Wtf Happened
The kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela, a former bus driver and union leader, and his wife, Cilia Flores, was an audacious attack involving the world’s most powerful military and has sent shock waves across the world. The operation took place in the early hours of Saturday, January 3rd, involving more than 150 U.S. aircraft and elite special forces units, and was carried out by the “elite” Delta Force, the US’s top military special operations unit. Trump didn’t hide his ghoulish excitement at what he witnessed from his private Mar-a-Lago residency: “It was an incredible thing to see,” Trump said on Saturday. “If you would have seen what happened, I mean, I watched it literally like I was watching a television show. And if you would’ve seen the speed, the violence… it was an amazing thing, an amazing job that these people did.”
Over 40 people were killed by the US operation (no US soldiers were killed), 36 of whom were Cuban soldiers who had been brought in some months ago to guard Maduro, likely due to growing mistrust and division within the ruling regime. Emerging claims suggest that there was a deal in which the Chavista leadership agreed to throw Maduro under the bus in exchange for the US selling the opposition down the river. The opposition leader Ms Machado, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for her “efforts to advance democracy in Venezuela” (a prize that Trump put himself forward for), was swiftly cast out of favour, with Trump saying that “she doesn’t have the respect within the country”, fuelling further speculation that a “Maduroism without Maduro” regime will continue, with a weakened Venezuelan government and a very large gun to its head. By doing this, the US is avoiding the biggest challenge for any regime change intervention: what comes after.
The case against Nicolás Maduro relied in part on the Trump administration’s designation of the so-called “Cartel de los Soles” as a terrorist drug organisation allegedly led by Maduro. While that designation remains in place, the U.S. Department of Justice has since revised its indictment, backing away from claims that the cartel exists as a structured organisation or that Maduro ran it.
Whose Based Order
Contrary to liberal commentators who frame this as a shocking deviation from the “rules-based international order”, the invasion of Venezuela perfectly encapsulates that order’s essence. Liberal democracy has always relied on war, coups, sanctions, and domination. For all states, war & violence are a permanent state of affairs and something intrinsic to the normal functioning of capitalism.
Political theorist Maurizio Lazzarato reminds us that moments of apparent political stability are merely pauses between “cycles of conquest and subjugation”. The capitalist “peace” we know is maintained by structural violence: mass incarceration, colonial appropriation, racial hierarchies, gendered domination and the ongoing civil war against the proletariat. As Lazzarato writes, “for production, there must be class; and to produce class, there must be a war of subjugation.”
And yet, despite knowing this is business as usual, especially for the imperialist and colonial US empire, we sense that there is a difference here. Perhaps it’s the brazenness with which the Trump regime undertook this act, with the big MAGA donors lining up for what would be huge payments from acquiring Venezuela’s assets. On Tuesday 7th Jan, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that “the interim authorities of Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 million barrels of high quality, sanctioned oil to the United States of America”, effectively holding the country to an economic blackmail against any deviation from US control.
We are perhaps entering into a new cycle of accumulation. If we are to take seriously Lazzarato’s work on war and violence and their fundamental relation to capitalism, this can only be achieved by war and plunder of the kind seen in the 19th century, but now with advanced hi-tech weaponry. We are in a world of warlord states extracting “tributes” from their conquests, where open military force becomes the precondition for authoritarian regimes of production and extraction, solely for US benefit.
America Breaking Bad
Trump is doing badly on “cost of living”. Twenty-seven per cent of Americans have skipped a medical appointment due to costs; social inequality may just crack the US before too long. The whole US economy has been fuelling a financial bubble in AI, with $400 billion invested in 2025 alone, increasingly funded through corporate debt. With the deployment of US National Guard troops to Democrat-run states through manufactured crises – crime, migration, antifa – what is occurring within its own territory mirrors the method of its power abroad: a process of securitisation that has accelerated across most advanced capitalist states, as governments heed the warnings of climate breakdown (only as much as to save their own skin) and rising popular discontent.
As we write this statement, ICE agents have shot dead a 37 year-old woman, Renee Good, in Minneapolis, during an ICE raid. According to reports, she was acting as “an observer” who was “watching out for our immigrant neighbours.” along with other community members.
This is the latest episode of brutal violence enacted by the state mercenaries of ICE against ordinary Americans, leading to increasingly mass resistance and the formation of new alliances. The war has not only been against migrants –- “aliens” or not – but also against women’s reproductive rights and trans rights, turning culture-war rhetoric into the violent reinforcement of gender binaries and hierarchies. As Trump’s America First doctrine rolls out, its capacity to back fire increases, and it’s here where cracks in his regime will rapidly widen.
Beyond Reactive Anti-Imperialism
In defence against the new wave of US militarised authoritarianism, too often the anti-imperialist left collapses into apologism, applauding any regime opposed to it, regardless of its own authoritarianism. This has long undermined emancipatory politics by binding the left to reactionary state powers. Real solidarity cannot mean defending governments that oppress their own working classes in the name of “sovereignty.” It must mean building transnational ties of resistance grounded in the shared conditions of exploitation and war.
There is potential for new movements and class formations, seen most recently in the political strikes in Italy in September and November 2025, led by the trade union USB but articulating a wider, much deeper social discontent. As Federico Tomasone writes on the strikes in Italy: “For years, the Right in Italy has governed not only by policies but by affects, pushing a pedagogy of apathy: nothing changes, nothing works, nothing is worth the risk. Blocchiamo Tutto broke that spell, at least momentarily. Markets paused, trains stopped, ports stood still, parliaments noticed.” These experiences are too easily dispersed in our minds, too easily forgotten, and purposely censored by design. Despite this they demonstrate the very real possibility and potential of such movements regaining the initiative and opening up space again.
Regaining the Initiative
The conflicts we have seen from Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to the Congo, and now Venezuela, represents a move towards a new phase of militarisations and industrial scale warfare. These are wars that exist as key drivers of economic cycles of capitalist accumulation. To confront this reality we need to look at the social power we do have – as value-producers in a capitalist economy. This requires recognising that this power lies not in the state but in the power of collective refusal. It was the collective refusal of millions in the streets of Venezuela back in 2002 that thwarted the US-backed coup against Hugo Chavez. It has been the only way that ordinary people, workers, have stopped wars and authoritarian regimes in the past.
Here in Britain, it has become increasingly clear that the same set of powerful financial actors—banks, investors, and asset management firms—play a dominant role across nearly all aspects of everyday life. Whether through rents, mortgages, privatised utilities, or credit rating systems, they maintain a violent system of control that structures the war economy, generating profit for those at the top whilst dispossessing the majority.
It is crucial to continually trace these connections. Capital and state power have always been intertwined, and understanding this clearly in every discussion forces us to ask: what action should we take? There is of course no single answer. We have tools that we can use: mass strikes, collective refusal to pay our bills, blocking arms production, shutting down circulation of goods and services. But to be able to do that we need to start to act and think as a movement, to accumulate militants, to build infrastructure and spaces for coordination and planning.
We know things are stacked up against us. Class discontent is being funnelled into nationalist fantasies, and anger is turned towards “illegals” and other fake “enemies of the people”. That is only one side of the picture, amplified by the mass media. There is another, vast layer of society yet to mobilise, yet to challenge where the world is heading, but which shares much of our values and desires. We are not alone. There will be moments born from what is yet to come, but they will be built upon what we do in the present; our task is to open up the possibility for it.
Plan C – Editorial Collective