The tone of the nearly two dozen Jacobin stories on Venezuela I was able to find ranges from celebratory to defensive. ”Today we mourn the death of Chávez, tomorrow we return to the grind for socialism," concludes one 2013 piece. Much of Jacobin's early ”criticism" of the regime laments that Chavism has not gone far enough. The Jacobin line in 2014 was that, ”Only a deepening of the Bolivarian Revolution can save it." Or, ”What is needed today, and what is more urgent than ever, is not dialogue or reconciliation, not harmony and understanding, but a radical commitment to press decisively forward." Indeed, the counterrevolutionary dissidents needed to be crushed: ”To the extent that the Bolivarian Revolution has problems, the solution to them won't come from chats with those looking to overthrow it, but rather the organization of workers trying to fulfill its potential. There can be no neutral ground between those two positions." The ”so-called human-rights abuses" were merely a pretext for Yankee imperialism.
This is all the same rhetoric Marxists used to justify the bloodshed in Soviet Russia and Maoist China. The revolution is not a dinner party, etc., etc.
As the Venezuelan economy has tumbled into crisis and the regime's failure has grown harder to deny, Jacobin's coverage has softened, but only incrementally. Demands for more fervent adherence to Marxist dogma have given way to criticisms of the regime's critics. If you have read the mainstream conservative analysis of Donald Trump, which focuses heavily on pushing back against the media and his opponents, the tone will be familiar.
”In mainstream accounts of last week's protests in Caracas, the opposition is depicted as an essentially peaceful force," complains one story. ”Strangely missing from the narrative of the Venezuelan opposition's peaceful march to victory over a cruel dictatorship was the small detail of the murder of a Venezuelan police officer by demonstrators Wednesday evening," insists another article, assailing a double standard: ”In most cases, ‘blue lives' apparently matter an awful lot — except when they're serving under a self-declared socialist national government that has been branded an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat' by the United States." A procession of stories has dismissed reports of failure in the country. ”Western journalists" are wrong, FiveThirtyEight is wrong, even Bernie Sanders is wrong.
Sunkara may want to work out why Marxist principles failed in the past, but he seems determined not to arrive at any conclusion that implicates the ideological principles that caused those failures.
In his Times op-ed, Sunkara suggests, ”The threat to democracy today is coming from the right, not the left." That is correct, but only because in the United States today, Marxism represents a minuscule faction with no plausible opportunity to obtain national-scale power. Those on the left who care about safeguarding democracy should work to keep it that way.
