Comrades from the Revolutionary Communist Group and our Cuba solidarity campaign Rock around the Blockade were invited to attend the World Conference of Anti-Fascist Youth and Students in Caracas at the end of November 2024, a recognition of our consistent solidarity over decades with the Bolivarian Revolution. Over two weeks, we had the opportunity to exchange ideas with 500 delegates from 75 countries, as well as hundreds of Venezuelan socialists and activists from across the country. On the fringes of the meeting, we were able to speak to the Palestinian revolutionary, Leila Khaled. On 23 November, the conference was addressed by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, with the words:
‘Study, study, study! Fight, fight, fight! Open paths of struggle in the networks, in the streets, in the media, on the walls, study, fight and, importantly, for all the ages, find a way!‘
The conference comes at a time where the Bolivarian Revolution is facing a renewed struggle against imperialism, with the US Biden government refusing to recognise the elected government of Nicolas Maduro and instead proclaiming the opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez as ‘President elect’ – despite him having high-tailed it to Spain. With Trump waiting in the wings, the outgoing Biden administration is pushing through the heinous BOLIVAR Act, insultingly named after the anti-colonial liberation fighter Simon Bolivar, in order to slap new sanctions on Venezuela.
The conference was one of a series of congresses convoked by Venezuela to promote a global perspective on the struggle against imperialism and the rise of far-right populism and fascistic tendencies across the world. Yvan Gil, Venezuela’s foreign minister, argued that fascism is a tool of capitalism in crisis, a destructive power that lacks a coherent ideology but is used to crush the working class and destroy class consciousness; he drew parallels between fascism in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and the military dictatorships installed across Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s that saw nearly 100,000 people killed, tortured and disappeared under the US-backed ‘Operation Condor’.
Gil made it clear that the anti-fascist struggle has to be an anti-capitalist struggle. Who, he asked, defeated fascism in the mid-20th century? ‘The organised people, especially of the Soviet Union and those who resisted colonialism in Africa. We do not have a big socialist power in the world today as we did [then] but we are seeing the emergence of a new world. No imperialism has ever been able to defeat the people. From Venezuela we are creating a vanguard of resistance, to struggle for life, for justice, for humanity!’
Venezuela continues to face down its own far-right threat in the guise of Maria Corina Machado, the viciously counterrevolutionary opposition leader who has presided over regular violent destabilisation protests in which a black supporter of the Bolivarian Revolution was burned alive, community activists have been assassinated, effigies of Cuban doctors hung off bridges and hospitals torched by paramilitaries and networks of Machado’s ‘commanditos’. Rander Peña, the vice-president of International Affairs for the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, stated that ‘what we understand as fascism today is no different from the actions in the Middle East, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist actions that endanger the human species including the Palestinian cause amongst others which we elevate, protect and assume as our own’. Delegates from Palestine, Mozambique, Niger, Lebanon, Colombia, Argentina shared their perspectives whilst working groups were set up to coordinate over different themes.
While in Caracas, we marched with the Bolivarian youth and student movement to demand freedom for Palestine, denounce the blockade of Cuba and stand against imperialist interference in Venezuela. We also visited the Frente Francisco de Miranda cadre school; the ‘Giant of the Homeland’ estate built by the Great Housing Mission, which has just completed five million units of social housing; the Otro Beta neighbourhood project in Petare and the San Agustin cable car that links Caracas’s hillside barrios to the city centre. Importantly we met with activists at some of Venezuela’s flagship communes including El Panal 21. These communes and social movements are driving forward the Bolivarian revolutionary process today.
Viva Venezuela! Long live the Bolivarian Revolution!
Sam McGill
