by Sirantos Fotopoulos
For a brief historical moment in the early twenty-first century, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela appeared to rupture the global neoliberal consensus that had dominated Latin America. Under Hugo Chávez, elected in 1998 amid deep social exhaustion with austerity and elite capture of oil wealth, Venezuela embarked on an experiment that promised to redistribute income, expand social rights, and reassert popular sovereignty against both domestic oligarchies and imperial discipline. The project was never a fully realized socialist transformation, but it did succeed — for a time — in materially improving the lives of millions of poor Venezuelans and in re-opening political possibilities that had been foreclosed for decades. That it ultimately collapsed so catastrophically under Nicolás Maduro does not negate those gains, but it does demand a sober post-mortem — one that resists both Cold War caricature and uncritical nostalgia.
The early Bolivarian period was marked by tangible achievements. Fueled by rising global oil prices in the 2000s, the Chávez government channeled petroleum rents into expansive social programs that dramatically reduced poverty, expanded access to education and healthcare, and incorporated marginalized populations into political life through communal councils and participatory initiatives. Illiteracy declined, malnutrition fell, and millions gained access to subsidized food and medical care for the first time. These were concrete improvements in material conditions, and they explain why Chávez retained genuine mass support well into the later years of his presidency. Any serious analysis must begin by acknowledging that the Bolivarian project addressed real suffering and did so in ways that orthodox liberal governance in Venezuela had conspicuously failed to achieve.
Yet embedded within these achievements were structural weaknesses that were never resolved and that became decisive once favorable external conditions evaporated. Venezuela remained a profoundly rentier economy, dependent on oil exports for the overwhelming majority of its foreign earnings and state revenue. Redistribution was financed not by a transformed productive base but by volatile commodity income, leaving social gains acutely vulnerable to price fluctuations beyond national control. Nationalizations, while symbolically important, often failed to establish democratic workers’ control or coherent planning mechanisms, instead reproducing bureaucratic hierarchies within state ownership. Domestic production stagnated, imports expanded, and price and currency controls — introduced to manage inflation and capital flight — gradually distorted incentives and decimated productive capacity rather than rebuilding it. Political power, meanwhile, became increasingly centralized in the executive, with institutions subordinated to the presidency and dissent framed as existential threat rather than as a corrective force.
These contradictions did not originate with Nicolás Maduro, but his presidency exposed and intensified them. When Maduro assumed office in 2013, the global commodity boom had ended, oil prices were falling, and Venezuela’s fiscal model was already under severe strain. Instead of recalibrating policy to confront these realities, the government doubled down on controls, improvised monetary expansion, and tolerated the steady decay of state capacity. Oil production collapsed due to chronic underinvestment, managerial dysfunction, and the politicization of technical institutions such as PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. — Venezuela's state-owned oil and gas company). Hyperinflation followed as the state resorted to printing money to cover deficits amid collapsing output. Shortages became endemic, infrastructure deteriorated, and real wages were obliterated. Long before the most punitive international sanctions were imposed, Venezuela was already in economic freefall, undermining claims that external pressure alone explains the catastrophe.
At the same time, the political response to crisis proved disastrous. Rather than expanding democratic participation to confront economic breakdown, the Maduro government increasingly relied on repression, legal manipulation, and institutional bypass to maintain power. The sidelining of the National Assembly, the erosion of electoral credibility, and the criminalization of dissent alienated broad segments of the population, including many who had once supported the Bolivarian project. What remained of the revolution’s legitimacy was progressively replaced by coercion and patronage, hollowing out the popular foundation that had sustained it under Chávez. The result was not merely economic collapse but social disintegration, reflected in the mass emigration of millions of Venezuelans whose departure further weakened productive and civic life.
The Venezuelan experience is best understood not as the failure of socialism but as the failure of a state-centered, rent-dependent reform project that never escaped the structural constraints of capitalism. The Bolivarian Revolution redistributed surplus without fundamentally transforming the relations of production that generated it. Workers were beneficiaries of state spending but rarely subjects of democratic economic power. Planning was bureaucratic rather than collective, and popular institutions lacked the autonomy needed to discipline the state itself. When crisis arrived, there were no robust mechanisms through which the working-class could intervene to correct policy, reorganize production, or hold leadership accountable. The revolution had mobilized the masses electorally and rhetorically, but it had not sufficiently embedded them in the everyday governance of the economy.
Reliance on extractive rents, combined with centralized authority and weak worker control, creates a fragile equilibrium that cannot survive prolonged shocks. Bureaucracy, far from being a neutral administrative tool, tends under such conditions to become a conservative force prioritizing institutional self-preservation over transformative goals. Corruption and inefficiency are not moral aberrations in this framework but predictable outcomes of concentrated power without democratic counterweights. When revolutionary legitimacy is grounded more in historical narrative and external antagonism than in present material improvement, it erodes rapidly once living standards collapse.
The Venezuelan case also exposes the limits of anti-imperialism when it is decoupled from internal democracy. Opposition to foreign intervention and sanctions is not only justified but necessary, yet it cannot substitute for accountable governance or excuse domestic repression. A politics that treats popular hardship as collateral damage in a geopolitical struggle ultimately forfeits the allegiance of the very class it claims to represent. International solidarity cannot be sustained through slogans alone; it depends on the credibility of a project that demonstrably advances human flourishing.
The lessons here are uncomfortable but indispensable for the Marxist left. Redistribution without structural transformation is reversible. State ownership without democratic control is brittle. Charismatic leadership without durable institutions invites collapse once the leader is gone. And economic sovereignty built on a single commodity is not sovereignty at all but dependency by another name. Venezuela fell not because it challenged global capitalism, but because it did so incompletely, inconsistently, and without building the material and institutional foundations necessary to endure crisis.
None of this erases the significance of the Bolivarian moment or the real hopes it generated. On the contrary, its tragedy lies precisely in the distance between what it promised and what it ultimately delivered. For those committed to emancipatory politics, the Venezuelan collapse should not function as a warning against ambition, but as a reminder that genuine transformation requires more than redistribution, more than rhetoric, and more than control of the state. It requires the patient construction of democratic economic power from below, capable of surviving both external pressure and internal failure. Without that, even the most inspiring revolutions remain vulnerable to their own contradictions
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