The Councils Before Maduro!

Venezuela is fucked up. A nation hanging from the edge of a cliff by its broken and bloody fingernails. Thick noxious clouds of acrid black smoke gather around the capital of Caracas as the bodies continue to stack up. There is all out chaos in the streets as warring clans of half-starved people open fire on each other indiscriminately. The sides are ill-defined. There seem to be leftists, soldiers and cops in uniform on both ends of the melee. The government of Nicholas Maduro rounds up scores of hellions, holding the ones who don't get shot in the streets indefinitely in unknown locations. Meanwhile the western vaunted opposition launches full blown terrorist attacks, killing scores of soldiers and civilians alike. There are no clean hands in this fist fight. Everyone has lowered their standards of human decency to meet the standards of their nations new era of depravity. Few things are clear here. The streets and social media alike are awash with rumors and hearsay. One thing that is clear is that we're not in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela anymore. The once robust egalitarian experiment of Bolivarianism has devolved into violent statist hell and this was the point.

Venezuela is fucked up because its been fucked up, subjected to a concerted campaign of economic sabotage that started long before Maduro's absurd Dengist market socialist reforms. The United States launched this campaign through its numerous tentacles, public and private, in response to a democratic revolution that also began long before Hugo Chavez became its benevolent figure head. Under this relentlessly oppressive regime of crippling sanctions and monetary manipulation, a nation state of any kind would crumble beneath the pressure. Just add the constant threat of coup de tats and a return to the western sanctioned petro-fascism of past decades and even the most egalitarian experiments will take on increasingly statist and authoritarian policies to protect their revolution and the people it serves. The cruel irony being that by taking these desperate measures they adopt the very same attributes they're attempting to stave off in the name of a revolution that these very trends betray. An almost operatic tragedy of the commons.

This is America's preferred prescription for the troublesome ailment of radical leftism. In its purest forms, all strains of this red plague, be they Marxism, socialism, anarchism, even communism, are inherently anti-statist by nature. Class exists due to the construct of difference; race, gender, sex, religion or any other jerry-rigged category the establishment can conjure up to justify it's aristocratic difference when the only real difference is 'who has the gold?' Regardless of intent, the very existence of the state precludes difference based on the governments monopoly on the use of force. This means that the American superstate's best defense against the spread of stateless leftism is to violently push these movements to adopt increasingly statist policies upon the threat of total annihilation. Venezuela is far from the first. America has been at this game both at home and abroad for some time.

The Russian Revolution was originally a quite diverse and inclusive movement that included everything from anarchists to left-wing nationalists before America and its putrid World War Allies infected the barely formed Soviet Union with tens of thousands of invading dough-boys to assist the Czarist death squads in carrying out their White Terror. Even organizations like Nestor Makhno's Ukrainian anarchist Black Army, who had committed themselves to collaborating with the Bolsheviks against the Whites, ended up caught in the crossfire as the Soviet experiment descended into Atlantist manufactured chaos. The end result was that a deeply traumatized population returned to the perceived security of Czarism in the form of Josef Stalin, dooming the Soviets to the same fate as the Romanovs.

Fidel Castro appeared to have every intention of holding free elections before we mined Cuba's harbors and fouled their crops. The Black Panther Party were the most effective civil rights movement in the country before the siege mentality developed by Cointelpro caused them to splinter and adopt increasingly criminal behavior as a doomed survival mechanism. The poor people of Nicaragua only agreed to vote out their liberators in the Sandinista government after over a decade of living in an endless horror movie directed by Ronald Reagan's favorite coke fiends in the Contras. And Chile underwent a near identical campaign of economic sabotage and CIA skulduggery as Venezuela, ending in the suicide of President Salvador Allende, a man who championed an early form of E-democracy long before the foundation of the first Pirate Party, and his replacement with one of the most savage dictatorships in the history of the Western Hemisphere. What do you think will happen to Venezuela if it to falls prey to America's brand of third world "democracy"?

People often forget that the Bolivarian Revolution didn't begin with Chavez. It began with the establishment of the Barrio Assembly of Caracas in 1991, a decentralized network of autonomous communal councils that bare more resemblance to Catalonia than Cuba. With Chavez's encouragement, these communes spread across the countries poorest favelas and villages, empowering millions to take a direct role in their own governance. This is the side of the revolution that America fears most and if they can convince Maduro to crack down on these rebellious experiments then they will have won, regardless of whether or not they get their golden boy Guaido to play Kid Pinochet.

For this reason, the key objective of all those inspired by the Bolivarian Revolution shouldn't be to pick sides between two thugs but to support the Councils, regardless of who takes the reigns. They can kill a thousand Allendes but they are utterly powerless against the authority of a people with no need for authority and they know it. The people created Chavez. America's war on the people created both Maduro and Guaido. But only the people can keep the revolution alive. And we can only truly support them by keeping America on a leash and putting the Councils before Maduro.


Si se puede, dearest motherfuckers. Keep yourselves alive.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Comeback Kid by Sleigh Bells
*  Keep Yourself Alive by Queen
*  It's All Over Now by The Cranberries
*  Reign In Blood by Slayer
*  Wave of Mutilation by Kristin Hersh
*  I Fought the Law by Dead Kennedys
*  Number of the Beast by Zwan
*  Search and Destroy by the Stooges
*  Night Shift by Lucy Dacus
*  Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden