Photo: Ringo Chiu
Often times an effective way to locate what unifies our class struggle in different parts of the world with those in America is to look at what we are fighting for and what is our common class enemy. On January 3rd Venezuela became more prominent news in the United States than it had been in years prior. For Americans familiar with the Trump administration’s willingness to employ terror and coercion on people and local officials in cities across the United States, the invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife was more easily understood as an extension of Trump’s domestic policy.
Making the connections between United States policy abroad and at home is more important than ever for conscious revolutionaries in America in helping understand the roots of fascism and the growing police and surveillance state apparatus at home. The Cop City training facility in Atlanta, for example, should be understood in the context of a years-long exchange program between American police forces and the Israeli military — an occupying force, practiced in the kind of siege operations Cop City is designed to simulate. Many such connections become evident in hindsight but it does highlight the importance of understanding the attack on Venezuela as one of the recent stages of a larger motion.
WHAT ARE THE CONNECTIONS?
Venezuela sits on the world’s largest oil reserves which Trump had made clear he wants control over. This will ultimately be impossible. Oil company executives in the United States were not particularly receptive to what Trump thought he had to offer, in part because taking Nicolás Maduro out of the picture did not automatically bring Venezuela under U.S. control. The United States has no legitimacy with the majority of the Venezuelan people. The most high-profile opposition figure in Venezuelan right-wing, María Corina Machado, is seen by most of Venezuela in the same light that Trump is seen in the United States.
President Trump’s claim to Venezuela’s oil is absurd on its face but it does underscore a long-standing assumption taken for granted by ruling-class interests but not stated as forthrightly. It’s not the resources that belong to the United States, but the entire country. All of it. The latest renewed effort to crush Cuba’s revolutionary government, has a commonality. Cuba’s nationalization of its sugar and oil production, like Venezuela’s nationalization of its oil, were necessary for the purposes of supporting their own economic development, were viewed by former business interests as “theft.” What is omitted are the pre-revolutionary conditions in both countries when those Western interests were making a killing, while the condition of the working class and rural peasantry was one of extreme poverty.
HARD TURNING POINT
In less than five years we’ve come to an inflection point in the United States. People who are not seeing any relief or respite delivered in the form or economic relief are not fooled. There has also been a fracturing with in the MAGA base over perceived divided loyalties within the Trump administration, particularly regarding its continuing fealty to Israel and its supporters. Thus far, no assurances have been given the working class that this will work in its favor.
The Trump administration’s policies to restore the American economy have failed to deliver on their promised ends. The G7’s global clout is greatly eroded and Trump has shown no great enthusiasm for maintaining NATO, which has long been an instrument of imperial expansion for the United States in Eastern Europe and West Asia. The ruling class interests that Trump represents have no sustainable solution to the diminishing U.S. economic hegemony that came at the cost of the gradual dismantling of its productive base that provided the standard of living Americans were largely accustomed to. The war on Latin American countries that don’t submit to the diktats of Washington is an outward sign of this desperation.
There may be some solace in the prospect that Trump’s ambitions will ultimately prove unsuccessful, but revolutionaries can’t afford to indulge in unwarranted optimism. Three weeks after the United States’ coup in Venezuela, two ICE assaults on protests in Minneapolis resulted in the shooting deaths of two unarmed citizens. After a year of such violent unilateral action and fierce resistance and the threatening rhetoric coming from the White House, it almost felt inevitable. They could no longer be viewed in isolation from one another. This doesn’t appear to be lost on thousands gathered in the streets of Minneapolis, Chicago, Washington D.C. and other cities, but will that seed any transformative consciousness? Fascism is all that is left to those unwilling or incapable of genuine governing. It is the naked rule of force, to paraphrase a Trump official, that is most effective in the end. Deception is no longer necessary.
STARTING AT GRASS-ROOTS: WHAT CAN REVOLUTIONARIES DO?
It is necessary too, to acknowledge that we are also pushing back on generations of institutional tradition. Getting people in the United States to understand the significance of another country’s people to determine their own future when their world is dominated by the domestic struggles that touch their own lives, is a tougher task. It would be a mistake to cast either of these concerns as wrong. A big part of the problem lies in how those concerns are manipulated.
Safety, security, jobs, the so-called bread-and-butter issues are where most people still live and the struggle for basic needs is universal; it is the responsibility of the revolutionary to educate and to build this understanding that the U.S. war machine does not exist to serve their interests. Attempting to reach people and local officials, is part of the heavy lifting that is necessary.
As it becomes more risky to speak out publicly against the injustices of our own ruling class, what revolutionaries can offer at this stage is to speak out, to educate and assist in building community wherever possible. The conscious working class we need only comes through struggles that revolutionaries emerge from, and are informed by.
Published on February 11, 2026.
This article originated in Rally!
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