We publish here Part 3 of a series examining the global wave of Gen Z protests, the deepening crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the necessity of fighting for the program of socialist internationalism on the basis of Leon Trotskyâs Theory of Permanent Revolution.Part 1 was published on November 6, 2025 here. Part 2 was published on November 14, 2025 here.
The Lineage of Gen-Z Revolts: Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Yellow Vests â Politics, Tactics, Programme and the Lessons for the Working Class
The Arab Spring â Historical Precursor and Political Object Lesson
The Arab Spring of 2010â2011 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) constitutes the decisive historical precursor to the successive waves of extra-parliamentary revolt examined here and its political lessons penetrate the entire subsequent history. It was not a single homogeneous movement but a global eruption of mass social unrest driven by the structural crisis of world capitalismârising inequality, mass unemployment, and collapsing living standardsâwhose politics were shaped by the collision of profoundly antagonistic class forces: a radicalising working class and poor, large layers of youth and petty-bourgeois activists, sections of the middle class seeking political space and a greater share of the spoils, and competing fractions of the national ruling classes including military cliques and Islamist parties. What began as mass popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes rapidly became a battlefield where different class forces and bourgeois factions contended to shape outcomes in their own interests.
Demonstrators celebrate in Cairo’s Tahrir Square after the announcement of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the military-backed Tamarod campaign each sought to channel mass anger into their respective bourgeois projects rather than into an independent working-class overthrow of the capitalist state. As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) analysis of the Egyptian experience established, the so-called liberal and pseudo-left organisations played a decisive counterrevolutionary role, with Tamarod leaders standing at the side of coup commander General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as he announced the military takeoverâan outcome those organisations had materially prepared.[1] The political demands advanced spontaneously in the streetsâbread, jobs, dignity, an end to corruption, democratic rightsâexpressed genuine and profound social need, but social and democratic demands do not automatically constitute a socialist programme. Where organised revolutionary working-class leadership was absent, liberal, Islamist, and petty-bourgeois currents filled the vacuum, offering alternative programmes that in every instance preserved capitalist property relations and imperialist domination.
A central feature of the Arab Spring was its spontaneity: sudden mass mobilisations, general strikes, and occupations that burst through the limits of existing organisations and terrified ruling classes globally. This spontaneity was simultaneously a strengthâdemonstrating the capacity of the masses to act independently and with enormous forceâand a structural limitation that proved fatal to the revolutionary potential of the uprisings. Without a revolutionary working-class party and without organs of working-class powerâfactory committees, rank-and-file unions, neighbourhood councilsâspontaneous movements remain vulnerable to appropriation by better-organised bourgeois factions or to demobilisation through absorption, exhaustion and repression. As Nick Beams argued in his contemporaneous analysis of the Egyptian upheaval in February 2011, the army and bourgeois forces were able to reassert control precisely where the working class lacked a political and organisational leadership capable of transforming mass revolutionary energy into state power.[2] Egypt possessed, in the strike waves that brought down Mubarak, the objective social power to make a socialist revolution; what it lacked was the subjective instrumentâthe revolutionary party anchored in the masses and fighting for the perspective of international socialismâwithout which that power could not be directed to its necessary conclusion. The result, confirmed by a decade of subsequent experience, was a military dictatorship under el-Sisi more brutal than the one the revolution had overthrown.
The Arab Spring exerted a direct ideological and tactical influence on Occupy Wall Street (2011), while simultaneously exposing the political pitfalls that Occupy would reproduce in the specific conditions of the imperialist center. The vivid demonstration that mass occupations of public space and horizontal assemblies could galvanise broad popular sympathy gave Occupy its tactical model and its initial political confidence. But the Arab Spring also disclosed, for those with eyes to see, the precise vulnerability that âleaderlessâ spontaneous movements carry within themselves: without a socialist programme and independent working-class organisation, mass insurgency is systematically channelled back into bourgeois institutions or reformist dead-ends.
The WSWS identified this danger at the outset of Occupyâs emergence, documenting the efforts of ex-left figures and Democratic Party operatives to absorb the movement into the 2012 Obama electoral campaignâprecisely the mechanism of bourgeois reabsorption that had disfigured the Arab Springâs political outcomes in country after country.[3] The strategic question the Arab Spring posed, and which Occupy failed to resolve, was the same question that confronts the Gen-Z movements from 2022: whether mass protests aim at symbolic disruption and awareness-raising within the framework of bourgeois politics, or whether they are directed toward building independent working-class organisationâgeneral strikes, rank-and-file committees, industrial coordinationâcapable of fighting the economic power of capital and posing the question of state power. From a revolutionary internationalist standpoint, only transforming spontaneous mass energy into a socialist political programme and durable proletarian (industrial) organisationâlinking democratic struggles to the working classâs capacity to seize powerâcan convert the recurring insurgency of the oppressed into a force capable of overthrowing capitalist rule.
Common Roots: The Crisis of Capitalism and the Crisis of Political Legitimacy
Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vest movement (Gilets Jaunes, 2018â2020), and the Gen-Z uprisings constitute three successive and qualitatively escalating waves of mass extra-parliamentary revolt. To treat them as unrelated or merely sequential phenomena is to miss the most important truth they disclose in common: all three are expressions of the same underlying and deepening contradiction of world capitalismâthe contradiction between social production organized on an ever more integrated and global scale, and its subordination to private ownership and profit that concentrates wealth in ever fewer hands while condemning the vast majority to insecurity, impoverishment, and precarity.
Each wave erupted from a specific conjuncture of that general crisis. Occupy responded to the 2007â2009 financial crash and the naked reassertion of Wall Street power through the Obama administrationâs bank bailout program, which transferred trillions in public funds to the architects of financial ruin while working-class families lost their homes, their jobs, and their savings. The WSWS observed at the time that the Occupy movement expressed âthe class struggle reemerging as the basic historical force,â and that it âforeshadows an explosive eruption of class struggle in the United States, the center of world capitalism.â[4]
The Yellow Vests erupted in November 2018 when Emmanuel Macronâs fuel taxâa levy deliberately designed to shift the costs of the energy transition (away from fossil fuels) from corporations onto workers and the provincial poorârendered unmistakable the class character of the âEn Marcheâ (the centrist, liberal party of Macron) project presented to the electorate as post-ideological (that the era of class politics and ideological conflict was over) technocratic modernization.
The Gen-Z wave erupted when the accumulated wreckage of forty years of neoliberal restructuring, the devastation of COVID-19, the economic warfare of the US-NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine, the IMFâs debt-peonage regime across the backward countries, and the accelerating climate crisis made survival itself a political question for tens of millions of young people across multiple continents simultaneously.
Their common political character follows directly from these shared material roots. All three registered a profound mass rupture with parliamentary politics, with the established parties of both nominal âleftâ and right perceived as equally complicit in exploitation, and with the trade union bureaucracies and institutional mediators that had long managed and dampened class struggle. The âWe are the 99 percentâ of Occupy, the Yellow Vestsâ visceral contempt for the âParisian elitesâ in their media chambers, the Gen-Z movementsâ blanket dismissal of all established political formations as corrupt beyond reformâthese slogans express not political immaturity but a genuine and deepening crisis of bourgeois political legitimacy that no cosmetic reform or change of government personnel can address.
Politics: Anti-Establishmentism, âNo Politics,â and the Populist Trap
Despite their common anti-establishment character, the three waves exhibit significant differences in political composition that must be analyzed with precision rather than collapsed into an undifferentiated ânew social movementsâ category.
Occupy Wall Street: The Middle-Class Rehearsal
Occupy was dominated from its inception by a predominantly middle-class social milieu concentrated in metropolitan centersâNew Yorkâs Zuccotti Park, Oakland, Boston, and their counterparts in London and other imperialist cities. The Occupy movement explicitly drew inspiration from the Arab Spring, with organizers from Canadian magazine Adbusters declaring: âLike our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America.â[ABC News] The movementâs imageryâthe occupation of Zuccotti Park echoing Cairoâs Tahrir Squareâand its timing, coming months after the Egyptian Revolutionâs triumph, established a direct lineage. As the WSWS observed at the time, âFrom the revolutionary upheavals in Egypt, to mass demonstrations in Israel and social eruptions in Europe, the class struggle has reemerged as the basic historical force.â[5]
Occupy protests in New York City (Image from wsws.org)
The movement emerged from anarchist organizations, in particular the Adbusters, which explicitly invoked âthe revolutionary Arab Spring tacticâ as its organizational model while stripping that model of its class content. The â99 percentâ slogan, however appealing as an expression of popular anti-oligarchic sentiment, was politically designed to obscure rather than sharpen the fundamental class division between the working class and the affluent upper-middle strata from which Occupyâs leadership was drawn.[6]
The political consequences of this class foundation became visible in the role played by pseudo-left organizations, above all the International Socialist Organization (ISO). Despite its nominally socialist rhetoric, the ISO worked systematically to subordinate Occupy to the AFL-CIO trade union apparatus and channel its energy toward Barack Obamaâs 2012 re-election campaign. As the WSWS documented in contemporaneous coverage, the ISO âis attempting to stifle the protest movement by helping to bring it under the control of the AFL-CIO and the rest of the trade union apparatus,â praising corrupt union officialsâamong them AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and CWAâs Bob Master, both fresh from betraying the Verizon strikeâwhile concealing their role in imposing concessions on workers.[7]
The ISOâs promotion of âno politicsâ and âno leadershipâ served to create precisely the political vacuum the Democratic Party rushed to fill. The WSWS warned with prophetic accuracy: âMany of the groups involved in Wall Street demonstrations have echoed the position of the indignados in Spain and Greece that there should be âno politicsâ and no leadership. The call for âno politicsâ amounts to a rejection of a principled and coherent political alternative to bourgeois politics and the capitalist two-party systemâthat is, to socialist politics. It plays directly into the hands of the Democratic Party, which will move to fill the political vacuum.â[8] This is precisely what occurred. The coordinated federal-local police crackdown that destroyed Occupyâs encampments in November 2011âdocumented by the WSWS as a nationally organized operation involving the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police forces across multiple cities[9]ârevealed the ruling classâs settled determination to tolerate no sustained challenge to capitalist order, however embryonic. The ISOâs subsequent dissolution and absorption of its dominant faction into the Democratic Socialists of America merely formalized the political trajectory it had pursued within Occupy from the outset.
The Yellow Vests: Broader Social Base, Sharper Edge, Same Political Ceiling
The Yellow Vest movement expressed a sharper social radicalism and a considerably broader working-class social base than Occupy. Its geographical and social centre of gravity lay in provincial Franceâamong commuters, pensioners, small proprietors, precarious workers, and the rural and peri-urban poor hit by transport costs, the decline of local public services, and the accelerating erosion of wages under neoliberal restructuring. This diffuse, provincial social compositionârooted in layers of the working class and lower middle strata most directly exposed to the costs of the âmodernizationâ celebrated by Macronâs metropolitan enthusiastsâgave the Yellow Vests a broader geographic reach and a more direct material confrontation with capitalist rule than Occupyâs metropolitan concentration had permitted.
Its tactics were correspondingly more disruptive. Weekly nationwide actions, roundabout and toll-road blockades, the occupation of commercial arteries, and confrontations with riot police in Paris and provincial cities created real costs for capitalist circulation and subjected the French ruling class to sustained political pressure of a kind Occupyâs symbolic square occupations had not achieved. At certain moments, the Yellow Vest movement intersected with strike wavesâteachers, health workers, transport workersâcreating the real possibility, if never the organizational reality, of a fusion between mass street protest and organized industrial action.
FILE PHOTO: A view of the Place de la Republique as protesters wearing yellow vests gather during a national day of protest by the “yellow vests” movement in Paris, France, December 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo
This possibility was systematically blocked. The French trade union confederations worked methodically to prevent any convergence between the Yellow Vests and the organized labor movement.[10] Left-populist tendencies within and around the movement framed demands in the idiom of âthe people versus the elitesââcalls for referenda, wealth redistribution, and stronger national welfare provisionsâthat avoided identifying the systemic enemy: the capitalist class and its state, not merely its more visibly corrupt or arrogant individual representatives.[11] Macronâs government survived. The Yellow Vests dissipated. The underlying social crisis intensified.
The Gen-Z Wave: Global Scale, Revolutionary Intensity, Identical Political Deficit
The Gen-Z uprisings represent a qualitative escalation in both geographic scope and revolutionary intensity. Occurring simultaneously across multiple countries of the former colonial world, they combined militant student and youth vanguards with genuine proletarian intervention through strikes and industrial action. Sri Lankaâs two general strikes of April 28 and May 6, 2022, in which millions participated across ethnic lines, demonstrated the decisive power of the working class when it acts as an independent force.[12] Kenya witnessed successive waves of strikes by teachers, healthcare workers, civil servants, and transport workers erupting in the wake of the initial Gen-Z protests.[13] The scale of political disruptionâheads of state driven from office, parliaments stormed, governments collapsedâsurpassed anything Occupy or the Yellow Vests had produced.
Nepal Gen-Z protests. Image Courtesy of Kathmandupost.com
Yet the political framework within which these movements operated reproduced in these countries of belated capitalist development the identical dynamics that had contained and betrayed Occupy and the Yellow Vests in the imperialist centers. Kenyaâs Revolutionary Socialist League, justifying the absence of leadership on the grounds that âthe government is actively looking for leaders,â created a political vacuum filled by Raila Odinga and the trade union bureaucracy.[14] The Communist Party Marxist-Kenya promoted defense of the 2010 Constitutionâdrafted by the ruling class with British and US fundingâthereby channeling mass anger into bourgeois-democratic illusions. BAYAN and Akbayan in the Philippines aligned with bourgeois anti-China factions, subordinating working-class politics to the strategic imperatives of US imperialismâs Indo-Pacific confrontation.[15]
The pseudo-leftâs international character was not incidental: these organizations participate in the same international political currentârepresenting affluent middle-class layers whose material interests require the preservation of capitalism while managing working-class discontentâthat the ISO embodied in the United States. They celebrate spontaneity to avoid building revolutionary parties. They promote âpeople powerâ and âanti-corruptionâ to obscure class divisions. They align with bourgeois opposition forces presented as âprogressiveâ alternatives. As the WSWS has consistently warned, these tendencies serve objectively as a reservoir for capitalist ideology within the âleft.â[16]
[6] The WSWS analysis identified this with precision: âThe social and political outlook of those at the core of the protestsâincluding anarchist organizations around the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which initiated the call to occupy Wall Streetâwas fundamentally hostile to the working class. Contained in the â99 percentâ slogan itself was an effort to obscure the deep social divide between the working class and the more privileged sections of the upper-middle class, for which these groups spoke.â
[9] World Socialist Web Site, âThe shutdown of Occupy Wall Streetâ (17 November 2011) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/11/pers-n17.html> ; see also âMayors conspired to close Occupy Wall Street encampmentsâ (17 November 2011) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/11/occu-n17.html> and âPolice repression escalates against Occupy protestsâ (19 November 2011) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/11/occu-n19.html>
Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPM-K) Secretary General Booker Ngesa Omole in prison [Photo: CPM Marxist (Facebook)]
The Central Committee of the Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPM-K) has reported that its secretary general, Booker Ngesa Omole, was violently abducted on Monday in Isiolo town by the Kenya Police Service.
In a public statement February 24, the party wrote: âThis was not an arrest. This was not lawful detention. This was a kidnapping.â Omole was âbeaten severely. Tortured. Brutalised to near death. His tooth was broken. His finger was cut with a pen knife.â They state that after the assault he was âdumped at Mlolongo Police Station,â a facility associated with extrajudicial kidnappings and killings. His phone signal, they report, was traced there.
The party posted a photo of Omole in a Mlolongo Police Station cell February 25, explaining that he is being held unlawfully, âand the police have refused all access to him. No lawyers. No comrades. No family.â
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) denounces Omoleâs abduction and demands that the Kenyan regime release him immediately.
That Omole was singled out by the âbroad-based unityâ government of President William Rutoâuniting the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) founded by the late political fixer Raila Odingaâis clear from the repeated and escalating character of the attacks against him and other CPM-K members. A year ago, he was targeted for assassination as part of a broader campaign of intimidation and repression directed at the partyâs leadership.
The assassination attempt came days after the attempted abduction of CPM-K National Chairperson Mwaivu Kaluka in MombasaâKenyaâs second-largest cityâalong with two other party members, by plain-clothes police officers. While Kaluka was eventually released, the operation came just weeks after a crackdown on the CPM-K following its national congress in November. At that time, Kaluka and former National Chairperson Kinuthia Ndunguâwho had been beaten repeatedly and arrested 10 timesâwere detained at Central Police Station in Nairobi. No reason was given for their arrest.
The repression against the CPM-K is part of the escalating violence of the Ruto regime since he came to power in 2022. In 2023, Rutoâs first year in power, security forces killed at least 31 demonstrators. In June 2024, during the Gen Z protests against Rutoâs International Monetary Fund (IMF) Finance Bill that sought to impose savage tax hikes, police killed more than 60. In 2025, at least 50 were killed in protests and hundreds injured.
The abduction of Omole takes place amid an escalating campaign of repression against opposition figures in the run-up to next yearâs elections. Weeks ago, police violently dispersed a rally in Kitengela organised by the former and expelled the general secretary of ODM, Senator Edwin Sifuna, firing tear gas and live rounds at thousands of supporters. One of the victims, 28-year-old Vincent Ayomo, was shot in the eye as he crossed the road from work and another 50 attendees were injured.
This deepening turn to repression unfolds against a backdrop of extreme social inequality and mounting economic hardship. Oxfam reports show that nearly half of Kenyaâs population lives in extreme poverty, surviving on meagre daily incomes, even as wealth accumulates at the very top. A minuscule layer of the super-rich has amassed obscene fortunes: the richest 125 individuals now control more wealth than 77 percent of the populationâover 42 million people.
Meanwhile, average real wages have fallen by 11 percent since 2020, the cost of food has surged by 50 percent over the same period, and household expenses for transport and energy remain punishingly high. Public services are deteriorating under the impact of IMF-dictated austerity and debt servicing, exposing millions to collapsing health, education and social support systems.
The trade union bureaucracy is backing this assault on the working class and rural masses. Francis Atwoli, Secretary General of the Central Organisation of Trade Unions (COTU), recently declared that workers should âsupport him [Ruto] and ignore the noise,â hailing him as the only leader capable of transforming Kenya into a âfirst-worldâ industrialised economy. âThe only person who can take us to that level is none other than William Ruto,â Atwoli insisted, presenting the regimeâs pro-capitalist agenda as the path to jobs and development.
Atwoli has openly backed Rutoâs violence on protesters after last yearâs July 7, 2025 âSaba Sabaâ protest massacre, when security forces gunned down scores of protesters nationwide commemorating pro-democracy protests in the 1990s against the Western-backed Daniel Arap Moi regime. Speaking days after the bloodshed, Atwoli instructed young people to âforget about demonstrations, remain home, silent, and promote peace,â warning that protests were âscaring investors away.â He called on the government to take âfirm measures to curb the unrest.â
By urging youth to stay off the streets while police deployed live ammunition, mass arrests and abductions, the trade union bureaucracy is providing political cover for state repression. It has made clear that it stands not with workers and youth facing austerity and bullets, but with the capitalist state and its demands for âstabilityâ and investor confidence.
The attacks on the CPM-K, the abductions, arbitrary detentions and cross-border renditions to neighbouring Uganda under brutal dictator Yoweri Museveni, carried out by the Kenyan government, are political preparations for far broader assaults on the democratic rights of the population as a whole. What is being tested against one organisation today will be used tomorrow against striking workers, protesting youth and impoverished communities resisting austerity.Â
These events lay bare the grave dangers confronting the masses as social tensions intensify and the ruling elite closes ranks in defence of its wealth and power.
The turn to open repression in Kenya is being emboldened by the example set by would-be dictator Donald Trump in the United States. Thousands of armed ICE agents have been sent into major urban centres, while detention centres have been built across the country, with 66,000 people held in immigration custodyâthe highest level in US history. These crackdowns have left two American protesters killed.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron and the political establishment have exploited the death of fascist activist Quentin Deranqueâfollowing clashes around an event addressed by Rima Hassan of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed)âto whip up a reactionary campaign against the left. Backed by the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) and the Socialist Party, a broad political front is seeking to criminalise opposition and prepare the ground for an authoritarian shift in advance of next yearâs presidential elections. As with Charlie Kirk in the US, the death of a fascist is being weaponised to strengthen the repressive powers of the state and legitimise far-right forces.
In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) government is deploying the army into townships under the pretext of restoring order. It follows the mass killings of protesters in Tanzania in the aftermath of last yearâs elections, where thousands were reported killed or disappeared amid a brutal post-election crackdown, and the ongoing suppression of opposition forces in Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni.
These developments are expressions of a global crisis of capitalism. From Washington to Paris, Pretoria to Nairobi, ruling elites confront deepening inequality, mass anger and political instability. Their common response is to fortify the police state apparatus, promote far-right forces and normalise violence against social opposition.
Workers and youth must draw the necessary conclusions. The defence of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the courts, the opposition factions of the bourgeoisie, or the trade union bureaucracy. Mass meetings, demonstrations and workplaces must establish their own defence committees to protect protesters from police violence and state-sanctioned gangs. Those targeted for repression must not be left isolated but defended collectively.
Above all, the working class must build its own independent political movement, rooted in factories, neighbourhoods and schools, and guided by an international socialist perspective. This means breaking from all parties and trade union apparatuses tied to the capitalist ruling class and uniting with workers across Africa and internationally in the struggle against imperialist domination, austerity and state repression. Only through the conscious mobilisation of the working class for socialist transformation can democratic rights be secured and defended.
The ICFI has well-documented and irreconcilable political differences with the CPM-K, which have been clearly presented in the World Socialist Web Site. But it unequivocally opposes this brutal attack on the organizationâs general secretary, demands Omoleâs immediate release, and calls for an end to all state threats and repressive acts against the CPM-K.
This perspective article was originally published on the World Socialist Web Site on 23 February 2026.
President Donald Trump speaks during a press briefing at the White House, Friday, Feb. 20, 2026, in Washington with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]
Fridayâs Supreme Court ruling invalidating $160 billion in tariffs collected under President Donald Trump over the last year generated sighs of relief among sections of the ruling class. It also provoked an unhinged verbal tantrum at a hastily convened press conference during which Trump labeled the three conservative justices who joined the three liberals against him âfools and lapdogs âĻ of the radical left.â
The decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and its fallout expose deepening divisions within the ruling class that ultimately stem from the decline of US capitalism.
After labeling the three liberals a âdisgrace to our nation,â Trump accused the entire majority of being âswayed by foreign interest and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.â
Trump called the forces challenging his unbridled assertion of power to set and modify tariffs, âmajor sleazebagsâ who are âforeign country-centric,â and the two justices he nominated who voted with the majority, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, âan embarrassment to their families.â
Trump ranted, imitating a Mafia don, that âforeign countries that have been ripping us off for years are ecstatic âĻ dancing in the streets, but they wonât be dancing for long, that I can assure you.â
The Wall Street Journal editorialized, âTrump owes the Supreme Court an apologyâto the individual Justices he smeared on Friday and the institution itself. Mr. Trump doubtless wonât offer one, but his rant in response to his tariff defeat at the Court was arguably the worst moment of his Presidency.â
The legal issues presented are relatively straightforward. Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution expressly allocates all taxation power, including the imposition of duties on imported goods and services, to Congress. Following President Richard Nixonâs resort to extraordinary measures in response to the collapse of the post-World War II Bretton Woods financial framework, Congress enacted the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which allows the president to identify an âunusual and extraordinary threatâ and declare a ânational emergency,â triggering executive power to âinvestigate, block, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibitâ transactions involving foreign-held property. The list of executive powers notably does not include tariffs, and for almost 50 years no president invoked IEEPA powers to impose them.
Shortly after resuming office, however, Trump declared a national emergency based on drug trafficking to justify a 25 percent duty on most Canadian and Mexican imports, and another national emergency citing trade deficits to justify an array of tariffs, modifications, reductions and exemptions that sent equity markets careening. The rate on Chinese goods was ratcheted up in rapid successionâfrom 10 percent to 20, then to an additional 34, then 84, and finally 125 percentâbringing the total effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods to 145 percent.
Trumpâs IEEPA tariffs account for almost three-fourths of US tariffs imposed last year. Without them, the average effective US tariff rate would fall from 17.4 percent to 6.8 percent.
Separate suits were filed by businesses hammered by tariffs, joined by 12 states. Several lower courts ruled the IEEPA tariffs illegal prior to the Supreme Court taking the case, where nine justices splintered into three camps of three, producing seven separate opinions totaling 170 pages.
The decisive opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, contains language that amounts to a remarkable indictment of the White Houseâs dictatorial aims. Roberts wrote that the Framers, âhaving just fought a revolution motivated in large part by âtaxation without representation,ââ gave Congress âalone âĻ access to the pockets of the people,â and deliberately excluded the executive branch from any part of the taxing power. This was, Roberts noted, the âbirthright powerâ of Congressâa characterization that underscores how fundamental the majority considered the constitutional question.
Gorsuch went even further in his own concurring opinion, warning that âour system of separated powers and checks-and-balances threatens to give way to the continual and permanent accretion of power in the hands of one man. That is no recipe for a republic.â
Roberts was blunt in his description of the scope of power Trump claimed, writing, âAll it takes to unlock that extraordinary power is a Presidential declaration of emergency, which the Government asserts is unreviewable.â The only check, Roberts observed, would be a veto-proof supermajority in Congressârendering the legislature virtually powerless. This would âreplace the longstanding executive-legislative collaboration over trade policy with unchecked Presidential policymaking.â
Trump craves the tariff power to bully and extort foreign nations, to promote or harm certain economic sectors, and to steer wealth to favored industries and companies, including those that directly benefit his family. Robertsâs opinion, read in full, describes a president who has arrogated to himself the unilateral power to tax the entire population, even the world, answerable to no one, on the basis of an âemergencyâ declaration that he asserts cannot be reviewed.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh drafted a 63-page dissent joined by the arch-reactionary Trump toadies Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito that, Roberts noted, âechoed point-for-pointâ Trumpâs arguments. Kavanaugh bemoaned the fact that the US âmay be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs,â like a bank robber asking to be let off the hook because the stolen money has already been spent.
Kavanaugh then switched from his role as a supposed neutral judge to Trumpâs consiglieri, advising him, âAlthough I firmly disagree with the Courtâs holding today, the decision might not substantially constrain a Presidentâs ability to order tariffs going forward because numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most (if not all) of the tariffs at issue in this case.â Those alternatives were not raised in the briefing, which addressed only IEEPA tariffs, and Kavanaughâs addressing them in his dissent, which itself has no legal force, deviates from accepted judicial standards.
Media outlets reported that Trump exploded in profane anger when informed of the ruling while in the midst of a breakfast meeting with various governors. A few hours later he appeared before cameras in the White House press room, his face beet-red with rage under layers of orange makeup.
âThose tariffs remain,â Trump said repeatedly. âWeâre still getting them and we will after the decision,â adding, âAs Justice Kavanaughâwhose stock has gone so up, you have to see, Iâm so proud of himâwrote in his dissent âĻ âthe decision might not substantially constrain a presidentâs ability to order tariffs going forward.ââ
âHeâs right,â Trump continued, âIn fact, I can charge much more than I was charging. So Iâm going to just start.â Following a Kavanaugh suggestion, Trump announced new tariffs under a never used emergency statute that authorizes 150-day tariffs to remedy balance of payment deficits.
The invocations of the American Revolution by the majority justices are not merely rhetorical ornaments. As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches this July, the Revolution and the democratic principles it evoked are intruding into political lifeâand not only into the sphere of legal opinions. The language of 1776 retains an explosive contemporary relevance.
That a chief justice of the Supreme Court felt compelled to invoke the memory of the Revolution against a sitting presidentâs assertion of unchecked taxing power is itself a measure of how deep the present constitutional crisis has become. The ideals of the American Revolution, rooted in the Enlightenment and in the struggle against monarchical tyranny, stand in irreconcilable opposition to the regime Trump is attempting to construct.
The Supreme Court has not, however, undergone a democratic awakening. The Court is, and remains, a pillar of the capitalist state. Its function is to uphold the property relations and class interests upon which the existing social order depends. Nothing in Fridayâs ruling alters that fundamental character. The same Roberts Court that struck down Trumpâs tariffs has gutted voting rights, overturned Roe v. Wade, and granted presidents sweeping criminal immunity. To recognize the political significance of the divisions within the Court on specific issues is not to harbor any illusions in the nature of the institution itself.
Thomas, Alito and Kavanaughâthe uncompromising Nazis on the Courtâargued that IEEPA gives the president essentially unlimited power to impose tariffs. Thomas, in his separate dissent, suggested a bare and temporary congressional majority can delegate virtually any power to the president.
The conflict between the two factions is not absolute. Roberts, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett have provided critical support for large portions of Trumpâs fascist agenda. They have backed the brutal assault on immigrantsâthe mass arrests, the deportation flights, the use of military facilities as detention campsâthat constitutes one of the most vicious attacks on democratic rights in modern American history. On the tariff question, however, which impinges directly on the economic interests of powerful sections of the ruling class, a part of Trumpâs judicial majority has been compelled to blurt outâthough in carefully worded legal languageâthat the president is seeking to overthrow the Constitution.
The ruling exposes a profound crisis within the American ruling class. One faction, represented by the Wall Street Journal and the internationally oriented sections of finance capital, recognizes that Trumpâs tariff war is a catastropheâraising consumer prices, disrupting supply chains, and provoking retaliatory measures that threaten the global position of American capitalism. The other views the tariff power as an instrument of personal rule and plunder, a means of rewarding allies and punishing enemies entirely outside the framework of democratic accountability.
The ruling class is deeply divided, its democratic institutions are breaking down, and the working class has no voice in official politics. The defense of democratic rights and the struggle against the emerging dictatorship can be carried forward only through the independent social and political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program. It is the working class that is the true heir of the revolutionary principles and spirit of 1776, and it is the working class that must fight to defend them.
Ruth T McVey, The Rise of Indonesian Communism (Cornell University Press 1965) (Read on Google Books)
George McTurnan Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Cornell University Press 1952) (Read on archive.org)
Robert B Cribb, Gangsters and Revolutionaries: The Jakarta Peopleâs Militia and the Indonesian Revolution, 1945-1949 (University of Hawaii Press 1991) (Read on archive.org)
This article was originally published on the World Socialist Web Site on 27 January 2026.
The Trump administration released its 2026 National Defense Strategy on Friday, a 34-page document that openly proclaims American military domination of North and South America as a platform for global war. The strategy, issued by the newly renamed âDepartment of War,â is a blueprint for imperialist conquest.
President Donald Trump walks onto the field with Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland, superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, left, and Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte, superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, right, before the start of the 126th Army-Navy NCAA college football game at M&T Bank Stadium, Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025, in Baltimore. [AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson]
The National Defense Strategy introduces the concept of âHomeland and Hemisphere,â effectively expanding the definition of the American âhomelandâ to include all of North and South America.
Building on the National Security Strategy released in December, which declared a âTrump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,â the document asserts that defending American territory requires military control of the entire Western Hemisphere. It declares: âWe will actively and fearlessly defend Americaâs interests throughout the Western Hemisphere. We will guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain, especially the Panama Canal, Gulf of America, and Greenland.â
The document explicitly invokes 19th-century imperialism, noting that âour predecessors recognized that the United States must take a more powerful, leading role in hemispheric affairsâ and that âit was this insight that gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine and subsequent Roosevelt Corollary.â Under the Roosevelt Corollary (named after Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909), US Marines invaded Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The Trump administration declares these crimes the model for 21st-century foreign policy: âThis is the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrineâa commonsense and potent restoration of American power and prerogatives in this hemisphere.â
The Pentagon is committed to âprovide the President with credible options to guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain from the Arctic to South America.â
âHomeland and Hemisphereâ recalls the Nazi slogan âHeim ins ReichâââHome into the Reichââused to justify Germanyâs annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Just as Hitler declared that German-speaking territories belonged to Greater Germany, the Trump administration asserts that Greenland, Panama, and the Gulf of Mexico are American possessions to be secured by force.
While proclaiming hemispheric domination, the National Defense Strategy claims the military will âno longer be distracted by interventionism, endless wars, regime change, and nation building.â The documentâs claim to oppose âregime changeâ is rendered absurd by the fact that it was released days after the administration carried out one of the most flagrant acts of regime change in American historyâthe kidnapping of Venezuelan President NicolÃĄs Maduro.
The claim was published as US warships steam toward Iran. On Monday, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group approached the Middle East. On Friday, Trump told reporters: âWe have a big flotilla going in that direction, and weâll see what happens. We have a big force going toward Iran.â This follows his bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities last year.
The National Defense Strategy makes clear that US domination of the hemisphere is not a retreat from global domination, but what the Trump administration sees as a prerequisite. It insists that âours is not a strategy of isolationâ but rather âone of focused engagement abroad.â
While claiming that âPresident Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China,â the National Defense Strategy frames hemispheric domination as preparation for great-power war. It acknowledges that China is âalready the second most powerful country in the worldâbehind only the United Statesâand the most powerful state relative to us since the 19th century,â adding that despite internal challenges, âthe fact is that its power is growing.â
To prepare for this conflict, Trump has called for a 50 percent increase in military spending, demanding a $1.5 trillion military budget for 2027. The National Defense Strategy demands that all US allies follow suit: âPresident Trump has set a new global standard for defense spending at NATOâs Hague Summitâ3.5% of GDP on core military spending and an additional 1.5% on security-related spending, for a total of 5% of GDP.â
Five percent of GDP would represent the largest peacetime military buildup in modern historyâexceeding $1.3 trillion annually for the United States alone, and tripling German military expenditure. The resources demanded for this military expansion will be extracted from the working class through austerity, the gutting of social programs, and the further impoverishment of billions of people worldwide.
On nuclear weapons, the document demands the modernization of US nuclear forces âwith focused attention on deterrence and escalation management amidst the changing global nuclear landscape.â It declares that âthe United States should neverâwill neverâbe left vulnerable to nuclear blackmail.â The reference to âescalation managementâ is military jargon for preparing to fight and âwinâ a nuclear war.
The document concludes: âWe will restore the warrior ethos. We will refocus the American military on its core, irreplaceable goal of winning the nationâs wars decisively.â
The Democratic Party supports this military buildup. On Thursday, the House passed combined defense and consolidated spending bills by a vote of 341-88, with 149 Democrats voting yes and only 64 voting no. The $839 billion military budgetâ$8.4 billion above what Trump requestedâfunds the weapons systems, carrier strike groups and military infrastructure required for the wars outlined in the National Defense Strategy. Both parties represent the same ruling class, and there is bipartisan consensus for militarism and global domination.
āļ¸āˇāˇāˇ āļ´āļŊāˇāļąāˇāļąāˇ āļŊāˇāļ āˇāļ¸āˇāļĸāˇāˇāļ¯āˇ āˇāˇāļļāˇ āļ āļŠāˇāˇāļēāˇ (āļŊāˇāˇāˇāˇāļ ) 2026 āļĸāļąāˇāˇāļģāˇ 17 āļ¯āˇāļą âThe Minnesota general strike and the re-emergence of class struggle in the United Statesâ āļēāļą āˇāˇāˇāˇāļąāˇ āļ´āļŊāˇāˇ āļāļ¯āˇāļģāˇāļ¯āļģāˇāˇāļą āļŊāˇāļ´āˇāļēāˇ āˇāˇāļāˇāļŊ āļ´āļģāˇāˇāļģāˇāļāļąāļē āļēāˇ.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Image courtesy of www.aa.com.trn
The January 3, 2026 U.S. military assault on Venezuela and the forcible seizure of President NicolÃĄs Maduro constitute a watershed in the degeneration of American imperialism and the collapse of the post-1945 juridical order. This was not a rogue âraidâ or law-enforcement operation but a war of aggression conducted to impose control over strategic resources and geopolitical space. As the World Socialist Web Site emphasized, the operation represents âa total repudiation by the Trump regime of any semblance of legalityâĻ an unprovoked war of aggression launched in flagrant violation of international law.â[1] The deployment of over 150 aircrafts launched from 20 bases across the Western Hemisphere, heavy bombardment across Caracas and surrounding states, a naval blockade, and at least 100 deathsâincluding 32 Cuban military personnelâunderscore the operationâs character as large-scale military conquest rather than counter-narcotics action.
Material Foundations: Oil, Finance Capital and Geopolitical Rivalry
The assault must be understood through the material interests driving contemporary imperialism. Venezuela possesses the worldâs largest proven oil reserves alongside substantial deposits of gold, bauxite, diamonds, copper, nickel, manganese, coltan and uranium. Control of these resources is central to U.S. finance capital and the oil majorsâ strategic aims. Trump made the predatory motive explicit, declaring that âweâre going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars.â[2] Reportedly,Trump briefed oil executives about the assault before it occurred while deliberately withholding information from Congress and the American people.
The operation simultaneously aims to reverse Chinaâs and Russiaâs deepening economic penetration of Latin America. U.S. demands to interim President Delcy RodrÃguez revealed the geopolitical objectives: Venezuela must âkick out China, Russia, Iran and Cuba and sever economic ties,â then âagree to partner exclusively with the US on oil production and favor America when selling heavy crude.â[3] Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed this explicitly: âWhy does China need their oil? Why does Russia need their oil? Theyâre not even in this continent. This is the Western Hemisphere.â[4] The raid therefore expresses both the search for surplus value through direct plunder and the sharpening geo-political rivalry born of US imperialismâs systemic crisis.
This crisis has deep historical roots. As Lenin analyzed in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, monopoly capitalâs need to secure sources of raw materials, investment outlets and markets drives the violent redivision of the world among rival powers. The contemporary period witnesses this process in acute form: decades of financialization, debt expansion and speculative excess have failed to resolve capitalismâs fundamental contradictionâthe tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The globalization of production from the late 1970s represented a temporary response based on accessing cheap labor and strategic territories, but that framework is now disintegrating as American imperialism confronts eroding economic dominance and intensifying competition from rival powers.
From Juridical Pretense to the âIron Lawâ of Force
The assault signifies American imperialismâs abandonment of postwar legal constraintsâUN Charter norms, sovereignty protections, diplomatic processâwhich had served as inter-imperialist settlement for the âpeacefulâ neocolonial plunder of former colonies, their resources and cheap labor.ââââââââââââââââ Historically, US imperialism never wanted to be restrained by these international limitations. Today US administration officials dismiss such constraints with unprecedented candor. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller declared: âWe live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,â dismissing international law as mere âinternational niceties.â[5] Miller made explicit that âthe United States of America is running VenezuelaâĻ we are in charge, because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions.â[6]
This represents government doctrine enacted through military operations, not rhetorical excess. The WSWS correctly characterized Millerâs formulations as âthe language of the Nazis, drawn from Hitlerâs Mein Kampf and its talk of âiron laws of Natureâ in relation to races and racial-state conflict.â[7] The Manhattan spectacle of parading Maduro in chains before federal courtsâa sitting head of state declared a âprisoner of warâ and denied even the opportunity to complete his statement of identityâaims to legitimize seizure through pseudo-legal theater while humiliating a sovereign nation.[8]
The postwar institutions that once helped regulate inter-imperialist rivalry and provided a veneer of legitimacy for neocolonial extraction have become, under conditions of acute capitalist crisis, obstacles to plunder. That order has collapsed. Trumpâs invocation of what he terms the âDonroe Doctrineââsuperseding the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrineâand his declaration that âthis is OUR hemisphereâ make explicit that Washington treats Latin America as colonial property. The willingness to threaten even NATO ally Denmark over Greenland, combined with explicit orders to expel foreign economic partners from Venezuela, demonstrates that the U.S. oligarchy now regards legal constraints as impediments to be swept aside. The long-standing fiction that American policy is shaped by principles other than naked imperialist interests is now being openly set aside.
An Escalation Built on Prolonged Aggression
The assault on Venezuela followed shortly after the release of the December 2025 National Defense Strategy, which explicitly designated the Western Hemisphere as an âAmerican sphere of influenceâ where Washington would reject any involvement by âextra-hemispheric powers.â This strategic document identified China as the primary adversary and demanded U.S. military control over âenergy dominanceâ by securing strategic resources across Latin America and the Middle East. The Venezuelan intervention represents the doctrineâs inaugural execution.ââââââââââââââââ
The Maduro abduction completed a sustained campaign of military pressure and economic strangulation. Throughout 2025, the U.S. assembled a massive naval armada in the Caribbean, conducted repeated deadly strikes on Venezuelan vessels, seized oil tankers, and imposed an effective naval quarantineâmeasures constituting acts of war and a de facto blockade. In late December 2025, the CIA conducted the first strike on Venezuelan territory, targeting a port facility. By early January, the military buildup had reached culmination point, with special forces rehearsing the raid using models of Maduroâs compound while Trump approved the final operation before Christmas.
This trajectory followed a deliberate escalation ladder: designation of the âCartel of the Sunsââwhich the state department alleged was helped manage and ultimately led by Maduroâas a Foreign Terrorist Organization, expansion of sanctions targeting Maduroâs family and oil shipments, demands for the return of nationalized assets seized from U.S. corporations in 2007, and finally direct military assault. The pattern reveals systematic preparation for regime change and resource seizure, with direct military intervention undertaken only after attempts to orchestrate a political coup failed due to lack of popular support for the opposition.ââââââââââââââââ
The Bankruptcy of Bourgeois Nationalism and the Pink Tide
The raid exposed with surgical precision the class character and political bankruptcy of Latin Americaâs national bourgeoisies. Brazilâs Lula da Silva, Mexicoâs Claudia Sheinbaum, Colombiaâs Gustavo Petro and other âPink Tideâ leaders offered tepid condemnations that carefully avoided breaking with imperialism or mobilizing popular opposition. As the WSWS documented, âthe rotten and reactionary response of all sections of the Latin American bourgeoisie to the US invasion of Venezuela must be taken by the working class as a testament to the inadequacy of all nationalist perspectives in the epoch of imperialism.â[9]
The same pattern of cowardice and betrayal emerged across South Asia. In Sri Lanka, while the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) issued a statement on January 4 condemning the U.S. assault and declaring that âpowerful countries do not have the right to violate this principleâ of sovereignty, the NPP government adopted a markedly different position. Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath, a politburo member of JVP, explicitly distinguished between the party and NPP government, stating that while âpolitical parties can have their own opinions,â the government ârepresents all sidesâ and must work through UN mechanisms. The official Foreign Ministry statement expressed mere âdeep concernâ while urging âdialogueâ and âpeaceful resolutionââthe language of diplomatic evasion that refuses to name the aggressor or mobilize popular opposition. This split exposes the fundamental contradiction at the heart of bourgeois nationalist governance: the party that once postured as anti-imperialist now defends defense cooperation agreements with Washington and New Delhi, fearful of jeopardizing its integration into imperialist economic and military frameworks.
Indiaâs Modi government demonstrated even more abject servility. The Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement over 24 hours after the assault expressing âdeep concernâ but conspicuously avoiding naming the United States or condemning the military strikes. Indiaâs response on 04 January carefully avoided naming Washington, instead calling vaguely for âall concerned to address issues peacefully through dialogue.â The Modi governmentâs calculation is transparent: trade negotiations with Trump, potential access to Venezuelan oil payments owed to ONGC, and strategic partnership with Washington take precedence over any principled opposition to imperialist aggression.
Pakistanâs military-dominated regime and Bangladeshâs U.S.-backed interim government maintained predictable silence, offering no statements of condemnation. Across South Asia, bourgeois nationalist parties and governmentsâwhether presenting themselves as left-progressive, Hindu-chauvinist, or Islamistâdemonstrated their organic incapacity to resist imperialism when confronted with its naked assertion of force.
This confirms Leon Trotskyâs theory of permanent revolution and his analysis of the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie in dependent countries to carry forward anti-imperialist or democratic tasks. In Results and Prospects (1906) and The Permanent Revolution (1928), Trotsky demonstrated that the belated development of capitalism in backward countries produces a bourgeoisie organically tied to imperialism and landed property, terrified of independent working-class mobilization, and therefore incapable of leading struggle against foreign domination. The Pink Tide represents merely the latest chapter in Latin American bourgeois nationalismâs history of accommodation and betrayal.
Right-wing and fascistic governments went further, openly celebrating the assault. The Brazilian far-right, architects of the January 8, 2023 coup attempt in BrasÃlia, seized on the operation to advance their own dictatorial aims under newly favorable international conditions. Trumpâs threats against Colombian President PetroââHe has to watch his assââand declarations that Cuba and Nicaragua âwill not surviveâ his administration signal that the Venezuela operation establishes precedent for unlimited violence throughout the hemisphere.[10]
The Counter-Revolutionary Role of the Pseudo-Left
Pseudo-left currents, reformist parties and NGOs that locate opposition to imperialism in international law, diplomatic institutions or alliances with rival capitalist powers play an objectively counter-revolutionary role. They funnel popular anger into impotent appeals and national strategies that leave capitalist property relationsâand imperialist dominationâfundamentally untouched.
Germanyâs Left Party exemplified this tendency. While formally condemning Trumpâs actions as âstate terrorism,â the party directed its criticism not against imperialism but toward demanding that Europe assert its own great-power ambitions more aggressively. As the WSWS analyzed, the Left Party âcriticises Chancellor Merz not from the left, but from the right,â calling for sanctions against the United States and âa concrete European planâ to counter American actionsâthereby functioning as âaggressive apologists for German and European imperialism.â[11] Similar patterns emerged across pseudo-left organizations internationally, each subordinating working-class opposition to their respective national bourgeoisiesâ geopolitical interests.
These tendencies propagate fatal illusions: that imperialism can be restrained through appeals to bourgeois institutions, that âmultipolarâ capitalist competition offers progressive alternatives, that identity politics or reformist parliamentarism can substitute for independent class struggle. As the WSWS emphasized, âthe struggle against war is inseparably linked to the struggle against its cause: the capitalist system. It must be led by the working class, with the aim of building an independent political movement, overcoming capitalism and reorganising society on the basis of social needs rather than private profit.â[12]
The Domestic Dimension: War Abroad, Dictatorship at Home
The turn to militarism overseas proceeds inseparably from authoritarian consolidation domestically. The WSWS identified this essential connection: âthe same illegality, the same ruthlessness, the same criminality that is expressed in the kidnapping of Maduro is expressed in the assault on democratic rights at homeâthe mass deportations, attacks on the press, purging of the civil service, deployment of the military against the population.â[13] Perpetual war finances and is employed to legitimize police-state measures while directing social anger outward rather than against the ruling class itself.
This pattern reflects objective necessity for the oligarchy. As Marx demonstrated, capitalismâs internal contradictions generate both external expansion and internal repression. Trump represents âa criminal oligarchy that has amassed its wealth through fraud, speculation and plunderâĻ the chosen instrument of the American ruling class, a gangster vomited up by the oligarchy to enforce policies that can no longer be pursued through democratic or legal means.â[14] The simultaneous assault on Venezuela and acceleration of authoritarian measures domestically express unified class interests of finance capital confronting deepening crisis.
Revolutionary Tasks and the Road Forward
The assault on Venezuela demonstrates that the fight against imperialist war is inseparable from the fight against capitalism itself. Defensive measures are urgent: mobilize mass anti-war action, build rank-and-file committees in workplaces to oppose military preparations, forge international links of workersâ solidarityâespecially between U.S. workers and their Latin American class brothers and sisters.
But defensive measures must connect to revolutionary perspective. The expropriation of the banks and multinationals, formation of workersâ councils and workersâ governments, construction of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to lead an international socialist alternativeâthese constitute the only realistic defense of oppressed nations and working people everywhere. As the WSWS stated: âThe answer must be to make 2026 a year of class struggle and the development of a mass movement for socialism. The fight against war is a fight against the capitalist system that breeds it.â[15]
The objective conditions for revolutionary struggle are maturing with extraordinary rapidity. Across the United States, the kidnapping of Maduro has provoked widespread anger and concern among workers in factories and workplaces. This opposition must be organized on independent class foundations, rejecting all factions of the bourgeoisie and pseudo-lefts that secure capitalismâs rule. Latin American workers must orient not toward their âownâ national bourgeoisies but toward their class brothers and sisters internationally in unified struggle to overthrow imperialism.
Only through the independent political mobilization of the international working class and the oppressed masses, armed with a Marxist program and the historical lessons embodied in the ICFI, can the descent into barbarism and annihilation be halted and the conditions created for genuine human emancipation through world socialist revolution.
References:
[1] âOppose Trumpâs criminal invasion of Venezuela! Release Maduro!â WSWS, 4 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/04/avdu-j04.html>
[2] âUS imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,â WSWS, 6 January 2026
[3] âTrump and Millerâs âiron lawâ of imperialist barbarism,â WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/erjx-j07.html>
[4] âAfter Venezuela attack: White House threatens Venezuelan acting president, Cuba and Greenland,â WSWS, 5 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/05/crzb-j05.html>
[5] âTrump and Millerâs âiron lawâ of imperialist barbarism,â WSWS, 7 January 2026
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] âUS imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,â WSWS, 6 January 2026 , <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/zyve-j06.html>
[9] âLatin Americaâs bourgeois governments bow to US attack on Venezuela,â WSWS, 6 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/slwp-j06.html>
[10] âOppose Trumpâs criminal invasion of Venezuela!â WSWS, 4 January 2026
[11] âAfter Trumpâs attack on Venezuela: Germanyâs Left Party supports European imperialism,â WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/sfqt-j07.html>
[12] Ibid.
[13] âTrump and Millerâs âiron lawâ of imperialist barbarism,â WSWS, 7 January 2026
[14] Ibid.
[15] âOppose Trumpâs criminal invasion of Venezuela!â WSWS, 4 January 2026
US imperialism rings in the New Year with a new war
By the WSWS Editorial Board.
Reposted below is the statement of the Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, published on the same website on the 04 January 2025.
U.S. F-35 fighter jets are parked on the tarmac as military personnel walk among the aircraft at JosÊ Aponte de la Torre Airport in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Alejandro Granadillo)
The World Socialist Web Site, the Socialist Equality Party in the US and the International Committee of the Fourth International unequivocally denounce the invasion of Venezuela and the criminal abduction of President NicolÃĄs Maduro in the early hours of Saturday morning. We demand the immediate release of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and the full withdrawal of all US troops and military forces from the region.
The invasion, which included the killing of at least 40 people, is a total repudiation by the Trump regime of any semblance of legality. It is an unprovoked war of aggression launched in flagrant violation of international law and carried out to reimpose colonial control over Venezuela and all of Latin America. This imperialist assault must be opposed by the working class in the United States and throughout the world.
Speaking at Saturdayâs press conference, Trumpâs âSecretary of War,â Pete Hegseth, declared, âWelcome to 2026.â Only three days into the New Year, the assault on Venezuela is an unmistakable signal that the imperialist violence that marked 2025âin the Gaza genocide and the bombings of Lebanon, Syria and Iranâwill escalate in 2026.
There is no concrete wall between foreign and domestic policy. Imperialist gangsterism beyond the borders of the United States will be accompanied by the acceleration of the conspiracy to impose a fascistic presidential dictatorship within the United States.
In his remarks at Saturdayâs press conference, Trump declared that the United States would ârun the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.â In the past, American imperialism sought to legitimize its wars with hypocritical invocations of democracy and human rights. Trump dispensed with pretenses. The purpose of the assault on Venezuela, he declared on Sunday, was to seize control of the country and its oil resources.
âWeâre going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars,â Trump declared. If there is any resistance, Trump threatened a more brutal military onslaught. âWe are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,â Trump warned.
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that top hedge funds and asset managers are preparing to send a delegation to Caracas in March to assess what one investor called $500â$750 billion in âinvestment opportunitiesâ over the next five years.
The invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of its president are meant, as Trump put it on Saturday, as a âwarningâ to âanyone who would threaten American sovereignty.â Referring to his new National Security Strategy, Trump declared that âAmerican dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,â hailing the assault as a reassertion of the âiron laws that have always determined global power.â
The immediate targets are governments in Latin America that may act against US imperialist interests. Speaking of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Trump warned in the language of a street thug, âHe has to watch his ass.â The fascist Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, added: âAmerica can project our will anywhere, anytime,â drawing a direct parallel between Venezuela and last yearâs US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. âMaduro had his chance,â he sneered, âjust like Iran had their chanceâuntil they didnât.â
Secretary of State Marco RubioâTrumpâs Ribbentropâissued his own gangster threat to the Cuban government, saying that if he were the leader of the island nation, âIâd be concerned.â
But the threats are not confined to Latin America. In addition to Venezuela and Iran, the United States bombed five additional countries last year: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and, most recently, Nigeria in December. Trump has issued threats of war against Mexico, floated the annexation of Greenland and Canada, and declared the Panama Canal ânon-negotiableâ for US control.
The aggressive message to China was unmistakable. Just hours before the assault, Venezuelan President NicolÃĄs Maduro met with a high-level Chinese delegation led by Beijingâs Special Representative for Latin American and Caribbean Affairs, Qiu Xiaoqi, to discuss joint energy cooperation. The US raid, timed to coincide with this meeting, was an act of aggression aimed at disrupting growing ties between China and Latin America.
The actions taken by the Trump administration are not only criminal, they have the character of sheer madness. In 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, the World Socialist Web Sitewarned that American imperialism had entered into a ârendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. âĻ It will not find, through the medium of war, a viable solution to its internal maladies.â
That warning was confirmed. What is now being set into motion is even more recklessâa rendezvous with catastrophe.
Trump declared on Saturday the intention to impose a dictatorship over Venezuela, proclaiming that the country will be ârunâ by Rubio, Hegseth and other officials in the Trump regime, as though this colonial fantasy could be imposed with a press conference. In reality, such an occupation would require the deployment of hundreds of thousands of US troops and a brutal campaign of urban warfare amid mass resistance. Trump said as much when he said he was not afraid of âboots on the ground.â
It should be recalled that the 2003 invasion of Iraq required approximately 180,000 coalition troops, including 130,000 from the United States. In total, nearly half a million US personnel were deployed across the region in support of the war effort. And Iraq, with a population smaller than Venezuelaâs, was already devastated by a decade of sanctions. The scale of military occupation required to enforce the subjugation of Venezuela would rapidly spiral into a bloody, protracted conflict across all of Latin America, and indeed throughout the world.
The recklessness of the Trump government can only be understood in the context of the crisis of American imperialism. Politically, there are no doubt many calculations behind Trumpâs actions, including an effort to distract from the explosive revelations surrounding the Epstein network, which has implicated top figures within the financial aristocracy and state apparatus.
But more basic issues are at stake. The United States is attempting to reverse the long-term decline of American capitalism through militarism and war. The economic foundations of US global dominance have dramatically eroded. Gold has surged past $4,300 an ounce, a de facto measure of the collapse in confidence in the dollar as a global reserve currency. The national debt has soared past $38 trillion. The seizure of Venezuelaâs oil and the reassertion of American control over the Western Hemisphere are seen by the ruling class as essential to the survival of its economic and geopolitical position.
The realization of this policy will require a massive escalation of the assault on the working class. The astronomical costs of militarism and global conquest will be borne through an intensification of austerity and the destruction of what remains of vital social programs. To impose neocolonial domination abroad, the administration must also overcome mass opposition at home. The inevitable disasters flowing from this strategy will be met with even greater violence, both internationally and within the United States.
At Saturdayâs press conference, Trumpâs erratic remarks shifted seamlessly from boasting about the âsnatch and grabâ abduction of Maduro to threatening major American cities. Praising the National Guard deployments to Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Memphis and New Orleans, he declared, âThey should do it with more cities.â The same âiron lawsâ of violence that govern US conduct abroad will be imposed on the population at home.
It is necessary to understand that Trump does not act as an individual. He is the chosen instrument of the American ruling class, a gangster elevated to power by the oligarchy to enforce policies that can no longer be pursued through democratic or legal means.
In 2025, US billionairesâroughly 900 individualsâamassed an 18 percent increase in their net worth, bringing their combined holdings to nearly $7 trillion. Ten individuals alone accounted for $750 billion of this total. Just as the German ruling class brought Hitler to power to implement policies that could not be carried out except through dictatorship, Trump serves the same function.
Notably, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, published an editorial exalting the abduction of Maduro as âone of the boldest moves a president has made in years.â The paper hailed the âunquestionable tactical successâ of the military operation, called Maduroâs downfall âgood news,â and praised Trumpâs willingness to âfollow throughâ where previous administrations hesitated.
The Democratic Party represents the same class and defends the same system as Trump. There will be no serious opposition from its ranks. Their differences with Trump are purely tactical, not strategic. This was made clear in the muted response to the assault on Venezuela. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries grumbled about the lack of congressional notification, while reaffirming that Maduro was ânot the legitimate head of government.â
Just weeks ago, Democrats and Republicans joined together to pass a $900 billion military spending bill, in an unambiguous endorsement of the imperialist agenda now being ruthlessly enforced.
For his part, anticipating broad popular opposition, Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement calling the action against Venezuela âillegal and unconstitutional,â but he did not propose any strategy to stop the war or call for a popular mobilization against it.
There will be a response in the working class, and not only in Venezuela and Latin America. The reimposition of colonial domination will confront immense resistance throughout the world. In the United States, polls show overwhelming opposition to a war against Venezuela. Trumpâs approval rating, at just 36 percent at the end of his first year back in office, is the lowest of any president at the same point in their term in more than half a century.
Demonstrations broke out within hours of the assault on Venezuela, an initial indication of popular opposition that will expand and grow. However, the experience of the mass protests against the Gaza genocide has shown that demonstrations alone are not enough. Without a program and leadership, popular outrage is funneled back into the political structures of the capitalist state.
What is required is the conscious intervention of the working class into political struggle. The conditions for such a struggle are rapidly maturing. The war abroad is inseparable from a social counterrevolution at homeâsoaring inflation, AI-driven job destruction, deepening poverty, and the systematic dismantling of every democratic and social right.
The oligarchy sits atop a social powder keg. The world volcanic eruption of American imperialism will set into motion a global tsunami of class struggle. Both arise from the same contradictions of the capitalist system.
And while it is expressed most violently in the US, the same basic tendencies exist throughout the world. All the imperialist powers are now engaged in a global redivision of the world. In Europe, the major capitalist governments are undertaking the most massive rearmament campaigns since the Second World War as they clamor for war against and destroy social programs. The German ruling class is nurturing dreams of a Fourth Reich, asserting its military power across the continent and beyond.
The ruling class has made clear what they want 2026 to be: a year of unrestrained military violence. The answer must be to make 2026 a year of class struggle and the development of a mass movement for socialism.
The fight against war is, at its root, a fight against the capitalist system that breeds it. This struggle must be led by the working class, the only social force capable of ending imperialist violence and establishing genuine democracy and equality. The alternative to dictatorship and war is revolution, the building of an independent political movement to overthrow capitalism and reorganize society on the basis of social need, not private profit.
The Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International call on workers, students, and young people across the United States, throughout Latin America, and internationally: Join our ranks. Build the Socialist Equality Party in the US and the sections of the ICFI around the world. Take up the fight to unify the working class across all borders, to abolish capitalism, and to establish socialism as the foundation of a new society.
