An Answer to Party for Socialism and Liberation Claim that ‘Bolivarian Revolution Still Stands’

(This is the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)

By Pete Seidman and Yvonne Hayes

On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces bombed Venezuela and abducted the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. In an editorial that day, World-Outlook unequivocally condemned this attack on the country’s sovereignty. “End U.S. imperialist aggression in Venezuela! Free Maduro and Flores! No blood for oil!” the editorial concluded, demands that we continue to embrace today.

The U.S. assault, World-Outlook explained, was not about whether “Maduro is a ‘legitimate representative’ of the Venezuelan people or a ‘vicious’ person or a ‘drug kingpin.’ This is about enabling U.S. corporations to take control of the country’s vast oil resources, maintaining U.S. hegemony in the western hemisphere, and allowing U.S. big business to challenge increasing competition from China … all this at the expense of the working people of the Americas.”

Indeed, within hours of their over-powering raid, U.S. president Donald Trump and his secretary of state Marco Rubio were crowing that Washington would now “run the country,” and “take back the oil that belongs to us.”

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Following that attack, many pundits expected Trump to appoint María Corina Machado to manage this piracy. Machado, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for her role in leading the opposition to Maduro in the 2024 elections, cravenly sought Trump’s approval for heading a new government in Venezuela. As part of that quest, Machado slavishly presented her Nobel Prize to Trump, who had been outraged at not winning it himself (after ordering a major U.S. military assault on another country!)

However, Trump left Machado in the dust, telling reporters she is “nice,” but “she doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to serve as president.

The Trump administration instead decided the most effective way to fill the leadership vacuum created by Maduro’s kidnapping was to greenlight Venezuela’s vice-president Delcy Rodríguez to take over. Trump and company did not mind her “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. They might even have found it useful for pacifying any unrest after their assault on the South American country. Washington wagered — with knowledge not readily available to the public at the time — that a Rodríguez administration would serve as a docile transitional regime, enabling U.S. big business to maximize profits off Venezuela’s oil and other riches at the lowest political cost.

Delcy Rodríguez, former head of the Venezuelan oil and finance ministry; her brother Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly; and Diosdado Cabello, the interior minister, found themselves Washington’s choice to run Venezuela’s government while Maduro and Flores face trumped up charges in New York City.

In the weeks since taking office, Delcy Rodríguez et al. are proving Trump and Rubio’s judgment to be sound.   

How to defend Venezuela’s sovereignty, working people?

Among those in the United States who oppose Washington’s assault on Caracas and its saber rattling in the Americas — the so-called Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,^[1] there are counterposed assessments on what has unfolded in Venezuela and on the character of the country’s current government.

After the U.S. raid and abduction of Maduro, Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of the People’s Forum in New York City and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, outlined his perspective in the January 4 article Venezuela’s Revolution still stands: debunking Trump’s psyop. It was first published by the People’s Dispatch and immediately reprinted by Liberation, the newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).

De Los Santos characterized the evolution of politics in Venezuela, beginning with the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez as president, as a revolution leading the nation toward what Chávez called “socialism in the 21^st century.” De Los Santos argued that this process — the “Bolivarian revolution”^[2] — is alive under Rodríguez’s leadership. This claim flies in the face of reality, as we will show in this article.

Eager to find an explanation for Rodriguez’s rush to negotiate with Washington, rather than organize resistance against the Yankee attack, De Los Santos argued that the weaknesses of her politics were actually strengths that avoided a more violent confrontation; not a betrayal of the Venezuelan people, but part of a necessary retreat to preserve “revolutionary state power” and “secure political space and prevent total annihilation.”

De Los Santos argued that, in the lead-up to the January 3 attack, the Trump administration faced “the power of organized popular resistance” alongside the professional military, creating a “scenario where any ground invasion would degenerate into a protracted people’s war.” Combined with “widespread public rejection of military intervention, spanning the political spectrum” in the United States, these factors compelled Washington to backtrack and accept Rodríguez as the legitimate successor to Maduro, De Los Santos claimed.

There was U.S. reluctance to involve Washington in a “regime change war,” De Los Santos insisted, citing the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan, where he said Yankee strategists learned to seek the “path of least resistance.” That involved utilizing bombing campaigns, abductions, and collaboration with local leaders the invaders could work with, rather than costly military interventions that would also result in many U.S. casualties. In Caracas, that path led to Rodríguez rather than Machado.

But there was another lesson the U.S. imperialists took from their disastrous occupation of Iraq. There, U.S. occupation forces completely obliterated the existing Baathist state apparatus but were never able to install a reliable client regime to fill the vacuum left behind.

De Los Santos claimed that “the Venezuelan masses, party, and state were prepared to counter a full-scale U.S. invasion in a decentralized people’s war of resistance.” That would create a situation even more unfavorable for Washington than what it faced in Iraq after a massive military intervention two decades ago.

Yet, when U.S. helicopters swooped in to capture Maduro and bombs exploded over several other targets, there was — by most accounts — a stunning lack of resistance on the part of both the Venezuelan armed forces and the population.

De Los Santos tried to explain this away with a very dark assessment of the chances for working people or any country to resist imperialist assaults today.

“No country on the planet has the preparation or the capacity at present to prevent the overwhelming and brutal force of a U.S. special operation such as the one conducted,” he said. “No nation, no matter how morally justified, popularly mobilized, or militarily capable, can presently match the concentrated, high-tech lethal force of the U.S. war machine in this respect.”

In other words, De Los Santos may as well be saying, “Working people are doomed.”

Need for objective analysis

“A concrete analysis is required to cut through the disinformation, understand the objective balance of forces, and chart a path forward,” De Los Santos said. But he seemed incapable of taking his own advice.

De Los Santos suggested that those disagreeing with his assessment of the balance of forces in Venezuela, or his view of the class character of the “process” now unfolding, are simply being hoodwinked by the Trump administration’s psychological warfare and campaign of disinformation. “No socialist should have a knee-jerk reaction accepting bourgeois propaganda,” he admonished.

Was Chávez — followed by Maduro and now Rodríguez — leading a social revolution toward establishing socialism in Venezuela? Are concessions and retreats now necessary or possible to protect the interests of the workers and peasants of that country? Does the “Bolivarian Revolution” point the way forward — in Venezuela or elsewhere?

To answer these questions, it is useful to take a look at the past 25 years of the “Bolivarian” process to better understand the class character of the Venezuelan state and the relationship of forces between Venezuela’s capitalist class, the country’s workers and peasants, and U.S. imperialism today.

Reforms under Chávez

In 1998, Chávez, a radical young army officer, was elected president following a period of mass protest against an International Monetary Fund (IMF)-mandated austerity program. Chávez’s trajectory was not rare. Government takeovers in semi-colonial countries by radical military officers from impoverished backgrounds — either through elections or military coups — have often led at first to significant social reforms but not to attempts to overthrow capitalism.

In the wake of this popular resistance and an electoral victory with a 56% majority, the Chávez administration enacted land reform, achieved a reduction in the poverty rate by 20 percent in a few years, and launched a literacy campaign that taught 1.5 million to read and write. With the aid of Cuban medical missions, new clinics brought preventive and emergency care to many who rarely, if ever, had seen a doctor.

These advances for workers and peasants were registered as high oil prices on the world market and a tightening of state control of the country’s oil resources ^[3] bolstered state revenues.

This period is described in more detail in the September 2024 World-Outlook article Venezuela Elections: Fraud Foretold?

Despite the social gains described above, that article noted, “Under the Chávez administration, private property in the means of production remained largely intact, with economic power staying firmly in the hands of the country’s wealthiest families. His nationalist regime, however, increasingly came into conflict with the majority of Venezuela’s capitalist class. The clash turned into a collision in the fall of 2001.”

At that time, Chávez’s government enacted legislation that, if fully implemented, would have cut into the profits and power of the financial oligarchy. These measures included the land reform, protections for working fishermen, greater state control of the country’s oil resources, and the allocation of state funds for affordable housing and other social programs.

“The new administration also drew the ire of Washington and the local bourgeoisie for cultivating closer political and economic ties with revolutionary Cuba,” the 2024 World-Outlook article noted.

“Encouraged by these openings, workers and peasants fought for land, jobs, and more democratic rights. These struggles alarmed most of Venezuela’s capitalists and their U.S. backers. The anti-Chávez opposition organized cazerolazos, large ‘pot-banging’ protest rallies demanding the president’s resignation, in 2001. In 2002 it staged a military coup that removed Chávez from power for two days but was reversed by popular opposition.

“This was followed in 2003 by a ‘strike’ in the state-owned oil monopoly, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), instigated by company executives who worked hand-in-glove with top union bureaucrats controlling the oil workers union at the time, lockdowns in other industries aimed at crippling production to accelerate an economic crisis, and armed attacks on government buildings; and a referendum to recall Chávez in 2004.

“Washington and other imperialist governments backed these efforts and later imposed debilitating sanctions on Venezuela that largely impacted the country’s working people.

“In one popular outpouring after another, however, working people mobilized and defeated every attempt by Venezuela’s capitalist class and its backers abroad to topple Chávez.” ^[4]

As oil prices flattened and suffered periodic sharp dives beginning around 2007, Venezuela’s state revenues decreased. The conflicts between the capitalist class and the government’s social agenda sharpened.

Chávez rejects ‘Cuban road’

“At the same time, the Fifth Republic Movement led by Chávez, which in 2007 fused with other organizations to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), rejected the Cuban road toward a genuinely socialist future,” the 2024 World-Outlook article pointed out.

“The PSUV refused to lead the country’s working people to end the rule of the capitalists, establish a workers and peasants’ government, nationalize the means of production, and reorganize society based on human solidarity and social equality,” it continued.

“Instead, the PSUV promoted ‘socialism in the 21st century.’ This was a euphemism for maintaining capitalist economic relations modulated by greater state control over some private industries and marked by increasing concentration of governmental power in the hands of the head of state — the president.

“The increasingly authoritarian role of the government became crystal clear in 2006. That year, Chávez was re-elected Venezuela’s president with 63% of the popular vote. A year earlier, his party had secured complete control of the country’s National Assembly, after the opposition boycotted legislative elections, as well as the Supreme Court and most of the judiciary, and the National Electoral Council.

“Following these sweeping victories, Chávez signed into law an ‘enabling act’ allowing him to rule by decree, with virtual dictatorial powers, for up to 18 months. He also floated the idea, repeatedly, of seeking constitutional reform that would permit him to seek reelection indefinitely, perpetuating his power for life.

“These are the hallmarks of a Bonapartist^[5] regime, albeit one with a leftist veneer in this case. They are the opposite of strengthening the political power of workers and peasants.”

Maduro’s regime: Chavismo’s thuggish caricature

Maduro, a close Chávez ally, assumed the office of president after his predecessor lost his battle with cancer. Maduro then elevated the government’s authoritarianism to another level. Beginning six months after his election in 2013, and relying on a string of enabling acts, he ruled by decree for the majority of his presidency during the next 12 years.

On February 4, 2026, Tempest, a “revolutionary socialist collective,” according to its website, published an interview with Federico Fuentes, a longtime Venezuela solidarity activist who lived in Caracas for several years during the Chávez government as a correspondent for Green Ve. He is also a contributor to Venezuelanalysis.

“Sometime during the Maduro government, between 2015-17, it became clear that the section of society for whom it governed was shifting,” Fuentes noted. “A combination of circumstances and choices led it to break with the poor majority and working-class base that had supported the Chávez government and formed the backbone of the Bolivarian revolution. Instead, it consolidated a new base among the military, security forces, and the new capitalist class.”

Unlike Chávez, “the Maduro government was undeniably a pro-capitalist government,” Fuentes continued. “It represented both the interests of the new capitalist class, which had enriched itself through its connections to the ‘Bolivarian’ state (the so-called Bolivarian bourgeoisie that Chávez denounced), but also the traditional capitalist class. The Maduro government ultimately won over the support of Fedecámaras^[6] [the country’s chamber of commerce], while the head of the Caracas Stock Exchange said after the 2024 presidential elections that the government, not the opposition, best represented economic stability.

“The Maduro government was also decidedly anti-worker. Often sections of the Left excuse the government, saying its policy decisions were due to the sanctions. But this ignores that government policies led to a dramatic upward redistribution of wealth even before the sanctions. Moreover, even under the sanctions, it is not the case that the Maduro government had no other options. From 2018 onwards, it deliberately chose to shift the burden of the crisis onto the working class.”

With continuing fluctuations of oil prices, tightened sanctions by U.S. and other imperialist powers, and mismanagement of resources by corrupt government officials, the Venezuelan economy went into freefall. Inflation rose from 100% in 2015 to 80,000% by the end of 2018. The poverty rate mushroomed to over 80% by 2020. These devastating conditions led to a mass exodus from Venezuela, with up to 25% of its population emigrating in search of a better life.

Protests in the face of rampant unemployment and shortages of food and other basic necessities were met with repression by the Maduro government. Security forces, the military, and extralegal goon squads took to the streets to suppress the demands for relief.

In July 2024, Maduro claimed victory in the presidential elections. Despite widespread doubts about the results, procedures designed to guarantee the integrity of the vote were ignored. Protests against this lack of transparency broke out, including in many working-class areas. The government responded with a wave of repression, resulting in some 2,000 arrests and the killing of 23 protesters and bystanders.

Anti-worker repression under Maduro

The turn in economic policy under Maduro “had to be accompanied by a ramping up of repression. Outside Venezuela, we hear about repression against the right-wing opposition — though never about their anti-democratic, violent and illegal actions. But the Left and working-class forces in Venezuela have arguably faced greater repression,” Fuentes explained in the Tempest interview.

“In terms of workers’ rights, there are hundreds of trade unionists in jail for protesting, new trade unions cannot be registered, strikes are illegal, and collective bargaining is essentially banned. As for the left, every single left-wing party in the country has either been stripped of its electoral registration or denied the right to register for elections. The last presidential election [in 2024] was the first since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1958 in which the left was completely barred from standing a candidate.

“When we add to this that the Venezuelan people were denied their right to have their votes counted and verified (arguably one of the most basic democratic rights, but which some on the Left seem to want to deny to the Venezuelan people, claiming nothing untoward happened in those elections), we get a sense of just how far democracy had been wound back. Not just in terms of the Chávez era (when the left rightly pointed to Venezuela as a world leader in transparent elections) but even in terms of minimum bourgeois democratic rights.

“There is a further component that needs to be considered; namely the use of security forces to terrorize working class and poor communities. As discontent with the government rose among traditional Chávez-voting sectors, the Maduro government stepped up its policing of these neighborhoods through its ‘Operation Liberate the People’ and creation of the elite death squad, FAES (Special Action Forces).

“The result was a dramatic rise in police killings of predominately young Black men in those neighborhoods: from about 1500-2500 a year in 2014-15 to 5000-5500 a year between 2016-18, making Venezuela’s security forces the deadliest in the region on a per capita basis. Though not strictly a political operation, this repressive policing had the effect of terrorizing communities which had begun to step out of line.

“Given all this, it is hardly surprising that even strong Chávez voting areas eventually turned against Maduro and did not rush onto the streets to defend him after his kidnapping.”

With the capitalist class still holding the reins of industry and finance and a repressive regime increasingly hostile to the needs and demands of workers and peasants, Venezuela’s working people were ill-prepared to answer Washington’s aggression on January 3, 2026.

Lack of any preparedness to repel U.S. attack

During the last five months of 2025, the amassing of the largest U.S. force in the Caribbean since the October 1962 missile crisis,^[7] the murder at sea of more than 100 people in small boats, and a naval blockade of Venezuelan oil ordered by the Pentagon clearly signaled that a U.S. military assault was likely, if not inevitable. With gunboats and aircraft carriers just 50-100 miles off the Venezuelan coast, even U.S. intelligence was surprised at the lack of a defensive response U.S. special forces encountered in the early hours of January 3.

On January 7, General Javier Marcano Tábata, commander of the presidential honor guard and head of Venezuela’s military counterintelligence unit, was fired by Delcy Rodríguez for failing to protect Maduro from capture during the U.S. raid. Marcano Tábata was reportedly then arrested on accusations of accepting bribes, providing the U.S. military with Maduro’s location, and deactivating anti-aircraft defense systems.

But the failure of the Venezuelan military to mount a robust defense cannot simply be blamed on one person. Venezuela’s advanced, Russian-made air defense systems were not even hooked up to radar during the raid and abduction, U.S. officials told the New York Times. Venezuela had been unable to maintain and operate at combat readiness the Russian-made S-300 antiaircraft or its Buk-M2 defense systems, purchased in 2009.  

In addition, Maduro had been asserting for months there were 4.5 million Venezuelans under arms, prepared to defend themselves against any assault by U.S. imperialism. De Los Santos inflated that number to 8 million. Yet that force did not materialize, in the months leading up to January 3, during the U.S. military assault, or in the weeks since then.

The only vigorous defense the U.S. invaders faced was at the presidential compound in Caracas. Fifty people were killed trying to protect Maduro and his wife; among those who died, Cuban combatants constituted the majority. Thirty-two Cubans assigned to a security detail gave their lives upholding a commitment to defend the sovereignty of a sister country and protect its president. Approximately 50 additional Venezuelan civilians lost their lives during the U.S. bombardment.

The election of Chávez as president in 1998 opened a period of mobilization of the working class and peasants in Venezuela. By the time of the 2026 U.S. assault, however, there was a nearly complete erosion of the gains workers and peasants had initially made. Along with that, widespread repression by the Maduro government — a capitalist regime that bore no resemblance to even moderate social democratic governments, had rendered popular defense of Venezuela’s sovereignty against imperialist assault impossible.

That’s the root cause of what transpired on January 3. Not the “high-tech lethal force of the U.S. war machine” that “no nation… can match” or stand up to, as De Los Santos and the PSL falsely claimed.

(This was the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)

Although this is a signed article, it reflects the views of all of the editors of World-Outlook.

NOTES

[1] First articulated by then-president James Monroe in 1823, when nearly all Spanish colonies in the Americas had either achieved or were close to independence, the Monroe doctrine asserted that any further efforts by European powers to control or influence sovereign states in the region would be viewed as a threat to U.S. security. It represented the seeds of a policy that could be summarized as Latin America and the Caribbean being the “backyard” of the United States — an unabashed attempt at U.S. economic domination in the hemisphere and the mustering of military power to back that up.

“The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” was first asserted in the 2025 National Security Strategy document released by the White House in November 2025.

[2] The Bolivarian Revolution refers to the process of social reform in Venezuela initiated in 1998 when Hugo Chávez was first elected the country’s president. It is named after Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan military officer who led the fight for independence from Spain in the early 1820s in the region encompassing what today is Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.

[3] The Venezuelan oil industry was officially nationalized on January 1, 1976, during the first presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez, Chávez’s predecessor. This nationalization established Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), as a state-owned petroleum enterprise. Soon after being elected president for a second time in 1989, Pérez announced El Gran Viraje (The Great Turn) to deal with empty coffers and a huge foreign debt. This turn included austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund and allowed for greater participation of private investors in PDVSA. Tightened state control of PDVSA returned in 2007 under Hugo Chávez.

[4] For more information on how working people defeated the 2002 U.S.-backed coup attempt to topple the democratically elected government of Hugo Chávez see ‘We’re fighting to defend workers in Venezuela,’ an eyewitness report published in the August 12, 2002, Militant newspaper.

[5] World-Outlook explained the term Bonapartism in its inaugural article, following the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a right-wing mob that tried to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. election through violent means. The mob was inspired by the false claim of a “stolen election” by Donald Trump.

World-Outlook called attention to the writings of Marxist scholar George Novack. Decades ago, Novack wrote that Bonapartism “carries to an extreme the concentration of power in the head of the state already discernible in the contemporary imperialist democracies. All important policy decisions are centralized in a single individual equipped with extraordinary emergency powers. He speaks and acts not as the servant of parliament … but in his own right as ‘the man of destiny’ who has been called upon to rescue the nation in its hour of mortal peril.”

[6] Fedecámaras (Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce) is the largest, non-profit, and most influential umbrella organization representing private business associations in Venezuela.

[7] In October 1962, in what is widely known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, Washington pushed the world to the edge of nuclear war by enacting a naval blockade of Cuba and threatening war unless the Soviet Union withdrew nuclear missiles it had installed in Cuba, despite the wishes of the Cuban government. The Cuban people and their revolutionary government, with unparalleled determination to defend their sovereignty and their socialist revolution, blocked U.S. plans for a military assault and saved humanity from the consequences of a nuclear holocaust.

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