Nope, not yet.

I have a lot of criticism about how certain aspects are handled in the general LatAm left. But they are dealt a very bad hand, and as a leader its hard to justify the slaughter of your nation for a goal that might not be winnable. Its the same with whatever the Hamas government of Gaza is doing.

I chalk it up with a lack of significant international support.

My view on the Venezuelan leadership since the abduction of Maduro has been that they are only human, with all the positive and negative connotations that this entails. There’s a far greater presence of contradictions than either many detractors or admirers of the PSUV are presently willing to appreciate.

For the latter, my position is that MLs should not be the political equivalents of K-Pop stans. Memes about Kim Jong Un or Xi Jinping are well and good but some people seem to stretch it to the point that they vicariously relate more to the more tangible visible leadership than the more abstract people, which I think would be a mistake, as it would be also in the case of Venezuela. My stance is that, for MLs, support for any political project ought to be contingent on its service to the aims of anti-imperialism and national liberation.

The ambiguities and contractions of the current situation mean that the most any one can do is guess and I would prefer to guess charitably. It’s within the governing PSUV’s interest (which is not necessarily wholly the same as that of the Venezuelan people’s nor that of the aim of Venezuelan sovereignty) to presently play the demure and to bide its time.

However, triggering a counter-revolution from above by hijacking the PSUV political apparatus, thereby demoralizing its base and engendering political apathy to create the conditions for a proper reactionary takeover akin to Bolivia, and more recently Peru/Colombia through takeover via electoralism, can be said to be the precise American playbook in Venezuela, opaque as many other aspects appear to be. As such, it should be said that a lie lived too long can very well become reality and I believe it would do no disservice to retain a principled bottom line.

After seeing what has occured in Iran, I’m even more convinced that the Venezuelan leadership’s actions are extremely logical for a socialist project.

Venezuela has none of the capacity to threaten US assets like Iran does, nor do they have one of the best multi-layered millitary apparatuses like the IRGC and Iranian military. They don’t have the ability to build that infrastructure in a timely matter and never have since the mainland US is only separated by the Gulf of Mexico. Any attempt to build that kind of defense architecture would immediately lead to the US bombing the entire country, since a ballistic missile system poses a tbreat to the US mainland and can be marketed as such to the US population. There is nothing stopping the US from never invading and just air striking the country unimpeded. There’s no ally to Venezuela to aid them in that scenario eitheir so all would he accomplished is that the Venezuelan people die while the bolivarian revolution is blamed for the state of affairs.

Venezuela doesn’t have a resource that can be sold easily outside of to the US. Venezuelan oil is famously sour, being described as tar like, with the only major infrastructure for refining it existing in California from Chevron. Venezuela doesn’t have a geographic fixture that could hold up the global economy like the straight of Hormuz eitheir.

What exactly is stopping the US from carpet bombing the entire country until the Boliviaruan revolution eitheir Buckles or the revolution is set back decades to a point that’s worse off then when Chavez took power.

I seriously fear to live under the kind of revolution that some western “Communists” would construct. Because if their takeaway from Venezuela is that Delcy Rodriguez should risk her country being reduced to rubble without any possible gain, rather than take measures to circumvent that possibility in a strategic retreat, then I must say they’ve completely failed to analyze the material realities of Venezuela and the US.

I’m not going to ask Venezuelans to die defending the international proletarian struggle while residing in the country murdering them just so I can feel inspired by their martyrdom. Venezuela is playing a careful and dangerous game because that’s unfortunately the hand they’ve been dealt by the US.

The US left is still in the phase of thinking reformism and bourgeois politics will achieve some kind of lasting change, and until this faith in bourgeois politics fades from the majority of US leftists, they won’t be able to mount meaningful opposition to the US plunder of Venezuela. Venezuela can’t depend on this shift accelerating at a pace that allows the Bolivarian revolution more breathing room.

Nope its been a couple of months, and they just had a massive natural disaster.

They haven’t even finished their current one yet and were there to be one that is distinctly a new one, it would surely be the current one in a somewhat different form, not an entirely new project. Dramatic instability favors the imperialists (who love to take advantage of instability to put puppets in place), not Venezuelans (who need to keep working on the Commune project without being thrown into disarray: https://chrisgilbert.site/commune-or-nothing/). Now as rainpizza once said (I’m paraphrasing from memory) if the current heads of state were to turn against the commune project, that would be a red line and a sign that the revolution is in real trouble. Many other things short of that can be explained by being in a hostage situation and working within that, strategically, as painful as it is to witness from the outside. Now for those who actually live there, the process may be different, working to hold the leadership accountable and ensure they are not compromising on pivotal things. But those of us who are looking from the outside, we need to have solidarity, not get caught up in fantasizing.

In time. They’re contending with the aftermath of a natural disaster, the sudden establishment of neocolonial domination, numerous neighbors falling to fascist rule. The best move I can see is building a movement that is ready to strike when the right moment arrives.

Not really. I think they are in a difficult situation and are doing the best they can.

Yeah, I think they need it even more