Urgent note on Venezuela: how did we reach this dead end?

The situation in Venezuela is developing very quickly after Sunday’s election. Monday morning dawned to the sound of cacerolazos (the banging of pots and pans) in protest against the declared victory of Nicolás Maduro. The cacerolazos in Caracas began in working-class and poor neighbourhoods; in Petare, in Catia, in 23 de Enero. Then they started to come down from the neighbourhoods la Dolorita, el Guarataro, Antímano, and the barrios to the east of Caracas.

[The following article was written on 29 July 2024. Read the original in Spanish here.]

At the moment [Monday, 29 July] there are protests all over the country alongside police repression. Some of these protests are heading for the military barracks. In Santa Capilla, three blocks down from the Miraflores presidential palace, demonstrators were stopped in their tracks by the national guard. Then, groups of armed civilians arrived and began to shoot, mainly in the air, to disperse the guards. 

Crisis and chaos after polling day

How did we get here? Sunday’s election pitted Nicolás Maduro against María Corina Machado (the name of the actual candidate of the opposition doesn't matter. Machado was the real candidate behind the scenes).

It must be understood that Maduro's government has nothing to do with that of Chávez. Rather, he represented precisely the opposite. Chávez led the Bolivarian Revolution, which involved land seizures, setting up communes, workers' control, nationalisations, confrontation with imperialism, the discussion of socialism, etc. Maduro has presided over a bourgeois and oligarchic restoration, which meant return of land to the landowners, privatisations, the destruction of workers' control, assaults on collective bargaining, and the imprisonment of worker activists for fighting back, etc.

This is a government that has also used Bonapartist methods to eliminate opposition, not only on the right, but also the left. They stole the electoral registration from Tupamaros, the UPV, the PPT, and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV). They went so far as to invent a fake party made up of paid agents to attempt to steal the Communist Party’s name. In Barinas, when they lost the elections, they annulled them, disqualified the opposition candidates (including the PCV candidate) and re-ran the elections… only to lose again. 

María Corina Machado represents the rancid, oligarchic, imperialist lackey right wing / Image: World Economic Forum, Flickr

Meanwhile, María Corina Machado represents the rancid, oligarchic, imperialist lackey right wing. She has spent 26 years plotting coup attempts and terrorist attacks, calling for foreign invasion, cheering on imperialist sanctions, encouraging violent guarimbas (riots) and generally spewing deep hatred against the working class, poor people, and peasants who dared to take the reins of the country into their hands; who dared to make a revolution. 

The comrades of Lucha de Clases, the RCI in Venezuela, warned that the working class had no horse in this race. It was a choice between death by suffocation and death by decapitation.

10 years of deep economic crisis resulting from the combined chaos of an unfinished revolution, imperialist sanctions, and crazy, uncontrolled monetary expansion followed by a harsh monetarist cut paid for by the working people, have totally worn down Maduro's support base. This base, which he inherited from Chávez, has been squandered to such an extent that many saw the possibility of defeating the government through the electoral route.

Hence the mobilisation at the polling stations that began, in an unprecedented manner, at 10pm on Saturday. Election day itself passed with only minor incidents, with some polling stations not opening until hours after the official opening time. But by the end of the day the situation began to heat up. Opposition supporters crowded outside polling stations to await the official count, which was to be announced publicly. Some demanded that the polling stations close at 6pm, as is required by the regulations if there are no voters waiting.

As the result from each polling station was announced, photos of the tally sheets (actas) were posted on social media. All of them showed the opposition candidate as the winner. I've heard of one single tally sheet – though I haven't seen it – in which Maduro was in the lead.

Of course, there are some 30,000 tally sheets all over the country. A few dozen on social media do not determine the results. But it was significant that many of them were from traditional Chavista strongholds. For example, the revolutionary neighbourhood of 23 de Enero in Caracas, including Chávez's own polling station, showed a victory for the opposition. It was also significant that no one published a single acta where Maduro won.

Then came the interruption of the transmission of results from the polling stations to the National Election Council (CNE). The government claims that this was the result of a cyber attack from North Macedonia. Opposition election observers have denounced the fact that they were not allowed to enter the CNE counting room, contrary to the regulations. 

There is more. Groups of armed civilians went to intimidate those waiting for the announcement of the results at each polling station. In some cases they fired shots to disperse them. In Táchira, one person was killed. 

Finally, at around 11pm, the CNE announced a result with 80 percent of the tally sheets totalled: Maduro 51 percent against 44 percent for Edmundo Gonzalez and 4.6 percent for the others. Turnout was 59 percent. “The trend is irreversible”, the CNE said. 

The official data, not yet totaled, did not coincide with the tallies that had been published on social media. Moreover, the following day, the CNE announced and declared Maduro's victory without ever publishing the full result with 100 percent of tally sheets counted, let alone publishing the breakdown by state, municipality, and polling station. The (partial) official results can not, therefore, be compared with the polling station reports. It is no wonder then that many did not believe the results.

Betrayal of the Bolivarian Revolution

Of course, we reject the stinking hypocrisy of the international right wing. The Spanish People’s Party, Milei, Donald Trump, the Peruvian Chancellor (who owes his position to a coup d'état!), the fraudster Vicente Fox, Bukele and other grotesque characters are all now crying fraud. These are individuals who have openly supported coups in Venezuela or directly organised them, who cheered the massacre of the people in the Chilean uprising, who recognise the coup government in Peru, who defend their imperialist class interests by all means at their disposal. We have nothing to do with them. They are our class enemies and we have fought them for two decades. We are not going to stop doing so now.

The responsibility lies with Maduro and the PSUV leadership who betrayed the Bolivarian Revolution / Image: Nicolás Maduro, Twitter

But none of that explains why the working-class and poor neighbourhoods, the barrios, came down today and protested. That is mainly explained by internal dynamics. The responsibility lies with Maduro and the PSUV leadership who betrayed the Bolivarian Revolution.

We have reached an explosive and very dangerous situation as of today [Monday 29 July]. Some poorer areas have spontaneously taken to the streets to defeat a government that no longer represents them, but their only political expression is that of Machado, the representative of the pro-coup, oligarchic, and pro-imperialist right wing. 

It is difficult to predict what will happen. But in all the most likely scenarios, the working class and the poor will lose. 

They lose if the bosses' Maduro government stays in power on the basis of massive repression. They lose if it falls and is replaced by Machado, the pupil of Trump, Bolsonaro and Milei.

Danger lies in the fact that sectors of the popular masses seem to have placed their hopes in her. Let no one be under any illusions. If Machado comes to power she will implement a brutal neoliberal shock programme à la Milei; dismantling what is left of the achievements of the revolution, privatising everything; selling off basic industries for peanuts; razing any vestige of communal power at gunpoint. And all this, of course, will be imposed by the repression of the workers' and peasants' movement, if it dared to oppose it. 

Some will say ‘we already have that with Maduro’. No. It will be worse. But it was precisely the bourgeois, bureaucratic thermidor of Maduro that has led directly to the rise of Machado’s open reaction. Moreover, right now, Maduro can only stay in power on the basis of open repression and by relying on the state apparatus.

Some will ask, ‘but was there an alternative policy Maduro could have followed faced with sanctions and imperialist aggression?’ There was. We have explained it repeatedly over the last 10 years. The alternative was the one Chávez himself pointed to in his Turn the Rudder speech: “to pulverise the bourgeois state” and build “a socialist economy”. This was always the instinctive aim of the mobilised working class and poor: to complete the revolution by abolishing capitalism.

That would not have stopped imperialist aggression or have prevented the guarimbas, coup attempts and failed invasions. But it would have put the working people at the helm, strengthened their morale, and served as an example for the working class and peasants of the whole continent, putting on the table the real possibility of extending the socialist revolution beyond the borders of Venezuela. 

Mistakes of the PCV and lessons we must learn

The PCV deserves special mention. We have been in solidarity from the beginning with the comrades of the Communist Party in the face of the government's anti-democratic offensive against them. But it is also our duty to point out what we believe to be serious mistakes made by the comrades.

First of all, they treated the APR (Popular Revolutionary Alternative, set up in 2020) as a purely electoral tool, instead of building it, as agreed, as an organisation of struggle. The decision to launch its founding congress was never carried out. Here the responsibility does not lie solely with the PCV, but an important part falls on the comrades as they were the most solid organisation of those comprising the APR.

We believe that, more important still, was the PCV’s mistake in supporting a candidate of the bosses in the election, Enrique Marquez of the Centrados party. They defended this candidate, who has participated in coup attempts, by arguing for “a united front for democratisation” and the need “to recover the institutions and the Constitution”. Now they appeal for the creation of "spaces of broad unity to strengthen the struggle for the recovery of the Constitution and the rule of law in Venezuela", which could be interpreted as a call for unity of action with Machado! 

These mistakes of the left have left the working class totally orphaned of its own leadership, and at the mercy of bourgeois interests.

What now? Whatever happens, it is crucial that we explain the need for an independent organisation of the working class. Whoever governs, the interests of our class must be defended. 

Furthermore, it is necessary to make a serious assessment of the experience of the Bolivarian Revolution, of its achievements, but above all of its limitations. Whoever makes half a revolution digs his own grave. We must learn from the mistakes of the past so as not to repeat them.