Venezuela caught between rival imperialists

The economic and political crisis is rapidly intensifying in the resource-rich nation of Venezuela. As workers starve or die for lack of basic medical care, battle lines have been drawn between blocs of rival imperialists. The possibilities range from a CIA-inspired coup, to an all-out proxy war to a U.S. military intervention.  
On January 23, Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader and head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, declared himself interim president in open defiance of last spring’s contested national elections. His move was supported by the U.S. bosses and their allies in Latin America and Europe. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro shot back with a demand that all U.S. diplomats leave the country within 72 hours. Maduro has the backing of U.S. rivals Russia, China, and Iran.
It is the international working class that stands to suffer most from the capitalists’ power struggles. As workers, we have nothing to gain from either the imperialist bosses and puppets like Guaidó, or fake-left bosses like Maduro and his phony “socialist” predecessor, Hugo Chavez. Our path to liberation lies in building a mass Progressive Labor Party and international Red Army, to crush the profit-hungry capitalists with communist revolution!
U.S. imperialists eye an opportunity
With the rise of Guaidó and mass opposition to the corrupt and disastrous Maduro regime, the U.S. capitalist class sees a golden opportunity to take control of Venezuela’s vast natural resource wealth. The country’s Orinoco Belt region is home to the world’s largest proven oil reserves, with estimates of close to 300 billion barrels (Telesur, 1/28).
Petroleum is the lifeblood of industrial capitalism. Control over the flow of oil and gas is essential for global imperialist domination. Since Guaidó’s announcement, U.S. President Donald Trump, along with National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have thrown their weight behind Guaidó. They’re trying to use the crisis to tip the country in favor of U.S. imperialism.
To that end, the U.S. offered $20 million in “humanitarian” aid—a drop in the bucket in a country where people lost an average of 25 pounds of body weight in the space of a year  and nearly 90 percent live in poverty (borgenproject.org). The Trump administration also imposed new sanctions on Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA, with the intention of funneling billions of dollars in oil revenue away from the Maduro government (Washington Post, 1/28). If these measures prove inadequate in forcing regime change, Bolton has echoed Trump’s stance that “all options are on the table,” including U.S. troop deployment (The Telegraph, 1/29).
The call to oust Maduro is a bipartisan affair, a rare moment of unity for the divided U.S. ruling class. Democrats have upped the ante by pushing bills through Congress to undermine Maduro’s rule (CBS News, 1/31). But the fact that Maduro is still hanging on to power—at least as CHALLENGE goes to press—exposes the accelerating decline of U.S. imperialism.
Chinese, Russian imperialists won’t be easily uprooted
The significance of the U.S. rulers’ push for regime change has not been lost on their two imperialist arch-rivals, China and Russia, who have long targeted Venezuela to expand their influence in Latin America. Both countries are formally objecting to U.S. sanctions. It is important to note, however, that the well-being of workers in Venezuela doesn’t factor into these complaints.
The Russian bosses recently have enlarged their footprint in Venezuela. Over the last few years, they have lent the Maduro government $17 billion, and the two nations held joint military drills as recently as December 2018 (msn.com, 1/26). In response to the 2014 U.S. destabilization of Ukraine, a nation on their own border, Russian imperialists are digging in to keep Venezuela as their military beachhead in Latin America, historically the U.S. imperialists’ backyard.
Between 2007 and 2014, China supplied $63 billion in loans to Venezuela, or 53 percent of all Chinese loans to Latin America for that period. To ensure repayment from the cash-strapped country, the Chinese bosses insisted on being reimbursed with oil (Foreign Policy, 6/6/17). They understand that a pro-U.S. Guaidó regime could disrupt both their oil supply and their strategic regional influence. To defend their stake, they have increased arms sales to Maduro to help his military and police death squads crack down on internal dissent (Al Jazeera, 1/30). At the same time, China’s Foreign Ministry issued a public statement that notably refused to take sides. If Maduro goes under, China would need “to cultivate a relationship with [Guaidó] that preserves its economic interests” (New York Times, 2/4).There is no loyalty among capitalist thieves. Even so, the clash of interests of the three top imperialist powers could set off a bloody proxy war that would threaten millions of working-class lives.
Compromises with capitalism always fail the working class
For workers, everyday life is a crisis in Venezuela. An estimated 2 million people have fled the country since 2015, nearly 5,000 per day (The Guardian, 10/1/18). Millions more are facing acute shortages of medicine and food, skyrocketing inflation rates, and a brutal crackdown on protests.
The experiment with a fake-socialist welfare state in Venezuela, piloted first by Hugo Chavez, was doomed to fail workers from the start. Chavez bankrolled a considerable expansion of the social safety net by exploiting the country’s massive oil wealth while also skimming off billions for his “Bolivarian” bosses. But shortly after his death in 2013, as the price of oil plummeted, the safety net was ripped to shreds. What remains is an intensely nationalist and impoverished military state under the murderous rule of Maduro and his drug-trafficking cronies (New York Times, 7/15/18).
Workers never held state power in Venezuela. They never controlled the means of production. A mass communist party must destroy the profit system through armed revolution, and build an egalitarian society based on production for workers’ needs. We can never make that happen by electing fake-leftist misleaders beholden to capitalist interests, in Venezuela or the U.S. or anywhere else.
A communist world to win
PLP calls on the international working class to undertake our own path to power. We call on workers to reject stooges like Guaidó and Maduro and their imperialist masters, and to fight instead for communist revolution. As contradictions between the bosses heat up and erupt in open conflict, the need for a mass international PLP and Red Army becomes all the more essential. It is the only road out of this capitalist hell.
Workers of the world, unite! We have a world to win, and nothing to lose but our chains.