there is still the most important question for any socialist militant and organisation in Latin America and the world: how do we look in front of the eyes and expectations of the workers, the people and what remains of the non-bureaucratic left in Venezuela? Will those sectors to the left of the PSUV, or hidden critics within the PSUV, today fragmented, persecuted,  in some cases imprisoned, many in full activity against authoritarianism, be abandoned to their fate?10 For us, supporting their struggles, encouraging their unity to resist, helping them to survive and breathe is the priority internationalist task. Everything else that does not take them into account may be geopolitics, but it is certainly not internationalism. After all, the only strategic guarantee for a sovereign Venezuela, for better living and working conditions, for reorganisation and popular power in the medium term, lies in the hands of those social and political subjects who were the protagonists of the golden years of the Bolivarian process, not in the hands of the gravediggers of this process.

Ana Cristina Carvalhaes, journalist and federal civil servant, is a founding member of the PSOL and a member of the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International. Luís Bonilla-Molina is a Venezuelan university lecturer, critical pedagogue and president of the Venezuelan Society of Comparative Education.

Venezuela Communist Party of Venezuela latin america US imperialism PSUV

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