There is no red Venezuela; there is no blue Venezuela; there is only Venezuela.

In the global context of right-wing movements brewing in the Ukraine, Venezuela and elsewhere—many of them using the same combination of social media savvy and boots on the ground that characterized the Arab Spring—progressives should be less concerned about how people are protesting and more concerned about who is mobilizing and what they’re fighting for.

Achy Obe­jas’ ​“End­ing the Pain in Venezuela,” which ran in the April issue of In These Times, made an Oba­ma-esque anguished call for civil­i­ty in the protest-rocked coun­try. Obe­jas right­ly notes the unten­abil­i­ty of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. Infla­tion, food short­ages and ris­ing crime have fos­tered an oppo­si­tion move­ment that is too strong to be van­quished by the nar­row pro-gov­ern­ment major­i­ty, but also too frac­tured to unseat Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro’s admin­is­tra­tion. Her solu­tion to the impasse is dia­logue: sit­ting down both sides to agree to some sort of nego­ti­at­ed settlement.

But this high-mind­ed­ness is com­ing from a prob­lem­at­ic place: a cen­trism unwill­ing to take sides in a bat­tle between forces stark­ly polar­ized along class and ide­o­log­i­cal lines. Too many pro­gres­sives reflex­ive­ly hon­or any and all protests instead of crit­i­cal­ly eval­u­at­ing their con­tent. Today in Latin Amer­i­ca, those rad­i­cals out of pow­er and seething with resent­ment are often on the Right.

Among Venezue­lan work­ers, still over­whelm­ing­ly sup­port­ive of the Boli­var­i­an Rev­o­lu­tion, the mood is less Obe­jas’ ​“we are all Venezue­lans” and more ​“they will nev­er come back.” They being such scions of priv­i­lege as Leopol­do López Men­doza, María Cori­na Macha­do, and Hen­rique Capriles Radon­s­ki, whose class had a stran­gle­hold on the nation’s future until the rise of Hugo Chávez and the Boli­var­i­an move­ment in the late 1990s, and who have been strug­gling ever since to regain their advantage.

The years of left-wing activ­i­ty that fol­lowed were hard­ly with­out set­backs or fail­ures, but they wit­nessed the politi­ciza­tion of many who were pre­vi­ous­ly neglect­ed. Though uneven­ly imple­ment­ed, assem­bly coun­cils and work­er coop­er­a­tives were con­struct­ed, rep­re­sent­ing a depth of demo­c­ra­t­ic par­tic­i­pa­tion rarely seen in human his­to­ry. Mate­ri­al­ly, pover­ty fell by well over a third dur­ing Chávez’s tenure, and extreme pover­ty by 58 per­cent. Qual­i­ty health­care and edu­ca­tion became acces­si­ble to ordi­nary people.

It should be of lit­tle sur­prise, then, to find that every block in Venezuela is not the scene of anti-state unrest. Even the New York Times head­lined a piece, ​“Slum Dwellers in Cara­cas Ask, What Protests?” In work­ing-class com­mu­ni­ties across Venezuela, the grass­roots demon­stra­tions thriv­ing else­where pro­voke only fear that the social and eco­nom­ic gains of the last decade will be rolled back and the old neolib­er­al régime, along with its dai­ly humil­i­a­tions of pover­ty and pow­er­less­ness, restored.

Yes, grass­roots. Among a cer­tain type of pro­gres­sive, ​“grass­roots” is used to describe a pla­ton­ic ide­al. Some who both hold that view and want to defend the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment are keen to por­tray the right-wing oppo­si­tion movement’s protests as inau­then­tic: the work of CIA pawns or a media event man­u­fac­tured in Mia­mi studios.

But a recent look to U.S. his­to­ry shows how much gen­uine pop­u­lar activ­i­ty can be mus­tered on the Right. The Chris­t­ian Coali­tion in the 1980s had lit­tle cor­po­rate mon­ey to start with, nor did the insur­gent cam­paigns of Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter decades pri­or. And though depict­ed by some as ​“Astro­turf,” the Tea Par­ty Move­ment today boasts a base of ener­getic mid­dle-class sup­port­ers. From school board elec­tions to let­ter-writ­ing cam­paigns, these peo­ple have a lot of time and a par­tic­i­pa­to­ry spir­it. Much the same for one of the largest com­mu­ni­ty move­ments in Amer­i­can his­to­ry — the Klu Klux Klan of the 1920s.

Which is to say, espe­cial­ly in the glob­al con­text of right-wing move­ments brew­ing in the Ukraine, Venezuela and else­where — many of them using the same com­bi­na­tion of social media savvy and boots on the ground that char­ac­ter­ized the Arab Spring — pro­gres­sives should be less con­cerned about how peo­ple are protest­ing and more con­cerned about who is mobi­liz­ing and what they’re fight­ing for.

The unrest in Venezuela may be impos­si­ble to ignore. Chav­ista ele­ments have indeed sup­port­ed con­ces­sions and a ​“gov­ern­ment of nation­al uni­ty.” The best of them, how­ev­er, view this as a tac­ti­cal maneu­ver, halt­ing the polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic insta­bil­i­ty for long enough to allow the gov­ern­ment to recon­sol­i­date its posi­tion and ral­ly its supporters.

But Obe­jas pro­pos­es not retreat, but sur­ren­der. And what she denounces is not just Chav­ista fail­ings, but the fruits of their success.

A sign of a real rev­o­lu­tion is its knack for con­jur­ing a counter-rev­o­lu­tion. 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.