US President Donald Trump’s kidnap of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is a naked and brutal attempt to pursue US capitalist interests. It is also a futile attempt to shore up his own unstable position.
Trump has proclaimed that the ‘US now runs Venezuela’, the nation with the world’s largest oil reserves. He is attempting to do this by leaving elements of the Venezuelan state in power and bullying them to do the bidding of US imperialism.
The threat to the world’s masses and the environment posed by this action can only be answered by mass workers’ action.
In carrying out the ‘strike’, Trump struck another blow against the capitalist so-called ‘rules-based order’ made up of bodies such as the United Nations, and others.
But to hope that these institutions will act decisively against atrocities has no basis in experience.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acted with impunity while the Israeli state has slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, despite a warrant for his arrest from the International Criminal Court since November 2024.
Presenting himself as all-powerful, in fact Trump is record-breakingly unpopular at home, with net approval ratings of minus 17%. He has faced the two biggest ever single days of protest in US history in the first year of his second term. US workers still face the grinding price rises that led to the demise of the last president Joe Biden. Trump’s Venezuela gambit won’t fix that.
However, Trump is also increasingly at odds with whole sections of the capitalist class internationally and at home, including in his own Republican Party. Their biggest concern isn’t workers’ living standards, but that by smashing up their ‘rules’ he is revealing in stark relief the brutality of their capitalist system, based on ruthless exploitation and competition.
What the defenders of capitalism fear is the political and economic instability he is amplifying. But above all, it is fear of the struggles that his brand of naked class rule will provoke.
To be successful, those struggles, which will come, will need a socialist programme based on democratic public ownership and planning, which puts the working class at the centre of running society.
