Chris Gilbert — Sea-Change in Venezuela

Now that the surprise has come, what should the Venezuelan government and people do? The risks of this new situation are more than evident but, by the same token, it should be clear that the Bolivarian government was extremely foolish to think that it could follow a risk-free path to socialism, which was the aspiration expressed in the concerted “Chinese model” of slowly developing the country’s productive forces by way of innocuous reforms. This is the perennial social-democratic myth, which is always projected upon capitalism’s gradualist time-lines and fantasies of normality. It is a myth that capitalism itself, when it periodically assumes a fascist modality, takes charge of debunking. 

With risk-free, rule-abiding normality dashed to the rocks, is it not time for Venezuela to try something else? That Maduro has been both brandishing the Venezuelan Constitution like a talisman and at the same time asked for exceptional powers, shows him to be caught between two options. Yet for the Bolivarian socialist movement as a whole, it is clear that some variant of the latter option – that is to say, declaring a state of exception – is the right path. 

The real state of exception, however, is nothing other than socialism: the negation of capitalism’s automatic mechanisms and clocks of all kinds in favor of a deliberate human construction. It consists neither of chasing the imperialist monster to the North Pole nor ignoring it, but rather marching to the beat of one’s own drummer. The rhythm of this drummer is marked by the masses’ needs, the programmed satisfaction of which (via solid steps toward socialism) is the surest protection Maduro’s government can have when faced with imperialism.

When the left hesitates or compromises, it gets rolled.

Counterpunch

Sea-Change in Venezuela

Chris Gilbert | Professor of Political Science in the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela

Also

Well, according to the new executive order, some of Venezuela’s leading officials have “criminalized political dissent” and are corrupt. That’s about it. There’s nothing in there about Venezuela threatening military action against the US, or promoting terrorism, or threatening Americans. 

But hold on. I remember reading in documents obtained through Freedom of Information petitions by the Partnership for Civil Justice from the FBI, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, that back in the fall of 2011, during the Occupy movement that swept the nation, the US national security apparatus, including the NSA and the 72 so-called Fusion Centers that had been set up to link federal, state and local intelligence organizations in all major US cities devoted most of its domestic intelligence and police resources to spying on, infiltrating, and ultimately crushing a purely peaceful wave of political protest against the rampant corruption of the political class and the banking industry.

And what about the National Security Agency, which Edward Snowden and others have exposed as being focused, in its unprecedented monitoring of all possible forms of communication among the American people, not as claimed on preventing terrorism but on simply gathering dossiers on millions of law-abiding citizens? 

What about the FBI and other national intelligence agencies, which have been labeling anti-war activists, environmental activists and even animal rights activists (and this news site!) as “terrorists” in their files?

Looked at objectively, isn’t it the US that is a national security threat to Venezuela?....

This is just the latest example of how the US, which once at least felt the need to act as if it were a part of the world family of nations, now just brazenly and unapologetically interferes in other nations at will, economically, militarily, and politically. Back in the days of the Cold War and earlier, the US least pretended to adhere to international norms by working through the United Nations to win international support for its actions. At least back then it felt the need to hide its more depraved acts of subversion and aggression, whether by creating false flag incidents like the alleged but fictional attack by North Vietnamese gunboats in 1964 on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a war against Vietnam, or by orchestrating a coup behind the scenes, as in the case of the military overthrow and murder of Chile’s elected President Salvator Allende Gossens in 1973.

Now it just openly works to overthrow elected governments....

The kicker,

History has shown us again and again that repressive and anti-democratic tactics used abroad inevitably find their way home, where they are then turned against the people of the home country. We’ve seen this happening with the militarization of US police, who now operate in most US communities as if they were occupying troops in a foreign country, carrying military weapons, shooting to kill, breaking into homes in night raids and using brutal force to make the most minor of arrests, treating ordinary citizens as criminals who have no right to speak or to challenge how they or a family member or friend are being treated. We’ve seen it in the massive expansion of domestic spying, and we’ve seen it in the corruption of the courts, where judges in national security trials now deny defendants even the right to present a real defense to a jury, and where higher courts give the government permission to violate almost every Constitutionally guaranteed right in the name of “combatting terrorism” or defending “national security” interests.

Dave Lindorff, Venezuela, the Latest ‘National Security Threat’