There are moments when political developments strip away every disguise and expose the class character of political forces with unusual clarity. The latest oil agreement between Washington and the government of Delcy Rodríguez is one such moment. After years of “Bolivarian,” “anti-imperialist” and even “socialist” rhetoric, Venezuela’s social-democratic leadership is presiding over a further opening of the country’s strategic energy wealth to U.S. monopoly interests.
The political significance goes far beyond the terms of a single deal. For years, opportunist forces internationally demanded that communists identify solidarity with the Venezuelan people against U.S. imperialist aggression with political support for the PSUV government.
Criticism of the capitalist character of the Venezuelan economy, of concessions to domestic and foreign capital, of attacks on workers’ rights or of the persecution of the PCV was often treated as if it objectively served Washington. Recent developments once again show how bankrupt that argument is. The same political current that presented the management of Venezuelan capitalism as a road toward “21st-century socialism” is now administering agreements that expand the access of U.S. capital to one of the country’s most strategic sectors.
None of this vindicates U.S. sanctions, coercion, threats or intervention. U.S. imperialism remains an enemy of the Venezuelan people. Its concern has never been democracy, social rights or the living standards of workers, but the interests of U.S. monopolies, access to strategic resources and the strengthening of Washington’s position in Latin America and in the broader imperialist competition.
Communists, however, do not understand imperialism simply as the aggressive foreign policy of one government. Imperialism is rooted in monopoly capitalism itself, in the struggle over markets, raw materials, investment opportunities and spheres of influence. Opposition to U.S. imperialism therefore cannot mean political subordination to a bourgeois government simply because that government is under pressure from Washington.
This distinction is decisive. The Venezuelan working class must oppose imperialist aggression without surrendering its political independence to the government that administers Venezuelan capitalism. The PCV has tried to maintain precisely such a class position, opposing foreign intervention while also confronting policies that favor transnational capital, undermine wages and labor rights and weaken national control over strategic resources. This cuts through the false choice so often imposed on the Left: either support the government uncritically in the name of “anti-imperialism,” or line up with imperialism against it. Communists have no reason to accept either course.
The Venezuelan case therefore reaffirms a broader historical truth: the bankruptcy of social democracy. Social democracy does not cease to be a form of bourgeois politics because it uses radical language, invokes sovereignty, carries out limited redistributive measures or surrounds itself with socialist symbols. Its strategic boundary remains unchanged: capitalist ownership and bourgeois power are not to be overthrown. Capitalism is to be administered and regulated, while workers are told that monopolies can be restrained without their power being broken and that the antagonism between capital and labor can be managed without overturning capitalist property.
A particularly revealing aspect of the current debate is the position of certain organizations that still call themselves communist while reproducing, in practice, the arguments of social democracy and the broader reformist Left. They continue to defend the PSUV strategy by invoking Venezuela’s “difficult realities,” sanctions, imperialist pressure and the need for tactical compromise. Those pressures are real, but they cannot become a permanent alibi for policies that strengthen capitalist interests, weaken the independent organization of the working class and open strategic sectors to monopoly capital. Difficult conditions may explain a retreat; they cannot turn retreat into a revolutionary strategy, concessions to capital into socialism, or class collaboration into anti-imperialism. To present every concession as an unavoidable act of “resistance” is not Marxist analysis. It is the abandonment of class criteria.
When capitalist contradictions sharpen, the limits of social democracy become visible very quickly. Investment must be “attracted,” markets must be “reassured,” and concessions to capital are repackaged as realism and pragmatism. What was yesterday denounced as surrender is today presented as necessity. The vocabulary changes, but the class content does not. This is not an accidental deviation from social democracy. It expresses its very character: the management of capitalism in the name of reform while capitalist property and bourgeois power remain intact.
Venezuela reaffirms that bankruptcy in particularly stark form. The problem was never that socialism had “gone too far.” Socialist relations of production and working-class power were never established. Capitalist relations continued to reproduce themselves, wage labor remained a commodity, domestic and foreign capital continued to operate, and the country remained integrated into the world capitalist market. State ownership of particular enterprises or strategic sectors does not change this by itself. State property under bourgeois power remains embedded in capitalist relations. Socialist property presupposes something qualitatively different: the conquest of political power by the working class, the socialization of the concentrated means of production and their incorporation into a planned economy organized according to social needs rather than capitalist profitability.
This is precisely why the so-called “Socialism of the 21st Century” could never overcome its fundamental contradiction. Socialist terminology cannot turn capitalist property into socialist property, just as anti-imperialist rhetoric cannot abolish the economic power of capital. A government may speak in the name of the people, nationalize particular enterprises and employ socialist symbols, but the decisive questions remain the same: which class holds power, which class controls the means of production, and which relations of production prevail? If these questions are left untouched, radical rhetoric sooner or later collides with capitalist reality.
The treatment of the Communist Party of Venezuela makes this contradiction even sharper. The party that repeatedly warned against concessions to capital and the erosion of workers’ rights was itself subjected to political and judicial attack. Yet the PCV did not respond by crossing into the camp of U.S. imperialism. It continued to oppose foreign aggression while fighting the anti-worker policies of the Venezuelan authorities. That is the independent class line which communists must defend: against imperialism without becoming the political tail of a bourgeois government, and against the bourgeois government without becoming an accomplice of imperialism. There is no contradiction here. There is only class independence.
The latest oil developments therefore do more than expose the bankruptcy of social democracy. They reaffirm it once again, openly and without disguise. A red flag over capitalist property does not make capitalism socialist, and anti-imperialist rhetoric does not abolish the power of capital. When the decisive choice is between breaking capitalist power and adapting to its demands, social democracy chooses adaptation. Venezuela’s latest oil deal confirms this once more. What is being exposed is not socialism in retreat, but capitalism with the mask removed.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
