1/10 🧵
Worth engaging with the full Politics Theory Other episode. Richard Seymour offers a familiar critique of corruption, repression, and the exhaustion of Chavismo. These are real issues the left should not ignore.
2/10
But his response shifts away from what my intervention was doing. I wasn’t offering a purity test for “real socialism,” or holding up Maduro’s Venezuela as a model.
3/10
I was responding to an academic demand to name a single progressive left policy of the Maduro government. That is an empirical question, not a definitional one.
4/10
The “if pandemic income support is socialism then Boris Johnson is a socialist” line is clever but evasive. The issue isn’t whether income support exists in the abstract.
5/10
The issue is whether, under sanctions, oil collapse, and hyperinflation, Venezuela chose redistribution and social provisioning over IMF discipline, mass privatisation, and austerity.
6/10
Yes, corruption exists. But “corrupt” is not an argument that a policy had no material effect. Under blockade and import dependence, rents concentrate and opportunists thrive.
7/10
That reality can coexist with programmes that prevent starvation and decommodify housing at scale. A materialist analysis has to hold both facts at once.
8/10
Scale matters. Under sanctions, a state branded uniquely corrupt built 4 million public homes. Britain, vastly richer and unconstrained, built almost none. If corruption explains everything there, then here the explanation is class power.
Jan 14, 2026 13:159/10
Several concrete claims were ignored: recognition of social reproduction, women-targeted cash transfers, Indigenous and collective land deeds, communal legal structures, and material South–South solidarity under blockade.
10/10
Bottom line: I’m not asking anyone to canonise Maduro or deny degeneration. I’m pushing back against a left habit of treating countries under economic warfare as failed thought experiments. Sanctions are economic warfare. Dismissing welfare under siege launders regime change.
