Organizing is, as always, tough work, but it continues to get results. Looking at Minneapolis earlier this year, it wasn't a vote that kicked ICE out, it was a general strike with 100,000 people. It wasn't the democrats helping out, it was the working class organizing and struggling against it. Local struggles against data centers, against landlords screwing over tenants, for labor unionizing, all of this is largely fought on the ground, not at the ballot box, and in many cases democrats directly oppose these struggles at local office.

No, revolution is not a few weeks out. Or, at least I don't think it would be. Revolution happens when the working class is organized, capitalism hits crisis, and the working class party can take it from a local struggle to a pointed attack against the system itself. The George Floyd protests came dangerously close to revolution, which is why organizers were targeted by the state directly. Organizers are targeted now by NSPM-7. The ruling class is scared and afraid.

Revolution isn't something you plan and trigger, it's something that can happen when the conditions are right and the implements necessary are in place. This isn't predictable in the specific sense, only in the general sense as capitalism necessarily enters crisis from its own contradictions. It's our job to make sure the necessary implements are already ready to go beforehand.

The CIA certainly helped in both cases, but the actual state apparatus in both Venezuela and Chile worked against the socialists. In Chile, Pinochet used the capitalist military to coup Allende, in Venezuela companies and businesses resist any progress from the PSUV. The solution is to replace the capitalist state with a socialist one, which doesn't make you immune to CIA influence, but does provide the basis for maintaining socialism domestically without retaining mechanisms that rely on private property to function.