askchapo

And even if you take a maximalist fight to avoid any concessions approach (which you shouldn't), what would they actually do? You can't wage a guerrilla war when the enemy troops aren't in your country. They'll just bomb the fuck out of you for as long as it takes. Venezuela is almost impenetrable to a land invasion and would slap the US if they tried to occupy, but they're extremely vulnerable to an air campaign. 93% of the population lives in dense cities in the north, the vast majority less than 20 miles from the mountainous coast. That makes it a nightmare to move troops in, but makes it extremely easy for the US to fly planes out of Puerto Rico or compliant Caribbean countries, go low through the coastal mountains, and unload on soft targets. You'd have a gargantuan internal refugee crisis with nowhere for those people to go but flood the two decent sized cities in the interior or the low-density rural plains. The economic damage would be far worse than the situation with the oil being seized.

What Rodriguez is doing is attempting to take advantage of the US's willingness to open economic activity and bring in foreign capital. The country's been under devastating sanctions for over a decade. This is an opportunity to reverse that, entangle foreign capital into the economy to offset the loss of oil revenue, diversify further away from oil dependence, and use the increased capital flowing through the economy to strengthen and expand the communal movement, which is the heart of the Bolivarian Revolution and an extremely advanced form of socialist construction. Of course this opening up introduces risks and contradictions. There will be more corruption. The US will wield its influence in sinister fashion to disrupt the political life of the revolution. In some cases, labor and environmental rights will surely suffer. It could lead to long-term weakening and liberalization of revolutionary forces.

There's a fundamental mistake here in thinking that socialist countries should not want foreign capital. It has never been the choice of socialist revolutions to expel all foreign capital - instead capital has fled and economic measures imposed by imperialists to starve socialism of necessary capital. Revolutionary governments operating on their own terms are more than capable of managing foreign capital, compressing and controlling the contradictions it produces, and socializing the benefits for their process of socialist construction. That's exactly why the US and Europe attempt to starve them of access to it!