U.S. socialists and Venezuela
My two cents about the correct attitude of U.S. socialists regarding Venezuela.
As U.S. socialists, fighting to make life better at home, being this the richest and most powerful country in history, our attitude should be decisively anti-imperialist. We must protest and mobilize against any intervention by our own government in the internal political affairs of Venezuela or of any other poorer nation in the world, period.
This fight is not only about the Golden Rule, about treating other nations as we wish other nations to treat us, about being respectful of the choices that people in other parts of the world make for themselves. It is also about how our public resources are used or — in this case — squandered, and for the benefit of whom. The public resources under the U.S. government management should benefit the 99%. They should not contribute to enriching the 1% any further. Existing foreign policy is fully captured by the dirtiest, nastiest, and most corrupt corporate interests in the U.S., and that we must oppose.
Does that mean that we endorse Nicolás Maduro’s government and policies? Not necessarily. We are entitled to our own individual opinions, favorable or not, about the internal political life of Venezuela, the nature and orientation of the different political forces at play in that country, including the forces that support Maduro. We can apportion the blame for the social catastrophe now ongoing in that country any way we wish.
What we are not allowed to do from our perch here as U.S. socialists is to give fodder to our trigger-happy government so it supplies it with support for its intervening, threatening, conspiring, and planning an invasion and bloody war in Venezuela, in alliance with other regional governments hostile to Venezuela. Again, that we should oppose. Not only because we would not tolerate it if done on us, but because it serves the interest of those who are in the way of a better United States of America.
What if we cannot stomach Maduro’s government? In that case, if we feel very strongly about Venezuela, and cannot stand what we regard as an outright betrayal of socialism by Maduro, etc., then we have the right as individual citizens of the world to pack our stuff and move to Venezuela, promote our own ideas there, and try to organize others in Venezuela around our absolutely correct socialist ideas, subjecting ourselves to Venezuela’s legal and political strictures just like all other Venezuelans, and fight the good fight there for whatever socialist goals we regard as necessary.
