Starting in the autumn of 2025, the US began attacking small civilian boats in or near Venezuelan waters, summarily executing over 126 people. January, 2026 began with it kidnapping Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and bringing them to the US. This month, just weeks after the kidnapping, Haymarket Books published the immensely useful and urgent book, Venezuela in Crisis. The historical range of the book begins with the regime of Hugo Chavez and ends with the 2024 elections in Venezuela.

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with the editor and translator of this collection of essays, Anderson Bean, and two of its contributors, Emiliano Terán and Simón Rodríguez.  The key argument of the book is that, even by his own admission, Chavez was not able to completely transform Venezuela into a socialist state. The book explains the roots of this failure, despite the inspiring successes of Chavismo. It then tracks an ever-increasing neoliberal and oppressive trend carried forward by Maduro, which is characterized by burgeoning extractivism, corruption, and suppression of human rights.  We end by calling on socialists and progressives everywhere to resist the tendency to side with Maduro’s false claims to socialism, and to focus instead on building solidarity with the people of Venezuela.

The Imperative to Support the People of Venezuela w/ ANDERSON BEAN, SIMÓN RODRÍGUEZ & EMILIANO TERÁN

Speaking Out of Place hosted by David Palumbo-Liu

Emiliano Terán is a sociologist from the Central University of Venezuela and has a master’s degree in ecological economics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is a PhD candidate in environmental science and technology at the same institution. He is also an associate researcher at the Center for Development Studies in Venezuela and a member of the Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela.

Simón Rodríguez is a Venezuelan socialist writer and journalist. He was a student organizer and later became professor at the Universidad de los Andes. When he was a member of the national leadership of the Socialism and Freedom Party, he ran as a candidate for the National Assembly in 2015. He is a founding member of Laclase.info and Venezuelanvoices.org and has published articles in Humania del Sur, NACLA Report on the Americas, The New Arab, and Rebelión and on dozens of electronic outlets, and his articles have been translated into six languages. He has given talks and lectures in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. He is coauthor with Miguel Sorans of the book Why Did Chavismo Fail? A Left-Opposition Balance Sheet.

Anderson Bean is a sociology professor at North Carolina A&T State University, a member of the Tempest Collective, and a North Carolina–based activist and editor. He is a contributor to Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives (Haymarket Books) and the author of Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis (Lexington Books).

Speaking Out of Place is produced in collaboration with The Creative Process and is made with support from Stanford University.

Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.

Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:

“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times.  This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues.
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
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