The two-part series published by Spring under the titles “Who will ‘run’ Venezuela? A socialist hope” and “What next for Venezuela? Three possibilities” by Lucy Lu is driven by admirable anti-imperialist instincts: an uncompromising rejection of US imperial aggression and a refusal to equate the Venezuelan people with either Washington’s plans or the right-wing opposition. On these essential points, we are in full agreement. The kidnapping of a sitting president, Nicolas Maduro, and a deputy in the National Assembly, Celia Flores, the use of sanctions as collective punishment, the Trump administration “running” another country, and the long history of Canadian and US intervention in Venezuela and Latin America must be rejected without qualification.
Lu is right to argue that imperialism is the principal enemy —no disagreement here! — but where the articles begin to falter is on their characterization of the Venezuelan state today, and what political positions the left should take to best strengthen the forces capable of resisting imperial domination in practice.
The wrong question: despicability and lesser-evilism
The first article poses a framing question that encapsulates our disagreement: “Maduro and his corrupt authoritarian regime are profoundly and rightly despised. Still for all that, is he more despicable than U.S. imperialism?” This is, in my view, the wrong question. It invites a moral ranking between two reactionary forces and subtly nudges the reader toward a familiar lesser-evil logic: if imperialism is worse, then some degree of political sympathy for the Venezuelan government may be warranted.
But socialist internationalism does not require choosing which form of domination is “less despicable.” It requires clarity about how different forms of domination interact and how certain government projects in countries oppressed by imperialism actively weaken the very social forces that could resist imperialism from below.
Lesser-evilism does more than just rank evils, it has political weight and has political consequences. In Venezuela, as elsewhere, it has repeatedly disarmed independent working-class organization by subordinating it to a government that claims anti-imperialist credentials while dismantling labor rights, criminalizing protest, and hollowing out popular autonomy. A left that frames its position primarily through this type of moral comparison risks reproducing this dynamic.
Anti-imperialism without illusions in the Venezuelan government
Lu’s insistence that opposition to US aggression must be unconditional is correct. Kidnapping presidents, imposing sanctions, threatening military intervention, and asserting the right to decide Venezuela’s future from Washington are crimes against national self-determination and should be condemned and resisted. On this we are clear.
But we should also be clear that defending the right of oppressed nations to self-determination does not mean that socialists should politically support the governments of those countries or the capitalist states through which they govern. In the case of Venezuela, the PSUV government has for more than a decade systematically undermined the forces of popular resistance. An anti-imperialism that evades what capitalism is like in a country dominated by imperialism becomes abstract and ultimately ineffective.
Lu is right to note that overwhelming popular hatred of Maduro does not automatically translate into support for the neoliberal opposition. But the analysis stops short of a harder conclusion: Maduro’s project itself represents a reactionary restoration of neoliberalism, albeit under a different ideological banner. Wage collapse, the destruction of collective bargaining, the elimination of effective union rights, the spread of precarious employment on a mass scale, privatization, austerity, the creation of special economic zones, and the repression of labor and communal struggles are central features of how the current ruling bloc has governed.
Rejecting Machado-style neoliberalism does not require offering any political sympathy to Madurismo. On the contrary, treating these as distinct alternatives obscures the reality that the present government has already carried out a neoliberal restructuring, through authoritarian means.
The limits of the “objective factors” explanation
Lu discusses the difference between “subjective” and “objective” factors, emphasizing how falling oil prices, on which Venezuela’s economy depended, resulted in disaster for the Bolivarian Process. This is true, but this analysis is incomplete in a way that has real political implications.
The core problem was not simply dependence on oil revenues, but the maintenance and deepening of how capitalism has been organized since Hugo Chavez became president back in 1999, beginning the “Bolivarian period” of modern Venezuelan history. This is not just about revenue sources and macroeconomic vulnerability, but rather a whole model of capital accumulation that is about how wealth is generated, how political power is organized, how classes are formed and how the state reproduces itself.
Lu’s suggestion that Venezuela “came closest to driving out capitalism” massively overstates the character of the transformation. Sure, there were inspiring social programs that were implemented and equally inspiring experiments with popular power in the communes and communal councils. But a society structured around extracting oil, the state collecting royalties and taxes from oil companies, state spending on social programs, and capital accumulation overseen by the state was not on the verge of transcending capitalism. That way of organizing capitalism was never overcome; it was reconfigured, and in many ways deepened. As the crisis intensified, the state increasingly relied on coercion, discretionary spending and allocation of resources, and opaque contracting rather than democratic planning or workers’ control.
Most importantly, the authoritarian turn cannot be explained as a passive response to adverse economic conditions. It involved conscious political choices: repressing strikes, undermining independent unions, dismantling autonomous communal spaces, and criminalizing dissent on the left. In this sense, it is not the case that the Maduro government simply inherited a grave dug by structural conditions; it actively dug it.
Any socialist analysis that treats repression as a regrettable but secondary outcome of “objective” constraints risks depoliticizing the destruction of popular power. Lu’s analysis implies that authoritarianism is just a consequence of economic crises rather than central to how the government operated under Maduro.
“Critical sympathy” and the problem of state-centered hope
In Part Two, Lu proposes a stance of “critical sympathy,” “something less than support,” toward the government of Delcy Rodríguez. The argument is that improved economic conditions, secured through new deals, might allow working-class organization and participatory democracy to re-emerge.
This is deeply problematic. Sympathy toward a government in a capitalist state that continues to undermine independent popular forces is not neutral. It shapes what internationalists amplify, excuse, or treat as unavoidable. More importantly, it is wrong about what would happen: economic “breathing room” secured through elite negotiations and external tutelage would not create space for popular resurgence. It would consolidate the very power structures that have suppressed it.
What is happening today is not a temporary concession under duress, but a qualitative transformation of Venezuela’s political economy and sovereignty, one that forecloses future democratic control. What is needed is not “breathing room” for the Rodriguez government but rather its opposite: militant bottom-up mass mobilization demanding the end of the repression of the left, mass mobilization in defense of sovereignty, and against the neocolonial arrangements she is delivering, even if under duress, to Washington.
Reform of the hydrocarbon law: from sovereignty to surrender
The recent reform of Venezuela’s Hydrocarbons Law makes this clear. It represents the most sweeping rollback of national oil sovereignty in nearly a century, carried out without public debate, without consultation, and without meaningful parliamentary oversight.
Under Chávez’s 2001 law, reformed in 2006, the state-owned company PDVSA was required to hold a majority stake in all upstream projects. The reform now approved unanimously by the National Assembly reverses this logic entirely: foreign companies can hold controlling stakes, govern operations, capture value through contractual mechanisms, and market Venezuelan oil directly.
Regulations that required a minimum of 30 percent royalties have been eliminated and can now fall as low as one percent; the extraction tax guaranteeing state revenue regardless of declared profits has been eliminated; and taxes on extraordinary oil prices, mechanisms that allowed Venezuela to benefit from future booms, have been repealed.
In effect, Venezuela retains nominal ownership of its oil while surrendering control over extraction, commercialization, taxation, and dispute resolution.
This is not tactical flexibility. It is a structural, constitutional rollback to conditions resembling colonial subordination. Shortly after the National Assembly unanimously approved the reform of Chavez’s Hydrocarbons Law, essentially dismantling almost a century of national oil policy, which represents the largest transfer of wealth and sovereignty in the history of Venezuela, one done with no public debate or consultation, Rodriguez proudly stated that the reform reflected Maduro’s vision for the future, that they had been discussing these plans for some time, and that this reform was done “for history, for the future and for our sons and daughters.”
Up against these realities it is difficult to understand what could possibly justify “critical sympathy” that Lu proposes for the Rodriguez government, or the suggestion that Rodriguez has not “abandoned her socialist roots.”
Lu writes “the country desperately needed better economic prospects — which required something precisely like the deal that Rodriguez has just struck.” While the former is certainly true, the latter is demonstrably false. Are the neocolonial deals described above “precisely” what are required for improving the economic fortunes of Venezuelans? The answer is no. Yet Lu seems to be endorsing, or at least strongly legitimating the necessity of a deal of this kind. We don’t need legitimization of neocolonial arrangements but rather resistance to them.
And the issue is not an issue of rhetoric but of political clarity. Describing this moment as one warranting “critical sympathy” implies that the capitalist state in Venezuela is still somehow moving Venezuela towards socialism, however imperfectly. This framing affects how we interpret events and where to give solidarity. The strategic danger is that the regressive measures being implemented by the PSUV government will be treated like tragic necessities rather than political choices made under imperialist pressure.
Also, the idea that these are emergency responses forced by invasion misreads the timeline. The abandonment didn’t begin post invasion, Rodriguez, as Maduro’s Vice President, played a central role in overseeing the most dramatic wage collapse in modern Venezuelan history, reducing public sector salaries to levels too low for people to survive, and dismantling collective bargaining.
And this new “oil opening” also didn’t begin post-invasion either, it began years ago, particularly after the 2020 Anti-Blockade law and the law on Special Economic Zones was passed. The opening of the Arco Minero to multinational corporations further entrenched the extractivist model that subordinated environmental, social, labor and indigenous concerns.
Strategically extending “critical sympathy” risks confusing the central question for socialists: what are the forces in Venezuela with emancipatory potential? If the government is treated as a flawed but still fundamentally socialist actor, even after these measures, then independent popular forces become secondary.
What solidarity from below actually requires
Lu is right to insist that Venezuelans themselves must decide their future. But this principle has certain practical implications. First, it means rejecting not only US-imposed tutelage, but also domestic collaboration with it. In other words, no sympathy with domestic collaboration. And second, it means centering the demands raised by Venezuela’s revolutionary left and popular movements today.
For example, the National Gathering in Defense of People’s Rights, an alliance of radical and revolutionary socialist organizations, condemns US military aggression, any type of neocolonial government partnering with the US, any collaboration with Washington’s impositions, Rodriguez’s cordial relationship with imperialism, and the collaborationist PSUV government facilitating a neocolonial advance delivering resources to the US. It demands the following:
- restoration of wages and pensions
- reinstatement of union rights and collective bargaining
- release of political prisoners
- an end to arbitrary arrests and repression
- full transparency about the events of January 3
- democratic accountability over oil policy and national resources
- the release of Maduro and Flores
- that Venezuelans, not Delcy or the US, should be deciding the future of Venezuela in assemblies, workplaces, and educational institutions, not by elite negotiation but through the sovereign will of the people
- an end to any type of neocolonial government advised by the US
- an end to any collaboration with Washington’s impositions
They go on to call for mass mobilizations in Venezuela and internationally and resistance against US imperialism, not collaboration. In other words, no breathing room for the collaborationist Rodriguez government.
Above all, socialist solidarity with Venezuela should involve opposing imperialist dictates and supporting people in the country who are trying to rebuild independent, militant, bottom-up organization capable of defending sovereignty against imperialism and against a government that has aligned itself with neocolonial restructuring.
Socialist hope in Venezuela does not lie in stabilizing the present order, but in resisting both the anti-worker PSUV government and the right-wing opposition to it.
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