Upstream - [TEASER] Venezuela Pt. 3: Sanctions as Economic Warfare w/ Cira Pascual Marquina

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

We are publishing this episode a few days early. Solidarity with Venezuela! This is a free preview of the episode " Venezuela Pt. 3: Sanctions as Economic Warfare w/ Cira Pascual Marquina." 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 3 of our ongoing series on Venezuela, Cira Pascual Marquina joins us to discuss sanctions with a focus on the US-imposed coercive economic measures on Venezuela. Cira Pascual Marquina is a researcher and popular educator at El Panal commune in Venezuela. She's the author of the Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution with Chris Gilbert and co-host along with Chris of the Marxist educational project Escuela de Cuadros. Our conversation with Cira opens with an update on the United States' military buildup in the Caribbean and the escalation of threats by the Trump administration against the Venezuelan people and their elected president Nicolás Maduro. We discuss what sanctions are more broadly, how they work, and how they are deployed as a weapon of war against governments that defy US hegemony. We then take a deep dive into the history of sanctions against Venezuela, the impact they've had, how the government and the people of Venezuela have resisted these sanctions, and how we can stand in solidarity with Venezuela during this period of heightened US aggression.  Further resources: Venezuela, the Present as Struggle Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution, by Cira Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert A Special Issue on Communes in Socialist Construction (Monthly Review) Venezuela Analysis Related episodes: Listen to our ongoing series on Venezuela Listen to our ongoing series on China 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 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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We hope you enjoy this conversation. One third of the world's population is under sanctions that have been put on by the United States. They function as a siege. They cut specifically in the Venezuelan case, but I think in most cases, they cut access to food, medicine, financial flows. According to a very recent Lancet article, it came out this year, sanctions actually have produced about more than half a million deaths, almost 600,000 deaths every year around the world. The impact is mostly on children, on the elderly, on women, and of course, especially

it affects the working class, the poorest in the country. You're listening to Upstream. 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. Far from being a form of soft power imposed judiciously against certain rogue governments, sanctions actually serve as a form of economic warfare waged by the West against those governments and states that seek sovereignty from the grip of U.S. hegemony. Sanctions kill and emmiserate millions. They further inequality, force migration, and often defy international law.

all for the purpose of regime change and collective punishment. Venezuela has been a victim of sanctions for a decade now, and yet it has continued to resist and even build the foundations for socialism within its borders. In this episode, part three of our ongoing series on Venezuela, we're joined by Sierra Pascual Marquina to discuss sanctions and the resistance to them in Venezuela. Sierra is a researcher and popular educator at El Penal Commune in Venezuela. She's the author of The Present as Struggle, Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution with Chris Gilbert and co-host, along with Chris Gilbert, of the Marxist Educational Project, Escuela de Quadros.

And now, here's Robert in conversation with Sierra Pascual Markina. All right, Sarah, it's great to have you on the show. It's great to be here. Thanks so much, Robert. Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate you coming on and talking about everything that's going on in Venezuela and a little bit of the history of sanctions that we'll get into. Just to start, though, maybe if you could introduce yourself to our listeners. I am a researcher and a popular educator at El Panale commune, specifically.

in the Pluriversity Patria Grande, which is the Communes Educational Initiative. And I'm also with Chris Gilbert carrying on for the past really four to five years an in-depth investigation on communes, how communes organize, how these spaces of popular, territorial construction of socialism are being organized, and also how they are impacted by the U.S. blockade. So that's a little bit of what I do. I'm also a part of an educational project, a Marxist educational project that is called Escuela de Quadros, Cadres School, and the author and co-author of several books, including books on Venezuela, books on Marxism and capital. So that's a little

bit of what I do. Mostly, I am a person who's committed a militant and a researcher. here in Venezuela, part of the Bolivier Revolution. Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you so much for that introduction. And, of course, if anybody is just tuning into this series without listening to Parts 1 and 2, your colleague Chris Gilbert was on two weeks ago to talk about communes in a lot of depth. I'm going to ask you a little bit about it here. But if anybody wants to learn more about that, Chris and I had an excellent conversation about communes.

today unfortunately we're going to be talking about sanctions unfortunate that we have to although I'm very glad to have you on to talk about them because I know that you know your lived experience and your research overlaps with that topic and of course sanctions are a form of warfare but there's also actual military warfare that is also unfortunately just as relevant to our conversation today at least potentially so maybe just to start because things have begun to escalate quite a lot. And so we're recording this on Thursday. So we will be about five days behind when our listeners are listening to this.

But just give us a sense of what is going on right now. I know there's a lot of tenseness and stress and anxiety, I'm sure, in Venezuela, because the United States has begun sending destroyers. The rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration is the classic rhetoric. that is designed to manufacture consent for war. He's doing all the things that we're unfortunately have been normalized here and that we're used to when we see this kind of buildup. So tell us a little bit about what's going on on your end.

So actually I would say that indeed since the beginning of the Bolivarian Revolution, more than 25 years ago, there's been an ongoing aggression, imperialist aggression. against this process that aims to build a sovereign homeland and also to build a new way of living through socialism and through the communes. But indeed, over the last past couple of months, there's been a military buildup around Venezuela. There are seven to eight destroyers

near the Venezuelan coast, US destroyers. They are also deploying Air Force in Puerto Rico and they've specifically said that it was there because of their so-called war against narcoterrorism. They are saying that the Trump administration is saying that our government is a government that is linked and that actually directly participates in narcotics traffic. This is absolutely false. Even DEA investigations recognize that there is no production. of drugs in Venezuela, and at most there's a very small trade, root trade, that would

come through here, between 5% to 10% of the overall trade that would end up in the United States. So actually, this is important to contextualize, but it's important to contextualize it in what the US, the Trump administration and prior administrations have openly defined as their attempt promote a regime change here. They say it with all the words, so there's no need to further. I think it's pretty obvious that countries, that nations should self-determine, and that is what the Bolivarian process is about, about popular self-determination.

The build-up is of great concern. Very recently, Trump unplugged the only channel of communication that there was with Venezuela, Grinnell, who was the envoy, the person who was speaking with the Venezuelan government. He was unplugged in that role, so right now Venezuela has no person, no channel, to communicate with the U.S. as the U.S. continues to build up just the, we received information that Trinidad and Tobago, which is very near here, also is getting more military helicopters. helicopters and other military assets. So the build-up continues to happen. And this is of great concern to every Venezuela, really it should be of great concern to anybody who is committed

to sovereignty and to people's being able to define their own destiny. Yeah. And just to note, I think very recently here in the U.S., there was a bipartisan measure to try to restrict the war powers that Trump has and that measure failed in the Senate. So the resistance on coming out of the, the feckless United States government that is not a part of the White House is not going to be effective either in this sense. That is right. And that's important. It was an important moment.

It was not expected that it would actually go forth in terms of liberal. the military build-up in the Caribbean, but it is indeed very telling that this happened. It happened yesterday, Tuesday. So that's something that we are also following. All right. Well, thank you for giving us a bit of an update and a sense of what's going on. Of course, we're going to be paying a lot of attention the next few days to see what happens. So, yeah, we can add anything that we need to in terms of updates into the show notes.

right now, let's talk a little bit. I want to talk about sanctions, of course. That's the topic of today's episode. But before we dive into that, like I mentioned, we had your colleague Chris Gilbert on for the previous episode and we took a deep dive into communes. And I know that communes are an area of focus for you both in terms of the theory, but also in practice. You know, you're part of a commune yourself. So I'd love it if you could tell us a little bit more about the communes through the lens. of your personal experience just to give us a bit of a thread like through our last episode into this episode and then actually a question that I had intended to ask Chris that I wasn't really

I forgot to basically is and we were talking a little bit before we hit record about whether or not you live on the commune or not or how housing works on the communes because I know a lot of people they hear commune and they think of like that's where you live

so give us a sense of like that as well just for someone who may not be super familiar with how the communes in Venezuela work? Sure. So communes are the territorial spaces for the reorganization of society in economical and in political terms. They are basically the roadmap for building socialism in Venezuela and possibly it has implications beyond Venezuela. But as far as we can say for now, they are our roadmap for building socialism. So basically, and working in a commune, which is a space, for instance, El Panale Commune, my commune, it's built up with nine communal councils, which would be the basic cells, the basic direct

democracy cell, where people from the different communal councils organize via assemblies to take decisions on how to solve the problems. But communes are more than just a sum of several communal councils. actually, they have a tremendous transformative potential because it's not just direct democracy, as we would call it in Venezuela, participative and pragmatic democracy, but they are also spaces for the reorganization of the economy, in the sense that communes, not all of them have them, but communes should have means of production. And the means of production in a commune are social property.

Social property is something that's a concept. It's important to explain this. not, of course, it's not state property. It is not cooperative property. The property, the means of production of my commune, for instance, a textile making plant, a meat packing plan, a plant for making cleaning products, all those means of production belong to all the communards who live within the commune. So the surplus from the production in those spaces goes to the commune via the assembly. So, for instance, in the latest period of production, there was a large production of school uniforms for school kids in the commune and in other communes, in Las Avejitas del Panal,

which is the textile making plant, and the surplus went for the wages of our educational initiative. I was mentioning in the beginning that I'm a popular educator at the Plurieu Bersidad, And so the surplus goes to basically generating material stimulus wages for the workers, for the teachers, for the educators in our school. So there you can see that it is profoundly transformative and it overcomes the limits of top-down state-run socialism because it's profoundly democratic. Of course we have a lot to learn from real socialism, from East Black socialism, but we also have to learn from the errors. And I think that the commune precisely comes as a profoundly

democratic proposal to reorganize social relations and to actually overcome the metabolism of capital. So living in a commune is really wonderful because you live in a space where what are abstract ideas of building socialism actually take shape, take form. You can leave it in the assembly, in the spaces of production. And you can also kind of like see that from the communes, you can project a new future, but you can also give responses to the needs of people in Venezuela, which of course have many, because as we'll be talking about, the blockade, the U.S. sanctions really is very brutal. It's very violent. It is actually a war without bombs. And so that's something that is important to highlight.

I was thinking just this morning, actually, and I don't know if this is really super relevant, but about the term like antisocial. And I was thinking about how antisocial so much of the way that our society in the United States is arranged, like the person, both interpersonally but also structurally in terms of just the way that we think of the word social is through like gregariousness,

like whether you like to like go to parties and talk a lot and that kind of thing and yet you can be that form of social and yet so antisocial in the way that you relate to other people and how much you care about the concept of community and all of that kind of stuff and it really sounds like at the commune or in a commune structure anything similar to that like you can be a super quiet like just not say a lot of words or whatever but just be like one of the most social people, right, because of how you live your life. So I don't know, I was literally just thinking about that this morning when I was making coffee and I thought I'd share it. That is true. Actually, capitalism imposes isolation on all levels, alienation and isolation, and especially

it produces it in the space of work and in the spaces of daily life. So for instance, the care task are isolated tasks. And communes precisely come to overcome not only the exploitation and the multiple forms of oppression, but also they come to be spaces for collective care. So that is actually very, very important. It is an important reflection. And so I was talking a little bit about, you were talking, asking a little bit also about the architecture of a commune. Communes are spaces that actually existed prior to them being defined as communes. So people who live in communes, communards, collectively decide to be part of a commune via the assembly. They are not intentional communities, therefore, as would be hippie communes of the 60s and 70s.

And not everybody who lives in a commune actually will participate in the assemblies, but the majority of the people will participate in one form of another or another in the communal life. So it is a profoundly collective space, but people live actually in their own home. Sometimes also they might think that everybody lives in one big building and they share everything. Now, people do live in their own individual households, but they are part of a collectivity that collectively, that together decides to change their life. Their daily life, but also it is important to say that communes are not only spaces for, the organization of life at a small level, communes are actually the national project, the strategic project for walking toward socialism in Venezuela.

Awesome. Yeah, thank you. That's actually really helpful, that clarification between intentional community and the commune. All right. Well, I invited you on today to talk about sanctions on Venezuela and also importantly the people's response. We haven't actually ever had an episode on sanctions more generally. So I think it could be worthwhile to at first just broadly talk about sanctions in a more general way. I think most of our listeners are familiar, of course, with sanctions as an abstract concept. But how do they actually work? Like give us a sense of like maybe some of the numbers, how they're imposed and sort of their overall function. Sure. So sanctions are, we oftentimes prefer to call the sanctions against Venezuela

unilateral course of measures because who is the United States to sanction a country. And sanctions generally are considered as a legal term, international legal term, as a process that is put on a country generally mediated by the UN. And there's no UN mediation, generally on most sanctions that are put around the world. But one third of the world's population is under sanctions that have been put on by the United States, one third of the world population. So this is important to say. So sanctions are measures imposed by one or more countries to course political change,

to course a country to change its policies, its way of. organizing its politics and ultimately it's a way of breaking with the sovereignty of a nation of a country. So, and how is it done, well, by restricting access to markets, to finance, to goods. It is not formally military, of course, but it does have the same impact as a military siege on a country. So actually between 2000, and specifically in Venezuela, between 2018 and 2019, yes, around there, there was a CRP investigation and that it released that about 40,000 people had died in Venezuela in that relatively short period of time due to the sanctions.

So, as I was saying, the function as a siege, they cut specifically in the Venezuelan case, but I think in most cases, they cut access to food, medicine, financial flows. Sanctions can be more targeted or broader by now in Venezuela, like in Cuba. We are leaving an all-out sanctions regime, and it actually limits the capacity for the Venezuelan government, for instance, to buy medicines and food. But this is very important because this is an oil-producing country. So historically, the rent was actually what was used to buy most of the food and medicine that was brought into Venezuela, as well as input. So, but this is not, doesn't only apply to Venezuela. It applies to all countries that have a high-level

intensity, high-intensity level sanctions. So Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, Venezuela. would be the countries that have the harshest sanctions imposed on them by the United States. So according to a very recent Lancet article, it came out this year, it was published by Weisbart and others. Sanctions actually have produced about more than half a million deaths, almost 600,000 deaths every year around the world. So you can see really that the implications are very, very high. When are sanctions imposed? Well, in this case, when imperialism thinks that it cannot succeed militarily or that it is not the most opportune option for its interests, that's when they impose unilateral coercive measures. And the impact, according to this Lancet article,

and I know it is true, it's not just because I've read it, the impact is mostly on chill children, on the elderly, on women, and of course, especially it affects the working class, the poorest in the country. So they are supposed to be, generally they say that they are there targeting the governments in imperialist discourse, but actually they really mostly affect the working people, and the consequences are really tragic wherever they are imposed. So I would not agree with those who say that sanctions are a form of soft power because they are tremendously violent. They are not an exercise of soft power because the amount of that they produce are enormous.

And also inequality. It is important to highlight that sanctions always produce inequality wherever they have been applied. they do produce inequality because, of course, well, we live in a capitalist country. Venezuela is still a capitalist country, and the logic of capital will ensure, the bourgeoisie will ensure that they are less affected by any economic situation, by any political or economic situation. So it also generates inequalities. So that's a little bit about the overall situation.

It is, of course, Cuba is a country that has living under sanctions for a longest period of time. And the affectation is enormous. Actually, currently Cuba has a very, very difficult situation with electricity, and it is 100% because of the US blockade on Cuba. They have not even been able to buy the parts that you need to keep an electrical system going. And you can imagine, I mean, in Cuba, any Cuban will tell you that they are actually affected by, in Lavana, even, which sometimes is less affected than other parts of the country. They might have blackouts of three to four to five hours every day. That makes life very, very difficult, daily life very difficult.

That also has a profound impact on the economy. Venezuela's electrical system has also been affected by the blockings. I mean, we had a tremendous blockout in 2019. Actually, that was the result of a direct attack, but the difficulty to actually stabilize the system, the electrical system afterwards has much to do with the blockade. So the impact is all around, and again, it is important to understand it as what it is,

which is an aggression akin to a military aggression that produces death and destruction that aims to overthrow governments and look, it actually really doesn't work in terms of overthrowing the governments. But it may work as a deterrent to other countries to go the path of sovereign revolution. There's very few countries that have,

I mean, I'd like, you could say that the sanctions were prior to the war and, of course, the U.S. succeeded in its aims, but actually they actually had to go on the war to overthrow the Iraqi government. So it's important to understand that, yes, they do generally create a lot of problems. They also sometimes generate, of course, contradictions within the projects, within the governments and within the countries, and people are not happy when they are suffering a lot and some people may become dissenters with the project but it is actually not an effective measure

within the countries in terms of the objective of regime change. Yeah, speaking of all of the different countries that have been, and that's crazy that one third of the population is under sanctions, I grew up partially lived on and off in Iran. And Iran has been under some form of sanctions since the 80s. And I remember, you know, there's a lack of essential medicines that come into the country, frequent outages of power. I remember standing in really long lines for milk. Like I don't, you know, remember exactly. I wouldn't be able to parse out exactly what aspects of those things

were like exactly from sanctions. But I'm hearing you speak about some of the impacts. And we'll also talk about your lived experience in Venezuela. It's hard not to think back on my experience in Iran growing up. Let's talk about Venezuela, though. So, yeah, tell us about how this all started. When were sanctions first imposed on Venezuela under what context, under what U.S. president? And all of those details. Give us kind of a history of that. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Sierra Pasquale Marquina. You can listen to the full episode by becoming an Upstream podcast Patreon subscriber. Through Patreon, you'll have access to bi-weekly bonus episodes,

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