A Great Leap Into Reality: Venezuela Today

By Chris Gilbert & Cira Pascual Marquina  –  May 28, 2026

What we know of what is going on…confirms the revisionist orientation of the present policy…gains are in the process of being liquidated. As far as foreign policy is concerned … United States imperialism is denounced less and less. Its interventions in the life of other peoples are frequently even seen as “positive.”… The struggle against the bourgeois right is scarcely mentioned.

Who wrote these lines? Is it one of the many international left voices denouncing the current Venezuelan government? The similarities are striking, but in fact, this was the French Maoist Charles Bettelheim, resigning in 1977 from the Franco-Chinese Friendship Association. In effect, it was an “hasta aquí” (washing one’s hands) moment from an intellectual heavyweight almost fifty years ago.

Along with China’s new “revisionist” policies, which he thought were pro-capitalist, Bettelheim disliked the crude propaganda being used to denounce the Gang of Four, including Jiang Qing, to whom Mao himself had been married. How could revolutionaries so celebrated in one moment be so harshly condemned in the next? Does all of this sound close to home? In fact, both Bettelheim’s observations and his complaints seem uncannily similar to those of many concerned Venezuela watchers today.

The View from the Core
Today, among numerous Venezuela solidarity activists and fellow travelers in the Global North, Alex Saab’s extradition to the United States last week has become a similar symbolic breaking point. For them, the case is definitive proof that the Bolivarian Process has crossed an unforgivable line. Yet it is both revealing and bizarre that the measuring stick of the Venezuelan revolution could become a single figure. In fact, their outsized reaction can only be understood if we consider that the #FreeAlexSaab campaign constituted much of these activists’ only practical engagement with Venezuela, and many mistakenly believed Saab (though objectively more like Meng Wanzhou than Che Guevara) to be an emblematic 21st-century revolutionary.

All of this reveals how problematic it is to evaluate a revolution based on a distant and partial experience of it. Here in Venezuela, among grassroots Chavistas, one does not encounter this obsessive fixation on Saab, nor, for that matter, on the recent—and indeed humiliating—“simulacrum of evacuation” involving U.S. military aircraft. This does not mean that people here applauded the extradition or feel indifferent toward these events. But at the communal and barrio level, among those who have spent decades building popular power while enduring U.S. sanctions, fascist violence, and endless imperialist aggressions, there is little appetite for the dramatic ruptures that some observers abroad seem to be encouraging.

Whether with regard to the Saab affair or some other concession or error by the government, many international intellectuals and solidarity activists approach revolutionary processes as though their main role were to determine the exact moment when fidelity must end—when they may finally pronounce, “hasta aquí.” However, this gatekeeper posture often carries an unmistakably arrogant undertone, and is connected to a particular class and great-power chauvinist position. It assumes that those situated in the core of imperialism possess the authority to declare the legitimacy—or death—of struggles being carried out elsewhere, by people who wagered their lives and those of future generations on them.

We believe that it is not international observers, but the Chavista grassroots—the people who have sustained this revolutionary process for twenty-seven years, who buried their dead and resisted sanctions and destabilization, and who are still, slowly and stubbornly, building communes—who should carry the most weight in this discussion.

The Truth on the Ground
Going back to China and Bettelheim, everything in that country’s subsequent trajectory shows that the verdict he offered in 1977 was spectacularly wrong. The very reforms that Bettelheim saw as betraying the revolution turned out to have saved it. Neil Burton, responding to Bettelheim from his workplace in China, respectfully suggested that the French intellectual could not clearly see his way through the events because the schemas he worked with were too static. Burton pointed out that Bettelheim neither spoke nor read Chinese and was not in China to experience events directly.

Of course, we bring up Bettelheim’s error—which was replicated by many left intellectuals of lesser caliber around the world at the time—in relation to the case of contemporary Venezuela not because we believe the country where we live and work is undergoing something precisely the same as a China-style “Reform and Opening.” Instead, we do so out of a conviction that many on the left are making a similar error in precipitously declaring the Bolivarian Revolution to be over or its leadership traitorous.

Let us be clear: This is indeed a time of unprecedented challenges and great dangers for Venezuela. In fact, no one who claims they completely understand the situation or the way forward is telling the truth. Nor can any participant in the Bolivarian Revolution say with certainty if we will succeed in the struggle against imperialism. However, in a still open-ended situation, why wager so firmly on defeat? And why precipitously discredit the Chavista leadership—a leadership built over decades by the people themselves—in a way that might contribute to that defeat?

Defending Venezuela: The Problems With ‘Brest-Litovsk’ and Cosmopolitanism

Venezuela’s ‘Long March’ under sanctions
Intellectuals of the international left, many of whom have created networks and collectives to project their own voices, would do well to reflect on their way of being in the world, on their modus operandi. Too often and for too long, being a left intellectual has meant being “right about everything,” “having the facts and the answers,” and, above all, demonstrating how others are wrong. But that is not what it means to be a revolutionary in the historically accepted sense. To be a revolutionary is to be an organic part of a movement. It means that the revolution matters more than one’s reputation.

In his fascinating book Red Star Over China, Edgar Snow writes that when Chinese revolutionaries told him their life stories, the personal part of the narrative miraculously disappeared once they reached the point where they joined the revolution. After that, Snow observed, a communist “lost himself,” and “one could only hear stories of the Army, or the Soviets, or the Party.” In effect, each cadre ceased to be an “I” and became a “we.” What a different world from the one we live in today, where online influencers—the dominant model of today’s intellectual life—never cease pointing out how they, as individuals, are being attacked, were right before, and so on!

China and Venezuela are, of course, very different, including in their culture. However, like the Chinese revolutionaries, many of us in Venezuela have lived through a trial by fire—a de facto “Long March” through the 2010s—which was a period marked by all kinds of complicated trials and reversals. The experience burned a certain humility into our consciousness. It marks a qualitative difference from many intellectuals of the Global North, whose practices are still framed by a focus on their ideas, their reputations, or their theoretical correctness.

By contrast, most workers and organic intellectuals in Venezuela know that the revolution is a colossal, telluric process. It has innumerable ups and downs, and sometimes takes apparently inexplicable turns. Yet it is no more to be pronounced “dead,” even in a moment of apparent stagnation, than the epic revolutionary process in 19th-century France, which Marx compared to a mole that never ceased in its sometimes invisible and underground work.

Parameters for debating the central question
A revolutionary process is a rigorous teacher. By way of experience, the Bolivarian Revolution has inscribed numerous concrete lessons in millions of consciousnesses here. One thing all of us have learned is that divisions within Chavismo are to be avoided. Loyalty in the face of imperialism, even when it might smack of blind loyalty—in the spirit of “Dudar es traición” (“Doubt is betrayal”), as one Chavista slogan has it—is always preferable. We have often had to put aside our desire to be “right” before the global intellectual class. We know that the most important thing is the revolution, and we would rather appear to be fools than see it fail. Much more is at stake than individual reputations.

At the same time, debate that is within the revolution is welcome. As Fidel said at a critical moment in the Cuban process: “Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing.” However, people in the Global North who wish to take part should be attentive to the problem of “great power” chauvinism, especially the tendency to jump the gun in debates that ought to be led primarily by those living and struggling within the country itself. Better internet connections, greater visibility, higher institutional salaries, and less precarious daily conditions can easily allow intellectuals abroad to overpower or even silence the voices of those directly confronting the contradictions of the process.

These are issues that Lenin anticipated in his writings on “great-power chauvinism” and the relation between oppressor and oppressed nations. In the 1920 “Theses on the National and Colonial Question,” Lenin argued that centuries of domination inevitably produce legitimate mistrust toward imperial-power populations, including the latter’s often-complicit workers and intellectuals. He contended that revolutionaries from dominant nations therefore bear a special responsibility to approach those struggling in such contexts with particular “care and attention” and a willingness to make political concessions in order to overcome historically accumulated distrust.

Humility, then, should be the order of the day. This is not the moment for theatrical declarations that “it is all over,” or for exclaiming Hamlet-like that every contradiction or error represents a betrayal. Too often, such gestures are simply an acting-out of frustration and a search for catharsis. In fact nobody, inside Venezuela or abroad, possesses a definitive answer to the central question looming over all of us. That question is: How can the anti-imperialist—and ultimately socialist—project initiated in 1999 in Venezuela, or more broadly the emancipatory project inaugurated by Simón Bolívar and the Venezuelan masses more than two centuries ago, continue advancing under conditions of U.S. imperialism’s expanded military capacity and its new willingness to cross former red lines in the region?

More broadly, all of Latin America is grappling with the problem of how to confront this new modality of imperialism. Nor have any people or government—not in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, or Cuba—discovered a definitive solution. For that reason, this is a time not only for modesty but also for avoiding factional and chauvinist positions. The stakes are of the highest order—but so too are the tools and assets, including the whole richness of what years of struggle and many revolutionary victories have taught us. It is a time for revolutionaries from the Latin American region and beyond to come together around the common task: defeating the principal enemy.

 

(Monthly Review)