FAIR: 'Real Coronavirus Death Toll'... Chinese 'Wet Markets'... USPS Threat... Oil Elegies....

Weekly Alert: May 9, 2020 Due to technical difficulties with our email service, there was no Weekly Alert last weekend, so here are the stories FAIR has been working on for the last two weeks. Please help us spread the word by forwarding this email to friends and by sharing our stories on social media like Facebook and Twitter.   Are People Getting Sick Staying Home Alone? That's Not What a Misinterpreted Survey Said New York State Tries to Suspend Democracy; NYT and WaPo Shrug NYT's 'Real Coronavirus Death Toll' Is Anything But Gov. Hogan’s Purchase of Korean Covid Tests Looks Like a PR stunt—and Media Fell for It Guardian Blames Trump’s Murderous US Exceptionalism on Hugo Chávez  Why It's Wrong (and Racist) to Blame Covid-19 on Chinese 'Wet Markets' Newspapers Won't Connect the Dots on Postal Service Threats There's No Reason to Turn Airtime Over to Trump's Deceptive Coronavirus Campaign Rallies Media Washes Hands of—and With—Boris Johnson It's Crucial to Distinguish Between Can't and Won't—With a Million Lives at Stake Corporate Looting as 'Rescue Plan,' Robber Barons as 'Saviors' A Pandemic Is Not a War By 'as Successful as Most Other Nations,' NYT Means Sweden Is 10th Worst in the World Is Kim Dead? Your Guess Is as Good as Western Media’s Rhode Island Only Looks Like It Has a Bad Covid-19 Outbreak Because It Has a Bad Covid-19 Outbreak As Covid-19 Forces Emission Reductions, Media Offer Oil Industry Elegies Both Sides-ing Bleach Injection Most recent episodes of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: Ricardo Salvador on the Food System & Covid-19 Jim Naureckas on Coronavirus False Choices, Peter Maybarduk on Pharmaceutical Price-Gouging Latest CounterSpin Transcript: 'We Can Pool the World's Science to Develop Better Medical Tools' 'There's a Perceived Need to Get This Over With So We Can Get Back to Work' 'The Industry Chose to Protect Billions of Dollars a Year in Its Own Profit' 'There Are People Dying and Suffering Because They Can't Get Healthcare' FAIR Cites: Anatomy of Media Lies About the Death of Kim Jong-un    FAIR’s ad-free, content-rich site is supported by contributions from our loyal band of media activists. Please donate today! FAIR's Website     FAIR/Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting 124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201 New York NY 10001 USA

FAIR: Guardian Blames Trump’s Murderous US Exceptionalism on Hugo Chávez

View article on FAIR's website Guardian Blames Trump’s Murderous US Exceptionalism on Hugo Chávez  Lucas Koerner   The Guardian's Rory Carroll (4/19/20) presented Donald Trump and Hugo Chávez as brothers under the skin: " as media-savvy populists they worked the same pitch: the avenging outsider out to overturn a rotten system and make their nation great again." What better time to vilify the popular former leader of a country under deadly US siege than a deadly pandemic? Such was clearly the reasoning of Guardian journalist Rory Carroll when he penned an op-ed headlined, “Blunder, Distraction, Denial: Trump Follows Chávez’s Successful Template” (4/19/20). Seemingly immune to irony, Carroll compares Venezuela’s late socialist President Hugo Chávez to the right-wing real-estate developer at the helm of an empire currently strangling the former’s country with deadly sanctions (FAIR.org, 2/6/19, 6/14/19, 6/26/19). This analogy was repeated at least 30 times by the corporate media during the 2016 US presidential election cycle (LA Times, 2/10/17), despite being the subject of penetrating critiques (Washington Post, 10/17/16; NACLA, 10/20/16; Venezuelanalysis, 2/16/17). The demonization of Chávez and Chavismo on the basis of a false equation of left and right has been instrumental in discrediting other leftist figures and their movements, including former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (New York Times, 1/25/19; Daily Telegraph, 2/4/19; Express, 11/26/19), US Senator Bernie Sanders (Wall Street Journal, 3/20/19) and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (FAIR.org, 7/11/18). A Stale, Self-Serving Comparison Carroll's recent column is largely a remix of one he wrote in 2016 (Guardian, 6/22/16), which argued that "in the extemporized mix of bombast, menace and bawdy humor, the symbiotic relationship with crowds, the articulation of long-repressed grievances, Trump echoes the comandante." Carroll’s latest is a condensed rehashing of a longer 2016 article with the same thesis (Guardian, 6/22/16). “Despite ideological differences, there are eerie similarities between the late socialist strongman and the Manhattan billionaire—and warnings to heed,” he wrote at the time, laboring to give his simplistic see-saw analysis an aura of sophistication. The article was one of many “think” pieces hawking cheap comparisons between Trump, Chávez and other Latin American leftists. Politico (3/24/16) placed Chávez in the same trinity as Trump and Pinochet, while the Wall Street Journal (3/6/16) included him among the US real-estate mogul’s “Latin role models.” Corporate outlets typically prefaced their vulgar analogies with a token reference to the two leader’s stark “ideological differences,” though they largely ignored or downplayed the obvious Manichean gulf separating the very personification of US racialized capitalism from an Afro-Indigenous revolutionary. “Beyond their ideological differences…Mr. Chávez’s and Mr. Trump’s speeches raise the possibility that violence may be the best solution,” the New York Times (9/20/16) quipped. Elsewhere (11/3/16), the paper of record suggested that Chávez, López Obrador and Trump “are united in posing as the enemy of the entrenched, corrupt elite, who make possible whatever ails the people, be it Muslim refugees or global capital.” The formulation suggests that it’s just as specious and inflammatory to criticize the wealthy for enriching themselves at the expense of the poor as it is to scapegoat immigrants and religious minorities. The neoliberal establishment’s attempt to cast Trump as an imported Latin American phenomenon continued after the election, with Vogue (1/27/17) crying “déja vu” and the Washington Post (1/27/17) warning, “Chávez, however evil, was not actually stupid. Neither is Trump.” In both cases, outlets were happy to cede the floor to Venezuelan emigres, who peddled these shallow parallels on the basis that policies are less relevant than “rhetoric.” Refusing to accept that Trump and his European counterparts are the outcome of decades of class war waged by the neoliberal “extreme center,” corporate journalists like Carroll have found a new bogeyman in “populism,” dusting off the discredited horseshoe theory to equate diametrically opposed figures in an empty formalism. Imperial Smear 101 Equating Trump with an Official Enemy like Hugo Chávez is a popular way for establishment media to strike a faux-oppositional pose (New York Times, 9/20/16). As in his 2016 article, Carroll refused to let basic facts or journalistic standards get in the way of his “strongman” analogy. Indeed, the Guardian’s former South America correspondent came out of the gates shamelessly lying about Chávez and his three-term presidency: During his 14-year rule, Chávez presided over economic dysfunction, managerial chaos and creeping authoritarianism. In fact, according to the World Bank and the CEPAL, Chávez presided over the most prosperous economic period in Venezuelan history (FAIR.org, 10/10/12, 12/1/12, 2/20/19). Between 1999 and 2012, Venezuela slashed poverty and unemployment by half, jumped from seventh to fourth in the region in human development, and reduced income inequality to the second-lowest in Latin America. While yearly inflation averaged 22%, this was a drop from 37% during the 18 years preceding Chávez. Chávez and his mass movement achieved all these gains despite facing down a US-backed coup d’etat and oil lockout, which in the latter case led Venezuela’s economy to contract by 27% in the first trimester of 2003, causing poverty and unemployment to spike. Scandalously, Carroll accused Chávez of creating a “narrative of elites out to get him,” suppressing any mention of the Western-sponsored opposition’s long-running destabilization campaign, which since 2002 has included coup attempts in 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2019. This stunning omission allowed the Guardian journalist to denounce Chávez’s “authoritarianism,” accusing him of “building a state propaganda apparatus and cowing private outlets.” The fact that Chávez (and his successor) won numerous democratic elections (FAIR.org, 12/1/06, 5/23/18),  and went to extremes to accommodate a violent, foreign-backed opposition with a stranglehold on corporate media (FAIR, 5/20/19) and the private sector, generally does little to dent this ideological claim, which has become an article of faith among Western liberals and leftists alike (FAIR.org, 2/12/20). ‘Quite Deceptive’ Noam Chomsky called this write-up of an interview Rory Carroll (Observer, 7/3/11) conducted with him "quite deceptive." This is hardly the first time that Rory Carroll—who reported from Caracas between 2006 and 2012—has slandered Venezuela’s Chavista government with glaring lies of omission. Back in 2011, the Guardian correspondent interviewed Noam Chomsky , who had published an open letter to Chávez calling for the release of Judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni, for the Observer  (7/3/11), the Guardian's Sunday edition. The judge was under house arrest, awaiting trial for ordering the release of a wealthy banker charged with multi-million dollar embezzlement. Carroll reported that the renowned linguist and left-wing intellectual had “accused the socialist leader of amassing too much power and of making an ‘assault’ on Venezuela's democracy.” Chomsky later told journalist Joe Emersberger (Venezuelanalysis, 7/4/11) that Carroll’s article was “quite deceptive,” complaining that the Guardian had omitted his harsh criticisms of the US and its regional garrison state, Colombia, whose human rights records are “incomparably worse” than Venezuela’s. The outcry at Carroll’s dishonesty was such that his newspaper was forced to release the full transcript of the interview (Guardian, 7/4/11), as well as modify the title of the original article. Propaganda Pandemic  Carroll’s decision to reheat his 2016 hit piece comes as the world confronts the deadly coronavirus pandemic. With decades of neoliberal social ravaging on full display in Western states, corporate journalists have scrambled to blame the multilevel crisis of the imperial core on the periphery, whether China (FAIR.org, 3/6/20, 4/2/20) or Venezuela. Ideological mercenaries like Carroll have eagerly jumped at the opportunity to present  Trump’s criminally incompetent response to Covid-19 as a symptom of “populist” decay à la Chávez, rather than the modus operandi of a genocidal empire. Carroll’s attacks on Chávez are outrageous, not only in light of the late president’s unprecedented popular healthcare initiatives and heroic role in disaster relief, but more importantly because they obscure murderous US economic warfare against the Caribbean country. The Guardian’s message is clear: Venezuela’s collapse is the inevitable outcome of Chávez’s pathological “authoritarianism” and “dysfunction,” rather than two decades of unremitting US assault, including years of sanctions responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, which the “progressive” newspaper has been instrumental in justifying. The Western media’s propaganda “playbook”—perfected by Carroll and his corporate colleagues covering Chavismo—was subsequently turned on Corbyn, Sanders and other Northern social democrats whose anti-systemic challenge was less revolutionary. Yet, for all its overwhelming firepower and media smokescreen, Washington has repeatedly failed to achieve regime change from Caracas to Tehran, facing fierce resistance from peoples who prefer to die on their feet than live on their knees. The facade of US exceptionalism is ever more riven with cracks—in no small part thanks to Latin American leaders like Chávez. That is why, seven years after his death, he still needs crucifixion, journalistic ethics be damned.   © 2020 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. All rights reserved.   Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting Our mailing address is: FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING 124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201 New York, NY 10001 FAIR's Website

Dissent Magazine: State, Bureaucracy, and Rentier Capital

William Pettus 

Jeffery R. Webber ▪ February 7, 2020

The present conflict between the right-wing opposition and the Maduro government is fundamentally a political confrontation between different fractions of Venezuelan capital—one backed by the imperial power of the United States and international financial markets, the other by the Venezuelan state (and, to some extent, Chinese and Russian imperialism), which has retained its rentier-capitalist character throughout the Chávez and Maduro eras. An emancipatory project of socialism from below cannot hope to wed itself to either fraction and survive. The difficult but necessary task facing independent socialists is to navigate an independent struggle against imperial intervention, total separation from the Venezuelan right, and simultaneous independence from the Maduro government.

State, Bureaucracy, and Rentier Capital

Venezuela is undergoing a rentier-capitalist implosion, made worse by imperial intervention, violent domestic right-wing opposition, and the fusion of the interests of the state and capitalists within the Maduro regime.

Jeffery R. Webber ▪ February 7, 2020 

Nicolás Maduro at National Constituent Assembly on January 14, 2020 (Carolina Cabral/Getty Images)

This article is part of a forum on the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.

At the end of May 2019, the Central Bank of Venezuela released the first official figures on inflation and gross domestic product in the country since 2015, which roughly correspond with recent estimates from the International Monetary Fund as well as independent economists. According to the bank, inflation reached 130,000 percent in Venezuela in 2018 (well surpassing the 50 percent technical threshold of hyperinflation), after averaging 863 percent over 2017, while GDP contracted by 22.5 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of the same year, the last quarter for which figures are available. Venezuelan GDP has been in free fall since the outset of 2014, shrinking by at least 10 percent in every quarter since the end of 2015.

Economic growth in Venezuela closely tracks the international price of oil; its national cycles of capital accumulation are rooted overwhelmingly in the appropriation of oil rents. Oil dependency, while hardly introduced by Hugo Chávez or Nicolás Maduro, has accelerated alongside deindustrialization since the outset of the Bolivarian process in the late 1990s. An overvalued currency, among other factors, made imports cheap and exports expensive.

When prices were high, as in 2012, oil constituted close to 95 percent of the total value of the country’s exports. Even when the price was relatively low, as in 1998, oil still accounted for approximately 65 percent of export value. Accordingly, Venezuela grew at an explosive rate of 18 percent in 2004 and maintained an average of 8 percent growth from 2005 to 2008, in a context of favorable world market conditions. This optimal scenario enabled the high period of nationalizations in sectors such as cement, steel, telecommunications, banking, and mining. It also undergirded popular features of the Bolivarian process, such as the health and education missions, dramatically declining levels of poverty, and ambitious anti-imperial regional initiatives like the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).

Venezuela and the Global Crisis

In the immediate fallout from the most recent global crisis of capitalism, however, the price of oil fell, reaching a low of $35 per barrel. It recovered to $120 over the 2011–2013 period, but in 2014 and 2015 plummeted again, at least relative to the peaks of the mid-2000s. By this point, public expenditure had become much greater than in the early years under Chávez, as had the structural reliance on imports. This formed the basic material backdrop to Venezuela’s intensifying economic crisis.

A forty-five-page internal report from the United Nations published in March 2019 indicates that 60 percent of the Venezuelan population now lives in extreme poverty, with consumption of meat and vegetables dropping precipitously from 2014 to 2017. Approximately 3.7 million people suffer from undernourishment, with 22 percent of children experiencing chronic malnutrition. Preventable diseases like tuberculosis, diptheria, measles, and malaria have made a comeback. Roughly 300,000 people are at acute risk due to lack of access to medicines, dialysis, and treatment for HIV and Parkinson’s. The Financial Times reports that migrant outflows from Venezuela will reach 6.5 million by the end of this year, mainly to neighboring Colombia, but also in significant numbers to Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Brazil, and Argentina. Twenty-two thousand doctors, a third of the country’s total, have left the country as part of a vast migrant exodus of technical professionals.

In no sense is this a crisis of socialism. What we are witnessing is the particular form capitalist crisis has assumed in Venezuela’s oil economy in the long aftermath of the global Great Recession. This is a rentier-capitalist implosion, made worse by a perfect storm of imperial intervention, violent domestic right-wing opposition to the government of Nicolás Maduro, and the conservative fusion of the interests of the state and a particular fraction of capital within the regime itself.

The Imperial Dimension

International socialists living outside of Venezuela, and particularly those of us in the Global North, have been correct to focus first—analytically and politically—on the role of imperialism in exacerbating the country’s crisis and attempting to undermine the basic principle that the shape of Venezuela’s future should be determined by Venezuelans themselves.

The South American nation has receded from Donald Trump’s foreign policy attentions in recent months. Early in 2019, however, Venezuela seemed to be of pivotal importance to the American imperium’s calculus, as evidenced by the U.S.-led recognition of Juan Guaidó’s self-declaration as Venezuela’s “interim president” and direct U.S. support for his spectacularly ill-conceived coup attempt at the end of April that year.

While grand geopolitical concerns have seemingly shifted elsewhere, the U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela by presidential decree in August 2017 and January 2019 remain in place, as do de facto economic constraints confronting the Maduro administration in the wake of U.S. recognition of a parallel government led by Guaidó. According to a detailed report for the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, the sanctions have gravely impacted the Venezuelan population’s caloric intake, the country’s disease and mortality rates, the migrant exodus, oil production, power outages, and the government’s ability to deal with the economic crisis more generally. According to the report, U.S. sanctions made a “substantial contribution” to a 31 percent increase in general mortality in the country from 2017 to 2018, or more than 40,000 deaths.

Whether or not Maduro’s administration would have taken the measures necessary for an “economic recovery” in the absence of sanctions, Weisbrot and Sachs convincingly demonstrate that they have worsened the already massive dimensions of the crisis in Venezuela. They have cut off the country from international financial markets and prevented a restructuring of its debt, while also restricting Venezuela’s access to foreign exchange—used to import food, medicine, medical equipment, and other basic necessities—by further undercutting its oil production and capacity to sell it abroad.

The United States has also seized billions of dollars’ worth of Venezuela’s foreign assets, such as the majority state-owned oil refinery and transport company CITGO, which is based in the United States. With the help of allied institutions like the Bank of England, the United States has also frozen much of Venezuela’s $6.6 billion in foreign reserves, a significant portion of which are held in gold. Real GDP fell roughly 37.4 percent in 2019. Even if the threats of U.S. military intervention or a right-wing coup d’état have diminished for the foreseeable future, opposition to imperial sanctions must remain a priority.

Characterizing the Regime

Alongside axiomatic anti-imperialism, however, there must also be a full analysis of the class character and nature of the Maduro regime and an assessment of its role in the crisis. Even a cursory examination demonstrates that the Maduro administration in no way represents the interests of Venezuela’s lower orders. Meaningful international solidarity requires continuing to reach out to those social forces—as beleaguered and minoritarian as they are at present—committed to building an anti-capitalist left that is simultaneously independent of Maduro, free of any association with the domestic right, and anti-imperialist to its core.

Those left-wing analyses that suggest that an “economic war” being carried out by the Venezuelan bourgeoisie accounts for the bulk of the crisis are deeply unconvincing. Other analyses confuse the systematic orientation of economic management under Maduro for a series of irrational technical errors that simply require policy correction from new advisers with better advice to offer. Still others draw up balance sheets of the “good” and the “bad” aspects of the Maduro’s rule, without offering sufficient analytical explanation for the logic of these divergent phenomena, or the overarching class character of the government. None of these analyses can offer much insight into the continuing class logic behind Maduro’s ostensibly irrational economic policy, nor any solid basis for the Venezuelan socialist left to determine its relationship to the government.

As Patrick Guillaudat has pointed out in Viento Sur, one key facet in understanding the character of the Maduro regime is to grasp the hegemony within it of the so-called “bolibourgeoisie,” and the evolution of this fraction of the Venezuelan capitalist class.

The bolibourgeoisie began its formation in the early- to mid-periods of Chávez’s rule as a group of domestic capitalists who enriched themselves spectacularly through speculation on currency and opportunities opened up through close political relations with the Chávez government. The bolibourgeoisie has since expanded in social weight and political power. A second pillar of the bolibourgeoisie formed as a bureaucratic layer within the state apparatus, creating vast opportunities for corruption on the part of high-ranking bureaucrats in the mid- to late-Chávez era. These bureaucrats enriched themselves and then gradually invested their private fortunes in legal capitalist enterprises and joint activities with international capital. In other words, former bureaucrats have become proper capitalists without abandoning their positions within the state.

The scale of such private accumulation through mechanisms of corruption facilitated by state policy is difficult to exaggerate, and it began well before Maduro came to office. One such mechanism was SITME, the notorious preferential exchange rate for import firms aiming to obtain U.S. dollars to purchase merchandise on the world market and then sell it at the “normal” exchange rate in bolívares in the domestic market. In 2012, then Minister of Finance and Planning Jorge Giordani publicly denounced this arrangement, arguing that it had facilitated corruption at all levels of state power, amounting to the disappearance of $25 billion of state revenue (Giordani was expelled from the Maduro government in June 2014).

As the Venezuelan economist Manuel Sutherland has suggested, it wasn’t simply that the government’s monetary policy amounted to a transfer of oil rent from the state to private importers with ties to the administration—which would have been bad enough—but also that many of these supposed imports did not actually materialize. With disturbing frequency, no merchandise ever arrived in the country. Between 2003 and 2012, the value of these often-fraudulent imports rose from $14 billion to $80 billion. Departing significantly from Giordani’s conservative estimate, the consultancy firm Ecoanalítica estimates that these years witnessed the loss of $69.5 billion through fraudulent imports.

Finally, and most critically, the third pillar of the bolibourgeoisie involves powerful military figures. Drawing on their enhanced infrastructural power within the state, military officials have entered the ranks of the bolibourgeoisie with a vengeance since Maduro took office. Maduro’s cabinet has had an average of more than 30 percent of positions occupied by active or retired military officials since 2014, including General Vladimir Padrino López as minister of defense and General Néstor Reverol as interior minister and overseer of the civilian security forces. In 2017, General of the National Guard Manuel Quevedo was named both minister of energy and president of the state oil company, PDVSA. General Iván Hernández Dala is head of the Presidential Guard and the military counter-intelligence agency, DGCIM, and General Manuel Cristopher Figuera is head of the secret police, SEBIN. Of Venezuela’s twenty-three states, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) controls twenty governorships, seven of which are occupied by military officers. Military officials are also prominent in positions of power within the National Constituent Assembly, the presidency of which is occupied by active captain Diosdado Cabello.

The fusion of state power exercised by high-ranking military personnel and the increasing economic power of the military elite—in both public and private capitalist enterprises—is evident on a number of fronts. Military figures now control key national corporations in addition to PDVSA, such as Caracas Metro, steel and aluminum enterprises, and the National Electric Corporation. They also enjoy tremendous power over the importation and distribution of subsidized foodstuffs and medicine and control the country’s main ports.

Francine Jácome, writing in Nueva Sociedad, points out that since 2013 several explicitly military enterprises have been established: the Bank of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (BANFANB), a television channel (TVFANB), a transport company (EMILTRA), an agricultural enterprise (AGROFANB), and a mining, oil, and natural gas company (CAMIMPEG). Guillaudat counts ten further military corporations in transport, agriculture, construction, water, and telecommunications. At least 785 active and retired military officials also manage private companies that have won lucrative contracts with the government in construction, imports, medicine, food, and health.

The rise of these military capitalists requires us to understand the imbrication of state and fractions of capital in contemporary Venezuela, rather than assuming—as in the common colloquial and academic language of “business-state relations”—an unambiguous separation of state actors from private entrepreneurship, and state enterprises from processes of capital accumulation.

Taken together, the constituent parts of the bolibourgeois class fraction are the most influential actors within the Maduro administration, and their interests are behind the class logic of seemingly “irrational” exchange rate policies and other apparent instances of economic “mismanagement.” Their ability to reproduce themselves as a capitalist class fraction is contingent on the reproduction of the Maduro administration as a whole, which helps to explain the paltry support of the military elite for the most recent U.S.-backed coup attempt headed by Guaidó.

The power of the bolibourgeoisie at present is perhaps nowhere more viscerally on display than in the recent establishment of special economic zones—most emblematically, the Orinoco Mining Arc, located in the state of Bolívar, with a surface area bigger than Portugal. The legislation surrounding these zones, together with supplemental laws guaranteeing greater protections for foreign investors, is designed to attract international capital to enter into joint contracts with military state enterprises such as CAMIMPEG, and to override the considerable social, indigenous, and environmental concerns with the intensification of extractive capitalism that these endeavors imply.

CAMIMPEG has already entered into agreements with the Anglo-Swiss corporation Glencore—a firm with a notable record of corruption and environmental abuse—and the British oil company Southern Procurement Services. According to Guillaudat, in the state elections of October 2017, the National Electoral Council (CNE) initially proclaimed the victor in the state of Bolívar to be the candidate of the oppositional party A New Time, Andrés Velásquez. Two days later, however, the CNE annulled its initial announcement and declared Justo Noguera Pietri, the PSUV’s candidate, governor. Pietri, an ex-General Commander of the National Guard, will manage the rollout of the Orinoco Mining Arc initiative.

Exits

The present conflict between the right-wing opposition and the Maduro government is fundamentally a political confrontation between different fractions of Venezuelan capital—one backed by the imperial power of the United States and international financial markets, the other by the Venezuelan state (and, to some extent, Chinese and Russian imperialism), which has retained its rentier-capitalist character throughout the Chávez and Maduro eras. An emancipatory project of socialism from below cannot hope to wed itself to either fraction and survive. The difficult but necessary task facing independent socialists is to navigate an independent struggle against imperial intervention, total separation from the Venezuelan right, and simultaneous independence from the Maduro government.

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Jeffery R. Webber is an associate professor in the department of politics at York University, Toronto. He is author, most recently, of The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left. He is working on a new book for Verso, The Latin American Crucible: Politics and Power in the New Era

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