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Workers Vanguard No. 1155 |
17 May 2019
The closing date for news in this issue is 14 May.
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Democrat-Backed White House Coup Flops Venezuela: Down With U.S. Sanctions, Military Threats! Once again, right-wing forces acting at the behest of U.S. imperialism have attempted to seize power in Venezuela. Standing on a highway overpass near a Caracas airbase in the early morning hours of April 30, Washington stooges Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López called on the armed forces to revolt in the “final phase” of “Operation Freedom,” the campaign to overthrow the bourgeois-populist regime of Nicolás Maduro. Regurgitating White House spin, the U.S. capitalist media refused to call the coup attempt by its right name, preferring terms like “uprising” or even “protest.” But with only a couple dozen soldiers by his side, Guaidó’s plot quickly fizzled. As tens of thousands gathered to defend the presidential palace, López scurried away to the Chilean and then the Spanish Embassy, while Guaidó led a march that was dispersed by the National Guard.
All opponents of U.S. imperialism should cheer the defeat of this attempted putsch. However, the U.S. rulers remain determined to oust Maduro and install a regime loyal to their diktats. Asked about military intervention, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox Business News, “If that’s what’s required, that’s what the United States will do.” The U.S. also stepped up brutal economic sanctions against Venezuela, which sits on the world’s largest proven oil reserves as well as substantial gold and other mineral wealth.
U.S. attempts to unseat the Venezuelan regime date back to a failed 2002 coup against Maduro’s predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez. Like Maduro, Chávez was a bonapartist capitalist ruler who exercised a degree of independence from the Yankee imperialists. Proud of his mestizo background in a country with a lily-white elite, Chávez used Venezuela’s oil revenues to fund social reforms benefiting the urban and rural poor and denounced U.S. military interventions. His regime established close ties with Cuba, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, providing oil to help keep it afloat in the face of relentless U.S. hostility. The White House has now further tightened the U.S. embargo against Cuba (see article this issue).
(read on)
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The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international. Our aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less. The ICL bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and seeks in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism developed in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky and embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International as well as key documents of the Fourth International such as the Transitional Program (1938) and "War and the Fourth International" (1934). We also look to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won to Trotskyism and went on to become a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), working in close collaboration with Leon Trotsky. The origins of the ICL are in the Spartacist League/U.S., which began as the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP and was bureaucratically expelled in 1963. Our ICL "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" was modeled on the Declaration of Principles adopted at the 1966 founding conference of the SL/U.S.
