The kidnapping of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro marks an acceleration of U.S. decline and a decisive break from its own the liberal world order. As imperialist China, Russia, and the U.S. hurtle toward wider war, the world is growing more volatile and dangerous by the day. 
To smash imperialism, the working class needs a communist movement. Progressive Labor Party strives to be that force, but we need you to join the fight.

Venezuela: rivalry flashpoint

Hugo Chávez’s 1999 Bolivarian “Revolution” ran on Venezuela’s vast reserves of oil, not working-class power. Following the death of Chávez, Maduro oversaw a drastic decline of living conditions for tens of millions of workers. Venezuela’s state capitalists enriched themselves while distributing crumbs to workers. The Chavistas used U.S. sanctions to obscure their own theft while millions were starved and displaced. As of last year, 60 percent of workers struggled to afford food and 80 percent were underemployed or unemployed (New York Times, 1/8). Workers always pay the price for bosses’ fights, whether local or global. That is why we must reject nationalism in all its forms. 

Venezuela is caught in the sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry among the U.S., China, and Russia. For the U.S., Maduro’s great crime wasn’t narcoterrorism—it was that he was cutting deals with the enemy. The U.S. rulers found an opportunistic section of the Venezuelan ruling class apparently willing to be bought off: “The whole operation looked so easy that many analysts…wondered whether regime insiders abetted Maduro’s extraction, in effect staging a palace coup by proxy” (FA, 1/7). 

Venezuela is strategically located and holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves: 303 billion barrels, or 17 percent of the global total (Institute for Energy Research, 1/13). Over the last 20 years, the historic U.S “backyard” of Latin America, rooted in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, has been steadily infiltrated by a rival imperialist. China has “economically displaced” the U.S. in “10 out of 12 countries in South America,” with more trade, investment, and development financing (NYT, 1/9). China’s banks have loaned billions in exchange for oil and minerals while its companies build ports, mines, and infrastructure. By 2024, most of Venezuela’s crude oil was flowing to China, though it amounted to only 4 percent of China’s total oil imports. What’s at stake here isn’t Chinese survival, but U.S. regional dominance.

China’s limited verbal condemnation of the U.S. invasion shows that China’s rulers aren’t yet ready for a direct military confrontation, especially as they manage friction with Taiwan and an economic slowdown. Russia’s muted response might signal its satisfaction with the U.S. bulldozing of NATO and its limited backing of Ukraine.  As there is no honor among thieves, these alliances will continue to shift. The world is unstable because capitalists are legitimized gangsters who fight tooth and nail for profits as they exploit our class. The ultimate and inevitable expression of their competition is world war. 

Competing visions of U.S. power

For seven decades, U.S. imperialism relied on international institutions that enabled its bosses to control the rules of the game: NATO, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank. These organizations normalized a “rules-based” liberal world order that consolidated U.S. dominance after World War II. But make no mistake—their dominance was a bloody one! From 1945 to 2023, the U.S. launched at least 255 military operations (Congress, 6/7/23).  

Because capitalist competition inevitably leads to rise and fall of empires, the old order began fraying in the 1970s, marked by the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. More recently, China’s rise has weakened U.S. leverage globally. State Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump’s response has been to wreck the old world order and move toward a Fortress America that would control Latin America while abandoning multilateral commitments in Europe and Asia. 

While some might see the theatrics of kidnapping a president as a show of strength, it is anything but. As U.S. dominance wanes, the bosses’ tactics to preserve it become even more desperate and rabid. 

The U.S. ruling class is split into two main competing factions. The Big Fascists of finance capital still seek global domination through endless war. But the domestically oriented Small Fascists behind Trump have no interest in spending their profits on far-flung ground wars. They accept that U.S. global dominance is slipping and are focused on locking down a sphere of influence in the Americas, hence the belligerent operation in Venezuela. Conceding Ukraine to Russia and Taiwan to China would seem to align with this strategy. But Trump’s raw coercion could have unintended consequences by emboldening other capitalists to do the same. Case in point: China’s 10-hour live-firing drills to rehearse a blockade of Taiwan. As CHALLENGE goes to press, meanwhile, threats of U.S. military action in Iran are escalating. 

How the next world war unfolds remains uncertain. What’s clear is we live in perilous times. Within that danger also lies Progressive Labor Party’s responsibility to turn world war into class war.   

We need communism

State terror is the order of the day. The display of brute force in Venezuela, which killed 80 people on the ground, is a harbinger of fascism, driven by U.S. decline and by bitter splits in the ruling class. So are the brazen murders of Black and white workers, from Keith Porter in Los Angeles to Renee Good in Minneapolis, by the modern slave-catchers known as ICE (see page 1). These incidents of callous violence expose the bosses’ raw dictatorship under their slipping democratic mask.

The capitalists know that the international working class is the mortal threat to their profits and survival. But the only way we can realize our revolutionary potential is by building a mass workers’ party. Amid the chaos of capitalism, there can be no return to a safer, more stable time. 

There are no good capitalist bosses, no lesser evils–not in the U.S. or China, not in Russia or Venezuela. From Russia to China to Vietnam, the only force that has ever defeated an “unbeatable” bosses’ empire is a mass communist-led movement. And it was only the communist leadership of the USSR that defeated the German Nazi war machine. 

There is no middle path. The time to organize was yesterday. We cannot appease or wish away fascism and world war. We need to build an international communist party that can smash imperialist war for all time–and create a new world that serves workers’ needs. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party! 

U.S. Hypocrisy

Laws are made by and for the ruling class. While liberal U.S. bosses act appalled at the “illegal” seizure of Venezuela’s president and oil, the rules of U.S. democracy have been a longtime cover for the invasion and overthrow or regimes that failed to roll over to serve U.S. capitalist interests. What’s different today is the capitalist rulers’ open shamelessness. Here are just a few past examples:

• Iran (1953): A CIA-led coup ousted the elected government after it nationalized the country’s oil industry, and reinstalled a  monarchy in league with the U.S.  
• Chile (1973): After Cuba-aligned President Salvador Allende nationalized the copper industy, the U.S. launched a coup that killed Allende and established a brutal 17-year dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet. 
• Panama (1989): Citing drug trafficking and the killing of a Marine, the U.S. invaded the country and captured and jailed military ruler Manuel Noriega. The real goal was to secure control over the Panama Canal, a critical passageway for global supply chains. 
• Iraq (1990-1991, 2003-2011): With various phony pretexts, including non-existent “weapons of mass destruction,” the U.S. waged two wars to control vast oil reserves in Iraq and Kuwait–and it destroyed as many as one million lives in the process.