PARTISAN!

The Central Committee releases a statement calling for solidarity with Venezuelan workers and for the defeat of the United States.

American aggression against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has reached a fever-pitch. The Trump administration appears to be copying Israel’s recent airstrikes against Iran, making targeted strikes against Venezuelan infrastructure, politicians, and army staff in an attempt to collapse the government. The US military has begun a bombing campaign in Caracas, the capital city of Venezuela. American forces have captured Venezuelan President Maduro.

The prelude to this imperialist assault consisted of massacring fishermen under the cover of “fighting cartels”, the closure of Venezuelan airspace, the embargo on Venezuelan oil exports, and the promotion of the reactionary Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado as a figurehead of an oppositional government.

The communist movement must unite to resist this imperialist assault on Venezuela. These attacks on the Venezuelan working class are among many last-ditch efforts to restore the political, economic and military supremacy of the declining American Empire. This attack has three major purposes: to create a favourable environment for US investment and the takeover of oil and mineral extraction, to ensure the deportation of 300,00 Venezuelans residing in the US whose Temporary Protected Status the Trump administration recently revoked, to cement the rationale of such uses of extraordinary force targeting migrants and other South American countries.

The primary task of Australian communists, socialists, and internationalist-minded workers today is to oppose this war, expose the imperialist alliance between Australia and the United States, and build a fighting anti-imperialist movement amongst workers and students. This movement must call for the defeat of the US military, the victory of the Venezuelan workers and peasants, and the overthrow of US imperialism. We support unequivocally the total mobilisation of the Venezuelan workers and peasants to crush the American imperialists, and their Venezuelan capitalist allies.

Millions of Venezuelan workers, peasants, and students are preparing to take up arms against imperialism. The greatest military force the proletariat has is its own class power. For US imperialism to be defeated, the entire might of the working class must be brought to bear in a political, economic, social, and military struggle.

We have never had faith in Maduro’s compromising nationalist leadership. History has shown us that these politics are a dead end: ending in integration into the imperialist world order, or the massacre of the most militant and combative wings of the proletariat. In Venezuela’s case, we have both. Under Maduro’s rule, state-owned businesses have been privatised, labour protections scrapped, welfare and pensions cut in favour of paying off predatory International Monetary Fund loans, hyperinflation has destroyed livelihoods, the indigenous population has been attacked, corruption has intensified, and the communist opposition has been suppressed.

Especially in the context of the sanctions placed on Venezuela by the first Trump administration in 2017, the national road to socialism has been shown to be wholly inadequate. Venezuelan workers have made immense sacrifices, and they have been betrayed by their leadership. If the US attempt to impose regime change succeeds, it will be because of Maduro’s failure to renew the Bolivarian revolution, break it out of the oil-extraction-development model, and place power directly in the hands of the working class. The task of communists is to break the capitalist hegemony over the proletariat and fight for the working class to realise its own power. The Communist Party of Venezuela succinctly summed up the nature of the issue in their statement“No to imperialist occupation, no to internal capitulation!”:

“The defense of the homeland cannot be confused with support for the authoritarian bloc in power, but neither can it be confused with indifference to the foreign boot… Faced with the threat of a naval blockade and military escalation, the PCV calls for international class solidarity, appealing to the communist and workers’ parties of the world, including the American proletariat, to denounce imperialist piracy and the neocolonial offensive against Venezuela and against all of Latin America and the Caribbean. Venezuela is presented today as an “exemplary case”: if the Trump Corollary prevails here, no country in the region will be safe from the confiscation of its resources and military imposition.”

The RCO calls on the rest of the socialist movement in Australia to fight for and agitate around these key anti-imperialist demands:

• The cancellation of AUKUS.
• ANZUS must be abrogated.
• Pine Gap must be closed, and the American military must be expelled.
• Australia must withdraw from all other imperialist alliances.
• All Australian police, military, and intelligence personnel must be withdrawn from international operations.

These demands provide the basis for united communist agitation against aggression in Venezuela. Our movement is far stronger when it is united around shared demands and common goals.

Some in the socialist movement will capitulate to pacifist demands to simply “stop the war”, without making any mention of the international struggle against US imperialism. This position is untenable and amounts to a rejection of the international class struggle. The communist position is not simply to stop the war. Communists are for the destruction of the US empire and imperialism altogether. US military dominance over the globe must end. Socialists who do not fight for a victory for Venezuelan workers only bolster the illusion of a rules-based international order in which peace can be achieved under imperialist domination and sow confusion around the necessity for world revolution and the destruction of imperialism.

In Australia, the primary task is to rebuild a fighting anti-imperialist movement. This means organising in the streets, in workplaces, and in schools against imperialist war and exploitation. However, any anti-imperialist struggle is divided and undermined by the presence of sectarianism and the absence of a mass, internationalist communist party. Only such a party can wage a struggle that breaks trade unions from the narrow politics of patriotism and Laborism and pose a genuine challenge to the imperialist order. All genuine internationalists who wish to fight imperialism, and to fight for the world revolution, must strive for the construction of an independent and democratically run proletarian party with an international perspective.

Whoever rules in Venezuela tomorrow and in the coming months, the working class will remain. Any attempt to lay low this or that government, any bloody suppression of the working masses, is useless against the power of a united working class. One day, the workers of Latin America will defeat American imperialism and forge a united Latin American workers’ republic.

Defend Venezuela! All Power to the Workers and Peasants!

Build the Anti-Imperialist Movement! Break the Imperialist Alliance!

¡El pueblo armado jamás será vencido!

¡Trabajadores del mundo, uníos!