Venezuela: Between Imperialism and Bonapartism

The US invasion exposes both Washington’s naked aggression and the strategic bankruptcy of Bolivarian nationalism

The gunboats are back. In August 2025, the United States assembled its largest naval force in Caribbean waters since 1903: the Iwo Jima Ready Group, the 22nd Marines, destroyers, a cruiser, a nuclear submarine, P-8 Poseidon aircraft. By late November, eighty-three Venezuelans were dead. None had been arrested. None had faced trial. None had been proven to be trafficking drugs. Nicolás Maduro sits in an American prison, charged with narco-terrorism by the empire that has spent two decades trying to destroy his movement.

This is imperialism without apology. Marco Rubio told NBC the quiet part aloud: “The Western Hemisphere is ours.”

And yet. To understand Venezuela’s catastrophe requires more than denunciation of American gangsterism, necessary as that denunciation remains. It requires confronting what Kunal Chattopadhyay, in a recent analysis that deserves serious engagement, calls the “two-way crisis”: the external assault of US imperialism meeting the internal decomposition of Bolivarian politics. The revolutionary left must hold both truths simultaneously. Washington is the principal enemy. Caracas prepared the ground for its own defeat.

The Petro-Socialist Trap

Hugo Chávez was not a Marxist. He said so himself, repeatedly, before his turn toward “twenty-first century socialism” in 2005. What he was, from the failed 1992 coup through his death in 2013, was an honest nationalist who genuinely wanted redistribution toward Venezuela’s poor. The Bolivarian missions transformed millions of lives: subsidised groceries, free healthcare staffed by Cuban doctors, land reform, literacy campaigns, and housing programmes. Chattopadhyay is right to insist on this. The transformation was real.

But it was purchased, not produced. Venezuelan socialism was never socialism at all; it was petro-redistribution, the state capturing oil rents and channelling them downward while leaving the commanding heights of the economy untouched. When oil prices collapsed after 2014, the model collapsed with them. There was nothing else. No industrial base. No productive capacity. No alternative to importing everything with dollars that no longer exist.

This was not an accident. It was a strategic choice, made repeatedly, at moments when other choices were possible.

April 2002. The CIA-backed coup had failed. Pedro Carmona, the bourgeoisie’s chosen instrument, had fled. Chávez returned to Miraflores on the shoulders of the Caracas poor who had poured into the streets demanding his return. The old state apparatus had fractured. Pro-Chávez soldiers controlled the barracks. Workers occupied the PDVSA headquarters. For perhaps seventy-two hours, the question of power was genuinely open.

Chávez urged everyone to go home. No prosecutions followed. The plotters regrouped.

December 2002. The bosses locked out the oil industry, shutting down computers remotely from Houston, attempting to starve the government into submission. Workers responded magnificently, seizing facilities, running production themselves, building what could have become the nucleus of genuine workers’ control. The lockout was defeated.

Chávez restored bureaucratic management. The moment passed.

This pattern repeated throughout the Bolivarian period. Every time working-class initiative threatened to transcend the limits of nationalist redistribution, Chávez pulled back. He talked constantly of socialism, of the Paris Commune, of workers’ councils. He never broke the bourgeois state apparatus. He never expropriated the bourgeoisie as a class. He never armed the masses as an independent force. The Bolivarian Circles and later the communal councils remained transmission belts for government policy, not organs of popular power.

Chattopadhyay puts it precisely: Chávez “did not understand the importance of breaking the bourgeois state apparatus, of breaking the economic power of the bourgeoisie.” This is too generous. Chávez understood perfectly well what breaking bourgeois power would require. He chose not to do it. The class content of that choice is what matters.

Maduro’s Qualitative Degeneration

Nicolás Maduro inherited an impossible situation in 2013: falling oil prices, a hostile bourgeoisie, intensifying US sanctions, an economy dependent on imports it could no longer afford. None of this excuses what followed.

The Maduro government did not simply continue Chávez’s limitations. It transformed them into something qualitatively different. Chattopadhyay’s documentation is damning. Workers’ share of national income has collapsed below Chávez-era levels. The government imposed savage austerity while mouthing anti-imperialist rhetoric. It privatised industries that Chávez had nationalised. It built the FAES, a police unit whose reputation for extrajudicial killings terrifies working-class neighbourhoods. It banned the Communist Party of Venezuela. It attacked trade unionists who demanded wage increases. It imprisoned left-wing critics as imperialist agents.

This is not “Stalinism.” The term obscures more than it reveals. What emerged in Caracas was Bonapartism: a regime balancing between classes, increasingly dependent on military and security apparatus, rhetorically radical while materially attacking its own social base. The nationalist generals became the arbiters of politics. Corruption metastasised. The Bolivarian project rotted from within.

The 2024 presidential election crystallised the decomposition. The opposition, for all its reactionary character, posted booth-level tallies as required by Venezuelan electoral law. The government refused to provide equivalent documentation. Brazil, Colombia, and Chile, governments with no love for Washington, declined to recognise Maduro’s claimed victory. And in the streets, it was not the right-wing opposition that mobilised against the results. It was workers, trade unionists, neighbourhood activists, the social base that Chavismo had once claimed as its own.

Hundreds were arrested on terrorism charges. The regime’s response to working-class protest was indistinguishable from any other capitalist government facing popular anger.

The Geopolitical Stakes

None of this justifies the American invasion. Nothing could.

Chattopadhyay situates the assault correctly within the architecture of dollar hegemony. The petrodollar system, constructed in 1974 through a US-Saudi agreement, made the dollar the mandatory medium for global oil trade. Those who challenged this arrangement, Saddam Hussein proposing euro-denominated oil sales, Gaddafi floating an African alternative currency, discovered what American “concern for democracy” actually meant.

Venezuela matters to Washington for three interlocking reasons. First, oil: not because America needs Venezuelan crude, which is expensive to refine, but because China buys 600,000 barrels daily. Cutting that supply forces Beijing onto costlier markets, preferably dollar-denominated ones. Second, the Monroe Doctrine’s resurrection: Latin America had drifted leftward over two decades, electing governments from Lula to Boric to Petro that, whatever their limitations, refused to align automatically with Washington. Venezuela’s subjugation is a warning to all of them. Third, Cuba: Venezuelan oil has sustained the Cuban economy since the Special Period’s worst years. Regime change in Caracas is a stepping stone to regime change in Havana.

Rubio, the son of Cuban exile gusanos, has waited his entire political life for this.

What This Means for Revolutionary Strategy

The Venezuelan catastrophe offers no comfort to anyone. Not to the campists who pretended Maduro’s government represented anti-imperialism rather than nationalist Bonapartism. Not to the social democrats who imagined you could redistribute oil rents indefinitely without confronting capital. Not to the ultraleft who dismissed Chavismo entirely, missing the genuine mass mobilisation it contained and the strategic lessons its failure provides.

The central lesson is not complicated. It is the lesson of every aborted revolution since 1848. You cannot use the bourgeois state to overcome bourgeois power. You cannot substitute oil revenues for working-class control of production. You cannot demobilise a popular initiative in the name of stability and expect it to rematerialise when you need it. You cannot build socialism in one country, certainly not in a country whose entire economy depends on a single commodity whose price is set in markets you do not control.

Chávez’s Bolivarian project was not a revolution. It was a redistribution programme with revolutionary rhetoric, and when the redistribution became impossible, only the rhetoric remained. Maduro’s Bonapartism stripped away even that, replacing anti-imperialist words with anti-worker deeds while maintaining the façade of radicalism for international consumption.

The resistance that now emerges in Venezuela faces an impossible choice. Unite behind the remnants of Maduro’s apparatus against American occupation? That apparatus spent years imprisoning the very activists who might now form the backbone of resistance. Demand democratic rights as a condition of unity? The government that refused those rights now asks for unconditional solidarity.

There is no resolution to this contradiction that does not pass through the self-organisation of Venezuelan workers, independent of both the occupation forces and the discredited Bonapartist leadership. Whether such self-organisation can emerge under conditions of military occupation remains to be seen. The odds are not favourable.

But the international left can at least begin with clarity. US imperialism is conducting an illegal war of conquest against a sovereign nation. That war must be opposed unconditionally, without illusions about what it seeks to replace. The Maduro government’s political bankruptcy does not legitimise American gunboats. American gunboats do not rehabilitate Maduro’s betrayal of the Bolivarian project’s original promise.

Two things are true. The task is holding both of them, building solidarity against imperialism while refusing to abandon the Venezuelan workers whom both Washington and Caracas have betrayed.

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This article reviews Kunal Chattopadhyay’s analysis “Venezuela from Imperialist Threats to Naked Aggression,” restructuring and engaging critically with his documentation of both US imperialism and the Maduro government’s degeneration.