US Attack on Venezuela

The quality of life for the worldwide working class is plummeting as the burden of the international crisis of capital is placed on our shoulders. This burden is felt all the more acutely by the people who are made to suffer for the crime of living in contested territory. US sanctions on Venezuela have contributed to a complete crash in living standards, with the average Venezuelan losing 11kg of body weight, reaching near-famine levels as even inputs for agriculture become scarce. The rentier nature of the Venezuela state, so dependent on oil, combined with the sanctions, have led to a falling income and a boom in participants of the informal economy and welfare recipients. Humanitarian exemptions could not reverse the crippling effect of sanctions on healthcare, with access to vaccines, insulin, and other drugs severely hampered. More than 7 million people have fled this brutal siege becoming refugees, facing hellish conditions trying to reach any sense of safety, and then being condemned to a slave-like existence abroad as they are persecuted by state bureaucrats and exploited by callous capitalists who salivate at the opportunity to underpay and overwork these vulnerable people. In the US itself, a recent crackdown on migrants involving the hired thugs of ICE, and using the usual techniques of racial profiling, disappearing of individuals and violent separation of families, has given rise to widespread protests. Dealings with ICE have resulted not only in deaths in custody, but now also in the killings of protesters.

The Roots of the Crisis

Tensions between the US and Venezuela are not a new development, however, they have increased with the global economic crisis and the present explosion is, at root, an expression of this crisis. The recent history of this crisis starts in 2017, when the US banned the Venezuelan state and its state oil company PDVSA from access to Western financial markets. In 2018, they banned the use of Venezuelan petro crypto tokens. In 2019, the US and Bank of England seized Venezuelan assets and imposed a total blockade.

Venezuela’s resources are its primary attraction and bargaining chip. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world at approximately 303 billion barrels. Despite the US mainly producing light oil, in the 1990s the US invested huge sums into oil refineries that require heavy oil to run efficiently – heavy oil which Venezuela holds. Venezuela also possesses around 300,000 metric tonnes of rare earth minerals such as neodymium, dysprosium, cerium, lanthanum, and thorium, worth around $200 billion in total. With this in mind, in 2025 China had signed a $18 billion deal with Venezuela to obtain gallium, antimony, and gold. Venezuela has strongly aligned itself with the Chinese imperialist bloc; from 2000 to 2010, China invested $62 million in Venezuela to be repaid in crude oil, and from 2018, China started buying oil from Venezuela in 100% renminbi, completely sidelining the US dollar, and Venezuela even applied to join BRICS in 2023, but was vetoed by Brazil’s Lula.

In 2025, Venezuela started exploring the unit currency as a settlement instrument for BRICS nations. The value of this ‘unit’ was to be split between a basket of BRICS currencies and physical gold. If Venezuela moved its gold reserves into this, it could prevent a repeat of the 2019 assets seizures by America. This is all in line with Venezuela's concerted efforts to completely ditch the US dollar in trade, threatening the petrodollar and US hegemony. All the while, the trade war for rare earths has been raging on for a while, with rare earths being especially important as the entire US economy is going all in on the AI bubble gambit. The US has tried securing both oil and rare earths from Ukraine and now Venezuela – the US cannot allow China to cut Venezuela off.

China’s challenge to the US is not restricted to Venezuela but extends throughout South America via its Belt and Road Initiative. China is the largest trading partner for at least 4 major South American countries and has built a large deep-water port in Chancay, Peru, from which to ship raw materials. The US sees all this as an intolerable threat to its domination of the Western hemisphere. Previously US economic power would have been all that was needed, and sanctions would have been sufficient to produce a compliant regime in Caracas. The fact that it has had to use military power to attempt regime change in Venezuela is a measure of its economic weakness and its desperation. However, there can be little doubt that the US sees its actions in Venezuela as a step in the process of kicking China out of South America and undermining its competitors.

Bolivarian “Socialism”: The Enemy of Workers

The ruling capitalist class of Venezuela is no stranger to imperialistic ambition. They themselves have laid claim to foreign oil, with ambitious plans to seize large parts of Guyana’s oilfields. After a rigged referendum in 2023 to manufacture consent for the invasion, and having assigned a military governor to the plan, Venezuela was ultimately deterred by the international support for Guyana. At the same time as conducting imperialist adventures, the Venezuelan ruling class claim that Bolivarian so-called “socialism”, introduced by Chávez, via a new constitution in 1999, has greatly benefitted the Venezuelan workers. Bolivarian so-called “socialism” is a variation of state capitalism and has involved nationalisation of key sectors of the economy. This is why sections of the private capitalist class have fled. There have been some benefits to the working class in improved social services such as health and education, but these have been undermined by sanctions. Another result is that corruption has resulted in sections of the economy, particularly oil, being in the hands of groups from the military. They will be reluctant to give these up to US capitalists and this is likely to frustrate US plans to loot the country. The US has not yet succeeded in placing a puppet regime in control, consequently the fantastic benefits for US capital which Trump boasts about may be illusionary.

The Venezuelan capitalist class only perpetuates this system of absolute international exploitation. Workers in Venezuela find themselves in the midst of an imperialist conflict just like the Iranian workers at the other side of the world. If the US sends forces into the country, Venezuelan workers will be asked to die for Venezuelan national capital. As in all the imperialist conflicts raging around the world the response we must give is revolutionary defeatism. Continue the class struggle! No support for either side in the imperialist war. The only power that can stop the drift to war and break free from the constraints of the system is the power of the working class. Another world is possible and necessary but can only be built by the global working class after the destruction of capitalism. It will be a world not based on exploitation, but on worldwide cooperation and production for need, controlled by the working class itself.

The above article is taken from the current edition (No. 74) of Aurora, bulletin of the Communist Workers’ Organisation.

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Image: RCraig09 (CC BY-SA 4.0), commons.wikimedia.org