Original in Portuguese: https://criticadesapiedada.com.br/2026/01/06/notas-sobre-a-invasao-da-venezuela-pelos-estados-unidos-critica-desapiedada/
On 3 January 2026, the United States launched military strikes on Venezuelan territory and subsequently seized Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, removing them from the country under the pretext of “law enforcement,” citing allegations such as drug trafficking and narco-terrorism. However, statements from the White House inadvertently revealed the operation’s underlying purpose: Trump declared that the US planned to “administer” Venezuela for a period of time and exploit its oil resources as a means of stabilisation and a supposed “new beginning.”
This is not a minor detail; it is the key to interpreting the intervention. When an imperialist power enters a country, carries out bombings, captures its head of state, and openly announces political tutelage and the plundering of energy resources, we are not dealing with a routine police action fit for a daily headline. What we are witnessing is an outright military intervention, conducted through the methods of war. In capitalism, such military intervention functions as a strategy for the accelerated resolution of contradictions that can no longer be contained through diplomacy or economic blockades.
1) Anti-imperialism is not ‘anti-American’: it is anti-capitalist
Reducing anti-imperialism to a simple “anti-US” position falls into a double trap. First, because imperialism is not a moral, cultural, or psychological trait of a particular state, but rather a historical form of competition between nationally organized capitals. In this dynamic, nation-states, capital, and military apparatuses are interwoven to secure markets, strategic routes, raw materials, technology, monetary control, and geopolitical dominance. While the United States remains the principal pole of “legitimate” international violence, this does not negate or diminish the existence of other imperialist centres—some already consolidated, others in the process of consolidation—with their own power networks, logistical chains, and financial mechanisms. Together, these structures form a veritable armed cartography of surplus-value appropriation.
Second, the “anti-American” reading is often accompanied by an ideological package that obscures class relations. Concepts such as “national sovereignty,” “self-determination of peoples,” and “defence of democracy” are mobilised abstractly, displacing the conflict from the material terrain of exploitation to a moral and legal plane. The nation is invoked to conceal social classes; “the people” are invoked to dissolve the proletariat as a historically revolutionary class; democracy is exalted to naturalise the political form of capital. In practice, this discourse ends up defending local (national) capital, its institutional expression in the state, and its internal fractions—as if a weaker, “peripheral” bourgeoisie were an antidote to imperialism, when in reality it constitutes one of its essential gears.
The result is a grotesque inversion: sectors that claim to be revolutionary end up choosing between a “good” and “bad” imperialism”, as if exploitation could acquire a moral or religious character depending on the flag under which it is carried out. What changes in this arrangement is not the plunder itself, but merely the administrator of the plunder.
This trap runs even deeper because it displaces the conflict from social class relations to the terrain of geopolitics. By reducing imperialism to a specific feature of US foreign policy, the logic that produces it is left intact. Capitalism appears neutral, while violence is portrayed as a contingent deviation. Yet it is precisely the permanent need to secure markets, guarantee access to strategic raw materials, control financial flows, and discipline the workforce that drives capitalist states toward expansion, war, and territorial guardianship. Violence is not an exception—it is a mechanism for regulating the global reproduction and redistribution of surplus value.
From this standpoint, China’s rise and the reassertion of Russian power do not represent a rupture with imperialism, but rather an internal redistribution of its centres of domination. Confusing a shift in hegemonic poles with the overcoming of imperialist logic is a recurring error. China’s expansion is not guided by “Global South” solidarity, but by the imperatives of accumulation: securing energy supplies, controlling trade routes, and stabilising production chains. Likewise, Russia’s actions in its regional sphere cannot be explained by “cultural defence,” but by its struggle for survival as a regional power within the framework of global competition. The centre may change, but the mechanism remains the same.
It is at this point that the ideological package reappears in full force. “Sovereignty,” “self-determination,” and “democracy” become mystifying categories when detached from class relations. The “sovereignty” being defended is that of the state as an apparatus of capital, not the autonomy of the proletariat over the conditions of its own existence. The “self-determination” invoked is that of the abstract nation-state, not the self-determination of the proletariat as an exploited but potentially revolutionary class. The “democracy” celebrated is bourgeois democracy—entirely compatible with exploitation, alienation, and repression, so long as they are administered through legal means.
In this way, hollow anti-imperialist rhetoric ends up legitimising fragile national bourgeoisies, capitalist states, and even autocratic projects, all cloaked in the language of external resistance. The working class is confronted with a false dilemma: submit to foreign imperialism or align itself with national capital. In both cases, it loses. The weaker capitalist state appears as a shield, when in reality it functions as a transmission belt for exploitation, negotiating its subordinate position with Washington, Beijing, or Moscow.
This inversion politically disarms the proletariat by redirecting its struggle against capital toward the sphere of global geopolitics. It leads to the defence of “necessary” sanctions, “progressive” bombings, or “anti-imperialist” repression—so long as they are carried out by the supposedly correct bloc. The result is an anti-imperialism without anti-capitalism, incapable of breaking with the logic that produces both imperialism and its wars.
A consistent anti-imperialism requires a rupture with this trap and must, above all, be anti-capitalist, revolutionary, and internationalist. It is not defined by choosing between blocs, but by maintaining class independence from all states and capitals. US imperialism must continue to be denounced as an aggressive foreign policy and a systematic project of plunder, tutelage, and violence, driven by the recomposition of its declining hegemony.
At the same time, anti-capitalism can only be meaningfully affirmed by opposing the other imperialist poles as well—including China and Russia—and the economic, financial, and military circuits that sustain them. The rivalry between blocs is not a contest between emancipatory projects, but a struggle for dominance over the global mass of surplus value. When criticism is limited to a single pole, it ends up naturalising the others and opening the door to new forms of alliance between states. Multipolarity, far from signifying international justice, more often means the multiplication of conflict zones and shifting alliances, especially within subordinate capitalist countries.
The anti-capitalist position also requires breaking with the illusion of the “peripheral” (or “dependent”) state as an anti-imperialist apparatus. In the Venezuelan case, the local bourgeoisie and its state machinery, under Bolivarian rhetoric, presented themselves as forces of resistance to imperialism, positioning the state as a supposed mediator between capital and the working class. Recent experience has clearly exposed this contradiction. What was once framed as “revolutionary” discourse became government discourse; government discourse became a policy of repression against the lower classes; and repression has now been consolidated as a permanent strategy of social control. The uncritical defence of this “peripheral state” in the name of an illusory national sovereignty merely changes the language while preserving the fundamental logic of capital: the instrumentalisation of the proletarian class in the service of accumulation.
Furthermore, the Venezuelan case reveals a broader problem: the refusal of sectors of the “left” (particularly within the progressive bloc) to maintain class independence in situations of inter-imperialist dispute, followed by the abandonment of that position by ambiguous and fragile sectors of the revolutionary bloc. When critique dissolves into the logic of the “lesser evil,” it loses sight of a fundamental truth: for the proletariat, there is no lesser evil in choosing between competing projects of domination. There are only different ways of enduring the same misery.
2) What is Maduro’s government: neoliberalism and increased militarisation
“The succession of ‘socialist’ governments [Chávez and Maduro] and their present crisis can only be understood—and criticised—by recognising that the socialism in question is, without doubt, a form of bourgeois ‘socialism’. It is social democracy establishing its own ‘workers’ governments’, proclaiming national sovereignty, defending the national economy, and claiming to govern on behalf of the very class it subjugates. Thus, through nationalisations, vast oil revenues, an enormous bureaucracy, intense nationalism and populism, and a mixture of repression and concessions for the majority of the proletariat, the Bolivarian revolution takes shape, with Venezuela becoming the bastion of the much-vaunted Socialism of the 21st Century.”
The myth of the left falls apart with Maduro – La Oveja Negra Newsletter
The imperialist nature of US intervention does not automatically render Maduro’s government anti-imperialist. This binary logic is one of the most effective mechanisms for dismantling materialist criticism, as it forces a false choice between distinct but politically convergent apparatuses of domination. In the Venezuelan case, this trap obscures the essential point: the country’s recent political and financial crisis reflects the reorganisation of a rentier state under the global conditions of integral accumulation—not the external blockage of a socialist transition.
Extreme dependence on oil revenues has not been overcome but rather pushed to its limits. The Venezuelan state now operates through new political-military and business alliances that are deeply vulnerable to global market fluctuations and inter-imperialist rivalries. Falling oil prices and international sanctions do not, by themselves, explain the regime’s fragility; they merely accelerate and expose pre-existing contradictions: productive weakness, massive reliance on imports, systemic corruption, and the capture of public funds by political-military networks.
In this context, the containment of class struggle no longer occurs through the expansion of rights, but through a combination of targeted assistance, territorial control, and repression. “Populist” social policies have been replaced by selective survival mechanisms—emergency and conditional programmes designed to manage scarcity and maintain minimal conditions of reproduction. In Venezuela, this dynamic is embodied in the Local Supply and Production Committees (CLAP) and the Carnet de la Patria, which regulate access to subsidised food and monetary benefits amid wage collapse and hyperinflation.
Far from constituting universal social policies, these mechanisms operate intermittently, unevenly across territories, and through political mediation. They produce continuous material dependence and transform daily survival into a tool of state control. At the same time, the militarisation of everyday life has been consolidated as a method of governance, whether through direct military involvement in food distribution and commodity circulation or through expanded territorial control in working-class neighbourhoods. Political repression is justified as the defence of the “revolution” or “national sovereignty,” reclassifying mass protest as a political threat and completing a system of discipline in which the lower classes are trapped between material dependence and political fear.
The Venezuelan diaspora is a direct expression of this process. With nearly 7.7 million people having left the country since 2014—around 20% of the population—mass migration reveals the limits of accumulation within this territory and the form of Venezuela’s insertion into the global division of labour. It exposes the state’s growing inability to guarantee even the minimum conditions for the reproduction of labour power. This is not simply a matter of “escaping the blockade,” but of a profound disorganisation of social life: wages lose meaning, work becomes precarious, and survival increasingly depends on remittances, informality, or forced displacement.
This dynamic signals the mounting incapacity of Venezuelan capital and its state to sustain the reproduction of the workforce, leading to its expulsion as a survival strategy for ever-broader sectors of the population. Large-scale migration does not eliminate accumulation; it reorganises it regressively—shrinking the internal productive base, deepening precarious labour, and reinforcing dependence on remittances and external circuits of social reproduction.
Politically, the institutional closure after 2017 is not a temporary episode but marks the consolidation of an autocratic arrangement designed to stabilise capitalist reproduction. Repression against critics, opponents, and sectors of civil society has intensified, affecting both progressive and revolutionary forces. This is accompanied by the hollowing out of bourgeois institutions, which increasingly function as mere façades—elections included. The defence of the “revolution” has gradually become the defence of the state apparatus and factions of the local ruling class.
It is within this framework that so-called “21st-century socialism” operates as an ideology of legitimation. It promised socialisation but preserved private property in state form; promised popular power while concentrating decision-making in the hands of the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy; promised rupture but merely reorganised exploitation. The emergence of the boliburguesía is not a moral deviation, but the logical outcome of a project that never broke with the state as a private instrument of accumulation. The lower classes bear the cost of this arrangement through inflation, precarity, repression, and forced migration.
3) What the United States seeks in Venezuela: oil, regional power and a show of force
“More importantly, not one American service member was killed, and not a single piece of American equipment was lost […] The United States military is the strongest and most formidable fighting force on Earth by far. Our enemies can scarcely imagine our capabilities. We have the finest equipment in the world.”
“As everyone knows, Venezuela’s oil industry has collapsed for years. Production fell to almost nothing compared to what it should have been. We will bring in our largest U.S. oil companies – the biggest in the world – to invest billions of dollars and repair the severely damaged oil infrastructure. We will restore production so the nation can generate real revenue again.”
Excerpts from Donald Trump’s press conference following the attack on Venezuela (03/01/26)
The explicit link between territorial control and oil reveals something essential: the intervention is not an exceptional response to an “authoritarian deviation,” but the continuation of a long-standing policy of energy control and state discipline. When Trump speaks of “temporary control” tied to oil exploitation, he merely makes public what has been operating for years through the technical mechanisms of sanctions, licences, and legal exemptions. Venezuelan oil is not simply a commodity; it is a geopolitical instrument, a lever of pressure and a bargaining chip in the struggle for energy hegemony amid global reconfiguration.
The sanctions regime imposed by the United States constitutes a class offensive, as Jamie Merchant argues. These measures serve the interests of the US transnational bourgeoisie, guided by a global strategy aimed at strengthening its position against rival bourgeoisies while simultaneously imposing its agenda on workers across multiple countries. The result is a series of adjustments favourable to US capitalist dominance.
Through the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Washington determines who may produce, sell, transport, and receive Venezuelan oil, as well as when and under what conditions. The pattern of licences granted and withdrawn over recent years demonstrates that the goal was never to fully “isolate” Venezuela, but rather to subject it to a regime of managed dependence—one in which the Venezuelan state can survive only insofar as it accepts negotiations on externally imposed terms. Military intervention thus appears as the radicalisation of a form of control already exercised through financial and legal channels.
This shift acquires broader significance when Venezuela’s geopolitical position is taken into account. The country occupies a strategic location in the Caribbean, connects to the northern Amazon, and directly shapes regional migration flows. Over recent decades, it has also become a site of economic and diplomatic penetration by China and Russia in Latin America. The intervention, therefore, is not aimed solely at a particular government, but at the regional reconfiguration of power. It sends an unequivocal message: Latin America remains a priority zone of US domination, where strategic deviations—such as alliances with China—will not be tolerated.
In this sense, the operation functions as a regional warning. It instructs nation-states on the permissible limits of autonomy and signals which alliances will be punished. More than toppling a government, the objective is to reaffirm the United States’ capacity for direct— even military—intervention at a moment when its global dominance is increasingly contested. Violence here is not merely a means; it is a direct and effective message.
So-called “legal cynicism” plays a decisive role in this process. Framing the intervention as a “detention operation” based on criminal charges exemplifies the instrumentalisation of law as post hoc justification. International law becomes complicit: it is invoked selectively and retroactively to provide a veneer of legitimacy to a fait accompli. When legal experts point to the absence of congressional authorisation and the fragility of the legal arguments, what emerges is the complete subordination of legality to reasons of state and the interests of capital.
This logic is not new, but its explicitness is revealing. It indicates that, at the current stage of capitalism, the distance between force and norm is closing. Legality ceases to function as a constraint and becomes a form of discourse, activated according to strategic convenience. Bourgeois morality no longer even needs to persuade; it is sufficient to impose and then rationalise.
Ultimately, this panorama reinforces a central point: the intervention cannot be understood as a specific response to Maduro, nor as a moral crusade against autocracy. It expresses a violent reaction to the relative decline of US hegemony in a context of intensified inter-imperialist competition. Oil, territory, and the display of force converge within a single movement—to ensure that, despite its erosion, the United States continues to determine who governs, how they govern, and in whose interests across the region.
For the Venezuelan and Latin American working class, this means only one thing: deepening instability, intensified exploitation, and the militarisation of everyday life. The ideological discourse of “legality” and “democracy” merely camouflages the fundamental reality: this is an operation of power, driven by the interests of capital, in which violence remains the ultimate argument.
4) The meaning of imperialism today: regional conflicts and competition for the global market
The notion of generalised war should not be understood as the immediate announcement of a single, continuous global conflict, such as an imminent Third World War akin to the two great wars of the 20th century. Today, local wars take the form of diffuse, permanent, and staggered military conflicts, which may eventually coalesce into two large imperialist blocs. What is becoming generalised is not necessarily the theatre of operations, but the logic of local, regional, and proxy warfare as a common strategy for redistributing power. This is a fragmented war, spread across multiple territories with varying intensity, yet guided by the same principle: to resolve by force contradictions that can no longer find a stable solution in economics or diplomacy.
The relative decline of the dominant power does not imply an immediate loss of capacity for destruction or intervention. On the contrary, historically, moments of relative decline often produce more aggressive responses, as violence comes to function as a tool for containing the erosion of dominance. The rise of new powers does not take place on neutral ground, but within an already hierarchical global market, where every advance shifts established interests. The disputes between blocs of capitalist states are therefore not only economic or technological; they translate into concrete territorial conflicts, where boundaries, alliances, and military capacities are tested.
The reorganisation of imperialist powers, global chains, and technological control intensifies this process. Capitalism relies on highly concentrated critical infrastructures: semiconductors, energy, data, logistics, maritime routes. The struggle over these strategic nodes transforms entire territories into geopolitical assets. Wars and interventions are no longer only about borders; they are about circuits. Controlling a port, an energy route, airspace, or logistics corridor is equivalent to controlling flows of value on a global scale.
Financialisation and indebtedness complete this picture. Debt functions as a tool of indirect control, subordinating states and populations to agendas of adjustment, privatisation, and liberalisation. When this mechanism falters—whether through insolvency, political instability, or social resistance—coercion tends to shift from the financial to the military sphere. War thus appears as the violent continuation of economic discipline, enforcing by force what credit can no longer impose.
In this context, local and regional wars function as laboratories of contemporary domination. They are used to test weapons, military doctrines, forms of information control, states of emergency, surveillance technologies, and models of post-conflict economic reconstruction. Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, and Venezuela are not isolated anomalies, but concentrated expressions of a broader process. Each reflects, in its own way, the same trend: transforming political and social crises into opportunities for strategic repositioning.
The ideological language accompanying these conflicts plays a crucial role. Terms such as “democracy,” “security,” and “the fight against terrorism” function as devices of legitimisation, capable of mobilising public opinion, neutralising criticism, and depoliticising violence. By reducing wars to moral crusades, their material purpose is concealed: control of energy, trade routes, currencies, territories, and populations. Morality serves to hide the economics of war.
Reading these conflicts as moments in a single trend allows us to move beyond episodic or moralistic interpretations. War, in contemporary capitalism, is neither an accident nor a product of irrationality: it is a mechanism of destructive regulation, capable of reorganising hierarchies, eliminating surpluses, redefining alliances, and conquering entire regions. The human cost—the deaths, the displacement, the misery—is not an unwanted side effect, but a constitutive element of the process.
Insisting that war is not a deviation from capitalism, but one of its operating strategies, restores critical perspective. As long as analysis remains confined to geopolitical choices or the moral intentions of nation-states, the essential point is lost: it is the very logic of capital accumulation that periodically demands open violence.
5) The immediate impact on the Venezuelan working class: between the ‘external saviour’ and the ‘patriotic ruler’
The promise of “liberation” is a central element of war propaganda, not mere rhetorical excess. It turns violence into morality, destruction into historical necessity, and death into legitimate sacrifice. By framing intervention as a mission to free “a people from an authoritarian regime,” imperialism shifts the analytical focus: war is no longer read as a redistribution of power, but as a moral enterprise. Yet the gap between discourse and reality is systematic: the proclaimed liberation never concerns the material conditions of the working class, but the replacement of one political arrangement with another that better serves external interests.
The most immediate effect of this operation is increased material insecurity. Wars and interventions disrupt supply chains, destroy infrastructure, drive up the cost of basic goods, and erode already fragile wages. Shock inflation is no accident: it results from deliberate disruption of economic flows and speculation amid instability. For the lower classes, daily life becomes a permanent struggle for survival, marked by uncertainty. Migration ceases to be a choice and becomes a compulsory strategy for enduring hardship.
At the same time, external intervention reshapes internal disputes within the ruling class. War does not dissolve the local bourgeoisie; it reorganises it. Military officers, technocrats, business importers, financial intermediaries, and illicit networks all compete for positions in the new arrangement of power. Some lose access to resources; others gain strength as mediators between external capital and the national state. This internal recomposition is often framed as a “democratic transition” or “institutional reconstruction,” yet its real function is the rearticulation of the local ruling class and its auxiliary strata. The proletariat participates only as labour to be exploited or as a disposable mass.
The invocation of a state of emergency completes this picture. In the face of intervention, both the attacked government and external bureaucrats use the emergency to suspend rights, restrict freedoms, and intensify social control. In Venezuela, emergency responses have historically meant increased surveillance, repression of dissent, and entrapment of the working class within the logic of national defence. The state of exception thus becomes the rule, and war begins to function as an accelerator of reactionary tendencies and mobilisation of the population against imaginary enemies, irrespective of who formally holds power.
Perhaps the most perverse aspect of this process is that the working class in Venezuela become political hostages. The external bourgeoisie exploits the suffering of the population to legitimise its intervention, presenting itself as a humanitarian saviour. The local bourgeoisie exploits the same suffering to demand loyalty, sacrifice, and silence in the name of the threatened homeland. In both discourses, the working class does not appear as an independent class, but as an exploited and alienated class. Its suffering is mobilised but its material demands are postponed indefinitely.
This double capture has profound political consequences: it disorganises class strength. Forced to choose between invader and ruler, the proletariat sees its struggle suspended in the name of a never-ending emergency. The internal conflict creates an exceptional period in which everything is indefinitely postponed: demands, self-organisation and collective struggle. External conflict becomes a mechanism of internal pacification.
In this sense, US intervention aims to reorganise state and regional domination, with the material costs falling almost entirely on the lower classes. War always redistributes costs and benefits unevenly: costs are socialised among workers and the unemployed, while benefits are captured by states and a reorganised capital.
Ultimately, the promise of liberation functions as a compensatory ideology. It offers moral meaning to material experiences of loss, fear, and destruction. Exposing this promise means rejecting the idea that state violence can ever be a path to emancipation.
6) Provisional conclusion[1]: the ‘wind of war’ as a strategy for social control
Maduro’s capture and open intervention are not an “excess” or a circumstantial policy decision; they mark a qualitative shift in how the United States is responding to its relative loss of hegemony. When traditional mechanisms of control—sanctions, blockades, diplomatic pressure, institutional mediation—fail to produce the desired effects, military force ceases to be an implicit threat and becomes a direct instrument of domination.
This move carries a fundamental contradiction: by resorting to overt force, the United States reaffirms its power while simultaneously revealing its structural fragility. Military intervention demonstrates capability but also shows that hegemony no longer relies solely on law, institutions, or markets. This dynamic encourages both symmetrical and asymmetrical responses from other imperialist powers, which accelerate militarisation, strengthen alliances, and secure spheres of influence. The result is a proliferation of tension, with local conflicts, power struggles, and greater instability.
In this scenario, violence intensifies and becomes increasingly pervasive in the lives of the lower classes. Militarised borders, increased surveillance, normalised states of emergency, and continued job insecurity accompany rising human displacement, with millions becoming refugees, forced migrants, or populations “under guardianship.” Everyday barbarism emerges as a slow, systematic erosion of living conditions, legitimised by discourses of security and emergency.
Two forms of blackmail operate simultaneously. The first is the blackmail of those who take up the defence of the “imperialist” side, demanding that the lower classes celebrate the invader as a liberator, and promising that external violence will bring democracy, prosperity, and rights. This promise is false: the intervention is not emancipatory but reorganises exploitation under new forms and mediators. Liberation is always conditional, selective, and subordinate to external capital.
The second is the blackmail of those who put forth the “nationalist” perspective, reflecting the interests of the local ruling class, for whom the proletariat is compelled to suspend class demands, sacrifice its life, and accept repression in the name of defending the homeland. Here, internal exploitation is naturalised as the cost of national sovereignty. The local bourgeoisie positions itself as the guardian of the nation, intensifying social control, silencing dissent, and using war as an instrument of internal pacification. Ordinary workers are called upon to die for a capitalist class that, in “normal” times, exploits them without hesitation.
These two forms of blackmail reinforce each other. The more aggressive the external intervention, the more effective the internal nationalist discourse; the more autocratic the state, the more legitimate the “liberating” rhetoric of imperialism appears. The proletariat is trapped between these forces—without representation, without autonomy, with no horizon beyond survival.
In this context, anti-capitalism expresses a strategic position against contemporary capitalism and its trajectory toward generalised war. It asserts that there is no emancipatory path in choosing between blocs or nation-states. The only perspective capable of breaking with barbarism lies in the resurgence of revolutionary proletarian politics, against all projects of domination, internal and external.
Here, the statement “the main enemy is at home” acquires revolutionary content. It is not inverted nationalism, but recognition that domination is organised through internal class relations. The local bourgeoisie—banking, industrial, military, and allied sectors—structures wage labour, seizes profits, controls territory, and defines the conditions for class reproduction. External imperialism does not act in a vacuum; it relies on, negotiates with, and reinforces these structures.
Anti-capitalism therefore does not stop at opposing external intervention; it rejects all forms of domination that make such intervention possible. It affirms that emancipation will not be brought about by wars between powers, tutelage by strong states, or the “lesser evil” among the blocs. Its reference point is the concrete working class, in its material conditions of existence under global capitalism. It re-situates workers’ struggle in the arena within which it could actually produce a revolutionary rupture: in the class fight against capital, its states, and its wars—whether under the US, Chinese, Russian, or Venezuelan flag.
7) The reorganisation of the dominance of the imperialist blocs: the US, China and Russia: what we must understand
“Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognizable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will.”
Rosa Luxemburg – The Junius Pamphlet (1915)
The current regime of accumulation—the integral regime—has gone through its cycle of dissolution and is now characterised by a global redistribution of imperialist domination, a direct consequence of the relative exhaustion of the so-called unipolar order consolidated after the end of the Cold War. What we are witnessing is not the decline of imperialism as a historical form of capital, but its mutation and recomposition into new, competing blocs, each of which articulates economic, military, technological, and political power over strategic regional spaces.
At the global level, two large imperialist blocs are emerging. On one side is the bloc led by the United States, which maintains its military and financial centrality, coordinates traditional alliances in Western Europe—particularly through NATO—and seeks to preserve hegemony over energy routes, financial markets, and historically subordinate regions, such as Latin America. On the other side is the bloc led by China, the principal emerging power, coordinating with states such as Russia and Iran, combining economic expansion, infrastructure investment, technological control, and military and energy alliances.
This polarisation should not be interpreted as a dispute between “civilisational models” or as a conflict between “democracy/fascism” and “autocracy/socialism.” It is, at its core, competition between capitals and states for the leadership of global capitalism. China’s rise, based on strong state intervention, control of strategic sectors, and external expansion through investment and credit, does not break with imperialist logic, but organises it in new forms. Similarly, Russia functions as a regional imperialist power, seeking to reaffirm influence in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space, using military power, energy, and strategic alliances to secure its position within the global pecking order.
At the regional level, this reorganisation becomes even clearer. In the Far East, China projects its hegemony over Southeast Asia and the Pacific, disputing trade routes, production chains, and political-military influence. In Eastern Europe, Russia asserts itself as a regional imperialist pole in direct conflict with the expansion of the Euro-Atlantic bloc, turning the region into a principal front of contemporary inter-imperialist war. In Latin America, the United States continues to treat the continent as a priority area of influence, not only for historical reasons, but because of its current strategic centrality: natural resources, biodiversity, energy, territorial control, and containment of China’s growing presence.
Recognising Latin America as a space of strategic interest requires understanding that it is not “on the margins” of global disputes, but a key territory for the hegemonic recomposition of the United States. The intensification of sanctions, direct interventions, institutional coups, political tutelage, and military presence must be read as part of a broader strategy to reaffirm US imperialist power in response to Chinese advances in the region, particularly through infrastructure, mining, energy, and logistics projects.
In this sense, the reorganisation of imperialist blocs does not signal a fairer “multipolar” world, but the multiplication of conflict zones, where weaker states become battlegrounds for the most advanced powers. The concrete outcome is not human emancipation, but deeper exploitation, militarisation, and political instability. Hegemony is being reshaped, but the underlying logic remains the same: capital in search of valorisation, increasingly mediated by armed force and open military intervention. Within this context, no nation-state can escape the pressures of inter-imperialist conflict, and a truly proletarian revolution must necessarily assert itself as a world revolution.
Critica Desapiedada (Brazil)
January 2026
Recommended Readings
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[1] Provisional closure means a temporary action, solution or mechanism. By ‘winds of war’ we mean that, as it is not yet known what will happen after the intervention in Venezuela, the fear of war is becoming the initial response to the action.
League of Internationalist Communists 