This report synthesises and analyses the main political, geopolitical and economic developments covered by the World Socialist Web Site in the week ending 31 January 2026. It locates events within the deeper dynamics of class struggle, imperialism and the global capitalist crisis, and draws the immediate political conclusions and tasks for the international working class.
1. Imperialism on the march — preparations for new wars
The central story of the week was the open escalation of US imperialism. The Trump administration’s mounting threats and military deployments toward Iran were documented and analysed as preparations for a major new act of aggression, not isolated bellicose rhetoric. The WSWS outlined the scale and danger of the US build-up of forces, the carrier strike group deployments and the propaganda pretexts being assembled to legitimise strikes on Iran (Trump administration threatens new war against Iran). The UN Security Council posturing and Washington’s invocation that “all options are on the table” were exposed as part of a regime-change strategy that follows Washington’s recent attack on Venezuela and its abduction of President Maduro (Washington menaces Iran at UN Security Council; After Venezuela, Trump targets Iran).
From an international-class perspective, WSWS emphasises that these moves are expressions of imperialism’s strategic imperative to control resources, markets and trade routes (notably oil and gas), to attempt to subordinate rivals such as China and to shore up domestic political authority through foreign adventurism. The analysis rejects humanitarian or “democratic” pretexts and situates the drive to war in the logic of capitalist rivalry and the breakdown of lawful institutions.
2. Repression at home — war and dictatorship as two sides of capitalist rule
The week reinforced the WSWS argument that war abroad and repression at home are inseparable. Coverage tied the Trump government’s domestic assaults—paramilitary policing, the killing of migrants and threats to invoke the Insurrection Act—to the same oligarchic interests driving foreign aggression (New Year Fund appeal on the rise of dictatorship and war). The ruling class’s resort to exceptional measures is explained as an attempt to impose social discipline and to defend the profits and privileges of the financial oligarchy amid global economic turmoil.
3. Intensifying class conflict — strikes and workplace resistance worldwide
While imperialist tensions dominate geopolitics, the working class continued to push back across continents. WSWS’s regular “Workers Struggles” reports registered growing militancy: Belgian rail workers launched a five-day national strike against austerity and pension attacks; French bank employees struck over pay and restructures despite record bank profits; and hospital, education and municipal workers staged sustained actions in the UK, Italy and Africa (Workers Struggles: Europe, Middle East & Africa). In Asia and the Pacific, mass actions by gig workers, ambulance crews and casino staff testified to mounting resistance to wage cuts, precarious contracts and privatisation moves (Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia).
These labour struggles reflect the material pressures produced by austerity, inflation and corporate profit-seeking. They demonstrate the objective potential power of the working class, but WSWS warns that this potential is being squandered by union bureaucracies that isolate workers and broker sellouts.
4. Material forces driving the crisis
WSWS analyses the above dynamics as rooted in the global capitalist crisis: mounting sovereign and private debt, falling rates of profit, currency instability and the scramble for strategic raw materials. The ruling elites respond with a two-pronged strategy—intensify exploitation at home through austerity and wage suppression, and secure imperial advantage abroad via military force. The result is the simultaneous escalation of poverty, layoffs and militarism.
5. Political implications and class tasks
Build political independence: WSWS insists that workers must break from bourgeois parties and pseudo-left forces that either collaborate with imperialism or reduce resistance to parliamentary petitions. The only credible barrier to war and austerity is the organised power of the working class.
Organise rank-and-file committees: To counter union sellouts and unify struggles across workplaces and borders, the WSWS calls for the formation of rank-and-file committees and an International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Defend democratic rights: Immediate campaigns must be mounted to oppose police militarisation, arbitrary detention and censorship; the fight for democratic rights is inseparable from the fight against war and austerity.
Political education and leadership: WSWS stresses the urgent need to rebuild revolutionary political leadership rooted in Marxism. Initiatives such as Socialism AI and WSWS educational work are presented as tools to equip workers and youth with theory and organisation.
6. Action guidance
Workers should link strikes and local struggles to an international political strategy: refuse austerity bargains that trade away living standards; demand immediate protections for democratic rights; and build cross-border solidarity committees to coordinate industrial and political action. To connect understanding with organised resistance, the WSWS urges workers to join efforts to build an independent socialist movement and to consider affiliating with the Socialist Equality Party’s organising work: https://www.wsws.org/en/special/pages/sep/us/join.html
— World Socialist Web Site / International Committee of the Fourth International
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 “Department of War,” 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 “Homeland and Hemisphere,” effectively expanding the definition of the American “homeland” to include all of North and South America.
Building on the National Security Strategy released in December, which declared a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” the document asserts that defending American territory requires military control of the entire Western Hemisphere. It declares: “We will actively and fearlessly defend America’s 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.”
The document explicitly invokes 19th-century imperialism, noting that “our predecessors recognized that the United States must take a more powerful, leading role in hemispheric affairs” and that “it was this insight that gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine and subsequent Roosevelt Corollary.” 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: “This is the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—a commonsense and potent restoration of American power and prerogatives in this hemisphere.”
The Pentagon is committed to “provide the President with credible options to guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain from the Arctic to South America.”
“Homeland and Hemisphere” recalls the Nazi slogan “Heim ins Reich”—”Home into the Reich”—used to justify Germany’s 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 “no longer be distracted by interventionism, endless wars, regime change, and nation building.” The document’s claim to oppose “regime change” 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 history—the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás 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: “We have a big flotilla going in that direction, and we’ll see what happens. We have a big force going toward Iran.” 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 “ours is not a strategy of isolation” but rather “one of focused engagement abroad.”
While claiming that “President Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China,” the National Defense Strategy frames hemispheric domination as preparation for great-power war. It acknowledges that China is “already the second most powerful country in the world—behind only the United States—and the most powerful state relative to us since the 19th century,” adding that despite internal challenges, “the fact is that its power is growing.”
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: “President Trump has set a new global standard for defense spending at NATO’s Hague Summit—3.5% of GDP on core military spending and an additional 1.5% on security-related spending, for a total of 5% of GDP.”
Five percent of GDP would represent the largest peacetime military buildup in modern history—exceeding $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 “with focused attention on deterrence and escalation management amidst the changing global nuclear landscape.” It declares that “the United States should never—will never—be left vulnerable to nuclear blackmail.” The reference to “escalation management” is military jargon for preparing to fight and “win” a nuclear war.
The document concludes: “We will restore the warrior ethos. We will refocus the American military on its core, irreplaceable goal of winning the nation’s wars decisively.”
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 budget—$8.4 billion above what Trump requested—funds 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.
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 Nicolás Maduro constitute a watershed in the degeneration of American imperialism and the collapse of the post-1945 juridical order. This was not a rogue “raid” 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 “a total repudiation by the Trump regime of any semblance of legality… an unprovoked war of aggression launched in flagrant violation of international law.”[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 deaths—including 32 Cuban military personnel—underscore the operation’s 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 world’s 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 majors’ strategic aims. Trump made the predatory motive explicit, declaring that “we’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars.”[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 China’s and Russia’s deepening economic penetration of Latin America. U.S. demands to interim President Delcy Rodríguez revealed the geopolitical objectives: Venezuela must “kick out China, Russia, Iran and Cuba and sever economic ties,” then “agree to partner exclusively with the US on oil production and favor America when selling heavy crude.”[3] Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed this explicitly: “Why does China need their oil? Why does Russia need their oil? They’re not even in this continent. This is the Western Hemisphere.”[4] The raid therefore expresses both the search for surplus value through direct plunder and the sharpening geo-political rivalry born of US imperialism’s systemic crisis.
This crisis has deep historical roots. As Lenin analyzed in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, monopoly capital’s 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 capitalism’s fundamental contradiction—the 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 “Iron Law” of Force
The assault signifies American imperialism’s abandonment of postwar legal constraints—UN Charter norms, sovereignty protections, diplomatic process—which had served as inter-imperialist settlement for the ‘peaceful’ neocolonial plunder of former colonies, their resources and cheap labor. 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: “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” dismissing international law as mere “international niceties.”[5] Miller made explicit that “the United States of America is running Venezuela… we are in charge, because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions.”[6]
This represents government doctrine enacted through military operations, not rhetorical excess. The WSWS correctly characterized Miller’s formulations as “the language of the Nazis, drawn from Hitler’s Mein Kampf and its talk of ‘iron laws of Nature’ in relation to races and racial-state conflict.”[7] The Manhattan spectacle of parading Maduro in chains before federal courts—a sitting head of state declared a “prisoner of war” and denied even the opportunity to complete his statement of identity—aims 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. Trump’s invocation of what he terms the “Donroe Doctrine”—superseding the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—and his declaration that “this is OUR hemisphere” 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 “American sphere of influence” where Washington would reject any involvement by “extra-hemispheric powers.” This strategic document identified China as the primary adversary and demanded U.S. military control over “energy dominance” by securing strategic resources across Latin America and the Middle East. The Venezuelan intervention represents the doctrine’s inaugural execution.
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 quarantine—measures 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 Maduro’s compound while Trump approved the final operation before Christmas.
This trajectory followed a deliberate escalation ladder: designation of the “Cartel of the Suns”—which the state department alleged was helped manage and ultimately led by Maduro—as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, expansion of sanctions targeting Maduro’s 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.
The Bankruptcy of Bourgeois Nationalism and the Pink Tide
The raid exposed with surgical precision the class character and political bankruptcy of Latin America’s national bourgeoisies. Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and other “Pink Tide” leaders offered tepid condemnations that carefully avoided breaking with imperialism or mobilizing popular opposition. As the WSWS documented, “the 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.”[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 “powerful countries do not have the right to violate this principle” 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 “political parties can have their own opinions,” the government “represents all sides” and must work through UN mechanisms. The official Foreign Ministry statement expressed mere “deep concern” while urging “dialogue” and “peaceful resolution”—the 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.
India’s Modi government demonstrated even more abject servility. The Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement over 24 hours after the assault expressing “deep concern” but conspicuously avoiding naming the United States or condemning the military strikes. India’s response on 04 January carefully avoided naming Washington, instead calling vaguely for “all concerned to address issues peacefully through dialogue.” The Modi government’s 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.
Pakistan’s military-dominated regime and Bangladesh’s U.S.-backed interim government maintained predictable silence, offering no statements of condemnation. Across South Asia, bourgeois nationalist parties and governments—whether presenting themselves as left-progressive, Hindu-chauvinist, or Islamist—demonstrated their organic incapacity to resist imperialism when confronted with its naked assertion of force.
This confirms Leon Trotsky’s 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 nationalism’s 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 Brasília, seized on the operation to advance their own dictatorial aims under newly favorable international conditions. Trump’s threats against Colombian President Petro—“He has to watch his ass”—and declarations that Cuba and Nicaragua “will not survive” 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 relations—and imperialist domination—fundamentally untouched.
Germany’s Left Party exemplified this tendency. While formally condemning Trump’s actions as “state terrorism,” 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 “criticises Chancellor Merz not from the left, but from the right,” calling for sanctions against the United States and “a concrete European plan” to counter American actions—thereby functioning as “aggressive apologists for German and European imperialism.”[11] Similar patterns emerged across pseudo-left organizations internationally, each subordinating working-class opposition to their respective national bourgeoisies’ geopolitical interests.
These tendencies propagate fatal illusions: that imperialism can be restrained through appeals to bourgeois institutions, that “multipolar” capitalist competition offers progressive alternatives, that identity politics or reformist parliamentarism can substitute for independent class struggle. As the WSWS emphasized, “the 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.”[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: “the 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 home—the mass deportations, attacks on the press, purging of the civil service, deployment of the military against the population.”[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, capitalism’s internal contradictions generate both external expansion and internal repression. Trump represents “a criminal oligarchy that has amassed its wealth through fraud, speculation and plunder… 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.”[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 workers’ solidarity—especially 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 workers’ councils and workers’ governments, construction of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to lead an international socialist alternative—these constitute the only realistic defense of oppressed nations and working people everywhere. As the WSWS stated: “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 a fight against the capitalist system that breeds it.”[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 capitalism’s rule. Latin American workers must orient not toward their “own” 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] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela! Release Maduro!” WSWS, 4 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/04/avdu-j04.html>
[2] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026
[3] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/erjx-j07.html>
[4] “After Venezuela attack: White House threatens Venezuelan acting president, Cuba and Greenland,” WSWS, 5 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/05/crzb-j05.html>
[5] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026 , <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/zyve-j06.html>
[9] “Latin America’s bourgeois governments bow to US attack on Venezuela,” WSWS, 6 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/slwp-j06.html>
[10] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” WSWS, 4 January 2026
[11] “After Trump’s attack on Venezuela: Germany’s Left Party supports European imperialism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/sfqt-j07.html>
[12] Ibid.
[13] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[14] Ibid.
[15] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” 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 José 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 Nicolás 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 Saturday’s press conference, Trump’s “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, declared, “Welcome to 2026.” Only three days into the New Year, the assault on Venezuela is an unmistakable signal that the imperialist violence that marked 2025—in the Gaza genocide and the bombings of Lebanon, Syria and Iran—will 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 Saturday’s press conference, Trump declared that the United States would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” 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.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars,” Trump declared. If there is any resistance, Trump threatened a more brutal military onslaught. “We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” 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 $500–$750 billion in “investment opportunities” 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 “warning” to “anyone who would threaten American sovereignty.” Referring to his new National Security Strategy, Trump declared that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” hailing the assault as a reassertion of the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”
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, “He has to watch his ass.” The fascist Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, added: “America can project our will anywhere, anytime,” drawing a direct parallel between Venezuela and last year’s US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. “Maduro had his chance,” he sneered, “just like Iran had their chance—until they didn’t.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio—Trump’s Ribbentrop—issued his own gangster threat to the Cuban government, saying that if he were the leader of the island nation, “I’d be concerned.”
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 “non-negotiable” for US control.
The aggressive message to China was unmistakable. Just hours before the assault, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro met with a high-level Chinese delegation led by Beijing’s 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 “rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. … It will not find, through the medium of war, a viable solution to its internal maladies.”
That warning was confirmed. What is now being set into motion is even more reckless—a rendezvous with catastrophe.
Trump declared on Saturday the intention to impose a dictatorship over Venezuela, proclaiming that the country will be “run” 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 “boots on the ground.”
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 Venezuela’s, 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 Trump’s 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 Venezuela’s 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 Saturday’s press conference, Trump’s erratic remarks shifted seamlessly from boasting about the “snatch and grab” 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, “They should do it with more cities.” The same “iron laws” 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 billionaires—roughly 900 individuals—amassed 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 “one of the boldest moves a president has made in years.” The paper hailed the “unquestionable tactical success” of the military operation, called Maduro’s downfall “good news,” and praised Trump’s willingness to “follow through” 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 “not the legitimate head of government.”
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 “illegal and unconstitutional,” 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. Trump’s 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 home—soaring 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.
Floods caused by Cyclone Ditwah in Mutur Central, Sri Lanka, November 30, 2025
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake declared a state of emergency on November 28, invoking the draconian Public Security Ordinance (PSO) in response to the catastrophic devastation wrought by Cyclone Ditwah. The cyclone has claimed at least 410 lives, with nearly 400 people still missing, marking Sri Lanka’s deadliest natural disaster since 2017. Nearly one million people have been affected, with over 180,000 sheltering in government-run safety centers.
The president’s address to the nation on November 29 carefully employed populist rhetoric, calling upon the people to “unite” and “ shed all party and political differences” in rebuilding the nation. He was careful to present the emergency measures as purely administrative necessities for disaster management. Yet the class character of these emergency powers reveals itself unmistakably in the fine print.
The Emergency Regulations gazetted alongside the state of emergency grant sweeping powers that extend far beyond disaster relief. These include provisions criminalizing “causing disaffection among public officers,” prohibiting “affixing or distributing posters, handbills or leaflets which are prejudicial to public security, public order or the maintenance of supplies and services essential to the life of the community”, and suppressing information deemed to constitute “rumours or false statements” that might cause “public alarm”. The Centre for Policy Alternatives, a Sri Lankan think tank, has raised alarm that such “overbroad regulations risk undermining civil liberties, including fundamental rights of freedom of movement, assembly, expression, and due process”. It notes that emergency laws have been put in place in spite of less-severe but specific laws available for disaster management like the Disaster Management Act of 2005.
What Dissanayake did not mention in his address—but what the working class must understand—is that these emergency powers provide the legal framework for strike-breaking, the deployment of armed forces against working class struggles, and the imposition of savage austerity measures under the guise of “national reconstruction.” The appointment of a Commissioner-General of Essential Services under the Emergency Regulations signals precisely this intention.
Preliminary estimates place economic damage due to floods, landslides and wind at over $500 million, hitting agriculture hardest in a nation still reeling from the 2022 economic crisis. The Foreign Ministry has indicated that Rs. 31 billion is required as of November 28 for restoration of agriculture, irrigation tanks, and damaged canals. Repairing and reconstruction of damaged roads, railway tracks, bridges, electrical supplies, and government buildings will cause significant costs. More than 57,000 hectares of farmland have been affected, devastating rural producers already struggling under the weight of debt and market dependency.
Towns inundated with flood water after cyclone Ditwah swept through the island. Mutur Central, November 30, 2025.
The catastrophe strikes at the most vulnerable layers of society with particular ferocity. Authorities have warned of rising food insecurity, as submerged farmland, damaged storage facilities and severed supply routes threaten shortages and price increases in the weeks ahead. For the working class and rural poor, this translates into imminent hunger and malnutrition—a direct consequence not merely of ‘natural’ disaster, but of the systematic neglect of agricultural infrastructure and food security under decades of neoliberal policy.
The government confronts this crisis while imprisoned within the iron cage of the International Monetary Fund program. As noted by former minister and Chairman of the island’s Parliamentary Committee on Public Finance, Harsha de Silva, the fundamental challenge lies in “working within the fiscal limits of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme imposed on Sri Lanka, which caps primary expenditure at 13 per cent of GDP”. Substantial external investments will be necessary for long-term rebuilding, particularly given IMF expenditure constraints, he has said.
This is the objective economic reality: the NPP government, having pledged to maintain the IMF agreement negotiated by its predecessor, possesses no means to address the disaster except through further attacks on the living standards of the working class. The calls for “international aid” and “donations from expatriates and Sri Lankan companies” are a prelude to the next calling by the government: “dedication “ from public employees from their salaries, benefits and working hours.
The disaster itself cannot be understood as a purely “natural” phenomenon. Meteorologists note that Ditwah’s intensification was fueled by warm sea surface temperatures, a trend linked to global warming. Cyclone Ditwah struck Sri Lanka simultaneously with devastating cyclones battering Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and other Southeast Asian nations, affecting millions across the region in what constitutes a broader catastrophe driven by extreme weather phenomena.
The intensification of such disasters is the direct consequence of global capitalism’s relentless exploitation of nature. The advanced imperialist powers—principally the United States, European Union, and Japan—bear overwhelmingly disproportionate historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is the working masses of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and in the same centers of imperialism who suffer the most catastrophic consequences.
Moreover, within Sri Lanka itself, decades of unregulated capitalist development have systematically destroyed natural flood barriers, eliminated wetlands, and concentrated vulnerable populations in disaster-prone areas without adequate infrastructure. The government has made no serious effort to relocate those in danger zones or allocate necessary funds for long-term disaster preparedness. Every rupee extracted from the working class through taxation was funneled toward debt servicing including interest repayment to international financial institutions rather than invested in flood control systems, early warning infrastructure, or climate adaptation measures.
The working class of Sri Lanka must approach the declaration of emergency with the full weight of historical experience. Every previous government—from the UNP to the SLFP, from Rajapaksa to Wickremesinghe—has employed states of emergency not primarily to address genuine crises, but to suppress working class resistance to austerity and exploitation.
The Public Security Ordinance, one of the dangerous weapons of the arsenal of the ruling class, inherited from British colonial rule and perfected under successive bourgeois governments, has served as the legal instrument for the brutal suppression of strikes, the militarization of labor disputes, and the criminalization of social opposition. On November 26, the President under Section 12 of the PSO called out all the members of the three armed forces for the purpose of maintenance of ‘public order’ all over Sri Lanka, a move resorted to by all his predecessors. PSO grants the President the power to declare curfew without the need to declare a state of emergency. On November 28, the President also declared several services as essential public services in terms of Section 2 of the Essential Public Services Act. The provisions of this law prevent workers in transport, health, education, and other sectors from exercising their fundamental right to strike.
The NPP government, despite the anti-establishment populist rhetoric of Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), now finds itself administering the same capitalist state apparatus, bound by the same class interests, compelled by the same imperialist financial architecture. Its invocation of emergency powers follows the identical logic of its predecessors: the defense of capitalist property relations and implementation of imperialist dictates takes absolute priority over human life.
The working class must understand that the bourgeoisie—whether represented by traditional right-wing parties or by parties of petty-bourgeois populism like the NPP—is fundamentally incapable of providing even the basic necessities of a decent life: adequate housing in safe locations, comprehensive disaster preparedness, food security, or protection from climate catastrophe.
The disaster unfolding in Sri Lanka is a microcosm of the global crisis of capitalism. As climate disasters intensify, as social infrastructure crumbles under austerity, as inequality reaches obscene proportions, the bourgeois nation-state reveals itself as an obsolete and reactionary institution, incapable of coordinating the international cooperation necessary for human survival.
The fight against emergency rule, against IMF austerity, against climate catastrophe, cannot be waged within the framework of bourgeois parliamentarism or through appeals to the “national unity” invoked by Dissanayake. It requires the independent political mobilization of the working class on an international socialist program.
This means:
Unconditional opposition to the state of emergency and all restrictions on democratic rights
Full compensation for the lives lost and property damaged and resettlement with decent living conditions
Rejection of all IMF-imposed austerity measures and repudiation of external debt accumulated under previous regimes, and expropriation of Banks and financial conglomerates that act as agents of imperialism, without compensation.
Massive public investment in climate adaptation infrastructure, funded by the expropriation of the wealth hoarded by the capitalist class
International coordination of climate disaster response under workers’ control, not imperialist “aid” programs that calls for further austerity
The building of action committees in workplaces, neighborhoods, and villages to organize independent relief efforts and resistance to emergency rule
The alternative is clear: either the working class breaks free from the prison of capitalism and imperialism through international socialist revolution, or humanity faces a descent into barbarism marked by escalating trade war, climate catastrophe, militarized repression, social collapse and nuclear war.
The experience of Cyclone Ditwah must serve as a catalyst for the political awakening of the Sri Lankan working class. The disaster exposes with pitiless clarity the bankruptcy of all variants of bourgeois rule, including that of NPP/JVP populism. Only through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers’ power—in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally—can humanity secure its future against the twin catastrophes of climate change and imperialist war. This requires, first and foremost, the building of the world party of the socialist revolution, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site on the 24 November 2025.
At two major public meetings over the past week—in Berlin on November 18 and London on November 22—David North, chairperson of the World Socialist Web SiteInternational Editorial Board, delivered lectures analyzing the deepening crisis of American capitalism and the Trump administration’s drive toward dictatorship. Both meetings drew over 100 attendees, demonstrating the widespread concern over the threat of fascism under Trump and his counterparts internationally.
Most significantly, North used both occasions to announce the imminent launch of Socialism AI, a revolutionary tool that will harness artificial intelligence for the development of socialist consciousness in the international working class.
In his concluding remarks at the Berlin meeting, held at Humboldt University, North explained the transformative potential of Socialism AI, stating:
The vast pedagogical potential of AI, combined with the revolutionary perspectives of scientific socialism, opens unprecedented possibilities. The consciousness of the working class, the understanding of the objective conditions of capitalist crisis, the clarification of the path to working class power—all of this can be spread on a scale that previous generations could scarcely have imagined.
Drawing a profound historical parallel, North continued:
Just as Diderot’s Encyclopedia in the eighteenth century became an instrument of enlightenment that contributed to the French Revolution by making knowledge available to masses of people who had been kept in ignorance, so artificial intelligence—properly developed and democratically controlled, utilized by the revolutionary Marxist-Trotskyist party and placed in the service of the working class rather than capitalist profit—can become an instrument of socialist consciousness and liberation.
North then formally announced Socialism AI, saying:
I am pleased to announce today that the International Committee has taken measures to harness the power of AI for the purposes and interests of the working class movement. Within a few weeks, we will be releasing Socialism AI, a revolutionary application of augmented intelligence to the development of socialist consciousness and the organizational capacity of the international working class. It is a chatbot which will enable users to pose political, historical, social questions, problems of organization and technical initiative, and receive a response which draws on the vast archive of Marxist thought. First and foremost, the archive of the World Socialist Web Site itself, which encompasses well over 100,000 articles.
North stressed that Socialism AI “will not be programmed as the existing chatbots are to provide an answer which has been conditioned by the establishment media.” Rather, “It will provide an accurate, thoroughly researched reply to critical issues which arise in the day to day struggles of the working class. It will answer questions posed by intellectuals, students, youth on a vast range of questions, and will give answers which reflect and express the interests of the working class.”
Drawing parallels between the launching of Socialism AI and the World Socialist Web Site in 1998, North stated:
This is not a minor technical project. Some 28 years ago, when the internet was first coming into existence, we understood the power of this new technology, and we were the first left-wing tendency to actually make the shift from a written newspaper to the internet. We founded the World Socialist Web Site… We understood the implications of this technology and acted upon it, and this was critical for the development of the revolutionary movement. We understand the power of AI, both its reactionary but also its revolutionary potential. We are acting on the latter. I am convinced that in the weeks and months ahead, and certainly in the years ahead, all of you will be using it. And thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of workers will utilize this powerful instrument as a means of education, social education, political education, cultural education. It will be used not in one language, but in dozens of languages.
North concluded:
This application of the most advanced productive forces to the transformation of consciousness has vast significance. It makes available instantly and globally the theoretical resources, the historical analysis, the programmatic clarity necessary for the working class to understand its historic mission and seize power.
The announcement of Socialism AI came at the conclusion of an extensive lecture addressing the fundamental question: “Where is America going?” North opened by noting that most people would respond, “To hell”—a judgment he acknowledged as largely justified given the accelerating political crisis.
Drawing on Marx’s description of France’s financial aristocracy as the “lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society,” North characterized the contemporary American ruling class as “a super-Mafia at the summit of capitalist society, flaunting crime and perversion while ordinary people pay the cost in misery and blood.”
North presented extensive data documenting the unprecedented concentration of wealth in the United States. Trump’s cabinet and top appointees possess a collective net worth exceeding $60 billion, with sixteen of his twenty-five wealthiest appointees ranking among the 813 billionaires in a nation of 341 million people—placing them in the top 0.0001 percent. “This is not symbolic representation,” North stated. “It is direct rule by the oligarchy.”
The lectures traced the historical roots of the crisis to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the subsequent financialization of the American economy. North documented how the total value of publicly traded US stocks now exceeds 220 percent of annual economic output—more than double the GDP—compared to just 80 percent in 1971. This represents an economy increasingly detached from real production and built on “fictitious capital.”
North argued that moral outrage alone cannot provide the foundation for revolutionary struggle. What is required is a scientific understanding of capitalism’s contradictions, particularly Marx’s law of the decline in the rate of profit. The current frenzy of investment in artificial intelligence under capitalism, while appearing to promise increased profitability through mass layoffs, will in fact accelerate the systemic decline in the rate of profit by further reducing the source of surplus value—living labor.
North concluded with a powerful metaphor:
The world in which we live is like a sleeping volcano upon whose slopes civilization builds its monuments, establishes its institutions, and organizes its daily life. For periods of time, the volcano appears dormant. But beneath the surface, immense pressures accumulate. The magma rises. The tremors intensify. And finally, the eruption comes with catastrophic force, transforming the landscape entirely.
He continued:
The eruption of class struggle in the United States will destroy the rotting structures of capitalism but will also open the possibility for a new world. From the depths of social oppression will arise a force greater than any army or corporation—the collective power of a class that produces all wealth yet owns nothing. When that force acts consciously, guided by scientific socialism and the analysis of objective reality, it will sweep away the barriers of nationality and ethnicity and unite humanity in a common struggle for liberation.
Following both lectures in Berlin and London, animated discussions took place, with many attendees leaving their contact information and purchasing books at the literature tables.
Both meetings reflected growing interest among workers, students, and youth in a genuine socialist alternative to the escalating crises of capitalism, dictatorship, and imperialist war. The announcement of Socialism AI was received with great enthusiasm as a tool that can democratize access to Marxist theory and historical analysis on an unprecedented scale.
In the coming days, the WSWS will post the full video recording of the London lecture.
