Venezuela

Chavez’s progress:
from “bourgeois nationalist” to efficient direct agent for imperialism

Why do imperialism and Wall Street keep up watch over Chavez’s health? In Venezuela there appeared a bourgeois nationalist government rather “sui generis” who attempted to utilize the drive of the masses and his own role of expropriator of the proletarian revolution to negotiate with imperialism a portion of the oil rent and of the plus value drawn from the workers.
This he did state-izing to an extreme degree the worker organizations, with the Labor Ministries and the workers Central Union absolutely dependent from the government. This is because the Bonapartist governments in their “sui generis” version (i.e. those that use the mobilization of the masses “against” imperialism) wouldn’t exist unless they could control those masses very tightly, by state-izing their organizations.
 With the deepening of the capitalist world economic crisis, imperialism gives no room for any bartering and here in the Americas its says more loudly than ever “AMERICA for the (US) Americans”. Thus in Honduras, in 2009, before a belated Bolivarian attempt, the US imperialists replied with a military coup against the government of Zelaya.
Today we are in the moment when the “sui generis” Bonapartist government is every day more Bonpartist and les “sui generis”. Thus, far from trying to co-opt the masses, they confront them each time more directly.
So, once the revolutionary danger passed along in the Americas, these bourgeois governments, expropriators of revolutions, have become more and more direct agents of imperialism. And this is simply the natural process of Chavez’s and of all the bourgeois nationalist governments in the History of capitalism in the imperialist epoch. That’s because the native bourgeoisie is a junior partner of imperialism because it and its businesses depend upon imperialism.
Once more the total validity is confirmed of the Theory-Program of the Permanent Revolution, written by the Fourth International:

With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.

Not only the agrarian, but also the national question assigns to the peasantry – the overwhelming majority of the population in backward countries – an exceptional place in the democratic revolution. Without an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry the tasks of the democratic revolution cannot be solved, nor even seriously posed. But the alliance of these two classes can be realized in no other way than through an irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the national-liberal bourgeoisie.