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Workers’ Voice Newspaper: January – February Edition
The Trump regime’s attack on the sovereignty of Venezuela by kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro opens up a new era in the Western Hemisphere of gunboat diplomacy and a reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine. Trump’s aggression abroad is only matched by the vicious ICE raids and shootings here in the U.S. This edition of the newspaper looks at the present moment of war and repression and the way forward for the working class. Also in this issue you’ll find articles on NYC mayor Mamdani taking office, Trump’s attack on gender affirming care, and a music review of Haley Heynderickx’s most recent album.
The January – February 2026 edition of our newspaper is available in print and online as a pdf. Read the latest issue of our newspaper today with a free pdf download! As always, we appreciate any donations to help with the cost of printing.
Click on the image to read the paper or message us to get a hard copy.
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The new policy of U.S. imperialism toward Latin America
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Trump tries to project strength, but his posture towards Latin America covers a global retreat, and mounting contradictions at home
By EDU ALMEIDA and FLORENCE OPPEN
In November 2025, the Trump administration published the document “National Security Strategy,” in which it announced the new strategic foundations of imperialist action in this period to impose its hegemony in the “Western Hemisphere.” This plan comes as no surprise, since Trump, in his inauguration speech, announced that “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation—one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.”
In this article, we want to focus on the consequences of this new policy for Latin America, which took the form of a brutal invasion and the kidnapping of Maduro in early January 2026. With this aggression, the U.S. government resumed the practice of direct military invasions in Latin America, which had not occurred for decades.
The document published by the White House details, with Trump’s typical shamelessness, the strategy of the far-right government that stands at the head of the still hegemonic but declining imperialist power, which seeks by all means to consolidate a regional base to compete with and confront China. This policy, in turn, further deepens the crisis of the imperialist world order and social, economic, and political polarization.
From the Monroe Doctrine to the “Trump Corollary”
The document explicitly vindicates the Monroe Doctrine and affirms a “Trump Corollary” to that doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, announced by U.S. President James Monroe in 1823, established the definition of “America for Americans.” At the time, it was a defensive expression against the intervention of hegemonic European countries in America, in a context of countries newly liberated from the domination of England, Spain, and Portugal.
Subsequently, this doctrine changed in character, reflecting the country’s transformation into an imperialist power with an offensive stance and military interventions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked this turn. The U.S. not only seized the former Spanish colonies (Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico) and imposed a protectorate on Cuba, but also annexed Hawaii, began exploration of what would become the Panama Canal, and in the following months acquired more than 7000 islands in the Pacific, more than 10,000 km away from California, establishing a military presence in the region of more than 100,000 troops.
In 1904, the “Roosevelt Corollary” (President Theodore Roosevelt) to the Monroe Doctrine blatantly advocated an aggressive imperialist policy, referred to as the “Big Stick.” This policy was expressed in successive military interventions to control the Panama Canal between 1903 and 1925, as well as in more than six interventions in Honduras between 1903 and 1925, and in military occupations in Nicaragua (1912-33), Haiti (1915-34) and the Dominican Republic (1916 and 1924). With this shift, the U.S. began its ideological campaign to position itself as an “international police power,” with the moral and military authority to repress the ‘misconduct’ of other governments and defend the values of Christian “civilization” and liberal democracy..
The United States became hegemonic after World War I, which it entered near the end, in alliance with British imperialism (which had been hegemonic until then). The United States took advantage of its expansionist process and the fact that it had not suffered major losses in the war.
U.S. imperialism consolidated its global hegemony after World War II. Crucial to this were the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, a counterrevolutionary pact between the US and Stalin’s Soviet bureaucracy that guaranteed US hegemony.
For more than five decades, the economic hegemony of the United States was based on its technological, financial, and military dominion. Its industrial oligopolies used ideologies such as “free trade” to expose the fragile industries of other countries to their dominance. The “American way of life,” spread by Hollywood and American bourgeois democracy, was the basis of political and ideological domination. International economic and financial institutions, such as the IMF and the WTO, operated internationally as an expression of US economic hegemony.
The Yalta and Potsdam agreements, together with the role of the Stalinist bureaucracy, ensured countless defeats in the great struggles of the postwar period. Even so, some revolutions were victorious and gave rise to new workers’ states, which soon became bureaucratized, such as Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam.
The combination of curbing progress and shifting revolutions toward bourgeois democracy was never a policy exclusive to imperialism. When this was not enough, imperialism resorted to coups and military invasions. In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. government promoted countless coups in Latin America, such as those in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and other countries.
In the 1980s and 1990s, globalization, neoliberal policies, and the restoration of capitalism in the former workers’ states made possible a new rise of capitalism. Neoliberal policies, the opening of countries’ economic borders, and the formation of international supply chains were then imposed.
After restoring capitalism, China and Russia integrated themselves in a subordinate manner into the upward curve of imperialism. But then, in this century, they became new emerging imperialist powers.
The US seeks to curb China’s expansion in the region
Since the beginning of the 21st century, U.S. imperialism has shown increasing signs of decline. Although it remains the hegemonic imperialist power in the economic, financial, technological, and military spheres, its hegemony has been diminishing, losing important economic ground, particularly to China. Since 2010, China has surpassed the United States in industrial production and today accounts for 31.8% of global industrial GDP. In Fortune Global’s 2025 list of the world’s 500 largest companies, Chinese companies (147) extended their advantage over U.S. companies (134) for the fifth consecutive year.
The National Security Strategy document responds to this reality. U.S. imperialism remains hegemonic, but it is in decline and its hegemony is diminishing. Far from abandoning the struggle for world hegemony, the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is an aggressive expression, the “Big Stick” of decadent hegemonic imperialism to rebuild its global dominance in the face of rising Chinese imperialism.
Although Latin America is not the place where China accumulates most of its investments and disputes hegemony, as it does in Southwest Asia and Africa, China’s investment in the region that the U.S. considers its backyard has taken a qualitative leap in the last two decades.
First, the region’s trade ties with the Asian giant have grown: “In 2000, the Chinese market accounted for less than 2% of Latin American exports, but China’s rapid growth and the resulting demand fueled the subsequent commodity boom in the region. Over the next eight years, commerce grew at an annual rate of 31%. In 2021, trade exceeded $450,000 million, a figure that, according to Chinese state media, grew to a record $518,000 million in 2024, with some economists predicting that it could exceed $700,000 million by 2035.
Obviously, this is a highly unequal trade that benefits Asian imperialism: while Latin America exports soybeans and other vegetable products, meat products, copper, oil, lithium, and other minerals that are key to Chinese development, the region imports high value-added manufactured goods, thus providing a market for Chinese industry and ruining domestic industry in the region. Within this framework, Beijing has already managed to impose free trade agreements with five countries: Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Peru. In the case of some countries, such as Chile, trade dependence on China is very significant, as in 2023, 38% of its total exports went to that country.
Beyond unequal trade, China has increased its direct investment ($8.5 million in 2024) in the more than 20 Latin American countries that it has incorporated into the Silk Road (BRI). This investment focuses on strategic sectors, such as energy resources, or on “dual-use” (commercial and military) infrastructure, which is of increasing concern to Washington. China’s strategic investment in the Lithium Triangle (Chile, Bolivia, Argentina) is well known, as the region is home to between 60% and 70% of the world’s lithium reserves, which are essential for electric batteries. Between 2018 and 2024, Chinese mining multinationals have invested more than $16 billion in its exploitation. In Argentina, China owns or is a partner in six of the 16 active lithium projects, including four of the most advanced ones. In 2023, a Chinese consortium (CATL, BRUNP, CMOC) signed a $1,000 million deal to build lithium carbonate plants in the Uyuni and Coipasa salt flats in Bolivia, the first foreign-led commercial lithium project in the country. Chinese companies are estimated to control nearly 40% of global lithium production through their operations in South America.
China currently has investments and total or partial control of more than 40 ports in the region, some in key strategic sectors, such as the port of Abaco in the Bahamas (near Florida) and the Beagle Channel in Argentina, in the Antarctic. Added to this are a dozen Chinese satellite facilities and the fact that China provides military equipment to several countries. This is the case in Venezuela, for example, which has been under a U.S. arms embargo since 2006, but also in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Cuba.
In addition, since 2005, Chinese banking monopolies have lent more than $120,000 million to Latin American countries. Of particular note are the loans requested by Venezuela, China’s main creditor in the region, which has received almost $60,000 million in loans, more than double that of Brazil, the second largest creditor. Also noteworthy is the latest $5,000 million SWAP loan that Milei, in Argentina, contracted with China in April 2025, despite his allegiance to Trump.
Trump seeks to impose puppet governments in the region
The U.S. National Security Strategy document explains the strategy of imposing puppet governments in the Western Hemisphere to achieve its economic and military objectives: “We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.”
At this moment, Venezuela is the central focus of this policy. Contrary to what Stalinist propaganda claims, Maduro’s government has been devoted to U.S. imperialism. Chevron remained fully involved in the exploitation of Venezuelan oil. In fact, in October 2025, Maduro, according to a New York Times report, offered to “open up all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, give preferential contracts to American businesses, reverse the flow of Venezuelan oil exports from China to the United States, and slash his country’s energy and mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian and Russian firms.” in exchange for remaining in power.
But Trump did not accept because his goal is not only oil, but also to implement a more global national security strategy. The Maduro government, despite being pro-imperialist, was not a puppet government, but rather reflected the contradictory and opportunistic interests of the corrupt Bolivarian bourgeoisie built up around the state. Trump, on the contrary, wants a government completely subjugated to his interests in the region, which is why he invaded and kidnapped Maduro.
This invasion could open the door to its repetition in other countries, such as Colombia, Cuba, and others. And it poses a great threat to the new revolutionary processes in the region. The meaning of “recruiting and engaging” allied governments is very precise: pro-imperialist bourgeois governments are not enough; far-right puppet governments are needed. As the National Security Strategy document states:
“American policy should focus on enlisting regional champions that can help create tolerable stability in the region, even beyond those partners’ borders. These nations would help us stop illegal and destabilizing migration, neutralize cartels, nearshore manufacturing, and develop local private economies, among other things. We will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy. But we must not overlook governments with different outlooks with whom we nonetheless share interests and who want to work with us.”
To this end, Trump openly and cynically uses economic pressure, making loans conditional on the electoral victories of his allies, such as Milei in Argentina and Nasry Asfura (of the National Party in Honduras).
It is undeniable that Trump has achieved results with this policy. Taking advantage of the disasters committed by class-collaborationist governments, such as those of Xiomara (Honduras), Boric, Petros, and others, the far right is making significant advances in Latin America. It can already count on the governments of Milei (Argentina), Kast (Chile), Bukele (El Salvador), and Asfura (Honduras), as well as victory in the 2026 elections in Colombia.
The case of Lula in Brazil is different. It is a pro-imperialist government, with which Trump negotiates under pressure from his own U.S. bourgeois base, rebelling against the negative consequences of the tariff war. Even so, Trump will help build a post-Bolsonaro right-wing alternative to try to defeat Lula in 2026.
Something similar is happening with Sheinbaum (Mexico), who has completely adapted to Trump’s pressure, as the Mexican economy is totally subordinate to its relationship with the U.S.: around 80% of Mexico’s exports, 55% of its imports, and 41% of its foreign direct investment depend on the United States.
In this context, it is essential to fight in all Latin American countries against this new aggression by Trump, who seeks to annex the continent. To this end, it is important that all parties that truly fight for socialism raise a program for the Second Independence of Latin America that proposes to confront all imperialisms, both U.S. and European, as well as Chinese imperialism, which presents itself as a “friend.” We must seek the broadest unity of action that can mobilize the working class and its allies, such as Indigenous peoples, against military interventions, such as that in Venezuela, against extractivist or overexploitation projects, and against other attacks on national sovereignty, such as indebtedness and unequal trade agreements, whoever the imperialism that proposes and imposes them may be. Once again, we must show that only an independent solution for the working class can achieve true independence that guarantees the social and political rights of the working class and stops the destruction of the environment.
The “Trump corollary” in politics: Bonapartism, the far right, and xenophobia
Trump, in order to impose his plan on the United States in the world, needs Bonapartism: the stark politics of decadent imperialism. One of the main differences between the Monroe Doctrine of the early 20th century and Trump’s policy today is that it no longer disguises itself with the false “civilizing” discourse used by the colonial powers of the last century, which sought to defend universal morality and legality and promoted a narrative of prosperity, modernity, and progress. Today, Trump seeks to subjugate other countries with his “America First” rhetoric, bluntly assuming that he can put his own economic needs above those of other nations simply because he has the power to do so.
Trump heads a Bonapartist government in the United States, in collision with the bourgeois democratic regime, which he wants to turn into an authoritarian Bonapartist regime. He is in constant conflict with the justice system. He sends troops to states governed by Democrats. He has greatly reinforced the Border Patrol (ICE) for the repression of immigrants.
On the world stage, Trump is following a similar path: he is setting aside the international institutions and agreements that previously expressed imperialist domination (UN, WTO, IMF) and resorting to force to impose his rule. The values of bourgeois democracy, the “American way of life,” have been left behind. Domination is exercised through military force, direct economic pressure, and Bonapartism.
The crisis of the imperialist world order is increasingly narrowing around two blocs: one directly subordinate to U.S. imperialism and another forming around China.
At the same time, there is a growing trend toward Bonapartism in countries around the world, which deepens the crisis of bourgeois democracy. Not only that, but the National Security Strategy document explicitly expresses direct support for the growth of the far right worldwide: “Our goals for the Western Hemisphere can be summarized as “Enlist and Expand.” We will enlist established friends in the Hemisphere to control migration, stop drug flows, and strengthen stability and security on land and sea. We will expand by cultivating and strengthening new partners while bolstering our own nation’s appeal as the Hemisphere’s economic and security partner of choice.”
To this end, Trump uses all the resources of the U.S. state, including economic, political, and military pressure. But the ideological and political basis common to the entire far right should not be overlooked. This includes the fight against immigration, which is so important to the far right in imperialist countries: “The Era of Mass Migration Is Over: Who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.
“ Any country that considers itself sovereign has the right and duty to define its future. Throughout history, sovereign nations prohibited uncontrolled migration and granted citizenship only rarely to foreigners, who also had to meet demanding criteria. The West’s experience over the past decades vindicates this enduring wisdom. In countries throughout the world, mass migration has strained domestic resources, increased violence and other crime, weakened social cohesion, distorted labor markets, and undermined national security. The era of mass migration must end.”
Similarly, it spreads ideologies, such as the “war on drugs,” which are linked to the electoral exploitation of urban violence by the far right, so well capitalized on by governments such as those of Bukele (El Salvador) and Noboa (Ecuador), and by the entire Latin American far right. In Brazil, the far right echoes Trump and promotes the classification of common criminals as “terrorists.”
The document defends another fundamental ideological point for the far right, both in imperialist countries and in semi-colonial countries (such as Latin American countries, for example), which is the defense of oppression against women, Black, and LGBTQ people.
This ideological combination could have fundamental political importance in unifying the international far right around Trump and weakening anti-imperialist consciousness, which is a product of the Trump administration’s actions against Latin American countries, for example. This is a hypothesis that may or may not be confirmed in the coming period.
It is important to note that the so-called “bourgeois class-collaborationist governments,” also known as “progressive” governments, bear direct responsibility for the rise of the far right. The implementation of neoliberal policies against the masses by these governments causes wear down that the far right takes advantage of.
The case of the Chavista regime is a particular expression of that process, because it was not class collaboration, but a bourgeois dictatorship hated by the masses and originated by the “left.” The polls after the invasion show that most of the Latin American population, even in Venezuela, supports the overthrow of Maduro by U.S. imperialism, which shows the decline of anti-imperialist consciousness.
It is essential that working-class organizations take up the demands for the rights of migrants and Indigenous peoples to national sovereignty, actively combat racism and xenophobia, and fight to defend and expand the rights of women and the LGBT community. It is the task of revolutionary socialists to seek to combine the struggles for democratic rights with the struggle for socialism, and the need for our class to come to power.
The consequences for Cuba of the aggression against Venezuela
The crisis in the Cuban economy is worsening with each passing day, and after Maduro’s forced removal by the U.S., the island could descend into social chaos. According to government statistics, in the last five years, more than one million Cubans (10% of the population), mostly young people, have emigrated abroad in search of better living conditions. Since 2020, the country’s GDP has fallen by 11%, the energy network is disintegrating, and wages are very low. Outside Havana, where the foreign bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie embedded in the Cuban state apparatus live, power outages of up to 18 hours a day are common. It is obvious that the new sanctions imposed by Trump in 2019 have greatly contributed to suffocate the island, with severe restrictions on travel and remittances from Cuban immigrants in the US.
In this context, Trump’s new control over what remains of the Chavista regime, led by Delcy Rodríguez, could cause Cuba’s total economic collapse. Cuba needs 100,000 barrels of oil per day to ensure the minimum functioning of its economy, and it only manages to produce a quarter of that volume. While Venezuela sent the rest a decade ago, today it only sends 35,000 barrels per day, partly due to pressure from the U.S. and partly due to the frustration of the Chavista regime, which was unable to receive payments on time. The same is true of Mexico, which used to send 22,000 barrels per day but reduced its shipments to 7,000 bpd at the end of 2025. Trump’s criminal policy is clear, as he wrote on Jan. 11 on his social media account: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!”
In the face of Trump’s threats, it is fundamental to strongly oppose any U.S. intervention in Cuba and demand an immediate end to sanctions and the economic blockade against the island. Building the greatest possible unity of action within our class against the attack on Venezuela and a possible attack on Cuba does not imply giving any kind of political support to the governments of Rodríguez or Díaz-Canel. On the contrary, in Cuba, as in Venezuela, our political and material solidarity is with the people who are mobilizing for their rights, and our goal is to ensure that they organize independently of the government and any interference from foreign imperialists, in order to position themselves as an independent and democratic class alternative that can advance toward true socialism.
The contradictions of the “Donroe Doctrine”
While the Trump administration is determined to exercise firm despotic domination over the continent, this does not mean that the success of its policy is guaranteed. On the one hand, this new policy will encounter resistance from the masses; on the other, it will have to contend with inherent limitations, or what we might call the “hidden corollaries” of this imperialist doctrine.
First, it must be considered that oil exploitation in Venezuela is neither an easy nor an automatic task. Venezuela’s oil production is in decline: at the end of the 1990s, 3.5 million barrels per day were produced, compared to just 800,000 today. Analysts say that at least five years of massive investment are needed to recover equivalent production levels. The consulting firm Rystad Energy, for example, says that at least $53,000 million would be needed over the next 15 years to increase production to 1,1 bpd. To be profitable, the operation that Trump is now selling as easy and quick requires securing both economic investment and political control of the country for at least the next two decades. Many of the oil fields had already been granted to China through legal contracts, and these imperialist multinationals will demand that their rights be recognized or that they be compensated.
Nor is it enough to invest in oil and mining resources to drive China out of the region. In fact, as we have shown, China has managed to insert itself into the continent’s supply chains and into the energy and digital infrastructure sectors. To “reconquer” the continent, the U.S. will need to invest much more than just in sectors that suit it and propose itself as an economic alternative in other sectors.
Second, the repetition of the Monroe Doctrine does not occur in a historical vacuum. On the contrary, the U.S. already has experience of the difficulty of maintaining economic and military domination over other territories: once you meddle, you end up meddling, which means allocating resources to neocolonial domination. The first case that demonstrated the cost of such a policy was the Philippines, because although the McKinley administration thought that installing a puppet government in the country would guarantee its control, it soon realized that the U.S. could not simply withdraw its troops and maintain a friendly government. In fact, the U.S. had to remain there for decades, and the Philippines only achieved independence in 1946. The same situation was repeated recently with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which resulted in similar disasters.
Third, there is a domestic “corollary”: most Americans do not support another drawn-out war. Polls conducted in January 2026 show that only 33% of Americans agree with military action designed to kidnap Maduro, while 72% fear that such intervention would lead to prolonged intervention in Venezuela. In fact, the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress has taken steps to limit any further military intervention.
Another risk of the deepening of this aggressive U.S. policy toward the American continent (and Europe) is that it could increase China’s popularity among the masses as a factor of balance and development. While we know that China is another imperialist and plundering power, the fact that it is in an emerging dynamic and has more capital to invest allows it to appear as the power that offers “economic development” to its semi-colonial allies, while the U.S. only offers coercion and oppression.
The most important contradiction is that it will exacerbate social and political polarization in Latin America and the United States. The mass movement has not been defeated, and sooner or later, there will be large mobilizations and even revolutionary explosions. This points to a more convulsive period of class struggle.
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Cuba: Popular sovereignty, democracy, and historical responsibility
Reducing socialism to bureaucratic administration and political control has undermined the emancipatory project that once mobilized broad sectors of Cuban society.
By SOCIALISTAS EN LUCHA (Cuba)
Socialistas en Lucha (SeL) rejects the intensification of the U.S. government’s coercive policies against Cuba. Recent provisions that penalize third countries for trading oil or oil derivatives with Cuba constitute unilateral economic pressure of an extraterritorial nature that directly affects the population’s living conditions. These policies do not promote democratization; rather, they are mechanisms of collective punishment that transfer geopolitical disputes to the social sphere.
The application of these measures coincides with a time of extreme vulnerability. The interruption of energy supplies from Venezuela—close to 30,000 barrels per day, or 30-40% of Cuba’s needs, has left the country without one of its main sources of support. In January, Cuba received only 84,900 barrels in a single delivery from Mexico, which is well below the 2025 daily average of 37,000 barrels. The result is a deep energy crisis with prolonged blackouts, deteriorating production, and severe impacts on basic services.
In this context, it is crucial to acknowledge an undeniable social reality: growing sectors of the population are perceiving external pressure, and even intervention, as a potential solution due to material and political exhaustion. This perception does not stem from allegiance to a foreign power but from the absence of credible internal alternatives, the closure of political debate, and the lack of effective mechanisms to influence the country’s direction. Understanding this shift is essential to delegitimizing it.
From a democratic leftist perspective, we affirm that no emancipatory transformation can come from external coercion. Those in power do not act in the name of people’s rights, but rather in their own strategic interests. Latin American history shows that economic pressure and political tutelage lead to dependence, social fragmentation, and new forms of subordination rather than democracy or social justice.
However, it would be politically shortsighted to attribute the Cuban crisis solely to external factors. The current ruling bloc is largely responsible. For decades, a highly centralized model of power was consolidated with little accountability. This model was hostile to political pluralism and increasingly disconnected from real social dynamics. Reducing socialism to bureaucratic administration and political control emptied the emancipatory project that once mobilized broad sectors of society of its content.
Sovereignty cannot be sustained as merely a rejection of foreign interference. It is inseparable from political democracy, civil rights, and effective popular participation. Without real channels for deliberation, organization, and contestation of strategic decisions, sovereignty becomes a rhetorical formula administered from above.
The United States’ policies of sanctions, financial restrictions, and trade isolation are real and deeply harmful. However, their impact is amplified by an internal blockade consisting of economic rigidity, a lack of transparency, the punishment of dissent, and a political culture that confuses stability with paralysis. This framework explains why broad sectors of society do not perceive endogenous solutions and instead place contradictory and desperate expectations on external factors.
Cuba currently faces a multidimensional crisis. The country has an aging population exceeding 20%, pensions that do not cover basic living costs, a deteriorating healthcare system, a declining education system, intermittent public services, collapsed infrastructure, and an informal dollarization process that exacerbates inequalities. Added to this is the persistence of political repression; more than 1185 people have been deprived of their liberty for exercising fundamental rights, further eroding social trust.
At Socialistas en Lucha (SeL), we believe the best way to prevent foreign intervention is through profound democratization, not immobility.
Only by genuinely opening up political rights, recognizing social pluralism, legalizing independent organizations, and restoring popular sovereignty can we rebuild a shared horizon and restore legitimacy to the socialist project.
Cuba does not face a choice between external coercion and authoritarian continuity. The real alternative is between dependence and democracy, between bureaucratic administration and popular protagonism.
Our position is clear: We reject all forms of external domination and oppose the internal order that has shut down social participation. We advocate for democratic socialism grounded in rights, public deliberation, and popular control of power.
Neither imperial coercion nor bureaucratic closure! We stand for popular sovereignty, political democracy, and socialism from below.
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The legacy of Victor Berger and the Sewer Socialists
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By JAMES MARKIN
Of late there has been some debate in the U.S. left over the legacy of the 20th-century “Sewer Socialists.” The early 20th-century Socialist Party (SP) operation in Milwaukee, Wis., led by the Transylvanian immigrant congressman, Victor Berger, got the unusual nickname for its focus on local issues (like sewers). The Sewer Socialists tended to advocate taking a reformist, electoral, and gradual road toward achieving a socialist society—as opposed to more militant revolutionists in the Socialist Party who favored building a working-class movement capable of fighting for state power and overthrowing capitalism.
The story of Berger and the Sewer Socialists, an otherwise obscure piece of socialist history, has been held up as a model for the modern socialist movement by Jacobin writer Eric Blanc. Blanc’s choice of role models has led to some backlash from those around him in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) since Berger has often been remembered more for his racist views than for his achievements as a socialist in Congress or local government.
In reply to the backlash, Blanc has argued that while Berger did hold reprehensible views on both Asian immigrants and Black people in the early 20th century, by the interwar period he had evolved. Thus, according to Blanc, we should not “cancel” Berger and the Sewer Socialists but instead admire them for their evolution toward having more acceptable views.
At the end of his article, Blanc points out that many socialists that we admire today also had personal views that we would abhor. This is true; however, the matter of whether Victor Berger was personally a racist or whether he personally evolved on that issue are of less consequence than an analysis of the politics of the party he led and the faction within it that he represented.
The position that the 20th-century Socialist Party took on issues of race and immigration was critical. This issue was bigger than Berger himself and encompassed the entire Socialist Party under the leadership of figures like Victor Berger and Morris Hilquitt. The sad fact is that under their leadership, instead of the SP actually being a vanguard that pushed the working class forward on issues of race and immigration, building up the consciousness of the class and steeling it for victory, the SP leadership repeated ideas that Asian immigration would be economically damaging for the working class, even as it seemed to change on the issue when it came to European immigrants. It also tolerated open racism and bigotry against Black people amongst its ranks. This led ultimately to negative consequences for the party and the U.S. socialist movement as a whole.
Anti-Black racism
While Berger in his day was more notorious on the left for his anti-immigrant views, much of the hue and cry against Blanc online focused instead on Berger’s racist comments against Black people. Indeed, Blanc agrees that Berger’s prewar stance on race was “vile” but argues that he had begun to shift on the issue entering into the period of 1912-1918. He acknowledges that early on Berger had repeated lies that Black settlement in an area increased rates of sexual violence and republished articles from Southern SP members that attempted to synthesize so-called “race science” with socialism. Yet Blanc points out that in later years Berger began to condemn race science and republish anti-racist articles by Black socialists.
While Blanc’s analysis might demonstrate that Berger indeed had an “evolution” when it came to his personal views and what was published in the Milwaukee Leader, these do not really demonstrate the real cost of the retrograde positions taken by Berger and other leaders in his faction, such as the New York City socialist leader, Morris Hilquitt. For that we have to consider the legacy of Berger, not just as a socialist thinker, writer, or editor, but as a socialist leader. Indeed, one of the biggest issues facing the SP when it came to recruiting and engaging Black socialists was the toleration of its often openly segregationist Southern wing.
To understand this, we might look at the work of the Black radical Hubert Harrison. In the early 1910s, Harrison was an enthusiastic member of the SP in New York City and a supporter of its left wing, led by the IWW radical “Big Bill” Haywood. Harrison had a perspective of pushing the Socialist Party left on issues of race, with the goal of eventually making it a political home for huge numbers of Black workers. To this end he formed the Coloured Socialist Club and became a frequent contributor to the city’s main SP paper, The Call. His series of articles in that paper, entitled “Race Prejudice” ignited important discussion in the party on the issue.
However, the true explosion on the issue came in response, not to one of Harrison’s articles, but instead to the writing of Mary White Ovington, a white NAACP activist in New York. In a 1913 article in the left-wing socialist publication, New Review, Ovington analyzed the work of leftist groups based on their work in fighting Jim Crow. While Ovington approvingly related the work of her own NAACP and of the IWW, she wrote that while she wished that she “might cite the Socialist party, the party I so love, as the third force to stand aggressively for the Negroes’ full rights,” only local groups in Oklahoma in her estimation had done any real work to speak of. She related that in other states, such as Louisiana and Texas, the situation was even worse; members of the SP “have, at times, shown a race prejudice unexcelled by the most virulent Democrats.”
In the article she also reported on the 1912 convention of the SP, where the faction led by Victor Berger and Morris Hilquitt defeated the leftist faction led by “Big Bill” Haywood: “At the last National Socialist Convention, while the delegates spent hour after hour in frenzied talk over amendments to amendments of motions which no one remembered, no word, save that of Haywood’s, was uttered in appreciation of the existence of this most exploited race. One Negro delegate was present, but he was not given the opportunity to speak. To this convention, the United States Negro, composing one-fifth of all the workingmen in the Union, did not exist.”
Following Ovington’s article, a response was published by the State Secretary of the Mississippi SP, Ida Raymond, entitled “A Southern Socialist on the Negro Question.” This article was filled with racist bile against Black people. It was openly segregationist and claimed that the KKK had been necessary in order to oppose the “period of negro domination” in the South that had followed the Civil War.
In response to this article, Hubert Harrison wrote a letter to the editors of the New Review—which they declined to publish—in which he stated that articles like Raymond’s in New Review and similar articles published in The Call showed that “Southern Socialists are ‘Southerners’ first and ‘Socialists’ after. And the Socialist Party, in the laudable ambition of increasing membership and vote among all classes of the population is apt to keep in the rear whatever implications of its doctrine may offend and scare off the desired elements. This may be sound tactics, but may it not mask a definite danger? I think so. Wherefore, so long as the tattered remains of the Granger and Populist movements rally to your standards in the South, we shall have to keep from saying that Socialism stands for the full civic and political equality of all workers at least … I wonder now whether any Socialist, Southern or other could blame me for throwing in my lot with the IWW?”
As Harrison became increasingly critical in public of the SP leadership for tolerating these Southern reactionaries in the party, he began to face punishment as an SP member. Eventually he was forced out of the party by Morris Hilquitt, resigning his membership in 1918.
The example of Harrison demonstrates the cost of Berger and Hilquitt’s actions as leaders, not merely their personal views. By not taking action on the issue of racial justice, and tolerating openly racist elements of the party, they cost it important Black activists like Harrison. Indeed, this activity even led to the condemnation of W.E.B. Dubois at the time, a man whose support could have radically transformed the relationship between Black workers and the Socialist Party. This remains not just a stain on the legacy of figures like Hilquitt and Berger but also on that of Debs, who, despite a much better track record of personal anti-racist views, similarly failed to adequately challenge the racism of Southern members of the SP during his periods of leadership in the party.
Opposing Asian immigration
The early part of Blanc’s article repeats much of the horrific line that Berger took on immigration from Asia. Just like anti-Black racism, this bigotry wasn’t merely a personal issue for Berger, but was a feature of the leadership of the SP of that era. Berger and Hilquitt’s Socialist Party leadership made both economic and racial arguments against Asian and European immigration. For an example of the economic argument, take the resolution that Hilquitt put forward at the 1907 congress of the Second International, which called for the following:
“[T]he Congress, therefore declares it to be the duty of the Socialists and organized workingmen of all countries: 1. To advise and assist bonafide workingmen immigrants in their first struggles on the new soil: to educate them to the principles of Socialism and trade unionism: to receive them in their respective organizations and to collect them in the labor movement of the country of their adoption as speedily as possible. 2. To counteract the efforts of misleading representations of capitalist promoters by publication and wide circulation of truthful reports of the labor conditions of their respective counties especially through the medium of the international bureau. 3. To combat with all means at their command the willful importation of cheap foreign labor calculated to destroy labour organizations, to lower the standard of living of the working class, and to retard the ultimate realization of Socialism.”
This resolution was opposed at the congress not only by delegates from Japan and Argentina but by delegates from Hungary, Austria, and even the U.S.-based rival Socialist Labor Party. Needless to say, it was soundly defeated.
It is clear that despite sometimes railing against even European immigration, there was some evidence that Berger had made a turnabout on that issue even before the 1920s. In a 1910 Socialist Party congress debate cited by Blanc, Berger argues that while the U.S. is capable of “digesting” European immigrants like himself, “it is entirely different with other races. They have their own history of about fifty thousand years. That cannot be undone in a generation or two generations or in three generations.” Indeed, he had fully embraced this position by 1924; Blanc cites a Milwaukee Leader article of that year, in which Berger extols the work done by Irish, Italian, Polish, and Finnish workers. He even spares a few words to tack on “even the Negro” to this list!
This is why Blanc’s argument does seem to ring true that by the 1920s, Berger had evolved beyond purely racial or civilizational arguments against immigration. However, he continued to make the economic argument against immigration, almost exclusively when it came to Asian immigrants. In 1921, Blanc cites an article in the Milwaukee Leader as evidence of his newfound progressive ideals when it comes to Japanese immigrants. However, in the article Berger wrote: “It is no doubt necessary to prevent unrestricted Japanese immigration to the United States for some years to come but there need not be so much belligerency about it.”
He continued declaring that racism against Japanese people is not worthy of a socialist but then clarified, “The only legitimate reason why the Japanese should be mainly excluded lies in the fact that they jeopardize the economic welfare of Americans. This should be bluntly understood—and not put the exclusion on any false grounds. Because they jeopardize the economic welfare of Americans, the Americans on the coast cannot get along with them. If hordes of them were allowed to enter, the result would be race riots, with hell to pay.” This is merely a recapitulation of the economic argument against Asian immigration from the 1907 SP Second International draft resolution and Berger’s comments at the 1910 socialist convention, showing little to no evolution on this issue, even by the late date of 1924!
The decline of the Socialist Party – The real source of Berger’s “evolution?”
The elephant in the room when Blanc compares quotes between pre-war and post-war Berger is the massive decline in the Socialist Party’s standings triggered by a crisis in 1919. Following the Russian Revolution, it was clear that there was a new left-wing energy in the party that sought to throw out Berger and Hilquitt and replace them with leaders more in the Bolshevik mold. Seeing this coming, the leadership of the SP, including Berger and Hilquitt acted ahead of the 1919 congress to expel left-wing and non-English-speaking party organs, including the entirety of the Michigan section.
This, however, failed to forestall the left-wing reckoning. In June 1919, members of the party voted to bring in a new left-wing leadership. John Reed, the journalist who witnessed and chronicled the Bolshevik Revolution, received four times the votes of Berger, the party’s only elected congressman. In response, Berger, Hilquitt, and the right-wing leadership simply ignored the results of the election and engineered an emergency congress in Chicago. The old National Executive Committee made sure that left-wing sections of the SP were not able to participate in this congress, expelling whole sections before the congress, and at one point even asking police to remove John Reed from the floor.
The result of the stacked congress was pre-ordained, and Hilquitt, Berger, and their allies used it as justification to seize control of party assets. Meanwhile, across town from this sham congress, the Communist Party (CP) was founded by some of the former SP left. This led to an enormous schism and collapse of the SP, with many members leaving to join the CP.
The events of the summer of 1919 meant that, even though he and his allies had managed to hang on to the official leadership of the SP, it proved to be a pyrrhic victory for Berger and his allies. According to available membership data, at the beginning of the year, the party had 104,822 members, but at the end of the year it was down to 34,926. While Berger eventually managed to hold on to his congressional seat despite attempts by the ruling-class parties to eject him from Congress in 1919, he and his Wisconsin party operation were an increasingly isolated bastion of the SP which was crumbling on the national level.
In this context, attempts by the leadership faction of the SP to evolve the party’s line on race and immigration following this collapse appear in a different light. Many Black leaders saw this as too little and too late. Indeed, Hubert Harrison was one of these critics. In a 1920 article in his newspaper, New Negro, Harrison wrote of his former party:
“Now when their party has shrunk considerably in popular support and sentiment, they are willing to take up our cause. Well, we thank honest white people everywhere who take up our cause but we wish them to know that we have already taken it up ourselves. While they were refusing to diagnose our case, we diagnosed it ourselves. Now that we have prescribed the remedy, Race Solidarity, they came to use with their own prescription, Class Solidarity. It is too late gentlemen! … We can respect the Socialists of Scandinavia, France, Germany or England on their record. But your record so far does not entitle you to the respect of those who can see all around a subject. We say Race First because you have all along insisted on Race First and class after when you didn’t need our help.”
Harrison then went on to quote paragraphs from a contemporary article in The Call, which demonstrate that it had continued to publicly advocate for race science, even as the party had supposedly turned over a new leaf. The experience of Harrison speaks to the issue with “evolving” on race and the impact that these kinds of stances can have on a party. By the time the evolution had occurred, many Black activists who could have been key allies for the party were no longer willing to give it another chance.
It is on immigration where accusations, like those of Harrison, of opportunistically changing the party line appear most damning. The reality is that the crisis of 1919 caused a total change in the fabric of the membership of the party. Before the crisis, in 1912, only 15% of the SP membership was born outside the country; however, afterwards in 1920, the party was majority immigrant. Consequently, it was no longer possible for those like Hilquitt and Berger to maintain their early stance against even European immigration, although it appears they had shed these positions before this change had fully taken place.
Nevertheless, it is unclear whether Berger and the SP leadership that he was a part of ever evolved very much on Asian immigration. Sure, they might have moved away from racial arguments against immigration, but articles cited by Eric Blanc himself point to the fact that Berger and his paper continued to make economic arguments against Japanese immigration, even deep into the 1920s, when he was voting against immigration bans in Congress.
Victor Berger as an exemplar?
So, can we still learn from Victor Berger and the Sewer Socialists despite their racial baggage, as Eric Blanc argues? Sure. We can and should always learn from the history of the socialist movement in the U.S. In some ways, Berger can still be a positive role model. We could absolutely use a socialist independent of the Democratic and Republican parties making an argument for class independence and socialism in Congress, in the way that Berger did. In the same vein, his struggle to maintain his seat in the face of a bipartisan effort to eject him from Congress also has many positive lessons.
However, a critical analysis of Victor Berger and the Sewer Socialists can also teach us many lessons. For one thing, an analysis of the disastrous leadership of Berger and Hilquitt in 1919, and their bureaucratic clampdown on the left wing of the Socialist Party, could fill up an entirely different article. More relevant here, we can and should learn much from a critical analysis of the SP leadership’s positions on race and immigration. It shows that while it is better to have anti-racist views than racist ones, it takes more than a simple change to undo the damage caused by public racist positions in the past.
From Berger, Hilquitt and the early 20th-century leaders of the Socialist Party, we must take away the lesson that being the foremost opponents of racism and anti-immigrant bigotry is not merely a moral question, but one that could make the difference between relevance or collapse for our movement amongst huge swathes of the population for decades after our actions and words have already faded.
(Top photo) Socialist Party leaders Eugene V. Debs (left) and Victor Berger in 1897.
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Minneapolis residents fight the federal occupation of their city
By N. IRAZU
Minneapolis is under a para-military occupation by the federal government. Since December, “Operation Metro Surge” has deployed upwards of 3000 masked gunmen from a number of DHS agencies, including ICE and CBP, more than in any other city. People are being kidnapped off the street, thrown into unmarked vans and disappeared. Cars are found abandoned with the keys still in the ignition, mementos to ICE raids. They are breaking down doors with no warrants and interrogating families to give up the location of their immigrant neighbors. Children are used as bait to lure out family members for deportation.
Two activists have been murdered so far, two more have been shot, and countless others have been teargassed and brutalized. In response, people in Minneapolis have organized street by street and block by block to support each other in confronting the violent occupation of their city. In their community organizations and labor unions, they have gone out to organize local and mass actions in the struggle to kick ICE out of their communities.
Anatomy of state terror
On Jan. 7, Jonathan Ross—a masked ICE gunman—fired three shots into Renée Good’s head and called her a “fucking bitch.” His fellow agents made sure she died by denying her medical attention, disregarding the pleas of a physician on the scene. As if that were not enough, the immediate reaction of the federal government was to defend the gunman to the hilt, portraying him as a person who “feared for his life.” How a 10-year veteran of the militaristic ICE such as Ross could be so scared of an unarmed mother of three who had just dropped off her son at school, who was simply observing their operation, would be bewildering if it were not a pathetic fabrication concocted to cover up state-sponsored murder.
This gruesome sequence of events was repeated on Jan. 24 when six ICE agents surrounded and beat up a 37-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti, before murdering him. Pretti was on the scene of a raid documenting ICE and attempting to help up a woman who had been thrown to the ground by the same agents. They then threw Pretti to the ground, beat him up and pepper sprayed him. While blinded from the pepper spray and laid out on the ground, an ICE agent emptied ten bullets into him, killing him. Although Pretti was armed, at no point did he unholster his weapon or present any threat to the agents, and was in fact disarmed by the same agents before being shot. Minnesota is an open carry state.
Once again, the federal government labeled a murdered victim of state-sponsored murder as a “domestic terrorist.” On Jan. 14, ICE agents attempted to murder Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. He was shot in the leg in front of his house, and again agents lied about the circumstances, until video came out demonstrating that Sosa-Celis had not been a threat to them.
In Minneapolis, working people experience daily repression and persecution. ICE agents have tear gassed a family of eight in their car, including an infant that required CPR. They have been invading schools and hijacking school buses to kidnap children. five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father were kidnapped on the way back from preschool and promptly sent halfway across the country to a Texas concentration camp. Detainee’s at this same camp protested against their incarceration, chanting “Libertad!”
There are reports coming from health-care workers in Minneapolis of masked agents staking out clinics and hospitals and following patients into the facilities, as well as professionals treating injuries inconsistent with what the authorities reported (read: ICE kidnapped people, abused them, and lied about the circumstances.)
The surge of ICE agents into Minneapolis has resulted in the kidnapping of over 2400 people in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul since the start of the operation. With thousands of agents crawling the streets. The Department of War has now threatened to send in an additional 1500 soldiers to participate in the occupation.
The political leadership
Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE agents who occupied Minneapolis in part because of an internet hoax that the Trump administration based “Operation Metro Surge” on. The hoax was made viral by Nick Shirley, a 22-year-old internet personality who made false claims about a multi-million-dollar scam in childcare services run by Somali immigrants.
All of ICE’s operations are in some way based on a false reality that portrays immigrant workers as criminals, distorting the image of who immigrants really are: an essential portion of the working-class, integral to the cultural and economic life of this country. Without this ideological cover it would not be possible for the government to maintain support for kidnapping and disappearing people.
The wool has to be pulled over the eyes of millions. Allies of immigrants against this terrorist regime, such as Good and Pretti, are liable to be murdered and themselves called “terrorists” by the Department of Homeland Security for not submitting to this narrative. Trump said that since Good was “highly disrespectful of law enforcement,” she deserved to die. The same has been said of Pretti.
After Good’s murder, Vice President J.D. Vance claimed that Jonathan Ross had “absolute immunity.” This was meant to be a green flag granted to ICE agents by the federal government that said, “do not be afraid to murder activists, go ahead and commit violence against the population of this country, and we will back you up.’”The federal government is on a warpath against working people, at home and abroad.
On the other side of the mainstream political ‘spectrum’ the elected political leadership of the city has left the people to fend for themselves. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, has mobilized the National Guard. However, any illusions that he is doing so to confront the federal occupation are misplaced. He is mobilizing the National Guard because he remembers the popular explosion of 2020 that had Minneapolis as its epicenter. He does not want a repeat of this experience that pitted masses of working people against Democratic and Republican politicians alike. Again and again, he urges those out on the streets to “keep calm.”
Walz assures us that although he supports peaceful protests, he seeks a resolution to this chaos through institutional bourgeois channels. He tells the people of Minneapolis to “go vote, we will fight in the courts, etc.” He means to steer the movement that has the potential of confronting the whole murderous state apparatus into a dead end. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, has said many strong curse words against ICE, but in a world where actions are louder than words, the silence of his actions makes his injunctions bare whispers!
The Minnesota Fraternal Order of Police put out a statement saying they “stand with ICE,” and reports on the ground indicate that the Minneapolis Police Department covers the back of ICE agents as they teargas protesters. This should not be a surprise when we understand that the worker who crosses over to become a cop (or an ICE officer for that matter) betrays and abandons their class in the service of the capitalist state. No salvation will come from the politicians or institutions that stand on the same foundation of capitalist exploitation and oppression as ICE and Trump. Working people and oppressed people must rely on themselves and their close allies in their struggle.
Grassroots organizing
The streets of the Twin Cities have become a political and physical battleground between the occupation forces and the masses of people who call the city their home. On-the-scene reports indicate that within the widespread counter-offensive there is an effervescence toward action that has connected and reconnected workers, students, and communities to fight back, reminiscent of the response in the city following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
The organizations with the most name recognition and resources are able to carry out anti-ICE rapid-response training for thousands of people on a daily basis. Rapid-response groups have spread to spanning whole neighborhoods and single streets alike, with Signal chats of hundreds of neighbors. These are themselves interconnected with other neighborhood chats, creating an organizing network that allows immediate response to ICE activity anywhere in the city. When ICE shows up to a neighborhood, people can be there within a minute, and on occasions hundreds of people come out.
In a meeting of May Day Strong, an organizer reported that at least 4% of every neighborhood was involved with these networks. This means that the foundations for strong grassroots community organizing have more than been built. As activists, we need to organize to increase the size of these networks and move towards consolidating them through local mass assemblies open to all members of our communities. We could elect leaders, vote on our demands, coordinate mutual aid, and effectively defend our communities against the roving bands of masked gunmen occupying Minneapolis. These networks, if they can be consolidated into bottom-up community assemblies, linked up with each other, will be able to coordinate the struggle across the whole city.
State terror is the order of the day. The administration will not back down unless it is confronted with the true power of the working class. As it is workers’ hands that make the economy run, workers’ hands can shut it down. The organized working class has the power to throw a wrench into the gears of capitalist production and circulation, striking at the heart of the ruling capitalist class that supports the Trump regime. A glimpse of this potential was seen in the Day of Action in Minneapolis on Jan. 23.
The power of organized labor: Jan. 23
With temperatures going as low as -20 degrees Fahrenheit with windchill, tens of thousands of workers, students, small shop owners, and community members marched through downtown Minneapolis to repudiate the occupation of their city. While estimates range from 50,000 to 100,000 people in the streets, it was by all accounts a monumental show of force. “Everybody showed up,” In These Times reported.
The unbearable persecution, kidnapping, and murder carried out by the federal government in the Twin Cities magnified the numbers of people who feel it is their duty to do something, anything, to put an end to this barbarism. In the labor unions, leaderships felt the pressure from their ranks to participate in the movement.
The Day of Action was born out of a gathering of community, faith, and trade-union organizations after the murder of Good. They called for the Day of Truth and Freedom: “No Work, No School, No Shopping.” SEIU Local 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, CWA Local 7250, ATU 1005, and other local unions and community organizations endorsed the call for the Day of Action, with a 2 p.m. rally in downtown Minneapolis.
It was also endorsed by the AFL-CIO labor federation, which stated: “Working people, our schools and our communities are under attack. Union members are being detained commuting to and from work, tearing apart families. Parents are being forced to stay home, students held out of school, fearing for their lives, all while the employer class remains silent. Our labor federations are encouraging everyone to participate on January 23rd. It’s time for every single Minnesotan who loves this state and the notion of truth and freedom to raise their voices and deepen their solidarity for our neighbors and coworkers living under this federal occupation.”
The Jan. 23 Day of Action was in effect a mass sickout, as expressed by the president of CWA Local 7250 Kieran Knutson in a call with the writer of this article. He specified that while the union was encouraging its members to take a sick day and participate, it was not calling for a strike. Other unions did the same. ATU 1005 clarified on their Facebook page that while they supported the action, they could not tell their members to take a leave from work.
But that should not lead us to understate the importance of this day. Unionists and organizers on the ground report that a few workplaces completely shut down, while other shop floors experienced 30% abstentionism from work, while managers had to perform the job of workers to stay open. At the Minneapolis airport, the main thoroughfare through which kidnapped immigrants are being deported, a UNITE HERE steward told In These Times, “‘a lot’ of airport workers in her union didn’t go to work [on] Friday in order to support the shutdown, with many of them calling in sick.”
While the mass sickout and protest did not bring the economy to a grinding halt, talk about organizing a real political general strike is now on the table. The Day of Action opens up the space to talk to our coworkers about our collective power and to form worker committees to pressure our union leaderships to put our unions at the forefront of this struggle.
Imaginations have been fired up: We could build mass meetings of thousands of workers, representing hundreds of thousands of workers, in a mass conference of labor, discussing and deciding on how to carry out a general strike. Organized labor can and must be both the spear and shield of our communities against occupation. Much is to be learned from the historic Minneapolis general strike in 1934, when the Teamsters Local 544 led a battle against the bosses, cops, and fascist bands to turn Minneapolis from an open shop to a union town.
Called for by the labor movement, a political general strike would be a serious force that would stop ICE and the Trump administration in its tracks. It would throw the whole rotten capitalist system that is disappearing and murdering our neighbors into question. Who deserves to run society: the likes of Trump, Vance, and Miller, or the heroic working masses that are out on the streets every day to defend each other?
Photo: Tim Evans / MPR News
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On the picket line in NYC: Striking nurses are determined to win
By LENA WANG
Today, Jan. 27, marks the 16th day of the largest nurses’ strike in New York City history. On Jan. 12, over 15,000 nurses from 10 hospitals in the NewYork-Presbyterian, Mount Sinai, and Montefiore systems went on strike with the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) demanding improvements in worker and patient safety, and better health benefits, working conditions, and pay.
On the picket line at Mount Sinai-West, an ICU nurse who has worked at the hospital for over seven years, Mary, told Workers’ Voice that “the main thing we’re fighting for is safe staffing ratios and health care.”
“Nurses need health care too,” Mary said. “I’m trying to start a family, and having a child is so expensive.” Even though she works at Mount Sinai, her current health plan doesn’t cover services in the Mount Sinai hospital system. Mary noted that better health care is a particularly crucial demand for the numerous older veteran nurses, who have worked at their hospital jobs for decades.
Many older nurses on the picket line concurred, including Julie, a woman nearing retirement who has been a nurse for over 30 years. Julie highlighted safe staffing ratios as equally crucial for her well-being. “Typically, we could care for patients in a 1 to 2 ratio and some even need one-on-one care, especially babies in the ICU,” she said. “But sometimes we’re assigned to look after four or five patients at a time, and we can’t even take a break.”
A number of nurses reported having been harassed and assaulted by dissatisfied patients and their families who felt they were not receiving enough attention from overworked staff. According to the NYSNA and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), workplace violence has been on the rise in hospital settings, with nurses and direct care aides as the most common victims.
“It happens all the time,” Julie said. “They start yelling at you and hitting you, and you can’t even defend yourself. And when we call security, the nurse is already hurt and there’s no support. Sometimes the nurse even gets all the blame.”
Hospital executives have responded to the strikers’ demands with union-busting tactics and dishonesty. Hospitals offered 1400 temporary nurses up to $9000 a week to cross the picket line, while Mount Sinai and Montefiore management spread misinformation to portray striking nurses as greedy, demanding 40% raises and an average salary of $250,000. The union countered that the figures were misleading and exaggerated by including the cost of health care and benefits and failing to account for the difference in pay scales for nurses with advanced degrees and specialized certifications.
The NYC Central Labor Council reports that “management is threatening to cut health care for frontline nurses, refusing to agree to workplace violence protections, despite two recent incidents of violence at New York City hospitals, and trying to undo safe staffing standards that nurses won for New Yorkers when they went on strike 3 years ago.”
The NYSNA strikers turned out for the Jan. 23 rally in Union Square in solidarity with Minneapolis, joining over dozens of unions in connecting their labor struggle with the struggle for immigrant rights. “As a part of our contract demands, we’re asking hospitals to do their part to keep our immigrant patients safe,” an NYSNA representative said, addressing the rally attendees. “That includes keeping ICE out of hospitals and refusing to collaborate with ICE.”
On Jan. 25, NYSNA also shared a statement on Instagram by National Nurses United, demanding justice for CBP agents’ murder of Alex Pretti, a registered nurse: “The nation’s nurses, who make it their mission to care for and save human lives, are horrified and outraged that immigration agents have once again committed cold-blooded murder of a public observer who posed no threat to them. … ICE agents have been kidnapping hard working people—mothers, fathers, and children—and now murdered a registered nurse, one of the most trusted professions in the country.
“National Nurses United calls for a no vote on the Homeland Security Appropriations bill that is up for Senate approval next week and demands Congress abolish ICE entirely.”
The movement for immigrant rights is inextricable from the labor struggle. Over a quarter of the nurses in the city are immigrants themselves, and as the New York City nurses on strike have demonstrated, the workers are ready to leverage their labor power to defend themselves and their communities. Grassroots projects to defend New York from immigration crackdowns, like Hands Off NYC, must stand in clear solidarity with the labor movement. Imagine if the thousands of attendees at rallies, Know Your Rights sessions, and ICE watch trainings came together, went door to door, and turned out all our neighbors to the nurses’ picket line!
Photo: AP
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Hands off Greenland! Abolish NATO!
By M.A. Al GHARIB
Donald Trump’s threats to seize Greenland during the first weeks of the new year remain menacing. Seen early in his second term either as a joke or as an attempt to “negotiate” with Europe, today the threats are no joke. Before he climbed down off the precipice, there was palpable fear, most immediately in Greenland and also in Europe, North America, and really, the entire world, that Trump would actually start another world war. He has now ratcheted down the military threat, but only after an astonishing bout of saber rattling at the Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Trump backed down after declaring that he had been given “everything we want” in talks with NATO Secretary Mark Rutte in Davos on Jan. 21. The terms of the “framework of a future deal” are still murky, although they would reportedly grant ownership of military bases in Greenland to the United States and certain rights to mine minerals there. On Jan. 25, a top official from Greenland, Naaja Nathanielsen, insisted that her government had not been “presented with anything” as yet, and that Greenland’s “giving up sovereignty is not on the table for now.”
Make no mistake, the threat against Greenland remains, although we can very easily imagine that the ever-erratic Trump wakes up one day and decides to do a 180. As with Trump’s attack on Venezuela and abduction of Nicolás Maduro and Celia Flores, the threats against Greenland show that U.S. imperialism has become increasingly dysfunctional, more personalized, and, consequently, more dangerous.
U.S. imperialism has always been a threat to the world
There is still a lot of liberal nostalgia about a supposedly better prior era of U.S. imperialism, though liberals would use words like “rules-based order” instead of “imperialism.” Below, we discuss how the MAGA and far-right version of U.S. imperialism is increasingly taking a qualitatively different trajectory in comparison to past iterations. Here, however, we must pause to emphasize that Native Americans and the peoples of countless Black and Brown-majority countries on every continent would point out that the United States has always had no problem violating national sovereignty and massacring millions to serve the interests of U.S. capitalism.
As with previous exercises in brute U.S. imperialism, the leaders of the administration in this case, are ultimately motivated by material and political interests. Here too, they openly talk about the mineral wealth of both Venezuela and Greenland, and about fossil fuels and “rare” earth minerals in enormous quantities. Secretary of State Rubio’s threats of regime change in Cuba are an escalation of the siege that Yankee imperialism has imposed on the island nation for the past six-plus decades.
Another continuity is the attempt to secure U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Even the Council of Europe’s general secretary, Alain Berset, not a person inclined to be critical of language about “Western values” and “the importance of the NATO alliance,” recently admitted as much in a New York Times op-ed: “The fear is that an independent Greenland might one day drift toward Russia’s or China’s orbit, placing their weapons at America’s doorstep. It would be an Arctic repeat of the Bay of Pigs.”
Is it different this time?
Here’s that same old U.S. paranoia about any country, especially one with a majority Indigenous population, even contemplating independence. But it would also be strategically foolish to dismiss the differences between the current expression of U.S. imperialism and previous ones. While there are continuities in terms of the content of US imperialism under Trump, the difference in form is of major importance.
This is related to the deep crisis of that imperialist project. Previous U.S. presidents rarely if ever failed to cloak their predatory actions in the language of higher purposes: promoting democracy, making the world more “peaceful” or “free,” “liberating brown women from brown men,” etc. This time, the president and his close associates openly admit the truth of what they’re doing.
More importantly, as the new national strategy documents released in late 2025 envision, the U.S. now sees the world in terms of Schmittian or social Darwinian “survival of the fittest.” As the administration’s most openly fascist ideologue Stephen Miller said on a CNN interview in early January, “we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” In other words, the U.S., unable to maintain its global hegemony, will now more increasingly resort to the hard side of its power.
A recent article by Erwin Freed in Workers’ Voice sums up well the implications of these documents: “Taken together, the three reports paint a picture of U.S. imperialism’s international standing falling from uncontested dominance to being compelled to game out its place in a new world order. While the United States retains economic and military superiority, the large strides made by Chinese technological advancements and control of strategic sectors are quickly closing the gap. All of the reports point to an economic world system facing stagnation and ever-sharper conflicts between the great powers.
NATO in crisis; Chinese imperialism to the fore
What is also new and deeply disturbing is the language of war—both trade wars and literal or “kinetic” ones—between NATO allies. Before Trump walked back his military threats, European officials were openly discussing sanctions on U.S. tech firms. Boycotts of U.S. goods and services are becoming the norm among everyday people in Europe and Canada.
The U.S. historian and blogger Heather Cox Richardson also noted the following in her daily newsletter, dated Jan. 18: “For all of Trump’s bluster about U.S. trade, the world appears to be moving on without the U.S. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada visited Beijing this week, the first visit of a Canadian prime minister to China since 2017. On Friday, Canada broke with the U.S. and struck a major deal with China, cutting its tariff on Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for China’s lowering its tariffs on Canadian canola seed. Carney posted on social media: ‘The Canada-China relationship has been distant and uncertain for nearly a decade. We’re changing that, with a new strategic partnership that benefits the people of both our nations.’”
This was shortly followed by Carney’s speech at Davos, in which he bluntly talked about a “rupture” in the NATO alliance caused by Trump’s malignity and called on “middle powers”—those secondary powers traditionally under the hegemony of either the U.S., China, or Russia—to unite and to propose an alternative to MAGA-fascist and Chinese imperialist domination. However, Carney’s politics, which promote finance capital and Canada’s fossil fuel industry, are unable to address—let alone resolve—the contradictions that generate the escalating crises and toxicities of our time. Only a mass, international, socialist struggle against imperialism can do that. But the degree to which the speech indexed a deep, probably irreparable rift within Western imperialism was striking if unsurprising.
Self-determination for Greenland
Often lost in the discussions about NATO, Trump, the U.S., Europe and China, is the fact that nearly 90 percent of Greenland’s 60,000 people are of indigenous Greenlandic Inuit heritage. Trump’s utterly despicable threats show in all its ignominy the racism and setter colonial mentality that infuses every fiber of the man and which he and his followers glorify. But Denmark’s softer tone belies its own history of colonialism.
Denmark’s colonization of Greenland goes back to the early 18th century. For most of that time until the present, the former treated the latter in a manner typical of settler colonialism, including, into the 1990s, a program of forced contraception of hundreds of Greenlandic women. Despite an official apology from the Danish government and an attempt at compensation of the victims of this crime, Greenlandic communities still live with the trauma and physical harm that this caused.
The Greenlandic independence movement pushed the Kingdom of Denmark to grant Greenland autonomous status in 1979. In 2024, right before Trump’s threats, the independence movement was polling at 60 percent of the population in favor. The past year, and especially the past few months, have seen a retreat for the call for full independence, with a majority of Greenlanders now saying that if the choice is between the U.S. and Denmark, they would rather choose Denmark, with its social safety net and predictability in international affairs.
The idea of full independence, for now, is on the back burner, as Greenlanders conclude quite reasonably that their small population and practical lack of defensive capability would make them easy prey for the insatiable colonial U.S. beast.
For an emancipatory, working-class abolition of NATO
If the current moment means the existential crisis of NATO, we as revolutionary socialists won’t lament this imperialist coven of gangsters. Founded as an alliance of imperialist countries with the objective of pushing back the Soviet Union—and more broadly, a socialist alternative—after World War II, NATO’s true role over the past 80 years has been as the world’s foremost anticommunist organization. It has put its stakes in the ground as the implacable foe of emancipation among the colonized and formerly colonized peoples of the world, as a stalking horse of U.S. imperialism.
So, while we fight alongside anyone fighting Trump and his far-right MAGA movement, we also make clear that we support the abolition of NATO. But the abolition of NATO can only avoid sinking the world into even more cycles of violence and war if it is led by mass movements from below as part of an emancipatory, socialist vision for society. If the collapse of NATO is allowed to happen in the Trumpist way, this will simply mean accepting the carving up of the world into “spheres of influence.” This is not a lesser evil in relation to the status quo, it means exacerbating the worst parts of it.
As we argued in our call for NATO abolition at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “just as the working class is the only class that produces the wealth of society, it is the only social force that can permanently end wars.”
Hands off Greenland! Hands off Venezuela! For the abolition of NATO!
Photo: A boy holds a crossed out map of Greenland topped by a hairpiece symbolizing U.S. President Donald Trump, during a protest against Trump’s policy towards Greenland in front of the U.S. consulate in Nuuk, Greenland on Jan. 17. (Evgeniy Maloletka / AP)
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Music review: ‘What of Our Nature’
By EMMA GRACE
I was already a fan of Haley Heynderickx. Her latest album, What of Our Nature, made with longtime collaborator Max García Conover, spoke to me both musically and politically.
Heynderickx, a Filipino-American, and Conover, a Puerto Rican-American, intended to write the album “in the spirit of Woody Guthrie,” a legend in the world of country and folk, famous for songs like “This Land is Your Land,” with a sticker on his guitar that read “this machine kills fascists.”
While never a formal member of the Communist Party, Guthrie was favored by its press and then-substantial cultural institutions, and some of his most famous pieces fit right in with the 1930s-40s CP strategy of the “popular front,” adopting overtures to the capitalist leadership in Washington (e.g., “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt”) alongside commemorations of the class struggle (e.g. “1913 Massacre”). Consequently, his songs are almost as likely to be heard at right-wing events as they are on the left (although Guthrie’s listeners on the right will omit uncomfortable stanzas that identify with the working class and the poor).
I wouldn’t say Heynderickx’s and Conover’s tracks are as anthemic as Guthrie’s, but they dig deep into topics such as immigration, the toils of capitalism, and labor history.
Folk music comes from workers and small farmers. It often derives from work songs, which workers would sing while on the job or in prison chain gangs. African-American “hollers” (work songs) formed a basis for the birth of the blues, which became a major influence for U.S. folk music. The idea of “folk” as a distinct musical category didn’t really start until the 1920s and ’30s when Alan Lomax, an American folklorist, began to record Southern folk songs. Work songs largely died out with the last of the “Gandy dancers” by the 1970s. These were railroad workers known for singing and dancing while laying down tracks. Folk as a genre, however, took off.
It feels more appropriate to compare What of Our Nature to folk artists such as Lead Belly (Hudie William Ledbetter), Phil Ochs, or Joan Baez. Lead Belly was a Black folk and blues artist who sang about racism, prison life, cattle herding, and was discovered by Alan Lomax and his father, John. Phil Ochs and Joan Baez became known as protest singers, performing at anti-war demonstrations during the Vietnam War, civil-rights demos, and organized labor events. These are artists whom I would say reflect a little more closely to the way Heynderickx and Conover write about politics.
“They’re just making money off of us fighting” is a line from the song “to each their dot.” What of Our Nature contains beautiful and poetic lyrics to express what it’s like living in a world where capitalism has failed the worker time and time again. Where people are locked up with “no trial or charge or conviction” (“Song for Alicia”). Where it feels like we have to sell our soul in order to succeed in the art world, and in a world of “cop-killing, coal-mining starvation wages” (“Cowboying”). These topics aren’t new to the folk genre, but to the indie music scene that they come out of, they’re a breath of fresh air.
Heynderickx and Conover express these feelings of woe in a way that is both catchy and oddly comforting. As ICE continues to kidnap people off the street, and people are fired because of their political beliefs with no due process, it’s important for music and art to reflect the goings on of real life. The only aspect I felt was missing from their album was the question of how we should fight and organize. Nevertheless, even if they do not directly impart lessons of political strategy, Heynderickx and Conover eloquently give plain-spoken voice to the oppressions we face and the struggles we fight.
Photo: Haley Heynderickx
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U.S. intervention in Venezuela, political control, and thirst for oil
Venezuela’s independence is threatened by both the U.S. military and by the Bolibourgeoisie, which is apparently now ready to work with U.S. imperialism hand in glove.By LEONARDO ARANTES
U.S. imperialism has carried out a bombing raid on Venezuela, kidnapping the dictator Nicolas Maduro, the country’s president. This extremely serious. event constitutes an act of war, which threatens and affects not only Venezuela but the rest of Latin America. It also has nothing to do with the reason given by the far-right U.S. president Donald Trump of “combating drug trafficking.”
What are the real reasons for this interventionist offensive in Venezuela? What was its prior context? How did events unfold? What are the implications and consequences? What is the overall strategy of U.S. imperialism for Venezuela and the rest of the region? What prospects are opening up? What is the dynamic of the Chavista regime in light of these events? What program and policy should we revolutionaries adopt, and how should we act to confront the strategy of U.S. imperialism? These are questions we will attempt to address in this article.
Political pressure and military deployment
We believe it is pertinent to describe and analyze the political context and events that preceded the events that took place in early January 2026.
Since the first half of August 2025, the U.S., under the pretext of the supposed “war on drugs,” began a disproportionate deployment of weapons on the coasts of the Caribbean and Latin America, with a particular focus on the Venezuelan coast. Prior to this, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an order authorizing the use of armed forces to “fight foreign drug cartels, with the aim of defending his nation.” Similarly, the U.S. government doubled the reward to $50 million for information leading to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, accused of leading an alleged criminal organization called “El Cártel de los Soles” (The Cartel of the Suns), dedicated to drug trafficking and terrorism. Simultaneously, money, jewelry, goods, and properties attributed to Maduro as proceeds of his criminal activity were seized.
In previous weeks, the Trump administration had opened a process of negotiations with Maduro’s government, which included the exchange of U.S. prisoners for Venezuelan migrants held by Bukele’s government in prisons in El Salvador, the release of some political prisoners in Venezuelan territory, and the granting of a new license authorizing Chevron to operate in the country, extract and market Venezuelan oil.
Following this, the United States carried out an unusual military deployment, which initially included three warships (destroyers equipped with the Aegis air defense system, armed with Tomahawk guided missiles to attack land targets, the latest technology in the U.S. Navy), a nuclear submarine with missile and intelligence capabilities, as well as P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft and military personnel exceeding 4,000 marines. This deployment increased over the months, with more and more warships, F-35 aircraft, and B-52 strategic bombers being added, along with the deployment to the Caribbean of the largest aircraft carrier in the U.S. armed forces, the U.S.S. Gerald Ford, and an increase in military personnel to approximately 10,000, including assault troops. In short, this was a deployment of military forces and resources that, from the outset, was more characteristic of wars and/or military invasions than of actions to combat drug trafficking.
For months (since September 2025), U.S. imperialism has been carrying out a military offensive, expressed in acts of war, such as more than 25 attacks on small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, leaving more than a hundred dead, fishermen of various nationalities (Venezuelans, Colombians, Trinidadians, among others), seizure of oil tankers from Venezuela, with the theft of the tons of oil they contained, as well as a cyberattack against PDVSA, affecting the company’s operations and endangering oil workers, and an alleged drone attack on “a large facility on the Venezuelan coast” (presumably at the docks of Maracaibo, Zulia state), the latter unconfirmed, but which Donald Trump himself claims to have carried out. “I don’t know if you’ve read or seen it, but they have a large plant, a large facility where the ships leave from, and two nights ago we destroyed it” (BBC News Mundo 12/29/2025), Trump said in a phone call he made to WABC radio station to speak with billionaire John Catsimatidis.
To this list of aggressions must be added the enforcement of a total naval blockade on oil tankers entering or leaving the country, with the clear purpose of suffocating the Venezuelan economy by cutting off trade in its main resource, and with it the inflow of dollars; and the orientation of an air blockade against the country, which was partially complied with by various international airlines.
After the bombings against Venezuelan territory on Jan. 3, 2026, all this military force remains stationed on the Caribbean coast, near Venezuela, as a threat and a mechanism of coercion.
A criminal act of war against an oppressed country
As is well known, at approximately 1:50 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026, the government of the far-right Donald Trump launched a bombing campaign using helicopters and drones. The U.S. military bombed several locations in the city of Caracas, namely, Fuerte Tiuna, La Carlota Air Base, Cuartel de la Montaña (where Chávez’s remains rest), the General Command of the Militia, and the Navy Academy (the Naval School in Meseta de Mamo, La Guaira state). In addition to this, civilian airports such as Higuerote (Miranda state) and the port of La Guaira (the country’s main port) were also attacked, and attacks on military installations in the neighboring state of Aragua were reported. All of these targets are located either in the city of Caracas (the country’s capital) or in states close to the capital, in densely populated areas, some surrounded by buildings and residential areas.
Thus, while aircraft flew over and bombed the city of Caracas and other parts of Venezuelan territory, and explosions were reported in the vicinity of military targets, ports, airports, and urban areas, special forces carried out the kidnapping of dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife and first lady Cilia Flores, a fact that was announced a few hours later by Donald Trump on his social network Truth Social and later confirmed at a press conference in Mar-a-Lago. The same was also confirmed by official spokespeople for the Venezuelan government, who demanded that the U.S. government provide proof of life for the kidnapped head of state and his wife.
These events constitute a criminal act of war against the sovereignty of an oppressed country and are an unacceptable imperialist interference by the U.S. government, led by the far-right Donald Trump. Far from representing any fight against drug trafficking and/or terrorism, it is part of the strategy of U.S. imperialism to apply the well-known Monroe Doctrine, augmented by the so-called “Trump Corollary,” in the context of disputes and negotiations over territories, markets, and areas of influence among the imperialist powers.
This is an unprecedented attack on Venezuela perpetrated by the United States, the world’s leading imperialist power. It constitutes a threat not only to this country, but to Latin America as a whole, being the first direct military intervention, i.e., U.S.ing its own armed forces, by U.S. imperialism in the last 36 years on the continent[1] and the first in history against a South American country. In this way, the U.S. is reviving the practice of interfering in the internal political affairs of countries on the continent through direct military intervention, openly returning to gunboat diplomacy, blackmail, and militarization.
The strategic objective is to brutally deepen Venezuela’s semi-colonial condition, subordinating its political regime, economy, and strategic resources to the dictates of the White House, while attempting to discipline the peoples of Latin America as a whole. This military operation, similar in nature to the 1989-1990 intervention in Panama, is part of Donald Trump’s global policy that seeks to reverse the crisis of U.S. domination as the leading imperialist power, in the broader context of the global economic crisis of capitalism, the greatest in history.
Recolonization strategy and the National Security Strategy document
It is clear that in the midst of the global economic crisis of capitalism and the inter-imperialist dispute with emerging powers such as China and Russia, U.S. imperialism seeks to regain its hegemonic dominance in a continent it has always considered its backyard, “reviving” the Monroe Doctrine and extending it to the Western Hemisphere as a whole.
This was formally announced in the government’s new National Security Strategy 2025. The document, published by the Trump administration on Dec. 5, 2025, presents this objective as a central priority of U.S. foreign policy, affirming that the Western Hemisphere is Washington’s main area of strategic interest.
This is not just a government plan, nor is it just another policy document, but rather the formal announcement of a major change in U.S. intervention in the inter-imperialist struggle, an increase in the levels of aggression and protectionism that U.S. imperialism intends to deploy to regain lost ground. It is centered on tighter and more direct control of Latin America, a geographical area that they historically consider their colony, and their expansion to the rest of the Western Hemisphere (Europe, Greenland), as indicated by the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
“After years of neglect, the United States will reaffirm and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere and protect our national territory and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine is a sensible and forceful restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.
“Our objectives for the Western Hemisphere can be summarized as ‘Recruit and Expand.’ We will recruit established allies in the Hemisphere to control migration, stem the flow of drugs, and strengthen stability and security on land and at sea. We will expand by cultivating and strengthening new partners, while reinforcing our own nation’s appeal as the hemisphere’s preferred economic and security partner” [2].
Following the publication of the aforementioned document, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stated: “The department’s activities throughout the Western Hemisphere are not limited to eliminating narco-terrorists, but also include deterrence and defense of our nation’s interests against other threats in the hemisphere. […] This includes ensuring U.S. military and commercial access to strategic areas such as the Panama Canal, the Caribbean, the Gulf of America, the Arctic, and Greenland” (Opera Magazine, 12/19/2025)[3]. This statement reaffirms the strategic objectives of U.S. imperialism, with the far-right Trump at the helm.
This, then, is the strategic, political, geopolitical, and military framework in which U.S. imperialism is developing its attack on Venezuela and threatening the rest of the continent, making explicit the Trump administration’s goal of having puppet governments throughout Latin America. Pro-imperialist governments that implement neoliberal plans are not enough for its hegemonic and colonizing interests; rather, it seeks far-right governments that are completely subservient to Trump and his interests.
To this end, it exerts economic, political, and military pressure, seeking to impose this type of government on the continent. U.S.ing these methods, and aided by the crises created by class-collaborationist governments, they have managed to impose, via elections, governments such as Milei’s in Argentina, Kast’s in Chile, Bukele’s in El Salvador, and Asfura’s in Honduras, and they seek to continue this advance with Uribism in Colombia (hence the threats and pressure on Petro).
Now, through military invasion, they have deposed Maduro, even though he had already conceded the country’s sovereignty and was making major concessions both in the Orinoco Oil Belt (FPO) and in the Orinoco Mining Arc (AMO).
The objective is to steal Venezuelan oil and impose a puppet government of imperialism, for now through the acting Executive Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, now invested as President of the Republic, while Trump affirms that he will govern Venezuela directly, that he will carry out a new military incursion if the recycled “new Venezuelan government” does not do what they say. Trump imposes conditions, and keeps María Corina Machado in reserve for an eventual puppet government if the Delcy formula does not suit them.
However, the actions taken so far by the Delcy government, its announcements, the commitments made, and the agreements signed reveal a collaborationism typical of the puppet governments that Trump seeks.
This entire strategy by Trump and U.S. imperialism, in the context of the global capitalist crisis and inter-imperialist dispute, the attack on Venezuela, the explicit intention to colonize this country and plunder its resources in order to better position themselves in this crisis and dispute, also foreshadow harsher attacks against immigrant workers, Venezuelans, Latin Americans, and others from other parts of the world in the U.S., as well as against the working class as a whole, and in addition to new pressures, threats, and interventions in other countries in the region and around the world. It is therefore necessary to build unified strategies to confront and defeat the ambitions and attacks of U.S. imperialism and its rivals in their respective areas of influence.
Internal complicity: a key element of the U.S. operation
The operation deployed against Venezuela in the early hours of Jan. 3 this year met with almost no resistance from the Venezuelan armed forces and defense agencies. Around a hundred aircraft (including planes, drones, and helicopters) flew over Caracas, while approximately 12 armed helicopters crossed the border from La Guaira to Caracas, evaded radar without a single warning shot, and bombed Fuerte Tiuna, headquarters of the general command and the Ministry of Defense, and three other military centers, in addition to the parliament. One of those helicopters landed on the palace, capturing Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores without much fuss and taking them out of the country. Only at the security level closest to Maduro were clashes reported, leaving at least 32 Cuban troops who were part of his personal security guard dead.
None of this could have happened without the collaboration of the military and internal security apparatus, especially in a country whose government has claimed to have anti-aircraft defenses that include radars, missile systems, rockets, and cannons purchased from China and Russia. This, coupled with subsequent statements by Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and other U.S. government spokespeople, as well as the attitudes and actions of Delcy Rodríguez, reveal the internal complicity that allowed the U.S. operation to achieve its objectives, and that Maduro has been betrayed and handed over by Chavismo itself for his capture.
This internal complicity, together with the evident U.S. military superiority, which destroyed 90% of the country’s anti-aircraft defenses, and the incompetence of the Venezuelan military responsible for the country’s defense, explain the relative ease with which U.S. forces successfully carried out their incursion into Venezuela[4].
Was Delcy Rodríguez involved in the betrayal?
It is obvious that internal complicity based on prior negotiation led to the surrender and capture of Nicolás Maduro (surrender by Chavismo, capture by U.S. forces). It is worth quoting the statements of Eric Rojo, a retired U.S. Army general and advisor to Marco Rubio in Latin America, who said, “Maduro was handed over to the U.S. armed forces by the Venezuelans…[5]”. Now, which leaders and sectors of Chavismo negotiated Maduro’s surrender and removal from power?
Trump gave clear answers when asked who the facilitator from Caracas was, stating: “…the negotiations were conducted with Delcy Rodríguez…”[6], adding: “Marco Rubio is negotiating the transition with Delcy Rodríguez. The vice president spoke with Rubio and said she will do what we say”; this makes clear her participation in the negotiations for the surrender of the deposed president and her collaboration with U.S. imperialism.
All this is reinforced by her recognition, finally and without any immediate objection from the U.S., by the Venezuelan Supreme Court of Justice as Maduro’s legal successor, in addition to her investiture before the National Assembly (AN, Venezuelan parliament), presided over since 2021 by her brother Jorge Rodríguez.
The recognition of Delcy Rodríguez came at the expense of the ambitions of Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado and the claims to power of Edmundo González Urrutia, who until then seemed to be Trump’s favorites to lead the transition.
Thus, the Delcy-Jorge tandem, now known as “Los Rodríguez,” would be the Chavista sector that negotiated with the U.S. government the terms and conditions of collaboration that the latter would impose for the continuity of the Chavista regime at the head of the state under U.S. tutelage. This faction would have brought along with it another faction led by Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, who had retreated in the face of CIA harassment. A third faction, led by Diosdado Cabello, would be the least acceptable to the Americans[7].
Delcy Rodríguez has built a reputation as a shrewd operator in the management of the country’s political and economic affairs, as well as in administrative matters, but she lacks sufficient influence in the party to guarantee the unity of Chavismo. For this reason, she seeks to surround herself with a politically hardline sector, while bowing to Washington’s tutelage in economic matters. In her speeches to the country, she resorts to allusions to Bolívar and Chávez, as well as references to Maduro as President of Venezuela, to appease the Chavista base (although they tend to be diminishing in number), while with the Trump administration, she talks about working “jointly” with the United States, remaining silent on Washington’s decision to control energy resources and force the purchase of American products with that money.
Then, within the country, executive and legislative power is concentrated in the Rodríguez family, with the help of Diosdado Cabello and Vladimir Padrino, ministers of the interior and justice and defense respectively, that is, guarantors of military and police power, to accentuate the repressive model that remains in force, while U.S. imperialism, with Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth, dictates, controls, and regulates economic and political decisions that are crucial to the country’s destiny, in a colonial relationship unprecedented in the country’s recent history.
- The dynamics of the Chavista regime, a collaborationist puppet government. The oil agreements.
The Chavista regime retains many of its characteristics, especially in terms of its repressive nature against the labor and mass movements, the centrality of executive power supported primarily by the armed forces and repressive police and paramilitary forces, and its austerity measures against the working class and the poor. It also preserves administrative continuity in the management of the state. However, what has essentially changed is its relationship with U.S. imperialism. Over the last 25 years, Venezuela has been led by submissive and dependent governments (first Chávez’s and then Maduro’s) that nevertheless caused friction with the various U.S. administrations. It is now being led by a totally collaborationist government, a potential puppet of U.S. imperialism and the Donald Trump administration, which consents to a colonial-type relationship between U.S. imperialism and Venezuela.
Strong evidence of this can be found in the statements made by Trump and reported by various international media outlets, claiming that he is the one in charge of Venezuela and that the U.S. government will immediately take control of the South American country, accepting and approving Delcy Rodríguez as the new acting president through a combination of pressure and support. Rodríguez’s government is clearly unstable and in crisis, without popular support, sustained only by U.S. imperialist support as long as it fully complies (according to the criteria of Trump and company) with its collaborationist and puppet role.
The greatest proof of this relationship of collaboration (on the part of the Delcy government) and patronage (on the part of Donald Trump and Yankee imperialism) are the agreements signed on oil matters after the U.S. president announced that he would administer Venezuela’s oil resources. These agreements, which were announced by Donald Trump[8] and later confirmed by the Venezuelan government itself and the board of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) in an official statement[9], stipulate that the Delcy government will deliver between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S..
The PDVSA statement specifies that negotiations with U.S. oil transnationals will take place under the terms already established with Chevron-Texaco, i.e., without any obligation on the part of the transnational to pay taxes and/or royalties to the Venezuelan state on profits earned and paying salaries at its discretion.
However, the U.S. Department of Energy explains the oil agreement announced by Trump in more detail:
“The oil will be sold on the global market for the benefit of the United States, Venezuela, and allies; all proceeds from the sale of the oil will first be deposited in a U.S. account at recognized banks to ensure the integrity and legitimacy of the final distribution; the funds will be used for the benefit of Americans and Venezuelans under the direction of the U.S. government; the sale of this oil begins immediately and will continue indefinitely; Oil transported to and from Venezuela will be done only through legitimate and authorized channels consistent with U.S. national security. The U.S. is selectively lifting sanctions to allow the transport and sale of this Venezuelan oil on the global market. U.S. light oil will go to Venezuela, as required, to optimize the production and transport of very heavy Venezuelan oil, as part of modernization, expansion, and development. The U.S. will authorize the importation of oil equipment and services to Venezuela to remedy decades of mismanagement and corruption. This will involve technology, experts, and investment. The U.S. will work on the Venezuelan power grid to also correct the destruction it has suffered” (U.S. Department of Energy, 01/06/2026)[10] [11] [12].
In addition to this, the U.S. government is establishing conditions such as prohibiting the sale of Venezuelan oil to rival imperialist powers such as China and Russia, suspending oil shipments to Cuba, and requiring that the purchase of supplies and products made with money from oil sales be exclusively from the U.S.. One would have to go back to the days of dictator Juan Vicente Gómez to find such aberrant conditions of patronage and colonialism in the 100-year history of Venezuelan oil exploitation.
Other examples of Delcy’s collaborationism and the potentially puppet nature of her government are the steps taken to reopen the U.S. embassy in the country, as well as the fact that it has already been announced that the four major U.S. banking corporations—JP Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America (BofA), Wells Fargo, and Citigroup (Citi)—plan to start operations in Caracas in the week of Jan. 12, 2026, under the control of the U.S. Treasury Department, and that it would be through these banks that the U.S. would handle all transactions in Venezuela. Additionally, there is speculation that public employees would receive their salaries through these banks, according to the account of X, ElObservadorBinario, as well as websites such as Forbes.com.mx and Bancaynegocios.com, which raise this as a possibility. And so another set of announcements have been made in recent days.
The situation of the Venezuelan masses
Amidst all this colonialist turmoil and the Venezuelan government’s collaborationist efforts, the question arises as to the situation of the working class and the Venezuelan masses.
They continue to suffer the rigors of pro-employer and anti-worker austerity measures, which the Maduro government has placed on their shoulders, formally since at least 2018 (in reality they had already been applied before, informally). The minimum wage earned by workers is barely $0.39 per month, and the benefits granted by the government, which have no impact on wages, such as food and other benefits, are $40 and $120 per month respectively (although they never reach these amounts due to devaluation), making a minimum monthly income of $160.39 (income, not wages, since only $0.39 of this is wages), compared to a basic family basket that, according to data from the Documentation and Analysis Center of the Venezuelan Teachers’ Federation (Cendas – FVM) and the Maracaibo Chamber of Commerce (CCM), exceeds $630 per month.
Inflation is hitting Venezuelan workers hard in the pocket, according to the BloombergLinea website, with the inflation rate standing at 556% in the 12 months of 2025, dwarfing the 45% rate in 2024.[13] The Venezuelan masses and workers continue to suffer from hunger and misery, surviving largely thanks to remittances from relatives abroad, which are increasingly diminished by the effects of devaluation and inflation. Added to this, basic services such as electricity, gas, water, telephone, and internet are undergoing a process of privatization or price increases and are a permanent calamity.
In addition to this, labor, contractual, and union rights have been violated through mechanisms such as Memorandum 2792 and the Onapre[14] directive, which are part of the adjustment program implemented by the Maduro government, pompously named the “Economic Recovery and Reactivation Program.” None of this has changed, and it is expected to continue during the government of Delcy Rodríguez, under the patronage of Donald Trump.
Another aspect that Venezuelan workers continue to suffer is the systematic violation of democratic freedoms. Hundreds of political prisoners abound in Venezuelan prisons, suffering isolation, torture, and violations of the most basic rights, as well as all the legal norms and procedures established in the legislation. Hundreds of union leaders, safety representatives, and workers without representative positions are also detained or facing legal proceedings simply for protesting in defense of labor rights that have been violated or for expressing political opinions. In addition, most opposition parties have been outlawed or stripped of their legitimate leadership, with the government imposing others that serve its interests.
Recent announcements by National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez regarding the release of political prisoners have been limited to emblematic prisoners and well-known political leaders, while a large number of ordinary people, detained during the protests against electoral fraud on Oct. 28, 2024, remain behind bars.
Reactions from the labor movement and the masses
The brutal economic crisis that has been hitting the Venezuelan economy since at least 2013 keeps the country’s workers and humble people in conditions of poverty and misery. This, coupled with the deterioration of basic services such as health, education, electricity, and water, among others, increases the desperation and hopelessness of the Venezuelan working people.
Additionally, the policy of handing over mineral and energy resources to mainly U.S., Chinese, and Russian transnational corporations, among others (to a lesser extent), the gross corruption of the Chavista regime (a key factor in the emergence and abject enrichment of the Bolivarian bourgeoisie), social inequality (the enrichment of the traditional bourgeoisie has also increased), miserable wages, the despotism of government bureaucrats, as well as the continuous. violations of democratic freedoms and the most basic human, social, trade union, and political rights, characteristic of the dictatorial nature of the regime, to which is added brutal repression against the labor and mass movement. All these factors have contributed to the majority of Venezuelan workers and masses coming to the conclusion that they had or have nothing to defend in Venezuela, welcoming imperialist intervention, viewing it with expectations of democratization and social vindication.
The justified contempt for the dictatorial Chavista regime and its corrupt, repressive policies that have brought the working class to starvation means that in Venezuela, any rejection of the U.S. government’s attacks against the country and against imperialist interference in Venezuela’s internal political affairs is seen as a defense of the hated Chavista regime. This is expressed both by the majority of the population and by trade unions and political groups that claim to be left-wing, even revolutionary.
The fact is that the impoverishing, corrupt, and repressive austerity policies of the Maduro government and Chavismo as a project have only served to facilitate the interventionist plans and imperialist interference that have been carried out with no resistance from the masses and even with majority support from them.
Since the early hours of Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026, there have been no reports of spontaneous and independent mass demonstrations in the streets to reject the U.S. military attacks, nor to support them (we believe the latter is due to fear of repression and/or arrest). However, the social media accounts of most Venezuelan citizens, both inside and outside the country, were full of expressions of celebration.
In the early hours of the morning of the day of the attack, sectors of the ruling party attempted to mobilize the so-called armed “colectivos,” as well as part of their apparatus, both in the capital city and in the main cities of the country. However, in all locations, this did not go beyond a few hundred militants and militiamen (military reserve groups), mostly employees of central public agencies, as well as governors’ offices and mayor’s offices, who are regularly used to fuel government mobilizations.
In the state of Aragua, an hour from Caracas, the governor summoned the militias, neighborhood watches, and military to the Maracay air base, which was an anti-coup stronghold in 2002. As the hours passed and in the days that followed, state governors and mayors of various municipalities across the country called for some mobilizations that did not go beyond what was described above.
None of these actions were accompanied by mass participation from workers or residents of popular sectors, nor have there been demonstrations of social significance. Not even the diminished grassroots sectors of Chavismo came out in significant numbers.
A necessary comparison
Sectors of the Chavista bureaucracy have attempted, through their rhetoric and the actions described above, to emulate the current situation with that of 2002, on the occasion of the coup against the late President Hugo Chávez. However, the situation is completely different.
As is well known, in 2002, a sector of the Venezuelan armed forces, allied with almost all of the bourgeois opposition parties, NGOs such as SUMATE, led by María Corina Machado (with the financial and political support of George Bush), management sectors of PDVSA, most of the major media outlets (mainly the major TV channels and radio stations), Fedecámaras (the country’s main business association), other business associations, and the Venezuelan Workers’ Union (CTV—the country’s main bureaucratic trade union, led at the time by the Democratic Action party, in the person of Carlos Ortega), among other political and social forces, carried out a coup d’état against the then president of Venezuela, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. All of this was driven and supported politically, logistically, and financially by U.S. imperialism, under the administration of George W. Bush, president of the United States at the time.
After weeks of pressure, marches, massive mobilizations, and street rallies, mainly in Caracas but also in other major cities across the country, on April 11, a massive opposition march was directed toward the Miraflores Palace with the intention of occupying it. This led to clashes at Puente Llaguno between sectors of the metropolitan police and armed groups allied with the coup in progress, with sectors loyal to the government defending the palace, resulting in a significant number of injuries and deaths. While this was happening, sectors of the armed forces linked to the coup attempt kidnapped Chávez and took him to the island of Orchila. Hours later, in the early hours of April 12, the then General-in-Chief of the Army, Lucas Rincón Romero, appeared on television announcing that, on behalf of the Venezuelan Military High Command, they had requested Chávez’s resignation and that he had accepted.
“The members of the Military High Command of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela deplore the unfortunate events that took place in the capital city yesterday. In view of these events, the President of the Republic was asked to resign from his post, which he accepted. The members of the High Command are placing their posts at the disposal of the officers appointed by the new authorities.” (12-04-2002, 3:20 a.m., Inspector General of the Army Lucas Rincón Romero) [15]
The coup had taken place, and Pedro Carmona Estanga, then president of the employers’ association Fedecámaras, was invested and sworn in as president of the republic before the national parliament, where he made a series of announcements to the country.
After a few hours of confusion, the country’s working class and popular masses began to react. Trade unions, neighborhood associations, popular movements, student groups, and others began to occupy the streets of the country’s major cities and to go through neighborhoods and towns to explain the invalidity of Chávez’s supposed resignation and to call on people to take to the streets to demand his return. These calls resulted in massive demonstrations in the country’s main cities. In Caracas, the population of the largest neighborhoods occupied the city center and surrounded the Miraflores Palace, demanding Chávez’s return.
In response, the Chavista leadership began to reappear and take up their government posts, while the troops and the middle and lower ranks of the military sided with the masses, refraining from repression and applauding and encouraging the demonstrations around the palace. High-ranking officers loyal to the government reappeared and took command of the troops. Popular pressure caused the coup leaders and their allies to flee the Miraflores Palace in a stampede. The then-president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, was sworn in as president at the end of April 12, and in the early hours of April 13, Chávez was brought back and reinstated as president of the republic.
There are enormous differences between that moment and the present one. Fundamentally, at that time, Chávez was a legitimately elected president and was perceived as such by the masses (although we did already have criticisms of him and his policies). As a result, he enjoyed enormous prestige and support from the mass movement, mainly from the popular sectors, but also from sectors of considerable weight in the trade-union and student movements. This explains the massive mobilizations to defeat the coup and bring him back to the presidency.
None of this is happening with Maduro today. On the contrary, he is a fraudulent president who was defeated in the last presidential election and took office by ignoring the will of the masses, that is, the vast majority of the Venezuelan population and political forces in the country. Maduro has no popular support, which is why the masses and the working class are not mobilizing in his defense.
Total rejection of imperialist intervention, no political support for Maduro and the Chavista regime
The rejection that we, the vanguard sectors, mostly left-wing and revolutionary organizations, express against imperialist intervention in Venezuela and even against the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, cannot be confused with political support for him. On the contrary, we denounce his pro-boss, anti-worker, dictatorial, corrupt character and his submission to imperialism.
What we defend is Venezuelan sovereignty, which is being attacked by U.S. imperialism at a level of colonialism infinitely worse to Maduro’s level of subservience. We denounce Maduro’s kidnapping as an act of interference by the U.S., which assigns itself the right to decide the political destiny of Venezuela and to impose governments on this country. We are against this in Venezuela and in any other country in the world. The political destinies of countries and their governments must be decided by their own peoples. The United States has no right or political or moral authority to interfere in this, least of all by use of military force. Consequently, we also reject and denounce the collaborationist pact to impose the government of Delcy Rodríguez and the colonial patronage imposed by the Trump administration on the political and economic direction of the country.
We reject the strategy of U.S. imperialism to reintroduce “gunboat diplomacy,” as well as the continental and hemispheric colonial pretensions set out in the U.S. National Security Strategy 2025.
A policy and program to confront imperialist plans and government collaborationism
As we have said throughout this article, there is a pact of patronage—collaborationism—between U.S. imperialism and the Chavista regime, now headed by Delcy Rodríguez, which has turned Chavismo from being a problematic but ultimately submissive subject of U.S. imperialism, to a project that is completely collaborating with the U.S.. This makes any kind of political unity with this regime to confront the plans of U.S. imperialism unthinkable and impossible.
This colonial pact stems from the objective of intensifying the plundering of our oil and other resources, which has always been the goal of Donald Trump as the highest representative of the planet’s leading imperialist power. This pact is part of a broader strategy to deepen political, geopolitical, economic, and military control over the entire Latin American continent and the Western Hemisphere.
The task before us in Venezuela, then, is to build a broad unity of action with the sectors that oppose Yankee interventionism and its colonial pretensions in the country, even as we oppose the Chavista regime, giving it no political support both when it was headed by Maduro and now by Rodríguez, in order to defeat these colonial pretensions in the country, but also at the continental and hemispheric levels.
We believe that a program to defeat this pact and this policy of U.S. imperialism involves categorically rejecting imperialist attacks against Venezuela and interference in the country’s political affairs, defending Venezuela’s sovereign right to choose its own government.
Likewise, we must reject the recent oil agreements that deepen the surrender of our oil and energy resources by Chavismo to the U.S. and the plundering and pillaging of these resources by the government of this imperialist country, and reject from the outset the possible extension of these agreements to other sectors such as minerals.
It is necessary to completely nationalize the oil industry, putting an end to joint venture agreements with transnational corporations and expelling them from the oil business. Trump and transnational corporations must be expelled from the oil business. The non-payment of the foreign debt must also be a central slogan of this program, as must the rejection of the intervention of U.S. private banks in the management of the nation’s resources and financial operations.
In addition to this, we must demand an increase in the minimum wage and pensions to match the level of the basic basket of goods, an end to wageless income structures, as well as the repeal of Memorandum 2792 and the Onapre directive, and the restoration of all violated labor, contractual, union, and social rights.
• For the restoration and respect of democratic, political, and union freedoms, an end to repression, no criminalization of labor and social protests, respect for the right to political expression, and the legalization of political parties and organizations currently banned by the dictatorship!
• Immediate and full freedom for all political prisoners and all union, social, and popular activists detained for fighting in defense of their rights; freedom for all those detained for the protests of Oct. 28, 29, and 30, 2024. No to piecemeal releases or revolving door mechanisms[16]!
• Arms for the workers to confront imperialist military aggression! No to the colonization of Venezuela. Let us defeat the colonizing pretensions of Donald Trump and Yankee imperialism in the country, in Latin America, and in the Western Hemisphere!
• Trump and Yankee imperialism out of Venezuela and Latin America
References
[1] The last one was at the end of 1989, specifically on December 17, 1989, when U.S. troops occupied Panama. After thirteen days of occupation, the then-president of the country, Manuel Noriega, was captured, transferred to the U.S., and tried on charges of drug trafficking.
[4] Incompetence and betrayal explain Venezuela’s lack of resistance to the U.S..
[5] Who betrayed Maduro? https://www.tiempoar.com.ar/ta_article/quien-entrego-a-maduro/
[6] Ibid.
[7] Incompetence and betrayal explain Venezuela’s lack of resistance to the U.S..
utm_source=whatsapp-network&utm_medium=compartilhar_conteudo&utm_campaign=organica&utm_content=geral
[8] Venezuela will transfer 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S..
[9] PDVSA confirms negotiations with the United States.
[10] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/05/trump-venezuela-oil-fields-00710893
[11] https://t.me/jhormancruznoticias/72751
[12] https://serviciodeinformacionpublica.com/
[13] Inflation in Venezuela exceeds 500% amid increased pressure from Donald Trump https://www.bloomberglinea.com/latinoamerica/venezuela/inflacion-en-venezuela-supera-500-ante-mayor-presion-de-donald-trump/
[14] Memorandum 2792 gives public and private employers free rein to modify working conditions and eliminate established benefits at their discretion and convenience. Meanwhile, the Onapre instruction, drawn up by the National Budget Office, lowered the basis for calculating bonuses and allowances, which went from being the salary actually received by workers according to the salary scale to the minimum wage. It also established salary tables that tend to equalize the salaries of public administration workers downward.
[15] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_Rinc%C3%B3n_Romero
[16] Name given to the practice of releasing some political prisoners while arresting others.
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Iran represses mass protests; Trump renews threats of military intervention
Economic collapse and political repression drove mass demonstrations across the country
By MAURICE MILLER
A broad wave of protests spread across all provinces of Iran since late 2025. The mobilizations grew to large proportions and began to shake the Iranian theocratic regime. The state’s response was violent and bloody repression.
On Jan. 13, Iran International, in a report printed in many major news outlets, said that sources in the Iranian government had revealed that at least 12,000 people were killed in the government’s crackdown on protesters. On Jan. 23, the Washington-based Human Rights Activists News Agency gave an estimate of over 5000 deaths, while reporting that another 9787 deaths were “under investigation.” Other sources have given even higher estimates.
On Jan. 22, President Trump said that an “armada” of U.S. warships has been directed to the area to possibly intervene militarily if Iran continues to kill protesters. “We have a lot of ships going that direction, just in case,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, while returning from Davos, Switzerland. “I’d rather not see anything happen, but we’re watching them very closely.”
In response to the protests, the government intensified control over communications, cutting access to the internet and other sources of information. This repressive hardening expresses not strength, but weakness: a regime that can no longer govern and increasingly resorts to coercion and violence to preserve its authority. Even so, the popular revolt has not been completely contained, though it has waned in intensity.
The bazaar breaks with the regime
A combination of explosive inflation, mass poverty, persistent inequality, and environmental collapse—exacerbated by international economic sanctions—has revealed the structural incapacity of the Iranian regime to guarantee minimum conditions of material survival for broad layers of the population, even in a country extremely rich in natural resources.
The immediate trigger of the protests was the collapse of the Iranian currency, the rial. In just one month, it lost around 20% of its value. Since mid-2025, the devaluation has reached 40%. The result has been a generalized rise in prices, a sharp decline in purchasing power, and the expansion of social insecurity.
The protests began in the Grand Bazaar of Tehran, a politically decisive fact. The bazaars are controlled by the commercial petty bourgeoisie, a social sector that sustained the regime for decades. This group played a central role in the 1979 Revolution and maintained a historic alliance with the Islamic Republic.
When this social layer begins to break with the government, it becomes evident that the crisis is not superficial. It is a deep crisis, in which the regime starts to lose the support of social sectors that historically guaranteed its stability. From the bazaar, demonstrations quickly spread throughout the country.
The slogans chanted by protesters express a qualitative political shift. Demands are no longer limited to prices or wages. Slogans such as “death to the dictator” and “woman, life, freedom” gain strength. Economic demands begin to merge with political and democratic demands, revealing how the struggle for material survival increasingly turns into a direct confrontation with the regime.
Iran has lived through a continuous cycle of mobilizations for nearly a decade. Since 2017, the country has experienced a sequence of struggles, including workers’ strikes, protests against fuel price increases, revolts over water shortages in Tehran, and, in 2022, the major explosion of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement following the killing of the young Kurdish-Iranian woman Gina Mahsa Amini by the so-called “morality police.” None of these crises was resolved. All accumulated and converged in this new national uprising.
Wealth for the few, poverty for the many
The Iranian paradox is clear and typical of semicolonial capitalist countries. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), (source: https://www.eia.gov/international/overview/country/IRN) Iran holds the world’s second-largest gas reserves and the third-largest oil reserves.
Yet social indicators reveal a dramatic picture. With annual inflation at 39.5%, food prices rising 42.9%, and more than 36% of the population living below the poverty line of US$8.30 per day, the economic crisis is pushing millions of Iranians into the streets (data from the “World Bank, Poverty & Equity Brief: Islamic Republic of Iran,” October 2025, https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099640404212584734/pdf/IDU-707990f6-e879-41c1-9d99-c93c15967845.pdf). Annual inflation shows repeated spikes and sustained high levels in recent years, contributing to the erosion of purchasing power and rising social tension (https://www.statista.com/statistics/294320/iran-inflation-rate/).
Poverty is expected to continue to rise in 2026, reaching 38.8%, which would push another 3 million people into poverty. The minimum wage is extremely low, and high inflation has surged since 2017. Only 41% of the working-age population participates in the formal labor market. At the same time, one third of all wealth in the country is concentrated in the hands of just 1% of the population.
This 1% constitutes the Iranian capitalist class: a bourgeoisie deeply intertwined with the state, the repressive apparatus, the high clergy, and international capital. It is a class incapable of playing any progressive role. The regime does not govern for the majority of the population, but for this minority, using systematic repression as a central mechanism for preserving social order.
The working class enters the scene
A decisive element of the current conjuncture is the more organized entry of the working class and its organizations. Teachers, nurses, truck drivers, metalworkers, and miners have been protesting for months. This represents an extraordinary demonstration of courage in a country where independent organizations, especially trade unions, are criminalized.
The entry of the working class can qualitatively alter the conflict, as it introduces into the social struggle the only class capable of paralyzing the economy and placing the question of power into perspective. The most strategic sector is that of oil and gas workers. In December, around 5000 workers went on strike in Asaluyeh, the country’s largest energy hub, responsible for more than half of national income, according to the Red Flag website (https://redflag.org.au/article/iran-on-fire-rebellion-returns-to-the-streets).
When these workers stop, the heart of the economy is directly hit. This gives the energy-sector working class a decisive strategic weight and could open the objective possibility of revolutionary crises in the country. Not by chance, oil and gas workers played a central role in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the Shah and delivered a hard blow to U.S. imperialism.
Alongside actions on shop floors, universities have once again stood out as centers of political mobilization. Students protest against repression, authoritarianism, and gender inequality, expanding the social reach of the uprising.
This process confirms an important thesis of Leon Trotsky, according to which, in dependent capitalist countries, economic demands and democratic demands tend to merge, since the local bourgeoisie is incapable of resolving even the most elementary demands. The struggle against high prices leads to a struggle against the regime. The struggle for democratic rights leads to confrontation with the class that controls the economy.
Imperialism, sanctions, and the deepening of the crisis
None of this can be understood without considering the role of imperialism. Decades of economic sanctions have weakened the Iranian economy, disrupted productive chains, and impoverished the population. More recently, military attacks by the United States and Israel have destroyed military, civilian, and energy infrastructure, further deepening the social crisis.
On Jan. 23, the Trump administration announced a new round of sanctions against Iran, this time targeting at least nine ships within the “shadow fleet” of vessels that transport Iranian oil and petroleum products.
In addition, the United States has imposed 25% tariffs on countries that trade with Iran, which are set to accelerate currency devaluation, expand poverty, and worsen economic instability. Imperialism does not oppose the Iranian regime in the name of democracy, but rather disputes geopolitical and economic control of the country, intensifying exploitation and the suffering of the masses.
This process is not limited to Western imperialism. Other powers also participate in the plunder of Iranian wealth, beginning with China, the destination of around 89% of Iran’s oil exports. In this relationship, Iran is reduced to the role of a supplier of cheap raw materials, often sold at steep discounts due to oil embargoes, reinforcing the country’s subordinate insertion in the international division of labor.
It is a “campist” political line, widespread in some North American left organizations, to treat the Iranian regime as progressive simply because it comes into conflict, at certain moments, with Western imperialism, while turning a blind eye to Beijing’s support for Iran’s bloody dictatorship. The Iranian government does not act in defense of workers or democracy, but seeks better conditions to preserve its own material and political reproduction, based on economic exploitation and systematic repression.
In this context, it becomes clear that no progressive solution can emerge either from the theocratic regime or from pro-imperialist liberal alternatives, such as that of Pahlavi, nor from subordinate alignments with powers like China. Only the independent action of the working class, in alliance with oppressed sectors, can open the path toward a genuinely democratic outcome under the control of the country’s workers.
Photo: Demonstrators march in Berlin, Germany, on Jan. 18 in solidarity with the protests in Iran. (Ebrahim Noroozi / AP)
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Trump administration to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth
By RIO NERO
In December, the Trump administration proposed sweeping restrictions on gender-affirming care for transgender minors. On Dec. 18, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) announced two new proposed policies that would effectively terminate Medicaid coverage of of gender-affirming care for individuals under 18, cutting off a critical lifeline for many trans youth.1
The first of these policies would modify the Conditions of Participation (CoPs) to disqualify hospitals that offer gender-affirming care from Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement. As virtually all hospitals in the U.S. rely on CMS funding to operate, the adoption of this policy would mean hospitals nationwide would no longer provide gender-affirming care.
The second proposed policy prohibits the allocation of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funds to gender-affirming care for minors under 18, ending state insurance coverage of gender-affirming care for minors. These policies alone would make gender-affirming care inaccessible for most working-class trans youth. These two proposals are subject to legal challenges; comments on them are due on Feb. 17.
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also signed a separate HHS declaration 2 on Dec. 18, which frames youth access to gender-affirming care as a public health crisis that violates professional medical standards and the Hippocratic oath. RFK defended this move by citing a widely disputed 3 medical study, 4 produced in November 2025 by the HHS under his authority, warning that “practitioners who perform sex-rejecting procedures on minors would be deemed out of compliance with those standards.” This declaration creates legal uncertainty for all medical establishments that offer gender-affirming care, creating an incentive to cease providing the treatment altogether—an effect hauntingly reminiscent of anti-abortion bills.
The crackdown extends beyond medical facilities. The FDA has issued 12 warnings to private manufacturers and retailers of chest binders—garments used to flatten the chest—signaling a broader campaign against resources commonly used by transgender individuals.5
These measures would have devastating consequences. For many transgender adolescents, access to HRT during puberty is not only affirming but lifesaving. Puberty introduces changes that are irreversible without timely intervention. While some effects, such as certain secondary sex characteristics, can be mitigated later, others including height, bone structure, and vocal deepening—cannot be reversed once adulthood is reached. For this reason, adolescence is a crucial treatment window. Denying care during this period forces trans people to endure life-long dysphoria that could have been prevented. These policies will deepen the suffering that transgender people already endure as highly marginalized members of the population through stripping young trans people of autonomy over their bodies.
The administration’s actions mark one of the most aggressive federal interventions into transgender health care to date. These decisions are clear attempts to rob the transgender community of the future that our youth embody. Mass, public resistance to these attacks on transgender youth is absolutely necessary to end this assault on bodily autonomy and to prevent it from widening in scope. Organizations fighting for bodily autonomy must come together with trans youth, medical workers, teachers, case workers, and other workers in affected industries to broaden the organs of collective struggle and fight back for trans rights!