26.02.2026
A strange endgame
Did Chávez and Maduro preside over a brave ‘socialist’ experiment? No, argues Michael Roberts - it was the absence of socialist policies, not least to end the sabotage of the economy, that brought the country to its knees
The kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Adela Flores, by US military forces; the subsequent takeover by the vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez; her agreement to allow the USA to control Venezuela’s oil export revenues and to bring in US energy multi-nationals to invest - all this signals the endgame of the ‘Chavista revolution’ that began over 25 years ago. So it is very opportune that a new book has been published on what happened in Venezuela to reach this point.
Called Venezuela in crisis and published by Haymarket, this book brings together “some of the most important Marxist, socialist and anti-capitalist thinkers in Venezuela, representing a range of left political traditions and organisations”. Some contributors served in Hugo Chávez’s cabinet and have now become critics of the Maduro government. Bringing such voices to an English-speaking audience “will allow readers to engage with the current debates and perspectives of the Venezuelan left”.
The book is edited by Anderson Bean of North Carolina State University, who has written before on Venezuela. He starts by pointing out that, through the 2000s, the Chavista-Bolivarian revolution was an inspiration for others in the so-called global south - perhaps even more so than the Cuban revolution of the 1960s. The election of Chávez in 1998, after decades of corrupt, pro-capitalist, pro-US governments, was a burst of fresh air. In the subsequent years, the Chávez presidency “improved Venezuelans’ material wellbeing, brought greater social equality and empowered sectors of society that were traditionally excluded from the political process”.
Bean argues that there were three key components of the Chávez presidency: first, the rewriting of the constitution to promote broad citizen participation and comprehensive human rights protections; second, the redistribution of oil profits through various social programmes, which reduced official poverty levels by 37.6% and “extreme poverty” by 57.8%. By 2008, Venezuela also had the highest minimum wage in Latin America, and inequality in the country dropped to one of the lowest in the Americas. By 2011, Venezuela was the second most equal country in the western hemisphere - only Canada had lower levels. And, third, which Bean reckons was the “most transformative”, was the transfer of power to the popular sectors through the creation of new forms of popular assemblies and experiments with workers’ controls and community councils.
But, from 2013 onwards, things began to go wrong, big time. From 2013 to 2021, Venezuela’s gross domestic product fell 75%, while inflation reached 130,000% in 2018, the highest in the world! The percentage of households classified as poor increased from 48.4% in 2014 to 81.5% in 2022. The collapse in real incomes and the sharp rise in poverty in the 2010s led to a migration crisis. Since 2016, millions of Venezuelans have fled the country, seeking work abroad in order to send money back home. Today, the number of Venezuelan refugees and migrants worldwide is estimated to be around 7.7 million, or 20% of all Venezuelans. Venezuela now has the highest number of displaced people in Latin America and the second highest in the world - just behind Syria.
Collapse
What explains this collapse from inspiration to nightmare? Bean says there were two causes. The first was US sanctions imposed on Venezuela, coupled with several attempts by the US state, in collaboration with the domestic rightwing opposition, to undermine the Venezuelan economy in order to carry out regime change. US imperialism saw Venezuela as a threat, with Chávez’s renationalisation of the oil industry, his attempt to build trade relations with other Latin American countries outside the orbit of US-led trade agreements, while looking for support in trade and investment from the likes of China. The very early success of the Chavista presidency was anathema.
Indeed, in 2002, the US, in collaboration with the Venezuelan business class, attempted a coup to overthrow Chávez. He was removed from office for 47 hours, before being reinstated by mass mobilisations. From late 2002 to early 2003, the US supported an oil lockout to bring oil production to a halt, with the stated goal of forcing Chávez to resign. In 2014, the US backed the Venezuelan right again in violent street protests called the guarimbas, demanding la salida (the exit) of Maduro (Chávez died in 2013). The US, again in collaboration with the sections of the Venezuelan right wing, attempted yet another coup in January 2019, when Juan Guiadó unconstitutionally declared himself president of Venezuela. After the January coup failed to overthrow Maduro, Guiadó tried again in April 2019, but was thwarted once more.
These attempted coups failed, but a litany of economic sanctions were imposed. Under Trump, US institutions and citizens were prohibited from trading in Venezuelan debt. All government assets were frozen. Sanctions also closed off Venezuela from its most important oil market, the US, and properties held abroad were confiscated - such as the US-based Citgo, which the state depended on for sources of income. These measures led to a loss of $6 billion in oil revenue in just 2018 alone. Sanctions froze $17 billion of the country’s assets and cost it around $11 billion in export losses in 2019, or $30 million a day.
The Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research published a 2019 report detailing the effects of US sanctions. Between 2017 and 2018 alone, they were responsible for the death of an estimated 40,000 Venezuelans and plunged many more into precarity. Over 300,000 people were put at risk because of the lack of medicine and healthcare.
But the writers in this book are at pains to argue that the collapse in Venezuela cannot be laid solely at the door of US imperialism and its sanctions. Despite the harm that the sanctions have wrought in Venezuela, the other major component was the economic mismanagement and neoliberal programme of the increasingly authoritarian Maduro government. Mainstream capitalist economists claim that the collapse of Venezuela was the result of ‘socialism’ (while many on the left claimed that the Maduro regime had to be defended as an example of such ‘socialism’). Both sides were wrong. Bean and the other writers do not accept that Chávez (and Maduro after him) had established a socialist economy, or even that Venezuela was on the ‘road to socialism’.
As I have argued in my own posts on Venezuela,1 Chávez’s relative success in improving the lot of most Venezuelans was founded on the boom in commodity prices during the 2000s. With the price of oil and natural gas high, even a modest increase in royalties and taxes created a huge influx in government revenues. This extra revenue enabled Chávez to increase social spending, create various distribution programmes and improve the standard of living of the majority of Venezuelans.
But, as Bean points out, Chávez was able to do this without touching the Venezuelan capitalist sector: “There was no real meaningful transformation of social property relations, no transformation of the international division of labour, and no challenge to the prerogatives of transnational capital.” Private capital still dominated in Venezuela throughout the presidencies of both Chávez and Maduro. The overwhelming majority of the means of production remained in the hands of the private sphere and the capitalist class. In fact, under Chávez, between 1999 and 2011 the private sector’s share of economic activity actually increased from 65% to 71%. The production and distribution of the majority of goods and services, including key industries like major food import and processing operations, pharmaceuticals, and auto parts, are still controlled by the private sector.
Even in instances where the state did own the means of production - for example, the oil and natural gas company, Petroleum of Venezuela (PDVSA), and the concrete and asphalt industries - it is the state bureaucracy that controls and makes all decisions in these industries, rather than the workers. Indeed, as Chávez put it himself, “Who would think to say that Venezuela is a socialist country? No, that would be to deceive ourselves. We are in a country that still lives in capitalism - we have only initiated a path. We are taking steps against the world current, including towards a socialist project; but this is for the medium or long term.” Most important, as I also argued,2 there was no break with the country’s dependence on the export of minerals and hydrocarbons. Venezuela’s dependence on oil exports increased during the Chávez and Maduro era, leaving the country as a ‘one-trick pony’ beholden to global financial and oil markets.
Crisis
The ‘compromise’ with Venezuelan capital finished with the end of the commodity boom in 2013. By 2015, commodity prices had hit a 12-year low. Maduro was faced with a dilemma. As Bean puts it, “Now in a situation of austere state revenues, who was going to pay for the crisis? Was it going to be labour and regular working people, the social bases that supported and voted Chávez into power?” Most important: “was there going to be a conflict with capital that had been delayed for years?”
The answer soon became clear. As one chapter by Venezuelan economist Luis Salas puts it,
There is not much difference between the economic programme of the [rightwing] opposition and that of the [Maduro] government … The only difference with the opposition is that the government wants to reach agreements with the Russians, the Chinese or the Turks, and the opposition with the Americans and Europeans. They are capitalist alliances, but with different partners.
And, as Roberto López argues later in the book,
… the inauguration of Nicolás Maduro as president in 2013 meant the almost total abandonment of the anti-neoliberal programme, and the return of the same economic policies implemented in the last decade of the 20th century. Maduro maintained the same radical discourse as his predecessor and presented his government as a genuinely ‘workerist’ and ‘socialist’ one. However, in office, he has implemented a real change of economic course, opening the doors to neoliberal policies, in a framework of growing authoritarianism.
\This too was also my view at the time.3
In 2016, the Maduro administration opened the Orinoco Mining Arc for mineral exploitation, and in 2021 he introduced ‘special economic zones’ for capitalist businesses, free of taxation and regulation. In 2018, the presidency abolished the right to strike. With the so-called Anti-Blockade Law in 2020, Maduro effectively suspended the constitution and granted authority to the executive branch for steering the economy. He dropped the living wage policy adopted under Chávez and introduced a ‘hate speech’ law that established prison sentences of up to 20 years for speeches against the government. The government also privatised major branches of industry, including oil, iron, aluminium, gold and diamonds: “Many of these privatisations targeted the very same industries that Chávez had previously nationalised, in effect carrying out a reverse appropriation that restored former state-owned assets to capitalist ownership.”
But perhaps worst of all is the cronyism. Under Maduro, the Venezuelan state has turned into a piñata, where a political-military caste distributes resources, privileges and financial benefits to secure loyalty and maintain its hold on power. The Maduro administration looked to compromise and reach agreements with the business sectors, including Fedecámaras - the big business organisation that had played a key role in the failed 2002 coup against Chávez. The voices of working class organisations were ignored.
It is the conclusion of this book’s writers from the Venezuelan left that among observers in the advanced countries of the global north, there has been a tendency
… to unwittingly lend credibility to a regime that uses the language of socialism to obscure its own oppressive and anti-worker practices. By failing to reckon with the realities of Venezuela’s crisis, such positions inadvertently sideline the struggles of the Venezuelan people, who are fighting both the consequences of the Maduro government and the suffocating sanctions imposed by the United States.
It is not socialism that failed in Venezuela, but the absence of socialist policies to end the sabotage of the capitalist sector in the country and unite the working class organisations in the struggle against US imperialism.
Now in February 2026, the Rodríguez administration is prostrate before US imperialism. The Trump administration has been clever and cautious; it has not yet replaced Maduro with the rightwing, free market, Nobel peace prize-winner (sic), Maria Machado, for fear of generating a tumult and even civil war. Instead, it is steadily forcing Rodríguez into acceding to all its demands in preparation for elections later that can then bring in a completely pro-US regime.
Michael Roberts blogs at thenextrecession.wordpress.com