Max Ajl: Any article which does not account for Venezuela’s reliance on a single resource – oil – whose price is set by the US and Saudi Arabia, and does not account for the economic sanctions, is not an analysis that serves the poor of Venezuela by providing people in the US-UK with information about where we can insert ourselves in the political process to change our government’s policies *in the midst of an ongoing coup, two decades of counter-revolutionary subversion and several years of aggressive economic warfare*. Any analysis which does not tell readers that the US-UK have been engaged in a sustained and hemispheric attempt to re-colonize the continent, is an analysis which is failing us as readers and as political actors.
[…] Furthermore, his false accusation of “authoritarianism” is right out of the lexicon of US mainstream political science and is propaganda. What “authoritarian” government allows opposition media and open protest against it? US “democracy” hardly allows either. The force-field of hedging “authoritarian” with “increasingly” doesn’t help the case, since it begs the question of why to use the word at all. It is curious that America, which has no democratic mandate to decide Venezuela’s politics or society, does not receive the descriptor “authoritarian” and the democratically-elected Maduro does. It is also ludicrous to chasten the racist elite opposition for “its inability to establish more effective links to Venezuela’s working classes,” it’s something like criticizing Trump for his inability to sink his roots into Harlem.