19. The ‘Advance’ of the Counter-Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, the author charts the trajectory of the Venezuelan counter-revolution through the latter half of 2017, arguing that while the open, violent offensive of the ultra-right was defeated, the deeper danger lay in the PSUV government’s own reformist and conciliatory policies. The chapter opens with Donald Trump’s military threat against Venezuela, which is dismissed not as a genuine humanitarian concern but as a response to Venezuela’s revolutionary example—its use of oil wealth for literacy and healthcare, in defiance of imperialism. The author establishes that the real crisis is not external but internal: Maduro’s government, having won the 30 July Constituent Assembly election, failed to use that mandate to tackle economic sabotage, inflation, and shortages. Instead, it clung to the illusion of a deal with the bourgeoisie, a policy the Marxists in the text openly label “Menshevik,” drawing a parallel to Lenin and Trotsky’s tactical defence of Kerensky against Kornilov while maintaining their own revolutionary propaganda.
The regional elections of 15 October 2017 are presented as a victory for the PSUV—5.8 million votes to the MUD’s 5 million—but a hollow one. The author argues the vote was a defensive act by workers who feared the MUD’s return, not an endorsement of the government’s social-democratic, class-conciliatory line. The campaign itself was demagogic, lacking any measures to solve the masses’ pressing problems, and the candidates were either corrupt establishment figures or bureaucrats parachuted in by the party machine. The MUD’s predictable fraud claims collapsed when two of its leading candidates accepted the results, but the ANC, instead of taking decisive action, became a legitimising talking shop.
The chapter’s most substantive polemic emerges in its treatment of the December 2017 municipal elections. With the MUD boycotting, the internal contradictions of Chavismo burst into the open. The author details how the PSUV bureaucracy and state apparatus, using the CNE, systematically blocked left-wing candidates who represented the revolutionary wing of the movement—those rooted in communes, occupied factories, and self-defence committees. The cases of Ángel Prado in Lara and Eduardo Samán in Caracas are examined in detail. Samán, a fierce opponent of capitalists and speculators, was denied ballot placement, subjected to a media blackout, and ultimately saw his name omitted from the ballot paper, forcing voters to write it in. He received 6.6 per cent against the official candidate’s 66 per cent, yet his campaign is presented as a vital focal point for the revolutionary left. The author argues that the bureaucracy feared Samán more than the MUD, because he represented a genuine alternative: workers’ control, revolutionary democracy, and no compromise with capital. The methods used against these leftist candidates—bureaucratic manoeuvres, intimidation, media blackout—are explicitly compared to those of the Fourth Republic, the pre-Chavista bourgeois state. The chapter concludes that the leftist movement within Chavismo was embryonic and disorganised, but the municipal election campaigns provided a necessary rallying point, revealing a widespread rank-and-file discontent that the reformist leadership could not indefinitely suppress.