Introduction

The revolutionary Jacobin leader Louis de Saint-Just famously warned that those who only make half a revolution have dug their own graves. This, unfortunately, was the case with the Bolivarian Revolution.

If there is a striking feature of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, it is how protracted the whole process was. Nearly fifteen years elapsed between the election of President Hugo Chávez on 6 December 1998 and his death on 5 March 2013.

The balance of class forces was so favourable to the working class and the poor that all attempts of the counter-revolution to overthrow him and put an end to the revolution were defeated. And there were many such attempts: a coup in April 2002 which briefly removed Chávez, several other failed coup attempts, guarimba (violent rioting) on the part of the reactionary opposition, imperialist sanctions, paramilitary infiltrations, mercenary incursions, a two-month-long nationwide bosses’ lockout, economic sabotage, a strike of capital, price fixing and large-scale hoarding on the part of the capitalist class – the Venezuelan oligarchy, backed, funded and supported by US and Spanish imperialism, stopped at nothing to try to crush the attempt of the impoverished Venezuelan masses to take their destiny into their own hands. All these attempts to oust Chávez and destroy the revolution ended in an embarrassing failure for the ruling class.

And nevertheless, the revolution was not completed. While the power of the capitalist oligarchy had been weakened, the economy remained a capitalist economy, and the state apparatus remained a capitalist state. Chávez was acutely aware of this. In one of his last speeches, he called for a “turn of the rudder” (golpe de timón).

But after Chávez died, Nicolás Maduro took the reins. The bureaucratic and reformist tendencies at the top of the Bolivarian movement became stronger, and slowly but surely the revolution turned into counter-revolution. Where Chávez had encouraged the self-organisation of the oppressed, Maduro brought it under the bureaucratic control of the state apparatus and that of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Where Chávez nationalised private companies and multinational corporations, Maduro privatised them. Where, under Chávez, latifundia were expropriated and land distributed to peasants, under Maduro, the national guard evicted peasants and returned property to big landowners. Factory occupations and experiences of workers’ control and management, which Chávez had encouraged, were crushed and destroyed.

As we were about to go to print with this new edition in January 2026, a six-month campaign of escalating imperialist bullying and military aggression against Venezuela by President Donald Trump culminated in a massive military strike in which the US kidnapped President Maduro and his wife. In the aftermath of the attack, Venezuela was forced into becoming a de facto semi-colony of the US, with Washington dictating policy to Caracas through its control over the flow of oil resources out of the country.

While we cannot predict with any certainty how events will unfold, the 3 January imperialist attack against Venezuela marks the end of a whole historical period. Revolutionary activists in Venezuela and abroad need to understand how we arrived at this point. Lessons need to be learned if we are to arm ourselves for the battles to come. We consider the republication of this book a crucial contribution to this discussion.

The character of this book

The book you have in your hands was originally published in 2005, in the heat of events, as a collection of articles written by Alan Woods between the defeat of the reactionary coup of April 2002 and when Chávez came out in favour of socialism in 2005. We have now added just a few more articles covering the period until Chávez’s death in 2013. There are many more, but we did not want to make the volume too lengthy, and in any case, we feel that all the central political and theoretical questions related to the Venezuelan Revolution are adequately dealt with in this selection.

The articles in this book were not written from the point of view of an outside observer. During that period of time, Alan Woods often travelled to Venezuela, where he was invited to speak at large meetings of workers, peasants and Bolivarian activists from the poor neighborhoods in Caracas and beyond. These articles were widely read and discussed at all levels of the Bolivarian movement. Alan also struck a personal relationship with President Hugo Chávez, whom he met on several occasions. Alan’s books were published in Venezuela – Reason in Revolt, Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution, and his reply to Heinz Dieterich: Reformism or Revolution – and were praised by Chávez in his public speeches.

At all times and to audiences of different types (solidarity meetings, mass rallies, discussions with President Chávez, interviews with the hostile capitalist media), Alan Woods defended a revolutionary Marxist programme for the Venezuelan Revolution, as can be seen in the articles in this volume. This can be summarised in the need to expropriate capitalism, abolish the capitalist state and the call for international revolution.

At the same time, the International Marxist Tendency (which has now become the Revolutionary Communist International) threw itself energetically into building a broad-based international solidarity movement in defence of the Bolivarian Revolution, through the Hands Off Venezuela campaign. Tens of thousands were mobilised in dozens of countries in mass meetings, street rallies, the defence of Venezuelan embassies from reactionary mobs, the passing of resolutions at trade union meetings, etc.

The articles in this book were therefore not written from an academic point of view, nor do they pretend to falsely present a ‘neutral’ point of view. They were written from a partisan standpoint of defence of the revolution, and with the aim of contributing to the debates taking place in Venezuela and abroad about the strategy of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Re-reading them twenty years later, I have to say, it is striking how accurate they were. This is not a post-mortem examination of the subject matter. These articles were written in the heat of the events they analyse, and in more than one instance they have a premonitory character. The first article was written by Alan Woods and Ted Grant on 14 April 2002, less than twenty-four hours after the Venezuelan masses had defeated the reactionary coup and reinstalled Chávez as president. It contains a clear warning:

The bourgeoisie, with the active support and encouragement of the CIA, will intensify its campaign of sabotage and disruption. […] Only decisive action can prevent a new crisis in which the counter-revolution will assume an even more violent and murderous character. […] Do not trust those who tell you that all is resolved, that the situation must calm down.

And this warning is accompanied by a call to action with an explanation of the programme needed to secure victory:

The only way to defeat US imperialism is by uniting the revolution in Venezuela with the struggles that are taking place in all Latin America… It is necessary to draw serious conclusions from the events of the last three days. It is not possible to make half a revolution. It is not possible to improve the conditions of the masses and leave the rotten and reactionary bourgeoisie in control of the means of production. The land, the banks and industries must be taken out of their hands. The economic power must be in the hands of the people. That is the first condition for victory. Without that, no progress is possible.^[1]

Instead, following the coup, Chávez attempted to appease the Venezuelan oligarchy through negotiations. As night follows day, this led directly to another counter-revolutionary attempt. This was to be a constant feature for the next ten years. At the end of his life, the nineteenth-century South American revolutionary libertador Simón Bolívar commented bitterly:

Each betrayal was followed by forgiveness, and each forgiveness was followed by a new betrayal that was forgiven again.^[2]

His words could be aptly applied to the Venezuelan Revolution.

The origins of the Bolivarian Revolution

Some put the starting point of the Venezuelan Revolution at the time of Chávez’s election victory in 1998, when he won against a united front of the two established parties, which had ruled the country for decades: the social-democratic Acción Democrática (AD) and the Social Christian Party (COPEI).

But one can only really understand the appeal of Chávez’s candidacy in 1998 by going back to the Caracazo uprising of 1989. At that time, Carlos Andrés Pérez, from AD, had only just been re-elected. Many voted for him with the illusion of bringing back the ‘good old days’ of his presidency in the 1970s, when he had nationalised oil and established the state-owned oil company PDVSA.

However, just days from being sworn in, Pérez implemented an IMF-sponsored shock programme of monetarist ‘adjustment’, including wide-ranging budget cuts such as the lifting of subsidies on fuel. This led to a massive overnight increase in the price of public transport.

Early in the morning of 27 February 1989, as commuters from the working class barrios in Guarenas, a commuter town outside the capital Caracas, made their way to work, they were shocked to find bus fares had gone up by 30 per cent. They refused to board the buses in protest and set some of them on fire. That was the spark which led to a nationwide uprising against the government’s austerity measures, with widespread mass protests and looting.

This spontaneous movement, which became known as the Caracazo, was drowned in blood by the authorities. They suspended the constitution, imposed a curfew and a news blackout, and brought out the army to mow down unarmed protesters. The exact figure of those killed is not known, but relatives of the victims put the total toll around 3,000. By 8 March, the protest movement had been put down by brutal repression.

That was the real face of bourgeois democracy in Venezuela prior to the Bolivarian Revolution, not the idyllic picture painted today by the capitalist media and ruling class commentators.

The Caracazo represented a turning point in consciousness, the final nail in the coffin for the already discredited system of puntofijismo, after the Pacto de Puntofijo, the 1958 political agreement through which AD and COPEI alternated in power and shared all official positions of government.

The military clampdown of the Caracazo uprising also had another impact, that of thrusting a group of junior military officers into open opposition. The criminal actions of the army in those days seemed to them to be in contradiction to the official ideology of the institution, which was one of protecting the people from a foreign threat, not of shooting them down. They started to organise an underground nationalist movement under the banner of Bolivarianism, after Simón Bolivar, the nineteenth-century independence hero who led the struggle to liberate half of South America from Spanish colonial rule. Amongst those military officers was one Hugo Chávez.

On 4 February 1992, Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel, led a failed civilian-military uprising against the rotten political establishment. Once it was clear that the attempt was going nowhere – the civilian uprising had not materialised and the military forces did not have enough support – the regime gave him a chance to appear on national TV to call on his supporters to lay down their weapons. He used the opportunity to say that their aims had “not been achieved”, but added: “for now”. That propelled him onto the national political scene, connecting with the deep-seated discontent with puntofijismo.

Chávez spent two years in jail before being pardoned by the incoming president Rafael Caldera, who had won the election in 1993 promising, amongst other things, to pardon all the military officers involved in the two failed 1992 uprisings. As he was being released, Hugo Chávez gave a press conference where he warned that “Venezuela was ripe for a revolution if the people’s demands for profound political and economic changes” were not addressed.

After many discussions over strategy, Chávez decided to stand in the 1998 Presidential Election as the candidate of the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), after the name of his political organisation, Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement 200 (MBR-200) was rejected by election authorities as it contained the name ‘Bolívar’. He stood on a programme of fighting corruption and poverty through the convening of a constituent assembly to re-found the Venezuelan Republic.

The 1998 presidential election pitted Chávez, who toured the country speaking at hundreds of meetings of workers, peasants, and the poor in the barrios, against Salas Römer, who had the support of the two Puntofijo parties and most of the establishment. During the campaign, Chávez forged ties with the masses and encouraged their self-organisation. At that time, two-thirds of the population lived under the poverty line and about 28 per cent lived in conditions of extreme poverty.

Chávez in power and the wrath of the oligarchy

At this time, Chávez stood for radical change but did not call himself a socialist, nor an anti-imperialist. In fact, immediately after coming into office in 1998, he praised Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’. Some in the ruling class thought they could use Chávez and his popular appeal to give the extremely discredited Venezuelan bourgeois democracy a new face. The British ambassador to Venezuela told a meeting of local businessmen that Chávez’s “popularity and his legitimacy […] [are] indispensable conditions for the hard measures which the next president must adopt.”

Chávez won a decisive victory (56 per cent of the votes against Salas Römer’s 40 per cent), because for millions of working people he represented the promise of radical change. His was not just a run-of-the-mill presidential election but an important milestone in the process of the “entrance of the masses into direct rulership of their destiny”, as Trotsky describes a revolution in his History of the Russian Revolution.

To his credit, Chávez stuck to his guns. He called a referendum to convene a constituent assembly in which his Polo Patriotico (a coalition made up of the MVR and a few other left parties: MAS, PPT, MEP, PCV, etc.) won 65 per cent of the vote. The new constitution was a step forward from the point of view of democratic rights – for instance, it included the right of recall of elected officials, all the way up to the president – but it was still a capitalist constitution enshrining private property rights.

The most important thing is that the masses had participated in tens of thousands of meetings up and down the country to discuss the draft constitution and considered it a weapon in their struggle against the old regime. Over 70 per cent voted to ratify it in a referendum. The constitution was printed in millions of pocket-size copies, a small blue book which people carried around with them at all times and brandished whenever they were in a confrontation with a member of the state bureaucracy.

By this time, hundreds of thousands amongst the poorest sections of society had become organised in all sorts of ways to solve their most pressing problems: Bolivarian Circles in the working class neighbourhoods, Land Reform Committees, Urban Land Tenancy Committees, Water Committees, community radio and TV stations mushroomed. The masses wanted to take direct action to address their demands and were not waiting for old style politicians to do it for them. Chávez, with his direct and plain style, using the language of ordinary working people and constantly breaking with protocol, encouraged them and gave them a voice.

His weekly, hours-long TV talk show, Aló Presidente, was an exercise in mass political education. On several occasions, Chávez appeared with a map of Venezuela behind him and explained the wealth of natural resources the country possessed: oil, gold, iron, biodiversity etc. Then he pointed out that the only reason why the majority were poor in such a rich country was because its wealth had been monopolised by a small unelected and unaccountable minority. This had profound revolutionary implications.

The capitalist media and politicians in Venezuela and around the world spent fifteen years denouncing Chávez’s ‘authoritarianism’. But the truth is that he enjoyed mass support, and this was ratified every step of the way in bourgeois-democratic elections. There were no less than nineteen elections (presidential, national assembly, regional, state and municipal) and referenda between his 1998 presidential election victory and his death in 2013. Chávez and his Bolivarian Movement won them all bar one, the 2007 constitutional reform referendum which was lost by the narrowest of margins.

In fact, one of the highest points of electoral support for Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution came in the 2006 presidential election, when he went to the masses and said “this election is not about Chávez, we are choosing socialism”. The response was a resounding endorsement of the need for socialism, with over 62 per cent voting for Chávez on a 75 per cent turnout.

One of the reasons for the hatred of the oligarchy against Chávez was precisely that he had awoken the masses to political participation. These millions were previously excluded from the political process. They rightly considered it to be rigged in favour of the rich and powerful, the “masters of the valley” (Los Amos del Valle) as in the title of Herrera Luque’s historical novel, a closely-knit group of well-to-do families with grand-sounding surnames which had ruled the country for 200 years and thought this was their God-given right.

They hated Chávez because he broke protocol, spoke the direct language of the people and connected with their thoughts and aspirations. He destroyed the idea that politics was reserved for professional politicians and those from the educated classes. They could not forgive him for having given the working class and the poor the idea that they had the right to participate in politics and to make decisions.

The capitalist class organises the April 2002 coup

By the end of 2001, Chávez used powers granted by the National Assembly to pass a wide ranging package of reforms. These became known as the 49 Enabling Laws, referring to the enabling law that gave Chávez executive power to decree them. They dealt with a whole number of different questions (fishing, insurance, small enterprises, banking, etc.) but the two most important ones were those addressing the questions of agrarian reform and the oil industry.

The agrarian reform law was a progressive step forward, as it allowed for the expropriation of idle latifundia and their distribution to landless peasants. The landed oligarchy, with its close ties to the bankers, capitalists and businessmen, represented less than 2 per cent of the population, but owned 75 per cent of arable land. At the other end of the spectrum, 75 per cent of landowners barely held 5 to 6 per cent of the land.

The hydrocarbons law reaffirmed the role of the state in the industry, particularly in managing PDVSA (the state-owned oil company), and took measures to reverse the so-called ‘oil opening’ (apertura petrolera) which had allowed private companies to exploit oil resources directly or in joint ventures with PDVSA.

None of the forty-nine laws can be considered as anti-capitalist per se, and they were all framed within full respect for the rule of (bourgeois) law and private property. Still, the ruling class and old-regime politicians considered them an open declaration of class war.

This reveals the crucial contradiction at the heart of a dominated country like Venezuela. The local oligarchy (the alliance of bankers, capitalists and landowners), whose interests are closely aligned with and subordinated to those of imperialism, is completely unable to accept – much less carry out – even the most moderate reforms in the direction of national sovereignty and the development of the country.

So much so that they responded to these moderate nationalist laws by starting the preparations to remove Chávez through a military coup, with the full participation of American (and to a lesser extent, Spanish) imperialism, which was to take place in April 2002.

And that is where this book starts, with the rebellion of the ruling class against the democratically elected government of Hugo Chávez.

Up until this point, the story was not new. There have been plenty of progressive governments in Latin America which have been elected by the masses in democratic elections and have attempted to carry out democratic and progressive reforms in favour of the workers and peasants, which have then faced US-backed sabotage, coups, interventions and assassinations to destroy them.

The coup in Venezuela was at first carried out to a successful conclusion. A new government, headed by Pedro Carmona, the leader of the business federation, was installed. The world’s capitalist media cheered on. They thought they had won, again.

Four hundred representatives of the ruling class – bankers, newspaper editors and TV station owners, landowners, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the leaders of the American Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce, of professional bodies and associations – met in the Miraflores Palace for the swearing in of Pedro Carmona and cheered as they decreed the abolition of the 1999 Constitution and Chávez’s Enabling Laws, and disbanded all democratic powers.

What was different in Venezuela was that within the space of forty-eight hours, between 11 and 13 April, the masses came out onto the streets, mobilised in large numbers, surrounded the presidential palace and key military barracks, and through their direct action, managed to sway important sections of the armed forces and the presidential guard, and restore the president they had elected to power.

These extraordinary scenes of counter-revolution and revolution were captured by an Irish documentary team who happened to be on the scene filming a documentary about Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution. The Revolution Will Not be Televised is a must-watch if you want to understand the epoch-making events of the 2002 coup and the masses’ response.

In his speech In Defence of October, Leon Trotsky says that “the active intervention of the masses in historical events is in fact the most indispensable element of a revolution”. This is exactly what happened in Venezuela on 13 April 2002.

The mobilisation of the masses took place despite a blanket media blackout about what was really going on. Both private and state-owned TV channels were broadcasting cartoons as hundreds of thousands were coming out on the streets. The masses relied on word-of-mouth and local community radio stations to spread the news that the president had been kidnapped and to call for mass mobilisation.

It is worth noting that, at that time, none of the material gains of the revolution had yet been achieved. They came later. What moved the masses to defy the coup was not just the fact that in Venezuela there was a progressive president attempting to carry out progressive reforms. There was in fact a revolutionary process that was unfolding, characterised chiefly by the irruption of the masses onto the political scene. It was because of this process that the masses instinctively mobilised against the coup.

Chávez’s first response after the April coup was one of conciliation. He had not expected the coup; he had been shocked by it. He called for dialogue with the counter-revolutionary, pro-imperialist opposition. A number of negotiating tables were set up. None of the coup plotters (golpistas) were brought to justice as the Supreme Court, stuffed with old regime judges, ruled that there had not actually been a coup, but rather a ‘vacuum of power’ which Pedro Carmona had just happened to fill.

But as long as Chávez did not abandon his whole programme of reforms, the ruling class was not prepared to conciliate. They immediately started to plot a new counter-revolutionary attempt. This was to take the form of a mutiny of reactionary military officers, who set up camp in Altamira Square in the wealthy eastern district of Caracas, followed by a bosses’ lockout and sabotage of the state-owned oil company PDVSA, which was to last for two months.

The aim was to deliver a mortal blow against the government by cutting off its main source of revenue. From a pre-lock out production of 3.2 million barrels a day, production was slashed to fewer than 50,000 barrels a day, causing multi-billion dollar damages to PDVSA and the Venezuelan economy as a whole.

The radicalisation of Chávez and the revolution

This was yet another turning point in the Bolivarian Revolution. The whip of the counter-revolution propelled the revolution forward. With a fine class instinct, the masses surged into action again. Oil workers took over PDVSA installations and restarted production under workers’ control. The working class and poor neighbourhoods came out to protect the oil installations against sabotage, in collaboration with loyal elements of the National Guard and the army.

The bureaucratic leadership of the old trade union federation CTV joined in with the bosses’ lockout, with the leader, Carlos Ortega, appearing in daily press conferences with Carlos Fernandez, the leader of Fedecámaras, the bosses’ confederation.

On the other side of the barricades, rank-and-file class struggle trade unionists organised to fight back. In the industrial stronghold of Valencia, workers threatened private car manufacturers that they would occupy the factories if they stopped production. Thousands of workers at the giant SIDOR steel mills took direct action to ensure gas supply to their installations, without which the massive furnaces would have been damaged.

The experience of workers’ control at PDVSA, a highly complex company run on computerised and technologically advanced processes, was a high point in working class power and the most advanced instance of workers’ control anywhere in the world in the twenty-first century. Oil workers in Venezuela demonstrated in practice that the workers did not need bosses nor bourgeois managers to run the country’s most advanced industry.

The defeat of the 2002-03 bosses’ lockout opened the way for the further radicalisation of the Bolivarian Revolution, the stages of which are dealt with in the book.

It is worth mentioning some of the most important milestones:

• In 2004, Chávez declared the “anti-imperialist” character of the revolution.
• In January 2005, Chávez decreed the nationalisation of two private factories which had been occupied by the workers: Venepal (a paper mill in Aragua) and CNV (a factory making and repairing valves for the oil industry in Los Teques, Miranda). He insisted that this was not just a normal nationalisation, but that the factories had to be run by the workers themselves.
• In January 2005, for the first time, Chávez declared that the aims of the revolution could only be achieved by overcoming capitalism and moving towards socialism. On this basis he won a landslide victory in the 2006 presidential election.
• In February 2005, Chávez gave the green light to the introduction of workers’ management at the state-owned ALCASA aluminium smelter.
• In 2007, the Socialist United Party of Venezuela (PSUV) was set up, with over 5 million joining its ranks.
• In 2008, Chávez re-nationalised SIDOR, the giant steel-maker in Bolivar state. Again, he insisted that workers’ management should be introduced.
• In 2009, he called for the setting up of a Fifth International, though the initiative was stillborn because of sabotage by Stalinists and the bureaucracy.

The radicalisation of Chávez and the masses went hand in hand and fed on each other. As Chávez drew more radical conclusions, from his own experience, because of the attacks of imperialism and the ruling class, and as a result of his own reading, the masses became more enthusiastic, more daring in their actions. As the workers and peasants took direct action, Chávez drew inspiration from them, and on many occasions, legalised what had already been done in practice.

Meanwhile, the government, using the revenues from the oil industry, launched a series of ‘Social Missions’, dealing with health care, education, literacy, pensions and housing, which transformed the lives of millions of working-class people. Cuban doctors were sent to the poor neighbourhoods to provide basic primary health care; hundreds of thousands were enrolled into education from primary to university, free of charge; over a million were taught how to read and write, effectively eradicating illiteracy.

A revolution which was never completed

The articles contained in the book raise a whole number of important theoretical questions, including the relevance of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution to the Bolivarian Revolution, the role of the individual in history, the approach that Marxists should take to a movement like the Bolivarian movement and its leader Hugo Chávez.

But perhaps the crucial question which runs like a red thread throughout the book is this: the revolution was never completed. For all the speeches and declarations about socialism, the economy remained a capitalist economy. Despite the far reaching democratic reforms, the setting up of communal councils and Chávez’s calls for the destruction of the bourgeois state, the state apparatus remained that of a capitalist state and was never destroyed and replaced by a workers’ state.

Faced with the sabotage of the economy by the ruling class, which expressed itself in the form of a flight of capital, an investment strike, hoarding, profiteering and more, the revolution responded not with the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy and democratic planning, but rather with an attempt to regulate capitalism through state controls. Thus there were foreign exchange controls, price controls and many others.

This created a situation which Alan Woods described as “the worst of all possible worlds”. The capitalist market economy was not allowed to function ‘normally’, but it was not replaced by a system of common ownership and democratic planning either.

Foreign exchange controls became a mechanism through which capitalists, private speculators and other such thieves acquired dollars at preferential rates (meant to be used for the import of parts and supplies for key industries) and then sold them on the black market, pocketing the difference. To maintain a cover, some resorted to importing containers full of cheap scrap metal, while the bulk of the preferential dollars were being diverted. Former Minister of Finance Jorge Giordani estimated that the amount of money stolen through this mechanism was a total of $300 billion.

Of course, side by side with this, a whole ‘industry’ flourished in which customs officials, those in charge of allocating dollars for importation and anyone involved in running the foreign exchange controls offered their services (for a fee) to those bleeding the country’s hard currency reserves dry.

Price controls, instead of protecting the living standards of working class families, led to capitalist producers and distributors of food and other basic commodities withdrawing them from the market and selling them at a much higher price in the black market. Capitalist producers found all sorts of ways to circumvent price regulation. If the price of rice was regulated, they would instead produce flavoured or coloured varieties which were not covered by the regulated price.

As soon as a product was included in the price regulation list, it would disappear from the supermarkets and shops, only to resurface in the black market. The state was forced to import massive amounts of food and sell it at subsidised prices, a process which in turn was the source of massive corruption.

Meanwhile, the conglomerate Empresas Polar retained a virtual monopoly on food manufacturing and distribution. Despite clear evidence that they were involved in price manipulation, speculation, profiteering and sabotage, they were never nationalised. The owners, the Mendoza family, were involved in almost every single counter-revolutionary attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government.

The old dictum was confirmed in practice: you cannot plan what you do not control, and you do not control what you do not own.

Expropriating capitalism in Venezuela would have been fully justified, even from a purely democratic point of view. If you were to take the attendance list of those who participated in the swearing in of coup-president Pedro Carmona in 2002 and seized their properties, capitalism would have been abolished in one fell swoop.

Chávez did carry out nationalisations, some of them significant, including in banking, telecoms, cement, steel, and electricity. But these were piecemeal moves, and key sectors of the economy still remained in private hands, to a degree which made it impossible for democratic planning of the economy to take place.

In relation to the question of the state, the situation was similar. Over a period of time, a substantial purge of the old state apparatus was carried out. Openly reactionary army officers removed themselves from the army during the Altamira Square encampment in December 2002. Others took early retirement. Revolutionary activists were brought into the different ministries and even the Caracas Metropolitan Police, the National Guard, etc.

You could say that the ruling class had partially lost direct control over their own state apparatus. However, the structure of that state apparatus remained basically the same. It was a capitalist state apparatus, dominated by an unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy. The Venezuelan workers and peasants did not control the state apparatus, not even at the peak of the revolutionary process.

The army, while partially purged and certainly infected by the contagion of revolution, remained a hierarchical, top down structure. Despite some steps taken towards the creation of a militia and talk of arming the people, the capitalist army remained intact.

The bureaucracy was composed of elements from the old state bureaucracy which simply changed their colours and now dressed in red shirts, as well as a layer of upstarts and careerists coming through the ranks of the movement itself.

And this bureaucracy acted with might and main to sabotage the most radical aspects of the Bolivarian Revolution. Many times that meant a direct sabotage of instructions given by President Chávez. The left-wing army officer and revolutionary politician Müller Rojas once warned that the president was “sitting in a nest of scorpions”, and he was not wrong.

At times it felt as if you had Chávez at the top, the revolutionary masses at the bottom, and then, in between, a mass of conniving bureaucrats who acted as an enormous brake on the revolution.

By the end of his life, Chávez seemed to have become aware of this. He made a series of speeches in which he expressed his frustration. One of those was an address to the council of ministers in 2012, which was broadcast live on television and became known as “Golpe de timón” (Turn the rudder).

In these speeches he complained that many things were being called ‘socialist’ in Venezuela (a socialist factory, a socialist roundabout), but that did not reflect the real position, it was just putting labels on things. “We cannot continue to build factories that are, in effect, islands in a sea of capitalism, because they will end up drowning”.

Regarding the state, he insisted that the old capitalist state had to be “pulverised”, turned into dust, and replaced by what he called a “communal state”. But again, he complained, “we talk about the communes, but where are they?”.

With the death of Chávez, all of the contradictions increased and the reformist, counter-revolutionary bureaucracy managed to get free reign.

The Keynesian illusion of ‘oil socialism’ and the collapse of the economy

For a period of time, high oil prices (which reached $100 and even $120 a barrel) masked the crucial question of the need to expropriate the ruling class. It seemed possible to carry out a programme of massive social reforms without fully expropriating the ruling class, though even this was done at a very high cost in terms of mismanagement, corruption, sabotage, etc. There was an illusion that ‘oil socialism’ was possible. In effect, that was a version of reformism, changing the system bit by bit without touching the private property of the means of production.

Chávez was surrounded by all sorts of ‘advisors’ who pushed all kinds of confused ideas, under the guise of ‘socialism of the twenty-first century’. All of them were reformists of one guise or another and strongly opposed any idea of abolishing capitalism.

Once the price of oil collapsed, the illusion was shattered and reality imposed itself. The impact of the 2008 capitalist crisis was attenuated in Latin America, because the Chinese economy continued to grow, and therefore continued to suck in massive amounts of raw materials and sources of energy from the continent. But by 2014, China slowed down, the price of oil suddenly dropped to a low of $27 per barrel, with a massive impact on the Venezuelan economy.

President Nicolás Maduro was now in charge. After the death of Chávez, there were new presidential elections in April 2013, which Maduro won by the narrowest of margins (1.5 percentage points). At that time he was seen as the successor of Chávez, who had anointed him as such just before his death.

The first reaction of Maduro when faced with the fall of oil prices was to continue with the previous policy of massive social spending. Since state revenue had massively contracted, this led to a huge fiscal deficit. The state continued to fund expenditure and foreign debt repayments through the printing of money, leading to an unprecedented expansion of the money supply at a time when the economy suffered a sharp contraction.

Inevitably, this expressed itself in massive inflation, and then hyperinflation. For several years the Venezuelan Central Bank (BCV) ceased to publish official economic figures, but once it resumed publication it had to admit a period of four years of hyperinflation between 2017 and 2022. At its peak, according to official figures, inflation reached 130,000 per cent on an annual basis in 2018. The official accumulated inflation between 2016 and April 2019 was estimated by the BCV at 53,798,500 per cent.

The economy contracted by 50 per cent between 2013 and 2018 according to official figures. The BCV has never published a full GDP growth series for the whole period, but according to the IMF estimates, the economy collapsed by over 80 per cent between 2013 and 2021.

The collapse of the Venezuelan economy in this period should be a salutary lesson to the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory and other variants of Keynesian economics. Deficit financing – the printing of money without any real backing in economic growth – inevitably leads to inflation. Following such a policy on a massive scale leads to hyperinflation and frightful economic collapse.

The Venezuelan working class paid a very heavy price for these Keynesian experiments. As the currency collapsed, many basic products and foodstuffs which were imported were no longer available. Millions were forced to emigrate: up to 8 million over a ten-year period, out of a total population of 30 million. Under Chávez, most of those leaving the country were upper and middle-class reactionaries demoralised by the progress of the revolution, moving to Miami, Alberta or Madrid. Now those forced to leave were mainly working-class economic migrants, who ended up being exploited for a pittance in other Latin American countries.

Those who remained in Venezuela suffered from hunger and malnutrition, the combined impact of scarcity and the collapse of the purchasing power of wages and pensions. The worst years of the crisis became known as the ‘mango years’, as many people survived on the fruit from mango trees in the streets, public parks and squares.

The economic crisis was aggravated by the imposition of US sanctions. Although these had already started in 2005, it was with the first Trump administration that US unilateral sanctions started to have a serious impact on the Venezuelan economy. In 2017 Washington banned Venezuela from access to US financial markets, in 2018 it banned the purchase of Venezuelan debt, and in January 2019 it imposed full sanctions on PDVSA. This strict sanctions regime limited the ability of the Venezuelan government to finance its debt and export oil, a double hit on state revenue. Additionally, Venezuelan funds abroad were frozen or seized, not only in the US, but also in Britain, where the Bank of England seized 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold reserves which were deposited in London.

It is important to note that this was a bipartisan policy, not just the whim of President Trump. In fact, the legal basis for Trump’s sanctions was set by Obama’s Executive Order 1369 of March 2015, which declared that the situation in Venezuela constituted “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”.

A bureaucratic thermidorian counter-revolution

Increasingly, the revolutionary masses were pushed to one side and the leadership increasingly resorted to using the state apparatus, the judicial system and police repression to stay in power. In spite of this, the brazen, provocative character of the reactionary opposition still provoked a reaction of the masses at crucial moments.

Already in 2015, this and the economic crisis started to have a political impact. In December that year, the forces of the Bolivarian Revolution lost the National Assembly elections, with the reactionary opposition receiving 53 per cent of the vote, and the PSUV coalition 40 per cent.

This was a serious warning. With the exception of the 2007 constitutional reform referendum, which chavismo lost by the narrowest of margins (less than 1 percentage point), the Bolivarian Revolution had never lost an election.

The results were a shock for the chavista rank and file. Furthermore, the reactionary opposition behaved in an extremely provocative manner. When they took over the National Assembly in January 2016, they immediately proceeded to remove the portrait of Simón Bolívar from the chamber, revealing their true nature as lackeys of imperialism. In some places the neighbourhood-based health clinics, staffed by Cuban doctors, were attacked.

In response, there were spontaneous demonstrations and rallies in defence of the revolution. These were extremely critical of the bureaucracy at the top of the PSUV and the government, which many revolutionary activists saw as responsible for the defeat. While the masses demanded a radicalisation of the revolution, the bureaucracy took the opposite route.

Emboldened by their victory, the opposition launched a campaign for a presidential recall referendum, a democratic right granted by the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution. In typical fashion they did not follow proper procedure, falsified signatures, and finally the process was cancelled. Furthermore, the opposition National Assembly defied a ruling by the Supreme Court nullifying the mandate of four legislators (three from the opposition) from Amazonas state over allegations of vote-buying. This defiance led the Supreme Court to declare the entire legislature in “contempt”. There was now a conflict of legitimacy, with the National Assembly pretending it still had a legal mandate.

In 2017, the counter-revolutionary opposition responded yet again with a campaign of street rioting (guarimbas), as part of a violent attempt to overthrow the government. Symbols of the social gains of the revolution were attacked and set on fire, including health clinics, schools and community radio stations. In one of the protests, Orlando Figuera, a 22-year old youth, was set upon by a reactionary mob who thought he was a chavista or a malandro (petty criminal), which in the eyes of the upper and middle-class reactionary opposition amounts to the same thing. He was stabbed several times and then set on fire. He died from his wounds a few days later. This incident tells you everything you need to know about the character of the ‘democratic’ Venezuelan opposition and the 2017 guarimba protests.

Eventually, the revolutionary masses responded with mass demonstrations and by taking direct action to clear the opposition’s barricades and road blocks, which prevented them from going about their daily lives. There was a massive turnout for the 2017 Constituent Assembly elections, as the masses of workers and peasants saw them as an opportunity to take back control and change course towards a radicalisation of the revolution. They were sorely disappointed as the bureaucracy kept a firm lid on the Assembly, which became an empty and ineffectual talking shop.

We saw the same phenomena in 2019, in the next attempt of US imperialism and Venezuelan reaction to crush the revolution. At that time, opposition leader Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself the legitimate president of Venezuela at a street rally, and was immediately recognised as such by Washington and the European capitals. A new round of violent reactionary demonstrations followed and again the revolutionary masses came out on the streets to defeat them.

One cannot fault the healthy revolutionary anti-imperialist class instinct of the masses. The leadership, meanwhile, was carrying out a silent counter-revolution. All things have their limits, and in the end, the revolutionary spirit of the masses was crushed by the bureaucracy, leading to cynicism, despondency and disillusionment.

The 2018 turning point

Of course, as we have explained, a reformist bureaucracy already existed under Chávez, and was playing a counter-revolutionary role. But at that time, the balance of forces was more favourable to the revolutionary masses, and time and time again Chávez would intervene to propel the whole situation forward.

Already in 2012, when Chávez was undergoing treatment for cancer in Cuba, the bureaucracy moved to destroy the elements of workers’ control and management which existed in many of the state-owned and nationalised companies.

This was particularly the case in the CVG, an industrial conglomerate in the southern Bolívar state, which included most of the heavy industries (Alcasa, Sidor, Ferrominera, etc.). In a meeting with worker representatives in 2010, Chávez had declared the Guayana Socialista Plan, which involved elements of workers’ management, including the right of workers to elect the company presidents from among their ranks.

The whole process had serious shortcomings, but nevertheless it represented a step in the right direction. It was seen by the workers as a way of taking control over the heavy industry in Guayana, which had been plagued by corruption, mismanagement and bureaucracy.

In the space of a few months, the joint action of the state bureaucracy, the police, the regional government and elements from the old management, removed all of the worker presidents and crushed the whole experience. The process was led directly by Nicolás Maduro, who by that time had become the vice president, and was carried out by the bureaucratic trade union faction that he had led, the FBT.

In other nationalised companies that had been under one form or another of workers’ control and management, the worker presidents were removed and replaced by military officers, which in most cases proceeded to loot the companies’ assets and fill their own pockets. Some of these companies became bankrupt and were eventually privatised.

Scores of companies nationalised by Chávez were handed back to private owners, including Fama de América, Abastos Bicentenario, Agropatria, the sugar cane mills, Teleférico Waraira Repano, Lácteos Los Andes, Arroz del Alba, Complejo Porcino Barinas and Agroinlaca, among others.

There was resistance, but this was mostly isolated and ultimately ineffectual. This process took place at all levels of revolutionary organisation. Within the PSUV itself, in the state media, in rank-and-file organisations… all of the avenues that the revolutionary masses had used to participate directly and attempt to take the reigns were systematically blocked.

This process had several turning points, but perhaps the key juncture was in 2018. The living conditions of the masses had become so bad, and the policies of the ‘Bolivarian’ bureaucracy – which many described as a new ‘boli-bourgeoisie’ – so counter-revolutionary, that a mood of opposition was spreading amongst the chavista rank and file, and there were attempts to organise an opposition to the left of the government and the leadership.

In December 2017, a number of revolutionary candidates stood as a left opposition to the official PSUV candidates. The bureaucracy used the full power of the state apparatus (the state media, the electoral bodies, the judicial system) to prevent them from gaining an echo, and when that failed, they simply refused to recognise their victory.

The former minister of commerce, Eduardo Samán, known for his fierce opposition to the capitalists and the multinationals, stood as a candidate in Caracas for the Libertador council, which covers most of the city’s centre and working-class and poor districts in the west. The state manoeuvred so that his name was not printed in the ballot papers and there were instructions not to platform him in any of the state media.

Even more scandalous were the cases of the left-wing revolutionary candidates standing in the Libertador municipality in Monagas (Régulo Reyna) and in the Simón Planas municipality in Lara (Ángel Prado).

Régulo Reyna, backed by the Communist Party, won a massive 62 per cent of the vote, against 30 per cent for the PSUV candidate, but he was disqualified by the National Electoral Council (CNE) on the grounds that he was a member of the Constituent Assembly and therefore could not stand in a mayoral election. The CNE curiously only found out about this conflict after he had won the election defeating the official PSUV candidate.

In Simón Planas, the revolutionary left candidate Angel Prado won 57 per cent of the vote against the PSUV’s 34 per cent, even though his name did not appear on the ballot papers! Their victories were never recognised.

The situation in the countryside was reaching boiling point. An unholy alliance was formed involving corrupt local land reform officials, the national guard, local judges, former landowners whose land had been expropriated and new aspiring landowners from among the ‘boli-bourgeoisie’. They moved to take away land from the peasant communes, to prevent any further occupations of fallow land. In the process, they did not shy from using all means at their disposal to crush the revolutionary peasant movement, including the selective killing of its leaders.

Hundreds of peasants organised and set off on foot on a 400 km long march to the capital – the Admirable Peasant March – to demand land and an end to sicariato, the killing of peasant activists by hired guns. Three weeks later, when they finally reached the capital, their way was blocked by riot police. Finally the pressure was so great that Maduro himself agreed to meet them. A lot of promises were made, the peasants returned home, and the promises were never fulfilled.

Up until this point, the government had continued roughly with the same economic policy. Controls and regulations still existed, though they were much weakened. The massive fiscal deficit was being financed by the printing of money, which in turn was fuelling hyperinflation. Between the death of Chávez in 2013 and December 2017, money supply went up by a whopping 12,000 per cent. At one point, the government did not have the necessary money to buy the high grade paper needed to print banknotes. The scarcity of banknotes combined with extraordinarily high inflation meant that if you had the actual cash to buy products you would benefit from a substantial price discount.

The country’s reserves were depleted. In the meantime the government continued to pay its debt to foreign and domestic capitalist investors.

The situation was unsustainable. Economic protests were spreading and threatened to turn into food riots. The spectre of the Caracazo loomed large. At this point the Maduro government decided to effect a sharp shift in economic policy. Keynesianism and monetary expansion was out and a brutal shock package of hard monetarist adjustment was introduced. Russian advisors were in the country several times that year and they were said to have played a role in designing the plan, which was given the Orwellian name of Prosperity, Growth and Economic Recovery Programme, announced in August 2018.

There was a sudden and sharp contraction of money supply. As always happens, a monetarist shock means that the working class and the poor are made to pay the price of the crisis. The capitalists had moved all their assets to dollars long ago.

The government issued two ‘instructions’: the Memorandum-Circular 2792 and the ONAPRE Instruction which had the effect of leveling down workers’ wages, abolishing all acquired rights and destroying collective bargaining rights. From now on, the basic wage used to calculate workers’ pay would be the minimum wage. Since most organised workers had won basic rates of pay of several times the minimum wage, this meant a massive pay cut. At the time of the counter-reform, the minimum wage was equivalent to $30 a month. As inflation continued, by 9 January 2020 the minimum wage, accounting for all increases which had taken place, amounted to only $7.82.

All additional acquired bonuses and benefits were deemed to be subject to ‘review’, instead of being protected by law. In practice, employers just repealed them. Under the guise of ‘economic emergency’, all workers’ rights were destroyed overnight. In the public sector, the government unilaterally imposed these detrimental measures without consultation with the unions and stopped collective bargaining negotiations altogether, thus de facto de-recognising trade union representation.

An increasingly repressive regime

By this time, the working class was facing widespread demoralisation, the impact of the severe economic crisis, a mass exodus from its ranks, etc. Still, there was some resistance. Trade union activists attempted to organise to defend their acquired rights. When they did, they were faced with brutal state repression. Dozens of trade union leaders were jailed, others were threatened with anti-terrorism legislation if they took strike action.

In several cases, masked military counter-intelligence or political police officers took trade union activists in the middle of the night to throw them in jail. They were denied due process, their democratic rights were violated and many spent several years in jail without a trial.

One of the most scandalous cases was that of Rodney Álvarez, a worker at the iron ore mining and processing plant Ferrominera del Orinoco, who was jailed under false pretences. He spent eleven years in jail waiting for a trial and when it finally took place, the trial collapsed and he had to be released without charges. There were many others.

After several years of this brutal shock therapy, the economy finally started to bounce back, but this was only after a GDP collapse of over 80 per cent. By this time, the working class had become atomised and scared into submission.

The bureaucracy at the top of the movement, having lost significant popular support, resorted ever more to repressive measures and the use of the state apparatus to remain in power. Meanwhile, corruption was rampant and top officials in the state and the party enriched themselves. On a regular basis, top officials in the state and the oil company would be denounced for corruption and jailed, others went abroad. Rather than a genuine struggle against corruption, this was a case of different groups of thieves fighting over the division of the loot.

Those who denounced this state of affairs were jailed, as was the case of Aryenis Torrealba and Alfredo Chirinos, two young revolutionary activists who worked at PDVSA as engineers. They denounced a corruption scheme within the company and as a result, they were sentenced to five years in jail, accused by the government of “betrayal and handing over secrets to the enemy”. After three years, having spent a year in jail and two under house arrest, they were released without charges as a result of a sustained campaign of support.

In 2020, several left-wing revolutionary parties decided to set up a Peoples’ Revolutionary Alternative (APR), with the aim of offering a left-wing electoral opposition to the ruling PSUV.

To prevent any opposition from emerging from the left and the rank and file, the state also embarked on a campaign of destroying and co-opting political parties which they deemed as a potential danger.

The state bureaucracy reacted swiftly and one by one they withdrew electoral registration from any parties which could have offered an avenue for left-wing opposition. This was the case with the Tupamaros, Lina Ron’s UPV and the PPT. The method used was to engineer a split within these organisations, buy off a section and then transfer electoral registration to them.

In the end, this attack on democratic rights reached the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV). This was a more difficult nut to crack, as the party had a loyal membership and it proved difficult to find a section of its leadership which could be bought off. This did not stop the Maduro bureaucracy.

In 2023, they set up a fake PCV Congress made up of non-members, many of whom worked for the state and some others who were members of rival pro-government parties. Then, they got the Supreme Court to appoint the ‘leadership’ elected at this ‘congress’ as the genuine and legal representatives of the party, granting them control of the PCV electoral registration.

In 2021, the PSUV lost the regional governor elections in Barinas, Chávez’s home state. This was a measure of how unpopular Maduro had become as a result of his policies against the working class and the poor. The state then decided to disbar the winning opposition candidate, after the results had been announced and forced a re-run of the election. The Communist Party candidate, who had been allowed to stand the first time, was now also disqualified with no reason given, to prevent any potential PSUV votes from going to the PCV. Still, the reactionary opposition won the re-run.

The state bureaucracy would stop at nothing to remain in power, as power was the source of enormous privileges and wealth.

By this time, there was very little or nothing left of the Bolivarian Revolution. Workers’ control and management, as it existed, had been destroyed. In some instances, peasant collectives had been expelled from land expropriated by Chávez, which was being returned to private landowners. Workers’ rights had been destroyed and worker activists thrown in jail. Left-wing parties had their electoral rights taken away. Many companies which had been nationalised under Chávez were now being privatised.

In 2020, the so-called Anti-Blockade law was used to reverse the Chávez-era laws which enshrined the primacy of state-owned PDVSA in the oil industry. The law, which was passed with the argument of the need to circumvent sanctions, nevertheless represented a serious step back and made substantial concessions to multinational corporations.

The mass revolutionary participation of the working class and poor masses which characterised the Bolivarian Revolution had ebbed away, through demoralisation, the crushing weight of the economic crisis and bureaucratic control and repression of their organisations.

Even the material gains of the revolution in education, health care and other fields, were slowly being eroded.

A process of Thermidorian counter-revolution had been completed. The same ruling party was in power. Maduro had been chosen by Chávez to succeed him at the head of the movement, which still had all the outward trappings of the Bolivarian Revolution. On occasion, it claimed to follow the legacy of Chávez and talked about Bolivarianism and even socialism. But the content was completely different. In fact, it was the opposite.

The fact that this counter-revolution had taken place under the banner of ‘socialism’, ‘bolivarianism’ and ‘chavismo’ had a profoundly negative effect of widely discrediting these ideas in the eyes of millions, who now came to identify them with a frightful collapse of the economy and a repressive regime.

At the end of the process what we had in Venezuela was a bourgeois Bonapartist regime, basing itself on the control of the state apparatus and only residually on the loyalty of a section of the working class and the poor towards the memory of Chávez and their anti-imperialist instinct. The Bolivarian Revolution was no more.

The International Marxist Tendency (as the Revolutionary Communist International was formerly known) had played a key role in organising worldwide international solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution by launching and promoting the Hands Off Venezuela campaign. Our support for the Bolivarian Revolution was always unconditional but also a critical one.

The transformation of the Bolivarian Revolution into its opposite did not change one iota our position of principled and unconditional opposition to imperialist aggression against Venezuela. Our slogan continued to be “Hands off Venezuela!”, as the question here is the imperialist meddling of the mightiest and most reactionary power on earth in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation in Latin America.

Regardless of our position towards the Maduro government, we maintain our rejection of imperialist aggression and bullying against Venezuela. It is for the people of Venezuela to decide their own future free from imperialist intervention.

The lessons of the Bolivarian Revolution

The Bolivarian Revolution was one of the most inspiring and radical revolutionary movements of the twenty-first century. The balance of forces was extremely favourable to the working people. And yet, the revolution was eventually defeated and rolled back. It is important to understand why and learn the lessons. This is precisely the aim of this book. It is not published merely to look back at historic events, now firmly in the past. The objective is to arm a new generation of class fighters with the necessary lessons of that extremely inspirational revolution.

In my opinion, there are two main lessons to be drawn from the Bolivarian Revolution, and they are closely linked with each other.

The first is that the revolution was never completed, as argued strenuously by the articles in this book, and that had disastrous consequences. The power and privileges of the ruling class were challenged, partial expropriation was carried out, but capitalism was never overthrown. The owners of banks, capital, industry and the land, were left largely untouched, and they used their economic power to sabotage the economy at every step.

Instead of completing the revolution with a wholesale expropriation of the ruling class and imperialism, a measure which would have had mass enthusiastic support by the majority of the people, the leadership of the revolution in practice applied a policy of controls and regulations. This impeded the normal functioning of the capitalist market economy, but did not replace it with a democratic plan under workers’ control. How could it do so, if key economic levers remained in private hands? This, together with the deliberate sabotage of the oligarchy and the attacks of imperialism, led to economic dislocation.

While the price of oil was high, this contradiction was masked. When it collapsed, it was revealed fully. The economic crisis which was unleashed under Maduro had its roots in the fact that the revolution had not been completed in the previous period.

The ruling class had temporarily lost control of the state apparatus, but in essence it remained the same, an instrument in defence of capitalist property relations. Under Maduro it was strengthened and used, brutally, against any threat to the power of the ‘Bolivarian’ bureaucracy from the workers and peasants.

Keynesian policies were no longer sustainable. Imperialist sanctions and bullying left no room for manoeuvre. The situation was at a dead end. Maduro and the bureaucracy chose the road of fiscal discipline, creating the conditions for private and multinational investment, making the workers’ pay the price through a monetarist shock, while lining their pockets with the proceeds of power.

Some may argue that they had no choice. That is false. They could have chosen to complete the revolution and expropriate the ruling class. That would have been faced with even greater wrath and aggression on the part of imperialism, but at the same time it would have aroused enormous enthusiasm amongst the masses of workers and peasants throughout Latin America and beyond.

The contradictions were rooted in the fact that under Chávez the revolution was never completed. It went very far. There was an unprecedented process of radicalisation and advance in political consciousness amongst wide layers of the revolutionary masses. But it never went all the way – capitalism was never abolished. That, in the final analysis, sealed the fate of the revolution.

This leads us on to the second lesson. Why was this the case? What was missing?

The revolutionary masses cannot be blamed. At every single juncture they showed a fine class instinct. Through their direct action they defeated the counter-revolutionary plots of the capitalist oligarchy and imperialism. Not once, not twice, but time and time again. They used their ingenuity to move forward, attempting to take power into their own hands, and on many levels they did. Factory occupations, workers’ control and management, peasant communes, neighbourhood organisation, the communal councils. They did their best, demonstrating, albeit in a partial way, the ability of ordinary working class people to run society. Nothing more could have been asked of them.

As for Hugo Chávez, he was an honest and courageous leader, committed to the cause of the people, who was capable of drawing very advanced conclusions. But he was not a revolutionary Marxist, something he himself admitted. For all his qualities, and he was certainly head and shoulders above any other mass left leader of the twenty-first century, the fact that he was not a Marxist meant that there were shortcomings and confusion in his actions.

For a revolution to be victorious, it is not enough that the masses are courageous and move forward decisively. It is not enough to have a brave leader. These things play a part – certainly, a very important one. But they are not enough.

What is required, and was missing in Venezuela, is a revolutionary party armed with the power of Marxist theory. A party serves as the living memory of the working class, the concentration of the experience of previous revolutions, of previous victories and defeats, combined with the scientific understanding of society and the class struggle provided by Marxism.

That is the only guarantee of victory. A revolution, by necessity, is a short period of time, a window of opportunity in which the power of the ruling class is challenged by the irruption of the movement of the masses. If anything, because of the combination of a series of particular circumstances, the Bolivarian Revolution was remarkably protracted. But ultimately, a revolution must end up either in the victory of the oppressed, or in the ruling class defeating the movement.

The working class learns through experience, and in the course of a revolution its consciousness advances in leaps and bounds. But it is not possible for all the necessary lessons to be learnt in a spontaneous manner, through experience alone. As Trotsky puts it in the History of the Russian Revolution:

The spontaneous activity of the masses is not sufficient for the victory of the revolution. Without a mass revolutionary party, victory for the proletariat is not possible. Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box.^[3]

This is arguably the most important lesson of the Bolivarian Revolution: the need for a revolutionary Marxist leadership, a party, which needs to be prepared in advance and cannot be improvised in the heat of events. This is the task we have in front of us. Its accomplishment is the best homage we can pay to the men and women who rose up and dared to attempt to take their future into their own hands.

Jorge Martín
London
February 2026

1. Alan Woods and Ted Grant, Revolution and Counter-revolution in Venezuela, 14 April 2002.

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2. Simón Bolívar, writing on the fall of the First Republic during the Colombian and Venezuelan War of Independence. See El Manifiesto de Cartagena, 1812.

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3. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Wellred Books, 2022, p. 17.

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