Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a goddamn commie, and I'm not talking Bernie Sanders here. I'm talking hardcore, blood-red, dyed-in-the-wool, revolutionary Marxism. I was a goddamn tankie and while I quoted Lenin and defended Putin, I tended to look to the Third World for inspiration. For a deeply closeted Queer kid outnumbered by pervy Catholic fundamentalists in hick country, there was something scrumptiously satisfying about other post-Papist outlaws taking on Washington's New Rome just south of the border. I was fascinated with Che Guevara, Salvador Allende and the Castro Brothers, but in the early aughts, Hugo Chavez was my greatest hope.
Everything about that man seemed impossible. He was a trash-talking, pot-bellied, serial David, going off on Goliath over and over and over again and somehow winning every fucking time. While Allende went down in a blaze defending democracy from the pulpit of Marxism and the Castros were forced to reduce Cuba to a floating citadel just to keep the Batista out, Hugo Chavez faced down the guns of American imperialism like Tony Montana and managed to come out of the maelstrom without ever missing an election.
It all should have been over by 2002 when the CIA organized another one of its spectacular Latin American coup d'etats. A phony protest movement was organized, high-ranking military officers had Chavez kidnapped and absconded to an unknown location, some corporate gangster named Pedro Carmena was arbitrarily installed as president, the National Assembly and Supreme Court were dissolved, and then-President George W. Bush recognized the whole farce as democracy. This is usually where the story ends and I've read that tragic story more times than I can count, from Augustus Sandino to Jacobo Arbenz. But then the Bolivarian Revolution flipped the script.
Hundreds of thousands of irate Venezuelans poured into the streets like a flash flood, many from the most impoverished favelas in the country, swarming the national palace and demanding their democracy back. When Uncle Sam rented thugs to open fire on these people, the people stood their ground and fired back. The lower ranks of the Venezuelan Army, staffed largely by denizens of those same barrios, were inspired to do the unthinkable. They turned their guns on their commanding officers and brought Chavez back from the dead. And just like that, what had started out as a carefully orchestrated American putsch had resulted in a spontaneous anti-American uprising. Uncle Sam was humiliated, Venezuela was galvanized, and I was officially in love with the Bolivarian Revolution.
Babylon kept on trying but their attempts just kept on backfiring in the most spectacular ways. When Wall Street manufactured an economic crisis by colluding with the fat cats running Venezuela's various state-owned industries in a lockout that froze oil production for two months straight, the workers toiling beneath them formed democratic councils and brought those resources back closer to the people that lived on top of them than they had ever been. When the National Endowment for Democracy dumped millions of dollars into building up a phony opposition movement, Chavez kicked their asses fair and square in elections that even Jimmy Carter couldn't bring himself to delegitimize and inspired a wave of other left-wing populist fire breathers across Latin America to do the same.
Soon the CIA had their hands full of democracies to overthrow from Evo Morales in Bolivia to Rafael Correa in Ecuador, from the Kirchners in Argentina to Lula and Dilma in Brazil. It was almost as if Che Guevara and Salvador Allende had birthed two, three, many Vietnams at the ballot box and started a storm too wild for firepower to pacify. Then something truly tragic happened that seemed to turn this entire Pink Tide into a hurricane of disillusionment; Hugo Chavez turned out to be human being after all.
That fantastic human missile crisis died very suddenly and somewhat suspiciously of cancer in 2013 and his successor, then-Vice President Nicholas Maduro, seemed to waste very little time betraying his revolution. He very quickly turned the Bolivarian Republic into a giant bludgeon for him to maintain the power he had practically stumbled into over Hugo's corpse, starting by dismantling the various workers councils, misiones, comunas and collectives that had created the architecture of direct democracy that had served as the backbone of Hugo's revolution and then concentrating their power back into a bureaucratic elite while repressing anyone who stood in this pink oligarchy's way beneath a banner of Dengist-style state socialism.
By 2015, Maduro was ruling the nation largely by decree, by 2017, he was castrating the National Assembly and rewriting the Constitution that Hugo Chavez and millions of other Venezuelans had risked their lives to preserve, and by 2018, the Bolivarian Revolution was dead and I was heartbroken. However, in my disillusioned grief, I was also forced to take a second look at the Revolution altogether, and I was haunted by what I found. While Hugo certainly did appear to do all that he could for the Venezuelan poor, he had also steadfastly relied on many pre-existing state powers to do so and in the process consistently undermined his own revolution's grass roots civilian infrastructure.
The most blatant and egregious example of this was the way Chavez managed Venezuela's state oil company, PDUSA, which was actually a relic of the neoliberal oligarchy that he was elected to confront. This humongous corporate behemoth continues to represent 90% of Venezuela's economy and was largely dependent on Chevron to function before Donald Trump's escalated embargo pushed Maduro to replace them with Chinese capitalist roadsters who now essentially own the nation's economy thanks to $62.5 billion dollars in predatory loans.
But it was actually Hugo who betrayed the workers councils who had saved his ass from the economic crisis of 2003 by colluding with their duplicitous bosses. In return for their cooperation, the Bolivarian Republic retained this same bureaucratic management system once the crisis was averted so long as they agreed to finance massive welfare state programs that kept their workers distracted from the fact that they had basically just proven they didn't even require a state to achieve true economic democracy.
While Chavez publicly rallied support for these autonomous councils, he continued to rely on the exact same top-down system that had long oppressed the Venezuelan people in what appeared to be a foolish attempt to liberate them. Even when this farce managed to temporarily benefit the people it did nothing to change the imbalance of power between them and the elites. At best, this arrangement swapped one raft of oligarchs for another, turning "revolutionary" civil servants into the new bourgeoisie, but mostly it just left a system designed for oppression largely intact and only one strongman away from being turned back into another meat grinder.
Soon, I began to question everything. I looked back at my revisionist history books and began to see this same tragedy repeat itself over and over again, from Lenin shackling the Soviets and building a centralized bureaucratic monstrosity that would ultimately offer Boris Yeltsin the ability to sell the Russian economy off in chunks the size of continents to Chairman Mao laying down the industrial foundation that turned China into the world's largest sweatshop plantation.
The problem was and has always been the state itself. As long as there is a system in place that offers one class of people a monopoly on the use of force, the government will always be a den for despotism regardless of whether the scam is dressed up in the trappings of socialism, capitalism, democracy or nationalism. Just so long as the sanctity of the state is left intact, the results will always ultimately be the same.
This was the painful revelation that ultimately led a Bolivarian-Guevarist like me to embrace free market anti-capitalism and post-left anarchism, but some things never change, and this includes my solidarity with what's left of the Bolivarian Revolution as it faces down the barrels of total war at the hands of an empire that it had humiliated one too many times.
America's war against the Bolivarian Revolution never changed. In fact, if anything, it has only grown crueler with age. After five major coup attempts and a dozen distinct rounds of sanctions, the United States has affectively crippled what had until fairly recently been a fully functioning economy which has in turn triggered an almost unprecedented economic crisis.
In 2014, Venezuela's GDP stood shoulder to shoulder with Brazil's at $14,000. By 2024, it was closer to Bangladesh at $3,870. As a result of this medieval style siege accelerated by every single American president from Obama to Trump, 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled for their lives, constituting the single largest displacement in modern history with 25% of the nation's population now living abroad as refugees. Some might argue such mass sadism constitutes a form of genocide; however, this Latin American Nakba is also primed for some serious blowback.
That's because the other thing that hasn't changed for Venezuela is the fire that stokes its poorest citizens to fight back, specifically the lumpenproletariats who make up Maduro's paramilitary Colectivos. While the Bolivarian oligarchy may have turned these civilian street fighters into a glorified Red Guard, they remain largely autonomous in structure, and they are the true heirs to Hugo Chavez because they were also his revolution's founding fathers.
The Colectivos began as the armed wing of Venezuela's Communal Councils, autonomous favela democracies that trace their roots back to the leftist guerrilla movements of the 1960s. These organizations may have been reduced to Maduro's errand boys in recent years, but the last time America very briefly took control of the streets of Caracas in 2002, it was this same rambunctious squad of Robin Hood gangbangers who took it back with steel pipes and Brazilian off-brand Berettas.
Now, there are dozens of Colectivos operating in 16 of Venezuela's 23 states with numbers as high as 8,000. If Donald Trump is stupid enough to play Iraq with Venezuela, he won't be fighting fat thugs like Maduro; that pig will roll quicker than Saddam; he will be fighting a guerrilla war against the true bastard fathers of Hugo's revolution. The Colectivos will become the Sadrists of the Western Hemisphere, and I will support their fight for the same reason that Murray Rothbard supported the Vietcong. Because sovereignty is sacred and solidarity is bigger than any one ideology.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks
* Here's Where the Story Ends by the Sundays
* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones
* My Hero by Foo Fighters
* Rise Above by Black Flag
* Suffragette City by David Bowie
* Fatal Flaw by Titus Andronicus
* Cochise by Audioslave
* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats
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