Venezuela in Trump's crosshairs: Interview with Anderson Bean

The kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores shocked people around the world. While it built upon the long and horrifying history of US intervention in the Americas, it was a sign that the Trump administration is taking an even more aggressive imperialist posture towards the region.

While the socialist left across the globe has strongly denounced this disgraceful action, it has also sparked debate about the nature of the Venezuelan government. When Hugo Chávez was president most leftists, inside and outside of Venezuela, believed that it was a socialist government or at least moving in a socialist direction. Under Maduro the government became openly authoritarian and pro-business, leading to a deep erosion of popular support.

While there remain plenty of slavishly pro-Maduro leftist commenters, ready to denounce any criticism as aiding US imperialism, this shift has led to many socialists becoming more critical of the government. However this opens up a whole series of complicated questions about the course of recent Venezuelan history.

In this interview Marxist Left Review discusses these issues with Anderson Bean, who has written widely about Venezuela under both Chávez and Maduro. He provides an account of recent Venezuelan politics that cuts against both the lies of the US government and the uncritical approach of sections of the international socialist left.

“The left’s task is not to choose between imperial tutelage and authoritarian neoliberalism”, argues Bean, “[i]t is to defend sovereignty while fighting for an independent, democratic, working-class alternative: restoring labour rights, freeing political prisoners, rebuilding unions, ending secret privatisations, and breaking with imperial capital”.

MLR: On 3 January, the US government launched a brazen attack in Venezuela, kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. While this action came after months of building tensions, and there is a long history of US imperialist intervention in the region, it is still quite shocking. Why did the Trump administration do this?

Anderson Bean (AB): Before saying why the Trump administration did this, I want to briefly dispel some of the purported reasons for this attack. First, Trump and Rubio described the operation as a “police” action and part of a “counter-narcotics” campaign, yet drug trafficking routes and data do not support this claim. Cocaine largely enters the US through the Pacific, fentanyl through Mexico, and Venezuela is a transit country rather than a major producer. As in earlier imperial wars, “drugs” functioned as a floating signifier – much like “terrorism” or “weapons of mass destruction” – invoked to legitimise unlimited violence without evidence, judicial oversight, or accountability. Also, just a month prior Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández who was convicted in the US on drug trafficking charges.

Second, this had nothing to do with democracy promotion or Maduro’s authoritarianism. Trump made this clear when he failed to mention the word “democracy” even once in his post-invasion press conference. In the same press conference Trump openly declared that Washington would “run” Venezuela until a “safe transition” was complete. After the bombing Trump also threatened the democratically elected presidents of Colombia and Mexico, these elections are contested by no one. Moreover just a month before the invasion of Venezuela Trump entertained the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who has never won an election.

Third, it is not the case that Trump invaded because Maduro refused to negotiate. Maduro, throughout 2025, sought rapprochement, releasing US prisoners, cooperating with Trump’s deportation policy, and offered sweeping concessions: dominant US control over oil and mineral assets, reversal of exports away from China, and the sidelining of Russian, Iranian and Chinese firms.

For the reasons that Trump did attack Venezuela there are several: Venezuela is a territory with extraordinary conditions for initiating new cycles of capital accumulation; to gain access to the largest proven oil reserves in the world; shoring up dollar reserves by preventing countries in the region from increasingly shifting toward trade and reserves in other currencies; immigration panic politics where much of MAGA has built its political identity around the idea that immigrants are responsible for social problems in the US and only removing Maduro from power can put a stop to it; appealing to the Florida, Cuban American bases in the lead up to the 2026 midterm elections, diverting attention from the Epstein case.

But the most decisive reason for the attack is a systemic one, it is a response to the US’s hegemonic decline and attempt to reassert hemispheric dominance. It is part of a broader imperial struggle over markets, raw materials, trade routes and spheres of influence amid an intensifying crisis of global capitalism. The goal is to deny non-hemispheric competitors’ control over strategic assets in the hemisphere. It is an effort to reassert US hemispheric dominance under conditions of decline and to use Venezuela as a demonstration case for the region, especially to discipline states that hedge with China, Russia, or Iran. Venezuela – cheap labour, dismantled regulations, abundant resources, and a shattered social fabric – is treated as both a warning and an opportunity: a place to expel rival powers and reimpose, by force if necessary, imperial order.

MLR: What has the response in the US been to the Venezuela attack? How have the Democrats reacted? What about the US left?

AB: In the US, the mainstream response split into celebration on the right and procedural pushback from most Democrats. Senate and House Democratic leaders focused on how Trump acted rather than what he did: demanding briefings, citing the War Powers Resolution, criticising the lack of congressional authorisation, and seeking to constrain further military action rather than issuing a full-throated condemnation of regime change or Trump’s claim that the US would “run” Venezuela. This is hardly surprising, given that Democrats and Republicans alike have spent decades undermining Venezuela: Obama initiated the illegal sanctions regime, Biden largely continued Trump’s murderous “maximum pressure”, and Democrats supported regime-change efforts like recognising Juan Guaidó in 2019. Even figures associated with the party’s “progressive wing” have echoed this framework at times – Bernie Sanders himself once referred to Hugo Chávez as a “dead communist dictator”.

A small number of Democrats went further, calling the attack unconstitutional or illegal, but these were exceptions rather than the rule, and even sharper criticisms were generally funnelled into procedural oversight rather than an anti-imperialist or anti-war critique.

The response on the US left looked very different. Within hours, “Hands Off Venezuela” protests were called in dozens of cities across the country. Hundreds demonstrated in places like New York City and Washington, DC, and even in small towns turnout was striking – I live in a small town in North Carolina where hundreds of people showed up despite the call going out less than 24 hours in advance. These mobilisations were explicitly anti-war and anti-imperialist, rejecting US intervention outright. Of course to successfully reverse Trump’s imperial encroachments in Venezuela there would need to be a far larger and more sustained anti-imperialist movement both here in the US and in Venezuela. Rebuilding a militant anti-war movement is one of the most important tasks for the left today.

At the same time, the protests reflected an ongoing debate on the left: whether opposing US imperialism requires political support for Maduro. Many of us argue it does not – and that conflating anti-imperialist politics with defence of an authoritarian, anti-worker government ultimately weakens the struggle against empire.

MLR: Delcy Rodríguez has taken over as the president of Venezuela. Debates abound about her role and the role of other sections of the Venezuelan government in the capture of Maduro, and their relationship with the Trump administration. What do you think about these debates, and how has the Venezuelan government responded to the US’s attack?

AB: I think at this point we can only speculate, but the speed of the operation, the minimal resistance, the failure to release transparent casualty reports immediately, the choice to recognise Rodríguez rather than Machado, the apparent readiness of the remaining leadership to continue governing and major concessions offered to Trump all suggest that sectors of the ruling elite were willing to sacrifice Maduro to preserve the structure of power. This reading is further reinforced – though not proven – by the fact that the US Department of Justice, in its charging documents, shifted from accusing Maduro of belonging to the “Cartel de los Soles” and engaging in “narco-terrorism” toward narrower allegations centred on corruption and illicit business dealings, a reframing that could be interpreted as leaving room for sentence mitigation or a future negotiating arrangement, whether contemplated before or after the capture.

Rodriguez initially demanded Maduro’s liberation and used nationalist language about defending Venezuela, but she soon shifted tone towards “collaboration” and “cooperation” with the United States and a return to “normal activities”. The defence ministry’s messaging has emphasised calm and returning to work, not mass mobilisation or popular defence. There has been an increased military/police presence in the streets – more consistent with internal control and stabilisation than with organising resistance from below. This absence of mass popular defence persisted despite the fact that some mobilisations did take place, largely promoted by the government or by aligned sectors, but these were limited in scope and tightly controlled rather than expressions of broad, autonomous popular resistance.

Rodríguez’s language since the attack is also striking: after a US operation targeted civilian infrastructure, that killed civilians and abducted the head of state, she describes her conversations with Trump as “courteous”, conducted in a “framework of mutual respect”, and oriented toward a “bilateral work agenda for the benefit of our peoples”. Trump has responded in kind, publicly praising Delcy and speaking glowingly about cooperation and Venezuela’s “future”, as if the relationship were between partners rather than aggressor and victim. Delcy has gone further, repeatedly invoking “cooperation”, “shared development”, and even meeting with CIA director John Ratcliffe to discuss joint operations – language and behaviour that actively normalise US tutelage. This rhetorical normalisation matters because it blurs the line between coercion and collaboration, reinforcing suspicions that sectors of the ruling elite prioritised stability and regime continuity over sovereignty. Whatever one calls it – collusion or compliance under duress – it is not the posture of an anti-imperialist government responding to an act of war.

The regime’s priority seemed to be stability and continuation – not sovereignty or resistance. What remains is Madurismo without Maduro: an authoritarian apparatus administering US demands under duress – a neocolonial state in practice if not in name.

Most revealing is the rapid restructuring of oil under US supervision. Under the new scheme, Venezuelan crude is being sold through US-authorised intermediaries, with proceeds deposited in bank accounts administered by the United States and disbursed at US discretion for tightly specified uses – effectively giving Washington leverage over Venezuela’s budgetary policy and access to its most important resource. In practice, that is semi-colonial subjugation, whatever language of “cooperation” is used to present it.

The combination of speed, silence, stabilisation-oriented messaging and immediate economic reordering under US control makes “Madurismo without Maduro” feel less like resistance than managed accommodation.

MLR: Many on the left believe that the Venezuelan government is a socialist and anti-imperialist government. It doesn’t seem like many Venezuelans have rallied to defend it despite the US’s disgraceful actions. What is the nature of Maduro’s government?

AB: Maduro’s government was not a socialist government in the sense that matters most: workers do not democratically control the means of production, and Venezuela’s economy remains overwhelmingly organised around production for private profit, with the private sector dominating major areas of economic life. Even at the height of the Chávez era – during the commodity boom that financed real gains in poverty reduction and social spending – there was no decisive transformation of property relations, no break with extractivism, and no sustained confrontation with domestic and transnational capital; the model remained dependent on oil rents and global markets.

When the commodity boom ended and oil prices fell, the underlying fragility of that model became brutally clear. The key political question became: who would pay for the crisis – capital or labour? Under Maduro, the answer has overwhelmingly been workers and the popular sectors. While maintaining socialist rhetoric, his government pursued an increasingly authoritarian, anti-worker neoliberal program: collapsing real wages (from region-leading levels to near-starvation), weakening labour rights and collective bargaining, expanding repression against unionists and left critics, and opening the economy through privatisation and secretive deals that bypass constitutional oversight. One specific directive was Memorandum 2792 which labour leader Orlando Chirino described as the most reactionary and anti-worker legal instrument anywhere in the world in the last thirty years.

A stark example of this rightward turn is the Arco Minero del Orinoco. In 2016, Maduro opened a vast territory for mineral exploitation and invited transnational corporations to bid for concessions under extremely favourable terms – what one scholar aptly called “colonialism by invitation”. The project has been environmentally and socially devastating, displacing communities (including Indigenous populations), poisoning rivers, and deepening a predatory extractivism that abandons the sovereignty and ecological commitments that once animated the best parts of the Bolivarian process.

This is also why many Venezuelans have not rallied to defend the government, even in the face of disgraceful US aggression. Under Chávez, anti-imperial defence could align with a lived experience of social progress and mass participation from below. Under Maduro, years of immiseration, corruption and repression have demobilised and fractured those popular forces, hollowing out the very social base that could defend sovereignty from below. The tragedy is that US sanctions and intervention have massively worsened the crisis and inflicted real harm, but Maduro’s response has not been to deepen popular power and confront capital – it has been to manage the crisis through concessions to capital, austerity for workers, and tighter political control.

So the nature of Maduro’s government is best understood as a corrupt, increasingly authoritarian, capitalist state that uses socialist and anti-imperialist language while implementing policies that resemble a rightward, neoliberal turn. That doesn’t make US aggression any less criminal – but it helps explain why “defending Venezuela” cannot mean uncritical defence of Maduro, and why solidarity has to be with Venezuelan working people organising against both imperialism and the government’s own anti-worker project.

MLR: Many on the socialist left would acknowledge that things aren’t great in Venezuela but argue that this is simply due to the harsh economic sanctions on the country by the US. What do you make of this argument?

AB: It is undeniable that US sanctions have caused immense pain, hardship and death in Venezuela, and any serious analysis has to include a discussion on sanctions. The most damaging measures – especially those imposed in 2017 and 2019 – cut Venezuela off from US financial markets, blocked the restructuring or issuance of new debt, froze assets abroad, and sharply restricted oil exports. These sanctions crippled PDVSA,^[1] slashed foreign-currency earnings, and made it vastly harder to import food, medicine, fuel additives and spare parts. They did not create Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis, but they dramatically intensified it and made recovery extraordinarily difficult. One well-known estimate found that sanctions contributed to more than 40,000 excess deaths between 2017 and 2018 alone, a staggering human toll that should never be minimised.

But two things have to be said clearly. First, the crisis did not begin with sanctions. Venezuela was already in a deep crisis before the first financial sanctions of 2017 were imposed. The end of the global commodity boom exposed a rentier model that had never been transformed. Instead of using oil revenue to diversify the economy and invest in domestic industry, the state massively expanded imports during the boom years. Local production was priced out, neglected, and hollowed out, leading to severe deindustrialisation and dependence on imports. When oil prices fell, that model collapsed.

At the same time, exchange-control policies became a massive engine of corruption. An enormously overvalued currency allowed elites – state officials, military-linked actors, and private importers, both pro-government and opposition – to access dollars at preferential rates. In practice, this meant an extraordinary transfer of oil rent from the state to private actors: every time the government sold $10, it effectively gifted roughly $9.50. Much of this was outright fraud – goods were never imported, and billions simply vanished. Two of Chávez’s former ministers, Jorge Giordani and Héctor Navarro, calculated that the government cannot account for over $300 billion – nearly a third of the roughly $1 trillion in revenue collected over a decade.

Then there is the question of foreign debt. While ordinary Venezuelans were earning starvation wages, prices were exploding, and three out of four people reported losing weight because they couldn’t afford enough food; the government slashed imports of food, medicine, and public services. Yet at the same time, PDVSA paid roughly $2 billion to international bondholders. This wasn’t about fear of default – Venezuela was already treated as being in default by most non-Wall Street creditors. Rather, the crisis itself became a site of accumulation, with insiders buying discounted bonds and benefiting personally from repayment. In 2017, the Washington Post even dubbed Venezuela “Wall Street’s favourite socialist revolution” because of the regime’s priority of debt repayment over social needs.

Second, even acknowledging the devastating impact of sanctions does not excuse or explain Maduro’s authoritarian and anti-worker turn. Sanctions did not require banning left parties from elections, jailing union activists, or repressing independent media. They did not require dismantling collective bargaining, allowing employers to unilaterally change labour conditions and fire workers, or arresting hundreds of labour leaders who resisted these measures. They did not require creating special economic zones – endorsed by right-wing business federations – where labour, environmental and fiscal laws are suspended. They did not require the Anti-Blockade Law, which effectively bypasses constitutional oversight and enables secret deals with capital. And they certainly did not require reversing Chávez’s nationalisations and returning to privatisation policies that resemble the Fourth Republic^[2] far more than the Bolivarian project.

So the argument that “sanctions explain everything” ultimately obscures more than it clarifies. Sanctions have been criminal and devastating and opposing them is essential. But the crisis is the result of both imperial aggression and a domestic project that chose to make workers pay for the collapse while protecting capital, debt holders, and a corrupt bureaucratic elite. Treating sanctions as the sole cause ends up absolving policies that dismantled popular power, hollowed out the economy, and left Venezuela more vulnerable – not less – to imperial domination.

MLR: Some defenders of Maduro argue that raising criticisms of his government simply aids US imperialism. Why is it important to be honest about the nature of the Venezuelan government while also opposing the machinations of the US?

AB: Because truth is not a luxury for the left – it’s a condition for effective anti-imperialism. Defending Venezuela from US aggression does not require defending Nicolás Maduro’s government, and conflating the two ultimately weakens both anti-war politics abroad and working-class struggles inside Venezuela. In the same way that defending Iraq and Afghanistan against US imperialism did not require giving political support to Sadam Hussein or the Taliban.

The left’s task is not to choose between imperial tutelage and authoritarian neoliberalism. It is to defend sovereignty while fighting for an independent, democratic, working-class alternative: restoring labour rights, freeing political prisoners, rebuilding unions, ending secret privatisations, and breaking with imperial capital. Maduro’s record matters here because his anti-worker, neoliberal turn did not protect Venezuela from imperialism – it made imperial domination easier. By hollowing out the Bolivarian process, repressing unions and the left, pulverising wages, and governing through opaque deals, the regime dismantled the very social forces capable of defending sovereignty from below.

This is why January 3 was possible. The US assault collided with a society exhausted by years of austerity, repression, and abandonment of popular emancipation. Under Chávez, an external attack would likely have triggered mass mobilisation. Under Maduro, anti-imperialist sentiment fractured. Many people were demoralised, atomised, or even tempted by the illusion that US intervention might offer an escape. That illusion is tragic – but it was produced by the government’s own policies.

Honest criticism is also essential because imperialism is not just sanctions or bombs. It operates through finance, debt, capital flight, transnational corporations, and domestic elites whose interests are deeply intertwined with imperial capital. Workers fighting unjust dismissals by transnationals, environmentalists resisting extractivism, and those demanding transparency in oil contracts are not “helping imperialism” – they are part of the anti-imperialist struggle. What weakens that struggle is treating secret privatisations, debt repayment to foreign creditors, and repression of labour as somehow anti-imperialist simply because the government uses radical rhetoric.

Maduro’s own conduct makes this clear. In recent years he offered sweeping concessions to US capital – dominant control over oil and minerals, preferential contracts and strategic realignment – proposals that were plainly neocolonial. That is not resistance; it is alignment offered from Caracas. Rhetorical denunciations of imperialism ring hollow when paired with policies that subordinate workers, protect foreign capital’s assets, and hollow out popular power.

Finally, there is a political cost to dishonesty. Defending Maduro as “socialist” alienates Venezuelan workers and left militants who have lived through wage collapse, repression, and the destruction of collective bargaining. It also undermines international solidarity: we cannot build a credible anti-war movement if we ask people to suspend their judgment about an authoritarian, capitalist government.

As Amílcar Cabral^[3] warned: “Hide nothing from the masses… Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures”. Telling the truth about Maduro does not aid US imperialism. It is a prerequisite for opposing it seriously.

MLR: Many socialists were inspired by Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution of the early 2000s. Where did Chávez come from, and what was the Bolivarian Revolution?

AB: Hugo Chávez emerged from the crisis of Venezuela’s old political order. Born in rural poverty in Sabaneta, Barinas, he came of age amid the exhaustion of the two-party system (AD–COPEI), the imposition of neoliberal austerity, and the popular explosion of the Caracazo in 1989. His failed 1992 military uprising – aimed at that discredited order – turned him into a national figure, and his 1998 election channelled a broad, bottom-up demand for social change, national sovereignty and deeper democracy. The Bolivarian Process that followed drew on a heterogeneous mix of influences – Simón Bolívar and Ezequiel Zamora, anti-imperial nationalism, currents of socialism from below, and popular Christianity – rooted above all in the lived experience of Venezuela’s poor.

There was much to be inspired by in the early 2000s. Using oil revenues during a global commodity boom, Chávez’s governments dramatically expanded social spending and improved living conditions. Poverty was cut sharply and extreme poverty fell even faster; inequality dropped to among the lowest in the region. Millions gained access to healthcare for the first time through the social missions; college enrolment doubled; pensions expanded; child malnutrition declined; unemployment fell; and Venezuela rose in regional human-development rankings. New institutions – communal councils, communes, experiments in workers’ control, and popular assemblies – gave real substance to participatory democracy and mobilised millions. These advances explain why so many socialists joined the PSUV [United Socialist Party of Venezuela] and defended the process against coups, lockouts, and US intervention.

At the same time, the Bolivarian Revolution had structural limits that matter for understanding what came later. Much of Chávez’s tenure coincided with extraordinarily high oil prices, which allowed major redistribution without having to confront the capitalist class in any serious way. There was no meaningful transformation of social property relations, no change in the international division of labour, and no sustained challenge to the prerogatives of transnational capital. Crucially, there was no break with extractivism – the reliance on exporting largely unprocessed hydrocarbons and minerals – and no reduction in dependence on oil. In fact, oil dependence increased, leaving the country more exposed to global markets. Roughly 70 percent of the economy remained in private hands, and production continued to be organised around profitability rather than democratic worker control.

Those contradictions don’t negate the real gains or the genuine popular energy of the early Bolivarian years. They help explain both why the process inspired a generation – and why, once the commodity boom ended and leadership changed, its achievements proved fragile. The early revolution opened spaces for popular power and redistribution; it did not complete a transition away from rentier capitalism.

MLR: What stayed the same and what shifted under Maduro?

AB: Under Maduro, two fundamental features of Venezuela’s political economy remained the same: rentierism and dependence on oil. Like Chávez, Maduro governed a country whose economy was overwhelmingly structured around hydrocarbon exports and access to oil rents, with little success in diversifying production or breaking dependence on global commodity markets. The promise of “endogenous development” and moving beyond oil was never realised, and in fact Venezuela’s dependence on hydrocarbons deepened over time.

What shifted sharply under Maduro was the direction of economic policy and the political regime built to enforce it. Chávez’s final years already showed tensions and contradictions, but after his death in 2013 those forces pushing alternatives to neoliberalism weakened decisively. Maduro largely abandoned the anti-neoliberal orientation that had at least partially defined the Bolivarian project and instead oversaw a return to policies resembling those of the Fourth Republic: market liberalisation, privatisation, labour flexibilisation, and the subordination of social rights to capital accumulation – while maintaining radical and socialist rhetoric.

Economically, this shift was catastrophic. Venezuela experienced one of the worst peacetime collapses in modern history: GDP contracted by more than 50 percent in seven years, industrial capacity collapsed, and real wages fell by 96–99 percent. The minimum wage dropped to just a few dollars a month while the cost of basic food baskets soared into the hundreds. This wage collapse drove the mass migration of over seven million people. While US sanctions from 2017 onward dramatically worsened the crisis, the core features of the collapse were already rooted in policy choices, mismanagement, corruption, and the failure of productive transformation.

One of the clearest ruptures was the turn to neoliberal extractivism, exemplified by the Arco Minero del Orinoco. Maduro opened vast swathes of national territory – over 12 percent of the country – to multinational mining interests under conditions that violated constitutional protections, Indigenous rights, labour law, and environmental safeguards. This represented not continuity with Chávez’s resource nationalism but a reversal toward denationalisation and external control, subordinating disputes to international tribunals and creating extractive enclaves akin to neoliberal free zones.

Labour policy also marked a decisive break. Memorandum 2792 effectively wiped out collective bargaining, flattened wage scales, and dismantled decades of worker gains. Repression of unions, suspension of union elections, and criminalisation of dissent accompanied this economic turn.

Politically, Maduro consolidated an authoritarian regime. Laws like the Anti-Blockade Law suspended constitutional oversight, enabled secret contracts and privatisations, and concentrated extraordinary powers in the executive. Democratic checks weakened, transparency vanished, and repression became routine.

In short, what stayed the same was Venezuela’s rentier foundation and oil dependence. What changed was the abandonment of even partial attempts to transcend neoliberalism, replaced by an authoritarian model that redistributed income upward, dismantled labour rights, deepened extractivism, and governed through repression – producing economic collapse while hollowing out the original emancipatory promise of the Bolivarian Revolution.

MLR: The early 2000s in Venezuela also opened up important opportunities for mass struggle and for the revolutionary left. Your forthcoming book collects a number of articles and debates among the Venezuelan revolutionary left about this period and afterwards. What were some of the revolutionary organisations in Venezuela at this time? What are some of the issues they were discussing and debating? What challenges did they face? How did the revolutionary left respond to the rise of Chávez?

AB: In Venezuela’s early 2000s, “revolutionary organisations” can mean different things, but if we take it to refer to left organisations that accompanied (and often contested within) the Chavista process, there were several key forces. Chavismo itself had shifting organisational forms: first the MBR-200, then the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), and later other Chavista vehicles. Around Chávez there was also the broader bloc he called the Great Patriotic Pole, which included parties like Patria Para Todos (PPT), the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), and, early on, the Movement for Socialism (MAS), which participated initially and then broke around 2002. Beyond those, there were important revolutionary and radical currents that developed in relation to the process: Trotskyist traditions that had passed through the PST and La Chispa later regrouped into formations such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and other currents that eventually helped form spaces like Marea Socialista (including a period of work inside the PSUV for some). Newer radical Chavista formations also emerged later, such as Redes (linked to Juan Barreto) and currents like Proyecto Nuestra América/Movimiento 13 de Abril associated with Carlos Lanz, alongside figures like Roland Denis. There were also smaller but socially rooted movements such as the Ezequiel Zamora Peasant Front, community-based formations (e.g. Communities in Command), alternative/community media networks, and localised militant groups like Lina Ron’s current and the Tupamaros, which often acted as satellites of Chavismo. Outside Chávez’s own party, the most significant organised forces in that period were generally the PPT and the PCV.

The debates were shaped by the rapidly changing character of Chávez’s project. After Chávez’s 1998 victory and 1999 inauguration, a central early debate was nationalism versus socialism. In the initial phase, Chávez largely framed his project as Bolivarian, democratic, and anti-neoliberal – criticising the Fourth Republic and pushing a constituent process – but not yet explicitly socialist or anti-capitalist. He even used language close to a “third way” logic: as much market as possible and as much state as necessary. The revolutionary left argued over how to relate to this: was it a progressive nationalist movement to support critically, or did it require an independent socialist strategy from the start?

After the 2002 coup attempt, the struggle over the process sharpened. With the Constitution and major reforms like the Hydrocarbons Law and the Land Law, and especially from 2004 onward, Chávez increasingly adopted anti-imperialist language, began speaking of socialism, and deepened ties with Cuba. This shifted debates again: how to push the process beyond nationalism toward socialism, and what kind of socialism that would be. Another major axis of debate concerned the working class: its real protagonism, workers’ control, union autonomy, and whether popular power (communes, councils, workplace organisation) would deepen or be subordinated to party-state structures. The revolutionary left’s response ranged from working inside Chavista structures to build popular power, to building independent organisations that supported the process against the right while contesting bureaucratic limits and defending workers’ self-organisation.

MLR: How did the revolutionary left respond to the shift to Maduro? What remains of the socialist left in Venezuela today?

AB: Initially in the early years of Maduro, after Chávez’s death, much of the revolutionary and socialist left continued to defend the Bolivarian process while pushing it to the left. But as Maduro’s government deepened its authoritarian and neoliberal turn – wage collapse, dismantling of collective bargaining, privatisations, repression of unions and critics – large sections of the revolutionary left broke with Maduro. Some currents that once identified as critical Chavistas or left-wing PSUV supporters shifted into open opposition from the left, arguing that defending working people and sovereignty required confronting both US imperialism and Maduro’s domestic program.

Today, what remains of the socialist left in Venezuela is real, but weaker, more fragmented, and operating under harsher conditions. It has been weakened by (1) sustained repression, (2) the demobilisation and exhaustion produced by years of crisis, and (3) mass migration – millions left the country, including many organisers, union militants, and cadre, making collective action harder.

Even so, important left formations and united front efforts persist. The Alternative Popular Revolucionaria (APR) emerged around the 2020 parliamentary elections as a coalition of socialist parties, unions, campesino organisations, and social movements seeking a non-capitalist way out of the crisis, and it included currents such as the PCV, MRT, PRT, and others. Related efforts have continued through broader fronts like the Encuentro Nacional en Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo (which includes groups like Marea Socialista, the PSL, PPT-APR, MPA, Communist Revolution, CUTV, etc.^[4]), which has coordinated campaigns among parties, unions and social movements in a united-front style.

There are also newer coordinating bodies rooted in labour struggle. A key example is the Comité Nacional de Conflicto de Trabajadores en Lucha (CNC-TL), formed in March 2023 with delegates from unions and workers’ movements across many states, aiming to unify dispersed workplace conflicts into a national push to restore labour, social and civil rights rolled back under Maduro.

One of the clearest markers of the left’s condition is the state’s systematic restriction of independent left politics. Parties such as Marea Socialista and the PSL have been denied or stripped of legal electoral status. Most dramatically, the state intervened in the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) – historically the country’s oldest party and a Chávez ally – using the Supreme Court to hand legal control to Maduro-aligned figures, effectively banning the PCV’s original leadership from electoral participation (now operating as PCV Dignidad without legal recognition). With that, the space for independent socialist electoral organisation has been nearly closed.

In short: much of the revolutionary left responded to Maduro’s shift by breaking, regrouping, and building new coalitions, but it does so today under severe repression, organisational hardship, and the long shadow of migration – making it smaller, but still politically significant.

MLR: The Venezuelan experience seems to raise a lot of the broader issues of reform vs. revolution, and the debates around campism and Stalinism that has also been highlighted by the protests in Iran. What are some of the lessons we can draw from this history that are relevant to these issues?

AB: A basic lesson – one the revolutionary left learned the hard way across the twentieth century in debates over Stalinism – is that you don’t build emancipation by suspending criticism of an authoritarian state “because the enemy is worse”. That logic tends to turn socialism into apologetics for whichever government is in conflict with Washington. But an anti-worker, repressive, neoliberal government does not become socialist by adopting anti-US rhetoric, flying a red flag, or aligning with Russia or China. On the contrary: when the left defends those regimes, we weaken our credibility with the workers and oppressed people who live under them, and we undermine the very principles that make anti-imperialism meaningful – democracy from below, working-class self-emancipation, and international solidarity with people, not states.

Venezuela also shows why “critical solidarity” can’t be a slogan that excuses silence. Maduro’s dismantling of collective bargaining, wage collapse, repression of unions and left critics, secret privatisations, and the hollowing out of popular institutions didn’t protect Venezuela from US aggression – it made it easier. It fractured anti-imperialist sentiment, demoralised the social base that would normally mobilise against an external attack, and left many people vulnerable to the illusion that US intervention might offer relief. That is precisely the tragedy of campism: it treats dissent from below as a threat, when in reality it’s the only durable foundation for defending sovereignty and resisting empire.

At the same time, the Chávez era also teaches a different, more complicated lesson about reform and revolution. The early Bolivarian process achieved real gains – poverty reduction, expanded healthcare and education, new spaces for communal participation – and it inspired millions because it opened avenues for mass struggle and popular organisation. But it also faced structural limits. The commodity boom created revenues that allowed redistribution and social programs without forcing a decisive confrontation with the capitalist class. There was no meaningful transformation of social property relations, no reorganisation of Venezuela’s place in the international division of labour, and no break with extractivism or dependence on exporting hydrocarbons and minerals. Much of the economy remained in private hands, and the rentier structure persisted. Those limits didn’t erase the advances, but they made them fragile – vulnerable to the end of the boom, to bureaucratic consolidation, and to counter-revolutionary pressure from above and abroad.

So the relevant lesson – whether we’re talking about Venezuela, Iran, or any other flashpoint – is that the left must refuse false choices. We oppose imperialist intervention and sanctions without endorsing domestic repression. We defend sovereignty while insisting that socialism means workers’ power, democratic rights, and class struggle from below. And we recognise that durable revolutionary change cannot be reduced to charismatic leadership or state redistribution alone: it requires transforming property relations, breaking dependence on extractivism, and building institutions of popular power that can outlast booms, withstand external attack, and resist bureaucratic degeneration.

Anderson Bean is a North Carolina-based activist, a member of the Tempest Collective, editor and contributor to Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives (Haymarket Books), and the author of Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis (Lexington Books).

1. Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the state-owned oil and gas company of Venezuela.
2. A coalition government that was in power from 1958 until 1999.
3. Amílcar Lopes Cabral (1924–1973) was a Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean political organiser, widely regarded as one of Africa’s foremost anti-colonial leaders.
4. MRT (Movimiento Revolucionario Tupamaro – Tupamaro Revolutionary Movement): While formerly part of the government coalition, a significant portion of this movement fractured and joined the opposition to the government (sometimes linked with APR forces) following “Supreme Court-led coups” against their leadership. PRT (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores – Revolutionary Workers’ Party): A minor, radical left-wing party that joined the Alternativa Popular Revolucionaria (APR) in 2020 to oppose the Maduro government’s economic policies from the left. MPA (Movimiento Popular Alternativo – Popular Alternative Movement): Part of the coalition (often linked with the APR) seeking a new revolutionary alternative. It brings together grassroots activists, trade unionists, and social movements opposing the current government’s, and the traditional opposition’s, policies. CUTV (Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Venezuela – Unitary Federation of Venezuelan Workers): A national trade union federation that has taken an independent, often oppositional stance against the government’s labour policies, which have been accused of destroying wages and benefits. Aligned with PCV.