April 30 Venezuela coup fails as trade war with China intensifies
On April 30, the Trump administration backed by the “Party of Order” launched a major new attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Juan Guaidó, claiming he had major military support, announced that “Operation Freedom” – the coup – had entered its final stage. The hope of Trump, Mike Pence, John Bolton, and Eliot Abrams, supported by Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, was that the Maduro government would be overthrown by May Day – the international workers’ holiday.
The hope of Trump and the Democrats was that Trump-appointed Juan Guaidó – perhaps on May Day itself – would be installed as the puppet “interim president.” The counterrevolutionary victory would then be ratified in a hastily organized election in which the overthrown Chavistas would be banned from participating, thus guaranteeing a victory for the pro-imperialist reactionaries.
Instead, the coup never got off the ground, and the Chavistas staged one of the largest May Day demonstrations in years, completely dwarfing the small, dispirited actions held by the Guaidó forces. Of course, the events of April 30-May 1 were only a battle – but an important one. A battle has been won but the war continues. The Trump administration still indicates that if all else fails it reserves the right to pass from economic and political war to a full-scale military invasion.
If the coup had succeeded, Trump, who has promised to banish socialism forever, would have celebrated what to him – and his class – would have been a major victory. When Trump uses the term socialism – a term of many meanings – he is not using it in the sense Lenin used it in his classic work “State and Revolution.”
In that work, Lenin defined socialism as the first stage of the future communist society. In this stage, private ownership of the means of production and with it the division of society into classes, along with commodity-money relations of production, have already died out.
But Lenin explained that socialism, while a form of communism, is an imperfect communism because people will still be paid, at least in part, according to their work rather than according to their needs, as would be the case in the higher form of communist society.
Trump, in contrast to Lenin, means by “socialism” the policies advocated by modern European social-democratic parties. These parties advocate a capitalist society with laws that limit the workday to 40 hours or less so workers have time to participate in politics; the right of workers to organize into unions and political parties and establish a mass workers’ press; and recognition of housing and education as rights along with social guarantees such as unemployment insurance, social security, and the right to medical care regardless of income and the ability to pay.
These things, even when taken together and fully realized, are still very far from Lenin’s definition of socialism. Under social-democratic “socialism,” society remains divided into a class of capitalist buyers of labor power and workers who sell their labor power and through their unpaid or surplus labor produce surplus value. The U.S. has achieved less of the elements of “socialism” in the modern social-democratic sense than virtually any other advanced capitalist country.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 