(This is a Google Translate of an article in Italian.) Venezuela: Don't call it treason
Raffaele Timperi, Sept. 24, 2026 On September 23, from the podium of the 81st General Assembly of the United Nations, the president of Venezuela Delcy Rodríguez thanked Donald Trump "for the readiness to take the path of diplomatic relations and cooperation with Venezuela", and claimed as a merit "the recent binational agreement between the United States and Venezuela, one of the largest ever signed", intended to contribute "to the energy balance of the hemisphere and the international economy". He was speaking in New York, in the same city where Nicolás Maduro has been on federal trial since January. Throughout the speech Maduro is not appointed once. Venezuela's president, Delcy Rodríguez, and the president of the United States, Donald Trump, during their meeting in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly Five days earlier, on September 18, the Financial Times reported on the deal that moved 31 tons of Venezuelan gold, worth about 4 billion dollars, from the Bank of England vaults to the New York Federal Reserve. Delcy Rodríguez's interim government gets legal control: he won't be able to sell it right away, but he can use it as collateral for loans. Three weeks earlier, on August 29, Trump had announced from the White House “the largest oil deal in history”: twenty-five years, seventeen deposits, about 65 billion barrels under U.S. control, a fifth of the world’s established reserves, with the Pentagon a shareholder through a private company. On August 30, a thirty-year contract was signed on the Choco gold mine, in El Callao, with Heeney Capital and Mercury. On August 11, Caracas and Tel Aviv had re-established consular relations discontinued by Chávez in 2009, after an Israeli team intervened in post-earthquake rescues and an AIPAC delegation had been received in the capital. To sign all this is not a right-wing government settled by the occupiers. It's the PSUV. She is the vice president of Maduro, an interim president sworn on January 5, two days after one hundred and fifty U.S. aircraft had bombed the north of the country and the Delta Force had taken Maduro and Cilia Flores from Fort Tiuna to transfer them to a federal court in New York. Twenty-nine days later, the same president signed the law of privatization of the oil industry. The Alibi of Betrayal The prevailing reaction in a certain Italian left was the re-edition of a proven scheme: betrayal. If you look for the exact moment, the signature of August, the law of January, the oath of 5, how you look for an original sin. It is the method that the communist movement should have learned to discard for a long time. All the variations of betrayal, from the crudest to the most elaborate, treat a political experience as a legacy to be guarded and its history as a sequence of deviations from an original intention: reflection flattens itself on the search for the moment of breakup, which becomes a moral fault even before a political fact. No one denies that there are moments of change. It is denied that reading them as an original sin helps to understand the material reasons why a historical process went in one direction instead of another. Betrayal is a comforting category: if the problem is men, the model remains standing. If Delcy Rodríguez betrayed, then “21st century socialism” was right and should only be cleared of traitors. It is the ideological operation that allows numerous organizations that refer, more or less directly, to communism to continue to mention that formula in its own programs while its homeland of choice delivers gold reserves to the Fed and deposits to the Pentagon. Defending the model, moreover, does not mean defending Caracas: it means defending the political line that for twenty years that word has legitimated here. What has never been expropriated In concrete terms, the “socialism of the 21st century” was this: a government conquered with elections and settled within institutions never touched, the same army and the same judiciary as before, and a generous social expenditure paid with the rent of mining and energy nationalizations. No overturned property relationship. The factories, the banks and the lands remained where they were, and with them the class that owned them. You just had to look at what was happening in 2020. On the eve of the MPs of that December, to secure the support of the opposition parties, the government leveled down wages and granted the Venezuelan capitalists mass dismissals. The PCV had just come out of the alliance with the PSUV and had given birth to the Revolutionary Popular Alternative; in all response it was excluded from the television debates and accused the ruling party of “playing the game of the right”. A redistribution built on rent, which had not touched the capitalist basis of economic relations, showed its weakness there: it was enough that the rent narrowed down so that the wages were paid, and for the ally to be sought to return to be the bourgeoisie. Six years later, the PCV – to which in the meantime the control of its symbol has been judicially stolen – is the only organized force that denounces “the new and serious delivery of the national heritage carried out by the illegitimate triumvirate”, carried out “behind the Venezuelan people, without transparency and on the margin of constitutional controls”: a “wild quarter” disguised as a “technocratic rhetoric”. And he does it without aligning himself with María Corina Machado. Those who were not in government must not explain today why the government signed: this is the advantage of class independence. There was no break, there was continuity. The apparatus that has repressed the workers’ strikes, criminalized the communists and administered for a decade an oil rent by growing a bourgeoisie within the state, in the face of the collapse of rent and the bombers of January did what every bourgeoisie does: it sought the best agreement with the strongest capital. He didn’t betray his own class nature, he showed it. Campism to the test of facts For years, in Italy, Venezuela has been the exemplary case of an entire political approach: the idea that there are “anti-imperialist” capitalist states to be supported as Washington’s adversaries. In eight months that bastion became the privileged supplier of the U.S. strategic reserve, emptied 41 percent of the war with Iran, and Israel's consular interlocutor. It's not a paradox, it's the way it works. When you support a capitalist state because it occupies the right box on the chessboard, you end up supporting those sectors of the national bourgeoisie that at that time have an interest in trading with the rival of Washington. But the interest is not fixed forever: the relations of force change, the alliances are reorganized, and the same bourgeoisie that yesterday signed in Beijing and Moscow today signs in Washington without having changed its nature by a comma. Change the buyer, not the seller. Those who had built their political identity on the geopolitical positioning of that government, and not on the analysis of the relations of production that supported it, today must explain why the bastion signed, and does so by talking about capitulation: that is, by archiving as an accident of path what of that structure was the product. Chávez’s break with Israel in 2009, in full “Cast Lead” operation, was among the most appreciable acts of foreign policy. The fact that it has been reversible in seventeen years, and reversible at the hands of the heirs themselves, measures how much the international positions that do not have their roots in the class nature of the state that assumes them are worth. No concessions, in no direction None of this attenuates the judgment on aggression. One country was bombed, its president taken from a commando and tried in a foreign court, dozens of Venezuelan military personnel and thirty-two Cubans killed, mineral and energy resources divided by contract, proceeds deposited in a Washington-controlled account. It is an act of imperialist war, and it is the model that the United States is building for the continent. On this there is no equidistance to be held, and the complaint must be brought all the way, starting with the Italian government and Italian companies that are already returning to the Venezuelan fields. But denouncing imperialism does not require inventing a socialism that was not there. Only the materialistic analysis of what the Bolivarian process really was allows us to understand why he did not have the strength to resist, and why his leadership team was recyclable as administrator of the loot. A power that had not expropriated the bourgeoisie could not call the working class to defend it, because it had never given it anything to defend but the level of an annuity. Cuba, where property relations were effectively overturned, has been holding the blockade for sixty-five years. The comparison is not made on the military power relations, which are incomparable: it is done on one point, and that is that there is a class that has something of its own to defend, and it knows it. A new century has not changed the elementary condition: either the working class takes away from the masters the means of production, or it ends up administering their state on their own. The budget that is needed is not on Caracas, but on those who continue to explain that first we must pass through an intermediate phase, that the institutions can be administered as long as they are governed by the “progressives”, and that socialism will then be seen. Those who seek the traitor are not taking stock. He's looking for ways not to. https://www.lordinenuovo.it/2026/09/24/venezuela-non-chiamatelo-tradimento/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43603): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43603 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121208788/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
