Last month, CPE hosted a strategic conversation and two online discussions on US imperialism in Venezuela and the Caribbean. Venezuela-based writer and professor Chris Gilbert joined us from Caracas for our first online event to talk about the immediate impact of the US abduction of President Nicholas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. For Gilbert, the Trump Administration’s killing of Venezuelans and the kidnapping of Maduro were neither unprecedented, nor the end of the socialist project in Venezuela.
“[T]he title of this talk was ‘Venezuela in the crosshairs and the crossroads,’” he noted, “but I’d say [it’s] more in the crosshairs than the crossroads. I think it’s more important to see the continuity happening here.”
Gilbert and fellow political educator Cira Pascual Marquina—who together teach Marxist theory and history through their Spanish-language program Escuela de Cuadros—urged Venezuela’s allies to engage in dialectical thinking in order to make sense of the Bolivarian revolution in the wake of the US attack.
Thinking Dialectically
Thinking dialectically means grasping that change is constant, and that contradictions (struggles or conflicts) are what power change through an uneven process involving ruptures, rather than as a steady progression in one direction. It means considering the past circumstances that shaped a current situation, as well as attending to how that situation is evolving into a future that will be shaped by the present.
Taking a dialectical approach is never a guarantee that we’ll reach the same conclusions, and there remain strong disagreements among the left in how to assess Venezuela’s political process. While there is no way to claim an objectively “correct” reading of a complex situation like Venezuela’s, any dialectical perspective recognizes that US interference (like sanctions) has shaped the Bolivarian revolution since Chavez was first elected. It also looks at present conditions to determine the degree to which concessions to the US on access to Venezuelan oil or other resources are part of a controlled retreat to ensure a future for the Bolivarian process versus betrayals of the revolution to empire. For Pascual Marquina, allies in the Global North who think dialectically won’t limit their analysis to actions by the Venezuelan state alone, but look to the agency of Venezuelans who still have “participative and protagonistic democracy” through their communes, even after Maduro’s capture.
Key Tasks of the Left
Taking the longer, dialectical view of current conditions while the left is facing a “moment of defeat”—as Salvadoran scholar Jorge Cuéllar described it during our second online session—is necessary for understanding the key tasks of the left in Latin American and the US at this juncture.
Max Elbaum, writing in Convergence Magazine last year, examined the significant challenge of MAGA authoritarianism. He said that “[d]igging ourselves out of this hole requires a process that accurately assesses the difficult balance of forces[,]” learns from recent history, and goes further. Seen dialectically, the path from MAGA’s return to the presidency at the start of last year to today has not been a straight line of democracy crumbling, but instead a back and forth between authoritarian power grabs and emergent, democratic resistance. MAGA has caused devastating and permanent harm to America’s already imperfect democracy, but resistance and electoral struggle has demonstrated that the authoritarian movement can be knocked off kilter and pushed back.
Similarly, we learned from our second online discussion with Jorge Cuéllar, Marisol Lebrón, and Alex Aviña—War in the Caribbean and the New Monroe Doctrine—about back and forth struggles for power in Latin America. While US militarization and its carceral alliance with Nayib Bukele and other right-wing forces in Central America are decisively on the march, there are discrete movements in Puerto Rico and across the Latin American region that are already challenging the logics of this transnational, authoritarian alliance. For Cuéllar, a key question for these forces is whether and how they can coordinate a shared politics against imperialism across borders.
A path to winning in our anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist struggles requires strategic thinking that isn’t weighed down by the despair or determinism that can result from the crisis conditions of our current moment. Dialectical thinking helps us to recognize how left forces have regathered in times of attack and transformed crisis into periods of ascension and victory.
New Monthly Program
CPE will be spending every third Tuesday exploring some of these lessons in our new When We Win political education film series with La Peña Cultural Center and Freedom Archives. Films in this series will center on struggles for liberation and decolonization and give participants a chance to engage in facilitated discussions with filmmakers, activists, and organizers. Join us for our first film tonight, Tuesday, February 17 at 7pm: Eyes of the Rainbow, the story of the victorious life and struggle of Assata Shakur.
