The World Peace Council (WPC) returned to the Americas this month, holding both its Executive Committee and its Americas and Caribbean Continental meeting in Montreal, Canada.
Hosted by the Canadian Peace Congress, the Mouvement Québécois pour la Paix, and the US Peace Council from October 30 to November 1, this was, amazingly, the first time the WPC executive had met in North America in 76 years.
With it, the concept of a revolutionary peace stemming from the construction of socialism through class struggle was firmly whacked back into the Americas’ ballpark, catalyzing the debate about what type of “peace” the region seeks.
“Guaranteeing peace” has featured as the backbone of Venezuela’s tutelaged triumvirate’s flex spin to justify their continued iron grip on power, with Delcy Rodriguez jumping through oil-clad hoops to convince her Orange Master that it is she and her cronies, and not the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Witch of the West, Maria Corina Machado, newly returned to Venezuela, who can keep the country “at peace”.
‘Peace’ in Venezuela?
As the dust was still settling from the barbaric January 3 bombing of Caracas, Delcy took front stage in an “annual address” to the nation.
In it, she stated:
“History has placed me in this responsibility in one of the toughest moments to preserve peace in our nation. As our Liberating Father [Simon Bolívar] said, ‘Peace will be my haven, my glory, my reward, my joy, and all that is precious in the world.’ This is what I have stamped on my soul, what it means to maintain peace in this republic. And I invite you all, as Venezuelans, to preserve the peace, to preserve the calm of our nation and to do so with absolute historic maturity and responsibility. There is no other path.”
Her sycophants picked up on this cue instantly. ‘Delcy appeased imperialism to avoid bloodshed and open warfare, and to guarantee peace,’ they echo.
Yet this tricky definition of “peace” is foolishly simplistic. On the one hand, it equates “peace” with “appeasement”; on the other, it reduces “peace” to “no war between states” while draining it of all class content.
A more complete understanding of peace includes social justice, living conditions, human rights, developmental tensions, and class war. The Venezuelan bourgeois state may not be “at war” with any other state, but its wage freeze shows it is certainly “at war” with the working class, just as the police are “at war” with the poor, large landowners are “at war” with peasants, industry is at war with the environment, and capital is “at war” with organized labor, leaving the fallacy of peace hung out to dry on the battlefield of class conflict.
Hours later, Delcy revealed her side in this war by announcing the reopening of the US embassy in Caracas, parading a catwalk of top US political and military figures, welcoming back US oil multinationals, handing over 1/5 of Venezuela’s net oil reserves, saluting the Zionists, and privatizing key sectors, as well as thanking Mr. Trump for his efforts in rebuilding Venezuela.
She also obediently oversaw the US Marines’ return to the US Embassy, US Osprey helicopters carrying out flyovers of Caracas, joint US-Venezuela military ops, and IDF troops on the ground, all while Trump is “looking at” constructing a US military base in the country. She is the “guarantor of peace,” remember.
As such, it’s clear that Delcy’s idea of peace is one that preaches submission to those who recently bombed us, to those who steal our resources and labor power and violate our sovereignty, and amounts to no more than class capitulation to put out the fires of struggle and appease foreign investment capital.
It is a “peace” that urges us to embrace those who exploit us day in, day out, those who look down on us from their air-conditioned offices of power, and those who repress us when we dare to organize or speak up. It is a peace based on trying to bury the contradictions inherent in a class-based society under the rug rather than resolve them. It is a false bourgeois peace with enforced poverty, banned political parties, locked-up trade unionists, and media censorship, which guarantees stability for large investment capital without social upheaval, labor conflict, or electoral commotion. It is a conservative peace that seeks to “preserve the calm” of the status quo.
One manifestation of this “peace” was the recent meetings Delcy headed with the leaders of the Federation of Chambers of Business and Commerce (FEDECAMARAS) and of Industry (FEDEINDUSTRIA) and the yes-men government unionists of the CBST [the largest pro-government trade union federation], which established “workplace consensuses” that guarantee “labor stability” and buried all contradictions, for now. Another is the block on a return to the electoral path.
But that’s not all: Delcy’s spin doctors are working overtime to place “peace” at the center of her Quisling government.
Delcy’s speech of betrayal at the UN General Assembly was coined “diplomacy of peace”; the government’s August policy package a “Program for Peace and Democratic Coexistence”; local government organizations proclaim to “defend peace” through community coercion; its yes-men call on workers to march “for peace” and defend the government; and on September 21, International Day of Peace, the government flexed that “Venezuela is a country that is a guarantor of peace”.
Gone are the days of confrontational rhetoric. These are days of sanction waivers, or removal from black lists, of “peaceful cooperation” and, as Lenin put it, “meaningless, non-committal, goody-goody desires of pacifism” with imperialism, with the bourgeoisie, and with large capital.
Peace and class struggle
Despite her best efforts, Venezuela’s “interim” President has not extinguished the fires of class conflict, and they will not be extinguished either, as “peace” between antagonistic, opposing classes is merely an illusion used to manipulate and control. The militant labor struggles, strikes, union-led protests, and worker-based organization in the country continue regardless.
“Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class,” said Lenin in one of his many writings on the topic.
“The struggle for such a peace cannot be waged by repeating general, vapid, benign, sentimental, meaningless and non-committal pacifist phrases, which merely serve to embellish the foulness of imperialism. It can be waged only by telling the people the truth, by telling the people that in order to obtain a democratic and just peace the bourgeois governments of all the belligerent countries must be overthrown,” he said in another.
“We [Marxists] understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle within the country; we understand that war cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created,” he added.
Bourgeois pacifism and Utopian idealism
In this context, the debate about “peace” in Latin America, in Venezuela, and the “agenda of cooperation” with Washington takes on fresh importance. “Bourgeois pacifism” must be confronted, class conciliation rejected, and the “duping” of the workers ended by informing them of – as Lenin put it – the “truth”.
But this debate is not new, nor is it the result of January 3 or Delcy’s betrayal.
Even in the times of Chavez, the debate raged between backers of a faith-based Utopian “peace”, in which we all just live together peacefully (idealism); bourgeois conciliatory peace, in which we futilely try to put our antagonistic differences aside to coexist (social democracy); and revolutionary class-based peace, which passes through the often violent towns of Class Conflict, Social Upheaval, Social Justice, and Revolution – “armed peace” in Chavez’s words.
The “pink progressive” wave that waltzed into most Latin American countries pushed bourgeois pacifism at the expense of a class-based revolutionary peace, while in Venezuela, a drift to Utopian faith-based “peace” was later led by Nicolas Maduro and his son.
Yet the unsustainable “progressive” absurdity of burying your head in the ground and praying for “peace” at the top of your voice when confronted with vivid, materialist class struggle only paved the way for the return of the imperialist hegemon by draining the debates of meaningful content and demobilizing the soldiers of class conflict. Thank you, Mr. Trump, must be cooing as he counts his stolen oil barrels.
This is why the work of class-based organizations, including the World Peace Council, is so important in the struggle of ideas to remove the blindfold that social democracy places over the eyes of the workers and help them see that peace with social justice is only achievable by transiting the path of socialist revolution, by seizing the means of production, and by ending the exploitation of one class over another.
This is the true “historic maturity and responsibility”, the true “path” that we must be walking.