Upstream - [TEASER] Venezuela Pt. 1: A Socialist Introduction w/ Vijay Prashad

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

This is a free preview of the episode "Venezuela Pt. 1: A Socialist Introduction w/ Vijay Prashad." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. access to bi-weekly bonus episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. In Part 1 of our new, ongoing series on Venezuela, Vijay Prashad joins us to discuss Venezuela’s history, politics, and its ongoing fight against US imperialism. Vijay Prashad is a journalist, political commentator, and Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He’s the author of many books, including The Darker Nations, Washington Bullets: The History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations, and Red Star Over the Third World. In this episode, we discuss Venezuela's political and economic conditions prior to the Bolivarian Revolution of 1999 when Hugo Chávez came to power. We discuss how oil colonialism kept Venezuela in a state of underdevelopment and poverty. Vijay tells us about the promise of the Bolivarian Revolution and how it was delivered, the obstacles that Venezuela continues to face in its fight against imperialism, the hybrid war of coup attempts, sanctions, and propaganda campaigns imposed by the US, what socialism in Venezuela actually looks like, the most recent escalation by the Trump administration, and much more.   Further resources: Tricontinental's work on Venezuela Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations, by Vijay Prashad The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, by Seth Harp The Politics of Heroin:CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, by Alfred W. McCoy Related episodes: The Fight for The Congo w/ Vijay Prashad China Pt. 3: Bourgeois Democracy vs Socialist Democracy w/ Vijay Prashad A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations w/ Vijay Prashad The Logical Case for Socialism (and Against Capitalism) w/ Scott Sehon Artwork: Political Repression in Latin America Poster printed by La Raza Silkscreen, 1975. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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You know, because of the oil companies were not you know, because the structure of the oil economy in Venezuela was such that US oil companies were not building refining capacity within Venezuela they were taking out crude oil from Venezuela, refining it abroad. Because of that, Venezuela actually couldn't sell oil at high market prices. It could only sell it at the crude price. And Venezuela never really developed refining capacity. So it was always at the mercy of oil companies. And when the sanctions hit, it couldn't refine the oil,

couldn't sell the oil to international markets. You know, it became very hard. Ships wouldn't carry Venezuela. oil. So it was in that sense blockaded into misery. Again, it's not socialism that produces the crisis in Venezuela. It's actually the blockade, the financial blockade of Venezuela imposed by the US government illegally. That's what actually creates the problem in Venezuela. It's nothing other than that. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you.

I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. What socialist has not heard the arrogant and thoughtless response, but Venezuela, when describing the positive aspects and the great potential of socialism. For years, Venezuela has been a talking point on the right and the liberal center to disparage socialism. And now, Venezuela has again become a battleground. between the forces of global capitalism and those who are fighting for a more just, equitable, and beautiful world. In this episode, part one of our new ongoing series on Venezuela, we're joined by BJ Prashad to discuss Venezuela's history, its politics, and its battles against U.S. imperialism.

BJ is a journalist, political commentator, an executive director of Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. He's also the author of many books, including The Darker Nations, Washington Bullets, The History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations, and Red Star Over the Third World. As we do with all of our ongoing series, like our series on Palestine, China, the Alliance of Sahil States, Iran, NATO, post-capitalist parenting, as well as our planned series coming up on Mexico, Ireland and Cuba, this episode serves as a foundation, off of which we'll have many future conversations to dive more deeply into specific topics on Venezuela. So stay tuned. And now,

here's Robert in conversation with BJ Prashad. Yeah, great to be with you, Robert. Yeah. So we invited you back on today because, as some of our listeners are probably aware, the Trump administration has been sort of continuing its legacy of antagonizing Venezuela. And they put a bounty on President Maduro's head. They've sent warships off the coast of Venezuela. And we're going to get into that in a little bit, like the details of what's going on there.

but I wanted to do this episode as kind of like just to set a foundation for our listeners moving forward to give a bit of history, give a bit of context on Venezuela, its history, the Bolivarian revolution, and all of that, just so that from moving forward this, from this, we can get into more specifics with a good foundation. So yeah, maybe it will be helpful to sort of start with Venezuela's socialist history and giving it a bit of context to understand like what the state was like before the Bolivarian Revolution. So yeah, maybe just tell us about like the, you know, how Venezuela was oriented really in the pre-Savez years. And, you know, from what I understand, they had succumb to many of the IMF's debt traps. And we're going to have a whole episode on the

IMF coming up shortly with actually a colleague of yours from the Tri-Continental Grieve Chelwa. But yeah, so just a little bit of that history. And then after that, I'll ask you a little bit more about the revolutionary period. But yeah, maybe just start with the pre-Shaba's years. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I think probably the most important thing to bear in mind is Venezuela has been for a century, an oil-producing nation. and it has perhaps the largest known reserves of petroleum, a pretty high-grade petroleum in the whole world. So that's actually interesting.

You'd imagine that a country with an enormous reserve of petroleum would be a very wealthy country. This has been the experience of some of the Gulf Arab states, the desert Arab states where there was oil found, were able to some extent to become pretty wealthy countries. Why wasn't Venezuela a wealthy country? Well, they signed in a sense very bad agreements with the major oil companies, Chevron, Exxon, and so on. And these oil companies were making a mint by just taking Venezuelan crude oil out of the country, not refining it in country, but taking it out, refining it outside, and then selling all secondary products. So the mostly U.S. oil companies had a bonanza in Venezuela. It's not that sections of the Venezuelan rich were not quite pleased with this because, you know, they were

collecting enough money for themselves to enjoy their lives, but the broad public was not in a great situation. And as a consequence of not really being in control of this oil wealth, even though Venezuela was one of the founders of OPEC along with Saudi Arabia, that is the organization of petroleum exporting countries. Venezuela was a key player in its founding. Venezuela never really controlled the drain of its oil well. And as a consequence, its public finances were a wreck. And so Venezuela had to, yes, go several times to the International Monetary Fund. I was in Venezuela in the mid-1990s, when one of the presidents who was elected on the pledge of no IMF austerity, no IMF structural adjustment, Carlos Andres, went on television and said, well, we're going back

to the IMF. So rather than take control of their public finances, the drain of oil wealth as a way to, in a sense, liquefy their public finances, they went to the international monetary fund. So here you had a major oil exporting country indebted to international bondholders and yet watching as these big oil companies became wealthy on their back. And that was the structure of Venezuela before first the attempted coup data by Hugo Chavez, a military officer in 1992. And then, you know, after he failed in the military exercise decided to build a mass movement which grew very quickly in the in the mid to late 90s and then winning the election in 1998 and Mr. Chavez becoming this enormously popular president in 1999. So, I mean, I don't even know how to say this in any other way. A rich

country indebted? What? Maybe if you could describe for us a little bit like the promise of the Bolivarian revolution as a political, socioeconomic, and also a regional project, because I think one of the biggest things, the biggest promises, and I think it's been delivered on, was this refusal to subordinate Venezuela to the imperialist bloc more broadly. And I think this really shifted the country's class and sort of foreign relations alignment. So yeah, maybe just give us a sense of the policies and the promises that were made and enacted since the rise of Chavez? Well, it's a pretty straightforward promise. I mean, there was nothing extraordinarily radical about what Chavez wanted to do. I mean, his idea was first that the Venezuelan state must take

control of the oil wealth, must not allow the oil wealth to be drained out of the country. That was the first thing. In order to do that, Venezuela would have to effectively annul the agreements made with largely U.S. owned oil companies and rewrite those contracts. That was the first thing. Look, I mean, these are all legitimate things within the bounds of capitalism. You don't like a contract that a previous government is signed. You can come back to the table and said, let's renegotiate it. That's exactly what he did. Many of the oil companies agreed. Some didn't. Exxon Mobil was furious. walked out of the country. It's not that Chavez was doing anything inappropriate in wanting to

prevent the hemorrhaging of the oil wealth. I think this is a perfectly reasonable thing. It's Venezuelan oil. Venezuela has the right to sell it to whomever it wants. It can work on the supply side to create its own market conditions. And that's precisely what they did. The idea was If you hemorrhaged the flow of oil wealth outside the country, control the oil wealth, then you could use that money to immediately improve the conditions of people's lives. So one way to have done that, a purely capitalist way, would have been income transfers. If you take the oil wealth and then you create a formula and say that every household is going to get this much money and you put that money into household income, They have now consumption money and you are able to take that consumption money and you are able to effectively boost the demand. And if you boost the demand at some point, you'll start seeing the economy get more robust.

But this is not what the Chavez government did. Rather than pure income transfers, what they did was they built these missions where effectively the state went in there to build the capacity. of the people, to increase education, to increase health care, to increase training, to increase housing, and so on. And this vast expansion of the social goods, effectively, rather than merely creating more consumers, produced a society in Venezuela, produced much more communal and community developed advances. It was a kind of socialist development by increasing social goods. And I think that marked the Venezuelan process,

the Bolivarian Revolution, as having a socialist character because they didn't merely, as I said, do income transfer. So the socialist character of the Bolivarian Revolution comes from the distribution of social goods, the production of social goods. Eventually, there was an attempt further to transform the productive relations

by creating what are known as communes, particularly to produce agricultural goods and to produce construction, real estate and so on. These communes were set up to train people to communally produce agricultural goods, food goods in particular for food sovereignty, and to communally produce housing. So the socialist character of the Bolivarian Revolution comes in that last aspect. primary aspect which really bothered the oil companies, which is renegotiation of contracts by itself is not a socialist device. That's principally within the logic of capitalism. But it's not really the social goods that bothered the oil companies. They don't care how Venezuela spends its oil revenues. The oil companies were bothered by something which is within the limits of capitalism, renegotiating the oil contracts.

It was the Venezuelan elite that was bothered by the expansion of the social wage. They would have preferred if there were income transfers and then their companies would see the benefits of it as the consumer base increase. But that didn't happen. So the socialist side of it, which was the increase of the social wage, that was really the crucial element of the Bolivarian revolution that I think. people need to pay attention to. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Vijay Prashad. You can listen to the full episode by becoming a Patreon subscriber. Through Patreon, you'll have access to bi-weekly bonus episodes,

access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll also be helping keep upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support.