They are not, as much of the South African left and the ANC-run government would have it, simply to be found in the long history of imperialist geopolitics and right-wing capitalist rule that preceded the rise to political power of the late Hugo Chavez in 1998 and the pursuit of his accompanyingThey are also to be found in the ways in which political power has been pursued and wielded by the post-1998 Bolivarian state and the ruling party , with Nicolas Maduro now in the driver’s seat.
Such a core contradiction, which is not unique to Venezuela, but which applies to many other “post-independence/liberation movement” situations, is most often masked by a more immediate “post-independence/liberation struggle” political and/or economic “honeymoon” period. The combined result was that within a few years huge amounts of economic and political power were being concentrated within a still heavily bureaucratised state, and after 2007, in the upper echelons of the ruling party, the PSUV. Alongside this corruption, through the vehicles of patronage and clientelism, began to flourish and spread, precisely because the state itself and its core structural relationship with domestic and international capital remained largely unchanged.
It was into this reality that then vice-president Nicolas Maduro entered, as the new leader of the PSUV and state . Even though Maduro/the PSUV won the proceeding presidential elections, the underlying domestic problems have remained, along with a newer set of international political and economic realities that have only intensified the crisis. These have taken on a three-tiered form.
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