The imperial hegemon’s regime change strategy for the new cold war era is proving more effective than many had anticipated. In Venezuela, Washington has been able to replicate its scheme for overthrowing Assad, where U.S. hybrid warfare pressures numerous officials to agree to a handover. This was the context around Washington’s kidnapping of Maduro, and its strong-arming of the Rodriguez government into critical concessions: a lack of sufficient working-class power, allowing for bourgeois elements to undermine an anti-imperialist state from within. In all of the countries that lack strong proletarian dictatorship, the balance of forces in the class war is perilously unfavorable for the side of the workers, meaning Washington will be able to carry out these kinds of takeovers until the balance fundamentally changes.
Right now, the imperialists are taking advantage of these weaknesses by sending the White Helmets into Venezuela, exporting the model of “humanitarian” covert operations that they applied to Syria. We will see if the White Helmets bring the kinds of violence to Venezuela that they did to Syria, where they collaborated with the Al-Nusra Front in committing atrocities; but the only reason why they wouldn’t do this in Venezuela is because the country has already been so thoroughly compromised.
Rodriguez was meant to have the role of a soft regime change facilitator, and essentially everyone in the anti-imperialist camp now recognizes this; the hope is in Venezuela’s popular revolutionary forces, which haven’t been defeated even though they’ve been kicked to the ground. The White Helmets invasion is about creating U.S.-run, quasi-state structures to replace the systems that Washington’s sanctions have destroyed.
Venezuela isn't the only place where Washington is advancing such insidious methods. With Iran, Cuba, and most other targets for aggression, the empire’s most realistic takeover path involves getting the leadership to fold, then taking a mile every time the leaders give an inch. It’s because this model is so insidious that we’re now objectively in a moment of revolutionary retreat. This will only remain our situation, though, for as long as the workers haven’t yet carried out their counteroffensive. Which could look like a much faster mass mobilization than the enemy will be able to anticipate.
In 1930, after the subjective revolutionary conditions in China had recently become quite unfavorable, Mao said that the entire equation could soon flip:
The subjective forces of the revolution have indeed been greatly weakened since the defeat of the revolution in 1927. The remaining forces are very small and those comrades who judge by appearances alone naturally feel pessimistic. But if we judge by essentials, it is quite another story. Here we can apply the old Chinese saying, "A single spark can start a prairie fire." In other words, our forces, although small at present, will grow very rapidly. In the conditions prevailing in China, their growth is not only possible but indeed inevitable, as the May 30th Movement and the Great Revolution which followed have fully proved. When we look at a thing, we must examine its essence and treat its appearance merely as an usher at the threshold, and once we cross the threshold, we must grasp the essence of the thing; this is the only reliable and scientific method of analysis.
To re-create the victories that the revolutionaries won thereafter, we will have to get our organizations in place for seizing upon all the popular struggles our era is going to see, and turn these struggles into a new wave of revolutions. These revolutions won’t necessarily be won through people’s war, and in countries like the U.S. people’s war model isn’t a serious possibility. Mao’s reasoning about a single spark having potential to rapidly change things applies everywhere, though.
The next opening will be when uprisings like the recent Kenyan and Bolivian strikes start occurring throughout many other parts of the globe, to the effect that the global financial rulers can no longer govern in the old way; this will be when a mandate appears for new proletarian leadership to step in. To succeed in this mission, something we must learn from is the ongoing Bolivian revolt, which has shown where a mass movement needs to be to win in our time.
Bolivia proves that even when the working masses have become fully mobilized, without a clear vanguard party they won’t have the direction needed for winning power. Without our building such a structure beforehand, trying to seize upon the next uprisings will just be worship of spontaneity. Lack of preparation is the problem that’s delayed working-class victory in Bolivia, where the strikers have threatened to depose the U.S.-backed regime but the Movement for Socialism party is fundamentally split.
The split came about from how the established leadership had been governing with weak class compromise after it came to office in 2020, forcing the base to break away from it and rally behind Morales. But the deeper issue is that the party had never been built in the style of a fully revolutionary vanguard entity; it was a mix between revolutionary and reformist elements, based within proletarian politics but lacking the intent to replace the state with a workers state. The need for clarity in one’s task is one of the core matters the anti-imperialist movement must reckon with in order to defeat the forces we’re facing.
Bolivia’s critical setbacks in throwing off imperial control provide lessons that all participants in this struggle can learn from. I’m arguing from a specifically Marxist-Leninist perspective when I say these setbacks show we need a vanguard party; but what it means to have a vanguard party in our era can only be discerned by looking at our particular situation, which can’t be understood just by studying the existing theory. We have to examine the methods that modern imperialism uses to destabilize countries, and to wage counterinsurgencies against mass movements.
In both these areas of class warfare, a crucial weapon that our enemies use is individualism. They recruit liberalized individuals from the regime change target countries, and aspiring petty-bourgeois professionals from the colonial countries, to propagandize or commit sabotage against the “authoritarian” states. They take advantage of how the world has already been Americanized, and how American society is highly individualistic, in order to divert consciousness away from the class struggle. These are the weaknesses that actors like the White Helmets exploit.
When individualism has gained such a great cultural advantage, both in America and in many other places, the only way to build an effective vanguard party is by modifying the old workers party structure that worked within collectivist pre-industrial societies. Individualist wreckers will be able to gain a foothold for as long as they’re operating in an environment that’s friendly to their activities, and we need to build around these forces whenever they inevitably appear.
Overcoming the destructive tactics of the imperial influence networks will require a new kind of flexibility, one that makes the saboteurs and their allies unable to dominate. We must not allow the concept of democratic centralism to get in the way of the struggle, and this may have to mean changing democratic centralism into a more open model like China’s ruling party has done. This is the direction that Marxism is being pushed in as our foes continue their offensive, and it becomes clearer that a shift within our methods is urgently needed. To defeat the forces of destructive individualism, we must learn how to outmaneuver them on an organizational level.
————————————————————————
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.
