Venezuela - January 31st 2019

This article concentrates the political and programmatic conclusions of the statement of the leadership of the Collective for the Refoundation of the IV International-FLTI, presented as an editorial in the paper Democracia Obrera #96, on the international conditions that shape the events that are shaking Venezuela and Latin America.
Here we state the conditions and premises of the program to face the imperialist attack upon Latin America, particularly in Venezuela.

US imperialism comes by direct control of Latin America. Maduro and the bolibourgeoisie are on their knees

Only the worker and peasant revolution can save Venezuela
from the claws of Trump and Wall Street

We must disarm the officers of the Armed Forces, the nest of the Trump coupists! Weapons for the people!
For the people to eat, we have to expropriate the bankers and the US capitals in Venezuela!

 

Venezuela is all the way crossed to its foundations by an acute crisis of dominance. US imperialism has launched an onslaught to impose the direct colonization of the nation by the hand of the oligarchy. Trump and his lackeys of the OAS only recognize Guaidó as the only president, the young representative of the oligarchy, President of the National Assembly.

Yankee imperialism comes for everything ... The Bolivarians opened the door to him strangulating the anti-imperialist struggle of the masses of Venezuela and Latin America

The recent events show that Maduro does no longer serve as an instrument to the capitalist system and to imperialism in Venezuela. Imperialism considers him to be a "squeezed lemon". The native bourgeoisie has already fulfilled its historic role of disorganizing and defeating the enormous anti-imperialist struggle of the workers of that country and of Latin America, as it is explained in the editorial of the paper Democracia Obrera 96.
In previous decades in Venezuela, the governments of the Punto Fijo pact regime were the ones that tried to impose generalized famine conditions to pay the IMF. But they were defeated by the Caracazo and a huge mass offensive.

Today it is the Bolivarians -that is to say those who expropriated that struggle with the colonels, now generals, who crushed the Caracazo in 1989, with 3,000 dead- who managed to impose the plans of famine, high cost of living, hike in prices of gasoline, etc. that not even Carlos Andrés Pérez could impose back then.
Maduro and the generals have plunged the exploited into a hell of hunger, misery and death, with 3 million Venezuelan refugees going around Latin America as outcasts without land. Maduro has already done his job. The scam of the "Bolivarian Revolution" comes to an end.

The masses do not defend the Bolivarian government as they did with that of Chávez against the 2002 coup. Why would they do it, if this government, in the name of "socialism" and "anti-imperialism", imposed the worst misery and repression to guarantee the businesses to the bankers and the IMF?
Now, after decades, the continuators of the work of Carlos Andrés Pérez come to settle the North American domination and finish colonizing Venezuela, and with it to punish all the masses of Latin America.
The way in for USA to Venezuela is opened. The Bolivarians opened the door for the reaction to come and complete their work.

Maduro and the bolibourgeoisie, kneeling down to the onslaught of Trump and the oligarchy

What is in dispute today is which bourgeois gang will control the Bolivarian Armed Forces' officers to crush the masses: if the scam of the “Bolivarian Revolution” continues to crush the masses or if the officer caste changes their shirt to the one that truly has, that of the assassins of the Caracazo.
This central issue is not defined in the National Assembly, in the Constituent Assembly or in any pseudo-democratic institution of the Bolivarian Constitution regime, but in the US embassy and in the barracks of the Bolivarian generals, from which the Pinochet will come to crush the people.
Maduro and the bolibourgeoisie have already surrendered in advance. While imperialism openly discharges Maduro and calls the generals to depose him, he did not dare to touch a single centimeter of property to the US capitals and the oligarchy in Venezuela.
In the semi-colonial countries the two fundamental classes that face each other are imperialism on the one hand and the proletariat on the other hand. Maduro knows that the only way he can resist the imperialist offensive is to arm the workers and the people, which he will never do.
The struggle of the armed masses against imperialism and the oligarchy would immediately turn into a fierce struggle against the generals and the government for bread, which would attack the property of the entire bourgeoisie and the transnationals. That is why the boliburgeoisie, which is an owner class and junior partner of imperialism, fears armed workers more than an imperialist invasion, although the latter endangers their fate.
That's why his rhetoric will be silenced quickly as soon as the first shot is fired. This was always the case pf the coward native bourgeoisies, as in Chile in 1973 with Allende (who preferred to die rather than to arm the workers), in Argentina in 1955 with Peron fleeing and letting the reaction to massacre the workers in Plaza de Mayo... or in Venezuela in 2002, when Chavez surrendered to Carmona and Bush.

 

The old World Social Forum and its heirs of the international "new left": co-responsible for the tragic situation of the Venezuelan proletariat

All the servitude of the treacherous leaderships of the working class is concentrated in Venezuela, where there are Bolivarians "without battles", "socialists" tied to the apron-strings of the bourgeoisie, who all these years said that "there was no chance to fight against Maduro" because "that would mean playing the US game".
Hundreds of workers 'struggles confronted Maduro -and Chávez before him- and they were in charge of putting the workers' movement on their knees in front of the Chavist Labour Ministry so that it "lauds" in favor of the workers. Groups of former Trotskyists such as Marea Socialista, Partido Socialismo y Libertad (of the UIT) or small groups such as the LTS were in charge of these tasks. For years, leaders like Orlando Chirinos, along with Stalinism, dedicated themselves to gathering votes for Chávez in the elections, such as the campaign for 10 million votes for Chávez."
Stalinism and tens of currents of the reformist left presented the declining Venezuelan semicolonial capitalism, submitted to the super-banks of Wall Street and London City, which plunged the people into hunger and misery, like the "socialism of the 21st century".
The biggest blow to the working class is to make them believe that socialism is hunger, repression and bullets against the exploited. The Castro brothers already said it: socialism cannot exist anymore, not even in Cuba, while they raised the US flag in Havana.
Therefore, to subject workers to the scam of the "Bolivarian Revolution" is to strengthen imperialism so that it comes back in full to its "backyard".

All these currents, yesterday at the World Social Forum and today as animators of the international "new left", are co-responsible for this tragedy of the Venezuelan and Latin American labour movement.
And now they regret that there is no alternative to Maduro and the oligarchy that has risen to hand over Venezuela to the US recolonization!
The spoils of the native bourgeoisies, their deceit and their cowardice, will also bring to the grave all their leftist and reformist agents who conspired with them against the workers' movement and their revolutionary struggles.

To defeat the advance of the US and the oligarchy..
Yankees out of Venezuela and Latin America! We have to disarm the murderous generals and arm the people!

To defeat the imperialist offensive, it is necessary to break with all subjugation of workers to the scam of the "Bolivarian Revolution" and the plans of the oligarchy.
Only then the working class willl be able to raise a program to weld the revolutionary alliance of the workers with the poor peasants of Venezuela, the only class alliance that can crush the attempts of coup of imperialism and the oligarchy, supported by the murderous officer caste.
To crush imperialism and the OAS, we must fight as in the Caracazo and open the way to socialist revolution.

Out with the US imperialism of Venezuela!
Enough with that scam of the "Bolivarian Revolution"!
We have to disarm the murderous generals who are preparing to impose the US domination by blood and fire...
Weapons for the workers and the people! Let’s march to the barracks to look for the rank-and-file soldiers! Committees of soldiers who dismiss the executioners of the people!
Let’s build up the supply committees, the factory committees and the popular assemblies in the neighborhoods!
To eat: Not another penny to pay the foreign debt! We must expropriate without compensation and place under workers' control all the oil and mining transnationals, the banking and the big trade chains!
Confiscation of all the land of the landed oligarchy! The land for the poor peasants!

Enough of governments of employers, military and oligarchs famine-causing of the people ...
For a provisional revolutionary government of workers and poor peasants, supported by the armed committees of workers, peasants and soldiers, and emerged from the ruin of the regime of the Bolivarian Constitution!

Jacobo García
 For the LCT of Venezuela