Washington’s Conquest in Venezuela
Part 1
On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces bombed Venezuela and abducted the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. In an editorial that day, World-Outlook unequivocally condemned this attack on the country’s sovereignty. “End U.S. imperialist aggression in Venezuela! Free Maduro and Flores! No blood for oil!” the editorial in World-Outlook concluded, demands that we continue to embrace today.
The U.S. assault, World-Outlook explained, was not about whether “Maduro is a ‘legitimate representative’ of the Venezuelan people or a ‘vicious’ person or a ‘drug kingpin.’ This is about enabling U.S. corporations to take control of the country’s vast oil resources, maintaining U.S. hegemony in the western hemisphere, and allowing U.S. big business to challenge increasing competition from China … all this at the expense of the working people of the Americas.”
Indeed, within hours of their over-powering raid, U.S. president Donald Trump and his secretary of state Marco Rubio were crowing that Washington would now “run the country,” and “take back the oil that belongs to us.”
Following that attack, many pundits expected Trump to appoint María Corina Machado to manage this piracy. Machado, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for her role in leading the opposition to Maduro in the 2024 elections, cravenly sought Trump’s approval for heading a new government in Venezuela. As part of that quest, Machado slavishly presented her Nobel Prize to Trump, who had been outraged at not winning it himself (after ordering a major U.S. military assault on another country!)
However, Trump left Machado in the dust, telling reporters she is “nice,” but “she doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to serve as president.
The Trump administration instead decided the most effective way to fill the leadership vacuum created by Maduro’s kidnapping was to greenlight Venezuela’s vice-president Delcy Rodríguez to take over. Trump and company did not mind her “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. They might even have found it useful for pacifying any unrest after their assault on the South American country. Washington wagered—with knowledge not readily available to the public at the time—that a Rodríguez administration would serve as a docile transitional regime, enabling U.S. big business to maximize profits off Venezuela’s oil and other riches at the lowest political cost.
Delcy Rodríguez, former head of the Venezuelan oil and finance ministry; her brother Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly; and Diosdado Cabello, the interior minister, found themselves Washington’s choice to run Venezuela’s government while Maduro and Flores face trumped up charges in New York City.
In the weeks since taking office, Delcy Rodríguez et al. are proving Trump and Rubio’s judgment to be sound.
How to defend Venezuela’s sovereignty
Among those in the United States who oppose Washington’s assault on Caracas and its saber rattling in the Americas—the so-called Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,1 there are counterposed assessments on what has unfolded in Venezuela and on the character of the country’s current government.
After the U.S. raid and abduction of Maduro, Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of the People’s Forum in New York City and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, outlined his perspective in the January 4 article “Venezuela’s Revolution still stands: debunking Trump’s psyop.” It was first published by the People’s Dispatch and immediately reprinted by Liberation, the newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).
De Los Santos characterized the evolution of politics in Venezuela, beginning with the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez as president, as a revolution leading the nation toward what Chávez called “socialism in the 21st century.” De Los Santos argued that this process—the “Bolivarian revolution”2—is alive under Rodríguez’s leadership. This claim flies in the face of reality, as we will show in this article.
Eager to find an explanation for Rodriguez’s rush to negotiate with Washington, rather than organize resistance against the Yankee attack, De Los Santos argued that the weaknesses of her politics were actually strengths that avoided a more violent confrontation; not a betrayal of the Venezuelan people, but part of a necessary retreat to preserve “revolutionary state power” and “secure political space and prevent total annihilation.”
De Los Santos argued that, in the lead-up to the January 3 attack, the Trump administration faced “the power of organized popular resistance” alongside the professional military, creating a “scenario where any ground invasion would degenerate into a protracted people’s war.” Combined with “widespread public rejection of military intervention, spanning the political spectrum” in the United States, these factors compelled Washington to backtrack and accept Rodríguez as the legitimate successor to Maduro, De Los Santos claimed.
There was U.S. reluctance to involve Washington in a “regime change war,” De Los Santos insisted, citing the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan, where he said Yankee strategists learned to seek the “path of least resistance.” That involved utilizing bombing campaigns, abductions, and collaboration with local leaders the invaders could work with, rather than costly military interventions that would also result in many U.S. casualties. In Caracas, that path led to Rodríguez rather than Machado.
But there was another lesson the U.S. imperialists took from their disastrous occupation of Iraq. There, U.S. occupation forces completely obliterated the existing Baathist state apparatus but were never able to install a reliable client regime to fill the vacuum left behind.
De Los Santos claimed that “the Venezuelan masses, party, and state were prepared to counter a full-scale U.S. invasion in a decentralized people’s war of resistance.” That would create a situation even more unfavorable for Washington than what it faced in Iraq after a massive military intervention two decades ago.
Yet, when U.S. helicopters swooped in to capture Maduro and bombs exploded over several other targets, there was—by most accounts—a stunning lack of resistance on the part of both the Venezuelan armed forces and the population.
De Los Santos tried to explain this away with a very dark assessment of the chances for working people or any country to resist imperialist assaults today.
“No country on the planet has the preparation or the capacity at present to prevent the overwhelming and brutal force of a U.S. special operation such as the one conducted,” he said. “No nation, no matter how morally justified, popularly mobilized, or militarily capable, can presently match the concentrated, high-tech lethal force of the U.S. war machine in this respect.”
In other words, De Los Santos may as well be saying, “Working people are doomed.”
Need for objective analysis
“A concrete analysis is required to cut through the disinformation, understand the objective balance of forces, and chart a path forward,” De Los Santos said. But he seemed incapable of taking his own advice.
De Los Santos suggested that those disagreeing with his assessment of the balance of forces in Venezuela, or his view of the class character of the “process” now unfolding, are simply being hoodwinked by the Trump administration’s psychological warfare and campaign of disinformation. “No socialist should have a knee-jerk reaction accepting bourgeois propaganda,” he admonished.
Was Chávez—followed by Maduro and now Rodríguez—leading a social revolution toward establishing socialism in Venezuela? Are concessions and retreats now necessary or possible to protect the interests of the workers and peasants of that country? Does the “Bolivarian Revolution” point the way forward—in Venezuela or elsewhere?
To answer these questions, it is useful to take a look at the past 25 years of the “Bolivarian” process to better understand the class character of the Venezuelan state and the relationship of forces between Venezuela’s capitalist class, the country’s workers and peasants, and U.S. imperialism today.
Reforms under Chávez
In 1998, Chávez, a radical young army officer, was elected president following a period of mass protest against an International Monetary Fund (IMF)-mandated austerity program. Chávez’s trajectory was not rare. Government takeovers in semi-colonial countries by radical military officers from impoverished backgrounds—either through elections or military coups—have often led at first to significant social reforms but not to attempts to overthrow capitalism.
In the wake of this popular resistance and an electoral victory with a 56 percent majority, the Chávez administration enacted land reform, achieved a reduction in the poverty rate by 20 percent in a few years, and launched a literacy campaign that taught 1.5 million to read and write. With the aid of Cuban medical missions, new clinics brought preventive and emergency care to many who rarely, if ever, had seen a doctor.
These advances for workers and peasants were registered as high oil prices on the world market and a tightening of state control of the country’s oil resources3 bolstered state revenues.
This period is described in more detail in the September 2024 World-Outlook article “Venezuela Elections: Fraud Foretold?”
Despite the social gains described above, that article noted, “Under the Chávez administration, private property in the means of production remained largely intact, with economic power staying firmly in the hands of the country’s wealthiest families. His nationalist regime, however, increasingly came into conflict with the majority of Venezuela’s capitalist class. The clash turned into a collision in the fall of 2001.”
At that time, Chávez’s government enacted legislation that, if fully implemented, would have cut into the profits and power of the financial oligarchy. These measures included the land reform, protections for working fishermen, greater state control of the country’s oil resources, and the allocation of state funds for affordable housing and other social programs.
“The new administration also drew the ire of Washington and the local bourgeoisie for cultivating closer political and economic ties with revolutionary Cuba,” the 2024 World-Outlook article noted.
“Encouraged by these openings, workers and peasants fought for land, jobs, and more democratic rights. These struggles alarmed most of Venezuela’s capitalists and their U.S. backers. The anti-Chávez opposition organized cazerolazos, large “pot-banging” protest rallies demanding the president’s resignation, in 2001. In 2002 it staged a military coup that removed Chávez from power for two days but was reversed by popular opposition.
“This was followed in 2003 by a ‘strike’ in the state-owned oil monopoly, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), instigated by company executives who worked hand-in-glove with top union bureaucrats controlling the oil workers union at the time, lockdowns in other industries aimed at crippling production to accelerate an economic crisis, and armed attacks on government buildings; and a referendum to recall Chávez in 2004.
“Washington and other imperialist governments backed these efforts and later imposed debilitating sanctions on Venezuela that largely impacted the country’s working people.
“In one popular outpouring after another, however, working people mobilized and defeated every attempt by Venezuela’s capitalist class and its backers abroad to topple Chávez.”4
As oil prices flattened and suffered periodic sharp dives beginning around 2007, Venezuela’s state revenues decreased. The conflicts between the capitalist class and the government’s social agenda sharpened.
Chávez rejects “Cuban road”
“At the same time, the Fifth Republic Movement led by Chávez, which in 2007 fused with other organizations to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), rejected the Cuban road toward a genuinely socialist future,” the 2024 World-Outlook article pointed out.
“The PSUV refused to lead the country’s working people to end the rule of the capitalists, establish a workers and peasants’ government, nationalize the means of production, and reorganize society based on human solidarity and social equality,” it continued.
“Instead, the PSUV promoted ‘socialism in the 21st century.’ This was a euphemism for maintaining capitalist economic relations modulated by greater state control over some private industries and marked by increasing concentration of governmental power in the hands of the head of state—the president.
“The increasingly authoritarian role of the government became crystal clear in 2006. That year, Chávez was re-elected Venezuela’s president with 63 percent of the popular vote. A year earlier, his party had secured complete control of the country’s National Assembly, after the opposition boycotted legislative elections, as well as the Supreme Court and most of the judiciary, and the National Electoral Council.
“Following these sweeping victories, Chávez signed into law an ‘enabling act’ allowing him to rule by decree, with virtual dictatorial powers, for up to 18 months. He also floated the idea, repeatedly, of seeking constitutional reform that would permit him to seek reelection indefinitely, perpetuating his power for life.
“These are the hallmarks of a Bonapartist5 regime, albeit one with a leftist veneer in this case. They are the opposite of strengthening the political power of workers and peasants.”
Maduro’s regime: Chavismo’s thuggish caricature
Maduro, a close Chávez ally, assumed the office of president after his predecessor lost his battle with cancer. Maduro then elevated the government’s authoritarianism to another level. Beginning six months after his election in 2013, and relying on a string of enabling acts, he ruled by decree for the majority of his presidency during the next 12 years.
On February 4, 2026, Tempest, a “revolutionary socialist collective,” according to its website, published an interview with Federico Fuentes, a longtime Venezuela solidarity activist who lived in Caracas for several years during the Chávez government as a correspondent for Green Ve. He is also a contributor to Venezuelanalysis.
“Sometime during the Maduro government, between 2015-17, it became clear that the section of society for whom it governed was shifting,” Fuentes noted. “A combination of circumstances and choices led it to break with the poor majority and working-class base that had supported the Chávez government and formed the backbone of the Bolivarian revolution. Instead, it consolidated a new base among the military, security forces, and the new capitalist class.”
Unlike Chávez, “the Maduro government was undeniably a pro-capitalist government,” Fuentes continued. “It represented both the interests of the new capitalist class, which had enriched itself through its connections to the ‘Bolivarian’ state (the so-called Bolivarian bourgeoisie that Chávez denounced), but also the traditional capitalist class. The Maduro government ultimately won over the support of Fedecámaras6 [the country’s chamber of commerce], while the head of the Caracas Stock Exchange said after the 2024 presidential elections that the government, not the opposition, best represented economic stability.
“The Maduro government was also decidedly anti-worker. Often sections of the Left excuse the government, saying its policy decisions were due to the sanctions. But this ignores that government policies led to a dramatic upward redistribution of wealth even before the sanctions. Moreover, even under the sanctions, it is not the case that the Maduro government had no other options. From 2018 onwards, it deliberately chose to shift the burden of the crisis onto the working class.”
With continuing fluctuations of oil prices, tightened sanctions by U.S. and other imperialist powers, and mismanagement of resources by corrupt government officials, the Venezuelan economy went into freefall. Inflation rose from 100 percent in 2015 to 80,000 percent by the end of 2018. The poverty rate mushroomed to over 80 percent by 2020. These devastating conditions led to a mass exodus from Venezuela, with up to 25 percent of its population emigrating in search of a better life.
Protests in the face of rampant unemployment and shortages of food and other basic necessities were met with repression by the Maduro government. Security forces, the military, and extralegal goon squads took to the streets to suppress the demands for relief.
In July 2024, Maduro claimed victory in the presidential elections. Despite widespread doubts about the results, procedures designed to guarantee the integrity of the vote were ignored. Protests against this lack of transparency broke out, including in many working-class areas. The government responded with a wave of repression, resulting in some 2,000 arrests and the killing of 23 protesters and bystanders.
Anti-worker repression under Maduro
The turn in economic policy under Maduro “had to be accompanied by a ramping up of repression. Outside Venezuela, we hear about repression against the right-wing opposition—though never about their anti-democratic, violent and illegal actions. But the Left and working-class forces in Venezuela have arguably faced greater repression,” Fuentes explained in the Tempest interview.
“In terms of workers’ rights, there are hundreds of trade unionists in jail for protesting, new trade unions cannot be registered, strikes are illegal, and collective bargaining is essentially banned. As for the left, every single left-wing party in the country has either been stripped of its electoral registration or denied the right to register for elections. The last presidential election [in 2024] was the first since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1958 in which the left was completely barred from standing a candidate.
“When we add to this that the Venezuelan people were denied their right to have their votes counted and verified (arguably one of the most basic democratic rights, but which some on the Left seem to want to deny to the Venezuelan people, claiming nothing untoward happened in those elections), we get a sense of just how far democracy had been wound back. Not just in terms of the Chávez era (when the left rightly pointed to Venezuela as a world leader in transparent elections) but even in terms of minimum bourgeois democratic rights.
“There is a further component that needs to be considered; namely the use of security forces to terrorize working class and poor communities. As discontent with the government rose among traditional Chávez-voting sectors, the Maduro government stepped up its policing of these neighborhoods through its ‘Operation Liberate the People’ and creation of the elite death squad, FAES (Special Action Forces).
“The result was a dramatic rise in police killings of predominately young Black men in those neighborhoods: from about 1500-2500 a year in 2014-15 to 5000-5500 a year between 2016-18, making Venezuela’s security forces the deadliest in the region on a per capita basis. Though not strictly a political operation, this repressive policing had the effect of terrorizing communities which had begun to step out of line.
“Given all this, it is hardly surprising that even strong Chávez voting areas eventually turned against Maduro and did not rush onto the streets to defend him after his kidnapping.”
With the capitalist class still holding the reins of industry and finance and a repressive regime increasingly hostile to the needs and demands of workers and peasants, Venezuela’s working people were ill-prepared to answer Washington’s aggression on January 3, 2026.
Lack of any preparedness to repel U.S. attack
During the last five months of 2025, the amassing of the largest U.S. force in the Caribbean since the October 1962 missile crisis,7 the murder at sea of more than 100 people in small boats, and a naval blockade of Venezuelan oil ordered by the Pentagon clearly signaled that a U.S. military assault was likely, if not inevitable. With gunboats and aircraft carriers just 50-100 miles off the Venezuelan coast, even U.S. intelligence was surprised at the lack of a defensive response U.S. special forces encountered in the early hours of January 3.
On January 7, General Javier Marcano Tábata, commander of the presidential honor guard and head of Venezuela’s military counterintelligence unit, was fired by Delcy Rodríguez for failing to protect Maduro from capture during the U.S. raid. Marcano Tábata was reportedly then arrested on accusations of accepting bribes, providing the U.S. military with Maduro’s location, and deactivating anti-aircraft defense systems.
But the failure of the Venezuelan military to mount a robust defense cannot simply be blamed on one person. Venezuela’s advanced, Russian-made air defense systems were not even hooked up to radar during the raid and abduction, U.S. officials told the New York Times. Venezuela had been unable to maintain and operate at combat readiness the Russian-made S-300 antiaircraft or its Buk-M2 defense systems, purchased in 2009.
In addition, Maduro had been asserting for months there were 4.5 million Venezuelans under arms, prepared to defend themselves against any assault by U.S. imperialism. De Los Santos inflated that number to eight million. Yet that force did not materialize, in the months leading up to January 3, during the U.S. military assault, or in the weeks since then.
The only vigorous defense the U.S. invaders faced was at the presidential compound in Caracas. Fifty people were killed trying to protect Maduro and his wife; among those who died, Cuban combatants constituted the majority. Thirty-two Cubans assigned to a security detail gave their lives upholding a commitment to defend the sovereignty of a sister country and protect its president. Approximately 50 additional Venezuelan civilians lost their lives during the U.S. bombardment.
The election of Chávez as president in 1998 opened a period of mobilization of the working class and peasants in Venezuela. By the time of the 2026 U.S. assault, however, there was a nearly complete erosion of the gains workers and peasants had initially made. Along with that, widespread repression by the Maduro government—a capitalist regime that bore no resemblance to even moderate social democratic governments, had rendered popular defense of Venezuela’s sovereignty against imperialist assault impossible.
That’s the root cause of what transpired on January 3. Not the “high-tech lethal force of the U.S. war machine” that “no nation… can match” or stand up to, as De Los Santos and the PSL falsely claimed.
Part 2
With Maduro out of the picture, the Rodríguez administration jumped quickly to accommodate Washington’s demands. “We consider it a priority to move towards a balanced and respectful relationship between the U.S. and Venezuela,” Rodríguez wrote just two days after the bombing of the capital city. She called for negotiations “on terms of sovereignty and equality.”
Of course, there is no equal playing field for such negotiations. This was true before January 3, when the U.S. government imposed brutal sanctions on Venezuela and deployed its armada offshore. And it is even more true today, as a Damoclean sword8 of possible U.S. military intervention hangs over every encounter between U.S. and Venezuelan officials.
During a January 28 hearing before the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee, Rubio said the Trump administration has established a “very respectful and productive line of communication” with Rodríguez’s government. As a result, he said, the Trump administration does not “intend or expect” to use military force against Venezuela.
In a written statement to the committee, however, the U.S. secretary of state warned Washington is “prepared to use force to ensure maximum cooperation… if other methods fail.” He noted, “Rodríguez is well aware of the fate of Maduro; it is our belief that her own self-interest aligns with advancing our key objectives.”
De Los Santos pointed out that negotiations with the U.S. government are a continuation of the approach by Maduro in the months before his abduction. “Maduro himself consistently called for diplomacy and negotiation to avoid an all-out war and had already offered to negotiate comprehensive economic agreements with the U.S. for Venezuela’s oil and mineral resources,” De Los Santos wrote. “If the Venezuelan state were to sign such deals going forward—now with Maduro kidnapped—it would not constitute treason.”
Those deals are now being signed. They are indeed a continuation of policy under Maduro, which reveals the degree of capitulation to U.S. imperialism then and now.
Opening oil industry to private foreign investment
On January 6, Trump announced a more than $2 billion deal to divert Venezuelan crude to the United States. Much of that oil was already loaded in tankers off the Venezuelan coast, unable to breach the U.S. naval blockade.
In her January 15 state-of-the-union address, Rodríguez argued for opening Venezuela’s state-run oil reserves to more foreign investment. She pledged that increased oil production through foreign acquisitions would create a flow of cash to the country’s healthcare system and infrastructure, much of which has severely deteriorated since it was built under Chávez.
In response to a request by Trump, Rodríguez also granted amnesty to 379 people imprisoned by the Maduro regime and has agreed to accept a larger number of U.S. deportation flights to Venezuela. Between 600 and 900 prisoners, according to Venezuelan human-rights organizations, remain behind bars. A vow by Rodríguez to establish a general amnesty for political prisoners fell short of indicating who would be released or when.
A day before Rodríguez’s January 15 speech, Trump made public the sale of $500 million in Venezuelan oil to Geneva-based Vitol, which has a U.S. headquarters in Houston, Texas. John Addison, a senior trader at Vitol and a $6 million megadonor to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, was part of negotiating the deal.
U.S. takes control of sales of Venezuelan crude
The proceeds of this first sale, the White House said, would be split between Venezuela, U.S. companies, and the U.S. government, at Washington’s discretion. Trump said proceeds going to Venezuela would be used to purchase only “American-made” goods—more precisely, “U.S.-made.”
Trading houses Vitol and Trafigura—both previously implicated in bribery schemes and price manipulation—were initially depositing monies for the oil in a Qatari bank. But on February 12, U.S. energy secretary Chris Wright told NBC News that the U.S. treasury has now set up an account to directly receive the proceeds from these sales.
Four private banks in Venezuela have already received a $300 million share of the proceeds from the first sale; Venezuela’s portion of funds from future sales will be meted out based on monthly budgets approved by Washington, Rubio told Congress on January 28.
All this and the lack of oversight under new licensing agreements underscores concerns that the arrangement is vulnerable to abuse. To what extent any funds will make it to Venezuela’s state coffers, and whether any of the funds that do reach that destination are used for the healthcare system or infrastructure needs remains to be seen.
In another clear indication of who is running the show, Bloomberg reported on February 10 that oil tankers have already been rerouted from Venezuela to not only the United States, but to India, Europe, and Israel. If true, this would mark the first shipment of Venezuelan oil to Israel in years, although Bloomberg noted that Israel does not disclose crude suppliers, and tankers sometimes disappear from digital tracking systems near its ports.
Venezuelan Miguel Pérez Pirela, a senior government spokesperson, called the report a lie. But, as Trump declared in a more truthful statement during a January 23 interview with the New York Post, “They don’t have any oil. We take the oil.”
In line with Rodríguez’s state-of-the-union proposals, Venezuelan lawmakers approved a bill on January 29 granting private companies autonomy to operate under new oil contracts or in joint ventures, even if they are the minority stakeholders. This makes possible asset transfers and outsourcings. The new law also formalizes an oil production-sharing model secretly negotiated by Maduro with little-known energy firms. Politicians and experts have warned about the potential for corruption due to loose regulation of these deals.
The bill also reduces income tax for energy projects, replacing that with a yet unregulated “hydrocarbon tax.” While this may attract investors, former Venezuelan officials say the legislation is unconstitutional.
“To Doubt is to Betray”
“There remains a strong base of support for Chavismo and the Bolivarian Revolution,” De Los Santos asserted, adding that the Venezuelan “Bolivarian” state remains intact, with the leadership of the government and PSUV, as well as the armed forces, in position to “stabilize institutions [and] reclaim public space by calling the masses to mobilize.”
It is true that thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets of Caracas protesting the kidnapping of their president. However, lest this patriotic fervor focused on Maduro and Flores boil over and foster opposition to the new administration’s course and to its concessions to U.S. imperialism, interior minister Cabello sent an ominous message.
Cabello was brought into Maduro’s inner circle following his prominent role in the brutal suppression of workers’ protests after the 2024 elections. At a January 6 rally in Caracas, he sported a blue cap, emblazoned with the Orwellian slogan “To Doubt is to Betray.”
“Brest-Litovsk moment?”
To give a left veneer to his argument that the concessions to Washington by Venezuela’s current government constitute a necessary retreat in the course of “building socialism,” De Los Santos drew a parallel with concessions the new revolutionary government of Russia, led by the Bolsheviks, made in 1918 when it signed a peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk, in what is today Belarus.
In 1917, as World War I raged around them, the workers and peasants of Russia carried out a mighty revolution, overthrowing the stranglehold of the tsarist regime and semi-feudal class relations. Exhausted by years of war, they faced the monumental task of building the new Soviet republic under the threat of attack by many imperialist armies lined up on both their western and eastern borders.
Squeezed in that vise, with its troops fatigued and demoralized, the Bolshevik leadership made the decision to concede a vast amount of territory and resources in a separate peace agreement between their infant republic and the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. This treaty effectively pulled Soviet Russia out of World War I.
“Venezuela faces a similar ‘Brest-Litovsk moment,’” De Los Santos argued. “Isolated by right-wing regional governments and facing a near-total blockade, the revolutionary core is prioritizing the survival of the state as a rearguard base for future struggle.”
While 2026 Venezuela may seem similar to 1918 Russia at first glance, there are critical differences between the two that show De Los Santos stretched the historical parallel he cited to the breaking point.
First of all, the Bolshevik leadership laid bare the harsh truth about the decision to end Russian involvement in WWI in exchange for the surrender of territory, calling the treaty “onerous and humiliating.” They did not try to dress it up as a “balanced and respectful relationship,” as did Delcy Rodríguez.
The Bolshevik leaders explained and educated, unlike Rodríguez who obfuscated the truth and misled and confused working people.
The Brest-Litovsk treaty was hotly debated and ultimately ratified by the Russian Communist Party at its 7th congress in March 1918. In contrast, the leaders of Venezuela’s government have opened no such public discussion of these matters, since January 3, or after the passage of the January 29 law surrendering control of its assets to Washington.
The Russian Communist Party’s 7th congress resolution explained, “Since we have no army, since our troops at the front are in a most critical state of demoralization, and since we must make use of every possibility, however slight, of a breathing-space before the imperialist attack on the Soviet Socialist Republic begins, the Congress recognizes the necessity of ratifying the most onerous and humiliating peace treaty which the Soviet government signed with Germany.”
At Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks surrendered roughly one million square miles of territory—including land containing about 90 percent of Russia’s coalfields, 50 percent of its industry, 64 percent of its iron ore, and Ukraine’s breadbasket. However, understanding what they did not concede is critical to seeing the difference between what the Russian Revolution faced in 1918 and what Venezuela faces today.
The Soviet republic used the breathing space opened up by the Brest-Litovsk treaty to build the Red Army, at the same time preparing to defend the conquest of worker and peasant power by mobilizing the population and energizing an international solidarity movement in their defense.
The Bolsheviks did not retreat on the conquest of state power by workers and peasants—which took place through a social revolution that shook the world—and the subsequent drive to uproot the vestiges of feudalism and tsarist rule. They did not retreat on their course to firmly cement the rule of the workers and peasants. The Brest-Litovsk concessions enabled them to drive ahead on continued education and mobilization of the masses of working people throughout the Soviet federations—and the world—to defend their revolutionary course.
The class relations in Russia following its 1917 socialist revolution sharply contrast with Venezuela today. While Chávez, Maduro, and now Rodríguez (plus De Los Santos, more vigorously than Rodríguez) have proclaimed that “socialism in the 21st century” was and remains alive and well in Venezuela, the country has never overturned capitalism.
Unlike the Russian Revolution of 1917, the PSUV did not lead the country’s working people to take political power and use it in their own interests to abolish capitalist social relations and open the road to socialism—either under Chavez or under Maduro. Chávez instituted measures that provided openings along that road. But all those were largely overturned under Maduro, who consolidated capitalist rule.
The example of Cuba
During the past 25 years, Venezuela instituted certain reforms to provide relief to the lives of working people by tightening state control over some industries. At the same time, its government sought to appease the capitalist class, leaving economic power firmly in the hands of the country’s wealthiest families. To manage the inevitable contradictions, the government increasingly concentrated political power in the head of state.
This is not socialism—21st century or any other flavor. It has, as World-Outlook explained in September 2024, “the hallmarks of a Bonapartist regime, albeit one with a leftist veneer…. [It is] the opposite of strengthening the political power of workers and peasants.”
The experience in Venezuela stands in contrast to that of its close neighbor and ally Cuba, which embarked on its own revolutionary course in 1959.
Not long after rebel forces led by Fidel Castro9 toppled the hated, U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and marched into Havana, Cuba’s revolutionary government moved rapidly to nationalize the main means of production.
Just as Washington told Venezuela recently it could not send its oil to Cuba, back in the early 1960s, Washington told Cuba it could not buy oil from Russia. In response, Cuba didn’t negotiate. It nationalized the Shell refinery and other oil installations! It then organized to deal with Washington’s retaliation of cancelling its sugar quota by nationalizing the country’s massive sugar industry. It also carried out a thorough agrarian reform. And it dismantled the capitalist state, from its army to all its bourgeois institutions. Cuban revolutionaries took key positions in government, banking, and industry, forcing out those capitalists who did not leave voluntarily, all the while mobilizing the population to defend the gains of their revolution.
The Goliath to the north, enraged by Cuba’s break from its grasp, took one step after another to block the forward march of the Cuban people. But every time Washington punched, the Cuban people successfully defended themselves.
The leadership of the Cuban Revolution mobilized the masses, speaking openly about the imminent danger and preparing the people for the military invasion they knew was coming—unlike the secretive and collaborationist course of the Maduro regime.
When—barely 15 months after the revolutionary victory—Washington launched the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, U.S. and Cuban counterrevolutionary forces were met with fierce resistance by an entire population. They were sent running with their tails between their legs in a matter of 72 hours.10
“A process is not yet a revolution”
There is no “easy road to revolution,” Castro told Chilean students during a state visit in 1971. He described what he saw unfolding in Chile under then-president Salvador Allende, a social democrat, as a “revolutionary process.” But he added that “a process is not yet a revolution.” Castro reminded his audience that “it is a political axiom that there can be no revolution without the total destruction of the old bourgeois state.”
The idea of “socialism in the 21st century” is not a revolutionary program any more than it is a new idea. It is a euphemism for maintaining capitalist economic relations, while trying to win some social reforms. It is a rehashing of social democratic ideas that have been tried and repeatedly failed to lead to socialism for more than a century.
Chile was a tragic example of this reality. In 1973, the Allende government was overthrown. Allende—a courageous social democrat, the polar opposite of Maduro, but with similarities to Chávez—heroically died while trying to defend his democratically elected government against a rightist military coup largely instigated and backed by Washington.
The cause of Chilean workers and farmers, and of working people the world over, suffered a severe setback precisely because Allende’s Popular Unity government instituted significant social reforms but avoided infringing on bourgeois institutions or arming the Chilean people to defend their gains.
The situation in Chile in the early 1970s resembled to a degree what unfolded in Venezuela under Chávez in the first seven years of that Venezuelan leader’s rule. But it bears no resemblance to what unfolded in Venezuela under Maduro in the decade leading up to his kidnapping.
We must condemn Washington’s brutal violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and the U.S. smear campaign against Maduro and his government. But we should not apologize for or offer political support to a capitalist regime that has repeatedly used force and violence to quell workers’ discontent while falsely claiming to represent their interests.
To call the process in Venezuela “revolutionary” and cite it as the road to a new kind of socialism sows confusion and demoralization. To tell the Venezuelan workers and farmers, as De Los Santos does, that the betrayal of their hopes for the future is being made in the name of socialism derails whatever impulse toward resistance might remain.
Socialism has already been given a bad name, first and foremost by Joseph Stalin and the degeneration of the Soviet state under his rule to a system in many ways worse than capitalism.11 The mouthpieces for the capitalist class in the media and in government work tirelessly to promote the deep-going prejudice among working people against socialism that Stalinism engendered. We don’t need De Los Santos’ arguments to further this travesty.
Mobilizing the power of working people
Contrary to De Los Santos’ doomsday assessment of the invincibility of the U.S. military, the power of the masses can be mobilized to face even the most “high-tech” lethal force. But to unleash that power, a revolutionary leadership must be forged that does not obfuscate the lessons of history or prettify the missteps, failures, and bloody errors of the past.
A conscious working class, committed to the fight for power, aware of the pitfalls, and mobilized in action can defend itself even against the lasers, drones, robots, and technology of imperialism’s war machine and the hands that drive it.
The proof of this is the Cuban people, who for nearly 70 years have withstood sabotage and invasion, economic strangulation and endless campaigns of disinformation, spying and assassinations, all just 90 miles from the same power De Los Santos describes as invincible.
Cuba is testimony to what workers and peasants, mobilized with the power of the state at their service, can accomplish. Even today, as they prepare to fight even with bare hands against the Goliath to the north, they have not given an inch in their commitment to the conquests of their revolution and their socialist ideals.
Cuba represents the “moral and political compass” for the world’s working people, as Cuban leader Ernesto Limia Díaz put it in a recent interview. It points in completely the opposite direction than that of Maduro and his successor in Caracas, who offered up Venezuela’s patrimony to Washington in sordid deals.
While the rogues in Washington, drunk with power, bandy about more threats and aim their weaponry at Cuba, Iran, and elsewhere, there is a need for the broadest unity in action against their crimes.
At the same time, those who have the interests of the working class and its allies at heart have a duty to tell the unvarnished truth about what has transpired in Venezuela to help avoid such setbacks being unnecessarily repeated in the future.
The claims of De Los Santos and PSL take a wrecking ball to that goal.
Although this is a signed article, it reflects the views of all of the editors of World-Outlook.
—World-Outlook, February 22, 2026
https://world-outlook.com/2026/02/22/washingtons-conquest-in-venezuela-i/
1 First articulated by then-president James Monroe in 1823, when nearly all Spanish colonies in the Americas had either achieved or were close to independence, the Monroe doctrine asserted that any further efforts by European powers to control or influence sovereign states in the region would be viewed as a threat to U.S. security. It represented the seeds of a policy that could be summarized as Latin America and the Caribbean being the “backyard” of the United States—an unabashed attempt at U.S. economic domination in the hemisphere and the mustering of military power to back that up. “The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” was first asserted in the 2025 National Security Strategy document released by the White House in November 2025.
2 The Bolivarian Revolution refers to the process of social reform in Venezuela initiated in 1998 when Hugo Chávez was first elected the country’s president. It is named after Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan military officer who led the fight for independence from Spain in the early 1820s in the region encompassing what today is Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.
3 The Venezuelan oil industry was officially nationalized on January 1, 1976, during the first presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez, Chávez’s predecessor. This nationalization established Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), as a state-owned petroleum enterprise. Soon after being elected president for a second time in 1989, Pérez announced El Gran Viraje (The Great Turn) to deal with empty coffers and a huge foreign debt. This turn included austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund and allowed for greater participation of private investors in PDVSA. Tightened state control of PDVSA returned in 2007 under Hugo Chávez.
4 For more information on how working people defeated the 2002 U.S.-backed coup attempt to topple the democratically elected government of Hugo Chávez see “We’re fighting to defend workers in Venezuela,’ an eyewitness report published in the August 12, 2002, Militant newspaper.
5 World-Outlook explained the term Bonapartism in its inaugural article, following the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a right-wing mob that tried to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. election through violent means. The mob was inspired by the false claim of a “stolen election” by Donald Trump. World-Outlook called attention to the writings of Marxist scholar George Novack. Decades ago, Novack wrote that Bonapartism “carries to an extreme the concentration of power in the head of the state already discernible in the contemporary imperialist democracies. All important policy decisions are centralized in a single individual equipped with extraordinary emergency powers. He speaks and acts not as the servant of parliament … but in his own right as ‘the man of destiny’ who has been called upon to rescue the nation in its hour of mortal peril.”
6 Fedecámaras (Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce) is the largest, non-profit, and most influential umbrella organization representing private business associations in Venezuela.
7 In October 1962, in what is widely known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, Washington pushed the world to the edge of nuclear war by enacting a naval blockade of Cuba and threatening war unless the Soviet Union withdrew nuclear missiles it had installed in Cuba, despite the wishes of the Cuban government. The Cuban people and their revolutionary government, with unparalleled determination to defend their sovereignty and their socialist revolution, blocked U.S. plans for a military assault and saved humanity from the consequences of a nuclear holocaust.
8 Refers to an extremely precarious and threatening situation.
9 Fidel Castro was the central leader of the Cuban revolution. He served as Cuba’s president from 1976 until his retirement in 2008. He died in 2016.
10 Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) was where counterrevolutionary forces — organized and backed by the U.S. government during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, a Democrat and liberal icon—landed in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Cuban Revolution in April 1961. The population mobilized and repelled the attack in just three days.
11 In 1917, the working class and peasantry of Russia carried out one of the most deep-going revolutions in world history. In a matter of months, the revolution led to an unprecedented leap in the country from a semi-feudal monarchy to a republic run by working people of city and countryside, opening the possibility of the socialist transformation of society in the former Tsarist empire and around the world. But the new workers and peasants’ republic remained isolated internationally when opportunities to extend the revolution in Germany and other advanced capitalist countries in Europe were lost. Under the pressure of unrelenting hostility from the capitalist powers, reaction set in within ten years. A privileged bureaucratic caste led by Joseph Stalin violently crushed the opposition to its policies in the Bolshevik Party, which had led the revolution, and drove workers and peasants from political power.
Stalinism replaced internationalism, which is fundamental to Marxism, with the idea of “socialism in one country.” It used thuggery and outright murder against those who defended Marxism around the world. It transformed the parties of the Communist International into subservient appendages of Stalin’s regime in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Over decades, it became the cumulative expression of the corruption of communism and Marxism, in the name of communism and Marxism.
In his book The Revolution Betrayed, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, who was exiled by Stalin’s regime and eventually assassinated by its agents, gives the clearest and most detailed explanation of how and why this bureaucratic social layer was able to take and hold political power in the USSR.
Revolution Betrayed
https://marxist.com/classics-the-revolution-betrayed/all-pages.htm