By JAMES MARSH

In the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 3, the U.S. military launched an attack on Venezuela and kidnapped the president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife. Top U.S. officials have said that a major objective of the action was to seize Venezuela’s oil and to sell it on the open market.

This blatant act of aggression followed at least 35 drone strikes on civilian vessels, which killed more than 115 people. This was accompanied by the seizing of oil tankers coming out of Venezuela as part of an illegal blockade; the piracy has continued in recent days with the capture of a Russian-flagged tanker in the North Atlantic on Jan. 7 and another ship near the Caribbean. The Trump administration has simultaneously expanded the network of U.S. military bases in Latin America.

The U.S. government is waging this campaign of imperialist terror on its neighbors because of the interests of multinational corporations and foreign investment. American workers must recognize the gulf between their interests in cooperation with other workers internationally and those of a narrow group of capitalists gorging themselves on the blood of neocolonies in the Global South.

This is not the first campaign of imperialist terror waged by the U.S., only the most recent. No one has forgotten the seemingly endless list of governments overthrown and counter-revolutionary dictators brought to power by the U.S. government. Haiti, Guatemala, Chile, Congo, Indonesia—listing them all would blur into senselessness.

No one has forgotten the bold-faced lies used to justify these interventions: Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that never existed, fabricated charges misrepresenting the complicity of Panama in the drug trade, “enlightenment and democracy” for the carpet-bombed and the massacred of Afghanistan, Vietnam, and other countries.

No one has forgotten the systematic torture and mass slaughter carried out by the U.S. to bring these collaborators to power, or the systematic torture and mass slaughter carried out by these collaborators with U.S. support. The bombing of Rafah and the starvation of Palestine, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib, Agent Orange and My Lai. Or collaboration with Pinochet, with Suharto, with Trujillo.

The U.S. government would prefer that people forget. No one has forgotten the blood on this government’s hands, but the past century and more of imperialism, and the genocide of native peoples before, are histories too detailed for any one person to remember in full. And it is easy to feel hopeless: too late to un-do the wars and colonial occupations, too late to save the maimed and the dead, too late to act.

But if we mean to stop the next war, we need to understand what drives imperialism, and the power we still have to act. This bloodshed is the price of global capitalism. It greases the wheels of a machine of exploitation that slashes open the veins of the formerly colonized world and imposes new regimes of neocolonialism to turn a profit in markets now conquered and controlled by the U.S. capitalist class.

We endure exploitation of workers abroad and exploitation of workers at home, so that a narrow minority of capitalists can see another dime in their portfolios. Why Venezuela? So its oil might be sold by U.S. companies and its minerals critical for military and energy technologies remain in supply chains dominated by U.S. firms. So its markets might be restructured to allow U.S. and international finance to step in and privatize any service which has resisted neoliberal pillaging of public resources. So its government which has taken a defiant stance in negotiating with U.S. companies or trading with Cuba can be brought to heel before the totality of U.S. political hegemony starts to have holes poked into it. None of these represent the interests of the U.S. working class in labor-led internationalism.

Why now? Because inter-imperialist rivalries with competing capitalist powers like China threaten to establish a beachhead against U.S. domination of its neocolonies in Latin America. Because authoritarian populist tactics under Trump use unrestrained military force as a tactic of international negotiation that discards the rules of the old order of legalist international regulation organized under the UN. Because the declining rate of profit for capitalists in the U.S., a crisis that has stretched into a long recession since the 2008 banking crisis, has led them to violently turn on the working class at home and abroad.

All of these threaten to bring another war in which the U.S. working class is sent as the soldiers who die fighting workers abroad for the profits of a narrow group of capitalists. All of these bring us closer to an inter-imperialist war, the kind of world war that does not stop until one of the warring great powers is leveled to ash, and its people with it.

What can advocates of peace and workers’ internationalism do in the face of this campaign of imperialist terror? There is no reforming imperialism, no talking it down, no reasoning or pleading. The power used to counter it must come from the working class itself. Activists fighting for peace and the labor movement as a whole must fight together in workplaces, in classrooms, and in the streets against the capitalists calling for blood. War with Venezuela is deeply unpopular in the United States; anyone supporting it must face an organized backlash strong enough that it seems like political suicide. This organized pushback must be deep enough that no soldier can be drafted or recruited without drawing from a pool of people already opposed to another war.

The halls of power and the Department of War belong to the capitalists; the streets and the forces of peace belong to the people. We must fight to organize a mass movement calling for peace so loud that all the world knows that regardless of the terrorists in power, the American people are against war in Venezuela.

Photo: Zhang Fenguo / Xinhua