Whose State? Whose Gain? Venezuela and the Test of Revolutionary Nationalisation

The criterion is not who owns the deed but who holds the power

Liberal anti-imperialism has discovered that the Venezuela crisis isn’t really about oil. This is progress of a sort. A Facebook post circulating among left-adjacent commentators patiently explains that US production exceeds Venezuelan output, that infrastructure restoration would cost $100 billion and take a decade, that the 2026 oil glut makes new investment irrational. The author concludes that Trump’s intervention is about “regional dominance and removing Chinese and Russian influence from the Americas” rather than direct extraction.

All true. And all inadequate.

The analysis treats Venezuela as a square on a geopolitical chessboard: great powers manoeuvre, smaller nations suffer, the morality is clear even if the economics are complex. Missing entirely is the question that should animate revolutionary politics: what happened to the Venezuelan working class? Where are the 4.5 million militia members Maduro claimed to have mobilised? Why did the Bolivarian Armed Forces recognise Delcy Rodríguez within hours rather than mounting resistance?

The answer to those questions requires a framework that liberal anti-imperialism cannot provide. It requires understanding why some nationalisations advance working-class power and others merely transfer exploitation to new managers.

The Criterion

Trotsky’s 1938 defence of Mexican oil nationalisation provides the analytical key. When Cárdenas expropriated British and American petroleum interests, Trotsky did not declare Mexico a workers’ state. He did not call for political support to Cárdenas’s regime. He defended the nationalisation unconditionally against imperialist attack while maintaining complete political independence from the government administering it.

The distinction matters. Nationalisation is progressive when it reflects mass pressure from below. When it develops organs of working-class self-organisation. When it builds consciousness of workers as a class capable of running production. When it produces material benefits that strengthen rather than domesticate the oppressed. Under those conditions, revolutionary socialists defend the measure against imperialism while fighting for workers’ control to deepen and extend the gains.

Nationalisation is not progressive when it merely shifts assets from private capitalists to a state bureaucracy that enriches itself while suppressing independent workers’ organisation. Under those conditions, the measure remains an anti-imperialist act deserving tactical defence, but the political content is fundamentally different. We stand with the oppressed nation against imperialism. We do not stand with the oppressing bureaucracy against the workers it exploits.

The Bolivarian experiment tested this distinction to destruction.

The Precedent

Venezuela had already tested permanent revolution’s thesis before Chávez was born.

In January 1958, a popular insurrection overthrew the US-backed dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez. A general strike developed into street-fighting; working-class districts of Caracas were barricaded against the police; armed left-wing groups occupied the ranchitos overlooking the capital. The Communist Party of Venezuela had broad popular support. For a moment, the question of power was genuinely open.

The CPV chose class collaboration. As Teodoro Petkoff later admitted, the party’s strategy of “national unity” with the “democratic bourgeoisie” meant “placing the party and the working class at the tail of the non-revolutionary parties and of the dominant bourgeoisie.” Rómulo Betancourt’s Acción Democrática contained the revolutionary wave through limited agrarian reform: 60,000 peasants received land, just enough to swing rural support away from the guerrillas who emerged when the left was outlawed. By 1971, latifundistas comprising 1.7 per cent of landowners still controlled 67 per cent of the land. The minifundistas, 60 per cent of farm-owners, occupied 2.5 per cent. Agrarian reform had served its political purpose and ceased; Venezuela remained dependent on food imports despite gigantic untapped agricultural potential.

The 1975 oil nationalisation under Carlos Andrés Pérez was celebrated as “the second independence.” Michael Löwy, writing for the Fourth International tradition in 1981, documented what actually happened. The multinationals received handsome indemnification. Secret agreements guaranteed them 88 per cent of exportable production and a virtual monopoly over marketing and distribution. “Technical assistance” contracts preserved real control over production and exploration; official sources recorded profits of 1,413 million bolívares in 1976 alone. Exxon’s vice-president called the arrangement “profitable business.” The state assumed the costs of extracting heavy crude while the companies preserved their position.

Löwy placed Venezuela within a broader taxonomy: the “semi-revolution from above,” where nationalist regimes implement reforms that generate hopes without transforming property relations or breaking dependency. Such regimes, he argued, inevitably face a choice: deepen toward socialist revolution or undergo “Bonapartist capitalist normalisation.” The pattern across Egypt, Turkey, India was consistent: reforms implemented from above prove “precarious and ephemeral,” rolled back when the bureaucratic layer that administers them finds accommodation with imperialism more attractive than mobilising forces it cannot control.

This was Venezuela’s inheritance. The 2002 coup resistance, when workers and the urban poor flooded the streets to restore Chávez, echoed 1958’s barricades. The question was whether this second opening would produce a different outcome, or whether the structural logic Löwy had identified would reassert itself.

The Promise

Something real happened in Venezuela in the early Chávez years. The 1989 Caracazo, when the Venezuelan military killed between 300 and 3,000 people protesting IMF-imposed austerity, had shattered the legitimacy of the old order. Chávez’s election in 1998 and survival of the 2002 coup reflected genuine mass mobilisation. Workers occupied factories. Neighbourhood assemblies formed. Oil workers defeated the 2002-2003 bosses’ lockout through direct action.

The nationalisations of that period drew their progressive content from this movement. Not from the act of state ownership itself, but from the relationship between state action and working-class self-organisation. When workers at Inveval occupied their factory in 2005 and demanded expropriation, they were building the kind of dual power that revolutionary socialists recognise as the embryo of workers’ control. The nationalisation that followed was progressive precisely because it emerged from and potentially strengthened that movement.

This was the hope people had for Chávez. Not that a military officer would deliver socialism from above, but that the opening created by his government would allow workers’ own organisations to develop to the point where they could take power themselves.

The Betrayal

The hope was systematically betrayed. Not through a single dramatic reversal, but through the patient consolidation of bureaucratic control over every space where independent workers’ power might have developed.

The communal councils, trumpeted as organs of popular power, became multi-class formations that strengthened the presidency rather than creating genuine dual power. The PSUV absorbed and subordinated independent working-class organisations rather than facilitating their autonomous development. State-controlled unions replaced combative independent ones. Workers who challenged management in state enterprises were placed on “non-required” lists, paid less than sixty dollars a month, effectively punished for the crime of taking workers’ control seriously.

When workers at Sanitarios Maracay occupied their factory demanding genuine control, the state intervened against them. When steelworkers at SIDOR organised a five-day strike in June 2023 demanding wage adjustments, union leaders Daniel Romero and Leonardo Azócar were arrested and charged with “incitement to hatred” and “terrorism.” By late 2025, unions reported 160 workers and 20 leaders forcibly disappeared, including José Elías Torres, Secretary-General of the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers.

This is not bureaucratic deformation as a regrettable secondary feature of an otherwise progressive project. This is the actual content of the Bolivarian project: the systematic prevention of independent working-class power.

The Boliburguesia

The theoretical category becomes concrete when we name the beneficiaries. Alex Saab, Maduro’s chief fixer, used the government-subsidised CLAP food programme to launder approximately $350 million, marking up food prices by 112%. The “PDVSA/Crypto” scheme allegedly diverted $3 billion in crude oil sales through cryptocurrency. Wilmer Ruperti and Maroil Trading received exclusive rights to petcoke exports; subsequent audits found over $423 million in accounts receivable owed to the state oil company.

These figures are not anomalies. They are the system. Currency arbitrage between official and black-market exchange rates, PDVSA contracts steered to regime loyalists, import monopolies granted to the politically connected: this is the material basis of Chavismo’s survival. The boliburguesia is not a corruption of the Bolivarian project. It is the Bolivarian project’s actual social content: the class that crystallised around state control of oil rents when the promise of workers’ power proved to be rhetoric.

Private sector value added reached approximately 70% of GDP around 2006-2009. The nationalisations, however dramatic in rhetoric, left the overwhelming majority of the economy in private hands. What changed was not the mode of production but the identity of the favoured capitalists. Ricardo Fernández Barrueco amassed billions after the 2002 strikes; military officers ran state firms on commercial lines; the bolichicos, children of regime loyalists, snapped up nationalised assets at discounts.

Simple state capitalism to more effectively enrich kleptocrats and their children is not progressive. It is not a deformed step toward socialism. It is a different form of capitalist exploitation, one that uses anti-imperialist rhetoric to legitimate the suppression of the very working-class forces that might challenge it.

The Test

The events of January 2026 administered the final examination. The 4.5 million militia members did not materialise because they were never intended to fight. Security analysts now describe the militia as a “semantic construction” designed for social control rather than combat. 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 FANB’s immediate recognition of Delcy Rodríguez, rather than mounting resistance, revealed the transaction among thieves that the Bolivarian project had become. Reports indicate that Trump’s team identified Rodríguez as a potential “business partner” weeks before the operation, based on her existing relationships with Wall Street and international oil interests. She reportedly told Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “We’ll do whatever you need.”

A leadership that hands the country to ExxonMobil rather than arm its own supporters has forfeited any claim to anti-imperialist credentials. The negotiated transition was not a defeat imposed from outside; it was a choice made by the Bolivarian bureaucracy when faced with the alternative of mobilising the working class. They chose collaboration because genuine popular mobilisation would have threatened their own position as surely as American intervention.

The Pattern

This has always been the pattern. The national bourgeoisie, however radical its anti-imperialist rhetoric, will ultimately accommodate to imperialism rather than unleash forces it cannot control.

Bolivia 1952: the MNR contained the workers’ revolution, disarmed the miners’ militias, and eventually opened the door to military coup. Indonesia 1965: Sukarno’s balancing act ended in massacre when the PKI, having subordinated itself to the “progressive” national bourgeoisie, left workers defenceless against Suharto’s slaughter. Chile 1973: Allende refused to arm the workers and died in La Moneda while the cordones industriales were crushed. Egypt under Sadat: the “re-privatisation” of the economy, the rolling back of agrarian reforms, the fusion of bureaucratic bourgeoisie with private capital that Löwy called “normalisation by the elimination of national-democratic excesses.”

Venezuela repeated the pattern twice within living memory. The CPV’s class collaboration in 1958 delivered workers to Betancourt. The PSUV’s bureaucratic consolidation after 2006 delivered them to the boliburguesía. In both cases, the moment of popular mobilisation was captured, channelled, and ultimately betrayed by forces that feared the working class more than they feared imperialism.

The Venezuelan Communist Party, hardly a Trotskyist outfit, reached this conclusion before we did. They broke with the PSUV, denouncing the government’s “liberal turn” and its “oligarchic-bourgeois pact” with sections of the right-wing opposition. The state’s response was clarifying: the Supreme Court appointed an ad-hoc board to “rescue” the PCV, effectively expropriating the party’s legal credentials from its historical leadership. When even the Stalinists recognise the regime as fundamentally bourgeois, the analytical question is settled.

The Solidarity We Owe

Solidarity with Venezuela means solidarity with the Venezuelan working class, not with the apparatus that sold them out.

It means solidarity with the trade unionists arrested for striking. With the 160 disappeared workers. With the Communist Party militants whose organisation was judicially expropriated. With Marea Socialista and the currents of the revolutionary left that broke with Chavismo from the left, not from the right. It means supporting the independent organisation of workers, peasants, and the urban poor against both the incoming American-backed regime and whatever remnants of the boliburguesia manage to survive the transition.

Concretely:

• We oppose the US intervention unconditionally. The crime remains a crime regardless of the character of the victim. Trump’s boast that American oil companies would now “go in” to “fix broken infrastructure” and that Washington would be “reimbursed” through “money coming out of the ground” is imperialism without a mask.

• We refuse to mourn the Maduro regime or call for its restoration. The task of removing kleptocratic governments belongs to the working class of the country concerned, not to nostalgic internationalists.

• We build direct links with Venezuelan workers’ organisations, socialist currents, and social movements that maintain independence from both the PSUV apparatus and the US-backed opposition.

• We demand that any solidarity campaign foreground the struggles of Venezuelan workers against both imperialism and domestic exploitation, rather than treating “defence of Venezuela” as synonymous with defence of its former government.

• We connect the Venezuelan struggle to the broader fight against all imperialisms, including Russian and Chinese, and against the extractivist model that locks peripheral economies into dependency regardless of which flag flies over the presidential palace.

The Lesson

The criterion is not who owns the deed but who holds the power.

State ownership that suppresses independent working-class organisation is not a step toward socialism but a different configuration of capitalist exploitation. Nationalisation that develops organs of workers’ control, that builds fighting capacity, that raises consciousness of the working class as a class capable of running society: that is progressive regardless of the ideological banner under which it occurs. Nationalisation that substitutes bureaucratic management for private ownership while crushing any challenge to the managers: that is state capitalism, and calling it socialism disarms workers politically precisely when they most need clarity.

The Venezuelan working class has been betrayed twice: once by the boliburguesia that promised them socialism and delivered kleptocracy, and once by the imperialism that promises them “freedom” and will deliver plunder. The task of revolutionary socialists is to stand with them against both betrayers, building the independent organisations that alone can break the cycle.

The liberal anti-imperialist is right that this isn’t about oil. But neither is it simply about great-power competition. It is about whether the working class will develop the capacity to take power for themselves, or whether they will remain objects of history rather than its subjects: passed from one set of exploiters to another while commentators debate the geopolitical chess moves of their masters.

The Fourth International’s position was never “critical support” for Bonapartist regimes. It was and remains: unconditional defence against imperialism, complete political independence from the regime, solidarity with the workers’ own organisations. The Venezuelan experience vindicates that position with bitter clarity.

And, the Fourth International's analysis was never retrospective. Löwy identified the structural logic in 1981, before Chávez entered politics. The superficiality of nationalisation that preserves imperialist control through "technical assistance" and marketing agreements; the agrarian structures that generate food dependency; the containment of popular energy through limited reforms and repression: these were diagnosed as inherent to bourgeois-nationalist transformation in dependent capitalist countries. Chavismo tested the thesis again. The thesis held. The task now is to build the organisations that can break the pattern rather than repeat it.

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