The Siege of Venezuela and The Travails of Empire

Not on CNN or MSNBC. Four of the huge pro-government rallies held throughout Venezuela on February 1^st 
(Photo: PSUV)

Here’s the bullet-point version:

• It’s imperialism.
• It’s American imperialism, a bipartisan national project.
• American imperialism is the global management of capitalist class power.
• It’s a binary situation in which one side or the other will win via the use and threat of armed force.
• It’s trouble for Venezuela and for imperialism.
• There’s no such thing as Progressive Except Imperialism.

Here’s the long rant:

The United States government’s new offensive against Venezuela is an act of naked imperialism.

I predicted last year that Venezuela would be the first new country hit by the Trump administration’s indispensable need to establish its American-exceptionalist, “Presidentialist,” bona fides. It is the Goldilocks target. Not too small: It is, in fact, a significant country with world's largest oil reserves, and a proclaimed socialist government that's been a thorn in the gringo boot on Latin America for almost twenty years. Not too big: It’s no military match for U.S. & Latin American proxy armed forces, and nobody will start WWIII to defend it. Just right: A decisive win, at little apparent cost. And just the kind of amuse-bouche needed to get the U.S. population’s juices flowing for a more costly and difficult attack on the ultimate target—Iran. At least, that’s the way they think.

Syria: No Better Angels

In my last post on Syria, I commented that “Short of widespread popular unrest, on issues like this, the will of the people counts for nothing against the exigencies of imperialism and Zionism, as understood by the American political elite,” that “there would be no challenging debate in the US Congress like that in the British Parliament,” and that “a combination of domestic political pressure that, along with international reluctance, [which would] create an effective pushback against Obama’s momentum towards war” was “not likely.” I was 100% certain of, and would have bet heavily on, a strike on Syria within a few days.

I am surprised and happy to see that I would have lost that bet. Indeed, there is substantially more than a glimmer of pushback on a number of fronts.  The British parliament’s rejection of a military attack on Syria turned out to be a wedge blow that opened crucial cracks in the hitherto seemingly-impervious American imperial edifice. It pushed Obama into going to Congress for a vote, which bought time in which the American people could think about the case and not just follow the leader, and in which the media would have to open the window of information and analysis at least a bit more than usual.

Too Many Cooks: The Syrian Demise

With Syria at full boil, it’s becoming clearer who exactly will be burned once this pot finally explodes: everybody.

The Assad/Alawite regime is cooking in a stew of its own penchant for brutality, which has been folded into the cleverness of the United States and Saudi Arabia in crafting a strategy for hijacking “Arab Spring” anti-authoritarian uprisings for counterrevolutionary purposes. 

To be clear: This is not a critique based on some notion of pacifism or national purity.  Non-violent resistance is a powerful tactic that can be quite effective in broadening political support, but revolutionary movements do not have to abjure the use of force to maintain their ethical legitimacy.  It is virtually impossible to imagine a successful revolution that does not use force to defend its gains and to advance its objectives.  Nor are revolutionary movements (or besieged governments) obliged to abjure foreign support in order to maintain national legitimacy.  Whether foreign support undermines a movement’s national legitimacy depends on the political content and consequences of that support – for our purposes, whether it advances or derails the purported objective of creating a renewed national polity that radically increases the democratic power, social well-being, and fundamental rights of the people.  This, in turn, depends on whether foreign allies accept the limits of their supporting role, and refrain from taking over or directing the course of the movement they claim to support.  Seen from the outside, in the course of frantic struggle, how this is unfolding can only be a judgement call, based on what one knows about the relative power, political cohesion, and the actual consequences of past and present actions, of the various players.