a statement from Anticapitalistas
August 6, 2017
In the face of the political crisis in Venezuela, as anti-capitalists, we declare that:
Venezuelans march to commemorate the people’s overthrow of the coup attempt in 2002.
1) We reject the offensive by the opposition against the Bolivarian government. The Venezuelan opposition is led by profoundly antidemocratic sectors, tied to the dominant class. These sectors are preparing an authoritarian reaction against the gains of the Bolivarian revolution, even if some of these gains have been watered down by the crisis in the country. The opposition has not hesitated in resorting to attacking, burning, and assassinating vulnerable citizens in recent years, and have escalated their methods to hijacking helicopters and the use of firearms.
While this offensive is nothing new, it is framed in a context of coups, whether soft or authoritarian in character, in different countries in Latin America, such as the cases of Brazil, Honduras, and Paraguay, which have been met with passive complicity by foreign governments and the international press. The immediate consequence of those coups has been a heavy handed repression of activists and the poor. In this case we see that same complicity and masking of the Venezuelan opposition’s violent nature. If the political destabilization gets its way of mounting a coup, as some in the opposition seek for Venezuela, we very much fear that they will use the same cruelty and viciousness against the leftist activists and the population in the poorest neighborhoods in cities across Venezuela.
2) This does not mean that we blindly support Maduro’s government, since corruption, bureaucracy, and the incompetence of the PSUV are intolerable in a socialist, revolutionary, and radically democratic project. The fact that we prioritize stopping the imperialistic offensive of the dominant class doesn’t mean that we can’t be critical of the limitations of Maduro and his political management. The revolution within the revolution means expanding freedoms, combating bureaucracy, furthering the redistribution of wealth, and constructing institutional mechanisms that guarantee control of the economy and State by the popular classes.
3) We reject all Spanish interference in issues of Venezuela. The PP and Rajoy’s government, as reluctant as they are to defend the memory of the victims of Franco’s dictatorship, utilize the Venezuelan crisis to defend the interests of corporations that are eager to recover their economic power in Venezuela. At the same time, they seek to wear down Podemos here in the Spanish state. The crisis in Venezuela can only have a democratic solution if there is a new revolutionary boost within the Bolivarian revolution, and never from those who have pillaged the countries in Latin America.
Anticapitalistas are a revolutionary current within Podemos in the Spanish state. This statement was published in Spanish on July 30, and translated to English by Lucila Conde.