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Venezuela Maduro wins presidential election despite imperialist meddling what n

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that Nicolás Maduro's re-election in 2018 was a defensive victory — a working-class rejection of open imperialist intervention — but one that masks a deepening crisis of confidence in the Bolivarian leadership. The central claim is that Maduro's government is caught in an irresolvable contradiction: it relies on working-class and poor support to resist imperialism, yet refuses to break with capitalism internally. By making constant appeals to capitalists, bankers, and landowners to invest, while refusing to expropriate them, the government is incapable of resolving the economic crisis. The only genuine alternatives are either a brutal IMF-style adjustment on the backs of the working class or a revolutionary socialist programme based on democratic workers' control of the economy. The article concludes that the task of the revolutionary vanguard is to build that alternative.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis is rooted in the Marxist theory of the state and the class character of bourgeois democracy. It treats the Venezuelan state not as a neutral arbiter but as a terrain of class struggle, where the Maduro government's refusal to break the power of the oligarchy means it ultimately governs within capitalist limits. The article draws on the Leninist distinction between a workers' government that genuinely pursues socialist transformation and a reformist government that manages capitalism on behalf of the ruling class. The critique of "halfway policies" — concessions to capital that demoralise the base without stabilising the economy — echoes Trotsky's analysis of centrism and the impossibility of a stable middle course in conditions of deep crisis. The argument also deploys the classical Marxist position on imperialism: that US and EU intervention is not a response to democratic deficits but a strategic assault on any challenge to capitalist property relations in the region.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was written in May 2018, immediately after the election, and captures a specific moment in the Venezuelan crisis. The economic data is stark: hyperinflation, collapse in purchasing power, scarcity of basic goods. The electoral figures show a drop in Maduro's vote from 40 percent of the electoral census in 2013 to 30.5 percent in 2018, a loss of 1.5 million votes despite a larger electorate. Turnout was visibly lower in working-class areas, not just in middle-class strongholds. The article identifies the Group of Lima countries — Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Honduras — as an ad-hoc imperialist bloc, and notes the hypocrisy of their concern for democracy given their own records. It also highlights the concrete conflict between the state and the rural communes, where peasants on officially granted land were evicted by state forces at the behest of landowners with links to the state apparatus. This is presented as a microcosm of the broader contradiction: a government that claims to defend the revolution but acts to defend property relations.

Where the Argument Continues

The article opens several lines of argument that are developed elsewhere in the IDOM corpus. The question of the communes and the state's hostility to grassroots revolutionary organisation is taken up in later articles on the Venezuelan peasant movement and the CRBZ. The critique of Maduro's "appeals to capital" is a recurring theme in IDOM's coverage of Venezuela, including in analyses of the 2020 parliamentary elections and the 2021 regional elections. The broader strategic question — how to build a revolutionary alternative within a movement that is still electorally dominant but politically exhausted — is addressed in theoretical articles on the united front and the relationship between the vanguard and the mass movement. The article also points forward to the intensification of US sanctions, which became a central focus of IDOM's coverage in subsequent years, particularly oil sanctions and their impact on the Venezuelan economy.

Connections

This article should be read alongside IDOM's earlier coverage of the 2017 opposition violence and the Orlando Figuera murder, which it references. It connects to the broader Marxist literature on Bonapartism and centrist governments in crisis, particularly Trotsky's writings on the German workers' government and the French Popular Front. The analysis of the Group of Lima countries echoes Lenin's theory of imperialism as a system of competing capitalist states united against workers' power. For readers interested in the commune movement, the article points to the work of the CRBZ and the El Maizal Commune, which are covered in more detail in other IDOM pieces. The strategic conclusion — that the vanguard must build a revolutionary alternative within the chavista movement — connects to the Marxist tradition of the united front and the tactic of critical support.

Key Quotes

  1. "The deep economic crisis is the major issue in people's minds and many are sceptical about the government's ability to deal with it."

  2. "Instead of tackling the crisis head-on by expropriating the capitalists, bankers and landowners, the government makes constant appeals for them to invest. While attacking the role they play in the 'economic war', the government gives them loans and access to dollars."

  3. "There is still a hardcore chavista vote, which turns out at every election out of loyalty to the Bolivarian Revolution and the struggle for socialism that Chavez represented. But it is increasingly more difficult for this hardcore to mobilise other layers."

  4. "The halfway policy of the Maduro government, with ever-growing concessions to the ruling class, only lead to demoralisation, scepticism, an aggravation of the crisis and finally, one way or the other, to a brutal adjustment plan on the backs of the working class."

  5. "There are, in fact, only two possible solutions. One, advocated by all wings of the opposition (and which has the backing of imperialism), is a brutal adjustment plan... The other option would be to take all fundamental levers of the economy into public ownership under democratic workers' control and use them to produce for the benefit of the people, not the profit of the handful of parasites that make up the oligarchy."

  6. "To break with this situation, the revolutionary vanguard needs to set itself the main objective of building a genuine, revolutionary alternative based on a socialist program, which offers a solution to the benefit of working people."