[The comrades of the PCV provide, within the umbrella of the Bolivarian revolution, a sober analysis of its limits within the framework of social democracy and capitalist dependency. We agree with our comrades in Venezuela that, in order to survive, the Bolivarian Revolution must proletarianize. History and the unstoppable masses have been pushing the revolution into the proletarian camp from the beginning. It is only unprincipled compromise and a poverty of imagination and trust in the people that will stop the inevitable. We have made the following available here in english for the purposes of study and struggle.]

The VIII Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), meeting in Caracas on January 30, 2018, with the presence of the regional Political Secretaries of the PCV and the National Executive Commission of the Communist Youth (JCV), evaluated the dynamics and complex national and international juncture, as well as the development of the broad process of collective discussion that opened the Seventh Plenary of the CC (December 19, 2017) with a view to holding the XIV National Conference of the PCV, especially framed in the base document of discussion: “The socio-economic and political picture of the current capitalist crisis in Venezuela. The revolutionary exit and the tasks of the PCV”, which includes the defining elements for the election of the candidacy of the PCV to the Presidency of the Republic.



In recent years the crisis of the exhausted model of capitalist dependency and rentier accumulation in Venezuela has worsened, generating growing impoverishment in the living and working conditions of the popular and working masses of the city and the countryside; making clear that the progressive-reformist projects that have taken place in Venezuela and other Latin American countries since the beginning of this century, since they are not directed by genuinely revolutionary organizations, lack the necessary class content to go beyond social assistance measures. consider removing the roots of the capitalist system, propose that the working class and the working people vanguardize the processes of change to conquer power and start, on the scientific basis of Marxism-Leninism, the construction of socialism.



Faced with the crisis of dependent capitalism and Venezuelan rentierism, while the working masses suffer the accelerated loss of purchasing power of their meager income—with a criminal and runaway increase in prices of all goods and services—and the improvement of their salary—with serious damages for the future of families and lowering the number of layoffs in public and private entities—banking continues with free hands for financial and exchange speculation to the detriment of internal production. Food monopolies increase their control of the distribution and marketing structure; the commercial and business sectors promote bachaquerismo (black marketeering) without effective controls from Sundde. The commercial-import bourgeoisie obtains billion-dollar profits with the preferential dollar for food and medicine; industrial and agricultural facilities deteriorate, or inputs are not provided in a timely manner, to justify their paralysis and subsequent liquidation or privatization.



Increasingly restricted access to food, quality medical care and medicines, the product of private and public corruption, the imperialist blockade, state inefficiency and national unproductivity, is seriously affecting the population. The instability of the economy and the loss of confidence in the future of the country, promote the steady emigration of young professionals—the brain drain and the loss of labor force—which affects prospects for national development.



The national government, in spite of multiple announcements and repeated promises, has not conceived of, or much less executed, policies or plans that signify a revolutionary solution to the Venezuelan capitalist crisis, that is, in favor of the interests of the people, and has instead limited itself to managing the crisis without affecting the domination of capital.



The National Constituent Assembly (ANC) is quickly advancing towards delegitimization, because the positive expectations that a wide swath of the population had at the election of the ANC (July 30, 2017)—and that were expressed in strong popular support for candidates of the governing party in the elections of Gobernaciones (October 15) and Mayorships (December 10)—have been diluted over time to the same extent as their expectations regarding the concrete problems of everyday life. Laws have even been passed that injure national sovereignty and privilege transnational capital, such as “productive foreign investment”. This situation has been aggravated by spokesmen of the ANC, who respond to popular demands with high-sounding and arrogant positions.

Meanwhile, agreements are made with factions of the bourgeoisie, both with large economic groups (through the National Council of Productive Economy, the engines of the “Bolivarian economic agenda” or the agreed prices), as well as with the political sectors at the table of the Dominican Republic—already known as the “Pact of Santo Domingo”. At the same time, the aggressive and political interventions of US and European imperialism are advancing simultaneously, especially through the governments of Trump and Santos. Evidencing that “dialogue, negotiation and pressure” is the formula applied by the international right, which acts in the interests of transnational monopoly capital.



The development of the class struggle for political power in Venezuela allows us to foresee various scenarios, contextualized by the deepening of the crisis of the capitalist system and sharp inter-imperialist confrontations, of exacerbation of the sustained international aggression of the world right against Venezuela and its government, and of aggravation of the living conditions of the Venezuelan people and progressive increase of social violence.



With this political and socioeconomic framework, the VIII Plenary of the CC—in the development of the policy of “Accumulation of revolutionary worker-peasant, communal and popular forces”, defined by our XV Congress (June 2017)—established that, in the goal of building a broad anti-imperialist and anti-fascist alliance, we must work for a unitary candidacy that expresses a consistently anti-imperialist, anti-oligarchic, anti-trust, democratic and popular program, characterized by worker-popular control of capital, production, distribution and consumption, nationalizing the financial and banking sector, industrial, agroindustrial and marketing monopolies, imports and exports, with a national, sovereign and productive development plan; imprisoning and confiscating assets from corrupt opposition or government mobsters, civil or military.



Depending on the date finally established by the CNE for the presidential elections, the Political Bureau will set the date of completion of our XIV National Conference, which is the statutory body for the election of the PCV candidacy to the Presidency of the Republic; so the VIII Plenum of the CC authorized the Political Bureau to continue analyzing, exploring and meeting with the possible candidates of the block of patriotic and revolutionary forces.



VIII Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela – PCV

Caracas, January 30, 2018.