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You’re right, as communists and Marxists, we shouldn’t support any governments or nation-states. Instead, our focus should be on supporting the lower classes in every country—the working, oppressed people—recognizing that our enemies are not just the capitalist business-owning class, but also all governments worldwide, since they are all capitalist oppressor states.

Main steps needed to overthrow a capitalist state and replace it with a workers' state in any country with an electoral capitalist liberal republic system

Main steps needed to overthrow a capitalist state and replace it with a workers' state in any country with an electoral capitalist liberal republic system

The objective: to seize state power and install a workers' state

From the materialist point of view, the overthrow of a capitalist state is not a moral plea but a political necessity driven by class antagonisms. The aim is to replace the capitalist state – an instrument of class rule – with a workers' state based on the democratic control of industry and society by the working class (workers' councils or soviets), integrated into an international revolutionary strategy. This requires both mass struggle and conscious Marxist leadership rooted in the proletariat.

1) Develop independent class politics and the organization of the working class

Capitalist parties, trade union bureaucracies and bourgeois institutions cannot be trusted to carry out the overthrow of capitalism. The first practical step is to build the political independence of the working class: a mass political movement and an organization that represents workers' interests in the face of capitalist parties and the trade union bureaucracy. This is the essence of proletarian political independence explained by Marx and reiterated by the tradition of the Fourth International. For the organizational form and necessity of a group of professional revolutionaries, see Lenin's discussion of the difference between trade union organization and organization of revolutionaries in What Must Be Done? (on the organization of revolutionaries).

2) Build grassroots structures and dual organs of power in workplaces and communities

It begins by creating democratically elected and recallable rank-and-file committees and plant organizations that can coordinate direct economic struggle (strikes, slowdowns) outside the control of the pro-capitalist union bureaucracies. These committees become the practical backbone for scaling action and mobilizing the class in a unified way. The International Committee stresses the need for grassroots organization as the germ of workers' political power and as a practical means for independent struggle (base committees and international coordination).

3) Politicize the struggles and develop a revolutionary leadership (vanguard party)

Economic struggles must be linked to political demands and explanations: workers must come to understand that their enemies are the capitalist state and the property relations it imposes. A disciplined revolutionary party, rooted in the working class, politically grounded in Marxism-Trotskyism and practicing democratic centralism, must provide strategic direction, train cadres, and maintain continuity in crisis (Lenin's argument for a professional revolutionary organization is instructive: organization of revolutionaries versus economism). This party must expose reformist illusions, combat parliamentary fetishes and prepare mass organizations for decisive political action.

4) Escalate the mass struggle to create a situation of dual power

Through strikes, factory occupations, demonstrations and mass political assemblies, the working class must create a situation of dual power—where workers' organs (councils, committees) exercise real authority in key economic and social spheres while the authority of the bourgeois state is eroded. This phase is when the working class demonstrates that it can democratically manage production, distribution, and social services. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution shows that the working class, when compelled by historical conditions, becomes the only class capable of completing democratic tasks and advancing towards socialist measures, especially in countries where the bourgeoisie cannot assume the leadership of the democratic revolution (Trotsky on Permanent Revolution and Uneven Development).

5) Seize state power through united mass action (general strike/insurrection)

When the workers' organs control the economy and have broad social legitimacy, the revolutionary party must act to break through the remaining pillars of bourgeois rule—police, army, state administration—by mobilizing a general political strike, a mass insurrection, and the seizure of the centers of governmental power. This requires careful preparation: plans to neutralize or win over sections of the armed forces, clear workers' control over key production facilities, secure lines of communication and supply, and mass mobilization to prevent counter-repression.

6) Destroy the political power of the capitalist class while defending workers' democracy

After seizing power, immediately dismantle the bourgeois state apparatus that enforces private property (police, state security, hostile courts). Expropriate the main instruments of capitalist domination—banks, monopolies, key infrastructure—and place them under the democratic control of elected and recallable workers' councils. At the same time, strict democratic protections were put in place: freedom of discussion and organization for workers, elections and recall of council representatives, and measures against counterrevolutionary conspiracies. As Trotsky and Lenin emphasized, this is not a "rule by a party clique," but the political conquest of power by the working class organized through soviets and councils (Trotsky on the need to link the national revolution with the world revolution).

7) Carry out revolutionary economic measures under workers' control

Initiate the immediate socialist measures required by the crisis: planned production to meet social needs, abolition of wage-worker relations when feasible, socialization of major industries and banking under workers' control, and land reform where relevant. These measures must be implemented democratically through responsible workers' councils and planning bodies. Nationalization under capitalist bureaucratic control is not socialism: democratic control of the workers is decisive.

8) Internationalize the revolution

No isolated workers' state can survive permanently within a hostile capitalist world. The socialist transition requires the active promotion of revolutionary struggles abroad—political solidarity, international coordination of strikes, and assistance to revolutionary movements—to spread the revolution and break the encirclement of capitalist states. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution and the basis of the Fourth International emphasize that socialism can only be consolidated through world revolution (the necessity of internationalism and world revolution).

Strategic Precautions: What to Avoid

Reject parliamentary cretinism: elections within bourgeois democracy cannot replace the seizure of state power; The reforms did not abolish class rule.

Reject dependence on trade union bureaucracies and Stalinist or petty-bourgeois movements that subordinate workers to national capital or bureaucratic leadership.

Prepare for counterrevolution: the capitalist classes will use all means—bureaucratic conservatism, military force, foreign intervention—to overthrow workers' power.

Conclusion

The overthrow of a capitalist state is a process: mass organization, class independence, political leadership, formation of dual power, seizure of state power, democratic workers' control of the economy, and internationalization. Each step is grounded in the material conditions of the class struggle and requires a conscious Marxist strategy. The tradition of the Fourth International—Trotsky, Lenin, and the current analysis of the ICFI—provides the theoretical and practical orientation for this strategy, insisting on the primacy of internationalism, the need for a revolutionary party, and the centrality of workers' democracy.

ANOTHER GREAT ARTICLE BY AN ULTRA-LEFTIST ORTHODOX MARXIST ABOUT HOW THE GOVERNMENTS OF MADURO AND CHAVEZ WERE CAPITALIST-REFORMISTS AND BONAPARTISTS AND NOT MARXISTS AT ALL

The imperialist attack on Venezuela, the crisis of Chavismo and the perspective of a continental anti-imperialist struggle

By: Milton D'León | Sunday, 01/18/2026 06:05 AM | Printable version

Source of the article:  https://www.aporrea.org/tiburon/a348851.html#google_vignette

Venezuela has suffered a brutal military attack by the United States on January 3 after more than four months of a constant siege with one of the largest military deployments off its coasts ordered by Trump. An attack that concluded with the kidnapping of the country's president, Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. From the LTS in Venezuela and the CRP-FI at the international level we call for active mobilization to defeat the imperialist military onslaught and the neocolonial policy of Donald Trump.

We denounce those who celebrated Trump's attack and who see it as a liberating thing, unfortunately there is a mass ideology in much of Venezuelan migration that Trump is going to liberate us. That is why we are on the front line of the anti-imperialist struggle against the neocolonial offensive and we call for mobilization, to confront and defeat it, because what they are doing in our country is the first step to do it in the rest of Latin America. We mobilize with all those who want to confront this entire imperialist offensive, we do so from a perspective independent of the government.

Many wonder why the government seems to be surrendering now, what is the reason for this immobility in the face of this imperialist attack, why in the end the government did not offer resistance either before or during the current attack, questions that many compañeros and compañeras are asking, it is even a question that sectors are asking themselves not only of the so-called critical Chavismo, but even of those who have been supporting him. This article aims to interact with all these sectors, seeking to forge a sector that mobilizes in an anti-imperialist key and independently in the face of urgent need.

Saturday, January 3, marked more than just a new episode of U.S. imperialist aggression against Venezuela. The government of then-President Nicolás Maduro, which manifested itself as anti-imperialist and with pretensions to national independence, did not offer any serious resistance, neither political, nor economic, much less military. In all the time that preceded the attack, it was limited to empty rhetoric, to denunciation without action, to the theatricalization of a supposed "revolutionary fortress." The government of the current president of President Delcy Rodríguez has become a government under the tutelage of U.S. imperialism that imposes all the conditions, administering in fact the surrender.

The absence of serious resistance, the paralysis of a military caste and the impotence of the Maduro government in the face of Washington's display of force, laid bare that its "anti-imperialism" was never more than demagogic verbiage. For years it was used to cover up a policy that was profoundly conciliatory towards capital, being reduced to an empty, impotent discourse, incapable of touching a single strategic interest of imperialism or the local bourgeoisie.

But the U.S. attack did not operate in a vacuum. It is important to note that the opposition right, especially its most rancid sectors expressed today in María Corina Machado, Leopoldo López, etc., have as a program to transform Venezuela into a protectorate, they are the ultra-reactionaries who always asked for military interventions to hand over everything to the United States.

But there are also those of old time who, since the beginning of the Chávez government, acted as direct agents of imperialism within Venezuela, carrying out coups d'état such as the one in April 2002, sabotage in the oil industry such as the bosses' lockout from PDVSA in 2003, all hand in hand with Washington. They were constant in their pro-imperialist attacks in all these long years, one of the latest offensives being the coup attempts with the puppet of Juan Guaidó in 2019, who proclaimed himself interim president supported by the first Trump government and the entire continental right together with the European imperialists. These were times of severe imperialist economic sanctions that fell brutally on working people and continued over the years.

The attack did not operate in a vacuum also because for the United States, the Chávez government was contrary to its interests and its imperial pretensions – even under Maduro. This, in the context in which Chavismo emerged at the end of the 90s as a response to a deep crisis of the Venezuelan political regime of puntofijismo sustained for decades by the United States, sunk after decades of looting, corruption and subordination to imperialism. Chávez channeled the popular rejection of the Punto Fijo Pact, relying on a nationalist, anti-oligarchic and, later, "anti-imperialist" discourse. It was the response to the decomposition of the traditional parties (AD and COPEI) and the vacuum left by the Caracazo of 1989.

In a context of high oil prices, Chavismo was able to build a broad social base, relying on material concessions financed by oil revenues. In this context, Chávez embodied features of what Leon Trotsky defined as a sui generis Bonapartism turned to the left: a leadership that relies on the mass movement and the army to arbitrate between imperialism and national interests, trying to gain room for manoeuvre.

It was a location that imperialism never tolerated, all this despite the fact that Hugo Chávez, from his origins, systematically refused to break with the material pillars of capitalist power, beyond the rhetoric of Socialism of the 21st century. This is because it was never a project of rupture with capitalism, but an attempt at "bourgeois nationalist" management that took advantage of an exceptional cycle of oil prices by granting relative concessions to the masses and advancing in a process of nationalizations with compensation, in essence, key companies that in the 90s belonged to the State and that had been privatized. at the same time that it was advancing relations with China and propping up Cuba subjected to historic sanctions, it questioned and shipwrecked the FTAA in 2005, all of which implied friction with imperialism.

For all this, Chávez had great support from the mass movement, which was clearly expressed during the coup d'état in 2002, where the masses came out to defend him, restoring him to power less than 36 hours after he had been overthrown. But there is a key issue to highlight, and that is that he managed to channel all the discontent that existed at the time, preventing it from becoming an independent irruption of the working class and the poor.

The policy of the United States also spread under the Maduro government, despite the economic turnaround, its authoritarian and repressive policy and its brutal measures, including the payment of the foreign debt at a time when oil prices were falling, more than 74 billion dollars were paid in less than three years. depleting reserves, reducing imports, which led to a brutal shortage never seen in the history of the country, opening up an economic and social catastrophe, which will be exacerbated with the arrival of the first economic sanctions as of August 2017.

All this too, despite the fact that in August 2018 a severe economic plan of "recovery" began, opening the economy, semi-dollarizing the country, a process of reconversion of the oil industry towards international capital more openly, a plan that fell brutally on the working people. But its continuity of alliances with Russia, China and Cuba, within the framework of an offensive policy of U.S. imperialism of hemispheric control under the second Trump administration, made the political position of Chavismo in power contradictory, which ended with the outcome of the aggression and the military attack on January 3 kidnapping Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.

However, from the beginning, Chávez's project was strictly a project of reform of Venezuelan dependent capitalism, not of overcoming capitalism. It never set out to expropriate the bourgeoisie or break with imperialism. The so-called "nationalizations" were carried out by paying millionaire indemnities to large economic groups, both national and foreign.

The paradigmatic case was the payment of monstrous figures to conglomerates such as Paolo Rocca's Techint, the purchase at the price of the New York stock exchange of electricity, telephone companies, banks, etc., establishing a precedent of sacred respect for capitalist property. Like CFK compensating Repsol in Argentina. These "nationalist" sectors never dared to expropriate without compensation, to touch the pillars of capitalist private property.

The so-called "anti-imperialism" of Chavismo never went beyond looking for margins of maneuver, which obviously led to friction. But at no time were the interests of the large transnationals operating in Venezuela seriously touched, nor was progress made in the state monopoly of foreign trade under workers' control, an elementary measure for any real policy of national independence.

Even in the moments of greatest verbal confrontation with Washington, Chavismo guaranteed the payment of the foreign debt, respected the agreements with foreign oil companies and maintained an economic scheme dependent on primary exports. The rentier structure was not only not overcome, but deepened.

When the international correlation of forces changed, with the fall in oil prices and the tightening of imperialist sanctions, the project showed all its fragility. Without having transformed the country's productive bases or empowered the working class, Chavismo was left naked in the face of imperialism's attack.

This logic was no exception in Venezuela. It is part of a Latin American tradition of bourgeois nationalisms that, in cycles of export bonanza, try policies of limited redistribution to contain the class struggle, without altering property relations. Chávez was, perhaps, the most "radical" in speech, but not in facts. The so-called "Bolivarian revolution" was never socialist, much less anti-capitalist.

Although this article does not propose to make a historical and political balance of Chavismo – from Chávez's original project to the current disaster – we do point out central issues that make the fatal result of that political project.

From Chávez to Maduro: from exhaustion to catastrophe and from there to surrender

The arrival of Nicolás Maduro to power marked the passage from the exhaustion of the Chavista project to its frank decomposition. Without Chávez's charismatic leadership and in the midst of a growing economic catastrophe, the government chose to unload the austerity on the backs of working people.

Maduro's policy combined three central elements: a brutal wage liquefaction, the destruction of collective agreements and a growing repression against workers' and people's struggles. Under the discourse of the "defense of the homeland", protest was criminalized, companies were militarized and union activists were persecuted.

The result was devastating. What was once an important and relatively organized Venezuelan proletariat was transformed into a destructured, impoverished class pushed into semi-destitution. Millions of workers were forced to emigrate, while those who remained faced poverty wages, hyperinflation and the collapse of public services.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Venezuela had a concentrated industrial proletariat. They achieved what the traditional right could not: dismantle the working class, fragment it, make it precarious. Through a systematic anti-worker policy, which combined the co-optation of unions with the creation of workers' councils emptied of content, Maduro's government ended up pulverizing the historical conquests.

Collective agreements were dismantled, dissident workers (such as those of Sidor, electricity, oil) were persecuted, parapolice and judicial violence was used against strikes and protests. When the criminal sanctions of imperialism came, they fell on an already weakened working class. Hyperinflation, shortages and the brutal fall in GDP turned workers into a semi-destitute mass. Under these conditions, Chavismo in power did not prepare the people for resistance; It demoralized him and reduced him to the struggle for survival.

The bankruptcy of Chavismo did not begin with Maduro, but under his government it reached a terminal form: economic surrender, anti-worker repression and open capitulation to the United States. With Delcy Rodríguez in the presidency, the delivery is administered under a government under the tutelage of the United States.

Imperialist sanctions and Chavismo's responsibilities in the government under Maduro

U.S. imperialist sanctions brutally aggravated the Venezuelan crisis. They are a crime against the Venezuelan people and that is how we fight them without any ambiguity. They are part of a strategy of continental discipline that seeks to make it clear that no country can step out of the imperialist script. They are an instrument of imperialist domination that seeks to discipline not only Venezuela, but all of Latin America.

However, rejecting the sanctions does not imply absolving Chavismo in power. When the economic sanctions came, the Maduro government used them as a scapegoat to hide its own responsibility for the disaster and to justify even more brutal austerity measures against working people, while the military and political leadership enriched itself in the most manifold ways.

Far from confronting imperialism with substantive measures, the government used sanctions as an alibi to deepen its sell-out and anti-worker policy. The payment of the debt was never suspended, the transnationals were never expropriated, the independent mobilization of the working class was never appealed to.

The impotence demonstrated in the face of the military aggression of January 3 is the synthesis of this policy, a catastrophic act. A government that claims to be anti-imperialist, but does not touch any imperialist interest, is doomed to capitulate. In the face of U.S. military aggression, Maduro's leadership showed its true face: a cowardly caste that fears its own armed people more than the imperialist marines.

After years of belligerent speeches about the "economic war," the "iron circle," and the "defense of the homeland," Maduro and his leadership did not lift a finger to organize a popular resistance, armed or massive. Nor did they take action against the imperialist economic interests that still operate in Venezuela. Joint ventures with foreign capital in oil (Chevron, ENI, Repsol, etc.) continued to operate.

Chavismo in power demonstrated that it is incapable of defending the nation because its own survival depends on secret pacts with sectors of global capital and on maintaining the internal bourgeois order. They prefer a negotiated surrender that maintains their caste privileges than an uprising that awakens the dormant forces of the masses, numbed by Chavismo itself, passivized to the maximum with co-optation first and then with its destructuring.

A Historical Perspective: The "National" Bourgeoisies and Their Cowardice in the Face of Imperialism

The bankruptcy of Chavismo administering the surrender under the government of Delcy Rodríguez is part of a broader historical trend. The United States seeks to discipline the Latin American continent. In the face of this offensive, the national bourgeoisies have demonstrated, time and again, their inability to offer consistent resistance. Chavismo was not a historical anomaly, but a late expression of the old Latin American bourgeois nationalism.

Latin American history is full of examples: governments that were Bonapartists who turned to the left in their beginnings, such as Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico peacefully handed over power to pro-American fugitives; Getulio Vargas in Brazil, cornered, opted for suicide; Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, after 18 years of exile, returned to stop the workers' rise of the Cordobazo and die as an instrument of "social peace" that benefited the monopolies.

After the defeats of the proletarian revolutions in the Southern Cone (Chile 1973, Uruguay 1973, Argentina 1976, preceded by that of Brazil in 1964), the "national" bourgeoisies abandoned any pretense of autonomy and were completely integrated as junior partners of imperialism. Chavismo, with its radical discourse, was the last illusion in that dead end. Its bankruptcy is the bankruptcy of an entire political strategy. Chavismo did not escape this logic: it confirmed it.

The Immediate Tasks and the Need for a Revolutionary, Class and Internationalist Strategy

The immediate task is to defeat the U.S. imperialist neocolonial attack and policy with Donald Trump at the helm. From the Workers' League for Socialism (LTS) and our international organization, the Permanent Revolution Current – Fourth International (CRP-FI) we call for active mobilization and also on an international scale, we are to fight together with all those who want to resist all this imperialist offensive.

That is why we have been mobilizing from the first moment with anyone in all the countries where we have strength and we call for a redoubling of the struggle at the continental level, we demand that the trade union centers, social and political movements, starting with those who have repudiated the attack, call for a Continental Strike of the working class, as the axis of an international mobilization capable of stopping imperialist aggression, expelling Yankee imperialism from Venezuela and opening a perspective of struggle for all of Latin America. Because now it is Venezuela that is attacked, but Venezuela is the advance guard of the regional discipline of U.S. imperialism.

As we affirmed in our second international declaration, we raise our strongest voice of protest against this imperialist aggression. Although we are left-wing opponents and anti-imperialists of the Venezuelan government, we demand the freedom of Maduro and Flores because we do not recognize the slightest right of the U.S. imperialist state and its justice to judge him. We stand unambiguously in the military camp against U.S. imperialism, and we call for the mass mobilization of the international working class and the peoples of the world to defeat it. We do so without granting any political support to the Maduro government, today continued with Delcy Rodríguez.

U.S. imperialism is forcing a transition agreed at gunpoint, with all warships on the Venezuelan coasts. All this is faced by unleashing the forces of the masses and not having the illusion that they are going to conciliate, fix or negotiate with Trump, in reality what they are preparing is a total turn of the right.

We demand from the current Venezuelan government full freedom, annulment of the convictions and trials of the workers imprisoned and those imprisoned for protesting. We demand the release of any worker, union leader or social fighter who is in any prison, a victim of the repressive barrage of the government, which has been deepening in recent years towards our class. We demand the repeal of laws that criminalize struggles.

The Venezuelan people have the inalienable right to discuss their destiny and the country's present. That is why we demand full freedoms to hold assemblies in the workplaces, studies and communities, where they can discuss how to confront imperialist aggression and its pretensions to subjugate the national economy, as well as on all the problems that afflict the Venezuelan people. Full rights of assemblies, organization and demonstration for working people, women and youth.

This catastrophe, where Chavismo in power came in this act to administer the surrender after the imperialist military attack, which came to demonstrate once again that there is no progressive solution within the framework of Latin American dependent capitalism or its nationalist variants. The capitulation of Maduro and surrender under the tutelage of the United States on the part of Delcy Rodríguez fatally marks the result of reformist illusions. The task of the moment is to rebuild the political independence of the Venezuelan working class, to expel imperialism with methods of mass mobilization and to expropriate the bourgeoisie and the bolibourgeoisie to put resources at the service of social needs.

Chavismo has demonstrated, in its last act in the face of imperialist aggression, that its anti-imperialism was pure speech. Its historic bankruptcy is the bankruptcy of an entire strategy of class conciliation. For the Venezuelan and Latin American working class, the lesson is clear: there are no national shortcuts within dependent capitalism. The imperialist aggression against Venezuela renews a fundamental truth: no Latin American country can confront imperialism alone. The pending tasks – breaking with the foreign debt, stopping the plundering of common natural resources, confronting soy monoculture and the military threat – are of a continental nature. Only by uniting the demographic and productive power of Brazil, and despite its setback, also of Argentina, with the enormous experience in the class struggle of Bolivia, Peru, Chile and even Uruguay, can a real solution be proposed. This unity cannot be achieved under the leadership of the national bourgeoisies, but of the independently organized working class.

From our Trotskyist organization, the Permanent Revolution Current – Fourth International (CRP-FI), we maintain that the only progressive way out for Latin America is the struggle for a Federation of Socialist Republics. In the face of the bankruptcy of Chavismo and all bourgeois nationalist projects, this perspective is not an abstract slogan, but a historical necessity.

The political fall of Chavismo should not be taken advantage of by the pro-imperialist right, but by the revolutionary left to draw strategic lessons. The task is to rebuild a socialist and internationalist alternative, capable of transforming defeat into a starting point for new struggles. Only workers' governments, supported by organizations of direct democracy and the revolutionary mobilization of the masses, can expropriate the transnationals, break with imperialism and reorganize the economy on new bases.

The task is to rebuild a revolutionary, internationalist and classist left, which fights for the political independence of the working class and for a government of the workers themselves. The bankruptcy of Chavismo must be the last lesson: the path is not bourgeois nationalism, but socialist revolution on an international scale. The only way out is socialist, internationalist and revolutionary. That is the perspective we defend.