19th May 2026 | By Eduardo Salgado Reyes
Executive Summary
The US aggression against Venezuela (2017–2026) is not a diplomatic dispute over natural resources, but an episode in the struggle between two antagonistic world systems: imperialist state monopoly capitalism, led by the United States, and the socialist and anti-imperialist camp, of which Venezuela—with its state oil economy, resistance to the blockade, and alliances with anti-hegemonic powers—constitutes an imperfect yet real defensive perimeter. The capture of Nicolás Maduro (January 2026) and the deportation of Alex Saab Morán (May 2026) represent tactical triumphs of imperialism in its global offensive against socialism, aimed at closing every breach where monopoly capital does not exercise absolute control over strategic resources and political direction. The present analysis demonstrates that only socialist revolution under proletarian leadership, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and proletarian internationalism offer a historical way out.
1. Theoretical Framework: Imperialism and the Class Struggle on a World Scale
Lenin demonstrated in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) that state monopoly capitalism constitutes the final stage of the capitalist system, characterised by the export of capital, the division of the world among monopoly alliances, and the struggle for territorial repartition. Stalin subsequently developed the thesis that the present historical epoch is one of the struggle between triumphant socialism in one country and world capitalism, and that this struggle finds expression in peaceful coexistence as a form of class struggle.
The correlation of forces between imperialism and socialism on a world scale is expressed today as follows:
| Imperialist Camp | Socialist and Anti-Imperialist Camp |
|---|---|
| United States (financial-military hegemon) | China (planned socialist economy with controlled market elements) |
| NATO (apparatus of military aggression) | Russia (post-Soviet state with contradictions, yet anti-NATO interests) |
| IMF, World Bank, SWIFT (apparatuses of financial domination) | BRICS, AIIB, alternative payment mechanisms (partial rupture with the dollar) |
| Colombia, Argentina, Chile (puppet regimes in Latin America) | Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela (anti-imperialist states with mixed state economies) |
Venezuela occupies a strategic position within this correlation: it possesses the largest proven oil reserves on the planet (303 billion barrels), the Orinoco Mining Arc (strategic gold, coltan, diamonds, and gas), and a Caribbean geopolitics controlling vital maritime routes. Its economy, though deformed by technological dependency and state bureaucracy, maintained key sectors under state ownership: PDVSA, the Central Bank, the CLAP food distribution network. This is not pure socialism—state property does not equal socialist property without workers’ control—but it constitutes an obstruction to US monopoly capital, which demands total privatisation as a condition for “normalising” relations.
The aggression of 2017–2026, therefore, does not merely seek “regime change” in the liberal sense; it seeks the elimination of a systemic obstacle in the imperialist offensive against the socialist camp. The recognition of Guaidó, the financial blockade, the capture of Maduro—these are operations in the class war on a planetary scale.
2. Sanctions as a Class Extermination Economic War
The economic blockade against Venezuela is not a “pressure policy”; it is a class extermination economic war, comparable to the blockade against Cuba (1960–present) or against the USSR (1918–1924). Its strategic objectives are:
- Destruction of the state economy: By preventing PDVSA from importing diluents, spare parts, and technology, imperialism paralyses oil production, generating economic chaos that is blamed on “socialism”.
- Provocation of mass exodus: The 7 million Venezuelan emigrants (2015–2025) are not a spontaneous “humanitarian crisis”; they are an imperialist demographic weapon to destabilise Colombia, Peru, and Chile, and to generate justification for “humanitarian intervention”.
- Diplomatic isolation: The recognition of Guaidó by 50 countries (2019) was not “support for democracy”; it was a diplomatic repartition of the world in the style of the League of Nations against the USSR in the 1920s.
- Seizure of strategic assets: The gold in the Bank of England (30 tonnes), Citgo (refinery in Texas), SWIFT accounts—these are direct imperialist expropriations of the national surplus product, transferred to US finance capital.
Superexploitation is accelerated by the blockade: real wages fall by 95% (2017–2021), inflation reaches 1,000,000%, infant mortality soars. This is not “bad Chavista management”; it is forced depreciation of the value of labour power as a mechanism of surplus value transfer. Imperialism wants not only the oil; it wants to destroy the masses’ capacity to resist through hunger, so as then to install a puppet regime that privatises everything.
3. The Case of Alex Saab: Class Collaborationism in the Anti-Imperialist Camp
The trajectory of Alex Saab Morán illustrates the penetration of class collaborationism into the anti-imperialist state apparatus. Saab was not an “independent businessman”; he was an agent of parasitic primitive accumulation operating within Chavismo, extracting rents from the state whilst feigning anti-imperialist loyalty.
3.1 Saab as a Social Type of Collaborationism
From 2011, Saab triangulated imported foodstuffs (CLAP), built overvalued housing, and operated as an intermediary between foreign monopoly capital and the Venezuelan state. His function was dual: on the one hand, maintaining import flows that the blockade hindered; on the other, extracting surcharges that transferred surplus value from the masses into his own pocket and that of the corrupt state bureaucracy. This is typical of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie that emerges in weak anti-imperialist states: it does not break with the world capitalist market, but inserts itself parasitically into its interstices, turning scarcity into private business.
3.2 The 2023 Exchange: An Inter-Bourgeois Betrayal of the Proletariat
The December 2023 exchange—Saab for 10 US citizens, “Fat Leonard”, and 20 Venezuelan political prisoners—was presented by Chavismo as a “diplomatic victory”. In reality, it was a class capitulation disguised as cunning. The US recovered intelligence agents and oil executives (direct representatives of monopoly capital); Venezuela recovered a parasitic intermediary. The masses obtained no lifting of sanctions, no access to medicines, no wage increase. The exchange deepened the integration of the collaborationist bourgeoisie into the state: Saab was appointed Minister of Industry (2024), fusing the national productive apparatus with private accumulation interests.
From the perspective of the imperialism-socialism correlation of forces, this exchange was negative for the anti-imperialist camp: it demonstrated to imperialism that Chavismo negotiates class principles, that its “resistance” is negotiable, and that the state bureaucracy prioritises the survival of its intermediaries over the defence of the proletariat.
3.3 The 2026 Deportation: Collapse of Collaborationism without a Mass Base
The capture of Maduro (January 2026) and the subsequent deportation of Saab (May 2026) confirm a historical law: the collaborationist bourgeoisie has no fatherland and no class loyalty. When Chavismo maintained a mass base—however deformed by Bonapartism—Saab was a “diplomat”, a minister, untouchable. When imperialism overthrew Maduro and installed a puppet regime headed by Delcy Rodríguez, Saab became a “migrant criminal” deportable at will. SAIME justified the measure as “compliance with migration legislation”, but the reality is that the collaborationist bourgeoisie serves whichever power pays most. First it served the rentier Chavista state; then, triumphant imperialism.
This is not “individual treachery”; it is the class logic of the comprador bourgeoisie. The Venezuelan proletariat must draw the lesson: it cannot trust bourgeois intermediaries, not even those operating within the anti-imperialist state. The defence of socialism requires the purge of collaborationists and direct workers’ control of production.
4. The Fall of Maduro and the Imperialist Offensive against Socialism
The capture of Maduro by US forces (3 January 2026) is not an isolated event. It is part of a systemic imperialist offensive against the remaining anti-imperialist bastions:
- 2022: Invasion of Ukraine (indirect attack on Russia, arms supplier and ally of Venezuela).
- 2024: Institutional coup in Bolivia (overthrow of MAS); attempted destabilisation in Nicaragua.
- 2025: Intensification of the blockade against Cuba; sanctions on Chinese companies operating in Venezuela.
- 2026: Capture of Maduro; handover of Saab; negotiations for PDVSA privatisation with Chevron and ExxonMobil.
This offensive responds to the structural crisis of monopoly capitalism: capital overaccumulation, falling rate of profit, and ‘super-power’ competition (US vs. China) for control of raw materials. Venezuela is not “just another country” to plunder; it is the strategic link which, if broken, opens the Caribbean and northern South America to total domination by US capital, isolating Cuba and weakening the Latin American axis of resistance.
Imperialism does not hate Maduro for being a “dictator” or “corrupt”—allies such as Bukele (El Salvador), Milei (Argentina), or Petro (Colombia) are equally authoritarian and corrupt. It hates him because he represents, however deformed, the refusal to surrender Venezuelan oil and coltan to US monopoly capital. The capture of Maduro is, in essence, the same operation as the coup against Allende (1973) or the invasion of Grenada (1983): to eliminate a space where socialism—however imperfect—demonstrates that an alternative to capitalism exists.
5. The Task of the Communists: Destruction of the Capitalist Regime and Establishment of Proletariat Power
The fall of the Maduro regime does not mean the defeat of socialism; it means the defeat of a deformed Bonapartist variant that attempted to reconcile capitalism and anti-imperialism without revolutionary rupture with private property. The task of Venezuelan and internationalist communists is clear:
- Destruction of the capitalist regime and establishment of Comunas/Soviets power: The government of Delcy Rodríguez is not a “democratic transition”, but the open dictatorship of the comprador bourgeoisie and foreign monopoly capital, installed by imperialist military aggression to complete the privatisation of PDVSA, the Mining Arc, and the state banking sector. Its class function is to liquidate the remnants of anti-imperialist state property and convert Venezuela into a protectorate producing raw materials for US capital. The immediate task of the proletariat is not to “reject it” from within bourgeois legality, but to prepare and execute national liberation under the leadership of communist parties, with the support of poor peasants and urban semi-proletarian layers, in order to destroy the state apparatus and replace it with workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ councils as organs of proletarian state power. General strikes and boycotts of production for the transnationals are auxiliary forms of agitation, subordinated to the central strategy: prolonged people’s war that, from the countryside and urban peripheries, encircles the cities, disarticulates the armed forces and their collaborators, and establishes the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only form of power capable of resisting imperialism and building socialism.
- Defence of the remaining state sectors: PDVSA, the Central Bank’s gold, the Mining Arc—these must not be privatised. Their defence is not defence of “Chavismo”, but defence of the means of production against foreign monopoly capital. This defence must be under workers’ control, not bureaucratic control.
- Construction of workers’ and peasants’ soviets: The only form of resistance that does not degenerate into collaborationism is the direct self-management of the masses. Factory councils, neighbourhood committees, peasant militias must replace the bourgeois state apparatus—both the fallen Chavista one and the present regime.
- Unconditional proletarian internationalism: The Venezuelan revolution can only triumph as part of the world revolution against imperialism. Solidarity with Cuba (blockaded), with Palestine (occupied), with Chinese and Russian workers (exploited by their own oligarchies), with the US proletariat (deceived by imperialist chauvinism). Not inter-state alliances with “anti-US powers”, but class solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the entire planet.
- Struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat: No “pluralist democracy” recognising bourgeois parties; no “broad front” with the national bourgeoisie. The only way out is the exclusive power of the proletariat organised in comunas, the socialisation of the means of production, centralised planning under workers’ control, and revolutionary repression against the comprador bourgeoisie and imperialism.
6. Conclusion: The War Continues
The capture of Maduro and the handover of Saab are battles lost, not the war. US imperialism has gained tactical ground in Venezuela, but the world correlation of forces remains contradictory: China grows economically despite the trade war; Russia resists in Ukraine; Cuba survives 65 years of blockade; the world proletariat—from Gaza to Detroit—develops anti-imperialist consciousness.
The lesson of the Venezuelan case is that socialism cannot be built through rentier Bonapartism, parasitic bureaucracy, and class collaborationism. Chavismo fell not because it resisted imperialism, but because it resisted in a deformed manner, without breaking with capitalism, without socialising production, without trusting the masses. Its fall is a historical warning: half the journey is worse than not beginning; anti-imperialist reformism feeds illusion only to surrender later.
The only way out is socialist revolution: dictatorship of the proletariat in Venezuela, extension of the revolution to Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, unity with the North American proletariat to overthrow imperialism from within, and the construction of world socialism. There is no third way. There is no “nationalist resistance” without socialism. There is no socialism without proletarian internationalism.
Workers of all countries, unite!
References
- Lenin, V.I. (1916). Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Petrograd.
- Lenin, V.I. (1920). “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Moscow.
- Stalin, J.V. (1924). Foundations of Leninism. Moscow.
- Stalin, J.V. (1952). Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. Moscow.
- Marini, R.M. (1973). Dialéctica de la Dependencia. Mexico City: ERA.
- Mandel, E. (1972). Late Capitalism. London: New Left Books.
- UN and IACHR reports on the effects of unilateral coercive measures in Venezuela (2020–2024).
- SAIME communiqué, 16 May 2026, on the deportation of Alex Saab Morán.
- White House, 20 December 2023, prisoner exchange agreement with Venezuela.
Final Note: This article is a class and world correlation-of-forces analysis: it evaluates the imperialist aggression against Venezuela not as a diplomatic incident, but as a front in the war between monopoly capitalism and socialism. It explicitly rejects Trotskyism and its revisionist theory of “permanent revolution”, condemned by the international communist movement. The evidence shows that imperialism does not retreat before national concessions; only socialist revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and proletarian internationalism can defeat it. The fall of Chavismo is a lesson, not a sentence: it demonstrates that anti-imperialist reformism is a dead end, and that only revolutionary socialism offers a historical perspective.
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