Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPM-K) Secretary General Booker Ngesa Omole in prison [Photo: CPM Marxist (Facebook)]
The Central Committee of the Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPM-K) has reported that its secretary general, Booker Ngesa Omole, was violently abducted on Monday in Isiolo town by the Kenya Police Service.
In a public statement February 24, the party wrote: “This was not an arrest. This was not lawful detention. This was a kidnapping.” Omole was “beaten severely. Tortured. Brutalised to near death. His tooth was broken. His finger was cut with a pen knife.” They state that after the assault he was “dumped at Mlolongo Police Station,” a facility associated with extrajudicial kidnappings and killings. His phone signal, they report, was traced there.
The party posted a photo of Omole in a Mlolongo Police Station cell February 25, explaining that he is being held unlawfully, “and the police have refused all access to him. No lawyers. No comrades. No family.”
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) denounces Omole’s abduction and demands that the Kenyan regime release him immediately.
That Omole was singled out by the “broad-based unity” government of President William Ruto—uniting the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) founded by the late political fixer Raila Odinga—is clear from the repeated and escalating character of the attacks against him and other CPM-K members. A year ago, he was targeted for assassination as part of a broader campaign of intimidation and repression directed at the party’s leadership.
The assassination attempt came days after the attempted abduction of CPM-K National Chairperson Mwaivu Kaluka in Mombasa—Kenya’s second-largest city—along with two other party members, by plain-clothes police officers. While Kaluka was eventually released, the operation came just weeks after a crackdown on the CPM-K following its national congress in November. At that time, Kaluka and former National Chairperson Kinuthia Ndungu—who had been beaten repeatedly and arrested 10 times—were detained at Central Police Station in Nairobi. No reason was given for their arrest.
The repression against the CPM-K is part of the escalating violence of the Ruto regime since he came to power in 2022. In 2023, Ruto’s first year in power, security forces killed at least 31 demonstrators. In June 2024, during the Gen Z protests against Ruto’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) Finance Bill that sought to impose savage tax hikes, police killed more than 60. In 2025, at least 50 were killed in protests and hundreds injured.
The abduction of Omole takes place amid an escalating campaign of repression against opposition figures in the run-up to next year’s elections. Weeks ago, police violently dispersed a rally in Kitengela organised by the former and expelled the general secretary of ODM, Senator Edwin Sifuna, firing tear gas and live rounds at thousands of supporters. One of the victims, 28-year-old Vincent Ayomo, was shot in the eye as he crossed the road from work and another 50 attendees were injured.
This deepening turn to repression unfolds against a backdrop of extreme social inequality and mounting economic hardship. Oxfam reports show that nearly half of Kenya’s population lives in extreme poverty, surviving on meagre daily incomes, even as wealth accumulates at the very top. A minuscule layer of the super-rich has amassed obscene fortunes: the richest 125 individuals now control more wealth than 77 percent of the population—over 42 million people.
Meanwhile, average real wages have fallen by 11 percent since 2020, the cost of food has surged by 50 percent over the same period, and household expenses for transport and energy remain punishingly high. Public services are deteriorating under the impact of IMF-dictated austerity and debt servicing, exposing millions to collapsing health, education and social support systems.
The trade union bureaucracy is backing this assault on the working class and rural masses. Francis Atwoli, Secretary General of the Central Organisation of Trade Unions (COTU), recently declared that workers should “support him [Ruto] and ignore the noise,” hailing him as the only leader capable of transforming Kenya into a “first-world” industrialised economy. “The only person who can take us to that level is none other than William Ruto,” Atwoli insisted, presenting the regime’s pro-capitalist agenda as the path to jobs and development.
Atwoli has openly backed Ruto’s violence on protesters after last year’s July 7, 2025 “Saba Saba” protest massacre, when security forces gunned down scores of protesters nationwide commemorating pro-democracy protests in the 1990s against the Western-backed Daniel Arap Moi regime. Speaking days after the bloodshed, Atwoli instructed young people to “forget about demonstrations, remain home, silent, and promote peace,” warning that protests were “scaring investors away.” He called on the government to take “firm measures to curb the unrest.”
By urging youth to stay off the streets while police deployed live ammunition, mass arrests and abductions, the trade union bureaucracy is providing political cover for state repression. It has made clear that it stands not with workers and youth facing austerity and bullets, but with the capitalist state and its demands for “stability” and investor confidence.
The attacks on the CPM-K, the abductions, arbitrary detentions and cross-border renditions to neighbouring Uganda under brutal dictator Yoweri Museveni, carried out by the Kenyan government, are political preparations for far broader assaults on the democratic rights of the population as a whole. What is being tested against one organisation today will be used tomorrow against striking workers, protesting youth and impoverished communities resisting austerity.
These events lay bare the grave dangers confronting the masses as social tensions intensify and the ruling elite closes ranks in defence of its wealth and power.
The turn to open repression in Kenya is being emboldened by the example set by would-be dictator Donald Trump in the United States. Thousands of armed ICE agents have been sent into major urban centres, while detention centres have been built across the country, with 66,000 people held in immigration custody—the highest level in US history. These crackdowns have left two American protesters killed.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron and the political establishment have exploited the death of fascist activist Quentin Deranque—following clashes around an event addressed by Rima Hassan of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed)—to whip up a reactionary campaign against the left. Backed by the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) and the Socialist Party, a broad political front is seeking to criminalise opposition and prepare the ground for an authoritarian shift in advance of next year’s presidential elections. As with Charlie Kirk in the US, the death of a fascist is being weaponised to strengthen the repressive powers of the state and legitimise far-right forces.
In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) government is deploying the army into townships under the pretext of restoring order. It follows the mass killings of protesters in Tanzania in the aftermath of last year’s elections, where thousands were reported killed or disappeared amid a brutal post-election crackdown, and the ongoing suppression of opposition forces in Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni.
These developments are expressions of a global crisis of capitalism. From Washington to Paris, Pretoria to Nairobi, ruling elites confront deepening inequality, mass anger and political instability. Their common response is to fortify the police state apparatus, promote far-right forces and normalise violence against social opposition.
Workers and youth must draw the necessary conclusions. The defence of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the courts, the opposition factions of the bourgeoisie, or the trade union bureaucracy. Mass meetings, demonstrations and workplaces must establish their own defence committees to protect protesters from police violence and state-sanctioned gangs. Those targeted for repression must not be left isolated but defended collectively.
Above all, the working class must build its own independent political movement, rooted in factories, neighbourhoods and schools, and guided by an international socialist perspective. This means breaking from all parties and trade union apparatuses tied to the capitalist ruling class and uniting with workers across Africa and internationally in the struggle against imperialist domination, austerity and state repression. Only through the conscious mobilisation of the working class for socialist transformation can democratic rights be secured and defended.
The ICFI has well-documented and irreconcilable political differences with the CPM-K, which have been clearly presented in the World Socialist Web Site. But it unequivocally opposes this brutal attack on the organization’s general secretary, demands Omole’s immediate release, and calls for an end to all state threats and repressive acts against the CPM-K.
This political report for the week of February 15–21, 2026, is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org).
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, peaks standing between Alexander Sollfrank, right, Commander of the Operational Command and Carsten Breuer, Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, during his first visit to the Operational Command of the Bundeswehr in Brandenburg, Schwielowsee, Saturday, June 28, 2025. [AP Photo/Michael Kappeler/DPA via AP, Pool]
I. Imperialism and War
US War Preparations Against Iran
The most urgent development of the week is the accelerating US preparation for war against Iran. Washington drew up plans for “leadership change” and “targeting of individuals” in any Iran strike, while US forces were repositioned in the region in readiness for what military planners described as a “sustained, weeks-long” campaign.[1] The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group was already operational in the Arabian Sea and the USS Gerald R. Ford — the world’s largest warship — transited the Strait of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean. More than 50 fighter jets, two carrier strike groups and dozens of refueling tankers were deployed.[2]
Trump and Netanyahu held a three-hour war council at the White House to coordinate strategy.[3] European imperialist powers — Britain, Germany and others — lined up behind regime-change in Tehran. This is not a bilateral US-Iran crisis but an expression of inter-imperialist competition for regional dominance, energy resources and geostrategic control. The working class internationally must oppose this war drive through mass mobilisation, linking anti-war demands to opposition to the domestic austerity imposed to finance rearmament.
Gaza: Slaughter Continues Amid Diplomatic Theatre
Israeli air strikes killed 12 Palestinians on the eve of Trump’s “Board of Peace” meeting — a cynical exercise in diplomatic theatre that masks Washington’s unconditional backing for genocide. Eyewitness testimony from Gaza published during the week, recounting the brutal killing of a Palestinian child and the systematic denial of medical care, cuts through every abstraction and exposes the class basis of imperialist violence. More than 100 international film artists condemned the Berlinale festival for censoring artists who oppose Israel’s actions, while Germany’s parliament president conducted an embedded visit to Gaza, signalling Berlin’s endorsement of the genocidal campaign. European institutions are not neutral bystanders — they are complicit partners in imperialist crime.
Militarisation of Europe
The heads of British and German armed forces called this week for “whole-of-society” mobilisation and massive increases in defence spending, demanding that Europe’s populations be made ready for war. Factories in ailing industrial regions of Berlin are being repurposed for military weapons production. This is a declaration of class war: rearmament will be paid for by workers through wage cuts, service reductions and political repression. The working class must respond with international anti-war mobilisation and rank-and-file committees to resist the austerity that militarisation demands.
II. Authoritarian Consolidation and State Repression
ICE: Spearhead for Dictatorship
ICE raids intensified across the United States during the week. Masked ICE agents conducted operations outside GM’s Factory Zero in Detroit; two Amazon Flex drivers were abducted during enforcement actions; a two-month-old infant was deported after falling gravely ill in a south Texas detention facility; and a former Cass Tech student, Alcides Caceres, was held in what lawyers described as an illegal “domestic Guantánamo.” Immigration attorney Eric Lee warned that the mass detention infrastructure being constructed by the Trump administration is the spearhead of a broader drive toward authoritarianism and domestic dictatorship.
Pennsylvania high school students who walked out in protest against ICE operations were met with violent police repression. The UAW bureaucracy remained silent as agents operated outside Factory Zero. This silence is not accidental — it reflects the union apparatus’s accommodation to state and employer power. The defence of immigrant workers is inseparable from the defence of the entire working class, and requires workplace committees prepared to shut down production in defence of coworkers.
Trump’s Assault on Democratic Rights
Trump signalled plans for an executive order restricting voting procedures ahead of midterm elections. The jailing of a former South Korean president for coup-related offences, contrasted with Trump’s continued occupation of the White House, illustrates the decomposition of bourgeois democratic forms under the weight of capitalist crisis. These are not isolated authoritarian manoeuvres — they form part of a systematic consolidation of executive power that requires mass, independent working-class political resistance, including preparedness for a general strike.
State Repression Internationally
In Hungary, German anti-fascist Maja T. was sentenced to eight years in prison in a politically orchestrated show trial. France’s mainstream politics lurched further right following the death of a prominent fascist figure. The ANC government in South Africa moved to deploy the army domestically to suppress worker unrest. Russia banned WhatsApp. The Albanese Labor government in Australia moved to bar women and children interned in Syria from returning home. France’s human rights commission documented torture, mass detentions and systematic discrimination against the Kanak people during 2024 unrest in New Caledonia. The common thread is the international capitalist class reaching for repression as its preferred instrument of social management.
III. Global Economy and Corporate Restructuring
IMF Presses China; Inter-Imperialist Economic Rivalry Sharpens
The IMF this week called on China to halve industrial subsidies from 4 to 2 percent of GDP and pivot from export-led manufacturing to domestic consumption, warning of international “spillovers” from China’s growing trade surplus and rising share of global manufacturing. Beijing rejected the framing, defending its competitiveness as innovation-driven — signalling that no major course correction will follow and that economic confrontation, above all with Washington, will intensify. The IMF’s prescriptions are not neutral technical advice but coordinated imperialist pressure to constrain China’s industrial rise. Workers in China and internationally must reject both IMF-dictated restructuring and nationalist protectionism as twin instruments of rival capitalist classes.
Wages, Jobs and Corporate Profits
The week’s economic reporting exposed the class content of the global “cost of living crisis” with precision. In Australia, new data confirmed real wages have fallen to their lowest level in 15 years — nominal growth of 3.4 percent against inflation of 3.8 percent — while major corporations simultaneously announced record profits and accelerated job cuts. Volkswagen announced plans to impose a 20 percent cost reduction across all its brands by 2028, equivalent to €60 billion annually, with entire plant closures envisaged — an escalation beyond the 35,000 job cuts and real wage reductions of up to 18 percent already certified by IG Metall in December 2024. UPS simultaneously prepared a second round of driver buyouts ahead of 30,000 planned layoffs in 2026, while the Los Angeles Unified School District moved to eliminate hundreds of positions. The US Department of Labor’s annual tally recorded 5,070 workers killed on the job in 2024 — not accidents but the structural outcome of deregulation, staffing cuts and production speedups driven by the profit motive, with union bureaucracies and weakened regulators normalising lethal conditions. In Argentina, Javier Milei’s Labour Modernisation Law — slashing protections and facilitating mass layoffs — passed despite a national general strike, as the CGT and allied bureaucracies deliberately confined action to a symbolic 24-hour stoppage. India’s BJP budget raised defence spending by approximately 15 percent while cutting the share of social expenditure and shifting rural relief costs onto cash-strapped states, combining military build-up with attacks on workers’ rights through new labour “reforms.”
Militarisation of Production and Civilian Infrastructure
The economic offensive is inseparable from the drive toward war. In Berlin, factories in declining industrial regions are being bought up and retooled for military weapons production. Walter Reed military hospital formalised an agreement with Kaiser Permanente to coordinate mass-casualty care for future wars — the subordination of civilian healthcare to military contingency planning. Veolia, the multinational water services corporation, was implicated in New Zealand’s wastewater crisis, exposing how the privatisation of essential infrastructure produces environmental disaster and social harm. Across every sector, the picture is the same: capital extracts record profits, destroys jobs, slashes wages, converts civilian production to military ends — and charges the working class for it all. The working class must reject the austerity that funds militarism, build independent rank-and-file committees to resist corporate restructuring, and link these struggles across borders and sectors into a unified international movement.
IV. Austerity and Economic Warfare
India: Guns Before Butter
The BJP government’s 2026–27 budget raised defence spending by approximately 15 percent while cutting the share of social spending and shifting rural relief costs to debt-ridden states. Corporate subsidies and infrastructure CAPEX were expanded alongside labour “reforms” that erode workers’ rights. The budget encapsulates capitalism’s response to global strategic instability: privilege military capacity and corporate accumulation while attacking living standards. The tens of millions who joined a one-day national strike against Modi’s class war assault the prior week demonstrated the scale of mass anger — but the Stalinist-led federations channelled that energy toward bourgeois electoral alternatives rather than independent working-class struggle.
In Argentina, a 24-hour general strike failed to halt the passage of Javier Milei’s Labour Modernisation Law, which slashes worker protections and facilitates mass layoffs.[4] The CGT and allied bureaucracies deliberately bottled up the struggle, enabling the ruling class to ram through anti-labour reforms that constitute the most sweeping attack on working-class rights in decades. The lesson is unambiguous: a single-day strike controlled by bureaucracies that refuse to paralyse production is not a general strike — it is a safety valve.
Volkswagen: 20 Percent Cost Reduction Across All Brands
Volkswagen announced a corporate plan to cut costs by 20 percent across all brands, threatening plant closures, job losses and intensified speed-ups. Co-management institutions and union bureaucracies will facilitate these cuts unless workers build rank-and-file committees to coordinate cross-plant resistance and international solidarity across global supply chains.
Falling Real Wages and Public Service Collapse
Real wages continued to fall in Australia. Seven Los Angeles County public health clinics announced the end of clinical services. The Los Angeles school district moved to eliminate hundreds of positions. Washington D.C. declared a public emergency after a major sewer collapse. The US Department of Labor reported 5,070 workers killed on the job in 2024 — an annual death toll that reflects not accidents but the structural outcome of capitalism’s drive for profit under conditions of deregulation and staffing cuts.
V. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal
US Healthcare: The Central Arena of Struggle
The Kaiser Permanente strike of 31,000 healthcare workers entered its fourth week, with operating engineers from IUOE Local 501 joining the action, broadening the dispute to technical trades whose withdrawal threatens hospital functioning.[5] Nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian simultaneously defied the New York State Nurses Association’s attempt to impose a second sellout agreement through a rushed snap ratification vote. Rank-and-file nurses had overwhelmingly rejected the first tentative agreement — nearly 74 percent voted it down; the bureaucracy responded by engineering a second vote under conditions designed to maximise management-friendly outcomes and minimise membership oversight.[6]
These strikes reveal a healthcare system driven by profit, executive pay and marketisation. The decisive question is whether they remain fragmented or develop into a unified national fight. That depends on the construction of democratic rank-and-file committees across hospitals, unions and regions, capable of coordinating industrial strategy, enforcing strike discipline and expanding the struggle beyond the boundaries set by bureaucratic leaders.
Mexican Auto Parts Workers Occupy Plants
Workers at six First Brands maquiladora plants occupied factories across northern Mexico after mass shutdowns and the firing of over 4,000 employees, physically preventing the removal of machinery.[7] The occupations echo the historic sit-down strikes of the 1930s and demonstrate the willingness of workers to assert direct control over production. This struggle exposes the transnational integration of auto supply chains: UAW bureaucratic nationalism and employer collaboration must be broken by international rank-and-file coordination. UAW rank-and-file candidate Will Lehman publicly backed the occupations and linked them to his campaign for democratic restructuring of the union.[8]
San Francisco Teachers and the NYSNA Sellout
The UESF bureaucracy in San Francisco ended a four-day strike with a tentative agreement containing minimal raises, a no-strike clause, and acceptance of austerity parameters — while the district warned of imminent budget cuts and layoffs. In New York, the NYSNA forced a second snap vote on a contract for NewYork-Presbyterian nurses that fails to secure safe staffing or meaningful job protections. Both episodes exemplify the same dynamic: union bureaucracies choreograph controlled stoppages that dissipate militant momentum while accepting the fundamental terms of the employers’ austerity agenda.
BP Whiting Refinery Workers and the USW Betrayal
Workers at BP’s Whiting refinery, who voted 98 percent for strike authorisation, were left on the job under day-to-day extensions while the United Steelworkers International negotiated a national pattern deal in secret. Workers publicly denounced the union for isolating their facility. The USW’s pattern deals normalise concessions, fragment industrial power and prevent the coordinated national strike that alone can defend wages, jobs and safety.
Royal Mail: CWU as Industrial Enforcer
At Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant Mail Centre in London, workers circulated the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee statement exposing the CWU leadership’s role in implementing the Optimised Delivery Model — a restructuring scheme that extends delivery spans, intensifies workloads and entrenches two-tier pay. The CWU has disappeared into closed-door talks with management and the EP Group. The breakdown of service is not the result of operational difficulties but of deliberate asset-stripping backed by the union apparatus. The only path forward is democratically controlled rank-and-file committees that restore power to workers on the shop floor.
VI. Elite Criminality and Political Decay
The Epstein Files and the Monarchy
Former Prince Andrew was arrested on suspicion of Misconduct in Public Office after documents from the Jeffrey Epstein releases linked him to the sharing of confidential information and access with Epstein’s network. Searches were conducted at royal residences.[9] Further documents forced high-profile billionaires, corporate lawyers and executives to resign. US corporate media simultaneously framed public outrage over the files as “conspiracy theories,” protecting elite networks from accountability.[10]
The arrest and the ongoing revelations do not represent justice — they represent factional damage control within a decomposing ruling class. The Epstein files expose the intimate integration of the monarchy, the state and the global financial oligarchy.[11] Newly released documents also confirmed Noam Chomsky’s extensive personal accommodation with Epstein — travel on his plane, stays at his properties, private counsel during Epstein’s 2019 media crisis — exposing the capacity of sections of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia to be co-opted by the ruling class while posturing as moral critics.[12] The lesson: meaningful opposition to oligarchy cannot rest on celebrity dissent. It requires independent working-class organisation.
VII. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism
Fortress Europe: Social Democracy’s Capitulation
The European Parliament approved a revised Asylum Procedure Regulation and Return Border Procedure Regulation, creating an EU-level list of “safe countries of origin” (including Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, India, Bangladesh, Colombia and Kosovo) and expanding powers to deport migrants to external “return hubs.”[13] The measures passed with notable defections and abstentions from social-democratic deputies in Denmark, Malta, Romania and Sweden. This is not a technocratic tightening of asylum law but a political offensive — the continentalisation of “Fortress Europe.” Social-democratic parties have abandoned any substantive defence of migrants or democratic rights, aligning with conservatives and the far right to militarise borders and outsource repression. The measures serve capitalist interests: disciplining labour markets, deflecting social unrest into xenophobia and consolidating the authoritarian tools the ruling class requires for class war at home.
The Pseudo-Left as Bureaucratic Enforcer
The DSA launched personal attacks and smears against UAW rank-and-file candidate Will Lehman, whose campaign for union president — built on abolishing the Solidarity House bureaucracy and establishing rank-and-file committees — drew wide grassroots support from autoworkers in the US and Canada. The DSA’s intervention exposes the pseudo-left’s function: to police acceptable labour politics and divert militancy into safe institutional channels. In Catalonia, union bureaucracies and the regional government moved rapidly after a mass teachers’ strike to contain rank-and-file anger through negotiated settlements. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani threatened a 9.5 percent property tax rise on workers while shelving rental voucher expansions and accommodating Governor Hochul — the DSA mayor managing capitalist budgets rather than challenging Wall Street.[14]
David North’s Lectures in Ankara
David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), delivered lectures at Bilkent University and METU in Ankara titled “Where is America headed? The American volcano and the global tsunami.” The lectures connected the US political crisis — domestic democratic erosion, rising inequality, aggressive imperialism — to Trotsky’s analysis of the epoch and the necessity of world socialist revolution. The strategic tasks posed are clear: build political independence from bourgeois institutions, construct rank-and-file and party-building organs across borders, and prepare the working class to lead the struggle against war, austerity and dictatorship.
***
The developments of this week confirm the central thesis advanced by the International Committee of the Fourth International: capitalist crisis produces simultaneous austerity, repression and imperialist war, while union bureaucracies and reformist parties function as the enforcers of the ruling class within the workers’ movement. The necessary answer is the independent, international organisation of the working class around a Trotskyist programme — rank-and-file committees in workplaces and schools, coordinated across national boundaries, and the construction of sections of the Fourth International capable of providing revolutionary leadership.
—theSocialist.lk
References:
[1] “US draws up plans for ‘leadership change’ and ‘targeting individuals’ in Iran strike,” WSWS, 21 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/21/abbz-f21.html
[2]: “US forces in position for illegal attack on Iran,” WSWS, 20 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/20/lhql-f20.html
[3]: “Trump and Netanyahu hold Iran war conclave,” WSWS, 12 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/12/wali-f12.html
[4]: “National strike in Argentina fails to halt historic labor counterreform and mass layoffs,” WSWS, 21 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/21/bdeb-f21.html
[5]: “Expanding nurses strikes in California and New York raise need for unified struggle,” WSWS, 18 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/18/uyrg-f18.html
[6]: “New York nurses in ‘uprising’ against union boss’s attempts to sabotage strike,” WSWS, 18 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/18/rtmw-f18.html
[7]: “Auto parts workers occupy plants across northern Mexico after 4,000 jobs cut,” WSWS, 18 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/18/whph-f18.html
[8]: “Will Lehman backs plant occupations by Mexican auto parts workers against mass layoffs,” WSWS, 20 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/20/jczl-f20.html
[9]: “Former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested in Epstein investigation,” WSWS, 19 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/19/xxkq-f19.html
[10]: “US corporate media slanders anger over Epstein cover-up as ‘conspiracy theories’,” WSWS, 18 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/18/pbbm-f18.html
[11]: “Andrew’s arrest, the British monarchy, and the international oligarchy,” WSWS, 20 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/20/zcdn-f20.html
[12]: “Noam Chomsky’s contemptible friendship with Jeffrey Epstein,” WSWS, 15 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/15/f305-f15.html
This report synthesises and analyses the main political, geopolitical and economic developments covered by the World Socialist Web Site in the week ending 31 January 2026. It locates events within the deeper dynamics of class struggle, imperialism and the global capitalist crisis, and draws the immediate political conclusions and tasks for the international working class.
1. Imperialism on the march — preparations for new wars
The central story of the week was the open escalation of US imperialism. The Trump administration’s mounting threats and military deployments toward Iran were documented and analysed as preparations for a major new act of aggression, not isolated bellicose rhetoric. The WSWS outlined the scale and danger of the US build-up of forces, the carrier strike group deployments and the propaganda pretexts being assembled to legitimise strikes on Iran (Trump administration threatens new war against Iran). The UN Security Council posturing and Washington’s invocation that “all options are on the table” were exposed as part of a regime-change strategy that follows Washington’s recent attack on Venezuela and its abduction of President Maduro (Washington menaces Iran at UN Security Council; After Venezuela, Trump targets Iran).
From an international-class perspective, WSWS emphasises that these moves are expressions of imperialism’s strategic imperative to control resources, markets and trade routes (notably oil and gas), to attempt to subordinate rivals such as China and to shore up domestic political authority through foreign adventurism. The analysis rejects humanitarian or “democratic” pretexts and situates the drive to war in the logic of capitalist rivalry and the breakdown of lawful institutions.
2. Repression at home — war and dictatorship as two sides of capitalist rule
The week reinforced the WSWS argument that war abroad and repression at home are inseparable. Coverage tied the Trump government’s domestic assaults—paramilitary policing, the killing of migrants and threats to invoke the Insurrection Act—to the same oligarchic interests driving foreign aggression (New Year Fund appeal on the rise of dictatorship and war). The ruling class’s resort to exceptional measures is explained as an attempt to impose social discipline and to defend the profits and privileges of the financial oligarchy amid global economic turmoil.
3. Intensifying class conflict — strikes and workplace resistance worldwide
While imperialist tensions dominate geopolitics, the working class continued to push back across continents. WSWS’s regular “Workers Struggles” reports registered growing militancy: Belgian rail workers launched a five-day national strike against austerity and pension attacks; French bank employees struck over pay and restructures despite record bank profits; and hospital, education and municipal workers staged sustained actions in the UK, Italy and Africa (Workers Struggles: Europe, Middle East & Africa). In Asia and the Pacific, mass actions by gig workers, ambulance crews and casino staff testified to mounting resistance to wage cuts, precarious contracts and privatisation moves (Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia).
These labour struggles reflect the material pressures produced by austerity, inflation and corporate profit-seeking. They demonstrate the objective potential power of the working class, but WSWS warns that this potential is being squandered by union bureaucracies that isolate workers and broker sellouts.
4. Material forces driving the crisis
WSWS analyses the above dynamics as rooted in the global capitalist crisis: mounting sovereign and private debt, falling rates of profit, currency instability and the scramble for strategic raw materials. The ruling elites respond with a two-pronged strategy—intensify exploitation at home through austerity and wage suppression, and secure imperial advantage abroad via military force. The result is the simultaneous escalation of poverty, layoffs and militarism.
5. Political implications and class tasks
Build political independence: WSWS insists that workers must break from bourgeois parties and pseudo-left forces that either collaborate with imperialism or reduce resistance to parliamentary petitions. The only credible barrier to war and austerity is the organised power of the working class.
Organise rank-and-file committees: To counter union sellouts and unify struggles across workplaces and borders, the WSWS calls for the formation of rank-and-file committees and an International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Defend democratic rights: Immediate campaigns must be mounted to oppose police militarisation, arbitrary detention and censorship; the fight for democratic rights is inseparable from the fight against war and austerity.
Political education and leadership: WSWS stresses the urgent need to rebuild revolutionary political leadership rooted in Marxism. Initiatives such as Socialism AI and WSWS educational work are presented as tools to equip workers and youth with theory and organisation.
6. Action guidance
Workers should link strikes and local struggles to an international political strategy: refuse austerity bargains that trade away living standards; demand immediate protections for democratic rights; and build cross-border solidarity committees to coordinate industrial and political action. To connect understanding with organised resistance, the WSWS urges workers to join efforts to build an independent socialist movement and to consider affiliating with the Socialist Equality Party’s organising work: https://www.wsws.org/en/special/pages/sep/us/join.html
— World Socialist Web Site / International Committee of the Fourth International
This article was originally published on the World Socialist Web Site on 27 January 2026.
The Trump administration released its 2026 National Defense Strategy on Friday, a 34-page document that openly proclaims American military domination of North and South America as a platform for global war. The strategy, issued by the newly renamed “Department of War,” is a blueprint for imperialist conquest.
President Donald Trump walks onto the field with Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland, superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, left, and Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte, superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, right, before the start of the 126th Army-Navy NCAA college football game at M&T Bank Stadium, Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025, in Baltimore. [AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson]
The National Defense Strategy introduces the concept of “Homeland and Hemisphere,” effectively expanding the definition of the American “homeland” to include all of North and South America.
Building on the National Security Strategy released in December, which declared a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” the document asserts that defending American territory requires military control of the entire Western Hemisphere. It declares: “We will actively and fearlessly defend America’s interests throughout the Western Hemisphere. We will guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain, especially the Panama Canal, Gulf of America, and Greenland.”
The document explicitly invokes 19th-century imperialism, noting that “our predecessors recognized that the United States must take a more powerful, leading role in hemispheric affairs” and that “it was this insight that gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine and subsequent Roosevelt Corollary.” Under the Roosevelt Corollary (named after Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909), US Marines invaded Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The Trump administration declares these crimes the model for 21st-century foreign policy: “This is the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—a commonsense and potent restoration of American power and prerogatives in this hemisphere.”
The Pentagon is committed to “provide the President with credible options to guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain from the Arctic to South America.”
“Homeland and Hemisphere” recalls the Nazi slogan “Heim ins Reich”—”Home into the Reich”—used to justify Germany’s annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Just as Hitler declared that German-speaking territories belonged to Greater Germany, the Trump administration asserts that Greenland, Panama, and the Gulf of Mexico are American possessions to be secured by force.
While proclaiming hemispheric domination, the National Defense Strategy claims the military will “no longer be distracted by interventionism, endless wars, regime change, and nation building.” The document’s claim to oppose “regime change” is rendered absurd by the fact that it was released days after the administration carried out one of the most flagrant acts of regime change in American history—the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The claim was published as US warships steam toward Iran. On Monday, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group approached the Middle East. On Friday, Trump told reporters: “We have a big flotilla going in that direction, and we’ll see what happens. We have a big force going toward Iran.” This follows his bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities last year.
The National Defense Strategy makes clear that US domination of the hemisphere is not a retreat from global domination, but what the Trump administration sees as a prerequisite. It insists that “ours is not a strategy of isolation” but rather “one of focused engagement abroad.”
While claiming that “President Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China,” the National Defense Strategy frames hemispheric domination as preparation for great-power war. It acknowledges that China is “already the second most powerful country in the world—behind only the United States—and the most powerful state relative to us since the 19th century,” adding that despite internal challenges, “the fact is that its power is growing.”
To prepare for this conflict, Trump has called for a 50 percent increase in military spending, demanding a $1.5 trillion military budget for 2027. The National Defense Strategy demands that all US allies follow suit: “President Trump has set a new global standard for defense spending at NATO’s Hague Summit—3.5% of GDP on core military spending and an additional 1.5% on security-related spending, for a total of 5% of GDP.”
Five percent of GDP would represent the largest peacetime military buildup in modern history—exceeding $1.3 trillion annually for the United States alone, and tripling German military expenditure. The resources demanded for this military expansion will be extracted from the working class through austerity, the gutting of social programs, and the further impoverishment of billions of people worldwide.
On nuclear weapons, the document demands the modernization of US nuclear forces “with focused attention on deterrence and escalation management amidst the changing global nuclear landscape.” It declares that “the United States should never—will never—be left vulnerable to nuclear blackmail.” The reference to “escalation management” is military jargon for preparing to fight and “win” a nuclear war.
The document concludes: “We will restore the warrior ethos. We will refocus the American military on its core, irreplaceable goal of winning the nation’s wars decisively.”
The Democratic Party supports this military buildup. On Thursday, the House passed combined defense and consolidated spending bills by a vote of 341-88, with 149 Democrats voting yes and only 64 voting no. The $839 billion military budget—$8.4 billion above what Trump requested—funds the weapons systems, carrier strike groups and military infrastructure required for the wars outlined in the National Defense Strategy. Both parties represent the same ruling class, and there is bipartisan consensus for militarism and global domination.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Image courtesy of www.aa.com.trn
The January 3, 2026 U.S. military assault on Venezuela and the forcible seizure of President Nicolás Maduro constitute a watershed in the degeneration of American imperialism and the collapse of the post-1945 juridical order. This was not a rogue “raid” or law-enforcement operation but a war of aggression conducted to impose control over strategic resources and geopolitical space. As the World Socialist Web Site emphasized, the operation represents “a total repudiation by the Trump regime of any semblance of legality… an unprovoked war of aggression launched in flagrant violation of international law.”[1] The deployment of over 150 aircrafts launched from 20 bases across the Western Hemisphere, heavy bombardment across Caracas and surrounding states, a naval blockade, and at least 100 deaths—including 32 Cuban military personnel—underscore the operation’s character as large-scale military conquest rather than counter-narcotics action.
Material Foundations: Oil, Finance Capital and Geopolitical Rivalry
The assault must be understood through the material interests driving contemporary imperialism. Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves alongside substantial deposits of gold, bauxite, diamonds, copper, nickel, manganese, coltan and uranium. Control of these resources is central to U.S. finance capital and the oil majors’ strategic aims. Trump made the predatory motive explicit, declaring that “we’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars.”[2] Reportedly,Trump briefed oil executives about the assault before it occurred while deliberately withholding information from Congress and the American people.
The operation simultaneously aims to reverse China’s and Russia’s deepening economic penetration of Latin America. U.S. demands to interim President Delcy Rodríguez revealed the geopolitical objectives: Venezuela must “kick out China, Russia, Iran and Cuba and sever economic ties,” then “agree to partner exclusively with the US on oil production and favor America when selling heavy crude.”[3] Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed this explicitly: “Why does China need their oil? Why does Russia need their oil? They’re not even in this continent. This is the Western Hemisphere.”[4] The raid therefore expresses both the search for surplus value through direct plunder and the sharpening geo-political rivalry born of US imperialism’s systemic crisis.
This crisis has deep historical roots. As Lenin analyzed in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, monopoly capital’s need to secure sources of raw materials, investment outlets and markets drives the violent redivision of the world among rival powers. The contemporary period witnesses this process in acute form: decades of financialization, debt expansion and speculative excess have failed to resolve capitalism’s fundamental contradiction—the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The globalization of production from the late 1970s represented a temporary response based on accessing cheap labor and strategic territories, but that framework is now disintegrating as American imperialism confronts eroding economic dominance and intensifying competition from rival powers.
From Juridical Pretense to the “Iron Law” of Force
The assault signifies American imperialism’s abandonment of postwar legal constraints—UN Charter norms, sovereignty protections, diplomatic process—which had served as inter-imperialist settlement for the ‘peaceful’ neocolonial plunder of former colonies, their resources and cheap labor. Historically, US imperialism never wanted to be restrained by these international limitations. Today US administration officials dismiss such constraints with unprecedented candor. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller declared: “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” dismissing international law as mere “international niceties.”[5] Miller made explicit that “the United States of America is running Venezuela… we are in charge, because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions.”[6]
This represents government doctrine enacted through military operations, not rhetorical excess. The WSWS correctly characterized Miller’s formulations as “the language of the Nazis, drawn from Hitler’s Mein Kampf and its talk of ‘iron laws of Nature’ in relation to races and racial-state conflict.”[7] The Manhattan spectacle of parading Maduro in chains before federal courts—a sitting head of state declared a “prisoner of war” and denied even the opportunity to complete his statement of identity—aims to legitimize seizure through pseudo-legal theater while humiliating a sovereign nation.[8]
The postwar institutions that once helped regulate inter-imperialist rivalry and provided a veneer of legitimacy for neocolonial extraction have become, under conditions of acute capitalist crisis, obstacles to plunder. That order has collapsed. Trump’s invocation of what he terms the “Donroe Doctrine”—superseding the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—and his declaration that “this is OUR hemisphere” make explicit that Washington treats Latin America as colonial property. The willingness to threaten even NATO ally Denmark over Greenland, combined with explicit orders to expel foreign economic partners from Venezuela, demonstrates that the U.S. oligarchy now regards legal constraints as impediments to be swept aside. The long-standing fiction that American policy is shaped by principles other than naked imperialist interests is now being openly set aside.
An Escalation Built on Prolonged Aggression
The assault on Venezuela followed shortly after the release of the December 2025 National Defense Strategy, which explicitly designated the Western Hemisphere as an “American sphere of influence” where Washington would reject any involvement by “extra-hemispheric powers.” This strategic document identified China as the primary adversary and demanded U.S. military control over “energy dominance” by securing strategic resources across Latin America and the Middle East. The Venezuelan intervention represents the doctrine’s inaugural execution.
The Maduro abduction completed a sustained campaign of military pressure and economic strangulation. Throughout 2025, the U.S. assembled a massive naval armada in the Caribbean, conducted repeated deadly strikes on Venezuelan vessels, seized oil tankers, and imposed an effective naval quarantine—measures constituting acts of war and a de facto blockade. In late December 2025, the CIA conducted the first strike on Venezuelan territory, targeting a port facility. By early January, the military buildup had reached culmination point, with special forces rehearsing the raid using models of Maduro’s compound while Trump approved the final operation before Christmas.
This trajectory followed a deliberate escalation ladder: designation of the “Cartel of the Suns”—which the state department alleged was helped manage and ultimately led by Maduro—as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, expansion of sanctions targeting Maduro’s family and oil shipments, demands for the return of nationalized assets seized from U.S. corporations in 2007, and finally direct military assault. The pattern reveals systematic preparation for regime change and resource seizure, with direct military intervention undertaken only after attempts to orchestrate a political coup failed due to lack of popular support for the opposition.
The Bankruptcy of Bourgeois Nationalism and the Pink Tide
The raid exposed with surgical precision the class character and political bankruptcy of Latin America’s national bourgeoisies. Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and other “Pink Tide” leaders offered tepid condemnations that carefully avoided breaking with imperialism or mobilizing popular opposition. As the WSWS documented, “the rotten and reactionary response of all sections of the Latin American bourgeoisie to the US invasion of Venezuela must be taken by the working class as a testament to the inadequacy of all nationalist perspectives in the epoch of imperialism.”[9]
The same pattern of cowardice and betrayal emerged across South Asia. In Sri Lanka, while the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) issued a statement on January 4 condemning the U.S. assault and declaring that “powerful countries do not have the right to violate this principle” of sovereignty, the NPP government adopted a markedly different position. Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath, a politburo member of JVP, explicitly distinguished between the party and NPP government, stating that while “political parties can have their own opinions,” the government “represents all sides” and must work through UN mechanisms. The official Foreign Ministry statement expressed mere “deep concern” while urging “dialogue” and “peaceful resolution”—the language of diplomatic evasion that refuses to name the aggressor or mobilize popular opposition. This split exposes the fundamental contradiction at the heart of bourgeois nationalist governance: the party that once postured as anti-imperialist now defends defense cooperation agreements with Washington and New Delhi, fearful of jeopardizing its integration into imperialist economic and military frameworks.
India’s Modi government demonstrated even more abject servility. The Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement over 24 hours after the assault expressing “deep concern” but conspicuously avoiding naming the United States or condemning the military strikes. India’s response on 04 January carefully avoided naming Washington, instead calling vaguely for “all concerned to address issues peacefully through dialogue.” The Modi government’s calculation is transparent: trade negotiations with Trump, potential access to Venezuelan oil payments owed to ONGC, and strategic partnership with Washington take precedence over any principled opposition to imperialist aggression.
Pakistan’s military-dominated regime and Bangladesh’s U.S.-backed interim government maintained predictable silence, offering no statements of condemnation. Across South Asia, bourgeois nationalist parties and governments—whether presenting themselves as left-progressive, Hindu-chauvinist, or Islamist—demonstrated their organic incapacity to resist imperialism when confronted with its naked assertion of force.
This confirms Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and his analysis of the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie in dependent countries to carry forward anti-imperialist or democratic tasks. In Results and Prospects (1906) and The Permanent Revolution (1928), Trotsky demonstrated that the belated development of capitalism in backward countries produces a bourgeoisie organically tied to imperialism and landed property, terrified of independent working-class mobilization, and therefore incapable of leading struggle against foreign domination. The Pink Tide represents merely the latest chapter in Latin American bourgeois nationalism’s history of accommodation and betrayal.
Right-wing and fascistic governments went further, openly celebrating the assault. The Brazilian far-right, architects of the January 8, 2023 coup attempt in Brasília, seized on the operation to advance their own dictatorial aims under newly favorable international conditions. Trump’s threats against Colombian President Petro—“He has to watch his ass”—and declarations that Cuba and Nicaragua “will not survive” his administration signal that the Venezuela operation establishes precedent for unlimited violence throughout the hemisphere.[10]
The Counter-Revolutionary Role of the Pseudo-Left
Pseudo-left currents, reformist parties and NGOs that locate opposition to imperialism in international law, diplomatic institutions or alliances with rival capitalist powers play an objectively counter-revolutionary role. They funnel popular anger into impotent appeals and national strategies that leave capitalist property relations—and imperialist domination—fundamentally untouched.
Germany’s Left Party exemplified this tendency. While formally condemning Trump’s actions as “state terrorism,” the party directed its criticism not against imperialism but toward demanding that Europe assert its own great-power ambitions more aggressively. As the WSWS analyzed, the Left Party “criticises Chancellor Merz not from the left, but from the right,” calling for sanctions against the United States and “a concrete European plan” to counter American actions—thereby functioning as “aggressive apologists for German and European imperialism.”[11] Similar patterns emerged across pseudo-left organizations internationally, each subordinating working-class opposition to their respective national bourgeoisies’ geopolitical interests.
These tendencies propagate fatal illusions: that imperialism can be restrained through appeals to bourgeois institutions, that “multipolar” capitalist competition offers progressive alternatives, that identity politics or reformist parliamentarism can substitute for independent class struggle. As the WSWS emphasized, “the struggle against war is inseparably linked to the struggle against its cause: the capitalist system. It must be led by the working class, with the aim of building an independent political movement, overcoming capitalism and reorganising society on the basis of social needs rather than private profit.”[12]
The Domestic Dimension: War Abroad, Dictatorship at Home
The turn to militarism overseas proceeds inseparably from authoritarian consolidation domestically. The WSWS identified this essential connection: “the same illegality, the same ruthlessness, the same criminality that is expressed in the kidnapping of Maduro is expressed in the assault on democratic rights at home—the mass deportations, attacks on the press, purging of the civil service, deployment of the military against the population.”[13] Perpetual war finances and is employed to legitimize police-state measures while directing social anger outward rather than against the ruling class itself.
This pattern reflects objective necessity for the oligarchy. As Marx demonstrated, capitalism’s internal contradictions generate both external expansion and internal repression. Trump represents “a criminal oligarchy that has amassed its wealth through fraud, speculation and plunder… the chosen instrument of the American ruling class, a gangster vomited up by the oligarchy to enforce policies that can no longer be pursued through democratic or legal means.”[14] The simultaneous assault on Venezuela and acceleration of authoritarian measures domestically express unified class interests of finance capital confronting deepening crisis.
Revolutionary Tasks and the Road Forward
The assault on Venezuela demonstrates that the fight against imperialist war is inseparable from the fight against capitalism itself. Defensive measures are urgent: mobilize mass anti-war action, build rank-and-file committees in workplaces to oppose military preparations, forge international links of workers’ solidarity—especially between U.S. workers and their Latin American class brothers and sisters.
But defensive measures must connect to revolutionary perspective. The expropriation of the banks and multinationals, formation of workers’ councils and workers’ governments, construction of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to lead an international socialist alternative—these constitute the only realistic defense of oppressed nations and working people everywhere. As the WSWS stated: “The answer must be to make 2026 a year of class struggle and the development of a mass movement for socialism. The fight against war is a fight against the capitalist system that breeds it.”[15]
The objective conditions for revolutionary struggle are maturing with extraordinary rapidity. Across the United States, the kidnapping of Maduro has provoked widespread anger and concern among workers in factories and workplaces. This opposition must be organized on independent class foundations, rejecting all factions of the bourgeoisie and pseudo-lefts that secure capitalism’s rule. Latin American workers must orient not toward their “own” national bourgeoisies but toward their class brothers and sisters internationally in unified struggle to overthrow imperialism.
Only through the independent political mobilization of the international working class and the oppressed masses, armed with a Marxist program and the historical lessons embodied in the ICFI, can the descent into barbarism and annihilation be halted and the conditions created for genuine human emancipation through world socialist revolution.
References:
[1] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela! Release Maduro!” WSWS, 4 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/04/avdu-j04.html>
[2] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026
[3] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/erjx-j07.html>
[4] “After Venezuela attack: White House threatens Venezuelan acting president, Cuba and Greenland,” WSWS, 5 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/05/crzb-j05.html>
[5] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026 , <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/zyve-j06.html>
[9] “Latin America’s bourgeois governments bow to US attack on Venezuela,” WSWS, 6 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/slwp-j06.html>
[10] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” WSWS, 4 January 2026
[11] “After Trump’s attack on Venezuela: Germany’s Left Party supports European imperialism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/sfqt-j07.html>
[12] Ibid.
[13] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[14] Ibid.
[15] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” WSWS, 4 January 2026
US imperialism rings in the New Year with a new war
By the WSWS Editorial Board.
Reposted below is the statement of the Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, published on the same website on the 04 January 2025.
U.S. F-35 fighter jets are parked on the tarmac as military personnel walk among the aircraft at José Aponte de la Torre Airport in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Alejandro Granadillo)
The World Socialist Web Site, the Socialist Equality Party in the US and the International Committee of the Fourth International unequivocally denounce the invasion of Venezuela and the criminal abduction of President Nicolás Maduro in the early hours of Saturday morning. We demand the immediate release of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and the full withdrawal of all US troops and military forces from the region.
The invasion, which included the killing of at least 40 people, is a total repudiation by the Trump regime of any semblance of legality. It is an unprovoked war of aggression launched in flagrant violation of international law and carried out to reimpose colonial control over Venezuela and all of Latin America. This imperialist assault must be opposed by the working class in the United States and throughout the world.
Speaking at Saturday’s press conference, Trump’s “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, declared, “Welcome to 2026.” Only three days into the New Year, the assault on Venezuela is an unmistakable signal that the imperialist violence that marked 2025—in the Gaza genocide and the bombings of Lebanon, Syria and Iran—will escalate in 2026.
There is no concrete wall between foreign and domestic policy. Imperialist gangsterism beyond the borders of the United States will be accompanied by the acceleration of the conspiracy to impose a fascistic presidential dictatorship within the United States.
In his remarks at Saturday’s press conference, Trump declared that the United States would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” In the past, American imperialism sought to legitimize its wars with hypocritical invocations of democracy and human rights. Trump dispensed with pretenses. The purpose of the assault on Venezuela, he declared on Sunday, was to seize control of the country and its oil resources.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars,” Trump declared. If there is any resistance, Trump threatened a more brutal military onslaught. “We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” Trump warned.
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that top hedge funds and asset managers are preparing to send a delegation to Caracas in March to assess what one investor called $500–$750 billion in “investment opportunities” over the next five years.
The invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of its president are meant, as Trump put it on Saturday, as a “warning” to “anyone who would threaten American sovereignty.” Referring to his new National Security Strategy, Trump declared that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” hailing the assault as a reassertion of the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”
The immediate targets are governments in Latin America that may act against US imperialist interests. Speaking of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Trump warned in the language of a street thug, “He has to watch his ass.” The fascist Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, added: “America can project our will anywhere, anytime,” drawing a direct parallel between Venezuela and last year’s US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. “Maduro had his chance,” he sneered, “just like Iran had their chance—until they didn’t.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio—Trump’s Ribbentrop—issued his own gangster threat to the Cuban government, saying that if he were the leader of the island nation, “I’d be concerned.”
But the threats are not confined to Latin America. In addition to Venezuela and Iran, the United States bombed five additional countries last year: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and, most recently, Nigeria in December. Trump has issued threats of war against Mexico, floated the annexation of Greenland and Canada, and declared the Panama Canal “non-negotiable” for US control.
The aggressive message to China was unmistakable. Just hours before the assault, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro met with a high-level Chinese delegation led by Beijing’s Special Representative for Latin American and Caribbean Affairs, Qiu Xiaoqi, to discuss joint energy cooperation. The US raid, timed to coincide with this meeting, was an act of aggression aimed at disrupting growing ties between China and Latin America.
The actions taken by the Trump administration are not only criminal, they have the character of sheer madness. In 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, the World Socialist Web Sitewarned that American imperialism had entered into a “rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. … It will not find, through the medium of war, a viable solution to its internal maladies.”
That warning was confirmed. What is now being set into motion is even more reckless—a rendezvous with catastrophe.
Trump declared on Saturday the intention to impose a dictatorship over Venezuela, proclaiming that the country will be “run” by Rubio, Hegseth and other officials in the Trump regime, as though this colonial fantasy could be imposed with a press conference. In reality, such an occupation would require the deployment of hundreds of thousands of US troops and a brutal campaign of urban warfare amid mass resistance. Trump said as much when he said he was not afraid of “boots on the ground.”
It should be recalled that the 2003 invasion of Iraq required approximately 180,000 coalition troops, including 130,000 from the United States. In total, nearly half a million US personnel were deployed across the region in support of the war effort. And Iraq, with a population smaller than Venezuela’s, was already devastated by a decade of sanctions. The scale of military occupation required to enforce the subjugation of Venezuela would rapidly spiral into a bloody, protracted conflict across all of Latin America, and indeed throughout the world.
The recklessness of the Trump government can only be understood in the context of the crisis of American imperialism. Politically, there are no doubt many calculations behind Trump’s actions, including an effort to distract from the explosive revelations surrounding the Epstein network, which has implicated top figures within the financial aristocracy and state apparatus.
But more basic issues are at stake. The United States is attempting to reverse the long-term decline of American capitalism through militarism and war. The economic foundations of US global dominance have dramatically eroded. Gold has surged past $4,300 an ounce, a de facto measure of the collapse in confidence in the dollar as a global reserve currency. The national debt has soared past $38 trillion. The seizure of Venezuela’s oil and the reassertion of American control over the Western Hemisphere are seen by the ruling class as essential to the survival of its economic and geopolitical position.
The realization of this policy will require a massive escalation of the assault on the working class. The astronomical costs of militarism and global conquest will be borne through an intensification of austerity and the destruction of what remains of vital social programs. To impose neocolonial domination abroad, the administration must also overcome mass opposition at home. The inevitable disasters flowing from this strategy will be met with even greater violence, both internationally and within the United States.
At Saturday’s press conference, Trump’s erratic remarks shifted seamlessly from boasting about the “snatch and grab” abduction of Maduro to threatening major American cities. Praising the National Guard deployments to Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Memphis and New Orleans, he declared, “They should do it with more cities.” The same “iron laws” of violence that govern US conduct abroad will be imposed on the population at home.
It is necessary to understand that Trump does not act as an individual. He is the chosen instrument of the American ruling class, a gangster elevated to power by the oligarchy to enforce policies that can no longer be pursued through democratic or legal means.
In 2025, US billionaires—roughly 900 individuals—amassed an 18 percent increase in their net worth, bringing their combined holdings to nearly $7 trillion. Ten individuals alone accounted for $750 billion of this total. Just as the German ruling class brought Hitler to power to implement policies that could not be carried out except through dictatorship, Trump serves the same function.
Notably, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, published an editorial exalting the abduction of Maduro as “one of the boldest moves a president has made in years.” The paper hailed the “unquestionable tactical success” of the military operation, called Maduro’s downfall “good news,” and praised Trump’s willingness to “follow through” where previous administrations hesitated.
The Democratic Party represents the same class and defends the same system as Trump. There will be no serious opposition from its ranks. Their differences with Trump are purely tactical, not strategic. This was made clear in the muted response to the assault on Venezuela. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries grumbled about the lack of congressional notification, while reaffirming that Maduro was “not the legitimate head of government.”
Just weeks ago, Democrats and Republicans joined together to pass a $900 billion military spending bill, in an unambiguous endorsement of the imperialist agenda now being ruthlessly enforced.
For his part, anticipating broad popular opposition, Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement calling the action against Venezuela “illegal and unconstitutional,” but he did not propose any strategy to stop the war or call for a popular mobilization against it.
There will be a response in the working class, and not only in Venezuela and Latin America. The reimposition of colonial domination will confront immense resistance throughout the world. In the United States, polls show overwhelming opposition to a war against Venezuela. Trump’s approval rating, at just 36 percent at the end of his first year back in office, is the lowest of any president at the same point in their term in more than half a century.
Demonstrations broke out within hours of the assault on Venezuela, an initial indication of popular opposition that will expand and grow. However, the experience of the mass protests against the Gaza genocide has shown that demonstrations alone are not enough. Without a program and leadership, popular outrage is funneled back into the political structures of the capitalist state.
What is required is the conscious intervention of the working class into political struggle. The conditions for such a struggle are rapidly maturing. The war abroad is inseparable from a social counterrevolution at home—soaring inflation, AI-driven job destruction, deepening poverty, and the systematic dismantling of every democratic and social right.
The oligarchy sits atop a social powder keg. The world volcanic eruption of American imperialism will set into motion a global tsunami of class struggle. Both arise from the same contradictions of the capitalist system.
And while it is expressed most violently in the US, the same basic tendencies exist throughout the world. All the imperialist powers are now engaged in a global redivision of the world. In Europe, the major capitalist governments are undertaking the most massive rearmament campaigns since the Second World War as they clamor for war against and destroy social programs. The German ruling class is nurturing dreams of a Fourth Reich, asserting its military power across the continent and beyond.
The ruling class has made clear what they want 2026 to be: a year of unrestrained military violence. The answer must be to make 2026 a year of class struggle and the development of a mass movement for socialism.
The fight against war is, at its root, a fight against the capitalist system that breeds it. This struggle must be led by the working class, the only social force capable of ending imperialist violence and establishing genuine democracy and equality. The alternative to dictatorship and war is revolution, the building of an independent political movement to overthrow capitalism and reorganize society on the basis of social need, not private profit.
The Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International call on workers, students, and young people across the United States, throughout Latin America, and internationally: Join our ranks. Build the Socialist Equality Party in the US and the sections of the ICFI around the world. Take up the fight to unify the working class across all borders, to abolish capitalism, and to establish socialism as the foundation of a new society.
