Order Reigns in Venezuela: Regime capture, not regime change

A transaction among thieves

UPDATE: 10pm GMT, Sunday 4 January

The picture emerging a day after my first post is grimmer and more clarifying than the initial reports suggested.

What we are witnessing is not regime change but regime capture. The FANB’s immediate recognition of Delcy Rodríguez, the demobilisation orders, the “tense calm” in Caracas: none of this is consistent with a state resisting foreign aggression. It is consistent with a negotiated handover in which significant elements of the Chavista apparatus concluded that their institutional survival was better served by collaboration than resistance.

The 4.5 million militia members, we now learn, were a “semantic construction.” The revolutionary rhetoric was theatre. When the moment came, the Bolivarian bourgeoisie chose exactly as every national bourgeoisie in the semi-colonial world has chosen when faced with the armed power of imperialism: accommodation on the best available terms.

Trump’s dismissal of María Corina Machado tells us everything about Washington’s actual priorities. This was never about democracy. A genuine democratic transition would be unpredictable, contested, potentially destabilising to oil production. Far better, from the perspective of ExxonMobil and Chevron, to retain the existing state apparatus under new management. Rodríguez has the relationships, the institutional knowledge, the willingness to deal. She will, Trump reports, “do whatever you need.”

This development does not diminish the crime. It deepens it. The extraction of Maduro was not an intervention against a resistant state; it was the enforcement mechanism for a transaction already agreed among thieves. The Venezuelan people were not consulted by Maduro, by the FANB, by Washington, or by the oil majors now preparing to “fix broken infrastructure” with their billions. They remain, as ever, the objects rather than the subjects of their own history.

Our solidarity is with them. Not with the Chavista apparatus that sold them out. Not with the “democratic opposition” now being sidelined by its imperial sponsors. With the workers, the poor, the organised left who will have to rebuild from the wreckage that both their own ruling class and American imperialism have made of their country.

The task of the anti-war movement has not changed. But we should be clear-eyed about what we are opposing: not a bungled adventure, but a successful one. The model being established in Caracas this weekend, of military extraction followed by negotiated collaboration with regime insiders, will be applied elsewhere if it is not defeated here.

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What the events confirm

Several readers have rightly pushed on what was missing from the original analysis: the economic dimension, particularly Venezuela’s failure to break from its petrostate model. The events of the last twenty-four hours have provided a brutal confirmation of this critique, though not in the way some might have expected.

The question was never simply whether the Bolivarian process should have moved away from oil dependence. Of course it should. The question was always why it didn’t, and the answer was never primarily technical or economic. It was political. Breaking with extractivism would have required breaking with the social forces whose material interests were bound up with the existing model: the state bureaucracy, the military high command, the newly-enriched Bolivarian bourgeoisie. The same forces, in other words, who have just demonstrated their willingness to hand the country to American oil majors rather than risk their institutional position.

The Bolivarian bourgeoisie makes its choice

The 4.5 million militia members were not a gamble that failed to materialise. They were never intended to materialise. Building genuine independent working-class capacity for armed resistance would have posed as much danger to the PSUV leadership’s bureaucratic consolidation as to any external threat. The militia served its actual purpose: social control, electoral mobilisation, rhetorical deterrence. When tested against Delta Force and the implicit threat of further escalation, the deterrent collapsed because it was designed to collapse. The generals made their calculations and Maduro was the price of the transaction.

Some leftists have suggested that the way forward lies in South American regional realignment against US aggression. There is a surface plausibility to this, particularly as Trump’s reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine threatens every government in the hemisphere. But we must ask: who leads this realignment? Lula, whose government has already demonstrated its accommodation to capital and the military? Boric, whose constitutional reform was defeated and whose programme has been gutted? Petro, who promised to transition Colombia away from oil and has discovered the same structural impossibilities that defeated Chávez?

Bloc formation among bourgeois governments will reproduce their limitations. The character of any regional resistance depends entirely on which forces are driving it. This is not an argument against the demand for Latin American solidarity against US imperialism. It is an argument about what that solidarity must look like if it is to mean anything: coordination of workers’ movements, trade unions, peasant organisations, and the organised left across borders, not diplomatic manoeuvres among governments that have already demonstrated their unwillingness to break with the constraints of managing capitalist economies under imperialist pressure.

Not a bungled adventure, but a successful one

The International Socialist Tendency’s statement, released yesterday, is competent on the historical contextualisation. Its tour through the Monroe Doctrine, the Cold War coups, and the current China rivalry usefully situates the Venezuela intervention within the longer arc of US hemispheric domination. Its handling of Maduro is franker than many on the left have managed: “To oppose these attacks has nothing to do with supporting Maduro’s corrupt authoritarian regime. It is the sole right of the Venezuelan masses, with their long revolutionary history, to remove him.”

But the IST statement was written before the scale of internal collaboration became clear, and it shows. The framing assumes a resistant state under attack. What we now face is something more demoralising: a state whose leadership negotiated its own capture. The call for solidarity “from below” is correct, but the statement offers little guidance on what this means when the regime that was supposedly the target of imperialism turns out to have been a willing participant in the transaction.

A transaction among thieves

Socialism must be anti-imperialist, or it is nothing. But we must now add: anti-imperialism that places its faith in bourgeois nationalists, however radical their rhetoric, will end in betrayal. It always does. The Bolivarian project has now provided one more confirmation, written in the blood and dispossession of the Venezuelan working class, of what revolutionaries have argued since 1848.

The task of rebuilding falls to the Venezuelan left, to the workers and the poor who have been betrayed by their own leadership and plundered by foreign capital simultaneously. Our solidarity is with them. The task of the international movement is to ensure that the model being established this weekend, extraction followed by collaboration, faces sufficient resistance that it cannot be replicated in Havana, in Managua, or anywhere else Washington designates as the next obstacle to the “money coming out of the ground.”

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