Pictured above: The massive May Day 2026 protest against the government’s labor policy in Caracas, Venezuela. (Camilo Arias / Tribuna Popular)

 

By Eva Garcia

May 11, 2026

 

Few days throughout the year spur our revolutionary spirit, fire up our fervor for change, or sync us with struggles afar in time and space as much as International Workers’ Day, May Day.

A tangible ‘mística’ arises when the vanguard sections of the global working class take to the streets to demand, debate, and dispute the structures of bourgeois power, at times crouching behind home-made placards or cowering from tear gas or bullets as their predecessors in Chicago did.

It a day when we allow ourselves the naughty delight of fantasizing of a new, better, and fairer world, even though we know that simple-solution dreaming can oft merely distract us from the toils of the class struggle.

But it is also a day to channel our anger, rage, and indignation at capitalist slave labor, despite these emotive outbursts often curtailing the cold-headiness that will push us forward.

As such, the contradictions inherent in this day make it a highly fitting topic for my first column with Marxism-Leninism Today.

In Venezuela, May Day 2026 brought a bitter (dialectic, some may say) mix of hope and harsh reality, as people’s growing expectations of a serious salary increase to alleviate the dire cost-of-living crisis were smashed out of the park by Delcy Rodriguez’s self-declared “responsible” flex, which she deemed the “most important [income] increase for years”.

Faced with a Grand Canyon-sized hole between the (take a seat before reading on) $0.27-equivalent legal monthly minimum wage of 130 bolívares and the estimated basic family food basket around $700, Trump’s favorite “interim” president opted to further erode real wages by extending the four-year wage freeze her predecessor imposed – which has devalued from being worth $30 to the current meager crumbs – and continue to replace them with a few, non-universal bonus schemes. Complete POS or straight-up dreck, some would say.

The Figures

Before May 1, 2026, Venezuela’s monthly minimum wage was the local currency equivalent to $0.27 in wage, which was (and is) used to calculate all workplace benefits, such as vacation pay, sick pay, Christmas bonus, pensions, or layoff pay. So a contractually-established three month Christmas bonus would be worth about $1, for example, or a six-month layoff package would be about $2. Yeah.

Food prices in Venezuela are commonly marked in US dollars as well as bolivars.

This wage was complemented by non-salarial and non-contractual bonuses, which most, but not all, public sectors received through parallel government-run payment systems rather than the companies’ coffers, amounting normally to around the equivalent of $190 a month. Pension bonuses were worth about $42 a month. These bonuses (part of what Delcy calls an “integral income”) are not taken into account when calculating the above-mentioned benefits, much to the bosses’ delight! Reversing this trend of replacing legal and contractual wage structures with ad-hoc and parallel bonus schemes has become people’s number one struggle, transcending political divisions with a common cry of “Bonuses are not wages”.

Post-May Day, the minimum wage and pensions remain equal to $0.27 a month but bonus schemes have been increased to the equivalent of $240 for workers and $70 for pensioners. Thanks Delcy.

The Streets

This April 30 announcement only further consolidated the red carpet laid out to large capital by reducing variable capital outlay to close to zero and effectively eradicating bosses’ responsibilities to pensions, social security, or other non-wage payments. It also showed that Delcy intends to continue her predecessors 2018 policy that looks to make Venezuela an investment paradise for foreign capital with maybe the cheapest labor force in the world, all at the expense of a tired and exasperated workforce.

However, it did have one silver lining (and it certainly wasn’t in the workers’ pockets): it beefed up the ensuing May Day protest.

Deemed by the class-conscious CUTV trade union confederation leaders as “massive” and “surpassing previous years”, May 1 protests in nearly every city and state revealed the fruits of months of hard work to construct a unitary set of demands between politically diverse labor confederations.

Under the common banner of demanding the application of Venezuelan law and restoring long-dismantled labor rights (wages and pensions – not bonuses – in line with the basic food basket, workplace health and safety, a return to collective bargaining and freedom of union affiliation, activity and protest), these unions temporarily put their differences aside and joined forces, led by teaching, university, healthcare and pensioners’ unions.

In the words of the CUTV, May 1, 2026, marked an “awakening in the workers’ mobilization in Venezuela” and an “advance in union unity.”

Many vexed workers – and especially pensioners – opted to shake off the shackles of fear that had been imposed during Maduro’s crackdown on protests to retake the streets: “The fear factor is now not a paralyzing factor,” one trade union leader told me. The hope and dreams that May Day traditionally spawns gave way, it seems, to incensed indignation and deception, which translated into mobilization, militancy, and organization. Smells like class struggle to me.

This May Day protest in Lara state was very large. (La Prensa de Lara)

 

Wheeling & Dealing

But Venezuela’s 2026 May Day also exposed a more sinister and complex power dynamic at play.

Delcy’s flex was the result of a tripartite pact signed between her government, a handful of detested yes-men ‘unionists’, and – believe it or not – Fedecámaras and Fedeindustria.

For those who aren’t aware of the history of Venezuela’s federations of the chambers of commerce and business (Fedecamaras) and of industry (Fedeindustria), take a fleeting look at the main actors of the 2002 coup that ousted Chavez, or who have promoted large capital’s interests in the country since… forever.

So May Day also revealed the behind-closed-doors and sneaky agreements the PSUV government is signing with large capital – which, it turns out, is ecstatic.

The May Day announcement involved a gigantic dose of spin, with which Delcy’s combo tried to convince workers that she and Trump couldn’t really do much more, but – don’t worry – better is to come, she promised! Haven’t we heard this before?

Funds or No Funds?

Their main argument to defend the “increase” was that “there are no funds” for a greater wage rise, linking this purported fiscal impediment to the illegal and criminal US sanctions and the engorged public administration payroll.

But Venezuelan workers on the streets have too many years of struggle behind them to be so easily blindsided. “No funds?” they asked. What about the billions stolen by Tareck el Aissami under the unseeing (really?) eyes of, literally, everyone who is now in power – or the million other cases of government-backed corruption? Or the $2.5 billion in oil gifted to Trump this year, the $300 million in oil revenue given to Venezuela’s banks for FOREX, or the funds channeled to pay Maduro’s legal defense? Seems there’s plenty of money for those!

But we don’t need to point fingers or delve into the systematic dismantling of OFAC’s sanctions against Venezuela to debunk Delcy’s ridiculous argument.

The reality is that – after a catastrophic 85% GDP contraction – Venezuela’s economy is growing again. Surplus value is being created in ever greater amounts. There is more money flowing than some years back – and the 1% know it.

Our industrial output has grown 148% since 2021, with sales increasing 56%. Tax collection has reportedly reached record levels of $3 billion (despite huge tax cuts to foreign large capital), oil income this year is projected to increase 50% and reach $21.2 billion (we have to ask Trump nicely if we can use it, though), banks recorded their largest profits in 2025 for seven years ($1.746 billion, up 216% from 2024), state subsidies have all but disappeared, and the GDP is projected to grow around 7% this year (after contracting to next to nothing). I don’t mention these figures to suggest that all is dandy in Venezuela’s economy – it’s not – but rather to point out that the “there’s no money” argument in an expanding economy with an increasing GINI coefficient (53.9, up from 0.39 in 2011) comes like a slap in the face to toiling workers who see nothing of this extra macro cash flow.

Another argument is that the wage increase has to be graduated, “responsible” is the word Delcy used, to avoid inflation (responsible to whom, I don’t know, certainly not the worker who struggles to “responsibly” feed their children or “responsibly” pay taxes from their $0.27 monthly wage).

But many on the streets are asking if Delcy acted “responsibly” with her oil gifts to Washington or by reforming the hydrocarbons and mining laws to hand over the   country’s resources (and sovereignty) to foreign capital (more on this in future columns).

Others point out that inflation has battered away at workers incomes for the last four years despite frozen wages – proving the disconnect between the two.

So after the post-May Day come-down, having stored away the placards and swallowed the sweet candy of better-world dreaming before returning to the day-to-day toil of wage labor, I, like many, now find it easier to reflect on Delcy’s wage hike. My conclusion? That “responsible” increasingly feels like political doublespeak for “screwing you over, again”.

 

-Eva Garcia is a columnist for Marxism-Leninism Today, writing from Venezuela and offering a class-based counter-narrative to the mainstream media. She can be contacted at evagarciaperiodista@gmail.com. Her columns are open-source and can be freely republished (with due reference to the original publication here at MLT) without previous permission.