The Scam of Representation: Dispatch from Venezuela

By publishing this statement from an anonymous Venezuelan citizen, we aim to provide a counter to the narrative that the US-backed Guiado coup is a legitimate expression of the discontent of the popular masses with the mismanagement of the economy by Maduro. While critical of the Maduro government, with their concessions to the national and international bourgeoisie and halting of the revolutionary process, the author argues that the popular masses must stand with Maduro against imperialist intervention. 

Who is the president and who represents whom? Venezuela is perhaps the country where we see a complete failure in the political field of all the big significant advances of modernity, where the whole myth of representation has come down. These are years of political troops fighting between each other until they reach the point where there is no political representation whatsoever in the National Assembly and the National Government. In other words, the State is completely broken and in the meantime the big mafias and small groups of the privileged that control the distribution of some resources (fundamentally food) fill their pockets, leaving a hungry people and a scarcity of everything. The big capitals do what they want while the “representatives” try to tie themselves to them in order to win their next spot as a representative of the people. It is true the military decides what they want in the border areas, but after all, they are just troops that depend on the decisions of a state power completely outlawed. All of this would not be impossible to overcome if we were talking about a real ongoing revolution where the law is the last legacy of a collective will that has appropriated its own collective life: the premise of all revolutionary revolt. But it is not like that, the Bolivarian revolution became a circus of interests folded to a representative logic that, as times go by, causes a country to dissolve itself.

But let’s not be like the whiner that denounces and screams without knowing what to claim or who to blame.

Venezuela is a national space (within the Latin American context of struggle against the misery imposed by capitalism and colonialism) that at some historic point, reflecting the economic power of giant oil revenues, wanted to turn that power into a new form of State that was not constituted power, but the power of constituents in order to gain an absolutely fantastic independence (to the extent that those same riches in the end were and are products of imperial needs, based in the current world order). One day we considered a true technological and food sovereignty with a few years of work and research, and we had spaces in which that was briefly possible. For challenging that unipolar world and believing in the beautiful possibility of transforming this world, imperialism deeply hated us and conspired for two decades to destroy us spiritually and economically, buying the will of those corrupted by it. The revolution fell among military traitors and civilians who preferred to use the pockets of dollars to go on forming corruption tribes; and while money lasted, they served enough resources to middle and popular classes to breathe their dreams, at least until the end of the reserves and the beginning of a devaluation tragedy which led to this pointless collapse.

Chavez died and the conspiracy began to be evident. The corrupt logic of those opportunists, who secretly wanted that Chávez to die, who do not obey any theory except the capitalist degradation with which the big capitals deceive the peripheral countries, becomes infinite in each particle of the territory until it reaches this really tragic point. Now we are talking about leadership that doesn’t represent anyone. The popular movement unravels among so much fantasy and we arrive at the circus without stars.

The Chavismo that could be established was not based on the power of the constituent, but instead a fundamentally Caudillist movement that gathers the great revolutionary losses of the 19 and 20th century and tries to update them, starting from the rebellion of February 27, to a world where the representative fallacies of the western world absorbed our continent. All the nationalist and justice myths reappeared but in a new popular hope. In short, this revived Caudillism, that couldn’t be the paradoxical possibility of a real revolution in the 21th century, could only survive on his (Chávez’s) own character. Once Chávez disappeared and left behind him the roots of the opportunists and immensely corrupt who joined him, the power discourse becomes garbage. And in the meantime, they attempt to seek legitimacy, as they have managed to establish representative bodies such as the ANC (National Constituent Assembly) that are the remains of a collapsed revolution.

In this economic situation, it is the responsibility of the billionaires that left a completely broken country fraying internally in all its institutional structures and services, and in the cracks a opposition is reborn. They only served to play the game, to do dirty business, to validate this movement between Caudillismo, corruption and representation, and sometimes trying to play the role of historical heroes of bourgeois democracy. There are not two bands of power, but two powers that try to constitute themselves unfairly. This tragical political circus is very close to a horrendous civil war.

Who gets the power? The rich will negotiate between them. Meanwhile, we are the poorest society on the continent. I only offer a hypothesis. The gringos retire from Syria, leaving an open field to the fascist of Erdogan to invade the north of Syria and to end the insurgency of Rojava. They have now chosen a new target, their natural sphere of influence, their own continent. South America is filled with right-wing governments. The satrapy that will remain in power will have to decide whether to abandon it, negotiate or prepare for war; but after the drowned Bolivarian revolution all representation is dead.

It is the time to prepare the resistance and reinvent ourselves in a new subject that must emerge from this total crisis. It is the time of a new, beautiful and very hard revolution.

In the face of an imperial aggression in Venezuela, all patriotic sectors must unite against the invading threat. I support Nicolás Maduro if he is willing to fight US imperialism to the last consequences, but the PSUV government has been a total destruction of the nation and must cease. But we will resolve that only after the imminent imperialist threat is over. The tragedy to which the terrible management of the PSUV and the opposition conspiracy (commanded by the CIA) has led to this beautiful country is only surpassed by the one we are facing with a possible invasion of the gringos.