In this situation, one where an anti-imperialist government is trying to build socialism despite existing in a bourgeois state structure, Chavez and Maduro's ability to keep the military on their side is what's been crucial in saving them from all of the U.S. coup attempts in Venezuela. In Bolivia, where last year the imperialists could both cause a post-election wave of racist violence and turn the military against the targeted leader, counter-revolution became unstoppable.
Our task as proletarian revolutionaries is to work towards Marxist-Leninist revolutions in our respective countries, while learning from the missteps that have caused counter-revolution to triumph in the countries that used to be Marxist-Leninist. The Soviet Union and its most dependent partnered socialist states didn't fall because the USSR was Marxist-Leninist. It fell because the USSR's post-Stalin leadership abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat. Khrushchev, in his opportunistic campaign to further the bourgeois vilification of Stalin, dismantled the country's proletarian-run democracy and opened the state up to political leverage from the capitalist class. The end result of this revisionism was the traitor Gorbachev, who dismantled the Soviet Union itself.
Kim Jong Il concluded that socialism collapsed in the USSR and the GDR because "they neglected class education and abandoned the class struggle. After assuming state power, Khrushchev weakened the function of the dictatorship of the state as a weapon of the class struggle. As a result, socialism could not be defended in the Soviet Union." This summarizes the essence of the line that we must embrace if we want to make any socialist project succeed in the era of imperialism and capitalist reaction. This is a line that consists of overthrowing the capitalist state, and then building a new state that will commit to depriving the bourgeoisie of power over government.
Even if the socialists unseat the fascists in Bolivia this year, the country's road to becoming a Marxist-Leninist state of the same vein as Cuba or China will be filled with complications and obstacles. So is the case in every other country that's currently run by a bourgeois state. If you live in one of these countries and are serious about wanting to build socialism, all you can do is try to better educate yourself and others about revolutionary theory, build the communist organizations that can become the revolutionary vanguard, and equip yourself for potentially violent confrontation with the forces of counter-revolution.
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