A lot of people swing so hard against idealism that they become vulgar/mechanistic materialists.

Sometimes things are overdetermined, sometimes they're a precarious balance. The US being an imperialist state is overdetermined, so the replacement of a single president (by vote or otherwise) wouldn't meaningfully change its mechanisms.

But the decapitation strike has been an effective part of the US's three-part destabilization model for decades. (I believe it's a model described in Prashad's Washington Bullets but I could be misremembering). The US uses economic and information warfare to create/heighten internal contradictions, then assassinations to tip the balance and put people in power. Once power and legitimacy have been seized, the (local) superstructure can shape its base to align with US interests.

Iran seems to have strategically organized itself to withstand such strikes. But there are a hundred examples throughout history of leadership change drastically altering the character of a country. See Syria for a recent example. It's not something to take for granted.

Marxists need to study and understand this in detail because that's what it means to seize the state and means of production. Material flows don't snap into whatever vision an idealist imagines, but they can be surgically adjusted by a disciplined vanguard. Or they're forcefully maintained unsustainably, beyond their natural lifespan, by a comprador state as in Ukraine.

This is just a funny post though tbf. And I don't know enough about Venezuela to have an opinion on that specifically.