Washington’s attempt at invading Venezuela must prompt us to rally behind Maduro, and to combat the supposedly socialist political actors which stand against him. This is the clarity that a moment like this one provides: it shows which forces are authentically on the side of the working class, and gives the principled elements an opportunity to come together. It’s inevitable that such a realignment will come from the resistance against the war on Venezuela; the question is how many members of the global communist movement will join in on the cause of defending Bolivarianism, which will determine how big a role the communist movement itself is going to have in the next stage.
Because the proletarian movement has yet to recover from the USSR’s fall, much of the globe’s class-conscious workers are right now led by communist parties that participate in the smears against Maduro’s government. There are the outright Trotskyist organizations that receive backing from the International Marxist Tendency, which was behind the operation to wreck Venezuela’s communist party. There are the purportedly Marxist-Leninist organizations that take guidance from Greece’s KKE, which has promoted the IMT’s anti-Maduro narratives, attacked China, and waged smear campaigns against the supporters of Russia’s anti-NATO resistance.
Exposing these forces is vital in ensuring that the communist movement takes on a positive role within the fight for Venezuela’s sovereignty. To be effective in this ideological struggle, though, we need to explain why the communist movement’s history proves our pro-Maduro position to be correct. Which will give the ranks of these flawed communist parties a greater reason to join with us, and give the broader supporters of anti-imperialist politics a greater reason to become communists.
Part of this historical basis can be found in the national liberation struggles that have been waged by Juche Korea, and that the DPRK’s theoreticians have written about. Kim Il Sung addressed the same arguments that the anti-Maduro camp is now making; he accounted for how there are different categories of anti-imperialist leaders, and explained why we need to join in a united front with these leaders all the same:
True, there may be various categories of people among those who oppose imperialism. Some may be active against imperialism, others may vacillate in the anti-imperialist struggle, and still others may join in the anti-imperialist struggle reluctantly under the pressure from their own people and the peoples of the world. But, whatever their motives, it is necessary to enlist all these forces except the henchmen of imperialism in the anti-U.S. joint struggle. If more forces, though inconsistent and unsteady, are drawn into the anti-U.S. joint struggle to isolate U.S. imperialism to the largest possible extent and deal blows to it by joint action, that will be a good thing and by no means a bad thing. Those who avoid the anti-imperialist struggle should be induced to turn out in the struggle against imperialism and those who are passive encouraged to be positive in the anti-imperialist struggle. To split the anti-U.S. united front or reject the anti-U.S. joint action will only bring a serious consequence of weakening the anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. struggle.
Maduro doesn’t even fall under the category of a leader who vacillates in the struggle; he solidly falls in the camp of being active against the empire. This becomes apparent when we expose the smears that the anti-Maduro elements have put forth. A big part of the IMT’s case against Maduro is that he’s supposedly fallen into the patterns of IMF reforms; in fact, as Washington has tightened the sanctions, Maduro has adopted a stronger posture in resisting the pressures towards austerity. The arguments from the anti-Maduro socialists have relied on blatantly omitting the role the sanctions have played, and construing a narrative where Maduro is responsible for the country’s economic crisis—which is the same story that the U.S. State Department tells.
By refuting this propaganda, we can help the global communist movement re-learn the basic knowledge about national liberation struggle which figures like Kim Il Sung provided it with, but which far too much of it has forgotten. The dogmatic opportunist forces within the socialist sphere have always been there, but it was when the USSR fell that they could become predominant within the communist parties that aren’t in power. The KKE itself was originally the opposite of what it is now; it was the party that led Greece’s anti-fascist resistance, and almost carried out a revolution until British imperialism crushed it. In the post-Soviet era, though, it’s completely detached from the dynamic role that it used to play. A failure in rigorous education among party ranks, both by the KKE and by the organizations which have tailed behind it, has allowed for imperialism-compatible “socialism” to become ideologically dominant.
This is the root of the problem: a lack of will to analyze the conditions as they exist today, and an insistence on staying with long-outdated frameworks for interpreting events. For example, the “neither Washington nor Beijing” position comes from the idea that the present great-power conflict can be understood through the same lens as the first world war, where different imperialist powers were competing for colonial territories. It’s a mechanical application of something that Lenin wrote about in a very different context, done without interest in examining how the situation has changed since then or which factors are driving our new cold war.
With Washington’s pivot to Latin America in this last year, it’s become less likely that a war with China will come; but now that the hegemon has settled upon what will likely be its next big target in Venezuela, the logic of “neither Washington nor Beijing” is doing as much damage as it would otherwise. The dogmatic opportunist elements are working to split the workers movement when it needs to be unified the most, instigating hostility towards the revolutionary project that’s under the most urgent threat right now.
The only path forward for the Bolivarian revolution and its global supporters is to form a united front, one which can wage this resistance fight without help from the stagnant and backward parts of the communist movement. Our cause represents the continuation of the 20th century liberation struggles which were fought by Kim Il Sung and others; we are here to carry these struggles into the present moment. This is what we must point out to our potential supporters: by coming to our position, you can take part in the types of efforts that actually advance history.
————————————————————————
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment