The economic conditions that pushed the United States into the great famine of the 1920s–30s, namely debt crisis, profit driven mismanagement of environmental resources, and foreclosure of personal and private property, are eerily similar to those of the 21st Century. These forces have historically worked in concert to create a downward spiral of food affordability and agronomic recession that ends in mass starvation for the working class.

Predatory agribusiness and real estate systems have not changed in any meaningful way throughout modern history. Modern capitalist agriculture is fundamentally designed to enrich capitalist profiteers, not to feed the people. Economic demand for food products is not driven by the people’s needs, but by consumer purchasing power; economic supply of food products is driven by a producer’s ability to realize profit from consumer purchasing power. Thus, under the capitalist mode of production, the devaluation of money can, has, and will cause the entire agricultural system to collapse.

In order to mitigate the damages already caused by the petroleum industry and profit driven agribusiness we must actively reverse their effects and shift our societal goals from exploitative, individualist competition towards egalitarian cooperation. Economic Degrowth, regenerative agriculture, and agrarian reform known in the United States as “Land Back” are three major tools that can not only avert famine but also actively engineer a brighter future in coordination with nature instead of industrial domination.

The 20th Century Dust Bowl — A Warning from History

Throughout its development, the United States has established itself as an agricultural hyperpower with market dominance in domestic production and colonial plantation crops. This hegemony has been cultivated through unsustainable practices of fossil fuel farming and imposed upon the rest of the world by imperialist war and economic austerity. In its aggressive expansion, the U.S. agronomy of today has become entrenched in the same practices that Hugh Bennett warned of on March 21, 1935, when he directed the attention of Congress to a Nebraska dust storm blacking out the sun in Washington D.C. This infamous storm, along with the many that preceded and followed, would become known as the Dust Bowl era of U.S. history, and the tangible manifestation of economic collapse, market stagnation, and environmental disregard. 

The Dust Bowl began when Savings and Loan banks in the 1920s — eager to exploit the inflated costs of real estate — were lending irresponsibly at unsustainable interest rates to American farmers. As farmers took on debt to invest in heavy machinery, substantial increases in harvest yields began to push prices down on staple commodities like wheat and corn. In the same way that 21st century working people sold more of their time to service interest on personal debt, farmers had to expand their arable land and harvest more crops at lower revenue to make ends meet. For example, in 1930, 68 million acres of wheat yielded 824 million bushels, generating $848 million in revenue, but by 1932, 58 million acres of wheat yielded 942 million bushels, generating just $358 million in revenue — a 14% increase in productivity, but a 57% decrease in revenue, over 2 years. 

Under immense pressure from similar interest payments throughout the 20th century, American farmers began an era of ravenous expansion: Farmland swelled from 413 million acres in 1930 to 945 million in 2000, or from 25% to 50% of the landmass of the continental U.S. Much of this land occupied the Great Plains, a landscape formerly characterized by deep-rooting prairie grasses — with roots more than 20 feet deep — capable of soaking up more than 7 inches of rain in a single storm and retaining it in one of the world’s greatest deposits of rich, black topsoil. The destruction of the North American prairie and its replacement with shallow-rooting monocultures has directly decreased the amount of freshwater held within the interior U.S., which contributes to rising sea levels and sustained droughts. 

Capitalist agriculture necessitates expensive, constant supervision of water resources to combat the symptoms of drastically reduced water infiltration and retention in the ground. Once a section of land has been cleared of native plants, farmers rely on combinations of retention ponds, irrigation systems, subterranean aquifers, rain collection, and municipal water supplies to retain moisture in the ground. With the onset of the Great Depression, urban citizens were unable to afford food, market prices dropped, and the lack of financial input bloated interest payments for most farmers. Between 1929 and 1932, more than 30% of U.S. farms were foreclosed, leaving over 100 million acres of tilled farmland completely barren and unmanaged, mainly in the Midwestern and Plains states. 

The culmination of these economic issues was a devastating period of drought and starvation in the U.S. while unsold crops rotted in piles or dried out in fields unreachable by the hungry and destitute masses.

A Dust Bowl for the Space Age

In the modern United States, wages have stagnated to such a point that the 2022 consumer holds less purchasing power than they would in 1980. This net negative for labor is the result of 40 years of neoliberal financial development and trickle-down tomfoolery. This decrease in consumer dollar power has already fomented a steep recession in agricultural activity: Farm debt is at an all time high, and farm profits are at all time lows. Farmer suicide rates — normally twice as high as the average — are increasing in tandem with drought conditions as the Colorado River system fails. Meanwhile, farm foreclosure rates are breaking records across the corn belt, once again leaving millions of acres barren and unmanaged. 

The average cost of cropland in the United States has increased 7.8% just from 2020 to 2021, and more than 75% since 2007. Over the same 15 year period, farmland mortgage debt has climbed 267% from $112.7Bn to $301Bn, achieving a U.S. total farm debt of $464.4Bn in 2022. On top of this grim financial situation, geopolitics and capital interests have caused substantial cost increases in seed, fuel, fertilizer, and water to compound the larger trend of failing farms. In reaction to the exploding cost of farm production, market prices are increasing leading to a 12.2% increase in the consumer price index for “food at home” over the last year and are projected to continue outpacing alarmingly high inflation. 

Climate change is predictably disrupting agriculture. Seasons continue to shift, rainfall becomes unreliable, and megadroughts are drying up dozens of major rivers across all six inhabited continents. In the Southwest U.S., where North America is experiencing its worst drought, the Colorado, Arizona, Canadian, Red, Pecos, Arkansas, and Rio Grande Rivers are running dry, while others in the agricultural heartland, like the Gasconade River in southeastern Missouri, have begun a deadly cycle of severe flooding and extreme drought, greatly damaging crops, infrastructure, and livelihoods in the region. In California alone, a million acres of farmland are expected to be lost to drought in 2022, as farmers make the financial decision to destroy established orchards and plow fields of immature crops, while California water prices reach all time highs. 

The severe untenability of this situation has farm operators and workers across the U.S. living in fear of foreclosure, and their farmland in threat of dereliction. This will inevitably lead to increased drought and flood severity, increased food prices, and decreased nutritional availability and diversity for the vast majority of people. These crises will continue to coalesce into a modern day mega-famine across the American Southwest unless revolutionary changes are effected in the way our societies allocate resources.

Avenues for Healing: Degrowth, Regenerative Agriculture, and “Land Back”

The U.S. began its slow recovery from the Dust Bowl and Great Depression — thanks largely to Hugh Bennett — when Congress passed the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936. The act not only gave the USDA purview over soil conditions and water conservation, but also directly increased wages for farm workers in a widely successful effort to boost consumer buying power from the root. Another example of FDR’s New Deal policies that edged towards U.S. agriculture reform, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1935, saw the federal government purchase more than 6 million domestic pigs and create the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation (dissolved in 1942) to distribute these and other surplus agricultural commodities to “destitute households.” However, our agronomic systems have calcified against the same social policies that saved the U.S. from civilizational collapse in the mid 20th century. This is evidenced by the ongoing food supply collapse under the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which millions of pigs and chickens have been euthanized (i.e., wasted), and more than a hundred million acres of land crops have been burned, buried, or otherwise left to ruin.

Politically, the solution to these problems exists by the name of Economic Degrowth. This movement is known particularly well in France, where notorious economist Timothée Parrique earned his PhD by compiling a constellation of disconnected policies and procedures into a coherent theory, deserving the attention of activists, policy makers, and economic planners globally. In his 2019 thesis, The Political Economy of Degrowth, Dr. Parrique meticulously explains the governing mechanics of turning entire capitalist economies on their heads, utilizing political power to actively redistribute resources among the working class. Degrowth has finally gained enough attention to be mentioned more than 5 times in the Sixth Report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a means to mitigate climate damage and minimize catastrophe. 

Everyone can contribute to healing the landscape in their local environments through Regenerative Agriculture — the practice of using agricultural techniques to regenerate ecosystems to their natural balance while maintaining an ability to extract food. The closest modern America has come to this kind of revolutionary food-system shift was the Victory Garden movement that began in WWI and eventually accounted for 40% of U.S. fresh produce in 1943. In order to achieve this, citizens were empowered to rehabilitate public land for agricultural use; or, in other words, (very) partial land reform. Rehabilitation of derelict urban land — like the 30,000 empty lots in Cook County owned by the City of Chicago — will not only provide local communities with the potential for food sovereignty, but reduce flooding through improved rain absorption, reduce summer temperatures through shading and plant respiration, as well as the myriad of social and health benefits inherent in dignifying the working class.

A perfect union of Economic Degrowth and Regenerative Agriculture has already manifested in the Land Back movement — a decolonization effort to return stolen land and culture to Indigenous governance. Before the 15th-Century invasion of the Americas, beginning with Columbus, Indigenous communities spent millennia transforming their environments into plentiful agroforests and prairielands on a scale that would blow the tin pot off Johnny Appleseed’s head. The techniques needed to combat global climate catastrophe and systemic collapse have already been developed and practiced in Indigenous cultures. Our primary task is to remove the systems of oppression that prohibit their reimplementation. 

If we intend to evade the looming civilizational collapse of the 21st century we must revolutionize our food systems with Regenerative Agriculture. We must return the land to Indigenous Stewardship. And we must embrace Economic Degrowth policy that supports people over profits and serves hunger over industry.

A Note From the Editors

The author correctly (more or less) diagnoses the problem, but prescribes an inadequate solution. This prescription has two components: degrowth and “regenerative agriculture,” which the author says are “united” in the Land Back movement.

The main problem with both components, and with the whole prescription, is that they are essentially reformist, not revolutionary.

Let’s examine either in turn.

First, the author calls for degrowth. Unfortunately, the author never tells us what degrowth actually is. Instead, the author sings the praises of a certain French economist and degrowth advocate, who is said to call for, “turning entire capitalist economies on their heads, utilizing political power to actively redistribute resources among the working class.” This has the elements of a definition, but is still too vague to really tell us what degrowth actually is.

Degrowth can be defined as a movement for mass deindustrialization and the extreme curtailing of production and consumption, based on the ecology-oriented critique of economic growth. A basic premise is that capitalism is predicated on unlimited growth, despite the Earth having finite resources — all true. Thus, within the degrowth movement are moderates, who wish to diminish capitalist production through reforms, and radicals, who wish to eliminate capitalism altogether, also through reforms. Another basic premise of degrowth is that sustainable development is not possible (or, should be assumed impossible), and that efforts to build an ecologically sustainable economy (e.g., investing in renewable energy, electrified public transportation, and so on) are still “growth” and should therefore be ended.

Without entering into a full discussion of the merits and limits of degrowth, the problem at hand is that the movement’s progressive ideas will never be implemented in public policy without a socialist revolution. Countries characterized by the capitalist mode of production are ruled by dictatorships of the property-owning and labor-exploiting classes, first and foremost the capitalists; the governments of these countries exist to defend the interests of the capitalists, and any demand to scale back production will, needless to say, threaten the profits of the capitalists. Despite its more radical theoretical content, the degrowth movement has not significantly departed from the practical orientation of its fellow environmentalist counterparts: Its proponents mainly focus on lobbying governments, setting up think tanks, working with NGOs, holding academic conferences, and so on.

This is why degrowth and other reformist environmentalist movements, such as the Green movement, while progressive in content, are incapable of achieving the revolutionary changes we need to repair Earth.

Degrowth proponents envision a new, post-capitalist, ecologically healed world, and yet seem to believe, wrongly, that such a world can be reformed into existence by existing governments. The author of the above article, despite identifying as a Communist and holding membership in an ostensibly “Communist” party (the CPUSA), fails to challenge this reformist practical orientation, and likewise says that degrowth demands the attention of “activists, policy makers, and economic planners,” as well as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the degrowth movement has already caught the attention of governmental and intergovernmental bodies across the world — and, as with every other environmentalist reform movement that threatens capitalist interests, those bodies have mostly chosen to quietly acknowledge degrowth, while failing to actually act on its proposals. Clearly, we cannot rely on the good will of “policy makers and economic planners,” nor on the UN. Clearly, begging our rulers and oppressors for reforms won’t work.

All Communists should adopt the best elements of degrowth — assuming we haven’t already. But we must recognize that only a socialist revolution that overthrows the capitalists and builds a new, eco-socialist global economy will manifest the political willpower and ability to repair our planet while at the same time ensuring that all people enjoy abundance, prosperity, and equality.

Second, the author calls for “regenerative agriculture,” which he defines only vaguely as “using agricultural techniques to regenerate ecosystems.” While on principle we would of course support such programs, we disagree with the author’s characterization of this as a “revolutionary food-system.” The author cites as an (imperfect) example of regenerative agriculture the “Victory Garden movement” of the first half of the 20th Century. It is interesting to note that the New York Times article cited by the author, as an explanation of the Victory Garden movement, argues that the “movement” was not really grassroots, and was not really about “empowering citizens,” nor about “revolutionizing” agriculture, nor about “regenerating ecosystems.” The Victory Garden “movement” was a U.S. Federal Government campaign to instill the American public with wartime patriotism, and it served to increase the profits of large-scale agribusinesses, not to undermine capitalist agriculture. The “movement” was abandoned shortly after the Second World War ended, mainly because the public, especially the white suburbanites, lost interest in small-scale agriculture.

The author then calls for the “rehabilitation of derelict urban land” for this same purpose, which he says will “provide local communities with the potential for food sovereignty,” in addition to various ecological benefits. We would of course support a community gardening movement that fostered solidarity among working and dispossessed people, while potentially alleviating some degree of food poverty, especially one that came packaged with ecological benefits. But there is nothing inherently “revolutionary” about repurposing undeveloped lots to serve as gardening allotments. Plenty of cities across the world feature public allotments of this sort, and while they’re certainly neat, struggling for reforms to open up such allotments in U.S. cities won’t in and of itself bring us an inch closer dismantling capitalism (and therefore to achieving true “food sovereignty” for the dispossessed) or to repairing our planet’s biosphere.

Again, in principle we support the author’s “regenerative agriculture” model. But the problem at hand is that only a socialist revolution can realize this model as a revolutionary initiative — an initiative that simultaneously contributes to ecological restoration and the elimination of food poverty.

Finally, the author prescribes the “Land Back” slogan. All Communists must support the reclamation of stolen land by Indigenous peoples, and the right of all Indigenous peoples to return to and enjoy sovereignty in their respective homelands. All Communists must support decolonization. Problematically, however, the author again fails to state how this will happen, aside from the very vague, “remove the systems of oppression” in the way of decolonization. We feel the need, again, to state unambiguously that decolonization necessitates revolution. In other words, the just “Land Back” demand cannot be reformed into reality. The only way to decolonize North America will be to overthrow, abolish, and dismantle the U.S. Empire, as well as its junior-partner Canada, in a continent-wide anti-colonial revolution. Only then will “Land Back” become a reality.

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

Characteristics of Political Mobilization

Political mobilisation in Venezuela is very different from in Jamaica.

In Jamaica, there are 2 main political parties and they have their own branches like women, youth, young professionals, and labour unions. There is a sense of cohesion and the parties’ branches fall totally under the party, with the exception of the unions which have a greater degree of an independent identity88. You either support one party or the other; the parties don’t have coalitions with other organisations that aren’t subordinate to them or seen as one of their branches. Also, we don’t really have social movements in Jamaica; the activist space is dominated by NGOs.

In Venezuela, things are different. The Bolivarian Revolution is supported by a broad base of political parties, unions, social movements, communes, and collectives. Some political parties that support the Venezuelan government have existed from before Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro started their political careers. There are many people and organisations in Venezuela who don’t support or aren’t aligned with the ruling party but still support Nicolas Maduro.

Caracas

In Caracas, the pro-government political mobilisations are massive. I can never see where they start or end, as they are always and endless sea of people. You can see multiple flags of different political movements and parties, like the PCV and ORA.

Mérida

We were told that Mérida is an opposition state and that we should take extra measures with our security because it was one of the opposition strongholds during the Guarimba riots in 2017. You could see cracked windows and bullet holes in buses.

Nevertheless, we never really encountered any problems apart from some minor jeering when we visited Pico Bolívar. The jeering usually seems to be only playful, though we were warned of the risk of escalation into violence.

While we had a demonstration in the streets against some newly-announced sanctions, random persons on the street cheered along, some joined us, some waved from their windows with their pro-government flags and banners, and I vividly remember a truck driver smiling and cheering along even though it meant he was in traffic. Someone even took a photo with some of us. We got a few bad stares, but all of the persons who gave us bad stares were white.

Lara

Lara has a strong presence of communes and communal bodies. The PPT, a pro-government party which is distinct from the PSUV, has very strong support in Lara. When we had a meeting with the Governor of Lara, she was wearing a PPT jacket instead of a PSUV jacket even though she is from the PSUV. The PPT is one of the parties that existed before the Bolivarian Revolution or before the political careers of either Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro. The PPT is stronger in some municipalities in Lara than the PSUV is.

We saw persons of all ages involved in activities held by the commune that we visited in Lara. A sense of unity and collective pride existed there. We had some difficult conversations there about some internal issues in the Bolivarian Revolution, but unity was still able to be maintained through necessary compromises.

The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV)

It’s important to note that the Communist Party of Venezuela openly supports Maduro and the government. They had supported Hugo Chavez, they have endorsed Maduro in the last 2 presidential elections, and they have maintained a coalition with the PSUV, the party of Maduro and Chavez, during legislative elections.

I don’t know how popular the PCV is, but I have met more persons – both young and old – who are from the PCV than from any other party, including the ruling party. I know more than a handful of PCV supporters who I met in Jamaica, and even more that I’ve met in Venezuela.

The PCV isn’t uncritical of the government, and their analysis of the situation is very different from the PSUV’s analysis of the situation, despite the fact that they’re allies. Of course, different persons or organisations don’t need to agree with each other on everything to be allies; the point of noting this all is that the people and organisations who support Maduro don’t do so blindly or without reason, and Maduro’s supporters are sensible people who can think for themselves. I knew this before visiting Venezuela, but I needed to point it out to others who ignore the support that Maduro has and only focuses on the expressions of the opposition. In the West, common discourse will find every reason to explain why some people support the opposition in Venezuela, but their discussions always omit reasons that people support the government; sometimes they make silly assumptions that the people only support the government because of welfare, but even this is false as I witnessed for myself that self-governed communes and community-based initiatives that don’t benefit from the government are still ardent supporters of the government.

There are grievances which are negative sides of the PSUV’s relationship with the PCV, but those specific things are typical in any multi-party democracy where a dominant coalition partner takes pride in its ‘majority’ within the coalition and feels no need to make concessions to their minor allies. These things are issues with the PSUV as a party and many of its functionaries, not specifically Maduro; I know this well because I’ve encountered issues with some of them myself and heard of some things from others, but these others are still people who support Maduro and the government. Criticism of the PSUV is distinct from criticism of Maduro.

Maduro is not a perfect leader; no-one is. This doesn’t mean that the PCV only supports him because he is the ‘lesser evil’ – it means that disagreements and criticism can exist among different forces which are aiming for the same general long term goals, especially about the path to take to get there and the pace of following that path. Criticism of the government doesn’t have to mean that persons want to change their government; many organisations and people want changes but push the government to make the changes rather than to try to overthrow the government, and that is the approach that the PCV and many other organisations and movements take. They see progress as a process, and they understand themselves to be a part of that process. rather than finding themselves antagonistic towards the government’s efforts.

It’s also important to note that the PCV takes a more hardline position on some issues. They opted not to re-join the National Assembly when the PSUV made peace with some sectors of the opposition, because they still see it as a body that it is contempt; they see the current assembly as “the key tool of imperialist aggression” – they support the Constituent National Assembly instead, and believe that it “should have taken forceful action” against Juan Guaidó when he proclaimed himself to be president. Outside of Venezuela, the Constituent National Assembly is painted as a body that was solely created to increase the PSUV’s power, but this is clearly not the case if a party that is critical of the PSUV has endorsed the body and has even complained that it doesn’t go far enough in making moves against the opposition.

The West spreads the idea that Maduro is an authoritarian dictator; however, inside Venezuela, some people complain that he isn’t authoritarian enough. Those who support or empathise with the opposition should be somewhat relieved that it is Maduro and the PSUV who are in power, and not someone from the PCV or the average supporter of the government who impatiently wait on the government to make certain moves and wish that the government would brutally crackdown on the big Capitalists and some opposition leaders.

Internationally, those who bash Maduro and the Venezuelan government don’t only do so from the right-wing; many self-labelled Socialists in the West also bash Venezuela because it still has a market economy, or other things that give them reasons to say that Venezuela doesn’t have ‘real’ or ‘pure’ Socialism. Ironically, these clowns are not anywhere close to building Socialism in their own countries, and they make excuses for compromising and supporting weak Capitalist candidates all the time. I prefer to listen to the PCV than to some Western chauvinists.

The PCV leader says that the party openly discusses Venezuela’s internal contradictions with international allies but specify that their struggle with the PSUV is an internal one and that they unite with the PSUV against the opposition locally and against the US internationally. It’s not the place of outsiders to get involved in the internal struggles of Venezuela’s Left; Comrades will of course offer their opinions and share them with each other, but that is not the same as bashing and discrediting. There is a responsible way in which Comrades and allied organisations can offer advice to each other or even to engage in critique with each other; it can be harsh, but these things should be done with discretion and in specific spaces.

Perception of Police

My friends and Comrades from different parts of Venezuela have very different views/opinions on police. My Comrades in Caracas and Petare have very negative views of the police, despite being hardline supporters of the government. This shows that their opinions of the police and of the government don’t impact each other much, if at all.

I attended a memorial service for 6 Comrades who were murdered in Barinas; there was a sense that the police were not doing enough to address the incident. Despite their negative views on police, the Comrades who mourned their deaths were hardline supporters of Maduro and the government; the murdered activists and the Comrades who mourned them were Chavistas after all, and the movement that they were from also strongly supports the government. They have held demonstrations, but they are not of the same nature as the opposition demonstrations.

When we stayed in the apartment complex in Carora, there was an interaction with police that made me and some other Comrades uncomfortable, because of our general feelings about the police in the places that we are from; a Comrade from Brazil explained how police in Brazil are reactionary, and Comrades from Caracas and Petare showed some slight discomfort. The police were there for our own protection and offered to escort us, and they interacted mainly with an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who was with us as security; a Comrade was telling me that the police officers’ intentions were good but that people would look at it in a negative light. However, the people in Lara who were hosting us said otherwise; she told us not to worry and that “the police here are different” as the Comrade from Brazil explained how bad the police in Brazil are.

I felt more comfortable after this, i.e. after our hosts in Carora told me that the police actually have decent relations with the people, even though the police in Caracas seem to be less successful with that. At another point, a Comrade from Mérida told us that the police in Mérida aren’t very aggressive or violent. A friend from Petare told me that the police in different parts of Venezuela are different, that police in Caracas and Petare are awful and don’t respect human rights but that I can trust what I’m told by Comrades from other parts of Venezuela.

We sometimes hear of how brutal police in Venezuela are, and the point of this section is to show that their character is not reflective of the character of the Bolivarian Revolution. After all, supporters of the government are open and honest about their negative views on police, and some of the police themselves are involved in the attempts to discredit or unseat the government.

On Peaceful Coexistence

I had a conversation with a Comrade about the topic of China and its role in countering the US’ hegemony and said that I would one day consider writing to the Communist Party of China on the matter. Like Khrushchev and the revisionist leaders who came after him in the USSR, China has been pursuing a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West; the idea is to maintain global peace and stability and prevent war. I have also engaged a Comrade from Cuba on this topic.

What exists in the world right now is not peaceful, and what they are trying to prevent is not violence; violence is already happening everyday as a result of US hegemony. Economic warfare continues against Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, the DPRK, and other countries. The world has watched while the US and its allies attempt to destroy Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. The peace that we are trying to preserve is an illusion, while people in particular countries experience violence daily.

While progressive governments have good intentions in reconciliation with the West, they are attempting to avoid war and the most overt forms of violence while leaving themselves vulnerable to continued strategies by the imperialists to weaken them and strike again later. We saw this with the Cuban government attempting reconciliation with the US, as it has been doing for decades, with the intention of ending the brutal blockade; however, we saw that the US was intending to replace an old regime change strategy to one that they considered smarter and more effective.

While making it clear to the world that they are allies, certain countries have still negotiated with the US on an individual basis instead of forming a strong united front. Cuba, the DPRK, and Iran have all negotiated to improve their own standing – and this is understandable and expected that each country will put itself first and that such negotiations are conventionally bilateral, but conventions have all been based on existing practice rather than things set in stone. The problem is that the US will negotiate with one country while attacking 3 of its allies, and the country that it’s negotiating with is backed into a corner to be nice and maintain a smiley face with the US because it’s backed into a corner about its own conditions.

But peace between the US and other countries is a fantasy. Even during peace time, the US won’t respect other nations’ sovereignty; it was built by the destruction of many other nations as it expanded its borders Westward under a “Manifest Destiny” doctrine. As we pretend that a peaceful world under the current conditions is possible, we weaken ourselves every day; at what point do we say that enough is enough? When will we challenge and overthrow the hegemony?

How many more countries will be invaded or bombed? How many more people need to suffer the brutal effects of blockades and economic warfare? We condemn these things, but we allow them to happen. Why do we aim for peace with an entity that commits so many acts of evil? Why does it satisfy us to have peace with a government that is bombing and destroying another country at the very same time?

Where do we draw the line? It wasn’t drawn after the wars in Viet Nam or Korea, it wasn’t drawn after the invasion of Grenada, it wasn’t drawn more recently after the invasion of Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands, it wasn’t drawn after the destruction of Libya, it hasn’t been drawn after decades of a genocidal economic policy towards Cuba, and it hasn’t been drawn after the US decided to engage in economic warfare against the peoples of Venezuela and Iran.

At the end of the Sao Paulo Forum, Maduro spoke of one day going on the counter-offensive against imperialism; true anti-imperialists are eager for the conditions to be right to do this and for it to be done. One could argue that it is already being done by the people’s movements resisting neoliberal policies and puppet governments in Haiti, Honduras, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, and other countries.

Still, I want to know; when do we move, from just surviving despite imperialism, to overthrowing imperialism? We will have no room to construct Socialism if we always have to worry about the imperialists intervening and violently re-imposing Capitalism on our peoples.

This idea that we must try to aim for peaceful coexistence and resist confrontation at all cost is not working, considering that the cost is that people are suffering and even dying in the violent conditions that the hegemony has imposed on them. The times of ‘peace’ that we have are not peace in the real sense, and the balance of power isn’t shifting; imperialism continues to grow stronger while countries that are resisting imperialism are focusing on their own survival. We are not buying time when we accept the imaginary peace; we are weakening ourselves with delusion as we let our guard down. Peace does give us some time to manoeuvre, but we often get too complacent in these times rather than reminding ourselves that we are in a constant struggle.

This is not a rejection of peace. We want peace, but we can’t keep letting our guard down in these times of nominal peace. This is also not a call for war; war is already being waged by imperialists so anti-imperialists wouldn’t be starting one. This is also not a call to take any sudden reckless actions to intensify war, but it is a call to recognise the reality we live in and that our efforts towards peace may not actually be bringing about peace for our peoples. This is something to bear in mind, going forward. Our final goal can’t be coexisting with imperialists who don’t value our lives.

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The most radical thing we can do, then, is to reshape our international relations in light of this reality. Again, this doesn’t mean supporting any sort of violence. It can be something as simple as radically changing our trade relations to decentre the West and give it less power. Our dependence on trade with the powerful Western countries gives them the power to coerce and control us. They have hegemony over the global economy, and demanding to remain assimilated in this current economy will always have us on our knees.

Individually, progressive Nationalist governments in the Third World have been doing this. They have tried to take control of natural resources from the hands of multinational entities, and they have faced sabotage and intervention; this is not a critique of these countries. This is a critique of the other nations which sit and watch this happen, offering nice-sounding critique after the fact but not doing anything concrete.

We cannot live like this. We cannot be smiling with the West while it strangles Cuba and other nations that we care about. The international community must draw a line and take concrete action, something more than just verbally denouncing the blockade at UN sessions each year, or more than throwing shade with vague language to criticise the US. If this spineless faux-clever approach that we take to the world’s problems now was the same one that we had applied to the problem of Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes in the 1930s, the Nazis would have dominated the world at the time.

Other Things

There are good things that happened that don’t have detailed notes, like a meeting with someone who will soon be sent to head Venezuela’s diplomatic mission to Jamaica, an Afro-descendants’ meeting in November that we got invited to, public canteens where people who don’t have food can eat for free, a visit to a potato farm, a visit to an archaeological museum that focuses on the history of indigenous peoples in Western Venezuela, our visit to the national pantheon, things I learned about veterinary services in Venezuela, and some other things.

Conclusion

My experiences in Venezuela are anecdotal, as anyone’s experience would be if they spent a considerable amount of time there and wrote a report. This does not mean that I spent time to talk to more than 30 million Venezuelans or that I know everything about Venezuela, but I know enough to say the things that I have said.

Despite the limitations of my observations and analyses, I think they are important experiences that depart from the narratives that are actively pushed by Western media. The things that I witnessed and experienced were not 100% positive; nonetheless, they have reaffirmed my confidence in the Bolivarian Revolution and in people’s movements in other countries – including my own – in general.

This report doesn’t have a particular central/single aim beyond documenting the things that I witnessed and experienced so that they are not lost in memory. Where some things are highlighted, the reasons that they’re being highlighted are explicitly stated. Things in this document may be cited as a reference for the organisation’s positions on issues in the future.