CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

A Great Leap into Reality: Venezuela Today

What we know of what is going on…confirms the revisionist orientation of the present policy…gains are in the process of being liquidated. As far as foreign policy is concerned … United States imperialism is denounced less and less. Its interventions in the life of other peoples are frequently even seen as “positive.”… The struggle against the bourgeois right is scarcely mentioned.

What we know of what is going on…confirms the revisionist orientation of the present policy…gains are in the process of being liquidated. As far as foreign policy is concerned … United States imperialism is denounced less and less. Its interventions in the life of other peoples are frequently even seen as “positive.”… The struggle against the bourgeois right is scarcely mentioned.

Who wrote these lines? Is it one of the many international left voices denouncing the current Venezuelan government? The similarities are striking, but in fact, this was the French Maoist Charles Bettelheim, resigning in 1977 from the Franco-Chinese Friendship Association. In effect, it was an “hasta aquí” (washing one’s hands) moment from an intellectual heavyweight almost fifty years ago.

Along with China’s new “revisionist” policies, which he thought were pro-capitalist, Bettelheim disliked the crude propaganda being used to denounce the Gang of Four, including Jiang Qing, to whom Mao himself had been married. How could revolutionaries so celebrated in one moment be so harshly condemned in the next? Does all of this sound close to home? In fact, both Bettelheim’s observations and his complaints seem uncannily similar to those of many concerned Venezuela watchers today.

The View from the Core

Today, among numerous Venezuela solidarity activists and fellow travelers in the Global North, Alex Saab’s extradition to the United States last week has become a similar symbolic breaking point. For them, the case is definitive proof that the Bolivarian Process has crossed an unforgivable line. Yet it is both revealing and bizarre that the measuring stick of the Venezuelan revolution could become a single figure. In fact, their outsized reaction can only be understood if we consider that the #FreeAlexSaab campaign constituted much of these activists’ only practical engagement with Venezuela, and many mistakenly believed Saab (though objectively more like Meng Wanzhou than Che Guevara) to be an emblematic 21st-century revolutionary.

All of this reveals how problematic it is to evaluate a revolution based on a distant and partial experience of it. Here in Venezuela, among grassroots Chavistas, one does not encounter this obsessive fixation on Saab, nor, for that matter, on the recent—and indeed humiliating—“simulacrum of evacuation” involving U.S. military aircraft. This does not mean that people here applauded the extradition or feel indifferent toward these events. But at the communal and barrio level, among those who have spent decades building popular power while enduring U.S. sanctions, fascist violence, and endless imperialist aggressions, there is........

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