Over the past two months, the Trump administration has deployed a massive naval and aerial force to the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela and conducted a series of deadly strikes on civilian fishing boats, killing at least 32. The administration insists without evidence that these boats were carrying drugs, and that its actions in the Caribbean are part of a legitimate operation to combat “narcoterrorism”. However, it is widely understood that these acts are part of Trump’s longtime goal of toppling the government of Venezuela’s elected president Nicolás Maduro and destroying the achievements of Venezuela’s ongoing socialist revolution.
Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution
The Bolivarian Revolution, named for the early 19th-century South American anticolonial revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar, was initiated by the late socialist leader Hugo Chávez. Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998 on a platform of fighting corruption and poverty, promoting social justice, and convening a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution that would dismantle Venezuela’s two-party political duopoly to permit more competitive elections. This campaign generated an unprecedented level of popular enthusiasm, winning Chávez the election and earning him the largest percentage for a presidential candidate in the country in four decades.
Upon taking office, Chávez got to work on this ambitious agenda. A new constitution, focused on human rights, social justice, and equality, was drafted and overwhelmingly approved by popular referendum. Chávez began improving state control over the country’s already nationalized oil company, PDVSA, with an eye to using oil revenues to finance social spending for impoverished Venezuelan workers. But when a march of opposition forces clashed with a wall of Chávez’s supporters (Chavistas) on April 11, 2002, resulting in a shootout, several high-ranking military officers blamed Chávez for the violence and arrested him, threatening to halt the Bolivarian Revolution in its tracks.
What happened next surprised everyone. Masses of predominantly poor, grassroots supporters of Chávez poured out of the barrios surrounding Caracas and spontaneously marched on the Miraflores Palace, demanding his return, supported by military officers who remained loyal to the constitution and to Chávez. Only 47 hours after the coup, loyal forces rescued Chávez and returned him to the Miraflores Palace, securing the future of the Bolivarian Revolution with a profound grassroots mobilization.
Chávez spent the remainder of his life continuing to make colossal strides in fighting corruption and poverty, and making further achievements in social justice. But he had an even grander vision. Building on a long popular tradition of autonomous organs of grassroots direct democracy in Venezuela, Chávez envisioned the construction of a network of communal councils and communes, based in the barrios, that could comprise the basic framework for a new socialist state to replace the existing capitalist one. These communes would represent a parallel popular authority tasked with administering territory, organizing production, and managing resources at the neighborhood level, independently of the official Venezuelan state power. Chávez’s strategy was to use the financial resources of the state, fueled by high oil revenues, to fund this project of Communes, with the goal to eventually transfer political and economic power “from the constituted power (the government) to the constituent power (the people).”
Shortly before his death, Hugo Chávez delivered a significant speech, known as the “Strike at the Helm” speech. In this speech, he humbly confessed that despite all the incredible social achievements the Bolivarian Revolution had made to date, the communal state was nowhere near ready for a transfer of full political power, and Venezuela was still a fundamentally capitalist state. Despite vast nationalizations of formerly private sector industries, an oligarchy of privileged elites still existed, thoroughly intertwined with the business interests of Wall Street, with an increasingly fanatical hatred of the Bolivarian Revolution and its policies of uplifting the poor. To his vice president, the former bus driver and union leader Nicolás Maduro, Chávez said, “Nicolás, I entrust you with this task as I would entrust my life to you: the communes.”
President Maduro
Chávez passed away on March 5, 2013, and Maduro succeeded him as president. In September 2014, in his efforts to carry the Bolivarian Revolution forward, Maduro announced the “Five Big Revolutions”: (1) the economic revolution, promoting social production; (2) the knowledge revolution, emphasizing education, culture, and science; (3) the social missions, crucial to building socialism; (4) the creation of a new democratic and communal state, ending “what remains of the bourgeois state”; and (5) the “territorial socialism” revolution, requiring the creation of a “new ecosocialist model.”
However, these ambitions were severely constrained by a sudden and unexpected plummeting of global oil prices. Because of Venezuela’s longtime inability to diversify its economy due to its legacy as a victim of neocolonialism and underdevelopment, it was overly dependent on oil revenues to fund state spending. When oil prices suddenly plummeted from $100 to $40 a barrel in the summer of 2014, the effect on Venezuela was devastating. But that was only the beginning.
In March 2015, the imperialist US President Barack Obama ridiculously declared Venezuela a “threat to national security” and imposed asset freezes and visa bans on certain Venezuelan government officials. When Donald Trump took office in 2017, he greatly escalated these measures into a comprehensive sanctions package and launched a full scale hybrid war against Venezuela with the intent to enact a regime change against President Maduro and liquidate the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution. These sanctions cut Venezuela off from international financial markets, and effectively created an oil embargo. As Venezuela’s oil is the source of over 95% of foreign currency earnings, these measures were intended to starve the Bolivarian Revolution of revenue for imports, debt service, and social spending.
The Trump administration then declared Maduro’s 2018 election victory to be stolen, and recognized a little-known Venezuelan opposition figure named Juan Guaidó to be the “interim president” of Venezuela. Trump gave Guaidó control of Venezuelan financial assets which had been illegally seized by the sanctions, and invited Guaidó as a special guest to a joint session of the US Congress, where he received bipartisan praise and adulation from the entire legislature. All this despite the fact that Guaidó did not even participate in the 2018 election, and most Venezuelans had never even heard of him!
The Return of Trump
This hybrid war failed to dislodge Maduro. So after Trump’s 2024 re-election, he renewed his efforts. After Trump provocatively teased the idea of himself receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in the middle of 2025, the award was shockingly given to a notorious Venezuelan opposition leader named María Corina Machado. For many, Machado was just as bad, or even worse, a recipient than Trump. Besides her warm friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu and support for the Gaza genocide, Machado’s longtime advocacy for violent US intervention in her home country has even mainstream human rights organizations criticizing the award. But it was clear to anyone following the machinations of US imperialism against Venezuela that the attention on Machado was intended as a part of Trump’s renewed hybrid war. In a recent interview with Donald Trump, Jr., she said that US companies will “make a lot of money” if she is successful at toppling Maduro and taking over the country. “We are going to privatize all our industry”, she said.
At the same time, shortly after the announcement that the falsely named US Department of Defense was being returned to its original and more honest name of the Department of War, Trump’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told US troops on a warship off the coast of Puerto Rico that they were being sent to the “front lines”, and that this is not training. These are the circumstances that have led to the US bombing of civilian fishing boats.
Let’s be clear: these attacks are illegal, an egregious violation of international law. President Maduro is not involved in the drug trade. The US government’s own documents establish that this is a lie. But even if it were true that Maduro’s government were complicit in trafficking narcotics to the US, bombing random boats in the Caribbean Sea is a shocking and illegal provocation.
And like all unilateral sanctions, the US government’s entire sanctions regime against Venezuela is illegal, designed with the express purpose of crushing Venezuela’s poor population into such immiseration that they would turn on President Maduro and topple him. These efforts are part of a long, sordid, and well-established pattern of US regime changes and attempts at regime change, all over the world, but especially concentrated in Latin America.
The Bolivarian Revolution is not a completed socialist revolution. Poverty, dysfunction, and corruption remain, ever worsened by the crisis. Capitalist relations of production still abound in Venezuela, as they did when President Chávez made his “Strike at the Helm” speech. However, in order for workers to understand what would be at stake if the Trump administration were to succeed in toppling President Maduro, and in order to cut through the fog of disinformation designed to manufacture consent for such a deed, we believe in the need for an objective appraisal of the revolution’s achievements.
What Has Been Achieved
Following the late President Chávez’s 1998 electoral victory, Venezuela embarked on a radical process of social transformation, starting with the drafting of a new constitution that shattered the old political duopoly. Chávez then utilized the wealth of Venezuela’s publicly owned oil industry to finance an ambitious program of poverty reduction and social justice. This program has greatly reduced inequality, provided free universal healthcare to the poor workers in the barrios with the help of Cuban doctors, extending healthcare access to over 95% of the population, eradicated illiteracy, provided free education to those who had been excluded from the system, established a massive network of subsidized food distribution markets, and vastly expanded access to clean drinking water.
These benefits have been built on a foundation of public sector enterprise by seizing the wealth from the elite Venezuelan oligarchs and US corporations. Chávez completed the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil and gas industry, which had originally been nationalized in the 1970s. He also nationalized substantial parts of the iron ore and steel, agriculture, banking, gold mining, telecoms, most electrical services, tourism and travel, and transportation industries.
Although President Chávez was originally brought to power by a democratic election, following the 2002 coup he was kept in power only by the grassroots mass mobilization and enthusiasm of the poor workers who live in the barrios surrounding Caracas and make up the vast majority of the population. Chávez and Maduro have, however imperfectly due to the strains of isolation and imperialist sabotage, supported the expansion and strengthening of the communes, the embryo of a revolutionary new socialist state. We consider these communes to be unambiguously a form of dual power.
Hail the Communes!
“Dual power” is concept that emerged in the history of revolutionary Marxism to describe a situation when two distinct and fundamentally opposed systems of political authority temporarily coexist and compete for control of the state. Upon the Russian Revolution of February 1917, after a spontaneous workers’ rebellion forced the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, a council of workers’ and soldiers’ elected representatives sprang into existence. This council was the Petrograd Soviet, and would form the basic kernel of the new revolutionary socialist government with the Bolshevik revolution later that year. Typically, such a dual power emerges as a product of the revolutionary upheaval of the workers in direct challenge to the outgoing capitalist state.
The dual power situation of the Venezuelan communes, however, has the unique characteristic of being actively supported by the leaders of the outgoing Venezuelan state, however imperfectly. The communes are an incipient form of dual power, but one that is incomplete and constantly under threat. They are the missing piece that President Chávez correctly identified in his frank diagnosis of the Bolivarian Revolution, and must be defended at all costs! Further, workers in the United States and elsewhere must look to the example set by the Venezuelan workers’ deep and insatiable yearning for self-governance, direct democracy, and collective control over production, as the key to our own collective liberation. We see the struggle against capitalism and imperialism as global. The workers of the world can never expect to make new gains in this global struggle if we can’t recognize and defend the old ones.
Class conscious workers in the belly of the imperialist beast must unconditionally denounce US imperialist aggression, sanctions, and any attempts to organize a coup or military intervention against the Maduro government, and vigorously defend every last achievement of the Bolivarian Revolution from reconquest by Trump and his fascist cronies.
¡CHÁVEZ VIVE!
¡LA LUCHA SIGUE!