A crucial question has arisen: what has happened within Venezuela's ruling class? Two theories:

Venezuela VP Delcy Rodríguez

I received this from a friend and share for readers interest. RM

A crucial question has arisen: what has happened within Venezuela's ruling class? Two theories:

 

1) Manolo De Los Santos of Tricontinental:

This clearly disproves the notion that multipolarity at the present stage can serve as a mechanism for protecting the sovereignty of Global South states. The US, with the world’s largest military budget, the most extensive network of military bases, and technological superiority, has reasserted its unipolar hegemony in the field of military power. The subsequent psychological warfare operation has sought to sow disunity by alleging “betrayal” or “treason” within the revolutionary leadership, particularly targeting Vice President Delcy Rodríguez. This narrative lacks any evidence, appears totally false, and is also a classic tactic in US military strategy and psychological operations. 

The Rodríguez family’s revolutionary credentials are etched in struggle. Their father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, a leader of the Socialist League, a Marxist-Leninist organization, was tortured and murdered by the Punto Fijo regime in 1976. Both Delcy and her brother Jorge (the President of the National Assembly) emerged from this tradition of clandestine and mass struggle for socialism. President Maduro himself was a cadre of the same organization. To suggest betrayal among them or capitulation born of cowardice or opportunism ignores four decades of shared political formation, persecution, and leadership under relentless imperialist aggression and the class character of their revolutionary leadership.

 

2) But a former insider - Chavez confidante Eva Golinger - has expressed a very different view:

 

Have been saying all along that the pseudo-experts on Venezuela that popped up over the past few months were miscalculating the internal situation in the country and government. The story the opposition and Machado were telling was not the reality inside the country, but they were platformed on all major media worldwide and had the ear of governments throughout Europe and the US, and most think tanks regurgitated the same talking points. 

 

This has been the case for years - decades really. They were wrong. This is just a simple overview. The government in Venezuela has been comprised of several groups that have a power-sharing pact. They control different sectors of the apparatus - security, military, pueblo, colectivos, institutions, judiciary, oil industry, business, etc. One of those groups - Delcy and her brother Jorge - have now taken power through a meticulous and 'evil genius' negotiation with the Trump administration that has been going on for months behind the scenes. Note that the new indictment against Maduro and Cilia includes both Maduro's son and Diosdado - this is purposefully to put them on alert that they are next should they betray the Rodriguez siblings. 

 

CIA is now operating inside Venezuela and can execute another 'extraordinary rendition' at any time on Trump's orders. Delcy has allowed them in and permitted them to stay. The US Embassy is returning, along with all of its intel & military support. The calculation was that the most important thing for the 'Boliviarian movement' (they do not represent chavismo, they long ago betrayed Chavez and his legacy) and their own interests (power, wealth accumulation) was for them to maintain power - no matter the cost, including sacrificing Maduro. There was zero chance they would ever cede power to Machado or the exiled opposition. They represent a system, not a government taking its turn. They will do whatever it takes to retain control of the country, even negotiating and compromising with Trump, the 'evil empire'.  The lobby began months ago, both with the Trump administration and in the media. Delcy was positioned in the international media as the 'moderate' and the most pragmatic to deal with. This made it clear that the cards had been dealt. Once Maduro was out, Delcy was in. 

 

In the coming days, more business deals will be made, some sanctions may be loosened and prisoners released. They will continue to appease Trump with lucrative deals, opening up Venezuela's rich resources (oil, gold rare earths, heavy metals, minerals, coastline, etc) to Trump and his friends. Perhaps a Trump resort in Margarita Island or Los Roques. All the things Machado promised, but without her. 

 

Trump has no interest in democracy or Machado. He never met with her, never invited her to the White House like George W. Bush did during the height of the attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez. Trump resents her Nobel Peace Prize (which he believes he deserves), but also understands the truth: Machado cannot command the country right now. She does not have the support from the groups in power or their enablers. Delcy&Jorge promised Trump stability and control, for now.  If sanctions ease, life can improve inside the country, which will calm tensions over the US invasion and Maduro's violent capture. No doubt that the remaining chavista and leftist movements in the country are not happy with this betrayal. Over time there will be a growing internal opposition to the government, but they will likely employ the same tactics as before - any dissent will be treated as treason and repressed. Especially now with Trump's arsenal hovering above Caracas. They will tell the people that this is necessary to continue the 'chavista movement', even though their true interest is their own power and wealth. 

 

However, the biggest wild card is Trump. His volatility and lack of strategy shows he can change his mind at any time. It is a very dangerous time for Venezuela. 

Oil Addiction and Class Oppression

A hard hat from an oil worker lies in oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill on East Grand Terre Island, Louisiana. (Reuters/Lee Celano) Source: The Nation *

By Sirantos Fotopoulous

The political power of low gasoline prices does not lie in affordability alone. It lies in dependence. Cheap fuel is not simply a consumer benefit; it is a mechanism through which millions of people are bound to a particular economic order and disciplined into accepting it. When Donald Trump presents low gas prices as proof of economic success, he is not offering relief so much as reinforcing a system that demands obedience in exchange for survival.

Americans are not dependent on gasoline by accident. They have been made dependent through decades of deliberate policy choices that dismantled public transportation, encouraged suburban sprawl, and structured employment around long commutes and automobile ownership. In this system, access to work, healthcare, education, and social life often requires a car. Gasoline becomes not a luxury but a prerequisite for participation in society. When fuel prices rise, life becomes immediately harder. When prices fall, the system feels temporarily humane. This oscillation produces compliance rather than freedom.

 

Low gasoline prices are therefore politically potent not because they redistribute wealth downward, but because they mask an upward transfer of wealth that is otherwise constant. Even when gas is cheap, households spend thousands of dollars a year on fuel, vehicle maintenance, insurance, and debt. These costs flow upward to oil companies, financial institutions, automakers, and logistics firms. Cheap fuel does not break this transfer; it stabilizes it by making the extraction tolerable.

 

The oil industry benefits from this arrangement in ways that go far beyond pump prices. A population locked into car dependence guarantees stable demand regardless of price fluctuations. Workers cannot easily reduce consumption without sacrificing access to employment or basic services. This creates a captive market. The industry’s profits are not primarily the result of high prices at any given moment, but of structural dependence sustained over decades. Cheap gasoline preserves that dependence by preventing rupture.

 

This dependence also disciplines political behavior. When livelihoods hinge on fuel prices, energy policy becomes a matter of personal survival rather than collective choice. Calls for alternatives — pedestrian and bicycle friendly urban centers, public transit, electrification, reduced commuting, an end to suburban sprawl or other similar structural changes — are experienced not as emancipatory proposals but as threats. The fossil fuel economy thus produces its own ideological defense. People come to identify their personal well-being with the health of the oil industry itself.

 

Trump’s fixation on low gasoline prices exploits this reality. By presenting himself as the guarantor of cheap fuel, he positions himself as the protector of daily life against abstract enemies — regulators, environmentalists, elites, or foreign forces. The simplicity of the promise is crucial. Structural transformation is complex and uncertain. Cheap gas is immediate and legible. It requires no rethinking of how people live, only continued submission to how they already must live.

 

This is not economic populism in any meaningful sense. It is class management. Cheap gasoline functions as a subsidy not to workers, but to the social order that extracts from them. It allows wages to stagnate while commute distances grow. It allows employers to externalize transportation costs onto workers. It allows logistics firms to expand without bearing the social costs of pollution, infrastructure decay, or climate damage. The apparent benefit at the pump conceals a far larger upward transfer of wealth that perpetuates the immiseration of the working-class.

 

Over time, this arrangement produces a political base whose material survival is bound to fossil capital. Workers in energy-producing regions, logistics hubs, construction, trucking, and suburban service economies become structurally aligned with oil, not because it enriches them, but because its disruption threatens them. Fear replaces solidarity. Dependence replaces agency. Political loyalty follows.

 

This is the social foundation of Trump’s energy politics. His promise is not transformation but continuity — a guarantee that nothing fundamental will change. Low gasoline prices signal that the system will keep functioning as it has, regardless of how unequal, precarious, or environmentally destructive it becomes. For a population already trapped within that system, continuity feels comfortable and safe.

 

This dynamic reveals how class power is maintained not only through coercion, but through managed dependence. Capital does not simply extract surplus; it organizes life in ways that make extraction unavoidable. The fossil fuel economy is a textbook example. Workers are paid wages that require them to purchase the very energy that enables their exploitation, creating a closed loop in which value flows upward while dependence flows downward.

 

Additionally, this same system represents a profound loss of autonomy. A society organized around mandatory fuel consumption is one in which freedom of movement, association, and survival are mediated by corporate infrastructure and state-backed markets. Choice becomes illusory when opting out carries severe material penalties. Obedience is produced not through force alone, but through design.

 

The end game of this arrangement is political consolidation. Cheap gasoline does not challenge inequality; it neutralizes resistance to it. It binds ordinary people to an economy that steadily extracts from them while offering small, visible concessions in return. Trump’s energy politics do not aim to improve material conditions in a lasting way. They aim to secure loyalty by ensuring that dependence remains manageable.

 

The danger is not simply environmental, though it is that as well. The deeper danger is political. A population whose survival depends on fossil fuel flows is easily mobilized in defense of the system that controls those flows. Empire, inequality, and authoritarian ambition find fertile ground in a society trained to equate obedience with affordability.

 

Cheap gas is not freedom. It is the price of submission and renders us all as addicts.

*The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe was not an accident; it was market driven. See here:  The oil industry regulators allowed the industry to write its own guidelines (in pencil).  

From Chavez to Maduro: An Analysis of the Bolivarian Revolution

by Sirantos Fotopoulos

For a brief historical moment in the early twenty-first century, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela appeared to rupture the global neoliberal consensus that had dominated Latin America. Under Hugo Chávez, elected in 1998 amid deep social exhaustion with austerity and elite capture of oil wealth, Venezuela embarked on an experiment that promised to redistribute income, expand social rights, and reassert popular sovereignty against both domestic oligarchies and imperial discipline. The project was never a fully realized socialist transformation, but it did succeed — for a time — in materially improving the lives of millions of poor Venezuelans and in re-opening political possibilities that had been foreclosed for decades. That it ultimately collapsed so catastrophically under Nicolás Maduro does not negate those gains, but it does demand a sober post-mortem — one that resists both Cold War caricature and uncritical nostalgia.

The early Bolivarian period was marked by tangible achievements. Fueled by rising global oil prices in the 2000s, the Chávez government channeled petroleum rents into expansive social programs that dramatically reduced poverty, expanded access to education and healthcare, and incorporated marginalized populations into political life through communal councils and participatory initiatives. Illiteracy declined, malnutrition fell, and millions gained access to subsidized food and medical care for the first time. These were concrete improvements in material conditions, and they explain why Chávez retained genuine mass support well into the later years of his presidency. Any serious analysis must begin by acknowledging that the Bolivarian project addressed real suffering and did so in ways that orthodox liberal governance in Venezuela had conspicuously failed to achieve.

Yet embedded within these achievements were structural weaknesses that were never resolved and that became decisive once favorable external conditions evaporated. Venezuela remained a profoundly rentier economy, dependent on oil exports for the overwhelming majority of its foreign earnings and state revenue. Redistribution was financed not by a transformed productive base but by volatile commodity income, leaving social gains acutely vulnerable to price fluctuations beyond national control. Nationalizations, while symbolically important, often failed to establish democratic workers’ control or coherent planning mechanisms, instead reproducing bureaucratic hierarchies within state ownership. Domestic production stagnated, imports expanded, and price and currency controls — introduced to manage inflation and capital flight — gradually distorted incentives and decimated productive capacity rather than rebuilding it. Political power, meanwhile, became increasingly centralized in the executive, with institutions subordinated to the presidency and dissent framed as existential threat rather than as a corrective force.

These contradictions did not originate with Nicolás Maduro, but his presidency exposed and intensified them. When Maduro assumed office in 2013, the global commodity boom had ended, oil prices were falling, and Venezuela’s fiscal model was already under severe strain. Instead of recalibrating policy to confront these realities, the government doubled down on controls, improvised monetary expansion, and tolerated the steady decay of state capacity. Oil production collapsed due to chronic underinvestment, managerial dysfunction, and the politicization of technical institutions such as PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. — Venezuela's state-owned oil and gas company). Hyperinflation followed as the state resorted to printing money to cover deficits amid collapsing output. Shortages became endemic, infrastructure deteriorated, and real wages were obliterated. Long before the most punitive international sanctions were imposed, Venezuela was already in economic freefall, undermining claims that external pressure alone explains the catastrophe.

At the same time, the political response to crisis proved disastrous. Rather than expanding democratic participation to confront economic breakdown, the Maduro government increasingly relied on repression, legal manipulation, and institutional bypass to maintain power. The sidelining of the National Assembly, the erosion of electoral credibility, and the criminalization of dissent alienated broad segments of the population, including many who had once supported the Bolivarian project. What remained of the revolution’s legitimacy was progressively replaced by coercion and patronage, hollowing out the popular foundation that had sustained it under Chávez. The result was not merely economic collapse but social disintegration, reflected in the mass emigration of millions of Venezuelans whose departure further weakened productive and civic life.

The Venezuelan experience is best understood not as the failure of socialism but as the failure of a state-centered, rent-dependent reform project that never escaped the structural constraints of capitalism. The Bolivarian Revolution redistributed surplus without fundamentally transforming the relations of production that generated it. Workers were beneficiaries of state spending but rarely subjects of democratic economic power. Planning was bureaucratic rather than collective, and popular institutions lacked the autonomy needed to discipline the state itself. When crisis arrived, there were no robust mechanisms through which the working-class could intervene to correct policy, reorganize production, or hold leadership accountable. The revolution had mobilized the masses electorally and rhetorically, but it had not sufficiently embedded them in the everyday governance of the economy.

Reliance on extractive rents, combined with centralized authority and weak worker control, creates a fragile equilibrium that cannot survive prolonged shocks. Bureaucracy, far from being a neutral administrative tool, tends under such conditions to become a conservative force prioritizing institutional self-preservation over transformative goals. Corruption and inefficiency are not moral aberrations in this framework but predictable outcomes of concentrated power without democratic counterweights. When revolutionary legitimacy is grounded more in historical narrative and external antagonism than in present material improvement, it erodes rapidly once living standards collapse.

The Venezuelan case also exposes the limits of anti-imperialism when it is decoupled from internal democracy. Opposition to foreign intervention and sanctions is not only justified but necessary, yet it cannot substitute for accountable governance or excuse domestic repression. A politics that treats popular hardship as collateral damage in a geopolitical struggle ultimately forfeits the allegiance of the very class it claims to represent. International solidarity cannot be sustained through slogans alone; it depends on the credibility of a project that demonstrably advances human flourishing. 

The lessons here are uncomfortable but indispensable for the Marxist left. Redistribution without structural transformation is reversible. State ownership without democratic control is brittle. Charismatic leadership without durable institutions invites collapse once the leader is gone. And economic sovereignty built on a single commodity is not sovereignty at all but dependency by another name. Venezuela fell not because it challenged global capitalism, but because it did so incompletely, inconsistently, and without building the material and institutional foundations necessary to endure crisis.

None of this erases the significance of the Bolivarian moment or the real hopes it generated. On the contrary, its tragedy lies precisely in the distance between what it promised and what it ultimately delivered. For those committed to emancipatory politics, the Venezuelan collapse should not function as a warning against ambition, but as a reminder that genuine transformation requires more than redistribution, more than rhetoric, and more than control of the state. It requires the patient construction of democratic economic power from below, capable of surviving both external pressure and internal failure. Without that, even the most inspiring revolutions remain vulnerable to their own contradictions

 

Israel is an Apartheid State. Go See For Yourself.

Condemning Zionism and the Zionist regime's crimes against humanity, as the author of this piece does, is the best way to fight anti-Semitism. Respecting and agreeing with Mr. Rosenthal's views expressed here, I have to differ when it comes to any suggestion that there is any way out of the Palestine/Israel crisis through the Democratic Party. Or any other global issues that are a product of the so-called free market. R. Mellor FFWP Admin

 Robert Rosenthal  · 

Zionists often say to Israel’s Jewish critics, “Come to Israel and see it for yourself.” Unless they expect Jews to book a Birthright-style propaganda tour for older folks, that advice makes no sense.

 

When Jews visit towns like Bethlehem, now walled off by Israel, and see the humiliating checkpoints, and speak with the wonderful Palestinian people struggling under martial law, many are appalled.

 

It’s often been said that if you want to see the ugliness of Israeli apartheid up close, go to Hebron. One of the most talked-about sites there is Shuhada Street. Palestinians who live along it are barred from driving on the main road and, in many stretches, forbidden even to walk down it, while Israeli settlers and tourists are free to stroll and drive wherever they like.

 

IOF soldiers and concrete barriers enforce what Israeli authorities call a “sterile” zone in the heart of a Palestinian city, where Palestinians who live along the route are barred from using much of the main street and are forced onto back alleys, rooftops, and dirt paths just to reach their own front doors.

 

For more on Israeli apartheid, see my post, “Denying Israeli Apartheid is Absurd,” in The Progressive Jew, and if it moves you, take a free subscription. Read in 78 countries, The Progressive Jew is for people of all faiths and people of none. The link is in comments.

Michael Roberts: Venezuela and oil

   Venezuela and oil

by Michael Roberts

Within hours of the US military strikes on Venezuela and the capture of its president, Nicolas Maduro, President Trump proclaimed that “very large United States oil companies would go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”  Trump did not hide that a major reason for the attack and kidnapping of Maduro was aimed at putting the US in control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, described as “our oil” by Trump.  

Venezuela holds the world’s largest oil reserves – about 303 billion barrels, or 17% of global reserves – surpassing OPEC+ leader Saudi Arabia, according to the London-based Energy Institute. But despite its vast reserves, Venezuela’s crude output remains far below capacity. Production, which once peaked at 3.5 million barrels per day in the 1970s (over 7% of global output), fell below 2 million bpd during the 2010s and averaged just 1.1 million bpd last year.

The U.S. is now the world’s biggest producer thanks to the so-called shale revolution in the 2000s. But that has meant the world is increasingly awash in oil, as supply outstrips global demand growth, which is slowing due to crawling economic expansion in most major economies, and to the gradual switch to renewables for energy production. Indeed, at the time of the attack on Venezuela, the price of benchmark Brent Crude was close to five-year lows at about $60 a barrel. 

Trump may be telling the global oil majors that he is running Venezuela now and they can pitch to invest and make ‘piles of money’, but the oil companies may be less sure of that. An ex- Chevron executive Ali Moshiri, is making a pitch to raise $2bn to take over multiple Venezuelan assets.  But this is a punt and the likes of Chevron itself, which already has a licence from the US to drill and produce Venezuelan oil, may not be so gung-ho.

The cost of restoring Venezuela’s oil production will not be cheap as the industry has a dilapidated drilling infrastructure and the oil extracted is ‘heavy’. Extracting this extra-heavy oil requires drilling lots of relatively shortlived wells — a process quite similar to US shale oil production — then mixing the sludge with lighter oil or naphtha so it can flow through pipelines before being exported and refined. Producing ‘heavy’ oil requires advanced techniques, such as steam injection and blending with lighter crudes to make it marketable. Also, the country’s reserves are mostly concentrated in the Orinoco Belt, a vast remote region in the eastern part of the country stretching across roughly 55,000 square kilometres (21,235sq miles).

Moreover, the oil glut has already started to hit profits on further exploration and extraction. The US shale industry’s cumulative losses in the 2010s reached close to half a trillion dollars.  Everything depends on the “break even price,” which has been estimated at an average of about $60 per barrel for American shale. All this is occurring against a backdrop of global oil supply growing faster than demand, with the International Energy Agency projecting global supply increases of 3 million barrels a day in 2025 and a further 2.4 million in 2026, against demand increases of only 830,000 barrels in 2025 and 860,000 in 2026. Jorge León from Rystad Energy estimates that roughly doubling production to 2mn barrels by the early 2030s would cost $115bn — some three times ExxonMobil and Chevron’s combined capital expenditure last year. Could Exxon and Chevron make that profitable in the current world supply and demand balance for oil, especially as such ‘heavy’ oil would need to be sold below the benchmark price?

However, there are other factors behind Trump’s move against Venezuela.  The new National Security Strategy makes it clear: the Monrow doctrine of the 1820s is back on steroids.  Back then, President Monroe declared that European nations must not interfere or try to control Latin America, as this was now the ‘sphere of influence’ for the United States of America.  Now under Trump, globalisation has given way to ‘Making America Great Again’ by firmly establishing Latin America as the US imperialism’s backyard.  That means no country can be allowed to resist US policy and interests.  ‘Friendly regimes’ must be installed to enable both privileged American use of resources and the ability to deny those to competitors. That means growing Chinese influence and investment in the region must be blocked – while Venezuelan oil made up just 300,000 of the 11.3m barrels China imported each day in 2025, according to the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies, companies from the People’s Republic had gained a foothold in Venezuela’s oil-drilling industry.

Back in 2024 at the time of the disputed re-election of Maduro, I pointed out that Venezuelan capitalism was tied closely to the profitability of the energy sector, which was in a death spiral after the collapse of oil prices after 2010 and US sanctions.

The gains for the working class achieved under Chavez in the 2000s were only possible because oil prices reached their zenith.  But then, commodity prices, including oil, dropped. That more or less coincided with Chavez’s death.  The Maduro government lost the support of its working-class base as hyperinflation destroyed living standards. The Maduro government increasingly relied not on the support of the working-class but on the armed forces, which had special privileges.  The military could buy in exclusive markets (for example, on military bases), had privileged access to loans and purchases of cars and apartments and received substantial salary increases. They also exploited exchange controls and subsidies, for example, selling cheap gasoline purchased in neighbouring countries with huge profits.

The tragedy of Venezuela is that everything depended on the oil price; there was little or no development of the non-oil sectors, which anyway were in the hands of private companies. There was no independent national plan of investment controlled by the state. Given US sanctions on top of that and the continual subversion of the government, the Chavista revolution’s days were numbered.

It’s a lesson for all of Latin America.  The de-industrialisation of the sub-continent since the 1980s and increasing reliance on commodity exports subject all these economies to the volatile swings of commodity prices (agricultural, metals and oil). That makes it impossible for any independent economic policy, given the weakness of domestic capitalists and economies under the shadow of American imperialism.

Venezuela shows 2026 will be a “wild” year

Reprinted from the UK Socialist Website Left Horizons

Editorial: Venezuela shows 2026 will be a “wild” year

3 January 2026Posted by Editor

The original intention of this editorial comment was to make a simple point: that politics in 2026 will more volatile and unpredictable than ever before. But no sooner had a draft been written, than events provided a violent confirmation of that basic idea.

On his Substack blog, US journalist, Seymour Hersh asked “What chaos will Trump unleash in 2026?” Hours later, he had his answer. On only the second day of the new year, US forces  bombed Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. They are to be taken to the United States, to face trial over alleged drug trafficking.

The charges against Maduro have been in place for five years, but these are in reality a pretext: after all, a real drugs trafficker, former President of Honduras, Orlando Hernández, was pardoned by Trump only weeks earlier and released from his 45-year sentence in a US jail. The real aim of the military aggression against Venezuela is to engineer regime change.

The interests of the United States, especially in oil, have been blocked for decades, first by the regime of Hugo Chavez, and then following his death, by Maduro. Trump sees all politics in transactional terms and his real aim, like his proposed ‘peace-plan’ for Ukraine, is to get access for US companies to natural resources.

Oil is the prize, not ‘democracy’

In this case, it is Venezuelan oil reserves, which are the biggest in the world. At his subsequent press conference, Trump mentioned “oil” dozens of times – and protested the past seizure of “our” oil by “socialist” governments.

Like other western capitalist states, the USA has backed various pretenders to the Venezuelan presidency, although opposition spokesperson, María Corina Machado, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is for some reason out of favour with Trump. The hope of the White House is that without Maduro, the Caracas government will collapse and its military will back down to allow the installation of some US puppet – and the hope is that all of this will be accomplished quickly, smoothly and without any serious hitches.

“We are going to run the country until there is a transition”, Trump declared in his press conference. US oil companies will run Venezuelan oil facilities. Moreover, he added, “we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if necessary”.

This relatively limited US operation, styled Absolute Resolve, was based on overwhelming military superiority. But in this military intervention, Trump is taking a huge political risk. There are all kinds of scenarios that may unfold, many of which could come back to haunt him. Three months from now, what will be the upshot of this adventure? What will it have achieved? And how much will it have undermined Trump’s personal interests and those of the USA?

In the USA there is not likely to be much opposition from a largely supine Democratic Party, too spineless and tied to the interests of US capitalism to offer any meaningful protest to the events in South America. But a few weeks of waving the stars and stripes will not improve the living standards of the mass of voters who are increasingly disillusioned with Trump’s claim that things are getting ‘better’. Operation Absolute Resolve will not help Trump’s declining fortunes at home.

Image of Maduro, handcuffed and blindfolded, from Donald Trump’s social media platform, ‘Truth Social’

And this is with the best case scenario for Venezuela. If there is serious opposition in Caracas what will that mean for the US military operation? US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, claims to have spoken to Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez, who, he says, is compliant with the aims of the US. But what if she proves, after all, to be defiant?

What if there is local opposition to the US “running” the country? Even in the best case, how exactly will the USA “run” Venezuela? The biggest unknown factor is the reaction of the Venezuelan population to this national humiliation.

Even though Trump has replaced many of the top brass in the US armed forces with ‘hawks’ – and the Department of Defense has been renamed the Department for War – there is no certainty that they would consider putting US boots on the ground in Venezuela.

That is not because the generals would be opposed in principle to a military assault, but because it would have a potentially huge political cost, in terms of US casualties. Thirty five years ago, the US invaded Panama, a much smaller country, and one with a much weaker army. But even then there were 23 US service personnel killed and over three hundred wounded. How long would popular support for Trump the ‘peacemaker’ be sustained in the face of US casualties in Venezuela?

Globally, whatever happens next in Venezuela, Trump’s gamble on forced regime change will undermine US, diplomatically, politically and economically. Other Latin American presidents will be wondering who is next. Hints were given by Trump and Hegseth about the governments in Bolivia and Cuba, for example.

When the dust settles, across Asia, Africa and Latin America, political leaders will condemn the kidnapping of a serving head of state and despite the overwhelming preponderance of US military might, the real influence of the US will be diminished. Even ‘friendly’ European political leaders have condemned the US action.

The international labour movement will condemn the US military assault. Socialists have had serious criticisms of the Maduro government, but will oppose unreservedly the aggression against Venezuela. The National Education Union was one of the first trade unions in the UK to protest – but it will certainly not be the last.

As we enter 2026, the broad international picture is one where there is a continued relative decline of US imperialism and the rise of China as a huge economic power. Although that has not been happened yet, that relative shift will also be reflected in terms of military power. It is possible that a part of the reaction to the events in Venezuela – in the ‘back yard’ of the USA, as the White House would argue – may be paralleled by military provocations initiated by China against Taiwan.

In any event, Trump and his administration have amply demonstrated the highly combustible nature of modern politics and vindicated what BBC journalist, Laura Kuenssberg, wrote her review of 2025. Summarising the events of the last year, she commented, “2025 was a crazy year in politics. But 2026 could be wild”.

“Normal” she added, “retired many years ago”.

What is true of international politics – that it is more volatile and unpredictable than ever – is also true of national UK politics. The the most dramatic change in the UK this year is likely to be at the top of the Labour Party, although the precise course of events and the detail are impossible to predict, particularly given the divisions in the left between those in the Labour Party, Your Party and the Greens.

The May local elections, and elections in Scotland and Wales, are likely to confirm the demise of Starmer’s Labour Party and confirm the collapse of the Tories. This is despite the blatant gerrymandering of a further delay in four English authorities, and possibly others where councils have been allowed to consider delays. While Labour and Conservative votes in the past would have combined to be around four fifths of all votes in the past, the elections in May will confirm that the political ‘centre’ has collapsed.

NEU statement on the US military action against Venezuela

A challenge to Starmer is very likely this year. Even the worst careerists in the PLP can read opinion polls, and few of them expected to be one-term wonders. If, as seems likely according to today’s polling, three quarters of Labour MPs are going to lose their seats next time around, these same former Starmerite loyalists will be forced to accept that a leadership challenge is the only ‘hope’ they have.

The volatility of UK politics is exacerbated by the volatility internationally. Capitalism world-wide is in its death throes, and that is why the political period in which we live is characterised by wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions. The decay and senescence of the ‘market’ system is evident in social, economic and political crises; it is evident in science, art and literature and in the growing differentiation in both wealth and income between a few hyper-billionaires and the mass of the planet’s population.

Through all the storms and stresses that lie ahead, Marxists will play an important role as activists, organisers and educators in the labour and trade union movement. Above all, we need to comprehend as best we can what is going on around us. The Dutch philosopher, Spinoza, once wrote, “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them”. That is a good summary of our task today. 

China: AI, involution and the national plan

by Michael Roberts

During his New Year’s Eve address broadcast, China’s Communist leader Xi praised the country’s advancements in key sectors. Images ranging from humanoid robots performing kung fu to new hydropower projects rolled on the screen as he spoke. He also announced  that the National People’s Congress would discuss the country’s new five-year plan at its upcoming legislative session in March. 

China’s 15th five-year plan is all about AI. The 14th Plan (2021-2025), which has just ended, focused on the “dual circulation” strategy (domestic + foreign trade) i.e driving economic growth not just through exports, but also through investment in the domestic economy, particularly aiming at self-dependence in technology. The new plan will continue that drive for technological independence, but this time through the diffusion of AI into industrial processes, consumer products, consumer products, health care, education and digital government. The plan is that by 2030 AI is expected to be as widespread as electricity or the internet – and so a big driver of economic growth. The government talks of China becoming an “intelligent society” by 2035.

It seems that China’s leaders are even more committed to making AI succeed than in the major economies of the West, where there are sceptical voices about what it can deliver in new discoveries, higher productivity and profitability.  To me, the difference is that in China there is a plan to meet key targets in technology that will boost the whole economy etc, while in the major capitalist economies, all the AI eggs are in a basket owned by the privately-owned AI hyperscalers and the Magnificent Seven giant tech media companies – and for them, profitability is key, not technology outcomes.

China enters the Year of the Donkey in 2026 and a new five-year plan having achieved mostly what it set out to do in the previous plan. China looks set to achieve 5% real GDP growth in 2025, and while its annual real GDP growth is no longer in double-digits, it is still growing twice as fast as the US economy, which managed 2.5% in 2025, at best, while the rest of the G7 economies struggled to expand by more than 1%.

According to the South China Morning Post, often a strong critic of China’s success, 86% of the 250 targets set in the previous national plan were met or exceeded. Depending on how you measure it, China’s GDP is close to surpassing that of the US and will, at current rates of growth, do so by the end of this new five-year plan.

China’s Western critics say that if you compare nominal GDP growth, which includes inflation, then US nominal GDP rose 5% in 2025, as much as China’s nominal rate. This shows that China is in a deflationary spiral that is weakening consumer spending and lowering investment growth.  Many Western mainstream economists argue that ‘moderate’ inflation is good for an economy. If there is deflation (falling prices), then consumers may spend less on goods and services and save their money in the hope that prices will fall further, and so economic growth will slow. 

Sure, hyper or accelerating inflation is bad news because people’s living standards will dive, the argument goes. But what is good is ‘moderate and steady’ inflation for capitalist enterprises to give them room to raise prices to maintain profits. This argument should apply to China too. But it does not apply to average households in the US, Europe and now Japan, facing unending rises in prices of essential goods, while in China prices are steady and even falling.

Why are prices not rising in China? Apparently, it is all to do with ‘involution’. Veteran ‘China watcher’, American economist Stephen Roach explains that persistent deflation in prices in China reflects involution (in Chinese, “neijuan” (内卷), referring to price declines arising from disorderly, overly-aggressive competition in several key industries.  Prices are falling because competition among producers of vehicles, solar panels, batteries etc is too strong! And yet we are always told in mainstream economics that competition is good.

According to Roach and other Western observers, including many on the left, without greater consumer demand, the Chinese economy remains at risk of falling into a Japanese-like quagmire of falling prices and rising debt. Like Japan during the late 1980s and early 1990s, China’s mounting debts suggests that the possibility of a prolonged balance sheet recession.  The spectre of ‘Japanification’ appears.  In a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, economists Scott Davis and Brendan Kelly argue that “there’s mounting evidence of ‘zombie lending’ in China, banks rolling over bad loans to unprofitable firms and allowing the status quo to continue rather than recognize losses.” They assert, “the current experience in China mirrors that of Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. Rapid growth in private sector debt—also fueled by domestic savings—was followed by the appearance of zombie lending. In Japan, that zombie lending led to the inefficient allocation of capital and decreased productivity, especially in sectors shielded from foreign competition.”

And IMF chief Georgieva pivots towards the “Japanification” risk, urging Beijing to let unviable property developers fail, if needed. “We have been urging more attention for closure on this problem,” Georgieva explained. “We call them ‘zombie firms.’ Let the zombies go away.” This is an interesting policy proposal for China, considering that in the global financial crash of 2008, the IMF and Western governments opted for bailing out the banks and sustaining ‘quantitative easing to drip feed unprofitable ‘zombie’ companies that are still crawling along today.  Apparently, it’s one policy for the capitalist economies of the West and another for China.

The property slump has been severe in China.  It is no bad thing, however, for property prices to fall sharply so that housing becomes more affordable.  The solution from here must be an expansion of public housing, not more private development. It’s true that China’s debt leverage ratios have surged in past decades, but they are manageable, especially as most of the debt is concentrated in local government sectors and so can be bailed out by central government.  And China has a state banking system, state-owned companies and massive FX reserves to cover any losses. 

And China is not stagnating like Japan. Take productivity growth. Even though China’s growth in labour productivity has slowed in the last two decades, it is still more than four times higher than in the US and six times higher than in Japan. Why has China succeeded in avoiding slumps, including the Great Recession and in the pandemic? Why has it motored ahead with unprecedented growth rates in such a large economy, while other large so-called emerging economies like Brazil or even India have failed to close the gap with the major advanced capitalist economies?

It’s because, although China has a large capitalist sector, mainly based in the consumer goods and services sectors, it also has the largest state sector in any major economy, covering finance and key manufacturing and industrial sectors, with a national plan guiding and directing both state enterprises and the private sector on where to invest and what to produce. Any slump in its private sector is compensated for by increased investment and production in the state sector – profit does not rule, social objectives do. The Chinese state owns a slight majority (55%) of the total capital of all companies. 

But Western mainstream argument, echoed by some on the Marxist left, continues: China must end its high investment strategy, reduce its export expansion and revert to boosting domestic consumption, just as the major economies of the West have done.  Sonali Jain-Chandra, a top IMF ‘China’ economist, argues that the key is to accelerate “reforms to rebalance demand toward consumption and further open the service sector, which can promote sustainable growth and help create jobs.” While “China’s economic development over the last several decades has been remarkable,” it “has relied too much on investment as opposed to consumption,” Jain-Chandra says.

But has a consumer-led strategy worked well for the major Western economies? Anyway, it is not true that China’s economy is growing at the expense of household consumption. A low consumption to GDP ratio does not necessarily mean low consumption growth.  China’s consumption growth has been way faster than the consumer-led economies of the West. A recent study by Richard Baldwin, found that China may have operated an export-led model up to 2006, but since then, domestic sales have boomed, so that China’s exports to GDP ratio has actually fallen. “Chinese consumption of Chinese manufactured goods has grown faster than Chinese production for almost two decades. Far from being unable to absorb the production, Chinese domestic consumption of made-in-China goods has grown MUCH faster than the output of China’s manufacturing sector.”  So much for ‘over-capacity or ‘involution’. Private consumptiongrowth in China has been much faster than in the major economies, precisely because of faster economic growth driven by faster investment growth. I repeat from previous posts: investment leads consumption over time, not vice versa, as mainstream economics thinks about economies.

Yes, China’s goods trade surplus with the rest of the world is large, reaching $1trn.  But it also runs a $100m deficit in services trade, and its overall current account surplus as a share of GDP is no higher than that of Japan and Germany, at about 4-5% of GDP. Contrary to accusations of China’s “mercantilist determination to sell but not to buy,” the country has remained the world’s second-largest importer for 16 consecutive years.

The real problem for the major economies of the West is that China is increasingly outcompeting them in advanced industrial sectors. 

Between 2005-2025, growth in Chinese output per hour worked has dwarfed that anywhere else, if still behind the US and the major capitalist economies in the level of productivity.

The irony is that the mainstream economists in the West continually tell us that China’s economy is slowing to a crawl and heading for Japanese-style stagnation and may even crash in a debt-fuelled spiral.  And yet they also tell us that China has ‘too much’ capacity and is suffering from ‘involution’, causing falling prices and flooding world markets with cheap goods that threaten the market shares of the major economies. So China must reverse its policy of high investment in manufacturing and become a consumer-led economy.  But if China is heading for stagnation and/or collapse, then surely the Western economic model will triumph, will it not?