The kidnapping of Venezuelan President and his wife Cilia Flores marks the most brazen exhibition of state terrorism, and the lengths US imperialism is prepared to go to arrest its decline as a global hegemon in recent years. The US regime’s claim that the injuries that especially those visible on Cilia Flores’ face during their appearance before the kangaroo court, were sustained during a fall is reminiscent of the apartheid regime’s claims to defend its barbaric actions. Detainees killed in detention had “slipped in the shower”, “jumped out of windows” or “malingered” as was said of Nicodemus Kgoathe, Solomon, Modipane, Ahmed Timol and Steve Biko. Maduro and Flores’ abduction erases the distinction between a government claiming its legitimacy through democratic elections, and a criminal gang.
US actions a long established modus operandi for subjugation, plunder and pillage
Shocking and abhorrent as this action is, it is not new. In 2004 in a joint French and US operation, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his wife Mildred, were forced onto a plane at gunpoint, leaving their two young daughters behind, and flown to the Central African Republic. Aristide was overthrown in a bloody February 2004 coup fomented by US-French supported right-wing paramilitary forces and the Haitian elite. In the aftermath of the coup, more than 3,000 people were killed and thousands of supporters of Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas political party were jailed. The South African cabinet approved the CARICOM’s (Caribbean Community) and African Union’s request and granted Aristide refuge albeit, under US pressure, as a “temporary stay” rather than asylum.
The allegations that Maduro led a non-existent cartel were so laughable, the charges were dropped by their first court appearance. As the CWI statement (8.01.2026) points out: “The stench of hypocrisy coming from Trump and US imperialism in the charges they level against Maduro is overpowering. The former right-wing President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, was backed by Trump in the 2017 presidential election. Obama at the same time referred to him as an “excellent partner”. He was later put on trial in the US for heading a drug cartel and involvement in shipping 400 tonnes of cocaine to the US and sentenced to over forty years imprisonment. Trump pardoned him and set him free on 1st December 2025 –– a month before he kidnapped Maduro!”.
The CWI statement continues: “US imperialism has invaded or instigated military coups in almost every country in Latin and Central America. By the mid-1970s most of Latin America was turned into a giant concentration camp through a series of US-inspired military coups. Bill Clinton authorised over 20,000 troops to invade Haiti in 1994 to overthrow a military regime there. In 1983 Reagan did not even bother to inform his “friend”, the then British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, that Grenada was going to be invaded despite its head of state being the British monarch. In 1989 George H W Bush authorised 27,000 troops to invade Panama.”
The US’s propaganda on drug trafficking is equally soaked in hypocrisy. Maga-supporting Republican Kentucky Senator Thomas Massey’s statement on the online news outlet Breaking Points, that the CIA “occasionally” finances the drug trade, is a gross understatement. There is overwhelming evidence of CIA involvement in setting up drug smuggling networks the world over including South East Asia and Afghanistan as well as Latin America. Part of US’s imperialism’s modus operandi included installing dictators like Panama’s General Noriega.
The US’s cynicism included turning on their own puppets when such covert drug trafficking operations became an inconvenient public embarrassment. In 1989 the US invaded Panama and kidnapped long-time US Central Intelligence Agency asset and military dictator since 1983. The US supported him as a key ally against “communism” in Central America, aiding US-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua. By the late 80s, Noriega’s drug trafficking, money laundering and brutality turned him into a liability. The US invasion and kidnapping followed Noriega’s annulment of the 1989 elections in which the US had fielded an alternative puppet. The US placed him on trial and imprisoned him for drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering – the very CIA aided and abetted criminal activities throughout his dictatorship.
US ascent to power soaked in blood
It is unlikely that Maduro’s abduction will succeed in bringing about a total regime change. That the intervention took the form of an abduction rather than an invasion itself reflects US imperialism’s fears that putting boots on the grounds might provoke armed resistance in Venezuela and from other countries, reviving long held anti-Yankee imperialist sentiment in Latin America.
This action is completely consistent with US imperialism’s decades-long state terrorism in Latin America, Africa and Asia since World War 2 and during its rise to power before. Marx wrote in Capital that “If money comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek, then capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” The US ascended to its position of global hegemon by wading through the blood of and trampling on the corpses of hundreds of thousands from before World War 2 and afterwards.
The US dropped atom bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, incinerating over 200 000 in 1945 – the only ruling elite to have committed a holocaust in this form. There was no justification for it even by the hypocritical standards of the rules of engagement in capitalist warfare. The Military Intervention Project at Tufts University’s Centre for Strategic Studies documents: “The US has undertaken over 500 international military interventions since 1776, with nearly 60% undertaken between 1950 and 2017… over one-third … after 1999.”
A March 8, 2022 report titled “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2022”, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a US government institution that compiles information on behalf of Congress, confirmed the US’s blood soaked history. It listed the countries the US military targeted, the vast majority of the nations on Earth, including almost every single county in Latin America, the Caribbean and most of the African continent. The US launched at least 251 military interventions between 1991 and 2022.
The US provided political and military support for Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor and the genocide that claimed an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 lives through systematic killings, repression and state terrorism between 1975 and 1999. The US-backed Indonesian dictator, General Suharto, carried out an initial anti-communist purge over 1965-1966, slaughtering up to 1 million trade unionists and suspected leftists. The US provided lists of senior communist party officials, equipment and money to the Indonesian army, according to official documents declassified in 2017. According to the Associated Press, one document revealed that in late 1965, the US embassy in Jakarta sent a cable to Washington calling the crackdowns a “fantastic switch which has occurred over 10 short weeks,” along with an estimate that 100,000 people had been slaughtered. In 2016, an international tribunal at the Hague found that the US, UK and Australia were all complicit in the1965 mass killings deemed crimes against humanity.
US imperialism has no monopoly on barbarism. Its modern foreign policy follows in the blood-soaked footsteps of its predecessors and contemporaries. Its aim has always been to eliminate all opposition to its insatiable greed for resources and determination to crush even the slightest hint of smaller nations desire for control of their resources, economic and political independence. In the Middle East, either directly or through its proxy the genocidal Israeli regime, kidnappings and assassinations of leaders of resistance organisations and senior government figures are standard practice. In Africa, Libya’s Muamar Gaddafi was hunted down and executed like a dog. The Belgian colonial regime assassinated the Congo’s first post-independence Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. Belgian police commissioner, Gerard Soetehe who oversaw his execution and the cutting of his body into pieces and dissolved it in sulphuric acid. The only part of his remains, a tooth Soetehe kept as a trophy, was returned to his family in 2022.
The method in the madness
The most pronounced feature of the Trump administration’s political and ideological character is its complete contempt for the “rules-based order” the US had itself played a leading role in constructing after World War 2. Not once since WW2 has Congress, which has the sole power to declare war, authorised US military interventions. Having disregarded its own domestic laws, it was never going to be constrained by its toy, the UN and all its structures. The UN Security Council’s inequalities are built-in with veto powers for the 5 permanent of the 15 member UN Security Council and the 193 member General Assembly. It makes a mockery of the idea of democracy and equality between nations – the hypocritical cover for imperialist predations.
The US ruling class has held the UN Charter that it is once again being accused of violating in Venezuela, in contempt for decades. So far as US imperialism is concerned “international law” is a unicorn that it has been quite happy to send all other nations in search of whilst it wields its power as it sees fit. The UN’s foundational architecture provided the US with immunity and impunity from the onset for its serial violations of UN resolutions.
What distinguishes the Trump administration from that of its predecessors is that its disregard for UN decisions on global peace and security has now evolved into a conscious strategy to free itself from the jurisdiction of even the most benign of the multiple institutions that spun off from the UN at the end of WW2. The Trump 2.0 administration in particular regards these institutions, established to give effect to different aspects of the “rules based order” – eg trade, health, international finance – whose construction, with built in de facto US control, as having proven not only ineffective in arresting its decline as a global hegemon, but as the cause of it.
Riddled as US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick’s article in the Financial Times (20/01/2026) is over the cause of the US’s decline, it nevertheless sets out the Trump 2.0 administration’s strategy with insolent clarity. Explaining why the US even bothered to attend January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Lutnick states: “We are here at Davos to make one thing crystal clear: With President Trump, capitalism has a new sheriff in town. For decades, countries were told there was only one acceptable model. They were forced to depend on global supply chains and foolishly trust that global institutions would have their backs. That model put America dead last and left countless others weaker as well.” (emphasis added).
As the more serious of global capitalism’s mouthpieces, the Financial Times observes: “Internationally, the US is mounting a war on almost all significant institutions, notably the EU. The World Trade Organization has been made irrelevant. Co-operation on climate and health is ruined. In all, the administration has announced its decision to pull out of a total of 66 international organisations, including 31 UN entities.” (21/01/2026)
The bombing of Nigeria, threats against Mexico, Panama and Iran and even allies like Canada, as well as Denmark over Greenland and NATO itself, are not simply the random actions of a rogue president. Space does not permit a detailed analysis of the subterranean processes that were to undermine the US’s economic and consequently political decline precisely through the measures it took to consolidate its ascendancy to position of the world’s hegemon since WW2. Suffice it to say that the very same “exorbitant privilege” Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, France’s Finance Minister and later President described as the effect of the imposition of the US $ as the world’s reserve currency in the post-WW2 period, dialectically, laid the basis for its decline today. Politics, as Lenin said is concentrated economics. War, as Prussian general and military theorist Clause von Clausewitz pointed out, is the continuation politics by other means.
The symptoms some medical professionals describe as cognitive decline, and malignant narcissism is the manifestation in the persona of Trump of the megalomania that characterises US imperialism economically and politically. For 80 years the US bestrode the globe like a colossus. Briefly, following the collapse of the Stalinist Soviet Union, it was the sole hegemon in a unipolar world. That period is decisively over.
In the final analysis it is an expression of the re-inflammation of the contradictions of the capitalist system and the laws by which it operates – the conflict between the nation state, whose limits the productive forces have outgrown, and the world market and, at the same time, between private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and social need. The defence of the capitalist classes of their own national interest within each nation state at the expense of each other is at the root of the US’s unprecedented attacks on NATO but also the rising tensions amongst the European capitalist powers themselves.
The US’s domestic economic crisis
The US is the world’s biggest debtor nation owing domestic and foreign investors including governments. Their treasury bonds holdings, valued at $38 trillion and rising are in reality IOUs. The cost of servicing this debt is approaching $1trillion per annum. The rise of China is less the cause than the prism through which this decline is expressed. China’s displacement of the US as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse has served to magnify its decline and acts as a red rag to the US imperialist bull.
That the tech billionaires were undeterred by Trump’s sexual assault conviction, his multiple corruption charges, misogyny, homophobia, racism, xenophobia and the cover-up of the files of his association with child trafficking and other sexual depravities in the Epstein files, speaks volumes about the repugnant and degenerate elite dominating US politics. They were prepared to pay billions to ensure the installation of someone willing to swing a wrecking ball at institutions and policies of bourgeois democracy at home and US-imperialist order abroad considered as impediments to the reversal of the US’ decline and reassertion of its dominance.
Trump’s outsize persona, buffoonery and unpredictability serve as a distraction from the reality that he reflects the shift in the outlook and character of the new breed of the US ruling elite dominating the Trump 2.0 administration. This cuts across both wings of its political parties – the Republicans and the Democrats. The US economy has failed to recover from the 2008 global financial crisis’s impact. Its cure, swinging empirically from quantitative easing (lower interest rates and stimulus packages funded by printing money) to quantitative tightening (higher interest rates and social spending cuts) have proven on each occasion to be worse than the disease. Trump’s call for the $1 trillion military spending budget to be increased by 50% and his demand, accompanied by threats to dismiss the Federal Reserve chairperson, for further interest rate cuts, merely a different version of the failed QE stimulus packages, will accelerate the crisis. Trump and the tech billionaires’ demands are a confirmation of the US’s ruling class incomprehension of what is unfolding or its consequences.
They are preparing the ground for a new global financial crash likely to exceed in magnitude the 2008 Global Financial Crisis in depth and scale. Its economic, social and political reverberations will be global. The US ruling class, to quote Trotsky are “tobogganing towards disaster with their eyes closed.”
The speeding up of polarisation between the classes and rising geo-political tensions globally have confirmed the CWI’s characterisation of Trump 2.0 as “the great accelerator.” The neo-liberal policies the US imposed in the neo-colonial world after WW2 have begun to have the same impact on the masses in other advanced capitalist countries since their ruling capitalist elites mimicked the US from the early 70s. The savage cuts in social spending and decline in living standards have coincided with unprecedented levels of inequalities worldwide.
On the one hand Trump’s right wing populist policies have emboldened the far right for which he acts as a point of reference and even inspiration globally. On the other hand, the sheer brazenness of US foreign policy has provoked a worldwide reaction as the mass demonstrations against the Gaza genocide including the general strike in Italy, and the mass revolts in the neo-colonial world and in the advanced capitalist countries have shown.
Trump 2.0 represents capitalist rule without the hypocritical pretences of the imperialist US-dominated world order constructed after WW2. The ideas the US hypocritically promoted of universal human rights, gender and racial equality, fraternal relations between nations etc, always served as a cover for its predatory ambitions. During the post WW2 boom the capitalist classes were able, and considered it an unavoidable necessity, to carry the cost of the policies of social democratic reforms the struggles of the working classes in the advanced capitalist countries compelled them to concede. With the boom exhausted, social democratic reforms and the accompanying idea of rights to decent education, housing, health and living standards have become intolerable for the capitalist classes. They are systematically and more and more ruthlessly being rolled back since the advent of neo-liberalism in the early 1970s.
For the overthrow of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society worldwide
Like all ruling elites throughout history today’s US and global capitalist elites have confused the temporary with the permanent, the ephemeral with the eternal. The US in particular is attempting to implement the policies domestically and globally that had ensured its historical ascendancy, in the period of its historical decline. It is doing so in a world much more economically integrated and interdependent with repercussions of policies in one country rapidly reverberating worldwide economically and politically. It will fail. It will detonate convulsions domestically and worldwide. It is a manifestation of Malcolm X’s 1963 statement following the US’s involvement in the overthrow of South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, that “the chickens are coming home to roost.”
The far right, emboldened by Trump, have taken full advantage of the absence of mass socialist workers parties. The urgency to establish such formations is now an even greater necessity worldwide, not least in the US itself. The US is the epicentre of the global economic crisis and its political consequences: climate degradation and proliferation of wars. We call upon the US working class to demand the rejection not just of Trump’s proposed increase in military spending by a further $500 billion to $1.5 trillion, but of the military budget altogether. We urge our US class brothers and sisters to include in the call for a general strike against the ICE gestapo’s murder of Nicole Good, the demand to end all US military interventions globally.
The crisis underlines the complete bankruptcy of global capitalism and the US authored imperialist world order economically and politically. In a 2009 Rolling Stone magazine article, US journalist Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs after the 2008 financial crisis, as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that comes up for air ” That is an apt description of the US today.
The youth-led uprisings throughout the neo-colonial world demonstrate the conclusion that political independence within the framework of capitalism merely perpetuated economic subjugation, poverty and war in which the post-colonial elites have colluded. This reflects a growing convergence in understanding with working class understanding in the advanced capitalist countries. They are drawing the lines between the dots between escalating military spending and the decline in the cost-of-living, between the unprecedented wealth concentrated in the hands of a shrinking minority at the top and the deepening impoverishment of the majority at the bottom.
Economically it underscores the necessity for the overthrow of capitalism and the socialist reconstruction of the world. Politically the deployment of the institutions of world governance have produced a combination of impotence and complicity in genocide, war and climate catastrophe. This in turn underlines the necessity for the total reconstruction of global governance on a socialist basis. A world without exploitation, capitalist competition and war, based on fraternal relations between people, sharing of resources for mutual benefit on the basis of equality and prosperity for all requires a world federation of socialist states.
Nothing can be more futile than for the working class to appeal to the so-called international community, the restoration of “international law” and the capitalist rules based order eg BRICS is campaigning for. Before and under US hegemony these have always been a community of plunderers and exploiters operating under the protection of capitalist law designed to entrench the imperialist status quo. Capitalism is rotten ripe for overthrow, far more today than at the time of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 – the greatest event in human history to date. The degeneration of the Russian Revolution resulted from its isolation in an economically underdeveloped country, produced Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary force. The conditions for the international unification of the working class are once again presenting themselves.
The working classes of all countries constitute the only international community that can challenge capitalism and imperialism. The working class can rely only on its own power, its own programme and its organisation united in action. United, the working class is a super power with the power, organisational capability and the sense of collective solidarity to overthrow capitalism and reconstruct the world on a socialist basis.
- the immediate release of Maduro and Flores
- the cessation of all military deployments and aggression in Venezuela, Latin America and everywhere worldwide
- the closure of all US 90 military bases throughout the world.
- No to xenophobia – draw in the African diaspora into this campaign
- A National Day of Action against imperialism and its meddling through proxy wars in the DRC, the Middle East and ongoing killings in Gaza despite the “ceasefire.”
- Full support for the International Day of Solidarity Action
The MWP welcomes the establishment of the Venezuela Solidarity campaign and its decision to unite eg with the Palestinian Solidarity campaigns. We also applaud SAFTU’s January 16 Special NEC decisions that the struggle is against imperialist ruling classes, not against the working people of any country … the building of the broadest anti-imperialist front in every country, continent and globally, linking national struggles, continental initiatives, and international solidarity into a single movement against war, plunder, and domination.
The NEC’s 2026 Programme of Action of 12 campaigns as the backbone of a united working-class offensive to address all the crises listed is an opportunity to unite struggles fought in silos in the workplace, working class communities, education and women’s struggles.
For a mass workers party on a socialist programme
The NEC decisions dovetail completely with 2018 Working Class Declaration to unite the struggles of all sections of the working class into one movement on a common programme of action. The NEC decisions furthermore have the potential to fulfil the aims of the 2018 WCS Declaration to form a mass workers party on a socialist programme to consummate working class struggles in unity on the political plane. The main bourgeois parties, the ANC and DA, and their GNU juniors are openly sowing divisions through xenophobia and racism. The SACP’s betrayal of Marxism has driven it into the sand, consigned the class collaborationist Tripartite Alliance to extinction and led to Numsa’s divisions and Cosatu’s complete disorientation.
The vacuum on the left threatens to be filled by racist, xenophobic forces on the right. Only a working class united on a socialist programme can cut across the divisions that the main GNU parties, all of them consciously mimicking Trump’s racism and xenophobia are creating. The convening of the establishment of the WCS was precipitated by the need to launch a counter-offensive against the disastrous consequences of the ANC’s neo-liberal capitalist policies that originated from the architects of the Washington Consensus. Trump’s war mongering rampage is the continuation of those policies. The most effective solidarity with the Venezuelan working class is the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism in SA itself. We call upon the Saftu NEC not to squander this opportunity to unite the working class politically on a socialist programme.
