This article claims to denounce American imperialism. In reality, it recycles an old political imposture: the defence of an authoritarian state in the name of anti-imperialism. Under cover of radicality, it slides towards a deeply counter-revolutionary position: « sovereignism ».
To present Maduro above all as a « victim » of the United States is to deliberately erase the material reality experienced by the exploited in Venezuela. Repression of social struggles, criminalization of strikes, militarization of working-class neighbourhoods, collapse of living conditions: all this disappears behind a narration where the state becomes a bulwark to defend.
The heart of the problem is this:
The article confuses the proletariat with its state.
Criticizing external state intervention in no way justifies laundering a regime that oppresses its own population. Oppression is not only external; It can be internal, bureaucratic, military, exercised by a national bourgeoisie under the guise of « socialism » in reality has nothing of socialism.
Speaking of « the kidnapping of Maduro », the text adopts the language of state diplomacy, as if the central issue was the attack on a head of state and not the overall domination of all states, whether hegemonic or peripheral. It is a total reversal of anarchosyndicalistic values that the author breaks with historical line of AIT a-natiolism.
This type of anti-imperialist position is dated, campist and dangerous.It values militarism gears capitalism to the commercial logic of life and destruction of the living.
He aligns the struggles on state blocks, chooses one master against another, and calls it resistance. Neither Washington nor Caracas are allies. The exploited have nothing to gain from defending a government on the pretext that it is in conflict with the United States.
The notion of imperialism and anti-imperialism is a chauvinistic vision derived directly from Bolshevism. It systematically leads to the defence of one State perceived as the victim of the other, while both are tools at the service of the bourgeoisie.
Sovereignty is a state fiction, always used against workers and the population.
What the article refuses to say is that the enemy is not only the dominant government, but the state form itself.
The mobilization of the self-organization of the proletariat in Venezuela consists of the social revolution against the colonizing national and external state which is expressed by the application of libertarian socialism.
A truly revolutionary position is clear and unambiguous:
against the campist, against sovereignism, against nationalism, against all states.
Solidarity with proletarian struggles, not with governments.
Live the Social Revolution !