So what’s the difference? Does it matter? Can we do Red Aid today? If so, what does it do? What is its effect? Can its purpose and form be the same as it was in 1969 (or Berlin in 1920)? There’s a lot of logistics and survival programs out there right now, being run by self-identified Communists in the U.S. and Canada. What are we to make of them? This debate has gone back and forth over the past decade. As always, it is most helpful to define our terms before we make any decisions.

What is Red Aid?

Red Aid differs from mutual aid in a few critical respects. Mutual aid is a way of organizing a community to meet its own needs; it is a kind of labor exchange where members contribute what they are able and take what they need. In a certain sense, it is an attempt to establish the political economy of communism in miniature. While mutual aid is often run by small(ish) anarchist circles, there’s no necessity that it be organized by the politically advanced or class conscious elements at all.

Red Aid, in contrast, is an explicitly communist strategy. Red Aid has to be run by a Communist organization. Although it can incorporate a labor exchange element as part of its overall strategy of organizing, there doesn’t need to be any such element for it to accomplish its primary goals. Red Aid can very easily be a unilateral form of aid directly from a Communist organization to a community. Unlike mutual aid programs, Red Aid is not performed primarily with community self-sufficiency as a goal. It doesn’t “develop dual power” or challenge the state system of distribution directly. Red Aid also differs from charity in that its goal isn’t merely to provide material necessities to make a difference in underserved communities by meeting their needs.

So what are the aims of a Red Aid logistics program, then? They are fourfold:

1. To create deep and authentic links with the lowest strata of the working class, that section which is least susceptible to the bribery of the labor aristocracy;
2. To identify and develop potential Communists from among that strata;
3. To learn the immediate needs of the class and then, using these three aims, to
4. Address those needs through mass meetings and other organs of working-class power; to organize the working classes and make them aware of their own existence as a class; to elevate class-consciousness and open a front of class struggle against the enemy.

This strategy can only be fully pursued by an entirely-constituted, working, militant, Communist political party. The movement in the U.S. and Canada isn’t yet at that stage, despite the claims made by the various reactionary organizations that they are a Communist Party. Why is it it the case that only a fully-constituted Communist Party can make full use of this strategy? Because the Communist Party:

1. Acts as a check and control on local party organizations and ensures they do not engage in reformist opportunism, tailism, or chauvinism;
2. Coordinates the areas of struggle of its local organizations to act in a unified way and ensure that all actions against the enemy are taken at the time most effective to keep the enemy off-balance and maximize the strength of the blow;
3. Collects and distributes resources and directs group labor so that these Red Aid programs can be well-funded and well-run;
4. Provides ideological training and uniformity to new members who enter the Party organization through Red Aid recruitment.

Despite this, even at our present stage, sufficiently large and developed local Communist organizations can effectively pursue a strategy of Red Aid, so long as it is coupled with an extremely robust political development program.

Logistics work requires consistency; it must occur on a regular, weekly basis to make inroads with the lowest strata of the working class. An aid program or station cannot be spotty or held at arbitrary times or places. Logistics workers must be reliable and dependable. Because of this requirement, there is a very steep minimum labor commitment necessary to keep a logistics station running.

For instance: three cadre-level members must be present for and prepare a food service each week at a minimum. Given two hours of preparation on, say, a Friday, and a four hour food service period on Saturday, that amounts to 6 x 3 or 18 labor-hours each week. An organization must either have an extremely committed and militant membership or a very large pool of cadre to draw on to maintain this kind of schedule. For instance, a one week on, one week off schedule requires at minimum six dedicated comrades who can reliably provide six hours of work every other week.

In small organizations, this degree of labor would leave little time for the critical work of internal political development and study, let alone other organizing actions such as publicly-facing development programs, marches, engaging with other organizations in the same locality or region, fundraising for arrested organizers, formation of community self-defense groups, etc.

Thus, while Red Aid can have an important effect on the movement overall, a local organization should not pursue it simply for the sake of “doing something.” There is a pressing feeling, especially from those of us with petit-bourgeois backgrounds, that we have to be “doing something” (cult of action!) and that “doing” should feel like going out into the streets to foment revolution right now. This ultra-left position is reinforced by the essentially rightist deviations of the already-existing U.S. and Canada-wide “Marxist” organizations.

In fact, however, you should realistically assess whether your organization has the capacity to meaningfully engage in logistics work. Typically this requires:

1. A membership of at least 10 cadre-level members;
2. Access to at least $100/week of materials for food service or other aid supplies;
3. A solid cadre-development program already in place.

If your organization does not already meet these requirements, it would strongly benefit from a period of development as a study group to strengthen it (see the USU handbook of the same name).

Building Logistics to Build the Party

We are still in the period or stage before a unified Communist Party has been formed in the U.S.-Canadian-Mexican bloc. We are the inheritors of a tradition of 2nd-internationalist social chauvinism that goes back to the late 19th century. The large organizations that claim the legacy of communism in this bloc are those that routinely engage in anti-democratic practices, shield abusers, cheat their memberships of money, and produce no meaningful contribution toward the revolutionary consciousness of the mass of people.

Thus, the overwhelming need for the Communist of today is to unite with other Communists and produce the Decolonial Marxist-Leninist Party. Regional leagues like the All-Empire Worker’s League have already begun to undertake that task. Local organizations that engage in Red Aid must do so with the understanding that their mission is to form one of the constituent elements of a convention organizing all Communist local organizations in the U.S.-led imperialist bloc into a single, decolonial, Marxist-Leninist party.

“The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism. They interpreted the period of preparing the forces for great battles as renunciation of these battles. Improvement of the conditions of the slaves to fight against wage slavery they took to mean the sale by the slaves of their right to liberty for a few pence. They cravenly preached ‘social peace’ (i.e., peace with the slave-owners), renunciation of the class struggle, etc. They had very many adherents among socialist members of parliament, various officials of the working-class movement, and the ‘sympathising’ intelligentsia.”

Perceptions of material and social precarity in the middle classes (principally settlers, petit bourgeoisie, and the imperialist working class) tend to produce two outcomes, both a product of the heightening of the international class struggle. In the first case, middle class precarity can produce real class consciousness, that is, proletarian consciousness. In seeking answers to the problems faced by the middle classes, a small contingent of radicals emerges who seek education on matters of class conflict, imperialism, colonialism, settler occupation, racism, patriarchy, and the international Marxist-Leninist, Decolonial, Indigenous, and National Liberatory traditions. In the second case, a broader movement of false class consciousness, that is petit bourgeois consciousness, emerges. The latter is what we’re going to look at here. What is false consciousness? This broadly refers to all forms of middle class consciousness which purport to be liberatory. Because of the diversity of interests represented within the middle classes, these forms of consciousness are equally diverse in content, though in practice they all point in the same direction:  continued bourgeois supremacy over the whole world. 

Contemporary liberalism for instance can be analyzed as a form of middle class consciousness: extolling the supposed intrinsic virtues of order and procedure, universal equality before the law, freedom of expression, and “non-violence” as a central tenet of political activity. In false consciousness, the individual begins with the assumption of an ideal reality towards which to strive, and through political action attempts to shape material reality according to these ideals. In actual practice, this produces a dogmatic approach to political activity where these central tenets of Liberalism are more important than the material outcomes. Why is this? Attempts to label liberals as unintelligent, misguided, or otherwise unaware of the contradictions within their approach to political activity are unsatisfactory, as can be quickly seen when these contradictions are pointed out in discourse, and liberalism demonstrates its boundless capacity to deny, distort, and excuse. What then is the material outcome of liberal political activity? Social and institutional inertia, the preservation of the status quo, and ultimately support for and defense of oppressive white supremacist regimes of settler-colonial occupation, and imperialist exploitation of the global south. It’s important to note here that these patterns are not necessarily inherent to any particular ideology, but to the class itself.

The professed ideals are a smokescreen for the material outcome, which is the real intended function of the ideology. This smokescreen serves mainly for the benefit of the ideology’s adherents, who easily learn to live with its contradictions by rationalizing their ideas as being broadly “correct” on the basis of their own material concerns. If they are comfortable, they feel their worldview is approximately correct. It is only when they experience or expect discomfort that they begin to change their worldview, and usually only by demanding the restoration (or increase) of privileges. This additionally serves the interests of bourgeois rule by keeping the politically active sections of the masses debating and disputing one another’s ideological conceptions — conceptions rooted in the material interests of different strata of the middle classes. These debates, while sometimes incredibly lively, all operate within the bounds of the overarching middle class interest of the continued maintenance of the settler empire, and at their most intense represent conflicts for control over the levers of imperial power, but never stray into the realm of revolution. While the right wing of the settler empire is happy to experiment with new methods of control and dominance in the face of crisis, the imperial left wing can only debate and denounce, or at most occasionally roll back or delay particular reforms taken by the right. This leads to a circular process, a sort of political holding pattern that can only react to events and retroactively justify inaction and passivity in the face of crises, rather than actively struggling to change reality. 

Whether their words say so or not, the liberal does not want to solve homelessness, because to do so would require the overthrow of the regime of private property which is fundamental to imperial land speculation, the surest path to “financial security” (that is, upwards class mobility) available to the middle class individual (which most commonly takes the form of “homeownership”). The liberal does not want to free Palestine, because to do so would be to shatter the legitimacy of the institutions which actively maintain the occupation of Palestine, and which at the same time actively maintain the occupation of stolen Indigenous lands inside the borders of the U.S. empire, and which actively maintain the continuing flow of inexpensive commodities and superprofit-inflated worker wages into the empire. 

The liberal may go as far as to couch their demands in radical language, but the demands remain reactionary nonetheless. In the case of homelessness, liberals will advocate for jobs programs, or zoning reform, or expanded homeless shelters, and so on, measures which may or may not produce improvements in the conditions of the homeless population, but which are ultimately aimed at maintaining homelessness as an institution by providing a harmless outlet through which to redirect any resistance against the private property regime. At the same time, the victims of housing exploitation are corralled along lines amenable to the bourgeois/settler state, and violence is employed against them should they resist or fail to comply with the measures imposed. The language may say “end homelessness”, but the demands say “the homelessness regime is in need of maintenance”. In the case of Palestine, the most popular of such liberal measures is the two-state “solution”, which seeks to divert the struggle for national liberation into a formalized acceptance of the occupation by Palestinians, and a concretized formalization of apartheid by the occupation. The language may say “Free Palestine” but the demands say “the occupation has a right to exist”.

With this analysis in mind, let’s now turn to the issue of middle class “communism”. On the 22nd of May 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two staff members of the Palestine occupation regime, shouting “Free Palestine!” during the act. In doing so he tangibly brought the struggle for liberation into the rear base of the U.S.-israeli empire. This was, first and foremost, an act of radical love for and solidarity with the Palestinian people, the victims of the occupation’s genocidal onslaught. At the same time, this was an act of political desperation, a refusal to accept the normalization of genocide, whatever the personal costs may be. In doing so, Rodriguez called direct attention to the failure of the “Free Palestine” movement within the imperial core to heighten the struggle and bring tangible consequences to the perpetrators of the Gaza Holocaust. In one stroke, Rodriguez demonstrated that resistance is absolutely possible, and that those of us who have so far failed to organize militant violent resistance to imperial genocide are failing in our duty to uphold and defend the oppressed.

Seemingly frightened to the core at the dreadful thought of militant struggle against the state, the so-called Party “for” Socialism and Liberation, and the so-called “Communist” Party USA both immediately leapt to denounce this heightening of the struggle. Professing a commitment to “peace” and “non-violent struggle” these organizations have eagerly demonstrated in action the real aim of their respective programs: maintenance of imperial rule and the bourgeois monopoly on violence. We already knew this was the case, but the discussions erupting around these revisionist statements point in the direction of the future of this movement, and where the red line of class allegiance is to be drawn. Remember to ask: what is the material outcome of their political practice? This will inform us as to their actual goal, and in turn the outcomes of their practice will inform us as to their class allegiance.

The goal of the settler Communist, as a member of the international middle classes, is to leverage their material and social privileges in the interests of the international proletariat, with the aim of the liquidation and abolition of the settler class. The goal of the settler “communist” is to claim to fight for liberation in word while obstructing liberation in practice. They will therefore wield whatever institutional power they possess to effect this desired outcome. The CPUSA claims to fight for liberation in word, but in practice they canvass for bourgeois parties, instruct their members to “call their senator” in response to genocide, platform and defend zionists, and denounce violent struggle. These proponents of watered-down and sanitized “communism” are not doing this because they are unintelligent or ignorant or otherwise unaware of the aims of Communism, but because these actions serve their real material interests. During the First Inter-Imperialist War (1914 to 1918) the leadership of the Second International famously betrayed the aims of the Communist movement in favor of backing their own respective national bourgeois formations, not because they misunderstood the aims of Communism but because their aims were the interests of their own class, which at the time was benefitting tremendously from the expansion of imperialism and the intense exploitation of the colonized world. Today this opportunistic betrayal of the proletarian struggle repeats itself, as it has for most of the past century, in the settler-run “communist” and “socialist” parties. 

Marxism-Leninism has been proven, time and again through the history of the last century of class struggle, to be the most potent ideological tool wielded by the revolutionary proletariat. In this sense it is a dire existential threat to the continued privileges of the imperial middle classes, whose comforts are predicated on the very system which Marxism sets out to defeat. Despite this, it does not require any greater degree of cognitive dissonance (compared to adherents of liberalism) on behalf of the middle class radical to claim adherence to Marxism while rejecting it in practice. It is equally as trivial to wield the phraseology and aesthetics of Communism in the interests of the settler middle class as it is to wield liberalism for the same. The difference is that while liberalism is at present a decaying order, increasingly seen as obsolete by the masses, Communism is, after decades of decay and decline, currently on the ascent in international power and influence. It is therefore more urgent than ever that committed revolutionaries study Marxism. It is the development of mass consciousness which is the antidote to the opportunistic poison of middle class radicalism. Don’t just accept what we tell you to be the truth! You have to study, learn for yourself, and develop yourself and your understanding. Settler radical “communists” prey on youth and ignorance, turning potential budding revolutionaries into the footsoldiers of the perpetual counter-revolutionary holding pattern. Marching in cop-approved circles waving signs and decrying “violence” in word while supporting it in action as colonized people are actively being exterminated with your tax dollars feels wrong because it is.

Equally as urgent is the need to recognize the direction that settler “communism” is developing. No ideology is static while it has living adherents, and the ideologies of the middle classes are no different. As mass consciousness has developed and grown, the settler “communist” parties have been forced to take up the increasingly radical and revolutionary language of the proletarian struggle and distort it in order to adapt it to their aims. In recent years these parties have started talking of issues like settler colonialism, decolonization, national liberation, gender liberation, and so on. When they think they can get away with it, they denounce these issues as “un-Marxist”, “revisionist”, “ultra left”, etc. If they feel they can no longer hold back the tide of consciousness this way, they may adapt by accepting these ideas in theory while continuing to struggle against them in practice. Beware of “communists” who claim settler colonialism is no longer an ongoing structure, but an event of the past, or “communists” who promote a workerist agenda to the exclusion of Indigenous, Black, Queer, and women’s issues.

The old adage that if you “scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds” holds truer than ever today. Faced with culpability in the extermination of the Palestinians, liberals have roundly demonstrated their commitment to upholding the imperial order no matter the human cost. This development does not create fascists out of liberals, but exposes the classes invested in liberal ideology as being committed to the same interests as fascism. This commitment is inherent to the class, not to the ideology. Though liberalism is fundamentally incoherent, this is owing to its idealistic character which it draws from its reactionary class representatives. Marxism is not fundamentally incoherent, but middle class “communism” only superficially resembles Marxism, and in practical character functions identically to liberalism.

Does this mean that the so-called “communist” parties of the middle classes have more in common with fascism than proletarian Marxism? In most cases this still remains to be seen: will the settler “communists” change their allegiance when a really revolutionary international proletarian party emerges? For many, particularly among the disillusioned youth of the movement, the answer is certainly yes! For many others however, their commitment to the imperial order will win out. With the undeniable necessity of Marxism-Leninism becoming clearer by the day, many middle class radicals are even now preparing to either stem this tide for as long as humanly possible, or to subvert it to their own ends. “Marxism” which openly upholds such reactionary and counter-revolutionary values as US nationalism, the patriarchal family, “anti-woke ideology”, queer/transphobia, zionism, etc, has been emerging. And while the left wing of the middle classes can only hand-wring over the (potential) loss of their privileges and otherwise maintain the counterrevolutionary holding pattern, the right wing is openly preparing to mount a renewed offensive against the proletariat by consolidating the middle classes under the banner of “Marxism”.

We’ve seen reactionary middle class revolutions before. It bears reiterating that the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) called itself a “socialist workers’ party” because it was drawing on popular radical ideas of the time, portraying itself as a “sensible” third way alternative to radical Bolshevik terror and failing capitalism. In our time the ideas have changed somewhat, but the processes of class conflict are very similar in many ways. When our own NSDAP emerges it will drape itself in both the red flag and the U.S. flag.

What are the hallmarks of an organization which upholds false consciousness?

• Attempts to control members, rather than empower them. Members are isolated from their community rather than supported as Communists within their community.
• Stifles development through repetitive tasks and overbearing bureaucracy, rather than making development and the carrying forward of the struggle the key priority.
• Education takes a lower priority to “action”, rather than practice and study being treated as equally important aspects of the dialectic of development. Members are taught what to think rather than how to think.
• Opaque and/or impenetrable internal organizational functioning, instead of clearly defined rules which everyone follows and which everyone has a voice in the drafting and implementing of.
• Communications with central leadership are limited to commands that are carried down the line, rather than a dialogue.
• Leadership is upheld on the “strength” of their ideas, rather than on their contributions of labor to the struggle.
• Decisions are justified by appeals to the authority of leadership, “The Party”, etc. rather than democratic accountability. 
• Leaders are treated as rulers to be obeyed, rather than servants of the membership and the people.
• Ossified leadership structures, leaders are not subject to recall, elections do not happen or are designed to reproduce leadership power rather than empowering the general membership.
• Historical revolutionaries (particularly Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao) are treated as infallible prophets whose word cannot be challenged, rather than regular human beings whose ideas should be studied and understood holistically and within their particular historical contexts.
• Contradictions in the ideology, outlook, organizational functioning, decision making, theoretical disagreements, etc, are resolved with appeals to “faith” in the organization’s mission or leadership, or the words of the aforementioned “prophets”, rather than constructive struggle.
• Attempts to engage in constructive struggle are shut down, treated as “wrecker” behavior, or ignored, rather than embraced as necessary to the development of the proletarian party.
• Finances are kept hidden from the membership, and/or spending decisions are made without the consent of the membership, rather than being open and democratically accountable.
• The voices and contributions of members from oppressed populations (women, Indigenous, Black, Queer, disabled, etc) are dismissed, excluded, minimized, or otherwise disempowered or decentered, rather than being held as central to the proletarian struggle, and empowered and uplifted by the organization.
• Discussions with or about other organizations are discouraged or silenced, rather than being considered essential to the task of building unity among the Marxist movement.

If you feel like you or someone you know may be involved in an organization which upholds false consciousness, we have several articles which can provide further guidance:

• From USU: Cadre Development Literature, Organizing Theory
• On the Cult Form: The Cult Building Tendency
• On CPUSA: A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words, Against CPUSA’s Colonizer “Communism”
• On PSL: Revolution in Our Lifetime
• On FRSO: Colonizer “Communism” in the FRSO, The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO
• On DSA: Organize Within the DSA!, Uncommitted: A Lesson in Counterinsurgency

The struggle for the Party is at times a bitter one, and promises to only grow in contention as the proletarian movement builds momentum and begins to truly challenge the established “communist” institutions. Already many middle class “communists” resort to increasingly coordinated campaigns of harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence in order to assert the “legitimacy” of their particular organization. Committed revolutionaries must understand the backwardness of this approach: To assert authority without the backing of the proletariat, or to attempt to cudgel the proletariat into submission to “the party” can only ever at most postpone the emergence of the Party of the revolutionary proletariat. 

The Party will form the vanguard of the revolution only when the masses of the most oppressed internationally recognize it as their representative and their weapon in the class struggle, wielded by and in the interests of the international proletariat.

Social revolution does not exist in the abstract; social revolution is always a concrete, embodied event or sequence of events. Those Marxists who make of revolution some nebulous virtue, rather than recognize it as a real process, are doomed to remain on the sidelines of the actual revolutionary movement. The social revolution comes clothed in actual struggles, and special tasks depending on where and when it occurs. This fundamental idealist error – the “pure class revolution” – has permitted the noxious rot of opportunism to destroy any chance for the Communist movement in the western imperialist powers. Because the leading “communist” organizations in those states refuse to grapple with the reality of the class structure in the imperial centers, they spend their time daydreaming, marching, and idling their time until a future where pure class revolution becomes possible – a future that will never arrive.

We Marxist-Leninists who truly understand historical materialism are left to pick up the pieces. For us to bring about the revolution in the imperial centers we must not only combat the powerful forces of the enemy state, but also their auxiliaries, the pure revolutionists, who insist on ignoring all existing conditions and carrying out their revolutionary daydreaming in a fantasy land based on their misreadings of past revolutionaries. Wherever these hollow revolutionaries spread their doctrine, they draw emerging class-conscious workers into their way of thinking; soon, these newly class-conscious workers are miseducated into becoming further ambassadors of the “pure revolution.”

While it is our task to build the revolutionary party in the United States-Canadian bloc, we must build it in such a way as to forever combat this source of opportunism and revisionism. Decolonial Marxism-Leninism is the only tool we possess that can inform the construction of such a party. Where the pure revolutionists decry that decolonial theory is the bane of Marxism, we know that it is only the bane of their fangless Marxism. They are terrified of it because it restores the fangs in the doctrine of social revolution.

Decolonial Marxism-Leninism embraces the two special tasks of the social revolutionary in the U.S.-Canadian bloc, namely the resolution of the national/imperial question and the woman question (which could more properly be phrased the domestic labor or reproductive labor question).

Decolonization is simply the national question applied to the conditions of the U.S.-Canadian bloc. The revisionists deny that there is a national question to address today. They often dress this denial in many colors; some say that there is no such thing as settler-colonialism, or that the period of settlement has ended and therefore settler-colonialism is wrapped up and done with. By this they mean that oppressed nations within the U.S. are not actually nations and therefore do not require self-determination. They subordinate the national question to the class question, and demand a pure social revolution in which the oppressed nations within the imperial centers must place their concerns for sovereignty aside. In fact, they deny a national struggle at all – these nations, which they have downgraded to ethnicities, must set aside their national demands. According to these revisionists, only the proletariat of each ethnicity need be approached and brought into the movement.

Do we need a special term to denote a kind of Marxism-Leninism that recognizes the need for the national struggle? Is that not the essence of Marxism-Leninism? Sadly, the term has been so perverted by the century of false struggle in the U.S.-Canadian bloc that we do need a special term. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxist-Leninists” (don’t laugh!).

Although we must draw from the entire corpus of works from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, we must also incorporate the critical analysis of the later 20th century from Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and George Jackson. The Russian and Qing empires did not engage substantially in the African slave trade or the Scramble for Africa – which is one of the reasons they lagged behind development of the European and colonial slaving powers – so the special task of national liberation did not take the form in the Tsarist or Qing empires that it must take here in the United States and its satellites.

To put it simply: the legacy of slavery and genocide at the hands of the settler population in the United States and Canada is not merely past, but continues on into the present. Combating this special form of national oppression is the task of Decolonial Marxism-Leninism. 

What Are the Central Tasks?

The formation of a guiding party is imperative for the revolutionary movement. It is impossible to form a militant revolutionary party while still being unclear about who our friends are and who our enemies are. Therefore, it is critical to the establishment of the revolutionary party-to-be for us to flush our enemies out into the open and draw a firm line against them. We want nothing to do with these pseudo-Marxist neocons, these Marxists-without-national-liberation; instead, we must actively seek to exclude them.

This can be done by openly embracing the two tasks of the social revolution in the U.S.-Canadian bloc: the liberation of the nationally oppressed through the establishment of national sovereignty (what our enemies contemptuously call “Landback ethnonationalism”) and the complete depatriarchalization of society. We must proclaim these tasks as the baseline for unity.

These tasks are the clothes that the revolution comes to us wearing, and they form a suit that would have been easily recognized by Marx or Stalin. They are the national question, as applied to the U.S.-Canadian bloc, and the question of reproductive/domestic labor, or the woman’s question, as applied to that same region. They manifest in the West as the tasks of decolonization and depatriarchalization, which are each composed of several necessary elements.

Departiarchalization must take the form of structural social changes, focused on true emancipation for women and LGBT people, the reorganization of productive and reproductive labor along gender-equal lines, the abolition of all outmoded institutions, industries, and medical, professional, and cultural practices that rely on gendered violence and maintain gendered oppression; the exact programmatic answers to these questions, however, are outside the scope of this present manifesto. The need is currently to break with the opportunist elements of the Marxist movement, and that requires a firm and explicit program of decolonization.

Decolonization

Decolonization is the task of establishing national self-determination for the oppressed nations within the U.S. and Canadian imperialist bloc. The desirability of the national self-determination of oppressed nations is beyond the scope of this article. We urge you to study Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and the other Marxist-Leninists for the answer to this question.

Here we are speaking of real nations, not, for instance, the reactionary projects of Cascadia or the secession of California or Texas. The really-existing oppressed nations within the U.S. and Canada are the Indigenous nations, the Black nation, and the Puerto Rican nation. There may be others, but such a determination would need to be made by careful examination of the national question in each individual instance.

As for the Black, Indigenous, Hawaiian, and Puerto Rican nations, decolonization means:

1. Economic sovereignty – that is, land reform;
2. Political sovereignty – that is, the freedom to establish politically independent states; and,
3. Cultural sovereignty – that is, the freedom to engage in culturally significant practices.

To achieve these three parts or elements of the task of decolonization, we must commit firmly to a program that guarantees them. The party-to-be must promise, in action, that Decolonial Marxism-Leninism means:

1. The establishment of Land Tribunals to be carried out by the existing Indigenous nations and the guarantee to abide by all their decisions; these Land Tribunals to distribute the geographical territories of the continental U.S. and Canada, excluding the Black Belt, to the apportionment of the Indigenous nations or, should the Tribunals so decide, to set aside geographical territory for the  construction of a plurinational socialist state where no Tribune claims that territory as national;
2. The redistribution of all land in the Black Belt to the benefit of Black workers and farmers;
3. The redistribution of all lands in Puerto Rico and Hawai’i to the benefit of Puerto Rican and Indigenous Hawaiian workers and farmers;
4. The support of all forces that are actually national-liberationary in character regardless of their class composition;
5. The complete  destruction of the U.S. state and its departments at all levels; and,
6. The incorporation of national proletarian elements into the party-to-be with the structural guarantee of authority over all programs and strategy concerning land and liberation.

This struggle cannot be downgraded to a mere aspect of the overall class struggle. It is a task separate and discrete from the final social revolution — and a task that, if not undertaken, precludes the possibility of a successful revolution. The proletariat of the oppressor (“Great”) nation (the imperial whites) must be made to join with the struggles of their nationally oppressed siblings to control their own national destinies. This is the meaning of proletarian internationalism at this stage of the revolution. To the greatest extent possible, the party-to-be must encourage and prepare the oppressed national proletariat to command the new states that emerge, but this is not a necessary outcome, so long as the nation is freed from the shackles of economic and cultural control. Should it prove impossible to establish socialism in one blow, we must commit to a longer struggle. It may be that we must win each national revolution as part of a nation-democratic front and the struggle must then move to the contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the national proletariat. This would not be a defeat, but a victory! However, should we correctly navigate the struggle for self-determination, there is no necessary barrier to the emergence of the social revolution at once from the many national revolutions; that is, each national revolution may pass over into the social revolution.

On that same line, we Communists are not in a position to insist on the establishment of socialist construction within any of the resultant territories after a decolonial revolution. Without the establishment of sovereign national territories, national oppression will continue to persist and mar the construction of socialism. Should the Land Tribunals and land redistribution set aside or grant territories for the establishment of plurinational socialism, that will form the basis for a post-revolutionary socialist state. Should they decide against this, it will then pass to the proletariat of the former nationally oppressed nations to struggle within the new context for the victory of the social revolution.

What Is the Demand?

Marxism-Leninism is already decolonial at its very core. It is the science of liberation and its core is anti-imperialism. Decolonization is nothing more than anti-imperialism applied to the conditions of the United States and Canada. It is self-evident for any Marxist-Leninist who cares to apply the lessons of the Russian and Chinese revolutions to our current time and place. Why, then, must we add Decolonization as a term? Because of the perversion of Marxism-Leninism in the West.

Revisionist organizations have threatened to prevent the emergence of a real militant people’s party by devouring all the oxygen in the room, by misrepresenting the meaning of Marxism-Leninism, and by burying the truth in mountains of lies. Marxist-Leninists must not allow ourselves, the heirs of Marx and Lenin, to be drowned out by opportunists and chauvinists. Just as the Russian movement was forced to adopt the term Communist as opposed to Social-Democrat to distinguish itself from the social chauvinism of the Second International, we must do the same. The lessons of the Second International were never really learned in the West. We are fighting that same battle today in a disguised form.

So we say, down with the traitors of the Second International who dress up their chauvinism in fine-sounding socialist phrases and reduce the movement to serve as the ineffectual lapdog of empire! Instead we must forward our demands for self-determination and openly require the task be set forth as the foundational one for the establishment of a militant, revolutionary, Marxist party.

The Navajo, Havasupai, and Ute Nations are being poisoned. Toxic uranium saturates their land, drinking water, and homes. Southwestern indigenous tribes lived on top of uranium deposits for centuries without issue. They called it leetso, or “yellow dirt.” Cancer rates in this area were so low that some believed the Navajo were immune. This changed in the 1940s, when the federal government pledged to commit a nuclear holocaust against Japanese civilians. Since then, over 40,000 tons of uranium ore have been extracted from their land with no concern for the Indigenous miners or their families. The Navajo language had no word for “radiation” or “cancer” at the time. They didn’t know what the mines would do to their people, and they were desperate for a source of income. The federal government and mining companies knew.  

The trucks traveled from Pinyon Plain Mine (formerly Canyon Mine), which is controversially located on Havasupai territory. The mine sits in the foreground of the Havasupai’s sacred mountain, Red Butte, and over several important aquifers. These were the first trucks sent from the mine since it began operation in December 2023.  They were set to follow a 300 mile route to the White Mesa uranium mill in southern Utah. The Navajo outlawed uranium transport in 2012 due to its horrifying legacy of radiation sickness and cancer in the Navajo nation. 

Alas, the federal government does not recognize Indigenous sovereignty in any meaningful sense. Indigenous nations are technically allowed to write laws concerning their internal affairs, but exceptions are made when a law could interfere with pillaging tribal lands. In the case of uranium transport, the statute exempts state and federal highways on Navajo lands which Energy Fuels Resources, the company contracted to mine and transport the radioactive material, has designated as hauling routes between their mine and processing mill. While the company is allowed to travel in the eyes of the American government, President Nygren has promised to set up roadblocks against any additional trucks. He demands an agreement that requires Energy Fuels to provide ten days notice before shipping uranium so that the Navajo nation can take safety precautions and inform the community. The Navajo nation is generally opposed to any movement of uranium through its land, but they are willing to let the ore through if given proper notice, which was not the case here. The Navajo nation only learned of the trucks because the Forest Service relayed the message that same morning.      

On August 2, First Lady Jasmine Blackwater-Nygren led a rally and march with Navajo, Havasupai, Hopi, and Fort Mojave nation members. They marched up the hauling route as Grand Canyon tourists drove by in the opposite direction. Many honked in support. Energy Fuels Resources has since agreed to pause uranium hauling until an agreement can be reached with the Navajo nation. It is in Energy Fuel’s best interest to cooperate, given new research that suggests the mine will contaminate the Havasupai’s drinking water. A temporary pause in shipments would be a small price for Energy Fuels to pay if they can continue exploiting the sacred Ancestral Footprints Monument. Genocide Joe Biden and Killer Kamala Harris ironically designated this area as a national monument in August, 2023, but since the Pinyon Plain mine was approved in 1986, it escapes regulation. Thanks for nothing, Joe and Kamala!

The Navajo nation’s promise to block uranium shipments is a test of Indigenous sovereignty over its borders. The federal government has their dirty fingerprints all over Indigenous statutes. Indigenous nations are often referred to as semi- sovereign, but “semi- sovereign” will always remain a shallow and disingenuous concept under the settler colonial relation. So-called limited sovereignty is reduced or annihilated at any moment the settler government chooses. Congress can terminate the existence of Indigenous nations at any time, like it did in 1953 when hundreds of thousands of indigenous were relocated to American cities for cheap labor. The Supreme Court will continue to affirm Congressional fiat over Indigenous nations. Limited sovereignty has a clearly defined ceiling, but no floor. These are the scars of oppressed nations entitled to full control over their peoples, resources, and destinies. 

Protests against Energy Fuels Resources are set to continue. Another 100 indigenous people marched along the haul route on Saturday, August 24th. The next march is scheduled for October 12th against the company’s processing mill. Energy Fuels Resources must face consequences after poisoning Havasupai and Ute Tribal members. Organized Indigenous nations pose an inherent threat to the status quo of settler domination. The settler regime will only pretend to recognize sovereignty for so long. Force Congress to exert its veto power so that all may see the zombified corpse that is limited sovereignty.

Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, and National Liberation

Colonialism in the modern era first developed in the latter years of the 15th century, but reached maturity in the late 19th and early 20th century with the comprehensive colonization of the African continent. In their infancy, colonialism and capitalism developed hand-in-hand, with the resources and profits extracted from the colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade spurring rapid growth in the European economies. In turn, products manufactured in the European metropoles were utilized to further develop the grip of the European economy over the world at large. In essence, capitalism was born with the profits of colonial extraction, and the insatiable capitalist mode of production drove the expansion of the colonialist system.

In its “traditional” form, the colonial economy is primarily an extractive economy, maintained through economic, political, and military domination. The colonial power takes raw materials and other resources from the colonized territory to be shipped back to the “home” country to fuel their burgeoning economies. During the dawn of the era of imperialism (from the 1880s onwards), colonial holdings also served as a sink for the exportation of capital from the European countries, financing international corporations in their advancement of the extraction of resources from the colonial territories. For “traditional” colonialism, the Indigenous population constitutes the labor force for the international corporations. The rapid development of the urban centers in the colonial territories drove the “proletarianization” of the colonized workforce; that is, driving populations from the countryside to the urban centers to engage in the newly imposed capitalist-colonialist economy. The Indigenous people themselves in this context serve as a resource; labor to be exploited for profit, most acute under the slave system in which colonized peoples were literally exchanged as commodities themselves.

Settler colonialism is a distinct form of colonialism. Whereas in the “traditional” colonial economy, extraction of resources is the primary focus of the occupying power and indigenous labor utilized in that extraction is a central component, settler colonialism is concerned with complete control and assimilation of the land as the foundation of a new settler nation. Under settler colonialism, the Indigenous populations are eradicated, in whole or in part, by a series of deliberate policies enacted by the settlers to drive them off the land and claim it for themselves.

In its initial stages, the development of settler colonies on the American continents was driven by rivalries between the last remnants of the European monarchies, which involved religious and military expansionism. The so-called “New World” presented a crisis for the European kingdoms, essentially constituting a new battleground for existing tensions on the continent. At the time, the nascent capitalist system in the form of mercantilism was subordinate to the interests of the monarchs, driven by the need to expand control in the religious sphere, through which the kings justified their “divine right to rule”, and the need to grow the coffers through which they funded their respective armies. An as yet “undiscovered” continent made up of billions of acres of “unclaimed” land presented both an opportunity and a threat to the kingdoms. They could not afford to be left behind while their rivals expanded their power overseas.

What resulted was a mad dash for the direct control of the land, leading to a period of primitive accumulation which increased the wealth and power of the European kingdoms, but also increased the wealth and power of the nascent bourgeoisie which would go on to supplant them in the following centuries. Some of the European powers attempted to engage in “traditional” colonization schemes, but the most successful and the earliest — that of Spain — was settler colonial from its inception and would provide the model for England.

The problem for the Europeans was that this land was not “unclaimed” as they pretended, but was inhabited by millions of Indigenous people organized in thousands of complex societies across both continents. Instead of halting the ambitions of the European economies, a solution was developed, and the Europeans, especially the English, having honed their skills at warfare through centuries of struggle both inside and outside the continent, utilized those skills towards the complete supplanting of the indigenous populations for their own.

Today, the first phase of the settler colonial project in North America is complete. What once was a land of dizzying cultural wealth and complex civilization has been completely supplanted by the US settler colonial empire and its Canadian counterpart. The millions of Indigenous people that once inhabited the continent have been subjected to outright slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and otherwise removed from the land to be corralled into reservations, making way for the fascist global hegemon to thrive. 

Some believe that because the “settlement” of the U.S. is complete, the colonial relation in the country has ceased. On the contrary, through the reservation system and the indigenous reserve labor force kept in perpetual poverty, through the continued subjugation of the Black interior semi-colony by the survival of slavery in the prison industrial complex and the continued denial of land rights in the Black Belt, and through the exploitation of immigrant labor largely consisting of indigenous South and Central Americans, the colonial relation is thriving. This relation is most clear through the antagonization of these colonized populations by the armed wing of the state — the DHS, the BIA, and the federal, state, and municipal police — which takes up its legacy as an occupying colonial military.

The imperial outpost of “israel” is the most readily apparent example of settler colonialism due to the intensity, and thus visibility, of the conflict. Through widespread media coverage of the issue, this genocidal relation is undeniable. Despite billions of dollars being funneled every year into maybe the most advanced propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, the age of social media has allowed the Palestinians to demonstrate their plight for all to see.

The colonization of Palestine is well-documented by scholars and by the zionists themselves. Following the British acquisition of Mandatory Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, the “holy land” provided a golden opportunity for the zionist conference in Britain to begin their colonial project. Between 1917 and 1948, zionists began in earnest to claim land in Palestine through both purchase and conquest. This process culminated in the infamous Nakba of 1948, in which zionist paramilitaries excised large swaths of the land through genocidal slaughter and ethnic cleansing, killing thousands and driving many hundreds of thousands more from their homes. What resulted was almost 80% of the land of Palestine falling under control of the zionists, driving the displaced Palestinians into refugee centers that became the Gaza Strip and the West Bank territories, an act that was legitimized by the international community’s recognition of the “State of israel”.

Zionist ideology closely resembles the religious settler ideology of Manifest Destiny that drove the lion’s share of the colonization of what would become the western United States. Believing the land to be promised to them by God, settlers push the boundaries of the existing colonial borders, encroaching into land that is still controlled by the indigenous inhabitants, often in violation of the various treaties and agreements previously negotiated between the colonialists and the colonized. When the colonized naturally resist this unlawful expansion, the military forces of the colonial entity intervene on the basis that the settlers constitute civilians and they must be defended from the “violent, uncivilized natives”. Thus, the colonial borders expand and the indigenous are further removed from the land. This practice is utilized to this day in the zionist settlements in the West Bank.

We should not be surprised at the similarity; we should not be surprised that the zionists appear to be brothers in arms to the U.S. ruling class. After all, the same economic exploitation of Indigenous people is the basis for both.

So what is the resolution to the colonial contradiction? Despite settler colonialism constituting a distinct form of colonialism, the solution remains the same: national liberation. The anatomy of the colonial system consists of the economic, social, and political domination of the colonized by the colonizers. To abolish this relation, the political, economic, and social spheres must be taken hold of by the subject nation. In a “traditional” colony, this is easy to envision due to the fact that the majority of the population is Indigenous. The anti-colonial liberation movement in this context must seize control of the state from the colonizers and the bought-off compradors, nationalize the colonial enterprises, and begin the process of developing national self-determination. In the settler colonial context, control of the land is the axis upon which the Indigenous peoples are oppressed and self-determination takes the form of the reclamation of the land from the settlers.

South Africa is a particularly interesting case study on this point. Prior to the takeover of the South African apartheid government by the ANC in the 1990s, South Africa could similarly be described as a settler colonial project. After the apartheid system was overthrown and Mandela elected in 1994 as the first president of the country, a process of land reform was undertaken, but was not taken to completion as it had been in Algeria in the 1960s and in Zimbabwe and other territories that made up the former Rhodesian state in the 1980s. As a result, racial disparity and racial tensions continue to wreak havoc on the South African social and political sphere, with white settlers still owning a disproportionate amount of land relative to their population, leaving millions of indigenous South Africans in poverty. What this tells us is that the land and who controls it is the most important aspect of the settler colonial context.

CPUSA Convention Controversy

This past weekend, June 7–9, the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) held its 2024 national convention in Chicago. Two particularly important results of this conference made a significant stir among communist circles on social media regarding the Party’s position on settler colonialism.

As part of the party’s membership in the International Meeting of Communist Workers’ Parties (IMCWP), the CPUSA invited delegates from several other participant parties to speak at the convention. Included in this group was the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), whose speech, delivered by israeli Knesset Member, Ofer Kassif, was streamed on YouTube and subsequently posted by the Party’s official account on Twitter. In this speech, Kassif began by “providing context” to the situation in the zionist entity, in which he vocally condemned the Palestinian Resistance for its acts on October 7, repeating the rigorously debunked lie that thousands of Israeli citizens were massacred by the Palestinians. Later in his speech, he rightly describes the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as a genocide, but ultimately delivers a message that is indistinguishable from the messaging of, say, US Senator Bernie Sanders. In essence, it espouses a political position which can be described as “labor zionism”; the genocide of Palestinians is to be condemned but so are those struggling against it. It is bad to kill Palestinians, but those who are waging a national liberation struggle to overthrow the settler colonial relation are terrorists. Essentially, their position is that the state of “israel” has a right to exist and that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine between 1917 and 1948 is legitimate, but with a left-wing facade. The position of the CPI is further revealed in an article posted on their website in November of 2023, calling for an investigation of war crimes against the Palestinians for sexual crimes committed on October 7, which has since been thoroughly debunked as a conspiracy, a lie spread by the IOF to justify the genocide in Gaza.

The Twitter post of Kassif’s speech received vitriolic backlash from people criticizing the party for inviting the CPI to speak at the convention, especially during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Many CPUSA members took to social media in an effort to do damage control, justifying the invitation of the party with such excuses as CPI being a “fraternal party of the IMCWP”, as if that isn’t an indictment of the IMCWP in its own right!

During the CPUSA’s discussion of the resolutions being adopted at the convention, the question of settler colonialism in the United States was presented. Following this discussion, a CPUSA delegate who was present at the convention tweeted “After an investigation the Communist Party USA has rejected settler colonialism as the primary contradiction in the United States”. Again, backlash from communist circles on social media was responded to by hand-waving and justification by party members, calling any who criticized this decision “ultras” and “wreckers.”

The formulation of this CPUSA resolution is malformed and belies the lack of understanding on the part of the CPUSA delegates and those who rejected it. It is clear that the resolution was raised as a sop, and always designed to be defeated. There is no primary contradiction; this is a mish-mash of Marxist terms. There is, of course, in any situation, a principal contradiction, but this is a question of strategy. The principal contradiction conditions the other, secondary, contradictions, which cannot be resolved without first addressing it.

Party members on Twitter immediately began denying the need for any national liberation struggle in the US. It is clear that, where CPUSA once suffered from extreme white (imperialist) chauvinism, that chauvinism is alive and well.

Social Class and Class Struggle

Defenders of the party’s resolution on Twitter made a point of railing against Anything But Class (ABC) Marxists. While ABC as an ideological trend does constitute a liberal distortion of Marxism, the Nothing But Class (NBC) position lacks any basis in reality. Proponents of NBC argue that all oppression and oppressive institutions arise from capitalism, and thus through waging class struggle, all oppressive contradictions will be resolved. What this deviation ignores is the reality of social classes, and the particularity of the nature of class in the colonial context.

The Wretched of the Earth, written by Martiniquais revolutionary Frantz Fanon, who developed his analysis from his participation in the national liberation struggle against the French settler colonial project in Algeria, argues that in the colonial context a person’s race in part dictates a person’s class. An analysis of the colonial relation reveals this fact to be true. In colonial Africa, all of the enterprises were owned by Europeans, whereas all of the industrial and agricultural workers were African. They were workers and not owners because they were members of an oppressed nation; because of their indigeneity. As a result, class was stratified along national lines, meaning that a national liberation struggle also constitutes a class struggle.

“Identity politics” is a contentious topic among Marxists, with many taking the view that the concept of identity is a liberal distortion that only serves to obfuscate the class struggle. What this leaves out is a robust understanding of what exactly goes into determining someone’s social class. In our white-supremacist cis-hetero-patriarchal settler colony, a person’s identity plays a part in determining a person’s class. If you are a trans person, a Black person, a gay person, or any intersection of the various avenues of oppression, odds are that you are not a member of the bourgeois class. As a result, gender relations, race relations, disability relations; these things all constitute social relations with an objectively identifiable economic base. They are class relations and thus are essential to address when engaging in class struggle.

These are fundamentally not questions of identity. Identity is a social question; the relations that produce these social identities are economic questions.

In the US settler colonial system, Black and Indigenous people are corralled into reservations and ghettos, flushed into the prison system to work as money-printing slaves, and are oppressed along national lines. As a result, a national liberation struggle must be waged as PART of the class struggle. National liberation IS class struggle, and must be taken up and supported by Communists.

When CPUSA and its membership reject an in-depth analysis and discussion of settler colonialism, reject the principles of national liberation, and embrace only a simplified analysis of class, they are, in effect, abandoning the class struggle. 

Do not mistake their behavior. The CPUSA has abandoned the class struggle. At best, they represent a dam holding back a reservoir of committed Communists, straining to fight in the class war. At worst, they represent an active barrier to the advancement of the very movement they claim to lead, and thus serve as an objective pillar of U.S. capitalist-imperialism.

A source within the party shared a section of one of the resolutions to be adopted at the convention with regards to the national sovereignty for Indigenous peoples of the Americas which read:

Therefore be it resolved that the CPUSA fully supports the struggles of the Native American people for full social, economic, and political equality and national sovereignty over Native lands. We demand expansion of federal and state funds and services for all the reservations. We oppose schemes to nullify tribal treaty rights.

While paying lip service to national sovereignty for indigenous nations, this resolution reveals deep issues within the party’s understanding of settler colonialism. In their message of support for the struggles of the Indigenous people of the Americas, CPUSA takes care to specify that this only extends to the borders of so-called “Native land”, a distinction that legitimizes the settler control of land not specified as “Native”. The resolution also calls for the expansion of federal and state funds with regards to the existing reservation system. Instead of calling to abolish this violent colonial institution, the CPUSA takes the position that the system should be expanded! Funneling funds into the existing genocidal reservation system can do nothing but strengthen it in its purpose: exercising control over the indigenous populations held captive inside of them. Additionally, this resolution calls for the upholding of existing treaties between indigenous nations and the US government, with no mention at all as to the nature of those treaties as documents forged through coercion that legitimize the settler control over already-stolen Native lands.

This position is indistinguishable from the “labor zionist” position of the Communist Party of “Israel,” which pays lip service to the plight of the Indigenous Palestinians while at the same time upholding the existing colonial borders taken through wholesale slaughter and ethnic cleansing in 1948 and today. By refusing to acknowledge the nature through which this land was claimed and the illegitimacy of the settler control over it, the CPI and its brethren in the CPUSA effectively condone the genocidal actions taken by the settler system.

Settler colonialism and national liberation are not buzzwords. They are not empty platitudes to be tossed out and then ignored, nor are they secondary issues to be subordinated to an ill-defined “class struggle”. They are class struggle, and any party which seeks to overthrow the settler colonial relation must engage with this from the outset. Settler colonialism is a material relation concerned with control of the land. A communist party in a settler-colony must contend with the question of the land and who controls it. They must take the stance that the reclamation of the land through a national liberation struggle is the issue at hand. Otherwise, they are giving in to settler chauvinism as willful idiots of empire.

What is to be Done?

A problem of this magnitude requires extensive education of general party membership, but the capacity to carry out that education would require a party leadership which has this understanding and is capable of imparting it to others. Many members of the CPUSA, especially the younger ones, have a better understanding of these issues than the old party bureaucrats, but the undemocratic nature of the party —  through measures such as the slate system — prevents that leadership from being replaced. Instead, membership at large is forced to table any attempts at eliciting structural change until the party convention, which is only held every four years, and even then resolutions are laundered through the National Committee before being put to a vote.

With the CPUSA’s rejection of settler colonialism as the principal contradiction, they willingly reveal the settler chauvinism that is eating away at the party’s structure, nullifies its revolutionary capability, and condemns it to serve the forces of reaction. 

We have no Communist party in the United States. Once we accept this, we can then begin the process of building one. National liberation and gender liberation are essential aspects of the class struggle, and we must begin to organize a resolute political structure that understands this fact. In order to engage in class struggle, in order to destroy all existing oppressive relations, we must come together to build a political formation capable of taking on this challenge and building a better world for all people.

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

Characteristics of Political Mobilization

Political mobilisation in Venezuela is very different from in Jamaica.

In Jamaica, there are 2 main political parties and they have their own branches like women, youth, young professionals, and labour unions. There is a sense of cohesion and the parties’ branches fall totally under the party, with the exception of the unions which have a greater degree of an independent identity88. You either support one party or the other; the parties don’t have coalitions with other organisations that aren’t subordinate to them or seen as one of their branches. Also, we don’t really have social movements in Jamaica; the activist space is dominated by NGOs.

In Venezuela, things are different. The Bolivarian Revolution is supported by a broad base of political parties, unions, social movements, communes, and collectives. Some political parties that support the Venezuelan government have existed from before Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro started their political careers. There are many people and organisations in Venezuela who don’t support or aren’t aligned with the ruling party but still support Nicolas Maduro.

Caracas

In Caracas, the pro-government political mobilisations are massive. I can never see where they start or end, as they are always and endless sea of people. You can see multiple flags of different political movements and parties, like the PCV and ORA.

Mérida

We were told that Mérida is an opposition state and that we should take extra measures with our security because it was one of the opposition strongholds during the Guarimba riots in 2017. You could see cracked windows and bullet holes in buses.

Nevertheless, we never really encountered any problems apart from some minor jeering when we visited Pico Bolívar. The jeering usually seems to be only playful, though we were warned of the risk of escalation into violence.

While we had a demonstration in the streets against some newly-announced sanctions, random persons on the street cheered along, some joined us, some waved from their windows with their pro-government flags and banners, and I vividly remember a truck driver smiling and cheering along even though it meant he was in traffic. Someone even took a photo with some of us. We got a few bad stares, but all of the persons who gave us bad stares were white.

Lara

Lara has a strong presence of communes and communal bodies. The PPT, a pro-government party which is distinct from the PSUV, has very strong support in Lara. When we had a meeting with the Governor of Lara, she was wearing a PPT jacket instead of a PSUV jacket even though she is from the PSUV. The PPT is one of the parties that existed before the Bolivarian Revolution or before the political careers of either Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro. The PPT is stronger in some municipalities in Lara than the PSUV is.

We saw persons of all ages involved in activities held by the commune that we visited in Lara. A sense of unity and collective pride existed there. We had some difficult conversations there about some internal issues in the Bolivarian Revolution, but unity was still able to be maintained through necessary compromises.

The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV)

It’s important to note that the Communist Party of Venezuela openly supports Maduro and the government. They had supported Hugo Chavez, they have endorsed Maduro in the last 2 presidential elections, and they have maintained a coalition with the PSUV, the party of Maduro and Chavez, during legislative elections.

I don’t know how popular the PCV is, but I have met more persons – both young and old – who are from the PCV than from any other party, including the ruling party. I know more than a handful of PCV supporters who I met in Jamaica, and even more that I’ve met in Venezuela.

The PCV isn’t uncritical of the government, and their analysis of the situation is very different from the PSUV’s analysis of the situation, despite the fact that they’re allies. Of course, different persons or organisations don’t need to agree with each other on everything to be allies; the point of noting this all is that the people and organisations who support Maduro don’t do so blindly or without reason, and Maduro’s supporters are sensible people who can think for themselves. I knew this before visiting Venezuela, but I needed to point it out to others who ignore the support that Maduro has and only focuses on the expressions of the opposition. In the West, common discourse will find every reason to explain why some people support the opposition in Venezuela, but their discussions always omit reasons that people support the government; sometimes they make silly assumptions that the people only support the government because of welfare, but even this is false as I witnessed for myself that self-governed communes and community-based initiatives that don’t benefit from the government are still ardent supporters of the government.

There are grievances which are negative sides of the PSUV’s relationship with the PCV, but those specific things are typical in any multi-party democracy where a dominant coalition partner takes pride in its ‘majority’ within the coalition and feels no need to make concessions to their minor allies. These things are issues with the PSUV as a party and many of its functionaries, not specifically Maduro; I know this well because I’ve encountered issues with some of them myself and heard of some things from others, but these others are still people who support Maduro and the government. Criticism of the PSUV is distinct from criticism of Maduro.

Maduro is not a perfect leader; no-one is. This doesn’t mean that the PCV only supports him because he is the ‘lesser evil’ – it means that disagreements and criticism can exist among different forces which are aiming for the same general long term goals, especially about the path to take to get there and the pace of following that path. Criticism of the government doesn’t have to mean that persons want to change their government; many organisations and people want changes but push the government to make the changes rather than to try to overthrow the government, and that is the approach that the PCV and many other organisations and movements take. They see progress as a process, and they understand themselves to be a part of that process. rather than finding themselves antagonistic towards the government’s efforts.

It’s also important to note that the PCV takes a more hardline position on some issues. They opted not to re-join the National Assembly when the PSUV made peace with some sectors of the opposition, because they still see it as a body that it is contempt; they see the current assembly as “the key tool of imperialist aggression” – they support the Constituent National Assembly instead, and believe that it “should have taken forceful action” against Juan Guaidó when he proclaimed himself to be president. Outside of Venezuela, the Constituent National Assembly is painted as a body that was solely created to increase the PSUV’s power, but this is clearly not the case if a party that is critical of the PSUV has endorsed the body and has even complained that it doesn’t go far enough in making moves against the opposition.

The West spreads the idea that Maduro is an authoritarian dictator; however, inside Venezuela, some people complain that he isn’t authoritarian enough. Those who support or empathise with the opposition should be somewhat relieved that it is Maduro and the PSUV who are in power, and not someone from the PCV or the average supporter of the government who impatiently wait on the government to make certain moves and wish that the government would brutally crackdown on the big Capitalists and some opposition leaders.

Internationally, those who bash Maduro and the Venezuelan government don’t only do so from the right-wing; many self-labelled Socialists in the West also bash Venezuela because it still has a market economy, or other things that give them reasons to say that Venezuela doesn’t have ‘real’ or ‘pure’ Socialism. Ironically, these clowns are not anywhere close to building Socialism in their own countries, and they make excuses for compromising and supporting weak Capitalist candidates all the time. I prefer to listen to the PCV than to some Western chauvinists.

The PCV leader says that the party openly discusses Venezuela’s internal contradictions with international allies but specify that their struggle with the PSUV is an internal one and that they unite with the PSUV against the opposition locally and against the US internationally. It’s not the place of outsiders to get involved in the internal struggles of Venezuela’s Left; Comrades will of course offer their opinions and share them with each other, but that is not the same as bashing and discrediting. There is a responsible way in which Comrades and allied organisations can offer advice to each other or even to engage in critique with each other; it can be harsh, but these things should be done with discretion and in specific spaces.

Perception of Police

My friends and Comrades from different parts of Venezuela have very different views/opinions on police. My Comrades in Caracas and Petare have very negative views of the police, despite being hardline supporters of the government. This shows that their opinions of the police and of the government don’t impact each other much, if at all.

I attended a memorial service for 6 Comrades who were murdered in Barinas; there was a sense that the police were not doing enough to address the incident. Despite their negative views on police, the Comrades who mourned their deaths were hardline supporters of Maduro and the government; the murdered activists and the Comrades who mourned them were Chavistas after all, and the movement that they were from also strongly supports the government. They have held demonstrations, but they are not of the same nature as the opposition demonstrations.

When we stayed in the apartment complex in Carora, there was an interaction with police that made me and some other Comrades uncomfortable, because of our general feelings about the police in the places that we are from; a Comrade from Brazil explained how police in Brazil are reactionary, and Comrades from Caracas and Petare showed some slight discomfort. The police were there for our own protection and offered to escort us, and they interacted mainly with an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who was with us as security; a Comrade was telling me that the police officers’ intentions were good but that people would look at it in a negative light. However, the people in Lara who were hosting us said otherwise; she told us not to worry and that “the police here are different” as the Comrade from Brazil explained how bad the police in Brazil are.

I felt more comfortable after this, i.e. after our hosts in Carora told me that the police actually have decent relations with the people, even though the police in Caracas seem to be less successful with that. At another point, a Comrade from Mérida told us that the police in Mérida aren’t very aggressive or violent. A friend from Petare told me that the police in different parts of Venezuela are different, that police in Caracas and Petare are awful and don’t respect human rights but that I can trust what I’m told by Comrades from other parts of Venezuela.

We sometimes hear of how brutal police in Venezuela are, and the point of this section is to show that their character is not reflective of the character of the Bolivarian Revolution. After all, supporters of the government are open and honest about their negative views on police, and some of the police themselves are involved in the attempts to discredit or unseat the government.

On Peaceful Coexistence

I had a conversation with a Comrade about the topic of China and its role in countering the US’ hegemony and said that I would one day consider writing to the Communist Party of China on the matter. Like Khrushchev and the revisionist leaders who came after him in the USSR, China has been pursuing a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West; the idea is to maintain global peace and stability and prevent war. I have also engaged a Comrade from Cuba on this topic.

What exists in the world right now is not peaceful, and what they are trying to prevent is not violence; violence is already happening everyday as a result of US hegemony. Economic warfare continues against Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, the DPRK, and other countries. The world has watched while the US and its allies attempt to destroy Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. The peace that we are trying to preserve is an illusion, while people in particular countries experience violence daily.

While progressive governments have good intentions in reconciliation with the West, they are attempting to avoid war and the most overt forms of violence while leaving themselves vulnerable to continued strategies by the imperialists to weaken them and strike again later. We saw this with the Cuban government attempting reconciliation with the US, as it has been doing for decades, with the intention of ending the brutal blockade; however, we saw that the US was intending to replace an old regime change strategy to one that they considered smarter and more effective.

While making it clear to the world that they are allies, certain countries have still negotiated with the US on an individual basis instead of forming a strong united front. Cuba, the DPRK, and Iran have all negotiated to improve their own standing – and this is understandable and expected that each country will put itself first and that such negotiations are conventionally bilateral, but conventions have all been based on existing practice rather than things set in stone. The problem is that the US will negotiate with one country while attacking 3 of its allies, and the country that it’s negotiating with is backed into a corner to be nice and maintain a smiley face with the US because it’s backed into a corner about its own conditions.

But peace between the US and other countries is a fantasy. Even during peace time, the US won’t respect other nations’ sovereignty; it was built by the destruction of many other nations as it expanded its borders Westward under a “Manifest Destiny” doctrine. As we pretend that a peaceful world under the current conditions is possible, we weaken ourselves every day; at what point do we say that enough is enough? When will we challenge and overthrow the hegemony?

How many more countries will be invaded or bombed? How many more people need to suffer the brutal effects of blockades and economic warfare? We condemn these things, but we allow them to happen. Why do we aim for peace with an entity that commits so many acts of evil? Why does it satisfy us to have peace with a government that is bombing and destroying another country at the very same time?

Where do we draw the line? It wasn’t drawn after the wars in Viet Nam or Korea, it wasn’t drawn after the invasion of Grenada, it wasn’t drawn more recently after the invasion of Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands, it wasn’t drawn after the destruction of Libya, it hasn’t been drawn after decades of a genocidal economic policy towards Cuba, and it hasn’t been drawn after the US decided to engage in economic warfare against the peoples of Venezuela and Iran.

At the end of the Sao Paulo Forum, Maduro spoke of one day going on the counter-offensive against imperialism; true anti-imperialists are eager for the conditions to be right to do this and for it to be done. One could argue that it is already being done by the people’s movements resisting neoliberal policies and puppet governments in Haiti, Honduras, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, and other countries.

Still, I want to know; when do we move, from just surviving despite imperialism, to overthrowing imperialism? We will have no room to construct Socialism if we always have to worry about the imperialists intervening and violently re-imposing Capitalism on our peoples.

This idea that we must try to aim for peaceful coexistence and resist confrontation at all cost is not working, considering that the cost is that people are suffering and even dying in the violent conditions that the hegemony has imposed on them. The times of ‘peace’ that we have are not peace in the real sense, and the balance of power isn’t shifting; imperialism continues to grow stronger while countries that are resisting imperialism are focusing on their own survival. We are not buying time when we accept the imaginary peace; we are weakening ourselves with delusion as we let our guard down. Peace does give us some time to manoeuvre, but we often get too complacent in these times rather than reminding ourselves that we are in a constant struggle.

This is not a rejection of peace. We want peace, but we can’t keep letting our guard down in these times of nominal peace. This is also not a call for war; war is already being waged by imperialists so anti-imperialists wouldn’t be starting one. This is also not a call to take any sudden reckless actions to intensify war, but it is a call to recognise the reality we live in and that our efforts towards peace may not actually be bringing about peace for our peoples. This is something to bear in mind, going forward. Our final goal can’t be coexisting with imperialists who don’t value our lives.

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The most radical thing we can do, then, is to reshape our international relations in light of this reality. Again, this doesn’t mean supporting any sort of violence. It can be something as simple as radically changing our trade relations to decentre the West and give it less power. Our dependence on trade with the powerful Western countries gives them the power to coerce and control us. They have hegemony over the global economy, and demanding to remain assimilated in this current economy will always have us on our knees.

Individually, progressive Nationalist governments in the Third World have been doing this. They have tried to take control of natural resources from the hands of multinational entities, and they have faced sabotage and intervention; this is not a critique of these countries. This is a critique of the other nations which sit and watch this happen, offering nice-sounding critique after the fact but not doing anything concrete.

We cannot live like this. We cannot be smiling with the West while it strangles Cuba and other nations that we care about. The international community must draw a line and take concrete action, something more than just verbally denouncing the blockade at UN sessions each year, or more than throwing shade with vague language to criticise the US. If this spineless faux-clever approach that we take to the world’s problems now was the same one that we had applied to the problem of Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes in the 1930s, the Nazis would have dominated the world at the time.

Other Things

There are good things that happened that don’t have detailed notes, like a meeting with someone who will soon be sent to head Venezuela’s diplomatic mission to Jamaica, an Afro-descendants’ meeting in November that we got invited to, public canteens where people who don’t have food can eat for free, a visit to a potato farm, a visit to an archaeological museum that focuses on the history of indigenous peoples in Western Venezuela, our visit to the national pantheon, things I learned about veterinary services in Venezuela, and some other things.

Conclusion

My experiences in Venezuela are anecdotal, as anyone’s experience would be if they spent a considerable amount of time there and wrote a report. This does not mean that I spent time to talk to more than 30 million Venezuelans or that I know everything about Venezuela, but I know enough to say the things that I have said.

Despite the limitations of my observations and analyses, I think they are important experiences that depart from the narratives that are actively pushed by Western media. The things that I witnessed and experienced were not 100% positive; nonetheless, they have reaffirmed my confidence in the Bolivarian Revolution and in people’s movements in other countries – including my own – in general.

This report doesn’t have a particular central/single aim beyond documenting the things that I witnessed and experienced so that they are not lost in memory. Where some things are highlighted, the reasons that they’re being highlighted are explicitly stated. Things in this document may be cited as a reference for the organisation’s positions on issues in the future.

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

The Opposition

General Reflections

Political polarisation doesn’t seem to be as serious among poorer Venezuelans as one would imagine. Jamaica has a history of political polarisation where streets or entire communities would be controlled by gangs that were affiliated with either of the 2 major political parties, and someone could be shot for just wearing the colour of one political party in the other party’s street. There was open warfare between militants of both parties in the streets, leading up to the 1980 election in Jamaica, and political violence was still seen as normal during my childhood.

The theatrics of political polarisation really seem to be from the political class and concentrated in Caracas. I met opposition supporters in Petare and Carora who have been friendly to me, despite knowing my alignment why I was there. I’ve stayed in touch with them.

The Myth of Popular Support for Juan Guaido

There is no doubt that you’ll see slogans and politicians’ names spray-painted on walls at different parts of the country; 2 opposition candidates from the 2018 presidential election had their names and faces spray-painted on walls in Lara, and both government and opposition politicians have their names spray-painted on walls in Caracas and Mérida. One name that I didn’t see, anywhere, was Juan Guaidó; this isn’t to say that his name is absolutely nowhere, because I won’t deny the possibility, but I personally didn’t see it anywhere. I think there is a higher chance that you will find the name of Henrique Capriles than that of Juan Guaidó.

Remember, Juan Guaidó was never a candidate in any presidential election before declaring himself president. This campaign to paint him as some popular alternative to Maduro is engineered by foreign media. He has never needed to run any real campaign for the presidency, and his claim to presidency was never tested by the ballot. His party refused to participate in the presidential election in 2018 and attempted to defame the politicians from other opposition parties who had decided to run against Maduro.

I’ve witnessed, for myself, that many people support the government. I also know that there are also many people who dislike the government like in any typical country, but I can’t honestly say that there are many people who support Juan Guaidó. He is not some democratic saint, or the leader of some popular movement that is being repressed; he is simply an opportunist who is seeking political power with the backing of the US.

Leopoldo Lopez

Leopoldo López is a much more influential figure in the opposition than Juan Guaidó; he is the leader of the party that Guaidó is in. Still, he is seen as “a divisive figure within the opposition” and “is often described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry” by his own peers. He was jailed for his involvement in the violent riots in 2014 and has not been held accountable for decisions he made which resulted in deadly political clashes in 2002.

Some paint him as a popular figure of resistance to the government, but he is on the far-right fringes of the opposition, and there weren’t mass demonstrations in support of him when he was on trial. Actually, “the fact that he played some role in the contentious events of 2002 is widely known in his home country and has likely colored how many Venezuelans view his role” in the riots by the Guarimbas in 2014. The riots received wide media coverage, but the opinions of the many people who didn’t support them were ignored.

Direct Support from the US

At this point, it is not secret that the Venezuelan opposition has direct support from the US. They have sent over 90 million USD to the opposition this year, and they have openly endorsed some specific dangerous incidents like Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation as president, the February 23 border incident, and the April 30 coup attempt. They have also been calling Venezuelan military officers to offer bribes and do other things to pressure them to turn against the government.

They were quick to vouch their support for Guaidó’s bid to oust Maduro. They also supported a coup attempt in 2002 and had allegedly met with the terrorists who attempted to assassinate the president in 2018.

The Promise of Life Support After Regime Change

Let me first establish that I don’t think regime change in Venezuela will be successful, and I am not speculating on the possibility of regime change and what may happen after. This section is strictly to speak of the opposition’s expectations, which exist whether we like them or not, and why they are dangerous and detached from reality.

The opposition is recklessly collaborating with the US on strategies that are aimed at wrecking the economy of Venezuela and making daily life miserable. This benefits them as they have fat pockets while the rest of the country is battling an economic crisis. There is a scarcity of US dollars caused by the sanctions which prevent Venezuela from exporting oil or interacting with much of the global financial system which is dominated by the US, so US dollars have become ridiculously expensive in Venezuela; the opposition having direct funds from the US government allows them to have power and influence that they would not have under normal circumstances.

The opposition expects that they can take power in Venezuela with the promise of rebuilding the country from the crisis, but the effects of the sanctions will be long-lasting, especially if Venezuela is reintegrated into the global economic system. They expect that they will take power and then they will get a lot of aid and favourable treatment from the US.

It is understandable that they expect aid and help from the US, but they are delusional if they think that it will solve the crises that Venezuela is facing. Help from the US is rarely humanitarian; they don’t care about funding social services that won’t make money. If anything, the US’ main interest would be getting returns on the investments that they have made, and they would count their regime change efforts as such. If they’re spending tens of millions of dollars to fund a change in government, they expect to be able to get something back.

Let us assume that the opposition knows that any investment the US makes in the future will be something that is economic, in terms of investing in developing or maintaining an industry; will even that be a reasonable expectation? Yes, it is reasonable that they will try but it’s not reasonable that it will work. This isn’t the first time that the US has been betting on or hoping for regime change in a country; they also salivated for Michael Manley to lose leadership of Jamaica to a politician who was US-friendly, Edward Seaga. The US went out of its way to help Seaga during his leadership in Jamaica, but that still failed and the economy was left in ruins.

The Unintended Effects of the Blockade

The Economic Effects of the Blockade

Both liberals and conservatives in the US support US imperialism, but they have different methods; the conservatives have more aggressive and overt approaches like we saw with the Bush administration in 2001-2009 and like we see now with the Trump administration, while the liberals who once supported these approaches are admitting that they don’t work to further the US’ agenda in these countries. While overt aggression is extremely damaging and does end up serving a part of the US’ agenda, they are somewhat correct in that overt aggression will not work to bring regime change in Cuba or Venezuela.

Listen carefully to the rhetoric of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and you’ll notice that they still vilify the Cuban government and speak about it condescendingly even when attempting to be peaceful. From an article in the Guardian in July 2015, it is evident that Clinton still wanted regime change in Cuba:

• She said that “no region in the world is better positioned to emerge as a new force for global peace and progress” and that “That progress had been promised to Cuba for 50 years.”
• She went on to complain that the aggressive strategy that has been used in the past have not been effective in accomplishing that; she says that it’s unwise to wait “for a failed policy to bear fruit.”
• Supporting the goals of the policy but not the approach, she recommends to “replace it with a smarter approach that empowers the Cuban private sector, Cuban civil society and the Cuban-American community to spur progress and keep pressure on the regime” to get “Cuba to reform its economy and political system more quickly.”
• The end goal is still regime change, but a softer method, because she still sees the Cuban government as adversaries and admits that the intention of a more friendly policy is still to be antagonistic to the Cuban government; “Engagement is not a gift to the Castros, it is a threat to the Castros. An American embassy in Havana isn’t a concession, it’s a beacon.”

Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State for 4 years in the earlier part of the Obama’s presidency. In the later years of his presidency, Obama had pursued very aggressive policies against Venezuela, despite attempting to soften up on Cuba. Donald Trump has reversed Obama’s policy of reproach towards Cuba, choosing to be aggressive instead, but he has continued Obama’s anti-Venezuela policies and has been brutal to both countries.

I’m not usually a fan of distinguishing between liberals and conservatives, because there is not much difference between them in juxtaposition to Socialists; Socialists and Communists are squarely on the Left, while liberals range from centrist to centre-right, and conservatives are simply right-wing. Their economic policies are pretty much the same; Obama is a neoliberal, much like the former president Ronald Reagan who we call a conservative. “Fiscal conservatism” is a big part of liberal economics; the terms have been muddled because both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ mean many different things in different contexts and different areas of policy.

Where I draw distinctions in this section, I use the term liberal is to refer specifically to neoliberals, and I use the term conservative is to refer specifically to neoconservatives. Neoliberal ideology is mostly concerned with economics, and concepts like free trade, whereas neoconservatism on the other hand is mostly concerned with foreign policy and is associated with the US’ most aggressive warmongering policies; they are not mutually exclusive, but they have different areas of priority.

Their stances on Cuba are an example of 2 approaches to the same goal; liberals believe that trade relations will influence Cuban society to reshape itself in the US’ favour, while conservatives prefer an aggressive approach that attempts to bring the Cuban people to their knees.

The approach towards China is another example, where Obama was pushing the TPP as a way to cement the US’ foothold in the Pacific through a free trade agreement, but Trump and his much more Nationalistic tendencies oppose free trade, so they scrapped those plans. This has left much ground for China to push for an alternative trade agreement which increases its influence on some of the countries that would have joined the TTP with the US, and the Trump administration’s response to China’s growing influence includes a trade war and significantly increased military activity in the Pacific rather than promoting free trade and letting the economic dynamics play out in the US’ favour to increase its influence in these countries.

All of this is said to establish that Donald Trump’s policies depart from neoliberalism, and liberal economists like Jeffrey Sachs have condemned the blockade against Venezuela; other economists have criticised other policies like tariffs on foreign goods because they are not in line with free trade. The blockade is not in line with neoliberalism because neoliberalism is about free trade, the removal of all barriers from trade; the US has never practised this perfectly but there will still be things we can say are more/less neoliberal than others or not neoliberal at all. This is not to discount the destructive nature of either Donald Trump’s policies or neoliberal policies, as both are destructive, and the US uses its power to impose its own interests in any case.

We can look at what neoliberalism has done to Haiti if we want just one example of how it ruins economies while benefitting the US. The US imposed neoliberal policies on Haiti, forcing them to cut their tariffs on rice because it was a ‘barrier to trade’ according to neoliberal ideology.

Tariffs are taxes on imported foreign goods to protect local goods from competition. Haiti had tariffs on rice; imported rice was taxed so it would be more expensive than local rice, so it was more likely for average Haitians to buy Haitian rice than American rice. “A significant portion of the economic, social and political predicament in Haiti can be traced to the decline of its agriculture sector. Up to about 30 years ago, Haiti was self-sufficient in the production of rice” but things changed.

As the competition drove Haitian farmers out of business, Haiti now produces much less rice and depends heavily on imports. As of 2010, it was said that “Haiti depends on the outside world for nearly all of its sustenance” including “80 percent of all rice eaten.”

Of course, “for Haitians, near-total dependence on imported food has been a disaster” as it has “put the country at the mercy of international prices”.

Neoliberalism has eroded Haiti’s food security. “Haiti imported only 19 percent of its food and produced enough rice to export, thanks in part to protective tariffs” in the past, but now Haiti imports most of its food and was the US’ “third largest buyer of rice, importing almost 300,000 metric tons per year” 68 by 2010.

To neoliberal economists, however, “food security” should not be a real concern. For example, one can look at statements made by a popular economist in Jamaica named Damien King, who mocks the concept of food security. This is a conversation that took place on Twitter on the 8th of September 2018.

To neoliberal economists, however, “food security” should not be a real concern. For example, one can look at statements made by a popular economist in Jamaica named Damien King, who mocks the concept of food security. This is a conversation that took place on Twitter69 on the 8th of September 2018.

Neoliberal ideology envisions a world free of conflict, a world free of political economy where politics and power imbalances don’t coerce, and a world where disasters or things like war and sanctions won’t interrupt trade. If there is a problem, they blame it on a barrier to trade. In their theories, you’ll more quickly see arguments that barriers to trade lead to conflict and that removing barriers to trade prevents conflict than you’ll see them talking about how conflict can negatively affect countries that are dependent on trade.

Neoliberals actually seem to even promote dependence on trade, and not by accident; they believe that each country should specialise in what it is most efficient in producing, and trade to attain whatever else they want or need. This is a cute ideal, but it is unrealistic. One conclusion that they draw from this is that if Country A produces food less efficiently than Country B, it should import food from Country B instead of trying to produce its own since producing its own will be more expensive for the consumers than importing.

The problem with dependence on trade is already known all too well by people who live in countries in the Caribbean or other places that have small economies or that import a lot of their important goods like food.

The market value of something that we specialise in may be high at first but may plummet at some point for reasons beyond that country’s control, which would reduce its buying power. Jamaica invested heavily in bauxite production in the 1980s, and it hit us hard when bauxite prices declined; more recently, Venezuela’s economy started to face some difficulties when the price of oil dropped by about 50% in 2014.

A conflict or natural disaster far away from Jamaica can still affect global prices of fuel, food, and other commodities, leading to these things becoming more expensive to produce or transport from wherever they were being imported. The blockade imposed by the US against Venezuela has led to fuel shortages in Cuba, because the US is outright preventing ships from transporting oil from Venezuela to Cuba72. This is a barrier to trade in the most serious sense, so I am not accusing neoliberals of supporting the blockade; however, the point is that the barrier to trade is one that wasn’t imposed by Cuba or Venezuela, but Cuba is nevertheless affected by it.

Likewise, one retort that neoliberals would bring up if you try to discuss Haiti is that American rice is subsidised and that they don’t support subsidies. It is true; the US government subsidises its agriculture and that helps its agricultural exports to undercut the prices of agricultural goods in other countries like Haiti. It’s not only the abolition of tariffs by the Haitian government that accounts for the price difference between Haitian and American rice, but the farmers in the US outright receive money from the US government. We acknowledge this and we acknowledge that neoliberals criticise subsidies, considering that free trade agreements usually argue against both subsidies and tariffs. However, the Haitian government and people are not responsible for the US’ policy of subsidising American farmers, and the economists’ criticism of the US’ policies won’t protect Haiti’s economy from the US’ tariffs, magically spawn food on Haitians’ tables, or solve its economic problems. The reality of the world we live in is that countries, especially smaller and less powerful ones, are vulnerable to things beyond their control. Food security is a real concern for us, and no country knows it better than one that is under a full blockade from the US; this is where we get to discussing Venezuela.

Before the financial sanctions and the blockade, Venezuela was exporting a lot of oil to the US and other countries; this allowed them to earn large amounts of foreign currency so that they could afford to import food and commodities. It was easier to import food than to produce its own for the most part; as a result, the urban areas consumed a lot of imported food. This wasn’t really a problem because they could afford to keep doing it. With the blockade now imposed on Venezuela, things have changed significantly; the new scarcity of foreign currency combined with the longstanding demand for foreign products has led to serious hyperinflation beyond what can be blamed on the government’s monetary policies.

1 USD was as much as 3,300 Bs.S in February. and some economists blamed the existence of currency controls and preferential trading for the problems with Venezuela’s currency; retailers were given preference for the sale of foreign currency so there was scarcity and they could sell foreign currency on the black market for higher prices than the official rate. In line with neoliberal recommendations, the government actually lifted controls on its currency which led to hyperinflation at an unprecedented rate. 1 USD was around 10,000 Bs.S when I arrived in late July, and around 17,000 Bs.S by the time I left in late August. The decision to lift the currency controls has been very unpopular among the people. Again, the current crisis of hyperinflation is the result of demand for imports combined with a lack of foreign currency to be able to buy those imports; the sanctions and blockade have severely damaged Venezuela’s ability to export, and therefore its ability to earn foreign exchange.

In the minds of idealist economists, food security is not a real concern; in reality, it is a serious issue for Haitians, Venezuelans, and people in other Global South countries. Now, Venezuelans are trying to be self-reliant in food production because their reality requires them to.

The hyperinflation and the increasing difficulty of daily life in Venezuela are intended effects of the blockade, but Venezuela’s steps to becoming self-reliant are unintended effects. With the prices of goods soaring from lack of imports, there is an opportunity for Venezuelan nationals to produce to meet the gap in demand left by lack of imports.

The blockade insulates Venezuela’s economy from the global Capitalist economy, having the exact opposite effect that free trade had on Haiti. Compared to Cuba, Venezuela has much more land and resources, as well as its own fuel, so it is more able to have a robust self-reliant economy. The neoconservatives took a big gamble, as they tried to pressure Venezuela until it would crumble, but it has not crumbled; instead, the global Capitalists are killing Capitalism in Venezuela. Import substitution is accelerating, and more young people are joining communes; I met a Comrade who was from the capital, Caracas, but moved all the way to the rural parts of Lara to join a commune there. Communes are being built even in urban areas like Caracas and Petare, but they are not physically contiguous communes; people are still organising themselves into communal councils and other social structures to manage socio-economic matters.

With global capital destroying its own ability to influence Venezuela’s internal affairs and dynamics, the Bolivarian Revolution has a chance to accelerate itself to achieve Socialism. I discussed this with a Cuban Comrade, and we both believe that some of the things I saw would be what a Communist society looks like. When I was in the communes, I could almost forget entirely about the hyperinflation. These people are organising their economies in real material terms rather than maintaining the economics of speculation.

I would ask myself, and a very few Comrades would ask me, what Communism would look like; before my trip to Venezuela, I did not know. I always thought that my generation would try to build Socialism and that Communism would be for 2-3 generations later. After what I saw when I visited Venezuela, Communism feels less like a distant ideal. I still believe that Communism is something for 2-3 generations after mine even if mine or the one after it accomplish the construction of Socialism, and I don’t think that Venezuela will somehow achieve a stateless and classless society right now or soon, but it can accelerate on its path to Socialism, and it is a beacon of hope that resistance to Capitalism and imperialism are possible.

This is not to say that I am in favour of the blockade, or to downplay its brutal effects on the lives of the Venezuelan people. It is a crime against humanity, and it must be condemned. However, we have seen that we cannot control the actions of our enemies; we see that decades of the entire world condemning the US’ blockade on Cuba has not brought about an end of that blockade, but the Cuban people still resist it. Cuba and Venezuela do not need the USA; if they must learn to survive without the USA, they will. Of course, the US knows this, which is why they design their sanctions to also sabotage relations between their targets and other countries; they try to force other countries, including their own unwilling allies, to drop economic ties with countries they dislike, i.e. Cuba, Iran, the DPRK, and others.

The main problem with the sanctions is that the US also punishes third parties for trading with the countries that they place sanctions on, so they try to stop other countries from trading with them by weaponizing the power of their currency. As the US’ currency loses its role in world trade and as the US’ actions undermine their own credibility, more countries will start to trade in other currencies and there may even be calls for relocation of multilateral bodies like the UN. The US will strain itself until it has no muscles to flex.

Political Effects of the Blockade

Another unintended effect of the blockade is that more Venezuelans realise that US intervention doesn’t benefit them. Whereas the causes of Venezuela’s problems were more obscure to some persons before, most Venezuelans – including supporters of the opposition – can now directly link their daily suffering to the US sanctions that have been imposed on the country.

Even someone who hates Maduro and continues to vilify him had to admit that the regime change strategies being used by the US government and Venezuelan opposition are harming Venezuelans and destroying their lives. Here are excerpts from an article he wrote:

“Over the past two years, Washington has imposed increasingly punitive economic sanctions on Venezuela. These sanctions have restricted the government’s access to external financing, limited its ability to sell assets and, most recently, barred it from trading oil with the United States.”
“The sanctions were designed to choke off revenues to the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Its architects claimed they would not generate suffering for Venezuelans. The reasoning was that Mr. Maduro would quickly back down, or the military would force him out before the sanctions could begin to have an effect. That was wrong.”
“The risks of famine — and what needs to be done to stop it — are lost in the conversation among Washington policymakers and the Venezuelan opposition.”
“Tell the opposition’s intellectual elites that sanctions are exacerbating the country’s crisis and you are likely to be met with silence or be told that this is false, that the country’s economic crisis began long before.”
“There is a stark contrast between their claims and the views of regular Venezuelans. A recent survey by the local pollster Datincorp found that 68 percent of Venezuelans believe sanctions have negatively affected their quality of life.”

Note that the unintended effect here is that the people directly blame the sanctions for their suffering and that anti-American sentiment is more easily brewing in the country; the brutal effects of the sanctions, in terms of it creating food shortages and making life harder for Venezuelan people, is not an unintended effect. They have attempted to strangle Cuba in the same way.

In 1960, officials in the US State Department assessed the political situation in Cuba when Fidel Castro was at the head of the revolutionary government, and they had to admit that “The majority of Cubans support Castro”, and concluded that “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”

They recommended a policy “that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

They then identified that the main thing to use as an economic weapon against Cuba “would be flexible authority in the sugar legislation” because sugar was Cuba’s main export, just like US sanctions now target Venezuela’s main export, oil.

The US is essentially saying that the internal political situation of a country is not in their favour, so they are willing to create misery for people so that they will either blame their own government for misery or they’ll try to change their government just to please the US because they fear starvation.

The US is playing a sick game with itself, but no-one is winning. The West was misled to believe that Venezuela was a ticking time bomb that just needed a little more pressure; their expectation was that this pressure would lead to an explosion that would work in their favour, as their agenda is destabilisation and regime change. However, sometimes pressure turns graphite into diamond, as we have already seen in Cuba; the Bolivarian Revolution is simply becoming more hardened.

The Venezuelan Left now has an opportunity to rediscover itself under new conditions, and to reach out to those who are becoming increasingly aware of the sadistic nature of US foreign policy. Hopefully power can be consolidated in a similar enough fashion to what we see in Cuba, but with Venezuela’s own national characteristics. Life in Venezuela is not easy; it is neither a communal paradise nor a grey dystopia, but the people are getting by. I am confident in the people’s ability – through their parties, unions, collectives, communes, and movements – to resist the heavy hand of US imperialism.

US State Department officials even warned against militant opposition towards Cuba from the outside, knowing it would not work, saying that it would only strengthen the Left in Cuba82. It has been difficult to penetrate Cuban society and to create internal opposition in Cuba, which is why they resorted to economic warfare.

Venezuela is a much larger country with much more people, land borders with other large countries including US allies, and an organised domestic political opposition that existed before and still exists during the revolutionary process in Venezuela. This is why the US has openly sponsored political violence in Venezuela83, and has sent over 90 million USD84 to Juan Guaid, the opposition’s self-proclaimed president.

Many people don’t want violence85, and the opposition’s violent tactics are turning people off, even those who are critical of the government; nevertheless, violence is the only way that the adventurists in the opposition have managed to seek the attention that they desperately crave. If they can’t win by creating a popular alternative to the government, they’ll just create chaos while the US wages economic warfare to make the lives of the people miserable. Left alone without US influence, the government won’t collapse.

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

Che Guevara Brigade (Notes)

These were notes that were written during the Che Guevara Brigade, sometimes in transit or when visiting a site.

August 8 – General Notes on the Situation in Venezuela

Venezuela is under a near-total blockade by the USA, similar to the one imposed on Cuba. This makes it difficult to do trade with any country, because most countries trade with the USA and need USD currency even when trading with other countries. The USA’s hegemonic status amplifies the effect of any sanctions that it decides to unilaterally impose, and we could discuss the former colonial powers (like the UK, France, etc.) in a similar fashion.

The blockade has forced Venezuela to hasten its economic independence, i.e. to be less reliant on trade. Domestic production is replacing imports; as this process of import substitution advances, the effects of hyperinflation will wither, and the Venezuelan people can overcome the blockade.

One could ask why Venezuela didn’t seek economic independence earlier or why they didn’t diversify their economy, but things are more complicated, and I will address that separately. In those notes, I will try to talk about the difficulties around diversifying the economy, the attitude of economists towards the issue of food sovereignty, and the recent issue with the currency controls.

Venezuela is facing a similar situation to Cuba, but the dynamics of their internal politics differ greatly. Right now, Venezuela needs a strong government to accelerate the transformation to a self-reliant economy. This is not a critique of how much power Maduro has in national politics; he is the legitimate president and the reality on the ground doesn’t dispute this. Even those who dislike Maduro can’t deny that he is still the President. He has as much power as any other head of government and as much recognition as any other head of state. The political situation that I am trying to describe has nothing to do with the presidency.

The Bolivarian Revolution (as well as support for the government and Maduro) is upheld by a broad alliance of parties, movements, unions, communes, and collectives. The Left here is broad and popular, but its decentralised nature and the impotent ‘Democratic Socialist’ tendency of the ruling party prevent power from being consolidated in a fashion similar to the consolidation that we see in Cuba. There isn’t a Socialist dictatorship in Venezuela, but some people feel that there needs to be one.

August 13 – Alina Foods
Happy Birthday, Fidel.

We are visiting the “Alina Foods” factory. A collective of workers have been in control of the factory for 4 years, i.e. since 2015. The operations at the factory were halted by the foreign owners, so the workers seized control. They sold the leftover potatoes and got a loan from a state-owned bank to raise funds to continue operations.

They produce snacks from potatoes, plantains (not bananas), and cassava. They used bacon in the past but stopped because it was being imported. There are 63 workers, and they say that production is profitable. There were 150 workers, but the blockade has hindered things.

The opposition gained control of the state of Mérida and tried to intimidate the workers to leave the site. Workers sometimes had to guard the property themselves.

The government is giving them the necessary paperwork/documents in official recognition of their control of the place; they are already registered as a social enterprise. They are rebranding because the old owners were the ones who used the name and logo of “Alina Foods” – they are also redesigning the packaging of the snacks.

Workers have invented machine parts to create new products; one example was a cutter that creates a special type of potato chips that go well with hot dogs.

Revenue is around 6000 USD per month; this is used for wages, maintenance, and raw materials for production. After wages are paid, all revenue is reinvested in the production cycle. The factory currently operates well below its maximum capacity, largely due to the economic difficulties caused by the blockade, but production is still growing, and operations continue.

August 14 – Notes from the Border Regions

The only place I’ve seen long lines for fuel are in the border regions with Colombia. There is a lot of vehicular traffic in Caracas but no long lines for gas as far as I’ve seen, and I frequented everywhere between Petare and Catia. There are many places with food, both fresh produce and cooked meals, and without long lines.

The long lines in the border regions are due to the fact that fuel is ridiculously cheap here compared to Colombia, so a lot of fuel is bought, smuggled to Colombia, and then sold there where it is far more expensive. In addition to what I’ve seen with my own eyes about fuel, I’ve read about a similar issue with food, i.e. it is smuggled across the border because it is cheap/easy to get here while being expensive in Colombia; according to Western sources like The Guardian and Reuters, about 40% of food and medicine from Venezuela was being smuggled into other countries from as early as 2014 and was documented by another Western source as still being a significant issue in 2016.

On another note, I was communicating with my Comrades back home in Jamaica last night when I had some internet connectivity. I discussed some things that I learned about community-based production and CLAP. I learned about some of this in February, but I got a deeper understanding and more details now. Witnessing social enterprises here has softened my stance towards the “social entrepreneurship” concept pushed by Dr. K’nife and others.

I’ve also now deemed it lazy and very irresponsible to publish raw statistics on public/private sector ratios in the economy because co-operatives and community-based operations are technically considered to be privates sector in this dichotomy since they are not owned or controlled by the state, but they are not Capitalist in principle and therefore should not be lumped with the Capitalist private sector.

It is critical to be more careful, especially when discussing production, because much of the bourgeoisie here in Venezuela are lazy merchants who don’t produce anything; they import and resell commodities to accumulate capital for themselves while facilitating the depletion of national capital, i.e. they retain small percentages of the large amounts of money that leave the country to buy foreign-produced goods.

There is no real national bourgeoisie here, in Venezuela; a national bourgeoisie must be productive and able to increase national capital. I’ve been told that the bourgeoisie here hasn’t even invested in oil; oil production has been done by the state (even before the Bolivarian Revolution) and foreign investors.

A national alliance (in the way theorised by Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral, or Chairman Mao) is not feasible here, in Venezuela. The bourgeoisie here is disposable, and there is more than enough fuel to cremate them or land to bury them (they can be given the choice). However, making moves against them is difficult:

• Firstly, Venezuela is the most scrutinised country in the world by Western media.

• Secondly, hostility to a powerful class with capital allows them to be a door for US intervention (as many of them already are).

But yes, we must be more careful in how we discuss the economy here. The economy is still largely Capitalist; Socialism definitely hasn’t been accomplished on a national scale yet, but it is being built.

What some persons lazily lump together and refer to the private sector includes:

• foreign investors
• the service sector (tourism, finance, telecommunications)
• big retailers/outlets (large-scale commerce)
• Capitalist producers
• Capitalist landowners
• campesinos/farmers (individual/family scale)
• small retailers/shops (individual/family scale in communities)
• collectives and communes

The ‘big Capitalists’ surely have a larger share of wealth, but the statistics on other groups are important as well. More careful analysis needs to be done than talking about a public/private sector dichotomy. A couple that operates a small shop in Petare cannot be in the same category as executives in telecommunications companies; both are private sector in a strict sense, and the operators of the small shop are trying to accumulate some capital through retail, but the operators of the small shop do not exploit labour and aren’t a part of some oligarchy. A commune that produces enough food for both self-reliance and commerce can’t be lumped with a private farm that exploits labour to produce food for profit.

Lastly, an anecdote about social enterprise to be mentioned better later: these entities don’t identify themselves as businesses (some don’t even identify themselves as enterprises), and they don’t operate for profit. Money from their small-scale operations is used to develop spaces where they provide education and other social services for free. I will elaborate on such an example with my notes on the Otro Beta movement.

August 14 – The Jesus Romero Anselmi Commune

As we visited the Jesus Romero Anselmi Commune, I no longer felt as if I was in a foreign country; most of the people here are Black. This place doesn’t look like the government did anything to develop it, but they still had Chavista signs, banners, posters, etc. – I only say this to dispel the myth that people’s support for the Bolivarian Revolution is based on poor people depending on the state for welfare. The people in this commune are self-identified Leftists; they were playing music and chanting at the imminent downfall of Macri in Argentina, and they sang along with all the Socialist chants and songs that we used in the brigade, because they knew them before. The names they use in Spanish, here and in other communes, are “Comuna Socialista…” and then their specific names; they identify specifically as Socialist communes.

The commune didn’t solely focus on agriculture; a commune is sometimes mistakenly thought of as some primitivist concept where farmers live in a collective. They produce good-quality clothing that is used by both the people in the commune and traded outside to earn money for the commune. I bought 2 dresses for a baby that was recently born in my household in Jamaica.

The municipality that we are in has 12 communes and 98 communal councils. This commune is in a cooperative with other communes; we will visit another commune in the same cooperative today. Over 2000 persons live in this commune. Over 440 hectares of land are controlled by this commune. The houses here are small flats, somewhat bigger than the 2-bedroom houses being built in many housing schemes in Jamaica. The houses seem to each have 2 bathrooms, and they also have a covered laundry area; the generic 2-bedroom model in Jamaica has only 1 bathroom and the washing area is outdoors. The yard space here is much bigger; houses are built further apart, and there are no fences or walls needed to mark boundaries.

The lands surrounding the main residential area have a lot of crops, including yucca, corn, and other things. I saw the largest passion fruit fields that I have ever seen in my life; I’ve never seen passion fruit production on such a scale before. There is a dense forested area that separates the agricultural fields from a nearby river that the residents visit and use sometimes.

August 14 – The Che Guevara Commune (Day 1)

The Che Guevara Commune takes up 25% of the land in the municipality that it is located in. It also has climate diversity, in that its lowest point is 150m above sea level (where it is warm) and the highest is ~4200m above sea level (it is cold here). It has more than 1300 families or ~3500 people living in it.

This commune is so large that it has 13 zones, each with its own communal council; 7 of these produce cocoa and 6 produce coffee. Their production is based on their climate. There is a complex including a processing plant and a greenhouse; the complex is under joint control of all the communal councils. Coffee and cocoa are produced for commerce while many other things are produced for food/subsistence. The processing plant is clean, well-maintained, and has modern machinery. A lot of chocolate is produced at the plant, and there is a sales office.

I spoke to a Venezuelan Comrade about how communal councils are elected and how they function; in each locality, members of communal councils are elected to specific positions or portfolios. For example, if there is a Culture portfolio, someone is elected to that; the person who comes 2nd for each council position serves as a deputy or substitute. The Comrade was elected to the Communications position in one of the communal councils in Petare. In the council that he is in, there are 5 positions for Finance (and therefore 5 deputies/substitutes).

Communal council elections are a standardised process nationwide; each council is elected every 2 years. Some communities have more positions than others; they create positions based on their needs, so a communal council may have a position for management of water, management of pests, or something specific to a community that isn’t in all communities.

August 15 – The Che Guevara Commune (Day 2)

The commune has a communal bank with its own digital currency and own app to circumvent the blockade and the USD.

The commune gives loans to its members in coffee; people ‘borrow’ coffee from the commune in weight, sell the coffee outside of the commune for cash to do whatever they want/need to do, then repay the ‘loan’ in coffee.

The commune has a relationship with Proinpa Foods (an industrial producer that we visited; I didn’t write notes on them during the visit).

Apart from crops, the commune also raises livestock for subsistence.

We left Mérida and headed to Lara.

August 15 – Nueva Esperanza Apartments

We visited an apartment complex called “Nueva Esperanza” in Carora, Lara – it is being built and developed by the “Pobladores” movement. The same movement seized a building in Caracas and turned it into a school.

Each building in the complex is an L-shape with 16 apartments; each apartment has 3 bedrooms and bathrooms. Each building also has an accessible roof with a covered area a bit bigger than the stairwell, and large uncovered areas. There are 4 buildings (i.e. 64 apartments) so far. Each pair of the L-shaped buildings is organised in a way that leaves a quadrangle for recreational space (including communal events).

Every family pays a maintenance fee of 300 Bs.S. The fee is very small, considering that 1 USD is about 13,000 Bs.S, so 300 Bs.S is like 0.02 USD. Even in February when 1 USD was 3,300 Bs.S, 300 Bs.S would have been 0.09 USD.

The complex falls under a communal council that is also responsible for some nearby areas, but they also have their own committees within the complex for production, organisation, planification, finance, formation, and communication.

There is a building that was being used for food and social services but is now used for administration (the office of the auditor, a warehouse) and a doctor’s office. The doctor’s office can be used/visited by persons who don’t live in the complex.

The complex is being expanded; the existing 4 buildings and 2 squares comprise 1 ‘terrace’ and 2 more terraces are being built for a total of 12 buildings (that would be 192 apartments, a total of 576 bedrooms). 110 families want to live in the complex. A family must do 60 hours of community service to earn an apartment.

The movement buys materials (cement and steel) from the government, and the government delivers the materials, but the residents and the members of the movement do most of the labour themselves. Many of the residents are elderly or at least middle-aged, so some of the labour is done by workers who are hired from the outside. Guarimbas (violent persons on the fringes of the opposition) try to attack the project and residents, so they set up a watch in the nights.

Children and their parents befriended me and a handful of other Comrades; I interacted with them a lot, and I also spent some time interacting with some of the construction workers, both the ones who live there and the ones who were hired from the outside.

August 17 – Alfareros del Gres

Workers seized control of the operations of this brick factory in 2012; it was operated by Spanish investors before that. The factory has been in operation non-stop since the workers took control, i.e. they have never needed to shut down production on a workday due to lack of supplies or a dispute or something like that. Workers’ control is recognised through their registration as a social enterprise, but they are going further by seeking total ownership instead of only control.

This is a large-scale industrial operation, though only 60 persons work here; a lot of the production processes are automated. The factory, as is, produces 190,000 bricks per month. They will also begin producing tiles. The workers that we’ve seen seem content. The factory doesn’t feel hot, despite the heavy machinery and this being one of the hotter parts of Venezuela. There are specific parts of the factory that are hot, but those places have the most automation (we don’t see any workers staying there, only passing by).

August 17 – A Refitted Brewery

We visited a factory that was once a brewery that produced beer. The owners tried to halt operations (which would cause the workers to lose their jobs), so the workers seized control and dismissed the owners in 2013. 62 workers work at the factory. Before seizing control, they had to work 12 hours per day. After seizing control, all workers’ shifts are now only 6 hours per day.

Instead of beer, they now produce flour, animal feed, and water; beer production required the input and processing of a lot of grain and water, so a lot of the old equipment was easily repurposed to produce flour, animal feed, and water.

The sale of animal feed is the main source of their revenue, while they truck water to communes and public facilities, even in other states. There is a lot of Communist imagery at the site.

August 18 – Arrival in Maizal

When I imagined communes, I imagined a homestead and a few houses or a small compound surrounded by some farmland, something like the size of a high school in Jamaica. La Comuna Maizal is the 3rd commune that I have visited; all 3 are huge areas. You can’t stay from 1 building and see everyone and everything and the people don’t all live in some compound.

These are communal spaces, but people have their own houses and yards. Some houses in the other communes are in clusters or rows like housing schemes or ‘normal’ neighbourhoods, but some are far apart like a typical rural setting. This commune doesn’t have housing; the members of the commune live in other neighbourhoods among non-members, but convene at the communal grounds for work, production, meetings, cultural activities, and other things.

August 20 – The Maizal Commune (Day 1)

Having arrived in the night, we could barely see the surrounding areas of the place we slept in. In the morning, we could see pigs, corn, cows, etc. – all the food that was eaten for dinner and breakfast are produced here by the commune.

The point of all these anecdotes isn’t to paint some romantic/feel-good sense, but rather to show that communal life is neither some Anarcho-Primitivist nonsense nor the abolition of certain personal comforts like living spaces and privacy.

We visited a ‘cultivation house’ which is a large complex with over a dozen large greenhouses, with space between them. At the time, they were trying an experiment with rice in the spaces outside between the greenhouses. The place that we stayed is not “El Maizal” – it is not their main territory, and neither is this place that has the greenhouses and the rice experiment.

The territory of the Jesus Romero Commune is more consolidated; the territory of the Maizal commune is split among different communal properties. The importance of noting this is to remind ourselves that we don’t need contiguous properties for projects or territory if we want to build a productive commune; a commune doesn’t need to begin as a single do-all physical site.

We later visited the main complex that the commune controls, the gigantic complex that they call ‘El Maizal’ – it has some workshops and factories surrounded by large crop fields. They have a gas distribution plant where 80 persons work. We visited a corn packing plant immediately after, where the shells are removed from corn and then the corn is packed into large bags. The trash from the shells is used as pig feed; the commune has a pig farm at another site. At this main site, they recently built a factory to produce corn flour; they currently have a single machine with 750hp that can produce 720 tons of flour per month (working 10 hours per day, 6 days per week).

August 21 – The Maizal Commune (Day 2)

We visited a pig farm that is one of the production sites owned and operated by the commune. 29 workers work here, producing ~4000 tons of pork per month. The workers get paid much more than minimum wage and are entitled to free lunch on workdays.

This was the last day of our stay in Lara. We headed to another state for 2 days of rest before we headed back to Caracas to reconvene.

Post-Notes

These are notes written after the Che Guevara Brigade; some things may be about encounters that took place during the Che Guevara Brigade, but they were not written until after it ended.

Invitations

I’ve been invited to visit and stay in multiple countries, though I’m not sure if I can. Comrades from Colombia were the most insistent with their invitation; one is from a movement that focuses on Afro-Colombian struggles, and she suggested that I visit the far North of Colombia where many Afro-Colombian people live. A Comrade from Argentina said that I should visit Argentina and that he would host me in his home.

Venezuelan Comrades and other persons I met insisted that I visit Venezuela again, and promised accommodation; I took their invitations seriously because they have hosted me already so I know that they can and would. I was hosted by Comrades in Petare, I was offered some help with accommodation from a Comrade in Caracas, and I was hosted by a family in Carora22. I was told by very specific persons that I have homes in Venezuela. I hope that I can return with other Comrades from the Caribbean to show them what I saw.

In the future, I hope that other Comrades from LANDS can form delegations to have these experiences, whether with me or instead of me. I am grateful for the bonds that I have built with people that I have met, but I want to eventually have a less central role in the face and image of the organisation, and I want the organisation’s relationship with other organisations to be less dependent on my personal relationships with other people.

Medication

I had taken some medication with me for the entire trip in general but for the Brigade especially, because it is guaranteed that persons will feel ill at some points. I brought some medication for headaches, diarrhoea, and vomiting; I didn’t need all of these things, but they became useful to my other Comrades. I also bought some sinus medication, but it ran out before the Brigade started, so I had to stop in a pharmacy to get more.

Hearing of medicine shortages in the media, you would think that a pharmacy’s shelves are empty or that there is less variety, especially in a pharmacy outside of Caracas. On the contrary, compared to Jamaica, the pharmacy a wider variety of over-the-counter drugs for simple things like sinusitis, and the prices were also ridiculously cheap. I was pleased. I could have waited until I had arrived in Venezuela before I bought medication.

Encounter with an Eco-Socialist

I met a Comrade who wore an Eco-Socialist shirt, and I was pleased to see it. I told her that I’ve gotten into arguments with dogmatic Westerners who say that Eco-Socialism doesn’t need to be a distinct tendency with its own name because Socialism is already environmentalist; this would be the same as saying that Marxism-Leninism doesn’t need its own name because Marxism is already inherently in favour of national liberation and anti-imperialism, a claim which would ignore the reality that many Marxists in the early 20th century were not concerned with those things.

The necessity of some sort of climate austerity and the understanding that we have to put limits on our growth goes beyond rejecting Capitalism’s infinite growth; one can reject Capitalism’s model of infinite growth without understanding that there needs to be an active effort towards degrowth of the economy that already exists. Eco-Socialism also has to be internationalist, to ensure that climate austerity is adopted where it is most needed, rather than forced on the already-marginalised people in the countries in the Third World.

Removing Populism from Socialism

Venezuelan Comrades told me that they are getting accustomed to some things during the crisis, and some of these things are normal in other countries that aren’t said to be having crises. For example, they eat less now than they did before the crisis, but they still eat more than anyone in my family. One admitted to me that they also use a lot of energy without much regard for wastage; you’ll see air conditioning in the poorest areas, something that was shocking for me as a Jamaican, and persons will have windows open while the air conditioning is on, because the price of fuel and electricity are ridiculously cheap there. Cuba, compared to Venezuela, is much more austere with energy use. Venezuelans were openly self-critical about these things, and some felt that the government made things too easy in an unsustainable way; they never had to think much about sustainability before, but they’re doing it now. This is not an indictment of the government, as they were simply pleasing the people. They will emerge from the blockade stronger than before.

Visit to Cultural Centre

The bus that we were using on our first day of the Brigade was not fit to take us for the entire journey, so we stopped at a cultural centre in small town in the state of Cojedes to wait for new buses to come so that we could change. The cultural centre was amazing; there was a lot of open space. I went in to use the restroom, and I had passed a classroom filled with young people who seemed to be practising for a theatre event, and a large open area filled with some other people practising dancing. The place was very clean, and I wish we had things like this in Jamaica; a lot of persons are interested in the arts.

Tauty TV

We visited Tatuy TV, a media house in Mérida. The persons who work here are not full-time journalists; they are all workers from other places, i.e. they have other jobs and they do the media work for Tatuy TV voluntarily.

The way that Tatuy TV operates is very different from the tendency that we see among the Left in the West, where activists or opinionated persons try to become career journalists in pursuit of attention/fame or an income. From watching Tatuy TV’s content, you don’t really see the faces of whoever is behind the work as they are not trying to become mini celebrities; at most, you will see long lists of credits. In the West, everyone wants to have their own blog or podcast, to build a sort of brand for their unchecked personal opinions; things become more about the personalities, preferences, and egos of the individuals involved in content creation, rather than the point or mission of the content itself.

Tatuy TV’s content is intended to educate and agitate. Some Comrades and I have some issues with some of their content, but we get where they are coming from, and we freely discuss these things with them, and they get what standpoint we are coming from. We (Comrades in the brigade and I) were impressed by what we saw, we built friendships with some of the Comrades from the organisation, and some of us did a lot of small activities with them separate from the main activities in the brigade.

Going forward, Tatuy TV and LANDS may have a working relationship, as they indicated interest in that. This will of course mean that we need to strengthen our Communications portfolio, and to prepare as well to develop Education as its own portfolio in the Secretariat.

Visit to Community Centre (Merida)

We visited a community centre in Mérida that was somewhat similar to the one in Petare, but it was not operated by the ‘Somos Otro Beta” movement. The building was at the corner of the block across from a park, and it had 3 floors. This area of Mérida seemed to be quiet.

The ground floor had a library and a bakery; the revenue from the bakery is likely used to fund other things at the centre. Some of us worked in there for the day, making arepas for dinner later in the night.

The floor above the ground floor had some bookshelves, a meeting area, and some offices; some activists operate a radio programme from there as well. Before arriving at the building, we were told that it’s a space that a lot of clubs and social movements use to do their work.

The top floor had an office, a kitchen, and a large balcony area. When we arrived, there were some teenagers participating in a rap battle, with many others spectating. We could see a lot of persons entering and leaving while we were there.

The main difference between this place and the one in Petare is that the one in Petare seems to focus a lot more on offering services; they have education, in that they offer multiple classes that attendees can materially benefit from, and they also have a clinic. This place in Mérida seemed to be a general community space, though nonetheless a valuable one.

We need community spaces like this in Jamaica, whether or not they will offer classes and skills training like the one in Petare. In both urban and rural areas, we could use more communal spaces for people, especially youth, to come together. In urban areas in Jamaica, there aren’t enough social spaces, so many inner-city youth convene on the street corner unless their community has a sports field; youth who aren’t wealthy are considered to be idling or loitering when they convene somewhere like a library or public space, as they are often considered to be wasting their time if they’re even at an internet café. In rural areas, people live far apart, and it would still be useful to have hubs for social activities. Petit-bourgeois youth may convene in green spaces in gated communities, or entertainment venues like restaurants and cafés; there aren’t enough developed and well-maintained public green spaces for youth to access otherwise. It would be important for youth to have spaces that they feel that they own and belong to, especially if there are scheduled activities or specialised areas for them to study, have meetings, share ideas, socialise, play, produce works of art, engage in skills training/practice, hold simple events, etc.

Visit to a Recreational Center

We visited a large recreational centre in Mérida, and we were told that there are several of them around the country. After this visit, I saw one in Barquisimeto in Lara and in another city and state that I don’t remember. The one we visited is a large cubic building with colourful external walls and 5 floors, and the 2 others that I saw looked the same from the outside.

When we entered, the ground floor has a front desk and a large playground. There were a lot of children playing when I got there, but they were leaving by the time that I got the chance to take some pictures; I had to attend 2 activities and a tour of the building. The tour started from the top:

• On the top of the building, there was a big basketball court with covering and a good quantity of seating. There were large translucent surfaces on all sides, so we could look out and see the city and surrounding neighbourhoods.
• On the top floor below the basketball court, there was a large area for fencing and a decent-sized area for table tennis; the fencing area had lockers and several lanes for fencing, while the table tennis area had 5 tables. Fencing equipment was freely available for anyone to borrow and use.
• On the floor below that, there was a boxing gym and another room that I’m not sure what it’s used for. The boxing gym had 2 boxing rings and some training equipment like punching bags. The other large room had some mats, lockers, tyres, and some mirrors; it’s possible that it’s a multi-purpose room as I can imagine it being used for yoga or for training for some types of sports.
• On the middle floor, there was a massive gym with well-maintained equipment. I was told that they were bought 5 years ago and that they’re expensive. Many persons were using it at the time that we visited, including what seemed to be a football team doing some fitness training. This gym was better than any expensive private gym that I have seen in Jamaica.
• On the floor just above the ground floor27, there was an auditorium where we held a meeting, some stands for social enterprises to display their products, some studios for community media initiatives. and restrooms.
• I went to the ground floor on my own to take pictures of the playground; it is bigger and has more things than any playground that I have ever visited before.

Access to this facility is free. When I told persons how much a gym membership costs in Jamaica, they looked at me as if I had committed a crime; the crime is Capitalism, but I am not the one committing it.

Visit to Pico Bolivar

We went to Pico Bolívar by cable cars. A Comrade took the opportunity to discuss Venezuela’s potential for tourism. Being from Jamaica, I took the opportunity to discuss some of the negative sides of Tourism with him. I said that we need to be careful and that we should avoid falling into some of the same traps that Caribbean islands have, where underpaid workers are used to keep prices low for entitled white foreigners who visit the country to get treated like gods who need to be pampered. I definitely saw Venezuela’s potential for eco-tourism and I also gave some ideas for cultural tourism; these forms of tourism depart from the colonial all-inclusive resort model, making it easier to avoid some negative things, but they are still not immune.

Somos Otro Beta in Quibor

We spent 2 days in the town of Quíbor in Lara with the Somos Otro Beta movement and visited 2 places that they operated. My Comrade from Petare, who introduced me to the movement during my first trip to Venezuela in February, explained to me that Somos Otro Beta isn’t a single movement, but rather a collaboration of multiple movements and organisations; the Comrades who led the Somos Otro Beta operations in Quíbor were also from the October 7 Collective, another organisation that operated in that city. I was too busy at the time to write any notes, but I remembered enough to include this in the post-notes.

They had taken control of a large building that was used as a public library before the local government abandoned it. The movement negotiated with the government for official control of the building so they could transform it into a community centre like the one in Petare. They had promised to maintain the library while doing other projects like the movement does in other places.

There is enough outdoor space to be used for cultivation, and there is some paved space that can be used for some sports. The space indoors is enough to fit an auditorium, a kitchen, a cafeteria, several classrooms, some offices, and activity-specific zones/areas/rooms. The movement already plotted out a floor plan for how they intend to use the space. They will need to make some repairs to the roof and install some plumbing fixtures, but the place is surely promising.

They also operate a bakery. There is a decree in the bakery, made by the October 7 Collective, that says that no individual is allowed to buy more than 4 loaves of bread per day. This suggested that the area had been struggling with food hoarding as well; they produce more than enough for everyone, but a handful of persons could together buy everything and hoard it if there was no regulation enforced.

Considerations with Diversifying the Economy

Many wannabe economists love to give a simplistic comment that some countries simply need to ‘diversify their economy’ to be better off; it has become an annoying platitude. It is true that a country is better off avoiding dependence on trade of a high-value product, but it is not that easy or simple to diversify the economy of a country with a high-value product. The Venezuelan government is trying nonetheless, and we are not saying that they shouldn’t; the main point here is that things are not that simple or easy.

Neoliberalism pressures countries towards specialisation and dependence on trade. By eroding barriers to trade that may actually be useful in protecting certain sectors of the economy, important sectors can become risky investments because of unbeatable competition from trade, or prices for domestic goods being impacted by international market dynamics.

Capital is coercive; it’s what forces farmers in many countries to prefer producing cash crops rather than focusing on food, and this is a legacy of colonialism. The economies of Third World countries have been organised around the needs and wants of consumers in the West. If an entitled European consumer is willing to pay more money for a cigar or some sugar than the average worker in Cuba or the Dominican Republic is able to pay for corn, that is pressure to produce tobacco or sugar instead of corn. The market is the language of daily life, and the people and interests with more money are the ones who are more heard. This is not something that the governments of either Cuba or Venezuela can control; they exist in a larger global economy that is Capitalist and that doesn’t care for the people or the goals of their governments.

Another problem is what neoliberal economists themselves call ‘Dutch Disease’ as explained by both the IMF and The Economist, where the export or even mere discovery of a high-value resource leads simultaneously to economic growth and increased demand for the exporting country’s currency, leading to higher domestic prices and strengthened currency; they coined this term specifically in reference to oil-rich countries.

It becomes difficult for such a country to export agricultural produce for competitive prices, because what’s cheap in its own currency is expensive for others, and dropping prices is not an easy option when costs/prices of inputs are rising domestically. It becomes easier for the consumers in such a country to buy imported food than to buy locally-produced food, so the business and workers from agriculture and other sectors suffer.

To make things easier for domestic producers, an oil-rich country could ensure its domestic prices of fuel are much lower than it sells things for to foreign countries; the thing is that Venezuela already does this, having fuel so cheap33 that I’ve been told that the price of a bottle of water is the same price as filling dozens of trucks with fuel; one consequence of this is that cheap oil/fuel is smuggled out of the country into neighbouring Colombia34, allowing a black market to boom. On the inverse, rising the domestic prices of oil to be closer to international prices would upset the people and exacerbate the damage done by Dutch Disease, simply by increasing domestic production costs35, as well as household expenses and therefore labour costs.

Of course, one does not need to think about all these things before simply saying the words “X country just needs to diversify its economy” – they just need to open their mouths and repeat a single phrase they came across once or twice as if they are cheap parrots, without doing any investigation or analysis of why the economy hasn’t been diversified or what factors impact the ability to diversify an economy.

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

Week in Petare

I spent a week in Petare, which I am told is one of the 3 largest slums in the world. In the nights, I slept in an office in a community centre in that is run by the Otro Beta movement in Venezuela, in the Antonio Jose de Sucre barrio. While there, I was told that the persons who live in the area are friendly and open so I could approach them randomly to ask questions. Some persons aren’t always in the mood to be approached by random strangers asking questions; as someone who is like that, I wouldn’t have thought to engage persons in the community unless I was told so.

The “Cacica Urimare” Community Center

The community centre is named “Cacica Urimare” after an indigenous leader. I had visited it before in February, and the concept and operations had excited my Comrades in Jamaica because we wanted to do similar things here even before a visit was made to the one in Petare.

It is usually bustling with activity, but there were less persons during the week I spent there in July because they were doing maintenance (like painting the walls, refitting the kitchen to create a bakery, etc.) and preparing for the next term of classes that they offer there. There were still a handful of persons visiting the centre to work in the production centres, to practice dancing, to use the visual arts studio, and to hang out. If more persons had been there, I would have had more to interact with, without seeming random or risking the chance of awkward encounters.

Bakery

There was a kitchen when I visited in February, but it was being converted into a bakery when I visited in the summer. The bakery would generate more revenue for the community centre and would be better integrated with other operations there.

Mill

A room was being converted into a mill to be able to produce flour from corn and cassava; some of the equipment was already bought, and the community centre already has some agricultural production that could be used as input. The flour produced by this mill would be used for 3 things: to supply the bakery, to sell to the CLAP network, and to sell to the private sector.

“CLAP” refers to the state’s organisation of local committees that manage community-based production and distribution of some goods; it buys food and other supplies and distributes them to outlets so that they are given to the people at prices far below the market price. The community centre would begin to sell flour to CLAP at a low rate and sell the rest to the private sector (nearby shops and restaurants) at the market rate. I suggested looking into the production of pasta from the flour as well.

Textile Workshop

The community centre has a textile workshop that produces clothes. I had seen it when I visited earlier in the year. This workshop is one of the ways that the community centre generates revenue to keep itself operational. The clothes that are produced and sold there are of a good quality and are cheap compared to what is offered by the private sector. I bought 2 samples, a polo shirt and a pair of pyjama pants, to take back to Jamaica to show others.

Dance Classes

Two groups of girls – one group of teenagers and a group of much younger girls – were practising dancing. The older group was practising first. I heard some music that sounded similar to something Caribbean, so I went in the room to see, and they invited me to stay; I made myself useful while I was there, as they asked me to do two favours to assist them.

The younger group came in later on with a dance instructor, who invited me to stay as well. They played some folk music and did some dances that reminded me of some dances that were done on specific cultural days in school in Jamaica; this led me to ask someone if the music and dance that they practise is Afro-Venezuelan, and he told me yes. Even the clothes that they were wearing seemed similar to Jamaica’s national dress, and I found that to be noteworthy. There should definitely be more cultural exchange between our 2 countries.

There is a school in Jamaica called the Venezuelan Institute for Cultural Cooperation that had been offering Spanish classes, free dance classes, and free music classes – they had to suspend operations this summer because the sanctions have prevented them from paying the staff since last year; this also affected a gardening project that LANDS was doing in the yard.

Music Studio

The community centre has a music studio that persons in the community can use for free. Many young people in Jamaica are interested in music but their interest isn’t sufficiently facilitated; it is especially difficult for persons from lower-income households, as they lack time and/or resources that can help them to develop their skills. The presence of a studio for recording music is a game changer, as it provides some of those resources and it builds an enabling environment. In other places that I visited in Venezuela, there were small media houses like radio stations and video studios; the music studio can be developed to facilitate such activities as well, but still serves a great purpose if it remains just a music studio. Such a facility in Jamaican communities would be very appreciated.

Health Centre

There is a health centre which offers both traditional services and conventional medical services; they offer check-ups and have medication in compliance with modern medicine standards, but they also offer other things that earn the trust and confidence of the members of the community.

The things that they offer are not only based on indigenous traditions from people in Venezuela, but also things like acupuncture. It is safer to get something like acupuncture done there, a place that has to meet the health and cleanliness standards of a clinic, than at a random place that may not put out the same effort to meet certain strict standards.

Classes & Skills Training

The community centre welcomes children to get help with their homework and also has its own classes on a variety of practical/vocational things like photography, video editing, electrical work, coding, hair styling, hair cutting, printing/stenography, English language, yoga, textile work, event planning, manicures and pedicures, mobile phone repairs, motorcycle repairs, acrobatics, urban agriculture, and some other things.

The movement has an arrangement with the Ministry of Education to give certification to some of the courses that are offered at the centre, so they get certification from the community centre itself but also certification from a formal school whose standards the community centre’s classes meet; this allows persons who take classes at the centre to easily re-integrate into the formal education system if they had dropped out. The classes are offered to persons of all ages, not just children.

Some of the things they teach are responsible use of the internet, including YouTube and social media, to create and disseminate content. I’ve maintained contact and become good friends with one of the teachers; he is frank with me about the realities and difficulties of the situation.

Encounters in Petare

Webpage on U.S. Intervention in Latin America

I had a few visitors while staying in the community centre; I had met them earlier in the year and I stayed in touch with some of them. They always ensured that I was okay, that I was comfortable, and that I had food.

One night, 4 of them were hanging out with me. Earlier that day, I had been showing one some information on US intervention in Latin America that we compiled for LANDS; he opted to show the others as we all talked about how far the US is going with its intervention strategy and how it is connected to the current daily difficulties in Venezuela.

They read the citations from the compilation and we visited a few of the actual articles that they were cited from, and they were shocked that the information was just there in plain sight, that the journalists and the politicians are open about their agenda in Venezuela.

Bachaqueros

One day, we descended from the hilly residential area that the community centre is in and hitched a ride to the more commercial area of Petare, where the metro station and many shops are. My friend was telling me about food hoarders who were only recently forced out of the area by police; they had occupied the streets and sold goods that they hoarded. They call them “bachaqueros” like big red ants.

They operate in bands/gangs that buy up large quantities of food or consumer goods to create shortages and then sell those same goods for much higher prices; this is somewhat similar to the concept of ‘scalpers’ in the West, who buy tickets to events and resell them for a higher price after they are sold out, but they do this with food and necessities rather than concert tickets.

They exacerbate the effects of the existing perception of scarcity and they profit from the hyperinflation, as they are able to sell goods for more money than they bought them. It is rumoured that they operate in networks with connections to smugglers on the border.

In a bakery operated by some Comrades from Somos Otro Beta in town in another state, they put a limit on the amount of bread that someone can buy in a day; the limit is 4 loaves, and 1 person definitely can’t consume that much bread in 1 day in any case. This is a measure to limit hoarding by bachaqueros.

Engaging Random Youth

I introduced myself to 4 teenagers, let them know that I’m from Jamaica and that I’m only in the community for a week and asked if we could talk about “the situation in Venezuela” – all of them allowed me to, then I proceeded to ask who they think is responsible for the situation.

One boy was sitting right outside the community centre for several hours, so I approached him first to ask. He seemed young, like 14-15. I asked if he spoke English and he said no, so I let him know that my Spanish isn’t great so that I may make mistakes. We got on with the conversation and I asked who he thinks is responsible or who he blames for the situation, and he said that he blames the people, including himself. I asked why, but then he started to get a little frustrated because I couldn’t understand everything he said; he directed me to a group of boys to ask them instead, and the main one he pointed to was someone who spoke some English. When he was answering, he was talking about consumption and the inflation, but nothing about politics. I approached the group of boys a little later because I had to attend to something.

A teenage girl who practises dancing in the community centre called me over to assist with something; I took the opportunity to engage her about this as well. I asked her who she blamed for the situation, and she said the same as the boy I first spoke to; she blames the people, including herself. When I asked her why, she also spoke about the economy and not about politics.

After my conversation with her, I approached someone from the group of boys who were sitting near the community centre, across from where I was talking to the first boy I encountered. They were teenagers who seemed to be slightly older than the first boy, like 17-19. The one who I approached spoke English. He had 3 persons beside him, but they didn’t join the conversation right away. I asked him about the situation, then I asked him who he holds responsible or who he blames, and his response was “the United States” and I said that I agree; he went on to talk about the economic war. I told him that Jamaica also had an economic war in the 1970s until 1980, and we discussed the similarities. One of his friends left to get something then returned to participate.

This friend joined the conversation and blamed Maduro for the situation, but he agreed that there is an economic war. We (his friend that I was talking to at first, and I) asked if he thinks anyone else could survive this economic war, and he said no; he also said that he thinks Maduro is in a difficult position. He didn’t seem to be truly anti-Maduro as much as he was just frustrated with the situation in general; the sanctions play on these frustrations, in my opinion.

They started to ask me questions about Jamaica, after this conversation. They asked me about the size and population of Jamaica, whether I could compare it to one of Venezuela’s states, and also about whether human rights are respected there.

Reflections on the Opposition (Petare)

I took note of how peaceful the conversation was between someone who believes strongly that the problems in Venezuela are due to US intervention, and someone who blamed Maduro for the country’s problems. People in Jamaica are far more ‘tribalistic’ (divisive) in their political opinions; nowadays it will turn into peaceful but loud passionate shouting matches, but differences in political opinions used to escalate to violence.

Some of my friends in Petare are from opposition households. I met one of my friend’s parents, 2 supporters of the opposition; they knew why I was in Venezuela and what my political leanings are, but they were nice and friendly to me, nevertheless. They offered me extra food when I only needed to reheat some food that I had from earlier, and the household gave me dinner one night when I hadn’t eaten on that day. They told me that they would look out for me if I needed anything and showed me which doors to knock if I needed them, and they meant it.

Interestingly, some opposition supporters cooperate or even support localised social movements like the one that operates the community centre in Petare, even though those movements openly support the president and the government. The political situation on the ground is not as polarised as the West portrays it to be. Some persons are critical of the government and support the opposition, but don’t actually believe that Venezuela is a dictatorship. Political polarisation doesn’t seem to be a problem in a place like Petare, in my experience and from what I witnessed.

Firstly, being ‘opposition’ or opposing the government doesn’t mean support for Guaidó; he represents a fringe of the opposition that is not popular in Venezuela. There is no popular movement that is pushing for him to become president. People are going about their daily lives; they are not constantly preoccupied with the topic of who is president, as the foreign media would have you assume.

One day when I went into Caracas, I walked around with my friend to run some errands; we passed the National Assembly and a nearby building that the Constituent National Assembly has its offices located. There weren’t many police or soldiers, or any excitement; people are just going about their lives as normal.

The ‘political turmoil’ is created by well-funded and well-armed members of the fringes of the opposition who create havoc for theatrics to justify US intervention. Despite being merely theatrics, the unfortunate reality is that they often put the lives of many people at risk.

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

Introduction

I stayed in Venezuela from July 26 to August 26, which is an entire month or approximately 5 weeks, to conduct business on behalf of LANDS. The trip can be broken down into 3 parts:

• Attending the 25th Sao Paulo Forum
• Spending a week in Petare
• Participation in the Che Guevara Brigade

I spent enough time to see both good and bad things in Venezuela. It is necessary to discuss both, but this will be done carefully. Overall, the things that I had experienced and witnessed have strengthened my confidence in the Bolivarian Revolution.

The nature of the good things is very eye-opening. These are not the things that they talk about in the mainstream media, or things that even well-known activists or journalists who visit Venezuela spend much time to focus on. These are things that my organisation may have heard small references to in the past, but without in-depth detail.

The nature of the ‘bad’ things is much more sensitive. Most of these things are issues regarding specific individuals and organisations rather than the situation in Venezuela, and thus they do not need to be in a public report; these things will only be discussed within our organisation and with our Comrades from Cuba and Venezuela. These things are not major concerns for the government, but they can become weak points in the Bolivarian Revolution in the future if they go unchecked and get out of hand.

This report will focus mainly on the good things; the only ‘bad’ things that may be mentioned in this report are related to the blockade and other problems that the Venezuelan people, movements, and government are actively trying to overcome.

This report will be read by specific Comrades from organisations and movements in Venezuela before being publicly released, just as a check on the accuracy of some things said in it. Before public release, it will also be discussed with Comrades from Jamaica and Cuba, as well as allies from other countries who are engaged with LANDS.

During the trip, I had a Jamaican Comrade with me for only the first 4 days; after the first 4 days, I had not encountered another Jamaican until after I left Venezuela. With this said, the report will have more of the tone of a personal account than a typical formal report; much of it will be written in first-person and there will be many minor anecdotes.

25th São Paulo Forum

My participation in the Sao Paulo Forum was limited, as I had arrived a day late, due to things beyond my control. Some details of this will be noted in a separate private report, as they are related to other issues that I faced or noticed during the trip. I was not the only person who experienced or noticed most of these issues. As established in the introduction, rather than focusing on these problems, this report is intended to note interesting things that I experienced or what was accomplished.

We (another Comrade and I, both representing LANDS) attended the 24th Sao Paulo Forum in Cuba the year before this one and the International People’s Assembly in Venezuela early this year, so I had high expectations and I had hoped to see some persons whom I had met in Cuba. This time, I went with another Comrade who is also a registered observer in LANDS but who was representing another organisation.

There were, however, some difficulties with organising this forum in the same way as the one before. The Sao Paulo Forum in Cuba was much more seamless because the party and the state worked together to ensure its success. The International People’s Assembly that was held in Venezuela in February 2019 was also a major success; it was organised by parties, other organisations, social movements, and with heavy involvement from the Foreign Ministry.

The separation between the party and the state in Venezuela is more than one would assume and became much clearer in this event when the Foreign Ministry was less involved. Officials working in the government were responsible for reaching out to invited guests, but they were not the ones organising the forum. There was a disconnect between the officials working in the government, the Comrades in the PSUV, and the Comrades in other parties and movements that are allied with the PSUV.

There are finer details and specific individuals who could bear more responsibility for some of the problems, and this will be mentioned in the separate private report, but the point of mentioning this disconnect is to get rid of the myth that Venezuela is some one-man or even one-party dictatorship.
There was also an apparent attempt to sabotage the Sao Paulo Forum; there was a cyberattack on Venezuela’s electricity and telecommunications systems on the day that officials from the party and the Foreign Ministry were working together on important things to ensure the success of the forum. Venezuela has its internal inefficiencies like any other country does, but this exacerbated the problem.

The result was that a significant portion of delegates were not able to arrive in Venezuela in time for the start of the Sao Paulo Forum, and things were rescheduled to ensure that we could participate in some things that we would have otherwise missed; the downside of this was that certain things clashed with each other (i.e. things that were scheduled for different times were now being held concurrently, though in different locations to avoid interference with each other). With all of this said, some important experiences during the Sao Paulo Forum were mostly things that I did outside the formal confines of the forum.

Formal Participation in the Forum

Plenaries

The plenary sessions were amazing experiences, just as they were in Cuba. They had less speakers, and most were Venezuelan, but they were great, nonetheless. The Venezuelans who spoke, both the government officials and persons from social movements, accounted for many of the critiques that someone would try to make at face-value.

They spoke of many problems in concrete terms and explained the international situation with more depth than just limiting things to Trump; the blockade against Venezuela only intensified with Trump but some of the measures and sabotage started before that. Some of the things that were emphasised were the importance of production and national self-reliance, a self-critique of the old dependence on imports for food and commodities. The government of Venezuela is very aware of its problems, and we were reassured of its competence in addressing them.

Afro-Descendants Caucus

I was not able to participate much in the Afro-Descendants’ meeting, but I was pleased to see several Black Comrades from places that I’ve never seen Black representation from before. There were some technical issues (relating to the audio equipment and the translation equipment) which made it difficult to listen to most of what was happening.

Youth Caucus

I was able to participate in the Youth meeting, but I arrived late because I spent more than half of the time in the Afro-Descendants’ meeting that was taking place at the same time. Originally, they were scheduled to be at separate times.

I was given a chance to speak, and I used it to explain the current situation in Jamaica with the austerity policies, the workers’ struggles, our government’s collaboration with the US, and the difficulties with rallying support around the mainstream Left party. LANDS itself was founded partly because a group of Comrades on the Left were losing confidence in the PNP, our mainstream Left party. The JLP, the mainstream right-wing party, is in power right now.

We prefer the PNP’s foreign policy over the JLP’s foreign policy, but the PNP lost the support of many older Jamaicans after embracing austerity politics and it fails to win the support of the youth because it is seen as focusing more on history than on things that are currently relevant. The JLP has more appeal among younger people, and their current policies make them seem more concerned with welfare while people associate the PNP with austerity. They’re also better at optics.

Unscheduled Encounters

This section focuses on things that were not officially a part of the Sao Paulo Forum.

Conversation with a Comrade from Peru

One of my first encounters on this trip was before I arrived at the Sao Paulo Forum; I met Victor, a Comrade from Peru, and we quickly got along. Our conversations started with asking about the problems in our countries and the organisations that we are involved in.

At some point, we began to discuss Maoism. I told him that Maoism is a major part of my ideology but that, since he is from Peru, I needed to clarify that I’m not the same type of ‘Maoist’ as the persons in Sendero Luminoso. I loved his response; he said that they were/are not Maoist, and he went into detail, and we both spoke about that for a while.

I had a similar encounter with a Peruvian Comrade who I met in Cuba at the Sao Paulo Forum last year; he said that many Peruvian people see Sendero Luminoso as terrorists, but he didn’t say that they were “not Maoist.” I was glad for this second encounter in Venezuela.

The conversation continued and we realised we were similar in thought, having strong admiration for much of Mao’s work, disliking dogmatism, equating some self-labelled “Maoists” in Peru and the USA to Trotskyists, etc. – these were not new ideas that I introduced to him or that he introduced to me; we both had these opinions already, and there is established literature1 on the similarities between Trotskyism and this new ‘Maoism’ that emerged in the 1980s.

These things are also not mere meaningless labels for persons to identify with and have random arguments online; this is about how we go about our political work, and some reckless errors of some organisations and individuals have caused harm to communities, movements, and even entire countries. We discussed particular strategies and the errors of Sendero Luminoso, particularly how they related or failed to relate to the actual material conditions and the different classes that existed in Peru.
It’s refreshing to have these types of conversations with like-minded Comrades in person. Apart from this encounter with the Comrade from Peru, another Comrade from Jamaica and I have had similar encounters with Comrades from Brazil.

Conversation with a Comrade from the Philippines

Like Victor and I, she dislikes Puritanism, and she is critical of dogmatic or orthodox stances on countries like Cuba, Venezuela, or China. She understands that different countries have different material conditions, and she extends this to having a nuanced understanding of State Capitalism.

She isn’t, however, uncritical of China. Her issues with China are not so much their internal politics, but we did discuss the imperfections with China’s internal politics. Like me, however, she sees China as a victim of the capital of the West; capital is coercive, and the global economic system that we exist in is one where we make decisions out of desperation for capital. China accepts low wages, subprime working conditions, and other things so that it can attract foreign investment. All Global South countries do the same. We can’t make critiques of China’s internal economics2 without accounting for the pressures of the global economic system.

She says that the issues with China and the Philippines are national, and that a lot of the anti-China sentiments in the Philippines are driven by the Nationalistic petit-bourgeoisie. She says that they have to accommodate them in the Left because they are trying to build a broad front with all sectors, and she is critical of China but also of the overdone anti-China sentiments. She doesn’t make the error of seeing China as worse than the US or condone her government’s friendliness with the US, but she is caught in the middle between genuine critiques of China and simply rabid anti-China sentiments.

We briefly discussed Duterte; I said that I had hope in him when I heard him aiming for peace with the Communists, but then felt betrayed when he took a 180 turn on that, and she excitedly explained that she felt the exact same, i.e. both in having hope and in feeling let down. She invited me to the Philippines and told me of an upcoming event, and also that she would try to arrange with her Comrades to provide accommodation at the university she works at.

Bolivarian University of Venezuela

A Venezuelan Comrade organised a tour for a small group of youth to visit the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV). We visited different departments to learn about the courses that are offered. The most notable departments that we visited were linguistics, indigenous studies, and computing. As is typical in Venezuela, the university is free to attend. The bathrooms are clean and well-kept, and the common areas have comfortable furniture.

We had a meeting with the Dean of the school, in which a Comrade who worked at a university wanted to establish a working relationship between her institution and the UBV. The Dean was young (he seemed to be in his early 30s), very friendly, and welcoming. He gave us many books including one of Chavez’ most important works, the Blue Book. After our meeting, I noticed that he had some ‘Russian doll’ type figurines3 of Soviet leaders, and I casually made remarks on the leaders based on how much I liked them, i.e. I gave thumbs up to Stalin and Lenin, a so-so gesture at the leaders from Khrushchev onwards, and a confused gesture at Gorbachev. He and others repeated my thumbs up with Lenin and Stalin, the so-so gestures with the others, but he gave a thumbs down at Gorbachev.

We had heard Maduro refer to Marxism-Leninism more than once, but to see that admiration for the earlier Soviet leaders existed among other Venezuelans was important. This wasn’t the last time I encountered Venezuelans who had favourable opinions of Stalin and Mao, and the others were normal persons, not officials like the Dean of this school.

We went to the nearest subway station after leaving the university; as we walked, I noticed a newspaper stand, and a large stack of newspapers of a particular type that were insulting Maduro; I remarked that it’s ridiculous that persons call Venezuela a ‘dictatorship’ where there is ‘no freedom of speech’ while that can happen. “Is this what they call a dictatorship?” I asked. My Comrades were still around me, as we were walking together, and they had similar remarks.

I added, to the conversation, that the People’s Revolutionary Government did not tolerate such things in Grenada, and referred to an incident where they arrested a group of persons and seized all of their printing equipment to shut down a newspaper they were creating; nevertheless, I consider the People’s Revolutionary Government in Grenada to have been one of the most democratic projects in the world. If others who know about it in detail would agree with me that it was a democratic project, and if that could happen there then but isn’t happening in Venezuela, it makes no sense to say that Venezuela has no Democracy because of a supposed lack of free speech; if Venezuela had no free speech, I would not have seen those newspapers.

Visit to the Students’ Residency in Plaza Venezuela

A Comrade opted to meet up with me when he found out that I was in Venezuela; he took me on a tour of the “Students’ Residency” where he lived. Over 200 students live there. There are several floors, and each room has 2-3 persons cohabiting as roommates. The kitchens and restrooms are communal, and there are free Wi-Fi zones; the size of each room is decent, and the conditions of the building seem very much like a regular university dorm in the Caribbean. The roof has a small garden with pumpkins and other things, as well as some equipment for working out.

The students took control of the building by seizing it around the time that its restoration was almost finished. On each floor, schedules are displayed with responsibilities and chores (like cleaning the common areas) assigned to different persons; these are collectively decided in meetings, which are held regularly on each floor. Delegates from each floor together form a committee which co-governs the entire building along with the institutional presence of the mayor’s office; the entire building is self-governed in that the administration, decisions, and even the security is done by the students themselves.

The students don’t pay rent in the typical sense, but they pay a small maintenance fee which goes towards expenses like utilities (which are cheap) and cleaning supplies. They oversee this money themselves; they know what it is spent on. This is to say that they are not students renting spaces from a landlord; they are students who pool funds to maintain the building that they live in. They also don’t jointly own the building as specific individuals; the building is collectively controlled by students in that only students are allowed to live there; someone is not allowed to continue to live there after they finish school. The students attend multiple different universities.

I asked what happens if a student gets pregnant, and I was told of 2 specific cases; one student opted to leave the building, and I assume this may have been because she wanted to discontinue studies, but another student stayed and the residents on her floor collectively discussed how the baby would be taken care of. I was also told that they offer education on contraception to lessen the chance of student pregnancies. I also asked what happens if persons want to swap roommates to be with their friends, and I was told that that is facilitated but that there is a process which involves meeting with all the affected persons.

The students don’t have formal/official ownership of the building, but they are in talks with the government about that. It would be owned by the collective as an institution, not by the individual students. There are business interests in the building, so the government has asked them to consider doing small-scale commercial activity on the ground floor.

Commercial activity could take multiple forms, and I had offered my suggestions which were welcomed by my Comrade; they also had their own existing ideas as well. The ground floor has the entrance, a stairwell, the elevator, and a lot of empty space. Commercial activities could fall into 2 main categories; commercial operations done by the students themselves, or commercial operations done by outsiders who pay rent to the collective of students since the collective of students would be responsible for maintaining the building. The more creative ideas would involve commercial operations done by the students themselves, but even outsiders could mean small vendors instead of larger establishments.

Ideally, the students could do something that they themselves would use. They could set up a gym, a printery, a laundromat, a café, a cookshop, or similar things. Depending on the type of service, the students could not get them for free; still, it would be better for the students to buy from there than to go to a separate for-profit establishment. These small businesses would need revenue, but the benefit is that they would employ the students themselves, and the profit would go to development of the building (and if a high profit is achieved, prices could be cut which would both increase the appeal of the businesses to outsiders and the benefits that students get from using those services instead of going elsewhere).

In general, this was simply a fascinating project to learn about. Hopefully it can inspire similar movements in Jamaica, as our people – especially young adults – struggle with access to land and housing. The monthly rent for a student living on campus at UWI is around the same as or more than our monthly minimum wage in Jamaica. Many people have built their houses on land that they don’t own, being labelled as ‘squatters’ and forming entire communities of informal settlements. We need tenants’ unions and more social movements like these in Jamaica.

Assembly of the Caribbean Peoples

Some members of the Regional Executive Committee of the Assembly of Caribbean Peoples had a meeting during lunch time on one of the days of the Sao Paulo Forum, to plan for the upcoming 8th Assembly. I informed them that I could not attend the 8th Assembly because I would still be in Venezuela, but that another Comrade would represent LANDS.

We discussed a few things, including what to do about translation equipment and some proposals that I had for the methodology of the Assembly after experiencing some issues the last time. We have been stressing the need to build a communication network among ourselves so that integration is something we feel when we are in our respective countries, not only when we have money to spend on flights to meet up in the same place.

Environmentalist Caucusing

In Cuba in 2018, we had encountered a coalition from Mexico called Nueva Esperanza, and one of the movements in the coalition was the Movimiento Animalista. In February 2019, we encountered MEVEN, the Ecologist Movement in Venezuela; the persons I mainly interacted with are persons who really love animals. Unfortunately, our Mexican Comrades from the Movimiento Animalista could not make it to either the International Peoples Assembly or the Sao Paulo Forum this year, due to personal reasons unrelated to the forum or Venezuela.

Our Comrades from Movimiento Animalista informed us that someone from Nueva Esperanza was attending the Sao Paulo Forum, and we had tried to set up an informal meeting between them and MEVEN. Both parties were interested, but we ran tight with time, so it did not end up happening. The interest seems to be there nevertheless, so we hope that these organisations will build a formal relationship soon.

Agro-Urban Movement

I was walking around the Teresa Carreño Theatre and I was fascinated by a particular video that I watched as well as a separate display set up by the Agro-Urban movement. After expressing this to a Comrade, he told me that the Venezuelan government has a Ministry of Urban Agriculture.

LANDS has been wanting to do urban agriculture projects for a while, but we haven’t found a space inside any community, except 2 Comrades’ homes; these Comrades don’t own these homes as they still live with their parents, so we don’t have that much liberty with the space. We got permission to use some space in the yard of the Venezuelan Institute for Cultural Cooperation, but that institute suspended operations because the sanctions have left them unable to pay utilities or staff since 2018. We hope that we can get some help with starting urban agriculture projects, whenever the sanctions are lifted or circumvented. We are looking for expertise or technical assistance in terms of training, not funding or materials. Still, even education and non-political cooperation have fallen victim to the sanctions.

Housing Missions

The government has built roughly 3 million homes and given them to the people for free; there was a stall displaying the different models of these homes. A model of a 3-bedroom house with an indoor laundry area caught my eye. The Comrades who were responsible for the display engaged me, and I told them about a similar common model in Jamaica, a 2-bedroom and 1-bathroom house that doesn’t have an indoor laundry area, and that costs millions of dollars.

Conversations with a Businesswoman’s Son

There is free public Wi-Fi at the Teresa Carreño Theatre, so I was pacing around a particular area for a while to try to connect to it. I was familiar with the area because I had hung out with a friend there in February. A random teenager in the same area saw me and knew what I was doing; he told me that it would be difficult to connect to the internet because of how crowded the place was at the time. He offered to turn on his hotspot to share data with me.

The teenager speaks English and he seemed open to conversation, so I engaged him a little. He’s white and his mother is a businesswoman6, and a Comrade had told me that this is a popular hangout spot for petit-bourgeois youth in Caracas at another point in time, so I considered the possibility that this boy may support the opposition and/or have negative feelings about the forum. He knew about the forum, I told him why I was there and the ideology and the type of movement that I’m involved in, and he didn’t give me any strange reaction or even disturbed facial expression; this is important to note because many right-wingers in Venezuela were not happy about the Sao Paulo Forum or the invitation of Leftists from other countries to Venezuela. Our conversation continued as normal.

As he knew why I was there, I was able to say/ask things more frankly/directly; I didn’t rush into asking it awkwardly, I had asked him permission to ask something political first. He told me that he is neutral in politics, and then I told him that I’ve never met any opposition supporters because everyone I meet either supports the government or is neutral. He told me that his father supports the Venezuelan opposition but that he lives in the US, while his mother lives in Venezuela and is neutral like he is. Socialism obviously doesn’t appeal to his class interests, but he still doesn’t support the opposition; I suppose that he doesn’t have enough discontent to decide to support the opposition, or the opposition simply doesn’t appeal to him with all its theatrics and careless tactics.

Even though this was a minor encounter, it was important. If the situation in Venezuela was as bad as the Western media describes, one would imagine that this random teenager who doesn’t support the government would have rushed at the first opportunity to tell me how bad things in the country are, possibly question why I would support Socialism, or at least show some sort of unwillingness to interact with me if he wasn’t in the mood for some political encounter; after all, this is how many persons who claim to be Venezuelan7 behave online. However, this teenager was quite friendly to me. Venezuela isn’t as politically-polarised8 as the Western media makes it seem.

Conversation with DPRK Diplomats

A diplomat from the DPRK opted to sit beside me on one of the days of the Sao Paulo Forum, and we had walked and talked together on our way from somewhere to Miraflores. He introduced me to the DPRK’s ambassador to Venezuela, and we had a pleasant conversation as well.

I told him that we were contacted before by someone from the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to start a Jamaica-Korea Friendship Association, but that we haven’t been able to manage such a task at this point in time. We were pleased to see the DPRK and Venezuela strengthening their ties, and to see the DPRK participating in the Sao Paulo Forum.