The United States’ military strikes on Venezuela and the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife on 3 January constitute the most flagrant act of US imperialism seen in this century.
This naked act of regime change follows months of murderous war crimes across the Caribbean and Pacific, the piratical seizure of over 1.8 million barrels of Venezuelan oil, and years of a brutal campaign of economic sanctions against the Venezuelan people.
Despite attempts to provide the US campaign with the flimsiest of legal pretexts, the administration of Donald Trump has not even attempted to conceal its desire to steal control of Venezuelan natural resources and depose the government of an independent country long considered an obstacle to US hegemony within South America. It has now demonstrated beyond all doubt that national sovereignty and international law mean nothing when pitted against the predatory goals of capital and empire.
Since its inception, Venezuela’s orientation towards ‘Bolivarian socialism’ has inspired much debate within the international left. Socialist criticisms of the Maduro government’s limitations are matters of public record. They are irrelevant to the immediate task: unqualified condemnation of an illegal war of aggression, rapacity and plunder. Socialism must be anti-imperialist, or it is nothing.
History regrettably suggests it is unlikely any serious opposition to war on Venezuela will be offered by other Western governments, the US Democratic Party or the international institutions which the Trump administration has so openly disdained. That responsibility therefore falls to international solidarity movements, which will need to think seriously in the coming days about the most effective actions that can be undertaken to advance the cause of anti-imperialism beyond the symbolic.
The people of Venezuela need and deserve our solidarity – not just for their own sake, but for the sake of the world that will be upended into chaos if the Trump administration is emboldened to follow this act of war with even greater acts of escalation.
Emergency demonstrations
Demonstrations against US military intervention in Venezuela are taking place today, Monday 5th January, at the following locations and times:
- Glasgow – Buchanan Steps, 5pm
- Edinburgh – US Consulate, Regent Terrace, 4.30pm
- Dundee – City Square, 5pm
This statement on Venezuela gets the essential point right: Trump’s abduction of Maduro was an act of imperial gangsterism that deserves unqualified condemnation. The strikes killed between 23 and 47 Venezuelan soldiers and 32 Cuban military personnel, with over 100 injured; seven US soldiers were wounded. The demonstrations we called were correct. The warning that this emboldens further escalation is accurate. I supported the statement and attended the Glasgow demonstration.
But I want to push back against one formulation that I think weakens our politics rather than strengthening them.
The statement says: “Socialist criticisms of the Maduro government’s limitations are matters of public record. They are irrelevant to the immediate task.”
I don’t think they are irrelevant. I think they’re essential to understanding what we’re actually defending—and what genuine solidarity with Venezuela’s people requires.
## Washington didn’t strike at socialism
Here’s the uncomfortable reality: the United States did not attack Venezuela because Venezuela threatened capitalism. It struck a country whose government had already made its peace with capital.
The 2020 Anti-Blockade Law authorised secret contracts with foreign investors, bypassed constitutional oversight, and opened state enterprises to privatisation without public scrutiny. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—now running the country—personally travelled to Moscow and Tehran to promote these investment opportunities. By 2021, private companies handled 90% of Venezuela’s food and raw material imports, up from 25% in 2019.
The minimum wage collapsed to three dollars monthly. Labour flexibilisation gutted workers’ protections. The communal councils and comunas that represented Chavismo’s genuine innovations were systematically marginalised, their proposals for democratic control of food distribution rejected in favour of top-down patronage networks.
This is not socialism under siege. This is a bureaucratic elite that converted revolutionary legitimacy into personal enrichment, then maintained anti-imperialist rhetoric for international consumption while negotiating the terms of its integration into global capital flows.
Trump struck anyway. Not because Venezuela was socialist, but because its oil reserves are the largest on Earth, because the Monroe Doctrine is back, and because this administration believes it can do whatever it wants. The Maduro government’s corruption and authoritarianism didn’t protect Venezuela from imperialism. They made it vulnerable—by hollowing out the popular mobilisation that might have resisted, and by cultivating the insider collaborators who made the snatch operation possible.
## The Venezuelan left exists
When we say “the people of Venezuela need our solidarity,” who do we mean?
I’d suggest we start with the Venezuelan socialists currently facing persecution from their own government. Edgardo Lander, the veteran sociologist who supported the Bolivarian process from its inception, was denounced on state radio last August as part of a “foreign interference network”—his crime being documentation of extractivist devastation in the Orinoco Mining Arc. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, linked to Germany’s Die Linke, was named alongside him.
The Communist Party of Venezuela broke with Maduro in 2020, citing “neoliberal and subservient” economic policies. The government responded by attempting to seize control of the party through judicial intervention. Trade union activists organising for wage increases—in a country where the minimum wage is three dollars—have been sentenced to sixteen years in prison.
These comrades oppose US intervention. They also oppose a government that represses them while claiming to represent socialism. When we declare criticisms of Maduro “irrelevant,” we’re telling them their analysis doesn’t matter. We’re subordinating their struggle to our geopolitical framework.
Marea Socialista, a Venezuelan socialist organisation, put it plainly: the Maduro government “prefers a thousand times a false polarisation” with the right-wing opposition “from which it benefits and is able to sustain its precarious internal cohesion, than to have to respond to people’s demands and criticism from the left.”
That false polarisation serves the regime. It shouldn’t serve us.
## Two enemies, one struggle
The formulation I’d propose is this: the Venezuelan working class faces two enemies. One is US imperialism, which has now demonstrated its willingness to kidnap heads of state and “run” countries it considers its property. The other is a domestic ruling clique that has enriched itself catastrophically while impoverishing the population it claims to represent.
These enemies are not equivalent. US imperialism is the greater threat, commands vastly more destructive power, and sets the conditions within which all other struggles occur. Opposing it remains the primary task for socialists in imperialist countries.
But opposing imperialism cannot mean pretending its targets are our allies. The Maduro government persecutes Venezuelan socialists. It has dismantled the structures of popular participation that made Chavismo meaningful. It governs through a combination of military backing, patronage distribution, and repression. If the US threat disappeared tomorrow, Venezuelan workers would still face a bureaucracy that exploits them.
James Connolly understood this. British imperialism was the primary enemy, but that didn’t make the Irish bourgeoisie friends of the working class. The struggle against imperialism and the struggle for socialism were intertwined, not sequential. You couldn’t defer one until the other was resolved.
## What solidarity requires
None of this means softening our opposition to Trump’s aggression. It means deepening our solidarity to include the Venezuelans actually fighting for transformation.
When we call demonstrations, we should amplify Venezuelan left voices—not just defend “Venezuela” in the abstract. When we make statements, we should note that the people facing repression include socialists, trade unionists, and community organisers. When we think about “effective actions beyond the symbolic,” we should consider how to support those building working-class independence against both imperialism and the bureaucracy that claims to oppose it.
The Ukrainian socialist organisation Sotsialnyi Rukh, which has its own experience of imperial aggression, got the balance right in their response to January 3rd: “The struggle against Maduro’s dictatorship and the struggle against American imperialism are not mutually exclusive. They are two sides of the same conflict, in which peoples become pawns in geopolitical games.”
That’s the framework I think we need. Not “unqualified” support for a regime that has abandoned its people, but solidarity with the people themselves—including their right to criticise, organise, and fight for something better than the choice between imperial subjugation and authoritarian decay.
Comradely,
Duncan