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

(This is the second of two parts refuting arguments presented in Manolo De Los Santos’ article Venezuela’s Revolution still stands: debunking Trump’s psyop. The first can be found in Part I.)

By Pete Seidman and Yvonne Hayes

With Maduro out of the picture, the Rodríguez administration jumped quickly to accommodate Washington’s demands. “We consider it a priority to move towards a balanced and respectful relationship between the U.S. and Venezuela,” Rodríguez wrote just two days after the bombing of the capital city. She called for negotiations “on terms of sovereignty and equality.”

Of course, there is no equal playing field for such negotiations. This was true before January 3, when the U.S. government imposed brutal sanctions on Venezuela and deployed its armada offshore. And it is even more true today, as a Damoclean sword of possible U.S. military intervention hangs over every encounter between U.S. and Venezuelan officials.

During a January 28 hearing before the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee, Rubio said the Trump administration has established a “very respectful and productive line of communication” with Rodríguez’s government. As a result, he said, the Trump administration does not “intend or expect” to use military force against Venezuela.

In a written statement to the committee, however, the U.S. secretary of state warned Washington is “prepared to use force to ensure maximum cooperation… if other methods fail.” He noted, “Rodríguez is well aware of the fate of Maduro; it is our belief that her own self-interest aligns with advancing our key objectives.”

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De Los Santos pointed out that negotiations with the U.S. government are a continuation of the approach by Maduro in the months before his abduction. “Maduro himself consistently called for diplomacy and negotiation to avoid an all-out war and had already offered to negotiate comprehensive economic agreements with the U.S. for Venezuela’s oil and mineral resources,” De Los Santos wrote. “If the Venezuelan state were to sign such deals going forward — now with Maduro kidnapped — it would not constitute treason.”

Those deals are now being signed. They are indeed a continuation of policy under Maduro, which reveals the degree of capitulation to U.S. imperialism then and now.

Opening oil industry to private foreign investment

On January 6, Trump announced a more than $2 billion deal to divert Venezuelan crude to the United States. Much of that oil was already loaded in tankers off the Venezuelan coast, unable to breach the U.S. naval blockade.

In her January 15 state-of-the-union address, Rodríguez argued for opening Venezuela’s state-run oil reserves to more foreign investment. She pledged that increased oil production through foreign acquisitions would create a flow of cash to the country’s healthcare system and infrastructure, much of which has severely deteriorated since it was built under Chávez.

In response to a request by Trump, Rodríguez also granted amnesty to 379 people imprisoned by the Maduro regime and has agreed to accept a larger number of U.S. deportation flights to Venezuela. Between 600 and 900 prisoners, according to Venezuelan human-rights organizations, remain behind bars. A vow by Rodríguez to establish a general amnesty for political prisoners fell short of indicating who would be released or when.

A day before Rodríguez’s January 15 speech, Trump made public the sale of $500 million in Venezuelan oil to Geneva-based Vitol, which has a U.S. headquarters in Houston, Texas. John Addison, a senior trader at Vitol and a $6 million megadonor to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, was part of negotiating the deal.

U.S. takes control of sales of Venezuelan crude

The proceeds of this first sale, the White House said, would be split between Venezuela, U.S. companies, and the U.S. government, at Washington’s discretion. Trump said proceeds going to Venezuela would be used to purchase only “American-made” goods — more precisely, “U.S.-made.”

Trading houses Vitol and Trafigura — both previously implicated in bribery schemes and price manipulation — were initially depositing monies for the oil in a Qatari bank. But on February 12, U.S. energy secretary Chris Wright told NBC News that the U.S. treasury has now set up an account to directly receive the proceeds from these sales.

Four private banks in Venezuela have already received a $300 million share of the proceeds from the first sale; Venezuela’s portion of funds from future sales will be meted out based on monthly budgets approved by Washington, Rubio told Congress on January 28.

All this and the lack of oversight under new licensing agreements underscores concerns that the arrangement is vulnerable to abuse. To what extent any funds will make it to Venezuela’s state coffers, and whether any of the funds that do reach that destination are used for the healthcare system or infrastructure needs remains to be seen.

In another clear indication of who is running the show, Bloomberg reported on February 10 that oil tankers have already been rerouted from Venezuela to not only the United States, but to India, Europe, and Israel. If true, this would mark the first shipment of Venezuelan oil to Israel in years, although Bloomberg noted that Israel does not disclose crude suppliers, and tankers sometimes disappear from digital tracking systems near its ports.

Venezuelan Miguel Pérez Pirela, a senior government spokesperson, called the report a lie. But, as Trump declared in a more truthful statement during a January 23 interview with the New York Post, “They don’t have any oil. We take the oil.”

In line with Rodríguez’s state-of-the-union proposals, Venezuelan lawmakers approved a bill on January 29 granting private companies autonomy to operate under new oil contracts or in joint ventures, even if they are the minority stakeholders. This makes possible asset transfers and outsourcings. The new law also formalizes an oil production-sharing model secretly negotiated by Maduro with little-known energy firms. Politicians and experts have warned about the potential for corruption due to loose regulation of these deals.

The bill also reduces income tax for energy projects, replacing that with a yet unregulated “hydrocarbon tax.” While this may attract investors, former Venezuelan officials say the legislation is unconstitutional.

‘To Doubt is to Betray’

“There remains a strong base of support for Chavismo and the Bolivarian Revolution,” De Los Santos asserted, adding that the Venezuelan “Bolivarian” state remains intact, with the leadership of the government and PSUV, as well as the armed forces, in position to “stabilize institutions [and] reclaim public space by calling the masses to mobilize.”

It is true that thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets of Caracas protesting the kidnapping of their president. However, lest this patriotic fervor focused on Maduro and Flores boil over and foster opposition to the new administration’s course and to its concessions to U.S. imperialism, interior minister Cabello sent an ominous message.

Cabello was brought into Maduro’s inner circle following his prominent role in the brutal suppression of workers’ protests after the 2024 elections. At a January 6 rally in Caracas, he sported a blue cap, emblazoned with the Orwellian slogan “To Doubt is to Betray.”

‘Brest-Litovsk moment’?

To give a left veneer to his argument that the concessions to Washington by Venezuela’s current government constitute a necessary retreat in the course of “building socialism,” De Los Santos drew a parallel with concessions the new revolutionary government of Russia, led by the Bolsheviks, made in 1918 when it signed a peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk, in what is today Belarus.

In 1917, as World War I raged around them, the workers and peasants of Russia carried out a mighty revolution, overthrowing the stranglehold of the tsarist regime and semi-feudal class relations. Exhausted by years of war, they faced the monumental task of building the new Soviet republic under the threat of attack by many imperialist armies lined up on both their western and eastern borders.

Squeezed in that vise, with its troops fatigued and demoralized, the Bolshevik leadership made the decision to concede a vast amount of territory and resources in a separate peace agreement between their infant republic and the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. This treaty effectively pulled Soviet Russia out of World War I.

“Venezuela faces a similar ‘Brest-Litovsk moment,’” De Los Santos argued. “Isolated by right-wing regional governments and facing a near-total blockade, the revolutionary core is prioritizing the survival of the state as a rearguard base for future struggle.”

While 2026 Venezuela may seem similar to 1918 Russia at first glance, there are critical differences between the two that show De Los Santos stretched the historical parallel he cited to the breaking point.

First of all, the Bolshevik leadership laid bare the harsh truth about the decision to end Russian involvement in WWI in exchange for the surrender of territory, calling the treaty “onerous and humiliating.” They did not try to dress it up as a “balanced and respectful relationship,” as did Delcy Rodríguez.

The Bolshevik leaders explained and educated, unlike Rodríguez who obfuscated the truth and misled and confused working people.

The Brest-Litovsk treaty was hotly debated and ultimately ratified by the Russian Communist Party at its 7th congress in March 1918. In contrast, the leaders of Venezuela’s government have opened no such public discussion of these matters, since January 3, or after the passage of the January 29 law surrendering control of its assets to Washington.

The Russian Communist Party’s 7^th congress resolution explained, “Since we have no army, since our troops at the front are in a most critical state of demoralization, and since we must make use of every possibility, however slight, of a breathing-space before the imperialist attack on the Soviet Socialist Republic begins, the Congress recognizes the necessity of ratifying the most onerous and humiliating peace treaty which the Soviet government signed with Germany.”

At Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks surrendered roughly one million square miles of territory —  including land containing about 90% of Russia’s coalfields, 50% of its industry, 64% of its iron ore, and Ukraine’s breadbasket. However, understanding what they did not concede is critical to seeing the difference between what the Russian Revolution faced in 1918 and what Venezuela faces today.

The Soviet republic used the breathing space opened up by the Brest-Litovsk treaty to build the Red Army, at the same time preparing to defend the conquest of worker and peasant power by mobilizing the population and energizing an international solidarity movement in their defense.

The Bolsheviks did not retreat on the conquest of state power by workers and peasants — which took place through a social revolution that shook the world — and the subsequent drive to uproot the vestiges of feudalism and tsarist rule. They did not retreat on their course to firmly cement the rule of the workers and peasants. The Brest-Litovsk concessions enabled them to drive ahead on continued education and mobilization of the masses of working people throughout the Soviet federations — and the world — to defend their revolutionary course.

The class relations in Russia following its 1917 socialist revolution sharply contrast with Venezuela today. While Chávez, Maduro, and now Rodríguez (plus De Los Santos, more vigorously than Rodríguez) have proclaimed that “socialism in the 21st century” was and remains alive and well in Venezuela, the country has never overturned capitalism.

Unlike the Russian Revolution of 1917, the PSUV did not lead the country’s working people to take political power and use it in their own interests to abolish capitalist social relations and open the road to socialism — either under Chavez or under Maduro. Chávez instituted measures that provided openings along that road. But all those were largely overturned under Maduro, who consolidated capitalist rule.

The example of Cuba

During the past 25 years, Venezuela instituted certain reforms to provide relief to the lives of working people by tightening state control over some industries. At the same time, its government sought to appease the capitalist class, leaving economic power firmly in the hands of the country’s wealthiest families. To manage the inevitable contradictions, the government increasingly concentrated political power in the head of state.

This is not socialism — 21^st century or any other flavor. It has, as World-Outlook explained in September 2024, “the hallmarks of a Bonapartist regime, albeit one with a leftist veneer…. [It is] the opposite of strengthening the political power of workers and peasants.”

The experience in Venezuela stands in contrast to that of its close neighbor and ally Cuba, which embarked on its own revolutionary course in 1959.

Not long after rebel forces led by Fidel Castro^[1] toppled the hated, U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and marched into Havana, Cuba’s revolutionary government moved rapidly to nationalize the main means of production.

Just as Washington told Venezuela recently it could not send its oil to Cuba, back in the early 1960s, Washington told Cuba it could not buy oil from Russia. In response, Cuba didn’t negotiate. It nationalized the Shell refinery and other oil installations! It then organized to deal with Washington’s retaliation of cancelling its sugar quota by nationalizing the country’s massive sugar industry. It also carried out a thorough agrarian reform. And it dismantled the capitalist state, from its army to all its bourgeois institutions. Cuban revolutionaries took key positions in government, banking, and industry, forcing out those capitalists who did not leave voluntarily, all the while mobilizing the population to defend the gains of their revolution.

The Goliath to the north, enraged by Cuba’s break from its grasp, took one step after another to block the forward march of the Cuban people. But every time Washington punched, the Cuban people successfully defended themselves.

The leadership of the Cuban Revolution mobilized the masses, speaking openly about the imminent danger and preparing the people for the military invasion they knew was coming — unlike the secretive and collaborationist course of the Maduro regime.

When — barely 15 months after the revolutionary victory — Washington launched the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, U.S. and Cuban counterrevolutionary forces were met with fierce resistance by an entire population. They were sent running with their tails between their legs in a matter of 72 hours.^[2]

‘A process is not yet a revolution’

There is no “easy road to revolution,” Castro told Chilean students during a state visit in 1971. He described what he saw unfolding in Chile under then-president Salvador Allende, a social democrat, as a “revolutionary process.” But he added that “a process is not yet a revolution.” Castro reminded his audience that “it is a political axiom that there can be no revolution without the total destruction of the old bourgeois state.”

The idea of “socialism in the 21st century” is not a revolutionary program any more than it is a new idea. It is a euphemism for maintaining capitalist economic relations, while trying to win some social reforms. It is a rehashing of social democratic ideas that have been tried and repeatedly failed to lead to socialism for more than a century.

Chile was a tragic example of this reality. In 1973, the Allende government was overthrown. Allende — a courageous social democrat, the polar opposite of Maduro, but with similarities to Chávez — heroically died while trying to defend his democratically elected government against a rightist military coup largely instigated and backed by Washington.

The cause of Chilean workers and farmers, and of working people the world over, suffered a severe setback precisely because Allende’s Popular Unity government instituted significant social reforms but avoided infringing on bourgeois institutions or arming the Chilean people to defend their gains.

The situation in Chile in the early 1970s resembled to a degree what unfolded in Venezuela under Chávez in the first seven years of that Venezuelan leader’s rule. But it bears no resemblance to what unfolded in Venezuela under Maduro in the decade leading up to his kidnapping.

We must condemn Washington’s brutal violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and the U.S. smear campaign against Maduro and his government. But we should not apologize for or offer political support to a capitalist regime that has repeatedly used force and violence to quell workers’ discontent while falsely claiming to represent their interests.

To call the process in Venezuela “revolutionary” and cite it as the road to a new kind of socialism sows confusion and demoralization. To tell the Venezuelan workers and farmers, as De Los Santos does, that the betrayal of their hopes for the future is being made in the name of socialism derails whatever impulse toward resistance might remain.

Socialism has already been given a bad name, first and foremost by Joseph Stalin and the degeneration of the Soviet state under his rule to a system in many ways worse than capitalism.^[3] The mouthpieces for the capitalist class in the media and in government work tirelessly to promote the deep-going prejudice among working people against socialism that Stalinism engendered. We don’t need De Los Santos’ arguments to further this travesty.

Mobilizing the power of working people

Contrary to De Los Santos’ doomsday assessment of the invincibility of the U.S. military, the power of the masses can be mobilized to face even the most “high-tech” lethal force. But to unleash that power, a revolutionary leadership must be forged that does not obfuscate the lessons of history or prettify the missteps, failures, and bloody errors of the past.

A conscious working class, committed to the fight for power, aware of the pitfalls, and mobilized in action can defend itself even against the lasers, drones, robots, and technology of imperialism’s war machine and the hands that drive it.

The proof of this is the Cuban people, who for nearly 70 years have withstood sabotage and invasion, economic strangulation and endless campaigns of disinformation, spying and assassinations, all just 90 miles from the same power De Los Santos describes as invincible.

Cuba is testimony to what workers and peasants, mobilized with the power of the state at their service, can accomplish. Even today, as they prepare to fight even with bare hands against the Goliath to the north, they have not given an inch in their commitment to the conquests of their revolution and their socialist ideals.

Cuba represents the “moral and political compass” for the world’s working people, as Cuban leader Ernesto Limia Díaz put it in a recent interview. It points in completely the opposite direction than that of Maduro and his successor in Caracas, who offered up Venezuela’s patrimony to Washington in sordid deals.

While the rogues in Washington, drunk with power, bandy about more threats and aim their weaponry at Cuba, Iran, and elsewhere, there is a need for the broadest unity in action against their crimes.

At the same time, those who have the interests of the working class and its allies at heart have a duty to tell the unvarnished truth about what has transpired in Venezuela to help avoid such setbacks being unnecessarily repeated in the future.

The claims of De Los Santos and PSL take a wrecking ball to that goal.

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

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

NOTES

[1] Fidel Castro was the central leader of the Cuban revolution. He served as Cuba’s president from 1976 until his retirement in 2008. He died in 2016.

[2] Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) was where counterrevolutionary forces — organized and backed by the U.S. government during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, a Democrat and liberal icon — landed in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Cuban Revolution in April 1961. The population mobilized and repelled the attack in just three days.

[3] In 1917, the working class and peasantry of Russia carried out one of the most deep-going revolutions in world history. In a matter of months, the revolution led to an unprecedented leap in the country from a semi-feudal monarchy to a republic run by working people of city and countryside, opening the possibility of the socialist transformation of society in the former Tsarist empire and around the world. But the new workers and peasants’ republic remained isolated internationally when opportunities to extend the revolution in Germany and other advanced capitalist countries in Europe were lost. Under the pressure of unrelenting hostility from the capitalist powers, reaction set in within 10 years. A privileged bureaucratic caste led by Joseph Stalin violently crushed the opposition to its policies in the Bolshevik Party, which had led the revolution, and drove workers and peasants from political power.

Stalinism replaced internationalism, which is fundamental to Marxism, with the idea of “socialism in one country.” It used thuggery and outright murder against those who defended Marxism around the world. It transformed the parties of the Communist International into subservient appendages of Stalin’s regime in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Over decades, it became the cumulative expression of the corruption of communism and Marxism, in the name of communism and Marxism.

In his book The Revolution Betrayed, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, who was exiled by Stalin’s regime and eventually assassinated by its agents, gives the clearest and most detailed explanation of how and why this bureaucratic social layer was able to take and hold political power in the USSR.

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