New Perspectives On Popular Struggle in Venezuela Against Intervention

Our comrade from Venezuela provides us with another dispatch, giving a strategic view on the situation arguing that a defensive war against imperialism must be transformed into a People’s War that changes the nature of society itself in a radical way, furthering the most radical aspects of the Bolivarian Revolution. 

As a response to the war that the imperialists have imposed on us with all the force of ethnocide and genocide, an expression of the need for slavery in all its different historical forms (from slavery itself to the current wars of imperial invasion), the mass struggle against imperialism potentially takes the form of the People’s War. The People’s War is not necessarily an armament-centered war. It goes beyond a quantitative measurement of bullets, rifles and changes of government and rather is about the prevalence of one political project over another, using all its organic strength to reorder life and society. It is a war that is based on the prevalence of the majority signifier of the population (which in our case is the nation: Venezuela), that through its communal intelligence seeks and achieves its very emancipation. At the foundation of our struggle our motivation must be for total democracy, the abolition of all forms of oppression, and communism. But it must also acquire the form that the people give it. In our case, the Latin American and Bolivarian referents have a lot of weight.

Once the death of political representation is a fact, the people, in their contempt for the right wing and corrupt bureaucracy of the PSUV, need to form a third force. If the feigned force of the government collapses and internal contradictions erupt, little by little generals and officers who have been part of the big smuggling and drug-trafficking mafia with all the power of the state will negotiate their lives. Much of the military command of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB), especially the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB), has bled out the country’s resources in an excessive and shameless manner. For no one is the brutal theft of meat, gasoline, CLAP boxes and paper money that has taken place on the Colombian border a secret; nor the looting of strategic minerals, such as gold, along the Brazilian border. All of the above, together with the worrying increase in drug trafficking in the east of the country to Trinidad and Tobago, should convince us that we do not have a large part of the FANB military command on our side.

The important thing is that interventionist operations are on the way. If the gringos achieve by military or political means overthrowing Maduro and the government of the PSUV, they will believe that they have won. But far from defeating us, they would unleash the awakening of the true heir of the Bolivarian Popular Revolution: the collective vanguard that is willing to die before seeing their hopes discarded, made of social bonds that transcend the government, and bases its strength in the fighting spirit of the people. In the bosom of the towns, a new force is silently shaping itself that will not let itself be swept away by its dreams. The gringos would face the fury of that same people who carried out the first uprising against world neoliberalism on February 27 of 1989, which after the fall of the socialist bloc had told the world that history had not come to its end and that there was still hope. That same people would open the millennium with a government that proclaimed itself socialist and shake up global geopolitics, proposing a multipolar and socialist world.

This parties of this savage capitalist system will do everything it can to consummate a coup that it could not finish 17 years ago (on April 11, 2002). There is a world of capitalists waiting for this outcome. We must not be disarmed in the hands and mind, nor disunited before a gigantic challenge that comes to us: the production of a force that opens the third decade of the millennium with a mass movement that renews hope and socialist praxis. At this time we poor people must ensure the possibility that the counterrevolution instead becomes a new emancipatory process thanks to the national formation of assemblies and councils that remove all the political trash that for years have infiltrated us. Nonetheless it is true is that there is not much time left, and we must act now to ensure that if this government bursts like this country has, we will never return to the old neoliberal capitalism, including its politicians, parties and other interests that have prepared with the help of the US to take back the command they lost twenty years ago. What is Guaido but an agent of the dependent and enslaving imperialist order?

A program of productive and just emancipation needs its own map of communal and labor institutional, workers and communities that dispute real and concrete power to the new masters on the way. These territorial networks and tissues must be prepared for such structuring in the coming times. The organized territorial axes: south, western, western and coastal centers, must all begin this journey with full organizational and productive capacity, leaving behind the stupid history of sectarianism and group confrontations that have done so much damage to the left, and in Venezuela have saturated popular power. This must start with ending the bureaucratic corruption that dominates PSUV. Public spaces of vital importance must be taken and administered again with genuine democracy, beginning with the administration of some elementary services such as water or transport, as well as the resources of educational and cultural institutions, displacing the parasitical corruption of the PSUV.

The direction that the People’s War outlined will take depends on the course of possible scenarios, one of which could see the continental right-wing “mercenaryize” the territory (filling it with armed bands following the Syrian model). Already in very specific areas of our territory, we see that gangsters and paramilitaries have political and military control, especially in socially but highly strategic marginalized areas, such as the borders of Zulia, Táchira and Bolívar. The people’s war must mobilize our territorial and sovereign muscle to impose our order. Will weapons be necessary? Of course, but the principle of people’s war is not merely arms but the ability of people to find themselves and organize a rebellion. We must understand that the struggle we undertake is not for the permanence of a populist government, which circumstantially favors the working class and then the bourgeoisie: our cause goes beyond that, it is the transition of Humanity towards a new kind of civilization. For that, we move paths of peace while building educational, artistic or productive proposals, but we must also prepare for the defense of the projects and ideas of the new civilization.

The popular movement must ensure some strategic points to realize victory. We are in a situation where governmental control over territory is in a state of crisis with the turmoil at the border seeing an incomplete state monopoly of control. However, it is important to categorically differentiate the control of a domain, which implies the mandatory submission of majorities, to the command of liberation, which springs from the same dynamic as the struggle of the exploited classes. The first is an exclusive command and its deliberations are secret, the second is a collective, democratic and critical command. In these two decades of social process in our land grassroots leaders have proliferated, who despite not registering within the Chavism constitute an important popular force: unions, communal councils, peasant organizations, indigenous communities and many more. Due to the political-economic crisis, this leadership is confined to its specific territorial spaces where they naturally have influence and leaving aside the possibility of joining a collective vanguard.

The first step for us is to have a unified and popular but not necessarily homogenous command. The unity of all the anti-imperialist national sectors is urgent, although they are not entirely in agreement with the socialist strategic program. The creation of this unity will surely attract high military commanders and relevant PSUV characters, as well as other important subjects of the Venezuelan political class. At this point, however,  it is important that the social base’s leadership does not lose its hegemony of command over the people’s war. This democratic-national command must not reproduce the old relations of domination of the bourgeois state, but follow the legacy of the Bolivarian emancipatory process and deepen participatory democracy. The discourse of the revolutionary forces should not be the war for the reordering of the bourgeois Nation-State, but for a war for a new Nation-Communal Republic that self-governing, in permanent redefinition, articulation, and expansion. Faced with the government of death and violence, we must raise “a government on things and not on people” as Marx said. The People’s War in the Venezuelan case must have as a strategic objective the total or partial control of the oil industry at the hands of the workers of PDVSA, as well as other productive sectors; replicating the experience of the oil industry in 2003. Many objectives are demarcated from this point, but first of all, without unity of the popular sectors we can not overcome our enemies.

Finally, it is necessary to clarify that we are in lands that breathe a story that has been too similar for five hundred years. We are part of the same historical flow that led us together to the continental uprising against the capitalist imperial order and its macabre civilization two hundred years ago, and that at the beginning of the millennium meant gigantic mass movements brought progressive governments to power throughout the region. Therefore, it is impossible that we do not understand ourselves as a historical community, one which the Cuban independence fighter José Martí was able to name with all the poetry it deserves: “Nuestramerica”, or, our land,  although also the land of endless looting. At the same time, it is a history fragmented in space and time, fragmented to the same extent that our lands were separated into nation-states with the betrayal of the liberal elites that divided our continent and helped to give a final form to the capitalist world order, contrary to the Bolivarian dream of continental unity. Our rebellions have been cut and separated on national lines, yet with the historical process that we are experiencing the collective command of the People’s War will have to understand that the liberation struggle is not confined to Venezuela alone. Our struggle is not the prevalence of a national government, but the transition of Humanity towards a new type of society. This translates into discussion and constant work in the department of international revolutionary coordination.

The mobsters and traitors who bleed the revolution they claim to represent have run out of time. Their ability to bring people to hunger to pay for their corruption has been indescribable. Now comes a new stage where the people’s war and its ability to displace the old and rotten Republic must open the way to a true self-governing and socialist, productive Republic, made by the science of the people, that is based on a free knowledge that completely confronts this modern capitalist civilization. We will continue pushing the sun even in the darkest of nights.