William Z. Foster and his movement once faced a parallel situation to the one that communists are confronted with today. One where amid new escalations by U.S. imperialism, one camp within Marxism sought to advance solidarity with the targets of this aggression, while the other side sought to appease the aggressors. Today, the forces of imperial appeasement within Marxism are the Communist Party of Greece and its adjacent political actors, which have assisted the U.S. State Department in slandering Venezuela’s revolutionary government.
This betrayal follows a historical pattern. Following the end of the second world war, and the effort by finance capital to re-solidify its control through the Truman White House, the world was facing an era of expanded U.S. imperial aggression. Washington’s deep state had successfully sabotaged the friendship which America built with the Soviet Union, and launched a new war against Russia to preserve the dominance of international banking. And the American workers movement had been crippled in its ability to fight back against these schemes, because certain communist leaders made disastrous compromises during the war; compromises with the same pro-fascist, pro-Zionist financial institutions that are behind the present war on Venezuela.
To connect Marxism with the Venezuelan people’s resistance against U.S. aggression, we must look at the tactics that opportunists have historically used to separate socialism from the anti-imperialist cause, and build a solidarity movement that can thwart these tactics.
Among these tactics is the one in which the appeasers encourage complacency amid imperialist schemes, as the American communist leadership did. A central figure within the workers movement’s internal betrayal during World War II was Earl Browder, the Communist Party USA leader who’d implemented a policy of “liquidationism”—effectively meaning the communists ceased to exist as a real fighting force, and tailed behind the “good” wing of the ruling class. The camp which Browder had hitched himself to was the Democratic Party, and this let him keep a superficial image of being pro-worker because FDR was helping the working class. But Browder wasn’t making inroads with the proletarian mass forces which were behind these gains; he was instead seeking to befriend the “enlightened” parts of finance capital.
Such was the realignment within the communist movement that preceded the CP’s no-strike policy during wartime. It was an abandonment of the mission to lead the workers; and Foster sought to undo that abandonment by re-connecting American communism with the globe’s anti-imperialist forces. Wrote Foster:
In the postwar world, which will face gigantic problems of industrial reconstruction and development, the United States, with its tremendous economic resources, is bound to play a very important role. What Comrade Browder does not see, however, is that if the role of the United States is to help in the realization of the programs of Moscow, Teheran and Yalta, this can only be accomplished if the broad masses of this country, especially the trade union movement, are very much on the alert to see to it that imperialist trends upon the part of our Government and the great capitalists are curbed and democratic policies imposed. The great goals of victory over fascism and the achievement of a lasting peace, laid down at Moscow, Teheran and Yalta, can be realized, but only upon the basis of eternal vigilance by the combined democratic forces of the world. Browder, contrary to this, is quite willing to leave the whole matter to the “intelligence” and “enlightened” self-interest of the big capitalists.
Right now, amid Washington’s drive to destroy Venezuela’s revolutionary government, Marxism is again afflicted with such opportunistic rejections of solidarity. The camp of CPs that align with the KKE have set themselves up against Maduro, who’s falsely depicted as a traitor to socialism within this camp’s narrative. Thereby, these CPs in effect side with imperialism’s war efforts. It’s a kind of crisis that the communist movement keeps facing throughout history, with another example being when the Second International supported World War I on the basis of “defense of the fatherland.”
In the case of the Second International’s betrayal, the communist movement was able to rescue itself from pro-imperialist opportunism. This was because the communists who’d remained principled would go on to create the world’s first workers state, supplanting the outmoded old international communist leadership. In the case of the Browderite problem, the anti-opportunist struggle had very mixed results. What Browder did couldn’t stop the revolutions in China, Korea, or elsewhere, because communism is obviously bigger than the United States; but in the USA, communism still hasn’t recovered, which has majorly set back the revolutionary cause in America and many other places.
How effectively we’ll be able to combat the anti-Venezuela actors depends on how well the workers movement within the “collective west” learns from the liberation struggles of the Global South. We must take example from forces like Gaza’s resistance coalition, whose member the PFLP has said about Venezuela: “the Venezuelan leadership is a legitimate leadership, democratically elected by the Venezuelan people and enjoying their trust in the struggle for sovereignty and dignity.” This statement is so significant because it goes against the lies of the fraudulent, Trotskyist-run “Communist Party of Venezuela,” which last year made a statement repeating Washington’s narratives about electoral fraud:
We alert international public opinion that, just as the government of Nicolás Maduro has stripped the Venezuelan people of their social and economic rights, it now intends to deprive them of their democratic rights. The accusation of an alleged attempt to undermine the electoral system, made by the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Elvis Amoroso, far from providing the necessary guarantees for the process, deepens doubts about the results presented to the country. In this regard, we demand that the CNE publish all of the voting records—as established by electoral regulations—as well as ensure maximum transparency in the vote count. The proclamation of Nicolás Maduro as re-elected president under this scenario of uncertainty, in which the results presented by Amoroso openly contradict the prevailing sentiment during the election day, is nothing more than a provocation that paves the way for violent situations.
This is the faction that the KKE’s camp aligns with: a platform for right-wing tropes about Maduro having taken away the Venezuelan people’s “economic rights,” and for the assertions of U.S. officials like Marco Rubio (whose accusation of fraud has been disputed by dozens of American electoral observers in Venezuela). I describe this party as being not just incorrect, but in itself fake, because the authentic militants within the PSUV wrestled back control over their party in 2023. After the Trotskyists had taken over, and anti-democratically enforced an anti-Maduro position, the members who represented the party’s true democratic will successively sued to re-constitute the organization. The group that wrote the statement above is a splinter faction which takes the exact same position as the U.S. State Department, and that’s unsurprisingly received a statement of solidarity from the opportunistic KKE leadership.
This is how we narratively defeat the KKE’s camp: by exposing how it assists in wrecking efforts against anti-imperialist and working-class movements, and by contrasting its positions with those of Global South revolutionary forces like those in Palestine.
Last month, the KKE said that “there exist communist parties such as the KKE and the CP of Venezuela that refuse to become the tail of the bourgeoisie, that do not identify the interests of the working class and the people with those of anti-popular bourgeois and social-democratic governments, as in Venezuela, and that pursue an independent policy in defence of the working class and its interests.” We can refute this defense by pointing out what the Venezuelan splinter CP has actually done: promote the lies of Rubio, Trump, Machado, and the other Zionist aggressors.
In our mission to prevent the KKE from wrecking the Venezuelan solidarity movement, the most constructive thing we can do is build alternative structures to the old guard which the KKE represents within global socialism. For those of us in the United States, this task is actually easier than it is in Europe, because the KKE doesn’t have an adjacent party here; America’s communist movement was dismantled so thoroughly that we are now having to rebuild from nothing. But on every front within this struggle, even where the opportunistic revisionists have the most control, there is a way of operating that we all must embrace: the mode in which we emphasize adapting the class struggle to today’s era.
It’s not just that the KKE is wrong. It’s that the KKE represents a mindset of outdated stagnation, where “Marxism” is made to mean blindly following a set of repetitive dogmas. Our goal isn’t merely to combat the KKE, it’s to take Marxism into the future. This present counter-propaganda mission, where we must show why the KKE and its partners aren’t telling the truth about Venezuela, cannot become a circular argument; the actors we’re arguing against are not speaking in good faith, and they’ll never admit to being wrong. The purpose of exposing their lies is to open up new paths within the workers movement, where we show the workers that they must seek out authentic revolutionary alternatives.
The forces behind this wrecking campaign hope to cripple the workers movement the same way that Browderism crippled it; but if we build those alternative working-class structures, what will follow is a new wave of workers revolutions. Ones that give the global proletariat new leadership and new opportunities for independent struggle, like the revolution of 1917 did.
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