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Video Alan Woods interview Venezuela coup attempt and imperialist hypocrisy

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The central thesis is that the US-led coup attempt in Venezuela, including the recognition of Juan Guaidó as interim president and the orchestration of a "humanitarian aid" convoy, is not a democratic intervention but a classic imperialist operation designed to reverse the gains of the Bolivarian Revolution and re-open Venezuela's oil reserves to foreign capital. Alan Woods argues that the hypocrisy of Western governments — particularly the UK's refusal to release Venezuelan gold reserves — reveals the material interests driving the coup: the restoration of neoliberal control over state assets and the destruction of an independent foreign policy that challenges US hegemony in Latin America. The claim is that this is not a spontaneous popular uprising but a coordinated assault by finance capital, using a manufactured constitutional crisis as its pretext.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on Lenin's theory of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, specifically the concept of interimperialist rivalry and the use of client bourgeoisies to destabilise sovereign states that resist subordination to metropolitan capital. Woods situates the Venezuelan crisis within the Marxist understanding of the state as an instrument of class rule: the coup is not about restoring democracy — which was already formally present — but about reimposing the rule of the bourgeoisie and its international backers over a state that had partially broken with that rule. The argument also implicitly relies on Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, in that the Bolivarian process is understood as an incomplete, contradictory movement that, despite its reformist leadership, has provoked the full fury of imperialism precisely because it threatened property relations and challenged the logic of capital accumulation in the energy sector. There is no invocation of the falling rate of profit or overaccumulation here; the framework is explicitly political-economic, focused on the geopolitical and class dimensions of imperialist intervention.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article is published in February 2019, at the height of the post-election crisis following Nicolás Maduro's re-election in May 2018 — an election boycotted by the opposition and rejected by the US and its allies. The specific events referenced include the UK government's refusal to release £1.6 billion in Venezuelan gold held in the Bank of England, and the deployment of US-backed "humanitarian aid" to the Colombian border, which Woods identifies as a pretext for military intervention. The conjuncture is defined by the broader offensive of US imperialism against left-wing governments in Latin America, following the coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil (2016), the imprisonment of Lula, and the return of the far right in Argentina. Woods argues that the Trump administration's Venezuela policy is a continuation of the Monroe Doctrine by other means, and that the European Union's complicity — including the UK's role — demonstrates that interimperialist coordination, not rivalry, is the dominant feature of this particular operation.

Where the Argument Continues

This interview is a short, polemical intervention rather than a developed theoretical article. The argument continues in several other IDOM pieces from the same period, including "Venezuela: Imperialism and the 'humanitarian' mask" (February 2019) and "The Venezuelan crisis and the tasks of Marxists" (January 2019), which provide a more detailed analysis of the class forces inside Venezuela and the strategic orientation required of revolutionaries. Woods's broader theoretical framework for understanding Latin American revolutions is developed in his book The Venezuelan Revolution: A Marxist Perspective and in the ongoing output of the Hands Off Venezuela campaign. The question of what Marxists should do in such a conjuncture — defend the Bolivarian state against imperialism while maintaining political independence from its reformist leadership — is a recurring theme in IDOM's coverage and in episodes of Against the Stream.

Connections

This article should be read alongside Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism for the theoretical framework, and alongside Trotsky's The Permanent Revolution for the strategic questions it raises about bourgeois-democratic revolutions in the epoch of imperialism. Within the IDOM corpus, it connects to Alan Woods's earlier analysis of the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela and to the broader series of articles on Latin America published in the late 2010s, which track the regional shift to the right. It also connects to Marxist analyses of the "colour revolutions" and the use of NGOs and "civil society" as instruments of imperialist intervention — a theme developed by IDOM in relation to Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere.

Key Quotes

  1. "The United States is trying to overthrow the legitimate government of Venezuela. They are using the usual methods: economic warfare, sanctions, and the threat of military intervention. The so-called 'humanitarian aid' is a Trojan horse for military aggression."

  2. "The British government is holding billions of dollars of Venezuelan gold in the Bank of England, refusing to release it. This is not about legality or democracy. It is about stealing Venezuela's assets to finance the coup."

  3. "The hypocrisy of the West is staggering. They claim to be defending democracy, but they have supported coups and dictatorships all over the world when it suits their interests. Venezuela is no exception."

  4. "The Venezuelan people have the right to determine their own future, free from imperialist interference. The only solution to the crisis is the mobilization of the working class and the poor against both the corrupt bureaucracy and the imperialist-backed opposition."

  5. "This is not a spontaneous uprising. It is a carefully orchestrated coup, prepared by the United States and its allies, using the opposition as a tool. The goal is to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution and open up Venezuela's oil to foreign exploitation."

  6. "The so-called 'international community' is nothing but a club of imperialist powers who act in their own interests. They have no moral authority to lecture anyone on democracy or human rights."