Hands off Venezuela: Understanding and Defending the Bolivarian Revolution
Red Star stands alongside DSA in opposition to the United States government’s acts of escalating aggression against Venezuela, including the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro. In an effort to help contextualize this event and support people who may want to learn more about Venezuela at this unprecedented moment of crisis, we wanted to share some of Red Star members’ favorite resources for understanding Venezuela's socialist project, including its popular governance, its situation in the Latin American context, as well as the U.S.'s decades-long war to subvert it.
- “Our Own Path to Socialism,” a collection of Hugo Chávez’s speeches, outlines much of Chávez’s revolutionary leadership in his own words
- In “Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution,” Marta Harnecker, a Marxist theorist and advisor to Hugo Chávez, compiled their discussions into a chronicle of the Bolivarian revolution, which Chávez led and Maduro succeeded
- Dario Azzellini’s “Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela” describes the depth of revolutionary change that has taken place in Venezuela since the advent of the Bolivarian Revolution, and the kind of power that has arisen from the grassroots as part of it
- Geo Maher also wrote of the history of the Bolivarian revolution in “We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution”, detailing the social forces and dynamics that supported the leadership of Chávez and Maduro
- Maher also wrote “Building the Commune”, an exploration of the different forms of popular democracy that were being developed in Venezuela’s Communes
- Venezuela has been featured repeatedly in the pages of Monthly Review, such as this interview with Cira Pascual Marquina and Ángel Prado
- Pascual Marquina, along with Chris Gilbert, is co-author of “Venezuela, the Present as Struggle”, a collection of testimonials from Venezuela’s revolutionary grassroots
- Citations Needed has repeatedly covered Venezuela:
- Vis-a-vis US propaganda against “authoritarianism” and “dictatorships”, highlighting in particular the way that American leftists have distanced themselves from the Global South to laud European social democratic projects https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/ep-50-anti-imperialism-and-msnbc-approved-socialism
- In relation to the “drug war” rhetoric we see Trump repeating today, and the way the media in the United States has played a role in supporting and normalizing the intervention that Trump has carried out https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-as-trump-attacks-venezuela-media-takes-his-absurd-drug-war-pretext-at-face-value
- And in their discussions of American sanctions, a repudiation of the idea that US-imposed sanctions against Venezuela and other enemy states are anything but tools of collective punishment, mass immiseration, and pretext for further intervention https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-106-the-sanitization-of-sanctions
- RevLeft Radio’s coverage of Venezuela, including a 2017 interview with Geo Maher on the popular forms of the revolutionary project and a 2019 interview with Mike Prysner covering the attempted coup which sought to place Juan Guiadó in power
- Eduardo Galeano’s “Open Veins of Latin America” is also a worthwhile introduction to the historical context of European settler-colonialism in Latin America
Red Star stands in solidarity with the Bolivarian project and people. We hope for the swift end of these attacks and a humbling renunciation of the Yanqui-imperialist agenda on the international stage. We believe in the triumph of the Bolivarian revolution against U.S. aggression. We urge anyone who supports the cause of socialism and an end to U.S. imperialism to take action to bring an end to this campaign of lawlessness, greed, and plunder, especially as the U.S. continues to agitate against other progressive and socialist projects in the region, from Colombia to Cuba to Mexico. Join DSA’s “Hands off Venezuela” mass call this Tuesday at 9 Eastern/6 Pacific, and sign up for the IC’s Venezuela working group to get involved.